Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  Another helicopter swooped by and I flinched, discomfited by its appearance below me as it swept west following the wind of the river, and watched until its lights were lost to the glittering backdrop.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’

  I flinched again. The words had been spoken less than a foot from my left ear. I stepped back, conscious that there was no barrier between me and a thousand feet of screaming death.

  ‘You could say that,’ I said. I’d been caught trespassing. I didn’t know what that meant – caution? fine? something more serious in these times of suicide bombs? – but it couldn’t be good. ‘You don’t look like security.’

  ‘What does security look like?’

  ‘Uniforms. Hang-dog expressions.’

  I had my fist tucked up tight on my hip. I was going to gyaku tsuki the crap out of him the moment he took one step nearer. It was difficult to make out his features in this rarefied altitude; none of the ambient light from the lower reaches was finding its way up here. But he didn’t strike me as Tann-related. And if he was, he’d had his chance to heave me over the side rather than chew the fat.

  ‘So you’re construction?’ I said. He shook his head.

  ‘Tell you the truth,’ I said. ‘I’m fed up of playing twenty questions. I couldn’t give a watery shit who you are. I was just after some “me” time.’

  ‘Me time,’ he said. ‘Up a skyscraper.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hear you. It’s why I’m here too.’

  ‘Well two “me”s make an “us”. And I don’t want “us” time. So could you kindly…’ I indicated the wide-open space before us and while my unspoken invitation to enter wasn’t explicit, I wasn’t going to complain if he took the hint.

  ‘I was here first,’ he said.

  ‘Okay. You want to play territory games. Stay here. I’ll go and find another floor.’

  ‘Everywhere you go from here is down,’ he said. I couldn’t be sure if that was some kind of veiled threat or an existential slight.

  He was right, though. Here was the eyrie. Top of the heap. Everything else was little people.

  ‘I built this,’ he said.

  ‘You just said—’

  ‘I don’t mean I got my hands dirty. I mean I designed it.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘That’s impressive, I guess.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So you’re what? An architect?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s say that.’

  I wasn’t happy about the way I was still standing between him and the great blue bye-bye, but when I moved to rectify that, he moved too.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve talked about me. Now let’s talk about you.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ I said.

  ‘You’re trespassing,’ he said. ‘One phone call and there’ll be a bunch of security guards on the ground floor ready to fill your face in.’

  ‘Do what you fucking want,’ I said, tired of all the vocal tennis I had to put up with all the time. ‘Just get out of my face. Give me ten minutes, please.’

  ‘Rough day?’

  I nodded. ‘Rough fucking week, actually. And you’re not making it any easier.’

  ‘Define “rough”.’

  ‘Seriously? Why does it matter how rough “rough” is for me? I’ve got a hang-nail. My wife won’t blow me any more. My local supermarket doesn’t stock dried blueberries.’

  ‘It’s a bit worse than that, isn’t it? I mean, why else would you be here?’

  Now I could make out some detail – my eyes growing used to the gloom. He was in his sixties. Maybe older. But he dressed like someone much younger. He wore jeans and a zip-up hoodie. He wore hiking boots with thick rubber soles. All the better to grip these dodgy boards.

  ‘I’m not here to kill myself if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Famous last words.’

  ‘Like you said,’ I said. ‘Rough day. Let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘I spend most of my time here.’ He walked to the very edge of the duckboards.

  ‘Hey!’ I said. I had been convinced he was going to walk straight off the edge of the building but he stood there, toes overhanging, hands in pockets as if it was the most natural position in the world. I closed my eyes and tried to ward off the visions of falling. I felt my groin and hips and knees do that weird jelly thing as my nerves sizzled like fury. He didn’t seem fazed at all by the brutal height and the vicious winds churning around us.

  ‘It helps level me out,’ he said.

  ‘What about your designing?’ I asked. ‘Does it make things difficult for you? Shouldn’t you be at floor level to get a better perspective?’

  ‘All my best work has been done with my head in the clouds.’

  I felt suddenly tired. I don’t know if it was because of the time I’d spent in hospital – I was sure my body was still some way off making a full recovery – but I was finding it hard to burn the midnight oil these days. Maybe it was injury, or fear, or just age, that great reducer.

  ‘I was spending a lot of time feeling as though I was up against everyone in the world and that I had to fight for breathing space,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find the centre of me. I felt as if I was searching constantly, that it was overtaking my life. I couldn’t rest for the fear that I was losing myself to these blueprints. That they were taking me over.’

  ‘But no more, presumably?’ I asked.

  ‘God no. I’m talking about my time back in the eighties and nineties, when I was young. When I was working sixteen-hour days and then getting shit-faced and coming straight in from the bar to do another sixteen-hour day. I never felt it when I was young, but I was building up quite some wall of debt. The kind of debt you can’t see until you hit a certain age and everything catches up with you.’

  It wasn’t so bad, having some company. Someone who didn’t judge you or advise you. Once we’d got past that cautious stage of introductions I saw how he was quite affable, perhaps as starved of decent companionship as I was. He was entertaining, smart, inquisitive – the conversation didn’t always circle back to him – but I played his questions about me with a straight bat. Neutral all the way. Because you never knew. It wasn’t in my nature to trust. Not any more.

  He pulled out a candle and sat cross-legged on the deck. I sat down too. All the tension and fear relaxed with me. He lit the wick and his face shivered orange above it, creased and stubbled, the eyes kindly, wrinkled, an unholy blue.

  ‘I saw you the other night,’ I said. ‘I was over there.’ I pointed at the jagged stack of the other tower, its cranes and rods like broken bones sticking out of the end of a ruined limb. ‘I saw candlelight.’

  ‘Well, no electricity up here. And torches are too bright. I want to be able to see the beam of the guards before they’re on top of me.’

  ‘But you designed the place.’

  ‘Kind of,’ he said.

  ‘You did or you didn’t.’

  ‘It was a project that was taken out of my hands at a somewhat advanced stage,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re here because what? You want to sabotage it?’

  ‘Nothing so dramatic,’ he said. ‘I just come here to think about what might have been, and for inspiration. A different perspective.’

  I must have dozed off. When I awoke the light had changed again – weak winter sun dribbling like liquid flame along the edges of all the glass buildings; orange everywhere – there was a note tucked into my jacket.

  Come to my office any time you want to talk, it said.

  I got down to ground level as the construction crews turned up to the site. I skipped out of sight while they stared after me, none of them willing to part with the bacon rolls sticking out of their fists to play the hero. I spent the next hour or so sheltering in back streets by skips filled with restaurant waste. The sun went in, as it so often does in this mulchy, mushroomy country. A light rain began to fall. I played spotting games in the rush hour that
I had not played since I was a kid in the back of my parents’ car on trips to the seaside. Keep my mind off the cold. Ten red cars. Ten BMWs. Ten buses. Ten twats crossing the road with their faces in their iPhones. I called Jimmy Two. When a barber’s opened I went and had my head shaved. I bought some reading glasses from the pharmacy and poked the lenses out, then grabbed some breakfast in Waterloo and caught a Tube to Mornington Crescent to pick up the car where Jimmy had left it, in a pay and display space on Chalton Street. Half an hour later I was on the A1 heading north.

  13

  I parked the car next to a small wood, not far from where I’d played a game of chicken on the motorway six months previously. I opened the window and sucked in some of the brittle winter air and sat there for a while, rubbing my hand back and forth across the brutal new landscape of my head. Farm smells. Something cloacal hanging about in the shadows between the wet, dark trees. The faint rumble of motorway traffic.

  I liked it here, away from the city. I could feel the vampire of London unhooking its fangs from my neck, bit by bit. A little green. A little quiet. I could hear myself think. I could feel the tension unravelling from muscles that seemed to be coiled too tightly whenever I was out on the streets. Fresh air. Christ. I should do more of this. Get in a car and drive away from the madness for a while, preferably with nobody mad in the seat next to mine. Preferably in a car larger than something made in Lilliput.

  I got out and walked through the woods in a roughly north-westerly direction. I enjoyed the feel of the damp air in my lungs, and the exertion as I stepped over felled branches and brackish puddles. Looking up, I could see the sun, or the area it inhabited behind the thin, hazy cloud through the criss-cross naked canopy. Back home, if I looked up, there’d be the dizzy-making towers, or acid rain, or a wad of pigeon shit on its way down to meet me.

  Didn’t we used to do a lot more of this, back in the day? Me and you and Sas?

  Yes, and you complained before, during and after.

  Did I? Are you sure? I like a good hike though. Get some mud on my boots. Scour my lungs out.

  I remember one day we drove out to Ashridge because Sas wanted to see the deer and the bluebells and you told me you’d rather stick your penis in the shredder.

  Yes, but the sentiment was well meant, no?

  Enjoy your walk, Yul Brynner. I hope your legs fall off tomorrow.

  I smelled the prison before I saw it. That cold, charred smell, a nauseating odour of incinerated wood and plastic that feels as though it’s clogging up your airways, layer upon layer. I thought I could still see remnants of the previous day’s fire in the carbon colours of the clouds, all ash and charcoal. I got to the edge of the trees and stared down at what remained of Cold Quay.

  Bedlam, more like. I’d seen some pictures on TV but this was much worse. The full extent of the damage was shocking. I could see the roofs of the units and dormitories and they were all collapsed. Nothing had escaped the flames; everything was coated with ash and soot. Wood was mackerel-striped where the fire had gnawed through it. Steel girders had swooned in the heat; one building leaned as if demonstrating the effects of being blown over by high winds. Debris littered the areas between the buildings, perhaps dragged out by firefighters trying to control the blaze: charred mattresses, melted plastic stretchers, piles of clothes. All the windows had shattered in the heat. Things fluttered, trapped in tree branches or the links of the fences surrounding the perimeter: latex gloves, documents, newspapers.

  Other fences had been hastily constructed around the perimeter, which I thought was a bit odd. The prison was already contained by a fence. Security guards roamed the interstitial areas, some with dogs. I saw one area in the car park cluttered with bulging black bin bags. Styrofoam cups spilled out. Maybe where the TV crews had gathered. Nobody here now. Dead news. The story had scarpered, on the heels of the escaped inmates.

  I wanted to take a closer look, but I was sure I would get no joy from the security guards. I sauntered down anyway, wishing I had a dog of my own so I could pretend I was just taking it for a walk.

  I saw heads turning my way pretty much as soon as I broke the shelter of the trees. I walked with my hands in my pockets, staring at my boots, trying to appear as if I was lost in my own thoughts. I got as far as the south-east corner when the security guard ostentatiously rapped on one of the metal posts supporting the chain-link fence with a truncheon.

  ‘No further for you today, chucklehead,’ he said.

  ‘The land around here doesn’t belong to the prison,’ I said, with conviction, not knowing whether that was true.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘We’re in the middle of a serious jail breakout. We can’t take any risks.’

  ‘I’m walking off a hangover,’ I said. ‘Where’s the risk? It looks as though the horse already bolted on that one anyway.’

  ‘Funny fellow,’ he said. He had a face like a blind carpenter’s workbench: acne scars peppered his skin and he had a nose that looked as if it had been torn off and reattached upside down; it was more of a snout, really. His jacket was a size too large and his trousers a size too big. ‘But you go no further, otherwise I go to town on your wagging jaw with this.’ He brandished the night stick and his face split under the weight of a smile.

  I stopped and considered the repercussions were I to argue the toss with this one-brain-cell freak. Hardly worth it. Stick v hand? The stick always wins. Plus, extra sticks because of the serge backup he could rely on. I wasn’t going to kick up a fuss by getting the gun out here. I’d be arrested within the hour. That serge backup was gravitating towards him now, more meat-heads than you’d find at a brawn festival.

  I held my hands up and turned away, headed back to the woods, gritting my teeth against the laughter and the whispered invective. Before I reached the trees it had begun to rain again, the same thin veils. It soaked you with stealth, this rain, and I was shivering by the time I made it back to the car. I turned the engine on and whacked the heating up. Thankfully it didn’t take too long to kick in. I rubbed my hands and thought about what to do. I was hungry and tired, but I didn’t want to go back to London without having had a proper look around that prison.

  I got back on the motorway and drove to the services at Newport Pagnell. I ate fish and chips and checked into the motel where I took a shower and got my head down. I slept dreamlessly for ten hours and woke up in darkness. I dressed and checked out, picking up a sandwich and a coffee on the way. I ate as I drove, and listened to a delicate Chopin prelude on Radio 3.

  It was still raining. I reached the spot where I’d parked earlier and switched off the engine.

  I got out and jogged down to the vantage point at the edge of the wood. A single torch beam cut through the darkness down in the shattered prison complex. A subtler light spilled from a Portakabin set back from the ruins. I wondered if the same number of security guards would be on site now. Maybe they were down to two: one on patrol, another in the Portakabin, playing cards or shuffling through a well-thumbed copy of Reader’s Wives. Maybe even just one guy. It didn’t matter. I didn’t intend to engage in any banter this time.

  The only sound was the soft hiss of rain on the nude branches and my jacket as I broke cover and followed the route down to the fence I’d taken earlier. The cloud cover was good, and there was no light beyond what the guard was producing.

  I got to the fence knowing that the guard was moving away on the eastern side. I just wanted a quick look at the top end, in case there was anything to give me a clue about where Tann was heading. I didn’t expect it. The police would have picked this place over like a baboon on its flea break; if they hadn’t found anything, why should I?

  That thought didn’t deter me. Mainly because I’m a stubborn bastard, but also because I suspected the police weren’t necessarily going to be interested in the things that caught my eye. Dangerous men were out and about. There wasn’t much detective work needed in such a situation. Maybe if there was a map on a wall with big red a
rrows and a note saying: LET’S HEAD FOR THIS PLACE, CHAPS. But that was extremely unlikely. Everything interesting was away from here now, hence the absence of boys in blue. Security guards didn’t count. The police were into damage limitation. This was politics as well as policing. Reputations were at stake.

  I hunkered down behind a mass of metal bed frames that had warped in the immense heat. No sign of life. Up ahead, the uniform shape of the fence had failed; presumably this was where everyone had got out. I reached it and saw shreds of clothing caught on the barbed wire. I got my torch out and risked exposing myself for a few seconds of illumination. Yes, there had been a grand old scuffle here. Part of the prison wall had collapsed, bringing down the perimeter fence. Broken glass, spilled blood. I was tempted to go inside and have a mooch around, but it would be a waste of time. The prison had been overcrowded and underfunded. It was antiquated – one of the last in the country to continue with that happy practice known as ‘slopping out’ – and had been dogged with rumours of brutality over the century or so it had harboured convicts at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

  I heard a scuff of a boot on concrete. The guard wasn’t one of those people who liked to do circuits. He’d cut back instead of going all the way around. Maybe he was on his way to the cabin for a cup of tea and a shufty at Suki from Hemel Hempstead. Maybe he’d heard me or seen the flash of my mini torch. I hoped volcano face was still on duty. I’d have that night stick halfway up his magma chamber before you could say ‘topical application’.

  I waited but there was nothing else. I waited some more, just because I’m cautious like that, and then kept going along the shattered perimeter until I reached the far corner. I looked around me at the likely route the escapees had taken. Presumably Forensics had been out here to take boot casts, or whatever juju those white gods get up to, and I did see some evidence of plaster, but they’d obviously been more interested in the interior of the prison than the exterior. I’d have to rely on scraps.

  I headed in the direction of another line of trees. If I was legging it from a prison, trees would be my shelter of choice, especially when the alternative was miles of open countryside. But I didn’t get anywhere near them. My foot went straight through the ground up to my thigh and I went over. The pain was immense, and for a sickening few seconds I thought I’d broken my femur. I was either going to pass out or scream the remaining bricks down at Cold Quay. Either way I was dead in the water. But it quickly transpired that the pain was only muscular – I’d perhaps pulled a hamstring; it didn’t help that it was so cold – and that what I’d fallen into wasn’t, as I’d suspected, a rabbit hole or some other such death-trap. It was a tunnel.