The Unblemished (3 page)

Frustrated by the locked door of the pub, Bo turned to make his
way along High Holborn towards Centre Point where he would be
able to flag a cab to take him home. In the turning of his body
through one hundred and eighty degrees, he lost sense of himself, and
what he was doing. The only glimmer of a clue as to what had
happened in the black hole between Vero's warning and his standing
cow-eyed in the cold was a scrap of speech: Vero's voice, trembling
and low, bordering on beseechment:

... him, him, not me, he's your gateway, him, him ...

For a moment it felt as if, as his body turned, his head had
remained where it was, pressed against the door of the Princess
Louise, in the act of trying to rescue his reality from a night that was
now rapidly passing him by.

* * *

High Holborn was dead. The lights were out on the street and in the
office buildings crowding him. Even the traffic lights were playing
blind. The road itself looked too unstable to have ever carried
vehicles. West, the convergence of Charing Cross Road, Oxford
Street, and Tottenham Court Road seemed unformed, as if the
architect's designs were mathematically awry. Or maybe it was just
the drink that suggested to Bo that the roads didn't quite meet
properly. Everything seemed out of kilter, soft, not right. It had the
flawed authenticity of a film set.

Bo's shoes on the pavement made the only sound. No late buses,
no mini cabs, no squabbles outside fast-food outlets. 'Fuck,' he said.
'Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Three out of ten. See me. Detention.'

He had dreamed of a London like this, fantasised about it, even. A
city sprawled, spread open, for him alone. But not quite like this. Not
a city of shadows and lies, a place that seemed to possess secrets
jealously guarded from him. Not a city where danger lifted off the
concrete like steam. The emptiness of the street, the sheer expanse of
it, confused him. He stopped, unsure how to proceed. There was
something else not right about this. Something so huge that it
was beyond his recognition. His fear, like the city around him, was
woolly, imprecise. He had nothing upon which to hang it.

He slipped down Sutton Row and found Soho Square dead,
the parking spaces that ringed it deserted, the winter trees empty-handed.

What ought to have been Frith Street was yet another dark avenue
without a name. He had walked along here many times, preferring it
to the overcrowded thoroughfares choked by tourists who didn't
know about the rat runs existing off the beaten track, but now any
familiarity had bled away, leaving a street that might as well exist in
any other town or city. It meant nothing to him. Again he paused,
wondering if he was trapped in a nightmare, wondering if there was
some way of jolting himself out of it. It felt too real, too intense.

You have to want it. Really want it. It's the only way I can get ...

Get what? What was it Vero had meant to say?
Get rid of it?

He turned back, determined to find the older man and have it out
with him, persuade him with fists to explain his nonsense. But he
knew that Vero was gone. He could scour the streets from
Bloomsbury to Broadgate and he'd do well to clap eyes on another
soul, let alone Vero. Terror plucked at his insides. Without anyone
around, his sense of time was ruined; it didn't matter what his watch
said. What did the time matter if you were mad? Nothing appeared
real. He sucked in breath to call out for help, but stayed his voice, in
case it sounded nothing like his own.

Home would have to do; he prayed that it was still there. He could
go on the hunt in the morning, if madness's stain persisted, when
daylight and a hangover might focus him.

Head down, he tramped vaguely northwest, knowing that he
would not luck into a night bus, or a taxi, and that the miles to
Shepherd's Bush would have to be ticked off under his own steam.
Not for the first time after a drunken binge in the city centre – when
he didn't have enough cash left over for a cab, or the queues for the
buses were too off-putting – did he wish that Keiko's flat was nearby,
instead of in Kilburn, much further away than his own base. She
would be there now, propped up in bed, maybe, with a bowl of hot
chocolate, Garbage or PJ Harvey or Sneaker Pimps in her earphones,
as she leafed through one of her magazines, or a Graham Greene
novel, or one of the biology textbooks from her UCL course, or
washed her hair clean of the chlorine from her part-time shifts at a
Kensington spa.

It cheered him, thinking of Keiko, while the faceless streets passed
by on either side of him and the cold connived a way through his
clothes. With a jolt he realised that it had been a year ago, and he had
met her in a pub, just like Vero – only the outcome had been far more
pleasing. She had been with a group of her student friends, sitting
around a table slowly accumulating more empty glasses, more bowls
of chips and mayonnaise, more cigarette butts in the ashtray.

He had spotted her early on in the evening and had casually
glanced her way on a number of occasions as the night progressed,
liking the way she didn't seem to possess any of the self-consciousness,
the outspokenness, the air of superiority that her
colleagues were guilty of. They all wore hooded tops and voluminous
jeans, except her: happy in a skirt and loose blouse, looking almost
gypsy-like, a rustic simplicity engendered by the long, straight black
hair, the lack of make-up, the pints of cider. He wondered what her
name was, and spent much of the evening ignoring his workmates,
guessing silently to himself: Maisy, Daisy, Cherry, Millie ... At the
end of the evening, she had approached him as he prepared to leave
and he froze, his jacket halfway across his back, as she said, 'What,
you spend all night staring at me and you're not even going to ask me
out?'

She liked Kubrick and told him there was a showing of
Eyes Wide
Shut
on at the Prince Charles the following night that she'd like to go
to, but not by herself.

'So I'll meet you outside at seven,' she had said.

'Right then,' he had replied, stupidly.

She was twenty, ten years younger than him. 'Keiko,' she said,
when he asked her name. It felt strange on his tongue, and he wasn't
sure he liked it, but at her flat after the film she brought them syrupy
vodka from the freezer in bullet glasses while he sat on the end of her
bed, riffling through her paperbacks. She kissed him, her eyes, the
colour of treacle, open throughout. She smelled so good, the great
shield of hair falling across his face as she sucked his tongue gently
between her small, white teeth, and he thought:
Keiko ... what a
fucking great name.

He rubbed his face, which had grown inflexible under the rip of
the wind, like something semi-defrosted, and thought of Keiko's
fingers as they stroked the same places, that first night. They hadn't
made love, just caressed each other through their clothes, listening to
Ella Fitzgerald singing
Lover Man
on the stereo, watching the light
lose its softness against the white walls of her room.

He checked his mobile phone again, but the signal was still
flatlining. The public phone he found once he'd drifted back on to the
howling wilderness of Oxford Street was similarly unhelpful. 'Wrong.
Three out of ten. Three out of fucking ten. Deee-tention. You
bastard.'

To combat his frustration at not being able to contact Keiko, he
pulled out the battered Ixus camera from his back pocket and fired
off a few shots of the desertion. The flash exploded into the creases
and wrinkles of this near-total dark, serving only to give some definition,
before the flash died and the dark came piling back in around
him.

He was reminded of the controlled panic he had once felt during a
game of hide-and-seek played at some birthday or other in his
infancy. He had climbed into his father's wardrobe, squeezing in
among the heavy twill and tweed jackets on their wooden hangers,
stepping carefully over the old biscuit tins in which Dad kept his stash
of pens, coins and worthless trinkets collected over the years.
There were cricket balls in there. A Stetson. Bottles of unopened
whisky from the 1960s, stuff that he had never seen before. But the
smell of his father's clothing was familiar to him, as was the shape
and solidity of the wardrobe, the feel of its grain under his fingertips,
and the room beyond its closed doors. But the dark was different to
anything he had known before. Nothing like the soft, granular dark
that sifted through his window on summer evenings, or the exciting,
eminently controllable dark under his bedclothes the moment before
he switched on his torch to read his comics. It seemed so ubiquitous,
so complete, that it put him in mind of bitter cough medicine forced
between his teeth. This dark felt as though it might easily fill him up,
an oily meniscus rising to, and then beyond, the Plimsoll line of his
fear. He felt as if he were gagging on it, drowning in darkness.

But here he couldn't simply lean against the doors and stumble out
into fresh air and beloved light. Here he had to swallow against its
ceaseless tide, push on, hope that he, or daylight, outstripped it before
panic pulled him down. He needed coffee, or water, something to
combat the sludgy mess of his head, the mess caused by too many
pints of lager and Rohan Vero's senseless yammering.

Marble Arch loomed on his left, trying its best to lend some kind
of ghostly pallor to the night. Wind channelling through the arch
sounded like the aspiration of a dying man. Beyond it, at the fork
where the Edgware Road and Bayswater Road separated, he saw a
house. At the same time, he felt fluid slide across his palm, as if he
had unwittingly rested it against a slick of juice on a café table. He
lifted his hand and saw that the weals in his skin had become more
pronounced and were weeping lymph and blood. He wiped it off
against his jeans, but the flow was becoming more free with every
step. He couldn't remember how he had wounded himself, but it must
have been during his blackout. One more item tonight on a growing
list of things to piss him off. Pausing to wind his handkerchief around
the puzzling injury, he returned his attention to the house, and
wondered why he had been distracted by it.

The house resembled any other in the area. A spruce Edwardian
semi, approached by a short drive flanked with yew trees. Its
windows contained a grainy blackness, as if the glass was speckled
with dust. Bo took a picture, and the light from the flash jagged
across the surface of the uneven windows. But there was something
out of the ordinary about it. Of all the houses within his field of
vision, this one seemed lived in. Having walked London's freshly
abandoned streets for a good couple of hours now, he was suddenly,
acutely tuned to this isolated spot of ... well, what? It wasn't
warmth. Or light. It went more subtly than that. It was the kind of
attenuation the sky knows just before a snowstorm. An immanence.
Without understanding why, Bo knew that this house had that kind
of suggestive occupancy, in spades.

As if in a dream, he approached the front door, knowing that he
would not need to ring any bell, aware that the door would open for
him, as if he were a key slid into its lock: his teeth a perfect match for
its tumblers. On the stoop, slightly sunken and burnished from a
century of approaching or departing feet, he pressed his damaged
hand against the gloss of the painted wood and the door swung away
from him.

He stared at the black riot that swarmed within its frame. A silent
writhing; it mesmerised him: an ecstasy of chitin.

'The house of flies,' he whispered, and he barely had the words out
before a flotilla of insects lazily detached themselves from the greater
mass and swarmed against his face. Paralysed by fear, he felt the flies
skid greasily across his skin and pour in between his lips with the kind
of excited buzzing that suggested they had waited for nothing but this
moment all their lives.

He came to on a bench in St James's Park, his body so cold that it was
as if he no longer occupied it. Mist unfurled across the lake, turning
the swans and moorhens within it into strange, meandering stains.
Big Ben rang for a quarter to the hour, although which one, Bo
couldn't imagine. It must be close on six, or maybe seven, judging by
the roseate smears trying to penetrate the mist to the east.

Buzzing remained in his ears, although when he had struggled to
his feet and walked to the perimeter of the park, where The Mall was
a ruler placed hard against its edge, he learned that the buzzing was
traffic. He had never felt so happy to see the usual parade of coughing
buses and farting cars. He pulled the stench of their exhausts deep
into his lungs as he crossed the road and angled up Queen's Walk,
further encouraged by the sight of joggers in Green Park, and early morning
shop workers walking to their shifts, sleep still in attendance,
softening their faces.
Where were you all last night?
he wanted
to scream at them.

At the tube station, he paused in his purchase of a single ticket to
Shepherd's Bush and, reluctantly, bought a ticket to Bond Street instead,
one stop away, but more than he could bear to walk. It was warm down
on the Jubilee Line platform, the smells of scorched diesel deepening his
sense of security. He endured the short trip to his destination alone in a
carriage where the lights were too bright, and the patterns on the seats
too complex to settle on for more than a few seconds without causing
his head to pound. He struggled with the nausea that comes from too
much alcohol and no food, and ascended to an Oxford Street that,
already at this hour – ten past seven according to the station clocks –
was alarmingly busy with people.

Again he walked west, following the same road as he had a mere
couple of hours ago, and yet not. This was nothing like the same
road. It held life like a flame in the crucible: it was incontrovertibly
there in the cut-price fashion in the windows of the clothes shops and
the stultified queues for buses and the fruit vendors on their stalls
fighting their losing battle against the coffee shops for freezing
customers.