Plume

by Will Wiles

  ‘This is where I turned off,’ Pierce said. It wasn’t really a turning, more a continuation of our current course – it was Burdett Road that veered away, hugging the park to our left. The street narrowed and sprouted car-obstacle humps and islands. The traffic disappeared. It was quieter and darker, a patchwork of truncated pre-Blitz leftovers and uncharismatic post-Blitz reconstruction. Names I remembered from Night Traffic: Eric Street, Ropery Street.

  ‘So what did happen that night?’ I asked.

  Pierce shrugged. ‘You asked that already. Nothing. I walked up here. The main road, Mile End Road, is just up there.’ He gestured north, and I could see the street ended about a hundred metres further on. A twinkle of passing cars, the blue interior light of a night bus. ‘It’s five minutes to my house from there.’

  We had come to a recess where purple dumpsters were parked, the recycling point for the surrounding housing estate. It was enclosed on three sides by high walls of windowless brick. The surrounding street turned its back on the spot, hemming it with clutter: car parks, playless strips of grass, a concrete cow.

  ‘This is where it happened,’ Pierce said. ‘In the book.’

  The architecture was right enough – it made a good spot for a group to loiter, mostly unseen, a dark harbour in which to surround and intimidate a passer-by. But there was no group here. And even past midnight, the mental weather was wrong.

  ‘It doesn’t feel very threatening,’ I said. I wasn’t sure. Maybe on my own I would feel differently. If I were another gender. So many personal factors bear on the complexion of a place, quite apart from its physical structures.

  ‘I’ll show you some of the places I mention in the book,’ Pierce said. ‘We’ll see how bold you feel in the cemetery.’

  Down Ropery Street, pastiche Victoriana on one side, and the real thing on the other, a fortress-like National School behind eroded brick walls. Halfway along, the street doglegged, a printer-jam kink without cause, and the pastiche was succeeded by authentic terraces. Further along, another abrupt dogleg, adding to the sense of a maze of nineteenth-century ad hoc building.

  ‘This is a bit more like it,’ I said. ‘Real East End.’

  ‘Yeah, a bit gangland,’ Pierce said. ‘It’s actually lovely during the day. Quiet and pretty. That’s where I bought the desk.’

  Pierce’s ‘desk’ was a sturdy, wide slice of mdf slung between two filing cabinets. He had bought it from a timber yard up ahead, where the street took a sharp turn right. It would be easy to miss the yard, a modest wooden gate on the outer elbow of the turn. It had featured in Night Traffic as the only time Pierce had previously visited these streets: to buy the surface he wrote on. Was that the connection he made when he decided to invent the attack? A sheet of engineered wood, bought on a crooked street, making a work of engineered and crooked biography? I had to remember that he had not walked the streets exactly as he had described: it had all been a later invention, a tour as contrived as the one we were on now. More so. I pictured him sitting at that desk, Google Streetview open on the computer screen. Or standing on this corner on a quiet and pretty day, camera in one hand, notebook in the other, not revisiting a trauma at all, but smiling at his cleverness, at all the observations and linkages he would put into Night Traffic. It made me angry. Why, I don’t know. Was I a victim, really? A victim of fraud and deception? I had been cheated by Pierce, made to feel things under false pretences, impersonally lied to.

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ I said. ‘Not really. When did you decide to write Night Traffic? To invent all this? What made you do it?’

  Maddeningly, Pierce ignored me again. None of the street’s weak orange light reaching him, moonless introspection. How he was able to do this, I don’t know. Maybe people just accepted it – a novelist’s privilege, to be moody and inconsistent and elliptical.

  ‘That’s the cemetery,’ Pierce said.

  Aged trees rose in a crowd behind the terrace, bare black branches untouched by light. A pool of blackness in the city.

  To briefly recap Night Traffic: walking home on Eric Street, our hero is accosted by a gang of youths. Cheerful, reeking of skunk and violence, multi-ethnic. (Another stab of anger. I thought about Pierce composing the very balanced racial make-up of the group, being careful to include and not offend. A complete rainbow of bourgeois fear, no one left behind.) Once the group has impressed upon Pierce the seriousness of his situation, he is taken to the cashpoint of a nearby newsagent to withdraw his ransom. But the cashpoint is not working. So he is marched through these quiet streets in the direction of another. They are heading to a small Tesco across the road from Pierce’s own street – his own suggestion. But on the way, they detour into the cemetery to make a more thorough stocktaking of Pierce’s possessions and removables.

  No ordinary cemetery, this. Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park had not received the dead for more than fifty years – the vast Victorian necropolis had been given back to nature, and thick forest had grown up within it, with narrow muddy paths running through deep brambles and fallen, upheaved lumps of crumbling memorial marble. By day it was quiet, wild, gothic, eerie. By night – I did not like to speculate. It radiated darkness, as if the night itself was made here, and here was its signal clearest.

  Pierce had been right. The boldness was gone from me.

  ‘Seems more like a place to get murdered than mugged,’ I said. ‘I can see why you put it in the book.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s, uh,’ Pierce said. His voice cracked and he swallowed. ‘It’s atmospheric.’ And, in his hands, it had made for atmospheric writing – violence among the tombstones. Chthonic horror. Chthonic, relating to the underworld; I knew the word from Pierce’s book, from that scene, the one all the reviews quoted, the one in the cemetery, and here I found it applied.

  A high wall separated us from the jungle, and we skirted it in silence. The entrance lay on a crossroads corner; just within, a war memorial, a brightly painted community centre, and an Edwardian keeper’s cottage, then a curtain of ink. Above the skeletal trees, the plume, squeezing and rolling, still with the source-less inner light.

  ‘I wish that thing would go away,’ I mumbled.

  ‘It’s mostly just kids snorting nitrous and trying to scare each other,’ Pierce said. His attitude had entirely changed – the energy was back. ‘I reckon you’re right, it’s not going to happen.’

  ‘You don’t want to go through with it?’ I said. I had not expected this, not at this moment anyway. ‘The mugging? Because if there was anywhere it could happen, this seems most likely.’

  ‘No, no, I do, I do,’ Pierce said. ‘But not here. I’m just not sure it’s going to happen. Feels too contrived.’

  I weakened in the knees. Disappointment at another failed outing, another so-so bit of uneventful colour for the piece, contended for a moment with epic relief, before being washed away by it entirely. I could return home, I could drink, I didn’t have to go into the cemetery. Without prompting, I looked towards the far glimpse of Mile End Road, and its passing night buses.

  ‘Contrived, OK,’ I said. This was a weird thing for Pierce to say – of course it was contrived! – but I didn’t want to argue, not when the fridge was calling me. ‘Contrived.’

  ‘Yeah. Inauthentic. Look at us. This is ridiculous. We need to think it through. New plan.’

  A whoop rose up from the cemetery park, a multiple shriek of joy, blunted by the trees and distance, but sudden enough to make us both start.

  ‘Kids,’ I said.

  ‘Kids,’ Pierce said.

  We walked towards the main road. That was the end of the experiment, then – there would be no mugging. But neither of us said anything to declare the episode closed.

  ‘It’s not even eleven,’ Pierce said. ‘That’s the trouble. We’re too early. It was later than this.’

  In the book, I thought. It had been later than this in the book, the crime that you had invented. I just wanted him to acknowledge that.


  ‘We should try somewhere else,’ Pierce said. ‘No sense giving up now. How about those big housing estates south of the river? Elephant and Castle. They were always a byword for mugging when I was growing up. I would never have gone there at night.’

  I grimaced, which Pierce saw, and he tutted at me. ‘Come on, you said you were up for an expedition. We’ve got to do this properly, give it a proper try.’

  ‘Round here is one thing, but going all that way …’ I began, heeding the siren call of the fridge.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Pierce said. ‘With two of us I’m sure there’ll be no real danger.’

  ‘Then why …’

  ‘Just the right amount of danger, then. Come on. I’ll call an Uber to my flat, we can have a quick beer while we wait.’

  I sensed that I was being bought off. But Pierce got something out of the deal as well – he didn’t have to walk back alone.

  EIGHT

  Pierce’s flat was three minutes away. That was one of the sympathetic details in Night Traffic: that the attack had happened so close to where he lived, in a neighbourhood he thought he knew. Again, that pang of rage at the calculation that had gone into the deception. We walked back together. Pierce had already summoned an Uber driver, but he would be half an hour. It was peak time for cabs: the pubs and parties emptying out, people on the move – peak time for muggers, too, perhaps.

  Three brown bottles of cold Czech lager reclined in Pierce’s fridge. It was, I suspected, the same beer that had been there the previous day, and I marvelled at people who could do that, who could keep beer in the fridge without touching it, without even thinking about it, for days.

  When I first lived with Elise, I could toss four cans or six bottles into my shopping basket, and one or two of them would still be there two or three nights later. Wine, too. We’d have wine with dinner, like grown-ups, and there’d be some in the bottle the next morning, the next evening. We could get home from the pub and find there was nothing in the fridge or no bottle on the side, and wouldn’t give it a second thought. There must have been tiny firsts, too insignificant to have noticed at the time, too insignificant to remember now. The first time I felt the drop of fear in my gut upon discovering there was nothing in the house. The first time I went, ‘just nipping out’, to the corner shop to get a can or two to cover that hole. Or four cans. The first time I stopped by the corner shop on the way back, just in case there was nothing in the fridge. Nothing special, no deliberation. No fanfare. No awkward questions, no guilt, doing nothing wrong.

  And then, later, the first time I got the tilt of the head from Elise. The first time I got the ‘Really?’

  Curious to know if Pierce’s instincts about south London were reasonable, I took out my phone and opened Tamesis. Best place to get mugged, I asked it. The Bunk logo spun as Quin’s servers pondered the question.

  Did you mean: Best places to buy mugs. Best places to get mugs printed. Best places to get mugshots.

  Where in London has the worst street crime? I asked, trying to tailor my question into something the algorithm was equipped to answer. The screen took breath and began to fill with colour and information. Street crime offences by ward, 2010–2015. Data source: Metropolitan Police. I tweaked the screen, zooming out. The familiar matrix of streets twitched and resolved. The river scooped up the neighbourhood. The broader shape of London cohered, the parks, the Thames’s turns. But the data overlay was confusing, a marbled mash. My own borough, Westminster, stood out as being particularly bad, which puzzled me until I remembered the West End, all those drunks and tourists. That was where I had been mugged, the first time. Kensington and Chelsea – rich, rich, rich – also appeared more dangerous than I expected, but I didn’t like the chance of it happening to us if we tried there. Everywhere else was a mélange, with pockets of danger mixed in among stretches of relative safety; the central boroughs appeared slightly worse than the suburbs. But there was no definitive answer, no no-go zone. Just noise. And this, I supposed, was just the view from the statistics, not the real picture at all.

  ‘Honestly,’ Pierce said, ‘I don’t know what happened that night.’ He had been silently tilting his beer while I fiddled with my phone, deep in thought, and this announcement came without preamble. It had been on his mind.

  ‘Describe it to me,’ I said. I still had to get the material for an interview, somehow. I needed to know.

  ‘You recording this?’ Pierce asked, nodding at my phone, which was cocked in my hand, screen lit.

  I wasn’t, but I realised that I should be. More than the basic raw materials of the interview, the quotes, I needed proof of the fraud – I needed a recorded acknowledgement of the fraud, if not an outright statement of guilt. Pierce describing the actual turn of events, and how he decided to construct his tale, would do very well.

  ‘May I?’ I asked.

  He rubbed his face with his free hand, pulling at the skin, like a man trying to rub away his tiredness.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ he said. Seeing my expression change, he added, ‘I know, I know, it’s just hard … it’s good to get this out in the open, but hard to … commit to it.’

  As exhausted as I was by Pierce’s prevarication, I had some sympathy for the difficulty the truth could cause in a mind accustomed to deception and delusion.

  ‘You’ll have to commit eventually,’ I said. ‘If we’re going to do this, I can’t have the possibility of you turning around and saying this didn’t happen.’

  Pierce was nodding. He had started nodding before I finished speaking. It was the kind of nodding that could be read as meaning: Yes, yes, shut up.

  ‘Honestly, I wish you’d trust me a bit,’ he said.

  I wasn’t going to allow that. ‘You tried to blackmail me to get the story you want. Yesterday. You were sitting right there and I was sitting right here and you tried to blackmail me. In fact, I am being blackmailed, aren’t I? There’s still that threat? Just so we’re clear. Let’s not talk about trust.’

  Pierce slumped. ‘Just trying to protect myself.’

  I drained my beer. It had not lasted long.

  ‘Are you recording this, though?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. Please don’t.’ He sprang out of his chair, walked over to the map on the wall, and started to pick at it, tweaking and adjusting its hide of notes and clippings as if grooming a pet. ‘Like I say, I don’t know what happened that night. I mean – on a crude, sensible level, I do know. I walked home. Nothing happened. I went to bed. But when I woke up – I couldn’t get out of bed.’

  He turned his attention to the stack of foreign-language editions of his books that crowned one of the filing cabinets. The same basic imagery, reiterated by different graphic designers for different markets: London, violence, police.

  ‘I had been at this lovely party, this book launch,’ Pierce said. ‘Another clever little novel, by someone I know. It’s here somewhere. I blurbed it. People I know, authors, friends, publishing people. They were all very full of praise for Murder Boards. How real it was, how important it was. The London novel they wanted, they needed. And I was lapping it up. I loved it. To be considered … I don’t know, in touch with a particular kind of realness, grittiness, authenticity. I know I keep coming back to that word, but … And the next morning …’

  He took a swig of his own beer, and it foamed energetically in the bottle. ‘The party had been in the upstairs room of this pub, a refurbished pub, walls all painted this rich green-grey colour probably called “snail tongue” or “wax jacket twilight” or something, this big industrial clock on the wall, blackboards everywhere, steel furniture made to look like it’s spent forty years in a machine shop but you know it’s brand-new, bearded blokes in plaid shirts on either side of the bar. I mean, don’t get me wrong, a nice fucking place, but a fantasy, yeah? An utterly conformist effort to look original. And when I woke up, I thought: I am that fucking pub. I’m a fucking fraud. I’m producing a simulation for a few coddled read
ers to feel like they’re getting something real.’

  It made sense. But it also did not make sense. ‘So you decided to be a fraud?’

  Pierce’s face twisted into a pained smirk. ‘Yeah. I suppose that’s about the measure of it. I wondered what would constitute something real. Then I decided to invent that.’

  ‘Was it a kind of revenge?’

  ‘No. No! On who, the readers? Publishing? Those people? No. I love those people. I am those people. That’s not it. At least they’re looking for it. The trouble is, they want it so bad, they see it everywhere, where it’s not. There are two kinds of reality, yeah? More than two. Occupying the same space.’ He gestured at the map. ‘Layers. Heterotopia. The same environment, experienced completely differently by different people, in different circumstances, at different times of day. And night. There are other people out there. We didn’t used to have much contact with them. But now, we can hardly even see them. That’s how we have reshaped the city, how we have structured our mental environment. Sitting here writing about the other people, I might as well be writing about knights in armour. It’s imagination. And they are right there. Right! There! But the walls of the bubble are so strong …’

  ‘It sounds as if you were depressed,’ I said. ‘Are you?’