Sam Thompson - Communion Town

As you neared the tower block, you became aware that something unusual was happening. Most of the time the inhabitants of Sludd’s Liberty went about their errands furtively and alone, but now a group had formed on the dilapidated high street: women and children from the high-rises, men from the bar on the corner, some of the youths who hung around in the recreational areas and a couple of the homeless people who frequented the district. A city watchman was there, too, and the doctor who ran a clinic here once a month. In spite of the group’s diversity, something united them, a recklessness sketched across all the faces. They had clustered around the entrance to a short blind alley that ran down beside a fast-food restaurant, their body language tense.

Drawing closer, you caught sight of what they had cornered. I’m sorry you had to go through that, but I suppose in truth it was a rite of passage into our city more significant than any Agency interview.

Can we try to describe what you saw? We could say it was pale and ragged, that its movements were oddly askew and that you felt sure it was broken or deformed in a way you couldn’t quite identify. We could say that your stomach turned, and you grew dizzy as the urge to stamp the thing out of existence struggled against the need to flee as far away from it as you could get; that you would have done anything rather than let it touch you. But in the end all we can say is that what confronted you was wrong , so intrinsically wrong that just by being there it was committing an outrage against us all. It stared back at you with ghoulish immodesty, clutching a lump of rotten matter which it had fished out of the bins.

I know you recognise what I’m telling you, Ulya, because I’ve had those encounters myself. You might spend a lifetime in the city and never glimpse one, if you’re lucky, but few of us escape the occasional reminder of their presence. They’re bolder in areas like the Liberties, but even in Cento Hill or Lizavet or Rosamunda you can never be sure they won’t slither without warning out of the crevices where they hide. Walking to work you might hear a verminous scrabbling underneath a bridge. Travelling on some deep line of the metro you might catch fleeting sight of an ill-fitting parody of a face, smeared and pallid in the dark beyond the glass.

There are several names for what they are. Some people call them ingrates or the abject, the pharmakoi or the homines sacri . But you might as well call a monster a monster.

For a long moment the people of Sludd’s Liberty confronted the thing. Then someone groaned, and someone else threw a stone that crashed into the bins. The trapped creature giggled and cowered and the watchman finally fumbled at his holster as the others cast around for weapons. But then it leapt forward, and as the crowd recoiled it slipped past with loathsome speed to vanish into the nest of alleys towards the foot of the tower.

After that there was nothing to be done except lay down the stones and sticks, exhale, shake heads and trade reassurances. Everyone was voluble at once, talking and laughing, eager to tell everyone else the story of what they had just witnessed. They turned to you, inviting you to join the conversation.

But you didn’t, did you? That was a pity, I think, because for a person in your position it’s worth taking every chance to become more integrated with the community. Still, you’d had a shock. Under the circumstances, no one could really hold it against you that you ignored their exclamations and hurried away alone, back to the apartment in which you could hear several generations of a large family quarrelling on the other side of the wall.

All right. He’s on your mind, so let’s talk about Nicolas. There’s a strong resemblance there, did you know that? The same dark eyes, always watchful, never telling.

You may find it difficult to believe, but I have a good idea of how it hurt when you realised you had lost him. I wish I could change it, I really do. And I know you can’t help holding the city a bit responsible. You can’t help feeling that if the two of you had never come here then everything would have been different. I just hope you won’t let it colour your impressions unduly — because there’s so much to celebrate about this place, and we mustn’t forget that. Of course sometimes it can seem excessive, too huge, with its fathoms of brick and iron and its endless capacity to churn out litter and exhaust fumes, and too sad, with its sleepers in stairwells and Cynics plotting in respectable suburbs. But that’s the price we pay for the sheer vibrancy that surrounds us. I don’t think I could ever leave.

You know what I like to do? I like to go out running. It’s so easy to lose touch with the simple, indispensable things, just the world around us, but running keeps me in the city in a fundamental way: the texture of the ground under the feet, the flow of the air around the body. I run first thing every morning. You can picture me lacing up my shoes in the dim space of my flat with dawn coming up in the windows. My place is over in Loamside, so I head past shut shops and cafés and across the park, I dodge the gangs of men hauling crates along the streets as the gaining light scribbles colour and texture into the world, and soon I smell brine and I’m on the seafront, buffeted by gusts of wind, with crows blowing around above the mud like cinders off a bonfire.

Actually I’m a serious runner. Not one of your fair-weather joggers, anyway: you’ll find me out there every morning without fail, heatwave or hailstorm or dead of winter. I’m never going to win any marathons but, you know, that doesn’t matter. It means something to me. When I think back, I get the feeling I’ve spent the better part of my life in this city pounding the pavements and river walkways and cycle paths, pushing through the pain barriers, keeping up that steady rhythm on one unending run, looping from Three Liberties to Green Stairs, from Syme Gardens to Glory Part, never stopping, with first light setting the pace.

This morning it was very fine. I ran along the path with the sun breaking through the mist, and I paused to catch my breath, paced up and down, leant on a bench and stretched my calves. Further down the seafront a pair of forms thickened out of the visual hiss and shot by me, one before the other, freewheeling. The light was lifting off the water in nets and chains of dazzle, and a gaff-rigged sloop was cutting around in the bay, jammed in between the elements, gearing the sea and the wind together, taking the strain in its ropes and the hands of its crew …

I’m digressing, aren’t I? You’ll have to forgive me. I think you know what I’m trying to say.

* * *

When someone means that much to you, you don’t have many choices, do you, much as you may pretend you’re free to do as you like. That other person is threaded into you as deep as your own soul — you hold his image in your mind, always, and you hope he keeps an image of you, because in the end that’s the only place where you can live secure and complete. You know that if you were to vanish from the world it would be in that person’s thoughts that you lingered, for a while at least, after you were gone. So I understand what it was like, those times he went off alone into the city without quite explaining his plans. Do you remember the night, less than a month after you arrived, when he came home late with two black eyes and a bloody nose? You were frightened for him but he shrugged off your questions. Already he seemed to be breaking away.

It’s true he didn’t reveal much, but I do feel that I came to know him, in my fashion, in the time we had. Have you noticed how each of us conjures up our own city? You have your secret haunts and private landmarks and favourite short cuts, and I have mine, so as we navigate the streets each of us walks through a world of our own invention. And by following you into your personal city, I can learn a great deal of what I need to know.