Don’t try to turn this into a Romantic tragedy of your making either—said Ariadne, correctly identifying the tenor of my thoughts. She got over you, Graeme, Luci—she fell in love—he was nice. They only separated because of his drink problem.

  Sounds like quite a catch—I nodded sagely.

  I assured myself Ariadne had lived long enough to know the world ran on unleaded irony and absurdity. The best response to everything was a shrug of defeat or denial. It wasn’t like being judged made it worse. I’d disappointed her a long time ago.

  I don’t generally resort to that name except in emergencies—I said without conviction but peevish, nevertheless.

  Her kids are incredible, like she was—she said, intending each word as a spinning kick, a deadly dragon strike in a kung fu double feature.

  Ariadne gathered her shopping bags into a dangling testicular mass and got to her feet, adjusting her center of gravity to compensate grimly for the drunken sway of the bus. She paused at the top of the stairs, stationary and precarious till we slowed to a stop.

  What happened to the vampire monks?—I said to paper over the yawning conversational stasis.

  She seemed genuinely surprised. You remembered that? They’re quite popular online. You can find me under “Anonymous.”

  We should keep in touch—I vogued. You can tell me what happened in the end.

  She smiled more warmly this time then remembered her emotional armor with a wry, tight shake of her head, an elaborate eye roll, effectively telegraphing—Nothing ever ends, does it, babes?

  Without the babes probably. She’d never say babes.

  We agreed we’d catch up, both of us aware we’d never find common cause to speak again in this lifetime. The three or four Christmas dinners we’d spent in each other’s company over decades of our lives were all we’d ever share. Our endless inconclusive Truth or Dare? where we never fucked behind her sister’s back or explored the implications communicated in our torrid eye-to-eye contact all those years ago.

  Nothing ever changes. Until everything does.

  It was there, then, with Ariadne’s head sinking below the chrome horizon of the handrail, that fate saw fit to allow me an uninterrupted view to the rear of the upper deck, where the Flat Policemen sat.

  I do declare.

  It was as if the sun had set, in the form of Ariadne, making her way to the exit doors, and in the first moment of twilight the awful machineries of Night were laid bare so that the hideous guts, the pulleys and levers, were no longer hidden.

  There were two of them, tall and thin enough to prop up a sizable tent, plainclothes in overcoats and hoodies. Both were scribbling in unison in black notebooks, scratching out the same observations. Then one of the men rose abruptly to his feet, snapped a rubber band around the cover, and folded his book into an inside pocket. Or perhaps it was only his phone. Perhaps there was nothing strange about him at all. Perhaps it was me.

  I turned away. I wanted to let out a yell, to warn Ariadne, but the bus had stopped already. There was the bottom deck door huffing open on its hydraulics to let passengers disembark. Facing front, I froze to my seat finding a new rictus appreciation of Hampton Row as it extended into leafy middle-class perspective lines, all converging politely at the same vanishing point lying directly, inescapably ahead.

  I could feel the midwinter chill of the tall Policeman’s unquestioned authority as he hurried down steps at my back. His partner stayed still and seated neatly in the rear, his presence a nagging wound in the space between my shoulder blades.

  I checked him out in the overhead convex mirror that allowed the driver a periscope view of the top deck. The seated Policeman angled his head, presumably tracking Ariadne’s progress onto the Row. There was something almost indecent in the intensity and eagerness of his searching eye. What next, I thought—a rasping cry of show us your tits, love, from the top deck?

  I craned my neck to see Ariadne safely cross the street. No one followed. I waited for the tall Policeman to lurch his way back upstairs, braced myself for a cold, leather-gloved hand to refrigerate into place on my shoulder—but nothing happened, as if he’d never been there at all.

  The second shadowy man jerked up his head suddenly as if to catch me measuring him up. I stared directly ahead. The railway embankment. The park gates. Left turn.

  * * *

  —

  The Policeman was still there twenty minutes later, an itch on the periphery of my senses that I couldn’t stop scratching. My body tightened into a boxer’s glove of muscle and sinew each time he caught me looking and made another sharp scribble in his jotter.

  As we circled back to the Dare’s south bank five miles downriver from the crossing at Knox, I was able to piece together the approach of Darewater through the rain-spittered window on the left across the aisle.

  The Flats were Gasglow’s answer to the glory and the Romance of Greece and Rome, a numinous wasteland of abandoned building projects, corrugated iron, cinder, and blaes. Derelict husks of old-model cars and burst chain-link brought the World War IV afterparty mood.

  Occupying, I should say more like squatting, the former site of a wartime “aerodrome” was a half-finished expressway junction whose colossal concrete pylons with their spray-painted graffiti tags supported unfinished roads to nowhere, truncated Rainbow Bridges to Valhallas that never got past the draftsman’s board, projected superhighways of a future stopped dead where budgets and imaginations expired in the dirt of fifty years ago at the End of the Age of Dreams.

  Generations of Gasglow bands had shot promos here since the ’70s, beguiled by the area’s seeming debt to the novels of J. G. Ballard and their charged panoramas of urban decline. Brutalist, sublime, the fragmentary ramps and cryptic sections of deserted roadway always made me think of fossilized mega-dinosaurs with rusting iron sinews, plated with cracked tarmac and radiating indefinable significance. Then again, I’ll take any opportunity I’m given to think about fossilized mega-dinosaurs, meaningful spaces, and anything that isn’t the here and now of my mangled life.

  Pigeon wings fluffed up the busy shadows under the flyover spans. Slashed mattress and split vinyl lay stacked and heaped against the concrete piers. Shopping carts stuffed to bursting with cardboard and plastic were parked unattended, shipwrecked on garbage reefs of splintered tent and torn awning. Even the homeless never stayed long, tormented in methylated slumber by monstrous specters of unfinished futures here in the Cardboard City of Tomorrow.

  The second Policeman—one too few for Flann O’Brien, I noted—finally got to his feet and hopped off the bus, trailing the same draft of icy ventilation as his partner before him.

  There he lingered, at home in the convening shadows of the valley of the concrete cryptosaurs.

  Praying for the bus to move again, I saw the detective flipping open his black ring-bound notebook. He licked night-blue ink off the ballpoint tip of his government-issue biro, jotting some curt, incriminating observation into his notebook as he glanced up to spot me staring down…

  The engine bunched its shoulders noisily, the door wheezed shut. Wheels bit the road and turned.

  No one would deny the atmosphere aboard the bus improved immediately now he’d gone. I’d hardly moved a micron since spotting the Flat Policemen and at last I could feel my entire body releasing tension, siphoning off the cortisol as cooling sour sweat.

  On my right were the comforting square chimneys at Craigend Crematorium where Mum and Dad had both gone to cinders, overlooked by the art deco high-rise blocks at Bellamy Court, resembling a Space Fleet Headquarters manned by refugees, while ahead were raised the ugly modern aesthetics of Southside General Hospital where Dad was sent to diminish at the last.

  Sliding into the strip-lit throat of the Dare Tunnel, I felt secure on home ground again.

  Safe enough to slit open the A4 padded envelope and scan for key words.

  In those last few miles and minutes, I can almost remember just how good it felt to be out of the house, far from the maelstrom’s comet-spangled rim, riding the edge of the vortex with Luda. But I knew this stilled, contained moment of time on the top deck of the 36 bus couldn’t hope to last much longer than the approximately fifteen minutes that remained before I was returned almost to where I’d started out earlier, decanted on Stables High Street in what would soon seem like another world, another century.

  The number 36 route traced a wobbly circular path around Gasglow’s city boundaries. In its inevitable orbital timetable, there was the assurance of seasonal, eternal return, but that was another harsh illusion.

  In truth, even the 36 bus on its majestic trans-urban trajectory was constrained by irrefutable entropic laws of physics and urban transport scheduling. Even this noble trajectory was a childish ring-a-roses around a confrontation with devouring singularity it was impossible to avoid.

  Curiosity got the better of me there on the return curve, the ecliptic. I slipped from the envelope a sheaf of stapled copies, scanned pages from a handwritten notebook. Birth records. A paper chase from the delivery room to the orphanage.

  With a pang I recognized Rose’s joined-up wavy art school scrawl from Post-it notes, to-do lists, birthday cards, and love letters. The last thing I noted before the world turned topsy-turvy was the massive red-brick grain store conversion at Porlock. All my attention was funneled directly into the folded documents I held in my hands.

  By the time the bus pulled in to pick up wan passengers decanting from the office blocks at Porlock Cross, before its rumbling right-angled left turn onto the lower numbers of Stables High Street, passing the Indian restaurants, rare vinyl stores, charity outlets, and long-running award-winning cafés, I was shaking, and the whole panorama of reality through the cinemascope dimensions of the upper deck window had sharpened to a malicious transparency where there was only one predictable outcome of every action.

  I’d opened the envelope. I’d scanned the document and isolated the pure hot signal beneath the emotional noise of Rose’s post-natal drugs hell. It could no longer be undone.

  I tried my best to evaluate the contents calmly, but calm seemed an inappropriate response to the developing situation. The existential onslaught I was experiencing called for nothing less than bug-eyed hysteria. With the playa face and butcher’s efficiency of an assassin Ariadne had delivered the death of a thousand paper cuts. Biding her time with the patience of the Immortal Undead, she’d waited until I was old and weak before slipping her blade, Rosie’s, between my fourth and fifth ribs into the thumping muscle of my wayward heart, completing a death strike begun twenty-five years before.

  Still, I kept arcing back to Ariadne’s shopping, bulging through the overstuffed skin of recycled paper, the hernia protrusions of fruit and veg, kale fan and celery truncheon that told of restricted diets and the 5-12 gone authoritarian.

  Rose and I had just one bag of all the groceries and cat food sachets we could afford on the day we came back from the coast, its empty spaces revealing more about our lives than any physical contents. Not that there was anyone to notice. There was no Flat Policeman then to leave a long blue-black stripe on his tongue as he licked his pencil and wrote three words—Justice is done…

  Everything about my meeting with Ariadne Welcome is very clear in my recall, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the walk home from the bus stop on Stables.

  As it appeared to me, I was the only moving object passing through a single suspended solid moment. I was a neutrino signal zipping between atoms of rock like a wish. Like a thought experiment. If pushed I might be able to remember a tall thin man matching my pace some fifteen yards behind me on the hill but honestly? He was more likely my shadow, elongated by the year’s fading light.

  It’s hard to explain, but under the deceptive glow of that low, artificial Hollywood sunset it seemed as if the whole world and everything in it had been replaced by its own luminous, lifeless duplicate. It looked real but it was a body double, a floodlit facsimile dressed for the camera setup.

  I walked home from St. Pat’s, along Stables High, dissolved to snow-globe Brownian motion among the student crowd and the weekenders thronging the boutique cinemas, Indian restaurants, renowned art deco ice cream parlors, independent bookshops, and thrift stores dedicated to feline welfare or starving children.

  By the library, another left turn brought me in a Pac-Man chess knight move onto Observatory Hill, where stood the scale-model copy in Rayonnant-period Gothic style of Sainte-Chapelle on the Île de la Cité in Paris I mentioned briefly before. It was here Jeremy and I made a point every year of turning up for the Watchnight Service on Christmas Eve, belting out carols in eyeliner and fishnet stockings, dyed hair, leather man stag and bimbo blonde drag.

  And after the first couple of times, when our sincere love of singing Yuletide hymns was no longer in question, everyone accepted us.

  I remember the interference ripples forming in the trees around the Fuzzy Felt square of the bowling green. Through what I came to understand were the pinprick prisms of my tears, I hoped the rainbow-fringed and dappled super-people passing by couldn’t see me crying like this but of course everyone could, all the way back to where I’d climbed from the bus stop at the subway station on Stables.

  Not that anyone cared.

  The bells in the spire of the replica church of Sainte-Chapelle chimed the passage of replica hours as they dropped away into the deep well of the past, leaving concentric splash patterns, diminishing farewells, echoes, and ripples.

  One.

  The momentous late afternoon seemed fixed, an emotional capstone upon a pyramid of hourglass sand.

  Two.

  The sky was a John Martin extravagance, a volcanic red-black apocalypse no one else could see for what it was because, to them, it looked like any other November twilight. Only I had been shocked awake to perceive a biblical catastrophe happening so slowly it could be savored and dreaded at leisure. An intimate Dies Irae.

  Three.

  There. Was. No. Abortion.

  Four.

  Rose went ahead with the baby, but she couldn’t cope. An orphanage was recommended.

  The church bells rang a death knell for Heather.

  Our child would be twenty-five now. I imagined a double exposure, Rose’s features superimposed on mine to make a stereoscopic third image, a composite face that was all too familiar.

  I knew then there was no Heather. There was no lost little girl. Heather’s imaginary life was the sacrifice I made, the burnt offering, in exchange for wisdom and power, the wavy-bladed Aztec knife buried to the hilt in her flat breast.

  Five, and the bells chimed out their count then rang the vast silence that followed.

  The baby Rose gave up had been a boy.

  As these things do, this was happening all at once and all too quickly.

  * * *

  —

  Wearing the dress my mother never wore, I climbed the stairs, one gloved hand gliding like a chairlift on the polished wooden banister rail, the soles of my shoes counting the stone flags, flight and landing, welcome mat and brass nameplate.

  The door was unlocked; of course, Luda had copied the keys along with everything else she’d reproduced.

  I stepped over another electrical bill with its bloody capital letters reading URGENT, treating it with the contempt it deserved.

  There was almost nothing left but decaying sonic trace vibrations, but I knew all too well the resounding concave hush that followed a performance of Spem in Alium.

  I wasn’t sure what I expected to find, I don’t count precognition among my many accomplishments, but it made so much sense it became inevitable and like the controlled demolition of a cooling tower it all fell into place, in bits.

  I knew she had to be there by the chill; the air in the apartment was at least ten degrees colder than outside and I recalled the first day she’d strode into the rehearsal room, heels clicking like bullets loaded into the magazine. Outside the wind drew itself up, and the first sharp rains of Storm Ingmar swept down as tin-colored diagonal scratches on the windowpanes.

  Luda was seated at my mirror and there was something about her deportment, the way she carried her whole body that gave me instant chills and an unexpected erection. She was primping her hair.

  I came back—she said, doing my lopsided smile. I’ve waited ages.

  When I looked at her, there was a disorienting stereoscopic feedback.

  Into the transcendent silence came the opening eight-bar riff of “Pretty Vacant,” with its unstoppable cavalry charge of drums and shattering glass.

  She hefted her fake tits in both hands. Luda preferred a manufactured rubber breastplate to my DIY lentil-based cargo cult fakes. I couldn’t blame her. When it came to breast substitutes, I’d failed to keep up with the times.

  You suit them—I practically spat. Almost knocks the last of the boy out of you.

  She was me, her makeup reproducing each wrinkle I’d tried to conceal, every broken line of my face. Luci LaBang split in two, like Superman sundered from Clark Kent, facing each other across a sensational Action Comics cover. She wore my wig, the one I’d personally designed and had made. The one I’d sliced from its box only weeks ago. My crown on the young queen’s head where it looked so much better.

  Only the eyes were hers. She hadn’t copied mine yet.

  I thought of poor Molly Stocking and I wondered what Luda had been up to, looking like that, dressed and made up like me. Where had she been before coming here? What footage of me now existed, committing fuck only knows what obscure crime?

  The Crone—she said with a smirk. I did it myself, but it might as well have been you.

  Don’t flatter yourself, babes—I came back, unsettled by the sound of my own voice, how much it sounded like her parody. Some things you should leave to the experts.