Communion Town (18 page)

‘You can’t go to the police,’ he said, as soon as I had blurted out my secret. He stared across the table for a long time, his eyes narrowed into an unreal distance, like a man performing a calculation in his head. Then he seemed to reach an answer that satisfied him.

‘Someone like you can never go to the police. You realise how it’ll look to them, if you go in saying you’re not sure, but you think you might have guessed the Flâneur’s identity? That you don’t have any evidence? That you think it’s your boss, but you can’t prove anything?’

The crows’ feet deepened at the corners of his eyes.

‘I’ll tell you what happens. At best, you’re sent away with a clip round the ear for wasting their time. More likely, they decide you’re sick in the head and arrest you on suspicion of being the killer yourself.’

He studied me thoughtfully until I looked away.

‘You’re on your own here, my friend,’ he said. ‘They can’t help you any more than I can. You can’t hand this on, and there’s no one else for you to persuade. You’re going about it the wrong way. You’re looking outside for a solution: but this isn’t happening outside.’

I must have looked startled, because he checked himself and spoke more softly.

‘We’re talking about your conscience,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter how: find whatever proof you need, search your memory, watch for clues. But you have to tell yourself a story you can believe. You have to make an account. Then, only then, you’ll be able to do it.’

I didn’t understand, I told him. Do what?

He paused, choosing his words. Eventually, he said:

‘Something good.’

Glory Part was a tangle of alleys, wynds and lanes, all built of sooted bricks, the surfaces opened by oblique evening light. In places the walls pressed so close together that they brushed your shoulders on both sides. The foundations were uneven, so that the pebbled lanes rose and fell in steep and unexpected ways and kept breaking into flights of steps. The houses, built up high because there was nowhere else for them to go, leaned together overhead and often enough they joined, turning streets into tunnels.

I walked, led by Bill’s advice, and kept walking until I found myself standing beneath a lamp post on the Strangers’ Market. It did not look out of the ordinary. If there were signs that anything had happened here, I couldn’t see them. When I looked up, the glass held a searing green squiggle on my retina and the rest of the world was shuttered out. Still, this must be the place to find what I needed. I squatted to examine the cobblestones. The surface of each stone was a mountainscape, and the cracks between contained ecosystems of muck, moss and grit. The closer I looked, the more the simple stones of the Market broke down to a chaos of detail. I crossed to the far wall and, after some minutes, found an iron nail sticking out. It was low down, at my knees. I couldn’t tell what adhered to the rust.

Then a jolt of panic straightened me up with my heart churning. A hand had closed on my shoulder. I turned around, expecting handcuffs, a lynch mob, a knife: but instead a stranger stared up at me, haggard and unshaven, his red-rimmed eyes filled with accusation. In the evening shadows and the low red light his face looked to have been hacked from the same bricks as the walls of the Market. For an instant I felt certain that I was confronting a personification – an envoy of all Glory Part, come to insist that I explain myself. What is your business, his eyes demanded, in the empty Market at sundown? How can you prove that you’re not guilty? My throat tightened, and as he began to speak I fell back from him, away from the lamp post, the nail and the stones, and fled.

As I left the Market, rubbing my head in agitation, I found that nothing had changed inside. The same pictures looped over and over, the two figures swapping places and swapping back again. I had learned nothing: or I had learned that scratching at the surface of the city would not answer my questions. Going back to my lodgings I knew less than before.

I MET THE FLÂNEUR AND LIVED

REVENGE HAVOC FEARED

WHO LET HIM IN

I stood in the shadows at the edge of the loading bay, waiting for Fischer to finish up whatever it was he did in the supervisor’s office at the end of the night. In the dark my pulse was slow. He stepped into the prism of the security lights and locked up the exit behind him. He was wrapped in his overcoat with his face muffled to the cheekbones. I waited until he reached the far side of the tarmac, then followed.

I did not like what I was doing. I could not have justified it if anyone had asked me, and, worse, I suspected that I was violating the principle of the good slaughterman: that when the shift is over he must cease to exist, must pass through the streets as an absence, without intention or desire. But I had to take the risk. It was a decision I had made.

Most of the workers used the shuttle bus into the city centre, where they could catch the early trams home. But not Fischer, who preferred like me to go on foot through Glory Part. We passed through the gate in the plant’s chain-link perimeter. I followed him as if I were tethered to a weight and falling through dark waters. Up ahead his form tremored on the edge of visibility, but I kept pace and did not let him out of my sight. I did not know how sudden or how subtle it would be when it came, the transformation of one figure into the other.

He paused under a lamp for no reason I could see. A column of drizzle drifted above his head. He flinched and moved on. We passed through lanes where, for all I could tell, they had pulled down the route back to my lodgings and used the pieces to mock up Fischer’s way home instead. A patch of cobbles, an archipelagic puddle, a low overhead arch, a triangular storm drain, a tree in an iron cage, a peeling green door. I could have sworn these featured, differently arranged, in the journey I walked each morning.

Pre-dawn light was up by the time he turned on to a steep residential street with identical front doors set close together, each one stone step higher than the pavement. Each would open directly into the downstairs room, in the way that had been thought best for the factory workers of an earlier generation. He dug around in his coat pocket. Those were his keys, two linked strips of metal, clinking once. As he addressed his latch he peered back the way he had come, doubting something in the corner dark.

Once he was inside, I withdrew to the mouth of a pedestrian tunnel on the far side of the road. I could just make out his door. The cold clamped inside my boots and gloves didn’t trouble me, nor the smell of urine. There wasn’t much difference between his lodgings and mine. It hardly mattered whether we’d come this way or that through the district. In there, I thought, he probably had the same bed frame and table and chair as me, arranged another way on the same worn carpet. I watched the door as if it might still prove something one way or the other.

I WILL KILL AGAIN

VIGILANTE ATTACKS RISE

WHO IS SHELTERING THIS DEVIL

Halfway through the night an animal slipped from its shackle and fell eight feet from the bleed rail, striking two of the workers. All three sprawled on the concrete, but it was the pig that got up first. It spasmed, its whole body a single muscle, and sprang to its feet, its head bobbing. It was bigger than any of us: its belly alone, strung quivering in its frame, was bigger. Coarse blond fur bristled along its back. A glancing wound had creased its skull. From its mouth projected a jumble of bloody tusks.

Rolling crimson eyeballs, the creature lifted its head into the side of a fallen worker and scooped him clear of the floor. It shook him free and charged off, scattering the onlookers and demolishing a rack of tools. It headbutted a safety rail, then clamped its teeth into a steel sink which with a shake of its head it wrenched loose and dropped. White strings of froth eased from its jaws. Urine poured rearwards from its bright pink funnel and began to crawl through puddled blood. The workers had retreated to the edges of the room.

Fischer watched without surprise. After a minute’s chaos he had stopped the conveyors so that the machine din lifted and only the clamour of beasts and workers remained. He folded his arms, and for an instant he caught my eye.

One of the fallen workers was curled on the floor, cradling something fragile in his side, his face turning grey. The pig approached him, champing as if the knocker’s work had stripped away a layer of its evolutionary history. The worker was taking quick, shallow breaths, with one hand pressed under his ribs and the other searching for a finger-hold in the texture of the concrete. The pig’s breath streamed into his face. Heaps of muscle mounted across its shoulders as it lowered its head.

Then Fischer was straddling its back with his heels deep in its sides. It thrashed and raked its tusks across the floor, trying to strike sparks. It crashed into another section of conveyor belt, but he hung on, hooking his fingers into its nostrils. Steel blurred and he stepped away from the creature as it exhaled and collapsed.

Workers came forward, pulling off their gloves and removing their earplugs. Throwing glances at the pig, they gathered around the fallen man. The floor looked like the nest of a carnivorous machine. Fischer cursed softly. He was drenched. As the workers carried their comrade towards the exit he caught my eye again, and for once I did not look away. I was reading the message there and piecing together what it meant, adding it to the account along with everything else I had seen: the way he had grappled the animal, the nuance of his technique with the knife.

Others were fixing chains to the pig’s front legs, hauling it upright to expose the taut, blond-furred length of its belly. They didn’t wait for the machinery to start. This was more pressing. Someone accepted a knife from his fellows and moved in close.

In the booth at the back of the Rose Tree, Bill leafed through today’s paper. It was the Flâneur again. Just when they had been losing interest in the story, he had fed them fresh material. It was a young man this time: no more than a child, out with his friends in one of the back streets near the Market, far too late at night.

Finally Bill looked up at me.

‘What kind of city is it,’ he asked, ‘where we sit here and gobble up this stuff, then shake our heads and do nothing? And tomorrow we buy the paper again for more. How do we explain it to ourselves? Tell ourselves we’re not responsible? Doing nothing has its own cost.’

There was no patience in his face, no indulgence.

‘But you know that,’ he said.

I wanted to explain myself to him. I wanted to tell him how much I cared for the welfare of the people of Glory Part. I felt that at birth I’d been given the duty of protecting them. I didn’t ask for anything in return. This morning, as I walked by the laundrette, the women leaning in the doorway had fallen silent to watch me out of earshot. I had crossed to the other side of the street where men were blocking the pavement, joshing each other, slapping hands and bumping fists. I had passed by like a duke in disguise as a beggar. I couldn’t imagine how life went for them. What we had in common was this cold day. Its failed light. The rain throwing itself away on the tenements.

‘Have you heard the story of the Sibyl?’ Bill asked, speaking more to himself than to me. He drank the last of his coffee and turned his face to the window. The daylight seemed to be filtered through the yellow-grey newspapers the Market’s fishmongers used to wrap their wares. We were not quite alone in the restaurant, but Dilks was keeping to the kitchen and the fat man sitting at the corner table looked away when he caught my eye. Without warning I was gripped by the conviction that I had forgotten to do something terribly important.

‘She wished never to die, and that was granted. But she neglected to ask for eternal youth to accompany her immortality. Her body grew old and more than old, but she lived on until she was a shrivelled, unrecognisable thing. In the end, she vanished from sight, turned to dust; but still her voice could be heard. Think of what it must be saying by now.’

A few raindrops began to crawl across the window. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but he was examining the paper again, scowling and kneading his belly under the table. I looked up at the big electric clock that hung above the counter, but as always the hands were stopped at a quarter past five.

‘These kids,’ he said, ‘these kids were out in the Market every night. They didn’t have anywhere else to go. For all they knew, this city was the whole world.’

I had to go, I told him. I knew it wasn’t true, but I could not shake the idea that I must leave at once. Bill didn’t respond. He only went on talking to himself.

‘I can’t imagine the boy was surprised, when it happened,’ he said. ‘Poor child. He never doubted the city went on forever. And now he knows.’

Printed on a slip of pink paper, formed in faint grey dots, was my name, and a few numbers, and the information that my employment had ceased as of today’s date. I should remove any personal items because after vacating the premises I would not be permitted to return. My responses are slow at the end of a shift, and I stood there until the locker room had emptied around me and the implications had soaked into my brain. So this, I thought, is how it feels to reach a decision. This is how it feels to enter into an action: to become a person who, very soon, will do something good. It feels like receiving a slip of paper informing you of a change in your situation.