TWENTY-SIX

CAMDEN, LONDON. 24 JUNE 2011. 11 P.M.

‘Mate. I’m outside. This is getting old.’ Kyle had lost the will to leave another message for Dan, who was still worryingly at large. There had been nothing from him since the flurry of calls during his flight to Antwerp. Finger Mouse had not seen him since he’d dropped off the master drives from the US shoot after they landed at Gatwick. Dan had told Finger Mouse he was going home to sleep.

They usually met at Kyle’s place in West Hampstead, because Kyle’s infrequent visits to the arse-end of Camden only served to cultivate his aversion to the area where Dan shared an illegal sublet with a performance artist, whose last kick was a painfully bad and entirely unsuccessful attempt at a burlesque act that Kyle had been coerced into filming: a self-important character called Raoul who mercifully spent most of his time in Madrid.

The red-brick block of flats looked empty, was mostly unlit. But then it always looked that way. He went through the broken front door of the block into a miasma of old urine on cold cement, because the concrete staircase was used as a latrine. As soon as the beleaguered council fixed the door, a scuffed sports shoe would unfix it and the local weasels took to pissing inside. Nothing new there. But what Kyle now feared to the point of becoming wordless and disoriented, didn’t use doors in the conventional sense.

Odd-coloured doors on every level were made from steel and all had spyholes. A lot of nans too poor to get out lived behind them, in fear. Balcony walkways featured closed doors and the shaggy silhouettes of abandoned flower baskets. But Kyle made the fourth floor without the usual molestation from a character with a perpetually wet nose that protruded between a puffa-jacket collar and long oily hair. It seemed to live in the stairwell. If that thing wasn’t home, something was up.

He fished the keys out of his pocket. Because of the rapid exchanges of shared film equipment between them, they each kept a set of keys to the other’s flat. The double lock wasn’t on. Which meant Dan had left and just pulled the door closed behind him. Unusual, because Dan had been burgled twice, and all of Kyle’s Motorhead CDs and Herzog box sets that Dan once borrowed went out the door in a swag bag, along with two cameras and anything else that had a plug attached. ‘Mate,’ Kyle called softly into the darkness through the gap he’d made between the door and the frame. He smelled the tang of a distant unemptied bin, old carpet and the merchant marine taint of municipal paint. No one home.

Reaching inside, he scrabbled for the hallway light switch. Flicked it down. The scruffy reception was flooded with yellow light. A good sign. Kyle went inside. Navigated his body around a bicycle and closed the door behind him. Listening hard and ready to retreat at the drip of a tap, he carefully opened the door to Dan’s room on the far right side of the passage.

‘Shit. Oh, shit.’

It took a few seconds to stop the shakes in his vision. His friend was pathologically untidy; Kyle knew that from two years cohabitation in a shared house at college. But over the eternal sea of unwashed clothes, magazines, soiled plates, and the poignantly masculine detritus of a male slob, shrapnel from his friend’s valuables added a topical layer of wreckage. This was no burglary; it was the aftermath of a frenzy.

The destruction of Dan’s Star Wars collectibles would have been mourned with more intensity by their owner than the burning of the library at Alexandria. But the Millennium Falcon had seen its last voyage and was ready for the landfill. The limited edition AT-AT had been hit by something the Rebel Alliance never had in their arsenal. Every collectible miniature, model kit and pricey diorama had been raked from the Ikea shelves, if not hurled with force against the sallow walls.

Clone Troopers and Jedi crunched under Kyle’s feet as he crept inside the room and inspected the damage. Flat-screen television screen smashed. Stereo crushed. Bed eviscerated. Even the mattress springs were visible. It was like his bed in Seattle, only worse. A greater and perhaps lengthier fury had been inflicted here.

Had Dan been inside it? Kyle sat down in the wreckage of a Tie Fighter and began to shake.

No blood.

Well that was one thing, and it made him leap with lunatic hope. But why hadn’t Dan been in touch since the early hours? In the voicemail message he said he’d found something.

Kyle was back on his feet and down the hall in seconds. Raoul’s room was locked and he kept it that way when he was out of the country. The bathroom looked like the aftermath of a car bomb ignited outside a hotel, but that might have just been Dan being Dan: towels on the floor, cardboard inner tubes from toilet rolls left where they fell, a smell of backed-up pipes and a ring like one of Saturn’s, but brown, around the bath.

But not even ten years of his friend’s slovenly use of the living room would account for the wreckage. Both armchairs and the sofa had been gutted and erupted with white foam. A coffee table had been swept clear of unwashed crockery, glasses, Pringle tubes and TV remotes. Their camera gear was strewn around the equipment bags from which it had been yanked, but Kyle didn’t stop to see if it was damaged. He banged out of the living room, staggered into the kitchen. And came to a dead stop.

The smell hit him full and hot in the face before he saw the stain. Sewage, wet ashes, carrion. An old scent, and an uncanny feature of his life these days.

It had come through the ceiling. Above the little breakfast table. Upon which it had dropped and scrabbled. Splashed a fluid over the Formica. The ceiling had once been white, but was aged like yellow ivory from the thousands of cigarettes smoked by Dan, Raoul and their predecessors. But the discolouration of their residency looked positively clean about the greasy smear with a four-foot diameter. Black at its heart, but veined with moist tendrils to its borders, it would look and smell to the uninformed like the toilet upstairs had flushed right into the heart of Dan’s kitchen. But Kyle looked for and saw the bones; to his trained eye it was as if a blurry X-ray of a fleshless hand, a scapula, and a bottom row of long donkey teeth had been superimposed onto the plaster by a nuclear flash.

It’s why Malcolm Gonal had papered his ceiling with yesterday’s news. Gonal. He’d kept them back with car batteries and dawn-light simulators, but for how long? Dan had refused to believe they were possible. The “old friends”. He’d been utterly unprepared; was probably fast asleep with Alice in Chains roaring about angry chairs through his iPod earphones when a martyr from New Jerusalem birthed over the toaster. The lights must have been off; it would have hunted him through the dark as he slept.

‘Oh, shit. Oh Dan.’ Kyle stepped back. His hands covered his mouth when he saw the heavenly letters on a saucer; possibly the last clean plate in Dan’s kitchen.

The saucer had been placed there, isolated. There had been a sudden relocation of bread bags, Olivio spread and Marmite around it. Dan must have been grazing when he found it . . . where? . . . about his person, or in their gear as he unpacked in the lounge? That’s how a claim had been staked on Gonal’s hunched shoulders. Malcolm said there had been a bone, a black bone in his gear when he got back from the States. And Dan had found a winning ticket too. It now seemed another rune had been cast and they never even knew it. They were all destined for The Kingdom of Fools, as foretold in The Saints of Filth. No one gets left behind.

‘Mate. Oh Mate.’

Dan had found teeth. Long teeth. Crown and root. Black as coal and cracked like pottery from an archaeological dig. A handful of teeth, dropped like seeds from the reaper’s hand.

Outside in the streets, revealed murkily like poorly lit photographs by the lamps and the odd rush of a car’s headlights, his unhinging felt physical. The going of his strength was tangible; like air from a ripped inflatable it gushed from him. Something loosened inside his skull. There was a slide of his thoughts into unfinished sentences and fragments of irrelevancy. To be followed by a ratchet of gut-level anxiety so acute his mind became a clenched fist. Then an open hand to scatter his thoughts like salt.

He moved like the undead towards the centre of Camden. Walked towards the lights. Followed a group of people for a while; two couples. Followed them up to the door of a gourmet burger restaurant. Wanted to go inside with them. Wanted time to go backwards so he could partake of ordinary unexceptional things with them, like the nonchalant eating of burgers and the sipping of beers in a carefree evening.

He recalled his recent life on rewind. Meeting Max for the first time in the production office; an empty house in Holland Park; the ferry to France with Gabriel; the desert; the ranch; the detective’s house; a dismal kitchen in Seattle . . . he saw all of this, and all else between these points of reference simultaneously, and he regretted having known any of it. Wished he could wipe his life of every scene of what he’d thought was a great film. The regret left him feeling so weak with hopelessness, he could barely get his breath in and out of his lungs. Despair rendered him limp enough to make lighting a cigarette impossible.

The people sat down to dine, and those others over there – that girl with the nose ring who laughed into her phone, the man who read the book in the window of the pub, the bus full of listless faces – they were in a parallel dimension. One he’d foolishly slipped out of and now could not get back inside, even though he yearned and scrabbled to do so. Everyone around him existed in a world of familiarity and security and predictability. A place utterly alien to him. He could rejoin it no more than he could pass through a screen and step into a television show. He was a living warning to the foolhardy, the reckless, the ambitious, the naïve; just like Gonal hiding behind a barricade of newspaper. This was why Bridgette Clover topped herself; because she’d entered a dangerous place with one outcome and could not walk back out. Kyle started to shake all over. Wondered if he was in shock.

He wheeled away from the wall he’d slumped against. A man walked his dog past Kyle, going somewhere better than he was ever going to be again in what was left of this life, or the next.

His lips trembled. If he spoke his voice would be glottal with grief. He thought of skeletal figures who danced around a pig with a sceptre. Was Dan there now? Did he now scream and cavort among carcasses of sixteenth-century dogs?

He’d as good as killed his best friend. If he hadn’t coerced Dan to go to America he’d still be around. ‘Oh, Christ.’

Around all of the light and motion and purpose in the world he was excluded from, his eyes were pulled into the dark places: the unlit windows, the wooden hoardings covered in flyers for concerts long over, a flattened cardboard box in a doorway that was going to be someone’s bed for the night. Around him all was bleached of colour, stained concrete and dusty tarmac, refuse rearing in the cold wind, unnoticed, neglected, and lightless. Leaden weights suspended from twine seemed to pull his spirits and his jaw down. This is how the world was when you knew it was terminal.

Dan was gone. Dead.

Отправить