Sam Thompson - Communion Town

* * *

I lost my balance, teetered on a high catwalk for one long gasp, and fell. The stained concrete flung itself at my eyes, and I woke, the springs of the mattress clanking. Red figures on the clock told me I had slept longer than usual. Each dawn now I returned to my lodgings worn out by the lurid show in my skull: the bloody man striding up and down the killing floor and the shadowed figure walking the streets. Continually, now, the two of them met and merged and changed faces until they were one and the same. I turned the idea over and over, finding no flaws and no way to tell whether it was true.

I sat on the edge of the bed, bewildered in the glare from outside, and put on my boots.

Most evenings I went to the Rose Tree for a breakfast of fried bread, baked beans and dark red tea. I always sat in the same booth at the back of the restaurant, far away from the grease-clouded plate-glass window. I felt inconspicuous there. I could rely on most of the customers to ignore me; but sometimes, as I came in, Bill would turn from his usual place at the counter and greet me with a nod.

Bill was an older man with an air of chronic ill health and outmoded bohemianism. His long hair and pointed beard were steel-grey, shot with white, and his face was netted with fine wrinkles. When he climbed off his stool and slid into the booth to talk to me, he moved painfully, pressing one hand into his belly. He wore faded floral shirts and always the same elderly corduroy jacket: I had seen him more than once in the Strangers’ Market buying a flower to thread through the buttonhole of the lapel. And yet he carried himself with the air of a man who had knocked around the city for long enough to know how things work. His pale lips pressed often into a sardonic line, and his china-blue eyes were steady and disbelieving. In our conversations he had dropped enough hints for me to understand that Bill was not his real name, and that in the past he had been a malcontent and a political radical. He implied that he had been suspected of involvement with the activities of the Cynics a score of years ago, and that, even now, he had to exercise caution because the authorities were not yet tired of persecuting him. But the clues he gave about his past all came with a teasing twinkle.

He knew what I did for a living, and although I could not have said how, I felt that our occasional talks had helped me to see what it meant to be a good slaughterman. If I were to confess to anyone it would be to Bill; and now, as he slid into the booth, I knew that I could not remain silent.

‘You can’t go to the police,’ he said, as soon as I had blurted out my secret. He stared across the table for a long time, his eyes narrowed into an unreal distance, like a man performing a calculation in his head. Then he seemed to reach an answer that satisfied him.

‘Someone like you can never go to the police. You realise how it’ll look to them, if you go in saying you’re not sure, but you think you might have guessed the Flâneur’s identity? That you don’t have any evidence? That you think it’s your boss, but you can’t prove anything?’

The crows’ feet deepened at the corners of his eyes.

‘I’ll tell you what happens. At best, you’re sent away with a clip round the ear for wasting their time. More likely, they decide you’re sick in the head and arrest you on suspicion of being the killer yourself.’

He studied me thoughtfully until I looked away.

‘You’re on your own here, my friend,’ he said. ‘They can’t help you any more than I can. You can’t hand this on, and there’s no one else for you to persuade. You’re going about it the wrong way. You’re looking outside for a solution: but this isn’t happening outside.’

I must have looked startled, because he checked himself and spoke more softly.

‘We’re talking about your conscience,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter how: find whatever proof you need, search your memory, watch for clues. But you have to tell yourself a story you can believe. You have to make an account. Then, only then, you’ll be able to do it.’

I didn’t understand, I told him. Do what?

He paused, choosing his words. Eventually, he said:

‘Something good.’

Glory Part was a tangle of alleys, wynds and lanes, all built of sooted bricks, the surfaces opened by oblique evening light. In places the walls pressed so close together that they brushed your shoulders on both sides. The foundations were uneven, so that the pebbled lanes rose and fell in steep and unexpected ways and kept breaking into flights of steps. The houses, built up high because there was nowhere else for them to go, leaned together overhead and often enough they joined, turning streets into tunnels.

I walked, led by Bill’s advice, and kept walking until I found myself standing beneath a lamp post on the Strangers’ Market. It did not look out of the ordinary. If there were signs that anything had happened here, I couldn’t see them. When I looked up, the glass held a searing green squiggle on my retina and the rest of the world was shuttered out. Still, this must be the place to find what I needed. I squatted to examine the cobblestones. The surface of each stone was a mountainscape, and the cracks between contained ecosystems of muck, moss and grit. The closer I looked, the more the simple stones of the Market broke down to a chaos of detail. I crossed to the far wall and, after some minutes, found an iron nail sticking out. It was low down, at my knees. I couldn’t tell what adhered to the rust.

Then a jolt of panic straightened me up with my heart churning. A hand had closed on my shoulder. I turned around, expecting handcuffs, a lynch mob, a knife: but instead a stranger stared up at me, haggard and unshaven, his red-rimmed eyes filled with accusation. In the evening shadows and the low red light his face looked to have been hacked from the same bricks as the walls of the Market. For an instant I felt certain that I was confronting a personification — an envoy of all Glory Part, come to insist that I explain myself. What is your business, his eyes demanded, in the empty Market at sundown? How can you prove that you’re not guilty? My throat tightened, and as he began to speak I fell back from him, away from the lamp post, the nail and the stones, and fled.

As I left the Market, rubbing my head in agitation, I found that nothing had changed inside. The same pictures looped over and over, the two figures swapping places and swapping back again. I had learned nothing: or I had learned that scratching at the surface of the city would not answer my questions. Going back to my lodgings I knew less than before.

I MET THE FLÂNEUR AND LIVED

REVENGE HAVOC FEARED

WHO LET HIM IN

I stood in the shadows at the edge of the loading bay, waiting for Fischer to finish up whatever it was he did in the supervisor’s office at the end of the night. In the dark my pulse was slow. He stepped into the prism of the security lights and locked up the exit behind him. He was wrapped in his overcoat with his face muffled to the cheekbones. I waited until he reached the far side of the tarmac, then followed.

I did not like what I was doing. I could not have justified it if anyone had asked me, and, worse, I suspected that I was violating the principle of the good slaughterman: that when the shift is over he must cease to exist, must pass through the streets as an absence, without intention or desire. But I had to take the risk. It was a decision I had made.

Most of the workers used the shuttle bus into the city centre, where they could catch the early trams home. But not Fischer, who preferred like me to go on foot through Glory Part. We passed through the gate in the plant’s chain-link perimeter. I followed him as if I were tethered to a weight and falling through dark waters. Up ahead his form tremored on the edge of visibility, but I kept pace and did not let him out of my sight. I did not know how sudden or how subtle it would be when it came, the transformation of one figure into the other.