London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  ‘Name?’ he asked Ilse.

  She seemed to ignore him, continuing with her drink as if he was one step down on the food chain from a low-life, chivvying for a cup of tea on Regent Street. But then she said: ‘Ilse. Now fuck off.’

  Iain looked past me, checking his profile and full-on reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Ilse’s friend, who I had never seen before, was clutching her handbag in a way that indicated she wanted to leave. She was glaring at Iain and tutting like a Geiger counter. Every couple of minutes I’d drift by to see how he was doing. Within half an hour he’d wangled her address and a kiss out of Ilse. Her friend had had enough and left. Light from the multi-screen videos bounced colours off the sweating plank that was Iain’s forehead.

  It didn’t seem to matter that Ilse was pissed on Moscow Mule or that she persisted in calling him ‘Wankpot’ rather than Iain. No matter that she’d rather eyeball the six-foot-fuck-off bouncer on the door with the questing pecs. He was in. Kind of. You had to give it to him.

  ‘Is he for real?’ I asked Meddie.

  ‘Iain is a teddy bear,’ Meddie said. ‘You know that. He’s soft as putty, really.’

  ‘He’s a game bastard, I’ll give him that,’ I said.

  ‘Can I walk you home?’ Iain was saying now.

  Ilse: ‘Go myself. Taxi. Why don’t you fuck off back to your mother, you sad bastard?’ Iain laughed at this and leaned in, started gently eating her mouth. Ilse wasn’t in any fit state to protest. She departed not long after. She wasn’t up for a long night at Saskia’s. Neither was I. But I was.

  Suddenly, it was chucking out time. Iain waited while Meddie and me collected empties, transferred the contents of ashtrays into buckets, shared out the evening’s tips. And then we were walking back alleys, trudging through the drifts of chip papers, the bottles and empty electric soup cans, absently eyeing the graffiti and the dog shit.

  ‘What’s your favourite film?’ Iain asked. He was always asking. And never listening to our replies. ‘Mine’s Don’t Look Now,’ he said, as usual.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Fancy that. I didn’t know.’

  Sometimes we caught a cab, but mostly we walked. At the flat in Crouch End that Meddie shared with Iain, we would have something unspectacular to eat before heading on to Saskia’s.

  Yoyo was sitting on the steps outside when we got there.

  ‘You tanked?’ she asked.

  ‘To the max,’ said Iain, and he certainly seemed pissed, but I hadn’t seen him drink more than two pints all evening. ‘You?’

  ‘Got any bacon? I could murder a bacon sarnie.’

  Yoyo was tall. About six two. She walked with her head down and her shoulders rounded, looked up at you under her fringe whenever she said anything. She spoke in a whisper. It was as if every other facet of her life needed to be miniaturised in order to cancel out her size. She drove a Yaris. Somehow. She was never without a soft blue cricket hat with a floppy brim. Or a paperback stuffed into one of the pockets on her duffel coat. Always a different one whenever I saw her. Always something a little left field, a little cultish, that you never seemed to find in the bookshops. There was one there now. I couldn’t see who the author was, but the title was Paddington Bare. A quote by David Lynch in white lettering across the top of the cover said: ‘And you think I’m weird?’. I liked her. She was the only one of the bunch that I did like. I don’t know why I persisted in hanging around with the others. It was just some ill-advised staff thing, that was all. Like going for a drink after work with the office dolts you wouldn’t otherwise give the steam off your piss. Iain had that kind of psychotic edge that made you want to observe him, like a car accident in the making. Meddie was fit as fuck, and dangerous with it. It was as shallow as that.

  Meddie – having consumed the best part of a six-pack of Carlsberg on the long walk back – attempted the manoeuvre that was Inserting The Key In The Lock. Dry cider ghosts wrapped themselves around us as we piled over the threshold. The hallway, briefly lit by a low wattage bulb on a timer, revealed a rusting sit-up-and-beg bicycle without any wheels and a large pile of sun-faded Q magazines tied up with string. In the kitchen, Yoyo cremated a few rashers while the rest of us ate bowls of Rice Krispies and stared at an empty Pilsner Urquell bottle on the table.

  Iain said, ‘That Ilse. That Ilse. I’d crawl naked and peeled across a thousand miles of salt and vinegar just to hear her tell me to go and shit up a pole again.’

  In Iain’s bedroom, I shifted some dirty cloths and a bottle of Renovex from on one of his rickety old director’s chairs and sat down, idly leafed through a copy of Premiere. Iain put on a purple silk shirt and too much Issey Miyake. Hundreds of issues of Hotdog and Empire, and older copies of Photoplay, Picturegoer and Film Weekly, were stacked in every available space. His walls were covered with posters of old films, silver screen classics rubbing shoulders with horror movies and skin flicks: Gilda, Death Line, Deep Throat. An old Bell & Howell 16mm silent projector stood in the centre of a table next to some plastic reels, a splicer and a Kodak presstape. There were a couple of cans of film with labels stuck to them, written in an illegible hand. The wall next to his bed was dotted with the corpses of flies, midges and moths he had swatted over the years. He never cleaned them up. They were like the decals of downed enemy planes on the side of a fighter. He saw me admiring them.

  ‘That Ilse,’ he grinned. ‘Ah, Ilse, how I’d like to swat something that crawled on you while I crawled on you. We could leave it there and get a tattooist to mark the spot forever. Silverfish on your thigh, earwig on your cleavage. To remember me by.’

  Iain Wild was originally from south Wales. Barry Island, I think. He had worked hard on removing his accent. But it was as if he had removed every other thing that supplies character alongside it. He had even excised his past. When I asked him where he had worked previously, before his current job, fixing old French cars at a garage in Oxford, he had pursed his lips and touched a finger to his nose, as if it was some great, terrible secret, as if he had been some kind of assassin, rather than a cleaner at McDonald’s, which, according to Meddie, was what he had been.

  He tended to wear outfits that were in differing shades of the same colour. Half the time he looked like various areas of a Pantone chart. He ate meals that were colour co-ordinated too. His favourite was pork chops, boiled potatoes, boiled cauliflower, and white sauce. On a white place. Vanilla ice cream to follow. I said to him once, when the best part of a bottle of Bordeaux had turned me mean: ‘This isn’t some fucking eccentricity that makes you mysterious or fascinating, you know. It’s an affectation. It’s an affectation that is dumb as fuck. It makes you look like nothing more interesting than a cuntist.’

  ‘Your trouble,’ he said to me, ‘is that you care too much about what’s going on around you and not enough about what’s going on.’ And then he touched his finger against his nose.

  Getting on for one a.m., we caught a taxi up to Muswell Hill, and Saskia’s place. She lived in a house filled with dressmaker’s dummies and Wade Whimsies. She earned a lot of money designing corporate websites. Saskia. Jesus. As we walked in she was leaning out of the window blurting a soup of thin vomit and obscenity on to the patio roof below. She was far, far away. She said hi and air-kissed us all, but she might as well have been in Ulan Bator. I didn’t know what was more distressing: the bump in her gut or the lack of colour to her eyes. Saskia’s baby went wherever she went: Hampstead Heath on a Saturday night, say, where she dropped gelatin strips of acid. The baby is well travelled, though it hasn’t left London yet.

  ‘You’re going to give birth to Timothy fucking Leary if you ain’t careful girl,’ somebody said, out of the smoky, syrupy dark. ‘You’ll bear down and a fucking Blue Meanie’ll fly out your twat.’

  Some drinking went on. As it does. Loud music. A complaint from the neighbours. A visit from the police. A quiet word. More drink. A dark room filled with chill out music and rafts of reefer smoke. Another dark room filled with coats
and fucking. Drink.

  ‘Egg,’ said Saskia, glottally. She always wanted eggs when she was stoned. Scrambled, fried or poached. She had a thing for eggs. She lifted her top and ran her palms over the bulge. A papery sound – like the hiss of a hangnail against an emery board – turned my stomach. I started making my excuses. Before I left, a spill of light from an opening door ignited Saskia’s swelling and I was convinced I saw, for a second, a blue, skittering suggestion uncoil in the subtle transparency of her flesh.

  Iain had tried it on with every female in the kitchen and scored a grand total of 0.0. He ended up on his own in the bedroom, in front of the portable TV, trying to coax something from the beery collapse between his legs; he’d fallen asleep with saliva drying on his fist. I had to help him down the stairs and into a taxi back home.

  ‘Do you have no fucking self respect?’ I asked. He was asleep all the way. I kept asking anyway. I was asking myself more than anyone else.

  Chapter 4

  Storm warning

  She survived, the first one. It read about it in a Standard It found fluttering around the tracks somewhere between Marylebone and Baker Street. Three of her fingers were severed, that’s all. Her name is Jemima. It says the name to Itself over and over until it loses its meaning. Jemima. Jemima. Jemimajemimajemimajemi. Less of a name now. Just a noise. A shape made with the mouth. Which helps. The human things are what makes this so hard. It remembers seeing pictures of the Iran/Iraq war from Its childhood. Corpses on a road just outside Basra. The blank faces or the relaxed nonsense of their limbs weren’t what affected It most. Rather, it was trimmed beards, or a bangle on a wrist. Moments of vanity.

  It’s standing flat against the curved wall, palms open, resting against the damp surface. Water trickles somewhere in the dark. Occasional gleams of light from the rail signals catch in the dusty curves of ceramic insulators. It breathes in. It breathes out. It breathes in. It breathes out. It breathes in. It breathes in. It breathes in. And holds the air inside It, all the atoms of for ever permeating the membranes of Its lungs, being changed, becoming something else. Might there be air from Napoleon’s lungs inside It now? Might there be the exhalations of Churchill, Nehru, Pol Pot, Boudiccea, Quetzlquatl filling Its chest, making its head thump?

  We are but dust, and a shadow.

  It is the dust. It is the shadow. The shadow is death. It is the shadow.

  The scatter of sound along rails; the hiss and sizzle. A train chasing its own overture. It presses back against the wall, feeling the brick dust and moss writhing against Its clothes, Its skin. It exhales. It becomes a part of the dust and the shadows. And now in the dark It is less aware of Its face. That despicable signature. Hateful signifier. The things that allies him to all the suits standing on the platforms waiting for trains to take them back to 2.4 and Sunday drives in the Mondeo for supposedly happy family lunches at the pub, but the food’s shit and the beer’s off and the kids won’t stop squabbling.

  Its legs shake as the train gathers pace, clattering into the bend a hundred metres away, lights scouring the blistered, scarred tunnel. The worm in its hole. Its hole. The tunnels feel like open mouths calling It home. The train barrelling on, optimum speed, midway between Hampstead and Belsize Park. The Misery Line, they call it. Well, come on Misery, have at ye. Try some of this on for size.

  It grins as the wash of headlights arc across Its face. Look upon me and know true fear, look upon me as I do and understand what horror means.

  It peels away from the wall and raises Its arms as if to welcome a lover. It closes Its eyes at the screech of brakes filling the air. Thirty metres shy, the train hits the pile of sleepers laid across the track. The snout of the first carriage buckles and buries itself in six feet of earth, ploughing through rails as if they were made of toffee. The rear of the carriage jack-knifes and gouges a trail through the roof of the tunnel. Broken tiles and brick debris rain down. It steps back into shadow as the train crumples around him, mashed at impossible angles through the tunnel like potato forced through a ricer. Some of the panes, before the lights within the carriages stutter and die, become drenched in blood. An interminable time later, It picks Its way through the rubble to the rear carriage, which is half as big as it ought to be, concertinaed between the two walls, a giant vertical rupture splitting its centre. A soup of limbs and oil and blood is bubbling out of it. People are screaming. For what?

  It screams too, lustily apeing the sounds he can hear. Save us, save us from death so we might go back to what we wanted to kill ourselves to escape from.

  It is over.

  It is beginning.

  That great fuck-off panther came crashing through the undergrowth again this morning. It’s a good job I keep a bag of cat nibbles handy or I’d probably be gnawed to the elbow by now. It’s a mean looking bastard. Goes by the name of Marlon. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a bit of form: GBH, armed robbery, that sort of thing. Its miaow sounds like a thirteen-year-old boy trying to keep his voice level. Before he was neutered, Marlon’s bollocks must have been the size of satsumas.

  I tried putting down a bowl of milk and scratching his head but he was looking at my arm like he was going to eat it, or fuck it. With Marlon you could never be sure. When I was with Laura, she’d find my magnetism towards cats amusing. The flat below her was occupied by a psalm-singing female tattooist who owned two ginger Toms which paid frequent visits and wrestled with me on the floor when Laura was too tired to. Another battle-scarred specimen used to delight in dashing through from the front window to the back, as if sent on a cat dare by its cat friends. Laura thought my reverence of these creatures a touch excessive but she humoured me, even when I went on about how, if you send your love through your fingertips when you stroke a cat, it will feel it and trust you. It was a trick I tried with Laura when she hugged me goodbye for the last time. It worked like a malingerer in an office where everyone else has gone to lunch. But then Laura wasn’t a cat.

  ‘You know you’re drinking too much,’ began Greg, loud enough for a pair of American tourists in pearl-coloured shell suits to hear, ‘when you wake up in the morning and last night’s unflushed piss has got a skin on it.’

  I seated myself opposite. Mozart’s was filled with newspaper-reading middle-class men and women with floppy hair and oatmeal linen. We ordered. You get great English breakfasts at Mozart’s, even at lunchtime. And you get music too. Mozart.

  A notebook was opened in front of Greg. Ideas for sketches were scrawled upon it, along with pornographic doodles and cross-hatchings. He was putting together the pilot for a late-night sit-com he wanted to pitch to the commissioners at the major TV stations, set in a TV cookery studio run by Sicilian chefs with a mob background. It was called Suck My Dish, Mothercooker. Greg is nothing if not in your face.

  I had first met him four years previously. He had come out of Lupo on Dean Street at a speed that made me suspect he had been forcibly ejected. He fell into me and we both went into the gutter, to the hilarity of the half-pint knobs spilling out of The French House. He picked me up and offered to buy me a drink by way of an apology.

  ‘What is with birds these days?’ he said. ‘What, you’re not allowed to pinch their arses any more? Tell the fucking Italians that. Why do they get away with it and we don’t?’

  I was protesting that I had to get away, it really didn’t matter, but he was having none of it. And it was a nice day, I was feeling pretty affable towards the world, I thought, why not? We walked up to the Dog & Duck on Bateman Street and I ended up buying the beers, spending the best part of twenty minutes waiting to get served at the tiny bar. I soon found out that when he was buying lunch or dinner for people, he took them off to the Eritrean restaurant in Kentish Town, or to Ed’s Diner, or a Stock Pot. When other people were buying, he pressed them for a table at Mezzo or Quo Vadis, or Quaglino’s.

  I wanted to sink the beer and leave, but we ended up staying for a few more. Everything about him was my antithesis: the strategically crumpled
Arnold Zimberg jacket, the lecherous way in which he sized up the women that squeezed past us (he felt totally justified in reaching out to squeeze parts of them, as if he were testing fruit: ‘But it’s a gesture of respect, innit?’). There was something about him that fascinated me, and also worried me. His behaviour felt somehow borrowed. He had it down too pat. It was like looking at a caricature of Soho man, right down to the surfer beard sticking out from beneath his lower lip, the Oakley Plates sitting on his scraped back Beckham locks, the American Express Gold card, the cutting edge Sony Ericsson phone that spent the entire evening nestled in his hand, as if it had been glued there. It never rang once.

  He lived off the Holloway Road, in some split-level flat that nobody had seen. He drove something fast and black with a soft top and then winked when you asked what kind of car it was. ‘I never said it was a car, did I? Did I?’

  Our eggs arrived. I liked the way they add a little sprinkle of herbs to the top of the yolk, and the side order of sourdough toast. That’s London, I suppose, in a nutshell.

  ‘How’s the script?’ I asked.

  He’s always been a bit of a drinker (he waded through a couple of Bloody Marys while I sipped at a fruit smoothie) though lately it seemed he had increased his intake. But then, apparently, productivity was up, as was his social standing. Much of this was down to a Channel Four contact who had started taking him drinking at Groucho’s. Being among the wolves gives you the illusion that you’re actually a part of the pack. He still hasn’t come down. Maybe he won’t. This all seemed less weird than the fact that I still hadn’t been invited round to his pad for dinner, or beers and footy on the TV.

  ‘Getting there,’ he said. His face was as expressionless as the omelette placed in front of him. I set about my food, keeping my contributions to a minimum. If you’re not careful, if you mention something out of context, he’s liable to veer off on a different tack, which means he’ll have two stories to tell you. Chip in again and, like a warren full of rabbits, you’ve got tales lined up all day, multiplying like hell. I consigned myself to the odd arched eyebrow, the occasional, demurring ‘Noooo’ and ‘Hmmm,’ and ‘Really?’