The Unblemished (25 page)

'What's going on?' she asked Nick. 'It feels as if we've stumbled on
to a film set. You ever notice, in films, how characters sit down to
dinner and then never eat anything? It's just scenery and props,
background for what they're saying to each other. This is like that.'

'But what are they saying?' Nick asked. 'I can't hear any words.
Something's off.'

He was right, she could see, and she was grateful that he was
picking up on something she'd perceived. It was the rhythm of their
speech. It was all wrong. There were none of the false starts, dead
spaces or collisions that occurred during a normal conversation.
Individuals spoke and stopped and their partners took up the baton.

There was no laughter, no raised voices, no coughing. Sarah couldn't
understand how she had missed it when they first walked in.

'What's going on?' she said again.

Nick said, 'They're looking at us.'

'No they're ...' But she couldn't finish the sentence. Nick was
right. They were looking at them, she knew that to be true, but
confirming it was like trying to nail jelly to a wall. She could feel eyes
on her, despite the way the pub's inhabitants seemed to be engrossed
in each other. Every time she turned to challenge somebody's gaze,
the stares slid away like leftovers from a plate.

'This is what Tina was talking about, wasn't it?'

'I think so,' she replied. 'A part of it, because I don't really understand.

It's not as if they're a threat. It's not something that would
make me lock myself in my flat and get tooled up with the kitchen
equipment. This is the centre of London. A fight breaking out in this
pub? There'd be riot police all over the place in minutes.'

'Nevertheless,' Nick said, 'it's spooking me. I think we should go.'

He drained his glass and placed it on the table. He stood up. The
conversations around them died. The music snapped off.

He looked down at her. The little-boy-lost look was back. She
reached out slowly and touched his hand. 'Let's go back to Tina's,'
she said. She rose slowly and the couple at the end of their table now
turned and watched them nakedly, their heads moving in little
saccadic jerks as Sarah and Nick made their way towards the door.

Someone was moving from another table, a woman with short
black hair and a beige trouser suit, and Sarah knew by the way she
was studiously avoiding looking at her and Nick that she intended to
block their exit.

'Come on,' she said, firmly. She grabbed Nick by the wrist and
yanked him towards the door. The smartly dressed woman was trying
to pull something out of her pocket but it was snagged on the lining,
or it was too snug a fit to be cleanly pulled free; either way, it was
giving them a chance.

Others were moving now, but Sarah couldn't understand their
reticence. They moved as a unit, getting up from their seats at the
same time. It was like watching a lazy swarm of bees. If they wanted
to attack, they could do so with ease, but something was holding
them back. It was warring with whatever had impelled them to show
such hostility to a pair of strangers. As they rushed past the blackhaired
woman, who was wearing a perfume so overpowering that it
caused Sarah's eyes to water, she thought she recognised what was
holding their reins. But then they were in the street, and Nick was
sprinting back towards Tina's flat.

'No,' Sarah cried. 'Not yet. This way.'

She led him quickly north along Tottenham Court Road, casting
nervous glances back towards the pub, but nobody had followed
them outside. Plasma displays in electronics shops poured garish
colours across the hard, cold pavements. Sarah imagined her blood
joining them and ground her teeth hard against each other. Just a
weird pub full of weird fuckers, she thought. Just London, doing
what it did best.

The absence of traffic unnerved her, as did the lack of pedestrians.
There were one or two people around, and they paused to watch
Sarah and Nick as they hurried by, but nowhere near as many as she
had encountered on her trips to the city in the past. It was as if it were
Christmas morning, or the day of a state funeral. There weren't even
any buses. In the windows of burger bars and kebab shops she saw
staff in aprons standing behind counters preparing nothing for
customers who stood silently and politely in a queue waiting for it.
She saw news sellers in a booth at Goodge Street station without
newspapers to sell. It was a replica city, a toy, with real-life players.
Everything seemed stylised, posed.

'This way,' she hissed, turning sharp left. She led Nick along
Tottenham Street. More shops and restaurants. More pubs with
people playing a role. What at first she had thought was the reflection
of streetlamps in windows she now saw were faces pressed against
glass, looking down at them as they passed by. These were haunted,
cadaverous faces, partially obliterated by the ground-in filth on the
panes, and the oily light, like something from a painting by Bacon or
Munch. She was worried that some of the windows were smeared
with more than the usual city detritus, but the light was too poor for
her to tell.

They turned left again into Charlotte Street and moved up past the
hotel, where diners sat around tables wiping clean mouths with clean
napkins and nodding over empty place settings. Tina was overreacting,
Sarah thought. It was just the festive coma that hit the city
every year, come a little bit early, that was all. Too many office
parties and free booze. Late nights and last-minute business to attend
to. Plus the usual jaded look of the urbanite. She wasn't a Londoner,
no wonder she should be so stunned by the blank faces and alien
gestures. Tina was suffering from cabin fever and paranoia. She had
been stuck indoors too long by herself, with only the violent news to
reinforce her prejudices against the city and its inhabitants.

You keep fooling yourself like that, Sarah, if it makes you feel better.

It was only when they were nearing Tina's building from the other
end of Percy Street that she saw something to persuade her that Tina
had made the right decision and, short of being a thousand miles
away, was in the safest place of all.

A man was sitting on what seemed to be a small, misshapen sofa
discarded in a back alley. He was aimlessly picking large chunks of
stuffing from the split in the fabric, tearing them free, and then
studying them under the lamplight before either discarding them or
bringing them up to his face to be sniffed. Sarah couldn't be sure, but
the sudden thump in her chest suggested that her hunch – that the
sofa wasn't actually a sofa but a human body – was closer to the truth
than she wanted to acknowledge. She hustled Nick through the main
entrance and up the stairs. Tina opened the door, perhaps surprised
they had been so tardy in returning, perhaps that they had returned
at all.

'You saw something,' she said, a look of triumph on her face. 'The
locks. Fasten them.' And then: 'Our world is changing.'

I work in the media. Press and publicity for a TV channel based in
Victoria. I sweet-talk journalists into doing features on programmes
or people in programmes that we produce. It's an interesting job, an
involving job, and I'm pretty busy most of the week. It's a good press
office. I've made good friends there, had a few lovers, gone to some
blinding parties. I know my work and my people. I'm aware of
change. And change has happened.

It was just over a week ago. I got to work and nipped down to the
canteen to get my breakfast muffin – honey and oats – as always, and
a grande latte. I flirted with Kenny on the till – he's this extremely
friendly, extremely camp Irish guy, whippet lean, very chatty with
everyone – and I was in good spirits as I walked back past the
reception desk to the lifts. As usual, I call a lift and a little huddle of
colleagues unknown to me gathers behind. There are a lot of offices,
a lot of employees. I smile at the occasional face that's familiar to me.
Smiling. I used to smile a lot. I didn't always look like this. Nick will
vouch for me.

In the lift, it's so lazy really, I'm based just a couple of floors up
and the stairs are quicker most of the time. But I've got my coffee and
my muffin and a heavy shoulder bag and so I get in the lift and I'm
pressed up against the glass wall and I can look into the street – it's
one of those trendy Richard Rogers buildings, all open, glass and steel
– and we're swooping up and I can see people in the street and
something's changed. People aren't moving the way I remember they
moved. I don't recognise the scene spreading out in front of me. It's
the same view I've taken in pretty much every day of my time there,
six years and counting, but this particular morning, bam, I don't get
it. It's like one of those child's games, spot the difference, two pictures
of the same thing next to each other, but there have been some
changes made to one of them, and you stare at it for a while until they
make themselves known to you. This was just like that.

I stay in the lift even though it opens on my floor. I stay in it long
after the others have got out, and I've descended to the ground floor
again. I must go up and down ten times in that lift, trying to pinpoint
what's wrong with the picture. My coffee goes cold.

I finally get out of the lift convinced that the main road is narrower
and, somehow, the sky is ... closer than it used to be. It must be
something as weird as that to account for so many people moving in
such a strangely fluid manner. It's as if they don't have bones. They
glide along. And they look from side to side with big eyes and oiled
movement ... until somebody walks by them and their heads follow
the path of the other in these horrible, horrible jerky motions.

(Yes, yes, that's right, that's what we saw too, isn't it, Nick?)

It's like somebody pretending to be a spider, or one of those awful
fucking preying mantises. It's camouflage. You see a stick insect on a
branch and you think, clever, but now I can see it, it's a stick insect.
It's something pretending to be something else. It doesn't fool you
any more. And now I've seen these people, these strange people, I
won't be knocked off kilter again. They're the image in those stereograms
when it finally swims out of the background mess. You can't
not see it any more.

In the office I was pretty shaken up. I was trying to process what
I'd seen. One of the bods in the stills department, new guy, starting
that morning, came and introduced himself. I didn't hear him. I was
just watching his lips move, and trying not to declare my revulsion at
seeing his little red hole of a mouth, ringed with teeth that were too
white, and the horrible noise coming out of it. He seemed too clean all
of a sudden. Too polished. I knew that was a part of the strangeness.
He looked like the 'after' picture in those dental adverts for tooth
whitening. There wasn't a hair out of place. His breath had no odour,
good or bad. His skin was so perfect it was almost translucent. It was
firm on his face. I felt as though, if I could close my eyes and touch it,
it would be like caressing a baby's cheek. I remember sitting there
thinking, he won't have a penis, it's too awkward, too ugly. He'll be
smooth down there, like an Action Man doll.

A guy, Keith, I work with leaned over and offered him a muffin.
The new guy took it and ate it quickly, and everything about what he
was doing was wrong. He didn't say anything else; he just ate. It was
like watching a bad actor doing a passable job on a role. Something
you couldn't describe was getting in the way of your acceptance.

He went away, and Keith pulled a face, which reassured me that I
wasn't just being paranoid. I got up and followed him part of the way
to his little booth. I watched him regurgitate the muffin into a plastic
bag, which he tied off and stuck in the bin. Then he sat in front of his
monitor and placed his hands on the keyboard and he didn't do
anything. He didn't fucking move. If he had an OFF switch, someone
had flicked it.

I wanted to grab my bag then and leave. I was so scared I was in
danger of blacking out. I was so scared I peed myself a little bit. It
just shocked out of me. I went back to my desk and pretended to be
busy. I picked up the phone and started doodling on a pad. Everyone
in the office was sitting at their workstations making the right
motions but not doing any work. You've seen extras in films set in the
office, or in adverts about finance. You see them talking into their
headsets and you know all they're saying is any old nonsense that
comes into their heads. The odd smile. The occasional nod. It's all
rhubarb. I was sitting in the middle of a hoax, and I wondered, who
is this all for? Is it me? And I couldn't believe that there weren't more
like me. People who weren't, well, glass.

Glass that had somehow learned to move.

I took my bag, and got hold of my letter opener in my other hand,
and – this is the hardest thing I've ever done – moved off through the
office, feeling the office change behind me. I knew they were all
turning to watch me go. I could hear the skin of their necks shushing
against their shirt collars. I had this awful feeling that I wasn't going
to get out. I would be thrown into an office and turned to glass
myself. But nothing happened. I wanted to tell Keith to get out, but I
didn't know if he was like them, and whether if I said something he'd
sound the alarm.

I walked the corridor that bridges the open reception area beneath
me. I saw a security guard leaning over the face of one of the receptionists,
his back convulsing. When she moved back into view, she was
wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. I saw a commissioning
editor in his private office closing the blinds as he reached into his top
drawer for what looked like a wax model of a baby. I was having
trouble breathing by the time I got to the other wing of the building,
and hid in a cubicle in the toilets, took some Ventolin. Someone came
in and sat in the cubicle next to me. I heard awful sounds. It sounded
like someone tearing great fistfuls of hair out of a head.