Plume

by Will Wiles

  Pierce shrugged. Or rather, I thought he shrugged, but in fact he was pulling his phone from his trouser pocket.

  ‘Our ride is here,’ he said.

  Where am I most at risk from street crime? I tried, as we were driven through the dark, hissing streets.

  Tamesis came up with advice for avoiding street crime. And it was what you’d expect: stick to busy, well-lit areas, use licensed cabs, don’t go alone. That was what was said about victims of crime – it has been said about me, to me: ‘In the wrong place at the wrong time,’ as if the crime were spring-loaded and waiting to happen in a particular location, like a mousetrap. Actually hunting for that location revealed the notion as absurd. Could we invite the crime, somehow attract it? I realised how this whole enterprise would take on an entirely different complexion if one or both of us was female. Or if we were a gay couple, holding hands. Those were the sections of the population who were skilled at making crime happen, out of thin air, to themselves. The crime whisperers. I realised that there was simply no way that we would be doing this if either of us was a woman. And the entire endeavour seemed abruptly more foolish, even grotesque: a peacock display of privilege. Look at us, male and white and hetero, from good-enough neighbourhoods – we can’t even get mugged in this town.

  Did Pierce get that? I doubted it, though he was sensitive to some of the delicacies around the subject. In Night Traffic he had been scathing about the asking-for-it myth: You’re never a victim-in-waiting, nothing is preordained. You don’t have it coming. I was in no mood to give him credit, but this was one thing that Pierce got dead right in that book: the alchemy of it, the near-random collision of factors that transmuted part of the mostly benign city into a moment of terror.

  Pierce was sitting in the front passenger seat, chatting with the driver. More than chatting: bonding. They were roaring away like old friends. The driver was Estonian; Pierce had been to Tallinn on a British Council jolly a couple of years before. I suspected that if I tried to impress the native of a place with impressions of their home picked up from a six-day jaunt, I would crash and burn in a firestorm of condescension and naivety, but of course Pierce was navigating it beautifully. They talked about the British stag parties that had besieged the city, and then they moved on to the Baltic ferries used by Swedish teens to get shitfaced, and of course Pierce knew a Vice writer who had been on one of those, and he had stories, and the driver snorted and yelped with laughter so much I feared we might come off the road. I hated them both.

  The Uber took us to the road junction at the heart of Elephant and Castle. This was as far as Pierce’s instructions went – for here we would be on foot, and in theory vulnerable. We were dropped on a peninsula of pavement on the south side of the doomed hulk of the shopping centre, and the scene was promising enough: walkways and underpasses, railway arches, patchy street lighting. But the junction pounded with traffic and buses, and the pavements were busy. Too busy, really, and I wondered why.

  ‘It’ll be quieter away from the centre,’ Pierce said. ‘Better.’ And we both knew what he meant: more dangerous. The concrete labyrinths that had loomed large in the London of our youths, the loci of all provincial middle-class fear.

  But we had made a mistake: misremembered it, given the driver the wrong destination, replaced one memory with another. We crossed under the railway bridge, expecting dripping shadow and mute monoliths, a place taxis won’t take you. The first thing we saw was a line of taxis, orange lights on, waiting for trade. Behind that, carnival brightness and music. Galvanised security fences screened the boundary of the estate, but it was not deserted or closed. The fences were strung with fairy lights and bunting, and in front of us was a scaffolding arch bearing a name spelled out in weathered letters reclaimed from older signs: WINTERZONE. Beyond the arch was a prim favela built from shipping containers that had been painted in acid colours, a miniature city on a bed of playpark woodchips. In the distance was another splash of coloured lights, machine movement, crashing and cheering.

  ‘What is this?’ Pierce said, horror in his eyes, upturned face bathed in light.

  I knew: I had heard of Winterzone, people had been talking about it in the office, and there had been a brief piece about it in the most recent issue of the magazine. A ground-breaking experiment in interactive urban renewal, urbanism as entertainment, shopping, music, film and street food. Nowhere does food indoors any more, it’s all street food. I just hadn’t realised that it was here.

  The gates were guarded by a line of glittery young people in black North Face, each bearing a tablet computer. They smiled and reassured us that entrance was free if you accepted the shared-space conduct fist bump, and I think my bruised face drew a suspicious look. We each bumped fists with one of the pad people and agreed that our conduct would abide by the terms and conditions that were laid out on the website accessible from the URL found on the wristbands we were issued.

  ‘Isn’t this where the big council estate used to be?’ Pierce asked one of the gate guardians, a bright-eyed girl with pink spiky hair.

  She raised both eyebrows, pleased by the question. ‘Right here!’ she said. ‘You’re looking for the Renewosaurs? They run till midnight. You can catch them next to where they’re projecting the film.’

  She gestured across the container village, where the site was bounded by a giant advertising hoarding, several storeys high and several streets long. But although it was covered in advertising, it was not a billboard, but one of the slab blocks of the estate, mummified in a taut white plastic wrap. Slogans were splashed across the giant canvas:

  WINTERZONE brought to you by CASTLE PARK.

  YESTERDAY … TO THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. A state-of-the-art development of new homes to own or rent.

  JOIN US and TAKE PART in a vibrant celebration of the transformation of URBAN RENEWAL.

  And much more of the same, alternating with a tasting platter of corporate logos: the local authority, property developers, building contractors, a hedge fund, a Singaporean pension fund, Wolfe / De Chauncey and others.

  We wandered onto the festival site, numb, staring, our plan temporarily forgotten. In the distance were the amped cries of Sam Neill and Laura Dern battling dinosaurs against a John Williams score, and another splintering crash, which brought a round of applause. The crash was not part of the film. Closer at hand, the music was familiar wispy female vocals over a twangy banjo, and although I knew it and had heard it in adverts, I couldn’t place it. Shopfronts in the shipping containers dispensed artfully sloppy burgers or cashmere sweaters. A spoken word poet was denouncing austerity to an audience of five people reclined on velour-covered cushions in a yurt. Visitors milled around us, a crowd heavy in beards and caps and stiff vintage military overcoats. The women had mastered the miraculous balance of dress that would work just as well pitching a phone game to venture capitalists in Dalston as it would at one of my mother’s WI meetings. It was eleven-ish at night but the shared space conduct fist bump was holding effortlessly – no one was visibly drunk, though most held bottles of microbrew, many swaying them casually from the barest contact of index finger and thumb. I saw two buggies with babies slumbering peacefully inside.

  ‘Fucking …’ Pierce muttered, but he couldn’t even bring himself to finish his profanity. He had not closed his mouth since we arrived, and appeared distraught.

  ‘What’s this music?’ I asked. It was bothering me, so obviously a song I knew, but just out of reach.

  ‘“Sweet Child O’ Mine”,’ Pierce said. ‘Cover.’

  On the inside, I was rejoicing. I shared Pierce’s disgust at this Mumford-infested travesty, but it had at least shut down his bizarre plan to get attacked. I might even be able to get a drink. We could sit down, and I could record a few essential quotes on my phone, and I might even be able to write a few lines tomorrow, enough to get Eddie and Polly off my back, some red meat to throw into the Monday meeting on Friday.

  ‘Not much risk of getting mugged here,’ I said, try
ing to conceal my relief. ‘Robbed, maybe, if we buy a beer.’

  Pierce came to a sudden stop, feet scrunching on the woodchips. We had reached a clearing in the midst of the shipping containers, surrounded by boutiques, bar fronts and Brazil-themed fast food outlets run by ex-financiers. Cumin and turmeric wafted through the night air and there was a burst of sizzling as something was flipped on a grill. A nearby group burst into educated laughter, making a big physical display of it, slapping legs and patting each other on the back. One, overcome with mirth, took off his flat cap and scratched his shaved head.

  ‘When I was younger, in the eighties or nineties, this place was …’ Pierce began. ‘You wouldn’t come here.’ He waved his arm at the banner that dominated the clearing: VILLAGE GREEN @ CASTLE GARDENS. Community will be at the heart of everything we do.

  ‘Let’s get a drink,’ I said. ‘Talk.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Pierce inattentively. ‘We will, but I want to see …’

  We crossed the clearing. Chalkboards advertised henna tattoos and curried goat burritos and wildstyle graffiti masterclasses from street art professionals. Under a thicket of patio heaters, a young man in a pork pie hat had stripped down to his string vest and was languorously grooving to the music, as if this were London Fields at the height of summer.

  ‘What is this music?’ I asked Pierce. It was the same artist, or similar, lisping and strumming away winsomely.

  ‘“Lithium”,’ Pierce said. ‘A cover.’

  Before, our view of the far half of the long slab block of flats had been obscured by a tower of scaffolding, which supported floodlights, speakers and a climbing wall. The container-street spread out into another large open area, larger than the ‘village green’, thinly filled with a crowd lounging on branded picnic blankets and deckchairs under additional groves of patio heaters. Many were sitting on the stumps of fallen trees. Above them, projected onto the skin of the shrink-wrapped council block, Jurassic Park was into its final half-hour. But the crowd’s attention was divided. Although many were watching the film, more were focused on where the plastic dermis of the block ended in a ragged, twisting line.

  Behind a cordon of polished hoardings, under spotlights, two demolition machines were tearing at the slab block, ripping it down piece by piece. Their long jointed necks were wrapped in strings of coloured lights, and the hydraulic jaws that were chewing through ferroconcrete were painted to resemble dinosaur heads. A window popped from its frame and smashed onto the hillock of rubble below, and some in the crowd whooped; with a snap and a twang, a section of floor broke away, bringing down a strip of facade as it slumped, and the punters roared.

  The hoardings around the demolition site were covered in images of lush primordial greenery, overlaid with further inspiring slogans: SAY FAREWELL TO THE OLD … CELEBRATE THE NEW. Castle Park is coming. The next era in urban evolution. Register your interest today.

  One of the Renewosaurs was worrying a structural support loose, tugging it back and forth to splinter the concrete away from the steel rebar underneath. The slow, cracking action made me run my tongue over my teeth. My mouth was dry.

  ‘I can’t fucking believe it,’ Pierce said quietly. ‘This is … This place always seemed, I don’t know, indestructible. Like it would always be there, good or bad.’

  ‘You never wanted to come here,’ I said. ‘It was terrifying to you.’

  His jaw muscles tensed. ‘Yeah … But it was part of the city; it was real, not like …’ He nodded towards the throng of beards and checked shirts.

  This lament for the dirtier, more dangerous city of thirty years ago was familiar Pierce territory, echoed in all his books and Vice pieces. And I was sympathetic to those angry, melancholy swipes against the rising tide of glass and waistcoated private security and Byron burgers. They had made me a fan of his. I had been sympathetic, before I knew the truth about Night Traffic. But that city had been before my time. I had been a child, growing up two hours away (by the faster train), where the whole of London was an exquisite, hazardous mystery. I was fascinated by a prior London I had never seen myself. I thought I was angry about that London disappearing – as angry as Pierce. But what if I was not? What if I was angry, and sad, about something else, and London was no more than a setting?

  ‘You think they should have kept the estate as it was?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not?’ Pierce fired back. ‘I bet the buildings were sound. Beautiful, in their way.’ He turned his gaze to what remained of the slab block, stretching back to the entrance of Winterzone.

  ‘But it was a sink estate,’ I said. ‘Crime. Neglect. Uninhabitable.’

  ‘People lived here, though, didn’t they?’ Pierce snarled. ‘And where are they now? Not fucking here, that’s for sure, not in this fucking crowd.’

  Resentment smouldered in the pit of my being. I had blundered onto the wrong side of an argument, or had been manoeuvred there, and it wasn’t fair. I desired, in a flash, to tear off Pierce’s mask, and savage him in print, like one of the demolition machines that were methodically going about their business above. I wanted to gouge into his facade of authenticity and concern, and show that it wasn’t as solid as it appeared. But I distrusted my motives. My revenge-lust was genuine enough – but I would also be playing the social-media takedown game, whereby if I could explode the myth of someone like Pierce, I would set myself up as being even more authentic and concerned than he ever was. I would absorb his stature and make it my own – while being no less a fraud.

  More than anything I wanted to sit and drink. It had been a while, even with the refresher in Pierce’s flat, and my legs were getting shaky. I wanted to be back across town; the fridge was full, but time was still an issue because a certain amount of drinking had to be done before I could go to bed. I don’t go to sleep, not any more – it was a matter of scheduling my blackout.

  But I couldn’t leave, and I couldn’t tear Pierce apart – not without a recording, or some kind of leverage. I needed Pierce on the record.

  ‘Let’s get a drink,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to watch this.’

  Pierce gave me a look, and I ignored it. I had indulged him long enough. I turned away and began to walk, and (to my mild surprise) he followed. A particularly energetic crash came from the Renewosaurs, and the crowd gibbered and yelped its pleasure.

  Laura Dern’s face filled the screen above. ‘Run,’ she said, through gritted teeth.

  We returned to the ‘Village Green’, where the bars were concentrated. We sat on stools made from fresh-cut sections of tree trunks – ‘upcycled’ from the mature planes that had grown on the estate, and available for sale, a label said. The table was an upended barrel cut in half at the waist, and everything was low down, like furniture in a primary school. Pierce went to fetch the drinks. The crowds were slackening, going home. Men in baseball caps and hi-vis vests – a look completely out of step with the woodsy, casual vibe – were emptying litter bins.

  Waiting for Pierce to get back from the bar, where tattooed artisans pulled plastic pints using pumps fashioned from the handlebars of Chopper bikes, I took my phone from my pocket. I wanted it ready to record a confession. I was still turning over the loss of the DVRs, more in the gut than in the mind, a physical sensation, churning beneath the sedative helplessness that paralysed useful thought about the problem. How could I have been so stupid, so negligent? I was accustomed to regarding myself in the worst possible light, but even by my low standards this lapse was difficult to countenance. How had it happened? How could it have happened? It was perfectly natural that I, a walking disaster, should suffer such a calamity, but putting aside the moral and chemical shortcomings that had permitted it to happen, what were the simple mechanics of the disappearance? Since I had discovered the loss earlier, an obsessive part of my back brain had been relentlessly milling the question, and only producing more questions. Fallen from my bag? Improbable. Taken by an opportunistic thief? Doubtful, when a perfectly good laptop was right next to them. Ha
d I taken them out of my bag for some reason – to show Quin?

  Quin had been there. The more I sifted through the murky memories, the more his presence felt connected to the absence of the DVRs. Had I told him about the interview, about the recordings? We had talked about Pierce. Had I given him the DVRs, or somehow invited him to take them? Had I wanted them to disappear?

  There wasn’t much sense to that, but it would fit with another mystery that was stirring within. Why wasn’t I more upset? I should, by rights, be paralysed with despair. It took so little to make me want to give up everything, to surrender and die. If I missed a Tube I found myself wanting to jump in front of the next one. I was coming to the end of the week almost empty-handed, with no De Chauncey interview and precious little to show from the Pierce interview. In less than thirty-six hours I would have to account for myself and I had nothing but lies and allegations. But here I was, coasting along, letting Pierce amuse himself.

  My phone was enjoying Winterzone, at least. Google wanted pictures of it, and had travel and weather information. Tamesis was alive with reviews and suggestions and sponsored content and requests for feedback. This was exactly the kind of young, connected, well-off crowd that would use Quin’s social-mapping system and it was busy grinding its gears, trying to make connections. People I know had been here earlier, it said, and I saw Freya and Ilse among the names. And Alexander De Chauncey. He had added me back. Would I like to invite my T-Plus list? Would I like to make my presence public? Would I like to add pictures or reactions to the event T-cloud?

  I would not.

  Pierce returned with two bottles of beer. They had been immersed in ice water, and their labels were askew, glue dissolved. Sloughing off like reptile skin. Fluorescent labels, covered in Smileys: ‘Madfer Pils’ by the Brilliant Balham Brewing Bros, a microbrewery.

  I tapped my phone. ‘I need to get some quotes,’ I said. ‘It’s time. You have to tell me about Night Traffic. How it happened. How it didn’t happen.’