His celebrity precedes him, just as surely as his creditors come after. Everywhere is his tumultuous legend known – the Abyssinian prince shanghaied aboard a British boat, shipwrecked in Portugal, arrived at Tilbury Docks, the greatest racing forecaster this land had ever seen. St Croix in the Danish West Indies and a runaway horse-breeder’s son called Peter Carl McKay are dull inclusions that have no real bearing, best forgotten and why even mention them? ‘Whoh-hoh-hoh-hoh,’ he foghorns to the baggy-suited punters at the rail, the toffs clutching binoculars. ‘I got a horse!’ And yes, he has, but where he got it is another story.

  It was, what, eight years ago? A thin patch, where his many skills had failed to keep wolves from his door; indeed, had even failed to keep his door. His tips would limp home if they made it that far, and his fortune-telling sideline plunged into an unforeseen decline. His trade in self-invented medicines looked not long for this world, and following the failure of his kerbside dentist business – with a deafening ‘Whoh-hoh-hoh-hoh’ to drown the screaming when he pulled a healthy tooth – only his wallet faced painful extractions. Hence, a touring Negro show bound for St Petersburg had seemed the very breath of opportunity, for a theatrical engagement of that kind would surely be another feather in his cap, if there was room. He shimmies in the trackside sunshine now, a fountain of volcanic laughter and outrageous hues, uttering priceless oracles to his delighted subjects. The great European adventure is not long ago but everything in life, he thinks, is changed. He is a different man, astride a different nag, a different world.

  In Russia, self-described as Abyssinian royalty, he’d been presented to his fellow head of state, Czar Nicholas. Although perhaps bewildered by his visitor, the czar seemed a kind-hearted chap and not at all the sort to be so soon thereafter murdered as a frightful tyrant. When the Negro show at last packed up its ridiculous paraphernalia, he had roamed the continent from Italy to France to Switzerland, using undignified expulsion as a means of international transport. This was the unfortunate itinerary that delivered him to shitting Germany in that eventful year, 1914. When the authorities there soon contrived the rounding up of coloured men, he had been sent to an internment camp called Ruhleben outside Berlin, for who knew how long. He processions through the racegoers, advancing without hurry on his favoured spot beside the finish line, and as he goes he thunders his free prophecy, ‘Spion Kop for best, and damn the rest! Whoh-hoh-hoh-hoh!’ He grins to think that by an almost comical coincidence, Ruhleben had been built upon a racetrack. With the other prisoners, he’d slept in filthy stables, which had much increased his sympathy for those proud beasts who were the usual occupants, as well as his abiding hatred of the Germans.

  In that cold, malodorous place he’d shared his straw cot with an older coloured gent from London, who had been a railway stoker in the reign of Queen Victoria. Before pneumonia took him, he had whispered many confidences to his bedfellow, remarking on their native city’s more elusive lengths and how these might be utilised by someone of sufficient foolishness or knowledge. This had been an entertaining yarn, although he’d thought it probable that the old fellow was a crackpot, or else one of those infuriating fellows who make up unlikely stories for the fun of it. But then, with the war’s end and his eventual return to Blighty just last year, he had been given cause to reconsider this unkind assessment. He’d gone to the Seven Sisters Road and done the things that he’d been told, performed the cockney obeah, and then he’d seen with his own eyes the unbelievable extension.

  He breathes deep of the invigorating Epsom air – he will not make some crack about the salts – and savours its enticing redolence of grass, of clothing laundered or unlaundered, with a base of underarm sweat and sweet accents of manure. He struts between the bookies’ trestles to admire the blurring semaphore of pallid hands, their tic-tac-toe unreadable until one knows its alphabet, much like that stretch of the metropolis he’d found near Highbury on the advice of the dead stoker. There he had encountered something called the Inferred Saracen, and similarly a fine gentlewoman with a most extraordinary steed. She’d said to him that he had flair, but that success would be the one who followed flair. He did not properly absorb the lady’s wisdom at that time, being preoccupied with screaming at her terrifying mount and hurriedly departing those intolerable extremities, but has since come to know her quip for the best tip of his part-fabricated life.

  As near the winning post as he is likely to attain, he makes his stand. At almost seven feet if one includes the plumes, the lucky charms on his billowing drapes will be the only view for those luckless enough to stand behind him, and his voice the only rumbling they’ll hear. ‘Put all you’ve got on Spion Kop! Black man for luck!’ Some months after his meeting with the memorable rider, which he had by then dismissed as a result of undigested food, he had been loitering at Peter Gilpin’s stables, listening out for useful news, as was his habit. When a stable-lad had asked his boss, ‘Is Flair alright, d’you think?’, receiving the response, ‘Oh, she’ll be fine. She beat that colt, and she’s the best we’ve got,’ the name had struck the quietest of notes. Flair was a filly owned by Major Giles Loder, an exquisite specimen that had outpaced promising colt Spion Kop, and was the major’s entry for the Derby. But why had the boy sounded concerned? He’d quickly launched into his loud, distracting patter, then had managed in mid-flourish to spill all the sealed envelopes containing forecasts on the cobblestones outside Flair’s stall. In the ensuing mockery, assuming his most woebegone visage, the self-styled poor, uneducated darkie squatted to retrieve his errant packets while examining more closely the prospective champion. She’d made a funny ducking motion with her head, repetitively; to his eye an indication if a horse was going barmy. That was when he’d understood.

  This wasn’t going to get better. Flair would be withdrawn, and the next-best contender substituted. Spion Kop would have the training and attention necessary to alleviate Major Loder’s disappointment. Spion Kop would be ‘the one who follows flair’. So, he’d put every penny on the 100–6 outsider and, without charge, had encouraged everybody else to do the same. Along the track where he can’t see, a thousand-throated monster roars the words, ‘They’re off !’

  Time crumples like a losing ticket, and the race is starting, happening, ending all at once. Faces in the surrounding jostle flicker through fifteen expressions in an eye-blink – hope, anxiety, wild triumph and despair – as they attempt to read their next month’s rent into the smearing blurs. He catches sight of Flair’s successor with the yellow-, blue- and black-clad form of Frank O’Neill stood in the stirrups, then can’t see a thing as those about him try to howl their preferred outcomes into being: ‘Come on, Archaic!’ ‘You can do it, Orpheus!’ Peering around a hat more ostentatious than his own, he shrieks with joy to glimpse O’Neill, a crouching incubus, propelling Spion Kop in first position past the post. The day explodes in a confetti of congratulation. He runs back and forth, stamping his feet, throwing his arms up in the air and barking, ‘What I told you? What I told you?’

  Everything becomes a splendid dream. Touring the Epsom bookies to collect his winnings, wading through a sea of jubilation and remorse, he finds that grateful beneficiaries of his advice are pressing notes and coins into his hands, his pockets. He is rich beyond his wildest hopes, and though he will no doubt have lost it all before the year is out, that does not rob this perfect moment of its shine. Receiving ten-bob notes and backslaps with an earthquake chuckle, he can’t help but think of the illustrious patroness who’d given him her cryptic tip, and who might well be due some favour in return. He pictures her, side-saddle on her thing of polished and articulated bones, that rattled as it shook its head and fixed him with its staring sockets. Now, she’d got a horse.

  ♫

  Strings: the decrepit rents back on to one of London’s vanished Liberties, and that’s how it got in. Ingeniously hinged, a slotted and indented central mass hangs in the firelight almost motionless, just under the low ceiling. Three of its extensions with their numberless points of articulation are supporting it – one by the door, one by the spitting hearth, one at the bed’s foot where a pisspot is knocked over – while the other two are lifted, mantid-still, in contemplative pause. The glasswork of an optical arrangement in its thorax sparkles with reflected nineteenth-century flame as it surveys the detailed artistry beneath, ratcheting, clicking, swivelling appropriate magnifiers into place with lurching shadow vast against the flaking plaster overhead.

  After some several minutes of deliberation, delicate adjustments are performed. Sticky and glistening in the infernal pink, the worst thing is its inappropriate beauty. All five many-jointed limbs have curling arabesques of chitin; poppy-stem hydraulics; troubling decorations that encroach on the Nouveau and gesture to a hideous aesthetic. Limp black membranes droop in folds between the quintuped’s splaying extremities, theatre curtains fluttering at each infrequent breath. Craned over bold impastos on the mattress canvas, dipping and rotating, pecking, calibrating, every movement is balletic. Both superior arms are armoured swans’ necks in their motion, plunging and retracting with appalling grace through rubicund miasma. Tilting, cutting, click-click-click-click-click.

  A little after two o’clock, when finally the image cannot be improved, it carefully manoeuvres itself down to a more manageable shape and size. Four of the thing’s appendages are folded up into themselves, becoming thicker and considerably shorter. It stands balanced now on two of these, its fifth protrusion curling up to wind into a tight, flat disc, approximately head-sized, at the top of the assemblage. Settling with a repellent shiver to the contours of this new configuration, its funereal membranes do not seem dissimilar to the falling pleats of a long overcoat, save at closer quarters where their beads of milky perspiration are made visible. With gait that of a rearing centipede, it crosses to the poorly fitted door, unlocks it with one razor finger and slides out into the cobbled cold.

  In the adjacent district that it hails from, it is called a Pope of Blades, and isn’t meant to come anywhere near Commercial Street.

  ♫

  Percussion: four days after Christmas and he’s cracking gas meters in Aldersgate, or trying to. The way it works, you wait until you hear the sirens, then when everybody’s in the shelters, you can nip in through the cellar window and have all the shillings. Dennis, though, has messed it up: he couldn’t force the meter open, and he’s even having trouble clambering back up the coal chute to get out the way he came. His mates would laugh if they could see him, trying to haul himself up on his belly, coal dust everywhere, coughing and wheezing. He’s a dead loss as a crook, he’s cottoned on to that alright, but then, he’s only nine.

  He’s got his fingers hooked on the wood frame he took the wire-mesh panel from when he broke in, dog-paddling on the rough slant for a foothold, rubbing all the scabs and skin from his bare knees. He’s starting to feel a bit frightened, to be honest. If he can’t get out before they sound the all-clear and whoever’s house this is comes back, they’ll fetch the coppers, and his mum will find out, and he might be put in prison. Panicked by this thought, his toecap finally finds purchase on the chute’s brick sides, and with a desperate heave he flops his upper half nose-down on to the chilly pavement of the street outside. The sirens have packed up, but now it sounds as if the sky is shaking – angels moving furniture, according to old ladies when it thunders – so it’s only just occurring to him that there’s worse things than the coppers, prison or his mum, and then the bombing starts.

  More fire than he has ever seen shoots up into the dark, it might be over Moorgate, and a second later it’s not even noise; it’s like the world is being punched. Then there’s another one, and then another. After that he isn’t counting. Making sounds that he can’t even hear, he’s halfway to his feet when they’re slapped out from under him and he just misses being flung back down the coal-hole. Face first on the slabs again and crying now despite himself, he struggles on his elbows like a caterpillar, staying flat as possible. He crawls quick as he can towards the nearest turning, and with every second there’s another roaring flash, so he can see his shadow in the middle of a Sunday night. Squirming around the corner into what he thinks is Glasshouse Yard, surprised to find he’s still alive with nothing hanging off, he slithers underneath a gate into some funny-smelling area open to the rowdy night. A leather business, where he curls into a ball behind a pallet stacked with slippery pelts and he can’t tell if everything is shrivelling up inside itself, or if it’s only him.

  And BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM why is he here? He doesn’t even BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM doesn’t even know what he was BOOMBOOMBOOM was going to spend it on, his BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM his loot, probably sweets and BOOMBOOM sweets and comics, something for his mum, and BOOMBOOMBOOM and now BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM and now he’s going to be dead, he reckons.

  How long it goes on for, he’s got no idea, like it’s a small forever on its own. At any moment, he’s afraid one’s going to come down right on top of him, right on his head, since that’s about the worst thing that he can imagine. He begins his prayers, because, well, you’re supposed to, but he only gets as far as ‘hallowed be thy name’ before he feels all daft and realises that he doesn’t properly believe in God. The thumping great explosions and the somewhere-up-there Jerry bombers, they’re the only things in heaven that he knows are real. At last, after a minute or two’s silence when he dares to let himself think that it’s finished, he gets up and makes his way on jelly legs between the trolleys and the hides, back underneath the gate and round the corner on to the main road. Where he sits down on someone’s icy doorstep and just stares.

  Cripplegate’s gone.

  It’s not … but how can … it’s not just blown up, it’s gone. There’s nothing there. No streets, no buildings. All the way to Moorgate, it’s like one enormous sloping field that’s growing fire instead of grass. It’s like the devil’s football pitch. It’s gone. But, like, hundreds of years it must have been there. Since the Romans, didn’t someone say? And now, it can’t have been a half hour, and it’s all been scrubbed away. The barbers’ shops, the washing lines, the drapers, everybody’s houses, places that he’s known since he was little, all of it a burning nothing; a big empty hole in London that he can’t believe he’s looking at.

  He stands up, sits back down and then stands up again. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, or even what he’s doing. For no earthly reason, he starts heading down in the direction of St Paul’s, when he lives up the other way, off along Old Street in Shoreditch. For quite a while he thinks the ground’s still shaking, but it’s just the way he’s walking. He can’t take his eyes off all the blazing rubble not ten yards away across the road, the sheets of flame shifting and blowing in the wind, like laundry. Splitting, spitting, cracking noises and he can hear fire-engine bells but doesn’t know where from. In glimpses through the billows and the showers of sparks, he can make out four buildings just about still standing in the whole of Cripplegate.

  The nearest, some way up the red-hot oven that he thinks used to be Beech Street, is the fire station. It strikes him as funny that it’s not been touched. There’s something going on there, when the thick theatre curtains of black smoke lift out the way, but it’s not where the bells are coming from, because the bells, he figures out belatedly, are only in his head. Past that – is it called Chiswell Street? – there’s somewhere else that’s not been flattened, by the look of it. It might be the old brewery. He’s not scared any more, although he isn’t really anything, to tell the truth. All of it’s too much to do any more than gawp at. Furthest off, right down the bottom, there’s a church that’s had a bomb go through its roof, with all fire belching from the blown-out shell, then closer by there’s … what is it, exactly? Through the blaze, it’s hard to make it out.

  It’s like an archway or a gate, a tall shape in the rolling clouds and bursts of flame, but then the top of it, it’s more a normal building with a row or two of tiny windows. Eyes stinging like mad, he strains to have a gander but keeps losing sight of it amongst the black drifts and the orange flares. There’s something that’s not right about it, where he’s not sure if it’s really there or if he’s made it up out of the lights and lurching shadows. It’s the arch that’s wrong, he finally decides: it’s open, with no gate across it, but when you look through it to the other side, it’s only dark. You can’t see any fire or anything, when everywhere around has gone up like a Roman candle. Squinting, blurring, trying to understand what he is getting wrong about the picture, in a sudden gout of firelight Dennis spots that there’s a figure in the opening, a man stood looking back at him.

  Wearing a long coat or a cloak or something, he leans with one hand against the archway’s wall to steady himself and the other up over his mouth, as if the sight has knocked the wind out of him. He’s a bald bloke, with what hair he’s got in greasy rat-tails hanging down the sides. Not what you’d call a big chap, and he doesn’t look like he’d be much good in a scrap, but it’s the eyes that he’s got on him, massive like an owl’s. He’s sagging, staring out at all the fires, the neighbourhood that’s disappeared, and Dennis can’t remember ever seeing anyone look that upset. The man’s expression stops him in his tracks. Now that he thinks about it, he supposes that this is an awful thing he’s in the middle of. He feels all weak, and starts to turn so that he can head back up Aldersgate, but when he looks around, the lofty gatehouse and the grief-struck man are gone. There’s only burning wreckage. He’s not even mystified. He wouldn’t be surprised if people saw all sorts of things after an air raid. He hears urgent grown-up voices, all-clear sirens and fire engines that aren’t just the ringing in his ears. It starts to tipple down with rain and he wants only to get home, if home’s still there.