Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Beverley got strangely agitated when she saw the firemen, and practically dragged me up James Street and away from the market. The riot seemed to be all over bar the media witch hunt, and TSG officers in full riot gear stood around in groups discussing baton technique and reattaching their ID numbers.

  We sat down on the plinth of the sundial column at Seven Dials and watched the emergency vehicles roaring past, Beverley flinching every time a fire engine went by. Still soaking wet, we were beginning to chill despite the warm evening. Beverley took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m in so much trouble,’ she said.

  I put my arm around her and she took the opportunity to slip one of her cold hands under my shirt and warm it against my ribs. ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said.

  ‘Just shut up and think warm thoughts,’ she said, as if that were hard with her breasts brushing up against my side.

  ‘So you burst a few pipes,’ I said. ‘How much trouble can you be in?’

  ‘Those were fire hydrants I messed with, which means the cult of Neptune’s going to be pissed,’ she said.

  ‘Cult of Neptune?’

  ‘London Fire Brigade,’ she said.

  ‘The London Fire Brigade are worshippers of the god Neptune?’

  ‘Not officially, no,’ she said. ‘But you know – sailors, Neptune, it’s a natural fit.’

  ‘The Fire Brigade are sailors?’

  ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘But in the old days when they were looking for disciplined guys who knew about water, ropes, ladders and didn’t freak out at altitude. On the other hand, you had a lot of sailors looking for a nice steady career on dry land – marriage made in heaven.’

  ‘Still, Neptune,’ I said. ‘Roman god of the sea?’

  Beverley laid her head on my shoulder. Her hair was wet, but I wasn’t complaining. ‘Sailors are superstitious,’ she said. ‘Even the religious ones know you got to have a little respect for the King of the Deeps.’

  ‘Have you met Neptune?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘There’s no such person. Anyway, I feel bad about the hydrants, but it’s Thames Water I’m worried about.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’I said. ‘Worshippers of dread Cthulhu.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re very religious at all, but you don’t piss off people who can release raw sewage into your headwaters,’ she said.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen your river.’

  Beverley turned and made herself comfortable against my chest. ‘I’ve got a place off the Kingston bypass,’ she said. ‘It’s just a semi, but my garden goes all the way down to the water.’ She lifted her head until her lips were brushing mine. ‘We could go swimming.’

  We kissed. She tasted of strawberries and cream and chewing gum. God knows where we might have gone after that, except a Range Rover screeched to a stop right by us and Beverley disengaged so fast I got lip burn.

  A stocky woman in jeans got out of the Range Rover and marched over. She was dark-skinned with a round expressive face that was, on this occasion, expressing a high degree of annoyance. ‘Beverley,’ she said, barely registering my presence. ‘You are in so much trouble – get in the car.’

  Beverley sighed, kissed me on the cheek and got up to meet her sister. I scrambled up myself, ignoring the pain from my bruised back.

  ‘Peter,’ said Beverley, ‘this is my sister, Fleet.’

  Fleet gave me a critical once-over. She looked to be in her early thirties, built like a sprinter – broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted with big muscular thighs. She wore a tweed jacket over a black polo neck, her hair trimmed down to a thick stubble. Looking at her gave me a weird sense of familiarity, like you get when you meet a minor celebrity whose name you can’t remember.

  ‘I’d love to get acquainted, Peter, but now is not the time,’ said Fleet. She turned to Beverley. ‘Get in the car.’

  Beverley gave me a sad little smile and did what she was told.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I know you from somewhere.’

  ‘You went to the same school as my kids,’ she said, and climbed back into her Range Rover. The door had barely closed before Fleet started yelling at Beverley. It was muffled but the phrase ‘irresponsible child’ was clearly audible. Beverley saw me watching and rolled her eyes. I wondered what it was like to grow up with that many sisters. I thought it might be nice to have someone pick me up in their Range Rover, even if they were going to shout at me all the way home.

  It’s a funny thing about a London riot, but once you’re outside the perimeter, nothing seems to be different. On the minus side, Covent Garden had nearly burned down, but on the positive side there weren’t any major bus routes or tube lines affected. It was dark, I was soaked, the Folly was still out of bounds and I didn’t fancy spending another night in that chair in Nightingale’s hospital room. I did what everyone does when they’ve run out of options – I went back to the one place where, when you turn up, they have to let you in.

  I made the mistake of catching the tube. It was crowded with people heading back from an evening out. Even that late in the evening it was warm and close inside the coach but wet, dishevelled and slightly ethnic as I was, I got more elbow room than anyone else.

  My back and leg hurt, I was tired and I was missing something. I’ve never trusted the idea of policeman’s gut instinct. I’d watched Lesley at work, and every time she guessed right it was because she’d spotted something I’d missed, dug a bit further or thought a little bit harder about a case. If I was going to save her life, I was going to have to do the same.

  More people got on at Goodge Street. It got hotter, but at least I was beginning to dry out. A guy in tan slacks and an off-the-peg blue blazer took the space by the connecting door on my right, close enough for me to catch the tinny backbeat from his iPod earpieces. I began to feel reassuringly anonymous again.

  None of the references to revenants I’d read had provided a clear idea of how or why an ordinary ghost gained the ability to suck the magic out of other ghosts. My working theory about ghosts was that they were copies of personalities that had somehow imprinted into the magic residue that accumulated on physical objects – the vestigia. I suspected ghosts degraded over time in the same way that stuff recorded on magnetic tape degrades, unless their signal was boosted with more magic, hence the need to suck it out of other ghosts.

  We must have picked up a ranting drunk at Warren Street, because after a brief wind-up he was in full flow by the time we reached Euston. There I was, distracted by a young woman in a pink halter with more cleavage than I thought physically possible who got on and leaned against the glass partition opposite me. I looked away before she caught my eye, and shifted my focus to the nearest advert. I felt the guy in the blue blazer shift position, and guessed he was doing the same thing.

  A white boy with dreads lurched into my little corner of the train and I caught a whiff of patchouli, tobacco and marijuana. The woman in the halter top hesitated and then moved closer to me – apparently I was the lesser of two evils.

  ‘The dogs, the dogs,’ shouted the ranting drunk from somewhere down the other end of the carriage. ‘This country is going to the dogs.’ The happy train lurched into movement again.

  Revenants had to be rare or there’d be no ghosts left for them to feed on, which brought me back to my question: what made a revenant? Psychological state at the moment of death, maybe? Henry Pyke had died a pointless and unjust death even by the lax standards of the eighteenth century but even so, his resentment at Charles Macklin and burning disappointment at the sad state of his acting career didn’t seem enough motivation to make him want to force poor Bernard Coopertown to beat his wife to death.

  ‘Used to be a fucking paradise,’ shouted the ranting drunk. He couldn’t be talking about Camden Town which, despite the markets, had never really aspired to much more than shabby respectability.

  Camden tube station is where the Northern Line splits into the Edgware and High Barnet branches,
and here loads of people got off and even more people got on. We all crushed up a bit more and I found myself staring at the top of the woman in the halter top’s head – she had blonde roots and dandruff. The man in the blue blazer got shoved in from the right, and between them they had me boxed against the door. We all shuffled about trying to keep our armpits out of each other’s faces – just because it’s uncomfortable, there’s really no excuse for not maintaining standards or making eye contact.

  The ranting drunk welcomed everyone aboard. ‘The more the merrier,’ he said. ‘Let’s have the whole fucking world in here – why not?’

  The smell of the white boy with dreads intensified, adding urine and excrement – I wondered when he’d last changed his fake combat trousers.

  Less than a minute out of Camden Town, the train lurched to a stop. An almost subliminal groan rose from the passengers, especially when the lights dimmed as well. I heard someone chuckling at the other end of the carriage.

  There had to be something else behind Henry Pyke, I thought, something much worse than a bitter failed actor.

  ‘Of course there is,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘That would be me.’

  I craned my neck to spot the drunk, but my view was blocked by the white boy with dreads whose face now had an expression of dumb satisfaction. The smell of shit got worse, and I realised the boy had just relieved himself in his pants. He caught my eye and gave me a big smile of contentment.

  ‘Who are you?’ I shouted. I tried to get out of my corner but the woman in the halter top thrust herself backwards and pinned me to the wall. The lights dimmed further, and this time the groan from the passengers was anything but subliminal.

  ‘I’m the demon drink,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘I’m gin lane and your local crack house. I’m a follower of Captain Swing, Watt Tyler and Oswald Mosley. I’m the grinning face in the window of the hansom cab; I made Dickens long for the countryside and I’m what your Masters are afraid of.’

  I pushed at the woman in the halter top but my arms felt heavy, useless as if in a nightmare. She started to rub herself against me. The carriage was getting hotter and I began to sweat. A hand suddenly grabbed hold of my backside and squeezed tight – it was the man in the blue blazer. I was so shocked that I froze up. I looked at his face but he was staring straight forward with the typically bored, abstracted expression of a seasoned traveller. The bleed from his iPod was louder and more irritating than it had been.

  I gagged on the smell of shit and shoved the woman in the halter top enough to get a view down the carriage. I saw my ranting drunk – he had the face of Mr Punch.

  The man in the blazer let go of my arse and tried to stick his hand down the back of my jeans. The woman in the halter top ground her hips into my crotch.

  ‘Is this,’ shouted Mr Punch, ‘any way for a young man to live?’

  The white boy with dreads leaned towards me and with great deliberation poked me in the face with his index finger. ‘Poke,’ he said, and giggled. Then he did it again.

  There’s a point where a human being will lose it, just lash out at everything around them. Some people spend their lives on the edge of that – most of them end up doing time in prison. Some, a lot of them women, get ground down to that point over years, until one day it’s hello, burning bed and a legal defence of extreme provocation.

  I was at that point, and I could feel the righteous anger. How wonderful it would be just to fuck the consequences and let rip. Because sometimes you just want the fucking universe to take some notice – is that too fucking much to ask for?

  Then I realised that was what it was all about.

  Mr Punch – the spirit of riot and rebellion – does what it says on the tin. This was him, the guy behind Henry Pyke, and he was fucking with my mind.

  ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘Henry Pyke, Coopertown, that cycle courier, lots of frustration – but that’s everyone in the big city, ain’t it, Mr Punch? And what percentage actually let you in? I bet you’ve got a piss-poor success rate – so you can just fuck off out of it – I’m going home to bed.’

  At that point I realised that the train was moving again, the lights were up and the man in the blue blazer didn’t have his hand down my trousers. The ranting drunk was silent. Everybody in the carriage was studiously not looking at me.

  I bailed at Kentish Town, the very next stop. Fortunately it was where I wanted to go.

  From September 1944 to March 1945, that lovable Nazi scamp Wernher Von Braun aimed his V2 rockets at the stars and yet, in the words of the song, somehow hit London instead. When my dad was growing up, the city was dotted with bombsites, gaps in the neat rows of houses where homes had been obliterated. In the postwar years these sites were gradually cleared and rebuilt in a series of ghastly architectural mistakes. My dad liked to claim that the mistake where I grew up was built on a V2 impact site, but I suspect it was probably just an ordinary cluster of German high explosives dropped by a conventional bomber.

  Still, whatever caused the two-hundred-metre gap in the Victorian terraces lining Leighton Road, the postwar planners weren’t going to pass up an opportunity to make mistakes on this scale. Built in the 1950s, the blocks of the Peckwater Estate are six storeys high, rectangular and constructed, as a final aesthetic touch, of a dirty grey brick that weathered badly. As a result, when the clean air act put an end to the famous London pea-soupers and they started sand-blasting the old buildings clean, the Peckwater Estate came out looking worse than it had before.

  The flats were solidly built, so at least I didn’t grow up listening to next door’s live docusoap, but they were built on the dubious assumption, so beloved of post-war planners, that the London working class was composed entirely of hobbits. My parents had a third-floor flat with a front door that opened onto an open-air walkway. When I’d been growing up, in the early 1990s, the walls had been covered in graffiti and the stairwell with dogshit. These days the graffiti was mostly gone and the dogshit got regularly hosed into the gutter which, by the standards of the Peckwater Estate, counted as gentrification. I still had my front-door key, which was just as well because when I got there I found my parents were out.

  This was unusual enough to give me pause. My dad’s in his early seventies and doesn’t move about much. I figured it had to be a major occasion, a wedding or a christening, for my mum to dress him up and drag him out of the house. I figured I’d hear all about it when they got home. I made myself a cup of tea with condensed milk and sugar and ate a couple of supermarket own-brand biscuits. Thus fortified, I went to my old bedroom to see if there was room for me to sleep in it.

  As soon as I’d moved out – and by this I mean about ten minutes after the door had closed behind me – my mum started using my bedroom for storage. It was full of cardboard moving boxes, each one stuffed to capacity and sealed shut with packing tape. I had to move several off the bed just to lie down. They were heavy and smelled of dust. On roughly a two-year cycle my mum collected clothes, shoes, cooking utensils and non-perishable beauty products, stuffed them into cardboard boxes and shipped them back to her family in Freetown. The fact that a great deal of her immediate family had already immigrated to the UK, the US and, strangely enough, Denmark never seemed to cause a reduction in the flow. African families are notoriously extended but from what I could gather, my mum was related to about half the population of Sierra Leone. I’d learned from an early age that anything I owned that I didn’t defend was subject to arbitrary seizure and deportation. My Lego, in particular, was the subject of a running battle from my eleventh birthday on, when Mum decided that I was too old for such things. In my fourteenth year it mysteriously vanished while I was on a school trip.

  I prised off my shoes, climbed under the covers and was asleep before I could wonder where all my posters had gone.

  I woke briefly some hours later to the sound of the bedroom door being stealthily closed and the muffled sound of my dad’s voice. My mother said something which made my father laugh and,
comforted that everything was all right, I went back to sleep.

  I woke again, much later, with the morning sunlight slanting through my bedroom window. I lay on my back feeling refreshed, with a solid erection and the vague memory of an erotic dream about Beverley. What was I going to do about Beverley Brook? That I fancied her was a given, that she fancied me was pretty obvious, that she wasn’t entirely human was a worrying possibility. Beverley wanted me to go swimming in her river, and I had no idea what that meant except Isis had warned me against doing it. I had a strong feeling that you didn’t shag a daughter of the River Thames without getting out of your depth – literally.

  ‘It’s not that I’m scared of commitment,’ I said to the ceiling. ‘It’s just that I want to know what I’m committing to first.’

  ‘Are you awake then, Peter?’ said a soft voice outside my door – my father.

  ‘Yeah, Dad, I’m awake.’

  ‘Your mum’s left you some lunch,’ he said.

  Lunch, I thought. The day was half-done and nothing achieved so far. I rolled out of bed, squeezed past a stack of cardboard boxes and headed for the shower.

  The bathroom was as hobbit-sized as everything else in the flat, and it had only been by dint of some serious Polish retro-engineering that a power shower was shoehorned into the gap between the sink and the window. It was me that coughed up the cash for it, so I guaranteed I didn’t have to duck my head to get it wet. There was a new soap dispenser mounted beside the shower, the kind you find in the toilets of executive office suites, bought or liberated from a cleaning wholesaler. I’d noticed that the toilet paper and bath towels were much better brands than the ones we used when I was living at home – Mum was cleaning a much better class of office these days.