by Will Wiles
Behind us, behind the motorway and the station, the plume. To be seen across London, the plume had to climb high in the air, and so it did, an impossible tower of churning ink. But here, almost at its base, the surprise it offered was its width. It appeared to fill a whole quadrant of the sky, blacking out the south-east. A vast field must be alight to fill that footprint; more than ‘alight’ – that was a word for foil-tray barbecues and dinky wood stoves – this was ablaze, consumed, engulfed, erupted. Yet there must still be fuel down there to burn, to ecstatically release and send its residual filth up into that roiling pillar. My curiosity was already almost sated, we were closer than near, we were inside it. The air was foul with it. That filling-station tang I had noticed this morning had become a burning tyre under the nose, a nauseating blast against the back of the throat.
Perhaps we had already done enough: I had dodged De Chauncey for now, gone on a trip that would make for scenic colour, and now we could turn around and go to the pub. I could wash away some of this hydrocarbon stench. But no, it was too soon. We had come all this way, we had to make something of it – and Pierce was just getting warmed up. I could see his enthusiasm rising.
‘Hopefully we’ll get a better view from the bridge,’ he said, striding off. But the bridge over the railway lines and sidings was enclosed by grey steel walls and caged in at the top, making a vandal-proof chute straight out of an abattoir. Or into one. The stairs down from the bridge were clogged with litter and weeds that had graduated into shrubbery, making me wonder if people ever came here, and who might be responsible for maintaining this miserable outpost. As soon as this thought formed, I had to revise it. Of course people came here, people worked here, did they not? Many people. All around were places of work: logistics centres and cement plants and, ahead, Barking power station. Even legit, old-school factories. Maybe the workers all drove in, rather than chance the twice-an-hour trains. Maybe they used buses instead. From where? Were there buses? So many of my fellow Londoners were, I realised, a mystery to me. Where did they live? The question: how did they make it work? All I knew was that I didn’t have to duck past Triassic overgrowth on my morning journey from Pimlico to Shoreditch.
‘I forget how big London is,’ I said. ‘You go to, say, Docklands, and you think you’re near the edge. But you aren’t. There’s all of this. Miles more.’
Pierce smiled and squinted at his surroundings. ‘If I ever want to shoot a zombie movie, I know where to come,’ he said. It was the most interesting thing he had said since we set out, this humdrum observation, and it was fundamentally wrong. The footbridge and roadside had an air of desuetude and abandonment, it’s true. But human activity was everywhere: a constant exchange of lorries up and down the road, the sounds of industry and the wail of the motorway. A steady metallic banging came from somewhere up ahead, and there was a general non-traffic growl of machinery and work. But no human voice, no people on foot.
To aggravate the go-away vibe of the place, a freezing drizzle began to fall. As we walked it worsened, enough for us to keep our heads down and our mouths closed.
Like the Ford factory, Barking power station was thoroughly free of awe or interest: flat, featureless blue slabs of building, and squat chimneys that issued no smoke. In any case, anything that they did produce would be quite redundant compared with the mountain of smoke rising across the way. We were close enough to see that the plume had its own shuddering orange illumination, but any actual flames were obscured by the sheds along the road.
The road from the station to the riverside was straight and wide. It and its wide pavement were not surfaced with tarmac but with scraped cement, giving them a temporary, construction-site feel. The drains, if there were any, had failed, and the gutter was a chain of giant, murky puddles. The lorries, which never ceased, sent up eruptions of filthy water, so our progress was halting. A shining stretch of cement would warn of a splash-zone, and we had to check if any vehicles were close before traversing it. I was reminded of the Nintendo platform games I played as a child: stop, wait for the swinging axe or angry ghost to pass, then jump the chasm. At the end of the road, where a wind turbine turned, was a compact constellation of flashing blue lights, twinkling and flowering in the drizzle.
‘We must be close,’ Pierce said, and I agreed when he said it, but again he was wrong. Perhaps it was the continual need to stop and wait for lorries to splash by, or the unfinished surface beneath our feet, or the overall hostility of the terrain, but a good deal of walking yielded little obvious progress. To our right, a collection of shiny new warehouses called Thames Gateway Park, then an online supermarket distribution centre, then the nerve centre of a popular brand of mass-produced bread. The supermarket’s delivery vans had fruit and vegetables printed on their sides; the bread giant’s lorries were decorated to resemble sliced loaves. The people we saw walking – three of them – shared characteristics: male, not white, hi-vis vests, an air of deep focus that suggested either tiredness or concentration on a task.
Two police cars were parked across the road ahead, one for each lane, front bumper to front bumper. Their lights strobed silently. Behind them, under the grey citadel of a cement plant, more emergency vehicles were parked: two police vans, an ambulance, two fire engines, and another fire appliance as big as an engine but not one, a mobile office or command vehicle. Yellow signs reading ROAD CLOSED stood in front of the police cars, strung with vibrating blue and white tape. Two police officers watched this frontier. They saw us coming from a distance and regarded us together as it became clear we were definitely approaching the tape rather than turning anywhere else. Words passed between them, certainly about us. As we drew closer, one of the officers walked – with deliberate, powerful slowness – to intercept us, gloved hands flexing, an expression of bored authority on his face. As soon as we were close enough to hear him, and there was no doubt we were going anywhere else, he spoke.
‘Road’s closed, gentlemen,’ he said, pointing in our direction, through us. ‘You’re going to have to go back the way you came.’
‘Can we just cut through?’ Pierce asked, with a casual air that I immediately envied. ‘We’re trying to get to the river.’
The officer formed a leather-clad fist with his left hand and was massaging it with his right like a child forming a snowball. He spoke as if he had answered the same question twenty times already.
‘I don’t know if you gentlemen have noticed, but’ – the right hand released the left and gestured, open, towards the plume – ‘there’s a rather serious fire going on over there. So no one is just anything anywhere this way. The road. Is closed.’
‘We don’t want to get in the way,’ Pierce said. ‘We only want to have a look.’
‘We’re journalists,’ I added quickly, seeing that the policeman was getting sterner and icier.
Either he didn’t believe me, or he held journalists in low regard. Quite possibly both. Again, he pointed through us, back up the road. ‘Media,’ he said. ‘Ocado car park.’
‘Excuse me?’ Pierce said.
The police officer indulged in a couple of slow, disdainful blinks. ‘Media liaison,’ he said, crafting every syllable, ‘Ocado car park.’ The pointing finger jabbed, once. ‘That way, gentlemen.’
‘You’ve been so terrific,’ Pierce said, taking out his phone. ‘Can I get a picture together?’
The officer had not lowered his arm. ‘That way.’
A flimsy laminated sign was zip-tied to the gate of the Ocado distribution portal. Distracted by the toy-bright vans parked in neat ranks, I had missed it on our way past. It read:
METROPOLITAN POLICE
MAJOR INCIDENT
MEDIA LIAISON
With an arrow.
‘Ocado,’ I said, still hopeful of eliciting some psychogeographical gems from Pierce. ‘The jihadists just need to knock out this facility and middle-class London starves.’ Bella and Dan used Ocado. On two occasions, they had been out at the time of delivery and had called me t
o take in their shopping. You wouldn’t believe the fuss Bella made over a melted sorbet.
‘Don’t knock Ocado,’ Pierce said. ‘When I couldn’t leave the house, they were lifesavers. Their drivers were about the only people I spoke to for three weeks. I should drop in and say hello.’
I didn’t say anything in reply. The roadblock had evaporated what was left of my momentum, and I was hunting for the earliest possible opportunity to call a halt and make for the pub. Not the nearest pub – I wanted somewhere I could be comfortable, where I could get myself home quickly under autopilot, not an alien boozer on the wrong side of Barking. I began to feel very far from the centre, very far from the convenience store and the fridge. But Pierce blazed on ahead.
Tucked behind the fence were two conjoined white portable huts, like the office on a construction site. Under the emblem of the Met were the words ‘Rapid Response Incident Media Assistance’. A male police officer minded the door, barely acknowledging us as we climbed the unsteady steps to enter. Inside, a female police officer sat behind a desk in a smart dress uniform, her shiny buttons the brightest objects in a thoroughly bland environment of fibreboard, acoustic panels and cheap carpet. She cocked her head at us.
‘Good afternoon,’ Pierce said.
‘Good afternoon,’ the police officer said. ‘Media?’ she asked, doubtful.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you have ID?’
Fortunately, I did. I pulled out my wallet and produced a business card and my NUJ card. Pierce followed my actions, hesitating a little before showing a small, teal plastic card of his own.
My NUJ credentials were accepted with a minimal nod. Pierce’s card was taken from him for closer examination.
‘Society of Authors?’ she said.
Pierce smiled. ‘I’m an author.’
‘This is expired.’
‘I’m an expired author.’
‘Oliver Pierce,’ she said, weighing the name for falsity.
‘That’s me,’ Pierce said, cheerful. I had spent more than an hour praying for him to do something memorable or outrageous, to unleash the caper, but now he looked ready to embark on mischief I found myself praying that he behaved himself. In and out, get this over with as quickly as possible, keep moving.
‘I wrote a non-fiction book about crime,’ Pierce continued. Is it an offence to lie to a police officer? Even in casual conversation? Although there was nothing very casual about this conversation. The officer was sandblasting Pierce with her gaze, as if expecting the paunchy author exterior to slough away, revealing a jihadist beneath. ‘About street crime. And a crime novel, for that matter. Kind of. It isn’t shelved in Crime. Perhaps you’ve read them?’
‘No,’ the officer said, the words bleached of tone. That might have been lucky. The Met had not approved of Night Traffic. And I thought, Forget the literary scandal, was there a possibility that Pierce might find himself in criminal trouble over his fraud? Had he considered that?
‘Pity,’ Pierce said. The police officer returned Pierce’s card, and Pierce returned it to his wallet. She said nothing, and little could be read from her face, other than homeopathic quantities of boredom and disapproval. There was no word or nod or wave to endorse or authorise our passage, nothing even slightly affirmative. We were simply no longer stopped from proceeding.
While we were having our cards read, someone had emerged from the screened-off area to meet us: a sparkling young woman in taut business attire. At a glance, I knew her – I knew her by type. I dealt with her kin every day. She worked in public relations.
‘Hiii,’ she said. She had a metal clipboard, like Polly’s, and was holding it in pose #3, ‘Small child waiting to give thank-you card to visiting dignitary’. ‘I’m Lily. Hiii.’
We did hellos.
‘You’re writing about the event?’ Lily asked.
‘I am,’ I said.
Lily looked troubled. ‘The next full briefing’s not until five, for the evenings,’ she said.
‘We don’t need the full briefing,’ Pierce said. ‘Just give us an abridged version. The basic facts.’
‘What kind of story are you writing?’
‘Factual,’ Pierce said brightly.
‘I should hope so!’ she said, with a laughing smile. ‘What did you say your magazine was called?’
I told her.
‘I know you!’ Lily said. ‘This isn’t your usual kind of story, is it? You’re more … modern urban lifestyle?’
‘Jack’s taking it in a new direction,’ Pierce said. ‘Grittier. More real.’
‘Eddie still the editor there?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘They’ll carry him out in a box.’
‘I love Eddie,’ Lily said. ‘Such a great guy.’
‘Yeah, he’s a great boss.’
‘I don’t know Eddie,’ Pierce said through a ghastly, insincere grin, ‘but I hear he’s great.’
Lily strafed us with another smile. Mention of Eddie had melted her reserve. ‘Come through,’ she said, letting us pass.
Half of the second hut was occupied by a miniature lecture theatre, with a dozen folding chairs facing a white projection screen and a podium. Behind the screen was a small office area, comprising two desks facing each other, a photocopier, a fancy-looking printer and a large wall-mounted TV. Lily’s clone sat at one desk, and the other was presumably Lily’s. Roles attract types. I thought of the two Rays at work – basically identical sub-editors, the same individual, apart from the fact that one was a white man and the other an Asian woman – and smiled. I thought of them fact-checking my Pierce profile and the smile faded. For that to happen, the draft would have to exist, and it was still very hard to imagine the act of writing it.
‘I remember Eddie from a trip to Miami Art Basel, must have been a couple of years ago,’ Lily said. ‘When I worked for Peloton Public Relations. Such a laugh. Please, have a seat. Can I get you anything to drink? Water, tea, coffee?’
Yes, a drink, but none of those. The Need had been building up since we had left the train, and now I felt a horrible rush of it, a geyser erupting deep within. I was far from the pub, far from the opportunity to slip away, far from home, and the fridge at home was empty. What was here, where I was, didn’t even feel real any more, only a ghastly succession of obstacles placed between my shade and being able to see and feel without pain.
‘Water, thank you,’ I said, trying to smile. Lily went to a water cooler in the corner of the office area and filled two small plastic cups.
‘So you used to work for Peloton?’ Pierce asked. ‘And now … the police?’
‘Yes!’ Lily said, as if she could hardly believe it. ‘On the media side, handling things like this.’
‘So this fire is a PR problem, is it?’
‘No problem at all,’ Lily said, easy and relaxed. She handed me a cup of water, smile unfaltering. ‘Our support is there to free up police and fire personnel so they can keep on keeping us safe, and that’s what’s really important, isn’t it? But we prefer to think of ourselves as working on behalf of the event itself.’
‘The fire?’
‘The event. We prefer to see it as an event like any other kind of event we might handle – just like a product launch or an exhibition, for instance.’
‘It’s a fire,’ Pierce said, with a disbelieving half-chuckle. ‘A big fire. Not a … gallery opening or a new magazine.’
‘Ha ha, yeah,’ Lily said cheerfully. ‘Well, we’re not promoting it, as such. We’re not saying, “Hey, come and look at this.” Because you shouldn’t. The advice is to stay away. But asking people to come to something and asking them to stay away aren’t so different. It’s all about managing perceptions of the event. Promotion isn’t the sum of what we do. We’re also here to make sure that the event is portrayed accurately and fairly – to dispel myths and calm fears. To put the event in the right light.
‘Because,’ she continued, ‘it’s more than a fire, isn’t it? There’s the spontan
eous early combustion of a quantity of petroleum products, sure – and, about that, it’s important to be clear, they were always going to be combusted, it’s all a matter of context and scheduling. But the event also includes the vital, vital work of our emergency services, and the economic ramifications, and the contribution presently being made to London’s atmosphere.’
‘That’s the part I’m interested in,’ I said. ‘The smoke column. Is it dangerous?’
Lily’s smile was indulgent. ‘Londoners have absolutely no reason to be alarmed.’
Pierce leaned in. ‘That’s not a “no”, though, is it?’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t harmful, why should people stay away? Why would it need a PR team?’
The gearshift in Lily’s attitude was barely perceptible, but it was there. Outwardly, she smiled the same smile she had been smiling the whole time, a smile that seemed directly connected to a deep pool of honesty and compassion. But to me it had been reassuring and, perhaps, a little condescending – a sales or service smile. To Pierce it was less mollifying and more engaged – a smile of respect, of professional speaking to professional.
‘I know where you’re coming from, Oliver. We tend to avoid “totemic” words like “no” and “yes” because they are in fact more open to interpretation and inaccuracy than you might imagine. If I say “no” or “yes” I am confirming or denying the content of your question, and your question is open to interpretation. Indeed, I don’t know exactly what you might mean by your question, what you might mean by a charged and flexible word like “dangerous”, so a crude answer like “yes” or “no” risks all kinds of semantic pitfalls. However, an answer such as “Londoners have no reason to be alarmed” is precise and useful.’
‘But it doesn’t answer the question. It doesn’t say if the smoke is harmful.’
