‘What’s her name?’ she said. ‘You know, I can tell you’re uncomfortable. Something in the eyes. My eyes, they change colour when my moods alter. My hair too. See, eyes blue? When I’m angry, they go really blue. And when I’m tired or sad they fade out, to a kind of soft blue. You too. She must have really meant something.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ I didn’t, I didn’t.
‘You do, you do. I’m a great listener.’
‘I’m sure you are – it’s just that I’m not a great talker. I can’t talk about it.’
‘How long’s it been?’
‘How long’s what been?’
‘How long’s it been since she finished with you?’
‘She didn’t finish with me. What’s for dinner?’ I moved to the kitchen, stepping over the item I’d seen stuffed into a box. It appeared to be a huge fabric bag but the buckles and straps indicated otherwise. Nuala was delving about in a compartment of her refrigerator, her words muffled.
‘Oh come come come, Adam. You have to face up to these matters. It’s no good tucking them away inside where they can hurt you.’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m not prepared to discuss my private life with someone I met just a little while ago.’
She lurched from the fridge, a flare of lollo rosso shivering in her fist. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t know you.’
‘Rubbish. You go to the doctor and tell him about your piles or pruritus don’t you? I mean the generic “you” that is.’
I knew I wouldn’t be able to deflect her unless I walked out and I didn’t want to do that. I was strangely fascinated by her. ‘It was a case of right people, wrong time. That’s all. It’s my problem, something I have to deal with. Talking about it won’t help.’
My heart sank when she yanked what seemed like an acre of coriander from a brown bag. Its ammonia smell filled the kitchen. I fucking hate coriander.
Nuala tore at the salad leaves with the aimless zest of a person trying to swat a fly. ‘But it will,’ she said. ‘Pain has substance. It sits here – ’ she pressed her hand against my solar plexus, ‘ – and draws bad stuff towards it from your mind, stuff that you remember or feel or predict for yourself. It grows here and unless you drain it you’ll end up making yourself ill. Drain it. By talking about it.’
‘There’s no problem,’ I insisted. ‘I don’t have any pain.’
We sat down to eat, the atmosphere stiffening a little around us. But the meal wasn’t as bad as I was beginning to anticipate. The food was excellent, and I managed to steer the conversation elsewhere, for a little while.
‘What do you do?’ I asked her.
‘I’m a hair stylist, if you mean how do I earn my money.’
‘A hairdresser? But you look… you seem so… you appear to… ’
‘What?’ Her lips flattened, pressed flush against a piece of aubergine before vacuuming it into her mouth. She seemed to inhale food, barely chewing before swallowing with such violence that I could see the cartilage in her throat spasm from the effort.
‘You seem so unusual.’
‘I see. And what do you do?’
‘I sell flowers. And I work in a pub.’
‘Well there you have it. You don’t look like a flower seller. You look like you should be working in a record shop.’
She tapped a button on her remote control. Apes shrieked. Warthogs truffled through the mud. Impala trotted across hissing pampas.
‘What I mean is. This flat. Your decor… ’
‘Is too lavish for a person who trims hair? Well, I work from home and I have a very exclusive client list. And the hair I style isn’t merely the stuff on your head. Follow?’
‘Ah.’ I followed. ‘So who’s on this client list? Anyone famous?’
She smiled, and everything felt better. ‘A couple of internationally renowned footballers. A rock star. An A-list actor.’
‘Get away. Give me names.’
She gave me names. I had to fight to keep my mouth shut. ‘But he’s a hard bastard, that United player. Don’t they take the piss out of him in the showers? I mean… in the shape of a love heart?’
After the meal I started clearing plates but she held up both her hands like a mime artist feeling the sides of an invisible box. The shadows of the candle flames slithered around the walls. Light glinted off the pictures, the spines on her bookshelf. Nuala’s eyes, I now saw, were swirls of cobalt. I was drunk.
‘No need,’ she said. ‘My cleaner will see to those tomorrow.’ She went to the CD player and stuck on another disk. Proper music for a change. I didn’t recognise it but it was full of swirling guitars and a woman’s voice that sounded as light as the air.
Nuala said: ‘Now, would you like to sex with me?’
Later, she stuck her tongue in my ear and whispered: ‘I noticed you didn’t complain about the fact that we’d only just met.’ Her voice was redolent of coriander. I could bear it. ‘You fucked me like you fucked her. I know, shush, you don’t have to disagree with me. You kept pushing my arms back over my head. She must have been very trusting to expose herself like that to you. Or was it just because you like the shape my tits make in that position?’
‘Well, they aren’t bad, are they?’ I said. And then, ‘Who’s H.?’
‘He’s the missing piece in my jigsaw puzzle. He’s the yin to my yang. Or yang to my yin. Whatever it is.’
I wasn’t hurt by her candour but I was hit with a sense of déjà vu. Being with Laura, thrilled by the way she held me in such high esteem, had, at the time, given me a sense of worth, a belief that I was special to someone for the first time in my life. When, after our break-up, she confessed that she’d never quite got over the split with her previous boyfriend, Ed, and hadn’t managed to put behind her the interim affair with James – who, she told me, she would have married within days of meeting him if he’d asked – simply left me feeling duped. I felt as though I’d been an experiment: the test to see whether Laura could proceed with her life in a normal way. Answer: no, not yet – so cheerio but thanks for all the hours you put in. I longed to be the soul mate that these others seemed to have been. How could she feel so deeply for them when she had told me they weren’t keen on sex and treated her so shabbily (Shaun, apparently, did nothing but curse and moan all the time and James relied upon her solely for emotional support). I was really attracted to her. I wallowed in her curves. We did things in the bedroom (and in the kitchen, on the lawn, in friends’ bathrooms) that she’d never done before. I wrote her little notes and hid them in the fridge. I went down on her for the length of a Smashing Pumpkins album (a double CD, mind).
‘Hey. Reality check, Adam. You’re getting tense. Think of nice things. Think of amniotic fluids. Think womb. Here snuggle this.’
She handed me her special pillow but I put it aside and placed my face against her breasts. They weren’t right, but they’d do.
‘Love,’ she said. ‘It’s like glandular fever. It takes a long time to get it out of your system and when it’s finally gone, you’re left feeling weak and vulnerable. Love fucks us something rotten, but we never fuck it. We worship it.’
Towards midnight… That song, still drifting, programmed on constant loop. It didn’t get boring. I got up to see what the track was but Nuala called for me from the living room, distracting me. She was unpacking the thing with buckles and straps. I was wearing her dressing gown. I noticed, with some dismay, that it smelled of the same perfume Laura used to wear.
‘There we are,’ she sang, as she fitted the last strap and swung herself into the hammock. Her feet slipped into a pair of stirrups and she yawned at me: just the right height.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh, I see.’
Chapter 5
The web
Nuala dozed beside me, but I was too fitful to follow suit. Every noise made me start – from the slam of a car door to the rush of juices in Nuala’s belly. And then, very clearly, I heard: ‘Not long now. We’re almost th
rough.’
I’d known all along that the sounds were voices – not breezy indiscretions in the pipes. But hearing complete sentences, rather than snatches, helped cement my conviction. I rose and dressed quietly, not knowing what I was intending to do. Outside, a stiff wind was pushing a tide of filth before it down Dartmouth Park Hill. Dust, plastic bottles, empty tins, twists of paper; there was even what looked like a dead shrew in there but it was enveloped by all the other bits of grime before I could be sure. It snagged around the wooden hoardings and whispered there, a strange convolvulus daring me to do what I didn’t know I’d already decided upon. Warm light flooded my bedroom. I ducked out of sight till Nuala’s shape had diminished in the window. At least, I hoped it was Nuala’s shape. I really didn’t want to have to explain my mad behaviour to her.
There was a padlock on the door that would have let me through the hoarding so instead I climbed over the spiked iron railings at the side of the house, the corner of which marked the beginnings of Wyndham Crescent. All the while, I was muttering to myself: ‘Adam, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ The house was wreathed in shadow. A huge hole had been bored in the front garden, which I edged around, though not before I’d peered in and felt my legs turn to pulp. The depth of its blackness made it appear without end but I also had the unpleasant thought that it was quite shallow and that, just beyond the limit of complete dark, people were huddled there, watching me intently.
On the front door was a warning sign: a white, expressionless face wearing a hard-hat against a red background. DANGER, it read. DEEP EXCAVATIONS. Beneath it, someone had scrawled: You talkin bout yo mother? Beneath that the shape I had seen earlier on the bus shelter was crudely scratched into the wood. I pressed my hand against the door, expecting it to be locked. But I was hardly surprised when it sprang open with a hideous cry. I waited there, eyeing up the block of revealed dark so carefully that I began to see tendrils of black tear off and curl towards me. I might have turned round and gone home then but for a single whoop from a siren in the road behind me. I stepped inside.
I’ve never been afraid of the dark. I just have a problem with what might be hiding in it. Once my eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom I inched forward, telling myself that the humanoid forms that loomed out of the thin pockets of grey were just workers’ jackets hung up on hooks. I had one unpleasant moment when I looked up the stairs to the landing and saw a bulbous shape against the window. I wasn’t going to check it out and when it refused to budge, that was enough to satisfy me, even if I was still uncertain of its identity. Something else wasn’t right here, but I was too occupied with deconstructing the alien forms that impinged upon me with every step to recognise it. Then I saw the reason for the warning signs. A chain barrier tapped my shins. Two feet further and the ground fell away. Joists of wood had been rammed into the earth beneath the concrete foundations and an aluminium ladder descended, severed by the dark beneath its sixth rung. The wind, or whoever possessed the whispers that had bothered me, was singing down there.
Why not?, I thought, swinging my legs over the edge and trying to understand why this should feel like the most natural act in the world. The temperature dropped rapidly as I descended and I was in half a mind to go back for a jumper when the ladder ended. Solid ground was nowhere within reach of my probing toe so I clung there for a moment, looking back the way I had come but unable to see the lip of the hole I’d sunk into. I’d been on the ladder for a few minutes, but it seemed fair to assume that the floor was within leaping distance. And then I felt something bend inside my head and I fell anyway. Somehow, the darkness became even deeper.
He seemed to be walking a matter of moments before figures emerged from the gloom and approached him. They were naked and pale: a man and a woman. As the dark became known to him, so their detail increased. She carried a baby in a papoose, slung around her hips. He carried what appeared to be a spear. Close up, now. Close enough to see the small rat that was following them, that gnawed at a hard growth poking from the man’s ankle. Close enough to see the candle wax colour of their irises.
‘Whofuck?’ the man said. The spear was out in front of him, its blade – some crudely sharpened piece of flint – gleaming black in the darkness, like coal.
‘I’m,’ he said, but found he couldn’t follow the sentence through. ‘I… am…’ He couldn’t draw anything from his mind. He did not know who he was. ‘I am…’ he said. ‘I forget.’
‘Monck,’ the naked man whispered, seeming not to notice the vermin chewing at him. His voice was cool and cruel, heavily sanded, perhaps by the grime that flew through the tunnels. ‘It’s Monck, come back to us,’ he whispered. ‘Wherefuck? Lucky it weren’t the soldiers come across you. Dead now, you’d be. A dead head on a pike, decoration for her Ladyship.’
The woman laughed. The baby giggled and pawed at breasts swollen with milk.
Monck rubbed his head. He did not feel quite right.
‘Why fiddle with thy nut? Does thou suffer a dysfunction? Afraid of us, is it? And rightly so. Monck. Monck.’ The naked man laughed: blackened teeth oozed from beneath his lips.
‘Tread soft, Mitre,’ the woman hissed. ‘He might be the one.’ The humour fell from his face.
‘And he might not,’ Mitre said. ‘He might just be a fly fallen into the silk: fuel. Fuel for the final push. And a couple of sovs for us, finder’s fee, like. You shouldn’t be so jumpy, Herschell. They can’t all be Gonebads.’
‘One of them has to be. Why not him?’
Mitre prodded him with the spear. Monck flinched. ‘You. Are you Gonebad? Or are you Surfacetype? Or are you thick with us?’
Monck rubbed his head some more. It seemed to help, though not with his memory. He felt more relaxed. He didn’t feel under threat in any way, despite Mitre’s weapon and Herschell’s hostility. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think I fell.’
‘He’s Surfacetype,’ Herschell decided. ‘Let’s get him along to Vane. Let’s have him processed and padlocked. The quicker the better. I don’t like being around this Topside scum.’ The baby fastened its lips to Herschell’s nipple; spilled mouthfuls made black tracks through the filth on her tit.
‘I’ll take him,’ Mitre said.
He prodded and poked Monck into some kind of narrow duct with loose floorboards underfoot and scarred tiling overhead. Sweating tallow candles showed the way at regular points, drenching the air with a claggy animal fug. The interstices were filled with shadows: one sinking into his feet as he passed beneath a candle, while at the same time another grew as he approached the next.
‘Who’s Vane?’ Monck asked.
‘Vane will have thee right as a carrot,’ Mitre replied, failing to answer Monck’s question. ‘And then we’ll have you at the Face working like bastards, or wherever it is you’re supposed to go.’ He laughed again, a sound that put Monck in mind of molten tar.
They emerged on to a platform choked with thick hives of litter. The line that served it appeared disused; mounds of filth had accrued between the rails; deep splits journeyed across greying enamel tiles. The station’s sign was just legible on the wall, in white on a blue panel, surrounded by the familiar red ring: Gospel Oak. Why then, should it transmit to him only warning signals? Error messages? Something wasn’t right. The electronic notice board stuttered, on the edge of total breakdown, its yellow letters and numbers glowing faintly, alerting him to a thin mist that folded through the tunnel. He couldn’t read the destination. Something that ended with the word ‘Fields’. Due in three minutes. Mitre waited with him, considering his clothes with unabashed expressions that moved between amusement and disgust. One of the hives of litter stirred: a young girl moved out from behind it and walked towards him. He took in the naked, wasted curl of her posture and made to reach out for her, worried that she might fall on to the tracks, but she was stronger than she appeared. She stopped short of him and pressed a piece of paper into his palm; smiled: the effort sent fractures through the caked skin on he
r cheeks.
‘Hello again,’ she said. ‘I’m Coin. Well, it’s Penny, but my friends call me Coin. I was told to give you that.’
‘Who gave it to you?’ he asked, trying to read what was written on it, but the light was too poor.
‘Oi, you,’ Mitre said, ‘sod away out of it, you little worm. Go fishing. We’re in need of muscle down here, and you playing footsie with this shitehawk isn’t doing nobody no good.’
She left without speaking again, jumping down between the rails and scurrying into the tunnel. He glanced again at the train indicator board just as a large CORRECTION alert flashed across it. There was a blank next to the train’s destination for a second or two, where the estimated time of arrival was meant to be and then: 9 YEARS. Thankfully, the text stuttered again before resolving itself as @&*^$)*&, which was somehow more comforting.
‘What did you mean, just then?’ Monck asked. ‘What did you mean when you told her to go fishing?’
‘Thy knows full well,’ Mitre snarled, waving the spear in Monck’s face. ‘Now lace up that cakehole or shitting hell, sir, I’ll paste thee something chronic.’
One of the benches was relatively free of refuse or human waste. He parked himself and sank his face into his hands. A faintly marine scent drifted from his fingers but he couldn’t recognise it. Tears came, born of hopelessness and frustration. He felt hollow, his centre stolen from him by something unseen that danced nearby, teasing him with its substance before snatching it back when it seemed he might gain purchase on who he was.
A metallic whistling drew his gaze to the tunnel. The walls deep inside the dark shivered with blue light. The bruised face of the train rattled into the station. The windscreen was heavily soiled – what appeared to be a bloody clot was smeared across the glass – concealing the driver, who was little more than a lumpen black shape. None of the compartments were inhabited. As soon as the train shuddered to a standstill, Monck stepped on and sat by the door. Mitre positioned himself opposite, his large genitals mashing beneath him as he sat. A hum invaded the carriage, punctuated by moments of static, as though the driver’s intercom was primed. Monck studied the map of the line – the Fleet Line – and allowed the somnolent jostling of the train to seep into his muscles. He didn’t know where he was meant to get off, which confused him, because he was sure he’d made this journey many times in the past. He noted the station names that succeeded Gospel Oak. Malden Road, Primrose Hill, Inner Circle, The Web, Urbania, Yerkes Way, Myatts Fields… names that inspired excitement and apathy in equal measure. His confusion was increased by the gathering pace of the train and the apparent depths it was sinking to. He swallowed hard to counter the pressure building in his ears, then stood up when the next station appeared in a blur, packed with bodies, their faces streaming, featureless orbs. So it was with the next station, and the next. Through the doors of the adjoining carriages, empty cars jinked and swayed. Mitre said nothing, choosing instead to run his thumb over the edge of his spear.
London Revenant Page 6