After an immeasurable time in that establishment eschewed by daylight, John felt it was only right to put at least an hour or two in at the Express offices. He restated his offer of a place to stay, and said, ‘You’ll be alright,’ but shook his head from side to side as he was saying it. Drifting away into the hoopla of surrounding smoke rings, he left Dennis nursing the remains of a fifth pint along with dwindling hopes that by this time tomorrow he might still be living and the right way out. Checking his mental processes to make sure that he wasn’t too drunk to think clearly – without once considering that sober people didn’t need to do this – he reviewed the unappealing menu of his options while he polished off his drink, those last few swigs that tasted more of spit than beer.

  Dennis’s first response to any of life’s snags was always to do nothing and just see what happened, although in his current circumstances it meant sitting waiting for Jack Spot to find him, so that one was a non-starter. Getting the book back to Harrison was now impossible without the intervention of a spirit medium. Burn it or discard it and he’d have his innards on the outside, like the Wilson feller; an inverted glove puppet, but messier. And yet, giving the book to Spot, according to his landlady, would somehow make things even worse, although how was that possible? Involving the police was out, and through his pale-ale fog the only dim light visible was something that Ada had said: ‘You can just stick it through his letterbox.’ Dennis was reasonably sure that’s what she’d said, although it might have been ‘You can’t just stick it through his letterbox’, now that he thought about it. Still, he nearly reasoned, that meant that his letterbox plan had at least a fifty-fifty chance of paying off, far better odds than any of the other schemes he’d contemplated.

  He’d head up to Soho, now that all the coppers would be gone, and post the Hampole volume back where it had come from, if by that Ada meant Flabby Harrison’s now empty flat, and he was fifty per cent absolutely certain that she did. Feeling much better now he had a solid working strategy and was half-drunk, he knocked back his last quarter inch of watery dregs and stood up as decisively as he could manage. Picking up the haunted bag by its twine handles, Dennis made his way from premises unmeasured by the sun to the surprise of an already fallen night outside. Only when he was veering down the little alleyway off Fleet Street, where the Cheshire Cheese had stood for getting on four hundred years, did it occur to him that not once in their lengthy chat had John McAllister described a single part of Dennis’s ordeal as tolerable.

  Of course, the lookouts saw him before he was halfway up the pitch-black crease of Berwick Street. The market had packed up and gone save for invisible detritus in the squashy dark beneath his feet, and with the absence of its noise and cram came an intensity of hush, a more abandoned emptiness. Other than half a dozen furtive clubs or knocking shops, the area’s mostly legitimate concerns were shut by six, leaving the district as a labyrinthine shadow trap where streetlamps only reinforced the blinkering gloom. Dennis ascended, bag in hand, into deserted silence punctuated by his scuffs and stumbles. From the fizzing apprehension in his stomach, he deduced that he was nowhere near as drunk as he had hoped to be for this poorly considered venture, just too drunk to have the faintest chance of managing it properly. Above, the slate diagonals and listing chimney breasts leaned in conspiratorially, their jet geometries against a starless London sky. So far, so good, and he was thinking that his hopeless scheme might work out after all when the two men burst from the sheltered door of E. J. Tate ~ Knitting Supplies, some distance up the slope ahead of him, grey raincoats flapping noisy in the breeze as though erupting from a pigeon loft.

  One had a trilby that he held clamped to his head with one hand as he ran. Beyond that they were hurtling shapes, monochrome patchworks racing purposefully down the night-blind street towards him and his carrier bag, soles slapping hard against the pavement’s weed-split cheek with lightless shopfronts snapping back the echo.

  ‘Oi! Fucking come here!’ Voice like a furious dog, it frightened Dennis wide awake, and filled him with the bowel-freezing conviction that he definitely wasn’t going to fucking go there. Turning on a sixpence, he threw himself back into the murk he’d come from, desperate not to slip and meet his end over a spoiling apricot. His pounding footfalls striving frantically to match the downhill pull, he clattered into Soho’s convoluted darkness with his thoughts in smithereens, poleaxed by shock.

  A right turn near the bottom into Broadwick Street, all without conscious motive or volition, his pursuers still somewhere behind, but whether far or close he couldn’t tell. Why on earth had he come here? It was the worst possible idea he could have had, returning by night to a crime scene, where there were now roaring killers at his heels and Dennis couldn’t see where he was going. All his visual impressions were a squall of underexposed photos, upside down or overlapping as they flickered by: the rough-edged brickwork of a terrace end-house; metal street signs made unreadable by soot; four or five startled onlookers who shrank back into doorways, anxious not to get involved.

  With gangster hoofbeats gaining, he propelled himself across the road and swerved into Ingestre Court, or Street, or Place – he couldn’t read it – then a left turn, then a right, his dangling carrier swung out horizontally by centrifugal force as he took corners. Was the slab-and-rubber thunder of his faceless chasers louder at his back, and nearer? Brewer Street, possibly Bourchier Street, then names he didn’t recognise, carious alley mouths that might lead to a literal dead end, all with his thumping heartbeat indistinguishable from the thudding boots of the men after him.

  He didn’t have the faintest notion where he was, nor any destination except out of this unbearable dilemma, so between the ale and the adrenaline, he was in an unprecedented state of being lost, both physically and psychologically. Tilting façades with unlit windows smeared past his peripheries and every breath was scalding in his gullet. Panting down a narrow entry, he could see what looked like a yard’s wooden gate, either ajar or off its hinges, leaning open only a few steps in front of him. If he could nip in there before they saw him do it, they might run straight past, the way it worked in chases he’d seen at the pictures. Wild with panic, he pulled the gate open and was part-way through it when he realised – wait, this wasn’t right, he wasn’t seeing this correctly, he was making some mistake – that it was wooden pallets propped against the passage wall, and not a gate at all, but then, how had he opened it? Unable to arrest his tumbling momentum, he plunged forward and then

  he is on his knees and puking in pellucid heaven, spattering the gutters made from gold, where scuttling to his vomit’s thin meniscus on those auric cobbles, there are bottle caps with brewery insignias and spider legs of slivered cork, crimped edges glinting, tinkling as they lap the bile and beer … immediately upright with revulsion, he sways, reeling in an overwhelming something … all about are foreign structures, shapes ungraspable, powdered with luminescent dusk yet unmistakeably still Soho by their tilted kilter, by their signal atmosphere … the air he’s breathing feels too mighty for his lungs, which makes him sick again and now the beetle caps are crawling on his shoes … he doesn’t know what it all means but knows that he can’t take it …

  this is almost Dean Street, if not for its scale, its shrilling undergrowth acoustic, its impossibilities … filtered through twinkles, he sees urban landscape writhing at the brink of ravenous biology … peony lampposts that have petals cast in wilted glass droop on gunmetal stems, and hanging cables squeak black rubber leaves … eye-corner movement, rustlings in a turf of quivering litter, caterpillar Durex, not a thing that is not animate … he tries a few steps but his legs are wobbling, and out of unsourced glimmer, there are crabs of broken crate whose eight limbs are articulated splinter; moths folded from nudie magazines with bosoms printed grey on water-damaged wings; a creep of fag-end maggots, heads burned black and soggy arses; anaconda drainpipes that detach from walls to slither clanking on the bullion slabs; chewing-gum molluscs inching to investigate his edibility and, understanding that it’s really happening, belatedly he screams …

  the wingtip of a silver-paper dragonfly slices his forehead, drawing sudden blood, and gilded flagstones lever up in alligator jaws with smashed milk-bottle teeth … a single-bar electric fire, shuffling and scraping, starts to wind its trailing flex around one of his ankles … earwig Bakelite, tarantula suspender belts … when through the crepuscule a locomotive force is rocketing towards him as he stands and shrieks and swipes screw-threaded hornets from his eyes … a bloated human figure moving at tremendous speed so that he thinks his wool-shop ambush has pursued him here to this howling wherever … it stops dead a few feet short of him in a great spray of thimble snail shells, newsprint topsoil, an advancing crate crab slammed to matches by the impact, shuddering into stationary focus as a much-inflated Maurice Calendar …

  nearly unrecognisable since Dennis saw him yesterday, the swollen trendsetter bulges against his pale fawn overcoat, even his flaking skin too tight for him … soaking in perspiration, puffing with exertion, he looks unwell … between breaths, he says, ‘You’re Knuckleyard? This is the worst way in you could have picked. Soho Entire’s a vividistrict, you daft bugger. Come on,’ and he kicks the one-bar heater so that it lets go and skitters whining over priceless pavement, swats a grainy pornographic butterfly, grabs Dennis by the hand without the carrier bag, and then they’re off …

  sucked into pure velocity, Futurist streaks on umber, the two men career in teeming, thrashing half-light … streaming breathless up a row that’s more than Bateman Street … a pack of rubbish bins with dented faces roll at them, easily hurdled … doubloon crocodiles yawn open underfoot; the trick’s to stamp down hard on the exchequer of their upper bite, where weak wire muscles cannot keep the mouth from closing … putrid vegetable insects and doorways that flourish tongues … down Frith Street Absolute, where inner-tubeworms bask in lurid Esso puddles … the medusa nest of bicycle chain half up a sweat-beaded door flails at them, clicking, oiled and lethal … sizzling along an Older Compton Street where inorganic foliage and fauna are less evident, Dennis pulled headlong in the slipstream of distended Maurice Calendar … lights moving through grooved space …

  in the epitome of Greek Street are still fewer horrors, nor are knotted-stocking vines so prevalent … strollers pass here and there, extravagantly clad amid scintillant dimness … near the bottom is an old gas standard, thick iron-bolls at its base, where waiting by it is a ghost, translucent and bereft in threadbare clothes that you can see the desolation through … Maurice hisses ‘De Quincey’ without explanation; without pausing in his cometary passage … things whip by, almost too quick to see … red rear reflectors burdening a gatepost bough like berries … hubcap terrapins … drains with incisors … overhead, colloidal galaxies, hung in suspension … all at once, Soho’s behind them and they’re stumbling to a standstill, there on an endless avenue, in that gigantic evening …

  he can take in nothing save for fabulous enormity … the agoraphobic breadth of this new boulevard, its sky star-crowded and apparently decanting an ethereal twilight … figures that may not be people moving on the ostentatious paving … some at speed as coloured smudges, pulsing in saccades as if along pneumatic tubes of their own motion … passing back and forth upon the shining highway are unutterable transportations, sumptuous carriages that glide a foot or two above the wide road’s lustre, cars with artificial leopard legs where wheels should be … surrounding architecture squirms from style to style with, on the further skyline, stupefying towers jab at the flocking nebulae above … and not three feet away stands the ballooning bulk of Maurice Calendar, bent nearly double as he gets his puff back, overstuffed hands propped against his too tight trouser knees …

  talk about gone to seed … the one-time fashion innovator looks about to burst asunder, flesh so taut against the too small cuffs and collar that his skin cannot be differentiated from his shirt, as though the clothes are painted on … he raises his exhausted gaze to Dennis, but is still too winded to be capable of speech … patches of eczema on his pink cheeks, pudgy wrists, damp brow, where none were noticeable previously … crushed by miracles, caught in the spin of the unearthly, Dennis says, ‘I’m – where are – this is –’ before clamming up again, unable to pose questions big enough … and Maurice Calendar holds up one hand as if to indicate he needs a minute … then, after a lengthy pause, he finally replies, subsiding gasps employed as punctuation …

  all sound, every syllable, bubbles away to liquid whispers in an aural distance: ‘You’re in the real London, on the Indices of Charing. You’re not in Short London any more,’ and he breaks off to breathe for a few seconds, sucking back each noisy lungful … an enormous jelly mould on casters trundles by and constellations without names jam-pack the firmament … ‘It’s London’s theory, not its practice. Look, mate, I’m on me last legs here. I’m decadal, and if I don’t get you back home sharpish, I’ll be in me next stage and we’ll both be goners. Where do you want taking?’, and he stares hard as if Dennis should know what he’s on about, or where they are, or anything …

  starting to shake as he goes into shock, Dennis gesticulates at golden tarmac, gastropodous chariots, buildings simultaneously rotting and regenerating, and he stammers, ‘But – how can – it isn’t –’, at which Calendar looks miserable, groans wearily … he’s clearly going to have to educate this Knuckleyard before he can get on with his own urgent business … he’s not happy … ‘Listen, Ironfoot saw you up at Harrison’s place yesterday. He guessed what you’d been lumbered with – old Hampole’s book – and knew that it meant trouble. Jack Spot’s after it, so Monolulu tells us. Thinks it’s going to get him into this place. Me and Gog, Gog Blincoe, we said we’d do shifts, keeping an eye out for you in the briefs of Berwick Street. Both of us come from here, so breaking in and out isn’t so much of a palaver as it is for shorties. Now, it’s better if you’re gone from the Great When before it does your bonce a mischief. This is not the place to drop you back, with Spotty’s bruisers all over the hockey, so I’ll ask you once more – where do you want taking?’ … understanding no more than a pinch of the foregoing, Dennis can but call to mind the reassuring thought of Tolerable John, who’d offered him a place to stay if all else failed … after a prologue of ‘I’m not – why does – that can’t be –’ and the like, he ends up saying ‘Street Fleet’ a few times, but luckily Maurice knows what he means … looking relieved, he seizes Dennis by the elbow, mutters, ‘Right you are,’ and both of them stretch into speed vectors again …

  the zoom of everything … Maurice drags Dennis, Dennis drags his carrier bag, their blurs reflecting briefly in the glister of the path beneath them … on these so-called Indices of Charing, awe and terror are abroad, dressed as though for an evening out … entities promenade, abstract flaneurs, each wearing its unique charisma like a stole … a lady whose hair has been lacquered into an absurdly detailed galleon, having masts and sails and ropes and gun ports … in celestial Leicester Square, theatres are replaced by giant mechanisms which recall the bright amusements of seaside arcades, realised as palaces … Dennis’s cheeks are rippling back towards his ears … on both sides of the dazzling main road stand edifices that seem made from moving words and letters, each façade a page left fluttering in the rush of the two men, in their heart-stopping whiz …

  they swerve left at the bottom, where the Eleanor Cross brushes overpopulated heavens, then shoot off into a flaring vision of the Strand … this whole experience is far too much; a fight between aggressively competing spectacles … it all smells rich and sounds unearthly … in the middle of the street, phantasmal traffic forks about a sculpted marble phallus of astonishing dimension that trails maypole ribbons from its tip … mounted on the colossal glans, there is a cylinder of white and silver angled at the overhanging night, a telescope too large and complicated for a human eye to be applied, as though the vast erection had ejaculated new astronomy … the pace they’re going, discrete landmarks melt and merge with one another … near the mouth of Surrey Street, a stationary human figure, a young man clad in an old man’s topcoat, stands with head tipped back and arms raised as if to embrace the instant, in a drench of emerald light that pours on him alone … Maurice says, ‘Arthur Machen,’ but the name bowls past into their hectic wake before it has a chance to register …

  at once upon them, Fleet Street’s various premises have been ingeniously folded out of newspaper, grave centuries of headlines as their masonry … Calendar brakes and digs his heels in at the entrance to the greatly enlarged lane, but their resultant skid takes them to its far end … brought to a halt at last in clouds of kicked-up gold dust, Dennis sneezing a king’s ransom, rubbing fortunes from the corners of his eyes …

  punch-drunk and near collapse, he leans on Maurice, by this point as plump and yielding as a pillow … each propping the other up, they stand amongst fluorescing flowers, some several times as tall as they are … their location seems to be the verdant grounds of a glass ornament as big as a cathedral, one with lines that undulate rather than seek the upright … Dennis is lost, every bit of him … he doesn’t have a clue what part of the metropolis this grand jewel and its garden represent … his rotund rescuer, who now has blotches of unhealthy hue on coat and jowls alike, regards him solemnly … even Maurice’s voice is different; a congested nasal buzz that wasn’t evident before … ‘This is the Fisbo opening in Furious Alsatia, off the Upper Scandals. It’ll bring you out in Bride Lane. I can see you through it in one piece, but then I’ve really got to go, before I get so I can’t even move’ … indeed, the style leader is looking worse with every passing moment, eyes beginning to cloud over … distantly aware that they’re discussing his release from this unbearable condition, Dennis fumbles in his carrier and retrieves A London Walk, brandishing it as he attempts to utter his misgivings and uncertainties … ‘This, though – can’t I just – y’know, somewhere around here – if I left it –’ … Maurice shakes his peeling head …