A DREAM. THE strangest dream. Instead of being asleep and seeing everything as though still awake, this was the other way around. Surely it was. Bo was awake, and seeing everything from within dreamland. He had better be. Oh Christ, he had better be.
A flat tyre on the Ninja. A determination not to let the enclosed spaces, his new fear of people (what was that called, in the great dictionary of phobias?) cow him. Push your chest out. Flex some muscle. You are as good as, if not better than, any of these fuckers. Stalking hard these cold London streets he thought he knew so well, and yet all of the shadows and shapes seem so alien to him now. The cold is like something he could peel off the air; layers of it fasten to him, slowing him down, turning him sluggish.
At Russell Square tube station he sinks gratefully into the heat of engines, diesel and crude body warmth. The slam and clatter of ticket barriers, sliding doors; the blur of legs, the expressionless choirs of monotony. The sway of carriages as the tunnels sheathe the train. People who don’t know each other, don’t want to know each other, moving in concert, a sexless fuck rhythm. A coming to and sliding away from.
Where are you going? He doesn’t know. He bought a ticket, he boarded a train. North or south. It doesn’t matter. This is a dream. The dream will sort itself out.
Only somewhere between stations, a foot lands against his and the pain rockets him out of that cosy, seductive illusion. This is real. The people around him are real. He looks at them: the seven in his half of the carriage, sitting primly on the vomit-patterned upholstery.
Directly opposite, the man with the grey hair and the grey trimmed beard. The tanned skin. A copy of the Financial Times and a worn leather briefcase. Blue suit. Red tie. Speed-reading.
Next to him, the slacker chick, mid-teens, an expression of boredom or disdain never far from her features. Wide green eyes, a little nub of a nose, lips plastered with gloss. Smack of gum. Eyes fastened on the tube’s route above your head. Converse sneakers. Jeans way too long for her legs, hems rotten and ragged from dragging in the dirt. The gleam of a stone in her navel. Pale-blue Babydoll T-shirt and a black woollen cardigan, sleeves stretched, clenched into her palm by ragged nails dotted with chipped black polish.
Next to her, a forty-something Chinese woman in a smart green trouser suit. A clutch bag held neatly between the fingers of both hands. White earphones. Eyes closed. Listening to what? Classical music? A Podcast? Minutes from some medical symposium? A laminated badge hanging on a chain around her neck. Her face on it, smiling. Her name, Linda Ho.
Next to her, a skinny black man in a plain white T-shirt, sifting through a handful of photographs. Big, bright smiles now and then. Clean-shaven. Blue jeans with creases ironed into them – oh dear. Black, no-name trainers.
Opposite skinny, three away from Bo: hard to tell. A glimpse of blonde hair and a sharp profile. Too much make-up. A Dan Brown novel. Her funeral.
Two from Bo. Hard to tell. Long legs in red jeans. Doc Martens. A shimmery black silk shirt. A furled Burberry umbrella.
Next to Bo. In the window you can see the reflection of a man in his late sixties, early seventies. His hair salt-and-pepper, combed neatly, perhaps trained with a little Brylcreem or Dax. A beige raincoat buttoned up to the throat where it frames a neatly knotted green woollen tie and a white shirt. Tired collars, slightly grey. Highly polished shoes nevertheless showing their age. Eyes on his shoes, perhaps thinking the very same thing. He looks Germanic.
Somewhere between stations, something odd happens.
Bo looks away, contemplating his own shoes, the deep rind of dirt in the half-moons of his nails.
And.
The prickle of self-consciousness. He knows, for a fact, without looking up to confirm it, that everyone in the carriage, every last fucking soul in the carriage, is staring right into him.
He looks up, trying not to appear too spooked, too shit-pant fucking terrified, and Linda Ho is still enjoying her recording, her eyes closed. Black guy is still grinning at his snaps. World-versus-me teen is stretching and winding apple-flavoured Bubblicious around her little finger, her eyes following the Piccadilly Line’s rich-blue slash on the map through the belly of London … but there’s the electric feel in the carriage of eyes having been averted at the last split second.
Bo looks away and again their eyes, as one, swing back on to him; he feels the weight of their stare, their eyes peeled back, hot on him, intent, searing. Unblinking. The scrutiny of the desperate, the ravenous. He knows it.
He looks up and maybe this time he catches grey beard at it, just for a second, the lunacy and ire packed into those insane eyes.
Somewhere between stations, the train judders to a stop and the lights go out.
Bo sits in the ticking, tutting blackness, the soft slither of panic piling up against his open mouth and the dead weight of his heart. The darkness is so utter that he can’t even see the gleam in a single eyeball that is straining his way. He feels a claw grip his knee and he yelps, getting to his feet, stumbling away into the well between doors. Unsure, after all, if that was a claw, or somebody’s jaws closing around his leg. He reaches down and tries to wipe away the feeling. His hand comes away wet. He backs into another body standing by the doors, but there had been nobody there a moment ago.
‘Sorry,’ Bo whispers.
‘It’s all right,’ something whispers glutinously back, something whose breath is hot and heavy with decay.
The moment stretches out, like the gum the girl has been twirling around her fingers. The hostility in the carriage is as palpable as the heat. Vomit climbs in his throat. The feeling of imminent violence is so strong he’s flinching, although the blows never land.
A fretful, excoriating few minutes later, the lights splutter into life, and for a split second Bo feels the heat of everyone looking at him so powerfully he believes he must be burned by it. And he blinks, and the train judders into movement, and the woman with the Burberry umbrella is picking a label off the sole of one of her new shoes, and the Germanic guy is folding his hands over each other as if he has a fan of invisible cards he doesn’t want anybody else to see. Nobody is looking at Bo. It’s as if he doesn’t exist, such is the lack of interest in him.
He gets off at Hyde Park Corner; nobody raises their head to watch him go. But through the window as the train departs, he feels the weight of a hundred maniacal stares. He walks up to Marble Arch, where he first saw the house of flies. The same old gyre of traffic. The same old buildings. One of London’s black pockets, the air thick with souls, the ground forever boggy with blood. Execution ground. A fine place for the house, a fine address for the original map reader.
Everyone he sees, whether they be jogging the perimeter of the park proper, queueing at the Odeon cinema, or swinging around the roads in taxis and buses, gives him different levels of attention. But they give him attention. For the first time, the new muscle within him flexes and a glimmer of understanding runs with it. He grasps the possibility that a map does not necessarily have to be drawn on paper. He gathers that other people’s interest in him might be due to something deeper than the cut of his clothes or the style of his hair.
So then, if I am a map, what secret country do I represent?
He wakens into cold, a sour taste in his mouth, the soft, blurred images melting away. A dream after all, but so gravid with truth that it might as well have happened. He digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to grind away the unbearable feeling that his life has been replaced by some robotic devotion to servitude. His frustration becomes amplified. Who is he in thrall to? When will they reveal themselves?
A part of him suspects, as he rises from his damp sleeping bag, his breath turning to ghosts in the cold back bedroom, that they already have.