London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  I don’t take anything for it, which might not be wise, but the Ritalin I was once prescribed was as effective as a dog muzzle made from Pedigree Chum. Depending on the whims of the illness, I can have an attack as many as five times in one day. On good days, I’ll have just the one. Lately, I’ve been fine. Not even the glimmer of shuteye.

  Sometimes I know when I’m going down; I’ll feel drowsiness pour through my body as though my blood’s been substituted with syrup. Other times I can switch off like a light bulb. I don’t hurt myself when I drop; everything relaxes. The worst injury I sustained was when I swan-dived into a bowl of oxtail soup and burned my face. It is not something you can resist. The narcolepsy, that is. Not oxtail soup.

  I revived after a couple of minutes. It can last hours. Cherry’s face was contorted with concern.

  ‘It was like…’ she struggled, her voice breathy with shock, ‘…it was like someone removed all your bones at once.’

  ‘That’s what your beauty does to people,’ I said, shakily, trying to make light of the matter.

  ‘You really should have told me about this,’ she said.

  ‘I always meant to,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Sorry if I alarmed you. I haven’t had an attack like that for months.’

  She gave me a sip from her can of Coke and asked me if I was okay. I nodded.

  ‘I think I’ll go home,’ I said. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  Of course she didn’t.

  By the time I got to Kentish Town, people were pouring out of the Tube and on to the buses. I moved my bag to allow someone to sit next to me. There was an announcement on the station platform, something about trains on the Northern Line being delayed due to an ‘incident’ at Euston. It wasn’t the only one. There were four other stations that had been closed. Four other ‘incidents’.

  On the bus, someone wearing a Walkman hissed: ‘Jesus wept.’ He had been listening to the radio. Apparently, the incident at Euston involved a woman being pushed under an oncoming train. And at Russell Square, Goodge Street, Bond Street and Holborn, the same thing. All of them at three pm. Five people pushed under trains. It’s not yet known how many survived.

  It is difficult to die on the Underground, contrary to belief. Touching the live rail is not a foregone conclusion; neither is jumping in front of a train. Often, the driver will be travelling slow enough to stop, or the deep trench between the rails – the suicide pit – will prevent you from coming to grief.

  I remembered a report on the front of the Standard from the previous week. A similar incident, involving a woman. She had been saved because the wheels snagged in her shoulder bag and acted as a buffer, pushing her along rather than slicing into her. Where was that now? Late night, St James’s Park? Already, there’s talk that whoever did that acted as the vanguard for this spate of attacks. Already, there’s talk that the incidents are acts of terrorism.

  I thought of the man who had kicked off this pushing business. Pushing people in front of trains. I had the awful conviction that I knew him.

  Soon, the rain had turned the windows into blurred squares and everything outside had a rilling, uncertain quality. There were so many people here. All of them borrowing London. All of them in transit. The thought of past civilisations – buildings, bodies, wooden toys, love letters, shit and tears – compressed beneath the thin crust that supported Kentish Town Road only made the edges of what I perceived as myself more blurred. My name and my ‘me’ness seemed as fragile and as pointless and as limp as the flowers I try to sell.

  It wasn’t just this ‘terrorist’, or the narcolepsy that was worrying me. There were other things too. Like the way the Tube seems to warp London, make it less real. Less reliable than it already is. London shrinks. It does, if you’ve travelled on the surface here. On the Underground, time becomes this vampire that attaches itself to the back of your neck, tapping you of energy and the ability to relate space to movement. It’s just you, and the clatter of the train, and the streak of black in the windows: between platforms, there’s nothing there to offer any clue to how far you’ve gone. Sometimes you get the feeling you must have missed a station. Just motion. Just blackness.

  Because there’s nothing to look at, people immerse themselves in fiction or Metro, trying to keep hold of a place that is normal and human, using the immutable ink in much the same way that they use the handgrips that dangle from the ceiling. We fear the swift glide into tunnels, the jarring and jolting, MIND THE GAP and platforms choked with commuters, like rats congregated on a sewer ledge. Descending: it is not something we look forward to really, perhaps because we step nearer the place we ultimately wish to stay away from. It’s a constant reminder of burial.

  In the flat above mine, a fresh pair of lilac curtains hung in the window.

  I checked the plastic label above the doorbell, which read: DEUEL. It was fresh ink, newly laminated. Inside, on the stairwell, music drifted down from her flat, but I couldn’t identify the artist. It sounded incredibly strange: without any discernible rhythm or vocals. I was feeling a little better, so I put my keys back in my pocket and strode up to her front door.

  I knocked and waited. A smoky voice behind the door husked: ‘Go away, H., I’ve got clients coming in an hour.’

  ‘Hello?,’ I said. ‘My name’s Adam. I live in the flat beneath you.’

  She opened the door. Big green eyes, slathers of soft brown hair. She was wearing a knitted cardigan that reached to the floor. ‘Oh, come in,’ she said. ‘Shoes off.’

  I heard the music more clearly. Not music at all; whale song underscored by the lapping of waves and the odd cry of a gull. I slipped off my boots and went in. She had been busy. The living room smelled of freshly applied matt. A Moroso sofa in pale blue took up the space along one wall. On it sat a large black dildo. A tiny NAD stereo was positioned under the bay window. A Toio lamp and a chunk of flat, smooth glass supporting a large church candle in the fireplace were the only other accessories.

  ‘I saw you move in last night,’ I said. ‘I just thought I’d come and say hi.’

  ‘Surely,’ she said. ‘I was going to come down and say hello myself, a little later. You aren’t from around here, are you?’ With her head, she gestured I should come deeper into the flat. ‘I mean, it’s not just the accent – which, I should guess places you somewhere Manchesterish – but your manners. Most Londoners are too busy, even when they’re relaxing, to go out of their way like that.’

  The hallway was filled with tea chests, cardboard boxes and tins of paint. A rough pencil sketch of a horse and half a dozen books – Graham Greene Penguins, a Taschen collection of erotic post cards, Matthew Weinreb’s study of London architecture – rested against a wall. We went through to the kitchen where she offered me tea. Brand new appliances gleamed subtly under fitted ceiling lights: Smeg, Bosch, Gagganau.

  ‘Am I right about Manchester?’ she asked.

  ‘Near as dammit.’

  ‘Oolong? Yunnan? Assam?’

  ‘Coffee would be better, thanks, if you have any.’

  ‘Go and sit in the living room,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring it through for you.’

  The sofa was the only available sitting space. I considered sitting on the floor but it was dusty and anyway, she’d probably think I was a terrible prude if I didn’t just move the dildo out of the way. But she might not realise that the dildo was on the sofa. She might be mortified if she saw it when she returned. I should hide it, in a box. But then she’d think I was prying if she was aware of the dildo.

  I moved to the window and studied the putty in its frame.

  ‘My name’s Nuala, by the way. Nuala Deuel.’ She handed me a mug of black coffee. ‘No milk, sorry.’

  ‘I could lend you some. Till you go to the shops that is.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I only drink soya milk and they don’t sell that at the corner shop.’ Nuala moved to the sofa and picked the dildo up, placed it on her lap when she sat down. She folded her legs beneath her as she settled. S
he had the kind of posture that makes any position seem comfortable. She was like a cat. One of the fingers on her free hand rubbed at the sculpted glans of the dildo; she did this with distracted skill, as if she were tickling a puppy’s chin.

  ‘I suppose I ought to go,’ I said. ‘I just thought I should say hi. See if there was something I could do for you. And your clients…’ I drained my mug and put it on the floor.

  ‘Well, actually, you could shift some of these boxes for me. They’re very heavy. The clients thing was just a firewall.’

  I spent twenty minutes lugging tea chests, mostly filled with books, into different areas of the flat while Nuala followed me around, eating half a toasted bagel with Marmite and giving sporadic direction. The dildo stared at me, supercilious and Cyclopean next to a plate of sliced organic peaches she had brought from the fridge. In one box I saw a mass of buckles and straps and wedges of padded material. From another, an oddly-shaped cushion fell.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, retrieving it.

  ‘Oh, it’s a womb-shaped stress reduction pillow. I have a very strong maternal side: I get in touch with it as often as I can. It lulls me.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Listen, why don’t I cook you dinner tomorrow night, for helping me? I get a good vibe from you, you know? You’ll be a good neighbour. I bet you don’t eat meat.’

  ‘I’m cutting down. I don’t touch red meat any more, apart from the odd bacon sandwich. Too heavy.’

  She was regarding me with an expectant expression.

  ‘But of course, I aim to cut out meat altogether eventually. Anybody who has owned a pet can’t possibly live peacefully with themse – ’

  ‘For sure. That’s all well and good, but do you want to come for dinner?’

  In the city the rain is somehow more offensive; the sun dirtier, turning everything parched and dusty. Cold winds are channelled and intensified, filleting you with boning knife precision. I watched the water collecting in blocked storm drains and drip from arthritic branches. Traffic made mist of the road.

  There was a telephone message from Greg. We hadn’t spoken much since Laura had stopped seeing me: I thought it was a guilt thing but maybe it was just because Greg was busy. They went back years, had gone to University together. Meet him for lunch, the next day. At Mozart’s. For the first time since Laura, I had consecutive meals sorted out.

  I thought about Nuala. Could something develop there between the two of us? Other than the dildo? Could I become involved with someone who drank Rose Pouchong?

  I placed a Nirvana CD in the player and waited for Kurt Cobain’s scarred, pitch-perfect voice to find a way through. I lay on the floor and rushed to a place that roiled at my core, where the music simultaneously calmed and inspired me. Eyes open, I looked through the window at a sky that was sullen but trying hard to impress, like a shy kid at a party. I felt I could disclose any part of my past to anybody who wanted to know when the screaming started, scraping against the edges of the melody and my spine. Slowly, my muscles relaxed and the music became so fluent that it was like liquid, pouring into my ears and bathing my brain. Womb-shaped pillow, indeed. Whale song, for fuck’s sake. She should try Very Ape. That’d blow her windows out.

  I had a bath and tried to take a nap, but I couldn’t relax knowing that I had to be at the pub in a couple of hours. It’s the cruel irony of narcolepsy. Nuala was heavy in my thoughts too. She was nice. She was very nice. She had that kind of softness to her that you find in some people. A lack of angles or edges of any kind. You couldn’t clash with people like that: you’d just slide off. Trying to pick an argument with people like that was as fruitless as trying to pick bananas off a pear tree.

  I lay on the bed, mentally prodding and poking her for half an hour, then made myself a peanut butter and apricot jam sandwich. It was easy to select that evening’s clothes: you get your own Pit Stop T-shirt – bottle green for the male staff, white for the females – and you have to wear it with black trousers. I thought about ironing them, for maybe a split nanosecond, then pulled on my jacket and headed for the door. I was closing it when I heard a voice. I was moving at the time, and making noise – the keys in my fist were jangling and the old leather in my coat was creaking up around my ears – so I can’t be sure where it came from, but it was either from the grate in my living room, or from beneath the door in Nuala’s flat. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but for the strangeness of it: Pass the warning.

  I got to The Pit Stop at a little before seven. Meddie had been there most of the afternoon, replenishing the bottle stocks, sorting the empties from the skips into their appropriate crates ready for collection, ringing up staff to get them to cover for last minute sickies. She was on the phone when I walked in. I clenched my jaw when I saw her. She had yet to change into staff gear for that evening’s shift. She was wearing a khaki vest top that bore the legend Urban Bitch in a grungy typeface, tight cut-off jean shorts, cheap plastic flip-flops and a lapis lazuli bracelet. Her long, brown hair was tied up in an elaborately plaited coil. She never wore it down.

  I dumped my jacket in the kitchen and made a cup of tea. Meddie came in and brushed past me with a brief ‘Hi’, to retrieve a roll of masking tape by the sink. She didn’t look at me once. As she was returning to the bar, she said, ‘I’m going to see Saskia tonight. You should come.’

  It was the same every time. The first time I had fucked her, a bitter, grunting thirty seconds or so, was at a party at Saskia’s, just after Laura told me it was over. It was as if there was no other venue worth the name for her in London. I asked her if she wanted to go to see a film once, and she looked at me as if I’d asked her if she wanted to cut her breasts off and use them for ear muffs. I didn’t ask her again. It was her who asked me stuff. It was her who asked me if I wanted to go round to Saskia’s. I didn’t, but I did. Every time. I didn’t know if her fondness for Saskia was because Saskia had a regular supply of drugs, or if it had anything to do with Iain. If it did, then why did she always insist on fucking me instead?

  ‘Who’ll be there?’ I asked.

  ‘Same crowd as per. You know. Don’t come if you don’t want to.’

  I didn’t. But I did.

  It was busy that night. It was always busy in The Pit Stop, even though the pool tables had been removed a few months back, and the beer had a greasy, metallic taste. Archway is one of those in-between places in London. You don’t go for a night out in Archway. You might meet your friends there, before moving on, but the only all-nighters are the hardcore fifty-plus bunch who sit at the bar and scowl, their hair bearing the plough marks of a steel comb; a triple-folded copy of the Sun or the Racing Post in their back pockets.

  I made a few errors: poured the wrong drinks, short changed, long changed. I couldn’t get the voice I’d heard back home from my thoughts. The telly, I thought. ‘It was the telly.’

  People were looking at me askance. I thought I might drop. I felt light-headed.

  Sometimes, pulling pints, usually when I was feeling woozy like this, and needing something to concentrate on in order to fend off a narcoleptic attack, I’d get this incredibly strong feeling that I was drawing on something deeper than existed in the kegs in the cellar; something that tapped into the juice below London, the very stuff that sustained the old city and allowed new layers to develop on top of it. Then the frothy mess would spill over my hand and I’d be dragged back into a world of beer that smelled thinly of detergent, ashtrays piled high like nightmarish open sandwiches and customers who looked lost, perpetually startled, trying to find a map home in the bottom of their glasses.

  On my knees in the bar, bottling up after the doors were closed, I’d feel the last trains on the Northern Line thrum beneath the palm of my right hand, flat on the floor, balancing me. It was a different vibration from the stop-start rhythm of the generator which cooled the cellar; this was a steady, rising throb which reached its limit just as it seemed it might go on indefinitely; as it curved off into nothing I
would feel a sense of loss that I couldn’t begin to unravel.

  All of my bases in London, I recognised, were governed by the presence of Tube stations or a proximity to their dirty magic. I hated them, feared them, but I was in awe of them too, an involvement with them that was at a more attenuated level than I could understand, but it settled in my bones with the same compulsion as the urge to eat, or to make love.

  Now, another voice, but one that I couldn’t match to a mouth, said: ‘There’s stuff underground you wouldn’t believe. It’s like another city, it’s like London but upside down.’ I searched the crowd, but everyone’s mouth was swilling beer, or vodka, or tongues. All the colours turned to ash.

  And then I rallied. Just as Iain was walking in, and I thought: fuck me, please let me go. Lying spark out was infinitely more appealing than listening to that flapping knackersack.

  Hair as slick as an emerging otter, he homed in on Ilse – another of Meddie’s Saskia-centric friends, standing at the bar with a bottle of Moscow Mule – with smart-bomb precision. Ilse was dressed in a cropped white halter and white denim shorts. Tanned skin filled in the gaps: she looked like a humbug.

  ‘Pint of Caffrey’s,’ he said to me, without looking up from where a steel ring clung to the pitted knot of Ilse’s belly button. My head was pounding.