‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ Jane said. ‘I put everybody at risk.’
‘Shush,’ Becky said. ‘We can do all that later.’
They hurried to the small lift at the back of the room. During the years it had worked it had taken three people at most, and clanked as if about to disintegrate into a welter of hinges and screws. Jane had used it once, then stuck to the stairs. Now it had been hollowed out; a rope ladder hanging from the defunct overhead sheave. They descended it quickly in darkness, Becky going first. At the bottom they had to lever open the doors with a crowbar that was hanging by wire on the wall. They burst out through the fire doors into Salisbury Place and did not stop running until they were out of breath, leaning on each other. Spit dangled from Jane’s throat, quicksilver mined from the pits of his lungs. It was so cold he felt as though he was running on the stumps of his shin bones.
‘We should find Aidan,’ Becky said at last.
‘Maybe he’ll be at Plessey’s. It’s worth a look. I can’t think where else he might be.’
It was rare to see women on the streets, unless they were part of some captured chain being led off to the Western Avenue. Rumours filtered through that they kept the women in Wembley Stadium, but nobody had ever travelled that way to check. There were some zones that were off-limits because of the sheer weight of numbers. Any reconnaissance party or rescue squad would be decimated before they reached Willesden. Jane remembered, though, around three or four years ago, a woman who came limping down the A40, naked, her skin torn like strips of errant wallpaper on a well-sized wall. She had been struck dumb by shock. It was in the silver colour of her hair and the owlish protrusion of her eyes, as if she’d seen something of a magnitude too great for her brain to process. Her mouth had been messed around with: there were strange scars pitted in the cheeks, chin and jawline. Most of her fingernails had been torn off; people wondered if that was torture, or something that had happened during her bid to escape. People tried to talk to her. Some of the Shaded wrapped her in blankets and gave her what food was available, and in such a state as to be easily digested. You didn’t want to be thinking of chewing your food when shock was threatening to put a brake on your heart. She ate some soup and was getting warmer by the minute, but she didn’t say a word. Not then, not for the next five days, after which she died in her sleep.
Jane looked around. He didn’t recognise these streets. No signs. No buses bearing destination boards. A row of skulls in rags leered at him from the melted plastic bench under a bus shelter like a comedy audience in between laughs, waiting for the next gag. The buildings had lost any detail that might have pointed to an era or an architect. Blunted, edgeless edifices. Polished office blocks of steel and glass were now riddled dark monoliths, floors bowing with rain.
They moved quickly, hesitantly, dashing to doorways in a bid to find some plaque that would tell them where they were, or a forgotten piece of post behind the door bearing an address. Jane hated the way they scurried around, like mice knowing there was a predator on the wing.
Behind one door was a lipless drop into a benighted chasm that Jane almost toppled over. Becky’s hand on his belt saved him a fall that might have lasted minutes. It was like staring in on his own nightmares.
Eventually they hit a series of junctions that pulled at Jane’s memory. He took a turning, then another, came back, stared and thought and went another way. With each step he felt knowledge return. It gave him the same sense of relief as an accident missed by inches.
‘This way,’ he said.
‘Where are we?’
‘Good news, I think,’ Jane said. ‘I thought we might be heading towards the Tower, and trouble. But we’re further north than that. I think Liverpool Street Station is up here. Which means we’re close.’
The shattered forecourt of the station announced itself moments later. They bypassed it on their left, mindful of the baleful stare of figures hunched into the glittering cave of an old coffee shop where coals burned cherry red and something indistinct turned on a makeshift spit. They crossed the road and turned right. A web of ginnels and alleys where small restaurants and wine bars had once enjoyed brisk business at the weekends when the old Spitalfields Market had traded were now host to slouching gangs drinking red biddy or wrestling in the icy mud on the cobblestones. There were others, still and emaciated, sitting on kerbs at the very end of life, blood leaking from their eyes or smeared across their faces as it seeped from noses and gums. They were paper, these people, all but ready to be blown entirely away by the tireless winds. You could see the grooves and notches on their bones through the skin. The recessions and tugs in throat and stomach at each drawn breath was so pronounced that it seemed they must implode. You could hear the suck of it over the muted roar of weather, like something being rescued from thin mud. Becky and Jane moved silently through them, eyes averted whenever possible, knowing that this was them in time.
‘Where do we find Plessey?’
‘He’s inside,’ Jane said, gesturing with his chin at the sacked remnants of the old market. Much of the façade was caved in; the ironwork frame remained, albeit malformed by fire, along with dozens of roasted trestles, warehouse trolleys, roll-cage containers and lampblack scaffolds. ‘Or he should be. I’ve only ever seen him here. Aidan likes his shop. Lots of stuff to look at.’
They moved through the wreckage like vacationers at the beach searching for rock pools. In a far corner of the great hall was a shop with its windows boarded over, reinforced with sandbags and razor wire. Faded gold lettering on a purple awning heralded HOUSE OF CLASS.
Jane threw a fallen bracket from the scaffolding at the board. There was a dull clang. They heard a voice call out. Jane said, ‘It’s me, Richard Jane. Have you seen Aidan?’
There was the sound of bolts shooting back, fully half a dozen before the door cracked open and a small crushed face looked out from a ring of shadow. Plessey ignored the two of them and ranged his gaze over the rest of the marketplace. ‘We weren’t followed,’ Jane assured him.
‘Inside,’ he said, and left them to forge a path through the obstacles.
Once they were in, Jane closed the door and rebolted it. It was sepia-dark in the shop. Buttery light was reflected back at them in soft-edged rectangles from burnished copper, foxed glass, mottled tin. A smell of naphthalene. Jane felt a known claustrophobia, the kind of stifling he had felt whenever he went to visit his grandparents as a child. Small rooms containing too many things, not least the people who lived there, barnacled fast to ancient, heavy rocking chairs, like pilots in a steampunk story, all antimacassars and brown tartan.
Plessey had moved ahead. He was busy with a teapot and a tin of leaves. The smallness of his face was explained by his ubiquitous peaked balaclava; Jane had never seen him without it. Perhaps it protected some injury caused by the Event. Perhaps he was just cold. They followed him along a narrow corridor, columns of things from the past crowding in from either side. Scratched dusty gramophone records of dull shellac. Mountains of old cracked lacquer boxes for fountain pens. Rusting tins that had once contained boiled sweets. A cigar box overflowing with tickets for trams, trains, dancehall events, coupons and vouchers for rations never obtained. Horn-rimmed spectacle frames. Sheepskin coats. Every smell was brown. It was tobacco and tannin, leather and corduroy, heavy, oppressive. Jane felt sweat rising through his skin. At any moment his grandmother would bring him a bowl of stodgy suet pudding and custard, Camp coffee made with condensed milk. Chocolate lipstick bleeding into crow’s feet. Dusty haloes shining in the floss of her hair. The metronomic beat on the mantelpiece of a clock presented on their wedding day and ageing alongside them. Oak and ormolu. The grind of the rocking chair. Slow, inescapable punishment.