The Unblemished (10 page)

Time passed. The shadows grew longer, but they were attached to
nothing more aggressive than trees. He rose and walked ploddingly
and nothing and nobody provided an obstacle. He did not look up.
He unlocked his bike and sat astride it for a long time, staring at the
indicator on his camera that showed how many exposures were left.
What had he captured? He rode back home without realising it. He
put the camera in a drawer and went to bed. He slept solidly for
fifteen hours. When he wakened he stared at his hand as if it was not
his own. Sleep had teased him with the wound's logic but
consciousness had snatched it away again.

He stepped out of his bed and on to a floor that was littered with
mouldering hearts.

They entered the city on the 18th November 2008. They filtered in
like refugees, wide-eyed, dazzled, uncertain. Hungry. They came
by various modes of transport. Some were so brazen as to hitch-hike,
though to have presented themselves before a human being at any time
before would have been unthinkable. The drivers who picked them up
thought them a little odd, a little shy, and so beautiful as to be
unnerving. They would not have been able to put their finger on the
reasons why, but it nagged them long after their rides had departed.

They came in by the river, barnacles clinging to the barges and
motorboats that cruised up and down a waterway that was as known
to the genes in their blood as the impulse to breathe. They came in by
the sewers and the tube, trudging miles through tunnels like tired
blood returning to the heart. They came in on foot, marching across
countryside that gave way to ugly urban conurbations. Some were
physically sick when they had reached the busy centre of this new
world, a thousand miles and years from what they had been used to,
or had expected. They bent double and vomited into the gutters
beneath the city's skyscrapers. The icons that had drawn them were
the very things that inspired vertigo and dislocation. Their heartbeats
were out of time with the thrum of the city. Panic hit. If they could
not feel at home here, then where?

But slowly, they dispersed and found more modest shadows. You
might have spied them from a night bus somewhere in the city. A
couple standing in a doorway on Knox Street, so still as to be
unrecognisable from the stone that framed them. A man swaddled in
scarves to the point that his face was almost eclipsed waiting halfway
down the steps at Bethnal Green tube station, underlit by blue light.
Thin figures crouching by bus shelters near an estate on Seven Sisters
Road, rubbing their chins, their heads, trying to reconcile themselves
with a city that turned its back on them half a millennium before.

And how to assuage this hunger, this burn within stomachs that
seemed to have lasted as long as they themselves? There were easy
targets. Bins, skips outside restaurants; waste disposal depots on the
outskirts of the city. Instinct intervened where physical weakness and
mental unpreparedness had undermined them over the centuries.

Hospitals were treasure troves, especially if they lucked into a
garbage chute, or an unsecured door to a chilled room where
harvested organs were stored.

Abattoir sluices. Pet cemeteries. Warm graves.

They knew the city, and sometimes, at an hour so late, so
temporary, that London itself seemed to be asleep, the city relaxed and
unlocked itself to them. They found niches within it in which to hide.
They learned the shape of the new shadows it cast. Slow, frail and
frightened, they nevertheless began to absorb the city's rules and laws.

Times were different, more sophisticated and yet somehow less
elegant. Hunger meant they had to learn quickly or die. After
centuries cowering in damp corners of unknowable buildings, it was
difficult to slough off the timidity that had settled into them. It was
like somebody who has never seen snow being asked to clear a
driveway of the stuff. Fear hung around them at all times, a caution
and an incentive. Fear was nothing new to them; they had learned
that fear could put you under and that it ought to be respected, but
met head-on, too.

It was time for others to know fear. It was time for them to
instil it.

Some were more savvy than others. They caught on quickly, assimilating
the patois of the street, understanding the impression that
clothes and haircuts made, recognising the aloofness, the forced diffidence,
the faux ennui of its inhabitants as a part of identity. You lived
in
the city, you did not live
for
the city. It got to you in the same way
that it got inside you. You loved it at the same time that it vexed you.
It was a city thrumming with life at the same time as it was stifling,
smothering, struggling to keep its head above water. Shit filled its
veins. Its breath was that of an asthmatic. Night was an excuse for it
to slob out,
sans
make-up, allow its true face to be seen.

The weakest fell away, took to scraping by on the banks of the
river, dodging the police patrols, feeding off scraps rejected by the
affluent crowd who came to skim the South Bank every evening like
roosting birds. They might infrequently be rewarded for the patience
with a dead dog, bloated and ripe, floating along the edges of the
current, a feast that would last a day or two. There were other bodies
too, on rare occasions, washed up on the shingle, long dead from a
bullet or a blade; a suicide leap or an overdose. They ate anything that
couldn't fight back and relished anew a flavour lost to time and
banishment, remembered only through instinct or race memory.

Some people were aware of the invasion, albeit subconsciously,
tangentially. They noticed a difference in the atmosphere, maybe, or
the slow unfolding of hairs at the nape for no apparent reason. It was
the kind of uncanny prickle that you get when you enter a room that
has just been vacated, as if the air still contains a little of what goes
to make a presence.

They felt uncomfortable in the park eating their lunch, when the
only other person was sitting in a hooded coat, knees drawn up, on a
bench a hundred feet away. They felt the sudden pressure of threat as
they passed a bus stop, but there was only a young woman sitting on
the plastic seats, resolutely staring ahead. Or there was the sudden
drop in temperature as they sat at their favourite stool at the bar, but
nobody had walked through the door, there was just the barman and
the guy in the corner chewing his nails with more gusto than made
you want to watch for too long.

They might get home and drink a little more than usual, or make
love to their partners with a touch, almost, of desperation. There was
the nebulous sense of danger thwarted, violence dodged. But it was
nothing unusual for someone living in the city. Living in London, you
understood death's timetable intuitively. They knew what could
happen and how nasty it could be. There was always the feeling that
death was on another tube or bus or waiting in a park in the shadows.
You got up each morning and kissed your loved ones good-bye and
then you went out and gambled with death. Death was somewhere in
the city, wearing one of its billion costumes. The game was avoiding
death by going about your life as if nothing was going to happen. You
got home and it was good to be alive.

The first wave was frail. It was overwhelmed by the lights and
sounds and pollution. It was shocked by the brashness of its foe, the
way they drank and swore and fought and fucked and worked with
a fervour that was like unfettered flame. The first dribs and drabs
were like turtles just hatched, making an insane charge for the
sanctity of the sea. There was too much here to pick them off. They
succumbed easily to the capital's night breeds; its muggers and
vandals, its sex offenders and violators. The dead were consumed by
their own: easy pickings.

But despite the woundings and the ugly surprises, they understood
what it meant to hide. They knew how to bide their time and recognised
that their time had come again. Half a millennium was not long
to wait, really; a couple more weeks in the dark was nothing to them.
So they waited, and watched, and learned, and grew stronger. They,
more than most, understood that the city was up for grabs. Nobody
truly owns the city. Nobody belongs. Everyone is in one kind of
transit or another. Know that and you have the upper hand on your
enemy.

He was asleep, but he was aware. At the same time he was
questioning himself: how can I be asleep if my eyes are open?
The moon was up, full and clean, and he might once have thought
about getting his camera and taking a long-exposure shot of it. Now
all he thought was how the moon, along with everything else in his
life, seemed to be eclipsing him.

Bo dressed shakily, unable to remember the last meal he had eaten.
He did not feel hungry but his body was clearly telling him it needed
something to boost his sugar levels. In the kitchen he made a bowl of
hot chocolate and raided the cupboard. He ate a Kellogg's Nutrigrain
bar and a couple of preserved apricots. He drank the chocolate sitting
by the window, looking out at the roofs. Five minutes later, despite
trying to keep it down, he vomited his breakfast into the toilet.

He snatched up his keys, helmet and camera and got on his bike.
He phoned Lewis at the offices of
The Urbanite
and asked him if
there was anything that needed doing. A cheque presentation – there
was a surprise – at the library in Victoria.

He set an alarm on his phone for the three o'clock shoot and
decided he had to keep busy or the dream would pile in, filling too
many spaces opening up inside him. He thought about unfinished
projects, people who had asked him for photographs but who he had
rebuffed because he either did not like them or the reasons they gave
for the commission. There had been a self-published writer, not very
good, who wanted an author photo for a new book that nobody
would read; a woman touching her forties who wanted some shots of
herself naked before her body went to seed; a bunch of teens who
wanted some publicity material to promote their band; a couple who
wanted him to take pictures at swingers' parties.

He tried the band first but the lead guitarist told him they'd split
up a couple of months earlier. He called the writer but he was out of
town, at some convention or other. He didn't want to call the wife-swapper
so he tried Emma, who was probably forty now, and had
overcome her sad urge to trap a part of herself in the past.

'Hello?'

'Emma Lerner?' There was something in her voice that was not
how he remembered it. Something awkward, cracked. 'Is this Emma
Lerner?'

'Hello?'

The line went dead. Bo checked his Filofax. Emma Lerner lived in
a flat on Liverpool Road, Islington. He could be there in twenty
minutes, get the shoot done how she wanted it, and bomb on over to
Victoria. The day would be filled with things to do; he would be
distracted by appointments, lighting, organising poses, Emma
Lerner's body, even. With luck he would not have time to brood on
what was happening to him.

He bought half a dozen rolls of fresh film and drove out to N1. He
rang the bell to Emma's flat and she buzzed him in without asking
who it was. He climbed the narrow staircase to the top floor, where
her flat was a small, split-level affair with a door positioned a couple
of risers down the staircase. It was open. A bad smell was filtering
down from the flat and Bo paused at the final landing, looking up at
the gap between the door and its frame. He couldn't pinpoint the
smell, that was the problem. It wasn't a dead smell, he knew that,
thanks to his work with the police. It was the smell of his grandparents'
house, but worse. It was the smell of an attic in a boarded up
shop he and his old mate Ian Ford had broken into having bunked
off school one day during a punishingly hot summer. They had found
a dozen birds dead among the old boxes of till receipts and ledgers,
rotten shelving, ancient cash registers, discarded signs and posters,
newspapers from a different generation. The birds had all died,
apparently, while airborne: their wings were frozen in an attitude of
flight. The feathers from the carcasses were gone, the tiny bodies
dried out. When Ian poked one with a finger, it disintegrated into
dust. He had been unable to get the powdery, ancient smell out of his
clothes or nostrils. It seemed to hang around him for days, permeating
everything. He felt he understood a little about death that day
that wasn't in life's users' manual, something he could never have
learned from any number of deaths in his extended family, or
passages read in books.

Bo licked his lips and called out. There was no reply, but he felt a
change in the movement of air, as if someone had carefully relocated
from one room to another, creating a little eddying gust in their wake.

I don't need this shit
, Bo thought, and turned to go. But thoughts
of Emma in trouble tied his feet up. That hello she'd offered, it had
been more than a little awkward. It had been pained, strangled. And
was it even hello at that? Couldn't it have been
don't go
? He reached
in his pocket for his keys and held them in his fist, allowing the jagged
ends to poke free of his clenched knuckles. He swept up to the door
and nudged it wider. He saw a body sitting at the head of the
staircase. It was sitting with its knees drawn into itself, its arms
bowed over the top, its head resting in the hollow between. It was
naked, and as white as chalk. He could see enough to confirm that
the body was male.

'Emma?'

He heard something coming from deeper within the flat. It
sounded like someone knitting.

'Emma? I'm calling the police. Can you hear me?'

He pulled out his Motorola and flipped it open. He dialled 999.
Dead line.

Okay.

He squeezed the keys tighter between his fingers and pushed the
door wide open. Anyone coming within striking distance was going
to get a mouthful of Yales. He stepped around the body, gritting his
teeth as his jeans brushed against its tinder-dry hide. He moved
deeper into the flat, questioning his sanity, wondering how long it
would take for his bladder, his bowels and his mind to give up to the
fear climbing his chest. Emma's flat was in a bad state. How long
since she had first approached him? He thought back to that time, in
a tapas bar in Farringdon Road, six, seven months ago? when he had
been talking to a magazine editor and showing her his portfolio. At
the bar, Emma had introduced herself, apologised for spying on him,
and explained, tipsily, her ambition. He'd taken her card and a kiss
on the cheek, never intending to follow it up. But here he was. And
he hoped she was too.

Bo told himself that everything was okay. The body on the stairs
was a joke from a trick shop. The dark stains on the walls were
splashes from a glass of wine. The knitting sound ... just that. 'Hi,'
she'd say as he rounded this corner into her living room. 'I turned
forty. So I started knitting. Want a cardigan?'

'Emma?' he tried again, his voice as dry as the aged spider silk
festooning the rooms' crevices. The sounds were coming from what
he guessed was the living room; the kitchen and bathroom were
straight on and to his left respectively, their doors open. Plates and
pans were stacked in the sink, along with what looked like a matted
hank of hair. The shower curtain was drawn in the bathroom; as far
as he was concerned, that's the way it would stay.

He moved through to the living room and saw Emma on a sofa
strewn with pieces of human flesh. She was naked, squatting, trying
to draw the body of a large man high enough from the floor for her
to be able to bite into it. He saw that the clicking sound was coming
from another man, sitting apart from the others. He too was naked.
His teeth couldn't stop chattering. His lips were blue. His eyes seemed
tired and wide at the same time. Shock. He was bound with some
kind of clear twine; his hands and feet were blackening. Blood
threaded the kink of his inner arm, the creases where his neck lifted
from his shoulders.

Above the sofa were six commemorative plates. It looked as though
they were meant to spell out the word CHRISTMAS but either the
payments hadn't been completed or Emma had grown bored of them.
It was an apt reaction to the tableau he was looking at. The carpet was
a Jackson Pollock of urine, blood, and shit. There was a hole in the
wall to the left of the sofa. It looked as though someone had been
chiselling at it rather than it being the result of any structural failing.

Bo took a picture.

Emma did not look up. The chattering man did not look up. The
dead man was fractionally consumed.

Bo left. He noticed that the man at the head of the stairs was not
kneeling, but was suspended on a thread that was attached to the
ceiling. He moved in the draught created by Bo's desperation, like a
paper figure on a baby's mobile. He took another picture. Smile, you
cunt.

He fell down the final flight of stairs, his legs were shaking so
much. He took off a layer of cells from his cheek against the wall, and
staggered out to his bike wiping lymph from his face, although he
thought it might be sweat, or tears.

He managed to keep himself from being sick, and sat astride the
Ninja for a few minutes, looking up at Emma's window, which from
here looked frosted. He thought of the hole in her wall. Two teenage
boys walked past him bouncing a basketball and talking about
breasts. An ice-cream van played saccharine melodies as it turned on
to Liverpool Road from Offord Road. Bo thought crazily of ice
creams he had liked as a kid, running out to the van as it parked
outside his parents' house. They always had a choc ice, because that
was sophisticated. He had all kinds of rubbish, pumped so full of E
numbers they might have glowed in the dark. Some of them might
still be in his gut, undigested, indigestible after all these years. Zoom.
Screwball. Tangle Twister.

And then he
was
sick, copiously, and the dead flies in his vomit
reminded him of his mother's rock-cake mixture before it was put in
the oven.

'What's happening to me?' he whispered. 'I don't know who I am.'

He looked back up to the frosted window and saw a face in the
moment of its retreat. His eyes shifted to the next window. That too
was frosted, although it might have been the reflection of the morning
sunlight, or net curtains in need of a wash. He kicked the bike into
action and moved away, thinking of honeycombs, of networks, of
death worming through the terraces of north London.

'Okay, and now just one of the councillor and Pete. Pete, if you could
lift the cheque a little higher. Level with your head. And bring it in a
bit so that your cheek is touching it. Councillor, if you could get close
enough so your cheek is touching the other side. I know, I know, but
space is limited and we might only be able to fit that shot in. Nice.
That's good. And that'll about do it, I think. Thank you for your time.'

* * *

He sat at a table on his own in the Albert, the little old pub on
Victoria Street that seemed out of place among all the glass office
blocks muscling in around it. He drank a lot of strong lager. He ran
his finger over the camera, tripping it against the wind-on lever as if
it were the rosary. He tried Keiko on his mobile but she wasn't
answering. That meant she was probably at the British Library where
mobile-phone use was prohibited, boning up on entomology, or
sending rude emails to her friends. He desperately wanted to be with
her. He wanted to hold her so tightly that she left an imprint on him.

He finished his pint and walked across the road to the antique
jewellers on Artillery Row. There he found a silver brooch in the
shape of a bee. He bought it and wrapped it in gift paper, placed it in
a bubblewrap envelope, and wrote a short note:

You've always been strong for me. But I don't know if that's
enough any more. I don't want you to end up as my crutch. Have you
noticed things changing? Can you see what I see? Am I going mad?
Does it mean I'm going mad if I have to ask the question? Do you see
a difference in me?

He thought about it, then crumpled the note in his fist. He posted
her the bee on its own.

There was a man standing on the corner of Albemarle Street and
Stafford Street eating a baby's arm.

He didn't understand how he got back home without causing an
accident. He had drunk too much, driven far too fast, leaning into
corners like a superbike racer, his leathered knee sometimes kissing
the tarmac. His head was full of clicking noises: teeth, shutter release,
his propeller pencil as he fed fresh lead for names for his notebook.

Councillor Tom Leyland. That's L-E-Y-L
...

He parked and locked the bike, covered it with green tarp, went
inside and took a shower. On the way home, as fast as he had
travelled, what fucking things had he seen?

He had seen a couple of tramps sitting on the road as he throttled
down through the lights at Notting Hill Gate. They had been kissing,
hoods up, holding on to each other too violently for passion yet too
controlled for drugs or booze. That's what caught his attention. He
saw his mouth so deep inside her face it was as if he were trying to
hide.

Figures as white as candles swaying in windows.

A small child, so gaunt as to suggest translucency, gnawing at her
own fingers, staring up accusingly at him, flattening lips dripping
with blood.

He poured a long measure from a bottle of vodka he kept in the
freezer. Tiredness had settled against his skin like cold bathwater. He
sat on his bed and went for another sip to find he had already drained
the glass without tasting it. He picked up the phone and tried Keiko at
home. No answer. He left a message that he despised for its wheedling
tone.
Come over. I need you. I don't want to be on my own.

I. I. I. Me. Me. Me.

He reached for his biker jacket and fished out Detective Inspector
Laurier's number. He'd barely dialled the number before it was
picked up.

'Joseph Laurier.'

'It's Mulvey,' Bo said.

'Mulvey. I don't know any Mulvey. Expound or remove yourself
from my phone line.'