Plume

by Will Wiles

  Room temperature vodka and room temperature lemon squash alone would be revolting. Looking in Pierce’s fridge, I found a full filter jug of water, and a couple more cans of Heineken. I took out another can, and opened it. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted from Pierce, but drinking all of his booze was a good start.

  When I turned to leave the kitchen, Pierce was standing in the archway. He leaned against the wall as if relaxed, but his whole manner was devoid of nonchalance.

  ‘Making yourself at home?’ he said, coming through and checking over the kitchen as if trying to discern what I had stolen. Arriving at a wooden knife block, he tapped his index finger on the handle of each of the four blades it held. Counting them? Checking I hadn’t armed myself? Had he used one of those knives the previous night to threaten De Chauncey? Was I in danger?

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked. In his hand was the postcard from my parents, which I had left on the counter.

  ‘I got it this morning,’ I said. Pierce was already reading the back, so it was superfluous to explain who had sent it. ‘By the time it arrived, there was no letterbox for it to go through.’

  ‘Huh,’ Pierce said. ‘Mugged, twice, and then your house falls down. Authentic experiences seem to follow you around. Some people have all the luck.’

  ‘Mugged three times, now,’ I said, fixing Pierce with a stare. Or trying to, because he turned his back on me, and opened a kitchen drawer. For a moment I thought he might be putting the postcard in there, but he had left it on the side, and it wasn’t clear what he was doing – taking out a small object, a tiny glitter of chrome, a weapon? But it was small enough to palm without my seeing more. Why was I so nervous around Pierce? His behaviour was off, for sure. Did I have reason to fear him? Or was I sensing my own conflicted motives reflected back at me? Did I mean to hurt Pierce?

  ‘I guess that’s right,’ Pierce said, returning to the living room. ‘Three times. You never did tell me about the second time.’

  Nor did I intend to. Not at this moment, in any case. My gaze had rested upon the cockatoo, which tipped its head at me, as if waiting for me to say or do something.

  ‘It’s weird, actually, what you say about authenticity following me around,’ I began, not really knowing where to begin. ‘Because for the past few days, I’ve had the impression that I’ve been followed around by …’ I couldn’t finish. It sounded too odd, spoken aloud.

  ‘By what?’ Pierce’s voice came from the living room.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I must have got a lungful of fumes when we went to Barking, and it’s been messing with my head.’

  ‘We were equally exposed,’ Pierce said. ‘What’s following you around?’

  ‘Smoke,’ I said. And as I spoke, my nostrils filled with the smell of burning, unbelievably strong and real.

  I clamped my eyes shut. It’s not real, I told myself firmly. It’s a panic attack. I’m stressed, I can’t cope with my circumstances, and my mind tells me to get out as fast as possible. And it creates a reason to do so. That’s what’s been happening. There’s no smoke, it’s an incentive conjured up by the flee reflex in the brain.

  The smell was only intensifying. I breathed in hard to try to show myself that the sensations were coming from within, not from the atmosphere. The incinerator stench was overwhelming, and I erupted into a coughing fit.

  This was ridiculous. It’s not real, none of it is real.

  The kitchen smoke alarm burst into noise, a staccato electronic peal. I was standing directly beneath it, and it was loud enough to cause pain, a spike driven into the head.

  I opened my eyes. Smoke was pouring under the kitchen arch in a solid grey river, drawn by the open window over the sink.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Shit!’

  I lunged into the living room. Smoke swirled across the ceiling and hazed the rest of the room. Its source was the wall-map, where a patch of flame, centred on east London, was licking upwards and outwards. Its bright orange tongues snaked with easy grace through the dry kindling of the notes and clippings. With every passing second a score of new leaves curled, smoked and ignited. Many detached from the map, carrying fire down to the lower portions of the wall and the floor.

  Pierce stood with his back to me, staring at what he had done. In his hand was a lighter.

  ‘Shit,’ I repeated. I twisted on the spot, torn between actions – get Pierce away, or combat the fire? It was immediately, instinctively obvious that he would not help. The blaze covered the entirety of the eastern borough of Newham and most of Barking, and had spread as far north as Walthamstow and Epping; flames were licking soot over the cornice and ceiling, which would soon be burning. Meanwhile the fire spread west, marching through the East End, where Pierce’s overgrowth of annotations was thickest. Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs were ablaze, and the inferno had reached Pierce’s home in Mile End – this was what had his attention, watching the fire creep towards the position of his house, even as his real house was on fire.

  On fire, and perhaps only seconds away from being beyond hope of control.

  I had seen the red cowling of a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. But when I dashed back there, all I found was a fire blanket, fixed to the wall by the stove – good for stifling pan fires, less useful for the kind of conflagration taking hold in the living room. Nevertheless I took hold of the release tags and pulled with such force that the whole affair, plastic cover and all, came off the wall. As I tried to separate blanket and container, I saw the jug of filter water on the side, left there when I gave up making my little cocktail. I grabbed it and ran, as fast as I dared without spilling the water, back into the living room.

  It was bad, really bad. Returning to the living room I took a lungful of the smoke, which was thicker and nastier than it had been just seconds earlier, and hung lower in the room. It was as if I had tried to breathe water, polluted water – my lungs revolted, my eyes flooded with stinging tears, and I doubled over, only preserving the water in the jug by a phenomenal act of will.

  Pierce appeared unaffected, and continued to watch the fire. Half the map was alight, all of London east of St Paul’s. The fire had caught at the cornice and on spots of the floor. I stamped across the floor, scattering smouldering debris, and aimed high with the water, towards Tottenham, trying to quench the fire at the point that it threatened the ceiling. The jug was exhausted in two large sloshes, the third was a pathetic spray of drops, and while some of the rage was knocked from the fire, it was not exhausted, and its boundaries moved ever outwards.

  Increasingly light-headed, I turned to the blanket, first holding it out like a sail to see how wide an area I could smother – not enough. But clutching its upper corners in my fists made me think – it was fireproof, right? I changed my hold, trying to wrap it around my hands as best as I could, and then tried to knock the burning notes from the wall, breaking up the largest patches of the fire and scraping firebreaks, stamping on the flames that fell to the floor. Embers went in my hair and eyes and bit at my cheeks; grey pushed in at the edges of vision. I had to stop, after making what seemed like little difference, to retreat and double over, coughing and retching.

  But Pierce had awoken from his trance and had disappeared into the kitchen. He reappeared with a blue plastic mop bucket, much bigger than the jug, even only filled halfway, and directed it at the fiercest points of the fire, across Hackney and Leyton.

  Without speaking, we worked together. Pierce hit the greatest concentrations of flame, and I swiped and stamped and snuffed the leftovers and fringes with the blanket. We fought for what felt like an age, though it had been less than ten minutes since he had sparked the lighter, and when we were sure the danger was past and all the windows were open to thin the smoke, we splashed across the sodden floor to the couch, coughing and weeping and spitting.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I said, as soon as it was possible to croak out words. ‘You could have killed us.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to take that
down for ages,’ Pierce said, with a nod towards the map. It was a ruin, two-thirds of it gone, only west London hanging on, damp and sagging from its pins. The cork tiles that had supported the map were blackened and scarred, some no more than charcoal, others fallen away to reveal the shocking, floury white of spalled plaster. A ridge of debris lay along the line of the skirting board, in a wide puddle of sooty water, soaking into a rucked, grimed rug. Despite the open windows, the room stank of smoke, and a haze of particulates perverted the light.

  ‘The people downstairs are going to be cross,’ I said.

  ‘I never see them,’ Pierce said. ‘Anyway, they can’t be cross. I’ve had a house fire. A terrifying accident. They’ll have to be sympathetic. There are rules.’

  Yes, malign sympathy. There it was, the sensation I had felt in the morning, sitting breathing the exhalations of my own destroyed house. The lure of freedom. But thought of it was cut short by another coughing fit.

  ‘What were you saying about being followed?’ Pierce asked. ‘Something about the fumes getting into your head …’

  I coughed again, and again, trying to dislodge the sack of charcoal briquettes that was crammed in my throat. I could taste blood, a little, and felt as if I were in the late stages of a chest infection. Light-headed, too. Perhaps I should have taken the paramedic’s advice and gone to hospital; perhaps I should go now.

  ‘It’s gone now, isn’t it?’ I said, unsure of how to approach the topic and fearful of the answers. ‘The column of smoke we followed on Tuesday. It’s gone – you couldn’t see it today?’

  ‘Today? It had cleared up the day after,’ Pierce said. ‘They put the fire out. Or it put itself out. From the look of the place there was nothing left to burn.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘The thing is – I can still see it.’

  ‘Still see what?’ Pierce asked. ‘The smoke column?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been able to see it ever since. No matter where I am. At night, even. As if it has been following me around. And getting closer, street by street.’

  Pierce didn’t say anything. I had his attention, at least, although it was impossible to read his gaze.

  ‘It sounds like an invitation,’ he said at last.

  Cold though it was, the street air tasted good after the soggy ashtray of Pierce’s flat. I breathed it deep, and was rewarded with another coughing fit. At least my head cleared a little, enough to remind myself that I had nowhere to sleep tonight. But Tamesis could take care of that, and it was not yet late. Pierce was insistent.

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t done this already,’ he said, once more alive with volatile energy. ‘Gone to the end of the rainbow, found the pot of gold.’

  ‘A notoriously futile and misguided activity,’ I said.

  ‘You said it’s no more than a couple of streets away,’ Pierce said. ‘You must have been tempted? Don’t you want to find out what’s there?’

  ‘I haven’t wanted to acknowledge it that much,’ I said. Pierce’s persistent questioning was once again putting me under pressure, and a voice within insisted that I was making a mistake. ‘Even talking about it with you gives it more significance than I would like,’ I continued. ‘I don’t expect to find anything, and I don’t want it to mean anything. If it isn’t fixed in a particular place, it must be centred on me. There’s nothing else to find.’

  ‘If there’s nothing to find, then there’s nothing to worry about, right?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘OK, think about it this way,’ Pierce said. ‘Has ignoring the smoke column made it go away?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No. It’s been getting bigger and closer, you said. So ignoring it hasn’t worked. Instead, let’s try tracing it, and maybe that’ll be what makes it go away and leave you alone.’

  There was logic to that. But I wished I had never mentioned the plume to Pierce, because I saw now that he had co-opted it as the basis of one of his adventures.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Which way do we go?’

  I kicked the pavement. ‘What are we doing here?’ I asked, not concealing my annoyance.

  Pierce shrugged. ‘You came to me.’

  True. Why had I done that? If it wasn’t to follow a story, what did I want from Pierce?

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’m doing here,’ Pierce said. ‘I am pursuing a process. We set out to make something happen – to make an event, a real event, to balance out the incident I invented. A truth for a lie. A true interaction with the city. And we haven’t quite got there yet.’

  ‘You didn’t get that last night? With De Chauncey?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. It was great, it felt amazing. But … I don’t like that Quin set it up. It was staged. Tainted. False.’

  ‘False? And chasing around an illusion, a hallucination, is truth?’

  ‘Don’t think of it that way,’ Pierce said. ‘Think of it as … pure. Untainted by outside interference. It’s Quin, see. Quin’s the problem. I thought he was trying to help, in his way – that he wanted to help the city, that he was trying to get it back. But he isn’t.’ He frowned hard, biting into a sour thought.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Last night I learned that Quin and De Chauncey were working together. Projects with landlords, with the police – he’s just another scumbag.’

  If this was news to Pierce, he hid his surprise. ‘It’s more advanced than that, I think. But Tamesis is certainly not what I thought it was. It’s not going to free the city. Anyway, this plume of yours is different. Nothing to do with Quin, or his little app. It’s from another place, a place inside, telling us which way to go. So, which way is that?’

  I pointed. There was no need to hunt around for the plume. It had been there all along, over Pierce’s shoulder – over both his shoulders, a curtain of looping, gulping yellow-black tar in the star-pricked sky, jaundiced light flickering where it squatted on the Mile End roofline.

  ‘That way, huh?’ Pierce said. His enthusiasm dimmed. ‘Across the road, I suppose?’

  I nodded.

  ‘OK then,’ he said, and he turned to fall into step beside me, and we walked south, towards the plume, towards the cemetery park.

  The red lights on the cranes crowded over the City gave the western horizon an industrial, petrochemical look, more refinery than business district. Which suited the half-built financial towers well enough – they dug and clawed and pumped as much as they rose and transcended. They were dirty, extractive objects, pummelling more and more value from the land that rooted them, and purifying it into glass and ineffable space.

  The smoke indoors was a product of panic attacks, but I had never decided about the plume. Was it a real phenomenon in the world, or a hallucination that existed only in my head? Neither possibility was very comforting, so I had never sought to reach a decision, keeping it to myself and keeping out of its way. Uncertainty was a more desirable state. No action required, no ugly conclusions.

  But now Pierce knew about it, and had pushed me into action. The probabilities were collapsing, and the plume appeared to know it. Our path took us directly south, cutting across Mile End Road, but there were no handy pedestrian lights, and I had to divert my attention from the skyline to the speeding evening traffic. Once we reached the other side, I looked again for the smoke, and could not find it. We walked down the side street that led towards the main entrance of the cemetery park, and I kept my eyes on the southern sky, where the plume had been seen last, waiting for it to reassert itself, perhaps with an apologetic cough.

  It did not. It was gone. The night sky was rained out, offensively clear, and I could see all of the twenty or thirty stars that London’s glare permits, and a nail-clipping of moon.

  At the entrance to the cemetery, with its gloomy lodge and war memorial, I hesitated. The plume was no longer there – it was pointless to go in. And I did not want to go in. There were no lights to guide us inside, it was a nature reserve, not a landscaped park, a pla
ce for birds and bats.

  I scanned the surrounding rooftops, to see if the plume might have popped up in another direction. ‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked Pierce.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Pierce replied. ‘You look lost. Are we going the right way?’

  My hunt for the plume continued, but its absence was as stubborn and disturbing as its recurrence had been. Time was slipping by. If I was going to find a place to sleep, I should do it soon. Then I could call my parents, or my sister, and try to make some longer-term arrangements. Make my ruin official. Pierce had evaded me to the last. Polly might still try to get a draft out of me, but even if I wanted to do the work, I doubted I could. I took out my phone to look at the time. Tamesis would know about hotels. Quin: he was the one I wanted to confront, but I could not imagine getting close to him.

  A wisp, within. The plume would not simply disappear like that. It had meaning. It had to have meaning. I had shunned it and turned from it, and it had persisted, and that persistence had been a promise, that it would reveal itself. And it had not gone as soon as I told Pierce about it, it had been fuller and stronger and angrier than ever, dominating the sky above him, indisputably centred here, at the cemetery. And it had not vanished when we set out to pursue it, but shortly after, once we were committed.

  ‘Never mind,’ Pierce said. ‘I see it.’

  He was staring past me, into the forested dark of the cemetery. When I turned, I saw he was telling the truth. A pillar of smoke climbed avidly above the trees, twisting and bulging with a fierce hunger, underlit by an infernal orange light. It was not the vast, distant cataclysm I had seen before, but it was, beyond question, real. And I fancied I could hear it: a keening whooping on the icy air.

  ‘You see that?’ I asked Pierce.

  ‘Plain as day,’ he said. He was transfixed by it, the expression on his face the same as when he had stood and watched his map burning. I was reminded of the ghastly fascination the plume had exerted over me the first time I had seen it.