Конрад Уильямс - One

The shape of the wind changed. He heard screams on the edge of it, carried from the other end of the airfield, beyond Terminal 5. They were women’s screams. Pained, almost bestial. Howling. Something in the sound made him want to go to them.

He found himself striding across the tarmac, and it was only when the screams began to assault his ears without the sonically softening buffer of the wind that he hesitated. A thin red light trembled on the horizon, staining the lowest part of the sky. He could hear something else now, but his mind would not allow him to identify what it was. Know this and you shut down for good. There is no coming back from something so dark.

Jane turned and fled.

The journey back to the city centre was achieved in a fug of disgust and regret and pain. Despite the shutters coming down in his mind the previous night, Jane kept trying to tease them open. It was like a facial scab. Your fingers kept gravitating towards it without you realising. The pain in his foot helped. He had had to cut his bootlaces in the morning, the flesh having swollen during a night spent wrapped around his beloved rifle in a crumpled heap of groaning containers that had been blasted into the garden of a house backing onto the Longford river, just south of the airport. He’d wrapped a triangular bandage around the swelling, making sure he could still waggle his toes when it was tied off. He ate a packet of nuts and spat bloodily into the earth. His teeth felt as stable as decorations pushed into a cake. Two of them were loose, an incisor and a pre-molar. His gums bled at the slightest pressure. If he ran his tongue across his teeth he’d be spitting red for a good twenty minutes. The menace in the air was catching up with him after all this time. He wondered, if Becky could get any of her X-ray machinery to work, if his body would be riddled with black stains.

He walked towards the suggestion of the sun as it dawned behind the thicket of bronze permacloud. He barely registered the topography as it altered around him. He was shivering, despite his thick waterproofs.

East Bedfont. North Feltham. Spring Grove. Brentford. Kew. Turnham Green. Shepherd’s Bush.

Jane felt at one point as if he was not so much walking towards as being sucked into his destination. London was a plughole drawing anything down that was not tethered fast. When the sawtooth architecture at the river’s edge emerged it reminded him of nothing other than the crippled shape of his own jaws. He didn’t feel as if he had returned or arrived. He didn’t feel at home. It wasn’t places that did that for you, he understood now, way, way too late. It was people.

It was getting dark. The sun had leapt over him and was at his back now, sinking into that part of the country that was a red rim of terror in the pit of his thoughts. The howling of the women. He thought he could never have felt anything but shock for a woman who screamed like that, but he had smiled into the face of one, once, long ago. He had kissed it, gently brushed away the damp hair that latticed it, whispered his love to it.

Her hand had gripped his so hard that they were like white ice statues. She didn’t have the spit to keep her lips dry. They were stuck to her bared teeth, cracking, a pain smile. Eyes slitted, turned to him, confused, afraid. He’d squeezed her hand as hard as she had gripped his and urged her on, told her how amazing she was, how much he loved her. Stanley had burst from her with the cord wrapped around his neck, a meconium-streaked shock. Jane had reared back at the violence and mess of it all. For one brittle second he feared his son and resented him for what he had done to his wife. But it all dissolved into concern and love. Love so pure and deep that it seemed to make a mockery of what he felt for Cherry.

He made it back to Spitalfields in a gloom so dense he thought he must get lost. He forced his way through the razor-wire barricades and hammered on the door. Nobody came. He tried the handle and the door opened. Mothballs and soup. A smell of age. ‘Becky?’

No reply. He shrugged the rifle from his shoulder and followed its muzzle into the shop. He closed the door behind him. He checked each room but could find no Skinners, no evidence of a struggle or a death. Becky was gone.

He went back outside and repositioned the razor wire. He locked and bolted the door and pressed his head against it. Safe now, for a while. Darling, I’m home . He could feel an ache pulsing behind his skull, transmitting through to the wood, almost knocking at it. A cough was hatching in his chest. Cold had reached deep into him. What was it Stopper used to say? I feel like seven different kinds of shite all knocked into a one-shite thimble . He moved through to Plessey’s workshop, thinking of listening to some broadcasts, but the crystal radio was gone. He couldn’t find it in any drawer or filing cabinet. He thought about where it might be; who might have taken it. He wished Becky was around. He missed her terribly.

Jane lit candles and put a flame to the wood stove in Plessey’s cosy little kitchenette. There was a water butt labelled Lavage at the heavily barred fire escape at the back of the shop. He knocked his hip against it, listened. Plenty. He carried countless pans of water to the stove and to the bath. When it was full and steaming, Jane undressed, closing his eyes against the dips and hollows and shadows, and slid into the water. He shampooed his hair and clipped his fingernails. He massaged the blood back into his toes. When he got out, the bath revealed a tidemark of dark grey scum. He towelled himself dry in front of the warm stove. He cut his hair with a pair of sharpish barber’s scissors from one of Plessey’s chests of wonders and shaved, carefully, with a cut-throat razor and some rose-scented cream whisked onto his bristles with a shaving brush made from badger hair.

He ate warm chicken soup with stale water biscuits crumbled into it. He sat in Plessey’s leather armchair in a towelling bathrobe sipping cognac, his other hand on the stock of the rifle lying across his lap. He felt reborn. When he slept, he dreamed of a black lake, still and deep, surrounded by black mountains and a sky bluing at its edges, brimful of stars. He dreamed of Cherry’s body, the way it had been when they met, not towards the end when she refused to be naked in the same room as him. She had been slender, almost athletic. She liked to squeeze her breasts when he made love to her. It turned him on to see her so thrilled by her own body. He dreamed of her now, beneath him, moving to his rhythm, her fingers snagging and tickling at her nipples. She looked up into his eyes and there was nothing there. No recognition. No love. No sense of who she was herself. He was looking up at himself through her eyes. No sweat, no expression of mounting excitement. They both stopped fucking. They both deflated, like rubber dolls under a knife. There was nothing to them whatsoever.

Knocking at the door.

Jane wakened feeling drowsy and unfamiliar. He was hot. He wiped sweat from his brow. The room was baking. He got up from the armchair and slopped cognac over the bathrobe. He got his finger behind the trigger of the rifle, the butt under his armpit, and scurried to the door, the muzzle of the gun pointing at the ground by his foot. He held his breath and placed his ear to the door. He heard something shuffling outside. He heard a muttered oath and knew this was no Skinner.

‘Who is it?’ he called.

‘It’s Simmonds.’

He opened the door a crack and her lachrymose expression dipped into view.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘You’ve scrubbed up well,’ she said. ‘Hot date?’

He waited, staring at her.

‘We’re on the move,’ she said.

‘What? Where? How do you mean?’