Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  ‘You don’t think you’re being targeted, do you?’ I asked.

  ‘Christ,’ Underdog said. ‘You sound so much like a copper it’s unreal.’

  ‘Not a copper,’ I said. ‘Just nosy. Like a writer, you know? Sniffing out an idea, a plot. Maybe there’s not so much difference between us and our boys in blue. Isn’t writing all about finding clues? Solving problems?’

  ‘If you say so,’ Underdog said. Again, I was dismissed. He seemed cheated of something; maybe my reaction. If he’d been trying to get a rise out of me he needed to try a different tack. I was used to being pissed about by noisy, toothless mutts; I almost didn’t hear them any more. Some of his earlier cockiness returned as we approached Cumberland Gate though. It was closing on three-thirty in the morning and it was quiet now, but for the odd taxi and a white van taking the corner into Park Lane more quickly than it needed to.

  ‘It’s interesting you should reference Le Carré,’ Odessa said. ‘You know, there’s a line in Tinker Tailor, when he talks about the way some people live… God, how does it go now… something about a dozen leisured lives when someone else just lives a hasty one.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what the relevance of that is, but really, it rocked my world. Where are we headed?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Underdog.

  I noticed Treacle had switched off. Maybe he’d seen this a dozen times and was bored of Underdog’s postures. Maybe, as he’d intimated, he was just tired. I noticed too that his hand and Odessa’s were interlaced.

  10

  We exited the park by a shuttered ice cream stall and crossed to Edgware Road. Underdog took a torch from his pocket and gave two short flashes and one long one at the cinema entrance. Two long flashes were returned.

  ‘Quiller’s back from Berlin already?’ I asked. Odessa snorted at this but Underdog only scowled. We crossed the road and the cinema entrance was yawning open before we reached it. A security guard stood aside as we piled through.

  ‘You have until seven,’ he said. ‘First staff on site today at seven-fifteen.’

  ‘We’ll be gone in an hour,’ Underdog said, slipping him a note from his wallet.

  ‘We watching a short?’ I asked. I’d had a bellyful of Underdog’s cloak and dagger.

  The guard pressed some buttons on a door panel and let us through to a corridor. We moved in the opposite direction to the cinema screens. We took a lift to the top floor, then a short concrete stairway to fire doors that fed us onto the roof, eighty metres above the West End.

  ‘One of the last times we’ll get to do this,’ Treacle said. ‘The owners are going to knock this fucker down and replace it with flats. So enjoy the view while you can.’

  It was a fine view, but all I could see was Treacle positioning himself between me and the exit. Underdog eased a leather cosh from his jacket pocket. He shook it out, enjoying the theatre, the sound of ball bearings as they shivered against each other.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I said. ‘What’s with the menace?’ My voice was all over the place but they didn’t pay it any notice and ignored the question. Odessa and Treacle sat down on the flashing, which gleamed dully in the flat dawn light, and proceeded to explore each other hungrily beneath their jackets. I was forgotten. But not by Underdog.

  ‘Initiation,’ he said.

  ‘But I wrote something. You can read it too, if you want.’

  ‘It’s not about the writing,’ he said, shaking out the cosh some more. The leather was like the skin of something alive.

  I looked around for another way down but there wasn’t one, unless I chose to be my own express lift. But that was good only for a single ride.

  ‘You’ll walk the perimeter,’ Underdog said.

  ‘I’ll do no such fucking thing.’

  ‘You’ll get up over that rail and walk the perimeter or I’ll break both your legs with this cosh and there’ll be no tomorrow with us.’

  I knew I could prevail in a one vs. one with Underdog, despite his cosh, but so much was at stake that I was prepared to let him have his violent way with me. But the little coda, about being out, was more difficult to stomach. If I took a beating and they legged it, I’d have no recourse other than to hang out like some weirdo spotter at places of literary interest in the distant hope I might find them again. I’d only have Taft to lean on, but he was none the wiser now; once you recommended a replacement, you were out of the loop for good.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ The question appeared to jolt him from some kind of trance. He was gleaning a vicarious pleasure from this. He was welcome to it.

  ‘Your initiation. What did you do? Drink beer out of a sock?’ I swung a leg over the low railing. London swerved away from me far below. ‘Streak through Piccadilly Circus?’

  ‘I crossed both lanes of the M25,’ he said.

  ‘Piece of cake. Why can’t I do that?’

  ‘I was wearing a blindfold.’

  ‘Kudos,’ I said. And then there I was, twenty-one storeys above certain death, on a parapet that was only slightly wider than my size nines.

  ‘Chop-chop,’ he said.

  A wind had crept up on us, unless it had always been there and only now was I noticing it because it was plucking at my clothes.

  I stood utterly still, aware only of the path in front of me diminishing into darkness. Another ten minutes and the sun would break over the horizon, but they wanted me to do this in technical night. A bit of spice. An edge to the challenge.

  I couldn’t look to my left: that was the side with the sheer drop. To my right was Underdog slapping the cosh into his hand. If I concentrated on my feet I’d be too aware of the abyss screaming away an inch or so from my little toe. Straight ahead was somehow easier, even though I’d have to trust myself to walk in an utterly straight line. In the distance, Peckham maybe, the cherry and ice-blue stutter of police lights. Burglary in progress. Man down. More likely it was a couple of night-shifters bossing traffic so they could pick up their coffee and pastries. Use that, I thought. Focus on that.

  I started to walk.

  I’d never had a problem with heights when I was a kid. I could climb trees and leap from branch to branch fifty feet above the ground, where squirrels fear to tread. And then something happened – I don’t know what – and I was afraid of heights, to the point where my mouth would turn tinder-dry and my knees would become crucibles of molten metal. Maybe it was as simple as becoming an adult; more likely it was because I became a father. It might have had something to do with the fight I had on top of the railway shed at St Pancras four months previously. That kind of behaviour does nothing for your sense of mortality, believe me.

  But this was going well – as well as I could hope – to the extent that I was building up some speed. Get it over with. Get home. Get vodkaed. But of course it’s when you’re feeling at your most confident and comfortable that something comes along to welly you in the bollocks.

  Part of the parapet shifted underfoot.

  I felt myself sway sickeningly to the left and my hand instinctively reached out for a counterbalance that was not there. I heard, very clearly, Underdog say: ‘Shit.’

  I knew I was dead if I didn’t move, and the only move I had was a jump, off my right foot. But because I was already tilting left, unbalanced, there was a strong chance I’d only propel myself into dead space. So I had to keep right, which meant launching from my left, which meant little purchase because there was hardly anything below my left foot any more but concrete dust. All of this went through my head in the time it took for that syllable to fly through Underdog’s teeth. I pistoned my foot down and the parapet collapsed completely, but there had been some purchase there, enough to lift me a foot in the air, so that I could get my fingers on the railing. My face connected with the abrasive edge of the brickwork and took off a layer of skin. I felt a fingernail fold back from the flesh of my finger; the dawn air was shockingly cold aga
inst the exposed meat. That, and the cold mask of lymph and tears, kept me aware, and I clung on, hearing the chunks of collapsed masonry smash into windscreens on the street below.

  I felt hands on me, lifting me over the rail: Treacle and Odessa.

  ‘I’ve not finished,’ I was saying, over and over, babbling it like a mantra.

  ‘You don’t have to prove anything else,’ Odessa said.

  ‘Where’s Underdog?’

  Treacle lifted me upright and gently drew me towards the exit. ‘He bailed. I think he’s expecting some sort of police presence off the back of that, um, structural failure.’

  Shock was crowding into me. That and exhaustion. And pain. I winced as the flapping nail on my finger caught on Treacle’s jacket. I rammed my hand into my armpit, relishing bitterly the nausea apparent on Odessa’s face.

  ‘I’d have thought Underdog might have embraced some new experience like that,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t new,’ Treacle said. ‘That’s the thing. He’s been involved with the police before. Suspended sentence. Another strike and he’s in clink. Again.’

  ‘Again? He’s done time?’ Talking helped keep my mind off what had just happened. Vodka would help even more. But I knew I wasn’t going straight home this night… this morning.

  ‘He did a stretch when he was in his teens. Fell in with the wrong crowd. Fencing stolen goods. He was in and out of institutions till he hit his twenties.’

  ‘Grist for the mill,’ I said. ‘What happened in his twenties?’

  ‘He met a woman. He started writing poetry. He went right.’

  ‘Or went wrong. Poetry?’

  We were inside now, descending the fire escape stairs just in case the police had been summoned. We’d left no evidence of our occupancy of the roof. We could hide out in a dozen different places while they hitched their belts and pressed buttons on their walkie-talkies and thought about what frostings they were going to have on their breakfast doughnuts.

  There was no sign of the security guard; we let ourselves out, pushing against fire doors that emptied us on to the side street. I stared at the tarmac, at the hard gleam of it. I wondered if you could hit something so hard there’d be some sort of molecular exchange; if it was possible to become the thing that slammed the life from you. And then the streetlights went off and the road lost its morbid glamour. No banter, no exhilarated recap – Odessa and Treacle were preparing to leave.

  ‘You want to go for breakfast or something?’ I asked. My legs and arms were jangling, as if I’d just been electrocuted.

  ‘We don’t fraternise outside of meeting hours,’ said Treacle. His face was straight when he said it.

  ‘What about you two?’ I asked.

  ‘Same,’ Odessa said. ‘It’s too risky.’

  ‘So you don’t know each other’s real names and you don’t know where you live? But you play gusset puppeteers with each other?’

  ‘Chef’s perks,’ Odessa said. Treacle laughed.

  I was shaking my head but I had to accept it. Maybe it was bullshit and they were just protecting each other from me, the unknown quantity. That I’d proved to them I was insane was certainly no reason to disburden themselves of personal information. I bit my tongue again when the instinct was to say that Solo and Needles knew each other, probably intimately, and had done for years. Had they hidden that from the other Accelerants?

  ‘Okay. Well, I’ve got to go and run this off. Or eat something. Preferably while also mainlining a bottle of Smirnoff.’

  ‘Okay,’ Treacle said. ‘Knock yourself out.’

  Odessa put her hand in her jacket and pulled out some sheets of paper. She pushed them into my hand. ‘I read you,’ she said. ‘You read us. Maybe tell us what you think. Next time.’

  I had a gander at the first page. Handwritten. Fountain pen. Green ink. Twenty feet from sanctuary, a SulciCam swam up out of the soul mists and pricked the back of Nuland’s head. He knew it was a SulciCam because the anaesthetising balm that preceded its sting was anathema to lice, and here they came, pouring off his scalp like black sugar from a scoop. So forget sanctuary, for now.

  ‘Next time,’ I said. ‘How do I find you next time?’

  ‘There’s a tree on Birdcage Walk, near Cockpit Steps,’ said Odessa. ‘It’s got a blue cross painted on it. We’ll leave you a message, pinned to an exposed root. Tomorrow. After nine p.m.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I didn’t know how to close proceedings. Handshake? Group hug? A tribute to J.G. Ballard via the medium of Bharata Natyam?

  Treacle solved that problem for me. ‘“Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others… Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”’

  ‘Beautiful,’ I said. ‘Who wrote that? You?’

  ‘I wish,’ he said.

  ‘Goodnight, Corkscrew,’ Odessa said.

  I said: ‘Good morning.’

  * * *

  I followed them.

  It seemed less important to find out where they lived than to quash this silly charade about anonymity. I was so sure I’d see Treacle and Odessa disappear through the same door that it was a genuine shock when they separated at a bus stop on Oxford Street. Treacle headed north along Berners Street and Odessa watched him go, so I had to stick with her. I hung back under an awning until I saw Odessa move towards the road as a bus approached. Just as the doors were about to close I hopped on, relieved that she’d headed to the top deck. I stayed downstairs. I’d had enough of heights for one night.

  * * *

  Odessa disembarked in Tufnell Park but she loitered at the stop, hunting in her bag for something. The bus moved away. I bolted to the door and begged the driver to let me out. When he started quoting company policy I triggered the emergency release and hopped off. He was swearing at me now, using words that were unlikely to be found in any company policy handbooks and would be considered extreme on the oil rigs off northern Scotland, or the terraces of underperforming football clubs.

  Odessa caught wind of it too and looked up just as I ducked behind a Range Rover parked on the street. Some more hard-earned experience for her Moleskine. I heard her footsteps moving away – thank God; I didn’t fancy playing ‘edge around the 4x4’ – and gave cautious pursuit. She moved north, along Dartmouth Park Hill. Behind us, the Tube station was coming to life. I could smell bacon and coffee, and that reminded me what time it was. I felt my blood sugar levels slump. I needed food. I needed sleep. Probably both. At the same time if at all possible.

  Odessa still seemed appallingly perky. She had the kind of gait that made you think there were springs in her shoes. Tokuzo called it ‘The March of the Tit-Jigglers’. That was what youth did for you, I reasoned. And as we turned off the main drag into a series of leafy streets, finally emerging on Laurier Road, I thought: that’s what wealth does for you too.

  At the foot of the road she turned into a house with an aubergine-coloured front door. I gave it a glance as I flashed past; not sub-divided into flats like many other big houses around here. A three-floor semi, with a converted basement. Newly clipped privet guarded a small front garden of fuchsia and beardtongue. Some other climbers I couldn’t identify – honeysuckle maybe. Maybe deutzia too – all assiduously pruned. I tried to remember if I’d checked out Odessa’s hands, but it meant nothing. If she worked on gardens she would probably wear gloves. The house was worth three, three and a half million, easy. What do you do, Odessa? Who do you know?

  Eventually I turned left on Highgate Road and traipsed down to Kentish Town. Cold sweat clung to my temples like blisters of hardened wax. I stopped at a café opposite a shabby kebab shop and bought a couple of bananas, a croissant, a bottle of orange juice and a large coffee. I scarfed the lot on the pavement outside and felt myself spiking away. It wasn’t quite on a par with Popeye plus spinach but the fear and the nausea were pressed back into their cages for a while.

  I sank into the London Underground and burned smells sank with me – old, overused co
oking oil, tar and tobacco – until I was in the sweaty world of scorched diesel and black snot. A woman on a seat, head down, was three bites into a green apple and had been overcome by tears. A paper bag shook in her other hand. Monsters and victims everywhere. The night crawlers go back to their pits and the unabashed day shift takes over. I stared at the headline of the newspaper opposite me as we chuntered down to King’s Cross where I caught a Circle Line Tube to Edgware Road. Somebody missing. Somebody dead. Somebody heartbroken.

  Mengele yelled at me when I got home. His litter tray was like a horror scene filled with severed gorilla thumbs. I cleaned it all up and saw a note from Tokuzo. Away for the rest of the week at some reclamation yard or other in Barcelona and I was welcome to use her place if I needed to as long as I took care of the plants, you bastard. She had left me some cold chicken and salad and half a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

  I’d been on the go for a day and a half. I made myself a cup of green tea and drank it on the balcony. The girl in the back bedroom at the pub was playing guitar and I could just hear snatches of it when the wind drew the notes my way. Slow and sad. Pretty. Then I went to bed, willed sleep into me. And it came, but it was not pure. It was not undisturbed.

  You write. You cut and shape. You rewrite. You wipe the blood and sweat and tears from the page. You rewrite. You get the rhythm correct. You find your voice. You know your characters. You believe in your story. You cut and shape. Edit. Revise. Ten per cent inspiration. Ninety per cent perspiration. The pages stack up. The characters develop. They change. They take over. They dictate. The story thickens and splits. You control the strands. You rewrite. In a windowless room you stand at the lectern sharpening pencile. The ream of paper. You will not finish until those twenty pointed leads are worn down to the wood. Four thousand words, give or take. And then to the typewriter. Hone. Polish. Commit. You stand there shirtless, covered in sweat. In perspiration. When you write you go to war. And you write every day. Its a story that needs to be told. Its a narrative that needs to be dug out of you, like a canker, something raw and bloody and painful. You pay back. You layer. You accrete. I beheaded him because he beheaded me. I will behead you because you beheaded me. The inspiration. I rewrite. You rewrite. You go on. I cannot go on. I go on. The pages stack up. Ten per cent. Ninety per cent. The characters come alive. Chapter and verse. Dedication. Acknowledgment. Beginnings. The end. I cut and shape. I redraft. The end. I polish. I rewrite. Perspiration. Inpsiration. Ninety-nine per cent. The end.