Конрад Уильямс - One

Cold was creeping through the blanket and the fleece of his coat into his legs. Jane stopped writing and stood up, wishing for a flask of something hot. He did some exercises, unhappy with how quickly he grew tired and breathless. He made himself cough into his fist and inspected his sputum. Each time he did this he was braced for flecks of blood but they never came. His breath smelled rotten, though, and he knew this was due to some failure in his teeth, the decay he had felt working its way through his mouth for years. As for the rest of him, sometimes when he moved he caught a whiff of how ripe his flesh was, but that was true of everybody. Washing was a luxury. Sometimes he took cold showers if he could find a working spigot and a compliant pump. Mostly he went without. His hair hung in damp ropes. He’d tried to cut it once, but there was no point. You felt you could never get dry. Dirt was ingrained in the contours of your fingers, these fingers that had once touched the pulse in the wrist of a sleeping child. Your hands became maps of all the places you’d been, digging through the filth to get to something or get away from it. You lost sight of who you were and where you came from. You failed to recognise things and they began to matter less.

He tended to keep many of his clothes on these days; he had enough to worry about without the shock of his own emaciation. Resources among the Shaded were growing scarce; soon they would not be able to offer any kind of reward for this work. He foresaw a future of blank pages. Hunger eventually blotted out all other thought. You couldn’t write if you were going blind with the need for sustenance.

Jane knew he was following a dark path with all this negativity. He could see where it was leading him. It was a case of how far he was likely to travel. How much distance was there between forgoing basic hygiene and swallowing the pill of Stanley’s death?

He spent three hours on the rooftop of the ENO building – hoping that Aidan might stop by this way – before the rain came back and he spotted the tiger, drifting like smoke out of Northumberland Avenue. He saw it pad across to Canada House, where it sat and washed its paws, gazing at its frozen brethren. Jane clenched his teeth and felt the gums in his jaw shift like a thumb pressed into sponge. He delved for positive images, the bright, shiny packages wrapped up with string that he turned to when it seemed he must go under. He wanted to believe that he always felt like this during Library duty; not because of the bad memories that it necessarily forced you to dredge up, but because it always presaged the worst job he had ever had. Plodding through frigid, alien fathoms in utter darkness in order to weld closed any number of fatigue cracks was a doddle compared to incineration duty.

But nothing he could fasten on, bar Stanley, ever repelled the misery. Peacock feathers found under a slurry of ash and black slush in Holland Park. A tray of glittering butterflies rescued intact from the looted squalor of the Natural History Museum. A can of Guinness discovered inside one thigh-high PVC boot in a BDSM dungeon in Kentish Town. It was all just a different kind of dust. It was as if, resorting to his son – every day, every hour, every other minute – was diminishing him. He was using Stanley up, like a pencil. There was nothing but a stub left, it seemed. He dreamed sometimes of his boy and he appeared so tired, so exhausted by his father’s demands that every rise of his ribcage had to be his last.

He watched the tiger slowly, almost lazily, pull itself on to all fours once more. He saw the great head swing his way, making hesitant curlicues as it sniffed the air, the jaws hanging open to aid its sense of smell. The wind was blowing up from the Thames today; his scent was being pushed in a different direction. Still, it terrified Jane to see the muscled hulk of three hundred pounds of big cat – or whatever filled the space it had once owned – working hard to draw Jane’s taste into its flavour chambers, pausing as if unsure of what the weather was telling it.

The tiger slunk away, the frayed rope of its tail trailing behind it.

Jane exhaled slowly and rubbed his face with his hands. The smell of ink and soil and dust. He pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes for so long that he saw motes of colour spawn from the black. It reminded him of the weird light show he had seen all those years ago, standing at the bottom of the sea.

Jane opened his eyes. He blinked, but everything was blurred. Eventually, the soft edges regained their shape, except for one. Stopper sat next to him. Jane stared at his old friend, leaning forward over his forearms, which had withered to useless air-dried limbs, like Parma hams carved back to bone. Severed tendons had caused his hands to contract into famished fists. Stopper’s face had been sucked clean by marine life. There was little left to distinguish him. The perished yellow Henrikson Subsea logo clung to the tatters of his jacket; it could be nobody else. He smiled, or grimaced, and black water drizzled from between his teeth. Something churned in the wet black reaches of his left eye socket, something with cilia. Something that made hard little skritting noises as it scraped parts of itself against Stopper’s orbit.

‘He warn’t delivered t’me,’ Stopper managed, and his voice was little more than the hiss of fossil-fuel ghosts released from ancient pockets in the seabed. His hair danced as if slowly animated by deep water. ‘None of your kin fell t’me. S’all right, big man. S’all righhhh.’

Jane leant into his old friend, feeling his tears come. He wondered if he would ever cry himself dry, if that were at all possible. Stopper threatened to topple over, but managed to right himself. Jane smelled marine, deep water, the high ruin of matter that has fermented to oil over millennia. There was beauty in it, Jane supposed, as he felt the familiar weariness drag him down. You could be the ugliest, nastiest, most miserable piece of shit known to man, but if you had a beating heart there was always a chance you’d turn into a diamond after a million years. Everyone was composed of stardust, the random, immeasurable collision of atoms. We’d return to it again one day. He’d be reunited with Stanley then, that was for sure.

He fell asleep to that thought and woke up, seemingly seconds later, more refreshed than he had been for months. He gazed down at the spot where Stopper had been sitting and saw a thin film of oil on the waterproof surface of the roof, a rainbow shifting through it.

His head was thumping; he remembered to breathe.

Stupid, though. A stupid thing to do, to fall asleep on duty. He was glad of the rifle as he crept down through the opera house, pausing at the mouth of the auditorium as if there had been some minuscule sound, that just yards away in the vast black space were hundreds of people in the slashed, scorched seats, the wings and the gods, staring back at him in silence, waiting for the heavy velvet curtains to peel open and reveal the future.

He stepped, shaking, on to Saint Martin’s Place. The dark was something almost solid between the buildings; moving through it was slow business. It clung to the lungs like tar. His head was craned out in front of him; he strained for any and every sound. All he could think was orange . He tried to recall the safe houses nearby but drew blanks at every remembered alley and aisle on the A–Z . There would be help in his bible if only he had a flame to read it by.

Cautiously, for want of any better idea, and in need to keep moving, Jane walked south. He might as well deliver the recent pages of his letter to the safeboxes at the hotel. He tried to remember which roads he was walking along, knowing that to get lost at night was to feed yourself to the Skinners. As long as he continued in this direction he would hit the water, and then things would become a little easier.