The Unblemished (26 page)

I ran out of that building. I nearly took the revolving doors with
me. I didn't get a cab, or a bus, or the tube. I ran and stumbled and
ran home in my dainty little shoes, an hour and a half. Too scared to
stop because there was always some other blank face coming out of
the houses and shops, looking like it had been made over. Everywhere
I looked there was something that might not be what it seemed to be.
Even in the distance there was ambiguity. I saw a figure bending over
another figure in the peace park in Tavistock Square. They might
have both been naked, but the figure on his knees might also have
been wearing a shiny red top. I hope. I fucking hope. A bus went past
and the windows in the top deck had been vandalised, someone had
covered them in red paint. I saw the shape of a hand in it, and I don't
know if it was a print, or a real hand, pressing against it, trying to get
out. I saw a man through a pair of billowing curtains in a posh hotel
in Bloomsbury, just before the breeze died and he was hidden again,
with his face buried in the stomach of a black cat.

I got home and I stood in the centre of my living room and I was
so tense, all that lactic acid built up in my arms and legs, I was afraid
to sit down in case I shattered. I tried calling Keith but there was no
answer.

I was so hungry I went to the fridge and I ate a tub of vanilla ice
cream and a box of Tuc biscuits. It's like seeing people eat dinner
through the window of a restaurant. You can't help feeling peckish
yourself. I realised that all I'd seen all morning was hungry people.
People eating.

Three days ago, around four in the morning, someone tried to get
into my flat. I heard them at the door messing with the lock. I
screamed my head off. I switched the stereo on and played U2 at full
blast for twenty minutes. They went away pretty fast: I only got a
glimpse of a shadow running down the stairs, but I didn't hear a door
slam. I didn't see anyone legging it down Charlotte Street. Nobody
came to see what the fuss was. Nobody complained about the noise.

I won't leave this flat again. I'll die of hunger, maybe in a month
or so, but I'm not leaving. No fucking way. There are other people in
this block trying to get to me. They're sitting in their rooms, looking
up at the ceiling, wondering how to break in. There are people in this
block who want to fucking eat me.

'That's a bit melodramatic, Tina, don't you think?'

'No, I don't,' she said, giving Nick such a stare that he had to look
away. 'I hear them at night, in the flat underneath this one, scrabbling
at the ceiling with their claws –'

'Claws? You've got dogs for neighbours now?'

She ignored him. '– and then they'll come up that stairwell and test
the door, wait on the landing until morning. This has been going on
for days. London is overrun. It's like woodworm. Everything's getting
eaten from the inside out. Pretty soon, this whole city is going to be
one empty shell.'

Nick said, 'They go back inside when it's light? How civilised.'

Tina turned her attention to Sarah. 'So what did you see out
there?'

Sarah nodded, as if doing so would give Tina the alliance she
needed without having to describe their experiences. She reluctantly
told her about the pub, and her sense of something out of kilter, and
how, once she'd noticed the lack of drinking or smoking or ordered
speech, she couldn't understand why she'd not locked on to it the
moment they had walked through the door. She could see that Tina
was pleased that elements of their stories chimed with each other.
Sarah told her about the sofa, or what she had hoped was a sofa,
what her brain had not allowed to view in its stark truth. Tina's hand
on the filleting knife tightened and relaxed, tightened and relaxed.

'It's being in a city that doesn't help,' she said. 'Everything's
magnified. But even then, you live here long enough and you see
things so weird you barely even blink. You never look twice. If what
went on in London happened in a sleepy seaside town, the military
would have been mobilised by now. You'd have tanks rolling down
the high street. But London is built on weirdness. It celebrates it. It's
stained into its history. People move to the city so they can be peculiar
and feel comfortable about it. Nobody cares. Every fetish and kink
and perversion is catered for in its secret rooms and back alleys. You
can blend in no matter what your needs are. You can disappear. Men
and monsters, rubbing shoulders in the street. It doesn't help that on
the surface of things, it doesn't look too mad a situation. There's no
martial law because everything's happening quietly. It's like rot. Like
cancer. By the time the cavalry come trotting in here, the guts will
have fallen out of everything. There'll be nothing left to rescue.'

Nick got to his feet, ran the back of his hand over his mouth.
Despite his returning cockiness, he continued to be nervous, Sarah
could tell, even though she was still learning about him. He snatched
the phone up, put it to his ear, asked the question even though his
expression was already answering it.

'I tried calling friends, relatives,' Tina said. 'Do you think I'm
stupid? The phones are down.'

'What about your mobile?'

'No signal.'

Nick shook his head and slipped his own phone out of his pocket.
He flipped it open and stared at the display. 'Fuck's sake,' he said.
And then: 'Sarah. What about yours?'

'It's probably fine, but it's in Southwold, on the junk-shop counter.'

'Fuck!'

'I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. But I was in kind of a rush, remember?'

He sighed and tried his phone anyway. He looked as if he might
hurl it at the wall when it did not respond, but he reined in his anger
and pocketed it instead. 'Might just be a busy zone here. Probably
work later.'

Sarah went to him, stroked his arm. 'We have to believe there are
others out there like us, looking for people like us. The city hasn't just
turned into a freak arena overnight, you know.'

'It's not overnight. This has been going on for days, maybe
even w–'

Sarah shot her a look and for a moment, Tina's face darkened
before she nodded gently and averted her gaze. Sarah sensed a change
in the balance of power. The other woman was clearly a loaded gun
on a hair trigger. She could go off at any moment, and probably often
did. She didn't like her authority, such as it was, being challenged. She
was alone, and used to taking orders from herself, nobody else. You
could see it in those cold blue eyes. Sarah turned back to Nick to see
if he had anything to add. His face was the colour of whey. He
shifted, as if about to make some kind of defiant gesticulation, but
then he suddenly appeared too weak to do anything.

'Aren't we jumping the gun a bit?' he said. 'I mean, what are you
actually claiming? That London is being overrun by monsters who ...
what? Pretend to do the things we do?' He laughed a little, nervously,
almost over before it had begun. There was incredulity and desperation
mixed in his eyes. You could see him wishing for Southwold's
lack of complication, where the only drama was in the weather.

'Sounds about right to me,' Tina said, avoiding Sarah's gaze and
any rebuke waiting for her there.

'But why? Why would anyone go to that trouble?'

'I don't know,' she admitted, but her triumphant expression had
not left her face. 'Why does the insect pretend to be a leaf?'

'To prevent itself from being seen,' Nick said.

'Exactly.' Bolstered by her train of thought, she met Sarah's gaze
head on. 'They don't want to be seen. It's too early for them to
announce themselves. They have some reason for biding their time.
They're waiting for something.'

Nick said, 'You're fucking mad.'

'Well, you'd know, I suppose.'

Sarah saw how Nick's temperament was just as fragile as Tina's,
but in a different way. Whereas she was looking for an opportunity
to let off steam with an argument or a slanging match, Nick was
forever wrestling with the phobias and paranoias queuing up at a
door he could never quite manage to close. He was brave, she knew
that, but he was as vulnerable as a sandcastle at the edge of the tide.
She suddenly realised what an achievement it had been for him to
make it this far without some serious failure in his deportment. The
cracks were beginning to show now, though.

Tina put down her knife, perhaps encouraged by her uninvited
guests, and headed for the kitchen. 'Can I get anybody anything?
Tea? Coffee? I've only got powdered creamer; the fresh milk went off
days ago.'

'I'll nip out and get you some,' Nick said brightly, although his
face retained its cheesy hue. Every shred of his being said that he
didn't want to go back outside, despite his stated scepticism.

'There's a brave lad,' Tina said. 'But I wouldn't push your luck.
Some of them, as Sarah saw for herself, have already caused harm –'

'I didn't see that,' Nick said. 'I didn't see any of that.'

'– so it's probably safe to assume the rest are capable of the same
behaviour, if not right at the moment.'

Sarah watched Tina as she clucked about her kitchen, and admired
her attempt to retain some sense of normality in the teeth of insanity,
or violence, whatever it was that was testing this little garrison she'd
created. The neatly folded tea towels, the lack of washing-up in the
sink, the militarily precise stacks of crockery in the cupboards
contrasted sharply with the barbed wire and staves of wood nailed
across the windows, the battery of knives spread neatly on a tablecloth
like a surgeon's arsenal. Despite her assurances that she would
never leave the flat, there was an emergency rucksack parked by the
door, open to reveal a torch, a flask, a first aid kit and spare clothing.

'This must have something to do with Claire,' Sarah said.

'Your daughter?' Tina called, her voice tinny and hollow in the
little kitchen. 'How?'

'It can't be the case that two separate incidents of madness can go
on in two separate places and not be interlinked. I don't think I could
cope if there wasn't some connecting thread.'

Tina returned to the room holding a teaspoon between her fingers.

Behind her, steam from a kettle swarmed across the ceiling. It must
have been cold in there because the steam was dense, folding and
roiling like bad weather. The moisture in the air caused the metal of
the spoon to gleam; Tina's eyes too. It sustained the feeling that Sarah
was in the middle of a long, strange dream; at any moment she would
waken with Claire by her side, asking if she fancied going to see a
film, or sharing a portion of fish and chips, as she had been wont to
do. Thinking of her like that was more dangerous than talking about
her as just another problem, in a room shared by other people trying
to deal with other problems. She felt tears rise.

'I have to find help for her,' she said. 'But you get here, you get to
this big place and ... I don't know where to begin. Or how.'

'I'm sorry to seem callous, chick, but I really don't care. I don't
know you. Ergo, I don't take risks for you.'

'I wasn't expecting you to,' Sarah said, unable to keep the
frostiness from her voice. 'I'm just looking for a way in, that's all. I'm
happy on my own.'

'Not that I'm sending any mixed messages, but
on your own
equals
dead.
'

'What do you expect me to do?' Sarah spat.

'Die,' Tina said. 'Some of the day you can feel fairly safe out there.
Daytime mostly. Night? Forget it. Fucking mayhem. And it's getting
worse.'

'How do you mean?'

'What you saw tonight? How you felt? I'm guessing your blood
was up. I'm guessing you didn't feel too hale and hearty. Running legs
you had on, I'm guessing. One wrong move and fucking bye-bye.'

'You could describe it like that,' Sarah said.

'Well, a week, ten days ago, that's all, I look out the window there
and all I see are people inching along the pavement with their eyes
buggy as fuck. Like old men with thyroid problems. Fast learners,
though. Believe me. Fast. Last night I saw a pack of three young guys
rush along there like they'd had their heels greased. They smashed
into a woman so hard I think I could hear her neck break even from
up here.'

'What about the police?' Nick asked. 'Aren't there any patrols?
Any sirens?'

'You can forget the police,' Tina said. 'I saw a kid out there
sucking what looked like a red lollipop – I wish I could say it
was
a
fucking lollipop – and he was wearing a policeman's helmet. No
patrols. No riot shields. No turtle formation. The police are dead. Or
in on it. Whatever.'

Nick snatched up the phone again and frantically dialled numbers
until Tina stood over him with a steaming mug. On it was the legend:
Instant male. Just add beer.

'Have a think about it, if you can detach yourself from your own
problems for a minute. You came here in the car. You see any police
on the motorway? Think about how much traffic you saw on the
roads.'

Nick spread his hands and looked into the space between them.
Sarah nodded. 'You're right. No police. I've been looking out for
them. And traffic ... well, let's just say that we had no jams on the
way in.'

There were other things now, tickling at her memory. Peripherals.
Things that she barely registered, like the music from the stereo or the
pain, dulled by Solpadeine, that was throbbing in her thigh. Figures
in dun fields that she had taken to be scarecrows and a suggestion of
movement in them, beyond what the wind was inspiring. She had
turned to see what she thought was heather clumped under a tree, but
her mind was now insisting it was a body opened from throat to
groin, its innards frozen into grey-lilac foam. Cloud shadow racing
over the countryside. But the skies had been clear. She had slept a
little in the car. Uncomfortable, claggy sleep. A dream of hunting. Of
pursuance.