Her eyes were unblinking yet full of humour. A green flaw nestled at the edge of an iris like flecks of mint in a round of bitter chocolate. Her dirty blonde hair was scraped back from her forehead, tied into a pony tail which heightened her jaw’s sweep and the tidy bow of her mouth. A plastic badge bearing the name Monique was pinned to her lapel.
‘Robert sends his regards. He’s unwell today but he hopes to chat with you soon. Just a sore throat but he milks it, you know? If I step into his room to see if he wants a little tea he’ll beg me to stay and talk. It’s like he loses his sense of being and needs it re-affirmed with a conversation.’
‘I can understand that,’ Iain said.
Monique’s eyes widened. Her skin was so clear it seemed to deliquesce in the pale light seeping in off the street. I felt as if I had diminished, become tissue-thin. I felt as if I wasn’t there.
Monique leaned over to fill his cup. Beyond the V of her blouse, her breasts curved into shadow.
Iain said, finally, ‘This is Adam Buckley. He’s friend of mine.’
Monique smiled at me, and then nodded her head, almost imperceptibly, as if confirming something she had on her mind.
‘What would you like?’ she asked.
‘Can I see a menu?’
She smiled. Iain smiled. I smiled.
‘We don’t have a menu. Just say what it is you want.’
I shrugged, and said, ‘Okay, I’ll have a corned beef and sweet pickle sandwich. And a cup of tea.’
In the street, the cars were beginning to shimmer. The windows of the houses were cold and empty. Now and again I thought I saw oily shapes moving beyond the glass but there wasn’t enough light to be sure. Slowly the crescent began to fill with life, all of it immaculate. I felt like an intruder; at any moment fingers would point and we’d be undone, me and this threadbare security guard with a poorly shaven face and swollen eyes. But it didn’t seem to matter. The square jaws and frosted pagodas of hair strolled by, almost like figures filmed in slo-mo. Some of them smiled at me, all lustre and silk. I nodded, raised my hand. A woman in a black dress filleted at the sides waved at me and blew me a kiss, her eyes concealed behind vast shades. Iain checked his watch.
Our food arrived. Iain was having egg and chips and a glass of milk. The sandwich was excellent: two slices of corned beef with some Branston in the middle. Lurpak butter on two pieces of Sunblest thick. The tea came with a spoonful of sugar added, how I liked it, even though I hadn’t asked for it. And I would swear blind it was PG Tips, the only tea I really liked.
‘This is weird,’ I said. ‘My mum used to make my corned beef sandwiches, and my tea, just like this, when I was a nipper. I mean, exactly like this.’
‘Same here,’ Iain said. ‘Good, isn’t it?’
‘This is part of it, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘This is part of what you’ve found.’
He nodded. ‘What I’m getting at is this,’ he said. ‘You have to be able to see the moments of depravity as moments of beauty, before you can see the extraordinary in the everyday. I was searching all the time, and seeing things that, ordinarily, you’d turn away from. All that fucking in a park full of dog shit. The discarded condoms. The prozzers grinning with their wet mouths, wearing a little something over their tits, quim-skimmer skirts, high-heels and little else, pumped full of drugs to deal with the cold… you have to accept it. You have to see the positives. And in a way, it was a beautiful moment. All that rank carnality going on under a sky that was filthy black until you really stared at it, and then it was chock full of subtle colour: swirls of purple, deep blue and bottle green. I saw it, in all that sloshing flesh, I saw something that was like art.’
I swallowed tea. I really fancied some Battenburg cake. ‘And this is your reward? A café with a sexy waitress, a meal that reminds you of home?’
He was ignoring me. ‘At first I found little impressions that leaked light when it was dark, until you got up close and found nothing. Holes in fences. Cracks in walls. I thought I had a brain tumour. I heard weird things, sounds coming out of stuff that shouldn’t have carried sounds at all: classical music from a vacant demolition site, a discussion about brass in an empty bus terminus, a typewriter clacking away in a disused church. And then I saw turnings off main roads where, on the map, there shouldn’t be any. I rang the council and they denied it. When I followed the roads, they petered out, or became dead-ends. A few days later, when I tried them again, they reached deeper. Until they finally led somewhere. I sat in a tapas bar at the top end of Eversholt Street for an entire afternoon, watching to see how many people would turn into Cable Lane, this new road that had gradually excavated itself out of the buildings opposite, between Cranleigh Street and Aldenham Street. Cable Lane, NW1. Nobody did. Because only I could see it. You won’t find it in the A-Z.’
He was mad. ‘And this place. I won’t find this place either?’
‘You can try,’ he said. ‘On the map, where we’re sitting, it should be someone’s back garden. We should be right on top of some poor bloke trying to assemble some decking and worrying about the cat from next door who keeps pissing on his begonias.’
I was dissatisfied with what I was being shown, and convinced that he was keeping something from me. I said as much.
He said, ‘And what about you? What makes what you’re looking for so special?’
I opened my mouth and shut it again.
‘We all need something,’ he said. ‘Saskia needed something and when she found it was too much for her. At a certain hour of the night, Yoyo has found deer roaming around one street in SW1. Meddie plays cards with pirates just before dawn on a jetty off the Albert Embankment.’
I said, ‘Fuck off, Iain.’
‘You owe me,’ he said. ‘Stick around, and allow yourself to be convinced.’ He opened his bag and slid a battered ring-bound A-Z across the table, opened at page 50. His dirty fingernail rested against the white strip delineating Bethune Road. Square 1E. No crescent opposite St Kilda’s Road. No nothing. I felt the floor fall away from me, and for a moment I was staring across the Formica into Iain’s face with a sense that we were falling through millions of acres of cold space. If I blinked and lost the connection with those flat, reptilian eyes of his, I’d be lost for ever.
‘Everything okay?’ Monique’s voice pinned me back to where we were, and I gulped and nodded, waiting for the colours to sink into the surroundings, waiting for focus, waiting for Iain to speak and so reassure me as to why I was here. She handed me a small plate with a slice of pink and yellow sponge on it. Marzipan. Apricot paste.
Before I realised it, we were on Stamford Hill, caught up in a thrash of sweaty bodies hailing cabs and throwing violent glances at watches. A woman sneezed into her handkerchief but failed to prevent a staple of snot from fastening her lips together. A girl with a patch over one of the lenses in her spectacles buried her sad face into an anaemic pie. Buses clattered by, filled with cheesy, featureless orbs.
My mind slowly and mournfully readjusted itself to the hubbub around us. Iain was saying something else, now, but I couldn’t hear him. My pulse was filling my head, and the traffic was too dense. I thought he said, but I hoped he hadn’t: I’ve never set foot in that coffee shop before in my life.
I wanted to go home, but I felt honour bound to see through my half of the bargain. We arrived at the building site in Hackney just before midnight. I was trying to work out why I had thought it was daytime at the café but the heartbeat in my head had segued into a nasty little ache and I knew there was little point in asking Iain questions. Not just because stubbornness wouldn’t allow him to answer, but also because I felt sure that he didn’t know, any more than I did.
The security guard he was relieving was a monster called MacCreadle. Six foot plus, sprawling beard and limbs so large it seemed the serge suit he was wearing could only have been hand made for him. I imagined he could wear nothing off the peg. A red bandanna was wrapped around his head. He was sitting with his feet up on the ta
ble, leafing through a copy of 40+. His black cowboy boots were scuffed; his spurs had turned the table-top into a grand doodle.
‘Mac,’ Iain said.
MacCreadle grunted and pushed away from the table. He removed the clip-on tie from his collar and stuffed it into his pocket. He almost filled the Portakabin and had to hunch over so his head wouldn’t knock against the broken neon strip light.
Iain said, ‘Any trouble?’
They moved to the doorway and surveyed the building site. The foundations for what would be a new day care centre had been laid: before them stood a forest of scaffolding and small hills of breeze block and brick, not yet released from their stiff plastic packaging. The estate opposite was like a child’s attempt at construction: simple brown rectangles punched with slit windows – a prison without bars. A sneering pub sat like a creased and shabby piss-artist against the crippled elms that separated its beer garden from a barber shop. The only other places in our sightline included a post office and a chip shop, its entrance obstructed by a pile of bin bags.
‘Jus’ kids,’ said MacCreadle. ‘Fuck’n kids. Tell you man, if I was quick enough to catch ’em, I’d fuck’n fuck ’em.’ He spat a great loop of phlegm against the bowl of a cement mixer and inspected a weeping sore on his hand.
Iain asked, ‘So, what are you up to tonight?’
MacCreadle grinned, his molars creeping into the open like foraging black slugs. ‘You don’t really want to know that,’ he purred. Picking up his rucksack and helmet, he strode to the Harley Davidson which was hidden behind the Portaloo. ‘Tomorrow,’ he mouthed, and roared away, blazer tails flapping in his wake. He hadn’t even looked at me.
We sat in silence for twenty minutes or so. My mind was still stuck in the place we’d left behind. I could still smell melted cheese in the Breville toaster; the peonies in their little vases. I could still feel the blue checked gingham and the slow breath of ceiling fans. Monique had been all eyes and cleavage and Amarige by Givenchy. I sat in a torn PVC swivel chair, waiting for Iain to put me in the picture, and delved for her lyrical voice.
Iain lit the gas burners on the wall, flinching when they popped into life. He tuned the radio till he found the sports bulletin but the football match he wanted to listen to had been abandoned because of a pitch invasion.
‘This business, security,’ Iain said, ‘is anything but. The whole business has more bent people in it than you’ll find in a rheumatology ward.’
I sat and waited and wished I had something to drink. Across the road, a light came on in the opaque window of a bathroom. Someone walked into the frame it provided, long hair, naked, judging by the amount of pink blur. Her shadows and curves bulged and elongated as she fussed with her hair, piling it on top, maybe teasing it into ringlets. I could even see, through the distorted glass, a twinkle or two from her ear-rings.
A shout turned her head; mine too. ‘Eggy! Eggy, ya wankah! Rock and roll… Rock and fucking roll!’
Violence has its own timetables and schedules. Its nature is cyclical and swift; tonight it had made an appointment with this particular urban stretch. Something in the way the air moved, or a posture in the buildings and streets that I hadn’t noticed before told me to watch it. The night was sticking its chin out, daring someone to stick a fist on it. So when a figure came barrelling out of the dark, chased by a pack of lads cackling like hyenas, Iain snuffed the lights and we watched, Iain holding his flask like a comforter between his legs.
They caught up with ‘Eggy’ outside the entrance to the pub. The pack leader grabbed hold of his hair and, like an Olympic hammer thrower, swung him around before depositing him on the kerb where they kicked him until he stopped making little grunts of pain. A tide of bodies spewed from the pub, where, apparently, a privileged few were enjoying a lock-in until the noise disturbed them; glasses smashed; I could watch no more. There was more shouting and pleading before the sirens arrived. Bodies were either dragged off into vans or stretchered into ambulances.
When I remembered to look back at the bathroom, the woman was gone, replaced by a man with his arms locked behind his head. I saw him relax before throwing a punch at someone unseen – perhaps the woman – which brought a black splash to the window just as the light went off.
By the time Iain’s boss, Nathan Troake, arrived in his soiled Jag the area was studiedly calm once more; I could almost see the nervous faces beyond the blocks of curtain, waiting for it all to kick off again.
‘Want some pips, start shaving properly. And who’s this cunt? Your girlfriend?’
Iain told me later that Troake never began a meeting with ‘Hello, how are you?’ It was all business – cut, thrust and me first, me second and if there’s anything left over, me again. He also said that the only pips he wanted were Troake’s and he’d like to retrieve them himself with a rusty knitting needle. Being an inspector in this line of work was even more of a grim experience than guarding. You earned two different species of abuse: the usual civilian kind from those who called you a ‘fascist’ for not allowing them to eat pork pies in stationery shops, and the resentful kind from your former peers who were now no better than dog shit – and all because of those silver nipples pinned to your shoulder. But Iain wouldn’t say as much; that was like saying he didn’t want to work in security. Apparently, you had to look keen to please Troake.
Hot nicotine scorched my nostrils as he leaned over to shake my hand. He wore a black beret tipped forward across his eye. The collars of his coat were batwings concealing his neck. When he moved back his collars shifted; I saw a damp grey bandage at his throat with a core of yellow. He took a silver cigarette case from the folds of his coat. Opening it, he pressed it against my chest.
‘Snout?’ he said. I shook my head. ‘Any trouble?’ he asked as Iain passed him a mug of tea. His voice was ragged and scarred, as though formed from the stuff he was dragging into his chest. Perhaps it was. His cigarette was finished already; he flicked the butt into the mesa of dog-ends in a tin foil ashtray. I watched it land and by the time I’d returned my attention to him, another cigarette was smouldering between his lips, a cold, blue helix of smoke winding around eyes so pale, their colour might have been borrowed from the mortar that was gradually sticking the bricks together outside.
‘Not here, no. Other than a bit of a scrap outside the pub.’
‘So there was trouble. Iain, Security is all about observation and anticipation. You aren’t just a deterrent you know. You are the wedge, the bolster, the thin red line.’ He sipped his tea. ‘So, is there trouble elsewhere?’
‘How do you mean?’ It was interesting to see Iain like this, cowed, not in control. It wasn’t just the difference in rank, though. Iain didn’t have any respect for hierarchy. I had the feeling he felt threatened by Troake in some other way.
‘You see, Iain,’ Troake was saying, ‘I’m trained to read between the words, to note the nuances mid-letter, even. The way you punctuate speech, lad – God, you might as well underline and italicise with a great big sad black pen. You said, when I asked you if there was any trouble, “Not here, no,” which implies that there are wars being waged in another part of your world. Am I right or am I very right?’ He smiled, and his bottom lip spread out like a discarded piece of hamburger pressed under the heel.
Iain shrugged.
Scoffing, Troake pushed his mug away and stood up, shovelling a fan of papers back into his briefcase. He paused by the door, looking out at the night, which seemed to be coagulating in the sky, its darkness somehow softening, like dust on a sable coat. There would be frost tomorrow morning. I couldn’t feel winter in the air, but I was shivering anyway; even the thought of warm air scooting through vents in the oak panels at the café didn’t help. The way Troake’s hair was mismanaged at the back of his head – tufted like some duck’s plumage – made him feel sorry, despite his aggressive manner; this was a man who rose alone in the morning, ate alone at lunch and perched alone in front of EastEnders with his microwaved lasagn
e.
‘I might pop round tomorrow,’ he said, and then looked at me. ‘Want a job in security?’ I shook my head. He shrugged. ‘Your loss. And remember, Iain – ’ he said, as he slid behind the wheel, ‘ – you are the thin red line.’
‘And you’re the thick red prick,’ Iain murmured as he waved Troake goodbye.
‘So how do I get involved?’ I asked. ‘You said something about cost.’
‘You’ve already paid,’ he said. ‘Open your shirt.’
In the warm glow of the gas lamps, the constant flicker of shadows, my skin seemed as complete as ancient paper. Darkness moved across it, dappling my chest. One area of black over my heart remained still. I touched the bruise and felt its dull pain deep inside me.
‘It goes right through you,’ Iain said.
‘How?’ I demanded. ‘What made it?’
He shrugged. ‘That we still need to find out.’
He admired the bruise, and his hands went to his arms, his own chest, where bruises of his own hung in the skin like fruit that has turned bad on the vine. ‘They don’t go away,’ he whispered. ‘They never go away.’
Chapter 11
Security
It wasn’t so bad, in the end. It had craved the pain, had felt it settle across the boss of Its skull like known fire; a necessary pain. But pain was all it was, and pain is always manageable, eventually.
While It knelt before her, she had worked the knife almost tenderly, despite her fear, not wanting to slice too deeply lest she severed any nerves and angered It. But It didn’t care. It had nerves to spare. She was going too slowly so It had to take her wrist and force her to carve with more urgency. It kept hold of her even when she was working at a pace It approved of because by then there was a lot of blood drizzling into his eyes and It could no longer see her clearly. It didn’t trust her not to plunge the blade through his throat, given the chance.
In the end, she held Its face in her hand the way a child will hold a sugar cube out for a horse: outstretched, fingers so splayed they bend backwards slightly, the palm tight and shiny in its offering. It tried to speak – Keep it, he wanted to say – but the blood and the loss of his lips meant that all he could manage was a moan, a spray of vermilion spittle.
London Revenant Page 12