‘I can’t tell you everything, but there’s this secret part of London hardly anybody knows is there. I’ve had a gang of villains after me, who want an introduction to this place, and … Oh. Hang on.’

  The pips were sounding, so he forced more coins into the slot before resuming.

  ‘What I’ve done, I’ve blundered into something that’s important, and I’m trying to blunder my way out again. I’m just about to go across to Brixton, where I’m told there’s this chap who could help me. Wynne Road’s where he lives. You’ll laugh, but it’s one of the books that I had in my Oxydol box that’s kicked all this off. I’ve got to get it back to where it came from, in this, well, this different part of London that I said about. I know this all sounds crackers, but if I can meet up with you soon, I’ll tell you the whole story then. I just need somebody who’s got their head screwed on, to talk it over with. I might be through the worst of it by Friday, so I could call into Bond’s again when you were on your lunch break, if that sounds alright?’

  ‘Dennis, it sounds absolutely bloody fascinating, mate. I always knew that you had hidden depths, and now here you are on the run from criminals and telling me about some terribly exclusive part of London, curtained off from public scrutiny. Right up my street! Much as I hate to say this to a scruffy Bolshevik such as yourself, I’m quite impressed, young Knuckleyard. Make that very impressed. You’ve got an enviable capacity for getting yourself into interesting trouble, and I’m going to be all ears on Friday. Shall we say just after one o’clock?’

  Relieved, Dennis had time to babble his agreement, gratitude and rushed farewells before the pips sounded again and he replaced the plastic barbell in its cradle. As he shouldered open the phone box’s heavy door to step once more into the morning shout of Spitalfields, he realised that he felt OK, despite the bruisers, books and bedlam visions. The brief chat with Clive had put him into a much better frame of mind. It wasn’t so much that the call had made him any safer – Clive’s involvement wasn’t going to stop somebody shooting Dennis in an alleyway – but more that Clive had been impressed by what was going on. That meant a lot. Dennis didn’t impress people very often, and especially not people he looked up to. The young barrister’s admiring tone made Dennis’s ordeal seem more like an adventure; an outlandish string of anecdotes he could show off to Clive when they met up, the day after tomorrow. Greatly reinvigorated, he strode through the dirty sunlit bustle of Commercial Street, heading for Aldgate and Tower Bridge, seeking the wet wound of the Thames.

  The sun went in as Dennis reached the iron river’s further side, reminding him and everybody else that it was still October, and that any sheen of optimism could be suddenly withdrawn by no more than a whim of meteorology. He hoofed it all the way to Elephant and Castle – a corruption of Infanta de Castile, if he remembered right – then got the bus down Kennington Park Road and into Brixton.

  Some distance along the Brixton Road he thought he spotted Wynne Road running off from the main artery, out through the streaky porthole that he’d rubbed in the bus window’s condensation with his coat sleeve. Snatching up his carrier bag, he hurried from his seat to the rear platform, but the juddering vehicle did not present an opportunity for Dennis to alight until it slowed for its next stop, at least a quarter-mile past his intended destination. He walked back up the dejected thoroughfare to where he might have seen the turning, gathering his first impressions of the famously dilapidated district as he went. With grimy buildings clinging to existence beside pulverised expanses that had given up the struggle, it looked pretty much the same to him as every other part of London; no worse and no better. He supposed that bombs were, unsurprisingly, great levellers.

  Nor did the Brixton faces he encountered seem more destitute or more dispirited than those found in the streets of Shoreditch. Flowing past him on the cracked grey pavement were the same aggrieved young husbands who’d been demobbed into dustmen, the same stout old widows who’d lost family in two world wars and wore their burst blood vessels like a cheaper rouge; the mouths all creased by poverty, the eyes all bloody-minded in their fierce determination to get through it. Looking at the almost monochrome parade about him, it occurred to Dennis that the English coped with deprivation by reworking misery into a ragged-arse mythology. They shared a fag with Gracie Fields on Mother Kelly’s doorstep or they dossed with Flanagan and Allen underneath the arches. They all lived in songs, in radio catchphrases, in skits from the few films they’d seen, and there they found a sentimental heroism that might keep them warm through this long economic winter. With an application of ferocious will, they turned their itchy coats to ermine.

  The one novelty he sighted, something that he’d never seen in Shoreditch, was a pair of coloured chaps stood talking by a bombsite just past Stockwell Road, most probably a couple of the ones who had come over from Jamaica on that boat, three or four months ago. He felt a bit let down, childishly disappointed by their failure to be exotic. Obviously, he hadn’t been expecting the cartoon theatrics of a Monolulu, but he’d thought his first West Indians would be more – he didn’t know – more tropical or something in their dress and their demeanour, throwing back their heads to laugh and wearing bright fruit-salad tunics. Instead, the two men were clad in what was practically Great Britain’s national costume: white shirts under poorly fitting black suits from a second-hand shop; shoes last worn by somebody’s dead uncle. Their discourse was urgent, and they both, if anything, looked cold and worried. Nobody was laughing.

  Wynne Road, just a little further up, turned out to be a sorry corridor of terrace houses that was at least mercifully brief if going door to door proved necessary. Luckily, it didn’t: Dennis asked a passing matron with a shopping basket full of tripe and trotters if she’d heard about an artist living somewhere in the street, at which she gave a throaty laugh of recognition.

  ‘Oh, you’re looking for old Spare, then, are yer? ’e’s with Millie Pain at number five. You want to watch out he don’t turn you into summat nasty with ’is voodoo and what have yer. ’e’s a proper warlock – or what’s left o’ one, at any rate. Don’t tell ’im as I said that.’

  Evidently cheered by their exchange, the offal-bearing woman was still bubbling with phlegmy chuckles as she went on with her outing, leaving Dennis to find number five amongst the battered residences listing there beneath a blank white sky.

  Despite stiff competition, it was easily the most defeated-looking dwelling in the terrace, with slates missing from its roof and a residual dampness in the lower courses of its brickwork. The ill-fitting door and window frames suggested ongoing subsidence, while the paving slabs outside were partially concealed by pigeon shit in constellated starbursts and, as well, by three dishevelled cats. They paced, and mewed in alternating tones of pleading and complaint, emaciated strays with matted tails or tattered ears. Dennis was forced to lean across these scabby sentinels in order to knock on the door, and when a tall and pallid woman answered, the malnourished trio flowed into the house around her ankles, only giving way to a quartet of other felines who were coming through the portal in the opposite direction. One of these escapees, a grotesquely wrinkled grey thing with sour lemon eyes, was possibly the ugliest living creature that he’d ever seen. Seemingly unconcerned by the flea-bitten tide about her slippered feet, the lanky female stared at Dennis slightly too long before saying, ‘Yes?’

  She seemed to be in her late fifties, her eyes big and watery, her chin small and receding, although probably a pretty enough woman in her day. She wore what looked like a long picnic frock from an entirely different era, with a much-darned navy cardigan on top of it and a loose noose of several beaded necklaces descending to her waist. There was a rumour of pink lipstick circling the mouth and absolute indifference in the glistening oyster eyes. Intimidated, Dennis swallowed hard.

  ‘Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for an artist chap called Austin Spare. I wondered if—’

  She shook her grey bob almost imperceptibly, her features still immobile.

  ‘I’m afraid that Mr Spare isn’t receiving any visitors at present.’

  Seeing that she was about to close the poorly hanging door, he blurted desperately that the reclusive artist had been recommended to him by Prince Monolulu, at whose name the woman’s slightly hyperthyroid eyes rolled heavenward. She exhaled down her nose and made a tutting noise. Returning a by-now-resigned gaze to her gawky caller, she said, ‘Please wait here’ in an annoyed tone, before drifting off over the hallway’s worn-out carpeting towards the house’s rear. Reaching the passage’s far end, she turned a corner and was out of sight – albeit still jarringly audible – as she shouted to someone, in a different voice to the polite delivery she’d used with Dennis.

  ‘Awstin? Awstin, there’s a feller here to see yer.’

  The response was gravelly and muffled. It was hard to tell where it was coming from.

  ‘Well, tell ’im I’m not ’ere.’

  ‘He says that Monolulu sent him.’

  An extended pause.

  ‘Ah, fuck. I s’pose you better send ’im down, then. Bloody Monolulu.’

  Stepping once more into view, the woman glided back along the shadow-crowded passage, drooping hoops of necklace rattling in the half-light. ‘Mr Spare says that he’ll entertain you in his studio. It’s up the hallway’s other end, then downstairs on your right.’ She nodded her clearly unwanted guest inside and then, while he was briefly turned away to pull the front door shut behind him, seemingly evaporated with a fading clink and clatter into the surrounding murk. Alone in empty silence, Dennis made his way up the benighted channel, nostrils flinching at the heavy and dispiriting perfume of damp. This wasn’t the accommodation where he’d pictured a magician living, or an artist, or, well, anybody really. At the hall’s furthest extremity, from a cramped alcove to the right, what seemed to be a cellar door hung halfway open on to brick-and-mortar steps, descending into seeping artificial brightness. Having no alternative, he climbed down apprehensively into the underworld, uncertain of his footing, on the chipped stairs or in any other sense.

  Reaching the bottom, shoulders zebra-striped by powdered whitewash from the stairway walls, he was stopped in his tracks by the impossible minuteness of the subterranean realm that waited for him: barely six-foot square, it was a cube of compressed energy and cold air, buried at the claustrophobic centre of the world. A tiny cellar window in the far wall had been boarded up, placing the burden of illumination on a sixty-watt bulb, dangling and bare, that drizzled only a thin sediment of light. The failing radiance, browning like old fruit or heirloom photographs, settled in sepia dust upon the room’s two chairs, both piled with newspapers; upon a roughed-up chest with all its drawers jammed open by protruding tins and implements; upon the squirming undergrowth of imagery propped up against the sides of the enclosure, glowering from canvas, card or radio circuit board; upon a nude stone floor that swam with cats; upon the spindly easel where the man was standing.

  With his back towards the cellar steps, the artist was positioned only inches from the tacked-up paper portrait he was worrying with a pastel crayon, perhaps leaning in to see his picture adequately in the useless light, or else without the floor space to step back. He wore an indoor raincoat, old shoes that were separating slowly into their component parts, his hair exploding out in grey parabolas of smoke as if from a direct hit by a V-bomb. Neither sturdy nor yet tall – possibly five-nine or five-ten – he was a figure built from dust who nonetheless filled the small room to bursting with the thrumming pylon of his presence, this before he turned and spoke.

  ‘And ’oo are you, when you’re at ’ome?’

  The voice was granular and crunchy, like a walk through cinders, and the face was unforgettable: cheeks hollowed by rear molars fallen out, rain-coloured skin where he’d not shaven, mouth a crumpled and mistrustful pen stroke and then, underneath a knotted forehead, the twin outlets of a white-hot furnace. A depleted body, dressed in a raincoat, old tweed jacket, jumper, shirt, vest, all its clothes at once, and held up only by magnesium-flare eyes. Caught in these unexpected headlights, Dennis’s mouth closed and opened three or four times before he remembered words.

  ‘I’m Dennis. Dennis Knuckleyard.’

  The vagrant illustrator frowned, then slowly shook his puffball head and issued an amused noise like a draining basin. All around, from the peripheries of vision, imbecilic satyrs writhed against constraining pencil lines and seemed to share the mirth of their progenitor.

  ‘Huh huh huh. More like Knacker’s-yard. Come on in, if you’re comin’, and sit down before I sprain me neck. You ’ave that seat what’s up the end, without the cat on.’

  Making a concerted effort not to wake the sprawling tabby in the other pew, Dennis attempted to comply, but was uncertain what to do about the newsprint heaps that both chairs had in lieu of cushions. There was no room for them on the floor, and in the end he followed the cat’s lead to sit with an autumnal crackle, perched atop a creasing pillow made of Tit-Bits and Reveille. Meanwhile, Austin Spare ignored his new arrival and continued to smudge highlight down one raddled cheek of the old lady whose delineation had been interrupted. After some few minutes, when he had presumably achieved or else abandoned the effect that he was after, the reputed sorcerer tossed his brief stub of Naples Yellow into the prolapsing chest of drawers, turning from the unsteady easel to more thoroughly inspect his visitor.

  ‘So, Monolulu sent yer, is that right? And what’s that ’eathen bugger saddled me with now? From lookin’ at yer, you’re not ’ere to ’ave yer picture painted. No offence, like.’

  Having failed to understand that Spare was noting his unsuitability for portraiture, Dennis assured the splattered revenant that no offence was taken, and proceeded to explain as best he could about his plight, which was to say not very well at all. He’d got as far as Hampole’s book and Flabby Harrison before the artist said, ‘Oh, dear,’ and scooped the semi-conscious cat unceremoniously on to the floor, so he could sit down on the stacked newspapers in the chair next to his new acquaintance. From below a hanging-garden brow, phosphorous lanterns swung in Dennis’s direction.

  ‘I know what this is in aid of. You’ve tripped over the Great When, is that the long and short of it? You’ve ’ad a scrap with the Theoria.’

  Through dim air weighted with the smell of cats and turpentine, under the gaze of viscous travesties, Dennis conveyed incomprehension via the medium of a protracted, noisy fidgeting.

  ‘I don’t know what that is.’

  The fleapit visionary bobbed a cloven chin.

  ‘What, the Theoria? Well, it’s a posh word, that. Ecclesiastical. The divine essence of a thing, as near as I can make out, like with Plato and ’is world of ideal forms. It don’t much matter what you call it. You’ve been in the other London, ain’t yer?’ Dennis nodded miserably, a small boy owning up to trespass on forbidden wasteland. Unsurprised, Spare grimaced and went on. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I thought as much. And ’ow old are yer? Seventeen, eighteen? That’s no age to get mixed up in all this palaver, is it? Sixteen, I was, when I got a gander at the Beauty o’ Riots, wadin’ through a punch-up outside Newgate. I don’t think I’ve been right since.’

  Distracted by the ambient filigree of breasts and melting animals cavorting at the corners of his eyes, Dennis tried hard to follow what was being said to him.

  ‘But, I mean, “Beauty of Riots”, what’s that? And all this other London place, how can it even be there? I’ve got no idea what’s happening. It’s like everything’s gone crackers since the war.’

  The painter reached one hand down and allowed the displaced cat to grind her forehead on his varicoloured fingers. He looked pensive, lips pushed out and smouldering brow knitted, all his features crammed in a compressed band halfway up his face.

  ‘Well, I’m not disagreein’ with yer, but the other London, that was crackers long before the war. Crackers before the Romans, that was. It’s a Symbolist substratum, as yer might say, what our London’s standin’ on. The ol’ Beauty o’ Riots, she’s what they call one of its Arcana, one o’ the big symbols what ’ang out in that neck o’ the woods. Y’see, that world, it’s realer than the one what we’re in. Our world’s just a shadow next to that, up on the wall o’ Plato’s cave. If this London is what they call the Smoke, then that place is the Fire, you follow me? This ’ere is echo, and that there is music.’

  Suddenly, as if he’d thought of something, the lead-pencil conjuror abandoned the ingratiating feline and sat upright, tilting his fog-shrouded cranium back away from Dennis, wanting to observe his sitter from a few more inches’ distance. The incendiary eyes were narrowed to a tighter beam as Spare considered the unravelled young man’s likely narrative.

  ‘’ang on – you say this ’arrison bloke, ’e ’ad ’is digs up in Berwick Street? You didn’t … nah. You didn’t end up in Soho Entire for your first visit, did yer? All banana-skin tarantulas and wooden barrows with ’ands on their ’andles? You poor bleeder. ’ow did you get out o’ there without a postbox ’avin’ all yer fingers?’

  Although still scared witless by its subject matter, Dennis was surprised to find himself enjoying the extraordinary basement conversation. Talking to somebody who took all this business in their stride, as if it were just something that occasionally happened in the normal run of things, was an incredible relief, and one he hadn’t known how much he’d needed. He ventured a rueful smile and gestured to the healing cut above his eye.

  ‘I got this off a silver-paper dragonfly, but I expect it could have been a good sight worse. No, what it was, I had a stroke of luck. This chap I’ve seen about, Maurice, he charged in, fast as anything, and pulled me out before the pavement alligators swallowed me.’

  A heavy wagon passed along Wynne Road outside, so that the cellar rumbled in a sympathetic drum roll. Spare let out a bark of laughter.