Regicide

Chapter Twelve

My father’s life seemed to diminish in every respect. When he was in the house he would be sitting talking in the lounge with my mother. The door would be closed and the radio playing quietly to cover their voices. I sat on the stairs and listened a couple of times. He never turned the radio up quite loud enough, so I could hear most of what they said to each other. It was practical stuff. The doctors had given him between three and eighteen months. I heard him telling my mother with an even voice how he was going to make sure there was enough money for us both. Most of the time she wouldn’t say anything and when she did I could hear the strain in her voice. She was fighting to keep her emotions under control. Sometimes she couldn’t and I heard her voice break, I heard her sobbing, and pictured my father putting his arm around her and the two of them sitting there on the settee staring at the gas fire.

I sat shivering on the stairs, part of me wishing I could sit with them and part of me too frightened to behold their faces while they talked about death. Also, I knew that my presence would make it harder for both of them.

When he was home but not well enough to sit with my mother, he would be up in his bedroom, which was now a sickroom. I didn’t go near it, if I could help it. Once I heard him calling me and at first I tried to ignore it. I looked out of my window at my mother kneeling down in the soil and tearing away at the bindweed that was choking her garden. Whenever she thought she’d destroyed a section it always grew back stronger than before, and it spread so quickly she was unable to keep up with it. But, being my mother, she didn’t give up. It wasn’t in her nature.

My father was still calling me. I went and stood outside his bedroom door, thinking that if he didn’t call again I’d leave him.

‘Carl.’ I could hear the effort he was putting into trying to make his voice sound normal.

I turned the doorknob and went in. The curtains were drawn across the windows even though it was mid-morning. Drawn curtains with daylight filtering through them have always depressed me since then.

‘It hurts my eyes,’ he said, lying on his side facing the empty half of the bed, his head completely bald.

The room smelt stuffy and damp. The illness was causing him to sweat a lot; my mother changed the sheets every day. I stood awkwardly, shifting my weight from one leg to the other, wondering what he wanted to say.

‘You mustn’t worry, Carl,’ he said eventually. ‘Neither you nor your mother must worry about anything. I’ll be up and about soon.’

His words rang hollow but in fact he was right. By the end of the week he was dressed and feeling much better. He looked like his old self. My mother’s face was gaunt and tense, as if she were expecting him to relapse at any moment. I was more naive, hoping the illness was in remission.

He started taking me to new places. I was still on my summer holidays so we had plenty of time. Sometimes my mother came with us and tried to enjoy herself, but with her it was as if I could see through the costumes and make-up and around the back of the set. The big man she’d loved all her life was dying. She knew and I knew it, even if he smiled and tilted his hat, and it was too painful for her. One day when my father was out — getting treatment — I caught her looking through old photograph albums. The fading brownish snaps of the two of them honeymooning on the north-west coast. The family groups in which the baby was me, but I was still too young to be able to see myself like that. My mother and father’s life before I was born and while I was tiny had always been a series of still images as far as I was concerned, but now I realised they’d had a life together and they were looking at the end of it coming up to meet them before they were half done with it.

I went into the garden and tugged at a fresh patch of bindweed.

My father took me walking in the Peaks, bog-trotting across the crumbly peat of Black Hill, clambering up the dried-up Kinder Downfall and wandering around lost in the mist on top of Kinder Scout. One Wednesday night he said we were going somewhere special. I asked if Mum was coming with us and he said it wasn’t her type of thing. This was at the tea table and my mother was there, smiling and nodding.

‘I know you’ll enjoy it though,’ she said to me, passing me the plate of buttered malt loaf.

As I was putting my anorak on and my father was buttoning his trench coat I saw my mother mouth something at my father. He nodded and said, ‘I’ve got it.’ I looked at his coat and saw something bulky in the pocket. I had no idea what it was and I didn’t ask. My father put his trilby on, tilting it in the hall mirror, and we stepped outside into the still-warm evening.

‘Why do we need coats?’ I asked.

‘It might not stay warm where we’re going,’ my father said as he led the way to the bus stop. I thought about asking why we were going on the bus instead of in the car, but thought that, like with the bulky thing in my father’s coat pocket, it might be better not to ask. I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by finding out too early.

It was already quite late in the summer holidays and the sun was setting as we rode towards town on the 263 bus through the suburb where I was born and later past the end of the road where my father was born. I glanced at him and he looked down and smiled at me from under the brim of his hat, then looked back out of the window. I wondered what was going through his mind. His face looked calm. He was probably excited by the thought of where we were going and how much it would mean to me. But he must also have been plagued by thoughts of the underlying reason for making this trip. I had already sensed on our walking excursions in the Peaks that he was trying to cram into a few short months the activities a father and son might normally spread over several years.

I didn’t twig where we were going until we got off near Moss Side and walked down narrow terraced streets that soon were resounding to the cobble-slap of Doc Martens and trainers as hundreds and soon thousands of men and boys in football scarves streamed in towards Maine Road. We stopped at a corner and my father reached into his pocket and pulled out a brand-new sky-blue, maroon and white striped scarf. As he tied it gently around my neck and I looked at his coat collar, unable to meet his eyes, I could hear him wheezing. He straightened up, ruffled my hair and we walked on.

I looked down back entries as we passed them. Fans strode out of each one to thread into the main flow. It was a great feeling, to be part of this huge mass of people all going to the same place, carried along on a tide of anticipation. I was glad of the scarf — it made me feel I belonged, just as my father had known it would.

Soon I could hear the roar of the crowd in the stadium and my heart beat fast. There was a lump in my throat that was only partly due to the occasion. We rounded the last corner and there was the ground, rearing up massive and monumental before me. I’d been a fan for years but going to games was never even a consideration because we couldn’t afford it. My father bought me a programme and as we reached the top of a flight of steps I suddenly saw this huge shocking expanse of green, vivid under the spotlights. I looked at my father and I saw the same innocent surprise in his eyes as well. I had a thought.

‘How many matches have you been to?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he began. I could see him weighing up alternatives. ‘I mean, when I was a boy…’ He rubbed his nose.

I looked back at the pitch and in a small voice he said, ‘I haven’t been before.’

I gripped his hand for a moment.

‘Come on,’ he said, turning and leading me away. ‘We’ll have to get to our seats. Don’t want to miss the kick-off.’

The match was almost unbearably exciting. I watched my heroes in action. I was close enough to hear them calling for the ball. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d lost but they won, 3–1. We moved up two positions in the league that night and I took a big step closer to my father.

It was painful but I learnt a lot from both my mother and father in those weeks, about love and how to treat those who are precious to you.

I ran out into the night and the raging storm, careless of dogs and police and vigilante patrols, intent only on putting as much distance as possible between me and that house. The body in the bed. The rooms full of blood. The telephone that may or may not have allowed me to hear Annie Risk’s voice on the other end. Even if it was her voice she certainly couldn’t hear me. In the confusion I gave in to fear and just ran.

Maybe I was lucky. Perhaps I had a guardian angel or I was blessed with a good sense of direction. Possibly the map was as much inside my head as printed on a scrap of paper. Whatever, however, I found my way back to Stella’s abandoned ice rink. I yanked the door open and tore at the corrugated iron.

I was stopped in my tracks by a banshee yell and a ball of fury rushing towards me. Before I knew what was happening there was a long blade quivering under my chin.

‘You should be more careful,’ Stella said, withdrawing the knife. ‘Were you followed?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, taking a deep breath. I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone.’

She reached behind me to close the door and drag the corrugated iron sheet across.

‘You must need a drink,’ she said, leading the way to her living quarters.

‘When did you get back?’ I asked. It suddenly occurred to me that for all I knew she might have been in on the betrayal.

‘Maxi must have been put under pressure,’ she said, second-guessing me again. ‘Friends do shop each other but only when they need to in order to survive. It’s not safe to stay here much longer. Hence the welcome I gave you just then.’

I didn’t tell Stella about breaking into the house to answer the telephone, nor about what I’d seen in the first room. After all, I still didn’t know what she’d been doing upstairs at the second-hand record shop. I told her I’d made my way back slowly through the storm, picking my way carefully so as to avoid pursuit. I did, however, ask if there was a telephone in the ice rink. She said no: there were very few at all in the City and, as far as she was aware, they were good only for local calls and all lines were monitored. I could believe that.

I stayed with Stella long enough to dry my clothes out and get warm again. She offered to tidy up my hair. ‘You can see how nervous Maxi was,’ she said, running a pair of nail scissors over the worst bits. ‘Normally she’s an excellent stylist.’ But I was restless. Having heard Annie Risk’s voice, clearly in distress, I knew I had to try anything to get out of the City. I asked Stella about the men she had mentioned who had been into the Dark and stumbled back into the City. Both were beyond reach, she said, committed to institutions for the criminally insane.

‘I must be able to get to them,’ I said.

‘Impossible. You’d be killed before you got close.’

‘Which of the two is the more accessible?’ I pressed.

‘A man called Gledhill,’ she said with a sigh. ‘They keep him in King’s Hospital. That’s all I know.’

She told me the way to King’s and said, ‘You can’t go now, Carl. You need sleep and it’s still curfew.’

‘Stella,’ I said, ‘thanks for all you’ve done, but I’ve got to go.’

She protested but held the corrugated iron guard aside for me as I climbed out. The rain had stopped, leaving pavements glistening under the orange lights. I walked quickly, running with as light and swift a step as possible across roads, and peering down back entries, alert to every sound and movement. The tail end of the storm blew around the rooftops, shaking trees and curtain rags behind broken windows. I found myself humming the keyboard riff from ‘Fear’ by the Passage and I pictured Annie Risk, her body illuminated by orange street light. The riff matched my quick, stealthy march. I’d only been to Annie’s flat twice, had only known her a few weeks but as the only link between this world and hers — that frightened voice on the phone line — she was assuming almost iconic significance. I’d even begun seeing her in Stella, which had been another reason for wanting to leave the ice rink without delay.

I stopped dead in my tracks. A splash of white light on the wall diagonally opposite could only come from a car headlamp. I crouched in a doorway and waited. The car turned into the street where I was hiding. I didn’t know if it was police or the dubious Giff and his associates. Either way I preferred my own company. The car crawled closer and I curled into a ball. Peeping out I saw the driver — wearing a black boiler suit bristling with badges — switch on a spotlight and angle it manually at the doorways on the other side of the street. He swept the beam back and forth while his colleague in the passenger seat had a good look. In a moment he’d swap to my side of the street and that would be my short cut to the even closer haircut and the open-topped bus.

The car crept forward. He switched the light across.

A matter of inches.

Had the car been travelling two miles an hour more slowly the beam would have caught me. Instead it hit the brickwork six inches to my right. Consequently I was plunged into deeper shadow and they never saw me. But they could almost have heard the thump of my heart or my sigh of relief. Only when the car had turned right at the end of the street did I uncurl my long body, stretch painfully and dart to the junction. I looked right and saw the police car turning right again. I went left and ran like a bastard.

I didn’t know how I was going to get into the hospital. Maybe I was relying on there being some wall to climb, a window to lever open.

King’s Hospital was a fortress. Floodlights bathed the front entrance on the main road, so I trotted down the smaller road at the side. There was a wall all right, but it was twice my height and offered few footholds. I ran on, asking myself if this was a stupid idea. I reached the end of the wall. It turned left and seemed to extend without a break into the night. I ran along it at a crouch. There were no openings. Then I noticed a section of railing on the other side of the street and went across to take a look. It was a canal. I leap-frogged the railing and scrambled down a muddy slope to the tow-path. There was just enough width and height to make it under the road. I bent down and crawled into the tunnel. It was dark and stank of sewage but if I was lucky it might just yield a stage door entrance to the hospital.

After twenty-five yards the ceiling lifted and I was able to proceed at full height. There was a soft phosphorescent glow hovering over the water, by which I could make out where to place my feet without tripping. A large opening came into view on my side. I guessed it was a waste outlet coming from the hospital. Looking ahead, there were no more breaks in the wall as far as I could see, which admittedly wasn’t very far but I was in a hurry. So I ducked into the waste pipe. The stench was nauseating but I held my insides together by force of will and splashed through the trickle of canal-bound effluent, humming ‘Watching You Dance’. I held my breath as the pipe became steeper for a few yards and then levelled out and the ceiling disappeared. I peered over the side. This section of the pipe ran through a yard at the back of the hospital, uncovered perhaps to allow extra waste to be tipped in by hand.

I clambered up into the yard and walked over to a rickety-looking door. It opened at my touch and I stiffened. Far off I could hear a buzz of talk and the clang of instruments or cutlery in a sink. I walked away from these sounds to the first intersection of passageways and looked down a long, unpainted corridor lit by a string of bare off-white bulbs. I crept down the corridor, glancing in at every window in every door I passed. I saw rooms full of lockers and dissection tables, rows of lecture-room desks and chairs, pigeon-holes stuffed with files and notes. No sign of any staff and no noise, save the odd dripping tap.

I reached a turning signposted Haematology and Secure Unit. I turned down the new corridor and when another junction pointed left to the Secure Unit I went that way.

Maybe I’d gained access the back way and comers from other directions would face tighter security, or the Secure Unit was not quite as described. I walked straight into a long, drab ward with beds down both sides, most unoccupied, a few curtained off and billowing with shadows. Something told me to keep going through the ward and into a second, L-shaped room. The walls were whitewashed, temperature and lighting kept low. I walked silently towards the corner and hugged the wall, waiting for my breathing to steady, listening for any sound coming from around the corner.

All was quiet.

Slowly I slid along the wall and angled my head to see around the corner.

There was a bed, a hard-looking chair and a tall man.

The man was standing up looking out of the window, his back to me. I stepped into his territory, my boot heel clicking on the wooden floor.

‘Who are you?’ the man asked without looking around. I focused on his reflection and realised he had been watching me in the window. Disarmed, I came to a halt.

‘My name is Carl,’ I said. ‘You don’t know me. Are you Gledhill?’ My heart was hammering. Although my gut feeling about the man was good, it was still possible he was one of theirs. Or, if he was insane as it was claimed, he could be dangerous. Alternatively, if he felt threatened he probably only had to call and help would come running.

‘What do you want, Carl?’ He turned from the window and looked at me with sad, dark eyes. I moved forward two steps and he went to lie down on the bed, offering me the chair with a casual gesture. I lowered myself onto the chair without taking my eyes off him. His face had once been handsome but the left side was now somewhat twisted out of true and his mouth didn’t close properly.

‘It’s not safe for you here, you know,’ he said, looking away from me and fixing his gaze on the ceiling. ‘They come and see me at irregular intervals. I haven’t had a visit for six hours at least. You haven’t got long.’

I sensed a terrible sadness, an emptiness that was the antithesis of my urgent need to flee the City. He had the aura of a man who had tried everything and failed. Being in his company depressed me.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him, keeping my senses alert to the approach of hospital staff.

‘I went too far,’ he said in a flat voice.

‘You mean the Dark?’ I asked in a whisper.

He winced and turned onto his side. He was a lean man, his skin displaying an unhealthy mustardy pallor. If he was more prisoner than patient, however, why was he left unguarded in an unlocked room?

I got up and walked around to the other side of the bed so I could see his face. ‘How did you come to the City?’ I asked him.

‘I went too far,’ he repeated, his lips barely moving. ‘Too fast.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I did what they said couldn’t be done.’

My stomach tightened. ‘What?’

‘I ran a mile in three and a half minutes. I collapsed at the tape and woke up here.’

‘You mean the City?’

He suddenly shot out a hand and gripped my arm. His grip was pitiful.

‘Go now,’ he ordered.

‘I have to know about the Dark,’ I said, leaning closer to him.

‘Stay away.’

What did he mean? From him or the Dark? ‘I have to get out of the City. Getting into the Dark seems to be the only way. I need to know where it is. How do I get there?’

‘It’s all around us.’

A ring around the City like Stella had said? ‘I just walk outwards from the City in any direction?’

He tightened his grip on my arm and drew me right up to his face. His eyes frightened me. The pupils were too big. What had he seen, this athlete? What horrors? ‘I ran out of the Dark,’ he said, ‘just like I ran into it. It’s everywhere and nowhere.’ With his free hand he reached up and touched my forehead. His fingertips were ice-cold. ‘It’s in here.’

I stared into his eyes, searching for a sign that he was telling the truth.

‘Now go,’ he said, withdrawing his arms and curling up on the bed.

‘Gledhill.’ It was my turn to grab hold of him. ‘How do I get there?’ I hissed.

He turned and lay on his back again. ‘Go out of the Secure Unit and turn immediately left, then left again and you won’t be far away.’

There was a sound behind me. Footsteps coming our way. Gledhill tensed and his head whipped around to watch the corner of the wall. I saw terror in his eyes and as I crawled around the back of his bed to hide I understood why they didn’t need to put locks on his door. The man had been so profoundly frightened by something — whatever he saw in the Dark perhaps — that he no longer had the nerve to turn a simple corner.

A thin man in a white coat appeared. He had unruly eyebrows and wore glasses that were lopsided on his squashed face due to their missing arm. He reminded me of someone but I couldn’t think who. I felt sick with fear and a growing sense of paranoia that I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. White Coat asked Gledhill if he was all right; he had heard voices.

‘Dreams,’ said Gledhill. ‘I was having dreams.’

‘Well, keep it down. You’re disturbing the other patients.’

With that he was gone. I stood up and looked at Gledhill. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll go now.’ He didn’t speak. I touched his cold hand briefly, which elicited no response, and then I walked around the corner.

The long ward was as before. No sign of White Coat. I walked to the end and, as Gledhill had reluctantly advised, turned left and left again. I was in another long corridor, this time darker and seeming to dip as it went. I shivered and pulled my jacket tighter around me. I could hear something in the distance. Somebody moving furniture around or wheeling heavy trolleys on a resounding surface. Enough to make sweat bead on my forehead.

I reached a door with a small window. I looked into a white-shining lab. There was noise. People moving around, talking, rattling metal and glass things in sinks, but I couldn’t see anyone, not even shadows. Then, I saw White Coat pass right by the little window. He was inches from me and would have seen me if he hadn’t been looking down at something he was carrying. I didn’t see what it was because I’d bobbed down out of sight. He must have been standing at the workbench just to the right of the door. I heard him walk back past the door and I moved away down the corridor. Only ten yards away the corridor came to an end. To the left was a fire-exit door with a push bar. Outside was a dark, empty courtyard. I had only to go through that door and I’d be out of immediate danger. Possibly there’d be a quick escape route out of the grounds. But Gledhill had put the idea in my head that somewhere down this corridor I’d find my way into the Dark. The fire exit didn’t look that significant. I followed the corridor around to the right. A little way up was another door. I stepped through into a warm, stale, reeking ward and my flesh started to crawl.

The ward probably connected with White Coat’s lab by an interconnecting door in the far right hand corner. I went the other way, towards the beds and the tiny muttering, chattering forms that moved under the blankets.

A bitter film coated the inside of my mouth. As I got nearer to the beds the noise of one pathetically abnormal voice chanting rose above all the other sounds: ‘Two three, Two three… Two three, two three…’

I realised who White Coat reminded me of and stopped in the middle of the ward, too frightened to go on, too far committed to go back.

‘Two three, two three…’

I started walking again, sweat running down my back, sticking my shirt to my skin.

‘Two three, two three. Two three, two three.’

There were at least a dozen beds. All the occupants were small children and all of them were strapped into place with leather restraints. They shifted their little bodies about but despite apparent strength could not loosen the straps. Their heads moved freely, swivelling at the neck. I wanted to free them but was too scared to attempt to do so. They had been strapped down for a reason, after all. The bed I was approaching was the first one on the left hand side of the ward.

‘Two three, Two three.’

The boy’s head, twisting from side to side on the bolster, was covered in a fine layer of dark brown hair. It was lighter under the eyes and around the mouth, where the pink skin showed through more clearly. His small ears were flattened against the side of his head and he had no lips. His eyes were very nearly those of a healthy, normal boy. There was intelligence in them but it was in their accentuated roundedness that you could see most clearly the canine influence. In the eyes and the mouth, which jutted subtly like a sculptor’s failed attempt at a snout.

The child was trying to count. But because of his deformed mouth he couldn’t manage to round the ‘O’ to say one and the lack of lips prevented him pronouncing four. So he went no further than two three.

This was what I was thinking as I watched him, my throat constricted by a lump, my stomach tying itself in knots. Anything to occupy the mind while I beheld the atrocity. It turned out I was wrong. As I backed away I saw the clipboard hooked on the end of the bed. The chart was headed with the patient’s number: 2323.

The boy was proclaiming his identity. He wanted people to know who he was. I wondered what kind of awareness he had of what he was.

The other beds held little boys — and two girls — all in different stages of development. Some appeared to have more dog in them than others. 2323 was one of the most human-looking. None of the others spoke their number like 2323. Some uttered gibberish, a few could only manage certain vowel sounds. Others barked and yelped.

I stood over the first boy’s bed. His head whipped from side to side like a metronome. With shaking fingers I reached forward and drew the sheet back an inch or two. There were straps under the covers as well. One chafed at his neck. It was red and sore. I couldn’t bear it any longer. When I looked into his eyes it was like meeting the stare of the bed-ridden man in the flashlit, blood-stained house — the man who looked like me.

‘Two three, two three.’

The Thin Controller had always spoken a call-sign twice. I was always Two Three, Two Three, never just Two Three.

The head beat hard against the pillow. A thread of saliva flew out of his mouth. And he kept on repeating his number, his name. I reached under the covers and undid the buckle on his leather neck restraint. His head shot upwards, checked again by straps lower down, and it jerked violently from side to side.

I heard a noise and whirled around. The ward behind me had become as dark as a forest in the thick of night, impenetrable. I turned back to the poor twisting creature in the bed but he’d gone too. Where his bed had been there was just blackness. Vivid colours flashed in my head and formed into tiny fish swimming in the night’s endless sea. They darted one way then shimmied back on themselves in a vast shoal and vanished. In turn I felt giddy, sick, weightless and afraid. Helpless and very small. Alone, completely alone in the night.

I went with my mother and father to visit relatives on the coast. I called them Uncle Billy and Auntie Nan but in actual fact they weren’t family. Uncle Billy had worked with my father’s uncle on the fishing boats and Billy and Nan had become such close family friends that they were always Aunt and Uncle to me.

They kept a dog.

We were sitting in the front room having a cup of tea and some fruit shortcake biscuits, my mother and father talking animatedly with Uncle Billy and Auntie Nan while I sat back on the settee eyeing the white Staffordshire bull terrier. I wouldn’t have stared, only it was looking right at me and I was scared to look away. I imagined it coming for me, snapping and biting, and the four of them just carrying on their conversation. Or they’d turn and laugh, thinking the dog was playing with me. Uncle Billy wouldn’t call the dog off until it had drawn my blood.

I could hear my heart beating and the dog, no doubt able to smell my fear, beat its tail on the hearth rug.

My mother looked at me and smiled. ‘Are you all right, pet?’ she said, then turned away because Auntie Nan had asked her something.

They won’t help you, the dog seemed to be saying with its sinister, too-small brown eyes.

Later, they were all outside admiring the clematis that climbed over the shed at the bottom of the garden. The dog was with them, basking on the lawn. I was bored and wandered from room to room, ending up in my Aunt and Uncle’s bedroom upstairs. I looked out of the window, saw the four grown-ups in a small group by a flower bed. The dog looked up and met my stare. I dropped down out of sight, sweat pricking the back of my neck. With no real awareness of what I was doing I began to open and close the drawers in my Aunt’s dressing table, not really seeing anything, just handling things and putting them back and closing the drawer.

I heard a noise behind me and I stiffened. In the dressing table mirror I saw the white dog standing erect, ears sticking up, in the doorway. I jumped when it barked. Too frightened to turn around and face it, I watched in the mirror as it padded into the bedroom. Only when it barked again and broke into a run did I react, scrambling up to stand on the stool. But I was still within easy reach of the dog. It barked and barked, terrifyingly loud in the enclosed space, and I clambered onto the dressing table itself, my feet slipping on my Auntie’s clothes, things I’d unconsciously removed from the drawers. The dog leaped at my feet, saliva spraying from its hot snapping mouth. I skipped sideways, screaming, backing onto the window ledge. But my left leg caught the edge of the mirror and I fell, knocking my shin against the edge of the dressing table and landing on the floor at the dog’s feet.

It was on me in a second, fixing its jaws around my upper arm and pulling at me, as if to goad me into a fight. The foul stink of the animal made me retch, its hot breath curled up my nose like a poison and its teeth sank deeper into my arm. I screamed and yelled. In desperation I fought back, no longer caring that to do so would enrage the beast. I kicked and beat the dog with my free hand, but its jaws were clamped tightly around my arm.

I felt a wave of black giddiness wash over me, saw sparks dance in front of my eyes. I wet myself and my limbs went momentarily slack. The dog pressed one of its sharp-nailed feet on my chest, slipping to my throat. Just when I had completely given up the fight and thought I was about to faint my father appeared in the doorway, howling like a warrior as he threw himself at the dog. His sheer weight knocked the animal off me and he rolled with it on the floor. My Auntie Nan gathered me into her arms. I yelled, screaming and crying. Then my father was standing up, holding the dog’s two front legs. He’d forced the legs apart and looked about ready to tear the dog right open down its seam. He was panting, bleeding from a cut on his cheek, looking at us and at my Mother and Uncle Billy who had just made it upstairs. My mother screamed when she saw my father. I wriggled out of Auntie Nan’s embrace and crashed into my mother’s legs. She hugged me fiercely, saying ‘It’s all right, Carl. It’s all right, love,’ over and over again.

Uncle Billy snapped the dog’s lead onto its collar and took it from my father, who collapsed on the edge of the bed. I watched him, my chest still heaving. For a few minutes everyone maintained the same positions and no one spoke. I knew how weak the treatment had made my father, yet he had fought with the dog as if it were the sickness itself. And won.

Two days later I came home from the recreation ground. I’d been kicking a ball around with some friends. After the visit to Maine Road I now imagined myself as Francis Lee or Colin Bell as I took pot shots at Dave Enty who stood like some gloved statue between the two piles of coats we used as posts.

I walked past the garage and entered the house by the side door. I called out but no answer came. On the dining table there was a note from my mother. She’d gone shopping and would be back about five. I looked at my watch. It was half past three. I wondered why the side door had been unlocked. My father had gone to Christie’s around twelve and I’d gone out to play football before he’d come back.

I took off my muddy trainers and walked upstairs in my stocking feet. My parents’ bedroom was empty, the bed all made and everything very neat as usual, looking like a show house. In my own room I sat on the edge of the bed and flicked a half-made pampas-grass quill float that was standing in a jam jar on my desk. My father had made the desk for me. I opened its single drawer and shuffled through my Esso World Cup coins, Brooke Bond tea cards and old bus tickets. I stood up and looked out of the window to see if I could see my father coming back from the railway station.

There was something wrong. I knew it in my stomach first, where some sort of bitter fight was going on.

I went in the bathroom to see if I could resolve the dispute but nothing came. I washed my hands, a little unnerved by the sound of the running water, which seemed too loud for the emptiness of the house. Downstairs I turned the television on and glanced at the different channels. I thumbed the off switch and stood at the window looking out at the garage. Something gnawed at my insides.

Leaves were falling outside. There had been a subtle smoky taste in the air that I’d noticed coming back from the rec. The first bonfires of the season were being lit in gardens. Down back entries kids were sneaking the last illicit cigarettes of the summer holidays.

I wandered into the kitchen and pulled open the fridge door. There wasn’t much: some butter and milk, rashers of bacon wrapped in foil, and a hunk of cheese. I closed the fridge and hovered by the side door leading back outside. Through the frosted glass I could see the distorted form of the garage. I put my muddy trainers back on and opened the door. Going left, I walked down the passage between the garage and the back garden. There was a peculiar smell coming from somewhere that set my teeth on edge. And a low growling noise I couldn’t identify. I trailed my fingers against the side of the garage and slipped around the corner at its end. There was a mossy tree stump which I had to stand on to look through the grimy window in the back wall of the garage.

At first it was difficult to see clearly because of the two thicknesses of glass and the dirty swirling clouds of some kind of smoke. But eventually the details resolved themselves and made sense.

The car was in the garage and my father was sitting in the driving seat.

His head was moving from side to side, his mouth gaping open and snapping shut. His eyes met mine.

I stared at him for a few elastic seconds then dropped down off the mossy stump and sat in the soil at the base of the garage wall. I was panting for breath, my heart hammering, pulse racing in my temples. Sweat in a sheen across my forehead making me shiver. My hands shaking.

But I didn’t get up and run to open the garage door. There was still time, I knew, because he had been moving. He had seen me.

I turned around and pressed my ear to the side of the garage. I heard the low rumbling of the car’s engine, the chugging of the exhaust. The smell was sickening.

I got up and ran. I ran down the passage between the house and the garage and straight out into the road. A car slammed on its brakes, squealing to a standstill. The driver thumped his horn. Burning rubber stung my nostrils. I ran over the road and dived into the nearest back entry, the damp cobbles slippery under my feet. At the corner I bowled into someone coming the other way. Without looking to see who it was I picked myself up and carried on running.

I ran for about two miles until I simply couldn’t go another step and I collapsed on the canal tow path in a tangle of long dewy grass and dead broken branches. I buried my head and cried until it hurt. Soon the longed-for oblivion came and I blacked out.

A white-haired man out walking his dog found me and took me to the nearby police station because he couldn’t get any sense out of me. They took me home. I eyed the flung-open garage doors with terror. My mother had found him. I hadn’t warned her. I hadn’t done the one thing my father would have wanted me to do.

The engine had stopped because it had run out of petrol. Despite the open doors there was still a nauseating stench. The policemen covered their faces with handkerchiefs before picking their way past the lawnmower and gardening implements.

There was a length of garden hose running from the exhaust pipe into the car via the back window, which was still wound up almost to the top. The driver’s door was open and my father’s blackened hand hung out of it. I didn’t get to see his face again because a policeman turned me around and led me outside. We found my mother in the back garden tearing clumps of bindweed out of the earth. One of the policemen approached from the side very carefully and reached out to touch her shoulder. She twisted away from him and raked her fingers through the soil, digging up more strands of bindweed. The trouble had always been that no matter how many individual strands she pulled up, the roots remained. It always grew back.

The policeman tried to get a grip and she snapped her arm like a whip, showering him with soil and grit. Then she saw me standing there with the other policeman and that was when she started screaming.

I felt myself moving slowly, rising through clouds of black, star-flecked matter towards a glimmer of light that grew dimmer as I neared it. My body felt paradoxically weightless and tethered; either way I had little control over it. The sounds of small dogs and children playing together in some distant park seemed like a trick of memory.

I woke up in the children’s ward, a bare bulb dispensing a sickly yellowish glow above the end of my bed. When I tried to sit up I found myself unable to. I had been strapped in like the crossbreed children in the beds on my left and opposite. Next to my bed sitting upright with his legs crossed and wearing a white coat was Gledhill.

I gave up struggling against the straps and lay back. For the time being the runaway train that was my escape from the City had been shunted into a siding.

The Gledhill thing didn’t dismay me as much as it might have done; I was merely puzzled as to who was betraying me this time. Was it Stella? And had she set up the trap at Maxi’s dental surgery? Or had Stella been telling what she believed was the truth when she passed on the name of Gledhill? Had the authorities somehow received intelligence that I was coming looking for the ex-Dark wanderer?

For now, Gledhill just sat and watched me. I wondered what his brief was. Guard or professional observer? I heard footsteps approaching the bed. It was White Coat, eyebrows twitching. He exchanged a few words quietly with Gledhill then stepped closer to the bed and loomed over me.

‘How’s our King killer then?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘Enjoy your little sojourn in the Dark, did you?’

I hesitated for a moment. I had been waiting a long time for this, since the first time I encountered the Thin Controller.

‘Cunt.’

‘Security are on their way. You’ll soon change your tune then,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a fucking holiday camp, you know.’

I thought about answering him back but there was no point. I’d made my gambit.

‘In the meantime,’ he continued, ‘we are responsible for your comfort.’ He turned half an inch in Gledhill’s direction. ‘Make sure he’s comfortable please, Doctor Gledhill.’ With that he turned and walked out of my field of vision. Gledhill got up from his seat. The paralysed look to the left side of his face had not been an act, though in this new context it twisted his mouth into a snarl.

He bent down and I felt him grab hold of something and pull. The broad leather strap across my chest tightened and I gasped for air. He tugged on the other straps that restrained my arms and legs and I made no show of resistance. There was no point at this stage. I closed my eyes but although sleep beckoned I didn’t want to be sucked back into the Dark.

I had an idea and turned to face Gledhill.

‘I want to make a telephone call,’ I said.

He appeared unmoved by my request.

‘You have to allow me a phone call, Doctor,’ I pressed him. ‘Ask him if you have to.’

He got up and walked over to the door in the far corner. I was left alone with the crossbreeds whose cacophony continued unabated. After some minutes Gledhill reappeared wheeling a trolley. White Coat was two steps behind him. Gledhill brought the trolley to the side of my bed. An old-fashioned black telephone sat on it. There was a long flex which Gledhill bent down to plug in behind the bed. He lifted the handset and, finger poised, looked at me.

‘Number?’ he said.

‘I’ll do it myself.’

Gledhill looked at White Coat, who signalled his assent. The necessary straps were loosened and I took the telephone down from the trolley, dialling the first few digits of Annie Risk’s number quickly and in the shadow of the trolley so they couldn’t follow it. I heard the ringing tone at the other end and swopped the phone over to the left side of the bed. White Coat and Gledhill stayed where they were. The ringing tone ceased and I heard Annie’s voice through a squizzle of interference.

‘Hello?’

‘Can you hear me?’ I said.

‘Hello?’

I tried again, shouting, but she couldn’t hear.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ she said and was silent for a moment, then: ‘Carl, is that you?’

‘Yes,’ I shouted.

‘Carl, if that’s you’ — her voice sounded anxious — ‘come back, you’ve got to get back. We’re in terrible trouble. Awful things are happening. People are disappearing. You’ve got to come back. Come back and help us, Carl. We need you.’

‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’

The line went dead. Gledhill stood up straight, the plug dangling from his hand.

‘She can’t hear you, King killer,’ White Coat said with a sneer. ‘You can hear them but they can’t hear you. That’s how it works. All those wrong numbers you used to get, picking up the phone and there’s no one there, that’s people calling out of the City. Just to listen to your confused babble because they know you won’t be able to hear them. Or maybe like you they want to ask for help, but they soon realise there’s no escape, and what links there are only go one way.

‘She’s right though,’ he continued. ‘Terrible things are happening over there. Our influence is spreading thanks to you.’

I frowned.

‘Yes, you, assassin,’ he said. ‘Our agents of darkness are slipping through into your world via the gap you so conveniently left in the side of the City when you walked in off the motorway.’

‘Your lot have been around in our world longer than that,’ I said, remembering what Stella had told me — how she was snatched from beside the railway line on her way home after jumping a quintuple salchow at the local rink.

‘But we could only maintain a small presence and only along the canals and railways and in the grey areas,’ said Gledhill, clearly getting over-enthusiastic. White Coat cracked a sharp look at him that caused him to shut up and withdraw like a whipped dog.

‘What he means,’ White Coat said, taking up the story, ‘is that now we can put more ambitious campaigns into action. All thanks to you. Your friend was right: people are disappearing. We have infiltrated the police and their dog handlers with some of our own security and our own dogs. Well, you can imagine the rest.’

White Coat was getting into his stride. He had never seemed happy with his lot in our world as the Thin Controller. Over here agreed with him. I was going to enjoy dispatching him when the time came.

The grimace slid off his face as the door swung open and a security outfit bustled in. They came to the end of the bed and the goon in charge muttered an exchange with White Coat while Gledhill released my bonds. I stretched, cracking my joints, and stood up.

‘You could have taken my boots off,’ I remarked to Gledhill.

White Coat left the room by the door in the far corner and I barely had time to glance at the faces and dark uniforms of the goon squad before he came back with an upright bed base which he pushed along the floor on castors. There were leather hoops at the four corners of the frame and three broad straps flapping loose across its width. White Coat parked it in the middle of the ward and two of the guards dragged me across. I was strapped in place, my body assuming the X position. What was coming next? Why these elaborate preparations? I felt an uncomfortable piece of apparatus descending over my head and White Coat himself affixed four sets of pincers that were attached to it onto my eyelids to prevent them from closing. Then he signalled to Gledhill, who drew a plastic bottle from his pocket and approached me.

‘No,’ I cried. ‘No, no.’

‘But you don’t know what we’re going to do, King killer,’ White Coat sneered.

One of the soldiers lit a cigarette and I imagined them burning me with it.

Gledhill opened his plastic bottle and pulled out a pipette. He reached up to my eye. I couldn’t close it, though I tried and the pain cut through my face like a knife. He squeezed the rubber bulb on the pipette and a drop of liquid fell into my eye.

‘Don’t worry, King killer, it’s only water,’ Gledhill said. ‘We’ve got something to show you.’ He moistened my other eye. ‘We want you to have a good view.’

There was a commotion at the far end of the ward. The doors swung inwards and a party of soldiers entered. They had three prisoners. One man was frog-marched between the beds until he was only two feet from me. Soldiers held his arms while he struggled like a child. His wide, staring blue eyes pierced mine.

‘Wolf,’ I said.

Tears fell from his eyes. They ran into the greasy stubble covering his pinched cheeks. The two soldiers drew him back from me and White Coat stepped forward, followed by another soldier carrying a steel poker. The heat coming off its red tip caused distortion in the air.

‘You see, King killer,’ White Coat said, ‘we are humane here in the City. We don’t like to see people suffer and your friend has been suffering ever since he went into the Dark. He must have seen such terrible things and he’s still seeing them now.’

I understood at last the reason for his awful stare, although I would never know what he’d seen in the dark. ‘Let him go,’ I pleaded.

For all my suspicions at the time, Wolf and his colleagues had been on my side. I could see the dark form of Giff and the rake-like Professor bound by chains among the soldiers at the far end.

‘Let them go. I’m the one you want.’

But White Coat had stepped aside to let the soldier with the poker stand in between Wolf and me.

‘We don’t want him to suffer these sights any longer,’ White Coat said, and the soldier lifted the poker. From Wolf’s open mouth came a scream so high-pitched and ragged I thought it would rip apart my eardrums. Soldiers held his head so that he couldn’t dodge the attack. I heard a terrible fizzling as the poker put out his left eye. Matter and fluid spat outwards, striking the soldier’s uniform. Still Wolf screamed. The soldier withdrew his poker before it lost all its heat to one socket. Gledhill continued to drip water into my eyes so that I could see clearly. I cursed him and all of them. The poker sank into Wolf’s other eye and I saw his knees begin to buckle as the eye boiled and sputtered before slumping misshapen down his cheek.

I thought the show was over but I was wrong. Another frame similar to my own was wheeled in and Wolf lifted onto it. Once Wolf had been secured, White Coat stepped forward with a scalpel in his hand.

‘Stop,’ I shouted.

But White Coat took no notice as he cut off Wolf’s sleeve and twisted a tourniquet around his upper arm. Wolf stirred and moaned. The soldiers tightened his bindings and White Coat sliced into Wolf’s forearm, opening a gash three inches long and deep to the bone. A soldier staunched the flow of blood with a rolled-up length of torn bed sheet. White Coat reached around the soldier to get something from a trolley. It was a thin but strong-looking length of plaited leather, like a lead.

Gledhill’s face hovered beneath mine as he dripped more water into my eyes.

White Coat threaded the leather strap under the bone and tied it there. He tugged on it and Wolf’s screams became shriller. Happy, White Coat pressed the two sides of the forearm together, his ungloved thumbs slipping on the raw flesh and bloody skin, and with a needle handed to him he stitched up the incision.

He turned and looked at me. Gledhill watered my eyes. The leather strap dangled out of Wolf’s arm, a steel ring glinting in the loop at its end.

One of the soldiers snapped his fingers and the doors were pushed open again. A dog handler entered, pulled along the tiled floor by a dark brown pit bull, snarling and spitting. Behind me the children and little creatures started up their howling, yelping chorus again. The soldier unclasped the pit bull’s lead from his chain and fastened it to the lead that emerged from the wound in Wolf’s arm.

The dog strained at the new lead. It tore open two of White Coat’s stitches before the soldiers were able to undo all of the hoops and straps holding the all-but-broken man. Once Wolf was free, the dog pulled him to the floor. He managed to stand up but the dog raced down the ward and the blind man fell headlong, hitting his head against the end of a bed. Two soldiers picked him up and let his guide dog drag him screaming from the ward. His screams echoed down the corridor as the pit bull led him away into the night.

The goons released me and marched me off past White Coat, who watched with bloody-sleeved arms folded across his chest, and past the soldiers holding Giff and the Professor, who stared through me at the prospect of their own fate.

‘Don’t worry, fellas. None of this is real,’ I said to them. ‘This is not happening.’

‘You tell yourself that,’ said White Coat.

Before we left the ward, one of the soldiers pulled my hands behind my back and secured them with a plastic grip that dug into my wrists. My legs were cracked repeatedly with a baton as I was pushed along in the middle of the group. A black van stood waiting in a floodlit courtyard. I was bundled in and we left the hospital grounds by the main gate. I had to sit on the floor in the back of the van and when we went around corners I rolled over, banging my head. One of the goons leaned across and poked me with his baton.

‘Keep still, King killer,’ he spat.

I said nothing and was sick in the corner. I wondered about what I’d said to Giff and the Professor. I asked myself where the impulse to say that had come from.

The van jerked and the engine was killed. The guards jumped out and I heard their boots scrunch on grit as they came around to unlock the back doors.

‘I guess you’ll have a jeering crowd ready out there,’ I said to them. ‘A braying mob.’

They dragged me out of the van and missiles and abuse rained down on me from all sides.

‘What did I tell you?’ I said.

The guards frogmarched me into the back of some building. I was expecting a gaol cell but it soon became apparent that it was to the law courts that they had brought me. Within three minutes I was standing in the dock, my hands still bound behind my back and my ankles fastened together by a chain. A chorus rang out from the public gallery — ‘King killer, King killer, King killer!’ Things were moving much faster than I had anticipated.

Chapter Thirteen

The charge was regicide.

Specifically that I had planned and executed the assassination of the King by a single shot from a rifle while he was being driven through the City in his car on official duties.

There was a row of people sitting in a box marked Prosecution Witnesses. I’d never seen any of them before. There was no box of defence witnesses, no defence lawyer as far as I could see, just a barrage of prosecution lawyers and the judge, all of whom had spiral scars scratched on their foreheads.

The clerk of the court was already reading out special clauses that meant nothing to me. The prosecution counsel stood up and declaimed from his little podium. I had killed the King. These witnesses had seen me do it. The penalty was death. I should be taken from this court…

The proceedings seemed to be running away from me at an implausible speed. If I failed to intervene, the whole thing would be over without my having spoken a word.

‘Stop!’ I ordered. The courtroom fell quiet and everyone stared at me. Rows and rows of blank faces that seemed to extend beyond the natural confines of the room. In the public gallery I caught sight of Stella sitting just in front of Maxi. White Coat, cleaned up, and Gledhill were standing to one side by the exit doors, behind a cordon of policemen armed with batons. Everyone held their breath waiting for me to speak again.

I looked at the judge. He was dressed like his street-corner peers in a tight-fitting shiny black suit. The scar on his forehead caught a slanting ray of light from the windows high up in the courtroom wall.

‘What’s he doing?’ I asked, pointing at a burly man wearing headphones and bending over a cutting lathe. There was an acetate disc in position on his turntable.

‘Recording the proceedings,’ said the clerk of the court.

‘I’m speaking to the judge,’ I thundered, finding confidence from somewhere.

The judge himself spoke: ‘As the clerk said, the case is being recorded.’

I knew what would be on the disc when the verdict had been delivered and the condemned man taken away: forty-five minutes of silence. Ticks, hisses, booms and clicks but no witness testimonies, no impassioned plea of defence.

So, I had to win the case first time around. There could be no appeal.

‘Continue,’ said the judge with a vague hand gesture in the direction of the prosecution counsel.

The arrogant young lawyer picked up a book from the table in front of him.

‘This book,’ he said, brandishing what appeared to be my copy of Un Régicide at the court, ‘was found in the possession of the accused. As evidence linking him to the crime for which he stands accused it is damning.’

‘Stop,’ I cried again. ‘I want to speak.’

This seemed to take everyone by surprise. There was a collective rustle as all the figures in the courtroom turned towards me again. Row upon row of blank faces.

‘I don’t have a defence counsel so I’m going to defend myself.’ I looked around the court. No one spoke or moved. In the public gallery I glimpsed my mother’s face and my stomach turned over, but when I looked back she wasn’t there. It was just some anonymous bloodless face like a rolled-out lump of pastry. Could have been anybody. ‘I didn’t shoot the King…’ I began again before being interrupted.

‘Objection, Your Honour,’ said the prosecutor. ‘The accused did commit the offence. That is established fact.’

‘Objection sustained,’ the judge muttered.

I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘Objection,’ I shouted. ‘It is not fact. You will hear the facts now.’ Suddenly, despite my weak position and my physical restraints I felt I was in a position of power. Despite a ruling from the judge the prosecutor had fallen silent — his head was bowed over his desk — and the assembly was turned my way again.

‘To begin with, I did not kill the King. I have never owned a rifle and nor did I ever see the King being driven through the City.’ I looked around at my audience. The numbers in the public gallery had swelled and my mother’s face was once more amongst them. I felt encouraged. If she blamed me for what had happened, not only for the death of my father but also for what it had done to her, would she not be sitting in the prosecution witness box rather than the public gallery?

The court was hushed, waiting for me to continue. The prosecutor appeared to have frozen to the spot. Only the cutting engineer’s disc moved, producing a low hiss. I sensed the need to go further.

‘The King was dying. He was suffering from a terminal condition which he knew would continue to cause him more and more pain and discomfort the longer he lived. He debated with himself the rights and wrongs of taking his own life and reached the decision that it would be better to do so. What right did I have to alter that decision at the last moment?’

A broad band of pain stretched across the front of my skull. Sweat tickled my neck and ran down my back. I couldn’t massage my temples or run a handkerchief over my face for even temporary relief. When I looked up at the public gallery it seemed impossibly distant, as if viewed down the wrong end of a telescope. My head started to spin. I looked at the prosecution witness box and it seemed as if its occupants had swopped positions with each other, but I couldn’t be sure. The prosecutor still stood with his head bowed. The judge had turned his head to bathe his face in the light streaming in from the high window.

‘I didn’t kill the King,’ I repeated. ‘He killed himself. I just let him do it. In the circumstances it was the right and most humane thing to do.’

In the public gallery my mother’s head was nodding slowly like a huge white bell. It was the only movement in the entire courtroom.

‘It was the right thing to do,’ I repeated.

If I really believed it, however, why when I looked back at the judge did I see my father’s face swinging from side to side behind the windscreen of his exhaust-clogged car? I blinked and shook my head and when I looked again I saw the judge shaking his head slowly and making an ambiguous gesture with his hand. The prosecutor, upon seeing this sign, slipped back to life, along with the rest of the court. It was like a piece of film that had been stuck in the gate of the projector slowly being freed and rolling again. The sound slurred back up to the correct speed and full volume. Witnesses stood up one after another in the prosecution witness box and rattled off accounts of how they had seen me holding the rifle, training its sights on the car that was carrying the King, squeezing the trigger. They saw the rear passenger window of the car shatter and the King slump forward inside. They saw me run away from the scene of the crime and collapse on the tow path of one of the City’s canals.

‘No, no,’ I shouted. ‘None of this is true. It’s not true. I didn’t kill him.’

I looked at the last witness, the one who’d seen me on the canal bank. He was a middle-aged man with white hair. I just bet he kept a dog as well. The prosecutor was summing up. All was quiet in the public gallery; my mother had disappeared. The judge laid his right arm across his own chest then pointed at my head. I looked up at the bright window and heard the judge’s gavel crash onto the leather stopper on his desk and suddenly the courtroom was in uproar. Officers freed my ankles and pushed me out of the dock. The crowd on the floor of the court parted to let us through. Bystanders and court officials shouted insults and spat at me as guards prodded and kicked me out into the open air where a mass of people had already gathered. They chanted ‘King killer, King killer’ and moved with the awesome, graceful give-and-take of the sea.

I was dragged up onto the back of a trailer and the tailgate was bolted after me. Four guards shared the trailer with me, each armed with a baton and an old-fashioned rifle. A sixth person — a woman — was helped up into the trailer as it began to move off through the crowds. When the woman turned around I saw it was Maxi. She was holding a straight razor in her right hand. My chest tightened and my throat dried. However poor the prospects for survival, the promise of pain is never easy to bear. Hence a dying man’s desire to commit suicide.

While the guards concentrated on the crowd so they could avert any attempt to kill me before the appointed time, Maxi set about finishing off the haircut she had started. Although a double-crosser, she was at least a familiar face.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked her as she grasped a handful of my hair and sliced cleanly through it. The razor was so sharp it almost wasn’t there.

‘You know where we’re going,’ she whispered.

‘How do they do it?’ I asked.

‘They have different ways.’

Part of me believed there had to be a way out. With my hands still secured by the plastic tie, however, it was going to be difficult. A stone thrown from the crowd hit me on the leg and my sudden movement caused Maxi to nick my scalp. It was so hot and sharp I didn’t realise until I felt the warm trickle of blood — stickier and thicker than sweat — make its way down past my ear. One of the guards fired over the crowd.

‘What about afterwards?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean, afterwards?’ she hissed. ‘There is no afterwards. This is it. The big one.’

‘Do I get buried, eaten by dogs, or what?’

She didn’t answer, just carried on shaving my head. I could tell she was being careful to avoid cutting me.

‘So?’ I insisted.

‘You know this place,’ she said mysteriously.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Hey, King killer!’ It was one of the guards. He thumped my shoulder with the butt of his rifle. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

The trailer rumbled on and eventually the guard had to turn his attention back to the mob below. Fists shaking, eyes rolling, they kept up their tirade of abuse.

‘They’ve systematically been slaughtering suspects here for years,’ Maxi continued. ‘But this place doesn’t follow your rules. The dead won’t lie down.’

‘They can’t kill me?’ I said.

‘They can kill you. And they will. But you won’t lie down and be buried.’

She fell silent, chopping away at what was left of my hair. I watched it fall to the floor of the trailer, hoping I would get a chance to grow it again. I wondered if they’d let me have a last cigarette. I still had a couple of Camels down my left boot, if they weren’t squashed beyond smoking by now.

‘I was reading a book before I came here,’ I told her, ‘in which the action constantly switched between two worlds. In one of them, the king was due to be assassinated, but then his body turned up in the other. And although one thread featured an unnamed first-person narrator and the other a protagonist called Boris, you sensed they were the same person. I wish I could just switch back to the other world like Boris could.’

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she said in a whisper. ‘That’s what they’re going to do. Take you into your world. As the train crosses over, the dead lie down.’

‘What train? And then what? Do they bring the bodies back?’

‘No. If they did so, they’d just get up again. It’s that kind of place.’ She dragged the dry razor over the dome of my head, now almost bald. ‘They leave them there. In your world.’

The trailer was pulled off the main road into a grid of short straight side streets. The crowd was no longer stationary. Thousands of people were streaming through the streets alongside us, hundreds more joining the flow from other streets and back entries. I knew where we were going. There hadn’t been any sign of a football stadium on my map but I didn’t doubt that was where we were heading. I didn’t have long. There had to be some break in the network of streets. I needed another element. I needed an escape route. My eyes searched the back streets and patches of waste ground, searching for the interstices.

There had to be one somewhere. It should be part of the geography of this part of the City. Every urban area had its grey area on the edge of the inner city. Derelict housing, old warehouses, dead industry, waste land, football grounds, railway sidings, gasholders, canals. Brownfield sites, interzones, edgelands.

I pictured the football ground. I imagined the splash of green under the floodlights. I imagined being led to the middle of the pitch — and then what? Would there be a gibbet? A trapdoor? A guillotine? A simple post and a firing squad?

Then I saw what I wanted, glinting like a seam of jet in redundant rock. A narrow, oil-black canal threading its way between the backs of two streets. The street we were on would go over it in fifty yards or so. Not a bridge as such, the width of the canal hardly merited it, but there was just a chance. In my position the slightest chance was worth taking. If I fell to my death at least I would have chosen the manner of my going, which was preferable to whatever execution the authorities had planned for me in the stadium.

Right at the last moment the truck that was pulling the trailer seemed about to turn off into another street away from the canal. My mouth filled with the acid taste of fear. But the truck bumped onwards. I looked at the guards. They were watching the flow of humanity in the streets. The trailer was drawn past the last row of houses before the canal and past the back entry whose cobbles shone in the orange light like fat little fish. I jumped.

In the air my arms came free. The plastic tie had been cut clean through. Only a razor would have produced such a clean cut. I didn’t have time to protect my face or hold my nose before striking the water. It went up my nostrils as I sank deeper and felt my leg hit the bottom. Thinking my head was about to burst I turned and headed under the road, swimming underwater. I couldn’t open my eyes but I heard the bullets that tore through the water on either side of me. I dived deeper and swam along the bottom for as long as I could before I had to come up for air.

Despite the desperate need to empty my passages and breath fresh air I surfaced slowly and quietly.

I found myself in total darkness. I could hear a far-off rumble and clamour, the thump of my pulse, and a constant drip, presumably from the ceiling of the tunnel. I cleared my throat, took a few deep breaths and swam on. The taste of the canal water in my mouth was bitter and nauseating. My boots were slowing me down but if I got rid of them I knew I’d regret it later. I put everything into moving my arms and legs, thrusting forward and pushing water behind me, kicking back as if there were dogs snapping at my heels. Just when I was beginning to think I couldn’t swim another stroke, I saw light up ahead. I listened but couldn’t hear anything apart from my own echoing splashes.

Even with the tunnel exit in sight it was the cold that now got to me. My limbs felt as if they had been packed in ice and I had started to shiver violently. I forced myself on by willpower, thinking of Annie Risk. If she was in danger I had to get back for her sake as well as mine. The distraction of her image gave me a few more strokes.

Ten yards from the end of the tunnel, I dived and swam as far as I could, then veered to the left-hand side and broke the surface. Water dripped off my nose.

The tow path and nearby streets were empty. I clambered out and sat on the bank, taking off my boots and emptying them. A minute later I set off again, trotting along the tow path, looking for what I guessed I would come across sooner or later. Only two hundred yards further on I found what I wanted: a railway bridge. I climbed up the side and walked onto the line. Nothing was coming from either direction.

I had to choose: left or right. It wasn’t quite fifty-fifty. My instinct said left because that way lay the stadium to which they had been taking me. Left would take me deep into the grey area where I would most likely find any sidings or depot. These wouldn’t be far from the stadium, because of the difficulties of transporting the executed men from the football ground to the railway line without any of them escaping. To some extent I was busking it, making assumptions based on comments made by Gledhill — when he had talked of maintaining a presence in the grey areas along railway lines and canals — and Maxi, who had referred specifically to the dead lying down only when the train passed over into my world.

She had been on my side at the end, when it mattered, so I had to trust her information.

I shivered in the raw night air. The oily canal water was still making me slip as I skipped from sleeper to sleeper. The line was built on relatively high ground and I could see the City’s lights spread out on the left. On the right lay darkness broken by a few scattered lamps. I was tempted to make off in that direction but resisted. I knew the City too well now to believe I might escape that way. The darkness would be thick with snares. I had come to understand that the City was everywhere and if you were inside the City looking out it stretched to infinity. If you were outside looking in, as I had been, it simply didn’t exist in physical terms at all. Somehow it was everywhere and nowhere at the same time, as Gledhill-the-patient had said of the Dark.

I noticed movement in the streets on my left. At least a mile away lights were gathering around a central point. Then, as I continued running, they started to disperse in all directions, thousands of lights. People carrying flaming torches perhaps. Presumably curfew had been cancelled and all loyal citizens sent out to hunt me down. The thought lent speed to my flight. Some of the lights were heading for points further up the line. I had no choice but to continue running, convinced now that this was my last chance.

When I hit the sidings the lights were still half a mile away, bobbing and converging as they narrowed the gap. I listened hard and heard what I wanted — the chug-chug of an engine ticking over. The smells of diesel and grease were sweet after the foul stench of the canal. Floodlights positioned at the corners of the depot meant I had to proceed with more caution, but the engine noise was easy to locate. I picked my way over the tracks, ducking beneath lines of idle rolling stock and freight wagons. The velvety darkness beyond the sidings was dotted with coloured signals. The train with the live engine which I was now approaching appeared to be waiting for a red signal to go green. The locomotive was painted grey and red.

The wagons were old cattle trucks with wooden, slatted walls. I stopped by one and pressed my ear to the side. All I could hear was the persistent chugging of the diesel. I peered in between two vertical slats and what I saw made me look away and double up to be sick over the oily chippings.

In the semi-darkness of the wagon I’d seen ceiling-filtered light from the high floods falling across bare dirty-white thighs and torn shoulders, twisted, wasted arms and shaved heads.

These were the dead. And they were standing up.

The idle of the locomotive took on a different, higher tone. I looked up the line, vomit still burning the inside of my mouth, and the light flicked to green. The locomotive revved and a great cloud of diesel exhaust billowed into the floodlit night. The trucks were jerked into life in a long domino line and I reached for the catch on the gate. At first it wouldn’t give and the loco gave its first real tug on the wagons. I had to jump and fiddle with the catch while walking sideways. Suddenly it fell open and I opened the gate just wide enough to squeeze in. I fastened it after me and stared out through the gaps in the truck wall at the receding lines of carriages and, jumping between them, the dancing flames of the late King’s loyal avengers.

As a deathly chill spread from my stomach to claim my extremities and my heart pumped faster than the clickety-clack of the trucks on the track, I turned to face my companions.

Chapter Fourteen

Their eyes were open. The light in the truck was poor — narrow shafts admitted by the gaps in the walls — but sufficient to allow me glimpses of terrible wounds, encrusted with blood now cold and dark. No one had told me what form of execution was preferred in the City but many of the injuries were consistent with my suspicion that suspects had been thrown into the football ground to fight for their lives with vicious dogs.

A man propped up not two feet from me had a ragged hole in his throat where a beast’s jaws had fastened and refused to let go. A short young man with a shock of blond curls and empty dark eyes had black puncture marks on his neck and chest. Either the accused were cast naked into the arena or the authorities stripped the bodies after the dogs had done their worst.

The train clattered on into the night, travelling distressingly slowly. I looked through a gap but couldn’t see anything beyond the hedges and trees and occasional lights at the edge of the track.

There was a pungent smell in the truck, which I had been trying to ignore. All I could think of was the bag of turnips I had once left undisturbed for months in the crisper drawer of my fridge. When I came across it I took hold of the top of the bag and pulled. The paper bag, weakened by the soggy decaying mess inside, broke and decomposed vegetables went everywhere.

It was the details — the shaving scar, the mole on one woman’s cheek, the pierced ears, dark roots amid dyed blonde hair — that affirmed the humanity of the train’s cargo. Otherwise they could be sides of meat destined to hang on hooks in the market. And yet, though dead, they remembered enough of life to remain standing.

As the train slithered across a set of points the truck rocked and a tall man with a long, crumbling nose and a bloody superficial labyrinth where his right ear had been fell against me. I recoiled but he came with me, the weight of several bodies pushing him from behind. We tumbled to the floor of the truck. Bodies slithered over the tops of ones that had already fallen and soon I was buried beneath them, trying to block my nose and avert my gaze. Even when I thought the landslide had stopped, another slight jolt from the train scythed a fresh crop.

Winded and bruised I tried to crawl out from under the corpses and it suddenly occurred to me that the train must have crossed over into our world. That was why they had all fallen over. At last they could rest in peace.

But I realised I was wrong when I felt a tickling on my ankle and tried to pull it away and couldn’t. One of the corpses was using it as a handhold and had started to climb up my body.

Another, a woman with a deep, sharp cleft in her face — the dull flesh of her cheek flapped loosely, exposing the glimmer of bone beneath, clearly not the work of pit bulls but that of a blade — approached me from my left. She crawled over the pile of bodies to get at me, clawing with her one good hand.

It dawned on me that I was the cause of these deaths. Or that was what the City would want me to think, anyway.

More of them found the energy to move, raising shaved heads that bore deep scratches from doing battle in the stadium, moving forward on elbows and stumps. Their desperate, vengeful hands reached out to my face, their broken, bone-splintered fingers cracking as they sought to put out my eyes, tear my flesh, as theirs had been.

I retreated into the corner, desperate to deflect their clumsy assaults. Still they came. As they hit me, some of them sacrificed their skin as it split from knuckle and joint like rotten fruit. The tall man with the crumbling nose had hauled himself up the length of my body and had his face next to mine. As weak blows landed on my legs and feet, this man opened his mouth as if to kiss out my life. His teeth were still good but his gums were rotting, his mouth having become a still-warm nest for fat white maggots, and the foul stench almost overpowered me. I was sick again, spitting bile at the man’s face, into his glassy eyes.

He opened his mouth wider and several of the larvae tipped out, wriggling, falling down the front of my shirt. He was pressing closer to meet my lips when his head fell forward and thumped against my breastbone. I noticed the others collapsing. Their little attacks ceased and they rolled off me. I pushed the tall man away and the maggots spilled out of his mouth onto the floor of the wagon. I approached the side of the truck and peered out.

I saw a galaxy of red lights hanging seemingly in mid-air and wondered if instead of crossing back into the real world I had entered some even more bizarre territory. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I could make out vertical masts and diagonal stays. The lights were attached to the masts, which occupied a vast area on the right of the line. There was a road also. A vague memory plucked at the back of my mind. I’d seen the masts before.

It came to me: Rugby radio masts. If that were the case, the train would be pulling into Rugby station any minute. I opened the catch on the gate and made a wider crack in the side of the wagon. I craned my neck to see up the line. I could see lights and a station approaching.

I knew, however, that even if the train stopped or slowed down enough for me to jump, I wouldn’t be able to. I might have seen no sign of them, but the train had to be carrying guards whose job it would be to unload the corpses. And if they didn’t get me, I’d still be stuck in Rugby in the middle of the night.

I fastened the gate and crouched down as the train rumbled under the vast glass canopy of Rugby station. The platforms were lonely and wet but they were part of my world. I wanted to get out, bend down and kiss them. The train slowed down and stopped, presumably awaiting a green light. I watched through the cracks as a British Rail guard sauntered down the platform, tapping his whistle against the side of his leg. He stopped fifteen yards from my truck, took off his cap and smoothed his hand over his balding head, yawning. I wondered about trying to call him over but the train jerked into motion again and we trundled out of the station.

The train accelerated, heading north. It blasted through Coventry station without slowing down, skittered over the level crossings at Canley and Tile Hill, then raced through cuttings, a tunnel and more deep cuttings and another tiny station before easing off in the approach to Birmingham International. Even here, though, there was no command to halt and the train thundered on towards the heart of Birmingham, under one road, over the next, another level crossing, a blink of a station, more bridges and tunnels, long streets of houses rising on either side then falling away and cars suddenly passing beneath the moss-clad stone arches under the tracks. Through Stechford, and past a bleak ill-lit park on the right, and finally the driver applied the brakes. The cattle wagons rolled forward, under three more roads, past a works depot on the right. Less than a mile away M6 traffic whipped through a busy interchange. Amid a great clanking of iron and steel, the train halted.

In the sudden stillness I listened to the hum of the motorway and the stuttering hum of the diesel. In between the motorway and the railway were several gasholders, three of them bunched up close to the M6 — I’d passed them dozens of times driving up to Manchester — and two hemmed in between a canal on the left, a scraggy little river, the railway line where I was sitting, and another line which came out from underneath and veered off to the right.

Of these two gasholders — both were the spiral-guided design — one was full and the other still half-empty.

Why did I think of it as still half-empty rather than only half-full?

I heard movement on the line ahead; men jumping down to the chippings and walking down the track. I thought I knew what they were going to do, so I took my chance. It was risky because I couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t have posted a guard on the off-side of the train. I unfastened the gate on the left side of the wagon, peeked out at the night and the empty southbound track, and lowered myself slowly onto a sleeper. I reached up to close the gate then scuttled away down the line, stepping only on the sleepers to reduce noise, and when I reached the end of the train I cut across the track and hid in the undergrowth at the side of the line. Thanks to the slight curvature of the track I had a perfect view of what was going on.

A gang of workers dressed in dark boilersuits had started unloading the wagons. They passed the corpses over their heads in a human chain. In a gap in the undergrowth a large works vehicle had backed up as close as it could get to the line. The bodies were tossed into the back of this vehicle. Some had stiffened and slid around on top of others like a load of discarded shop-window dummies; others were still pliable and their arms and legs cracked and bent this way or that as more were thrown on the pile.

The men emptied at least a dozen wagons and I guessed there must have been at least twenty-five bodies in my own cattle truck. When the first works vehicle could carry no more it drove off down the slope and another took its place. I watched the first vehicle as it rumbled down over the rough ground towards the gasholders. It stopped by a cluster of small outbuildings and another team of workers emerged from the darkness to unload the cargo. Behind the outbuildings were several pipes leading up to the half-empty gasholder. I watched disbelieving as the bodies were carried one at a time and inserted into the broadest of these pipes. It was a slow process: after seven or eight bodies had been tipped into the pipe, the workers could push them no further along inside and they stopped, replaced a cover over the gap in the pipe and opened up a faucet several yards up the pipe. After a few seconds the faucet was closed again and the cover taken off the gap and more corpses stuffed in.

When they had finished, the gasholder seemed to have risen very slightly, but it was almost impossible to tell. There would be room for hundreds of thousands of bodies so it was unlikely a few hundred would make much of an impression.

The teams of men strolled back up the slope in an almost leisurely way and got back on the train, which started moving straight away, back the way it had come, the locomotive pushing from behind.

I crouched down even further in the bushes and watched as the train passed over my head. In the last wagon I saw a group of the corpse carriers. They’d left the truck gate open and were smoking cigarettes, the ends glowing like fireflies as the men stared out into the rushing night. One took a final pull and cast his hot coal into space. It arced through the velvet darkness and landed in the vegetation an inch or two from my face. I held my breath, waiting for the sound of the driver slamming on his brakes, but it didn’t come.

Because I reasoned there was nothing to be gained from a closer inspection of the gasholder or its feeder pipe — and because I was too fucking freaked out to go near it — I crossed the line and fought my way through a set of allotments to get to a road where I flagged down the first minicab I saw and asked the driver to take me into Birmingham.

I was exhausted and my instinct was to go home and collapse, but I was worried about Annie Risk, so I caught the first train from New Street to Manchester. There wasn’t time to ring before it left. On the train I fell asleep. If I dreamed at all I woke up when the train braked at a red light outside Piccadilly with no recollection of having done so. I stared out of the window and saw the two giant gasholders over beyond Ancoats. I shivered and pulled my jacket around me. My clothes had dried out after my dip in the canal but I had not warmed up.

I walked down the Piccadilly ramp and crossed the tramlines, having decided to walk to Annie’s so I had a chance to get my head together. It wasn’t that far, a couple of miles. Within minutes I was marching past the sprawling university buildings. It was late and the streets were deserted. I took in my surroundings, relieved to be back in the real world. Even the wind on my face felt different, slightly cooler than in the City. I plunged into the grid of terraced streets and back entries that was Moss Side.

I stood outside Annie’s place for half a minute looking up at her window for signs of life. The light was on but there were no shadows of movement. Pushing open the street door I felt my way through the gloom of the hallway to the stairs and began to climb. My legs felt heavy. At the top I hesitated outside Annie’s door and listened again. Nothing. I knocked and waited. There was no sound of activity from within so I knocked again, louder. Still nothing. I tried the handle. The door swung open.

‘Annie,’ I said quietly as I walked into her flat. ‘Annie, are you there?’

The bathroom on my right was in darkness. I checked it nevertheless. It was empty. The little flints of mirrored glass on the wall flickered in the light from the hall. The kitchen was also empty, dirty mugs left standing on the draining board and take-away boxes sticking out of the top of the bin. The light I’d seen from outside was burning in the bedroom, but Annie wasn’t there either. The bed was unmade. I glanced in the living room. Empty. I stepped back into the hall then straight back into the living room, my heart in my mouth: I’d glimpsed something on the living room wall and only assimilated it unconsciously.

On the wall in two-foot-high letters — in red — were the crudely daubed words KING KILLER.

I looked in the empty bedroom again. The unmade bed. The light.

My breathing became quick and shallow. Where was Annie Risk?

Chapter Fifteen

It was too late to get a train anywhere and when I sat down on Annie’s bed to think about what I could do to find her I must have given in to exhaustion because the next thing I knew I was waking up. Light was streaming in at the window. I felt a momentary elation that I was back and then I remembered that Annie was missing. I got up and looked in the other room: I had not dreamt the message on the wall. The red seemed a little less vivid in daylight. Or maybe it was just that it was six hours later and no longer fresh. It had acquired the rusty look of dried blood.

I showered, shaved and dressed in ten minutes, and left the flat.

On my way to Piccadilly I bought a bap, a pack of Camels and a newspaper, which told me it was a Wednesday. So what? On the train I soon put it down unread: I couldn’t concentrate on this world while Annie was being held hostage for me in another. The Camels, however, tasted good after the stale muck available in the City.

Arriving in London I went straight to the shop. I pushed the door open against a wodge of circulars, free newspapers and bills. I trailed my finger through a layer of dust on the counter, thought about sticking a record on the turntable and decided against it, in case it turned out to be the recording of my court case. I sat in the back room for a while with a cup of instant coffee and a couple of cigarettes, then went up the back stairs to use the toilet. I sat there looking at the picture of a figure skater in the Winter Olympics I’d clipped from one of the Sunday supplements and tacked to the inside of the door. About to go into a spin, she had already started to turn and twirl her star-speckled black skirt.

I walked downstairs, lit another Camel, stuffed the pack down the side of my left boot and left the shop by the back door.

I found myself stepping directly into a back entry in the City. The air was thicker, warmer on my shaved cheeks. I walked with confidence now I had some purpose other than my own salvation. Soon I was among the crowds. People streamed out of an official-looking building carrying brown paper parcels stencilled with the letter W. I guessed — or understood, as you do in a dream — that W stood for Wednesday, as M had stood for Monday; today’s news on the hunt for the escaped King killer. Twenty yards further on was a street-corner judge. I approached him.

‘I want to hand myself in,’ I said. ‘It’s me you’re looking for. I killed the king.’

He became flustered, calling excitedly for the police. I felt sorry for him. His big chance and he was making a muck of it.

A crowd gathered around us, backing off when they realised what was going on. There was no abuse this time, no angry recriminations, maybe because they hadn’t yet had the chance to go home and read their information packs and shoot up whatever drugs the City fed them. It took about three minutes for the police to turn up. I was pushed roughly into the back of a van and driven away. One officer sat in the back with me, restraining a dog. When the van turned a corner, we all lurched in one direction. Eventually the driver braked sharply, I heard footsteps and then the doors were flung open. The dog chased me out into the midday brightness. I blinked, rubbed my eyes.

‘Where is she?’ I demanded. ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me where she is.’

Ignoring me, one of the guards grabbed me by the arm and led me through a large open doorway. We walked down a long, green-tiled corridor, my guard’s heels snatching metallically at the paved floor. He pushed me to the left through a set of double doors and I stumbled into a reception area. Trophy cabinets stood empty in the middle of the floor. I smelt disinfectant and other institutional smells that made me think of hospitals. A group of people stood waiting for me. Their buckles and buttons gleamed in the harsh light of a single fluorescent strip. A small figure ran out of the centre of the group towards me. The guard let go of me, I opened my arms and Annie Risk bowled headlong into me, almost knocking me over.

They allowed us a few moments. The smell of her hair was instantly familiar despite the fact I’d known her for such a short time. She looked up and I wiped her tears away. And then mine.

‘Carl,’ she said. ‘Carl, Carl.’

‘Don’t cry, Annie,’ I said.

‘Carl, you’re sick. You’ve got to get better,’ she said, brushing her lovely long black hair out of her eyes. ‘All this running around…’ she said. ‘You’ve got to get better.’

‘Yes, Annie,’ I said, not letting her see my confusion. ‘I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. I’m feeling better already.’

Had they drugged her? Brainwashed her? Perhaps it wasn’t the end of the world. Better she didn’t know what was about to happen.

‘You’ve got to go back now, Annie. You can go back. Go back and wait for me.’

I had to tell her something. Over the top of her head I could see the belted-and-buckled advancing towards me as a group.

‘You have to let her go,’ I said. ‘That’s the deal.’

They nodded as one man, still moving forward but slowing down and suddenly looking all fuzzy and colour-saturated like a weird music video. They took Annie from me and propelled her towards the door I’d come in by.

‘Where are you taking her?’ I asked.

‘She’s going back,’ one man confided into my ear as the door to the corridor was pulled open and Annie stepped out. I ran to the door to watch her go. Already she was impossibly far away, vanishing in the distorted perspectives of the green corridor. I felt a hand on my shoulder pulling me back into the bare room.

‘It’s time,’ said a man in a white coat who wasn’t White Coat, and suddenly I thought the execution was going to take place in a small private room, perhaps a lethal injection administered by this man. But the buckles and buttons in the large group took control of me and ushered me out into a tunnel. My own footsteps and those of the group behind me echoed around the walls and ceiling. My heart was pumping faster and faster, my mouth drying up like a rose in the desert.

The tunnel sloped upwards and natural light leaked into it from somewhere ahead. The footsteps behind me seemed to speed up, forcing me to do the same and, before I realised fully what was happening, they had faded away while I carried on to the end of the tunnel, where I emerged out onto the pitch. The gates were locked behind me.

It was a big old-fashioned ground with seating areas and terraces. Every available place was occupied. As I walked, blinking in the bright light, into the middle of the vast pitch, the hush that had fallen at my appearance became a murmur that soon grew to a roar of deafening volume. Those who were sitting rose to their feet, tens of thousands of them, wronged citizens, they believed, whose King had been assassinated in cold blood by this bizarre-looking individual now brought to face justice before them.

What would happen to their City once the execution was over? A city whose raison d’être seemed to be the relentless search for their ruler’s assassin.

In an instant the crowd fell silent and my ears picked up the insistent rushing beat of a beast’s paws upon close-cut grass like a drum roll. I even knew exactly what drum roll it was. The opening bars of ‘Shave Your Head’.

I turned around and looked straight into the starved dog’s eyes as it sprang at my throat.

But the animal twisted in the air, caught by a single bullet whose report I heard a split second later as it reverberated around the stands. I stared uncomprehendingly at the felled executioner, a single smoking hole torn in the side of its mottled skull. My death had been snatched away from me.

An announcement was made over the PA but it boomed too broadly for my spinning head and the muscles and bones in my legs turned to black night and stars and I collapsed, an approving roar from the crowd battering me finally senseless.

Chapter Sixteen

‘You were away a long time, Carl,’ Annie said, taking my hand as we skipped down the last of the steps out of the ground. Behind us the Maine Road faithful could still be heard celebrating City’s eighth win in a row. From the Kippax they gave full voice to time-honoured Blues songs and jeered the visiting fans filing out dejectedly from the North Stand.

‘I know,’ I said, relishing the taste of the November night air, a tang of gunpowder mingling with the petrol fumes and hot dog clouds. It was all real.

We walked beneath the mist-shrouded orange lamps of Moss Side’s grid of streets, linking arms and talking quietly. I glanced down back entries and Annie reassured me each time something seemed to shift in the shadows.

‘There’s nothing there,’ she’d say, or, ‘It’s just a dog.’

Just a dog.

We headed towards Rusholme, our goal a relaxing beer and curry. On Great Southern Street a police van crawled along in the traffic snarl-up and I tensed when barking erupted from the back of the van.

‘It’s all right,’ Annie said, putting her arm around my back.

The van rocked from side to side. As we overtook it I looked in at the policemen in the front. They looked complacent, unconcerned about the restless dogs. I shuddered as I pictured the carnage that would be inevitable if the doors were to spring open.

‘We’re quite safe,’ Annie said. ‘They’re on our side.’

‘They don’t look like it,’ I said, eyeing the officer in the passenger seat, the way he ran his nail-bitten finger over his lip.

I hadn’t been as lucky on the motorway as I’d thought I’d been. I never saw my car after the crash, but apparently it looked less like a motor vehicle than an abstract sculpture. Although I had only broken a few minor bones, I lost a lot of blood from lacerations in my neck and side. There had been a dog in the car that hit mine from behind and somehow as our two cars meshed together and cartwheeled across the three lanes the dog had become entangled with me. The shock of the impact and the ordeal I went through waiting for assistance and being cut out of the wreckage took its toll in other ways. As Annie said, I was away for a long time. In a coma, thanks to a substantial blow on the head.

In another place, as I explained.

When I finally came back after more than two months, apparently I was babbling, wanting to know what had happened, why they’d shot the dog, why hadn’t they let it tear me to pieces? I’d prepared myself for the end and they’d offered it to me on a plate before taking it away again.

Annie had come to the hospital as soon as they found her phone number in the back pocket of my jeans and gave her a ring. She had sat by me and talked to me for days on end, forcing herself to remember tiny details of our short time together that might break through the barrier my mind had erected.

‘They even got me to try ringing you, talking to you on the phone while someone held the receiver to your ear. We’d spent so little time together and part of it had been on the telephone just talking. The doctors thought it was worth a try.’

‘What did you say on the phone?’ I asked her.

‘I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea, but the doctors thought I ought to appeal to you for help, say that I needed you, that it was terribly important.’

‘You got through, Annie. You got through.’

She laughed. We could laugh about it now. ‘But you never got back to me,’ she answered.

By now we were on the Curry Mile and we’d ordered. The waiter brought us a huge jug of Cobra beer and Annie poured two glasses.

‘One of the doctors said there was, and I quote, “a fuck of a lot going on” in your head,’ she said.

‘Or if he didn’t, he should have done,’ I said. ‘I wonder how they knew.’ I recalled White Coat and Gledhill in King’s Hospital and then the man in the white coat in the hospital-like interior of the football ground. Green tiles, paved corridors.

‘They knew. They know these things.’

We grinned and drank more beer.

‘Good stuff,’ I said, looking at the golden liquid.

‘The best,’ Annie confirmed.

We were quiet for a moment. In the weeks since I’d been back, we’d talked around the whole thing a great deal and slowly it was making sense, to Annie as well as to me. They said it would take me a while to get back to full strength. Indeed, as far as my mental condition was concerned, I was suffering from frequent anxiety attacks. Whenever I walked under a railway bridge at night and heard a freight train rattle overhead, or crossed a bridge over a canal and happened to look down, I would go weak at the knees and start shaking.

As for finishing Un Régicide, that would have to wait.

‘You battled long and hard to come out of the coma,’ a doctor had said to me, ‘so it’s no wonder you should still be feeling the repercussions of that struggle.’

I tried to avoid walking through the interlocking streets of Moss Side at night unless Annie was with me: it was a little bit too much like taking a walk through the coils of my brain. A grey area indeed. I had considered selling the shop and moving back to Manchester. Annie was happy to look after me until I felt myself again, she said. But after a week or two, I realised I needed to know my flat and the shop were there to go back to when I was ready. Consequently, I planned and looked forward to a grand reopening perhaps in a few weeks’ time.

‘Let’s drink to your mother,’ Annie said, raising her glass.

‘Too right,’ I agreed. ‘To Mum.’

Without her I might still have been stuck in the City. My mother’s spirit had broken after my father’s suicide and she had spent many years in hospital, emerging only when the government’s Care in the Community programme kicked her out to fend for herself. She went to live in a sheltered housing project and hardly spoke a word to anyone. When Annie went to her and explained how badly I needed her help, some door must have opened in her mind and she agreed to come. She had never harboured any ill will towards me but equally was oblivious to any emotional damage I might have sustained as a result of the suicide.

She had come and sat and talked to me — Annie Risk on one side of the bed, my mother on the other — and that had done the trick.

Later I unscrambled the sense of that final stadium PA announcement in my head. Something about the Queen emerging from exile to issue a pardon. My life had been spared, my guilt rubbed out.

‘To you,’ I said, lifting my glass to Annie. ‘If you hadn’t gone to see my mother I wouldn’t be here tonight.’

We both drank, I lit a cigarette and at that point, naturally, the food arrived.

I went down to see Jaz for the first time since coming out of hospital. I didn’t drive, because I didn’t have a car any more. You could have offered me a Mini Cooper S, a Mark II Jaguar or a Jensen Interceptor and I still wouldn’t have driven. I’d done enough driving for a while.

I went on the train.

I glanced up every branch line that veered off into the trees. I knew where they led now. I sat back, feeling more relaxed than at any point since I’d come out. Gradually my life was getting back to normal. I reached into my left boot for my cigarettes and took one out, lit it and inhaled deeply.

Arriving at Euston I thought about taking a short ride up to the Caledonian Road and having a look at the shop, but decided to go straight to Jaz’s place in Bethnal Green. I went south on the Northern Line and headed out east on the Central. I’d cleaned my jacket as best I could. In the crash it had got covered in engine oil and blood, both mine and the dog’s. My hair, which they’d shaved so they could open my skull, was growing back. It would take many months before it got to my preferred length, but I could wait.

I walked through the damp, blowy streets of Bethnal Green, crossing the road to avoid the requisite stray dogs in the council block car-park, and enjoyed the solid feel of my boot heels on the stairs up to Jaz’s flat. It smelt as glorious as ever.

‘It’s open,’ I heard Jaz shout from some distance as I knocked on his door. I pushed it open and wandered inside. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ he called. ‘Just finishing up in here.’

He was in the darkroom.

‘I’ll get a beer,’ I said. ‘Do you want one?’

‘Yeah,’ he shouted. ‘In the fridge.’

I looked in the kitchen. He had some strange-looking Thai beer in brown bottles in the fridge. I took two, levered off the caps and set one down on the work surface for Jaz. I took a swig and reached for another cigarette, wandering into the main room. My boots went clump, clump on the bare boards. I swallowed another mouthful of Singha beer and approached the wall to have a look at Jaz’s photographs. Clearly he was still doing his urban landscapes thing. The first grim picture — they were all monochrome — showed the tatty car-park opposite his building. He’d caught three dogs sniffing each other. The next was a desolate scene down at Rotherhithe. In the background was a half-full gasholder. I looked back at the first picture of the car-park: the two big gasholders on the other side of the canal were just visible over the top of the old building.

In the third photograph I recognised a pair of gasholders at Wood Green.

The beer sloshed uncomfortably in my stomach as I progressed to the fourth picture: an exterior shot of the Tube station at Bromley By Bow; in the background, out-of-focus but deliberately in the frame, a cluster of gasholders. I counted nine. And they were all full.

I felt a bit sick. A chill crawled spider-like up my spine and I shivered.

There were several more pictures hanging on the walls but I couldn’t bring myself to examine them. I was looking out of the window at the two copper-coloured gasholders on the other side of the canal. They were both full as well.

I heard footsteps behind me and dropped the bottle. It didn’t smash, just rolled on the boards, tipping out beer. I could feel Jaz’s breath on the back of my neck.

‘Brother,’ he said in a thick, insinuating whisper, ‘who the fuck did you think dropped the map in the street for you to find in the first place?’

I turned around slowly to face him. He wasn’t alone. Annie Risk was standing next to him. And they were holding hands.

I called out and opened my eyes. I was lying in Annie’s bed, my T-shirt soaked in sweat. The quilt was on the floor and Annie’s side of the bed was empty.

The telephone was ringing in the hallway.

‘Annie,’ I called.

Apart from the strident tone of the ringing telephone, the flat was silent.

I crawled out of bed, tearing my T-shirt off over my head. I grabbed Annie’s bathrobe and went to answer the phone.

‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello?’

There was no one there. Just the barely perceptible metallic scrape of a missed connection.

I hung up.

I shivered and pulled the bath robe tighter around my shoulders.

And then came the knock on the door.

END