The Unblemished (16 page)

In any band of society there are factions. There are always
dominants and submissives. Some find it easier to climb that
triangle of power and sit at the pinnacle, looking down on the poor
souls wondering how to even get a leg up to a level only slightly more
rarefied than their own.

So it is with London's one-time saviours.

Blinking, coming back from the brink, they vibrated with
awareness at each others' proximity. They knew their mass was great,
but their muscle lacking. Their instincts had been dulled by many
generations of sleep. They spent long, cold days trying to orient
themselves within this newly huge, labyrinthine space, many times
greater than how they remembered it. Their eyes sucked in drilling
moments of light and pain with every blink: too much glass, too many
reflections. They spent a lot of time goggling at themselves in office block
windows, pulling on clothes too big or small for them, stolen
from warehouses, washing lines, the dead and the drunk.

They had forgotten how to kill.

It itched within them, this knowledge, in the way that a stump will
itch in its memory of the departed limb. The compulsion was there,
but it was directionless, imprecise. It manifested itself in fruitless
intra-family squabbling. Hands lashed out but weren't primed for
connection; shapeless cries and screeches were uttered, but more from
an ecstasy of frustration at the self, rather than in genuine animosity
towards fellow lost, fellow eaters. Once they had been feted as
saviours of the city, thanks to their unconventional appetites. They
could still, over those vast tracts of race memory, recall the peculiar
flavour of spoiled meat, and hanker after it again. They were alive,
awake; they were here.

A buzz of anticipation sizzled through the community, as if they
were all hooked up to the same battery. One or two pieces of the
puzzle were needed, that was all, before they were able to get over
that first hurdle, this all-consuming blindness of hunger, sate
themselves, and rebuild the broken bridges between themselves and
their banished fathers. Gain understanding, rekindle the fires of envy
and revenge that had gone cold for so long. They had waited four
hundred years. They could afford to wait a little longer.

They had safety in numbers. They had the protection of the
cathedral, if they needed it. Things, they felt, in that frisson running
through the cold, damp London air, were on a knife-edge. A
reckoning, of sorts, was at hand. They would wait and try to learn,
try to stay alive. Try to slough off this debilitating skin of weakness.

Some, though, were not weak. The pyramid's summit-dwellers,
they could flex their muscles and sniff the blood of prey that they
were already laying into, albeit on a much smaller scale than their
brothers were considering. This cadre comprised of few. A dozen,
give or take. Freakishly large, they were nevertheless regarded as the
runts of the litter and had the personalities to match. They shunned
their family and its fond regard for ancient times. They dressed in
modern clothes, stealing labelled garments that fitted well. They cut
their hair, shaving it flush to the skull. They sought out tattooists to
pattern their skin, the babyish finery of which sickened them so, and
branded each other with knives held over gas rings till the metal
glowed orange. They slashed and flensed the flesh, creating deep,
intricate markings to emphasise their otherness and indicate a
fellowship that was elsewhere. Instead of taking the first name they
saw on a television set in a shop window – the usual recourse to
identity the lost took – this splinter group browsed bookshops, record
shops and video shops for their names, shoplifting the titles that
appealed to them, jacketing the volumes and laminating the by-lines,
attaching them to their clothes.

One of these bulls of men, Graham Greene, with his violet eyes
and a penchant for red suits, so despised the pathetic mien of his own
kind that he determined to alter his look, to opt out of their foul
beauty. One freezing night, frost on the pavements, he was with his
chosen sidekicks, Stanley Kubrick and Kurt Cobain, stalking Praed
Street, considering how he could radicalise his look to the extent that
he would not be recognisable to others even from his own sect. Talk
had been of limb removal; of tweaking out organs so they hung on
the body's exterior; of peeling off the outer coats of skin so that the
sinews and muscles could be seen; of breaking legs to the point where
the bones were rubble within the limbs and they had to get around by
dragging themselves with their arms.

They huddled by the entrance to Paddington Station, watching the
suits and the briefcases and the brollies, sneering at the stooped
creatures as they came home or went to work, at the smell of sweat
that powered out of them, at the scars and boils, the acne, the
bandages and wheelchairs. The bald heads. The port-wine birthmarks
like still fire on downturned faces. The hare lips. The mastectomies.
The withered hands. The blind.

Greene turned away and vomited into the gutter. He pulled his
raincoat more tightly around him and wiped tears from behind his
blue-tinted sunglasses. He was simultaneously appalled by and
attracted to their failure, their physical imperfections. He assessed his
brothers, the friends he trusted with his life, and was glad to find the
same blend of distaste and veneration on their faces. They had been
lucky, he felt, to find themselves, once pulled from sleep, in the
foundations of a forgotten corner of St Mary's Hospital.

They had had to burrow through ten feet of soil and failing
concrete, floorboards, a mass of discarded boxes and folders filled
with papers recording the deaths of people who must now be little
more than dust. They had emerged into this dumping ground, a
plaster and lath construction at the rear of the complex, and stared at
the great swathe of glass buildings that adorned the Paddington
Basin. Soon they discovered that the morgue was sited not far from
this location, and they were able to feast without foraging for scraps.
They grew strong quickly, and scorned the lesser lost as they grubbed
for the bodies of dead pigeons on the banks of the canal, or fought
over the bones in discarded fast-food cartons in bleak car parks on
the edge of this opulence, wastelands where construction had not yet
reached.

Now, as Kubrick and Cobain shuffled and stamped on the
pavement, trying to drive the cold out of their aching legs, Greene
thought again of the reasons for their revival. It was always chemical
in nature, this resuscitation. And it meant that a Map Reader had
been found, someone to make sense of this alien country, someone to
open up unknown routes within this people who had been lost to
time.

Greene didn't need his hand held. He wanted to explore these
territories on his own terms. If they wanted a Map Reader, an
explorer, a true visionary, why didn't they approach him? Instead,
they had a clown, ponderous, unaware, inattentive. He could see him
– they all could, if they closed their eyes – this messiah, a slight man
with delicate facial bones, large hooded eyes, a downturned, fleshily
attractive mouth and a sparse beard that either couldn't, or wasn't
allowed to, flourish. His look was one of perpetual confusion.

We could all die of boredom before this fuckwit drops his penny.

The thought was seized upon and torn to shreds. Hundreds of
dissenting voices flew back at him, howling out of the darkness.

Give him time.

Patience. There is no need to rush.

London shall be our playground once more. He is the right man to
lead us into it.

The right man. Greene sucked his teeth ruminatively. He had not
been chosen. He had lucked into this map. How could he shoulder the
responsibility? How could they even consider allowing him to be their
front line? He had no vatic quality, no obvious warrior talent. He was
running away all the time. How were they to learn anything from
him?

Greene's frustration reached his fists: he punched himself hard in
the mouth, eager to drive away the maddeningly calm, bovine voices
that pleaded with him to give the Map Reader a chance.

Give ME a chance,
he raged, and hit himself again. He sensed a
massive recoiling from his mind. He felt wild, dangerous. It was good.
A tooth, one of his bright, white, too-perfect teeth, jumped clear of
his gums and fell to the floor, like a chunk of solid ice. He spat blood.
For a second he felt like any of the people heading for the trains, or
fanning out of the station seeking food, or love, or warmth. He felt
damaged, tired, alone.

He punched himself again. Another tooth cracked, splitting his lip.
Cobain and Kubrick were regarding him with amusement.

'Come with me,' he said.

He led them across the bridge spanning the canal. They walked the
North Wharf Road to a subway that led under the Marylebone
Flyover. Here Greene found a half-brick that he held aloft like a
trophy. He handed it to Stanley Kubrick.

'Empty my mouth,' he said.

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 15:15
Subject: progress

i wl hld yr hnd 4 u if u nd it. i cn shw u thngs. our pple nd 2
grw. thy r hngry 2 lrn. all u hve 2 do is b yrslf. thy r vry vry
hngry

How did this chewing bastard finger him? What was going on?
He felt a twinge of regret at even opening his online email
package. All he had come in here for was a chance to track down
Rohan Vero, an act that had led him up so many dead ends that he
doubted he'd ever be able to manoeuvre himself back out into the real
world. He had sworn to himself to cut all links, which was why he
had discarded his mobile phone. But he wanted to see if Keiko was
trying to contact him. He had felt tartly irritated to discover she had
not.

Where had this freak picked up his email address? Bo was no geek,
although he had taken computer studies in his final few years at
school – and failed it spectacularly – when the Sinclair ZX-81 was
still making jaws drop. He'd got his parents to fork out for a
Spectrum. He'd sold his dad on it by telling him that it contained
more sophisticated circuitry than was used on any of NASA's Apollo
missions. He'd spent three fucking hours on Christmas morning
keying in a couple of hundred lines of Basic from the user's manual
in order to display a Union Jack on the TV screen.

Big wank.

All he ever used it for was to play
Jet Set Willy.
Or, oh the hilarity:

10 WRITE 'Jacko is a spastic'

20 GO TO 10

RUN

He pulled the lapels of his denim jacket closer around his throat
and touched the edges of the black beanie rammed on to his head.
Keiko always found his wearing of woollen hats sexy, she said,
because his longish, dark-brown hair would curl under them.
It works
for me
, she'd explain, when he gave her a confused look. Now it
worked for him because it made him feel concealed, no matter how
demonstrably untrue that was.

Maybe I should just give in
, he thought, suddenly.
Let them have
me.
But an internal instinct kicked out at him. He could not, would
not allow that to happen. This wasn't the cosy seduction of
something like vampirism. You didn't get a couple of cool bite marks
on the neck and a fashionably pale look. You didn't get to join the
ranks of the immortal and drink salty Shiraz for the rest of your days.
You died. You died horribly.

He emailed a friend, a long-suffering guy who was hot on Apple
Macintosh computers and who more often than not received emails
and phone calls that began:
Hi Mike, how are you – we've got to get
out for a beer again soon. By the way ... I'm having trouble with
my Mac
, and asked him how his address could have become available
to the public domain.

Mike replied within ten minutes:

LMAO

Which was how, spam-filtering system or not, Bo learned it was a
stupid question.

He felt the occasional jab of adrenaline threaten to shred his
stomach as a person walked by the window, looking in on the intent
ranks of webheads, but it was not as acute a feeling as his journey on
the tube. He found himself casting nervous glances around the room
nevertheless, and jumping whenever somebody walked behind his
chair. But it was better than venturing out at night. The people,
Christ, some of the people in this city after dark, it was as if they had
been injected with a kind of intensity drug. They didn't gaze benignly
around them as they pottered about their evening activities. They
stared with a blatant ferocity that threatened to scorch the skin off
you if it fell your way.

He pulled up Google and entered
chewingman.
There were no
relevant entries, unless the figure shadowing Bo was a cunnilingus
expert working on porn films out of Venice Beach, California. The
Yahoo! profile for chewingman was similarly fruitless, devoid of any
details. Bo rubbed his eyes and wondered if he should contact
Detective Inspector Laurier and tell him of the email. Yahoo! would
presumably have to divulge chewingman's whereabouts if the police
came knocking, but Bo had the feeling that any given address would
be bogus or, if it wasn't, then chewingman certainly wouldn't be
sitting on the sofa with his feet up when the feds piled through the
door.

He made fists of his hands, squeezed until the knuckles were sore,
and his nails were digging into the meat of his palms, and then he
replied.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 12:07

Subject: Re: progress

Who are you?

A few seconds after he sent the message, his inbox indicated a new
arrival.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 12:07

Subject: Re: Re: progress

dnt mtr wh i am. jst knw this. we wl bry u in pces if u dnt flfl yr
role in our rsrectn. lt th mp thru. lt yr veins b r roads. lt yr skn b
th rf ovr r hds. lt ths hapn. b th mp or die

Bo slid back sharply on his chair, creating a shriek on the linoleum
floor that brought hisses and shouts of rebuke from his fellow
browsers.

This isn't a fucking library
, he wanted to yell at them, but he was
too afraid of how hysterical his voice might sound. That first sentence

dnt mtr wh i am.

It was not so obvious, once you read it a couple of times, that the
wh
meant
who.
It appalled Bo to be thinking more that perhaps it
meant
what.
And
rsrectn.
What did that mean? He knew it was the
skeletonised remains of
resurrection
– he had taken his NCTJ course
in Teeline shorthand and, though he never used it any more, he
remembered the basic idea of reducing any word mostly to its consonants
– but whose resurrection? How could he have a hand in it if he
didn't know what he was supposed to do?

Almost immediately, he felt a strong, molten pain run through the
centre of his head. He closed his eyes and put out a hand to steady
himself. His hand slid over the surface of the table, skidding off the
edge, almost spilling him from his chair as his fulcrum was suddenly,
severely shifted. A woman's voice said:
Oh Jesus. Oh my God.

He snapped his eyes open and saw a long bloody smear running
half the length of his desk. The woman was sitting next to him,
leaning away, her face white. A man had shot out of his seat and was
screaming for the management, pointing a wavering forefinger at Bo
and his mess, his face etched with naked aggression suggesting that
bleeding wounds, along with chewing gum and dogs, ought to be left
out on the street.

Bo tried to say something, to explain it away as an accident with
scissors, but by then pandemonium was close to breaking out, and his
attention was being drawn away by the strange thing he had seen
when he closed his eyes.

A woman was shouting
don't touch him, don't touch him, you
don't know what he's got.
Two men came out of an office at the back
of the cyber café, and Bo decided it was time to make himself scarce.

He had the sense to quickly sign out of his Internet account, and
then he marched straight out of the café, his damaged left hand
tucked into his right armpit.

The traffic on Victoria Street was a slap to the face. It roused him
more effectively than any number of the coffees he'd been downing.

The strange grid that had overlaid the iridescent mud of his interior
vision flashed back, as if it had been trapped there, like a neon sign
that remains for some time after it has disappeared from view. It
resembled some poorly rendered street map, all uneven lines, grunge
patterns, something created by a child with a crayon. He closed his
eyes again to improve its definition, and pondered the section that
was – he struggled for a word to describe it –
bruised.
It was less
bright that the other sections, and some of its lines were incomplete.

Bo heard a car horn and swung his head towards the sound, his
eyes still closed. The grid turned on an invisible axis. Sudden
excitement leaped inside him. It
was
a map. And now he saw how to
decipher its codes. The leading edge, that part at the bottom of his
vision, was where he was standing. All that was missing was a large
red arrow and the words
YOU ARE HERE
.

The spoilt part of the map was away to the right, high up. If he
opened his eyes while looking at it, he would resemble somebody
trying to recall an important fact, or delving for an answer to a tricky
question. All he had to do to reach that section was keep his own
position locked to the base and follow the lines that angled their way
to it. The novelty of the task almost inured him to its bizarreness, its
inherent threat. Part of him again wondered, almost disconnectedly,
if this was some symptom of cancer, a tumour inoperably deep within
his brain.

Before he knew it, he had carved a route deep into Pimlico,
following a vaguely southeast direction. He bypassed many people
and tried to keep his mind on the task so that the brilliant, fiery
suggestion of their organs, embedded in the darker flesh of bodies
being exposed to him, would be quelled. He tried to ignore the pangs
in his belly when these little knots of tissue were made known. He
swallowed the saliva that suddenly seemed too copious for his mouth.
The way his teeth felt larger than normal, clenching together as if of
their own accord they had developed a need to bite something, was a
factor he ought not to dwell upon, for now.

Other people were unreadable, to him, as if their clothes were
made from lead to defeat his X-ray capabilities. All of these, without
exception, assessed him with a passion he noticed peripherally. As on
the tube train, whenever he returned their gaze, their focus was
elsewhere. The heat in their eyes remained disguised; he was no
clearer as to whether it was born of hostility or admiration. At least
in daylight, he felt able to withstand that concentration of curiosity.
At night-time, the fear of it was crippling.

He turned and strode, strode and turned, moving through streets
and alleyways as if on the end of a cable that was being wound in.
The grid behind his eyelids shifted liquidly as he changed direction, as
though on a gyroscope. That strange, bruised area drew nearer.

He faltered when he began to consider what that decayed chunk of
the map might represent. It occurred to him that it might be a trap or,
less grand but no less worrying, a wild goose chase, and that the object
of his search would be nothing he could relate to this violated, organic
reference point. He had to go on in order to prove his sanity was intact.

He opened his eyes and saw someone staring straight at him,
unashamed, unaffected by the niceties the other Bo-watchers were
affording him. This man locked eyes with his own in an unspoken
challenge. Here it is, Bo thought, here's where things come to a head.
But the man remained still, eyeing Bo as if waiting for him to make
the first move. He was Bo's height, with longish hair, straggly and
unwashed, plastered against his scalp like something painted on. His
clothes were besmirched, hanging off his frame. When Bo opened his
mouth to ask what the fuck the other guy's problem was, the other
guy opened his mouth too.

'Jesus Christ,' Bo said, and the guy mouthed the same words. He
stepped back and realised he was standing before his reflected image
in a shop window. He couldn't get over the bug-out weirdness of his
eyeballs. It was as if they were on the verge of prolapse.

It's because my vision is deteriorating ... it's because I'm
becoming like them ...

He broke into a trot, forcing himself to close his Mussolini eyes,
his Rasputin eyes, and read the map, get back to what it was he
needed to do. A sinuous voice rose up, like something trapped for too
long in stagnant water:
What will it mean to be like them?

Nothing good. Nothing good.

His feet were hurting. He was mildly astonished that he had not
yet bumped into another pedestrian, or a lamp post, or walked out in
front of traffic, even though he was spending more than half the time
with his eyes shut. The corroded part of the grid suddenly meshed
with the point at which he was standing. He opened his eyes.

Battersea Dogs' Home.

Okay.

He had been expecting something more ... dynamic, more apocalyptic.
What, exactly, he didn't know, but a look to his left, where the
iconic, disused power station stood, like a giant table that has been
upended, gave him some measure.

He waited at the entrance, listening to the yelps and whines of the
inhabitants, wondering when exactly the treasure he had been
tracking would yield itself. Nervously, he licked his lips. A defining
moment lay ahead, he felt. Something that would seal his involvement
with the London that was dissolving around him. Either that, or
abject disappointment, a return to square one.

There was nobody sitting in the reception area behind the
entrance, and no signs of human life deeper into the building, as he
passed through doors marked STAFF ONLY. The smell of dog food, dog
shit, and
dog
was everywhere. He turned a corner and found a
corridor that looked to have been partially painted with blood, before
its decorator got bored, or distracted, or the thing that was providing
the colour ran out of product.

More streaks meandered across the floor further along, leading to
a pair of swing doors. Bo marched grimly up to them and forced them
open, trying to avoid the soft impact marks where whatever it was
had been unceremoniously dragged through into the next room.
What greeted him seemed suddenly so commonplace as to confuse
him regarding its nature. It was like walking in on a bunch of staff
performing stock-taking duties; it was a scene so pathetic, so
repellent, that it inspired only pity in him, rather than shock or fright.

The middle-aged man on the floor was naked from the chest up,
his body spattered and slathered with blood from the six or seven
dog corpses lying around him. All of their bellies had been rent
apart, their ribcages gleaming jaggedly. The man was still plucking
at fragments of meat poking from the torn hides, jabbing them
absently between his teeth while he gazed at the far wall, in the same
way a compulsive eater will burrow into a bag of chocolates or
chipsticks. Bo watched the man occasionally dabble his fingers into
the wounds he had created, or press a faded eyeball, his expression
frozen into childish wonder at death's accommodating nature; no
indignity was too great. Even when he realised Bo was in the room
with him, his lassitude was too pronounced to impinge on his meal.
He looked like a glutton who had reached bursting point.