by Will Wiles
I pored over the picture, trying to make out features amid the ruins. What was I looking for? The fridge, perhaps, tumbled like a dice. Not that I could get to it. In the lower left-hand corner of the picture was a shape, a curl of white plastic – the edge, I realised, of a drone, part of the circular guard around one of its rotors. That was how news organisation got pictures like this, now, so much cheaper than a helicopter. Would I be on the evening news? Where would I watch it?
Kay returned, with a pint.
‘We haven’t had a drink in ages,’ I said.
She gave me an appraising look, and said nothing. I wondered if I had said the wrong thing.
‘This is nice,’ I said, raising my glass. ‘I’m pleased you got your job back.’
‘Are you OK?’ she said, and although she didn’t elaborate on what she meant, the look she threw at my beer said enough on its own.
‘I’m not well,’ I said. ‘I’ll figure it out.’
‘Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?’ she asked ‘I used to enjoy hanging out with you, but the last few weeks, it’s like you don’t want to know.’
I didn’t reply. At first. And then I realised that I did have a reply.
‘Maybe I didn’t want to be asked if I was OK,’ I said.
‘Well, excuse me.’
‘No, no. That not really what I mean. I mean … I’ve been having a rough time. I didn’t want anyone else getting drawn into it, getting hurt. I really enjoyed hanging out with you as well. I suppose I wanted to … preserve that.’
She sipped her lager. I wondered what kind it was, and felt the usual pang of outraged jealousy that came with watching non-alcoholics drink, that it could be so easy for them, that they would reach a point when they didn’t want any more, how could they, how could they.
Kay removed a touch of foam from her top lip with a flash of tongue, and said, ‘Bollocks.’
‘Bollocks?’
‘Bollocks. I think you had it right the first time, more or less, not wanting to be asked if you were OK; you’ve been following your little trajectory, you know where you’re going, and you didn’t want the hassle of dealing with other people along the way. Getting asked if you were OK might mean admitting you’re not OK. You’ve been streamlining.’
‘Bollocks,’ I said.
She shrugged, and made a face. ‘What will you do now? Tonight? Go to a Travelodge or a Way Inn? Do you have family you could stay with? A friend you can call?’
Another time, I might have taken this for flirting, but it was most definitely not an invitation, though the underlying concern was real.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do.’
TWELVE
It was the time of the Olympics – wholesome athletics filled the television, and outside the sun shone on a rejoicing city. I was in a secret agony as dark and bleak as an Arctic winter. And so, I suspected, was Elise, still shackled to me, still desperate to help, watching and fearing. Not that I saw, in my mirrored cell, every thought reflected inward.
I had stopped drinking, overnight. We had watched the opening ceremony on television together, windows open to the evening air, too far away to hear any fireworks or flypasts, but we could make out the mingled sounds of our neighbours enjoying themselves. And we had fun too, of a pinched kind, clearing the fridge of cans, avoiding thoughts of the next day and subsequent days, relaxing like the ‘old times’ that were only a couple of years before. Opening ceremony to closing ceremony, that was the deal – if I could fully abstain for that period, we would reopen talks about moderation and rules and setting limits and so on, all the stuff that had failed in the past.
Not that I could see my way to the closing ceremony. I could hardly stand to speculate as far as the end of the next day, the next morning. The future was inaccessible, and any optimistic speculations had a counterfeit air. But the word addict was still absent from our conversations, and when it crept into my thoughts, it came as a devilish intruder. No, it seemed to me that another force was keeping me drinking, quite apart from either free will or addiction – a spook I had never caught in the light. Twisting away within me was an immense contradiction. I believed that stopping drinking would have very little real effect. After all, I was in great shape: an enviable job, a supportive relationship, good health, the world at my feet. Clearing away the drink, and all the problems it had caused, would do no more than reveal happiness, the happiness that had proved elusive so far.
At the same time, I feared stopping more than I had feared anything before. It should have been possible to infer the truth from this – that I was not opening the curtains to a refulgent dawn of contentment, but something else, something worse – but I did not.
If you want to believe, well, that’s very powerful, it’s very hard to resist.
Work continued. Most of my colleagues had asked for time off during the Olympics, and Eddie hadn’t wanted to decline any of those requests. He had tickets for a couple of events, too. So we had all put in extra effort in the fortnight before the games, and I earned some credit for volunteering to forgo leave. But with much of the work done, the days were quiet, so quiet that management turned the office TVs to the BBC coverage, muted, so we could all ‘be part of it’.
I was part of nothing. I loitered on the web and picked fights on Twitter, hoping to be taken out of myself for a moment, and then crashing back into shame and embarrassment. I sweated in my seat and pretended to enjoy the sport, feeling alienated from the athletes and the spectators, respective paragons of physical health and communal joy.
Those were the good times. Worse, far worse, were the evenings, when I prowled in our space, temper unbearably strained. The knowledge that my fury was unreasonable did nothing to quash it. I was afraid, terribly afraid, and there was no way of talking about it because I would not be understood. At work I could just about cope, I could divert myself, and there was time yet before the night. In the evening, at home, I was just shut away, and the night was inevitable.
Elise tried her best, and I was not nearly as grateful or gracious as I should have been. Her encouragement numbed me and her compassion repulsed me. And she was so patient with my temper that it made me angry. She filled the fridge with myriad flavours of fruit juice and bought fizzy water in the shrink-wrapped packs of four swollen two-litre bottles. Alongside this were boxes of fancy tea bags: green tea, mint tea, chamomile tea, fruit infusions. She sincerely believed – or wanted to believe – that in one of those pretty boxes lay the methadone I needed, the acceptable substitute for booze that would tide us over to the other side.
Weeks later, she did not take those boxes with her, and when I cleared the flat I threw them away. Half had not been opened.
The permissible drink that gave me any kind of relief was Gaviscon, which soothed the bouts of heartburn that racked me. It was at its most intense when I lay down at the end of the day, nerves tied like violin strings, in order to sleep. Inside, a scorching, corroding sensation would mount. Though it came from the guts, it always felt as if it were dissolving its way upwards into the heart and lungs, somehow both eating away and clogging up all the vital places of the chest, and I would have to rise and swig Gaviscon from the bottle.
Sleep didn’t come easily when the heartburn was raging, but it didn’t come easily at all. Heartburn was, in a way, a welcome visitor at night, because for all the pain it entailed, it was a connection to the real and the corporeal. Worse were the dreams.
Dream isn’t quite the right word. I was not asleep when they came – later in the night they turned into dreams, but they began as paralysing episodes of fear. I would lie in bed, convinced beyond all argument that death was imminent, that I was riddled with cancer or another (torturing, humiliating) terminal disease and I had already left it just too late for the doctors to do anything about it. Given that my insides were boiling and every sinew was aching from withdrawal, this was one of the more believable treats served up by the gruesome cinema of my imagination. I believed that Elise was the
one dying, not me, and we had missed our chance to save her by focusing on me. I placed myself in the brutalised aftermath of economic or ecological collapse, fleeing marauders in a wasteland of burned-out cars hissing with corpse-fed nature. I killed off my family individually or in batches, by bacillus and calamity, and I prodded my reaction for its deficiencies, for evidence that I was less than functionally human and undeserving of aid. Nightly, I built hell for myself.
Very worst of all – in the sense of being least explicable and most persistent – were the fantasies of accusation, trial and imprisonment. I would be accused of a crime – naturally, a heinous crime – that I had not committed, or that I had somehow committed without meaning to, and I would hurtle through the machinery of justice on skids of official outrage, landing in prison without prospect of release, abandoned by all who had previously cared for me. Not just any prison: a Piranesi nightmare wrapped in suicide nets and jaundiced paint, the one-handed creation of an authoritarian mind, only in my mind, all for me.
That was cold turkey. It was a prison without escape. It was a living death. And when I think about stopping, it’s those waking dreams of prison that come back to me.
I should have made the connection with the conversation that we never had, with the words I never wanted to hear. There I was, every night, imagining an accusation, a charge, and a life sentence, fearing that above all else and not knowing why. And meanwhile, during the day, fearing the words that would traduce me. Addict and alcoholic – I would have no defence. That’s when the talk of moderation and finding a balance would end, and there are no more loopholes or cheats, and you have to stop. For ever.
Ocado bags were scattered in Pierce’s hall. Not the fridge and freezer bags – if there had been any of those, he had put them away – but anything that could be left had been left. Profile antennae still twitching, without purpose, I scanned the bags for insights. He liked Krave, the chocolate-filled cereal, which struck me as childish and odd. But his essays did have a sugar-crazed quality. I thought back to our expedition on Tuesday, the police public relations shed in the forecourt of the Ocado depot, right next to the source of the plume. Don’t knock Ocado, Pierce had said. They had kept him alive in the days following the Night Traffic attack, when he couldn’t leave the house. An interesting detail to invent, given that there had been no attack and nothing had been stopping him leaving the house. Who had been watching?
I said something about the bags to Pierce. ‘Yeah, I’ve been meaning to get around to that,’ he replied. He was already a couple of steps up the stairs; stung, he returned, picked up two bags in each hand, and sprinted back up. I picked up two bags as well, including the one with the box of Krave.
Pierce’s flat had not been tidy when I was here on Tuesday, but it was distinctly messier today. Two plates, bearing the remains of two distinct meals, had been left on the dining table, and a couple of empty beer bottles. Not many by my standards, but they would have been the first things to go if he had made any effort to clear up.
He gave me a beer – a Heineken, in a can – and I told him about my house.
‘So you’ve got nothing? No clothes, nothing?’
I nodded.
‘Wait here.’ He left the living room.
I hadn’t said anything about losing my job – about quitting my job. I had quit, not been fired, I needed to be clear about that even to myself. Especially to myself, before a fiction began to cloud and supplant the truth. Nor did I intend to say anything. He didn’t have to know, for now.
When Pierce came back, he was carrying a pair of trousers. ‘You can have these, they’re a bit tight for me now.’ He patted his paunch. ‘This is, ah, the director’s cut.’
While I changed, Pierce turned his back to me, looking at the map that filled his wall. ‘Where was it you said you lived, again? Pimlico?’
‘Yeah.’
He smoothed the scraps on that part of the map, and picked through them. ‘Technically part of the East End, if you believe soil is destiny – built up from the flood plain using spoil from the excavation of one of the docks.’
‘Is that so?’ The trousers fitted fine, with a belt. This charity had thrown me. I could not have named the instinct that drove me to Pierce’s house, but I was angry and – now that the profile no longer mattered – had some vague idea of settling my account, of telling Pierce exactly what I thought of him. But I did not know precisely what that was, and his unprompted kindness complicated my feelings even further, spilling in more resentment and self-loathing. I wondered where the soil scraped out from under my neighbours’ houses had gone now – perhaps back east, infill for one of the vast new developments on the river. Returning. Dust to dust.
‘Mistress City,’ I said.
‘Pardon?’ Pierce said.
‘Mistress City,’ I said. ‘It’s on your map, on Pimlico. I saw it there the other day.’
Pierce folded back the map’s hide of notes and clippings. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Mistress City. Nickname, because it was where Members of Parliament kept their mistresses, in little rented flats. It’s where politicians get fucked.’
‘It’s certainly where I get fucked,’ I said. ‘Got, anyway. Thank you for the trousers.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Pierce murmured, still staring at the map. ‘Why do you live there, anyway? Why did you?’
‘I used to share a flat there with a girlfriend,’ I said. ‘When that ended, I couldn’t leave – it was as if leaving the area for somewhere more affordable was an admission of failure. Of being downwardly mobile, I suppose. And the irony is, I had to move downwards, literally downwards, in order to stay. I used to be on the first floor, and I went down into the basement flat.’
‘The basement flat of the same house?’
‘Same house, yes.’ I swigged the beer. ‘Another couple live in the flat upstairs. Lived.’
Pierce turned, smiling over his shoulder at me, amused by the story. I could picture him re-telling it, at my expense, for laughs – another little scrap of detail tucked into his vibrant mental city.
‘Are we going to talk about what happened?’ I asked. ‘Last night.’
‘It went well, I thought,’ Pierce said. He had returned to poring over the map, making tiny adjustments here and there, as if planning a military operation. His casual manner, the complacent way he referred to what he had done, needled me.
‘Are you done now?’ I said, not disguising the scorn I felt. ‘Do you have what you need?’
‘Oh, not even slightly,’ Pierce said, very calm. ‘It’s given me an appetite. Thrilling, wasn’t it? I used to feel afraid – this ubiquitous fear that I had stopped noticing, it had become part of me – and I don’t any more. It’s gone.’
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what he wanted, and I suspected that I didn’t want to find out. And the same applied to me. Why was I here? To get to Pierce, somehow. To get to the end of his ploys and plans, to exhaust them. But there was more there, always, and indulging him only expanded his desires.
‘I liked the way you set it up,’ Pierce continued. ‘Using Tamesis.’
‘I didn’t do that,’ I said. ‘That was Quin.’
He hesitated. ‘Yes. But it was a clever idea.’
‘It wasn’t my idea. It was all Quin. He did it without saying anything to me.’
The map lost its power over Pierce. He turned, not looking around at me, but down, away, to the floor, into thought, brow creased.
‘How did Quin know what you wanted to do?’ I asked.
‘I may have spoken with him,’ Pierce said, with a hint of what might have been regret, or even guilt. ‘We’ve been in touch.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘He’s been moving us about like pins on your fucking map. And I don’t know why.’
Pierce kept his gaze away from the wall. ‘It’s his map,’ he said quietly. ‘Gather enough data about a person and you can manipulate them, guide their choices, get them doing what you want, and they might not even kno
w.’ He turned towards me, and stared. At first I thought I saw the gleam of tears in his eyes, but if they had been there, they went, he overcame them. ‘What if that’s also true of a city?’
I swallowed, and felt the tightness in my chest. How much dust and smoke had got into my system today? How much of London, as it remade itself?
‘All this time I’ve been wondering why he would waste his time jerking around a nonentity like me,’ Pierce said, and the words might as well have come from me, so closely did they match my thoughts. ‘What if it’s not me, not you? You know’ – again he was at the map, as if compelled, up close, eyes flickering from place to place, hands spread out, caressing – ‘my little plan, the map, the psychogeographical index, it wasn’t just about getting revenge on the psychogeographers, the other novelists. I mean, who gives a shit, really? They’re old, old. It was about … ownership. Taking ownership. Retaking it. The city was slipping away from me, from us all, and I wanted it back. And the same had applied to Night Traffic – trying to own a single moment. Because if I had that, no one else could have the whole. Part of it would always be mine alone.’
‘But it was false.’
He didn’t look at me, but he winced. ‘Well, if it was true, it wouldn’t belong only to me, would it? It would belong to … to the ones who …’ and he trailed away, absorbed in an internal struggle beyond my sight.
I had about a third of the can left, and I drained it. During the journey over, I had discovered a vodka miniature in my pocket, the last survivor of my stealthy office session yesterday. Only yesterday. It was warm.
‘Do you have any mixers?’ I asked. ‘Coke?’
‘Lemon squash?’ Pierce said absently.
It would do. I went to the kitchen and found the squash concentrate in a cupboard. Beside it was the whisky we had drunk together earlier in the week – about a quarter left. Whatever Pierce’s mental turmoil, he hadn’t been binge drinking, and I hated him for that.
I took the miniature from my coat pocket. That pocket also contained the postcard from my mother, the picture of the cockatoo. I took that out as well.