Over the next few weeks he tells his pals the story until even he’s not listening, leaving out the archway that he has by now put down to shell shock. After that he more or less forgets the whole experience. Two years later, when the amputated stump of Cripplegate becomes a pink expanse of rosebay willowherb, what they call London rocket, he’s eleven and they’ve started learning about plays in school. He’s sitting frowning at an illustration of the playwright in a fancy oval on the title page, trying to think who it reminds him of, but doesn’t have sufficient interest to pursue the thought.

  In fact, not until 1949 when he’s eighteen does Dennis Knuckleyard have cause to think about what happened to him on that night, and after that he doesn’t have a choice. By then, the city’s secret vertebrae have made their own decision.

  ♫

  1

  The Best Way to Start a Book

  ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’ was, in Dennis Knuckleyard’s opinion, the best way to start a book he’d ever heard of. Inconveniently, this insight had occurred at an inopportune point in the eighteen-year-old’s morning regimen of exercise, where a distressed copy of Picture Show from 1920 was the only apparatus. With a stifled groan, he realised that an Orwellgasm wasn’t going to be possible and, after three or four despondent tugs, abandoned the whole enterprise. He was the dead.

  It was a bloody miserable day in Shoreditch and the clocks weren’t striking anything, most nearby churches having broken in the clumsy hands of the preceding decade. Something after seven, judging by the tinge of Reckitt’s Blue to the October light, decanted into Coffin Ada’s spare room through disheartened curtains. In the halo of a nursery-size lamp, flypaper yellow, he allowed his cancelled date on page sixteen of Picture Show a last apologetic glance before ungallantly consigning her to the debris that topped the bedside table. She was maddeningly beautiful, black hair like lustrous petals in an inky bob that kissed her pewter neck, mascara as a soot of filings caught in the magnetic field of her unanswerable eyes. Licentious smirk, only its pout adorned by a dark dot of lipstick letting the observer know that here was everything he’d ever wanted while also informing him he didn’t stand a chance. The wavering, liquid brush-stroke of her body line. She’d probably died elegantly through some Isadora Duncan balls-up, strung pearls caught in the propeller of a Spitfire and ‘If You Knew Susie’ crackling on the wind-up gramophone.

  From downstairs, he heard the ongoing fury of the hounds that were his elderly landlady’s lungs, which meant that Ada was already up and facing down the leaden day with her superior unpleasantness. Landlady and employer, he supposed, and possibly disturbing mother-substitute into the bargain: he’d been twelve when first he started running errands round at Ada Benson’s bookshop – Lowell’s Books & Magazines according to the sign, although nobody ever called it that, and he’d always assumed the name to be that of a previous owner. Then, when he was fourteen and his mum had died, Ada had let him come and stop with her, provided that he earned his fucking keep and didn’t mistake Ada for his fucking mother, as she’d put it. Not that there was any chance of that. Dennis’s mother had been nice, unlike the wheezing engine of contempt and malice that was Coffin Ada.

  There were benefits, though. During uneventful stretches at the till he was permitted to read what he wanted from the wildly various stock, as long as he did not remove it from the confines of the shop itself. This would have constituted borrowing, and Ada had on numerous occasions made it clear that she was not a fucking library. The tattered Picture Show, plucked from a nondescript stack by the counter with a dozen like it in the last-gasp thrupenny pile, was obviously not included in this stricture, which presumably only applied to books. He’d had to read the Orwell novel in instalments, perched behind the register, when the shop had acquired a copy that August just gone. Near mint, barely two months since it was published, with its green Secker & Warburg wraps still pristine, brought in by an outraged communist or outraged Tory who had taken it all personally. Dennis wouldn’t dream of spiriting a thing like that back to his room. Even safely lodged on the New Fiction shelf downstairs it had already spoiled his morning.

  Grudgingly, he crawled from a warm bed into cold clothes and a still colder day, where he could see his breath. Knuckling a residue of dream from clotted sockets, he somnambulated his way down the stairs into the shop’s rear rooms, relieved to find that Ada and her bronchial cannonade were up front, tidying or counting change. He went through to the backyard for a Jimmy Riddle in the outside lav, numbly absorbing fortnight-old torn headlines from the scraps of newspaper on their bent nail, then hurriedly retreated to the kitchen, gasping Comic Cuts balloons of fog. His strip-wash at the cracked stone sink was a perfunctory nod in hygiene’s general direction, while his subsequent thin smear of margarine on a grey noggin-end of ration bread gestured at breakfast. When she heard him fill the kettle and swill out the teapot, Ada somehow simultaneously coughed and shouted from the shop with her upsetting voice like fifty crows; at least four murders.

  ‘You can make us one as well, you useless little toerag,’ was approximately what she said, but with dislodged phlegm substituting for the comma.

  Dennis grunted in assent then made them both a cup of tea, milk and two sugars, before carrying one in each hand through to the shop and Ada, opening the intervening door using an elbow. Mercifully, his employer was already dressed, in that her horrible pink dressing-gown was knotted at the waist, and she already had the half-smoked Park Drive Plain glued to her curling lower lip. It was what Coffin Ada looked like, all the time. It was her uniform.

  Her unimpressed eyes glanced down at the steaming cup, then back at her already flinching shop assistant. They were mottled green and grey, like sunken marble colonised by algae.

  ‘Well, half of it’s in the fucking saucer and it looks as though the cow’s dead, but cough cough cough it’ll have to do.’ Not enough milk then, but otherwise satisfactory. Good, even. Dennis concealed his relief with an apologetic shrug and asked if she was going to want him serving in the shop that day. Sipping her tea, she skewered him with a pitying expression.

  ‘Dennis, love, if I weren’t desperate and near death, I wouldn’t want you in my fucking shop this day or any other. I can’t stand the sight of you. Cough cough cough cough. No, where you are today’s up Charing Cross, hole in the wall place, Harrison’s Books. I’ve heard there’s a chap there with some cough cough Arthur Machen bits and bobs he’s having trouble getting rid of.’

  Setting cup and saucer on the counter, she commenced a shuffling circuit of the premises in slippers which were either tartan or elaborately stained. Audibly tutting, back towards him, she returned books that had wandered to their designated shelves, wiping the covers with one matted cuff. Atop her thinly papered skull stood the stiff mass that had once been a hairstyle, before decades of neglect compacted it to off-white rhino horn. Regretting it immediately, Dennis risked a question.

  ‘Who’s this Machen bloke, then?’

  Ada stopped what she was doing and rotated slowly to appraise him with the kind of look one might give dog shit. Shaking both her head and driftwood crust of once-was-hair, she turned back to her rearrangements before venturing a curdled-milk reply.

  ‘He was a proper writer who weren’t nothing like Hank Janson, so you won’t have heard of him. Cough cough cough cough. He came from Wales, went barmy over London and put out some holy terrors in the nineties. Died a year or two back, somewhere up near Buckingham. Turned a bit fascist at the end, but, still, he had a fucking lovely way with cough cough cough cough words.’

  Slender diagonals of light leaned in through the front window, so that all the flecks of dust showed off like ballerinas. There were a few people passing by outside now, fellers mostly, on their way to work, which meant it must be getting on for eight and Ada would be opening soon. The sun, unseen for days, crept furtive on worn spines or the gilt names of vanished authors, burnishing the typefaces and titles to a coppered mausoleum of unwanted sentences. Remembering to stir his tea when he’d already drunk three-quarters of it, turning the remainder into barely moving diabetic silt, Dennis attempted to learn more of that day’s salvage mission.

  ‘So, the fascist business, is that why this bloke wants shot of Machen’s books, you think?’

  Paused between Medical and Ghosts, Ada considered for a moment.

  ‘No, I shouldn’t think so. That were one book in the thirties, writers putting their two penn’orth in about the Spanish Civil War, and he came out for cough cough Franco. No, more likely it’s that no one these days gives a toss about him either way. Dead stock you couldn’t even donate to a fucking cough cough cough cough orphanage is my best guess.’

  In the mostly erased sketch of a street outside, there were already two or three prospective customers who squinted through the mildly dirty pane at all the mildly dirty books that were Ada’s front-window strategy: Walter – My Secret Life. The Well of Loneliness. Rape of the Lock. Dennis’s benefactress gave her would-be clientele a long, unblinking stare out through the half-glass door which said that, yes, she knew that they were there and, no, she wasn’t going to let them in before the stroke of eight because she didn’t like the look of them. Peering disconsolately down into his cup where tea leaves swam in torpid circles through the glucose sludge, he cautiously enquired as to why Ada wanted the forgotten works of a Welsh fascist that were, by her own account, unsaleable.

  Off in the battered distance a surviving clock began to chime the hour, but Ada gladly interrupted her unhurried totter in the door’s direction, while she both replied to her assistant’s query and exacerbated the annoyance of the reading public shivering outside.

  ‘Because I know a cough cough cough fucking investment when I hear it. All signed books and rarities, this Charing Cross Road pillock said. Give it enough time, that’ll be gold fucking cough cough dust, you mark my words. It’s like with all this occult rubbish – hardly anybody wants it, but the ones who do will have your hand off for it, and they’re rolling in cough money, most of ’em.’

  Rotating the bleached cardboard sign from LOSED to PEN, she next pretended not to know which key of several would unlock the shop and so tried all of them, baggy eyes glittering with evil glee as the short queue outside gave up the will to live. In Dennis’s unvoiced opinion, Coffin Ada was most probably a Dracula who feasted on human discomfort. Finally, the door was PEN. Finding herself in mid-paroxysm, she greeted those seeking admission with a hostile semaphore, waving them irritably in through a damp haze of pulmonary spindrift. Thus, reduced to herded livestock, the quartet of middle-aged men slouched resentfully to their desired shelves while Ada – stockings corrugating at the ankles; still trying to smoke even as she was coughing – made her way back to the counter and the conversation with her cringing underling. Congealing custard eyes surveyed the crystallising mess in her employee’s cup. She pointedly restirred her own, then took a noisy slurp before springing the till and taking out two fivers with a handful of pound notes.

  ‘This cough cough cough cough Harrison, he reckons they’re worth twenty quid, his Machen items. So do I, but he can cough cough whistle for it. Fifteen’s what I’m giving you. Talk him down any further, you can keep the cough cough cough cough change.’

  She pressed the money with a pencilled list of required books into his palm, and Dennis stuck it in his jacket’s inside pocket, where there were no holes. The bell above the door jingled reproachfully as one of the four men and the briefly intruding sun both exited together without making any purchase. Dennis couldn’t tell if Ada’s strychnine sneer was meant for the non-customer or the departing daylight. After what seemed an interminable paragraph of coughs, she carried on with her wheeze of instructions.

  ‘Listen, keep your eye out for scarce occult stuff as well. I’m thinking there might be a craze. And put a coat on or you’ll catch your cough cough cough cough cough cough death.’

  He nodded, usually a safer bet than saying anything, and took his sugar-varnished cup through to the kitchen, picking up a gabardine mac on the way. Back in the shop, still pulling on his raincoat, Dennis noticed that one of the three remaining customers was sidling towards the counter with a fair-condition copy of Sax Rohmer’s Dope and a superior expression. This, in Dennis’s experience, might not make for the smoothest of transactions. Hurriedly, he did his buttons up and edged towards the front door, anxious to be on his way before Ada was given opportunity to show her still-worse side, but wasn’t quick enough. The doomed man had by then reached the cash register, and greeted the shop’s owner with a condescending smirk that he perhaps believed to be intimidating. Ada ran a rosebud tongue tip around desiccated lips, and Dennis struggled to remember if he’d ever seen her blink. He wasn’t even sure that she had eyelids.

  ‘Ooh, Sax cough cough cough cough Rohmer, is it? Very good choice, that. Very popular. Cough cough cough. Should you like it in a paper bag cough cough?’

  Lapels now twinkling with sputum, the surprised man – possibly a teacher, doctor, somebody accustomed to authority – attempted to repeat his strategy of seeming loftily amused.

  ‘Ha ha. Yes, I was looking at the cover …’

  ‘Mm. Very attractive. Lovely olive-green cough cough cloth boards, you’ll notice. Cassell first edition, that is, 1919, and at seven shillings very reasonably cough cough cough cough priced.’

  ‘Ha ha. No, I was looking more at where it’s rubbed, and how the spine’s cracked. What d’you say we call it five bob?’

  Still without a flicker of expression in her lithic features, Ada held the man’s gaze for a moment, then looked down at the scuffed volume in her hand, as if uncomprehending. Finally, she tilted back her petrified coiffure and once again stared into his increasingly uncertain eyes.

  ‘Oh. Cough cough cough. You want to haggle.’

  That was it for Dennis. Uttering a hasty, ‘Right, I’m off, then. See you later,’ he made for the exit past the brace of other customers, who both stood rooted to the spot as they watched the unfolding ugly situation at the counter. Ada’s kippered voice, behind him, notched the volume up.

  ‘You want to fucking cough cough haggle, do you? Is that it, you cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough haggling little cunt?’

  Lent speed by cowardice, Dennis burst jingling through the door into the petrol, brick dust, coal smoke, horse muck, cooking offal, reeking tanneries, glue-factory particulates, urine that smelled of beer, medical ointments and fresh air outside. Despite his urgent pace and stork-legged stride, he was barely halfway across Gibraltar Walk when the shop’s doorbell tolled again. He had no need to ask for whom, but craned his head around and peered over his shoulder anyway.

  Lowell’s Books & Magazines stood at the top end of Gibraltar Walk, a single carious tooth somehow protruding from a jaw that was no longer there, punched clean off in the recently concluded prizefight. All of the street’s other houses and therefore the street itself were gone to lumpy pumice, likewise the adjacent parts of Gossett Street and Satchwell Road. The luckless customer was backing from the open shop door, where stood his tormentor in her morbid dressing-gown and slippers, skeletal and rattling like a woman made of coat hangers. She brandished the Sax Rohmer book in front of her, as if repelling heretics with a witchfinder’s Bible.

  ‘Five cough cough cough fucking bob? I’ll give you fucking haggle. Cough cough cough. I’ll fucking haggle you in a cough minute. Here, you want five fucking bobs’ worth, do you, you cough cough cough jumped-up splash of spunk? Well, how about this for a cough cough bargain?’

  In a storm of mucus and exertion, Ada tore the book’s front cover off and flung it at the stammering, retreating miscreant. She did the same with the ripped spine and, in an emphysemic frenzy, clawed the innards of the tome into bold-headed signatures: Kerry Consults the Oracle, Night-Life of Soho, The Black Smoke, most of them flapping down the empty memory of Gibraltar Walk after the frightened and now sprinting man. Spitting at where a gutter used to be, the nastiest old woman in the world went back into her musty bunker while the curtain-twitchers on the other side of Gossett Street gaped in appalled surprise, as if this didn’t happen every other morning.

  Overhead, in an enormous grubby fleece of sky, the sun briefly apparent from inside the shop was nowhere to be seen. Regretting that he shared a species let alone a house with Ada Benson, Dennis turned his collar up, so that he looked more like someone mysterious and violent, from a film. With what he thought might be construed as a detective’s or a secret agent’s gait, he hunched off moodily through the remains of Shoreditch, heading towards Old Street and the shattered city piled beyond, humming the ‘Harry Lime Theme’.

  Dennis dum-badum-badum-badummed his way to Clerkenwell and over Gray’s Inn Road, thinking haphazardly of sex, books, Orwell, Coffin Ada, finding somewhere else to live, sex again, money, and the relative attractions of a lonely but dramatic death in the Vienna sewers, being meanwhile largely unaware of his material surroundings. Unseen stagehands wound a canvas backdrop past, a crawling frieze of buildings hyphenated here and there by rubble. Chimneys that exhaled an early midnight were cranked by unnoticed, as were horses, carts, bikes, barrows, a few motors and the trudging multitude of strangers. This oblivious trance was only interrupted when he crossed the entrance to Red Lion Square in Holborn, the supposed location of Oliver Cromwell’s missing head, so he’d been told, stolen when Charles the Second had the erstwhile Lord Protector dug up and dragged through the lanes of London, with his putrefied cadaver having spent the night before laid out in the eponymous Red Lion Inn. As rumours went, it was a memorably ghastly one.

  Deciding that he’d probably have been a Roundhead but would have denied it later when the monarchy was back, Dennis continued past a soot-skinned church in Bloomsbury Way and then, before he got to Oxford Street, banked into Charing Cross Road on his left.