I went to the nearest shop, a corner newsagent’s, where I bought a newspaper and a wrapped falafel. I ate the falafel where I stood on the street, wolfing it down in three bites then wiping my fingers on the greaseproof paper. Then I headed for the Woolwich Road and a hotel I knew, an enormous Victorian pile that had always been frequented mainly by travelling salesmen and had something of a dubious reputation. Its reputation mattered very little to me right then; what I needed was a bed for the night, some time to think in a place where I would not be noticed.
The hotel was still there and still a hotel. It looked more down-at-heel than ever. Some of the rooms on the ground floor appeared to have been converted into long-stay bedsitters. There was a pervasive smell of cooking fat and stewed tomatoes.
“I don’t do breakfast,” said the landlady. “You get that yourself, out the back.” She was huge, a vast whale of a woman in a flowered print dress with the most extraordinary violet eyes I had ever seen. I told her that was fine. She looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered what she would look like with her hair down. I shook my head to clear it and headed upstairs. The upper landing was sweltering and my poky little room was no better but I didn’t care. I sat down on the bed, which creaked alarmingly; it seemed strange how much this room, with its faded wallpaper and antiquated washstand, resembled the hospital cell where I had spent the previous night.
As well as the bed and the washstand there was a battered mahogany wardrobe and a portable television set with an old-fashioned loop aerial. I opened the window, hoping to let some air into the room, and then switched on the TV. The six o’clock news had just started. There was footage of a refugee encampment like those I had seen previously in Tangier and Sangatte. I was amazed to learn that the camp, a ragged shanty town of tents and standpipes and semi-feral children as skinny as rails, was situated on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. A delegation from the camp had delivered a petition to Downing Street, and the prime minister himself appeared on the steps to receive it.
The prime minister was black, a slimly-built, earnest-faced man named Ottmar Chingwe. I had never seen him before in my life.
I watched the broadcast through to the end. Some of the items covered—the famine in Russia, the blockade in the Gulf—were familiar or at least they seemed to be at first but other events, reported in the same matter-of-fact tone, were like passages from some elaborate fantasy. The newspaper I had bought was the same. I felt dazed not so much by the scale of the changes as by their subtlety. There were no miracle machines, no robots, no flying saucers; in many ways the world I had entered was the same as the world I had left. What I saw and felt and observed was a change not in substance but in emphasis.
Was it this that the Billings regime had learned of, and sought to reverse? Certainly Billings’s world view—his ‘Fortress Britain,’ as he had proudly referred to it—was everywhere conspicuous by its absence. This new England seemed more like a gipsy encampment, a vast airport lounge of peoples, chaotic and noisy and continually on the move. There seemed to be no overall plan.
Yet commerce was active, the homeless were being fed. People of all shades of opinion were expressing those opinions robustly and at every opportunity.
It was like the London I remembered from when I was young.
I watched TV for about an hour then went down to the curry house opposite and ordered a meal. I ate it quickly, still feeling conspicuous, although none of the other diners paid me the slightest attention. Once I had finished I returned to the hotel. There was a pay telephone in the hallway. I inserted my card and dialled Dora’s number. The phone rang and rang, and was eventually answered by a woman with an Eastern European accent so strong I could barely understand what she was saying. Silently I replaced the receiver.
After a moment’s hesitation I lifted it again, this time dialling Owen Andrews’s number, reading it off the slip of paper in my wallet. The phone clicked twice and then went dead. I climbed the stairs to my room and watched television into the small hours, trying to gather as many facts as I could about my new world. Eventually I turned out the light and went to sleep.
I had to keep reminding myself that this was not the future. That is, I had lost three months somewhere but that was all. The year was the same. The TV channels were more or less the same. The Shooter’s Hill Road was still rife with carjackings, only now there was no talk of reinstating the death penalty. The increase in my finances I put down to some lucky quirk, an error in accounting, if you like, between one version of reality and another.
Once my initial nervousness had begun to wear off my biggest fear was meeting myself. It was the kind of nightmare you read about in H.G. Wells, but Owen Andrews had not mentioned it and in any case it did not happen. I began to wonder if each reality was like Schrodinger’s theoretical box, its contents uncertain until it was actually opened. I thought that perhaps the very act of me entering this world somehow negated any previous existence I had had within it.
Such thoughts were unnerving yet fascinating, the kind of ideas I would have liked to discuss with Owen Andrews. But so far as I could determine Andrews did not exist here.
I returned to what I was good at, which was buying and selling. I was still nervous in those early days, afraid to expose myself through some stupid mistake, and so instead of applying for a job with an estate agent I decided to set up by myself selling watches and clocks. I enjoyed reading up on the subject and it wasn’t long before I had a lucrative little business. I had learned long ago that even during the worst times there are still rich people, and what do the rich have to do but spend their money on expensive luxuries? I had never lost sleep over this; rather I made good use of it. I was amused to find that some of my clients were people I knew from before, men whose houses I had once sold for them, or their sons or daughters, or people who looked very like them. None of them recognised me.
The only thing I had left from my old life was the photograph of Miranda that I had always carried in my wallet. It was a snapshot taken of her on Brighton beach soon after we married. Her topaz eyes were lifted towards the camera, her heart-shaped face partially obscured by silvery corkscrewed wisps of her windblown hair. It was like an answered prayer, to have her with me. There were no traces of her death now, no evidence of what had happened. All that remained was my knowledge of my love for her and this last precious image of her face.
One evening in September I left a probate sale I had been attending in Camden and walked towards the tube station at St John’s Wood. It was growing dusk, and I stopped for a moment to enjoy the view from the top of Primrose Hill. The sky in the west was a fierce red, what I took to be the afterglow of sunset, but later, at home, when I put on the radio I discovered there had been a fire. The report said that underground fuel stores at the old army hospital at Shooter’s Hill had mysteriously ignited, causing them to explode. The resulting conflagration had been visible for twenty miles.
The Royal Herbert was a listed building, said the newscaster. It was originally built for the Woolwich Garrison at the end of the eighteen eighties and was most recently in use as a long-stay care facility for victims of war trauma.
The police suspected arson and had already sent in their teams of investigators. I wished them luck in their search. I supposed they would find something eventually, some loose circuitry or faulty shielding, but felt certain that unless they were experts in tracking a crime from one region of reality to another they would never find out the real truth of what had happened.