It all rested on Pierce’s confession. No: it all rested on my recording of Pierce’s confession. That was everything, my muscle, my back-up, my leverage. Without the recording, the confession was inconsequential. It might as well have never happened. It would be his word against mine, a proven liar accusing an unproven liar. A degenerate, desperate drunk, accusing an acclaimed author. I had two recordings of the interview, but only one included the confession, and little else mattered. Or rather, I assumed it included the confession. But I had blacked out. Had I lost or damaged the DVR? One evening a few months ago I had spilled most of a can of Stella into my then-laptop. What my reaction had been at the time, I don’t know. Maybe I hadn’t even been aware. I discovered the accident the next morning, confronted with a soggy, sticky keyboard and a black screen. Hundreds of documents, hundreds of photos and hundreds of pounds, gone.
The other danger was that the recording had never happened. I was habituated to fuck-ups with interview recordings – it had happened with Quin. Button not pressed, wrong button pressed, low or dead battery and no spare, low memory, background noise, microphone in the wrong socket … In recent months I had made a comprehensive survey of ways to fail to do this essential part of my job.
And there was … a fear. I had not laid eyes on the DVRs since parting from Pierce. I needed to check the recordings. But the other Need had me. I could not do it.
It’s hard to explain this incapacity. Why not just look, find out? Because if I had fucked up, but I didn’t yet know that I had fucked up, the fuck-up had not truly happened, not yet. Drink helps see things this way – the drink, the Need, means that I can sit here on the sofa, paralysed with low-grade anxiety and fear, but able to deal with those problems because I have drink. Meanwhile the disaster, the possibility of disaster, is all conditional and abstract and positioned safely in a range of possible futures. It’s susceptible to the kind of anaesthesia that drink provides.
What alcohol provides to the alcoholic is delay. It doesn’t make your problems disappear, but it does defer them – it delays the point at which you will have to care about them. The price of this service is steep, but it always looks like a good deal at the time. ‘At the time’ is all that matters. Addiction is a kind of time travel, or the opposite of time travel: the obliteration of all the bad decisions that have led to a moment, and all the possible consequences and horrible unfoldings of that moment, so that only the moment exists. The past is soothed and the future postponed.
But this whole magical process only worked as long as there was beer in the fridge, and there was none left. The precious moment was dissolving. I would have to act, I would have to get up and go to the corner shop, and I would have to go out and see Pierce, and I needed to check the recordings of the interview. The commitments I had made were fading back in, a growing racket.
The shoulder bag I took to work was in the living room, leaning against the seldom-used armchair with the poor view of the TV, the one heaped with dirty laundry. It troubled me, the bag. Its shape troubled me, its poor posture. It was guilty. Something had happened. An ill odour clung to the thought of the DVRs.
I stood and – not thinking too much, trying to silence the awful thinking that was coming in now that I didn’t have anything to drink – picked up the bag. Then I returned to the sofa and sat with the bag in my lap.
I stayed like that a while. Then I opened the bag.
It looked pretty good. There were my notebooks and assorted pens, and my copies of Murder Boards and Night Traffic. My laptop was there, safe in its padded side-pocket. The other worthless bits and pieces that float around in my bag were all present: a comb, a couple of memory sticks, a USB cable. There were no DVRs.
The bag’s lining was black and quite loose, and it can be easy to miss objects. I took it through to the kitchen and started to methodically remove every item from the bag, laying them out on the kitchen table. There were no DVRs.
I ran my hands around the insides of the bag, feeling every seam and pocket, feeling the whole thing in its unusually light and empty state – it’s never empty, this bag, never. I squeezed it, exploring if something might have slipped in between the lining and the fabric of the bag itself. There were no DVRs.
They were gone, both of them. I had lost the recordings of my interview with Pierce.
A period of numbness followed. I went to the corner shop and bought twelve cans of Stella. I smiled at the man behind the counter and said ‘cheers’ when he gave me my change. I walked back to the flat and put the cans in the fridge, except one, which I opened. I looked at the kitchen table, where the contents of my bag were still neatly laid out. I did not feel despair, or anger, or depression. I didn’t feel much of anything at all – just emotional tinnitus, a rising, meaningless clamour within, drowning out any effort to put together a coherent reaction. I did not feel that all was lost: on the contrary, one of the sickly aspects of alcohol’s deadening of consequence was that there was always hope, deluded hope – not hope at all but hope substitute, hope methadone, the dull synthetic buzz that left you thinking that perhaps you still might be able to turn around that 2,000-word profile that was due first thing in the morning, when it is already nine thirty in the morning and not one word has been committed to the screen. Not hope, then, but a continued flight from the implications of what had happened.
One ugly truth: I was now obliged to go out and spend the evening with Pierce, on the possibility that I might be able to do something to recover from the loss of the recordings. I could get his confession again, maybe, or at least a couple of quotes that I might be able to use. Some shreds of a feature that I might be able to take in to show Eddie and Polly on Thursday, or Friday if I decided to go to ground tomorrow. Even as alcohol shuts down my ability to understand anything coherent about the future, it has the extraordinary effect of stretching out that future, so that the eighteen or so hours between now and my appearance in the office tomorrow might be for ever, enough time to do anything, to achieve anything, to right all the wrongs and mishaps that were piling up around me.
Pierce had explained his plan to me over the phone. He wanted to recreate the circumstances of his invented mugging for real, in the hope of being attacked for real. The long, terrifying ordeal he had invented was unlikely to be replicated – or enacted, as it had never taken place – but he might at least get threatened and robbed. Maybe even roughed up. That, he figured, was enough: enough to show remorse, enough to show a willingness to atone, enough to show that he understood the reality of what he had created in fiction. What about the risk of more serious harm, I asked – what if he got himself stabbed? Well, it’s a risk, he said, but not very probable, especially with a witness there. Meaning me. He didn’t sound concerned. Indeed, I was left with the impression that he welcomed the risk. Did he want to get stabbed? Probably not, but he wanted the risk, he wanted it to be a real possibility. He wanted to put himself in the way of the blade.
What I did not understand was my own role. In Night Traffic, Pierce had been alone when he was attacked; this time, I would be with him. That must affect the likelihood of becoming a victim. He dismissed my concerns with a ‘We’ll see, we’ll find out.’ I don’t want to get mugged again, I said. Fine, said Pierce. Run. But not too far. I need you to witness.
That was the important part. He needed a witness. There could be no ambiguity about the facts. He needed proof. And so did I.
‘Anything I need to bring?’ I asked.
‘Your phone?’ Pierce said. ‘There might be a chance to document – you know, to film or something. Or photos, afterwards, of injuries.’
This made me think of my scraped face. ‘Won’t they take my phone? If it happens.’
A thoughtful pause. ‘Yeah, I suppose. Back up your files. You have insurance?’
‘I think so.’
‘Then you’re fine,’ Pierce said merrily. ‘You get a new phone. Sorted. Everyone wins. Oh, and dress smartly. Jacket and tie. Like you’ve been to a posh party.’
The fabrications in Night Traffic were set against a background of established fact. Pierce had been to a party, the launch of a friend’s book, and had drunk a good deal. Not as much as me on an average night, but a good deal for a civilian. Another friend, who lived further east, out in Leyton, had called a minicab, and had offered to drop Pierce along the way. They had expected to leave the centre via Whitechapel Road, which would ultimately pass by the end of Pierce’s street. But the driver had instead chosen Commercial Road. It had been a warm night, and rather than argue and demand a detour, Pierce had asked to be dropped at the bottom of Burdett Road, a long connecting street, intending to walk the rest of the way home. He was cheerful from drink and friendship. I remembered nights like those. Halfway, he deviated from the main road into a side street, trying to shave a minute or two off the walk.
This much was real. The party had happened, the cab-ordering friend was real, the cab was real, the chronology to that point was easy to verify and check. So that was what we would do.
I napped for a while before going out, the fog of horror at the loss of the recordings having manifested as a terrible tiredness. The alarm on my phone woke me at seven, and I was sure that I would have slept on without it. Changing into the jacket and tie that Pierce had mandated was an ordeal of heavy, aching limbs. Everything had frozen in place on the sofa, held with an aching frost, and moving shattered me anew. In the mirror, I studied the damage to my face. It had lost some of its delicatessen rawness and was adding smoky purple bruising at its edges and in the lower pocket of the eye. Tomorrow morning there would be some explaining to do in the office, if I made it in. The shirt and tie made it look worse, somehow. A bookie’s clerk on the wrong side of a gang, a low-rung City sort after a fracas in an Essex nightclub.
I took some Stella on the Tube, poured into an aluminium water bottle I used to take to the gym. It held almost two cans, good for most London journeys. Anything to clear the sluggishness, the soggy fatigue in my bones.
Pierce was waiting for me in a pub beside Limehouse Station – almost underneath the station, beneath the elevated line I had spent so much time on yesterday. He greeted me like a friend, springing up from his seat, gripping my hand, patting me on the shoulder. Just thirty-six hours earlier, this would have delighted me, but now it was disquieting. Energy crackled around him, a bright photo-negative to my lethargy. He was on edge, volatile, and I wondered if he had taken something, either licit or illicit. It could simply be adrenalin.
‘What happened to your face?’
I decided to give the truth a go. ‘I was trying to get a plastic bag out of a tree in my back garden, and I fell.’
‘Last night?’
‘This afternoon.’
Pierce examined me. ‘I thought maybe Quin had beaten you up.’
This stopped me. It was said without malice, but the fact that Pierce knew about my encounter with Quin meant I had to adjust the pieces on the game board in my head. If, that is, he did really know – could this be a joke that doubled as a lucky guess? I had assumed that Pierce’s disappearance from social media meant that he no longer looked at it, but that was not necessarily true. My accounts, and Quin’s accounts, were all public, anyone could see them. Pierce might have anonymous accounts of his own for quietly keeping tabs on things. I thought of that rush of unfamiliar followers over the past twenty-four hours.
‘You saw that?’ I asked.
Pierce nodded.
‘I ran into him,’ I said, trying not to sound guilty. On a technical level, I was pretty sure I had nothing to feel guilty about, but guilt came anyway. ‘I went into a pub for a quiet drink on my way home, and he came in a few minutes later.’
‘What an amazing coincidence,’ Pierce said, eyes wide, cartooning innocence. ‘Tamesis knew where you were, I suppose?’
‘Yes, I used it to find the pub.’
Pierce stared at me, smiling, knowing. I had put together these ‘coincidences’ myself. I could readily imagine what Quin had done, but I still could not quite face the reality that he would misuse his own software like that. Why I couldn’t, I don’t know.
‘Happens a lot around Quin,’ Pierce said, ‘that kind of co-incidence. If I was still writing journalism I might be more interested in that.’ He gazed deep into his bitter.
‘Perhaps, in the piece, we can expose some of Quin’s involvement,’ I said. ‘Since he’ll no longer have any hold over you.’
‘Perhaps,’ Pierce said. ‘I don’t relish the idea of making an enemy of him, mind. What did he want to talk about, anyway? Me, right?’
Partial truth. ‘I don’t remember. But yeah, a bit about you. I think he might simply have been trying to mess with me.’
Pierce smiled. ‘That might be 90 per cent of the reason he does anything. All the personal data he has amassed from his various projects gives him power, but …’ Here, he frowned. ‘What’s strange about Quin, for someone so successful, is that he’s terrifically angry. Maybe that’s not strange. I had success, I was celebrated, and it did weird stuff to me. Anyway. He’s made a lot of money. Millions, tens of millions. Maybe he thought that would give him the power to do what he wants. Not super-villain things, just … When we first met, he just raged about the city, about London. The cost of housing, how his staff couldn’t afford their rent and had to commute for hours, the expense of that building in Shoreditch, how money was killing everything. He’d go on and on about the 1980s and 1990s, how great it was, empty buildings everywhere, artists, designers, squats, crime … No wonder he was a fan of mine, no wonder he liked Night Traffic and Murder Boards; I suppose it was a link back to that kind of grungy, squatty stuff.’
‘Before my time,’ I said. I hated to think about it. Soon the city would spit me out, dead, half-dead, or alive. Without my job, it was over. And then what? No other job, that was for sure. If people like Quin couldn’t make it work, then … It made me angry, too. With Quin, as much as anyone. ‘I would have thought he was responsible, at least in part; he’s been the face of trendy Shoreditch for so long, him and his dazzle-pattern building and apps to help you find a good cold-press place and share photos of your ostrich burger.’
‘Yeah, and you’re a feature writer for a glossy magazine on Old Street, and I’m a Vice writer, a lapsed Vice writer anyway. We’re all to blame. Christ, what was the name of the guy who founded your magazine? Aaron …?’
‘Errol,’ I said.
‘Well, there you have it,’ Pierce said. ‘Didn’t he do the first pop-up shop?’
‘There’s some dispute about that,’ I said. Errol certainly believed he was the first, never having heard of market stalls or car-boot sales. But this didn’t seem an appropriate fact to bring into the conversation.
‘What’s he doing now?’ Pierce asked.
‘He has a creative consultancy,’ I said, fearing I was letting the defensiveness tell in my voice, and wondering why it was there at all. I revered Errol. His eye for the new, the pre-popular, was without parallel. He could make a magazine sing with metropolitan desire. He was the modern urban lifestyle, without doubt, and without visible effort. Eddie didn’t encourage the Errol cult too much, which I could understand. They had been difficult shoes to step into. But sometimes, when Kay or Freya or I were convinced an idea was interesting and could not be dissuaded, Eddie invoked Errol. What would Errol make of this? He was more than the first editor: he was the first reader, the perfect reader, the one we had to please.
But when this had to be explained to an outsider, it could sound stupid. What would Errol have made of Pierce?
‘And he publishes a magazine, Networth, for, uh …’
‘Very rich people,’ Pierce said. ‘Yeah, I know it. They asked me to write a piece about Hackney Wick just after the Olympics. “London’s Meatpacking District” or something.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said yes, what do you think?’ Pierce chuckled. ‘Pound a word, fucking phenomenal. It was funny. “So you want me to sell the place?” I said. “Make it sound good?” No, no, they said. Make it sound dirty, edgy. That’s what’ll sell it. Like it’s got potential.’
‘Quin said something similar,’ I said, not loudly.
Pierce drummed his fingers on the table, an impatient look coming over him. ‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I thought you’d be more excited about this. Great colour for your piece, isn’t it? Better than a trip to Dagenham in the rain.’
Perhaps I should fake some enthusiasm, some crackle and verve, to make the excursion into the kind of zany adventure that I had once wanted to write about. But I could not. Since the loss of the recording, it was no more than an uphill slog, a Quixotic errand on the road to maybe avoiding losing my job. ‘It’s difficult for me,’ I said, choosing not to share those musings, and use my victimhood instead. ‘I really don’t want to be involved in another mugging. Even to watch. That’s assuming that it happens, and I don’t think it will.’
‘You don’t have to worry,’ Pierce said, without much sympathy in his voice. ‘You’ll be fine. I’ll make myself the focus. You can – I don’t know – recede. Not too far, though.’
I frowned. Pierce’s conception of what would happen clearly resembled a chat with a charity fundraiser or an encounter with a street performer, not a terror-based robbery. If it happened – if! – I sincerely doubted that it would be something I could just step back from. The whole art of mugging was to shut off the exits, to enclose the world and charge for readmission.
He thought that he would have some kind of control over events. But that’s what the attacker steals first, your control. And they never really give it back, even afterwards.
‘You’re very confident this is going to happen just the way that you want,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I’ve got a good feeling,’ Pierce said, still with that bubble of energy. ‘Really good feeling. I can see it perfectly.’
‘It’s not like imagining a scene,’ I said.
‘Well, it has happened to you twice,’ Pierce said. ‘It happens.’
‘Not on demand,’ I said.
Though the self-assurance in his words had hardly changed, Pierce had seemed diminished by my mild scepticism. But now he recovered, taking on that lecture-hall manner again.
‘When I was writing Night Traffic,’ he began (and I expected him to look from me to a spectral audience, as if we were on stage at Hay-on-Wye or Cheltenham), ‘I came across a brilliant essay by David Freeman about muggers in New York in the early seventies, real behavioural sink, Panic in Needle Park stuff – do you know it?’
I did not. I shook my head.
‘Anyway, there’s two of them, man and woman, Hector and Louise. They work as a team. Louise acts like bait. She walks down the street, and when someone tries to chat her up, she steers him towards Hector, who puts a knife to his throat.’
If this information had any relevance to our situation, it was impossible to see. It might as well have been a tale of knights and chivalry, or cattle rustlers in the Old West.
‘Yeah, but that’s New York in the early seventies,’ I said. ‘Not …’ I sat up in my chair and stretched out my arms, a gesture that took in the pub around us, the busy, bright, gentrified East End pub. After-work drinks that had turned into deep sessions, young flat-sharers enjoying midweek mini-breaks, sport on the telly, music. Maybe Pierce didn’t see it, but I meant to take in the wider city: its intense inhabitedness, its unaffordable dormitory towers filled with fair folk watching TV and heading to bed.
‘I know, I know.’ Pierce looked deflated – perhaps even disappointed. ‘It’s a horrible story, anyway. Cockroaches, miscarriages. Another pint? Before we set out.’
It was a gloomy prospect for me, as well, this pub. Too many young couples, not married yet but not far off, talking about their work day before heading back to a building with two or three front doors. They’d have something waiting in the fridge, the rest of a big batch of chilli made at the weekend, perhaps, or a couple of M&S ready meals for the microwave. Maybe that would seem like a bit much effort, and he’d suggest, all sly, they get something in, and the phone would come out. And in half an hour they’d be unloading tinfoil trays from a sweaty white bag.
I had done that. Elise and I left Divider within a couple of months of each other – her for a recently launched news and opinion website, me for the job I have now. There was a leaving party every other week, it seemed, as the financial crisis raged and anyone with prospects headed for a lifeboat. And we both had prospects. Her website was the UK arm of a fabulously well-resourced US institution, a name that brought eye-rolls among print journalists, but with tycoons lined up behind it. The print journalists don’t roll their eyes any more, and most of them aren’t journalists or in print any more. Meanwhile I was headed for the reading choice of the taste-makers, one of the few physical magazines that looked certain to weather the eschaton of the analogue, because business-class lounges would always need something to go on their Noguchi coffee tables. Our combined departure brought urgency to our long-running discussion about maybe getting a place together, and we did it. Pooling our resources meant we could afford a small place that was fairly central – Pimlico, near Victoria Station, a reasonable midway between her work in Hammersmith and mine in Shoreditch.
It felt like the start. Excellent new jobs, a comfortable flat on a side street that was just for us, savings and mortgages and marriage possible soon. In the meantime we could enter the dress rehearsal stage of adulthood, where you do all those things that adults do, with just a little too much awareness. Doing the generous, laid-back adulthood that I never saw my parents do, which I assumed was the stage before their stolid permanence. Grown-up extravagances like ordering in food, which my parents did not do, but the adults do on TV. Going to the pub after work and talking about your day. Every day. Having wine with dinner. Every night. Not getting drunk, not really, just merry. But every night.
‘Just … act happy. Drunk, merry, off guard. A soft target. Well-off, privileged. We should have our phones out, maybe. Definitely.’
Acting merry was less of a problem than I anticipated. To my surprise, I was a little merry. Pierce’s fizzy enthusiasm had spread. Maybe my disco nap earlier was helping. Maybe it was my certainty that nothing would happen, that we were entirely safe, and I could simply observe Pierce, capture his erratic behaviour, and report it all.
Looking well-off was more of a challenge. My recent gauntness comes as a nasty surprise when I happen to see myself reflected. Today’s damage to my face didn’t help. Pierce was little better. He did not suit a suit – it was not a question of build or fit or cut, it was a problem at the level of mien that left every part of his outfit looking wrong, a beach inflatable in the back of a car. If we rolled along looking jolly, I suspected that the impression would be more threatening than vulnerable, precisely wrong.
I had, perhaps, put my fingers to my scraped cheek as I thought about it – in any case, Pierce picked up that I was thinking about it.
‘So how did that happen, really?’
I frowned at the implication. ‘Like I said. I was trying to get a plastic bag out of a tree, and I fell.’ Sometimes self-deprecation sweetens belief; why would you invent a story that puts you in a bad light? It worked well with lies, and it was disappointing that it did not work better with the truth. ‘It was stupid. The drink, I suppose.’
‘Why were you trying to get a plastic bag out of a tree?’
I hesitated. ‘It was bothering me.’
‘How?’
‘It kept catching my eye.’
Pierce smiled. ‘Well, that is pretty stupid. It wouldn’t work in fiction. People expect nice clear chains of cause and motive. In life, of course, stupid stuff happens for no reason. Or it only makes sense for a second, not before, and certainly not after …’
I felt the cheek under my fingertips – the skin unfamiliar, rough, hot. Pain from touching, the odd moreish pain that can be controlled and savoured. Once again, I resented being interrogated by Pierce. He could not help himself.
‘I have a question for you,’ I said.
‘Go on.’
‘What really happened that night?’
‘What night?’
‘The night you didn’t get mugged.’
Pierce frowned. ‘I got dropped off by the cab around here’ – we were on Commercial Road, under the spire of the Hawksmoor church – ‘and I walked home, exactly the way we’re going now.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it. Nothing happened.’
‘When did you decide to invent the mugging and write the book? Was it on that walk? Before? Afterwards?’
My main intention in this line of questions had been to shift the subject away from me; I also wanted to guide Pierce into saying more about his fraud, in the hope that I might be able to jot down some relevant quotes, or perhaps even record something useful on my phone, some indisputable proof that he had invented the story. I was surprised to find Pierce’s manner becoming prickly and guarded – more than I would have guessed, given that he had already confessed, and I knew the truth.
‘I’m not sure I remember,’ he said, not with much confidence. ‘What do you mean?’
‘When did you decide to write Night Traffic?’ I asked, and I realised that it was the question I should have been asking all along. It was a remarkable thing to do, to commit a fraud like that, to sculpt such an enormous lie. It was not a project one embarks upon accidentally or innocently; there must have been a genesis, a moment of inspiration or decision, an intent. He might say that people did stupid things for no reason, but this wasn’t a drunken misadventure or a moment of madness. It was a book. It was 60,000 words of artfully constructed deception undertaken with total commitment. When? Why?
The longer I thought about it, the more vexing the chronology became. In the Night Traffic version of events, Pierce was traumatised by the attack and spent days and weeks shut up in his flat before deciding on using writing as a form of therapy. This period of seclusion was, again, verifiable fact: he had vanished from social media and stopped answering emails, a dry run for his later deliberate hermitage. The plan must have formed on the night, because he was already acting the role he had chosen the next morning. But the confusion with the minicab – that appeared to be genuine bad luck, a random event. Impossible to plan. Possibly the idea was already fermenting, and then fate proffered the perfect night … Nevertheless, it wasn’t clear.
‘Had you already had the idea to invent the attack? Or did you think of it while you walked this way?’
‘I mentioned …’ Pierce began, then halted. ‘I said … about being unhappy with the kind of work I was doing, the kind of writers I was being bracketed with. That was before.’ He was avoiding eye contact, thinking it through – or coming up with a plausible lie.
‘And then you had the mugging idea on that evening?’
‘Yes,’ Pierce said uncertainly. ‘The idea … Before that night, I wasn’t going to write the book. Afterwards, I was.’ He scowled.
‘So what gave you the thought?’
‘“Where do you get your ideas from?” Is that where this is going? I honestly … creativity really isn’t like that.’
Curious. ‘Even if nothing happens, it’ll be good to see the, uh, the scene of the crime,’ I said. ‘You might remember something. Besides, it’s on your way home, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Pierce said. ‘Like you say, I’m sure nothing will happen.’
Maybe not. But I saw it now: within the unravelling of Pierce’s big lie, another lie was being revealed.
I had thumbed through the streets on my phone while we were in the pub, and I had a rough sense of where we were, a pointer moving on a mental map. Commercial Road was an unloved artery lined with architectural hulks left over from the time of the docks. Even this late, traffic on the road was constant and the pavements not empty. Ahead was the lighted citadel of Canary Wharf, the watchtowers of the banks. Behind that – and for the second time that day I felt a queasy kink of surprise – the plume.
The sight of it caused me to miss half a step and scuff my unfamiliar smart shoe on the pavement. It was not the smoke column itself, although it had the baleful presence I knew well; this time, at least, it was where I’d expect it to be, maybe a little larger, a little wider, which gave it the illusion of being closer. No, it was the fact that I could see it at all against the night sky, against the solid dome of low cloud. It had the curious quality of being lit from below, perhaps by the ambient light of the city, perhaps by the fire itself. Perhaps it was a quirk of the atmosphere, an optical illusion – the plume could almost be somewhere in Canary Wharf itself, a towering inferno among the skyscrapers.
‘Still burning,’ I said.
Pierce had stopped a pace ahead of me. He glanced towards the towers and the plume. ‘The lights stay on all night,’ he said. ‘I was once at a party with someone who worked for one of the big Square Mile law firms, and he said that if they turned off the office lights, even in the wee hours, they got complaints from clients. Not giving it 110 per cent, you see, not burning the midnight oil.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s fucked up.’ And he kept walking. I followed.
We turned left, north, onto Burdett Road. If you had a paper map – the large one on Pierce’s wall, for instance – and a ruler, and you drew a straight line from the place he had been dropped by the cab and his house, you’d find that no roads came close to following that line. There were topographical accidents in the way, most significantly two canals. But we were also cutting across the grain of the East End, the main roads radiating out from the centre of London, the spider-web connections traced between those spokes. This urban rhythm, this warp and weft, was against us. By main roads, a lightning-strike zigzag, a steep backwards N, was the only path, and this turn took us onto its middle stroke. Pierce’s shortcut – if it had happened as described – had been an effort to shave some of the distance from the zag.
My provincial childhood furnished me with memories of deserted midnight streets, sodium-sterilised, which gave a fugitive air to any lone cars that sped through, high above the thirty limit. Why linger? The last bus was at 11.08 and after that the place was a husk. The four city sixth-forms took it in turns to host the annual tragedy, two or three of their headcount lost, a sporty hatchback gift from Dad overturned between hedges, beaten into a ball of tinfoil, trails of fluid along the scarred road surface, special assembly. The title of Pierce’s book, Night Traffic, used ‘traffic’ to mean business, transactions, trade, human traffic. But there was traffic at night in London, car traffic, as my suburban soul had been startled to discover. Who were these people? Where were they all going?
Not long after I arrived in London – especially after the Christmas robbery – a place like Burdett Road might have scared me. The canal, gloomy terraces, slab blocks on both sides of the street, and our pavement passed between a high brick wall and a screen of trees. Fly-tippers had called between some of the trees, leaving odd little heaps of ungainly rubbish: crushed baby-buggies, black bags of polystyrene packing, bed headboards spattered with peeling Care Bear stickers. Blind alleys punctured the wall.
Today, however, I saw the security lighting, the bike hire racks, the cranes over it all, unsleeping red demon eyes to ward off low-flying aircraft. We passed a modern church, a divine electricity substation. ‘This is the Gate of Heaven,’ claimed the red letters set above its porch. Crossrail had swallowed a site on the far side of the road, giant machines behind glossy hoardings. Helping you make the great escape. Whitechapel to Heathrow in 36 minutes. I remembered a nugget from Pierce’s book: Burdett Road, one of the tower blocks along here, was the subject of Pulp’s song ‘Mile End’ – all squats and squalor, fights, burning cars. When was that, twenty years ago? Had it ever truly been like that? No doubt, but now it was hard to believe. It was before the colourful glass balconies had been added to these long, low blocks, that was for sure, before they sprouted the smart black railings and neat landscaped lawns, scattered with those tidy boulders that urban renewalists leave behind – regenoliths.
‘This is where I turned off,’ Pierce said. It wasn’t really a turning, more a continuation of our current course – it was Burdett Road that veered away, hugging the park to our left. The street narrowed and sprouted car-obstacle humps and islands. The traffic disappeared. It was quieter and darker, a patchwork of truncated pre-Blitz leftovers and uncharismatic post-Blitz reconstruction. Names I remembered from Night Traffic: Eric Street, Ropery Street.
‘So what did happen that night?’ I asked.
Pierce shrugged. ‘You asked that already. Nothing. I walked up here. The main road, Mile End Road, is just up there.’ He gestured north, and I could see the street ended about a hundred metres further on. A twinkle of passing cars, the blue interior light of a night bus. ‘It’s five minutes to my house from there.’
We had come to a recess where purple dumpsters were parked, the recycling point for the surrounding housing estate. It was enclosed on three sides by high walls of windowless brick. The surrounding street turned its back on the spot, hemming it with clutter: car parks, playless strips of grass, a concrete cow.
‘This is where it happened,’ Pierce said. ‘In the book.’
The architecture was right enough – it made a good spot for a group to loiter, mostly unseen, a dark harbour in which to surround and intimidate a passer-by. But there was no group here. And even past midnight, the mental weather was wrong.
‘It doesn’t feel very threatening,’ I said. I wasn’t sure. Maybe on my own I would feel differently. If I were another gender. So many personal factors bear on the complexion of a place, quite apart from its physical structures.
‘I’ll show you some of the places I mention in the book,’ Pierce said. ‘We’ll see how bold you feel in the cemetery.’
Down Ropery Street, pastiche Victoriana on one side, and the real thing on the other, a fortress-like National School behind eroded brick walls. Halfway along, the street doglegged, a printer-jam kink without cause, and the pastiche was succeeded by authentic terraces. Further along, another abrupt dogleg, adding to the sense of a maze of nineteenth-century ad hoc building.
‘This is a bit more like it,’ I said. ‘Real East End.’
‘Yeah, a bit gangland,’ Pierce said. ‘It’s actually lovely during the day. Quiet and pretty. That’s where I bought the desk.’
Pierce’s ‘desk’ was a sturdy, wide slice of mdf slung between two filing cabinets. He had bought it from a timber yard up ahead, where the street took a sharp turn right. It would be easy to miss the yard, a modest wooden gate on the outer elbow of the turn. It had featured in Night Traffic as the only time Pierce had previously visited these streets: to buy the surface he wrote on. Was that the connection he made when he decided to invent the attack? A sheet of engineered wood, bought on a crooked street, making a work of engineered and crooked biography? I had to remember that he had not walked the streets exactly as he had described: it had all been a later invention, a tour as contrived as the one we were on now. More so. I pictured him sitting at that desk, Google Streetview open on the computer screen. Or standing on this corner on a quiet and pretty day, camera in one hand, notebook in the other, not revisiting a trauma at all, but smiling at his cleverness, at all the observations and linkages he would put into Night Traffic. It made me angry. Why, I don’t know. Was I a victim, really? A victim of fraud and deception? I had been cheated by Pierce, made to feel things under false pretences, impersonally lied to.
‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ I said. ‘Not really. When did you decide to write Night Traffic? To invent all this? What made you do it?’
Maddeningly, Pierce ignored me again. None of the street’s weak orange light reaching him, moonless introspection. How he was able to do this, I don’t know. Maybe people just accepted it – a novelist’s privilege, to be moody and inconsistent and elliptical.
‘That’s the cemetery,’ Pierce said.
Aged trees rose in a crowd behind the terrace, bare black branches untouched by light. A pool of blackness in the city.
To briefly recap Night Traffic: walking home on Eric Street, our hero is accosted by a gang of youths. Cheerful, reeking of skunk and violence, multi-ethnic. (Another stab of anger. I thought about Pierce composing the very balanced racial make-up of the group, being careful to include and not offend. A complete rainbow of bourgeois fear, no one left behind.) Once the group has impressed upon Pierce the seriousness of his situation, he is taken to the cashpoint of a nearby newsagent to withdraw his ransom. But the cashpoint is not working. So he is marched through these quiet streets in the direction of another. They are heading to a small Tesco across the road from Pierce’s own street – his own suggestion. But on the way, they detour into the cemetery to make a more thorough stocktaking of Pierce’s possessions and removables.
No ordinary cemetery, this. Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park had not received the dead for more than fifty years – the vast Victorian necropolis had been given back to nature, and thick forest had grown up within it, with narrow muddy paths running through deep brambles and fallen, upheaved lumps of crumbling memorial marble. By day it was quiet, wild, gothic, eerie. By night – I did not like to speculate. It radiated darkness, as if the night itself was made here, and here was its signal clearest.
Pierce had been right. The boldness was gone from me.
‘Seems more like a place to get murdered than mugged,’ I said. ‘I can see why you put it in the book.’
‘Yeah, it’s, uh,’ Pierce said. His voice cracked and he swallowed. ‘It’s atmospheric.’ And, in his hands, it had made for atmospheric writing – violence among the tombstones. Chthonic horror. Chthonic, relating to the underworld; I knew the word from Pierce’s book, from that scene, the one all the reviews quoted, the one in the cemetery, and here I found it applied.
A high wall separated us from the jungle, and we skirted it in silence. The entrance lay on a crossroads corner; just within, a war memorial, a brightly painted community centre, and an Edwardian keeper’s cottage, then a curtain of ink. Above the skeletal trees, the plume, squeezing and rolling, still with the source-less inner light.
‘I wish that thing would go away,’ I mumbled.
‘It’s mostly just kids snorting nitrous and trying to scare each other,’ Pierce said. His attitude had entirely changed – the energy was back. ‘I reckon you’re right, it’s not going to happen.’
‘You don’t want to go through with it?’ I said. I had not expected this, not at this moment anyway. ‘The mugging? Because if there was anywhere it could happen, this seems most likely.’
‘No, no, I do, I do,’ Pierce said. ‘But not here. I’m just not sure it’s going to happen. Feels too contrived.’
I weakened in the knees. Disappointment at another failed outing, another so-so bit of uneventful colour for the piece, contended for a moment with epic relief, before being washed away by it entirely. I could return home, I could drink, I didn’t have to go into the cemetery. Without prompting, I looked towards the far glimpse of Mile End Road, and its passing night buses.
‘Contrived, OK,’ I said. This was a weird thing for Pierce to say – of course it was contrived! – but I didn’t want to argue, not when the fridge was calling me. ‘Contrived.’
‘Yeah. Inauthentic. Look at us. This is ridiculous. We need to think it through. New plan.’
A whoop rose up from the cemetery park, a multiple shriek of joy, blunted by the trees and distance, but sudden enough to make us both start.
‘Kids,’ I said.
‘Kids,’ Pierce said.
We walked towards the main road. That was the end of the experiment, then – there would be no mugging. But neither of us said anything to declare the episode closed.
‘It’s not even eleven,’ Pierce said. ‘That’s the trouble. We’re too early. It was later than this.’
In the book, I thought. It had been later than this in the book, the crime that you had invented. I just wanted him to acknowledge that.
‘We should try somewhere else,’ Pierce said. ‘No sense giving up now. How about those big housing estates south of the river? Elephant and Castle. They were always a byword for mugging when I was growing up. I would never have gone there at night.’
I grimaced, which Pierce saw, and he tutted at me. ‘Come on, you said you were up for an expedition. We’ve got to do this properly, give it a proper try.’
‘Round here is one thing, but going all that way …’ I began, heeding the siren call of the fridge.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Pierce said. ‘With two of us I’m sure there’ll be no real danger.’
‘Then why …’
‘Just the right amount of danger, then. Come on. I’ll call an Uber to my flat, we can have a quick beer while we wait.’
I sensed that I was being bought off. But Pierce got something out of the deal as well – he didn’t have to walk back alone.