London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  He took an almighty mouthful of omelette – his first and last. Pushing away the plate, his meal already congealing, he lit a Marlboro Light and gusted a blue question towards me.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I accept your apology. Now, have you been getting any? A nation needs to know.’

  I shook my head.

  He asked how I was. I told him. Laura’s name came up. In a rather relaxed, non-obsessional way, it has to be said, but he was on to it like a stoat with a hare.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Adam. You… you’re like a bungalow. You’ve only got one storey.’

  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘Put it in your script.’ I had nothing else to say on the matter of my sex life. He knew that and so he didn’t balk when I changed the subject. Give him his due, the bastard.

  I asked him if he’d seen any of the old Capital crew. He hadn’t. And he didn’t want to, come to that. He had moved on. Moving on was a staple in his repertoire of things to say.

  Capital was my first whiff of London employment, an outfit trying to compete with Time Out but proving to be an extremely poor relation. Greg edited its city guides for tourist and students new to London. He got me a job checking facts on the latest edition. I felt I could do a decent job on the subs desk even though I didn’t then know the difference between a running turn and overmatter; kerning and tracking. I knew how to spell and I understood when writing needed to be cut. An emergency lesson in the vagaries of QuarkXpress (which sounded like some kind of fast cheese delivery service rather than a piece of design software) on an office Mac one Sunday evening and I was thrust into a world of goatees and Gauloises Blondes, Evian face spray and Obsession. There were six people on the subs desk: India, Elspeth, Greg, Shaun, Claire and Elliot. I knew which of them I would get on with and which would be awkward bastards almost immediately. It’s like going to buy a pet.

  Elspeth came in at nine, before everyone else, so that she could leave at five, before everyone else. That she put the same number of hours in didn’t matter to anyone: seeing someone collect their bag and flounce out an hour before the Real People’s home time was enough to give you indigestion. She rarely spoke to anyone, and when she did it was with a barely concealed disdain, sarcasm filling her voice like effluent plopping into a river. I watched her more than the others; mainly because my desk was opposite hers but also because her head fascinated me. Her chin didn’t slope upwards into her neck; it shot back at ninety degrees and was as flat as the underside of an iron.

  When she talked, she’d collect cheesy deposits in the corners of her mouth and would later dislodge these nuggets with a specially unwound paper clip. She’d leave messages on her screensaver such as I’d rather be washing underwear or I’d rather be a rich man’s plaything. I often wanted to ask her why, if she was so transparently unhappy with her lot, she didn’t pack up and find something else to do. But I kept shtoom; being the freelance, you never feel suitably liberated to be so up front about such matters. Everyone else was all right, approachable, not too intent on the work that they couldn’t enjoy a laugh now and then. But I was a little bit intimidated by Shaun, who was vegan, shaved his head and wore different badges on his bomber jacket every day: I Hate Travis or FFC or Jesus Jones. He had strange-coloured eyes. A kind of pale brown, almost dark yellow. If I asked him a routine question, the kind of thing we always asked each other on the subs’ desk, such as whether he’d copied a file from the server over to his machine without initialling the original file to let people know where it was, he’d wave me away with his hand without turning around. Once, I’d gone to make a coffee in the staff kitchen and tried to engage him in conversation. He watched me while I was twatting on about something, possibly hating Travis too, and had simply walked away, mid-sentence. He was astonishingly successful with women, apparently. They liked the challenge. They liked his pinched look, his expression of perpetual disdain. They liked his heavy-lidded eyes. They liked, when they asked how he was, how he answered: In a state of urbane ennui.

  For a boy who had grown up in the north of England on a chiselled lexicon filled with lopped ‘g’s and dropped ‘h’s, it was a shock to find women talking like Radio 4 newsreaders. Those cultured voices made my chest tight with excitement. It became almost Pavlovian; I’d turn hot and gooey when India breathed the words ‘I’m off to the sandwich shop for a tuna salad. Anyone want anything?’ I started to fantasise about her enunciating unlikely morsels such as ‘Marrakech’ or ‘rapacious’ and the surely unattainable ‘clitoral stimulation’. If her lips and tongue could make her speech sound so good, what could they do when turned to other tasks? Sometimes I’d work myself into such a fever I’d have to go for some fresh air or suffer a headache. She could make ‘Good morning Adam, Jesus you look rough,’ sound like a come on.

  I was grateful to Greg for the work, even though it didn’t work out. Offices and me. Went together as well as shit does with custard. I was grateful too for him introducing me to Laura. Even though that didn’t work out either.

  I paid for breakfast and asked him if he knew what had become of Shaun and Elliot. Shaun, apparently, had jacked in work to travel, disillusioned with London life, and Elliot was now Chief Sub.

  I walked Greg to the bus stop where he did a very Greg thing and hailed a cab. And then asked me if I had any money to pay for it.

  A wind was getting up by the time I returned home, exciting the litter in the street. I felt bushed. The previous night’s so-called party had left me edgy and dissatisfied with my circle of friends. I couldn’t work out if I was tagging along with them, or allowing them to be a part of my life. I didn’t know how hard it might be to quietly leave them.

  A bitter flood of sunlight slashed at the window when I looked at it. If it could have made a noise, it would have been the cry of an oil-shy gate opening. I took a shower and wrote a letter to Dad. While I was eating lunch I heard the wind coming up the flue to howl behind the fireplace in my bedroom.

  And then voices.

  I knelt by the hearth, carefully pushing aside the wicker arrangement of dried flowers my mother had given me years previously. Trapped in the gusts of wind came sudden, alien words, wrapped in diesel: ‘…enditohoff…’ and ‘…urtcob…’ and ‘…stardwan…’

  It occurred to me that I was catching snatches of sentences but the voices that uttered them were somehow inhuman: atonal and passionless. Perhaps they were being distorted by the movement of underground breezes. Perhaps they weren’t voices at all, just the movement of metallic echoes through tunnels which, by some architectural fluke, produced vocal similarities. Laughter made a mockery of that theory, though. Thick and phlegmy, it hung like smog in the gutted heights of the house next door, at one point passing so close to the fireplace I thought the mouth it was coming from must only be inches away from me.

  The rest of the afternoon I spent indoors, becoming more and more nervous about that evening’s dinner date with Nuala. I flicked through gardening notes I’d made, wondering if we should go for something a bit unusual for the stall, make it less a flower thing and more a wild sanctuary for plants. A bit of Japonica, say, or Hoary Mullein, or Himalayan Balsam — something hardy, with a bit of clout that would attract the attention. Hopefully, it would be tough enough to survive even my most savage bouts of care. The colour plates in my book could not touch me with their calming images of hedgerows and ivy; I felt restless and itchy, my skin somehow not right for the body it was containing, as if I’d bought it from a shop only to find it was a size too small.

  ‘…barramulch…’

  Nothing on the television, but I increased the volume for a bit of company. The sky’s colour was deepening. A cat loosed an unearthly cry somewhere out back. I imagined Marlon nailing some hapless female with his satanic cat penis.

  ‘…ispersprit…’

  Footsteps gritted next door. What was going on? There were no vans or plant outside. No tea-breaks or wolf whistles. I was just nipping to the bathroom for a piss when the phone rang.r />
  It was Yoyo.

  ‘You have to come. You have to come. Can you?’

  I could. I did. But I wish I hadn’t.

  The towers of Yoyo’s estate closed in like bunched shoulders as I walked the few hundred metres to her flat from the bus stop on Edgware Road. The previous night’s beer still wallowed in the greased confusion of my guts. The moon was an incomplete thumbprint breaking free of the tower block’s edge. I could see Yoyo, mannish and gawky, stumping around the car park, her head on her hat to stop the wind from taking it. I pulled the frozen lapels of my leather jacket around me and shouted her name. She trotted over and got hold of my arm.

  ‘It’s Saskia,’ she said.

  ‘It always is,’ I said, thinking, I’m fucked if I’m coming all the way out here just to go all the way back to Muswell Hill. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Yoyo didn’t know. She had received a phone call an hour previously but Saskia hadn’t said anything. There was very loud music in the background. Raised voices.

  ‘I heard someone say “Pass the warning”, and then the line went quiet.’

  I must have winced when I bit my cheek because she asked me if I was all right.

  I said, ‘Where’s your car?’

  She was too nervous to drive. I drew the driver’s seat closer to the steering wheel and we set off. It started raining as I pushed the Yaris up through Marylebone, and by the time we had circumnavigated Regent’s Park, the weather had deteriorated to such an extent that, even with the wipers full on, it was difficult to make out what was happening on the road just a few metres in front.

  We were leaving Camden in the rear view mirror when Yoyo took my hand in hers. ‘I’m scared,’ she said.

  ‘I can call the police if you like,’ I said. ‘If you’re worried about what you think we might find.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m probably just imagining things. Sas probably pressed a button on her phone by mistake while she was watching a noisy film. She likes horror films, doesn’t she?’

  She asked it in such a way that replying in the negative wasn’t an option.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I asked, reaching out to switch on the radio. I found jazz fm. John Surman. Soothing. I removed my hand from hers, changed gear, and patted her leg.

  She removed the novel in her pocket and cursorily waved it at me. ‘It’s called The Vanishing Road,’ she said, as the rain found a new, impossible intensity.

  ‘Apt,’ I said. She laughed. The tension unwound a little in that tiny space.

  By the time we got to Muswell Hill I had the crazy urge to suggest to Yoyo that we go to the pub for a drink first, because whatever had happened to Saskia couldn’t still be happening. And then I felt sick for thinking that, and for thinking that whatever might have happened to Saskia was too good for her, which reminded me of the quote that I had heard on two separate occasions. Which made me feel even more sick. In the end I pulled over and was sick.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Yoyo said. ‘I mean, fucking hell.’

  All I could smell was my vomit rising from the gutter, the exhaust fumes and Yoyo’s lip balm, a cloying strawberry. I felt too weak to try driving the car through more of this shitty weather so I suggested Yoyo waited in the car while I checked on Saskia, whose house was less than a quarter of a mile away. She protested, said she wanted to come with me, but when I started across the road, she didn’t move from her seat. I looked back at her shape, spoilt by the rilling of water across the windscreen, and thought, right then. Right then.

  I was sopping before I got to the end of the street, but I felt better for being out on my own in the cold. Hunched figures bore down on me, blind, steaming with beer, and I had to dodge out of the way of all of them. I put my hands in my pockets, fixed my eyes to the glassy pavement and walked hard.

  Saskia’s place was like a blacked out house during wartime. I tried the door and wasn’t too surprised to find it open. Inside I waited for my heart to calm down and the sounds of the house to make themselves known to me. A television was playing somewhere, quietly. More quietly than Yoyo had suggested. I checked the downstairs rooms but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Unless you count as extraordinary split bin bags and dozens of flies in the kitchen; a living room with three televisions and a massive framed film poster depicting Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat and a cork notice board in the hallway studded with Polaroids of semi-hard penises wearing coloured condoms. Mildewy blankets hung from the banisters, slowly drying in the damp heat of the house. This is Saskia we’re talking about. I don’t find it extraordinary.

  Upstairs in the master bedroom I found her fast asleep. An ashtray filled with roaches trembled uncertainly on her belly. There was nobody else around. I moved the ashtray and, as there were no blankets available, wrapped Saskia in a couple of cardigans from her wardrobe. She shifted slightly in her sleep. Reached out a hand and cupped my crotch, said: ‘Yeah, Pete. Yeah.’ Smiled. Disappeared back into the depths.

  My thoughts folded inwards and the edges of the room followed it, dissolving to black, leaving only the trembling outline of Saskia, like a cut out. Through the loose-knit cardigan I could see how her blouse had ridden up to reveal her swollen belly. I saw the sleeping curve of potential within. It turned its head towards me and opened its eyes: ash trickled from them. Its yawning mouth carried no sound, only the rank, concrete ghosts of what it would become.

  Everything whited out and as I sucked in breath, so the colours returned. I was in my bathroom and there was shaving foam all down my shirt. My razor was in my hand. I pulled myself upright and caught sight of my half-shaved face in the mirror. The strip light over it made me appear pasty and undernourished. Too many shadows. According to my watch I’d been out for about five minutes. I could smell strawberries and mildew. There was ash on the floor, but when I bent to touch it, I saw that it was just talcum powder, coloured by the dust. My fingers left prints. Laura’s talc; I never used it.

  I wondered if I should phone Nuala, or pop up to tell her I wasn’t feeling well and that I couldn’t go through with dinner, but as I was thinking this I was rooting through my suitcase for something to wear, and I could smell dinner drifting down the stairs.

  Should I opt for a jeans and T-shirt combo, or go for something a bit more dangerous? I didn’t own any kimonos or sarongs so I plumped for a linen shirt opened cheekily to the throat and a pair of ‘slacks’. I had half a bottle of Australian Chardonnay in the fridge but I suddenly had a panic that she might be tee-total so I took a few cans of Pepsi Max instead. And then berated myself as I waited for her to let me in for being such a twat.

  ‘No wine?’ she asked, when she saw my offering. ‘You might like drinking that liquid death, but I don’t. I’ll pass, thanks.’ She had progressed with her unpacking. The paint on the walls had dried, brilliant white throughout, and a Moïse Kisling nude was hanging above the fireplace. A vase on a Minotti table was tightly packed with pebbles from a beach. A battered bronze cat was being used for a doorstop. There was a bookshelf containing more orange Penguin spines, large coffee table books on photography and art, and dog-eared copies of Wallpaper*.

  ‘It’s starting to look very welcoming in here,’ I said. ‘Very cosy.’

  She was wearing some kind of wrap, so tight she might have been poured into it. I could smell steamed vegetables, ginger, garlic. She’d changed Whale Song to Storm in a Rainforest. At any moment I expected a disgruntled baboon with an arse like lava to come clattering through the bamboo drapes and make off with the olives. What was I doing here? Too soon. Too soon. Laura danced through my thoughts, a mischief that was as brightly compelling as the urge of blood from a paper cut. Despite Nuala’s simple, tasteful surroundings, I craved Laura’s uncomplicated flat. She had a beautiful china tiger that stood under the window. A bowl in which she floated tea-lights. I wondered if the cards I sent her were still propped up on her groaning bookshelves.

  Greg had leaned across in the pub and tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Laura.
This is young Adam. Say hi.’

  She said hi. She smiled. Here eyes were blue, and almost ruinously symmetrical. At the end of the night she asked me back to her place for a cup of tea. I sat in her kitchen, waiting for her to put the kettle on. She sat waiting too. I thought maybe I should get some cups sorted out. She said, ‘You know, when a woman invites you back for a cup of tea, well, that’s not necessarily what she means.’

  Over the course of a year, we fell in love and drew the city unconsciously into the bubble of warmth that enveloped us both; it is hard not to involve London at some level; it is almost an imperative. It regimented the way in which our time was spent, and it rushed us into spending that time, and of course, it sat there while we played in its belly. It was difficult to recall a time when we ever simply relaxed and chatted, watched shit television, ate pizza, slobbed out. Always we were bathing and dressing and making telephone calls, arranging cabs, dinner appointments. When bedtime came we fucked till exhaustion knocked us out. We made plans; talked of the house we would share. We even looked for it, pointing out likely contenders in St John’s Wood, Belsize Park, Marylebone. She told me she wanted to have a child by me. Always, there were little encouragements and reassurances; always, her hand in mine, her eyes brimming with me. The death of our relationship was my enslavement, her manumission.

  London life is a race. A Marathon with a sprint finish and a lap of honour. Woe betide if you get a stitch, if you lag behind.

  ‘Hey. Reality check,’ said Nuala. ‘You’ve got a face as long as a pair of wet tights.’ She pushed a gin and tonic into my hand and told me to sit. I lowered myself on to a floor cushion. The black dildo peeked out from beneath it; I resisted an insane urge to sniff it.