We walked to Bow Road Station and caught a District Line train bound for Barking, the seat of the fire.
Pierce lived at the eastern limit of my knowledge of London. This personal, psychic boundary coincided with a geographical boundary. My journey to Pierce was all in tunnels, apart from that unhappy moment at Liverpool Street. But the journey east was only under the sky. Pierce lived where the Underground stops being underground.
I remarked as much to him, thinking that this was the kind of observation that might get him waxing psychogeographical – a winding path through tunnelling technologies and the cost of land in the nineteenth century, perhaps, with stops for the great Victorian cemeteries and the machinations of the rail companies. Instead he grunted, as if it had never occurred to him before, and looked out of the window. Unsatisfactory, deeply unsatisfactory. I was ditching work, and ditching the pub, in order to go on an expedition with Oliver Pierce. Oliver Pierce. Throw in a few encounters with eccentric characters, surreal and/or threatening, and it could be considered a caper. If it involved drinking or drug use, criminal or semi-criminal activity of some kind, and perhaps a lucky escape from arrest or a beating, I could justifiably call it a gonzo escapade. This was a wish fulfilled, but only if Pierce was Pierce. He had to play along, to conform to the personality that appeared on the pages of his essays. He had to be unpredictable and dangerous and full of bad ideas. I was just along for the ride. As the writer, you are a passenger, the avatar of the reader. You can’t instigate the crazy, you just happen to be there when it gets started. That’s how it should work.
Or that’s how it should appear, anyway. How did Pierce set up those Pierce-ish situations? Had he invented even more than he admitted to? If so, how? This trip hadn’t even been his idea, it had been mine. He was a writer too. What if neither of us was the instigator, the protagonist? What if we were both Boswells? If we were just blokes on a train?
I looked out of the window. Material for the escapade piece I would write. A slash through unexplored outer London. The sinews of the modern city. Gas-holders and scrub. Broken, daubed walls. Industrial buildings sinking into triffidous greenery. Triffidous, that was good. Neologisms were always good for this sort of thing. Think Will Self, Iain Sinclair. London’s fringe, where it breaks apart and loses its shape, before yielding to fields. But I was mistaken. This was only a temporary lapse. The city regrouped and re-exerted itself, growing denser again. With a lurch akin to vertigo, I became aware of the sheer size of the metropolis, the huge area it covered, the multitudes it contained. Builders’ yards and taxi roosts were replaced by terraced lines of back gardens. Punch bags and trampolines. Blocks of flats. A train depot, its Christmas lights still up. More gas-holders. The train grew weary, getting into a melancholy cycle of slow deceleration and fitful, uneven acceleration. It terminated at Barking, and wanted us to know that well in advance, its efforts palpably waning.
We had come to Barking because that was where the fire was – the Barking Blaze, it said in the papers. Beyond that, we had not put much preparation into the excursion. I had, I think, expected to walk out of Barking Station and into a scene resembling a painting of the last hours of Pompeii. A geyser of destruction, infernal orange light, people cowering and fleeing, and so on. At the very least I expected the fire to be visibly nearby, within a few streets’ walk. In fact, it was as if we had travelled no distance at all.
There was the plume in the east, but it was still removed from us, almost abstract, a threat without presence. Not even perceptibly closer, just fatter, bolder, higher resolution, its unceasing internal coilings and rearrangements more clearly defined. But not close. No one was looking towards it but us, or so I believed.
‘You should have seen it yesterday,’ said a voice behind us. A Big Issue seller, a ginger beard between red tabard and woolly hat.
‘Bigger than that?’
The Big Issue seller frowned. ‘No, not really. But newer.’
‘Is it near here?’ Pierce asked.
‘Nah,’ the seller replied. ‘Down by the river.’ He nodded, helpfully, towards the plume.
A silent but eloquent moment passed between me and Pierce. We both understood that the social circumstances demanded that we buy a magazine, and that it might look a little forced if both of us did. In the end, after long milliseconds of wordless deliberation, Pierce volunteered, and I immediately wished that it had been me who jumped, for appearance and out of genuine guilt. But if I tried now that guilt would be a bit too obvious. The opportunity was lost.
Down by the river. Naively, I had assumed Barking to be on the river. Out came the phones, for navigation. I remembered the map in the morning paper, the aerial photo: the industrial lands of the estuary. From the satellite’s eye, not the texture of city or suburb or countryside, but more resembling a circuit board. The white buboes of oil tanks, the dull tessellation of warehouse roofs. Pierce had opened Google Maps. I tried Tamesis, which combined maps with live information and social updates. The screen raced to one side, away from the often-loaded pages of my usual haunts, into grey unloaded areas. ‘Finding you …’ it said, Bunk logo spinning merrily. Then central Barking unfolded on the screen. Menus opened like jeweller’s drawers. Where’s the fire? I asked it.
Ongoing event / Major fire / Barking Riverside / Police, TfL warnings in place / Ongoing air quality alert / Road closures / Related news stories (23) / User pictures (37) / What people are saying / Directions here / Share this?
I thumbed ‘directions’.
While Pierce looked at timetables, I pecked out a quick email response to the press contact at Wolfe / De Chauncey. Earlier interview overrunning, unexpected circumstances, sincere apologies, possible to reschedule? And then another train east: not a Tube, a mainline train, albeit an unhurried local one. We only went one stop, but the change was startling. Beyond Barking, the city really fell apart. The railway line itself spread out as if no longer pent up by urban pressure, splitting into a wide braid of sidings and halts. Disused goods cars brilliant with graffiti fed rust to beds of weeds. Other trains passed us, rushing out of the city on separate, better, tracks. We were in the distribution steppes, the pylon orchards. Expansive wastes of tarmac patrolled by lorries and cranes, and filled with shipping containers.
Dagenham Docks Station – I liked the unregenerated name – lay under a swerve of elevated motorway, a speck of Edwardian brick caught between the concrete teeth of a later era. No one disembarked with us. Leaving the station, we were confronted by what I knew from the map to be the south-western corner of the Ford factory. This turned out to be underwhelming: no obvious forest of belching smokestacks or cathedral of automation, just unmarked, unremarkable low-rise buildings in fleshy brick. If they made any noise, it was drowned out by the motorway.
Behind us, behind the motorway and the station, the plume. To be seen across London, the plume had to climb high in the air, and so it did, an impossible tower of churning ink. But here, almost at its base, the surprise it offered was its width. It appeared to fill a whole quadrant of the sky, blacking out the south-east. A vast field must be alight to fill that footprint; more than ‘alight’ – that was a word for foil-tray barbecues and dinky wood stoves – this was ablaze, consumed, engulfed, erupted. Yet there must still be fuel down there to burn, to ecstatically release and send its residual filth up into that roiling pillar. My curiosity was already almost sated, we were closer than near, we were inside it. The air was foul with it. That filling-station tang I had noticed this morning had become a burning tyre under the nose, a nauseating blast against the back of the throat.
Perhaps we had already done enough: I had dodged De Chauncey for now, gone on a trip that would make for scenic colour, and now we could turn around and go to the pub. I could wash away some of this hydrocarbon stench. But no, it was too soon. We had come all this way, we had to make something of it – and Pierce was just getting warmed up. I could see his enthusiasm rising.
‘Hopefully we’ll get a better view from the bridge,’ he said, striding off. But the bridge over the railway lines and sidings was enclosed by grey steel walls and caged in at the top, making a vandal-proof chute straight out of an abattoir. Or into one. The stairs down from the bridge were clogged with litter and weeds that had graduated into shrubbery, making me wonder if people ever came here, and who might be responsible for maintaining this miserable outpost. As soon as this thought formed, I had to revise it. Of course people came here, people worked here, did they not? Many people. All around were places of work: logistics centres and cement plants and, ahead, Barking power station. Even legit, old-school factories. Maybe the workers all drove in, rather than chance the twice-an-hour trains. Maybe they used buses instead. From where? Were there buses? So many of my fellow Londoners were, I realised, a mystery to me. Where did they live? The question: how did they make it work? All I knew was that I didn’t have to duck past Triassic overgrowth on my morning journey from Pimlico to Shoreditch.
‘I forget how big London is,’ I said. ‘You go to, say, Docklands, and you think you’re near the edge. But you aren’t. There’s all of this. Miles more.’
Pierce smiled and squinted at his surroundings. ‘If I ever want to shoot a zombie movie, I know where to come,’ he said. It was the most interesting thing he had said since we set out, this humdrum observation, and it was fundamentally wrong. The footbridge and roadside had an air of desuetude and abandonment, it’s true. But human activity was everywhere: a constant exchange of lorries up and down the road, the sounds of industry and the wail of the motorway. A steady metallic banging came from somewhere up ahead, and there was a general non-traffic growl of machinery and work. But no human voice, no people on foot.
To aggravate the go-away vibe of the place, a freezing drizzle began to fall. As we walked it worsened, enough for us to keep our heads down and our mouths closed.
Like the Ford factory, Barking power station was thoroughly free of awe or interest: flat, featureless blue slabs of building, and squat chimneys that issued no smoke. In any case, anything that they did produce would be quite redundant compared with the mountain of smoke rising across the way. We were close enough to see that the plume had its own shuddering orange illumination, but any actual flames were obscured by the sheds along the road.
The road from the station to the riverside was straight and wide. It and its wide pavement were not surfaced with tarmac but with scraped cement, giving them a temporary, construction-site feel. The drains, if there were any, had failed, and the gutter was a chain of giant, murky puddles. The lorries, which never ceased, sent up eruptions of filthy water, so our progress was halting. A shining stretch of cement would warn of a splash-zone, and we had to check if any vehicles were close before traversing it. I was reminded of the Nintendo platform games I played as a child: stop, wait for the swinging axe or angry ghost to pass, then jump the chasm. At the end of the road, where a wind turbine turned, was a compact constellation of flashing blue lights, twinkling and flowering in the drizzle.
‘We must be close,’ Pierce said, and I agreed when he said it, but again he was wrong. Perhaps it was the continual need to stop and wait for lorries to splash by, or the unfinished surface beneath our feet, or the overall hostility of the terrain, but a good deal of walking yielded little obvious progress. To our right, a collection of shiny new warehouses called Thames Gateway Park, then an online supermarket distribution centre, then the nerve centre of a popular brand of mass-produced bread. The supermarket’s delivery vans had fruit and vegetables printed on their sides; the bread giant’s lorries were decorated to resemble sliced loaves. The people we saw walking – three of them – shared characteristics: male, not white, hi-vis vests, an air of deep focus that suggested either tiredness or concentration on a task.
Two police cars were parked across the road ahead, one for each lane, front bumper to front bumper. Their lights strobed silently. Behind them, under the grey citadel of a cement plant, more emergency vehicles were parked: two police vans, an ambulance, two fire engines, and another fire appliance as big as an engine but not one, a mobile office or command vehicle. Yellow signs reading ROAD CLOSED stood in front of the police cars, strung with vibrating blue and white tape. Two police officers watched this frontier. They saw us coming from a distance and regarded us together as it became clear we were definitely approaching the tape rather than turning anywhere else. Words passed between them, certainly about us. As we drew closer, one of the officers walked – with deliberate, powerful slowness – to intercept us, gloved hands flexing, an expression of bored authority on his face. As soon as we were close enough to hear him, and there was no doubt we were going anywhere else, he spoke.
‘Road’s closed, gentlemen,’ he said, pointing in our direction, through us. ‘You’re going to have to go back the way you came.’
‘Can we just cut through?’ Pierce asked, with a casual air that I immediately envied. ‘We’re trying to get to the river.’
The officer formed a leather-clad fist with his left hand and was massaging it with his right like a child forming a snowball. He spoke as if he had answered the same question twenty times already.
‘I don’t know if you gentlemen have noticed, but’ – the right hand released the left and gestured, open, towards the plume – ‘there’s a rather serious fire going on over there. So no one is just anything anywhere this way. The road. Is closed.’
‘We don’t want to get in the way,’ Pierce said. ‘We only want to have a look.’
‘We’re journalists,’ I added quickly, seeing that the policeman was getting sterner and icier.
Either he didn’t believe me, or he held journalists in low regard. Quite possibly both. Again, he pointed through us, back up the road. ‘Media,’ he said. ‘Ocado car park.’
‘Excuse me?’ Pierce said.
The police officer indulged in a couple of slow, disdainful blinks. ‘Media liaison,’ he said, crafting every syllable, ‘Ocado car park.’ The pointing finger jabbed, once. ‘That way, gentlemen.’
‘You’ve been so terrific,’ Pierce said, taking out his phone. ‘Can I get a picture together?’
The officer had not lowered his arm. ‘That way.’
A flimsy laminated sign was zip-tied to the gate of the Ocado distribution portal. Distracted by the toy-bright vans parked in neat ranks, I had missed it on our way past. It read:
METROPOLITAN POLICE
MAJOR INCIDENT
MEDIA LIAISON
With an arrow.
‘Ocado,’ I said, still hopeful of eliciting some psychogeographical gems from Pierce. ‘The jihadists just need to knock out this facility and middle-class London starves.’ Bella and Dan used Ocado. On two occasions, they had been out at the time of delivery and had called me to take in their shopping. You wouldn’t believe the fuss Bella made over a melted sorbet.
‘Don’t knock Ocado,’ Pierce said. ‘When I couldn’t leave the house, they were lifesavers. Their drivers were about the only people I spoke to for three weeks. I should drop in and say hello.’
I didn’t say anything in reply. The roadblock had evaporated what was left of my momentum, and I was hunting for the earliest possible opportunity to call a halt and make for the pub. Not the nearest pub – I wanted somewhere I could be comfortable, where I could get myself home quickly under autopilot, not an alien boozer on the wrong side of Barking. I began to feel very far from the centre, very far from the convenience store and the fridge. But Pierce blazed on ahead.
Tucked behind the fence were two conjoined white portable huts, like the office on a construction site. Under the emblem of the Met were the words ‘Rapid Response Incident Media Assistance’. A male police officer minded the door, barely acknowledging us as we climbed the unsteady steps to enter. Inside, a female police officer sat behind a desk in a smart dress uniform, her shiny buttons the brightest objects in a thoroughly bland environment of fibreboard, acoustic panels and cheap carpet. She cocked her head at us.
‘Good afternoon,’ Pierce said.
‘Good afternoon,’ the police officer said. ‘Media?’ she asked, doubtful.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you have ID?’
Fortunately, I did. I pulled out my wallet and produced a business card and my NUJ card. Pierce followed my actions, hesitating a little before showing a small, teal plastic card of his own.
My NUJ credentials were accepted with a minimal nod. Pierce’s card was taken from him for closer examination.
‘Society of Authors?’ she said.
Pierce smiled. ‘I’m an author.’
‘This is expired.’
‘I’m an expired author.’
‘Oliver Pierce,’ she said, weighing the name for falsity.
‘That’s me,’ Pierce said, cheerful. I had spent more than an hour praying for him to do something memorable or outrageous, to unleash the caper, but now he looked ready to embark on mischief I found myself praying that he behaved himself. In and out, get this over with as quickly as possible, keep moving.
‘I wrote a non-fiction book about crime,’ Pierce continued. Is it an offence to lie to a police officer? Even in casual conversation? Although there was nothing very casual about this conversation. The officer was sandblasting Pierce with her gaze, as if expecting the paunchy author exterior to slough away, revealing a jihadist beneath. ‘About street crime. And a crime novel, for that matter. Kind of. It isn’t shelved in Crime. Perhaps you’ve read them?’
‘No,’ the officer said, the words bleached of tone. That might have been lucky. The Met had not approved of Night Traffic. And I thought, Forget the literary scandal, was there a possibility that Pierce might find himself in criminal trouble over his fraud? Had he considered that?
‘Pity,’ Pierce said. The police officer returned Pierce’s card, and Pierce returned it to his wallet. She said nothing, and little could be read from her face, other than homeopathic quantities of boredom and disapproval. There was no word or nod or wave to endorse or authorise our passage, nothing even slightly affirmative. We were simply no longer stopped from proceeding.
While we were having our cards read, someone had emerged from the screened-off area to meet us: a sparkling young woman in taut business attire. At a glance, I knew her – I knew her by type. I dealt with her kin every day. She worked in public relations.
‘Hiii,’ she said. She had a metal clipboard, like Polly’s, and was holding it in pose #3, ‘Small child waiting to give thank-you card to visiting dignitary’. ‘I’m Lily. Hiii.’
We did hellos.
‘You’re writing about the event?’ Lily asked.
‘I am,’ I said.
Lily looked troubled. ‘The next full briefing’s not until five, for the evenings,’ she said.
‘We don’t need the full briefing,’ Pierce said. ‘Just give us an abridged version. The basic facts.’
‘What kind of story are you writing?’
‘Factual,’ Pierce said brightly.
‘I should hope so!’ she said, with a laughing smile. ‘What did you say your magazine was called?’
I told her.
‘I know you!’ Lily said. ‘This isn’t your usual kind of story, is it? You’re more … modern urban lifestyle?’
‘Jack’s taking it in a new direction,’ Pierce said. ‘Grittier. More real.’
‘Eddie still the editor there?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘They’ll carry him out in a box.’
‘I love Eddie,’ Lily said. ‘Such a great guy.’
‘Yeah, he’s a great boss.’
‘I don’t know Eddie,’ Pierce said through a ghastly, insincere grin, ‘but I hear he’s great.’
Lily strafed us with another smile. Mention of Eddie had melted her reserve. ‘Come through,’ she said, letting us pass.
Half of the second hut was occupied by a miniature lecture theatre, with a dozen folding chairs facing a white projection screen and a podium. Behind the screen was a small office area, comprising two desks facing each other, a photocopier, a fancy-looking printer and a large wall-mounted TV. Lily’s clone sat at one desk, and the other was presumably Lily’s. Roles attract types. I thought of the two Rays at work – basically identical sub-editors, the same individual, apart from the fact that one was a white man and the other an Asian woman – and smiled. I thought of them fact-checking my Pierce profile and the smile faded. For that to happen, the draft would have to exist, and it was still very hard to imagine the act of writing it.
‘I remember Eddie from a trip to Miami Art Basel, must have been a couple of years ago,’ Lily said. ‘When I worked for Peloton Public Relations. Such a laugh. Please, have a seat. Can I get you anything to drink? Water, tea, coffee?’
Yes, a drink, but none of those. The Need had been building up since we had left the train, and now I felt a horrible rush of it, a geyser erupting deep within. I was far from the pub, far from the opportunity to slip away, far from home, and the fridge at home was empty. What was here, where I was, didn’t even feel real any more, only a ghastly succession of obstacles placed between my shade and being able to see and feel without pain.
‘Water, thank you,’ I said, trying to smile. Lily went to a water cooler in the corner of the office area and filled two small plastic cups.
‘So you used to work for Peloton?’ Pierce asked. ‘And now … the police?’
‘Yes!’ Lily said, as if she could hardly believe it. ‘On the media side, handling things like this.’
‘So this fire is a PR problem, is it?’
‘No problem at all,’ Lily said, easy and relaxed. She handed me a cup of water, smile unfaltering. ‘Our support is there to free up police and fire personnel so they can keep on keeping us safe, and that’s what’s really important, isn’t it? But we prefer to think of ourselves as working on behalf of the event itself.’
‘The fire?’
‘The event. We prefer to see it as an event like any other kind of event we might handle – just like a product launch or an exhibition, for instance.’
‘It’s a fire,’ Pierce said, with a disbelieving half-chuckle. ‘A big fire. Not a … gallery opening or a new magazine.’
‘Ha ha, yeah,’ Lily said cheerfully. ‘Well, we’re not promoting it, as such. We’re not saying, “Hey, come and look at this.” Because you shouldn’t. The advice is to stay away. But asking people to come to something and asking them to stay away aren’t so different. It’s all about managing perceptions of the event. Promotion isn’t the sum of what we do. We’re also here to make sure that the event is portrayed accurately and fairly – to dispel myths and calm fears. To put the event in the right light.
‘Because,’ she continued, ‘it’s more than a fire, isn’t it? There’s the spontaneous early combustion of a quantity of petroleum products, sure – and, about that, it’s important to be clear, they were always going to be combusted, it’s all a matter of context and scheduling. But the event also includes the vital, vital work of our emergency services, and the economic ramifications, and the contribution presently being made to London’s atmosphere.’
‘That’s the part I’m interested in,’ I said. ‘The smoke column. Is it dangerous?’
Lily’s smile was indulgent. ‘Londoners have absolutely no reason to be alarmed.’
Pierce leaned in. ‘That’s not a “no”, though, is it?’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t harmful, why should people stay away? Why would it need a PR team?’
The gearshift in Lily’s attitude was barely perceptible, but it was there. Outwardly, she smiled the same smile she had been smiling the whole time, a smile that seemed directly connected to a deep pool of honesty and compassion. But to me it had been reassuring and, perhaps, a little condescending – a sales or service smile. To Pierce it was less mollifying and more engaged – a smile of respect, of professional speaking to professional.
‘I know where you’re coming from, Oliver. We tend to avoid “totemic” words like “no” and “yes” because they are in fact more open to interpretation and inaccuracy than you might imagine. If I say “no” or “yes” I am confirming or denying the content of your question, and your question is open to interpretation. Indeed, I don’t know exactly what you might mean by your question, what you might mean by a charged and flexible word like “dangerous”, so a crude answer like “yes” or “no” risks all kinds of semantic pitfalls. However, an answer such as “Londoners have no reason to be alarmed” is precise and useful.’
‘But it doesn’t answer the question. It doesn’t say if the smoke is harmful.’
‘It does more than that. It makes the event less harmful. No one should go out there and stick their head in the smoke. Police and fire service advice is to stay away. We’re clear about that. But do you know what could cause more harm? Much more harm? Worry. Worry can impact your health in a dozen ways. Worry can shorten your life. Worrying about this event is much more likely to cause us harm than the event itself. By reducing worry, we are directly reducing the harm associated with the event. What if someone is concerned by the air quality, so they stay at home and miss a day at work? That’s unnecessary economic damage, unnecessary concern, unnecessary harm. This is precisely what I meant by our role in managing perceptions of the event: we are not concerned with the cloud of smoke as much as we are with the cloud of psychological consequences the event has created. The emergency services can deal with the combustion incident, while a public relations department can address the action of the event on the minds of the public. We can change the nature of the event for the better. We can do good that way. Our intervention here is essentially therapeutic.’
The atmosphere in the cabin had become stifling. How did they stand it? The reek of smoke was everywhere. The back of my mouth tasted like a petrol station forecourt and a space in my head had been surrounded by hoardings promising that a tremendous migraine was coming soon. As we left, Lily gave us both a tote bag containing a press pack, a couple of police and fire service leaflets, a squeezy fire engine with tips for preventing house fires written on its side, and a pen and USB drive bearing the Metropolitan Police emblem. She thanked us for stopping by, and for our interest in the event, and took my business card, promising to sign me up for an email.
Pierce held the cabin door for me.
‘Patricia Highsmith,’ the policewoman at the desk said.
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘Patricia Highsmith,’ she repeated. ‘I enjoy a good Patricia Highsmith. In case your friend thought I didn’t read anything.’ She nodded towards Pierce.
‘Patricia Highsmith,’ Pierce said. ‘Me too.’
Colourful hieroglyphs on the pavement, spray-painted by contractors, arrows and boxes limning the subterrain: Blocked. No signal. By now I should have been deep in the bosom of Alexander De Chauncey. I didn’t want to look at my phone, to measure the fallout of my cancellation, but my conscience was able to briefly overpower my other inhibitions and I looked. There was an email from his PR. Three minutes after I sent mine. ‘Very inconvenient … Time very limited … Difficult to reschedule at this notice …’
Bad. Not maximum bad, and no worse than I could reasonably expect, but bad. Would they go straight to Eddie and complain? That might be the end for me. But there were no emails from Eddie or Polly, nothing else out of the ordinary. Would they email about something like that? Unlikely. It would be a phone call.
My phone sprang to life in my hand, throbbing with an incoming call, and almost flew out of my hand as I spasmed in surprise. Adrenalin thumped through my system. The passing chemical blitz made me woozy, and I felt the blackout grey crawling in at the corners of my vision.
Withheld number. That could mean one of the phones at the office.
I swiped to answer, thumb skidding on the drops of drizzle that had clung to the phone screen, little pinpricks of rainbow.
‘Jack Blick?’ said an unfamiliar voice, a confident drawl.
‘Bick,’ I said. ‘Yes. Hello.’
‘Alexander De Chauncey.’ He savoured every syllable of his name.
‘Mr Chauncey, Mr De Chauncey,’ I began, already stumbling. I was completely on the wrong side of this conversation, the one who needed a boon from the other, and the one who had just done wrong by the other, a double supplicant, and De Chauncey didn’t sound as if he was on the wrong side of anything, ever. ‘I’m so sorry about this afternoon, I had another interview and it has—’
‘Where are you?’ De Chauncey asked, drawing out the words again, a note of bemusement in the question, as if there was nowhere that I could reasonably be.
‘Er, Barking, as it happens,’ I said. He could probably tell that I was outside, and hear the wind against the phone mic. ‘I left a message with—’
A soft cluck or tut came over the line – perhaps no more than the sound of a man turning a Polo mint over in his mouth. ‘We were supposed to be meeting,’ he said. ‘The girl from the magazine said you were coming over this afternoon.’
His girling of Polly, my immediate manager and a terrifying force in my life, triggered conflicting emotions: a crackle of righteous anger on her behalf, a spark of amusement and delight. ‘As I said in my email—’ I began.
‘It’s difficult this week,’ he said with a sigh, as if I should feel sympathy for him. ‘Not a sliver of daylight …’
‘I appreciate that, and I really am sorry,’ I said. ‘I promise it won’t take long, if you can possibly spare just half an hour in the next day or two.’
‘Well, where are you now?’ he asked, as if I hadn’t just told him. ‘If you can make it over here in the next hour or so, we could still do it.’
I swallowed. ‘It might be tricky, I’m quite a way out.’
A sigh. I was pushing my luck. ‘It’s best we get it done today.’
‘OK, I’ll get moving now,’ I said. There was no reply, no closing acknowledgement. The call was over. I put the phone back in my pocket with quaking hands.
‘We should get moving,’ I said to Pierce, thinking more about my empty fridge, cold fear twisting inside me. Even within me, in my innermost core, there was a lie – that I would make every effort to get to De Chauncey’s office in Shoreditch – and, deeper, the truth – that I would not, and was already planning the heavy session I would need to anaesthetise myself against the consequences of that, and the rest of today’s events. I wanted to believe the lie. It would be a really heavy session. ‘This weather …’
‘There may be another way around,’ Pierce said. ‘We might be able to get a better view, even if we can’t get much closer.’
I looked up at the plume. A helicopter clattered overhead, tufting and tugging the sides of the column. Was it weakening, or simply losing contrast as the sky around it descended and darkened?
‘Light’s going,’ I said.
‘That might make the effect all the more dramatic,’ Pierce said. ‘There was a turning, back the way we came – if we go along there, we’ll be able to find another way back down to the river and the fire.’
‘No, I need to get back – that call …’
Pierce shrugged. ‘OK, let’s get back. It’d be good to get out of this.’
The puddles alongside the road had deepened and widened and the lorries, headlights on, tyres hissing, had sped up in the wet. To avoid getting drenched, we had to wait more often, and longer, and sometimes had to sprint.
‘It’s a shame to come out here and not to see a lick of flame,’ Pierce said.
‘Looks like they’ve got the place locked down tight,’ I said. ‘I doubt we’d be able to see anything.’
‘Keen to get back?’ Pierce asked, his tone a trace loathsome. I had forgotten that he knew about the drinking, and I disliked the possibility that he might be needling me about it. ‘It’s typical, though, isn’t it?’ he continued. ‘We come out here wanting a brush with disaster, something real, and end up being fed a bunch of bullshit by PRs.’
My irritation with Pierce jagged upwards. So I wanted to get back and drink, true, but he had no right to say it. Or imply it, anyway. Knowing about my problem didn’t mean he knew me. Perhaps I felt a little guilty – I was the one cutting the dérive short, even though it had been my idea. Perhaps these thoughts were all facets of the same general dismay about the way the day had turned out.
Anyway, hurt, I aimed for a spot on Pierce that I knew would hurt back.
‘Isn’t all this fussing over “authentic” urban experience a bit try-hard?’ I said. ‘A bit hipster-ish?’
‘Hipster-ish?’ Pierce said, and I was pleased at the affront in his voice. Bull’s-eye. ‘I’d say it’s the opposite—’
‘But it isn’t,’ I cut in. ‘It’s as anxious as the flannel shirt and the vinyl collection. An obsession with status, with defining yourself through experience. Getting mugged as some kind of artisanal treat. A pop-up that gives you something to Facebook about, something to define yourself to your friends. A marker of status, victimhood and depth.’
Pierce was glaring at me, but he didn’t respond.
‘When I read Night Traffic,’ I continued, ‘I loved it because I could relate it to my own experience; it took my memory, my trauma, and, without diminishing the ugliness of it, stripped away its ordinariness, gave it qualities I could appreciate.’
‘That’s exactly the kind of self-help bullshit people want from writers,’ Pierce spat back. ‘Exactly what I wanted to avoid. This idea that autobiographical writing has to inspire, which means everything becomes a lesson, so “how I got over this trauma” gets the unspoken addition “and you can too” and everyone’s lived experience turns into a Victorian lecture on moral fibre and self-improvement.’
‘But you didn’t live it! You didn’t overcome anything! It wasn’t autobiography, it was fiction!’
‘Nevertheless—’
‘No! There’s no nevertheless! A forged bank note isn’t worth half of its face value, it’s worth nothing!’
For the first time in our acquaintance I felt that something I had said to Pierce had really affected him. The indignation and pride that he had displayed moments earlier were gone, and he had the same haunted look he had at times when we first met, when he must have been weighing up the confession he was about to make. The squareness and bulk of him was unchanged, but now appeared baggy and tired, not a reservoir of force. I knew what it was: he wanted to salvage something, to retain some of his reputation as a writer, some of Night Traffic’s renown as literature. And he was seeing that it might not be possible.
‘If you want to go ahead and come clean,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to get used to this kind of reaction. Worse. People won’t want a sympathetic interview. They will want me to beat you up on the page, and if I hold back, they’ll do it themselves. The days of good faith are over, my friend. Everything you did, it won’t just be considered a sin, it’ll be considered an insult, and that’s so much worse.’
My innards lurched. Not nausea, though that was coming – an instinct I had gone too far. However long and wrong this day had been, I still had to get a feature article out of Pierce. The truly great interview I had seen shining before me was still attainable, unless I drove Pierce away. He might simply decide to clam up; worse, he might decide that there was no value in having this pet magazine journalist if he wouldn’t even follow instructions, and go to one of our rivals, or a newspaper.
‘You do want to go ahead?’ I asked gently. We had reached the overgrown base of the stairs up to the footbridge. As we ascended, Pierce kept his head bowed, thoughtful rather than humble.
‘I do, I do,’ he said. ‘I have to. Quin, remember? And I have to get on with my life. There has to be a way to do it that minimises the backlash.’
This struck me as delusional, but I admired his commitment to the idea. Maybe it was just denial, or a natural but misplaced desire to weasel out of the full consequences of his fraud. However I thought there might be a little more to it than that: an urge towards literary experimentation. Pierce wanted to take an established prose form, the confessional interview, and screw with its boundaries and conventions. And, truly, I wanted to enable that in any way possible, even if it meant being a passive enabler of what he had in mind. What I did not want was for him to take fright and decide to do it the normal way with the Sunday Times.
‘You have to understand why people will be angry,’ I said. ‘It’ll be seen as romanticisation of crime. Genuine victims of crime will be angry, especially if they read the book.’
‘You’re a genuine victim of crime,’ Pierce said with a drop of acid. ‘What makes you angry about it?’
‘Well, you lied your way into my trust, which is a betrayal,’ I said. ‘Reading something like that is a two-way process: you, the author, are opening up to the reader, but in turn the reader feels as if they’re sharing something with you. Regardless of how adeptly you did it, you were taking a creative holiday in my misery. That’s as bad as fraud, really, because there’s this implication that you wanted to experience an attack; rather than merely finding the good in a terrible experience, you were making that case from nothing. And you really don’t want to experience an attack. The second time I was mugged, it … well, it really fucked up my life.’
We had reached the top of the stairs, disturbing a skulking pigeon. It fled up and out in an explosion of wings and scrambling claws. But before I clocked that it was a pigeon, I saw the pale burst of escaping feathers and a shining avian eye and imagined a rarer bird had been waiting for me.
‘Can you tell me about it?’ Pierce said. ‘That second time?’
No, I realised – it wouldn’t make sense and he wouldn’t understand. It was too open to interpretation, and might not obviously support what I had been saying. ‘I don’t think I can,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Not now, or here.’
The encroaching gloom had made the footbridge a tunnel through Hades. Its few lights revealed enough of its slick, foul surfaces to make the threat clear. Another stunted winter day giving up. Coming through here alone, at night, was as unimaginably unwise to me as trekking solo through a crocodile swamp.
‘We know getting mugged is horrible, Pierce,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to go through it to know that. The fear of it spills out, infects the city. Places like this. It shuts down parts of the urban circuits, corrupts the operating system.’
‘I think you’d be pretty safe here,’ Pierce said. ‘No one in their right mind would have a good reason to come here at night. Not even muggers. I hear what you’re saying. But fear isn’t a good measure of a situation. We fear lots of things that turn out fine. And there are lots of other things that we should fear, but don’t.’
On the platform, huddled out of the steady, heavy almost-rain, we talked briefly and ambiguously about what would come next. I said I’d be in touch the next day. Pierce said he’d think about it. The pub excursion we had originally sketched out was forgotten. The pub is useless for determined drinking. I needed quiet, and privacy. The fridge had to be restocked. I needed to be away from people, all people, but especially Pierce. I needed the kind of clean that alcohol gave me, the dreamless sleep. Peace, alone on the sofa, a kebab or a box of chicken, that first beer, that nth beer. I could taste it – worse, I could not taste it, not yet.
Was there material to write a feature? Of some kind, sure. If 2,000 words could be woven out of fifteen PR-supervised minutes with a distracted celebrity in a hotel room, there’d be no trouble getting it from this sprawling wreck of a day. We had talked for hours. But at the same time I felt that he had told me very little. Most obviously, he had not even hinted at why he had faked the book. This waffle about ‘authentic urban experiences’ was not entirely convincing, not least because it contradicted itself. It had the smell of a smokescreen thrown up to obscure something else. Perhaps this was genuine journalistic instinct on my part. It hardly mattered because as I was thinking this, he stood beside me – jacket collar pulled up against the cold, hands crammed into pockets – and I didn’t ask him. Getting away was more important. The minutes creaked by. No device is slower than the orange-lit information display in an unimportant station. Out at the edge, among the hubs.
For the rest of the journey we spoke very little, and it wasn’t a long journey. Pierce got off the train at Barking in order to get the Tube back to Bow Road. I stayed on, aiming at Fenchurch Street. The train moved with little urgency, as if it could feel the rush-hour pressure building up in the city at the end of its line, and feared that approaching too fast could cause the whole place to rupture.
I checked my phone. More emails. I skimmed the senders and subjects: there was an email from Polly but it was routine office stuff, no sign that De Chauncey or his press person had gone crying to Eddie. A couple of Twitter notifications, people favouriting things said by other people that happened to mention me. I hadn’t said anything worthwhile on Twitter for days. Just empty I’m-alive, Is-it-lunch-yet stuff. What would really set my feed alight would be to tweet something like: ‘Just spent day with @Oliver_Piercing. Major interview coming soon.’ But that might inspire other journalists to get in touch with Pierce, seeing that he had decided to ‘break his silence’, and he might talk to them. I could tweet a tease: ‘Spent amazing day with next interview subject. Rarely speaks with press. Going to be a big one.’ But that’s just annoying, isn’t it? Perhaps I could layer the tease with some ironic distance, serve it backhand: ‘I hate those teaser tweets, “secret meeting today, big story coming soon”, but today I really want to do one!’
But that just made me hate myself.
This is what I tweeted: ‘I am on a train. It is moving very slowly.’
Which was no more than the truth. I tried to bring up the @Oliver_Piercing feed, thinking – fearing – that Pierce might be coming out of his hole. But it was still blank, an error message.
Polly was in my notifications. She had favourited something I said about interviewing Bill Nighy back in early 2014. Why would she do that? Was it a deliberate message of some sort? Or just an accident, a slip of the finger? Either way, she was rooting about in the deep past of my timeline. Why? Looking for something? Evidence? She was unlikely to find anything. My online persona was a work of art. Modest, but without disingenuous self-deprecation. Always out doing interesting activities, but never boastful about them. Occasional wry jokes but no clowning or waggishness. Worldly without being jaded. Warm without being syrupy. Humane without being preachy. I liked to think that even my silences had a particular quality to them.
Not much was happening on Instagram. I took a photo of my copy of Murder Boards sitting on the stiff, worn fabric of the train seat next to mine, taking care to show its beard of bookmarks. That hit the right note. Literature. Work. Research. London. On the move somewhere. But not first class, oh no. Maybe the slightest hint at what I had been doing all day. Nothing that might contradict any later lies I might want to tell about missing the De Chauncey meeting. Perfect.
I had Tamesis notifications. Information for Fenchurch Street, as it had guessed in its spooky way that I was on a train heading there. A message from Kay.
Where are you?
I replied: Been out & about w Pierce. Heading back now.
Was she checking up on me as well?
The Tamesis screen flickered and refreshed, refilling with streets and labels and tags and coloured heat. Travel Alert, it warned. Delays to C2C services into Fenchurch Street. Avoid if possible. More details / Show me other routes / What people are saying / Dismiss. I dismissed the warning. It might have been possible to avoid C2C services if I wasn’t sitting on one.
Twenty past five in the afternoon and as black as night on a viaduct snaking through Limehouse. I raised myself in the seat to look around the carriage. There were only a couple of other passengers. By now the train was at least thirty minutes late.
In the darkness, graffiti on the side of a new apartment building:
BUILD ROBOTS
DESTROY RENT
AND
TAKE THE REST OF HISTORY OFF
An electronic tok emitted from the train’s public-address system, and it crackled softly as if an announcement were about to come, but nothing happened. The crackle, a machine breath so gentle it was barely audible, continued – the sound of expectation, of something about to happen. Anything coming over? No.
Updating London … said Tamesis, the Bunk emblem spinning. East London unfolded on the screen again, with the rail line into Fenchurch Street an angry red and the District and DLR baleful orange. The map pulsed with markers. Fenchurch Street: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Tower Hill: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Bank-Monument: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Breakdown rippling outwards. Are you affected? Please tell Tamesis. We might not be able to help, but we love to listen!
From Kay: U in east? Drink?
I replied: Trains all ducked up.
The little Bunk-star under my words turned from grey to blue, indicating that she had read my message, but it did not pulse – she wasn’t typing a response. Nothing coming over.
Restlessness was mounting in me. The window that De Chauncey had left open was closing, causing a familiar churn of emotion: foreboding, and sickly delight. Even if I had wanted to hare over to Shoreditch and meet the man, the trains were now preventing me. I was obliged to go home and drink, boo hoo. It was perfect, and I started composing an excuse-filled email to the PR, hope that the disruption was severe enough and widespread enough to be news, to get into De Chauncey’s bubble, and keep intact the illusion that I had made every effort to reach him in reasonable time. But there was still that foreboding. Even if he accepted that there were real train problems, it didn’t clear up his schedule, or his disinclination to help me out. That thought needed dousing in lager until it went away. Tomorrow had to be obliterated. That was the only job on my to-do list. And the train was keeping me from that, as well. Every minute I spent sitting in this inert train was another minute I could be safely back home annihilating the future. What had promised to be a long evening of drinking was receding into being a standard-length evening, or even a short evening. My insides crawled with dissatisfaction. Never enough time to waste. At least I would be home all day tomorrow. But, in theory, working – I had promised Eddie. What were the odds of getting a draft done? I needed one, even an ‘unauthorised’ version. I might be able to brazen out the De Chauncey situation if I had something really explosive to show Eddie, even a (carefully edited) transcript. But it didn’t seem likely. Not with all the drinking I had planned.
The train lurched, and stopped again. Its halt had a more permanent quality this time: the engine sound dropped out completely and the lights flickered. I expected an announcement – I wanted an announcement – but none came, and the unresolved possibility poisoned the air. Clicks and pings came from below, components cooling. I thought about the becalmed freight cars in their Dagenham sidings, weeds growing up around their axles. We were probably only metres from a station. A more serious problem? A bomb, gunmen on the loose? I took a look at Twitter and Tamesis again to see if bad news, awful news, was breaking. It wasn’t. But Tamesis knew that something was up. Its real-time experience rating of Fenchurch Street and all other City stations was bad and falling.
On Tamesis, there was another message from Kay: Do you want to meet up? I liked Kay, but this was horrible, horrible, my evening, she was crashing my evening. Which was, in any case, trickling away minute by minute on this fucking train.
Who was I kidding, thinking that Pierce would go ahead with the interview? He’d be home already, deciding obscurity was better than infamy, or on the phone to the Sunday Times. I’d be left with nothing, or an angle piece about how I almost had the story but let it slip away – which would probably have to involve coming clean about my own problem, if I did it at all.
What was wrong with this fucking train? It was serious, evidently – either that, or the heaters were on the blink, as an acrid smell was filling the air, beginning in the pocket of membranes at the back of my mouth. I rocked in my seat, and craned up again to see if I could detect any panic among my fellow passengers. No obvious alarm. One young woman was hissing a lengthy complaint about the situation into her mobile phone, but the others gazed without focus and did not frown or sniff as toxins misted the air.
‘I’ve got to get out,’ I said, gathering my things into my bag. There was no way off, of course, the carriages were sealed tight, air thickening and fouling, vents coughing fumes, but on a superstitious level I thought I might be able to jog the train into movement by acting as if arrival in the station was imminent. Also I simply had to move – to stay still was to be stifled, to invite paralysis and collapse.
My legs dissented under me. I found myself swaying against seats, attracting wary glances, being assessed for drunkenness, criminality and mental illness. Yes, yes, I’m sorry. No. I fear so. Again the speakers of the PA system clicked and crackled, but no words came over. The train did move, it shuddered again like a great beast dying but instead of dying it lived and moved. I looked through the window, seeking a familiar landmark to orient myself, only to see my own reflection, low-res in the smeared, scratched glass, eyes dark pits. I squinted and focused as the train gathered speed, and saw a line of white lights or reflectors beside the track. Except they were not reflectors or lights. They were birds, lined up on a wire fence, watching the train. Cockatoos, white cockatoos, not watching the train, watching me. They knew me.
At Fenchurch Street I had to physically shoulder through a crowd of irate City types, and one of them called me a ‘fucking cunt’, and I sincerely hoped they all got trapped together on a stinking train. Gulping the damp, cold air in a brick arch outside the station, surrounded by hunched and angry private misery, I realised that the District Line would be as bad or worse. I just couldn’t face it. So I looked for a pub.