by Will Wiles
One housemate was insistent that I should report the incident to the police, in the teeth of my insistence that I didn’t want to, and that the police wouldn’t bother doing anything, and that the men would never be caught even if they did.
It doesn’t matter, Jack, they need to know for the statistics. That’s important. The statistics, he kept saying. You have to report it for the statistics.
The following Monday, face showing a jaunty bruise, I was received as a hero in the Divider office. A crowd formed to hear what had happened (director’s cut). Again I heard about the importance of police statistics. In the end I did report it, but only to get a crime number that I could use to claim insurance for my lost phone. The statistics were served.
Among the most sympathetic of my colleagues was one of the women I had unsuccessfully flirted with at the party. Her name was Elise.
Divider closed in 2009. We had both moved on by then, Elise and I, and moved in together.
‘I’m not sure that’s true.’
Pierce tilted his head, interested. ‘What isn’t?’
‘What you just said,’ I said. ‘About mugging being “the most primal urban experience”. I mean, it’s a primal experience all right, but how urban is it?’
Pierce leaned forward. He was engaged. The eyes were back at full beam, the brow locked, the self-pity gone. ‘It’s completely urban. It is a crime almost unknown outside cities.’
‘Sure, I know, but—’
‘The city arose as a place of concourse and trade,’ Pierce said, barging on, in full talking-to-an-audience mode. ‘Mugging is a kind of trade, conducted by force, imposed on you, in a place made for trade. It’s by definition in the street, or at its edges, and unlike a lot of violent crime it’s mostly stranger-on-stranger, and therefore thrives where there is the highest population of relative strangers. You are brought into sudden, total contact with one of your fellow citizens, people you might be highly unlikely to encounter otherwise; it’s an extraordinarily powerful and meaningful interaction, transcending some boundaries, but operating entirely within others, urban in its—’
‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve read Night Traffic, that’s all true enough.’ Except it wasn’t, I had to remind myself: Pierce’s thoughts on the matter were based on imagination, not experience. True enough was true enough. ‘I put it badly – what I meant to say was, when it happened to me, when I was mugged, it didn’t feel very “urban”. The city went away. I was on my own, in nothingness, with the two men robbing me. I might have been interacting with them, but I wasn’t interacting with the city.’
‘You were out of your bubble, though, weren’t you?’ Pierce said. ‘No passivity, no distance, no irony or detachment. You were involved in city life.’
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t disagree, I just didn’t know what to think. A curious sensation had come over me. When I had read Night Traffic, I had admired it greatly. It had appeared both objectively true and true to my experience. Now, knowing that it was based on a mighty lie, I found myself reassessing its other apparent truths. Perhaps what had appeared to be an accurate description of my own experience only came across that way because it ennobled my experience, made it out to be more grand and important than the shabby encounters I had lived through. This deepened my appreciation of the trouble that Pierce was in. The lie had metastasised, spreading out to corrupt everything it touched. It was intimate.
I had finished my beer, and Pierce his whisky.
‘What else would qualify?’ Pierce asked. He was eager to get his view endorsed, almost bullying me into agreement. It reeked of insecurity.
‘You mean – what’s the primal urban experience?’
‘Yes.’
‘Buying a house?’
‘No.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Fuck no.’
‘OK. You’re right. Modern trade? I don’t know … working on the commodities markets?’
‘No. Better suggestion than your last one, though, but it’s all automated now, the preserve of very few people. Deracinated, networked, delocalised. No city necessary.’
‘Walking from your home to a street market and haggling with the traders.’
‘Better. Bit retro.’
‘Getting the Tube.’
Pierce looked as if he had smelled something offensive, and didn’t respond.
‘Being caught in a disaster,’ I said. I was losing patience with the game – with Pierce’s games in general. ‘An urban disaster. A terror attack.’
‘That might be your best yet,’ Pierce said. ‘But, believe me, I’ve given it a lot of thought, and getting mugged is the quintessential urban experience.’
All at once I felt a great weariness. Pierce’s games were tiring me out. I was beginning to find this talk about authenticity strangely odious. Having had the genuine experience that Pierce so craved, I didn’t feel better for it. It had made a kind of sense when I had read Night Traffic and felt that Pierce had known what I had been through. Now I saw that someone – albeit someone very talented – was able to simply conjure up that experience, I was even further separated from it. That second attack, though. If that hadn’t really happened, I might have needed to invent it. ‘How about a real drink?’ I said. ‘We could take this to the pub.’
At this, Pierce looked happier than at any other time since I had met him.
Coats, lights, keys – the assorted chores that came with leaving Pierce’s flat refocused me on the enviable fact that he had two floors to himself, and the London question.
‘Do you own or rent?’ I asked.
He looked embarrassed. ‘Own.’ No prompting was needed for the explanation, the answer to the unspoken part of the question. ‘My parents did me the favour of dying while I was still fairly young.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I thought the money from Night Traffic …’
‘That’s been paying my mortgage the past couple of years. It’s a good flat and I know I’m lucky to have it, but on balance I’d rather have my mum and dad.’
We walked down the creaking stairs in silence. ‘It’s the London question,’ I said. ‘Not really “How do you afford a place to live?” – more, “How is paying to live fucking up your life?” Either you’re deep in debt, or you’re giving everything to a landlord, or you’re doing a job you hate with no way out, or you live in a shithole. Or someone has to die.’
Pierce smiled icily and smacked the button that unlocked the front door. ‘Someone has to die – and that’s if you’re one of the luckiest ones,’ he said. ‘Congratulations, someone you love has gone. You’re allowed to stay. You win. That’s the sacrifice London wants. And that’s if you have asset-rich elders to offer up. Moloch in reverse.’
‘The only ones who don’t have to pay in blood are the psychopaths,’ I said.
‘Oh, obviously,’ Pierce said. He knew at once who I meant. He had met a lot more of them than me. ‘Not that it would bother them.’
‘Not in the slightest.’
The time was approaching 1 p.m. The interview with De Chauncey was scheduled for 3 p.m. I had, at most, half an hour of pub time. My phone had been on silent during the interview, a basic courtesy, and I had avoided checking it, to avoid repercussions from the incident with Alan, and to postpone confronting the De Chauncey arrangements. And, as I could have predicted, there was an email from the Wolfe / De Chauncey press person confirming the time and asking for my mobile number ‘in case’. Alongside half a dozen other emails, there were notifications from the various social networks – just likes, nothing out of the ordinary. But on Tamesis, there was an invite from Kay. That was potentially awkward. She was on my T-plus list: if convenient (and if it suited the machinations of Quin’s algorithms) Tamesis would discreetly try to guide us into ‘chance’ meetings. A meeting I would, for the time being, prefer to avoid. I could unplus her, take her off the list, or even give her the dreaded T-minus, for people you wanted to avoid – Tamesis would then not recommend venues where it knew, or believe
d, she might be. But that was brutal. T-minusing was for your exes, creeps, people you weren’t talking to, deadbeat pseudo-friends, creditors. The system gave you no indication you had been T-minused, just as you have no idea if someone has muted you on Twitter. Naturally, T-minusing was one of the big selling points of Tamesis – arguably more popular than its ability to cause you to run into your friends more often. Quin affected to be embarrassed by the T-minus function as it ran against his cheerful, utopian picture of London (and, soon, the rest of the country) becoming smaller, friendlier and better connected. It wasn’t even possible in the earliest releases. So why did he enable it?
‘Bunk doesn’t believe in denying people tools,’ Quin said. ‘T-minusing is feasible, it’s useful, so the greater sin would be to disallow it.’
He didn’t say this to me, mind, or if he did I didn’t get it down – I’ve taken that quote from elsewhere. It’s classic Quin, though: practicality held up as a moral quality in itself, overall shine of sanctimony, completely self-serving. As if it had never occurred to him that an app that helped you avoid people would be as popular as his dream of an app that helped you find people. And so it proved. Hardly a week went by without an Evening Standard or Guardian feature about the new etiquette of T-plus and T-minus. Who knew what would happen when Bunk launched Tamesis nationally later this year.
There weren’t a huge number of pubs near Pierce, but several were warm-rated on Tamesis.
‘Don’t do that,’ Pierce said, seeing the blue glow of Tamesis on my screen. ‘You don’t need that. That fucking … I’m right here. I live here. I know where to go. Look around you. Look at the city.’
I was chagrined, and quickly re-pocketed my phone. In fact I hadn’t been thinking about where we might go, just about Kay, and about getting to Shoreditch to see De Chauncey. A sickly, acid emptiness in my gut, but it wasn’t the urge to drink, not entirely. It was anxiety about the pub. Time was not on my side: I’d have to leave just as I started to feel comfortable. Obligations, seeing people I didn’t want to see, doing things I didn’t want to do. Things I wanted to escape. Escaping was, for the moment, even more important than drinking. Pierce, he was the key. I wasn’t done with Pierce yet. The interview had led to … What? Whatever it was, it was important, and it meant, with regret, I would have to postpone De Chauncey for a day or two. Plans do change. I would be giving them advance warning, almost an hour’s worth; it wasn’t as if I was standing him up. Any repercussions in the office – well, that was for tomorrow. Or the day after, if I muted my phone, and by that time I might have the full incredible story from Pierce. But what could Pierce and I do together?
The sun was, presumably, somewhere overhead, but it was obscured and ineffectual. Pierce turned towards the garden square, and I followed his instruction and looked around, at the towering plane trees and the handsome stucco and yellow-brick houses. Above the white line of their parapets, darkness unnatural. I had forgotten it, and it had waited out here for me. And at once I felt it, in my sinuses, by taste, on the skin of my face, in my eyes.
‘You want real, authentic?’ I said, stopping. ‘A primal urban event?’
Pierce stopped too, but didn’t reply. He looked at me, waiting for me to continue.
‘That fire in Barking. Where all that smoke is coming from. That’s real. Let’s go there.’
FIVE
We walked to Bow Road Station and caught a District Line train bound for Barking, the seat of the fire.
Pierce lived at the eastern limit of my knowledge of London. This personal, psychic boundary coincided with a geographical boundary. My journey to Pierce was all in tunnels, apart from that unhappy moment at Liverpool Street. But the journey east was only under the sky. Pierce lived where the Underground stops being underground.
I remarked as much to him, thinking that this was the kind of observation that might get him waxing psychogeographical – a winding path through tunnelling technologies and the cost of land in the nineteenth century, perhaps, with stops for the great Victorian cemeteries and the machinations of the rail companies. Instead he grunted, as if it had never occurred to him before, and looked out of the window. Unsatisfactory, deeply unsatisfactory. I was ditching work, and ditching the pub, in order to go on an expedition with Oliver Pierce. Oliver Pierce. Throw in a few encounters with eccentric characters, surreal and/or threatening, and it could be considered a caper. If it involved drinking or drug use, criminal or semi-criminal activity of some kind, and perhaps a lucky escape from arrest or a beating, I could justifiably call it a gonzo escapade. This was a wish fulfilled, but only if Pierce was Pierce. He had to play along, to conform to the personality that appeared on the pages of his essays. He had to be unpredictable and dangerous and full of bad ideas. I was just along for the ride. As the writer, you are a passenger, the avatar of the reader. You can’t instigate the crazy, you just happen to be there when it gets started. That’s how it should work.
Or that’s how it should appear, anyway. How did Pierce set up those Pierce-ish situations? Had he invented even more than he admitted to? If so, how? This trip hadn’t even been his idea, it had been mine. He was a writer too. What if neither of us was the instigator, the protagonist? What if we were both Boswells? If we were just blokes on a train?
I looked out of the window. Material for the escapade piece I would write. A slash through unexplored outer London. The sinews of the modern city. Gas-holders and scrub. Broken, daubed walls. Industrial buildings sinking into triffidous greenery. Triffidous, that was good. Neologisms were always good for this sort of thing. Think Will Self, Iain Sinclair. London’s fringe, where it breaks apart and loses its shape, before yielding to fields. But I was mistaken. This was only a temporary lapse. The city regrouped and re-exerted itself, growing denser again. With a lurch akin to vertigo, I became aware of the sheer size of the metropolis, the huge area it covered, the multitudes it contained. Builders’ yards and taxi roosts were replaced by terraced lines of back gardens. Punch bags and trampolines. Blocks of flats. A train depot, its Christmas lights still up. More gas-holders. The train grew weary, getting into a melancholy cycle of slow deceleration and fitful, uneven acceleration. It terminated at Barking, and wanted us to know that well in advance, its efforts palpably waning.
We had come to Barking because that was where the fire was – the Barking Blaze, it said in the papers. Beyond that, we had not put much preparation into the excursion. I had, I think, expected to walk out of Barking Station and into a scene resembling a painting of the last hours of Pompeii. A geyser of destruction, infernal orange light, people cowering and fleeing, and so on. At the very least I expected the fire to be visibly nearby, within a few streets’ walk. In fact, it was as if we had travelled no distance at all.
There was the plume in the east, but it was still removed from us, almost abstract, a threat without presence. Not even perceptibly closer, just fatter, bolder, higher resolution, its unceasing internal coilings and rearrangements more clearly defined. But not close. No one was looking towards it but us, or so I believed.
‘You should have seen it yesterday,’ said a voice behind us. A Big Issue seller, a ginger beard between red tabard and woolly hat.
‘Bigger than that?’
The Big Issue seller frowned. ‘No, not really. But newer.’
‘Is it near here?’ Pierce asked.
‘Nah,’ the seller replied. ‘Down by the river.’ He nodded, helpfully, towards the plume.
A silent but eloquent moment passed between me and Pierce. We both understood that the social circumstances demanded that we buy a magazine, and that it might look a little forced if both of us did. In the end, after long milliseconds of wordless deliberation, Pierce volunteered, and I immediately wished that it had been me who jumped, for appearance and out of genuine guilt. But if I tried now that guilt would be a bit too obvious. The opportunity was lost.
Down by the river. Naively, I had assumed Barking to be on the river. Out came the phones, for navigatio
n. I remembered the map in the morning paper, the aerial photo: the industrial lands of the estuary. From the satellite’s eye, not the texture of city or suburb or countryside, but more resembling a circuit board. The white buboes of oil tanks, the dull tessellation of warehouse roofs. Pierce had opened Google Maps. I tried Tamesis, which combined maps with live information and social updates. The screen raced to one side, away from the often-loaded pages of my usual haunts, into grey unloaded areas. ‘Finding you …’ it said, Bunk logo spinning merrily. Then central Barking unfolded on the screen. Menus opened like jeweller’s drawers. Where’s the fire? I asked it.
Ongoing event / Major fire / Barking Riverside / Police, TfL warnings in place / Ongoing air quality alert / Road closures / Related news stories (23) / User pictures (37) / What people are saying / Directions here / Share this?
I thumbed ‘directions’.
While Pierce looked at timetables, I pecked out a quick email response to the press contact at Wolfe / De Chauncey. Earlier interview overrunning, unexpected circumstances, sincere apologies, possible to reschedule? And then another train east: not a Tube, a mainline train, albeit an unhurried local one. We only went one stop, but the change was startling. Beyond Barking, the city really fell apart. The railway line itself spread out as if no longer pent up by urban pressure, splitting into a wide braid of sidings and halts. Disused goods cars brilliant with graffiti fed rust to beds of weeds. Other trains passed us, rushing out of the city on separate, better, tracks. We were in the distribution steppes, the pylon orchards. Expansive wastes of tarmac patrolled by lorries and cranes, and filled with shipping containers.
Dagenham Docks Station – I liked the unregenerated name – lay under a swerve of elevated motorway, a speck of Edwardian brick caught between the concrete teeth of a later era. No one disembarked with us. Leaving the station, we were confronted by what I knew from the map to be the south-western corner of the Ford factory. This turned out to be underwhelming: no obvious forest of belching smokestacks or cathedral of automation, just unmarked, unremarkable low-rise buildings in fleshy brick. If they made any noise, it was drowned out by the motorway.
