It was probably unrelated to the attack on him, of course — and the odds were overwhelming that it had no bearing at all on why he’d written my name in his own blood as he sank into unconsciousness and possibly into death. But I had to start somewhere, and if I couldn’t cajole the truth out of the neighbours I knew someone I could buy it from at the market price.
I went back into the daylight at last, and it was welcome. There was something oppressive about the interior of the tower that made me grateful to see the sun again, even if it was beating down like a hammer on an anvil. A wounded-ox lowing of distant traffic met my ears, audible again because I’d been out of it for ten minutes. The miasma was becoming harder to sense for the opposite reason — because it was holding steady now, and my senses were starting to tune it out.
I might as well carry on north, I thought — maybe pick up the Tube at Elephant and Castle. I headed on along the walkway, past more bin bags and a bike that had been chained to a lamp post with a D-lock and then deprived of its wheels to deter theft. Unless the wheels had been stolen to deter cycling.
I saw the same sigil again — the teardrop with its corona of radiating lines, this time executed in red paint — on the parapet wall. Next to it, spray-painted on the grey cement of the walkway itself, were the words NOW IT BLEEDS. The words were also done in red, and they looked fresh and new in this faded place. I crossed to look at them, then squatted down and touched the curve of the final S. Very fresh: the paint was still wet.
From this vantage point, I noticed for the first time that the concrete slabs of the parapet wall had been set with narrow gaps in them every few feet. The gaps afforded a view of the lower walkway beneath me and then the ground, where Bic’s friends — or maybe a different group of boys entirely — came briefly into view on their way to somewhere that probably wasn’t any better than here.
Someone on the lower walkway was watching them, or at least looking out in that direction. He was standing right up against the parapet, his back to me. He wore a raincoat of pure unblemished white that recalled Alec Guinness as Sidney Stratton, the Man in the Ice Cream Suit, and his sleek, possibly brilliantined black hair stood out all the more starkly against it. There was something indefinably familiar about that black-white contrast, and about the man’s ramrod bearing; his refusal to lean against the parapet even though it was right there, at the perfect leaning distance and height. I had a presentiment that was nothing to do with my death-sense.
Another man walked into my severely restricted field of vision and joined him. This guy was big and rangy and looked subtly out of proportion: but then I was seeing him from an odd angle. His face was almost completely flat, as though he’d made humorous Tom-and-Jerry-style contact with a frying pan. When he spoke, his mouth opened across its full width in a way that looked strained and awkward, the lips not moving at all. It was like a ventriloquist’s doll talking, the lower jaw bobbing straight up and down to convey by clumsy shorthand the full range of human articulation. His complexion was appalling, the skin piebald with blotches and roughly pitted.
The man on the lower walkway turned to face the newcomer as he approached, and a jolt of surprise went through me when I saw his face, even though I’d subliminally made the connection already. It was Father Gwillam, of the Anathemata Curialis.
Gwillam pointed up towards one of the higher walkways diagonally across from us. Flat-face spoke again, and Gwillam sketched something with his fingertip in the air in front of his face. It looked like brackets.
Flat-face left, at a fast trot. At the other end of the walkway he was joined by a woman — tall, somewhat heavy-set, with long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. She seemed to have bandages tied around her hands, like the ones that the boy Bic had had. They headed off together towards the south end of the estate.
Time for me to book, too. I knew enough about the good father to make that particular encounter a must to avoid. But I wasn’t quite quick enough. He turned and looked up, directly towards me, as though he’d known that I was there all along.
The sun was hanging over my shoulder, directly in his face. From that distance and at that angle I’d probably just be a silhouette.
Probably.
I didn’t stay to find out.
5
Harrison Ford went first, sidling out onto the landing from the barely opened door of his apartment and checking out the lie of the land before he allowed Sean Young to join him. Her immaculate hair and high-gloss lips suggested the unearthly perfection of CGI, but in 1982 that wasn’t even a twinkle in George Lucas’s eye. She just happened to be perfect.
‘You’re talking through your arse,’ Nicky informed me curtly, wrenching my attention away from the on-screen action. He flicked a couple of switches on the projector, unnecessarily, just to remind me who was in charge. ‘There’s no way Deckard is a replicant.’
Suppressing a shiver that was purely physiological — the projection booth was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator — I tapped the glass that separated us from the auditorium below. ‘Just keep watching,’ I instructed Nicky.
On the screen, Ford looked down. The heel of Sean Young’s shoe had kicked against some small object on the floor, making it move and catch the light. He bent down and picked it up, but the focus stayed on his face for a moment or two before pulling to the thing in his hand: a tiny unicorn made out of the silvered paper and card from a cigarette packet.
After the briefest of pauses, Ford nodded — one of the most eloquent and compelling gestures in the whole of cinema, in my lowbrow opinion. He followed Young into the elevator, the door sliding closed behind him with a terminal, echoing THOOM.
I whistled and examined my fingernails through the final bit of tacked-on action, with its tacked-on voice-over, waiting until Vangelis faded up and the credits rolled. Irritably, Nicky unlocked the spool from the projector mouth and fast-forwarded it into the can. Down below us, the auditorium went from black-shot-with-silver to pure, midnight black.
‘It just means the other detective — Eddie Olmos — has been inside his place,’ Nicky said, shrugging in exasperation. ‘Why do you have to build a whole thing on top of that?’
‘Because it’s the turning point of the movie,’ I explained patiently. ‘It throws everything up into the air — Batty’s death speech, “It’s a pity she won’t live”, the whole works — and then makes it come down again in a new pattern.’
‘Yeah, well, Rutger Hauer says you’re full of shit,’ Nicky pointed out, fitting the lid onto the can and carefully detaching it from the projector’s housing.
‘Fine actor — not the sharpest tool in the box,’ I summarised.
‘It’s left ambiguous.’
‘In this version it’s left ambiguous. In the director’s cut, the sequence where Deckard dreams about the unicorn nails it down tight.’
Nicky put the film canister into the steel cabinet at one end of the projection booth, closed the doors and double-locked them with painstaking care. ‘I prefer Deckard to be human,’ he said, tugging on the handles to make sure the doors were secure. There was a slight tension, both in his voice and in the set of his shoulders.
I let it go at that point. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing, because Nicky used to be human once too. That was before he had a heart attack in his late thirties and joined the ranks of the existentially challenged. Some people come back in the spirit — as ghosts — and have an uneventful afterlife hanging around the places they remember from back when they had a pulse. Others take the low road, invading and possessing and reshaping animal flesh (the default option, if only because animal spirits are weak enough not to make a fight of it most of the time) into something broadly resembling the body they used to have. That’s how werewolves are made, although the term most often used these days is the polite, non-judgemental loup-garou.