London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  I seldom travelled on the Underground. I can’t stand it. It was too crowded and hot in summer and too crowded and damp in winter. I didn’t like the way some people appeared down there, as though they’d left their brains behind before leaving for work, or were this far away from snapping and massacring everyone in the carriage. Nobody wore an expression worth the name in the Tube. Nobody laughed, and there was no reason why they should. Down there, people act differently. It’s almost a social requirement that nobody speak to each other, that misery or boredom surfaces on each face. You could believe by those masks that the people down here never actually go up top, that they throw away their tickets and keep to the trains. Perhaps pop up on the escalators occasionally to stare longingly at the ticket barriers and wonder how things are outside. I usually took the bus to work.

  Work was one of two places. Daytimes I work at Cherry’s flower stall, on the wedge of land between Castellain Road and Warwick Avenue. Three or four nights a week I’m at The Pit Stop in Archway, pulling pints of gut rot for men too old to give a toss about the quality of the beer or pubescent chancers too wet behind the ears to know better.

  Cherry was in her mid-thirties, two or three years older than me. She wore her hair in bunches most of the time. Her clothes differed only slightly every day: jeans and jumper and Doc Martens, or jeans and T-shirt and Doc Martens. She was the kind of woman who was slim only because of the extent of her activity. She ate constantly: chocolate bars, crisps, quiches and cold pizza wrapped in greaseproof paper from her fridge; burgers and hot dogs snaffled at lunch, along with a pint of lager at the pub. If she stopped moving, fat would catch up. In a certain light, sometimes I thought I could see it trying her on for size, positioning a girdle of itself above her hips or showing me how her jowls might hang. But I knew that she’d be happy with that, if it ever happened to her. Cherry was that kind of woman: accommodating, fatalistic, agreeable. Nothing fazed her.

  She had taken me on just when it seemed I would have to give up my dream of living in the city, and head back north, to the dull industrial town I had worked so hard to get away from. It was just a couple of days each week, but that, allied to the pub work, meant that I was just about able to afford the tiny flat on Dartmouth Park Hill. I was existing on little more than potatoes and tins of Heinz Soup for One, but it was better than the life I’d left behind.

  I liked to think I knew a bit about plants. I wasn’t Rachel de Thame, but I could say Acer Palmatum Dissectum before I knew what one looked like. My parents had allowed me a corner of their garden when I was a child where I could do as I wished: I spent a week digging the soil over, weeding, picking out the gravel, introducing a few worms, along with a rockery and a pond. But despite my efforts, I couldn’t grow anything beyond a virile strain of bindweed. I knew it wasn’t the fault of the soil; feet away, Mum had cobbled together a mix of fruit and vegetables that would have satisfied the most vengeful of gods at harvest festival. It seemed I was destined only to look at plants and not nurture them.

  But I didn’t give up. I took to more unorthodox measures; anything to get a result. I talked to plants. I shouted at them sometimes, suspecting they’d benefit from a little tough love. I massaged stems, stalks, petals, buds and when that didn’t work I furiously wanked them off. I watered and sprayed, invented my own composts after forays into mulchy forests to collect high quality leaf mould failed. Whenever I quizzed my mother about these shortcomings, she would shrug.

  ‘I just leave it alone. A bit of weeding, that’s all. You can move your plot, if you like. Maybe we’re just lucky with the soil on our patch, I don’t know.’ This last was meant to pacify me, I was sure, but I was certain there was something more to what she did. Sometimes, I would imagine her gliding into the garden at midnight dressed in billowing white robes, splashing blood from her wrists on to the blossoms and offering up a prayer to the Great Garden God, Fison.

  When she died, just after Christmas a couple of years ago, I lay flattened by the flu for three days, convinced that her magic would creep into me like the quiet attenuation of the sky as it gathers snow. I’d maybe feel a sappy thickening in my veins or a blossoming of secrets deep within my mind. When I was finally able to get out of my sick bed, I wandered up on to Parliament Hill on legs that felt foal weak and watched the night fall. Below, London looked clean and emergent, Canary Wharf and the BT tower flirting with each other; jets banking over the city; the lights dangerous and expensive. I sat in the grass, something Mum loved to do, and thought about her planting lettuces or watering the lawn, hand on hip or fingers trawling through her hair. She was very beautiful. Old photographs of her resembled Sophia Loren: large, wide eyes and a full mouth. I liked to think there was something of her in the way I looked, but then I would, wouldn’t I? I liked to believe that some of her sensitivity for living things had passed on to me, but once I’d returned home and given the ivy a drink (keeping it in an environment where there was no direct sunlight and the temperature remained between 16° and 25°C) I knew that its famished appearance was not going to improve. In the same way, I was certain the aspidistra I bought soon after my mother’s funeral (there were buttercups growing around her headstone these days) was going to struggle. The cast iron plant. I did everything you were meant to do: I left it well alone. It was dead within three months.

  Slow, cold days – like today – I stood freezing in my overalls and watched people climbing or descending the steps at Warwick Avenue Tube station and guessing where they might be going to, or returning from. People appeared staggered emerging from the Underground, as if even a short period away from daylight rendered them amnesiac to everyday sights. I had seen young men halt at the top of the flight and look around, blinking like owls while the man holding a wad of Top Storys tried to break into their catatonia.

  ‘Only a quid. Help the homeless. Only a quid, mate.’

  Some of the people I saw seemed to connect with me in ways I couldn’t understand. Maybe it was a distance in them, a social flaw, which called to my own feelings of inadequacy. This man, wearing a thick twill overcoat, carrying a translucent carrier bag that rustled like tissue paper and contained a Sunblest loaf and something by Fray Bentos. This woman, her hair too consciously styled, her skin decaying under its fine powders and creams. Something in their deportment, or the lost way in which they scanned the road; it screamed out at me, in a way that this girl emerging with a padded envelope and a can of Tizer didn’t. In a way that this man, with his briefcase and headphones, didn’t. Whatever it was had an unknown frequency and I was tuned in to it.

  There was a problem too with the flowers on Cherry’s stall. They were, according to the reference books, unable (or reluctant) to open up. A number of people had brought them back to complain. Some accused Cherry of doctoring them to give this permanently fresh look. But a few people stopped on their way home, perhaps preferring the slim, gathered petals, perhaps not knowing any better. Cherry was at a loss as to their reticence, and I kept quiet about my apparent horticultural voodoo.

  I concentrated on the flowers, wrapping them in cellophane and marking prices on cards with a gold marker pen. Freesias to please you. Poppies to make you soppy. What kind of hard bitch dumps you on her birthday? Glads to make you… well, what do you think?

  While I was cursing Laura and myself for losing her, a woman stepped into my light, her eyes clouding, no doubt as she felt the change in atmosphere. I smiled and steered her away from the lilies. ‘They’re past their best,’ I said, though they’d failed to bloom in the first place. Brown smudges were underscoring the petals and the stems looked tired. ‘Lilies to make you chilly,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘I’m looking for something colourful for a friend who’s sick. She needs cheering up. How about some of those chrysanthemums?’

  I wrapped her a couple of bunches in tissue paper and charged her for one, apologising for the fact that I hadn’t thought of a rhyme for them yet. I was often giving away too many flowers; all down to guilt
regarding their parsimony. Once we had complained to the woman from whom we buy them wholesale at Covent Garden Market but she directed us to a flower stall owner in Holborn who had bought from the same batch. We couldn’t see him for a tumult of buds. We tried changing the way we stocked them; moved the stall to alter the angle of light; loosened the bands that group them together. Nothing worked. It was less a flower stall than a flowers stalled.

  Come eight thirty, a series of small steam clouds at the Warwick Road Tube entrance heralded the arrival of Lucas, the Top Story man, who finishes his sprint up the stairs with a little hop, a flourish to energise a day begun in a squat shared with about thirteen Kiwis in Kensal Green. When he leaves, at seven in the evening, the slope of his shoulders are so pronounced, it’s as if his neck has been removed. He trudges back into the bowels on steps that might now be made of thick toffee.

  By mid morning I had a headache. I switched on the radio because the chant of ‘Top Story?’ was getting on my nerves. When that failed to drown out the noise, I beckoned Lucas over and offered him a cup of tea.

  ‘So how’s it going with you, man?’ Lucas wanted to know, nodding as though I had already provided him with an answer.

  ‘All right, I suppose. Although I don’t know if I’m coming or going half the time. Half the time, I don’t know who I am, or what I’m supposed to be doing.’ I snapped my mouth shut and looked away. What a dumb thing to say. But Lucas didn’t miss a beat.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘What about you?’ I said.

  ‘Tight. Cracking. You know?’

  I guessed he hadn’t been at this game for very long; he was too enthusiastic. Some of the sellers I’d seen on, say, Shaftesbury Avenue, had the wizened, defeated countenance of people who seemed to have turned to glass and can’t get any attention unless they stand in the way of pedestrians. One seller on Berwick Street was so disenchanted with the whole game that he’d taken to a novel way of offloading his stock of copies. ‘Aw buy a Top Story won’t you, you miserable bastard? Come on, you grouchy old mingebag, open your sodding purse. Bitch.’ Whether he was frightening Londoners into buying his magazine I couldn’t say. But it seemed to work.

  Not that I felt I could transplant those practices here: ‘Step up and buy a bunch of daffs, fuckface. And you madam, improve your smell with a bouquet of tulips, why don’t you? Twat.’

  Lucas sucked at the rim of his mug. ‘Used to see you get picked up round here of an evening. Tasty looking Maude in a VW Golf. What happened? She run off with someone higher up the social scale, eh?’ He laughed. ‘News vendor, was it? Sandwichboard man?’

  I fiddled with the change in my pockets and swallowed the temptation to point out his position in the food chain. ‘She’s on a lecture tour of Europe at the moment. I’m taking care of her flat.’ Why shouldn’t I lie? I wasn’t going to tell every toe-rag my ins and outs.

  ‘Yeah? Why didn’t you go with her? She could be being shafted at this very minute by all kinds of trouser.’

  ‘That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about,’ I said. But because it wasn’t, it was a protest without muscle. I couldn’t rise to the bait. I wished I could. But what was the point of defending something that wasn’t there any more? What was the point of defending a lie? I didn’t know where Laura was, though my treacherous imagination was eager enough to show her in any number of sexual positions with hulking, shadowed strangers. And her face would bear the same shapes it had worn at the moment of her last orgasm with me: sealed into my memory, the look of a person fighting for breath after too long under water, and a confusion, as though she couldn’t quite understand what was washing over her. All the times we had made love before that: I couldn’t recall her expression from any of them. You don’t, do you? You lose all that. When a relationship dies, that’s one of the first things to parachute out of your head.

  ‘Mmm, well I can’t sit here with you all day, chatting about shit and everything. I’ve got a living to scrape. Thanks for the tea.’ And he was off, pursuing a woman along the zebra crossing. ‘Buy a Top Story, Madam?’

  One woman couldn’t buy flowers from me without touching my forearm. One elderly gentleman brought me a small apple pie from his son’s bakery every fortnight. I noticed, if they did not, that we looked at each other in a different way. As I handed them their change, their eyes lingered a fraction longer or they would smile more expansively, or force a short conversation. A difference, then; an aspect that brought a connection they didn’t understand or hardly recognised. I wished I could speak about it, to Cherry perhaps, or Greg, or even Lucas, but I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t making it up, as some kind of compensation for what had happened with Laura.

  The day wore on; a white sun failed to burn off the haze drifting up from the canal in Little Venice. For April, it was bitterly cold.

  When I moved to London, I travelled everywhere by the Victoria, Bakerloo, Piccadilly and Northern lines. You could trace my movement across the capital with a web of cyan and brown and navy and black. Now and again I’d sample Central’s artery or the lime and lemon of District and Circle, but those other four lines remained my staples. I used up my travel cards on London’s secret country; as the trains muscled through the dark, I imagined nineteenth century labourers churning through the unhelpful clay soil, tensed against the threat of collapse (either their own, or the shored up tunnels around them). I tried to know the suppressed panic they must have experienced, to imagine them, bodies streaked with sweat and mud, the alien underworld reek of gas pockets and rich, mineral earth. The endeavour. The sacrifice. I wondered if I could ever marshal my nerves enough to accomplish something so encompassing and revolutionary. But there was nothing but flowers and beer.

  I day-dreamed of a crowd. A part of it was made up by me: my mass, filling a me-sized space. I was jostled and swept along as easily as a leaf on a breeze. Yet there was something centrally wrong, an intranuclear fault, and I realised that it was my otherness that was the cause. The crowd lost its oiled precision of movement; became aware of the buckled spoke and ejected me. The properties of each constituent body, though melded into a sinuous flesh current, were narcotically sharp: polished buttons on a military overcoat; slivers of clear light seen edge-on in the orbit of an eye; a scab healing on a pale hand.

  My features turned to water; my spine dissolved like ash in rain. The boxed snout of a train barrelled down on me. I didn’t belong anywhere, or to anyone.

  ‘Are you all right, Adam?’

  I came out of it a little, just enough to tell Cherry to break my fall. Then I was gone. Gone.

  Chapter 3

  Scheintod

  It’s in the tunnel, just standing out of the ring of light at Goodge Street, watching the suits on the platform. There are hundreds of them jammed together, pretending to be interested in their newspapers or their novels or the music that pours into their ears through their headphones. Ageless currents of cold air flap Its clothes and caress Its neck. London leaps away from It above the arch of tiles, a great mass of death and history mingling with the smell of scorched fuel. The smell plucks at Its muscles, the emotions, the sharp sweat, the tang of fear. The people on the platform wear wide eyes. They look at each other, assessing, sizing up: Is that one of them? Could she be? Could he be a Pusher? They just want to get home. Everybody in this city, in an ecstasy of to and fro. Waiting to be somewhere else. Never concentrating on the here. The now. Well, then…

  It watches as women at the front of the pack glance nervously around them. Some of them stand side-on, to reduce the threat of attack. A member of staff exhorts passengers entering the station to walk to the end of the platform where there is more space. The next train, he warns, is very crowded. Groans lift from the crowd. People relax a little, united in irritation. It sees the tension in their shoulders reduce a fraction. A strange Mexican wave of shaking heads ululates through the crowd, giving it the impression of singularity. Somebody laughs. Somebody else says: ‘You just can�
�t give in to it. You mustn’t.’

  The vomit rises in Its craw.

  It can hear the train now, at Its back. It knows its speed by the special sound of the train’s movement and the deep vibrations that move through Its feet. It knows to the second how long it will be before it is upon It.

  Pressing against the nearside curve of the tunnel, It edges out, sinking into the dark beneath the lip of the platform edge. It can smell shoe leather and boot polish, hear the skitter of ferrules, the clack of a throat lozenge against teeth as a tongue shifts it from one side of the mouth to the other. Smells and sounds that fill It with hatred and despair.

  Light on the tracks, slithering along them like brilliant snakes. It stops when the light splashes across the wall tiles and the clatter of the wheels explodes into the confined space. The brakes shriek. At least It thinks it’s the brakes, but no, its more than that. A collective sound, It realises, as It lets go of the man’s leg and watches him fall across the path of the train: a collective sound of horror, loud and shrill enough to crack the arched roof.

  But not just horror. It scampers alongside the train, dipping beneath it and pulling Itself through to the blind side, then into the tunnel. Faster. Faster.

  No, not just horror. Those screams had the flavour of rapture in them, relief that this time, it wasn’t them. Relief that they had been spared.

  ‘It’s narcolepsy.’

  I had said those words to maybe half a dozen people in my life and had received the same response every time: the same as Cherry’s now. A look of sympathy mingled with incomprehension.

  I read somewhere that for a doctor to be an authority in sleep disorders he or she needs just ten hours of specialisation. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but what is certain is that nobody is certain about what narcolepsy is. And as long as that’s the case, you can bet there’s as much chance of a cure in the near future as there is the possibility of chimps living at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. There’s plenty of debate as to what kick-starts this particular bastard of a disease, a list that is syllable heavy to say the least: baroreceptor hypersensitivity, ultradian or circadian rhythm disturbances, receptor abnormalities, immune response modulation defects, genetic defects, neurotransmitter abnormalities, neuronal membrane defects, neuroanatomic abnormalities, head injuries, tennis, blonde jokes, an allergy to semolina… I’m fisted if I know. Could be any or all for all I care. Fact is, I’ve got it. Fact too is, I’m stuck with it.