So we’re here and it’s now, maybe ten years since I last saw you, you a big boy now, already at the end of school and thinking about sixth form, maybe, and we’re playing One for real. Well, it’s not properly One, because there are some of us left. You too, I’m hoping. You and Mum, I’m praying every day that’s the case. Things are dangerous, Stan.
And sometimes I hope you went fast. Right at the start of things. With no danger of ever being alone and afraid, your innocence being torn to meaninglessness. I hope you did not suffer.
Jane’s pen hovered above the journal; he was unable to form into words what he doubted his son would ever understand anyway. Instead, he returned to his survey of this corner of the city. For maybe the thousandth time he counted the cars and buses that were ranged around Trafalgar Square. Forty-eight cars, including taxis; nine vans of varying size; one coach (what a day trip that turned out to be); twelve buses. Seven motorbikes. He remembered photographs he had seen of various parts of London, miraculously free of traffic. Dogs and horses and carts. One or two automobiles driven by people who had nowhere to go and few roads on which to take their shiny toys. Sheaves of mud and dung peeled to one side by thin wheels. Now, unless you were walking at night and alert to possible hiding places, you could easily miss the vehicles that cluttered the streets. Even if somebody could be bothered to shift them, their ghosts would remain in the parts of the road shielded by metal and cellulose like the outlines of bodies at the scene of a crime.
There were twelve buses ranged around Trafalgar Square. One of them was on its side. Four of them were black where fire had turned them to shells. A Brixton bus for ever veering left to travel down Whitehall had been turned into an armoured safe house. Steel braces had been bolted onto the sides of the bus and dug deep into the earth under the tarmac, to prevent anything from pushing it over. Steel shutters protected the empty frames of the windows. During the daylight hours, when few Skinners were seen, the people who lived in this tank would come out to fortify the braces where they had begun to be excavated, and reposition the thickets of barbed wire that had been pulled away in the night. Jane envied them their stoicism, but could not have done the same thing. All those weeks of walking down to London had instilled in him a fear of standing still, even for a short time. Although he liked this spot, he grew itchy after just quarter of an hour, and had to quell the instinct to get back on the road. This was orange. This was safe. For now.
Cold was creeping through the blanket and the fleece of his coat into his legs. Jane stopped writing and stood up, wishing for a flask of something hot. He did some exercises, unhappy with how quickly he grew tired and breathless. He made himself cough into his fist and inspected his sputum. Each time he did this he was braced for flecks of blood but they never came. His breath smelled rotten, though, and he knew this was due to some failure in his teeth, the decay he had felt working its way through his mouth for years. As for the rest of him, sometimes when he moved he caught a whiff of how ripe his flesh was, but that was true of everybody. Washing was a luxury. Sometimes he took cold showers if he could find a working spigot and a compliant pump. Mostly he went without. His hair hung in damp ropes. He’d tried to cut it once, but there was no point. You felt you could never get dry. Dirt was ingrained in the contours of your fingers, these fingers that had once touched the pulse in the wrist of a sleeping child. Your hands became maps of all the places you’d been, digging through the filth to get to something or get away from it. You lost sight of who you were and where you came from. You failed to recognise things and they began to matter less.
He tended to keep many of his clothes on these days; he had enough to worry about without the shock of his own emaciation. Resources among the Shaded were growing scarce; soon they would not be able to offer any kind of reward for this work. He foresaw a future of blank pages. Hunger eventually blotted out all other thought. You couldn’t write if you were going blind with the need for sustenance.
Jane knew he was following a dark path with all this negativity. He could see where it was leading him. It was a case of how far he was likely to travel. How much distance was there between forgoing basic hygiene and swallowing the pill of Stanley’s death?
He spent three hours on the rooftop of the ENO building – hoping that Aidan might stop by this way – before the rain came back and he spotted the tiger, drifting like smoke out of Northumberland Avenue. He saw it pad across to Canada House, where it sat and washed its paws, gazing at its frozen brethren. Jane clenched his teeth and felt the gums in his jaw shift like a thumb pressed into sponge. He delved for positive images, the bright, shiny packages wrapped up with string that he turned to when it seemed he must go under. He wanted to believe that he always felt like this during Library duty; not because of the bad memories that it necessarily forced you to dredge up, but because it always presaged the worst job he had ever had. Plodding through frigid, alien fathoms in utter darkness in order to weld closed any number of fatigue cracks was a doddle compared to incineration duty.
But nothing he could fasten on, bar Stanley, ever repelled the misery. Peacock feathers found under a slurry of ash and black slush in Holland Park. A tray of glittering butterflies rescued intact from the looted squalor of the Natural History Museum. A can of Guinness discovered inside one thigh-high PVC boot in a BDSM dungeon in Kentish Town. It was all just a different kind of dust. It was as if, resorting to his son – every day, every hour, every other minute – was diminishing him. He was using Stanley up, like a pencil. There was nothing but a stub left, it seemed. He dreamed sometimes of his boy and he appeared so tired, so exhausted by his father’s demands that every rise of his ribcage had to be his last.
He watched the tiger slowly, almost lazily, pull itself on to all fours once more. He saw the great head swing his way, making hesitant curlicues as it sniffed the air, the jaws hanging open to aid its sense of smell. The wind was blowing up from the Thames today; his scent was being pushed in a different direction. Still, it terrified Jane to see the muscled hulk of three hundred pounds of big cat – or whatever filled the space it had once owned – working hard to draw Jane’s taste into its flavour chambers, pausing as if unsure of what the weather was telling it.
The tiger slunk away, the frayed rope of its tail trailing behind it.
Jane exhaled slowly and rubbed his face with his hands. The smell of ink and soil and dust. He pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes for so long that he saw motes of colour spawn from the black. It reminded him of the weird light show he had seen all those years ago, standing at the bottom of the sea.
Jane opened his eyes. He blinked, but everything was blurred. Eventually, the soft edges regained their shape, except for one. Stopper sat next to him. Jane stared at his old friend, leaning forward over his forearms, which had withered to useless air-dried limbs, like Parma hams carved back to bone. Severed tendons had caused his hands to contract into famished fists. Stopper’s face had been sucked clean by marine life. There was little left to distinguish him. The perished yellow Henrikson Subsea logo clung to the tatters of his jacket; it could be nobody else. He smiled, or grimaced, and black water drizzled from between his teeth. Something churned in the wet black reaches of his left eye socket, something with cilia. Something that made hard little skritting noises as it scraped parts of itself against Stopper’s orbit.