‘I-I didn’t know. I didn’t know that this went on. I shouldn’t be ’ere …’

  He trailed off into a helpless silence, while …within a shifting Fort Knox spotlight, law’s anathema tilts his three-foot boulder of a head and dons a frown of patient sympathy, his voice reverberant and subterranean as a sewer main, his tenor frighteningly gentle … ‘That’s as may be, sunshine, but ’ere’s where you are in our eternal dance of planets and police cars, aincha? Ask yer tawdry favour of extortion’s ultimate, then fuck off out of it, there’s a good boy’ … the words hang hefty as a ten-stretch on the diamond air and are in no way a request, so that … the quaking turf baron had no choice but to state a case that he’d become increasingly unsure of since the incident with Blincoe and the kitchen knife, in Spitalfields. He stammered, stalled and startled. ‘My, my, my, my name’s Jack Spot, and I’m, I’m in a bit o’ bother, look, it’s nothin’, nothin’ that I should ’ave troubled you with, you don’t wanna ’ear about it, I’ll just go. I can just go.’ A pace away and in another world …the prayer of scoundrels shakes his meaty face from side to side, almost regretfully, and once again the voice, a buried river of black syrup … ‘No, son. No, yer can’t. Not until I’ve put my two penn’orth in, as you demanded when you called me from my glorious subterfuge. I know ’oo you are, Jacky. You’re a criminal, and as such are a shitty little particle o’ me; a bit o’ dirt beneath my priceless thumbnail. I know all your form and all your previous. I know what name you called your teddy bear, and I know what you want me to sort out, which is to say the sour grapes between you an’ Billy ’ill’ … the name drops like some squealer from a bridge, and in result… a burst of last-ditch desperation seemed to grip the formerly subdued and shaken gangster, a determination to at least get what he’d come here for.

  ‘I know. I know I’ve mucked things up, but if you could just get it back to ’ow it was with me an’ Bill, to ’ow it was before, that’s all I’m askin’.’

  Arnold Circus held in its collective breath, assuming that Gog Blincoe breathed. Whimpering on the blunt discomfort of the cobbles, Solly Kankus had both hands up, covering his eyes, while Dennis swayed unsteadily against the builder’s wagon and saw a great deal of merit in the writhing thug lieutenant’s tactic. At the epicentre of the dazzle were the two Jacks, Neave and Spot, their stretching shadows flung across the ring behind them, stark and black on its prismatic mottle. The audial collage of gunfire, faulty brakes and belching slot machines that laced the ambience was rising in its pitch, corkscrewing up into dog-whistle altitudes, while at the focal point of everybody’s rapt attention … the sublime of sin turns flickering-newsreel eyes to his despairing supplicant, delivering his verdict in tones that are grave and Stygian, but not unkind … ‘That’s not what’s gunna ’appen, Jacky. You know what you’ve done. You made yer play while Billy was in stir, the London airport job that was supposed to put you in the top seat for when ’e come out. Only it was a right dog’s breakfast what you made of all that, weren’t it? And now the mutations of the day are acted, do yer see me point? You’ve set a thunderous process into motion, an’ it all works out ’ow it works out. There’s nothin’ to be done’ … felony’s emblem sighs, like half the globe’s last breaths at once … ‘Just over five years, you’ve got, till it ’appens. You’ll be doin’ bad by then, with up-and-comin’ villain twins employed to bolster your decreasin’ reputation. Billy and a couple of ’is friends will duff you up an’ stripe yer, practically on yer front doorstep, with yer missus lookin’ on an’ givin’ it the waterworks. This is what’s on the cards, Jack, and you knowin’ in advance about it won’t change nothin’. Afterwards, you’ve got another thirty years. You’ll outlive Billy, if it’s any consolation, and you’ll be a little Jewish chap called Colmore, with a stitched-up face and lots o’ fascinatin’ stories, ’oo works in a bacon-packin’ factory. The judge’s summin’-up was jotted on your mother’s womb, with time itself your penitentiary, and there might be a second-hand-shop paperback or two for ’eadstones. Now, you keep yer nose clean, and you’ll not see me again while you are living’ … reaching from his burnished universe, Lud lightly touches Jack Spot’s arm with one manicured car door of a hand, a mournful pat indicative of interrupted camaraderie … tipping the barest fraction of a nod to Neave and Blincoe, the summation of misconduct starts to turn his panorama of anatomy away, which action … seemed to cut Spot’s puppet strings. His face a motionless wax mask of loss, he folded slowly to the stony ground and never noticed that the left sleeve of his jacket was now bleached unevenly, and smouldering.

  Ironfoot looked down at the kneeling mobster, unimpressed, and …in the treasure glimmer, terror’s author takes mastodon steps, glacier slow, into a colour-saturated background, with his barbershop-floor spoor and cataclysmic sounds ribboning after him, the almost oblong outline dwindling in unfixed perspective, until … with his eyes already aching, Dennis had to look away. When he forced himself to look again, Jack Neave was shearing red-hot iron filings from his heel as he stamped back across the circus, leaving Spot there on his knees with all his dreams gone; with his sharp suit smoking and discoloured. Hollowed out of point or purpose, the dismantled gang boss didn’t even budge when …businesslike, Gog Blincoe strides right by him, seizing up the thick folds of the curtain that are gathered to the left and dragging them back over the fluorescent opening, their soft material hardening to scored and splintered planking as he does so, before himself vanishing around the drapes’ end like an unobtrusive stagehand … finally, with a metallic clink, the painted padlock becomes real again, and so the gaudy rupture between Londons disappears … and had, within an instant, never been there. Timid mists, that until then had stood and quivered nervously in the convergent streets, not wanting any trouble, now crept hesitantly back into the centre ring and, like most witnesses to violence, behaved as if it hadn’t happened.

  Shrugging off the reconsolidated fog, Neave scraped his way to Dennis and peered in disdain at Solly Kankus, bundled embryonic at their feet with his paroxysm subsiding into shivers. Ironfoot pulled the ornate fastening tighter on his silk cravat, and sniffed before he spoke.

  ‘So, Mr Kankus, is it? Mr Kankus, you’re all done ’ere. I was you, when I was fit to walk, I’d get your gaffer in the motor so ’e can collect ’imself before one of yer drives the other ’ome. This is the finish of it. See as everybody understands that. Come on, Dennis. Let’s be on our way, and leave these two to ponder on the marvel of existence. We’ve all ’ad, I’m sure, a very tryin’ night.’

  With Dennis, Neave limped noisily and pyrotechnically up through the grounded cloudbank filling Calvert Avenue, and by the time they were on Shoreditch High Street, the dense little bulldog of a man was grinning, eyes alight like gypsy fires beneath the trailing hedges of their brows.

  ‘I think that was a decent evenin’s work. I can’t imagine you or your young lady gettin’ any further interference from that quarter, shall we say? So, that the first time, was it, you’d seen one o’ the Arcana? What it’s worth, I thought you ’andled yerself very reasonably.’

  Although Dennis was aware that ‘reasonably’ only meant he’d managed not to scream or soil himself, he took a certain warming pride in Ironfoot’s compliment. This must, he thought, be what it would be like to have a job, discussing the success or otherwise of your endeavours with your colleagues, at the end of a long working day. It felt, he had to admit, very satisfying.

  ‘Thanks. Yeah, well, I’ve seen the Inferred Saracen and Her Train, but that was the first time I’d heard one of the Arcana talking, back there.’ He thumbed back over his shoulder towards Arnold Circus, deathly silent in the fuming shadows at their rear. Neave lit another fag.

  ‘There’s only one or two of ’em as can talk. ’arry Lud, ’e’s one, an’ Broadstair the Prime Monster is another, Slender’orse as well, but the majority do all their signifyin’ by just bein’ what they are. Beauty o’ Riots, she sometimes sings, I’m told, but if we’re lucky, we shan’t live to ’ear it. Now, young man, I think this is where we part company. I’m ’eadin’ on up Kingsland Road, and you’ll be off down Bishopsgate to see yer girlfriend. It’s been nice to meet yer, Dennis, an’ I dare say we’ll run into one another down life’s byways now an’ then. Ooh, that reminds me – I ’ad word from our mate Awstin, said to tell yer that ’e’s got a show on at the Temple Bar in Walworth Road, a week today. Said you’d be very welcome if yer fancied droppin’ by.’

  Slightly ashamed that he had not, so far, corrected anybody who’d referred to Grace as his young lady or his girlfriend, Dennis said he’d try his best to be there. The two men shook hands, and Dennis watched as Neave lurched off, top-heavy in the marbling grey and sparking like a foundry, the Stoke Newington Hephaestus. Only when he was halfway to Spitalfields and heard a clock strike once for half past twelve did Dennis realise that the interchange between Jack Spot and Harry Lud, for all its detailed incident and doodlebug intensity, had been no more than ten or fifteen minutes in duration. Lazily, he entertained the notion that all aspects of the Great When, from its characters to its evinced emotions to its very sense of time, existed as some sort of concentrate, like orange squash. If it could only be diluted in some way, he dreamily construed, it might be easier to swallow. By the time he’d noticed that this train of thought was neither interesting nor practical, he had arrived at Folgate Street.

  The fog in Spitalfields was constitutionally just the same as all the other fog, but much more threatening because of its location, soured by top hats, butcher’s knives and all the Gladstone baggage of a dozen props departments. Dennis shouldered through the gaseous veils and somehow found the right front entrance. Letting himself in using his borrowed key – with a slight pang of melancholy that he might be called upon to give it back soon – he performed a haunted-house walk down the creaking hallway and tapped near inaudibly on Grace’s door. He hoped she was still up.

  ‘Is that you, Dennis? Come on in. I’m decent.’

  ‘Decent’ turned out to be a long navy dressing-gown, ridiculously big on her and probably a man’s, its sleeves rolled back, although he had to admit that it went wonderfully with Grace’s fireball hair. Completing the ensemble, she wore silky-looking slippers of ice blue and a faint smile that hovered unresolved between fond and amused. Even the rabbit-hutch proportions of the flat seemed cheerier and more welcoming, and Dennis realised that she must have simply swept and tidied up a bit. She very likely did this every Friday, but he still allowed himself the flattering delusion that her ordinary domesticity was just for him. She padded to the kitchen and returned with cups of tea for both of them, and they sat there at each end of her sofa, cosy in the paraffin stove’s smelly halo.

  ‘So what happened, then? Did Jack Spot get the meeting he was after?’

  Dennis stared at a fixed point above the picture rail and thought how best to answer.

  ‘Yes and no. He got his meeting, yes, but from the state of him when it was done, it weren’t the one that he was after. Harry Lud … I can’t describe him. He was wider than a lot of houses, but the size of him, that was the least of it. It was, it was as if he was all swollen up and fit to burst with what he meant, but what he meant weren’t something definite, and it kept altering, depending on the way you looked at him. He was more like, I don’t know. More like a frightening poem than a person.’

  Grace regarded him, lighting a Craven ‘A’ and squinting to prevent the floating curlicues from getting in her eyes. She nodded in approval.

  ‘Very well put, Knuckleyard. I shan’t press you for details, but you say the trouble that we had with Spot, that’s finished now? And all the other business, too: I won’t be called upon to pull my kitchen knife out of the heads of any more of your peculiar friends?’

  He laughed, and sipped his tea.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. I think it’s all done with now. With any luck, we can forget about, you know, the other place, and just go back to being who we were before. I can get out your hair, first thing tomorrow morning, and go back to my exciting life at Coffin Ada’s.’

  Obviously, he was expecting her to say she wouldn’t hear of it, that he must stay in Folgate Street to share her dreams, her life, her bed, and, just as obviously, she didn’t. For the seconds that it took for this to be apparent, there was a taut silence in which the astonishing erotic future Dennis had been whittling since breakfast time that morning could be heard collapsing into hopeless dust, at least by him. Eventually, attempting not to show what he at least knew to be childish disappointment, he ended the crushing hush by thinking to ask Grace what her day had been like.

  ‘Not bad at all. I done brisk trade because the sun was out, and knocked off early. Had some fish and chips on the way home, got in here around eight o’clock to have a bath, and since then I’ve been looking at the book you lent me last night. Have to say, that Machen, he’s a cracking writer.’

  She inclined her head towards the coffee table, where belatedly he noticed his near-mint edition of The Cosy Room in its sepulchral white-and-green wraps, resting near the seashell ashtray. Dennis was still thinking about how unfair it was that Grace still didn’t fancy him after the terrible ordeal they’d shared, which he, admittedly, had been the cause of. Worse still, he was wondering if, with him back at Coffin Ada’s, he and Grace would ever have a reason to meet up again. He didn’t, at that moment, have a lot of interest in the literary skills of Arthur Machen, but still managed to ask her if she’d read ‘N’, so that it wouldn’t look like he was sulking.

  ‘I’ve read all of them, from front to back. I finished “N” about a half hour before you got home. So that’s the one that landed you in this mess, with its made-up book that somehow turns up in your Persil box, or whatever it was? It’s the best story in the collection, for my money – you can tell he’s really serious with what he’s saying, like there’s something dead important that he’s trying to get across – but all the others in there are good yarns, too, don’t you think?’

  Still steeping in self-pity, Dennis grudgingly confessed to having only looked at ‘N’.

  ‘I thought the others looked a bit sedate for my taste. I mean, just the title put me off, The Cosy Room. It’s hardly the most gripping subject for a story, is it?’

  Grace looked at him through smoke and very slightly narrowed eyes.

  ‘Dennis, it’s what’s called irony. The cosy room is a condemned cell. You’d do better not to make your mind up about matters before you’ve completely understood them. Same with people, same with everything. My policy is, don’t dismiss things, but don’t swear them your allegiance either, not before you’re sure that you’ve got all the facts. It saves a lot of trouble.’

  She ground out her cigarette in the remains of a sea creature which could never have anticipated that its exoskeleton would one day suffer this indignity. Had that last thing she said been telling him to not get too attached to her? Dispirited already by imagined intimations of finality, Dennis elected to say nothing in response to this, but fixed his stinging eyes upon the paraffin stove’s tennis-ball-sized dome of glowing wire mesh. Grace studied him, her bottle-green gaze thoughtful, weighing up his obvious dejection and deciding that she’d better say something companionable.

  ‘You know, for all that this has been a bloody nightmare, I expect we’ll miss it now it’s over with. I liked the atmosphere around it, and the fairy-tale stuff like your Mr Blincoe. And when we weren’t both in terror for our lives or else administering first aid to monsters, it was quite nice having you about, although quite frankly, you’re starting to smell a bit. I like you, Dennis. You don’t know it, but you’re interesting. You recommend good books, even if you’re too lazy to have read them properly, and I was very grateful for those racing forecast cards, so that’s another thing you’ve introduced me to, this Spare chap’s work. I shall be looking out for him.’

  Though still rapidly sinking in his quicksand of despond, Dennis dimly perceived that Grace’s well-intentioned sympathies might offer him a lifeline. It was one he clutched at desperately.

  ‘I’ve just thought. When I was saying cheerio to Ironfoot Jack tonight – you’ve not met Ironfoot Jack, but he’s a proper human being, he’s not made of iron or anything, he’s just got a bad leg, he’s not like Blincoe – anyway, Jack said that Austin had invited me to this show that he’s having in a pub, the Temple Bar on Walworth Road, next Friday. If you wanted, you could come along. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll have a bath by then and, you know, smarten myself up.’

  Her smile was like a buried earthquake victim’s glimpse of daylight, so delightful that he wondered for a moment if he hadn’t wanted that more than the sex. Also, unlike his probably inexpert first attempts at coitus would have done, this seemed to have thoroughly pleased her.

  ‘I should like that. That would be a proper treat. And the Spare exhibition sounds alright as well.’ She giggled at her own joke, and when Dennis at last got it and looked hurt, she reached across and jabbed him in his nearer shoulder. ‘Dennis, I was kidding. You don’t really smell that bad, although you’re getting there. No, I should love to come and see his show with you. I’ve never seen real art before, not in the flesh. You come and call for me next Friday afternoon, and we’ll go over there together. An art exhibition! Don’t know about you, but I’m feeling more civilised already.’

  His emotional death penalty commuted thus to a suspended sentence, Dennis found he was in a much better mood. They laughed and chatted for a good half hour before they noticed it was nearly two o’clock. He fished out the spare key and gave it back to her with nothing like the pang of loss that he’d expected, and then Grace and he went off to their respective bed or knackered couch. Like a compressed spring, with his head against one of the sofa’s hard, unyielding arms, he slept only in fits and starts, and, for the fourth or fifth night running, had no dreams he could remember. He thought it might be experiences like the recent spectacle in Arnold Circus that had squeezed all the imagination out of him, or possibly that his unconscious mind had become constipated, though this last thought only led him to anticipate a large and painful dream, tomorrow or the evening following. His last night under Grace’s roof was passed in an ambiguous grey drift of dustballs that weren’t quite ideas, until he could no longer tell where the fog tumbling in the gutters outside ended, and the fog in his part-shaven skull began. He’d had a busy week.