One (26 page)

He couldn't keep his eyes off those backstage city shadows. It was like seeing a car crash occur in front of you, or a Skinner uncoil within its epidermal prison for the first time.
What if?
The question had died in him long ago.
Maybe? Just think
. . . All of it had withered like a basil leaf scorched by frost. The secret slots and pockets of the city were too dangerous for casual checks these days. Leave it to the flushers.
If he crops up, he crops up. Old enough to look after himself now.

Ahead of him lay Shepherd Market, a tiny enclave with neighbouring pubs and an alleyway between them leading to Curzon Street, if memory served correctly. To the left, curving away from him, more restaurants, chichi fashion boutiques, jewellers and chocolatiers. People sitting inside a Polish-Mexican bistro at pretty tables waiting for a meal that would never arrive, time having drawn deep runnels into their superdried faces. Nothing moved. He made his way towards the alley, keeping an eye on the oily windows of the pubs.

He walked down Curzon Street past the Mayfair cinema where he and Cherry had watched some Japanese horror film centuries ago. Afterwards, they'd walked home, a fair hike miraculously shortened by the excitement in their conversation and proximity. Love could do that to you, he thought, staring at the broken cinema entrance. It creased time and distance, put you in a bubble. He wasn't going in there either. Not without a flame-thrower and plenty of back-up. And it was another two weeks before he was on incineration detail.

A gust of wind drove a blast of black hail into his face. He flinched from it and pulled the collar of his coat up around him, checked the positioning of his goggles, cycling mask and helmet. He had never grown used to the smell of sunblock; it stuck in his craw like the dense stench of a rancid dairy. He tucked himself into the doorway of a café while he went through his backpack, habit lifting his head to check the various approaches every few seconds. There was a bottle of water, a tin of emergency rations, a First Aid kit, a sheaf of tracing paper tucked into a plastic wallet and an Ordnance Survey map of London from 1968. He ignored these and picked out a battered notebook. Loose leaves, old tickets, photographs and torn pieces from maps were tucked in among its pages. Notes to himself. Reminders. Warnings. White spaces on the
A–Z
he had yet to explore. The city according to him, decked out in highlighter, pencil and paper clips.

The light was failing. He had to find shelter before it vanished completely. Some had taken to riding bicycles around the ruins but he preferred to go by foot. He didn't like the way a bicycle switched you off. Your senses were dulled by the rush of wind and the exertion. You could coast around a corner into any amount of trouble. One step at a time. Stop, look, listen and think. Stay alive.

Jane thought of the places he had slept in over the years. He'd stayed in a bedroom in Buckingham Palace that he was pretty sure had belonged to Queen Elizabeth II. He'd slept on the grand old table in the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street; a lovely blue sofa in the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square. But the novelty quickly wore off and he became more careful with his choices. He stayed in rooms close to well-connected roofs in case he had to make a quick getaway. Whenever he found a secure place to hide out, with excellent escape options, he marked it by the front door with a stick of orange chalk, making sure he found a spot that the sleet couldn't get at. Orange marks crossed with blue meant that a previously good place was now infected, unsafe. You didn't go there unless you had a canister of kerosene strapped to your back.

He moved now through Mayfair but paused at Berkeley Square, where he could see masses of bodies that had not been burnt piled up against railings. That would have to be reported. He made a note of the location and doubled back on himself, not keen to invite trouble by trying to pick a way through them. Not this late in the afternoon, anyway. He crossed Piccadilly and jinked up Jermyn Street. A sign in a window:
Quality Cooled Offices
. All the buildings failing in some way. Rain sanding the concrete back to reinforcement rods. Teeth marks where Skinners had, like leeches at fish-tank glass, sucked away the animal grease of fingerprints and sputum laid upon the stone by human beings over the decades. The venom in their saliva had reacted with the building materials, producing ugly seams of black decay that wormed through brick and breeze-block, like cavities in a tooth going unchecked. There could be only one outcome. Already some of the more recent constructions were sagging like sots at a happy-hour bar. Terraces made stovepipe shapes. Millionaire waterfront properties tossed up in the 1980s were throwing themselves into the river.

There were a number of hotels sharing space with classy formal dress shops. Mannequins in the windows had not changed their outfits in a decade. Those that had not melted looked more human than the people he saw every day, himself included. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass that remained in its frames. Long hair. Wild beard. He looked like a shabby mountaineer. All the razors were as blunt as a bad comedian's punchline. Hillaby had taken to sharpening his old blades with a strop and shaved religiously, every day, but life was too short, way too short, for that kind of behaviour. One nick from those blades and there was no telling what might tumble into your bloodstream.

Jane stood and watched the entrance to a hotel at the Regent Street end of the road. Orange chalk mark on the steps leading to automatic doors long dead. Ornamental bay trees crumbled to ash in their grand marble pots. A man in a black suit and top hat lay dead just inside the entrance. He had fallen awkwardly, his left knee bent unnaturally, causing his shin to splay. Jane always felt a twinge of sympathetic cramp whenever he saw a body crumpled like this; felt the compulsion to straighten things out, give the body some dignity, some illusory comfort.

He panthered into the lobby and paused again, felt his skin prickling as he strained to hear noises that might give him a reason to leave. He hated this. Every night, the necessity of a roof over his head. It was like shutting yourself in a coffin, but statistically it was safer than a night spent treading pavements, ducking, hiding, trying to stay one step ahead. The reception area was empty. He took marble steps carpeted with red up to the top floor. A long corridor with subtle lighting that had not worked for ten years studded in the ceiling. Jane had forgotten what electric lighting was like. Sunlight too, for that matter. It would probably scour his eyes out.

He listened at the doors of all the rooms. Silence from within. He chose a room at the end and delicately closed the doors behind him, gritting his teeth at the soft, barely audible click of the lock. He listened for a while. Wind growling in the old city lungs. Snow spittle lashing glass and steel.

There was a body on the bed. A skeleton in ragged pyjamas with a white floss of hair. Most of the bones were still connected by leathery integument; he picked up the pyjamas like a bundle of faggots and tossed it into the wardrobe. He heard the scrabble and scratch of claws in the walls and sat on the bed, smelling the musty, rotten stench of ancient serous fluids rising from the mattress. It was rare to escape the filth. Occasionally he'd crack open the seal of a room that seemed never to have been occupied. A virgin territory, spotless, ghost-free, that breathed the faintest odour of new carpet and paint upon him as he entered. Mostly, though, he spent his nights in bedsit crypts and hotel-room mortuaries, clearing the beds of cringing bones or stiff, withdrawn bodies like so much unwrapped beef jerky.

He checked the exits. On the corridor there had been a fire escape next to his door. It would take him down to the ground floor and up to the roof. There were any number of options up there. The double-glazed windows didn't open that far; they were on a security catch, but they were weak, shot through with cracks. A judicious blow would clear their frames.

Jane went to the wall separating this room from the next and pressed his ear against it. The journey of air through the hotel's pipes and gutters and gulleys, little else. He returned to the bed and stripped the mattress. He lifted one corner but the body had emptied itself into the filling. It was rotten, the springs coming through the fabric as he inspected it. Good only for burning.

The sofa was a better option. It was a two-seater, which meant his legs would hang over the side, but it was better than the floor. He positioned his pack by the cushion where he would lay his head and placed his rifle alongside it, safety off, within easy reach. He lighted the stub of a half-inch candle and dripped wax on the dining table so that it would sit fast. The light didn't matter; Skinners couldn't see. He kicked off his boots, unzipped his sleeping bag and got into it, fully clothed.

From the pack he pulled a packet of chocolate buttons he'd found at the back of a fridge in a Holland Park kitchen. Best Before: over five years ago. They were white with age but they were delicious. So sweet he worried that his stomach might reject them. He unzipped a compartment in the top flap of the rucksack. A blister pack. Omeprazole. Protein-pump inhibitors. He pressed a bright yellow capsule into his palm and swallowed it.
Twenty milligrams a day keeps the incubus at bay.
What a chipper line Liggett had dreamed up; one that Jane could not shift from his thoughts every time he swallowed his medicine.

He lay back on the cushion and sighed. He felt age settle in his bones. What was he now? Forty? Give or take. His muscles would seize up by morning and he'd struggle to get his boots on. He thought back to a time of lying in hot baths while listening to the midweek football commentary on the radio. A glass of beer and the newspaper. Stanley lalling from his cot and the chatter of Cherry's sewing machine as she worked the treadle. Maybe imagining his face under her foot. Some Thai food on its way from the local restaurant. Christ. Thai food. Close to sleep, he felt his mouth fill with saliva at the thought of prawn crackers and sweet chilli dipping sauce, curried chicken, jasmine rice.

Distant screams rose in the night. He knew what that was all about. He shut his eyes tight to it, and thought only of his son.

The candle was out when he wakened. But it was only recently extinguished; he could smell its acrid last breath. He heard the scratching in the plaster between the walls. He sat up, his hand falling to the stock of the rifle, which filled his hand and gave him a surge of confidence. There was a shocking, high-pitched cry, so loud he thought the rat that had loosed it must be upon him. He swung his feet out of the sleeping bag and they landed, not on his boots, but on the greasy, bristling backs of countless squirming animals. They recoiled before he did; he jerked back onto the sofa and pointed the barrel of the gun at the floor. He fired. Something screamed. There was the sound of bodies, an avalanche of bodies, falling over one another to get away. But then he realised he'd hit something and they weren't trying to get away, they were fighting over the booty, they were tucking in.

Jane flipped over the back of the sofa. No light. No boots. Maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred rats in the room. Rats that he'd watched get fat and get thin again over the years, once the carrion ran out. Rats who had lost their timidity; he'd watched hunger push that right out of the rat set-up.
Shit
.

He leaned over the back of the sofa and snatched his rucksack towards him. He held it to his chest, and yelled out when a warm, bony body scuttled out of it, over his arm and away. A different rat might have buried its jaws in his throat.

There were three glowsticks in their wrappers tucked into an inner pocket. He tore two open and shook them awake: sudden acid-green light reflected back at him from dozens of eyes. More rats were pouring through a hole in the door beneath the desk. Fear turned him sluggish; his bladder slackened and he leaked piss. The sudden whiff of released chemicals sent the rats into a frenzy, but defocused them. Jane slammed the butt of the rifle into the window. A fist of wind did the rest of the work for him.

He felt claws at his feet and looked down as a rat attacked him, bared stained incisors shredding the leg of his denims. Its glistening fur seemed to ripple with pleasure as it inhaled the stink of his fear-sweat. Jane couldn't shake it off. Another rat got a piggyback off its mate and launched itself at his eyes. Jane twisted his face away so violently that he felt a muscle pull in his neck; blindly he swung an arm and batted the rat away. He beat at the rat on his foot with the butt of the rifle. The rat continued to gnash at the air even as it was stove in.

Jane got a leg out of the window and, straddling the frame, fired three shots into the room. A squeal suggested he'd hit something, enough time to get out while they fought over the remains. He stood on the windowsill, grateful it was too dark to see how far down he would fall if he lost his footing. To his left, below the edge of the sill, was a ledge that ran to the end of the building, a distance of less than ten feet. A drainpipe waited for him there: another twelve feet above that and he'd be on the roof.

He sat on the windowsill, hands on either side of him, and inched along, using his palms to lift his bottom and swing himself incrementally towards the end. The wind plucked at his clothes – it felt to Jane as though it were assessing his weight, gauging how much it would take to drag him off into the night. He paused at the end of the sill, thinking how best to make the drop. How far life could take you, he marvelled, how far away from what you deemed to be normal could you be transported. Cups of tea, the crossword, a phone call home, all of this seemed as bizarre in the same way as what he was doing now would have appeared to his old self.