London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  ‘Monck,’ I said. ‘I’m Monck.’

  ‘Those photographs you see in Top Story from time to time. Their Missing page. None of them are missing. Not really. They’re all down here. Lending their muscles to the Face.’

  ‘Kidnapped?’

  ‘You could put it that way. Odessa prefers to say “acquired”. There are people from decades ago down here. They’ve become blind. They’re pit ponies is all they are.’

  I sat and rubbed at the chain-link bruises on my shoulder. The densely packed soil walls around us glistened like coal. Part of it fell away into a deeper darkness. In the distance, a pale, oyster-coloured light trembled. I thought of the creature I had seen at Tufnell Park, shaking the gates, his black eyes like open mouths, silent screams. I thought about the person, the family, who might be sitting at home with his photograph. Wondering when – if – he would return. My head pounded with this, and the torments of epiphanies as they dawned on me. My narcolepsy – was it even deserving of the word? Was I simply tuning out of one level and into another? Maybe that’s what narcolepsy was, after all. The doctors I had sat in front of over the years had all chewed the ears of their glasses, or steepled their fingers, and said words to the effect: Research is ongoing. Which means fucked if I know.

  I said, ‘Thank God I wasn’t picked up on Cock Lane.’

  She said she would wait for me while I searched for Greg.

  I emerged into hard sheets of rain. Men and women in overalls struggled to raise tarpaulin on to hastily constructed struts to shelter the wounded and the dying. I saw a man being tended by a whole posse of surgeons. He was bleating, frequently: ‘I’d really rather have a cup of tea, if it’s all the same to you.’ A thick length of timber had skewered him through the centre of his chest. I saw Dr Massey gauge its width with a tape measure. She swore. Another day I might have joined her. Not today. My surprise gland had been removed and was currently in a bed with a sign reading Do Not Resuscitate, down at the gland hospice.

  I managed to get back to the quadrangle without incident, where I continued my search for my friend. In the corner, where the rain was piling in unchecked, I found a sleeping bag with a piece of damp paper attached to it. The name Greg Noon was written on it in ink that was bleeding into the wet. The bag was zipped all the way up to the hood; a foul, brown affair torn in many places and scattered with dust, or tiny mites that bounced off the fabric in droves.

  I unzipped him and his head oozed from the aperture like something eager to be born. I tried to grab it before it rolled away but I scuffed his scalp with my fingers and it landed in the channel between his sleeping bag and its neighbour with a loud crack. One of the other patients saw this and started to wail. I joined him.

  There was a note driven into Greg’s throat with a nail. It read: Know who you are at every age.

  I knew it was meant for me. I had a feeling that all of this was meant for me.

  A door slammed in the distance, its echo moving through the remains of the hospital like a tortured, ghostly heartbeat. I gritted my teeth and withdrew the nail from Greg’s throat, wincing as it squealed against cartilage and bone. I put his head back in the sleeping bag and sealed it. As I stood up the lights in the ward and all across the hospital went out.

  Through the window I could see a figure advancing in one of the corridors. Its shadow moved languidly, like the slow movement of blood filling a syringe. I could hear something heavy and metallic being dragged in its wake. I didn’t hang around to see who it was. It might only have been a porter carting some important filing cabinet from one place to another. But I didn’t think so.

  I left the ward and navigated a way through the collapsed filing cabinets and storage cupboards that were now making an obstacle course of the corridors. I ran and stumbled for what seemed an age and then halted, listening for signs of him, or her. The sound of metal clinking against cool stone was still there, like the pulse of a robot. I took off again, desperate to find some stairs or a place where I could hide. I was disoriented and in the dark I couldn’t see any of the signs that might point me in the direction of a fire exit or a passage to the main entrance. A fire burned lazily on the horizon. The clatter of emergency helicopters with nowhere to land came and went, a strangely comforting, tidal sound.

  I fell into a room, when it seemed the noise of the chains was directly on top of me, a room filled with screens, a maze of them, the kind a patient might undress behind, before the doctor conducts an examination. I carefully forged a route through them, and was barely concealed by the nearest one to me when the door whispered open and I was no longer alone.

  I stood still, maybe halfway into the room. The light cast long, looping shadows against the panels of canvas. I only hoped that they didn’t show through the material. Slowly, I retreated, moving left to right until my back was against the wall. I couldn’t see anything to use as a weapon. Of all the rooms, filled with surgical instruments or caustic compounds, I had to hide in the one where they stored all the screens.

  I didn’t know which way he would come for me. He might even simply wade through the centre of the room, barging the screens out of the way as he wielded his chain. But his silence told me that he was still cautious. He thought I was in here. He didn’t want to steam in, in case he lost me.

  Crazily, I recalled a piece of writing I’d subbed on shopping psychology. It dealt with how, when a potential customer enters a shop, he or she tends to veer to the right, so that was where retailers displayed old stock that they wanted to shift or brand new lines to tempt the shopper. This was no shop, but I guessed my pursuer was anything but conventional, so I tiptoed to my left and began the slow return journey to the door, hoping that I might be able to somehow lock him in here. At some point, I knew, we would pass each other, albeit on opposite sides of the room, with any luck. I prayed that he would be too occupied with the care of his own progress to notice mine.

  And then I realised that he was a conventional shopper after all. I was within two feet of him, a single screen separating us, when he announced himself to me with the slightest squeak of a leather boot against lino. I swiftly edged to my right, sweeping soundlessly along the rank of screens just as he stepped into view. I got a glimpse only of tattooed biceps and a face swathed in bandages. Black, scuffed boots. And that chain, as I passed into the rank that he had occupied moments before, slithering along the floor. Without looking back I slowly shifted towards the door. I was through it and sprinting even as he let loose a roar and began carving a route towards me.

  Hurrying through Belsize Park, I made my way to Swiss Cottage, where the surroundings seemed less affected by the tectonic activity. I found a car abandoned by the road at the end of Eton Avenue, its keys hanging from the fascia, attached to a ring bearing a picture of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story. I got in. Things caught up with me. I thought of Laura and Greg, who had both helped me become settled and comfortable in London, and who were now, themselves, anything but. I thought of being moments away from a terrible death at the hands of a man who was stalking me for reasons I was only beginning to understand. I thought of the earthquake and how many people must have died, or were dying now, while I struggled to keep it together in the driver’s seat of a Renault Clio, staring at Buzz.

  I thought of my mum, dying on her own in the house while me and Dad were outside throwing a ball to each other because he had found one while he was mowing and we were both a bit bored of Sunday afternoon telly. I remembered, as we came inside that day, the first spots of rain fizzing out of a sky that had bruised with storm-clouds, thinking when we found her and Dad started this strange noise at the back of his throat as I went to phone for an ambulance… I’ll chin the first cunt who says to me: At least she went quickly.

  She had loved azaleas and had meant to grow a great sprawl of them all along the back fence. Me and Dad did that for her eventually, but they never grew quite so well. Nothing ever did, if she hadn’t planted it.

  Gunning the engine, I took the ca
r south, almost retracing the route I had taken earlier, until I was forced to get out as I approached Gower Street. An elephant was tapping at the windscreen of an upturned ice-cream van. An anaconda sleeping on the bonnet of a car tightened its coils more securely around itself. A tiger licked its paws at the entrance to Euston Square Tube.

  Nuala had told me that H. lived on Charlotte Street, above an overpriced Italian restaurant. I hoped that she had made her way here… if she had been able. The thought of her packed down under hundreds of tons of debris turned my throat dry.

  I headed towards Tottenham Court Road, keeping an eye on the tiger and getting ready to sprint for a car if he launched himself at me. He looked too sleepy for an attack though, and his muzzle was already pink with dinner. I didn’t hang around to see what it was he’d been eating.

  I ducked into Grafton Way and clambered over the jagged teeth of the road where it had burst upwards. What remained of the BT Tower was a jagged column, threaded with fractures, like a stick of rock that someone had just taken a bite out of. The aerial tip I saw as I reached Fitzroy Street. It had smashed into the landscaped part of Fitzroy Square, shedding its satellite dishes like scales. I turned left and hurried along the road until Charlotte Street took over. Most of the buildings here had escaped serious damage. Nice place, Charlotte Street, I had thought when I first came to stay in the city. Laura had taken me for chicken and steak frites at Chez Gerard on one of my first nights with her. We’d stepped out after the meal into a warm, well-lit street thick with lazy summer music. There was the lamp-post where I had steered her into a long, deep kiss. The lamp-post looked like a snapped pencil now; its business end disappeared through the window of a flat.

  I headed for one of those café/restaurant jobs with a gaudy, faux-Italian façade painted green, white and red, the only obvious Italian in sight. Tony’s, it was called, for a change. Only one of the nameplates on the panel by the entrance was blank. I rang the bell but after a minute or two I decided it wasn’t working and tried the door. It fell inwards, moaning as it wrenched free of its hinges. The darkness swooped towards me like an effect on a cheap fairground ride, carrying with it the smells of groundnut oil, hibiscus and something that reminded me of cold Ready Brek. The reek of garlic came at me in waves from the walls. It seemed that the place hadn’t had an airing for weeks.

  ‘Hello?’ I called as I reached the landing. I heard movement, a slump of noise, like a bag of laundry falling over. A huge crack had bisected the wall, culminating in a split that made a mockery of the heavy system of locks meant to keep H.’s inner door secure.

  I was about to force my way in when I heard a noise behind me. I looked down the stairs to see Troake breaking open a shotgun and slotting two cartridges into the breech.

  He said, ‘Jesus, if this was up to me, they’d be live.’ And then he raised the gun to hip level and fired both barrels straight at me.

  Meddie had been convinced that we all left the womb as established murderers.

  ‘All that crap,’ she had told me, on a quiet stint – just a few dour pool players and a woman in a Kappa tracksuit top who kept putting Nirvana’s Come As You Are on the jukebox. ‘All that crap about us being born as clean blackboards to be gradually sullied as you grow up… it’s all crap.’

  There was just me and her. I was leaning back against the cold shelf, happy to watch the afternoon wend its way along Archway Road and wondering how I could have spent so much time cultivating Work Related Upper Limb Disorder in bad-tempered offices filled with photocopier dust and cheap coffee and feature writers who couldn’t spell.

  ‘In the womb, you know, it’s a sheer bloodfest bucket of barbarity and slaughter. Chances are, you committed murder in your mother’s belly while she slept soundly in her bed, anticipating your cherubic features doing all that “kajagoogoo, aren’t I cute?” bollocks.’

  Meddie’s teeth were of an unholy – or even American – whiteness. She was wearing a tiny cropped T-shirt from to show off her buff tummy and the tiny bolt through her navel. Her breasts were exquisitely Wonderbra’ed so that they seemed to perch on the deep V of her top like proving dough. She was speckled and smooth as rare eggshells.

  ‘You’ll have dominated any twin in the coliseum of the cunt – ’

  ‘Steady on, mate…’

  ‘ – and absorbed the tiny bird-bones he or she was developing. Sometimes, though, parts of them escape you. You’ll be born with a foetal head grafted on to your neck, or the mortuary men will cut you open when you finally slide off the plate and find a little cluster of hair and teeth grinning up at them.’

  She was like that, Meddie. Gruesome to the point where I think she got off on it, which pretty much nipped in the bud any possible romantic involvement between us beyond the occasional animal rutting session we rushed through in the cellar.

  ‘That’s why I think most of us are screwed up. We don’t know ourselves because we don’t know what we’re made of. Our constituent parts, they’re all cannibalised. We take a piece from Mum and Dad, have a chaw on whatever’s lurking in the uterus, and before you know it, you’re born, some patchwork creature. Some fucking evil, shat-out Prometheus.’

  ‘Meddie!’

  She seemed to share my affinity for the skin of the city, that papery epidermis that separated us from all the weird sluices and sewers and gutters and ginnels, an alien civilisation beneath our feet. This was before she went a little mad, preying on men, trying to extract secrets from London’s shadowlands. Late-night shifts, she might stay behind when the punters had been kicked out and help me with the bottling up. In the cellar, the cold would tighten the skin and draw ghosts from between our lips. Bottles were massed before us, like a glass army. Meddie’s T-shirts became even more interesting to look at.

  She’d help me load the crates with the evening’s drained bottles of Bud and Beck’s. Sometimes the trains would surge beneath us, like wakening monsters. On one occasion, Meddie tugged me back against the giant kegs of lager and pressing her Rouge Pulp lips against mine, dunking her tongue for a second as her thigh slipped between my legs.

  ‘Nearly dead, down here,’ she whispered, as I tried to scrabble away from her. ‘Deeper than the buried bones of thousands around us. I feel different, don’t you? I feel… as though my skin has been peeled away.’

  Mostly, she was all right. She talked about the way London’s underbelly had been manipulated by its human inhabitants over the centuries. How its secret rivers had been diverted or concealed or bested, turned into ditches; the bodies that had been claimed as the Tube network was tunnelled. The hidden scars carved out of the city, a crude, ongoing liposuction.

  ‘I feel different too,’ I had confessed to Meddie. ‘I get headaches when I’m in the cellar. It’s as though, a few feet under, I lose sense of who I really am.’

  ‘No, you’ve got it arse about tit. You’re being drenched in reality. You’re losing all that surface cosmetic when you go underground. You’re who you really are. Glory in it.’

  I sucked the chill air deep into my lungs and felt close to understanding the strange ciphers and signals as they creaked, rumbled and burped around the whitewashed walls, embedded in the ancient soil cradling us. Her smell was earthy and rich. I pushed Meddie against the plastic crates, unwrapping her breasts and holding them gently as they threatened to overspill the span of my hands while I slid into her from behind, displacing her moisture, painting me with it. She thrust and ground against me until I withdrew and came on to the cellar floor. Watching it, as she hurriedly dressed herself… watching it soak into the unknown tissues of the city.

  She said: ‘I won’t be around for ever.’

  I came to my senses, fully expecting to see a gaping hole where my guts ought to be and a trail of offal strewn upon the ground behind me. The concretised mesas and buttes of the South Bank rose around me. What was I doing here? I tried to stand up but the pain was excruciating, as though somebody had gathered all the loose skin on my abdomen and fed it int
o a mangle. At least I was whole. I tore my shirt from the waistband of my jeans and inspected my stomach. Two large purple dinner plates had bloomed there, just below my heart. Rubber bullets?

  My head felt tender too, a lump rising from my crown where I had banged it on falling. I felt exposed, played with, as though in its levelling London had been turned into a giant safari park and it was open season on the lesser-spotted Buckley. There was still much I had to do, but I realised I was better off travelling by the tunnels, at least until it was dark.

  I had to get to Troake. Troake, who had been behind all this since the beginning. It must have been him who shot me and transported me across the capital. But why? Why not kill me and have done with it? What was he playing at?

  I took in my surroundings. For some reason I had been dumped at the South Bank. The Thames was a strange colour, almost purple, and its currents were disturbed by the collapse of Waterloo and Hungerford bridges; grey spume lifted off the water like dirty soap bubbles. One of the Connex South Eastern trains that crossed that bridge departing Charing Cross was sticking vertically out of the river. A cluster of pigeons were roosting on top.

  I shuffled over to a park bench that faced the river and Victoria Embankment. Cleopatra’s needle had snapped in two. A Japanese tourist took a photo anyway. Then he creased up. Even from here I could hear his hysterical bleats but I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or in tears. St Adam’s was a punched in egg-shell. Cromwell, Shakespeare and Lauderdale – the three residential tower blocks at the Barbican – had disintegrated; well, one had, the other two had managed to fall against each other, forming a giant, inverted V. Through the razed surroundings behind me I could see that Canary Wharf had become Canary Dwarf.

  Sitting down, I noticed a dirty sack of clothing at the other end of the bench, slumped over, snoring. The tramp wore a filthy long coat made, seemingly, of more dirt and grease than cloth. He smelled darkly of burned oil. His head was obscured by an open tabloid newspaper. As much as I craved some human interaction, I let him sleep and closed my own eyes, trying to cleave together the disparate elements inside my head.