Laura. Nuala. Greg. London. Narcolepsy.
Sitting on the porch, his voice coming slow and easy, it was hard to believe that this hadn’t happened before. Dad was articulate and funny. His tone seemed to convey the message: You only ever had to ask. Laura kept out of the way, spending her time resting, reading, walking in the garden. I wanted to speak to her, but I didn’t know what to say. The silences were perfectly comfortable. Sometimes we smiled at each other. I could deal with that.
Dad didn’t probe me about what had happened in London; I suppose he could see what I had been through. Raking over those coals might only make me clam up, or withdraw into myself, to a place even deeper than the one Odessa, Coin and the others had found.
That’s the only thing we didn’t discuss. I was concerned that he might think I had lost it completely if I told him about my other life, my secret history. A part of me wondered about him – how many masks did we own? How many different roles did we play? – but I quickly realised I didn’t want to know. I liked Dad Mark I. That was good enough for me.
As I surfaced from all this mess, I started getting curious about London again; gradually, the metropolis was sucking me back in. Dad and I scrutinised the newspapers and watched the news for bulletins about reparations to the capital. The death toll was many, many thousands. There were warnings that some people might never be found, that their bodies had been obliterated by the trauma. London was their graveyard. London knew where they were.
On the television we saw pictures taken by satellites trained upon the south-east of England. From above, the fracture resembled a pencil score that measured its own damage. The bisected city would have to be rebuilt, knitted together. The Underground had been damaged beyond repair. It was decided that it should be completely sealed off and tenders sought for a new overland transportation system.
Well then, I thought.
I dreamt a lot, during those weeks at home. At first, I thought the restfulness of my surroundings might bring me soothing images. Close my eyes and I would be confronted with great swathes of green, in more shades than could surely be possible. Thrusting blooms, bursting with colour, broke the foliage. Acid yellow bracts like sodium lights in rain. Every leaf I touched, every stem I breathed upon, responded as though I had been gifted with some Midas-like ability. But then I saw that these lush surroundings were nothing more than screens thrown up by my brain, an attempt to conceal what lay beyond. My dreamscapes became infected with terrible, patchwork faces of Blore’s victims. The ruined flesh was knitted together crudely; rough seams that promised to spill their features if they or I moved. They swam out at me from tunnels, peeling away from the dark like ghoulish stickers on a schoolboy’s exercise book. Through this terrain, Blore pursued me. He was a hulking, blackened cinder, his eyes shining out through a crisped mask. Despite this disability, he moved swiftly, heralding his arrival in my dreams with the sound of scorched limbs creaking and crackling. He shed carbonised fragments of himself as he swung his chain at me. Fat spooled through the red raw splits in his body like hot mozzarella…
Still, as the days passed, I rallied. I had healed well and now my mind was purging itself of all those shocks and anxieties. I began to relax. I began to grow bored.
Like I said, I was hungering for the city again.
Dad, to his credit, didn’t try to put me off. He simply asked me if I was ready. It had been three months since he picked me up off the street, a wreck in every possible way.
‘Where will you stay?’ he asked. I hadn’t thought about it but I told him that my boss, Cherry, had a spare room I could use until I settled in. I didn’t know if this was true, but I didn’t want to give him cause to worry. I didn’t know if the flower stall was still standing and, if it was, whether I wanted to work there any more. Maybe I could hire Marlon and set up a protection racket.
London had quickly been stitched together. A string of benefit concerts for the relatives of the dead had been planned across the planet. The quake was a blessing in disguise. The designs that had already begun to be considered for the centre would see the streets completely pedestrianised with plenty of green spaces instead of road choked by taxis and buses. Shuttles that clung to tracks on terraced buildings would provide transport around the heart of the capital. The government pushed for people to get their bikes out. Adverts for cheap microlight aircraft began cropping up. The city was being given a facelift and people were buying into it.
And then, the night before I left, I was sitting in the dark. Dad had gone to bed. The TV was off. Headlights on cars coming down Troutbeck Avenue took our shadows for a ride around the room.
I said, ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
‘I’d rather not. I don’t know if I’m ready.’
I said, ‘His face… did he make you – ’
‘Yes.’
I said, ‘I wish I could have been there to help you.’
‘You couldn’t have been there. There was no reason for you to be there.’
I said, ‘I’m different, Laura. I’ve changed.’
She came out of the dark and pressed a finger to my lips. She held me. She said: ‘So have I.’
I caught the first train down from Bank Quay on a misty winter morning. Dad dropped me off at the station and we hugged each other hard. Tears sprang to my eyes. He was looking at me strangely.
‘Goodbye,’ he said. That was all. Laura was standing away from the train, her back against the wall. She was going to stay on a little while longer, until she had worked out what she wanted to do. She thought she might go north, at first. Spend some time in the highlands. As high above ground level as she could get.
She waved as the train departed. I watched her until she became a speck, and was lost as the train canted to the right, as it curved out of Warrington and headed south.
There was nobody else in my carriage. England streamed past the windows and it was easy to believe that beyond the confines of those grey, feathery borders nothing existed. But London was at the end of the line, and every time I thought that, my heart took on the rhythm of the train on its tracks. A couple of hours and the sun made a push to be recognised, a slow wound seeping though gauze. We stopped, I got off.
I walked for miles. Thinking of you.
How it ended. Me and Laura.
I remember your profile edged with troubled light falling from the tower of neon angles at the Hayward. This was our first night together since you told me you didn’t want to see me any more. One of those bad nights that people arrange to make it official. To cap it all off. Where you struggle through the conversations that involve the words ‘still friends’.
I remember it being bitter beyond the confines of your car. Flapping like anxious pigeons, we hurry across the road, skirting the brutal, colourless aggregate of the complex till we find the glass doors. The weather scowling behind us, we duck into a civil expanse of espresso and bow ties. You buy drinks at the bar but before we have chance to finish them, the gong is ushering us to our seats. In the concert hall, you smile at me; it’s enough to charge me with hope.
Occasionally, I sense a yield in your voice, a softening in your eye which suggests all might not be lost.
The first time, I remember the first time: April dying beyond your window, on the heels of a dovetail kiss, you moved over and sank upon me till I had no measure of where I ended and you began. The curtain of your hair moving pendulum slow above my face; the sound of the fountain outside, the only thing pinning me to reality.
On to the stage, to understated applause, comes a kind-looking man with a trained side parting and a wolfish woman in a red dress. She sits at a grand piano. He takes an age over the position of his cello before smoothing his hair and taking in the audience while exhaling levelly. Then, with a disconcerting flurry of movement, the instruments find their voice, driven by manic stabs and jerks of arms and hands. I can’t equate the disarray of their movement with the beautiful sound of their strings.
The music cr
eeps around the auditorium, stealthy as oil, settling against the skin during low chords, spirited away like a rising helix of bubbles during the high. In this moment, there is only you and the music; a silent proximity exerted by the loose arrangement of your clothes, the way your leg climbs over its partner, your left hand gently grips the right. I can smell your perfume (and if I turn my head a little, I see the wet flash of your eyes and the threaded chunk of metal infected by your pulse in the gully between your breasts).
You called me from Heathrow (on your way to a conference in Naples) to leave a message on the answerphone. You thanked me for taking you to the airport, explained that you were about to board the flight and then, whispering: ‘I… I love you, chicken. Very embarrassing to say that with all these people around.’ We talked twice while you were there. When I came to pick you up, you were tired but you looked well, had picked up a little sun. Back home, you went straight to bed and we made love when I joined you, your face as you came, taking on the expression of a person frantic to swallow breath after a long time underwater. A week later, you said we were finished.
After Barber, after Bach, the musicians play Debussy’s Sonata and you shift slightly, the hard edge of your forearm meeting mine on the armrest. The playing of music evolves on the stage in several leaves, like cels in an animation: the man turning pages of music, the pianist, the cellist. The cello. I see details that might have eluded me at other times, but with this heightening of sensation, it does not appear strange that I notice the cellist’s hand: a white spider skittering up and down the cello’s neck. Or the polished part of his knee where the bow brushes it at the limit of its stroke; filaments of horsehair; the slender, toned muscles in the pianist’s arms.
In your letters to me, you outlined your apprehension about relationships, how you’d been stung by the end of a long term commitment but not so disenchanted that you didn’t want to risk another affair of the heart. You’d told me how you would fight this time. You wanted this to work. And yet here we are, just shy of a year together, and your voice is full of regret.
I can’t concentrate on the encore. Outside, you make small talk with an old friend you didn’t know was sitting a few rows back from us. You hold my hand till she goes, then slip from my fingers with cruel professionalism. Why, I don’t know, but driving back we talk about the first time we met, at a birthday party in a loud, sweating basement club. It had been too loud to talk. Your eyes were wide and full of me. I wanted to kiss you so desperately that when, later, you leaned across your kitchen table, as the dawn chorus began in the copper beech in your lane, I had to break away, gasping with relief.
You carried me. I was weak. As a puppy. As a chick.
At your house, you set about making tea. I riffle through your CD collection until I find Borodin’s String Quartet No 2 in D Major. The first night I spent here, you and I looked at each other from opposite sides of the room for an age before you came to sit by my feet and hold my hand. This is what you do now, after placing the tray with the teapot and mugs on the table. I slip down on to the floor and you move between my legs, lying back so that your head finds the dip of my right shoulder. We don’t say anything. There is a beautiful, haunting phrase that Borodin uses over and over during the Notturno. The cello’s voice is plaintive and hopeful, rolling around the other three string instruments like an invocation. Although you don’t move against me, I feel a settling of your weight, as if your muscles and bones have slipped beyond the threshold at which they find their usual repose. I become aware of your heartbeat and the measured journey of your breath. Everything is right in a way it hasn’t been for weeks. Slowly, with as much tenderness as I can muster, I place my hands on your shoulders and squeeze, allowing my fingers to work your arms and the flat gloss at the top of your chest. Your clavicle, the small cob of bone at the back of your neck, the flat planes of your shoulder blades – I touch it all, trying to pass on something of my need for you: all my warmth and good feeling for you. Nothing is so important. Can you feel this? Eyes closed, I move my hands to the swell of the music, following the ebb and flow of the cello’s ache. In my touch is all the tenderness we’ve shared before. The raw centre of you is where I’m trying to reach, softly plucking and drawing upon the area that remembers the good times and wishes for them to return. I know this can work. Can you feel? I know this can work. Along with the charity of my hands, I send a message, forcing it through my fingertips and into the knot of pain and confusion we all carry at our centre. Please let me try. Don’t throw me away just yet: wait and see. I won’t let you down.
You stay my hands. Bring one to your mouth and kiss the palm. I’ll think about it, you said. I promise. But just like the cello, all your promises were hollow.
The door, when it closes on you for the last time, always sounds different.
All of the animals had been rounded up. London Zoo had been overhauled and now sat beneath a pale blue umbrella cage that completely ensnared the complex.
I wandered around Regent’s Park for a while, wondering what I should do. I couldn’t afford to stay at a hotel and I had no friends left who might have been able to help me. I thought of Cherry then, and thought why not?, although I wasn’t expecting her to be at the flower stall. Nobody was buying flowers, and the demand for other kinds of labour was rocketing.
But she was there, in her jumper, jeans and Doc Martens, arranging stems and leaves, expertly wrapping bunches of flowers in cream sheets of paper. I could have cried.
‘Cherry!’
She looked up and smiled as if I had never been away.
‘Been on holiday?’ she asked. I laughed out loud. It felt pretty good.
‘You could say that,’ I replied. ‘Business booming?’
‘It’s gone off in the last few weeks,’ she said, and then: ‘What?’ when she saw that I’d creased up again.
‘Cherry, you’re an absolute stick. Unflappable. Where were you when the world ended?’
‘I was at home with my gran in Lewisham,’ she said. ‘We watched it all on TV.’ Like it was some kind of fly-on-the-wall documentary.
‘I hope you locked up here beforehand,’ I said, and I was off again.
‘You want another holiday,’ she said, looking a bit nervous now. ‘Get away from it all… oh, by the way,’ she handed me a shrub in a pot. ‘I wanted to give you this,’ she said. ‘It’s a – ’
‘Euphorbia griffithii,’ I interrupted. ‘Fireglow. Thanks. It’s beautiful.’
It was. A bushy little shrub with mid-green lanceolate leaves bearing pale red midribs, professionally speaking. When it flowered, it would appear orange-red.
‘Use gloves if you ever think of cutting it,’ she warned. ‘The sap burns. I think it’s poisonous.’
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘me and it both.’
A lost city.
An ancient, underground civilisation. I sat in the corner of the demolition site in Stag Place and picked through the fragments still stuck to the wall in the bivouac where I had met Reef and the suffering Sloe. At the time, they had been so many squiggles and hieroglyphs, as indecipherable as a GP’s scrawl. But into the imbroglio I could now force new knowledge and a shape emerged. Beneothan, they had called this forgotten country of theirs. If the faded map of London and its outskirts was to be believed, the blue pencil shading that engulfed it was the area beneath London that Beneothan occupied. The blue made an oval that my eye lingered over, as though it was a smooth, dusky jewel I was viewing. I ran my fingers across the paper and the soft whisper that returned was as deep and as sweet as any of the echoes that had winged through the dark of the underground.
And I extend an invitation to join us, should you feel that your life as a Topsider is over.
I thought of Dad at the station, looking at me in that odd way, as though he were drinking in my details for the last time. The way he said goodbye.
I had had a bad moment, as I reached the north side of the pontoon bridge at Victoria Embankment. I had heard the scrape and
rattle of chains and swore I heard my name called, flayed almost beyond recognition by strangled vocal cords. But when I swung round to see, the chains belonged to a tug that was anchored to the jetty and the voices were those of two drunks murmuring thickly in their alien language.
Blore had surely died in the fire. It didn’t seem conceivable that he could have escaped. He had drenched himself in petrol, after all. The exit I had taken was the only one. Yet still it nagged at me that I had found the remnants of only one body in the ashes.
I moved through the centre of London cautiously, not wanting to get lost. I saw a sign that made me smile because it had been something, along with quacking ducks and side partings, that made Laura and I both laugh. HEAVY PLANT CROSSING, it read. And here was something. Thinking of Laura, for the first time, didn’t trigger a pang. Especially now I knew she was all right. We were both different. Both new. Both alive. That was what mattered.
Diggers, cranes, piledrivers and Portakabins dominated the city. People moved through it all like nocturnal creatures venturing into the sun. We blinked and stared, trying to come to terms with the change. Trying to spot something recognisable that might make our repossession of the city a little bit easier.
Where the English National Opera had once stood, I caught sight of a figure as it rushed down one of the alleyways that linked St Martins Lane with Charing Cross Road. I recognised his movement before I had chance to see his face and I had taken after him before I realised that it was Lucas.
I caught up with him as he entered Leicester Square, its cinemas crippled, splintered monster billboards advertising broken mosaic names: LEONARDO CLOO… WINON WITHERS… BRAT PISS…
‘Raglan!’ I yelled and he wheeled in mid-stride as though shot.
We stood and looked at each other for a long time. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said finally, spreading his hands. ‘I’d never hurt anybody. Do you know that?’
London Revenant Page 28