Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

‘Yeah, I told you, ISSP.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Program.’ He pulled up the left leg of his jeans and showed me the grey band that circled his ankle. ‘Plastic. The tag beeps if I leave the area at night. I have to do therapy and re-education. And planting.’

  ‘Is that why you can’t go back to King’s Cross, Finsbury Park or the Elephant?’

  ‘No. I’ve got ASBOs on me in King’s Cross and Finsbury for fighting and that. And Shadwell Massive keeps me out of the east.’ He flicked his fingers at me in that silly gesture kids have copied from American music videos. ‘There’s places you can’t go after you’ve been marked. I got into a few sites and was given a warning.’

  I presumed he meant gang territories. There had been an article in the paper about a boy being pushed under a DLR train by three gang members who had forced him from the platform onto the track. An argument over a box of KFC. Dreadful.

  ‘Is that something to do with graffiti?’ I asked.

  ‘Do I look like I’m in fucking infants’ school? Online gaming. You hide code inside jpeg pixels so that when the other person opens it, their system crashes.’

  ‘Why would you want to?’

  ‘If they piss you off and that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to upset too many people.’ I thought of Lou’s son locked in his room, staring angrily into his computer screen while the street slept.

  ‘There’s people you don’t,’ he agreed. ‘Serious gunsters and a lot of jokers. The Lock City Crew in Harlesden, the Holy Smokes and Tooti Nung in Southall, the Drummond Street Boys in Camden, Snakeheads and Wo Shing Wo in Soho, Spanglers and Fireblades in Tottenham, Brick Lane Massive, Bengal Tigers, Cartel Crew in Brixton, maybe two dozen others. If you can convince the old git here to employ me more often, I won’t be such a drain on decent law-abiding society.’ He grinned at me, then lolloped off in the direction of Vauxhall Station, the ghost of a child shadowboxing as a man.

  ‘Hop in, Mrs. Cryer. We’ll get you a light,’ said the old boy.

  ‘I guess the lad told you there was nothing up there.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’ He held the car door open. ‘Come on.’

  The surface of the river pulsed with a sickly jaundice from the floodlit buildings. Lights strung between the lamp-posts looked mournful, not celebratory. Half the bulbs were dead or missing. The rain had calmed to a soft mist, leaving lakes in the corners of the roads. We were within sight of the Houses of Parliament, yet the area felt unsafe and poorly planned, usable only as a thoroughfare that would quickly take you somewhere else.

  ‘There aren’t many people around.’

  ‘It’s early. Never gets that busy around here because the roads don’t lead anywhere.’

  ‘All roads lead somewhere.’

  ‘They don’t go where you want them to.’ He returned his attention to the blurred slush of vehicles, an elderly meerkat checking for predators. ‘Quiet streets. I prefer it late, when the moon’s high and the river looks like it’s made of mercury.’

  ‘You like the river?’

  ‘Because there’s more space, and there are more trees. When I was young you used to be able to walk through the tops of them.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very likely.’

  ‘Down in Battersea Park they had a tree-walk right beside the river, rope bridges and Chinese lanterns. It was quite magical. You could do things like that when London wasn’t so crowded. Walk around empty museums, be the only person on a Tube platform.’

  I smiled. ‘Normally I’d be going to bed around now.’

  ‘You’re not a Londoner, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m from somewhere you won’t have heard of.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A town called Hamingwell. It’s near Orpington, in Kent.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t know that. The garage is over there.’ He stopped and pointed to a fierce bright area set back beside the railway arches of Vauxhall. ‘It doesn’t look it, but you’re fine around here. It’s a neutral zone. Over there, those are all gay bars. You’ll get queues outside later, it keeps the area safe.’ He brought the Wolseley to the kerb.

  The garage was an oasis of brilliance. As I walked into it, the ferocity of the light stung my eyes. An African man in an ancient Ford Fiesta pulled forward on the forecourt near the kiosk and began shouting at the Asian cashier. Suddenly he ran back to his car, jumped in and drove it forward until the bonnet nearly ruptured the glass booth. Customer and attendant were still swearing at each other as the cashier vaulted over his counter, came out and threw a beer bottle. It looped through the air to smash across the windscreen of the car. Grains of glass scattered like a bucket of ice being emptied from a height, a fragmenting prism sparkling across the concrete, but the Fiesta’s windscreen held. The African man appeared to be waving goodbye to the Asian. There was a dull snap in the air and the car lurched off, bouncing out into the oncoming traffic. It took me a moment to realise that a gun had been fired.

  ‘Sorry about that.’ The cashier was breathing hard and smoothing his hair back in place as he rang up the price of the battery light. ‘Fucking Nigerians are always driving off without paying. Fucking hell. Did you see? I got a fucking bullet hole in my canopy. Fuck me. Always fucking Nigerians. You never see fucking Asian kids juking each other for drugs on the fucking street corners, do you? Asian kids know how to fucking behave. Fuck. Sorry. That’ll be nine ninety nine.’

  Shocked, I picked up the battery light and walked back to the Wolseley. Even Lou didn’t swear that much. The old man was fiddling with the heater and appeared to have missed the entire episode. On reflection I decided it would probably have been safer to stay at the Ziggurat, with its reassuringly old-fashioned ghostly apparitions.

  ‘Do you know anything about psychogeography?’ he asked me as I climbed back in. The interior smelled of damp leather and rolling tobacco.

  ‘The garage guy was just shot at,’ I told him.

  ‘Did you get a licence plate?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh well.’ He squinted through the window and wiped it with a length of sleeve. Presumably he was satisfied with what he saw, because he started the engine and we set off. ‘The area has a history of violence. That’s probably why you attracted this vision of the girl and her attacker.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ever hear of the Starling Lane murder? The road ran right through here. It’s gone now. The police ended up chasing a phantom. Quite a scandal at the time. You always get ghosts near water. Specially in London.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The city’s riddled with it. The canals, the underground rivers, why do you think we have so many wells? Sadler’s Wells, Clerkenwell, Bridewell, Ladywell. Map the wells, connect the lines and you find that the streets of ancient London followed the hedgerows, which followed the rivers, because fields have to be watered. The lowlands were poor areas largely because they were close to the water-table and were always damp. Water and fog brought respiratory illnesses, the stagnant rivers brought cholera, and early deaths created superstitions; who wouldn’t want to wish a dead child back to life? That’s why ghost stories were more associated with say, the poor East End than the city’s prosperous hilly north. The London of my early childhood was a city of ghosts. Despite the fact that mere proximity to the Thames was once enough to kill you, its mystical significance was once so strong that the Romans floated gods upon it.’

  I unsmeared the window and looked out. The Wolseley had pulled up in front of the Ziggurat. ‘Your building, it’s a conversion,’ he explained. ‘It used to belong to a petrochemical company. Ex-Ministry of Defence property, before that slum houses, back to back all the way along the river. I’m not saying you saw dead people, but perhaps you attracted a similar event. Areas don’t change. It’s not a supernatural thing, just the past coming through, like a leak. Even water leaves a stain.’

  ‘I didn’t dream it.’


  ‘You have to face the possibility that you did. Dreams are just electrostatic discharge, images from the waking day. Your subconscious forces a narrative onto them, but the story doesn’t hold any logic. Don’t be scared. If you see anything strange again remember, it might not even be there, so it’s nothing to worry about.’

  This wasn’t much of a comfort, or something I ever expected to hear from a former police officer. ‘You get a lot of stuff from the past coming up near the river. It’s the only thing around here that never changes. It runs through the city like a dirty artery. The water, the riverbed, the shoreline, just like they always were, you’re bound to get things coming through.’ He made it sound like a plumbing problem.

  ‘I didn’t realise that.’

  I stood on the steps, sorry to see the Wolseley leave. The old man wanted to wait until I was right inside, and only left after I assured him I would be all right. The river blotted light, creating a dark vacuum in a jaundiced sky. When I looked at the dark building above me, my nerve failed.

  I couldn’t bring myself to go in.

  Clutching the handle of the red plastic battery light, I waited at the edge of the road and stared up at the Ziggurat. I could still hear the Wolseley retreating in the distance. For a moment I felt like running after it. The old man had apologised for not being able to do more, but I felt equally bad about being unable to provide proof of what I had seen. I felt jumpy and displaced, as though I had taken one of Lou’s diet tablets. Lou believes everything operates on a basic chemical level. She says husbands are like arsenic; tolerable in very small amounts but cumulatively fatal.

  The glistening angles of the Ziggurat reared up before its ancient counterpart, the only other building in the area that stood in total darkness, Lambeth Palace. I had watched a programme about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official residence only a few days earlier. It had been intended as a college for monks in the twelfth century, and its secular history was peppered with violent incident. Rioters, rebels, murderers and book-burners had trodden the grounds. One of its deceased archbishops, Matthew ‘Nosey’ Parker, had been dug up and reburied in a dunghill. During the time leading to the Restoration it was used as a prison, and in the second world war its ancient stones were cracked apart by German bombs.

  The Ziggurat had no history, and perhaps no future, but the land on which it was built could tell a thousand tales. This was what gave it a melancholy air that no amount of glass and concrete could dispel.

  So perhaps – just perhaps – I had seen a ghost. Except there had been blood. Or had I somehow cut myself, as the medic had suggested?

  I couldn’t go back there, not yet.

  I had loaded all my change from different pockets into my purse; the total came to eighteen pounds eleven pence, and I thought there was a small amount left on my Connect card. It felt like the aftermath of the event, and I wondered what to do next.

  I didn’t realise how much worse things would get.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Cassandra

  I WALKED BACK towards the river, trying to work out my next move.

  You always wanted a chance to be strong, June. Well, now you have it. See the weekend through, there’s nothing left for you in Hamingwell, not even a bed. I had never imagined leaving, let alone on such bad terms. A few days ago, the idea of changing surroundings had been as unthinkable as divorce or suicide. Lou always complained that Hamingwell was a prison, but it was still her home. She was full of ideas about taking revenge on her husband and son, but never got around to leaving them. I knew she had no intention of getting out because she’d just got new kitchen units. Not knowing what else to do, I decided to call her. I needed to talk to someone.

  Lou always answered the phone on the second ring when she’d been drinking; instead of slowing her down, alcohol made her hypertense. Tonight she sounded as drunk as a dean.

  ‘Darling, where the hell are you?’

  I could hear Lou’s TV in the background, and felt as though I had caught her out. Lou was probably sitting at home with her family, watching in an alcoholic haze, eating from a plate that was balanced on her knees, carping against a husband who was waiting for her anger to be soporifically displaced. I wanted to explain what had happened, but knew I would end up frightening myself again.

  ‘June, I can hear you breathing but you’re not saying anything. Either that, or you’re speaking in a voice that goes beyond my hearing range. Lately I’ve developed the ability to screen out the sound of the telly. All I can see is pictures of murdered grannies and mouths moving. Darren’s watching serial killer crime re-enactments, probably studying them for tips. I think it’s Harold Shipman. Shame for Primrose, she must have been a size eighteen. I thought you’d have texted me fifty times by now. Hang on, let me take this in the kitchen. There’s a bottle of vodka in the tumble dryer. Okay, I’m back. What’s that noise?’

  ‘Some drunk bloke is singing through a traffic cone. I’m in a South London street, near the river, just past Lambeth Palace.’

  ‘What on earth are you doing there at this time of night?’

  ‘I can’t charge my mobile because the power’s off, so I’ll have to be quick. Something’s happened.’

  ‘How is the place? Julie says it’s great. The perfect place to break up a married man’s marriage. Darling, I’ve got to tell you, I had a fight with Hadrian today, the worst we’ve had in weeks. He’s been caught trying to sell Hungarian women. You know, mail-order brides, on the bloody internet if you please. I wondered why he had so many photographs of skanky blondes on his bedroom wall. He’s been acting as an agent for some dodgy company, lied about his age, running up debts and giving people this address. We had bailiffs round, how Victorian is that? Darren freaked out, seems to think it’s all my fault. I had the police here, everything. Did it ever occur to you –’

  ‘Lou, I need your advice –’

  ‘Did it ever occur to you what a raw deal married women end up with? The single ones get all the empowerment and equal opportunities and beating men at their own game, and we get the last of the dinosaurs and their disgusting throwback offspring. I didn’t have Victoria Beckham as a role model when I was at school. Mind you, she never smiles, does she? There’s not a happy woman over thirty in our street, they’re all pretending to make the best of things because they chose marriage. That’s what happens when you spend your formative years flicking through bridal magazines in the hairdressers. What did you want?’

  ‘Forget it. I’m fine. I just thought I’d see how you were.’

  ‘Darren and Hadrian had to go down the police station to try and sort out the mess. I was out cold by the time they got back. You could always come here. I’ve still got your bottle of Bombay Sapphire under the sink. I can’t touch it because he smells it on my breath. You sure you’re fine? You don’t sound fine.’

  ‘There was a girl in Malcolm’s flat,’ I blurted out.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘When I went to get help she vanished and I’m not entirely sure that I’m not going mad.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘No, I... well, a bit –’

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘I met a very old man who used to be in the police, and a strange boy.’

  ‘Oh God, Malcolm’s paintings aren’t damaged, are they?’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘Will he find out what’s happened? There’s nothing broken, is there?’

  ‘There’s nobody there now. Nobody need ever know.’

  ‘If anyone else in the block finds out weird stuff has been going on, you’ll have to call Malcolm and tell him. Oh, June.’ Lou sighed wearily. ‘It wasn’t a complicated thing, just looking after the place. How did you let it happen?’

  ‘I haven’t let anything happen,’ I replied angrily.

  ‘I’m having trouble following you. I’d come over tonight but I’ve taken enough valium to drop a cow. Tell you wha
t, I’m coming up to town tomorrow. I’ll see you in the evening, around seven. I should be following whole sentences by then. Will you be all right tonight?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ I closed the mobile and dropped it into my jacket. The street was devoid of pedestrians, lit in a sulphurous shade that leeched out any other colour. Somehow it felt safer here than back in that blacked-out rectangle of concrete. I decided to take positive action and check into the nearest hotel. I’d figure out how to pay for it later.

  The Waterloo City Arms Hotel looked as if it had once been one of London’s invisible Edwardian buildings, crusted in streaks of railway soot that hung like fallen shadows below the window sills. A few uplighters and vertical banners had been added, along with a basement bar called METRO and a doorman sartorially pitched between a Royal Fusilier and a guardian of the Land of Oz, and suddenly a low-end dump used by tired salesmen during conferences had been repositioned as a faux-boutique stop on tourists’ tours of Europe.

  The bony-faced desk clerk studied my mismatched clothes with an odd intensity. He wore a thin brass badge on his lapel, like a stationmaster, with his name, Nizwar, etched on it. He looked like he’d been working nights all his life. Unnerved, I glanced away at a fiercely ugly Chinese vase standing on a plinth in its own alcove. The hotel foyer was as over-decorated as my house in Hamingwell. Dusty swathes of marigold, lilac, primrose and lavender, colours found in the homes of old people. Why is he taking so long? I wondered.

  When the clerk glanced up, I could see that he hated me, and couldn’t imagine what I had done to upset him. ‘I need to take an imprint of a major credit card,’ he stated flatly. In a place like this? I thought.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any at the moment.’ I tried to sound calm.

  There was an imperceptible narrowing of Nizwar’s eyes. ‘You have any luggage?’

  ‘No, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision.’

  The narrow eyes were now joined by smug thin lips. ‘I’ve seen you in here before. I remember those earrings.’

  I fingered my golden plastic sunflowers in some embarrassment. ‘I don’t see how you could have. I’ve never been here before.’