Spot held out one palm expectantly and creased his face into the rictus grin of a triumphant salesman. Dennis stared appalled at the extended digits, pink and neatly manicured.

  ‘But … I’ve not got the first idea of how the other London works. I’ve only been there once. You know that I can’t promise to keep my part of the bargain.’

  Both the hand and smile remained in place.

  ‘That’s true. But I can promise to keep my part, which is what you should be focussed on.’

  And so it was that when the heavies ushered Grace back into her own living room some moments later, Dennis Knuckleyard and Jack Spot were both shaking on their private deal, and Knuckleyard alone was simply shaking. The straight razor, folded shut, was restored to its snug interior jacket pocket. Grace seemed unperturbed by her gangster-accompanied interval, and there appeared to be a difference in the manner with which the two henchmen treated her, the way Solly the Turk gestured politely to the sofa’s empty half while indicating that Grace should sit down. Both men, however, were unwaveringly hostile when they looked at Dennis.

  Now convivial, Spot reiterated the arrangements for that night and the next day, before announcing that Sonny the Yank could drive him back to Hyde Park Mansions and his girlfriend Rita in Cabbell Street, while Solly the Turk took the first watch outside. As the three men were leaving, the darkly complexioned thug popped his head back around the door and spoke to Grace.

  ‘When I’m back ’ere tomorrow mornin’, sweetheart, I’ll bring you that pack o’ Craven “A” I promised yer. Sorry about the threats an’ that. You ’ave a good night.’

  Grace allowed the man a little smile of gratitude that was half wince, and with a final hangman’s glare at Dennis, he was gone. Both Dennis and his inconvenienced hostess found that they were shivering, and so Grace lit the paraffin stove and they goggled in mute horror at each other, albeit relatively temperately. Later, Grace would thank him for the autographed Surrealist Racing Forecast Cards and they’d confer before she went off to her bedroom and left Dennis to his largely sleepless sofa, but there in the wake of Spot’s departure they were speechless, tongue-tied with the upsets of the day. They both knew that they had a lot to talk about, not least their individual contributions to the ongoing predicament, but neither one knew where to start. At last, Grace broke the silence by referring to the issue that was hanging heavy on both of their minds.

  ‘Didn’t that bloke look like Glenn Miller?’

  On the Thursday morning they were up and dressed by eight, which was when Jack Spot and his men came back, with everyone except the criminal entrepreneur appearing rough and far from rested. Solly Kankus, who was not remotely Turkish and was in fact Jack Spot’s cousin, was made Grace’s minder for the day while Spot himself popped in and out on bits of other business. Dennis had seen Kankus surreptitiously slip Grace a packet of ten Craven ‘A’ on his arrival, and concluded there were probably worse killers she could be held hostage by. As for his own ordeal, it was decided that Sonny the Yank – now carrying a black cane that looked worryingly like a swordstick – would drive Dennis to his rendezvous with Spare in Brixton. This trip south, borne on a tide of writhing blue exhaust beneath gunmetal heavens, entailed very little in the way of conversation. Dennis learned that Sonny was no more a Yank than Solly was a Turk; that his real name was Bernard Schack; and, yes, it was a swordstick. They’d just pulled in opposite the entrance to Wynne Road when Sonny made this last point clear, as his extremely anxious passenger was climbing from the car: ‘That little Grace girl, she’s worth ten o’ you. You let her down, you don’t turn up this evenin’ with whatever it is Spotty wants, and I solemnly swear that I will run you through from arse to gullet. Now get out.’ When Dennis hunched across the Brixton Road towards his fated destination, he could feel Glenn Miller’s eyes, in cold facsimile, boring into his spine. Grace, it appeared, had made something of an impression.

  All in grey, the crumpled terrace wallowed in a luxury of bleakness as he made his way towards Spare’s doorstep, once more carpeted in cats, although possibly different ones to yesterday’s. Answering Dennis’s half-hearted knock, the tall landlady with the faded-wallpaper demeanour didn’t bother speaking to him, nodding instead to the cellar entrance at the far end of the hallway with a rattle of her beads in lieu of words. Halfway through his mumbled apologies, she disappeared with nothing but the ghost of her cheap scent to say she’d ever been there. Fearing that no good would come of this, fearing that him and Grace would be no more by nightfall, he went down the bare brick steps into the artist’s permanent electric gloaming.

  The impossibly small basement cubicle seemed somehow different to the way it had the day before, and Dennis realised with a start that Spare – halfway across the room and bending over with his back turned – had been tidying up, or at least moving mountains of exquisite refuse into new positions. Previously unseen areas of wall were visible, exposing distressed plaster and some childlike chalk lines, a skewed rectangle perhaps left over from some rough-and-ready geometric calculation, no doubt formerly concealed behind a dune of leering fauns. Spare, shifting a stack of unravelling devils closer to the chest of drawers, looked round with a disarming grin as he heard Dennis’s hesitant tread behind him. There were only four cats, but it seemed like more.

  ‘Ah, Mr Knuckleyard! Good mornin’ to yer. I’m still gettin’ ready, an’ I’m not long out o’ bed. Got a bit plastered with the Grants an’ Gawsworth after you went ’ome last night. Stone me, that Johnny Gawsworth, he can’t ’alf put ’em away. Asked us all back to ’is place when they called last orders, so that ’e could serve us coffee with M. P. Shiel’s ashes in it. Fuck that for a game o’ soldiers. I told ’im that coffee made me fart since my experiences in the First World War, then staggered to me rest. What about you? What kind of night did you ’ave?’

  Which was, obviously, quite a saga. Spare was someone else that Dennis hadn’t told about Jack Spot, and although Spare smiled when he heard about the mobster’s dread of him, the windswept moorland of his features clouded over at the mention of Spot’s deal, with Grace’s life and safety as a bargaining chip. Surrounded as he was by copulating horrors, the magician’s lip curled in distaste.

  ‘Well, that’s unfortunate. Makes things a touch more complicated, but we’ll ’ave to see what we can do. ’ere, tell yer what, open that cupboard door for us so I can put these last few odds and sods away, then we can get on with our business.’

  Eager to comply, Dennis’s hand had closed around the cupboard’s bulbous doorknob before he remembered it had been a looping chalk scrawl halfway up the wobbly rectangle, and that Spare’s cell was much too small to have space for a cupboard, but by then

  the loosely scribbled door is opening away from him on to a sun-speared sunken garden, and there’s summer in his lungs, orchestral thunder in his thudding heart, the soft force of Spare’s hand against Dennis’s back, encouraging him out into the sound and light of a translated morning …

  he stands shaking in a ringed drystone enclosure, set a good ten feet into the earth with soil-and-wood stairs climbing to the surface, nameless flowers erupting from their interstices … overhead, the sky’s a pouring dazzle … the South London oracle steps out into the submerged yard, closing a portal that from this side seems a stoutly timbered affair after him, and looking like a different man … his layers of shabby clothing are the same, and likewise his lined face, but where the pumice smoulder of the painter’s hair had been is now a blinding phosphorous, a film frame trapped in the projector’s gate and melting into empty glare … something apologetic in the artist’s tone … ‘I didn’t mean to take you for a mug. It’s just the crossin’s easier if you’re not thinking of it consciously, blunderin’ through a door that’s not really a door. Bit like me sigils what I do: it only works when it’s not on yer mind’ … Spare walks towards the rough-hewn steps and runs one hand back through his white mane of St Elmo’s fire, self-consciously … Dennis is just now noticing malformed miniature faces, a grotesque precipitation in the weird delineator’s wake … ‘Sorry about me barnet, as well. It’s just ’ow I look when I come ’ere. And take no notice o’ these ugly mushes followin’ me everywhere. They’re atavistic personalities I’m sheddin’. Anyway, come on. The sooner we get started then the sooner we’ll be finished’ … solemnly they mount the steps towards the opening, with Spare ahead and Dennis batting at the imbecile visages showering from the strange old man’s ball-lightning hair …

  ground-level Brixton all around is an engulfing swirl of giant paint in constant flux between distressed brick terraces and garden-suburb fields; between stark monochrome and too ripe technicolour; between disagreeing centuries in furious debate … the skull of sky enclosing everything rains light in the straight downpour of a wrestling match, or Greek theatre … Dennis isn’t vomiting, but still feels far from steady at the creep from turf to tarmac underfoot … he can’t take it all in, doesn’t have room, and Spare’s already wading off impatiently into the sometimes filth and sometimes flowers, leaking a contrail of insufferable countenances … ‘It’s Tower Bridge we’re ’eaded for, or Bran’s Span, what they call it ’ere. Then up to where the ’eads are – an’ I’ve got yer poxy book tucked in me pocket, by the by. After we’re done there, I’ll be turnin’ back, but I’ve sent word to Monolulu, so with any luck ’e’ll meet us and take you the rest o’ the way ’ome. Now, buck up, an’ try not to step on any fairies or inchoate forms’ … they’re trampling roughly north along what might be an exaggerated Brixton Road, where the bucolic hedgerows blossom into Atlantean chip shops, into gibberish-scrawled shutters and unfathomable enterprises before shrivelling back to grass and bushes weighted with gargantuan strawberries … behind them, they leave flickering Deco palladiums, crystal windmills scattering paint-box smudges and the cast-off selves of the disgruntled mystic …

  near as bilious as on his first excursion, Dennis staggers where Spare strides, both men waist-deep in wriggling history, climbing towards Camberwell Immaculate through slip and shimmer from horizon to horizon … there are figures blurring into momentary focus everywhere about: a grey child railing from a soapbox; an untended pram that holds a year-old baby with a painted lightning bolt across its puzzled features … and a great tornado of a creature that storms down the centre of the road through squirming symbol, liquid time, descending on the Burn of Brixton while the artist and the errand boy head past it in the opposite direction … Spare inclines his blinding locks towards the spectacle … ‘That’s one o’ yer Arcana, that is. That’s the Inferred Saracen’ …

  approximately eight feet high, it flaps and wraps and ravels in a ribbon squall of incompatible couture, whip strips of zippered leather overlayering vivid fabrics, baggy denim, orchid skirts and threadbare second-hand suits in a constant flail … in shape and gait it is now he, now she, flowing in gender seamless from one moment to the next, from undulant to angular, from drunken slouch to dance to riotous scatter … intermittently exposed, the being’s skin shifts through the spectra between palest tan and ink-black that is almost blue … likewise its hair, erupting into spheric shrubbery, unpeeling into swaying ropes of tangle and receding to a fine suede in which cryptic runes are somehow etched, or else concealed by pork-pie hat, by knitted yellow-green-red, by full covering with veil and the brief, slanting insolence of a beret … six arms it has, that reprise the continual swim and gesture of a Hindu god, and at its many hands a slippery montage of coloured bottles, paperbacks, gramophone records, knives, guns, Bibles, roll-up cigarettes, nice handbags, oversized American hamburgers … as its self-transforming flutter hurries down the stunning avenue towards the district’s heart, it wears an envelope of wildly various song and music, fragments tuning in and out like random fiddling with the wireless dial … the apparition dwindles on the brilliant thoroughfare, moving away from them, and Dennis glances in bewilderment to Spare for explanation …

  features lit unearthly by his halo mane, the cunning-man of Wynne Road stabs a jutting chin at the increasingly remote southbound phenomenon … ‘It looks and sounds like that because it’s made from bits o’ past an’ bits o’ future, tossed up like an ’istory salad. Been ’ere in the ’igher Town as long as anybody can remember, but these days you see a lot of it ’ere in the Burn o’ Brixton or across in Nottin’ ’ill Sublime, where yer’ve got the West Indians comin’ in. I’ve tried to draw it, but it’s near enough impossible to get the movement, all them bandages o’ different years forever windin’ round it’ … none the wiser, Dennis asks if the impressive being is perhaps the essence of black people, but Spare shakes his head, dislodging a brief rain of dandruff Calibans, and says, ‘Nah. It’s the Inferred Saracen, the essence o’ what white people imagine about black people’ … and they continue with their spectral promenade, and the great distance that they tread slips effortlessly by in a smudged torrent of backyards and miracles as they retrace their passage of the previous evening, up through Taller Walworth and the skirts of Blazing Lambeth, pulsing in the endless noon …

  the Elephant and Castle is replaced by a tremendous sphinx, high as St Paul’s and hewn from limestone, with its body a war pachyderm that wears a castellated howdah on its back, and has a carven face resembling Eleanor of Castile, the Infanta, as symbology hedges its bets … the monumental woman-headed tusker seems more stable, more continuous than the surrounding structures that are rotted and regenerated with each passing second … Dennis is slapped speechless by streets that are all and only language, leaving any small talk to his incandescent escort … ‘Not to state the bleedin’ obvious, but this is where Blake got ’is Golgonooza from; ’is fourfold city what’s forever fallin’ down an’ buildin’ itself up again, along with everything that’s in it. Tell the truth, it’s where I get me goats that turn to tits and candle wax, all the inchoate forms I warned you not to step on earlier. All of us artists, poets and ne’er-do-wells ’ave done alright from the Great When, an’ if it sometimes needs a favour in return, best not to ’ang about. That’s why I’m with yer now – I mean, you seem a nice enough young feller, but I know it’s what the ’eads would want, so it’s my obligation, if you like. And Monolulu’s, if the fiddlin’ bugger bothers to turn up’ …

  amongst the temporary rural turf furring the pavements underfoot, Spare indicates one of the aforementioned clusters of material substance in transition, the inchoate forms … pallid and glistening in the grass, at first it’s a discarded portion of cooked chicken, but the savoury muscle unpeels and reties itself upon the poking bone … crisp skin in petals, lifting from the meat that bifurcates and splits into its new configuration, and at last a woman, naked and four inches high, shakes grease from her uncurling wings before she flitters dazedly away amongst stems that are shrinking down to kerb and cobble … at which Dennis asks, ‘Was, was, was that a fairy?’ and the flare-haired illustrator nods another dozen tiny lechers, brutes and cretins into momentary being … ‘If you like. Fairies an’ goblins an’ all that, they boil up naturally out of the pseudo-matter ’ere, the legendary mulch. Three or four ’undred years ago, if people talked about this place, they’d name it as the Land of Cockaigne, or they’d call it Fairyland. Mind you, for sayin’ that, you don’t get many fairies round ’ere lately. It’s a different century, where all the undecided shapes resolve themselves into stuff what’s more Freudian and modern. Anyway, can’t stand round natterin’ all day, not if we’re gunna get you to the Bonce Tribunal’ … scared to ask what that might be, Dennis falls into line behind his paint-stained Sherpa and they soldier on into a shuffled urban history beneath the sky’s torrential shine …

  approaching the black, steaming palace of an overstated railway station, they behold a great and vicious spike of glass that sizzles up as if to slash the stratosphere, but then subsides to flat horizon in the blink of a dilating eye … on an exalted Borough High Street, with the hidden river tumbling not far ahead, Spare of a sudden grabs his young charge by a scrawny arm and drags him into the Epiphany of Stoney Street … ‘Oh, fuck. Get up against the wall, an’ sharpish. It’s an anamorphic spasm’ … hurrying to comply, Dennis remembers Maurice Calendar using the same expression in a cautionary context, but is even so entirely unprepared for the disorient of the experience … he doesn’t understand what he is seeing … there’s a visual ripple shuddering across the landscape, from the Over-Borough racing east to Perfect Bermondsey, a travelling distortion moving through the ground, the atmosphere, and everything it passes is stretched instantly enormous before swift contraction once the lensing shiver has moved on … buildings balloon, entities elongate, swelling and dwindling in the seismic fisheye pulse … traffics of chariot or palanquin rubber upwards into skinny strings, then just as quickly snap back to a manageable size, continuing their journeys as if nothing had occurred; as if what had just happened was quite normal … indeed, Dennis would assume the bulging visuals to be a disorder of his eyes alone if not for the anxiety in Spare’s …

  after a taut, unmeasurable interval, the optic pressure front reduces to a distant migraine-jangle over Rotherhithe Unfolded, far off to the east of this incessant everything, at which the destitute enchanter raggedly exhales … ‘A bit too close for comfort, that was. Anamorphic spasms, they’re a weather pattern, ’ere where all the shapes are shiftin’ an’ there’s nothin’ stable. You won’t see ’em more than once in a blue moon, but when you do, steer clear of ’em’ … the artist turns and stalks off up the relatively narrow lane of trees, no, cottages, no, slithering silver filigree, and Dennis trots behind him babbling questions in a literal and figurative effort to keep up … ‘But why does everybody say they’re dangerous? The things and people they affect go back to normal straight away with no harm done, it looks like’ … plainly irritated, Spare glares back across his shoulder through the drizzle of depraved personas … ‘Yeah, well, that’s because the things and people they affect are made out of ideas, where it don’t matter if you stretch ’em out a bit. If they were made o’ beef an’ bone an’ bits o’ gristle like what you an’ me are, it’d be a different story, mark my words. No, it’s a good effect, an’ I can use it in me pictures, but I’ve seen what ’appens if you don’t get out the way in time. You ask Jack Neave if yer run into ’im. Now, shut yer yap an’ follow me up here. I’ll show you summat dangerous, if that’s what yer after’ …