The Unblemished, page 3
Bo’s shoes on the pavement made the only sound. No late buses, no mini cabs, no squabbles outside fast-food outlets. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Three out of ten. See me. Detention.’
He had dreamed of a London like this, fantasised about it, even. A city sprawled, spread open, for him alone. But not quite like this. Not a city of shadows and lies, a place that seemed to possess secrets jealously guarded from him. Not a city where danger lifted off the concrete like steam. The emptiness of the street, the sheer expanse of it, confused him. He stopped, unsure how to proceed. There was something else not right about this. Something so huge that it was beyond his recognition. His fear, like the city around him, was woolly, imprecise. He had nothing upon which to hang it.
He slipped down Sutton Row and found Soho Square dead, the parking spaces that ringed it deserted, the winter trees empty-handed.
What ought to have been Frith Street was yet another dark avenue without a name. He had walked along here many times, preferring it to the overcrowded thoroughfares choked by tourists who didn’t know about the rat runs existing off the beaten track, but now any familiarity had bled away, leaving a street that might as well exist in any other town or city. It meant nothing to him. Again he paused, wondering if he was trapped in a nightmare, wondering if there was some way of jolting himself out of it. It felt too real, too intense.
You have to want it. Really want it. It’s the only way I can get …
Get what? What was it Vero had meant to say? Get rid of it?
He turned back, determined to find the older man and have it out with him, persuade him with fists to explain his nonsense. But he knew that Vero was gone. He could scour the streets from Bloomsbury to Broadgate and he’d do well to clap eyes on another soul, let alone Vero. Terror plucked at his insides. Without anyone around, his sense of time was ruined; it didn’t matter what his watch said. What did the time matter if you were mad? Nothing appeared real. He sucked in breath to call out for help, but stayed his voice, in case it sounded nothing like his own.
Home would have to do; he prayed that it was still there. He could go on the hunt in the morning, if madness’s stain persisted, when daylight and a hangover might focus him.
Head down, he tramped vaguely northwest, knowing that he would not luck into a night bus, or a taxi, and that the miles to Shepherd’s Bush would have to be ticked off under his own steam. Not for the first time after a drunken binge in the city centre – when he didn’t have enough cash left over for a cab, or the queues for the buses were too off-putting – did he wish that Keiko’s flat was nearby, instead of in Kilburn, much further away than his own base. She would be there now, propped up in bed, maybe, with a bowl of hot chocolate, Garbage or PJ Harvey or Sneaker Pimps in her earphones, as she leafed through one of her magazines, or a Graham Greene novel, or one of the biology textbooks from her UCL course, or washed her hair clean of the chlorine from her part-time shifts at a Kensington spa.
It cheered him, thinking of Keiko, while the faceless streets passed by on either side of him and the cold connived a way through his clothes. With a jolt he realised that it had been a year ago, and he had met her in a pub, just like Vero – only the outcome had been far more pleasing. She had been with a group of her student friends, sitting around a table slowly accumulating more empty glasses, more bowls of chips and mayonnaise, more cigarette butts in the ashtray.
He had spotted her early on in the evening and had casually glanced her way on a number of occasions as the night progressed, liking the way she didn’t seem to possess any of the self-consciousness, the outspokenness, the air of superiority that her colleagues were guilty of. They all wore hooded tops and voluminous jeans, except her: happy in a skirt and loose blouse, looking almost gypsy-like, a rustic simplicity engendered by the long, straight black hair, the lack of make-up, the pints of cider. He wondered what her name was, and spent much of the evening ignoring his workmates, guessing silently to himself: Maisy, Daisy, Cherry, Millie … At the end of the evening, she had approached him as he prepared to leave and he froze, his jacket halfway across his back, as she said, ‘What, you spend all night staring at me and you’re not even going to ask me out?’
She liked Kubrick and told him there was a showing of Eyes Wide Shut on at the Prince Charles the following night that she’d like to go to, but not by herself.
‘So I’ll meet you outside at seven,’ she had said.
‘Right then,’ he had replied, stupidly.
She was twenty, ten years younger than him. ‘Keiko,’ she said, when he asked her name. It felt strange on his tongue, and he wasn’t sure he liked it, but at her flat after the film she brought them syrupy vodka from the freezer in bullet glasses while he sat on the end of her bed, riffling through her paperbacks. She kissed him, her eyes, the colour of treacle, open throughout. She smelled so good, the great shield of hair falling across his face as she sucked his tongue gently between her small, white teeth, and he thought: Keiko … what a fucking great name.
He rubbed his face, which had grown inflexible under the rip of the wind, like something semi-defrosted, and thought of Keiko’s fingers as they stroked the same places, that first night. They hadn’t made love, just caressed each other through their clothes, listening to Ella Fitzgerald singing Lover Man on the stereo, watching the light lose its softness against the white walls of her room.
He checked his mobile phone again, but the signal was still flatlining. The public phone he found once he’d drifted back on to the howling wilderness of Oxford Street was similarly unhelpful. ‘Wrong. Three out of ten. Three out of fucking ten. Deee-tention. You bastard.’
To combat his frustration at not being able to contact Keiko, he pulled out the battered Ixus camera from his back pocket and fired off a few shots of the desertion. The flash exploded into the creases and wrinkles of this near-total dark, serving only to give some definition, before the flash died and the dark came piling back in around him.
He was reminded of the controlled panic he had once felt during a game of hide-and-seek played at some birthday or other in his infancy. He had climbed into his father’s wardrobe, squeezing in among the heavy twill and tweed jackets on their wooden hangers, stepping carefully over the old biscuit tins in which Dad kept his stash of pens, coins and worthless trinkets collected over the years. There were cricket balls in there. A Stetson. Bottles of unopened whisky from the 1960s, stuff that he had never seen before. But the smell of his father’s clothing was familiar to him, as was the shape and solidity of the wardrobe, the feel of its grain under his fingertips, and the room beyond its closed doors. But the dark was different to anything he had known before. Nothing like the soft, granular dark that sifted through his window on summer evenings, or the exciting, eminently controllable dark under his bedclothes the moment before he switched on his torch to read his comics. It seemed so ubiquitous, so complete, that it put him in mind of bitter cough medicine forced between his teeth. This dark felt as though it might easily fill him up, an oily meniscus rising to, and then beyond, the Plimsoll line of his fear. He felt as if he were gagging on it, drowning in darkness.
But here he couldn’t simply lean against the doors and stumble out into fresh air and beloved light. Here he had to swallow against its ceaseless tide, push on, hope that he, or daylight, outstripped it before panic pulled him down. He needed coffee, or water, something to combat the sludgy mess of his head, the mess caused by too many pints of lager and Rohan Vero’s senseless yammering.
Marble Arch loomed on his left, trying its best to lend some kind of ghostly pallor to the night. Wind channelling through the arch sounded like the aspiration of a dying man. Beyond it, at the fork where the Edgware Road and Bayswater Road separated, he saw a house. At the same time, he felt fluid slide across his palm, as if he had unwittingly rested it against a slick of juice on a café table. He lifted his hand and saw that the weals in his skin had become more pronounced and were weeping lymph and blood. He wiped it off against his jeans, but the flow was becoming more free with every step. He couldn’t remember how he had wounded himself, but it must have been during his blackout. One more item tonight on a growing list of things to piss him off. Pausing to wind his handkerchief around the puzzling injury, he returned his attention to the house, and wondered why he had been distracted by it.
The house resembled any other in the area. A spruce Edwardian semi, approached by a short drive flanked with yew trees. Its windows contained a grainy blackness, as if the glass was speckled with dust. Bo took a picture, and the light from the flash jagged across the surface of the uneven windows. But there was something out of the ordinary about it. Of all the houses within his field of vision, this one seemed lived in. Having walked London’s freshly abandoned streets for a good couple of hours now, he was suddenly, acutely tuned to this isolated spot of … well, what? It wasn’t warmth. Or light. It went more subtly than that. It was the kind of attenuation the sky knows just before a snowstorm. An immanence. Without understanding why, Bo knew that this house had that kind of suggestive occupancy, in spades.
As if in a dream, he approached the front door, knowing that he would not need to ring any bell, aware that the door would open for him, as if he were a key slid into its lock: his teeth a perfect match for its tumblers. On the stoop, slightly sunken and burnished from a century of approaching or departing feet, he pressed his damaged hand against the gloss of the painted wood and the door swung away from him.
He stared at the black riot that swarmed within its frame. A silent writhing; it mesmerised him: an ecstasy of chitin.
‘The house of flies,’ he whispered, and he barely had the words out before a flotilla of insects lazily detached themselves from the greater mass and swarmed against his face. Paralysed by fear, he felt the flies skid greasily across his skin and pour in between his lips with the kind of excited buzzing that suggested they had waited for nothing but this moment all their lives.
He came to on a bench in St James’s Park, his body so cold that it was as if he no longer occupied it. Mist unfurled across the lake, turning the swans and moorhens within it into strange, meandering stains. Big Ben rang for a quarter to the hour, although which one, Bo couldn’t imagine. It must be close on six, or maybe seven, judging by the roseate smears trying to penetrate the mist to the east.
Buzzing remained in his ears, although when he had struggled to his feet and walked to the perimeter of the park, where The Mall was a ruler placed hard against its edge, he learned that the buzzing was traffic. He had never felt so happy to see the usual parade of coughing buses and farting cars. He pulled the stench of their exhausts deep into his lungs as he crossed the road and angled up Queen’s Walk, further encouraged by the sight of joggers in Green Park, and early-morning shop workers walking to their shifts, sleep still in attendance, softening their faces. Where were you all last night? he wanted to scream at them.
At the tube station, he paused in his purchase of a single ticket to Shepherd’s Bush and, reluctantly, bought a ticket to Bond Street instead, one stop away, but more than he could bear to walk. It was warm down on the Jubilee Line platform, the smells of scorched diesel deepening his sense of security. He endured the short trip to his destination alone in a carriage where the lights were too bright, and the patterns on the seats too complex to settle on for more than a few seconds without causing his head to pound. He struggled with the nausea that comes from too much alcohol and no food, and ascended to an Oxford Street that, already at this hour – ten past seven according to the station clocks – was alarmingly busy with people.
Again he walked west, following the same road as he had a mere couple of hours ago, and yet not. This was nothing like the same road. It held life like a flame in the crucible: it was incontrovertibly there in the cut-price fashion in the windows of the clothes shops and the stultified queues for buses and the fruit vendors on their stalls fighting their losing battle against the coffee shops for freezing customers.
Some night, he thought. Some hangover.
At the foot of Oxford Street, the Marble Arch gleaming pale white in the morning sunshine, he breathed in deeply and said: ‘Okay. Okay.’
There was no house. A deep, brittle part of him had known this would be the case all along, yet it still came as a shock to find that motorbike couriers, black cabs, white vans and endless cars were now racing over the spot where the house had stood the night before. He looked down at the sodden, scarlet handkerchief. He remembered the sound of his boots as they moved across the short gravel driveway and the feel of the door beneath his fingers. He remembered the sound of the door swinging open, a well-oiled sigh.
He remembered –
The frantically motile sheet of black insects like a million dead eyes sucking in his image on the doorstep, a blackness that is absolute, intimidating. A disarming blackness. He takes a picture. Greased light reflects off a billion compound lenses, a million commas of chitin. Fractals of metallic green and blue and black glint and dance, prettier than they ought to be. The flies sweeping like a curtain of beads against his face, rushing into his mouth. Impossibly, driven by the crazed impulses of a dream, he steps inside, the flies shifting to accommodate him and, without being able to see more than a millimetre in front of him, he knows that every room in the house is crammed with insects. He smells their mealiness. The drone fills his head so completely he believes it might never release him when finally he leaves, or is allowed to leave. This thought propels him to turn and flee, but he can no longer see the way out. The crawling all over his scalp. The tickle of chitin against his skin as insects find a way into his clothing. Fat, slow flies, close to death, flying in erratic trajectories, bursting against his face. He can’t open his mouth to scream for fear of allowing more of the filthy things to invade him. When he believes that madness or death are his only releases, and he feels himself sinking to the floor, suffocated by the massing of the insects, they part and he falls through them into a space. No floorboards coming up to meet him. Just the withered, naked body of a man – is that you, Rohan? – who is peppered with punctures, his flesh drained to the point that it resembles the colour of lard. The soft tissue of his face so wasted that his teeth seem to have grown through the puckered hole of his mouth, giving him a smile that couldn’t possibly have been there at the moment of his death. He lands on the corpse and it disappears in a great plume of dust around him at the same moment that he hears, like an echo gradually amplified, the sound of chewing. And then there are words caught up, couched in the chewing, a skilful rolling of meat around a tongue spilling myth and meaning, but he can’t work out what is being said.
He remembers –
Nothing more.
His eyes scoured the area, as if determined to find some remnant of the house to prove to him that it was something more than a hideous dream fuelled by a night of excess. Or Vero might have slipped him a Mickey Finn. Nothing would surprise him now.
All that happened was that the traffic grew in volume and became snarled at the corner, and the pedestrians tutted and swore at him as they found him blocking their path.
He turned to leave and felt something with his tongue, tucked between his teeth. He worked at it on his way back to the tube, some stray shred of meat from the previous day’s dinner, perhaps, and the thought made him hungry for breakfast. At the mouth of the tube station, he dislodged the morsel and picked it off the tip of his tongue with his finger.
A fly. Mashed and mangled, its head gone.
The world went away from him again, but in an infinitely more manageable way. Bo put out his hand to stop himself from falling and jarred it against the wall. He leaned over and vomited copiously, so hard that he saw black spots dancing behind his eyes. But once the straining and the retching were over and he was aware of the sounds of disgusted pedestrians avoiding him, he saw that the black spots were more fly corpses studding the brown gruel of his own waste. He staggered away down a side street and breathed hard until he thought he had a grip on reality once more. He craved Keiko’s warmth, her cat eyes, the softness of her lips on his neck: There, there, he could almost hear her whisper. There, there.
He bought a bottle of water and drained it before returning to the tube and buying a ticket to Kilburn. He sent Keiko a text before he sank to the platform: brkfst, hny? my trt. xx
The train wasn’t long in coming, but it was busy, and he had to stand all the way. His thoughts were a pendulum between Keiko and the house and by the time he had reached his stop, he was determined that he would never get as drunk as that again. To lose control was to risk everything, and he had too much to live for. But in thinking this, he knew that booze could not have had such a profound effect on him. He felt he should be tested for narcotics, but it was an empty impulse. Something inside him had opened itself to this moment. Something inside him understood what was going on, and welcomed it.
Now that his involvement with the house was over, the world rushed in to fill the vacuum. He felt better as he reached Kilburn High Street, but suddenly realised, as he passed through the ticket barriers, that despite the fact that nobody else had got off at his stop and the platform was empty, he was being followed.
2. OUTFANGTHIEF
SARAH HICKMAN WAS trying to find a radio station that might carry some news of her crime. She had been driving for hours, risking the M6 all the way from Preston. Though she had seen a number of police vehicles, the traffic had been sufficiently busy to allow her to blend in and anyway, Manser would hardly have guessed she would steal a car.
But Manser was not stupid. It would not be long before he latched on to her deceit.
She had a cigarette going, and the window was open slightly despite the cold, so that the smoke would stream out. Claire was asleep in the back, or dozing at least – she never seemed to sleep deeply much these days, if at all – and she didn’t want her daughter breathing in her second-hand fumes. She’d determined to quit, but this intention was one of a great many things that had somehow become irrelevant in her life now. Few things mattered, and they were of such crucial importance that focusing on them made everything else seem pallid and shallow at this ungodly hour, as she fled Preston. Crucial things that, along with the cigarette she wasn’t enjoying, were helping to keep her awake as the odometer slowly rolled off the miles.
