The door isn’t nearly as heavy as its thick varnish and bottle-glass panels suggest: when you pull it towards you, you practically hit yourself with it. The roadside air, though far from fresh, washes over you like water. You don’t have to go far to identify the source of the commotion. Bent over the pavement, his hat gone, his thin hair disarrayed, Wilkes dribbles blood into the gutter.
You catch him by the shoulders and ease him away from the road where the traffic is barrelling by. He has his hands over his face. You take hold of his arms to steady him and his hands come away. His nose is half-off, his left cheek horseshoed by neat triangular punctures. His chickie must have attacked him. He sinks to the pavement, his feet stuck out wide, like a toddler lost in a mall, and pats spastically at his jacket. He finds his cigarettes. The lighter’s in the packet but his fingers are bloody, the flint wheel will not catch. You bend down to help him. He kicks at you like a child.
You ask him: ‘Do you want me to call someone?’ Where is his chickie? Where has it gone? How long will it last, scampering back and forth across these busy roads?
Wilkes is still struggling with the lighter. You force it away from him and snatch the cigarette packet from his lap and stay out the way of his drumming feet while you light him a fag. He won’t even take it when you offer it to him. Some punters from the pub have joined you now. You throw the lit cigarette in the gutter, hand the pack and the lighter to the barman – one of the barmen, seriously, they must be twins – and, heading south, you take City Road back to the Barbican, trying very hard not to let the misery in.
Shit. He pronounced your houses shit.
You look about you. Yes, shit by any measure, though they might still be thought well of in the West Riding. You wish very much that you were home already, back in the valley, back in your father’s house, feet dangling off the end of your little truckle bed and freezing in the cold air. And, come to think of it, why not return tonight?
There is a sleeper service. If you’re not sticking around in town you could afford the ticket for that. Is there anything in the flat so very precious that you really need to fetch it? For a second, you pause, and the foot-traffic of City Road barges about you: secretaries and clerks are tottering sore-eyed from a day’s work in the Bund; shop assistants stride along in determined pursuit of happy hours.
Thinking to leave it all behind, you look around for a bus stop. Then you remember James’s picture in its frame. That’s a problem. You can’t leave that behind, can you? And once you are walking again, a dozen other vital articles spring to mind, things you simply cannot do without, though you’ve managed perfectly well without them for months.
You take a meandering route back to the flat, hoping to clear your head a little after this haywire afternoon. City Road is the line along which original London abuts the Bund. It is the civil boundary beyond which Bundist land purchases cease. The contrast between the two halves of the city – the unaccommodated West and the Bundist East – is stark. It is as though the city has been divided by war, rather than by the conscientious and passionate avoidance of it.
The border between old and new is clear, but it is not brutal. Finsbury Circus, which happens to lie on the Bundist side of the road, is hardly changed. Quality will out, and nothing has been allowed to interfere with the lines of Edwin Lutyens’ Britannic House. There is still a ring of limes around the park, though otherwise the planting is much improved, and the Bund have introduced lemurs to play about its stand of preternaturally matured baobab. Office workers sprawl exhausted on blue lawns, watching as the lemurs chase each other through the branches. Sometimes a lemur comes to ground, steals someone’s phone, settles on a high branch to study its blank screen, disappointed, then drops it in fright the moment it rings.
You sidle through the crowd waiting to enter Moorgate Tube Station. These are unaccommodated workers who have spent the day working in the Bund. Serving coffee. Sweeping offices. Operating phones and reception desks. They are quiet and slow to move, each nursing the mild headache induced by hours spent on the Bundist side. Many unaccommodated men and women work in the Bund. The pay is good, though the jobs are menial. The Bundists’ treatment of their unaccommodated guest workers is always civil, and when you slip up, or seize up, or panic (it’s inevitable, sooner or later), passers-by are kind, though some of them sigh a little. Where is it you are trying to get to? What is it you are trying to do? Here, let me open this for you. Come over here. Have a sit down. Can I get you some water? Is there anyone I can call?
You turn right along London Wall. Where the Barbican estate overtops the road, making a tunnel, you turn right again on Wood Street, past maisonettes above green-painted garages, and left, into the estate by Saint Giles.
A scrabbling sound to your left startles you. You see a concrete spiral stair near a sign for ‘Gilbert Bridge’. Over the top of the curved pebble-dash wall, you catch a glimpse of something grey. A pork pie hat. Whoever is wearing it is no taller than a child, but (trust me on this) it moves much more quickly.
Slowly, cautiously, you take the stairs up to podium level. There is no one about, just a view across the ponds, and the maisonettes on the far side of the rectangle are half-hidden behind the foliage spilling from planters and window boxes.
Behind you, you hear a door click shut. You turn. Nothing moves. A few yards away there’s the entrance to a stairwell. You go over to the door. It’s locked, and access is gained by typing a code into a stainless-steel keypad. The code has not changed since you lived here. You pull the door open, take the stairs back down to street level, and in the crawl space under the last flight of stairs you find me crouching, clutching Wilkes’s pork pie hat in my nailless hands.
I stare back at you with blind-black eyes, giving nothing away.
You’re waiting for me to move, but you’ll never win that game. I can outstare suns. Slowly, carefully, you pull the corn dolly from your trouser pocket and hunker down, so that you are on a level with me.
I have shed my skirt of silver grass and my spangled bolero shirt, but there is still that black leather collar round my neck. You would help me take it off, but you are afraid to approach. The mess I made of Wilkes’s face is not something you’re going to find easy to forget.
You speak to me as to a dog of unsure temperament: ‘How did you get in here?’
Because you told me the code for the door. Dummy. I lick my teeth at you.
‘Hmm?’
Impasse.
‘Here.’ You hold the dolly out to me. ‘You like this?’
I lean forward a little, sniffing. I’ll play along.
‘You like it?’
I lean back into the shadows and nictitating membranes flash sideways over my black eyes. I paw the hat closer to myself, hiding my groin.
‘Was he a bad man? Was the man bad to you?’
I take the hat from my groin, straighten it out and place it at a jaunty angle on my head.
So that is that. What are you going to do? You mull the options. The council exterminator is just a call away.
Carefully, so as not to startle me (as if!), you stand. You go to the door, palm the green exit button to unlock it and push it open. ‘Out you go, little one.’
I hunker further into my corner.
‘Come on, now.’
I draw the whole business out for an age – I need you to think that I’m frightened – but as I sidle past, I can’t resist tugging the corner of my new hat in salute. Courtesy ought to beget courtesy. You laugh.