The Unblemished, page 20
This is not a busy pedestrian thoroughfare, although cars speed down it often. Across the road is an Indian restaurant and a grocer’s shop. He watches a man stand in the doorway of the shop while he smokes a cigarette. In a window above the restaurant he can see another man talking to a woman while they wash dishes. He can hear the soft clash of cutlery as it is dropped into a drawer. He can smell the cigarette smoke. He can hear the smoulder of the paper as the man takes a drag. He can see the smoke thicken in the deflated balloons of his lungs. He can hear the clunk of a petrol hose being fed into a tank at the station fifty metres away to his right. At these super-sensitive moments, coming to him more and more now, he feels as though he is some kind of conduit for all sensations, a living filter for experience.
He sits in the centre of the room. The fire affected this flat only tangentially: blistered paint on the door, sooty fingers reaching halfway across the magnolia walls. The smell of charred things is still in the air, though the fire has been dead a full six months. Bo had to come out at 4 a.m. with Col, one of the staff writers, to photograph it. He watched a woman leap from one of the windows further along this floor and fudged the shot of her, capturing only the mad dance of her long black hair in the corner of the frame. She was fine, bar the odd cut and bruise. She sat on the kerb and watched her home burn while a neighbour put blankets around her and gave her hot sweet tea to drink. She had the look of someone who had missed a bus, or found the bottle of milk she bought from the supermarket to have soured. It troubled Bo that her hair was straight and calm. In the moment of falling, she had seemed alive. Now she appeared to have been switched off, as if she had realised that moment would be the pinnacle of what it meant to experience life. He did not see her again, and did not know where she went, but it felt good to be living in the same building as she had. Now the memory of her hair seems important for another reason, but he cannot jolt its significance from the tired mess of his mind.
He turns his attention to the interior, listening to the voice of the tower block. He doesn’t think there are any other unofficial residents, but he never takes his time coming up the stairs, just in case. He doesn’t want to see, or be seen.
Water is sluicing in and around the building as if trying to rinse away something bad. The chatter of wind in the bone-dry litter of rooms unopened for months. The patter of mice feet, and their echo in tiny, industrious hearts. What could be the wind see-sawing through the keyholes and cracks might also be breath in resting, still bodies. He turns himself off from what is beginning to unsettle him.
Now it is safe to close his eyes. In the instant he does so, he feels the answering flicker of thousands of eyelids, and a massed curiosity, a drinking in of detail that is limited to a few square feet of dusty, varnished pine, all he is allowing them. He feels the usual combination of filthy invadedness and heart-stopping excitement. And he sees their development.
He sees:
the woman carrying shopping bags from the Waitrose on Marylebone High Street. She looks up at a passenger jet making chalk marks in the winter blue. On Knox Street she is hit by icy blasts of wind and dips her head closer to her scarf. Tiny silver cats hang in her pierced ears. At Paddington Gardens she can hear children laughing in the attractive playground, but before she can draw level to see, shapes move out of nowhere: two men, suddenly there, as if they peeled themselves from the colour of the brickwork. She’s shocked to indecision. She keeps her head down, her hands tight on her bags, and marches on. At the entrance to the Gardens, one of the men slips up behind her and grabs her wrist
LIKE THIS, MAP READER?
while the other sweeps a straight leg out and folds her over it
MAP READER, DO YOU APPROVE?
and they drag her into the shadows within earshot of those squealing children, jabbing her with their stings until she is still, her muscles seizing, her face warping with the pain and the toxins. They pull open her coat and blouse and with a horned, scalpel-sharp fingernail one of the men slits her open. They ransack her abdomen with a haste born of violent hunger. She’s trying to scream but all that pours forth is a dense ruby froth. Steam from her unveiled body obscures his view
for a moment and then
a father and his son on Parliament Hill beneath a broad sky the colour of overripe apple flesh. They’re kicking a ball back and to with the kind of easy skill that comes from long hours of practice. It’s getting colder. All of the kite fliers have gone home. London sits in its basin away to the south beneath a caul of amber pollution.
Dad’s asking him if he’s serious about Jenny and he’s shy from the questioning, he just wants to have a kick around. Two women walk out from the goal posts but he can see in the dad’s eyes, and the son’s eyes, that neither is certain that they were ever there on the other side of that thin barrier of wood.
‘I don’t fancy yours much,’ says Dad, smiling at his boy. The smile masks his uncertainty. He doesn’t like the way the women are staring at them. There’s something too naked, too raw and bestial about it. They’re dressed almost formally, their hair short and, he thinks, bookish; there’s nothing lascivious about them, apart from the eyes, which he can tell from here are drinking them in, almost watering with the strain.
‘C’mon, Jamie,’ says Dad. ‘Time to get home.’
THE SOLAR PLEXUS, MAP READER, FOR THE SWIFTEST PARALYSIS, YES?
They swoop after the man and boy and catch up with them before they reach the path that will take them to the park’s exit. The Swiss Re tower catches a last ray of sunshine and turns it into a closing bracket; a car farts and belches along Savernake Road.
‘Evening, ladies,’ Dad says, and gives them his most winning smile. It’s a smile that says, no trouble here. No trouble from me or my boy. We’re good. We’re on your side.
One of the women hits the boy so hard in the face with the heel of her hand that a rupture flashes red across the centre of his throat as his head snaps back.
TOO HARD, MAP READER. I THINK HE’S DEAD. SORRY.
Dad’s shocked, gargled ‘Hey’ of protest doesn’t make it past his lips. The other woman pulls him in close, bending him to his knees, peels back her skirt and sends the stinger at her groin powering into the hollow beneath his breastbone. He goes down like something shot. His eye is on that black, glossy ovipositor even as it snuggles back into its sheath, even as the breath catches in his frozen chest and his lips darken. They leave the boy. Dead meat is no good.
They drag the man to a hollowed tree and warehouse him, sealing him into the gap with mucus coaxed from their mouths. It looks, to him, as reality fades, that they are blowing him kisses.
Bo sees that opaque resin too, rising before his eyes. A blink and five youths dressed in black leap from a window in Poland Street. They clatter into a drunk weaving along the pavement trying to strike a light from the wrong end of a match. Moments later, one of the boys spins away, laughing, raising a bright red lung in his glistening fist. Mouth open, he squeezes oxygen-rich blood into his throat as if he were playing in the bath with a waterlogged sponge
and
at a school in Hammersmith, a loner pupil called Joe with alopaecia sits on his own in the corner of the canteen, picking at his sandwiches. The new girl comes to sit next to him. When the bell goes for the first double lesson of the afternoon, he doesn’t get up. The shutters come down hard on the serving area. The girl reaches out a hand that he takes. She leads him to the gym. Inside, to the rear of the games teacher’s office, is a storeroom filled with punctured footballs awaiting repair and old framed certificates telling of forgotten athletic achievements. She has trouble trying to sting him in the right place, and she cups his head in her hands so that she can look closely into his eyes.
WHERE AM I GOING WRONG, MAP READER?
She gently pushes him down to the floor and squats above him. With one hand she peels aside the gusset of her white underwear. She looks at herself with a detached fascination as she squeezes her buttocks together and makes the sting extrude, slowly, its tip weeping clear venom. She flicks it with her finger and it jounces and sways, making little involuntary thrusts at the air. She sees how its curve is causing her to slide ineffectually against him and repositions herself so that her hips are tilted at a higher angle than before. He lies beneath her breathing rapidly, his cheeks ashen, his shirt slashed, his chest and belly a red game of noughts and crosses. The breath tumbles out of him like someone stepping into an uncomfortably hot bath as she buries herself to the hilt into his groin.
She pulls open a false wall at the back of the storeroom and places the boy alongside the games teacher, who is bound in thick white ropes of hardened organic glue. His eyes move dolefully, his jaw is broken, more of the glue holding the mandibles tightly in place so that they can neither crush nor prematurely release the wad of eggs crammed behind his teeth.
The girl closes the partition and returns to the playground. There are fewer children, fewer teachers now. A police car is positioned by the headmaster’s office. She turns her face to the sky and watches for the dark cloud.
Hundreds more incidents like that. Hundreds more requests for advice, for endorsement. It’s not just a map that he carries, it’s a blueprint for survival. He goes to the window and peels back a corner of a page devoted to the pros and cons of having sex in the workplace. He too looks for the dark cloud. The map has altered to accommodate it. Plenty of dark clouds. None that prick his interest.
The map is beginning to fascinate him. He wonders why it was that Rohan Vero was so eager to give it up. It folds around his thoughts when he is resting, like clingfilm around broccoli, settling itself into every niche of his mind as if it were custom-made for him. The grid is still there, pulsing away behind his perception. His hand does not bleed quite so much now, perhaps because he is understanding the map’s impulses to be read. Those impulses had made themselves known in the illusion of rotting hearts on his bedroom floor. You learned to get over that quickly. You recognised what was real and what turned out to be quirks of the map. The patterns on his hand shift as he moves through London searching for Vero. The map, as yet, is not helping him locate the man. It’s an extraneous element; it has nothing to do with the real purpose, which he has come to recognise as the city subtly changes.
Lights are going out all over the capital. Roads that were long links between the hubs of what had once been isolated villages, long ago, are being truncated. Kentish Town Road is cut off before it is underway at Camden, where the overland railway bridge has been brought down on to the tarmac. Haverstock Hill is blocked at the junction with Prince of Wales Road. The Euston Road now ends at the Euston Underpass. A black melange of broken concrete and glass takes over from there, running all the way to St Pancras. There are no cars, no buses, running on this version of London’s streets any more. They have been abandoned at the points where their journeys were curtailed by upheavals unlisted in the A–Z. Figures inhabit them, perhaps treating them as shelter from the cold, more likely using them as urban camouflage from which to launch attacks. Each night, the city sloughs off more and more of its logic and accrues the shadows and rot, verdigris and mould, lonely cold places where trouble can spawn. The city is slowly being cut off from the links that might take people away or bring help in. It is drawing its limbs into a shivering heart, like a flower thrown on to a fire. It is dying. It is waking up.
Bo’s map delineates these new twists and turns to the roads before they materialise. In the darkness, he waits on the floor of the flat, hearing the groans and creaks as his town realigns itself into a place this breed can understand. The city is regressing; the city is becoming the disease that is spreading through Bo’s body. He feels this when he’s ventured out at night. He feels that he’s the only solid part of the street, and that all else is liquid, unstable. He feels himself skimming through it, touching everything around him tangentially, like the tips of the feet of a waterboatman on a meniscus. Dribs of his surroundings sometimes catch on his hair, his clothing; he feels it tease away from the fabric of what appears to be real, a minute wrenching out of true, a needle drawn through a blob of paint: traces trail behind him for a span.
In the morning, the streets revert to their original status. They correspond to the orange and white lines of his street atlas. He feels safe going out during the day, but the roads he walks along feel faked, a mock-up on a Hollywood soundstage. The traffic is an animation. The people who cleave to the pavements are soulless marionettes shifting jerkily under an invisible puppet-master’s strings. The lights that come on and go off are too measured, like a pre-programmed security system. Everything seems too precise, too controlled. For the first time he realises that thousands are relying on him; he is the finger that can slip the knot for them, allow the strands to come loose, to bring freedom to an oppressed race. He sees how he works outside any imposed realm. His world doesn’t know, or care a fig, about the strictures of architecture or science or society.
And then Vero’s haggard face rises out of the optimism and shows him the map’s bonus features. His misery, his desperation, can he see any of that in his own face? He doesn’t know because he hasn’t looked in a mirror for weeks.
He retreats from the allure. He sees it for what it is. It’s his own death sentence. It’s London’s own Holocaust. There’s still enough of himself burning to be able to back away and fight.
He wonders where Keiko is now. Who she might be with. How she might be making love with that taut, supple loveliness of hers. She could make a kiss feel as though it were enveloping every part of your body when it was just your lips that were being touched. She could help him, he was sure of it. She could help him before it killed her.
He stares back at the floor as acid tears stream down his face. Keep fooling yourself with that one, he tells himself, if it helps you any.
‘Vero!’
He regrets the outburst as soon as it’s out. He shouted the name so hard that his throat is sore, and the silence around him carries a heavy, muffled tang, as if it were insulted. Dogs bark in the street. He hears a gang trilling and screaming as they run through the darkness. The map pulses behind his eyes, growing all the time, the number of people requiring assistance diminishing, the number of deaths and warehousings increasing.
Little corners of London are being turned into larders.
23. FOGBOUND
SHE KEPT HER eyes dead ahead, concentrating on the beams from the headlights as they pushed through the light fog on the motorway. Nick had turned on the radio, some jazz station filled with noodling muted trumpets and shivering drums. She hated jazz, hated its lack of structure. It was lazy music, she thought, but it was somehow suitable now, a confused, rambling soundtrack to her life. In her mind, though, utter clarity, at least regarding one thing. London. She must get Claire down to London.
Nick had flashed her down on the country road out of Southwold. She had wanted to laugh out loud and scream hard enough to blister his face as he asked her where she was off to. Are you okay? he had asked. Is everything tickety-boo?
I just saw a man up to his arms in Ray. My daughter was almost taken from me. We could have died. Am I all right? Yeah, fair to middling. Mustn’t grumble.
Acid-blue light was roiling around the deepening colour of the sky behind his head. She liked the image. The marriage of blues, his face. She liked his face very much, she decided, despite his dumb questions. She was happy to see him and happy too that he had offered to take her; there wasn’t enough chivalry in her life. She was dead tired. The thought of driving any kind of distance made her feel sick.
‘What about your car?’ he asked her. She’d parked it in a lay-by.
She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s for the best that I get rid of it, actually. The people who want me, they know what kind of car I drive.’
‘I’m just sorry you had to trade Italian pizzazz for this Swedish bucket.’
‘Beige too,’ she said. ‘There ought to be a law against beige.’
‘I think there is now. But there’s a beige amnesty. If I hand this car in within thirty days they won’t prosecute. To hell with it, though. I’d rather be a fugitive.’
‘Claire –’ she said.
‘She’s sleeping.’
She looked at him, at his soft, amiable features. He resembled a cat that has just eaten its fill and found the best spot by the fire.
‘I might kiss you,’ she said, her voice all wrong, the words filled with holes.
‘I might let you.’
He was regarding the ugly bite in her jeans. Blood was coagulating around the torn edges like gleaming rubies.
‘You’ve got a nasty gash,’ he said.
‘How would you know? You haven’t seen it yet.’
That stung a laugh out of him, which suddenly turned to a grimace.
‘What?’
‘I just pulled something in my back,’ he said.
‘Christ, look at us both. A pair of infirms.’
‘I’m very firm, thanks. Speak for yourself.’
The drone of the car cut through their banter. Shock caught up with her. She began to shiver so violently that her feet began to stamp into the footwell. Nick turned the heating up high and after ten minutes pulled into a lay-by in view of the level crossing at Darsham Station.
