landed with bruising force on the deserted pavement of Bride Lane, where was the sound of something weighty swinging shut behind, and where the jarring pain of impact, the unlit sky and the sudden, bitter cold were all real things. A kicked sandcastle of a man, after some several minutes grovelling and gasping, he contrived to lever himself up into a seated posture on the front steps of what he would later notice was a printer’s institute. He sat there for the next hour, trembling and staring, while the six or seven passers-by who happened on him in that time assumed he was perhaps a shell-shocked veteran. In a way, he was.

  Identity came back to him, but only in confused instalments. Dazedly, he reconstructed who he was and what had led him to this chilly, lightless doorstep: he was Dennis Knuckleyard, he thought, and since his mother’s death four years ago, had lived with Coffin Ada Benson at her bookshop. She had sent him on an errand that had led through tipsters, gangsters, hawkers, artists and wooden men, into a shining town that relegated bricks-and-mortar London to a shadow it was casting. He supposed he was in love with Grace, though she was too grown-up and beautiful for him to stand much of a chance; would probably end up with someone more her own age, someone with a car and a career and their own place to live. In this way, with the background colours of his life at least roughed in, Dennis reluctantly came to address the foreground detail of his last two hours.

  Although he desperately needed to regard his travels in the other London as those in a dream, a random sequence of unsettling but blameless incidents, he knew that wasn’t true. For all of its fantastic trappings, Dennis’s assistance with the killing of Clive Amery had really happened. Clive was really dead, and Dennis really had arranged for that to be the case. However justified or necessary it had been, he had a feeling that the evening’s events had ushered something dangerous and new into his inner life, his personality. He couldn’t talk to anybody in material London about what he’d done, not Grace or Tolerable John or Ada, because in material London, what he’d done was murder, punishable by the rope. Nor could Dennis tell anyone acquainted with the Great When, because in the Great When, what he’d done was to commit an act of treasonous betrayal, punishable by an intestinal extroversion. He could dimly apprehend the loneliness of his new situation, knowing that in the attempt to understand or to assimilate what had just happened, he would be completely on his own. After a while, he opened his clenched fist and gazed down blankly at the iron mortice key that rested in his palm, without the first idea of what it meant. Eventually, on his third try he managed to stand up and, thrusting both hands and the tightly clasped key deep into the pockets of his coat, commenced the long, refrigerated walk back home to Shoreditch.

  When he found himself outside Lowell’s Books & Magazines an indeterminate while later, all the lights were off and, mercifully, Ada herself had evidently already retired. Braving the dead-nettles that were the bookshop’s only neighbours, Dennis fumbled with the latch of the back gate, tripped over Ada’s inconvenient flowerbed – or perhaps premature grave, he really wasn’t bothered any more – and entered by the back door before going straight up to his excuse for human accommodation, taking off his clothes and lowering himself down into his two-inch-thick mattress and oblivion. Where he remained for almost the next thirty hours, left undisturbed by a landlady who’d deduced that whatever was wrong with him was almost certainly her fault. He finally woke, massively disoriented and bewildered, on November 2nd, Wednesday, only to discover that his fingers were still wrapped around the key, his cryptic and upsetting keepsake. Dennis placed it in the top drawer of his bedside cabinet, got dressed, and then got on as best he could with his unsatisfactory life.

  All that day and the next, both Dennis and the world surrounding him seemed hollow as a blown egg. He performed his duties adequately with a shift or two behind the counter, but attended to his customers without a word, without a noticeable change in his expression. Even when the woman with a funny eye and fondness for a titillating murder tried to carry out another of her lightning raids, he only had to meet her frantically rotating glance with the charred abyss of his own to send her hurrying away, without so much as a beguiling strangled nudist for her troubles.

  To her credit, other than enquiring if he’d like a cup of tea, Ada took care to leave Dennis alone, at least until the Thursday evening, by which point he was at least partially reassembled. They were both sat at the kitchen table, finishing the pig’s liver and onions that she’d made for dinner, when he noticed that Ada was giving him a long, appraising stare, as if at a new sofa that she wasn’t sure she liked the look of. Although, when at last she spoke, her tone was barely even hostile.

  ‘Dennis, cough cough cough am I to take it you’ve been in a bit of cough cough cough cough bother? Since you come out of yer cough cough coma, you’ve been knitted out of fucking steam.’

  He supposed he had been. That was certainly how it had felt.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I had a spot, you know, a spot of trouble. Thanks for asking.’

  Ada slithered a reptilian tongue tip around lips of bacon rind while she considered.

  ‘Cough cough cough I see. And am I cough cough cough to understand that this, shall we say, spot of trouble, it’s all cough cough cough cough done with now?’

  He glanced up at the pub-piano ivory of her eyes, then ducked his head and looked back at his plate, where he was studiously scraping up the last few scraps of liver, mash and onion gravy.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s all finished. That’s all done with now.’

  She stared at him for a few seconds more, in silence, before leaning forward and delivering her next remarks in slightly lowered tones that were at once more urgent and more intimate.

  ‘Yes, cough cough cough but are you sure? You say it’s done with, but are you as sure of that as I’m sure of my cough cough cough cough flowerbed, for example?’

  He put down his knife and fork and looked up into Ada’s level and unblinking gaze, his own eyes full of nothing save for startled disbelief. She knew. Not names or even the most rudimentary details, but she knew that there was only one thing which could put that look on someone’s face, the look that Dennis had on his. She knew because she was a member of the same exclusive club, had guessed what it took thirty hours of deep sleep to recover from. As somebody who’d staked their future on a body never being found, she evidently knew the signs. Still eye to eye with her unwavering scrutiny, he answered in a calm voice that surprised him, one he hadn’t heard before.

  ‘I’m sure. It’s like your flowerbed. Nothing will be coming up.’

  She gave a nod of satisfaction that was almost imperceptible.

  ‘That’s cough cough cough cough what I thought.’

  Haltingly, Ada raised herself out of her chair with grunts and groans that made her seem like a forgotten triumph of nineteenth-century engineering. Gathering up their dirty plates and mash-scabbed cutlery, she slippered her way past him to the rough stone sink, and as she did, she briefly rested one dried-leaf hand on his shoulder, patted it and said, ‘Good cough cough cough cough lad.’ It was so unexpected, so precisely what he needed, that it almost made him cry. He was a good lad, even if the only other person to have ever called him that had been his mum. He blinked hard, having not foreseen the touching sympathy of murderers.

  After she’d left the washing-up to soak in half a sinkful of cold water, Ada scuffed and spluttered to the cupboard, from which she retrieved a bottle of Bell’s whiskey and two small glass tots about the size of eyebaths. Earlier that afternoon she’d splashed out on a spitting, crackling conflagration in the kitchen fireplace, and although it was now down to hot coals of translucent orange in a powdery encroachment of grey ash, its light and warmth still conjured up a close facsimile of cosy. On returning to the woefully abraded table, she poured both of them a generous measure, raised her brimming eyebath in the firelight and said, ‘Cough cough cough cough cheers.’

  They drank and talked for hours about everything except the dreadful things they’d done, which was more difficult for Ada who’d done very few things that weren’t dreadful. Mostly she regaled him with hair-raising stories of her brief career on stage and screen, including an informative classification of her fellow thespians as either ‘cunts’ or ‘alright if you cough cough cough cough like that sort of thing’. By the time she’d recounted fraught affairs with both sides of the house during Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition government, Dennis perceived her raddled features and her rigid hairdo in a mythic glow that didn’t seem to be wholly occasioned by the whiskey.

  ‘Ada, honestly, all of the things you’ve done in your long life, they’re great. They’re really, really great. I only hope that, if I live as long as you, I’ve notched up half of your experiences.’

  She put her empty glass down and regarded her pie-eyed employee with a puzzled frown.

  ‘Dennis, I’m cough cough cough cough cough cough fifty-one.’

  By Friday evening, when he met with Tolerable John down at the Cheshire Cheese, Dennis was almost normal. If, after the horrifying business of the Monday night just gone, Dennis’s psychological condition could be likened to a smouldering bombsite, then his thirty hours of sleep were a bulldozing of the rubble, and, come Guy Fawkes Night eve on Friday, he had managed to erect a personality equivalent to a substandard block of flats – shoddy but functional.

  They mused upon this, that, the other, and the only noticeable symptom of his recent danse macabre was a persisting tendency to tune out from what John was on about, in favour of his own interior broadcasts. In the main, these focussed on the overwhelming notion that wherever Dennis was in London, there was, too, another world that occupied exactly the same space. Although he hadn’t seen it, he was confident that, somewhere off its Upper Scandals, the Great When must have its own outlandish version of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. Its clientele, he hazily conjectured, perhaps sitting right where he was now and yet a universe away, would be the shades of Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and all the rest, content amid the smoky gossip of eternity. As a poetic fancy this had been a comforting idea, but as a point of fact it was disturbing, bringing to mind as it did the final line of Arthur Machen’s ‘N’: ‘It is possible, indeed, that we three are now sitting among desolate rocks, by bitter streams … And with what companions?’ Stifling an inadvertent shudder, Dennis tried to pay attention to what Tolerable John was saying.

  ‘ … so I had a think about your situation, being stuck up there at Ada’s with no expectation of parole. It seems to me that what you need’s a proper job, so that you could afford to look for lodgings somewhere else, and if it turns out you can’t find a proper job, there’s always journalism. I remembered you’d once said how you might like to have a go at writing. Writing stories, literary fiction, I assume, but when it comes to finding your way into a career like that, or polishing your skills, then you could do a good sight worse than working as a journalist. I often hear about odd little jobs, short features to fill up a column here or there, and if you fancied giving it a go, then I could shove some of ’em your way. Course, it wouldn’t be a lot of cash at first, but it’d be a start.’

  Dennis was glad he’d listened. In a dizzying twenty seconds of elation, he imagined himself in a whole new life: a junior newshound with a gripping prose style that would soon see lots of money rolling in, at least compared with intermittent five-pound notes out of the till from Ada. He could get some new clothes, buy some shoes that fitted, find a decent place to live, somewhere he could take Grace to that she’d be impressed by and then probably they’d marry. He was just considering a more suitable hairstyle to accompany his new profession when it struck him that he hadn’t written anything since school and, even if he had, did not own so much as a fountain pen that he could write with. As his soaring aspirations ploughed into the runway upon take-off, Dennis looked up at McAllister and shook the haircut he was stuck with ruefully.

  ‘Nah. Thanks a lot for thinking of us, mate, but I don’t reckon I’d be up to it. I wouldn’t have the first idea of what to do, and, anyway, I haven’t got the kit.’

  John took a gulp of his just-purchased pint, wiped a Bismarck moustache of foam on to the forearm of his coat and tipped his chin from side to side as if in a display of pensive balance.

  ‘Yeah, I knew you’d say that, although that’s what comes of living up at Coffin Ada’s since you were a little kid. She’s siphoned off your self-respect and confidence because, in other people, those are things that get on Ada’s nerves. It’s just the way she is. But I’ve been giving it some thought, and I can’t see that you’ve got anything to lose. As far as writing goes, you’re a smart chap who’s read a couple of good books and, take my word for it, could not be any worse than the great load of rubbish I see published every day. As for not having any kit, I’m getting a new typewriter in January or February next year, so if you like, you can have my old Olivetti. True, the “e” key sticks a bit, but if you don’t mind that, it ought to last you a good while. I can throw in a ream of Croxley Script, a ream of onion-skin, a pack or two of carbon paper, if that’s any help.’

  Out of the scattered wreckage and the burn mark it had made on Dennis’s internal landing-strip, his dream defied all laws of aeronautics and miraculously lifted off into the sky again, this time as a Wright brothers model that had lowered expectations but which seemed a great deal sturdier; seemed airworthy. Dennis immediately accepted John’s generous offer, thanked his dolorous friend once more and promised that he’d give it his best shot. With this resolved, they got another round in and their conversation was both livelier and of more consequence. Both men devoured a packet of potato crisps – to ‘line their stomachs’, a beer-inspired strategy to keep them from becoming as drunk as they obviously already were – and Tolerable John submitted what turned out to be a three-pint thesis on the state of Britain following the war, talking about the massive changes in society that Dennis, up until that point, had barely even noticed, much less understood. A good hour or so later, as the landlord rang his bell and called last orders, John’s political analysis approached its finish line.

  ‘The war turned Britain into somewhere else. It had to. When it was still going on, everyone knew that this would have to be a different country when the war was finished, that it couldn’t just go back to being for the benefit of wealthy toffs who claimed that poverty was what the poor deserved for being lazy, stupid and incapable. You can’t say that to the people who’ve just saved us from a century or two of Nazi Europe, can you? Not when they’ve come home victorious to find jobs gone, and family members dead, and miles of rubble where their houses used to be. No, in the wartime coalition, even the Conservatives like Churchill knew that there was going to have to be a change, a serious attempt to sort out all the miseries of class and inequality, once and for all. They’d had Clem Attlee there in the war cabinet, and good old Ernie Bevin for the unions, and they could see the working classes weren’t just going to let this lie. They had to feel they’d fought a war for something.

  ‘And, to be quite fair, society’s a lot more equal now. The main proposals in the Beveridge Report have been put into practice, we’ve been promised full employment, there’s Nye Bevan’s health service, there’s proper education for all walks of life, and even with the rationing we’re better fed now as a nation than we’ve ever been. This new Britannia’s looking good, but where I think we’re going to have a problem is in letting old Britannia go. It’s clear the empire’s had its chips, with India ready to abandon ship, but what’s the betting that we’ll try to hang on to our status as a grand world power, up there with Russia and the Yanks, despite the fact we’re in debt to our eyeballs? We can have the decent country we’ve been guaranteed, or we can keep up the illusion that we’re still a great one, but I can’t see that we’ll have the money to do both. And knowing us, we’ll probably decide that destitution’s not too bad, so long as you can dress it in a Union Jack waistcoat.’

  Dennis, who’d been wondering if characters that had enjoyed the Cheshire Cheese in fiction – Sydney Carton, Hercule Poirot – might be occupying nearby tables in the world next door, had missed a lot of the foregoing argument, although he thought he’d caught the gist of it.

  ‘So, given what you’re saying, what’s the outlook for this next ten years? What do you think the fifties will be like, all things considered?’

  Tolerable John regarded him with tired, lugubrious eyes beneath perpetually regretful brows.

  ‘What, in a word?’

  Guy Fawkes Night came and went with no more than the usual amount of maiming or disfigurement, but as Dennis walked down to Grace’s around sunset on the Sunday after, the debris was everywhere. Spent banger casings littered the smashed flagstones, while strewn over the adjacent ruins were half-pint milk bottles still full of smoke, dead sparklers, the martyred stubs of Roman candles and the blackened thumbprints left by last night’s fires. He would have thought that everybody’d had enough of loud bangs in the dark, of sparks and flames and rockets, but then Dennis wasn’t a psychologist; had barely a psychology to call his own when it came down to it.

  He got to Folgate Street just as it started to get dark and Grace seemed pleased to see him, grinning as she asked him in. She made them both a cup of tea, and conjured a Victoria sponge with jam and buttercream from somewhere, probably her mixing bowl and oven. Her apartment, Dennis noted, looked a lot more spacious without razor-wielding thugs and timber golems. Grace was wearing some variety of Woolworth’s perfume, perhaps Lily of the Valley, and, remembering the swift kiss on his cheek she’d given him when last he’d seen her, Dennis wondered if tonight might be the night. She asked him how his week had been and, while avoiding any mention whatsoever of its first three days, he told her. When he got to Tolerable John’s admittedly inebriated offer of a typewriter with nearly a whole alphabet of working keys, she was almost beside herself.