Ahead, a narrow wooden staircase took him down into an open-plan office above what must have been the ironmonger’s proper, where two old desks were arranged, facing each other. There was a Bakelite telephone on one desk, thick cord wrapped around itself. There were also two polished wooden trays, bearing labels upon which were written, respectively, in a cursive hand: IN and OUT. On the other desk sat a bulky Remington Noiseless typewriter, edged with a grin of light that had found its way in from the main road. There was a bowl with a single lemon in it, that had dried and shrivelled before its small wound of rot was able to spread. A game of patience had been abandoned.
Everything was coated with a fine patina of gum and dust. On the wall, a calendar for 1976 was pinned, forgotten. Sean flicked through it for anything to inspire him, but there was nothing beyond the glossy curves of women with bouffant hairstyles and heavy make-up.
Sean went to the window and looked out at the main street, feeling an itch beginning in the back of his mind that wouldn’t go away. Something wasn’t right. Across the road, saplings in a garden had been wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect them against the cold. Down on the shop floor, there was still a great deal of unsold stock. Grates and bedsteads and ovens formed solid shadows. Sean walked the narrow aisles between them, breathing air that was heavy with the clean, almost animal tang of the metal. There were drawers from old chests that were used to store different gauges of screws, nuts and bolts. A huge ledger was open on a crate, balancing a mug and a pencil within its pages. Saws on a rack winked at him as he went by. A heavy cash register sat on the counter, its tongue out. Post was still being delivered to the shop. A glut of it was fanned out by the door, ignored by Salty or whoever else locked and unlocked it.
Sean ducked under the counter and checked the recess for anything that might give him some edge over his colleagues. Three cardboard tubes were tied together with string, leaning against the back of the register.
It was while he was trying to make sense of the charts within the tubes that a key trembled through the lock and the front door swung open.
It was Ronnie Salt. Sean hunched under the counter and watched the older man stride through the shop, a mass of rope looped around one shoulder. Level with Sean, he stopped and sneezed. Sean watched him press a nostril closed with his thumb and blow the contents of the other nostril onto the floor. He repeated this process with his other thumb before climbing the stairs to the office. Sean was wondering whether to take the charts and escape when Salty came back. He retraced his steps through the shop and relocked the door. From outside came the snarl of an engine and the sweep of headlights across the shopfront as Ronnie departed.
Breathing raggedly, Sean nipped up to the office with the charts and, throwing caution to the wind, wrapped his jumper around the shade of a table lamp and snicked it on. Under the crepuscular flood, at first glance, the charts resembled blueprints or schematics, or architectural drawings, so clean and precise was the presentation of their lines. Yet Sean soon realised that he was looking at a series of maps, though they were constructed along the rules and regulations of no projection that he knew. The lands that were represented did not stir any recognition; they were unlike any countries he’d seen in an atlas.
He didn’t understand how these maps, if maps they were, could be of any help to him. After a few moments’ consideration, he repackaged them and stacked them behind the counter in their original position. He left the way he had come, after a cursory search for clues had yielded nothing else. All the way home, he thought of nothing but the alien charts that he had seen. And he carried them into his dreams too, the lines given substance, and he realised the places he had seen on the paper were places he knew in his own mind. Areas of his brain that had not been walked for many years.
He woke in a sweat, his hands shaking, but the dream was dead in his mind. As much as he paced, drinking coffee, he could not remember what it was that had filled his thoughts during sleep. Frustration had him on the verge of tears. He knew there was knowledge to help him. He just didn’t know how to access it. What lingered too, more than the maps, was the vision of the rope on Salt’s shoulder and the noose tied into one end.
EMMA LED A rogue stream of sunshine into the pub as she entered. Her fringe was flattened by her hood, and as she released it she gave it a scrub with her hand and made a beeline for the bar, smiling and pointing to Sean’s glass to see if he wanted another.
“What’s that?” Sean asked, when she returned with another pint for him and a small tumbler for herself.
“Malt whisky,” she said, luxuriously. Her green eyes filtered the light and spat it back at Sean, glittering with colour. Light fed her face, made her look impossibly attractive. She took a sip and her meaty lips disappeared as she savoured it. When they reappeared, they were red and wet and smiling.
“What?” she laughed.
“I’ll tell you, before too long,” Sean said, leaning across the bar to kiss her. He felt empowered whenever she was near. Unassailable.
“So what’s happening?” she asked. “You buying me lunch?”
“Of course.”
“What is it brings you up this way?”
Sean told her about the architect. “The place where I’ve been working is one of his,” he explained. “I’m pretty certain that the guys I’ve been working with were looking for something there. But they won’t find it now.”
“Why not?”
“Someone burned it down today, this morning.”
Emma said, “My God.” She reached for his arm. “You could have been working there.”
Sean shook his head. “I think one of the boys I work with did it. I think they just wanted to be sure that this something was there. I don’t think it was something you could put in your pocket and take away with you.”
“How do you know?”
“Just a feeling,” Sean said. “I think it was a search and destroy job.”
“What king of thing?”
He smiled. “I don’t know.”
Sean showed her the notes he had made. “There’s a house around here. This architect chap used to live there, or at least keep his fancy women there. I think these guys I work with would like to know about this place too. I think this place has something else in it that they don’t want others to know about.”
“Where is it then?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “But neither do they.”
“Do you want me to help you find it?”
Sean drained his glass and nodded. “I think your intuitive skills might be of use. But no rush, hey?”
“Table twenty-six?” the waitress called out. They ate sandwiches and pinched chips off each other’s plates. Sean watched a customer punch buttons on the jukebox: Bowie, “Modern Love”. “This was the first single I bought,” they both said at the same time.
Emma told him that she was thinking of applying for a teaching course to get her out of the town. To start afresh. Sean spoke of his friendship with Naeem. Talking about him seemed to authenticate the memories, make them even more fresh and real in his mind.
“What’s he doing now?” Emma asked.
Sean shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea. Isn’t that the saddest thing? You grow up with these people and you think it’ll be you and them for ever. It should be you and them for ever, you get on so well. But something drives you apart. You lose touch. It’s criminal.”
Emma rubbed his hand. “It would be easy enough to find him, you know? Do an Internet search. Or he’s probably still in the book.”
“Maybe,” Sean said. “Come on.”
Outside, Emma ribbed him about the deliberate way in which he was walking. A huge articulated lorry thundered past, its logo in bright orange against a green background, a phone number two feet tall imploring customers to call now.
“I don’t seem to have a hangover any more,” he said, “but my legs are shot.”
Emma laughed. “They’ll be worse tomorrow. That’s what happens when you g
et older.”
Sean mock-chased her up Myddleton Lane, breaking off his pursuit when the uniformity of the buildings impinged upon him.
“He lived along here somewhere,” he said.
“Did he build the house himself?”
“I thought he would have done, but look, they’re all the same.”
Semi-detached blocks stretched away on either side of the street. Occasionally there were differences in taste represented by cladding or pebbledash or adornments, such as the metal butterflies stuck to the roof of one house, or the garish green used to paint the windowframes of another. Not one stood out. Nothing that said de Fleche.
“Have a nosey inside, then,” Emma suggested. “Maybe that’s what’s different.”
“It’ll take for ever,” Sean complained. “Do you know how many houses are on this street?”
“Ooh, I don’t know,” Emma said. “Twenty-six thousand?”
Sean stopped walking and stared at her. “What made you come out with that number?”
Emma shrugged. “I was kidding. Hyperbole, dear boy.”
“Something’s not quite right here,” Sean said.
“It’s raining, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, it’s numbers is what it is.” Sean grabbed Emma’s hand and led her across the road. “In the pub, what table were we on?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Then I’ll remind you. Twenty-six. It was table twenty-six.”
“So?”
“So you just said twenty-six thousand.”
“So?”
“So. The wagon that just went by. The phone number was two-six-two-six-two-six.”
“Sean. Don’t be so–”
“I’m not being so. The Bowie song in the pub. The guy keyed in A-twenty-six.”
“Ah. Well then, if you mention that, then it must–”
They came to a halt outside a house that looked much like any other they had scrutinised.
“Number twenty-six,” Emma said. “I didn’t know you were superstitious.”
“I’ve got nothing else to rely on,” Sean answered.
The garden was a riot of weeds. The bones of an ancient BSA motorbike leaned against the front wall, beneath the windows. There were no curtains in the windows at the front of the house but the view inside was hampered by a series of screens that reached from floor to ceiling. Two off-white buckets filled with cleaning rags and rusting screws, bolts and washers stood sentinel at the front door, comprised of a badly painted black frame that encased a single opaque pane, the view through which was further confused by an elaborate dimpling of the glass.
Sean rapped his knuckles against it and rang the doorbell. A few minutes’ wait brought nobody to answer it. He turned to Emma, who was standing by the gate, her arms crossed. He winked at her. “Let’s try round the back.”
A narrow archway punched between the semis allowed access to the rear of the house. Passing through a wobbly wooden gate that filled its intended space as well as a square peg in a triangular hole, Sean and Emma struggled across a tiny patch of thigh-high grass to a back window that was as miserly with its view as the front had been.
“What would you say to me if I told you that I think we should break in here?”
Emma closed her eyes and groaned. “I’d say, ‘What’s with this we shit?’”
“Good answer,” Sean said, and sent his elbow through the glass. They stood in silence, listening for movement, before Sean reached through the hole and unfastened the window.
“Cosy, isn’t it?” he said when they were standing inside, gingerly picking the larger shards of glass from his leather jacket.
“It’s bloody freezing,” Emma said, rubbing her arms and looking around the plain white room, which was unadorned by anything as simple as even a lampshade.
“It’s not been lived in for some time,” Sean guessed. There were two main rooms on the ground floor, of equal size, and a hallway, the floor of which was a mosaic of blue tiles that travelled from the front door to the back and gradually shifted through every conceivable shade from ice to navy as they did so.
“I think this is the place,” Sean said. “Let’s have a look at his kitchen.”
The kitchen was a bright, welcoming room with a large wooden table and a fireplace. The floor here was also tiled, in all shades of orange: a sun radiating spirals of energy reached out to the walls.
“Nice idea,” Emma said.
“Isn’t it?” Sean agreed, moving the toe of his boot along one of the spinning arms of colour. “Do you think it means anything?”
“There doesn’t have to be a signal in everything you see, does there?”
Sean looked at her. “I wonder, sometimes.”
Emma said, “Funny though, I feel I know this place. Maybe it was featured in one of those décor magazines once.”
Back towards the stairs, Sean held up his hand. The shadow of a man was on the glass of the front door. As long as they were frozen, studying the figure for a clue as to what action to follow, they could see that the man wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there.
“Now that,” Emma said, when she realised it was an illusion, “is creepy.”
“Look at how he did it,” Sean said, pointing to a series of mirrors up the stairs that, when sunshine hit them, projected the shadow of a doll onto the glass of the door.
“What kind of a man wants to piss around like that?”
Sean started up the stairs, his boots thumping dully on the bare wood. “Maybe he liked to feel less alone,” he said. “Figures at the door, maybe they made him feel popular, as if he was getting lots of visitors.”
“Yeah, right,” Emma said, trudging after him.
On the top floor, the bathroom was an ice cavern, but without any shades of white whatsoever. It glowed in colours that could have been blue or green or both or neither. The two bedrooms were as spartan as the rooms on the ground floor. The tiles on the floor in the back room depicted a green island in the centre of a sea of aquamarine. Along the hallway to the front room, the colours suddenly disintegrated – soft reds meeting an ash-grey mess that took over until the threshold. Beyond it, the tiles created a perfect black limbo without anything to arrest the eye.
They were about to return to the ground floor when Emma stopped Sean. She had the look of someone trying to root around in her mind for the key to recognition of a face so weathered by time and experience that there could be no hope of success.
She was looking at a map of Pangaea stitched into heavy fabric hanging on the wall, the continents when they were all part of the same land mass. A breeze from somewhere was causing the bottom edge to move slightly.
She reached out and tugged one edge of the map away from the wall.
There was a door, a tiny wooden door with a loop of string for a handle, behind it.
A picture, drawn in crayon on an old piece of paper from a school exercise book, was tacked to its central panel. It was a childish scrawl, a bald man in grey standing on a green hill, with white holes for eyes. The sky was black and a black sun burned in it, edged with brilliance, like a perpetual eclipse.
Sean said, his voice breaking, “I know that place.”
Emma said, carefully, calmly: “I drew that.”
Their hands found each other.
Behind the door: more stairs. They were only half-way up, Emma at the rear, when she heard Sean’s voice, low and breathy, come whistling through his teeth: “Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck.”
The room stretched away from them. Emma was frightened to a point where she could not think clearly. None of the houses along this street had three floors, did they? And the roofs were too shallow to allow for this level of conversion. The ceiling was of an unknowable height, an insane height. The impossibility of it crushed her.
Sean stood on the threshold to the room and she could tell by the movement of his shoulders that he was crying.
“What is it?” she asked, softly. The house creaked and g
roaned around her as the wind and rain buffeted it. It too seemed affected by whatever it was that Sean had discovered.
“I’ve been here before,” he said. “When I was a child. But I can’t remember... I can’t remember how.”
She pressed against him and looked through the gap between his arm and the curtailment of the banister. The room had no tiles in it; the floor was covered with a ragged piece of matting. Chalked signs and messages had been scratched into it. The walls seethed in shadow and light, spoilt further by an imbroglio of graphite and ink and spray paint.
Emma said, in a voice too small for the room: “Me too.”
What illuminated the walls, what quaked and pulsed at the centre of the room, was hidden within a tube of fabric that was pinned and pegged to a scaffold that reached up to the eaves. An arched window, the only one on this level, provided a view of the tower at Sloe Heath, as if it were a painting, framed and hung.
Sean unfastened the fabric and let it fall. The fire that was revealed, burning in a small, ceramic crucible, was unlike any flame Emma had seen. The tongues of it, reaching to the newly revealed ceiling, were sometimes milky and smooth, sometimes purpuric. Acid whites became mottled with cartoon orange; sudden, impossible black flames measled with slowly expanding moments of electric green. At the ceiling, they rilled and plaited like flecks of rain on glass. The sheer alien spectacle was enough to shock tears from her, but what elicited the pain to go with it, a bone-gnawing sadness, was what coalesced at the heart of the fire.
She had not seen her grandfather for twenty years, yet here he was, bathed by the flames, as scrubbed and as fresh as a child. He turned to look at her, his eyes animated with joy. He was trying to speak to her but either the words were being soaked up by the conflagration or she wasn’t close enough to hear. The enticement of listening to a voice that had been lost to the vagaries of time and her untrustworthy memory was irresistible. She edged towards the tower of fire, cocking her head to improve the trajectory of his words, and saw Sean doing the same. Tears made his cheeks shiny. How could he be feeling this way for someone who belonged to her? She remembered weekends spent with this man, when her parents were having some time to themselves. She would sit on his knee while they watched Charlie’s Angels or Starsky and Hutch or The Six Million Dollar Man. He would waggle her toes and tell her stories about dark horses in stormy fields and angels who played with your hair while you slept and how that was what made you become more beautiful every day. He brought her cakes from the factory where he worked as a confectioner, icing buns and decorating birthday sponges.
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