‘I’m sorry. I saw you were reading.’ This was untrue. ‘I like books. This is a box of books I’m carrying here. Work in a bookshop.’ This was true, but made Dennis sound simple. The young woman, or perhaps girl, it was hard to tell, was now regarding him with an expression of concern.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  Anxious to put right the half-sharp impression he was fostering and before he could help it, Dennis came out with the most unhelpful, unconvincing thing that he had ever said to an attractive woman, or an unattractive woman, or a man, or anything.

  ‘Haha. No, it’s alright, there’s nothing wrong with me.’ Realising how this sounded, albeit too late, he added, ‘What’s the book, then?’

  She stared at him for too long in silence, as if trying to make him out, glanced at the cover of the volume she was holding, drew deep on her fag, exhaled, and then looked back to Dennis.

  ‘London Churches.’

  Oh. She was religious. That was why she stood here leaning up against this lamppost opposite St Bride’s, the printer’s chapel. Feeling more ashamed than ever of his prior assumptions, he jiggled his brow in obvious confusion until she put him out of his misery.

  ‘I was up here a week ago, and thought I spotted something in the churchyard over there. That’s why I’m reading up on it.’

  ‘So, what, you thought you’d seen a ghost?’

  Brushing stray flames of hair out of her bottomless eyes, she regarded him with almost tangible indifference.

  ‘No. No, not a ghost. Can you remind me why I’m talking to you?’

  Clutching at his load to stop it sliding, Dennis ducked his head uncomfortably.

  ‘No, I, I just, I saw you standing there, reading your book, and I thought, well …’

  Slowly, a smile began to spread across her perfect face.

  ‘You thought I was a prostitute.’

  Caught bang to rights and stumped for anything to say, he laughed self-deprecatingly, which was as good as a confession. The girl’s smile evaporated, leaving in its place the patient, sympathetic countenance that’s necessary when explaining matters to a four-year-old.

  ‘Well, funnily enough, I am. I’m just one who can read. You have a nice night.’

  And with that, as if he wasn’t there, the precious balm of her attention was returned to a disintegrating book on churches that could not know its good fortune, or be troubled by inopportune erections. Grateful at last for his all-concealing Oxydol container, Dennis at least had the self-awareness to know that he’d made himself appear ridiculous. When Bride Lane failed to open up and swallow him, he did his best to follow the red-headed girl’s example and pretend that their exchange had never happened. With his every cell attempting to cringe from its neighbours in embarrassment, he lugged his stupid-looking box down Ludgate Hill, and never dreamed that the foregoing incident would prove to be only the second-worst encounter with a woman that he’d have that day.

  Off Warwick Lane he found a fish and chip shop where he got himself cod and four penn’orth, setting down his load so he could sit crouched on a partially dismantled wall to eat the only hot meal he’d been near for days, out of a week-old Daily Telegraph. He’d paid for it with his remaining pocket change: he was aware that Ada had said he could keep the difference if he managed to talk Harrison down under fifteen quid, but he was equally aware that since the difference had turned out to be a tenner, she would have his guts for garters if he took her literally.

  Squatting on blown-down brickwork, he exulted in the chewy dough of skin and batter, in the glossy chunks that slid apart like pages in a poorly stapled magazine. Eyes watering from the acetic overdose he’d lavished on his chips, he peered at the surrounding street through rationed daylight that was gradually abandoning its day. Everything had been knocked about, and in the middle of the road there stood an obsolete Anderson shelter, gaping empty and no longer plump with frightened families. Up on a corrugated-iron fence, old home-front propaganda posters lingered, half erased by rust. London was haunted by six years of burning sky, tongue sandwiches and rained-on slogans. Staring gas masks under everybody’s sideboards. Dennis scoffed his grub, then licked his fingers and deposited the crumpled rose of newspaper, glassy with grease, in someone’s dustbin. Once more taking up his crate of woes, he carried on with the return to Shoreditch.

  He made hard work of ascending Aldersgate, up into settling dusk and more people than usual coming in the opposite direction. He excused his way through crowds at studded crossings, egg-yolk light from a Belisha beacon dribbling on faces with expression all but worn away. Across the road and its occasional rush of vehicles, the nothingness of Cripplegate blazed pink with London rocket in defiance of encroaching twilight. Out amongst the weed-bound hollows and the absences, he could make out the cordoned sites of archaeologists, white ribbons shying from a risen breeze.

  Adjusting his grip on the box at every other drainpipe, he recalled the finds he’d read about or picked up from the gossip washing in and out of Ada’s shop: it seemed the Luftwaffe had turned out to be keen historians, helpfully excavating parts of London that had not been seen for centuries. By London Wall, the boundary of the Roman city, fragments of the gatehouse for which Cripplegate was named had been unearthed; an archway – fortified, imposing and with upper storeys – giving access to a round fort situated here before Rome stumbled and the ages suddenly went dark. It had been pulled down getting on two centuries ago when the road needed widening, and then wiped from the lapsing memory of the metropolis until this year, hauled from the ruins of the vanished neighbourhood.

  Characteristically, Dennis did not link these retrievals with the thing that he may or may not have seen when he was nine. He’d edited that otherworldly glimpse out of the story of himself almost as soon as it had happened, relegated it to a concussion and effectively suppressed it. As for all the other moments of that thunderous night, they too were lost, buried beneath the mountainous embroidery that Dennis had adorned his tale with in its numerous playground retellings, so that many of his memories were simply things that he’d forgotten making up. At nine, as he remembered, he’d been a case-hardened crook who’d screw a gas meter as soon as draw breath, rather than someone who’d done it once because an older kid said it was easy, and who’d nearly got himself killed as a consequence. And as for what had happened when the fireworks stopped, all that he knew was that he’d saved a kitten; no, a frightened dog; no, a small girl who couldn’t find her parents; and as such he’d had no time to witness visions in the crumpling smoke, the spouting flame.

  He carried on past Glasshouse Yard without a thought for how he’d sheltered from the air raid there, preoccupied with the increasingly unmanageable box and his increasingly unmanageable life. He wasn’t certain of his hold on either of these things, and felt like both could slip at any minute. What kind of a future had he got, or how was he supposed to build one for himself with just these bombed and bankrupt raw materials to hand? Gloomily taking in the blushing acreage of rosebay willowherb across the road, it struck him that both he and London shared the same predicament, with neither able to imagine anything beyond the bombsites; beyond the paralysis and life arrest of shell shock; beyond being Coffin Ada’s live-in servant until you yourself were spent and hideous, although this last anxiety was Dennis’s alone and London didn’t seem so bothered by it.

  Feeling old, he staggered along Old Street, groaning with cardboard arthritis, unsure how he’d fill the time between now and his death. The only two jobs that he could imagine himself doing were, first, secret agent, and, then, writer as a distant second. Dennis thought he’d make a decent spy because at over six foot, and with a head like a plucked chicken from the rear, he felt he was unnoticeable. Writing, on the other hand, was a transparent fantasy that he would hopefully grow out of. At school, he’d liked doing composition, but the one or two things that he’d tried since then had fizzled out and not gone anywhere. He was eighteen. He had nothing to write about because nothing had happened to him yet, except the firebombing of Cripplegate and that bit after where he’d rescued the blind nun. He obviously had no aptitude for fiction, creativity or anything like that. So, espionage it was.

  Passing the gutted remnant of St Luke’s, its roof gone and the cenotaph thing that was its peculiar steeple rearing against falling dark, Dennis reflected how it was most probably his childish literary ambitions which had made him think that working in a bookshop might be a step in the right direction, as if being a gravedigger could lead naturally to a career as a professional assassin. Hadn’t he heard that his early-morning bromide, Orwell, had once worked at W. H. Smith’s and, for a period, had loathed the whole idea of books as a result? Dennis continued to love books with all his heart – they were a sole escape hatch from the depth-charged submarine of his existence – but feared he was coming to detest old women.

  Veering as the load inside the Oxydol container slid from one side to the other, he went past the busy station and then over the main road to Austin Street. Along the home stretch of Virginia Road, he found that he was studying the pavement underfoot as best he could around the intervening box, attempting to discern through the declining light how much of what he trod was fallen leaves and how much litter, litter being less hospitable to surreptitious dog mess. As he neared Gibraltar Walk, he was obscurely gratified to spot a few bold-headlined pages from Sax Rohmer’s Dope amongst the disparate fluttering from the gutter – The Cigarettes from Buenos Ayres, The Dream of Sin Sin Wa, The Strangle-Hold, flavorous shreds snagged in the gobs of drains.

  Electric lamps, few as there were around those parts, were lighting up one at a time and looked the way that a descending run of notes played on a xylophone would sound, bright peals of amber ringing from a deepening violet. Lowell’s Books & Magazines hulked lonely in the murk up at what once had been the top end of Gibraltar Walk but which was now, effectively, Gibraltar Walk. He failed to see how the five paces it would take to pass the shopfront could be construed as a walk, unless by someone even more averse to exercise than Dennis was. The relic structure stood heading a queue where everything in line behind it had died waiting, given up the ghost and blown away. It was as if the German High Command had left just this one place alone, perhaps deferring to a greater evil.

  From the LOSED sign hanging in the lightless entrance, he deduced the time to be something past five, and so hefted his cargo through the stretch of slate and nettle that had been next door, around to the back gate. Negotiating this was tricky, what with having to put down the box and pick it up again, at least twice, before he could brave the near-dark deathtrap of the shop’s rear yard. It wasn’t that the walled concrete enclosure was what you’d call cluttered. There was the collapsing shack of Ada’s lavatory, keeping to itself up in one corner, but then there was also Ada’s inconvenient flowerbed. Approximately six feet long by three feet wide, it seemed this had been situated with an eye to optimum obstruction, a depressing black dirt barricade that somehow only seemed to produce flowers that were already dead. Tripping and swearing on the feature’s raised brick edging, Dennis lurched his way to the back door where he repeated all the putting down and picking up again before gaining admittance. Almost weeping with relief, he finally deposited his Machen horde in the rear passage, where the coat hooks were in better nick than any of the items hung thereon.

  Ada was waiting for him in the kitchen.

  On a stool, she sat beside the lacerated table where she had a magazine, a half-drunk cup of tea and a chipped willow-pattern bowl of walnuts. Skilfully, she’d cracked the suntanned skulls along their seams before winkling out the shrivelled brains and eating them, crushing their crenellated lobes between her twelve or so remaining teeth. Still in her formerly pink robe and perhaps tartan slippers, still with hair like starched steam and with stockings or sloughed skin around her ankles, Ada stood up as he entered, which confused him and made him feel briefly ladylike.

  ‘Well, I got all the Machen books. You’ll never guess how much I—’

  Ada threw her half-cup of cold tea, complete with floating doily of coagulated milk, into Dennis’s face and his unfortunately open mouth.

  ‘You can get out my house, you cough cough cough cough cough cough thieving little cough cough cough cough fucker.’

  This took Dennis rather by surprise. Wide-eyed and spluttering his incomprehension, he fished the remaining fiver and its five green underlings out of his inside pocket, brandishing them at his landlady like a crucifix. ‘But, but, but look, I got the lot for five quid. There’s a tenner change …’

  Her features crowding to the centre of her head in outrage, Ada hissed, ‘I don’t cough cough cough want your fucking money,’ even as she grabbed it with a raptor swipe and stuffed it into a marsupial pocket of her gown. Stepping forward until her sulphuric gaze was level with his chin, she issued her consumptive verdict.

  ‘Cough cough cough cough cough cough fucking cough cough sling your hook, you cough cough cough ungrateful little shit. Pinching my cough cough cough cough fucking stock …’

  Dripping and disoriented, terror-stricken by the thought of being suddenly without a job or home, Dennis had no idea what he’d done or what was happening to him. Reeling, he clutched desperately for any straw of reason that might help explain his dreadful situation.

  ‘No, no, the George Orwell book, I never took it out the shop. I read it at the counter …’

  She flung her remaining walnuts and the cranial debris of their fallen comrades at him.

  ‘George cough Orwell? George cough cough cough fucking Orwell? I’m not fucking talking about cough cough cough George Orwell. I’m cough cough cough cough cough talking about this!’

  Ada snatched up the magazine, the one thing from the table that she’d yet to hurl at him, and shook it in his trickling face. Until that moment, Dennis hadn’t realised there was anything that could be worse than homelessness and unemployment, but then recognised the periodical as the copy of Picture Show he’d been perusing earlier. His entire sex life, pretty much, was waving back and forth before his wincing eyes, clutched in the venomous old lady’s withered fist. A copper-boiler heat was rising in his cheeks and he knew that he must be blushing, although not that he’d turned bright cerise.

  ‘Look, I was going to put it back. I’d, I’d, I’d only borrowed it because, because I’m interested in films. Lots of chaps my age, we’re all interested in films. I wasn’t going to nick it.’

  Tilting her head like a puzzled dog, she squinted first at Dennis and his vivid colouration, then at Picture Show, then from one to the other for a few times more, her homicidal fury gradually subsiding into blank mystification. Finally, deep in the unimaginable stew of Ada’s psyche, it appeared an understanding had been reached. She lifted sour-cream eyes to meet his apprehensive gaze, and then did something awful with her face that he had never seen before.

  Her smile was sunrise on a renderer’s yard, its dire light creeping into every crevice and uncovering each gruesome spectacle. The corners of her mouth crawled back towards pendulous ears, exposing the magnolia cemetery of her dentition. Coffin Ada Benson was quite clearly taking something very much like human pleasure from all this, having the time of her abominable life.

  ‘Cough cough cough ha ha ha ha ha cough cough. Dennis, love, you should have said. Ha ha ha ha cough cough. Course you can ha ha ha cough cough cough you can borrow it. Just give it ha ha cough cough cough cough give it back in fair condition when you’re ha ha ha ha cough cough when you’re done with it. No hurry. Ha ha ha ha ha ha cough cough. See you in the morning. Ha ha ha ha cough.’

  She pressed the dog-eared magazine upon him and, upsettingly, patted his hand before she turned and tottered off in the direction of her room, leaving a stave of barking laughs and coughs strung on the air behind her. With his lodgings and employment both apparently secure for the foreseeable, Dennis was unsure why he wasn’t feeling more relieved. He looked down at the shards of walnut shell still clinging to his sodden front, and frowned. He hadn’t the remotest understanding of what had just happened, and supposed he never would have. As with most of his defeatist suppositions, this was comprehensively discredited in less than twenty minutes.

  He’d wiped himself down, locked the back door, then squeaked his way upstairs, back to his quarters with the recently disputed magazine rolled in one hand. Along the landing, he could still hear Ada laughing between coughs or possibly vice versa. Switching on the table lamp and pulling the heartbroken curtains closed, he sat down on his bed’s edge in a great complaint of mattress springs and, lacking any other recreation, opened Picture Show to page sixteen.

  And there she was, even more irresistible than he recalled. He took her in like a tall drink, commencing at the top: her hair, her face, her modest breasts defined by hanging folds in the sheer fabric of her dress, her poured-out legs, her feet with insteps arching like the backs of hissing cats. Beneath the picture, previously unnoticed, was an almost microscopic credit line. He lifted the page closer, so that he could read the name: ‘Ada Mae Lowell, in Starlight Express.’

  It didn’t register immediately, but when it did, he was reduced to mewling paste beneath a rockslide of soul-rending comprehension. Away down the landing, Ada oscillated between choke and cackle, which was more demoralising than George Orwell’s rat-cage helmet. Empty-eyed and staring into empty space, Dennis conjectured that it was, by far, the worst day of his life.

  This time he had to wait until the following morning to be proven incorrect.

  2

  A London Walk

  White as a sheet, she was – whiter than Dennis’s – when he crept down the squeeze-box stairs next day and found her sitting at the kitchen table, showing all the animation and complexion of a waxwork. Spread before her were the unpacked contents of the Oxydol container, which itself stood empty and ignored beside her chair, flaps splayed as if for surgery, innards gone.