IN ANY BAND of society there are factions. There are always dominants and submissives. Some find it easier to climb that triangle of power and sit at the pinnacle, looking down on the poor souls wondering how to even get a leg up to a level only slightly more rarefied than their own.
So it is with London’s one-time saviours.
Blinking, coming back from the brink, they vibrated with awareness at each others’ proximity. They knew their mass was great, but their muscle lacking. Their instincts had been dulled by many generations of sleep. They spent long, cold days trying to orient themselves within this newly huge, labyrinthine space, many times greater than how they remembered it. Their eyes sucked in drilling moments of light and pain with every blink: too much glass, too many reflections. They spent a lot of time goggling at themselves in office-block windows, pulling on clothes too big or small for them, stolen from warehouses, washing lines, the dead and the drunk.
They had forgotten how to kill.
It itched within them, this knowledge, in the way that a stump will itch in its memory of the departed limb. The compulsion was there, but it was directionless, imprecise. It manifested itself in fruitless intra-family squabbling. Hands lashed out but weren’t primed for connection; shapeless cries and screeches were uttered, but more from an ecstasy of frustration at the self, rather than in genuine animosity towards fellow lost, fellow eaters. Once they had been feted as saviours of the city, thanks to their unconventional appetites. They could still, over those vast tracts of race memory, recall the peculiar flavour of spoiled meat, and hanker after it again. They were alive, awake; they were here.
A buzz of anticipation sizzled through the community, as if they were all hooked up to the same battery. One or two pieces of the puzzle were needed, that was all, before they were able to get over that first hurdle, this all-consuming blindness of hunger, sate themselves, and rebuild the broken bridges between themselves and their banished fathers. Gain understanding, rekindle the fires of envy and revenge that had gone cold for so long. They had waited four hundred years. They could afford to wait a little longer.
They had safety in numbers. They had the protection of the cathedral, if they needed it. Things, they felt, in that frisson running through the cold, damp London air, were on a knife-edge. A reckoning, of sorts, was at hand. They would wait and try to learn, try to stay alive. Try to slough off this debilitating skin of weakness.
Some, though, were not weak. The pyramid’s summit-dwellers, they could flex their muscles and sniff the blood of prey that they were already laying into, albeit on a much smaller scale than their brothers were considering. This cadre comprised of few. A dozen, give or take. Freakishly large, they were nevertheless regarded as the runts of the litter and had the personalities to match. They shunned their family and its fond regard for ancient times. They dressed in modern clothes, stealing labelled garments that fitted well. They cut their hair, shaving it flush to the skull. They sought out tattooists to pattern their skin, the babyish finery of which sickened them so, and branded each other with knives held over gas rings till the metal glowed orange. They slashed and flensed the flesh, creating deep, intricate markings to emphasise their otherness and indicate a fellowship that was elsewhere. Instead of taking the first name they saw on a television set in a shop window – the usual recourse to identity the lost took – this splinter group browsed bookshops, record shops and video shops for their names, shoplifting the titles that appealed to them, jacketing the volumes and laminating the by-lines, attaching them to their clothes.
One of these bulls of men, Graham Greene, with his violet eyes and a penchant for red suits, so despised the pathetic mien of his own kind that he determined to alter his look, to opt out of their foul beauty. One freezing night, frost on the pavements, he was with his chosen sidekicks, Stanley Kubrick and Kurt Cobain, stalking Praed Street, considering how he could radicalise his look to the extent that he would not be recognisable to others even from his own sect. Talk had been of limb removal; of tweaking out organs so they hung on the body’s exterior; of peeling off the outer coats of skin so that the sinews and muscles could be seen; of breaking legs to the point where the bones were rubble within the limbs and they had to get around by dragging themselves with their arms.
They huddled by the entrance to Paddington Station, watching the suits and the briefcases and the brollies, sneering at the stooped creatures as they came home or went to work, at the smell of sweat that powered out of them, at the scars and boils, the acne, the bandages and wheelchairs. The bald heads. The port-wine birthmarks like still fire on downturned faces. The hare lips. The mastectomies. The withered hands. The blind.
Greene turned away and vomited into the gutter. He pulled his raincoat more tightly around him and wiped tears from behind his blue-tinted sunglasses. He was simultaneously appalled by and attracted to their failure, their physical imperfections. He assessed his brothers, the friends he trusted with his life, and was glad to find the same blend of distaste and veneration on their faces. They had been lucky, he felt, to find themselves, once pulled from sleep, in the foundations of a forgotten corner of St Mary’s Hospital.
They had had to burrow through ten feet of soil and failing concrete, floorboards, a mass of discarded boxes and folders filled with papers recording the deaths of people who must now be little more than dust. They had emerged into this dumping ground, a plaster and lath construction at the rear of the complex, and stared at the great swathe of glass buildings that adorned the Paddington Basin. Soon they discovered that the morgue was sited not far from this location, and they were able to feast without foraging for scraps. They grew strong quickly, and scorned the lesser lost as they grubbed for the bodies of dead pigeons on the banks of the canal, or fought over the bones in discarded fast-food cartons in bleak car parks on the edge of this opulence, wastelands where construction had not yet reached.
Now, as Kubrick and Cobain shuffled and stamped on the pavement, trying to drive the cold out of their aching legs, Greene thought again of the reasons for their revival. It was always chemical in nature, this resuscitation. And it meant that a Map Reader had been found, someone to make sense of this alien country, someone to open up unknown routes within this people who had been lost to time.
Greene didn’t need his hand held. He wanted to explore these territories on his own terms. If they wanted a Map Reader, an explorer, a true visionary, why didn’t they approach him? Instead, they had a clown, ponderous, unaware, inattentive. He could see him – they all could, if they closed their eyes – this messiah, a slight man with delicate facial bones, large hooded eyes, a downturned, fleshily attractive mouth and a sparse beard that either couldn’t, or wasn’t allowed to, flourish. His look was one of perpetual confusion.
We could all die of boredom before this fuckwit drops his penny.
The thought was seized upon and torn to shreds. Hundreds of dissenting voices flew back at him, howling out of the darkness.
Give him time.
Patience. There is no need to rush.
London shall be our playground once more. He is the right man to lead us into it.
The right man. Greene sucked his teeth ruminatively. He had not been chosen. He had lucked into this map. How could he shoulder the responsibility? How could they even consider allowing him to be their front line? He had no vatic quality, no obvious warrior talent. He was running away all the time. How were they to learn anything from him?
Greene’s frustration reached his fists: he punched himself hard in the mouth, eager to drive away the maddeningly calm, bovine voices that pleaded with him to give the Map Reader a chance.
Give ME a chance, he raged, and hit himself again. He sensed a massive recoiling from his mind. He felt wild, dangerous. It was good. A tooth, one of his bright, white, too-perfect teeth, jumped clear of his gums and fell to the floor, like a chunk of solid ice. He spat blood. For a second he felt like any of the people heading for the trains, or fanning out of the station seeking food, or love, or warmth. He felt damaged, tired, alone.
He punched himself again. Another tooth cracked, splitting his lip. Cobain and Kubrick were regarding him with amusement.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
He led them across the bridge spanning the canal. They walked the North Wharf Road to a subway that led under the Marylebone Flyover. Here Greene found a half-brick that he held aloft like a trophy. He handed it to Stanley Kubrick.
‘Empty my mouth,’ he said.
From: chewingman@yahoo.co.uk
To: saycheese@mac.com
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 15:15
Subject: progress
i wl hld yr hnd 4 u if u nd it. i cn shw u thngs. our pple nd 2 grw. thy r hngry 2 lrn. all u hve 2 do is b yrslf. thy r vry vry hngry