To get to his first appointment, Joe Spork elects to take a shortcut through the Tosher’s Beat. This is in general very much against his personal policy. He resolutely travels by bus or train, or even occasionally drives, because taking the Tosher’s Beat is an admission of parts of his life for which he no longer has any use. However, the discovery of another garden full of Vaughn Parry’s victims has brought a great deal of discussion in broadsheets and free papers regarding the nature of human criminality, and this is a conversation he devoutly wishes to ignore.
At the same time, certain recent events have given Joe a mild but undeniable case of the willies, and the Tosher’s Beat has a feeling of security and familiarity which the streets above never really achieve. Blame his childhood, but shady alleys and smoke-filled rooms are more reassuring than shopping centres and sunlit streets. Although, even if Joe himself were not determined to be someone new, those days are over. Most of the Old Campaigners died early. The roly-poly court of crooks he grew up with is just a memory. There are a few still around, retired or changed and hardened, but the genial knees of crime on which the young Joe Spork sat, and from whose vantage he was initiated into the secrets of a hundred scandalous deeds, are all withered and gone.
Meanwhile, Vaughn Parry is England’s present nightmare. Above and beyond Islamic extremists with rucksacks and policemen who shoot plumbers nine times in the head for being diffusely non-white, the great fear of every right-thinking person these days is that Parry was not unique, that there lurk amid the wide wheat fields and bowling greens of the Home Counties yet more bloody-handed killers who can unlock your window catches and sneak into your room at night, the better to tear you apart. Parry is in custody for the moment, held in some high-security hospital under the scrutiny of doctors, but something in him has cut the nation deep.
The upshot of this has been a scurrying of the middle classes for shelter, and a less-than-learned discussion of historical villains and in particular of Joe Spork’s safe-cracking, train-robbing, art-thieving father, the Dandy of the Hoosegow, Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork. Joe has a greater horror of this chatter than he does of the Tosher’s Beat. Under normal circumstances he shies away from the idea that he is what a certain class of crime novel calls an habitué of the demi-monde, by which it is implied that he knows gamblers and crooks and the men and women who love them. For the moment, he is prepared to acknowledge that he still lives somewhat on the fringes of the demi-monde in exchange for not having to talk about it.
Inevitably, in crafting a thumbnail sketch of himself, he finds that it has turned into an obituary, to be held in readiness. Joshua Joseph Spork, son of Harriet Peters and Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork the noted gangster, died childless before the age of 40. He is survived by his mother, now a nun, and by a small number of respectable ex-girlfriends. It must be acknowledged that his greatest achievement in life lay in avoiding becoming his father, though some might assert that in doing so he went too far towards his grandfather’s more sedentary mode of being. There will be a memorial service on Friday; guests are requested to bring no firearms or stolen goods.
He shakes his head to clear it, and hurries over the railway bridge.
Between Clighton Street and Blackfriars there is a cul-de-sac which actually isn’t a cul-de-sac. At the very end is a narrow gap and a pathway which leads to the railway line, and immediately on the left as you face the tracks there’s a doorway into the underworld. Through this little door goes Joseph Spork like the White Rabbit, and down a spiral stair into the narrow red-brick tunnels of the Tosher’s Beat. The corridor is absolutely black, and he scrabbles in his pocket for his working keyfob, from which depends a small selection of keys and passcards, and a torch roughly the shape and size of a pen lid.
The blue-white light shows him walls covered in grime, occasionally scarred with someone’s only immortality: Dave luvs Lisa and always will, at least down here. Joe breathes a sort of blessing and passes by, stepping carefully around knots of slime. One more door, and for this he wraps a handkerchief around his mouth and smears some wintergreen ointment under his nose (“Addam’s Traditional Warming Balsam!,” and who knows why a balsam is exciting enough to merit that exclamation mark, but it is to Mr. Addam). This one requires a key; the toshers have installed a simple lock, not as a serious barrier to entry, but as a polite statement of territoriality. They’re quite content that people should use the road, but want you to know you do so by their grace. The Tosher’s Beat is a webwork, but you can’t just go where you will. You need permissions and goodwills, and sometimes a subscription. Joe’s keyfob will grant him passage through perhaps twenty per cent of the safe tunnels; the others are held aggressively by official and unofficial groupings with a desire for privacy—including the toshers themselves, who guard the heart of their strange kingdom with polite but effective sentries.
Ten minutes later he meets a group of them, bent double over the noxious ooze and combing through it in their rubberised suits.
Back in the day—when London was pocked with workhouses and smothered in a green smog which could choke you dead on a bad night, or before that, even, when open sewers ran down the middle of the streets—the toshers were the outcasts and opportunists who picked over the ghastly mix and retrieved the coins and jewels lost by chance. Even now, it’s amazing what people throw away: grandma’s diamonds, fallen down inside their box, and Auntie Brenda taken for a thief; rings of all descriptions, cast off in a passion or slipped from icy fingers on a cold day; money, of course; gold teeth; and on one occasion, Queen Tosh told the infant Joe at one of Mathew’s parties, a bundle of bearer bonds with a combined value of nearly ten million pounds.
These days, toshers wear gear made for deep-sea divers—well, the filth itself is bad enough, but there’s worse: hypodermics and other gruesomenesses, not to mention the chemicals which are changing the world’s male fish into females and killing all the toads. The average corpse lasts a fortnight longer than it used to, pickled in supermarket preservatives. The work gang look like astronauts from another world, landed badly and picking through what they take to be primordial muck.
Joe waves to them as he hurries by on the raised pavement, and they wave back. Don’t get many visitors, and still fewer give them a thumbs-up in the approved Night Market style, knuckles to the roof and thumb-up pointed at forty-five degrees. The leader returns the gesture, hesitantly.
“Hi,” Joe Spork says loudly, because the helmets don’t make for easy comprehension. “How’s the Cathedral?”
“Clear,” the man says. “Tide gate’s shut. Hang on, I know you, don’t I?”
Yes, he does: they played together as children in the velvet-hung torchlit corridors of the Night Market. The Tosher Family and the Market are cautious allies, tiny states existing within and beneath the greater one that is Britain. Gangster nations, however much diminished now from what they were when Joe was young. The Night Market, in particular, has suffered, its regents unable to inspire the kind of rambunctious, cheeky criminality which was the hallmark of Mathew Spork and his friends: a court without a king. But let’s don’t talk about those days, I’m in disguise as someone with a real life.
“I’ve just got one of those faces,” Joe mutters, and hurries on.
He slips through a door into the old Post Office pneumatic railway (at one stage, Mathew Spork owned a string of Post Office concessions around the United Kingdom, and used them to distribute and conceal all manner of unconventional wares), then down a side tunnel and a flight of stairs and into Cathedral Cave. Dug as the foundation of a medieval palace which was never finished, subsided now into the mud of London’s basin, it’s wet and very dark. The arched stone has been washed in mineral rain over so many hundreds of years that it’s covered now in a glutinous alabaster, as if this place were a natural cavern. When London’s Victorian sewers overflow, as they do more and more in these climate-change days, the whole thing is under water. Joe suppresses a shudder of claustrophobia at the thought.