Tuesday Falling

by S Williams

  ‘In the Interzone, yeah. She asked me what had happened. What they did. Who they were. And then she said she’d help me, but that there’d be a price. A price on my soul.’ Lily-Rose stares into her coffee cup. ‘She said that she’d meet the boys, and whatever they brought to her, she’d bring it back to them full tilt. That if they brought violence they’d get it back double. She said that there would be no going back. That, although the responsibility was theirs, I might try to make it mine, and there would be no way to undo what was started.’

  Lily-Rose takes out some money from the pocket of her new cargoes and places it on the table. Her mother reaches across the table and takes her daughter’s hand in hers. ‘I’m glad you did. I’m glad those boys got stopped. Not just for you, but for all the other girls they’ve, they’ve …’ She doesn’t know how to frame it. How to say what has happened to her daughter. ‘Fucked up. Would have continued to fuck up.’

  Lily-Rose’s mum squeezes her daughter’s hand, but not too hard. She can feel all the tiny bones, and is afraid of breaking one of them.

  Lily-Rose smiles at her mum. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you effing before.’ Her mum smiles back. ‘I’ll try not to do it again.’

  Lily-Rose stands up. ‘Let’s catch the train. She told us any time before half past, so it might as well be now.’

  Lily-Rose and her mother make their way into Victoria Station, and board the 17.11 fast service to Brighton.

  At half past five the first tube station in central London is evacuated.

  73

  DI Loss is standing outside the cracked remains of the refuge off Charing Cross Road, where his daughter used to work in between shifts at the hospital. It is Victorian, its smoke-damaged brickwork pocked, eroded by 130 years of acid rain. The mortar between the red bricks is similar to scar tissue. The whole structure is being pulled apart in super-slow motion by weeds and some form of mutant city honeysuckle. There are crows flying in and out of the broken roof. The late-afternoon London light seems to get sucked into their feathers, then reflected back, prism-like, through city oil and polluted air. It does nothing to ease the knot of pressure building in his spine. Rather, it feeds into the despair he feels whenever he thinks of Suzanne. There is a thin cloak of cooking smoke drifting around the area, possibly from a squat in one of the adjacent buildings. Since the change in the law prohibiting squatting, a new kind of unauthorized occupation has developed: pop-up squats; people who live in the buildings for a few days, and then move on. Slash and burn.

  Survival always finds a path.

  The door and windows to the refuge have been covered by metal security sheeting, bolted, and stapled, making it look as if the building is being tortured. A faint smell of putrefaction seeps out of the garbage bags scattered against the walls, shiny and slick, non-biodegradable and utterly impervious to the march of time.

  DI Loss is not surprised to notice ‘Tuesday’ spray-painted across the scarred metal sheet bolted to the wall that has replaced the door. The lettering is cracked and blistered with at least one year of city heat and cold, and he wonders if Tuesday did it. If this is the first tag she ever wrote.

  ‘Just give me the keys, darling,’ says a voice he barely recognizes. He looks round, but nobody is there; impossible shadows in the sunlight. Time is stuttering in front of him. The doorway to the broken building in front of him morphs into the doorway of his flat. His old flat. Suzanne is standing in front of him, seven years old. She is wearing black jeans and a sweatshirt. Her hair is tied back in a loose ponytail because that’s all he can do, and she is blocking the door her mother will never walk through again.

  And she has hidden his car keys. She doesn’t want him to leave for work. She has had too much leaving. You can see it in her too pale face and her too old eyes. He wants to hold her and tell her it’s all right. But it isn’t all right. It won’t ever be all right again.

  ‘Don’t leave, Daddy.’

  But leaving is all he can do. He can’t stay here in this flat.

  ‘I need to go to work, Suzanne.’

  Loss wipes his hand in front of his eyes. The determined look on his daughter’s face falls apart, and the past disappears.

  The street in which the refuge is situated is run-down. London is endlessly amazing, he thinks, his mind cart-wheeling, trying to find something to cling on to: poverty and prosperity lie next to each other, with only a courtyard or a side street between them: the past and the present. In the gutter outside the building he can see used disposable lighters, crumpled squares of blackened tin-foil, and deflated balloons, which would, he knows, have been filled recently with nitrous oxide. For a moment his mind stutters again and the black garbage bags become morgue bags, the contents too awful for him to face.

  He thinks about the children at the refuge whom his daughter tried to help. Children being destroyed by circumstance. Imprisoned by culture. Children for whom ‘family’ was the word for pain rather than love. Children who would rather live on the streets of London, with the gutter-men and drug dealers, with the skin-girls and hobos, than with their own parents. Loss looks at the building and thinks of the girl known as Tuesday.

  ‘What happened?’ he whispers. Even to himself it is unclear who he means: Suzanne or Tuesday.

  He thinks of his daughter. He sees her life staggering in front of his eyes. The withdrawal when her mother died, like the cutting of a flower. The betrayal when he left for work, again and again, for longer and longer, unable to cope with the pain in his own body. More withdrawal as his job took him to desperate places. Vice. Drugs. Gangs. The work getting darker and darker. The distance between him and his daughter growing each day.

  Suzanne’s resolution to become a doctor; to make sure no other son or daughter had to lose a mother as she had, and his inability to hold her because, year after year, she was moving toward the likeness, inside and out, of his wife, and it made him want to scream. Scream at himself. Scream at the world.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Suzanne.’ Loss leans his head against the door of the refuge, trying to fill what remains of his daughter’s spirit with his love.

  Too late.

  All that is left are ghosts.

  His phone beeps. Detective Loss keeps his eyes closed and his hands clenched, trying to stop time. Trying to find the space between the seconds where his daughter might live.

  His phone beeps again, and he takes a deep breath and pulls it out of his pocket. It’s a text from his DS, telling him she’s at Euston tube station, but in his head he is so far away he can barely see it.

  74

  Hacking into the national database that collates the DNA of over 10 per cent of the population of Britain is not an easy task. There are security protocols that are rock hard, even for me. And it’s not as if all you’d have to do is replace one set of data with another. Sometimes they go back to the original samples. You’d have to set up a rolling program that would Trojan in behind, and return to a request and shiv in your false reading each and every time. It would be an absolute nightmare.

  Lucky I don’t have to bother then, isn’t it?

  By the time I’ve set up everything I want to do, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, or at least that’s what my watch tells me. Down here it doesn’t matter what time it is. It’s always my time.

  I keep my watch set to GMT, cos that’s what the World Service runs on. I don’t fuck about with British Summer Time. I’m not a farmer, or Scottish. I live underground. I don’t have friends, only clients.

  I don’t have appointments, I just find out what appointments others have, and make sure I’m there too.

  The last time I cared about time was when my daughter’s was stolen.

  Stopped.

  Taken.

  Since then. Well since then, who cares? I’m awake, I’m asleep. I hear the water in the sewers and rivers. I hear the air compressing and releasing in the tunnels. I hear the rats and the bats and the tunnel foxes with no eyes, and I know some sort of time pass
es.

  One day it will stop passing for me, but in my world down here it will carry on, become less human and stranger. I like that.

  I hit the button on my laptop and start shutting down the tube system. Really, people are so closed in their little worlds. They create this entire network; tubes, signal boxes, escalators, air flow, and then instead of employing loads of people to run it, they computerize it. And then they allow remote access because it’s so fucking complicated when you go out to fix this or that you need to access the whole system. And that means there are laptops that are live.

  Hooked in.

  Connected and open on the tunnel Wi-Fi.

  They make it too easy. I just slide in behind a hot laptop and ease myself into the train-web, copy all the access protocols, and ghost out.

  Easy.

  The first station I shut down is Leicester Square.

  I don’t want any panic and trampled babies; I just want the station empty.

  First I shut down the timetable screens, and replace the train information with a message to leave the station as quickly as possible. From the pop-up box in the top corner of my screen showing the CCTV feed I can see everyone looking confused. The staff are talking into their radios, but nobody’s saying the T word yet.

  That’s terrorist, not Tuesday. I’m not some egomaniac who thinks, just cos she’s shut down London, she should get top billing.

  Next I send a system-wide message for no trains to stop at the station. Now I can see the staff running, and people are beginning to head out. The staff are really doing very well. I hope they get some sort of bonus for today, I really do.

  I press a button and all the lights in the station black out.

  Ta-daa! OK, I might be a bit egomaniacal, in my James Bond underground bunker.

  I’m not sure, but I think I can hear the screams from here.

  75

  ‘So. Tell me again why we aren’t going to the cinema?’ DI Loss enquires as he and DS Stone tramp along the road, their clothes sticking to their bodies in the heat.

  ‘Are you asking me out on a date?’

  Loss wipes his face; he is too tired for this. ‘The abandoned cinema where Five lives, as you well know. By the way, is that even legal? I thought the squatting laws had changed. And what about fire regs and stuff?’

  ‘Well, if you’re worried about that you’re going to brick yourself about this.’

  He sighs; his feet hurt and he has a headache caused, he has decided, by too much caffeine and too little nicotine. ‘What’s “this”?’

  ‘“This” is this,’ says Stone, coming to a halt. ‘The Temperance Hospital. Five’s new home, apparently.’

  They have walked the short distance from Euston underground to the derelict hospital on Hampstead Road. The London sky is midnight blue, lit up and time-fractured by lightning. It is impossible to tell from which direction the thunder is coming. To Loss it sounds as if it is coming from everywhere. Or maybe just from his head. Everything seems to be moving to a beat that he can’t quite hear: the rape riots, as certain parts of the media had begun to call them; the feeling that his city is ready to erupt in flames; the confusion of the gang world, its handles on power being blown away, the tension in the office, not just because of him. The case seems to be affecting the entire staff.

  At least on the surface. Loss is not so naive as to think people as cold-hearted and vicious as those in control of the East London estates were just going to shut up shop and walk away, all because of a girl called Tuesday.

  No. They would be out searching for her, and anyone who knew her.

  And now Five. The art terrorist. He was also fairly confident that she would know Tam, who had not only mentioned the cinema, but also the derelict hospital. That she was somehow connected to Tuesday, Loss had absolutely no doubt. When he looked her up on the NCDB he found that she had been arrested several times as a student, involved in various different protests: Gaza; corporate control; Militant Pride; arrested but never charged.

  The arrests hadn’t shed any light on who she was. As part of her art degree, she had apparently wiped her personal history from the college records, creating the ‘Five’ persona as an expression of ‘art as real in an art-ificial world’. Her reasoning, according to her teachers, was she had wanted to show that modern life was an imitation, or construct, of a perceived reality that was the past. That modern-day living was, in effect, nothing more than an art project imitating a reality that in all probability never existed. She had written an essay on how easy it was, both legally and illegally, to not only change one’s identity, but to make it virtually impossible for anyone to discover the prime identity. As her final dissertation piece she had handed in a valid British passport containing her new name.

  ‘So, do you get her? Five?’ Loss asks as they turn the corner into Cardington Street, following the decrepit, hulking building round to its entrance. The day has become so dark that the cars have all switched on their lights and the automatic street lighting has activated.

  Stone shrugs. ‘Not really. I like her, though. Don’t trust her, but like her. I like the fact that she just sees us as people. Not the enemy, not the ally. She’s just in her own world doing her own thing.’

  ‘Except, she’s not, is she?’ Loss protests. ‘She’s not just some experimental artist; I don’t know, Stick, or Banksy, or someone messing about with what we think. Putting creative things into the public space.’

  ‘Isn’t she? I thought that’s exactly what she said she was doing’, Stone pauses, then adds, ‘the dangerous thing is that, maybe she thinks that’s what Tuesday is doing too.’

  They walk up the stone steps leading into the hospital entrance, and are unsurprised to find that there is a brand-new security door with a camera intercom. Loss presses the button, and waits. Stencilled onto the door in black and white ink is a stylized representation of the planets in their orbit around the sun. There is something wrong with the picture, but Loss can’t put his finger on what it is. He’s just about to ask Stone when there is a buzzing and the door swings open.

  ‘Jesus.’

  Inside is exactly as one would expect the inside of a derelict building to be. Exposed wires everywhere, and the high odour of rat urine. Broken glass and pieces of ceramic tiles on the floor, and because the windows have been boarded up there is very little light. By the door, is a small table with a Nitecore flashlight, which Stone picks up. She turns it on.

  ‘Bloody hell. You could light up the moon with this.’

  The beam is as bright as a helicopter searchlight. It picks up every detail in the lobby and throws it into nightmare, horror-film relief. To the left of the curving staircase, treads missing like broken teeth, is a door with ‘5’ sprayed on it in red. They pick their way over. From all around comes the sound of whispering and muttering, as if the place is filled with spirits. Stone notices tiny speakers placed around the lobby.

  ‘OK,’ says Loss. ‘This is officially very creepy.’

  Under the large number on the door is a neatly stencilled notice: ‘please knock’. They knock.

  ‘Who is it?’ Five’s voice rings out from behind the door.

  ‘Oh she’s funny. I’ll give her that,’ mutters Stone. The police officers identify themselves, there is the sound of bolts being thrown, and then the door is opened. In front of them stands Five. She is wearing a black hijab, a long-sleeved canvas grandfather shirt with ‘Conceived in Heaven: Designed in Nature: Made in Britain’ written across it, and her ripped 501s. On her feet are a pair of brown military fur-lined boots. On her face is the ever-present grin.

  ‘Why hello, Detectives! How nice of you to drop by.’

  ‘Yes, er, Five.’ DI Loss hasn’t managed to acclimatize himself to the single-name format yet. ‘What with you asking us, and everything, it’s amazing. What happened with the Cinema, anyway?’ Five moves to the side to allow them in, shutting the door behind them. The whispering is immediately cut off. Loss and Stone find themselves i
n a space very similar to Five’s last room: vinyl records strewn across the floor; on the turntable, David Byrne’s ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ is playing quietly; an old poster of the band Tubeway Army advertising the single ‘Me: I disconnect from you!’ is on the wall, together with a frame containing strips of text in English, Hebrew, and Farsi, woven together to form a pattern.

  ‘The problem with abandoned buildings, detectives, is that you occasionally have to abandon them.’ Five waves her hand toward a sofa futon covered with books and sketchpads. Even from the door, Loss can make out the picture of the three monkeys in their traditional poses, each wearing a tee shirt with a symbol of a major religion on it. Loss is not going anywhere near it. Loss walks up to the picture on the wall, hoping it is safer.

  ‘What is this?’ he enquires.

  ‘The Serenity Prayer in three languages, woven together to make a point. Yours for 1200 quid.’ Loss looks at it for a moment. The way the strips cross over and under each other making a new design, almost a new language when viewed as a whole, for some reason creates an emotional response in him. He makes a mental note to look up the Serenity Prayer when he has a moment. He turns and faces the artist, who is grinning at him.

  ‘I’m sure I can arrest you, just for living here.’

  ‘Actually you can’t. I am officially a Building Angel.’ Five pulls out a laminated card from a pocket on her sleeve and holds it out to him between her slender fingers, waggling it back and forth. He nods at Stone, who walks over, takes the card, and examines it.

  ‘Looks legit, sir.’

  ‘Good. Now, can you tell me what a “Building Angel” is?’ Loss feels somewhat stupid as the two women look at him, obviously amazed that he hasn’t heard of Building Angels. Then Stone tells him, ‘Building Angels are people employed by equity firms, banks, people like that. The people who either own the buildings, or manage them. Surely you’ve heard of them?’ Loss shakes his head.