by Tobias Hill
‘Well,’ Cyril says, ‘you got what you wanted, though, didn’t you? You made your fortune; hers, too. We all make mistakes, but here we are. It worked out for the best in the end.’
‘I don’t know,’ Michael says, ‘I don’t know that it did,’ and Cyril’s gentle, seamed face hardens.
‘There’s no point dwelling. You were young and hungry. You set out for more of everything and bingo, here you are with it. You couldn’t ask for more than this. You came out on top, you did alright, and you did alright by her. Look at us, we should all be grateful. We’re bloody kings compared to what we were! Up the West End, drinking wine, and this nice young lady to pour it for us. Come on, let’s have a toast: to Mary. Will you have a taste yourself, my love?’
They raise and drink and fall quiet. There is the clink of thick club cutlery on heavy china. The waitress has stepped back from them, is hiding her face by the dumbwaiter, but it’s alright, they’re almost done. ‘Jack,’ Oscar says quietly, ‘you’ll know a place to go on to.’
Jack does. Michael gets the bill. For the waitress he asks for an envelope, folds in a fifty for her. Oscar and Jack have gone ahead. Michael follows them out with Cyril at his side.
‘Alright?’ Cyril asks, and when he nods, ‘Almost there now. Tomorrow it’s onwards and upwards again, the way it’s always been for us.’
They’re heading into Soho, where the evening crowds are denser, clustered around pubs and bars, peep shows, clip joints, encounter parlours. The vice business is past its prime, these days, is dying one by-law at a time, though there’s no shortage of custom.
‘I saw them,’ Michael says, and Cyril glances around inquiringly.
‘Eh?’
‘The old lot, from the Buildings. Not here. They were meeting Floss, it was outside the cemetery.’
Cyril has slowed, is peering at him, one hand waist-high to steer the crowd. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m telling you now. It was after the service, there wasn’t much you could have done.’
Cyril shrugs. ‘I could have had a word, asked for some respect. Who was it? What were they doing, all the way out there?’
‘I didn’t wait around. Drinking champagne, for all I know, they had that look about them. It was Dora, the watchmaker’s wife, him too, and the orphan boy they took in. Them and Clarence Malcolm.’
‘What do you mean, the boy?’ Cyril asks, ‘he must be, what, fifties by now. The world’s moved on a bit since then, ain’t it?’ he says, and Michael grinds to a halt. He raises a hand to wipe his mouth, staring at nothing or the crowds, who stare queerly back at him.
‘Fuck me,’ he says, softly. ‘I must be wrong in the head. Am I mad, Cyril? I’ve been seeing things. I saw them clear as I see you.’
Cyril has a hand on him. ‘Easy,’ he says, ‘come and lean a minute, I’ll run in here and get a chair.’
‘No – leave it, Cyril. I’m alright.’
‘Sure, now?’
‘I’m alright,’ Michael says, more strongly.
‘Course you bloody are,’ Cyril says. ‘You’re right in the head as the rest of us. It’s a long day, that’s all, it’s a lot to take in, it’s just got tangled up, that’s all. It’s the grief of it, Mickey.’
They start off again, snail’s pace: slow as hearses, Michael thinks faintly, or Chelsea Pensioners. Half a block ahead stands Oscar, looking back, his head cocked. Like a hound, Michael thinks, who scents his master’s worries, and he laughs. ‘Good old Oscar,’ he whispers, ‘good boy.’
‘Let’s see the inside of Jack’s place,’ Cyril is saying, ‘have a drink and a sit down.’
‘Alright.’
‘One for the road and we’ll get you home.’
‘Alright. It could have been worse.’
‘How’s that?’ Cyril asks, but Michael shakes his head. It could have been her I saw, is what he thinks, but he daren’t say the words: the thought alone is terrible enough.
4. Midnight
Glitterball-spun light. Spirit on the rocks, the glass pressed into his hands, its sweat icy between his fingers. Arms around his shoulders. ‘One more, Mr Lockhart?’ his embracers ask, and he says go on, then, keep them coming. They laugh and pat him on the back. ‘You still alright there, Mickey?’ they ask, and he says oh yes, never better.
Up above them and their shadows, in the densest whirl of light, girls, so young and beautiful it breaks his heart to look at them. Flash cash in the gloom around them, young bloods and silver foxes with their tongues and wallets out. A split-second in the mirrors when he catches one girl’s eyes. There is no disgust in them, only the deadly boredom of her simulation.
His ears ring with the din. He can’t hear himself speak. Jack Swan is shouting in his ear, so shatteringly close that he can smell his breath. ‘This is the life, sir, isn’t it? This is the way to do it! The stories it could tell, this place!’, and he says, but I don’t want them. I don’t want stories, Jack, I’ve had enough of them for one day.
The spirit courses in his blood; his temples thrum with it. It’s true, he’s never felt better. The girl is still dancing above him, by him, for him alone. Her skin is dark and plush as mink, black as the pearls he once gave Dora Lazarus. Oscar is there at his right hand. Oscar, he says, tell me something, the woman who died, the one I killed, do you ever think of her?
‘We all do,’ Oscar says, and he is so grateful he smiles, as he so rarely does, it seems so generous that anyone should answer him.
Listen, he says, Oscar, listen. Did you ever hear this story? There’s a knight who’s still a boy, and a fisher who’s a king . . . do you know that one, Oscar? Can you tell me what it means?
This time there is no reply. When he looks, Oscar is gone. A stranger is there in his stead, an old man with stone-grey skin who turns and becomes Clarence Malcolm.
He rises. Hands try and hold him down. A table turns, its freight of glass cascading into darkness. Leave off me, he says, I need air, and then he’s stumbling free, through the mass of seated watchers, up the stairs, into the night.
Where is he? Some alley, a chink of stars immured above. He leans against damp brick and vomits into the rankness, backhands the last spool from his lips. Behind him, by the alley’s mouth, someone laughs and jeers, and he turns – his hands already fists, his knuckles grazing on mortar – but there is no one to be seen, only a car’s brief passing, out under a shimmy of neon.
He pushes himself upright, walks out into the street. Which one is it? Brewer or Wardour or Old Compton. ‘They all look the same to me,’ he says, and hears himself for what seems the first time in hours, his voice thick as that of any pavement drunkard. Abruptly he wants nothing so much as to be home, out of sight of the city’s unremitting judgement. Where is his car? Somewhere the wrong side of Crockford’s, and too far for him, now, even if he could trust himself to sober up behind the wheel.
He straightens, steadies, starts to walk again. It feels better to be moving, though his heart is going double time, he can feel it in his breath. He grins as best he can and shakes his head at it. ‘Get back to work,’ he says, ‘you’ve years left in you yet.’
At Air Street he turns south. Ahead of him he can hear the perpetual motion of Piccadilly, and as he comes out by the circus he sees, in the oncoming coil of traffic, a black cab’s molten-copper beacon.
‘Last orders,’ the driver warns, kerb-crawling in beside him. ‘Might not be you, depends on where you’re heading.’
‘North,’ says Michael, ‘Highbury,’ and the man hawks, phut and into the gutter it goes.
‘Can’t do it, can I? I’m for Romford. Try Trafalgar Square, you’ll still catch someone if you’re lucky . . .’
He’s already starting away when Michael grabs the open window. ‘Shoreditch. You can do me that,’ he says, and when the driver glances down at his hand, ‘I’ll make it worth it.’
He gets in, leans back into leather. Eros wheels above him. In the blissful dark, as they start eastwards, he closes
his eyes. He’d like to drowse, but his thoughts still nag, as if he’s forgotten or neglected something. He thinks of those he has left behind, Dora, his boys, his girls.
‘Long day, sir?’ a voice asks, and he opens his eyes to see the driver’s slot open, his face streetlit, in profile. ‘Not exactly the same thing, Shoreditch and Highbury. Got friends down there, have you?’
‘Good friends,’ Michael says, ‘good family,’ and the man peers back, one-eyed, measuring: it isn’t any of his business, so long as he gets paid.
‘Where am I dropping you, then?’
‘Home,’ Michael says, and the man laughs, none too kindly.
‘So where’s home, when it’s at home?’
‘The Buildings.’
‘Listen, I’m not being funny, but if you can’t tell me somewhere proper I can’t take you anywhere.’
‘Columbia Buildings,’ Michael says, scowling to remember, ‘Columbia Road.’
‘That’s more like it. You see, that wasn’t so hard, sir, was it? Now we’re both getting somewhere.’
He gazes out. They’re passing from the Strand into Fleet Street, Fleet Street to Ludgate Hill, leaving Westminster behind, entering into London according to the old boundaries, shadowing the unseen, guiding permutations of the river.
Southwards, between the buildings, the air is thickening, acquiring luminosity. It takes him a moment to realise what he’s seeing. A tide of mist is rising off the Thames. Look at that! he thinks. It’s like the old days. There was mist like that in the beginning, in the mornings, when he rose and went to work, his barrow elbow-deep in flowers.
He thinks, where am I going, now? Is it the street of flowers, then? He doesn’t mind. It hardly matters. Wherever he goes, he ends alone.
‘It’s always the last job,’ the driver is saying, eyes on the road, beyond appeal. ‘Always the last one does my head in. The state I see people in, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I mean look at you, sir. How old are you? Old enough to know better, I’d call you. Older, greyer and none the wiser. No offence, I’m only saying. People should look out for themselves, look after number one. It’s not like anyone else will if you don’t, is it? Not these days.’
Momentarily they pass into some overarching darkness. A face looms up in Michael’s window. It is shark-like, monstrous: big-nosed, small-eyed, a thin-lipped mouth made for tearing morsels. They are out into lamplit night again before he recognises the features as shadowed burlesques of his own.
He thinks, am I a monster, then? The crowd outside the cemetery gates – the ghosts – they’d call him that, no doubt – and can he say for sure they’re wrong? After all, no one in Michael’s life has frightened him half as much as he frightens himself.
The driver is no longer talking to him, is remonstrating with the traffic. ‘Lanes!’ he yells, ‘lanes – yes, you, you numpty! Out of it. Get out of it!’
Michael no longer listens. He is dreaming with his eyes open. It is he who is driving. He turns from the road behind to that which still lies ahead. The dark woman stands in his path, between him and his deliverance.
She is stopped in the street of flowers, one arm bent to her hip. She is looking at him across forty years. Her young man is there beside her. He is at the last stall, buying flowers. They have come halfway across the world. They are all done up in their Sunday best, Clarence and Bernadette, as if they have just been to church, though it is not church they leave behind.
She is very beautiful. Michael never saw, but it is clear to him now. It is as if, in this small, late hour, something dull and ill falls from his eyes. Even heavy with child – more than ever, with child – Bernadette Malcolm shines. She has a dignity he has never possessed and which, now, he never will; golden-rayed, unrationed, pure. Her eyes are wide. Her smile of pain has had no time to fade.
Michael closes his eyes. His heart aches in his chest. Motes of light dance on his lids – glitterball afterimages – and then even they are gone, and there is just the void again, unrelieved, unsatisfied, still waiting to be filled.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the Arts Council of Great Britain, for financial support; to John Woolrich, for a place of retreat; and to Helen Garnons-Williams, Victoria Hobbs and Hannah Donat, for everything.
A Note on the Author
Tobias Hill was born in London. In 2003 the TLS nominated him as one of the best young writers in Britain. In 2004 he was selected as one of the country’s Next Generation poets and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. His collection of stories, Skin, won the Pen/Macmillan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. What Was Promised is his fifth novel.
By the Same Author
Year of the Dog
Midnight in the City of Clocks
Skin
Zoo
Underground
The Love of Stones
The Cryptographer
Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow
The Lion Who Ate Everything
The Hidden
Also available by Tobias Hill
The Cryptographer
‘Hill is among the most notable talents of his generation’
Independent on Sunday
‘Hill merges all the dynamics of a thriller – a riveting page-turning plot – with crisply poetic observation’
The Times
‘He writes the kind of fiction that can change the way you look at the world’ Observer
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The Hidden
‘A beautifully paced thriller’
Observer
‘A wonderful novel’
Daily Telegraph
‘An elaborate mystery along the lines of The Magus or The Secret History, and a sustained meditation on the special ethics of terrorism in ancient and modern times’
Guardian
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The Love of Stones
‘Hill is among the most noticeable talents of his generation’
Independent on Sunday
‘Hill, who is also an accomplished poet, writes the kind of fiction that can change the way you look at the world’
Observer
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Skin
‘The first collection of short stories by the poet and critic Tobias Hill could serve as a masterclass in the genre . . . Quite apart from the excellence of their construction and the quality of the writing, these stories, with their many and far-ranging voices, all have a cool, clear beauty’
Sunday Telegraph
‘His prose resonates with the precise, sensuous energy of his poetry. He writes with astonishing assurance’
Observer
‘The poetry of his writing lies in its surprise and precision – a smell of mustard in the flash of a gun, for instance, which would have delighted Nabokov – or an understated lyricism which recalls Raymond Carver . . . Already an award-winning poet, Skin establishes Tobias Hill as an important w
riter of fiction’
The Times
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Underground
‘Genuinely thrilling . . . It is hard to overestimate Hill’s descriptive powers. The Underground network is evoked so convincingly it delivers a considerable emotional punch, as if this Underground and its hideous crimes are telling us something uncomfortable about ourselves’
New Statesman
‘Beautifully paced and genuinely exciting’
Evening Standard
‘Until now, no writer has succeeded in capturing the heady combination of menace and gothic excitement that lurks under the surface of London . . . Hill’s precision is extraordinary and his ear for a range of dialects uncannily accurate’ The Times
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First published in Great Britain 2014
