Regicide

Chapter Eight

Luck had not deserted me. The cars behind all had room to overtake and I drifted unsteadily to the left, my legs shaking with shock, and the car came to a dead stop in the gravel on the hard shoulder. I sat very still waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Because that’s how it felt: I was a passive figure in a drama unfolding in front of me. I could only watch. But now I sat in a silence broken only by the occasional car bowling down the middle lane. Each time one went past, the Escort rocked. It was almost comforting.

After a while I tried the ignition. Nothing. Radio: dead. Lights: no response. The car had died and I had been lucky not to have done.

I got out and had a look at the car. One of the tyres was shredded. Otherwise there were no obvious signs of what had caused its demise. I reached into my boot for my cigarettes. I had more than half a pack. I lit one and drew in a lungful. Mixed with the sharp night air it tasted good. My legs were still trembling but the smoke was counteracting the bitter taste of fear in my mouth.

I smoked the cigarette and walked around for a few minutes before I felt able to get back on top of things. I opened the door and got my jacket from the back seat, then took the keys, locked the car and set off looking for an emergency telephone.

There were two quite close but neither of them worked. I even crossed the motorway to one on the other side but that didn’t work either. My breakdown membership had lapsed but I had to get off the motorway somehow.

I walked further on and spotted a sign up ahead. It was only small and no higher than my waist, so probably was not an exit road. The sign grew larger but only slowly. Two more minutes and I was able to read it. ‘Work vehicles only’, it said, and just beyond it there was a sharp turning to the left, a single track road which led off into the darkness. I had to try it. My road atlas was still lying open on the floor at home so I had no idea how far it would be to the next proper exit. There were no major well-lit areas visible from where I was. This service road offered a glimmer of hope, at least. There were even a couple of lights winking in the velvety distance that could be workmen’s trailers or farmhouses.

I left the motorway and walked into the darkness.

The narrow road seemed to go on for a long way, petering out as a track. There was no light other than that of the cold stars and I stumbled over a cattle grid. The further I walked the more my mind drifted. The problem of the car became less serious even though there was no sign as yet of how I was going to get out of this mess. I just kept walking with the single-minded purpose — or abstraction — of the very drunk.

The track rose slightly and seemed to go over a small bridge. I stopped at the highest point and went to the edge of the track to see if I could hear or see anything. But it was all too silent and dark. There was a smell but I couldn’t place it, so I walked on. I lit a cigarette. If I’d been tired earlier I felt wide awake now but increasingly it seemed that things like tiredness and knackered-out cars just didn’t matter a great deal any more. I walked on, my boots making a humble clump, clump sound soon swallowed by the fields on either side of the road.

I saw a light in the distance, possibly one of those that I’d seen from the motorway. As I got closer, though, it became obvious it was neither a constructors’ yard nor a farm building. It was bigger than both and, in this setting, far stranger. I thought I knew what it was but had to wait until I was closer to be sure.

Flat as a pancake and as big as half a football pitch — floodlit from eight points — here, in front of me, was an open-air ice rink. I gazed at it in wonder. Quite apart from any other consideration I wanted to know how it stayed frozen in the open air in the middle of summer. But the longer I stood and watched the sparkle of the light shimmering on the surface of the ice, the less its incongruity seemed to matter. I lit another cigarette and as I was bending down to slip the pack back down the side of my boot a skater slid onto the ice. She wore a black outfit, a tight top with a loose flapping skirt that glittered with tiny flints of mirrored glass. I watched, entranced, as she completed a circuit of the rink, presumably unaware of my presence, her hair and her skirt trailing out behind. The ice shone so brightly under the lights it seemed almost to hover above the ground. I saw the girl bend at the knee as she came down towards the corner nearest to me and I knew she was going to jump. My heart beat faster. And when she jumped and twisted and kept on twisting before touching the ice my stomach flipped, my head spun and I was back in bed with Annie Risk, the trumpeter hitting his triple G. The skater was already at the far end of the ice and jumping again. There may not have been any commentary to help me but I was pretty sure she had just executed a quadruple salchow. She went into a steps sequence for all the world as if she were practising for a competition and then slipped into a spin that far surpassed anything I’d seen. She spun so fast she lost all solid form and I drew a sharp little breath when I realised she had risen at least six inches above the ice. Then she came out of the spin like wine being poured from a carafe and skated away to the far side again where she jumped another quad and drifted off the ice, melting into the darkness.

I stood watching the ice for two or three minutes hoping she might come back. I knew I hadn’t imagined her: I could still make out her signature scratched on the ice’s glittering page. Only when I turned away and felt the movement of air on my face did I realise the effect her display had worked on me. There were cold tear tracks down both my cheeks.

I walked on, and once the ice had been swallowed up by the darkness behind me I began to wonder if I’d hallucinated the whole episode.

In the darkness on both sides of the track I became aware that things were starting to change. Where there had been only trees and grass there now stood sturdier shapes. It was too dark to see what they were but soon I noticed the irregular echo of my footsteps which told me the track was edged intermittently by buildings. In the distance I saw light and in a few minutes I was walking under streetlamps that shed a diluted milky light over the disused workshops and factories lining my route. Soon, I hoped, I would find a phone.

But even after passing the openings to several side roads I still hadn’t seen a kiosk. I passed one or two beaten-up vehicles, trucks that appeared to have been abandoned. Apart from these dubious clues I saw no signs of life and so just kept on walking.

I appeared to be heading into town. God knew what town: some grim Midlands industrial community. The frequency of side streets increased and my track had widened to two lanes with a white line down the middle — a road, then. I saw a few old cars dotted about and the factories were soon replaced by four-storey blocks of flats. There were occasional shops all shuttered and padlocked. The street had that strange, alienating feel common to all dark streets. In the full light of morning — if I hadn’t managed to find a garage or a phone by then — it would all look quite different.

The streets changed again and now looked like the area around Annie’s flat. I could have been wandering about lost in Moss Side. Long low rows of terraces and back entries, whatever they called them around here. I was surprised to find myself in such a heavily built-up area when there had been no sign of it from the motorway.

But still there were no phones. I turned off my straight route once I formed the impression I was heading away from the centre of whatever town this was. I wasn’t even sure I would be able to find my way back to the motorway.

I felt a tickly sensation at the back of my skull even before I heard the muted rumble of the engines and then the sensation spread to the base of my spine. My mouth went dry. I looked about for a hiding place then stopped myself: what was I scared of? If there were vehicles approaching could I not stop them and ask for help? On a rational level there should have been nothing to fear, so why did I seem to have three small rats chasing one another’s tails in my stomach? The rumble got louder; I heard a gear change. I thought they were still several streets away, whoever they were, but my mistake became clear as two police cars turned the corner at the far end of the street and headed slowly in my direction. They were perhaps a hundred yards away. I flattened myself against the wall but they would still be able to see me.

I should have been able to ask them for help but I was frightened. There was no one else about, the air seemed unnaturally still, and the police cars proceeded so slowly it could only mean they were on the lookout for something or someone. My head was buzzing now and beads of sweat had sprung up along my hairline. I didn’t know which way to turn, where I could hide. The cars rolled closer.

Another movement caught my attention. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a man beckoning to me from a car parked in a side street. The engine was running. To get to him meant crossing the road in full view of the police cars. If they happened to be looking to the front their beams would probably just pick me out and I sensed that might mean trouble. I didn’t think it was a brilliant idea, to get into a car with a complete stranger, but if I stayed put I’d almost certainly get picked up by the police and I had no idea what trouble that might lead to.

I crouched low and ran across the road, ducked into the side street and jumped into the waiting car, which took off immediately, throwing me back in my seat.

‘What you doing out?’ the driver asked, his tone incredulous. He was short and dark, wearing a woollen hat pulled down over his forehead and a black bomber jacket. His gloved hands gripped the wheel. I was too shocked to know what to say to him. ‘What you doing out on the streets at night? You want to get shot? You must be mad.’

‘My car broke down,’ I said.

‘What do you mean, your car broke down? You shouldn’t have been out in it. Asking for trouble. Where did it break down?’ As he fired these questions at me he steered the black car around the most unlikely bends and corners at speeds that seemed out of all proportion, but he drove with such confidence that I trusted him. Even when we appeared to be heading straight for a lamppost it always side-stepped the car neatly at the last second.

‘On the motorway,’ I said.

‘On the motorway?’ he exclaimed. ‘What motorway?’

Fear spread through my insides like smoke. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘To a safe house,’ he said, leaning into another ninety-degree corner and tearing out of it like a bishop out of a brothel. I decided to shut up and let the man drive. Watching the side streets flash past I got the impression we were skirting the city centre. If any police cars came into view at the end of any street my driver quickly re-routed us down some unlikely alley, hurtling into the darkness without headlamps. There were no other cars or pedestrians about though I did glimpse dark blurs of movement around the base of buildings, which could have been dogs. At major intersections there were statues mounted on plinths. As far as I could make out in the dark they were all the same man: a tall, broad-shouldered figure wearing either a trench coat or a double-breasted suit with a trilby-style hat. Something about his deep-set eyes and square jaw unsettled me. This was no ordinary Midlands town. Frightened and confused, I began to find myself short of breath.

In a street of anonymous uniform terraced houses the driver emergency-stopped outside a derelict-looking building.

‘Safe house,’ he said. ‘Go in and wait. Someone will come.’ As I was hesitating, he explained, ‘Wait for someone to come. You might have to wait till dawn but they’ll come.’

‘Who are you?’ I asked him.

‘I’m Giff. If you need me, don’t ask.’

I turned and got out of the car.

‘Get some sleep,’ he suggested, and with that he accelerated out of the gutter, the passenger door flapping wildly until he took the corner on two wheels and it slammed shut. Feeling exposed, I tried the door of the house. It was locked. Panic threatened to rise in me. There was no access down the side of the house and the windows in the front room were all closed. I wondered about the houses on either side but Giff had been specific. Not knowing what else to do I took off my leather jacket and balled it around my fist and punched a hole in one of the windows.

I jumped in and landed in a crouch. Looking around to get my bearings I wondered if I should answer the phone. Then, seconds after, I couldn’t work out why I’d thought that. To start with, the phone wasn’t even ringing.

I had a look around. The house was in slightly better shape than its exterior had suggested; nevertheless, the carpets were threadbare, the balustrades rickety, and there was a fine film of dust stretched over all the surfaces. The floorboards upstairs sagged and groaned under my weight. I placed my boots as lightly as possible. When I was satisfied all the rooms were empty I lit a cigarette and watched the street from an upstairs window. It was dark and quiet. Only the stars allowed me to see fifty yards down the street where I noticed a curious stone or concrete seat fashioned into the wall at an intersection. It was too high up to have been designed for passers-by, so I wondered what its function might be. For all I knew, it could have been neo-utilitarian sculpture.

I could hear dogs barking somewhere off to the right but the house itself remained quiet. When my legs got too tired to allow me to continue standing by the window I went and sat against the wall. I was close enough to the window to hear if anyone came and I was determined not to fall asleep. Cupping my hand to shield the flame I lit another cigarette and waited some more. I concentrated hard on the environment of the house, listening for any sounds at all, and watched the sky for a change in the light.

When I was very young, maybe eight or nine, I came into the house one day to feed the hamster that we kept in a cage in a corner of the dining room.

My father was out at work and my mother was weeding in the back garden. I got down on my hands and knees in front of the cage and peered in. Sometimes, when he wasn’t running in his wheel, Cassidy would lie down behind his water bottle at the back of the cage. At first I couldn’t see him at all and I crawled closer to the cage. He was indeed lying at the back but something about him didn’t look quite right. There was something different about his tiny bulk; his coat was dull. I opened the cage door and gingerly reached my hand in — Cassidy had bitten my mother and me a couple of times. He didn’t move when I touched him lightly with one finger so I prodded him harder to wake him up. He rolled slightly, whereas I would have expected him to spring to life and turn quickly to see what was going on. I pushed him again and he just slid across the straw on the bottom of his cage.

My breath was coming quite fast and I realised I was burning red. Guiltily I looked around to see if by chance my mother had come in and was standing watching. But I was alone.

I picked up the hamster and lifted it out of the cage. It lay in my hand without moving. Normally you would feel its tension as it prepared to jump out of your hands or you would just feel its small, warm pulse beating in your palm. Instead it was just there. I rolled it from one hand to the other to see if I could wake it up. I realised I was grinning nervously and immediately wiped the expression off my face in case someone came in. Turning Cassidy over I looked closely at his face. It looked no different. His eyelids were closed as if he were asleep. I threw his little body up in the air several times and caught it then I put it back in the cage in the same position I had found it.

It was my first experience not only of death, but of the death of something I cared about. And for a while my reaction to it worried me. Why had I thrown it up in the air like a toy? Why had I preferred to leave it for someone else to discover?

In that dark upstairs room I drifted in and out of sleep, half-dreaming about my mother and the pleasure she used to get from weeding and gardening before it became an obsession and her only comfort. As she knelt at the edge of the lawn and rooted through the catmint and rhododendrons for stray grass seedlings and twists of bindweed I would watch from my bedroom window, pictures of footballers and pop stars decorating the wall behind me, and listen to the dogs barking in next door’s garden. Except that the neighbours didn’t have a dog.

I suddenly came wide awake and pricked my ears.

Dogs.

I heard them quite clearly and it wasn’t just a matter of a couple of strays picking over rubble. These were the real thing. I jumped up and ran quietly to the window. The street was empty and light had begun to creep into the sky. I could hear the dogs around the back of the house, maybe not in the garden or yard of the house itself, but pretty fucking close. Too close for my liking. My blind trust in Giff was beginning to look a bit previous. I heard more low growling and scurrying of feet and needed no further encouragement. I crossed the tiny landing and stepped into the back bedroom. Its boards, too, were bare and I had to walk lightly to avoid making a noise. I crept to the window and hugged the wall next to it as I looked outside. My heart raced. Half a dozen strong black dogs came running up the back entry. They stopped outside the gate that led to the little yard directly below my window. With saliva spraying from their snapping jaws they jumped at the gate and thumped it with their thick skulls. They looked like the dog I’d seen from the train. It wouldn’t take a pack of pit bulls very long to break down a simple wooden gate.

Another figure appeared. This was a heavily built man walking with a stoop. I couldn’t make out his features in the darkness. He strode purposefully through the dogs — which parted without a whimper — and rattled the gate.

I was down the stairs in two seconds flat, careless of the racket my boots were making, and at the front door with my hand on the latch as the gate to the back yard gave way. I heard the dogs growl like a single organism as they leapt across the yard and straight into the back door of the house. It splintered on impact. Fuck it, I thought, and yanked open the front door.

The street was deserted.

As I ran I heard the dogs break into the back of the house behind me and I ran faster, wishing I’d thought to shut the front door behind me — every second was vital and there was no point me making it easier for them.

I ran as fast as I could, my boots clumping and jacket buckles jangling. I was hardly inconspicuous. The identical streets closed around me as if they were folding me in. I saw no sign of human activity but I sensed the dogs couldn’t be far behind. I dived down a back entry and almost slipped on the cobbles and long wet grass. Turning right at the end I ran along the entry, the darkened backs of houses and their yards lining both sides of the path. At the end I emerged into a street lit by a meagre handful of dirty orange lights. I heard the car too late. It screeched around the corner and caught me in its full beam. I leapt back into the entry but a man jumped out of the passenger door and seized me before I’d got ten yards. Exceptionally strong, he hauled me back to the car and pushed me in through the rear door. We sped off and I picked myself up off the floor, recognising the black beanie of Giff bobbing above the back of the driver’s seat. There was another man in the car, in the front passenger seat, and he turned to look at me. He was unshaven and had staring bright blue werewolf eyes, but his gaze was neither hostile not self-congratulatory. Only later would I realise what it was.

‘That safe house wasn’t safe,’ Giff said.

‘No shit.’

‘It was safe a week ago. They’re tightening up.’

I just sat there and waited, resigned, wondering who ‘they’ were and whose side Giff and Wolf were really on.

We pulled up outside a large heavy tenement block with external spidery fire escapes and very few windows that were still intact.

‘Take him in,’ Giff said to Wolf. ‘I’ll park round the back. And,’ he placed his left hand on the other man’s forearm, ‘be gentle. We’re supposed to be looking after him.’

I wished someone would address me instead of just speaking about me but Wolf was already tugging at my arm.

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I can manage.’ I got out of the car and allowed the staring man to lead me into the tenement building. He glanced about nervously. I shivered as I smelt animals.

‘What is it?’

It was the first time I’d heard him speak and it was a shock. He spoke with a quiet, educated voice which belied the wild look in his eyes.

‘Animals,’ I said. ‘There are animals here.’

‘Only rats,’ he said. ‘No dogs. No problem. Let’s go.’

As we made our way up the creaking wooden stairs I heard Giff enter the building from the back and run to catch up with us.

‘Don’t,’ snapped Wolf as I gripped the banister rail. I let go and he demonstrated by kicking out one of the spindles. The rotten length of wood turned somersaults in the air as it fell down the stairwell and clattered among the rubbish piled up in the foyer. Giff had caught up with us.

‘Trying to bring the house down, are you?’ he snarled at Wolf, who looked wounded. ‘Let’s get him inside quickly.’ He meant me.

Wolf kicked open a door and there was a desperate flurry of activity inside. As we stepped into the room a man pointed a gun in our direction.

‘Put it away, Professor,’ Giff growled.

‘You should have warned me. There were clearly three of you and I was expecting two.’ The Professor was a tall, thin man with small rimless glasses that flashed as his head moved. As we went further inside I noticed the Professor staring at me like Wolf had done. He didn’t let up until I had sat down on a battered old sofa covered with an off-white sheet. The Professor turned to Giff and said, ‘Is this really him?’

Giff just grunted and the Professor lost his shyness, looking directly at me and asking, ‘Is it really you? Was it you?’

I shrugged. This game was beginning to annoy me. I was tired and disorientated. Whoever I was supposed to be I was not sure I wanted the attention.

‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I need rest.’

The Professor nodded and Wolf looked at Giff, who wiped a hand over his head to remove his black woollen beanie. I kicked off my boots and swung my legs up on the sofa. No longer bothered about what I should and shouldn’t do, I really did need some sleep.

‘You’re safe here,’ I heard Giff saying in a low voice as I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes. ‘At least for a couple of days.’

I had no intention of sticking around that long and it was only as I was drifting off to sleep that I remembered the map in my back pocket. Too tired to reach for it, I spread it out in my head and sought to trace a circuitous route out of this dark place back to my car on the hard shoulder of the motorway.

As my conscious mind gradually closed down, however, the streets changed to those of my childhood: the interlocking rows of terraced houses around the corner from our street of semis, the back entries smelling of rotten fruit and old prams, the 16-year-old girls who walked along the street across the top of the entry with their short pleated skirts and bouncing red hair, the tiny sky-blue invalid carriages parked outside the prefabs near the railway line, the dogs that snatched free ad-filled newspapers out of my hand as I stuck them through letter boxes, our flame-haired window cleaner Jim and his sleepy wife in her half-undone dressing gown, the advancing shadow of the only neighbourhood boy who was bigger than me.

Stamford Jackson was an unusually fair-minded bully. Most adolescent terrorists would pick on the smallest kids around and make their lives miserable but Stamford Jackson chose me, the second tallest child in all those roads off Heath Street, perhaps because he worked out that if he established his dominance over a big kid it would prove just how powerful he was to everyone else. Maybe he could sense also that I was a pushover — literally: the first time he hit me I fell and bruised my ankle on the cobbles down one of the entries at the top of Heath Street.

The first time I saw Stamford Jackson was on my paper round. I was nearing the end, having done Jim’s house — and failed to spot his half-naked wife through the curtains — and Sally Darke’s. I’d seen Jim’s wife once when I’d happened to look in through their front window and she’d been bending down to pick something up and her dressing gown had fallen open. She hadn’t seen me but I had of course looked in their window every week after that and never seen her again. Sally Darke was a girl who’d been a couple of years above me at primary school and who had once said something vaguely encouraging to me like ‘Lanky bastard’. Occasionally I saw her going in or coming out of her house and she sometimes flicked Vs at me and skipped past. I knew that if I said anything to her it would ruin it and she’d never look at me again. If I didn’t speak to her I could maintain the fantasy of a perfect relationship.

I’d also done all the houses that had dogs — I knew them well — and I’d not had my hand bitten off. At the top of Heath Street there was a funny little road that had a cul-de-sac going off it and that’s where Stamford Jackson lived. I didn’t know this at the time though I had heard of him from the kids I used to hang around with. I was delivering to the houses in the cul-de-sac, running up and down the paths and banging the gates, and I came to a house that had its front door standing open. The hallway was spectacularly untidy and dirty and I stood and looked at it in amazement. I didn’t know how anyone could live in such filth. Half-empty tins of Dulux Non-Drip Gloss, upended coffee mugs, an ashtray with about two thousand cigarette ends in it, a pair of dark blue underpants with dirty white piping, a copy of the Sun open at page three and some obscenity scrawled across it in red ballpoint, a crushed box of Mr Kipling’s Bakewell Tarts and a Wilbur Smith paperback with the spine broken in several places. And this was just the hall.

What I didn’t know was that I was being watched from the front room bay window. A sharp rap on the glass made me jump. There was a grey-haired old man wearing a vest that swelled over his belt, and his son who towered over him.

‘What are you fucking looking at, you nosy cunt?’ the old man snapped.

‘Fuck off,’ the boy added.

‘Just delivering a paper,’ I said.

The old man came striding into the hall at full tilt. He grabbed the paper from the floor and threw it at me.

‘Take your fucking paper. We don’t want it, nancy boy. Fuck off.’ He was practically screaming at me. The huge boy, still standing in the bay window, was grinning. I turned and ran as far as the embankment to the new road that had turned this street into a cul-de-sac. I was shaking. I ran up the embankment and crossed the new road which, unfinished, was still a sea of mud, thinking that I would finish the papers later.

I hung around on the footbridge over the railway line for twenty minutes, watching the electric trains scuttling into the station, their pantographs sparking against the wires. I thought of my father saying there was no romance left in the railways since the end of the steam era. I didn’t agree but I understood why he said it: he missed the trains he’d watched in his youth, whereas these electrics and the diesels that pulled freight wagons through Skelton Junction and over Broadheath were all I’d ever known and I couldn’t imagine them ever changing. I tried to imagine standing on the bridge and being enveloped by a cloud of steam from a locomotive passing underneath.

When I thought it was safe I crept back to the cul-de-sac to complete my paper round.

Stamford Jackson was waiting for me in the entry two doors down from his house.

‘What you fucking doing here, kid?’ he barked. ‘My dad told you, we don’t want your fucking paper.’

I started to back off but he said, ‘Come here.’

I should probably have done anything but obey his command. I should have flicked him the Vs and legged it. But I went to him. I didn’t know why. Simply because he told me to, perhaps. I walked into the entry, my long legs wobbly on the slippery cobbles, and he took one swing at me, hitting the side of my head. I went straight down with a deafening ringing in my ears and feeling sudden pain from my ankle.

‘Don’t fuck about round here,’ he said while deciding whether to kick me as I lay on the ground catching my breath. After a while he wandered off and I felt my head gingerly to see if it was cut. My fingers came away red and I felt tears pushing at the corners of my eyes. I hated bleeding.

When I’d limped home, I told my mother I’d slipped taking a short cut down one of the entries. She fussed over me, which was nice, and I didn’t feel guilty till I had to lie again about the newspapers. ‘They were over,’ I said of the dozen or so papers still in the bag.

‘You don’t often have any over,’ she said as she pressed a cold butter knife to the rapidly swelling cut on the side of my head.

When my father came home, huge and reassuring in his dark double-breasted suit which smelt of damp wool and cigars, it was my mother who told him what had happened. He looked at me in a particular way he had when he knew there was more going on than he was being told. It was a very direct look which only lasted a moment and I never knew if my mother saw or understood it. I didn’t want to tell them about Stamford Jackson for shame. I felt that my father would have expected me to put up a fight. He would have done so in a similar situation. He’d worked down the pit and in the docks before getting where he was today, which was in fact a bit of a mystery to me. I knew it had something to do with a club and a group of other men. Sometimes they came around and sat in front of the fire in the front room in a huddle of smoke and steaming cloth and I heard them using phrases like ‘venture capital’ and ‘fixed assets’. If my mother saw me listening she shooed me away and closed the lounge door quietly before retreating to the kitchen where she would be preparing a huge plate of sandwiches. The front room smelt for days afterwards. I used to sit in there for as long as possible, thinking it was good training for being grown up.

The next time Stamford Jackson saw me I was coming home from school. It was a cold day and he was wearing a big grey duffel coat. I was just wearing my blazer because I didn’t have a big coat and I didn’t like wearing my anorak to school. For some reason I laughed at Stamford Jackson’s duffel coat. I may have made some remark as well because he was on me in seconds, punching my ears and frog-marching me down the street away from my house. I saw where he was leading me: at the end of the street near the railway was a patch of wet cement. I struggled to get free but there was no question of me having any control. He took me right to the edge of the cement and, grabbing my blazer collar, sent me sprawling in it.

He laughed as I flailed about trying to stand up, but eventually walked away back the way he’d brought me.

I couldn’t say I’d accidentally fallen in wet cement so I told my father when I got in that Stamford Jackson had done it. Calmly he got his hat from the hook by the door and left the house. I ran through to the front room so I could watch him walk up the street, his trilby making his head appear to tilt to one side as it always did. He walked in a relaxed way, not too fast, but he seemed to know exactly where he was going and what he was going to do.

I never found out what he did do. All I know is that Stamford Jackson never bothered me again. Occasionally I’d see him at the end of a street or down an entry but he’d always be the first to look away. My school uniform had to be replaced but I was never blamed or made to contribute to the cost.

Chapter Nine

When I woke up, the Professor and Wolf were in the room with me, both fast asleep, and there was no sign of Giff. Whatever strange place it was I’d fetched up in, I thought I should take full advantage of their lapse in vigilance. Carrying my jacket and boots in one hand I tiptoed to the door. There was an awkward moment when the door seemed to be locked, but it was just stiff. I worked it loose very slowly and carefully and only pulled it to behind me. I didn’t put my boots on until I had reached the ground floor.

My watch had stopped but I could see light streaming in through the cracks in the door to the street. There had been no windows in the room I’d slept in and I wasn’t sure what to expect from outside. I think I imagined the streets awash with light but as empty as the night before so when I pulled open the door and stepped out I got a shock.

It was like penetrating a stream of energy. Like Oxford Street at lunch time. For a couple of minutes I allowed myself to be carried along with the flow and before I knew it I was half a mile from Giff’s safe house. Even if I went back I wouldn’t know which was the right door. I had burned my boats but that was fine because Giff and his colleagues were mad and I had to get back to my car. Annie might have been trying to ring me at the flat. She could be worrying about me. I wanted to let her know I was all right.

I drew back from the procession of folk and rested my back against an official-looking building. A steady stream of people entered the building by a set of double doors on the corner and as many left at an exit ten yards further along. Those leaving carried a small, regular parcel wrapped in brown paper. I wondered what it might contain. On the side was stencilled a capital letter M.

They generally looked slightly different to the people I was used to having around me in London or Manchester. Their features were recognisably European, possibly British, but there was something different about their look: clothes, hair, shoes, bags. The ensemble was all wrong. They looked a bit like the confused people we saw emerging from behind the Berlin Wall or scrambling aboard ferries to Brindisi when the communist governments toppled, as if they’d had a stab at copying western fashions but had followed a bunch of style magazines that were at least ten years out of date. In fact, they looked like they lived in another country — one that had little or no contact with where I was trying to get back to.

I noticed a few suspicious glances coming my way and realised I was standing out — in my white leather jacket, tight jeans and butterfly boots.

I looked around for the nearest side street. Fifty yards away. Head down I covered some ground and slipped out of sight. The crowd continued to press past at the top of the street. On a corner opposite was one of the inset stone bench seats I’d seen the night before. Sitting on it was a man in early middle-age wearing a tight-fitting shiny black suit. He was watching intently the people who passed by under his perch. As I watched, two policemen approached him leading a third man through the stream of passers-by. There was a brief exchange. I noticed with horror that whenever the suspect tried to speak up he was beaten on the legs by one of the two policemen with a stick like the fat end of a billiard cue. The man on the chair eventually made a gesture with his right arm, laying it across his own chest then pointing at the head of the suspect who had started to struggle. A mask of fear had settled on his face. Passers-by looked down at the pavement and hurried on. The policemen led the man away, one either side, and they turned into another street where I saw a black van waiting. The back doors were opened from the inside and the man was bundled in. His face pressed up against the glass as the van drove away.

The two policemen re-emerged from the street and melted back into the throng. I turned and walked in the opposite direction down my side street, away from the crowds. Turning right I saw people again at the end of the street and headed for them. At least I would be well ahead of the two policemen. Before the intersection I stopped and took out my map. I was well acquainted with its boulevards and grids of streets but had seen nothing so far that enabled me to orientate myself. Even if I were to, though, I knew the map would only represent a fraction of the city — or of the City, as I now came to think of it. I slipped into the crowd, slouching in an effort to blend in.

I looked around and accidentally caught the eye of a judge at the next corner. Behind his head was a street name — Great North Road — which I remembered from the map so I dropped my eyes and shuffled past as part of the general tide of wretched humanity. I felt the judge’s eyes burning holes in the back of my head but when I had put enough distance between us that I felt half safe again I ducked into a doorway and took the map from my back pocket. I found Great North Road at the left of my map and worked out which way I was going. Then I reasoned that as I had been travelling south on the motorway and had found the City by wandering down a service road on the left-hand side of the road I had to go west in order to get back to the car. The Great North Road forked off the map near the top left-hand corner and there was no sign of any motorway or major road to the left of it.

I didn’t dare ask anybody if they knew where the motorway was. Giff had been quite clear: there was no motorway. There was, of course, there must have been, but these people didn’t know about it. I stepped back into the main street and set off in the other direction, heading north-west. For the first time I looked properly at the shops lining the route. They were drab and anonymous, named only after what they sold: SHOES, FASHION, IRONMONGERY, BOOKS. Displays were rudimentary and unenticing: windows full of dead flies and wasps, the odd badly dressed dummy, mismatched pairs of cheaply made shoes.

I turned my attention to the road. There were two steady streams of cars and trucks and I wondered if I would perhaps be better off in a car. I looked around but couldn’t see any cabs. What would I have said to the driver? Just drive up here for a bit so I can see if it leads to the motorway. He would have said what motorway and I would have been heading straight back into trouble.

I walked up the Great North Road as unobtrusively as possible, feeling I ought to do something about my appearance but reluctant to do so as it would be like admitting I was stuck here for longer than I wanted to be. People brushed by on both sides, many carrying their brown paper packages stencilled with the letter M. Soon — when the pavement began to empty as they turned off into old, greasy-looking side streets — I realised no one was talking. In place of a buzz of conversation there was only a shuffle of feet, the slap of leather on slabs and cobbles. Had the police and street-corner judges cowed the people so much they were too afraid to speak? What did they have to hide?

I neared a kiosk selling newspapers, tobacco and confectionery. Some of the remaining pedestrians stopped to make silent exchanges with the vendor, an old grey man with heavy glasses. Crumpled old notes passed between them and the old man folded them into his pocket, handing out coins from his other pocket, taken seemingly at random. No one inspected their change. They just tucked their paper under a free arm or dropped a packet of cigarettes into a shopping bag. The kiosk looked like a stand in a railway station but more old-fashioned, with a timbered, lean-to, almost unfinished look about it. I tried to peep around the back to see if it was only half-finished but a small crowd pressed close to me and to avoid drawing their attention I was forced to move on. As I passed by, I read the blurred billboards that proclaimed: NEW LEADS IN HUNT FOR REGICIDE.

A police car growled past and I looked the other way, wishing I could have gone back for a newspaper, but caution made me carry on walking.

Since entering the outskirts the night before when I’d seen the ice-skater perform her impossible jumps I’d seen nothing else to suggest this was the city of my dreams. The dogs, the police presence, the general level of paranoia and this apparent hunt for some king killer suggested something quite different. I didn’t want to think about it.

I concentrated on finding the motorway. I’d left the map now and as I walked further north-west I was becoming increasingly isolated. If a police car came by they’d be sure to pick me up. There were fewer shops, and gaps had started to appear between buildings. I looked down the side streets on my left but always at the bottom there was just another street of redbrick terraces running across. I heard a car with an ominous, low, rumbling engine and slipped through the first shop doorway I came to.

There was a sound, which was oddly familiar, and it was only when I took in my surroundings that I recognised it as the empty hiss of a runout groove. I was in a record shop. The smell of old much-thumbed sleeves washed over me. There were racks around the walls holding stacks of LPs, and a free-standing unit in the centre of the small, musty shop. At the far side was the counter and an old-fashioned till. Behind the counter was a door that was ajar but there was no one tending the shop. I was the only customer. Faint noises came from the half-open doorway. I also heard the police car cruise past the shop but instead of heading straight back outside I turned to one of the racks and flicked through the sleeves. They were all blank. I selected one at random and withdrew the contents. The transparent paper in the centre crinkled as I slid the record itself from the yellowed inner sleeve. The black vinyl shone like my father’s shoes and when I looked close I could see a tracery of small scratches and insignificant scuff marks like those he had always tried to hide by slapping on Cherry Blossom Shoe Polish and brushing until he could see his face in the shoe.

I wondered what the record was. The label, like the sleeve, was blank. Over the loudspeakers I could still hear the stylus bumping around the runout groove of whatever record had been playing. I made my way over to the counter and looked around for the turntable. It was on a ledge below the counter and my heart stopped when I saw the record was only halfway through. The noise I was hearing had been recorded. I remembered the white label I’d dreamt the Siouxsie lookalike had brought me and I felt my stomach muscles contract. Then I heard something that made me shiver: a high-pitched squealing sound accompanied by the drumming of running feet. It was coming from the half-open doorway.

As I ducked under the counter and stepped through the doorway I slipped back twenty years.

I was coming downstairs first thing in the morning. My father was out doing some strange shift work. My mother was getting dressed upstairs and above the tinkle of her jewellery and the rustle of Radio Two on her transistor I could hear the pitter-pat of scampering feet and the squeal of the fast turning wheel. I trailed my fingers against the raised knobbly paint patterns — like purple waves breaking on some dream shore — on the hall wall and turned into the dining room. The squealing got louder, the feet ran faster. I went and crouched down in the corner and watched our second hamster as he ran on and on against the gravity which meant he would never climb to the top of his wheel but would be condemned forever to run on the spot. I knelt down in front of the cage and watched him run. His little black eyes seemed to register the futility of the effort and yet he carried on running, even despite my close attention. If anything he started to run faster.

At the end of the short passage behind the shop I stepped into a semi-dark dusty room. There was some machine cranking away in the far corner that was responsible for the squealing and drumming I had heard. Straight ahead of me was another doorway which led to an uncarpeted staircase and to the back door. Through the glass in this I could see that evening was coming on. The sky was turning red. The machine drummed on. I realised there was a familiar smell that reminded me of some place but I couldn’t think where. I had started to sweat. I could still hear the record playing from the shop — even though the machine’s drumming noise was getting louder — as if someone had turned up the volume. A shadow extended down the old wooden stairs. I retreated into the shadows of the room, imagining angry shopkeepers coming at me from both directions. After all, I was trespassing. The shadow lengthened on the stairs and I took another step back and bumped into the pounding, shrieking machine. I caught my hand in something and felt a sudden sharp pain. I looked at my hand. The end of the short third finger of my left hand was burnt black and the pain quickly receded as the finger went numb.

Then I realised what the smell was — I remembered the toilet cubicle on the train and the dog that smashed its head through the window. I spun around and saw my ‘machine’ clearly for the first time. It was a large running wheel constructed out of two bicycle wheels spinning on an axis. The diameter of the wheel was increased by wooden extensions and the perimeters were two four-foot-wide hoops of beaten metal. Wooden slats were affixed between the two metal hoops, creating a wheel which spun around the central axis.

Running inside the wheel was a dark mottled pit bull terrier, its eyes flashing, ropes of saliva flying from its hanging jaw. It was staring at me as it ran, its nailed feet hammering on the wooden slats. The bicycle wheels squealed. The dog ran. I couldn’t move.

Someone appeared in the doorway, having come down the stairs.

It was a girl in a dark, sliver-flecked skating dress.

‘This way,’ she hissed at me. ‘Quickly.’ She nodded towards the passage that led to the shop and even this close to the dog I could hear the dull booms and ghostly clicks of the endless ‘groove’ music.

I moved towards the girl, noticing that the hairs on my arms were standing on end and my legs felt weak. As I got closer I could see her long black hair shining in the yellowish light from the shop. Was she the girl from my dream? Or was she the skater I’d seen on the night I’d entered the City? I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust my eyes. She wasn’t real. I darted back into the passage towards the shop.

I barged into the shop just as two figures entered from the street.

‘Fuck,’ I said as I took in their appearance and turned back to the passage. But already they were coming for me. Stooped, twisted, black-haired bodies but with unmistakably human features, they covered the distance between the door and the counter in a heartbeat. I slammed the passage door after me and raced for the back door, which the dark-haired girl was holding open for me. As I fled across the space of the back room I heard the dog, no longer running in its wheel, give a powerful tug on its chain leash. It could smell my fear and it wanted blood.

The two creatures smashed through the door behind me into the passage and I leapt for the open doorway beyond the old wooden staircase. The girl closed and locked it after me in a flurry of hand movements that seemed to melt into one action.

‘This way,’ she said and we took off down the back entry. I’m not saying she skated over the cobbles but she moved faster than the things behind us and somehow I was able to keep up with her. We ran for at least a mile and a half. ‘In here,’ she panted, pressing her weight against a solid-looking door at the back of what looked like an abandoned cinema. The door gave and I squeezed through after her.

‘My name’s Stella. You’re safe now,’ she said when she’d got her breath back. I was still bent double. ‘You know, if you’re going to stick around you’ll have to do something about your appearance.’

Stella moved away from me and I saw where we were. Not a cinema at all, but an ice rink. One or two bare bulbs burned, causing the expanse of ice to glow dully beyond the rows of seats. The girl slipped onto the ice. I couldn’t imagine how she’d had time to lace up her skating boots.

Chapter Ten

I sensed there was something wrong with my father even before I was told. As I sat on the stairs and watched him carefully thread the buckle of his trench coat and place his trilby on his head, tipping it slightly to one side in the hall mirror, I was aware of feeling vaguely anxious. Maybe it was the way he avoided his own eyes in the glass and just observed the angle of his hat. He would go through into the kitchen to say a quiet goodbye to my mother. I rarely heard what they said to each other at these times. Their voices were a low murmur. Then he would come back into the hall and shout up the stairs, ‘Ta-ra, Carl. Look after your mother.’ He didn’t know I’d been sitting watching him get ready so I would always creep away from the banisters before shouting back, ‘Bye’.

He’d open the front door and close it gently behind him and I would run to my room to watch him walk up the street. Always the same, he walked with a relaxed, confident step, nodding at the Hansons in the garden outside their prefab and turning to look behind before crossing the road. I always thought he might see me at that point, but his eyes remained on the road.

I sat in my room for a bit, picking up books and reading the first lines before putting them back, fingering my jam jar filled with half-completed fishing floats made out of pampas grass stems, which Jim, the window cleaner, pinched for me from the garden of the big house at the bottom of Heath Street. I couldn’t settle to anything. I turned my little clock radio on but it was always playing ‘If You Leave Me Now’ by Chicago, so I got up and mooched around the landing and stairs for a couple of minutes, then went downstairs and into the kitchen.

My mother was leaning over the work surface rolling out pastry. There was flour all over the lino around her feet. I looked at the pastry. She’d rolled it completely flat and it had split in a dozen places yet she carried on rolling like a faulty machine and the flour spotted the sleeves of her cardigan and caught in the long dark hair drawn across her face.

How old was I then? Twelve, thirteen? I reached across and took the rolling pin from her. She didn’t resist, just pressed her hands against the worktop for support and cried. I hugged her around the waist and felt her body shake. Eventually she turned enough to take me into her arms and we stayed that way for up to a minute. The edge of the worktop was pressing uncomfortably into my back, but, as my father had said, I had to look after my mother. Then I felt foolish because I realised I probably wasn’t helping much at all by allowing her to comfort me.

My mother pulled away and took a paper tissue from her cardigan sleeve. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes and blew her nose. There were little shiny paths running through the powder down her cheeks.

‘It’s Dad, isn’t it?’ I said and she started crying again. I’d seen my mother cry at films on the television but never like this. There had to be something terribly wrong with my father. I knew it couldn’t be money or work, or his parents dying, because they were both dead. It had to be his health. He was sick. But how sick?

‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked, my voice muffled by my mother’s leaf-patterned skirt, but she wouldn’t tell me.

‘He’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be all right again soon.’

‘What is it?’ I persisted, crying as well now because I was panicking.

‘You don’t need to know.’

I did. I did need to know. Not knowing, I felt helpless. Of course, my mother knew I would feel just as helpless if I did know, which was why she didn’t tell me.

Over the next few weeks my mind worried at this mystery like a dog working at an old knot of rags. What was wrong with my father? I watched him closely for clues but he was just the same as always with me. Whatever it was that was wrong with him grew like all secrets grow in the minds of children until it assumed terrible proportions. If it was something that couldn’t be spoken about then it had to be something to do with some part of him that was taboo even under normal circumstances.

We went out for a day to some woodland about an hour’s drive from home. My father drove in his usual calm but firm way. My mother sat wreathed in a cloud of the perfume he always gave her at Christmas. I sat in the back playing with his hat, reading the maker’s label — Dunn & Co — and stroking the feather in the chequered band. After walking in the woods for a mile or two — sometimes I ran on ahead kicking through the leaves and could hear them talking in low voices behind me — we stopped for lunch at a pine-panelled cafeteria. My father said I could have ten pence if I would eat a piece of Blue Stilton. I put it in my mouth and tried to swallow without chewing it. He gave me the ten pence but I couldn’t swallow the cheese and I had to spit it out. He and my mother laughed along with the people on the next table and he took back his ten pence.

All the time we were out I was worrying about him and guessing what might be wrong with him. I decided that for it to be such an unspeakable problem it had to have something to do with going to the toilet, so when my father announced after the cheese and biscuits that he was going to the toilet I got up and said I was going as well. I waited for a look to pass between him and my mother but there was none. I followed him nervously to the door marked GENTLEMEN. If this was going to be the moment of truth he might take the opportunity to talk to me about it. Suddenly I didn’t want to know and I almost turned back but he’d reached the door and was holding it open for me. I smelt the disinfectant and dirty hand-towels and had to go in.

My father and I stood at neighbouring stalls — the first time I could remember us doing that — and I looked, because I had to.

It was all there and I couldn’t see anything wrong. When we left the gents I was doubly relieved.

If not that though, I started thinking as we got back to the table, what was wrong with him?

I found out a couple of weeks later. I crept downstairs one Wednesday night and listened outside the lounge door as my mother and father talked. They still had the television on and the door was closed, so it was not easy to follow their conversation. But I did manage to hear the odd word and half-sentence. When I heard the word ‘Christie’s’ I experienced a sudden, awful sinking feeling in my stomach and a chill spread from there to grip my entire body. I tiptoed upstairs so the sound of crying wouldn’t alert them to my presence.

Christie’s was the cancer hospital where several of my mother’s relatives had died. My father’s aunt, also, had spent her last two weeks there. I’d never been, but the name of the place terrified me. It was synonymous with cancer, which in those days and in my experience meant suffering and death.

It had been at the back of my mind, buried deep beneath layers of denial and fear, ever since I’d known my father was ill. Even to utter the hospital’s name was to tempt fate and hasten the inevitable.

I spoke to my mother the following morning while my father was out of the house.

‘Dad’s got cancer, hasn’t he?’ I said. I was hurting too much to realise how insensitive I was being to my mother’s feelings. She looked at me for a moment, tears brimming at her eyes, but I felt angry. I wanted to be treated like an adult.

‘He has, hasn’t he?’ I persisted.

‘No, Carl, he hasn’t,’ my mother said, kneeling down and holding my arms.

‘He has leukaemia. It’s like cancer but it’s different.’ She was trying to make it seem better than it was by giving it a name which wasn’t cancer — a word which in our house was usually lip-read — but because of the Christie’s connection I knew exactly what kind of illness my father had.

‘Is he going to die?’ I asked, my voice on the edge of breaking.

‘I hope not, love. I hope he’ll be all right. If you hope so too, as hard as you can, it might help him.’

I started to cry. Standing there in front of my mother I just gave in and the tears tumbled from my eyes. She gathered me into a fierce hug. I couldn’t stop once I’d started. My eyes hurt, I was short of breath, my head ached and still the tears fell, soaking my mother’s shoulder. She stroked my hair and said, ‘What, love, what?’ when I tried to speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘Ssh, ssh. Stop crying. Try and be strong for your father. It’ll help him.’

By the time he came back inside I was in my room pretending to be engrossed in making floats and my mother was polishing the brasses in the lounge.

I didn’t tell my father I knew but I gathered that my mother had told him. We never spoke about the disease or the hospital and I did my best to be strong. At night after I’d gone to bed I’d slide out and kneel on the floor and pray for him, whispering the words so they wouldn’t be heard downstairs but would be loud enough for God to hear if He was listening. I didn’t believe in God but if my father died and I’d left a stone unturned I knew I’d never forgive myself.

A few days later my mother told me my father had been receiving treatment for months. When I thought he’d been doing shift work he was actually walking to Navigation Road, getting a train to Stretford, then a 22 bus to Christie’s. He didn’t take the car because the treatment left him feeling too groggy to drive home afterwards. And he refused the ambulance they offered to take him home in so that I wouldn’t look out of my bedroom window and get the shock of my life.

When I woke up in the abandoned ice rink, slumped on a wooden bench, Stella had come off the ice and was wearing a big old blue sweater. She’d exchanged her skates for a pair of heavy boots, and a pair of thick woolly tights. She made me a cup of what passed for coffee in the City. It tasted like dust and was pitch-black — ‘There’s no milk’ — but it was hot and wet.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her when we’d been talking for a while.

‘Most people can’t remember how they got here,’ she said. ‘They’ve just blanked out on it. But I still can. The details have gone but I can still just about remember the big picture.’ She sipped her own coffee. ‘I was a skater. It was all I lived for. I was no good at anything else and I dreamed of skating for England. They wrote about me in the local paper. I was prodigiously talented, they said. But I went too far. I did a quintuple salchow one day at the local rink. It’s not supposed to be possible. It means you spin five times in the air. It’s just not possible. But I did it. I got enough height and I was light enough. Somehow I did it. I knew I’d done it. I felt sick when I landed.

‘Only one person had seen me. I saw this woman staring at me like she’d seen a ghost. Her mouth hanging open, her eyes all wide. She’s here now as well. I’ve seen her a couple of times but she doesn’t remember a thing. I tried to talk to her but she was suspicious so I’ve steered clear ever since.’

‘How did it happen?’ I asked. ‘How did you end up here?’

‘On the way home from the ice rink I was grabbed by someone hiding in bushes next to the railway line. I can’t remember anything after that.’

‘Haven’t you tried to get back?’

‘It’s impossible. There’s no way back.’

‘There must be,’ I insisted.

‘People have gone mad trying. It doesn’t matter how far they walk, there’s no escape route. It’s hard enough to get out of the City and even if you manage that you’re faced with miles and miles of the Waste. People have wandered there for up to a year and stumbled back into the City completely mad. The contours change and you lose all sense of orientation. Only two people have made it beyond the Waste and into the Dark.’

‘What the fuck is the Dark?’ I asked.

‘The Dark defies all the laws of nature. It’s always dark, as if it were night-time, only day and night don’t have any meaning there. At least we’ve got light and dark in the City. There are no dimensions to the Dark. It just goes on and on in all directions, like space. If you do go into the Dark your only hope is the one in a million chance that you accidentally wander back into the Waste. There’s no way out the other side because there is no other side.’

‘Who are the two people you mentioned who’ve been into the Dark? Did they come back? I want to meet them.’

‘You can’t. One man’s in an institution. Hasn’t spoken a word of sense in five years. The other one escaped and is roaming the City somewhere.’

‘Why didn’t I come through the Dark on my way into the City?’

‘It’s a one-way thing. It’s only there going out.’

‘How do you know all this?’ I asked, pulling my squashed pack of Camels from out of my boot and lighting one. They were almost all gone.

‘I’m an outlaw. I’m outside society. I don’t take the drugs, don’t read the propaganda. I’m not on record. Some people slip in through the net. Like you did.’

‘Only now they’re after me.’ I took a deep drag and felt my head swim.

‘They’ve been after me for years. You just have to remain one step ahead. You have to think like them. The point is, they’re only really after one person — whoever it was who killed the bloody king — but no one is above suspicion. You’re assumed to be guilty here until proven innocent. And nobody’s going to expend energy on your behalf trying to prove you innocent. Everyone remains guilty of harbouring the assassin until he is caught and justice is done.’

‘I can guess what form that might take,’ I said.

‘If money meant anything here, there’d be a bounty on his head,’ she said. ‘As it is, there’s an enthusiastic vigilante movement. Everyone’s eager to prove they’re not guilty. That’s why you have to do something about your appearance. You won’t last long looking like that.’

I took a long drag on my cigarette and thought about how long I’d been growing my hair, how much I loved my white leather jacket and my butterfly boots.

‘I know someone,’ she said.

Ten minutes later we were peeling away the corrugated iron sheeting that blocked the inside of the door to discourage intruders. Stella had smeared dust and grime on my jacket to make us less conspicuous. It would take about half an hour to go across town to Eyshall, the district where Stella’s friend Maxi lived. Maxi was an actress and she kept a well-stocked wardrobe. In the meantime Stella had given me a black woollen beanie like Giff’s and I tucked the rest of my hair down the back of my jacket, but there was nothing we could do about my boots. Stella’s feet were several sizes smaller than mine.

It was dark outside. I had no idea of the time. My watch had stopped when I’d entered the City. I asked Stella but she just shrugged and said, ‘Keep close to me.’ We walked in the shadow of buildings, turning our heads away whenever we passed anyone. At first the streets were fairly quiet but it clearly wasn’t curfew hour yet and the nearer we came to the city centre the more people we saw. At one intersection we passed right beneath a judge’s nose, Stella claiming that was less obvious than crossing the road to avoid him.

‘Turn down here,’ Stella said, taking us into a quieter district of bigger, grander-looking terraced houses with imposing gateposts and steps up to the front doors. The windows were all black as night and there was no noise coming from within. A few of the windows on the top floors betrayed shadows flitting across pulled blinds but Stella hurried on and I didn’t have time to linger. I heard a ringing telephone but again Stella led me on deeper into the City. We turned back towards the light and the noise after two more blocks and soon found ourselves in a crowd of murmuring bystanders lining the sides of a main road. Stella motioned to me to keep my head down. I tried to listen to the voices around me but there was only an indistinguishable mutter, like extras mumbling lines of nonsense in a film.

‘What’s going on?’ I whispered to Stella.

She shook her head. ‘They’re obviously waiting for something,’ she said. ‘I think we ought to wait quietly or we’ll draw attention to ourselves.’

I nodded and reached into my boot for my squashed pack of Camels. Stella saw me and pushed my hand back down. From the breast pocket of her jacket she produced a drab soft pack which she passed to me. I examined the pack. There was no brand name, just the word CIGARETTES and a logo that was a rough spiral design. I shrugged and tipped one out of the packet. Stella struck a match for me and I took a drag of what tasted like the paper straws we used to light on the Bunsen burners in school physics lessons. I scowled and Stella smiled grimly.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Tastes like shit but there’s not a lot of choice here.’ Then she looked up because there was movement in the crowd. Heads were turning towards the road and necks craning. I heard an engine approaching; it sounded like a big truck. It rumbled closer and I could see from the cab that it was a very old worn-out haulage vehicle. Proceeding at walking pace it was escorted by paramilitaries wearing black drill and brandishing wooden clubs. They wore black woollen hats similar to the one Stella had given me to wear. She noticed me fingering it and I left it alone. The paramilitaries looked into the crowd with eyes that were chips of black ice. Occasionally one of them would heft his club.

The vehicle was pulling a trailer like an open cattle truck in which were packed at least thirty prisoners, staring wide-eyed and sallow-faced at the crowds as they were drawn past. Their heads had been shaved roughly, nicking the scalp here and there and leaving short trails of dried blood. A few tufts of hair remained behind the ears or at the temple. I thought of the Passage.

The reaction of the crowd was curious. They watched the approach of the trailer, then bowed their heads as the prisoners passed right by them as if to avoid the vacant stares, and once it had moved on they looked up again, catching the steady but blank gazes of the few creatures standing at the back of the trailer. Then one or two hollow cries went up — ‘Traitors’, ‘Murderers’, ‘King killers’ — and the crowd started to disperse.

‘Where are they being taken?’ I asked Stella after we’d crossed the road and plunged down another side street.

‘To die,’ she said. ‘But first they get driven all around the City to set an example.’

‘Set an example?’ I said sharply.

‘Yes, why?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘A line in a song.’ The lyrics to ‘Shave Your Head’ hovered just out of reach. Something about setting an example, starting a trend.

For some reason I thought of Annie Risk and I felt a little kick in my stomach. I didn’t know how long I’d been in the City but it must have been at least a couple of days and she was bound to have tried to call me. Unable to get me at home she would have tried the shop and there would have been no answer there either. She would be worried and there was nothing I could do. For the time being I had to go along with Stella’s advice in order to give myself a chance merely of surviving in the City. Stella had said there was no way out but given that I’d found the place — I’d begun to suspect partly because I’d been so convinced it did actually exist — I had to believe there was a route out of it. My belief would help me find one. Perhaps the day I gave up believing it was possible would be the day I became a true citizen of the benighted place.

‘What?’ said Stella, looking at me.

‘Nothing.’

We entered a large square. A cluster of taxi cabs dozed by a small section of railing, their engines switched off and lumpy figures slumped over in the driving seats. An articulated bus bent almost double waited for daylight to come. A few bits of newsprint, damp old cigarette packets bearing the same spiral design as Stella’s and plastic drinks bottles whispered under our feet as we crossed the wide road and headed for a narrow bridge.

‘It must be near curfew,’ I said.

‘We’ll just make it,’ Stella answered without looking back. ‘We’re in Eyshall now.’

I didn’t know how she was able to be so accurate without a watch but I didn’t question her. As we walked across the little bridge I looked over the parapet and at first it was too dark to see anything. I heard Stella’s shoes on the road and knew I should catch up with her but I wanted to know all there was to know about my surroundings. As I concentrated and shielded my eyes from the bleak street lighting either side of the bridge I could make out the black, treacly canal beneath. It moved slowly, bearing a patina of litter and patches of scum. The banks were reinforced with stone slabs. It was narrow and there was very little room beneath the bridge, yet despite its unwelcoming aspect I felt reassured by the mere presence of another element in this restrictive landscape.

I heard Stella’s voice hissing in the distance. Looking up the road I saw her a good fifty yards away beckoning me from beneath a broken street lamp.

Chapter Eleven

Maxi’s place was an old dentist’s surgery. She had the reclining chair, the pull-down light, wall-mounted cabinets with mirrored fronts, little instrument trolleys from which she served drinks. She even still had the drill, one of the old, slow motor-driven kind with long extendible arms and strings. I shuddered in recollection.

‘What would you like, Carl?’ Maxi asked. ‘To drink?’

I had a small glass of the City’s fruit brandy. Although clearly made from tinned fruit, it was less vile than the cigarettes. Since we were inside and Stella had indicated Maxi’s place was quite safe, I took out my Camels and offered the pack around. Both women smoked but preferred their own brand. I lit up and at Maxi’s invitation sat down in the reclining chair.

Maxi was a tiny woman, more like a little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes, and she wore exaggerated make-up which made her look slightly clownish. I assumed she changed before going out, like Stella swopping her skating tutu for a baggy jumper and leggings.

‘How come you’ve got this place?’ I asked Maxi.

She looked at Stella who replied for her. ‘Dental care is not a priority in the City. Most people don’t live long enough to lose their teeth. We perform our own extractions if necessary.’

I winced.

‘There are lots of squats like this,’ Stella said. ‘We might be able to find you something similar.’

‘I’m not planning to stick around long enough to put down roots, but thanks for the offer.’

Maxi spoke to me. ‘Stella says you need a new look.’

I shrugged. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’m surprised you’re still walking around.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘So let’s get started.’

I sat back in the chair and Maxi came up behind me, taking a handful of my hair. I wanted to wriggle out of her grasp and run away. I was attached to my hair. But before I realised what she was doing she was sawing through it with a huge pair of dressmaker’s scissors. In dismay I watched my magnificent mane hit the floor. Let go, I told myself. It’ll grow back.

Maxi continued cutting. My impression was that she was more enthusiastic than proficient. Her scissors tugged at my scalp. It seemed to me she wasn’t taking a lot of care to layer the cut and I would more than likely have to pay a visit to Jerry’s Gentlemen’s Barbers when I got back to London. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly homesick. When I’d started to let my hair grow I still went back to see Jerry and watch him do his stuff on a couple of customers. It only ever took him the time it took to smoke one cigarette. He’d stick a Raffles between his lips, light up and start working his magic scissors. He never took the cigarette out of his mouth but instead let the ash droop until inevitably it fell into your hair and he dealt with it in his next stroke.

‘That’s enough, surely,’ I said sharply, coming back to my senses as Maxi yanked too hard again.

‘Not really,’ said Stella, who must have been watching from behind.

‘Let me see,’ I insisted. ‘Give me a mirror.’

Stella handed Maxi a mirror and she held it behind my head. I sat up to see myself reflected in one of the cabinet doors and there was only a split second in it: I saw Maxi’s eyes sliding away from a door in the far corner of the room and knew I’d been set up. For some reason I felt Stella wasn’t part of it so I shouted, ‘Stella, get out of here now,’ as I launched myself from the chair, batting a hand backwards to ward off Maxi’s scissors just in case. Even as I was still turning, the door in the far corner burst inward and a spitting, frenzied ball of vicious flesh and teeth spun into the room.

Stella had gone for the door we’d come in by but already my way was cut off by the intruders. I whirled around as they came for me. There were windows — my only hope. In one fluid movement I yanked the overhead light from above the chair and had enough leverage on it to smash it into the nearest attacker’s face. Maxi clutched the scissors to her chest, clearly hoping her stillness and twisted loyalty would stand her in good stead with them. I didn’t much care. OK, she’d double-crossed me and Stella, but that was nothing compared to what she’d done to my hair. I plucked the scissors from her hand and as the second creature leapt I thrust them out in front of me. It gored itself spectacularly, spraying Maxi and me with steaming hot blood.

They were like the things that had come for me in the record shop.

The other one was already regaining its stance and I sensed more creatures or shock troops about to emerge from the far door, so I picked up the instrument trolley, bottles of fruit brandy toppling and smashing on the tiled surgery floor, and hurled it at the biggest window. I followed it, shielding my face with my arm, and fell into the street in a roll. I picked myself up and ran. I knew that more of them would be after me within seconds.

I ran over the little bridge over the canal, thought about jumping down onto the tow path but before I’d had chance to consider it I was halfway across the big square. I could hear faint cries behind me. I hoped Stella was safe. There was no sign of her and no evidence of anyone else. Just to add to my problems it was obviously curfew now as well. The thought of forcing open the concertina doors and hiding in the articulated bus occurred to me as well but as an idea it was only marginally better than shinning up a street lamp and hoping to stay up there until my pursuers got bored and slunk away, tails, if they had them, between their legs. Creatures like these didn’t get bored. They were perfect machines.

I turned off as soon as there was a side street to turn into, then immediately took a left and then a right, until I had lost all sense of direction. Some bizarre logic suggested that if I lost my way the things would lose theirs too, as if they were somehow in my control. I ran through nameless streets that all looked the same. My heart was pumping furiously, my head amazingly clear. I was sorry to have lost Stella and felt soiled after almost becoming trapped in Maxi’s sticky web of betrayal. At least I’d managed to make a mess of her post-modern surgery squat, I thought with grim satisfaction, but then realised I didn’t actually hold a grudge against her. In this city you had to sell yourself and others in order to postpone your ride in the open-topped trailer I’d seen earlier that evening.

I stopped for breath. The night was humid and prickly. Bent over, hands on knees, I listened but couldn’t hear the creatures any more. Could I really have outrun them?

No clatter of pursuit, but the telephone was loud and clear in the night.

It was only a couple of streets away, or so it seemed. I had to stop it ringing before it attracted unwelcome attention. As I ran I caught sight of my reflection in the oily blackness of a ground-floor window. My hair was uneven and scraggy. If anything I stuck out more than before. From my pocket I pulled out the black beanie Stella had given me and put it on.

I stopped in front of the house the ringing was coming from. The air was very still and heavy like just before a storm, the streets behind me quiet, but I sensed my pursuers couldn’t be far away. I ran up the three steps, stepped across to the window ledge and smashed a single pane with my elbow. Reaching in to release the catch, I jumped down into the room, landing as softly as an eleven-stone man in cowboy boots can.

I followed the ringing out of the front room and into the hall which was cast in a ghostly half-light by coloured glass in the front door. The end of the hall, however, lay in darkness. I walked slowly, my heart hammering, sweat trickling down the back of my neck. There were two doors. I opened the first and stepped inside.

I looked across to the far side of the room. There was something there but it wasn’t a telephone. I stood there for a few seconds feeling every hair on my body stand stiffly erect. Fear filled me up like gas fills up a room.

I took three steps back, turned around and closed the door behind me. I twisted the knob to open the second door and suddenly the ringing was much louder. I could see the telephone sitting like a lobster on a table covered with a sheet. Feeble starlight made the room’s shadows grainy and thick. There seemed to be dust sheets covering all the furniture and the sheets were smeared with something dark. The deep carpet impeded my progress, catching at my boot heels.

I picked up the receiver and the sudden silence seemed louder than the persistent ringing. The Bakelite felt clammy in my hand and the receiver slipped as I lifted it to my ear. A woman’s hysterical voice screamed down the line — ‘Carl! Help! Come quickly, Carl! Please!’ — then was cut off.

I stood there in the darkness, cold and alone, as the line buzzed.

I knew the voice on the line. It was Annie Risk’s.

I rattled the cradle but the connection had been severed. I dialled Annie’s number and listened to the rustle of digits down the line. To my amazement the ringing tone sprang up at the other end and then stopped as the phone was picked up. My heart in my mouth, I waited for a voice.

‘Hello?’

It was Annie’s voice.

‘Annie,’ I said. ‘It’s Carl.’

‘Hello? Who is it? Hello?’ She sounded anxious.

‘Annie, it’s me. Was that you before ringing here? Annie, what’s wrong?

‘Who is this?’ Panic caused her voice to break. She couldn’t hear me. I could hear her but she couldn’t hear me. To her it was just a wrong number. She’d be hearing those odd metallic scratchy sounds I’d heard both at the flat and at the shop when I’d picked up the phone and there’d been no one there. Then, out of the terrible silence, came her voice again, barely a whisper: ‘Carl?’

I shivered.

‘Annie, it’s me,’ I shouted.

Silence.

‘Carl. Is that you? Are you there? Carl!’ She broke down and cried. ‘Carl. Oh Carl.’

I shouted her name again but she obviously couldn’t hear me. For a few moments all I could hear down the line was the sound of her quietly crying. Then the line went dead and a tremor passed through me.

Some time later I came to, roused by thunder outside. I was sitting in one of the armchairs. I felt a terrible emptiness, like you feel when you wake up and realise it wasn’t a dream and your life really is spinning out of control. Rain beat against the windows like the feet of small animals. The dust-sheet beneath my hands was damp and sticky. I pushed myself to my feet. I had to get on. As I reached a standing position and stretched my body backwards a flash of lightning outside turned the room momentarily to daylight and imprinted its shocking colours on my retinas.

The sheets, which I had thought merely grimy with age, were stained with blood, and from its vivid shade I knew it was not long spilt. A thunderclap shook the room, rattling the windows in their frames. My flesh crawled as I strained to see into the corners but, dark again, they guarded their secrets. I backed away to the door and just as my hand closed on the knob another jagged flash of pure white light lit up the room. There was red everywhere. Even the carpet was tufted and matted with blood. I turned and fled.

In the dark hall another lightning flash burst in through the half-light at the far end. As if someone were taking pictures of me. There was nowhere to turn. I knew I had to go back into the first room and confront what lay there. I opened the door. A thundercrack made my breastbone vibrate. I walked across the dark, tacky floor towards the figure in the bed.

There was a drip stand at the head of the bed and tubes threaded into the patient’s pale arm.

‘Oh God,’ I whispered.

Lightning stripped the bed bare of shadows and I saw the bruised, bloodshot eyes staring right at me. They were not my father’s eyes, but mine.