Plume

by Will Wiles

  ‘That’s not possible,’ I said.

  ‘It’s close,’ Pierce said. ‘Can’t you hear it? It’s so close.’

  Thick lines of crooked headstones like fans of fungus. Headless infants, handless angels. Tombs tipping into the dirt, or rearing from it. Even winter-bare, the trees and undergrowth hissed at our intrusion – this was not our place.

  There were no lights, and although the path we trod was clear and level, I had to scurry to keep up with Pierce, and feared that I might at any moment trip or slip amid the fallen masonry. But the plume lit our path, or rather the fire beneath it did, a beacon in the heart of the park. Our destination was a rushing geyser of fire, cupped in the black, skeletal hand of a car frame.

  The burning car was parked in an uneven clearing where paths converged. We slowed, feeling the heat on our faces. As we came into the glade, a tyre blew out and the car’s body shuddered, coughing up a rush of sparks. All around the naked branches danced and snatched, catching the light of the somersaulting flames. A wet slap of combusted petrol hit the back of my throat and I gagged, feeling again the damage Pierce’s arson had done to my lungs.

  Another tyre blew, putting a knot in the plume of smoke. We had entered the clearing, but stayed at its edge, near the line of tombs and trees, circling the car.

  ‘The fire’s just started,’ Pierce said. ‘Only a minute or two ago.’

  ‘Should we call someone?’

  Pierce was staring into the fire, but his gaze was askew – he was not looking at the funeral pyre of the car, but through it, to the far side of the clearing. The oily light of the blaze had saturated my eyes and at first I took the activity he was watching to be the dancing ghosts of the flames. But it was not – it was people, moving out before the trees. They had tracked us as we circuited the clearing, and now stood in the mouth of the path we had come by, blocking our return: three young men, looped together by volatile youthful energy, jostling and striding and laughing, and looking at us.

  Together, thinking the same, Pierce and I turned our heads the other way, to the next path from the clearing. And there were more, another four clustered around a bench, two men and two women, all young, full of strut and angry cheer. Two of this second group broke away and began to approach us. Quite by chance, we were caught in pincers.

  Horrid familiarity crept up inside me.

  It was happening again.

  I looked at Pierce, hoping to see some of the reassuring confidence I recalled from our earliest acquaintance, the good-for-all-occasions cockiness and charm that made him cheek police officers and lad it up with photographers. His face was hollow with horror, mouth a shapeless scrawl.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ the nearest youth said, jutting his chin at us. He was, like his companions, wearing a chunky puffer jacket, and it was impossible to place his age – mid-twenties, though the margin of error could be a decade wide each way. Everything in his stance and step was a challenge to us. Though they were dressed almost identically, the trio on that side were racially diverse; the advance party was black, the two behind them white and Asian.

  Exactly as Pierce had described in Night Traffic. A few years older, but as he described.

  I looked again at Pierce, not that I needed to gauge his thought, not that I needed confirmation.

  ‘I invented you,’ Pierce said in a whisper.

  You only see the threshold once you’re past it. Too late, always too late, you discover that the temper of the moment has passed, and you’re in another place, another city.

  ‘You calling someone, bruv?’

  To my amazement, I found that this was addressed to me. I had had the sensation – the reassuring delusion – that somehow this might all be for Pierce, laid on solely for his benefit, and would flow past me. Perhaps this was an after-effect of last night, with De Chauncey, when I had been a bystander in a bubble of safety. But that was fantasy. I was here. I was involved.

  My phone was in my hand. ‘No, not calling anyone,’ I said. I eased my phone into my coat pocket. ‘We’re just leaving.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  Familiar.

  I was aware of the other two, manoeuvring at the left periphery of my sight.

  ‘How ’bout you give me that,’ the man said, eyes on my coat pocket.

  I breathed in hard, filling my nose and lungs with the rough stink of the burning car. Its warmth was the most comforting thing around.

  ‘No,’ I said. Not so familiar.

  The young man cocked his head to one side.

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ Pierce said, voice quiet and wavering where mine had been firmer than I expected. He took a messy step backwards.

  ‘Ffff …’ one of the pair in the rearguard said.

  Our challenger turned to him.

  ‘We fucking know this prick,’ his friend said. ‘From before.’

  Pierce took another step back, and I sensed movement behind me.

  A smile spread across the lead man’s face, mockingly slanted to one side.

  ‘You going to write about us?’

  Pierce emitted a demi-human groan and spun, clumsily, making to run. The lead youth lunged towards him. As the youth passed me, I moved, taking my hands from my pockets and shoving him in the flank. He sprawled over, off the path, into the graves.

  It had all happened in an instinctive moment, feeling like precisely timed force, but the scene it birthed was bumbling farce. Pierce had stumbled, and was bent back, almost seated, in an awkward crab-like pose; his antagonist was also momentarily incapacitated, rolling on his side amid the chaos of stone and bramble around the clearing. Rough hands grabbed one of my sleeves, but ineptly, distracted by the low spectacle. Pierce had scrambled over onto his side, and was reaching into his coat. He gathered himself back to his feet as his opponent did, but now there was a spark in his hand, a flash of fire reflected off polished metal.

  ‘Blade!’

  I tore myself free of the youth who had grabbed my coat; he was too preoccupied with the unfolding confrontation to improve his hold, or to try to stop me.

  The knife had come from the wood block in Pierce’s kitchen. He was holding it close to his hip, pointed out, forward, at the young man in front of him. I could see no reason in the writer’s eyes, only frothing animal impulse.

  ‘Pierce, listen to me,’ I began, but I had nowhere to go.

  ‘I created you!’ Pierce shouted, with enough ragged force that the young man quailed a little; for a moment I imagined he might be asking himself if he really was a figment of Pierce’s imagination, but it was a quite natural reaction in the face of an unpredictable, distraught person carrying a knife. Even if he was having doubts about his own existence, I found mine melting away. I knew at once that Pierce had invented nothing: Night Traffic was the whole truth.

  But Pierce sincerely believed that he had invented it – and if he sincerely believed that the people in front of him were no more than phantasms that he, the author, could summon and dismiss, then we were all in terrible danger, not least the man presently under the point of the knife.

  ‘Pierce, they’re real, they’re all real,’ I said.

  It was too late. Pierce moved, the start of a charge, intent on carving an edit into his ‘creation’. And I moved, incapable of subtlety, astonished that I could be doing the same act twice in less than a minute, no more than a lump of dumb matter, an obstruction that could be placed in the path of disaster.

  We crunched together, a clumsy heavy-coated mismatch of joints and weights, and I felt the knife between us, like a toothpick caught in closing jaws; then we hit the ground, Pierce on top of me, and the knife, caught between us, did not turn one way or another but went rigidly in.

  Pain, at my lowest rib on the left side. A point of light.

  Pierce rolled off me, and I put my hand to the hurt, expecting worse pain and torn cloth and slick warmth. No.

  The three men had backed away, nonplussed at what had happened. One was hissing, ‘Fuck sake! Fuck sake!�
� to himself.

  A white shape swooped over me, slicing through the smoke still erupting from the burning car and sending it coiling and curling. I felt the downbeat of wings against my face.

  The shape burst into light. I was dazzled, and night was made day. The long, cold grass around me was made green and lush, and every detail of the scene was made perfect. Was I that badly injured, to have come to the Elysian field? I felt fine, not dead, but how should the dead feel but fine? Standing, I thought I might see that I had left my body behind; but it had stood with me, we were still very much connected. I was alive.

  I winced into the light and shielded my eyes. Rotors whined.

  ‘This is the police,’ said a voice above, an amplified recording. ‘Disperse immediately.’

  The drone’s lights swept the clearing, ending their dazzling focus on me and letting me get a good look at the machine: four fat rotors clover-leafed around a hub of cameras and lights, the blue badge of the Metropolitan Police transferred on its white and yellow hull.

  ‘Disperse immediately,’ the drone repeated, and the youths needed no further invitation – they scattered like birds at a gunshot.

  Pierce did not budge. He lay exactly where he had slumped after tumbling off me. His hand was still clasped around the handle of the knife, the blade of which was lost inside his chest. He stared into the open night sky, not looking at the drone or the widening smoke from the wreck of the car, not looking at anything.

  ‘Disperse immediately,’ the drone repeated in its curt recorded voice. It spoke only to me, and I listened.

  I did not go back the way I had come in. I did not fancy returning by the meandering path we had followed from the main entrance, especially if there was any risk that the youths had paused in their flight upon reaching the street – or worse, were being held there by the police. Besides, the nearest gate lay to the north, at the end of a wide, straight path.

  Once I was out of the cemetery, I had a clear view along an alley that followed its wall towards the entrance corner, and no blue lights were congregated there, or hooded figures. The smoke from the car was weakening as the blaze burned itself out, and by the time I reached the main road it could no longer be seen. A fire engine streaked past, sirens shrieking, turning towards the park.

  There had been no fraud. Night Traffic was the truth, and Pierce’s confession was the lie. I had understood as soon as Pierce had recognised our assailants in the cemetery – our would-be assailants. All the inconsistencies in his account had evaporated at once, and all his evasions had been explained. Quin had uncovered no evidence of deception because there was nothing to uncover; Pierce could not commit to giving details of what he had done, because he had not done it.

  Why, then, had Pierce been moved to confess to a crime that he had not committed? To a crime that had not been committed?

  I imagined Pierce in his hermitage, and the bright boys and girls of Bunk arriving, sifting his papers, turning up the notes he had made in the distraught days after the attack. He had not feared discovery of a lie – he had feared facing the truth.

  The attack described in Night Traffic had been real, and so the intense trauma he described there had also been real. He had told how he turned to writing in order to cope with that trauma. But he had gone further. He had convinced himself that by turning the attack into writing, he had turned it into fiction, that his description was his invention. He wanted it gone from memory, so he smoothed it into the realm of inspiration.

  When, though? Did the attack slip from fact to fiction during the writing? Possibly, but I suspected that Night Traffic became a fraud in Pierce’s mind later than that, once it became a success, and he was called upon to talk about it again and again, and to repeat and relive the events of that night over and over. Writing is abandoning. In making a record of our thoughts and experiences, we give ourselves permission to forget them. We put down our words – we leave them. But sometimes they get picked up, and brought back to us. I only knew this sensation in a small way, in my continual efforts to escape what I had written, and its mistakes and borrowings and fabrications. For Pierce the sensation must have been multiplied a thousandfold. At some point, sitting on a BBC sofa, his damaged mind had decided that it had created the pain that he was experiencing. The source of the inner conflict was obvious. There was a fraud in Night Traffic, in a way, a more sympathetic one: the book was an account of how writing had helped him heal. But he was not healed, far from it. There was the lie, or at least the error. And as he was obliged to endlessly repeat it, it contaminated the entire narrative.

  So he retreated from view – and then Quin’s unblinking eye was turned on his file cabinets, and the polite burglars started rifling through his office … The cognitive dissonance must have been intolerable. Inventing the fraud had safely bottled up the attack in the realm of fiction; but was the fraud real if it existed only in Pierce’s head, as a story he told only himself? No – stories can’t work like that. It had to be shared, it had to be confessed. And who better to serve as witness to this confession than Quin, pious arbiter of digital truth, the man fanatically sifting London’s facts from its myths?

  That prig, Quin.

  I halted at the portal of Mile End Underground Station. The bright pool of light at the head of the steps, the sober white lettering of the station sign, the nicotiney tiles, the warm waft of the tunnels, a haven of electricity and dust – it was all so reassuring, it was unbearable. My knees buckled and I retched. Staggering, I struck a recycling bin, and I steadied myself against it, belching swampy fumes, trying to regain control. My head throbbed. When did I last drink? In Pierce’s apartment – but the memory was interrupted, kicked, by bursts of image. When Pierce said he could see the plume. When we saw the burning car. When we saw the others in the clearing, surrounding us. When Pierce recognised them. When I saw the knife in Pierce’s hand. When I saw the drone. They hit me one by one, each a perfect shard of terror – no, facets of a united terror, catching the light in sequence, like a turning gemstone. Only now could I see the whole thing, and find that I could not take it as a whole. I had been in fear, the whole time, and now I was safe. Because there was another light flaring in my gathering recollection of what had just happened: why did Pierce have the knife?

  Bent against the bin like a busted umbrella, I drew some censorious glances. But I didn’t care. I had been through a terrible experience and I didn’t care. I could do what I liked.

  And there it was again. The feeling. Venomous freedom.

  Behind Victoria Station, where Pimlico meets Belgravia, lies a wearying net of characterless streets, distorted around the rail terminus like spacetime around a black hole. A couple of vestigial city grids collide, contorting in the process, with M.C. Escher effect; despite living nearby for years, I often found myself walking a ninety-degree angle to the one I expected, or even the opposite direction. I was never quite able to build a proper mental map of this urban fault. And by a sick joke of planning, this is one of London’s gateways, where tourists and visitors totter off airport trains and coaches. They roam ceaselessly in bewildered herds, suitcase wheels grumbling.

  It was the pinnacle of summer. The days were warm and bright, though they grew shorter. Elise and I had been to St James’s Park, to meet friends and enjoy the fringes of the Olympic events at Horse Guards Parade. Fuchsia mazes of hoardings and fences, exhortations to excel and amaze. Cheerful volunteers and crowds. Distant loudspeaker announcements. Clusters of vans and trailers bursting with antennas and satellite dishes, lounging in the heat of throbbing generators. Little space could be found on the lawns, but we sat and ate a late picnic lunch from supermarket bags, and Elise held my hand. I crawled with discomfort and fatigue – not at the hand-holding, which was sweet and well-meant, but at the daily growing realisation that I was only delaying a horrible crash, that the end was coming, that these times, however good, could not last, and my withdrawal could not be endured. I had been sober a week.

  When
the park staled, one of our friends – our friends then, her friends now – suggested going to a pub off Ebury Street to watch the sport. Elise cast me a troubled look. But I had no intention of drinking, I wasn’t going to give in there. The pub, under her eye and in view of friends, was probably the safest place I could be, which is precisely why I hated it. I watched them with their pints – not Elise, she had orange juice out of sympathy and solidarity, and the ease with which she made that choice rubbed me wrong. I watched them and I held my soda and lime with white knuckles. Every now and then, when the others were diverted, Elise would smile at me and give my hand a squeeze. I hated that. Not because I hated her. On the contrary, I loved her, which made the threatened avalanche of failure all the worse. Not because she was doing the wrong thing. She was doing everything right, precisely as I would wish. She was thoughtful and gentle and generous of spirit – she gave me no excuse, and I hated that. A misstep, a sliver of spite, that was all I wanted, to give me a reason.

  When I could take it no longer, I said I wanted to go home. It was a pleasant evening, still light in the sky. Elise was reluctant to leave but prepared to if that was what I wanted, but I suggested that she stay and enjoy a real drink. We had not been there long, and they were more her friends than mine. I was being a drag. I would appreciate a quiet walk home, to clear my head. I expected her to suspect me, because everything I said felt like a lie, even though it was the truth. But she was ready to trust me. And she was right to. I wasn’t going to drink, I just wanted silence and solitude.

  I had to traverse the Victoria vortex. Many of the streets there are blind, with no homes or shops, only empty offices or high walls blocking off railway lines. Misjudging my bearings, I made a wrong turn, and found myself having to take a longer route. I was not lost; I gave it little thought.

  They might have seen me leave the pub, or they had simply guessed that was my origin, spying a leisure-wearing, unladen young man making his directionless way. My head was down, and I was walking without spirit. Perhaps I looked miserable and vulnerable. Perhaps I looked drunk.