Neverwhere (26 page)

He hesitated. He thought of Lamia, and Hunter, and Anaesthesia, and even Door, but none of them were someones in the way that she meant. “No. No one else,” he said. And then, realizing it was true as he said it, “I’ve just changed, that’s all.”

His intercom buzzed. “Richard? We’re waiting for you.” He pressed the button. “Be right down, Sylvia.”

He looked at Jessica. She said nothing. Perhaps there was nothing she could trust herself to say. She walked away, and she closed the door quietly behind her.

Richard picked up the papers he would need, with one hand. He ran the other hand across his face, as if he were wiping something away: sorrow, perhaps, or tears, or Jessica.

He started taking the Tube again, to and from work, although he soon found that he had stopped buying newspapers to read on his journey in the morning and the evening, and instead of reading he would scan the faces of the other people on the train, faces of every kind and color, and wonder if they were all from London Above, wonder what went on behind their eyes.

During the evening rush hour, a few days after his encounter with Jessica, he thought he saw Lamia across the carriage, with her back to him, her dark hair piled high on her head and her dress long and black. His heart began to pound in his chest. He pushed his way toward her through the crowded compartment. As he got closer, the train pulled into a station, the doors hissed open, and she stepped off. But it was not Lamia. Just another young London goth-girl, he realized, disappointed, off for a night on the town.

One Saturday afternoon he saw a large brown rat, sitting on top of the plastic garbage cans at the back of Newton Mansions, cleaning its whiskers and looking as if it owned the world. At Richard’s approach it leapt down onto the pavement and waited in the shadow of the garbage cans, staring up at him with wary bead-black eyes.

Richard crouched down. “Hello,” he said, gently. “Do we know each other?” The rat made no kind of response that Richard was able to perceive, but it did not run away. “My name is Richard Mayhew,” he continued, in a low voice. “I’m not actually a rat-speaker, but I, um, know a few rats, well, I’ve met some, and I wondered if you were familiar with the Lady Door . . .”

He heard a shoe scrape behind him, and he turned to see the Buchanans looking at him curiously. “Have you . . . lost something?” asked Mrs. Buchanan. Richard heard, but ignored, her husband’s gruff whisper of “Just his marbles.”

“No,” said Richard, honestly, “I was, um, saying hello to a . . .” The rat scurried off and away.

“Was that a rat?” barked George Buchanan. “I’ll complain to the council. It’s a disgrace. But that’s London for you, isn’t it?”

Yes, agreed Richard. It was. It really was.

Richard’s posessions continued to sit untouched in the wooden packing cases in the middle of the living room floor.

He had not yet turned on the television. He would come home at night, and eat, then he would stand at the window, looking out over London, at the cars and the rooftops and the lights, as the late autumn twilight turned into night, and the lights came on all over the city. He would watch, standing alone in his darkened flat, until the city’s lights began to be turned off. Eventually, reluctantly, he would undress, and climb into bed, and go to sleep.

Sylvia came into his office one Friday afternoon. He was opening envelopes, using his knife—Hunter’s knife—as a letter-opener. “Richard?” she said. “I was wondering. Are you getting out much, these days?” He shook his head. “Well, a bunch of us are going out this evening. Do you fancy coming along?”

“Um. Sure,” he said. “Yes. I’d love it.”

He hated it.

There were eight of them: Sylvia and her young man, who had something to do with vintage cars, Gary from Corporate Accounts, who had recently broken up with his girlfriend, due to what Gary persisted in describing as a slight misunderstanding (he had thought she would be rather more understanding about his sleeping with her best friend than she had in fact turned out to be), several perfectly nice people and friends of nice people, and the new girl from Computer Services.

First they saw a film on the huge screen of the Odeon, Leicester Square. The good guy won in the end, and there were plenty of explosions and flying objects on the way. Sylvia decided that Richard should sit next to the girl from Computer Services, as, she explained, she was new to the company and did not know many people.

They walked down to Old Compton Street, on the edge of Soho, where the tawdry and the chic sit side by side to the benefit of both, and they ate at La Reache, filling up on couscous and dozens of marvelous plates of exotic food, which covered their table and spilled over onto an unused table nearby, and they walked from there to a small pub Sylvia liked in nearby Berwick Street, and they had a few drinks, and they chatted.

The new girl from Computer Services smiled at Richard a lot, as the evening went on, and he had nothing at all to say to her. He bought a round of drinks for the party, and the girl from Computer Services helped him carry them from the bar back to their table. Gary went off to the men’s room, and the girl from Computer Services came and sat next to Richard, taking his place. Richard’s head was filled with the clink of glasses, and the blare of the jukebox, and the sharp smell of beer and spilt Bacardi and cigarette smoke. He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table, and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying, and, which was worse, that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.

And it came to him then, as clearly and as certainly as if he had been watching it on the big screen at the Odeon, Leicester Square: the rest of his life. He would go home tonight with the girl from Computer Services, and they would make gentle love, and tomorrow, it being Saturday, they would spend the morning in bed. And then they would get up, and together they would remove his possessions from the packing cases, and put them away. In a year, or a little less, he would marry the girl from Computer Services, and get another promotion, and they would have two children, a boy and a girl, and they would move out to the suburbs, to Harrow or Croydon or Hampstead or even as far away as distant Reading.

And it would not be a bad life. He knew that, too. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.

When Gary came back from the toilet, he looked around in puzzlement. Everyone was there except . . . “Dick?” he asked “Has anyone seen Richard?”

The girl from Computer Services shrugged.

Gary went outside, to Berwick Street. The cold of the night air was like a splash of water to his face. He could taste winter in the air. He called, “Dick? Hey? Richard?”

“Over here.”

Richard was leaning against a wall, in the shadows. “Just getting a breath of fresh air.”

“Are you all right?” asked Gary.

“Yes,” said Richard. “No. I don’t know.”

“Well,” said Gary, “that covers your options. Do you want to talk about it?”

Richard looked at him seriously. “You’ll laugh at me.”

“I’ll do that anyway.”

Richard looked at Gary. Then Gary was relieved to see him smile, and he knew that they were still friends. Gary looked back at the pub. Then he put his hands into his coat pockets. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s walk. You can get it off your chest.
Then
I’ll laugh at you.”

“Bastard,” said Richard, sounding a lot more like Richard than he had in recent weeks.

“It’s what friends are for.”

They began to amble off, under the streetlights. “Look, Gary,” Richard began. “Do you ever wonder if this is all there is?”

“What?”

Richard gestured vaguely, taking in everything. “Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?”

“I think that sums it up, yes,” said Gary.

Richard sighed. “Well,” he said, “for a start, I didn’t go to Majorca. I mean, I
really
didn’t go to Majorca.”

Richard talked as they walked up and down the warren of tiny Soho back streets between Regent Street and the Charing Cross Road. He talked, and talked, beginning with finding a girl bleeding on the pavement, and trying to help, because he couldn’t just leave her there, and what happened next. And when they got too cold to walk they went into an all-night greasy spoon café. It was a proper one, the kind that cooked everything in lard, and served cups of serious tea in large chipped white mugs shiny with bacon grease. Richard and Gary sat and Richard talked while Gary listened, and then they ordered fried eggs and baked beans and toast and sat and ate them, while Richard continued to talk, and Gary continued to listen. They mopped up the last of their egg yolks with the toast. They drank more tea, until eventually Richard said, “. . . and then Door did something with the key, and I was back again. In London Above. Well, the real London. And, well, you know the rest.”

There was a silence. “That’s all,” said Richard. He finished his tea.

Gary scratched his head. “Look,” he said, at length. “Is this real? Not some kind of horrible joke? I mean, somebody with a camera isn’t about to leap out from behind a screen or something and tell me I’m on
Candid Camera
?”

“I sincerely hope not,” said Richard. “You . . . do you believe me?”

Gary looked at the bill on their table, counted out pound coins, and dropped them onto the Formica, where they sat beside a plastic tomato ketchup container in the shape of an oversized tomato, old ketchup caked black about its nozzle. “I believe that, well,
something
happened to you, obviously . . . Look, more to the point, do
you
believe it?”

Richard stared up at him. There were dark circles beneath Richard’s eyes. “Do I believe it? I don’t know anymore. I did. I was there. There was a part in there when you turned up, you know.”

“You didn’t mention that before.”

“It was a pretty horrid part. You told me that I’d gone mad and I was just wandering around London hallucinating.”

They walked out of the café and walked south, toward Piccadilly. “Well,” said Gary. “you must admit, it sounds more likely than your magical London underneath, where the people who fall through the cracks go. I’ve passed the people who fall through the cracks, Richard: they sleep in shop doorways all down the Strand. They don’t go to a special London. They freeze to death in the winter.”

Richard said nothing.

Gary continued. “I think maybe you got some kind of blow on the head. Or maybe some kind of shock when Jessica chucked you. For a while you went a little crazy. Then you got better.”

Richard shivered. “You know what scares me? I think you could be right.”

“So life isn’t exciting?” continued Gary. “Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I’m going to eat and sleep tonight. I’ll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?” He turned and looked at Richard.

Richard nodded, hesitantly. “Yeah.”

Gary looked at his watch. “Bloody hell,” he exclaimed. “It’s after two o’clock. Let’s hope there are still a few taxis about.” They walked into Brewer Street, at the Piccadilly end of Soho, wandering past the lights of the peep shows and the strip clubs. Gary was talking about taxis. He was not saying anything original, or even interesting. He was simply fulfilling his obligation as a Londoner to grumble about taxis. “. . . Had his light on and everything,” he was saying, “I told him where I wanted to go, he said, sorry, I’m on my way home, I said, where do all you taxi drivers live anyway? And why don’t any of you live near me? The trick is to get in first, then tell them you live south of the river, I mean, what was he trying to tell me? The way he was carrying on, Battersea might as well have been in bloody Katmandu . . . ”

Richard had tuned him out. When they reached Windmill Street, Richard crossed the road and stared into the window of the Vintage Magazine Shop, examining the cartoonish models of forgotten film stars and the old posters and comics and magazines on display. It had been a glimpse into a world of adventure and imagination. And it was not true. He told himself that.

“So, what do you think?” Gary asked.

Richard jerked back to the present. “Of what?”

Gary realized Richard had not heard a word he had said. He said it again. “If there aren’t any taxis we could get night buses.”

“Yeah,” said Richard. “Great. Fine.”

Gary grimaced. “You worry me.”

“Sorry.”

They walked down Windmill Street, toward Piccadilly. Richard thrust his hands deep into his pockets. He looked puzzled for a moment, and pulled out a rather crumpled black crow’s feather, with red thread tied around the quill.

“What’s that?” asked Gary.

“It’s a—” He stopped. “It’s just a feather. You’re right. It’s only rubbish.” He dropped the feather in the gutter at the curb, and did not look back.

Gary hesitated. Then he said, picking his words with care, “Have you thought about seeing somebody?”

“See somebody? Look, I’m not crazy, Gary.”

“Are you sure about that?” A taxi came toward them, yellow for-hire light burning.

“No,” said Richard, honestly. “Here’s a taxi. You take it. I’ll take the next one.”

“Thanks.” Gary waved down the taxi and climbed into the back before telling the driver that he wished to go to Battersea. He pulled down the window, and, as the taxi pulled out, he said, “Richard—this is reality. Get used to it. It’s all there is. See you on Monday.”

Richard waved at him and watched the taxi drive away. Then he turned around and walked slowly away from the lights of Piccadilly, back up toward Brewer Street. There was no longer a feather by the curb. Richard paused beside an old woman, fast asleep in a shop doorway. She was covered with a ripped old blanket, and her few possessions—two small junk-filled cardboard boxes and a dirty, once-white umbrella—were tied together with string beside her, and the string was tied around her wrist, to keep anyone from stealing them while she slept. She wore a wool hat, of no particular color.

He pulled out his wallet, found a ten-pound note, and bent down to slide the folded note into the woman’s hand. Her eyes opened, and she jerked awake. She blinked at the money with old eyes. “What’s this?” she said, sleepily, displeased at having been woken.