TWELVE

It was the time of the Olympics – wholesome athletics filled the television, and outside the sun shone on a rejoicing city. I was in a secret agony as dark and bleak as an Arctic winter. And so, I suspected, was Elise, still shackled to me, still desperate to help, watching and fearing. Not that I saw, in my mirrored cell, every thought reflected inward.

I had stopped drinking, overnight. We had watched the opening ceremony on television together, windows open to the evening air, too far away to hear any fireworks or flypasts, but we could make out the mingled sounds of our neighbours enjoying themselves. And we had fun too, of a pinched kind, clearing the fridge of cans, avoiding thoughts of the next day and subsequent days, relaxing like the ‘old times’ that were only a couple of years before. Opening ceremony to closing ceremony, that was the deal – if I could fully abstain for that period, we would reopen talks about moderation and rules and setting limits and so on, all the stuff that had failed in the past.

Not that I could see my way to the closing ceremony. I could hardly stand to speculate as far as the end of the next day, the next morning. The future was inaccessible, and any optimistic speculations had a counterfeit air. But the word addict was still absent from our conversations, and when it crept into my thoughts, it came as a devilish intruder. No, it seemed to me that another force was keeping me drinking, quite apart from either free will or addiction – a spook I had never caught in the light. Twisting away within me was an immense contradiction. I believed that stopping drinking would have very little real effect. After all, I was in great shape: an enviable job, a supportive relationship, good health, the world at my feet. Clearing away the drink, and all the problems it had caused, would do no more than reveal happiness, the happiness that had proved elusive so far.

At the same time, I feared stopping more than I had feared anything before. It should have been possible to infer the truth from this – that I was not opening the curtains to a refulgent dawn of contentment, but something else, something worse – but I did not.

If you want to believe, well, that’s very powerful, it’s very hard to resist.

Work continued. Most of my colleagues had asked for time off during the Olympics, and Eddie hadn’t wanted to decline any of those requests. He had tickets for a couple of events, too. So we had all put in extra effort in the fortnight before the games, and I earned some credit for volunteering to forgo leave. But with much of the work done, the days were quiet, so quiet that management turned the office TVs to the BBC coverage, muted, so we could all ‘be part of it’.

I was part of nothing. I loitered on the web and picked fights on Twitter, hoping to be taken out of myself for a moment, and then crashing back into shame and embarrassment. I sweated in my seat and pretended to enjoy the sport, feeling alienated from the athletes and the spectators, respective paragons of physical health and communal joy.

Those were the good times. Worse, far worse, were the evenings, when I prowled in our space, temper unbearably strained. The knowledge that my fury was unreasonable did nothing to quash it. I was afraid, terribly afraid, and there was no way of talking about it because I would not be understood. At work I could just about cope, I could divert myself, and there was time yet before the night. In the evening, at home, I was just shut away, and the night was inevitable.

Elise tried her best, and I was not nearly as grateful or gracious as I should have been. Her encouragement numbed me and her compassion repulsed me. And she was so patient with my temper that it made me angry. She filled the fridge with myriad flavours of fruit juice and bought fizzy water in the shrink-wrapped packs of four swollen two-litre bottles. Alongside this were boxes of fancy tea bags: green tea, mint tea, chamomile tea, fruit infusions. She sincerely believed – or wanted to believe – that in one of those pretty boxes lay the methadone I needed, the acceptable substitute for booze that would tide us over to the other side.

Weeks later, she did not take those boxes with her, and when I cleared the flat I threw them away. Half had not been opened.

The permissible drink that gave me any kind of relief was Gaviscon, which soothed the bouts of heartburn that racked me. It was at its most intense when I lay down at the end of the day, nerves tied like violin strings, in order to sleep. Inside, a scorching, corroding sensation would mount. Though it came from the guts, it always felt as if it were dissolving its way upwards into the heart and lungs, somehow both eating away and clogging up all the vital places of the chest, and I would have to rise and swig Gaviscon from the bottle.

Sleep didn’t come easily when the heartburn was raging, but it didn’t come easily at all. Heartburn was, in a way, a welcome visitor at night, because for all the pain it entailed, it was a connection to the real and the corporeal. Worse were the dreams.

Dream isn’t quite the right word. I was not asleep when they came – later in the night they turned into dreams, but they began as paralysing episodes of fear. I would lie in bed, convinced beyond all argument that death was imminent, that I was riddled with cancer or another (torturing, humiliating) terminal disease and I had already left it just too late for the doctors to do anything about it. Given that my insides were boiling and every sinew was aching from withdrawal, this was one of the more believable treats served up by the gruesome cinema of my imagination. I believed that Elise was the one dying, not me, and we had missed our chance to save her by focusing on me. I placed myself in the brutalised aftermath of economic or ecological collapse, fleeing marauders in a wasteland of burned-out cars hissing with corpse-fed nature. I killed off my family individually or in batches, by bacillus and calamity, and I prodded my reaction for its deficiencies, for evidence that I was less than functionally human and undeserving of aid. Nightly, I built hell for myself.

Very worst of all – in the sense of being least explicable and most persistent – were the fantasies of accusation, trial and imprisonment. I would be accused of a crime – naturally, a heinous crime – that I had not committed, or that I had somehow committed without meaning to, and I would hurtle through the machinery of justice on skids of official outrage, landing in prison without prospect of release, abandoned by all who had previously cared for me. Not just any prison: a Piranesi nightmare wrapped in suicide nets and jaundiced paint, the one-handed creation of an authoritarian mind, only in my mind, all for me.

That was cold turkey. It was a prison without escape. It was a living death. And when I think about stopping, it’s those waking dreams of prison that come back to me.

I should have made the connection with the conversation that we never had, with the words I never wanted to hear. There I was, every night, imagining an accusation, a charge, and a life sentence, fearing that above all else and not knowing why. And meanwhile, during the day, fearing the words that would traduce me. Addict and alcoholic – I would have no defence. That’s when the talk of moderation and finding a balance would end, and there are no more loopholes or cheats, and you have to stop. For ever.

Ocado bags were scattered in Pierce’s hall. Not the fridge and freezer bags – if there had been any of those, he had put them away – but anything that could be left had been left. Profile antennae still twitching, without purpose, I scanned the bags for insights. He liked Krave, the chocolate-filled cereal, which struck me as childish and odd. But his essays did have a sugar-crazed quality. I thought back to our expedition on Tuesday, the police public relations shed in the forecourt of the Ocado depot, right next to the source of the plume. Don’t knock Ocado, Pierce had said. They had kept him alive in the days following the Night Traffic attack, when he couldn’t leave the house. An interesting detail to invent, given that there had been no attack and nothing had been stopping him leaving the house. Who had been watching?

I said something about the bags to Pierce. ‘Yeah, I’ve been meaning to get around to that,’ he replied. He was already a couple of steps up the stairs; stung, he returned, picked up two bags in each hand, and sprinted back up. I picked up two bags as well, including the one with the box of Krave.

Pierce’s flat had not been tidy when I was here on Tuesday, but it was distinctly messier today. Two plates, bearing the remains of two distinct meals, had been left on the dining table, and a couple of empty beer bottles. Not many by my standards, but they would have been the first things to go if he had made any effort to clear up.

He gave me a beer – a Heineken, in a can – and I told him about my house.

‘So you’ve got nothing? No clothes, nothing?’

I nodded.

‘Wait here.’ He left the living room.

I hadn’t said anything about losing my job – about quitting my job. I had quit, not been fired, I needed to be clear about that even to myself. Especially to myself, before a fiction began to cloud and supplant the truth. Nor did I intend to say anything. He didn’t have to know, for now.

When Pierce came back, he was carrying a pair of trousers. ‘You can have these, they’re a bit tight for me now.’ He patted his paunch. ‘This is, ah, the director’s cut.’

While I changed, Pierce turned his back to me, looking at the map that filled his wall. ‘Where was it you said you lived, again? Pimlico?’

‘Yeah.’

He smoothed the scraps on that part of the map, and picked through them. ‘Technically part of the East End, if you believe soil is destiny – built up from the flood plain using spoil from the excavation of one of the docks.’

‘Is that so?’ The trousers fitted fine, with a belt. This charity had thrown me. I could not have named the instinct that drove me to Pierce’s house, but I was angry and – now that the profile no longer mattered – had some vague idea of settling my account, of telling Pierce exactly what I thought of him. But I did not know precisely what that was, and his unprompted kindness complicated my feelings even further, spilling in more resentment and self-loathing. I wondered where the soil scraped out from under my neighbours’ houses had gone now – perhaps back east, infill for one of the vast new developments on the river. Returning. Dust to dust.

‘Mistress City,’ I said.

‘Pardon?’ Pierce said.

‘Mistress City,’ I said. ‘It’s on your map, on Pimlico. I saw it there the other day.’

Pierce folded back the map’s hide of notes and clippings. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Mistress City. Nickname, because it was where Members of Parliament kept their mistresses, in little rented flats. It’s where politicians get fucked.’

‘It’s certainly where I get fucked,’ I said. ‘Got, anyway. Thank you for the trousers.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Pierce murmured, still staring at the map. ‘Why do you live there, anyway? Why did you?’

‘I used to share a flat there with a girlfriend,’ I said. ‘When that ended, I couldn’t leave – it was as if leaving the area for somewhere more affordable was an admission of failure. Of being downwardly mobile, I suppose. And the irony is, I had to move downwards, literally downwards, in order to stay. I used to be on the first floor, and I went down into the basement flat.’

‘The basement flat of the same house?’

‘Same house, yes.’ I swigged the beer. ‘Another couple live in the flat upstairs. Lived.’

Pierce turned, smiling over his shoulder at me, amused by the story. I could picture him re-telling it, at my expense, for laughs – another little scrap of detail tucked into his vibrant mental city.

‘Are we going to talk about what happened?’ I asked. ‘Last night.’

‘It went well, I thought,’ Pierce said. He had returned to poring over the map, making tiny adjustments here and there, as if planning a military operation. His casual manner, the complacent way he referred to what he had done, needled me.

‘Are you done now?’ I said, not disguising the scorn I felt. ‘Do you have what you need?’

‘Oh, not even slightly,’ Pierce said, very calm. ‘It’s given me an appetite. Thrilling, wasn’t it? I used to feel afraid – this ubiquitous fear that I had stopped noticing, it had become part of me – and I don’t any more. It’s gone.’

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what he wanted, and I suspected that I didn’t want to find out. And the same applied to me. Why was I here? To get to Pierce, somehow. To get to the end of his ploys and plans, to exhaust them. But there was more there, always, and indulging him only expanded his desires.

‘I liked the way you set it up,’ Pierce continued. ‘Using Tamesis.’

‘I didn’t do that,’ I said. ‘That was Quin.’

He hesitated. ‘Yes. But it was a clever idea.’

‘It wasn’t my idea. It was all Quin. He did it without saying anything to me.’

The map lost its power over Pierce. He turned, not looking around at me, but down, away, to the floor, into thought, brow creased.

‘How did Quin know what you wanted to do?’ I asked.

‘I may have spoken with him,’ Pierce said, with a hint of what might have been regret, or even guilt. ‘We’ve been in touch.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘He’s been moving us about like pins on your fucking map. And I don’t know why.’

Pierce kept his gaze away from the wall. ‘It’s his map,’ he said quietly. ‘Gather enough data about a person and you can manipulate them, guide their choices, get them doing what you want, and they might not even know.’ He turned towards me, and stared. At first I thought I saw the gleam of tears in his eyes, but if they had been there, they went, he overcame them. ‘What if that’s also true of a city?’

I swallowed, and felt the tightness in my chest. How much dust and smoke had got into my system today? How much of London, as it remade itself?

‘All this time I’ve been wondering why he would waste his time jerking around a nonentity like me,’ Pierce said, and the words might as well have come from me, so closely did they match my thoughts. ‘What if it’s not me, not you? You know’ – again he was at the map, as if compelled, up close, eyes flickering from place to place, hands spread out, caressing – ‘my little plan, the map, the psychogeographical index, it wasn’t just about getting revenge on the psychogeographers, the other novelists. I mean, who gives a shit, really? They’re old, old. It was about … ownership. Taking ownership. Retaking it. The city was slipping away from me, from us all, and I wanted it back. And the same had applied to Night Traffic – trying to own a single moment. Because if I had that, no one else could have the whole. Part of it would always be mine alone.’

‘But it was false.’

He didn’t look at me, but he winced. ‘Well, if it was true, it wouldn’t belong only to me, would it? It would belong to … to the ones who …’ and he trailed away, absorbed in an internal struggle beyond my sight.

I had about a third of the can left, and I drained it. During the journey over, I had discovered a vodka miniature in my pocket, the last survivor of my stealthy office session yesterday. Only yesterday. It was warm.

‘Do you have any mixers?’ I asked. ‘Coke?’

‘Lemon squash?’ Pierce said absently.

It would do. I went to the kitchen and found the squash concentrate in a cupboard. Beside it was the whisky we had drunk together earlier in the week – about a quarter left. Whatever Pierce’s mental turmoil, he hadn’t been binge drinking, and I hated him for that.

I took the miniature from my coat pocket. That pocket also contained the postcard from my mother, the picture of the cockatoo. I took that out as well.

Room temperature vodka and room temperature lemon squash alone would be revolting. Looking in Pierce’s fridge, I found a full filter jug of water, and a couple more cans of Heineken. I took out another can, and opened it. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted from Pierce, but drinking all of his booze was a good start.

When I turned to leave the kitchen, Pierce was standing in the archway. He leaned against the wall as if relaxed, but his whole manner was devoid of nonchalance.

‘Making yourself at home?’ he said, coming through and checking over the kitchen as if trying to discern what I had stolen. Arriving at a wooden knife block, he tapped his index finger on the handle of each of the four blades it held. Counting them? Checking I hadn’t armed myself? Had he used one of those knives the previous night to threaten De Chauncey? Was I in danger?

‘What’s this?’ he asked. In his hand was the postcard from my parents, which I had left on the counter.

‘I got it this morning,’ I said. Pierce was already reading the back, so it was superfluous to explain who had sent it. ‘By the time it arrived, there was no letterbox for it to go through.’

‘Huh,’ Pierce said. ‘Mugged, twice, and then your house falls down. Authentic experiences seem to follow you around. Some people have all the luck.’

‘Mugged three times, now,’ I said, fixing Pierce with a stare. Or trying to, because he turned his back on me, and opened a kitchen drawer. For a moment I thought he might be putting the postcard in there, but he had left it on the side, and it wasn’t clear what he was doing – taking out a small object, a tiny glitter of chrome, a weapon? But it was small enough to palm without my seeing more. Why was I so nervous around Pierce? His behaviour was off, for sure. Did I have reason to fear him? Or was I sensing my own conflicted motives reflected back at me? Did I mean to hurt Pierce?

‘I guess that’s right,’ Pierce said, returning to the living room. ‘Three times. You never did tell me about the second time.’

Nor did I intend to. Not at this moment, in any case. My gaze had rested upon the cockatoo, which tipped its head at me, as if waiting for me to say or do something.

‘It’s weird, actually, what you say about authenticity following me around,’ I began, not really knowing where to begin. ‘Because for the past few days, I’ve had the impression that I’ve been followed around by …’ I couldn’t finish. It sounded too odd, spoken aloud.

‘By what?’ Pierce’s voice came from the living room.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I must have got a lungful of fumes when we went to Barking, and it’s been messing with my head.’

‘We were equally exposed,’ Pierce said. ‘What’s following you around?’

‘Smoke,’ I said. And as I spoke, my nostrils filled with the smell of burning, unbelievably strong and real.

I clamped my eyes shut. It’s not real, I told myself firmly. It’s a panic attack. I’m stressed, I can’t cope with my circumstances, and my mind tells me to get out as fast as possible. And it creates a reason to do so. That’s what’s been happening. There’s no smoke, it’s an incentive conjured up by the flee reflex in the brain.

The smell was only intensifying. I breathed in hard to try to show myself that the sensations were coming from within, not from the atmosphere. The incinerator stench was overwhelming, and I erupted into a coughing fit.

This was ridiculous. It’s not real, none of it is real.

The kitchen smoke alarm burst into noise, a staccato electronic peal. I was standing directly beneath it, and it was loud enough to cause pain, a spike driven into the head.

I opened my eyes. Smoke was pouring under the kitchen arch in a solid grey river, drawn by the open window over the sink.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Shit!’

I lunged into the living room. Smoke swirled across the ceiling and hazed the rest of the room. Its source was the wall-map, where a patch of flame, centred on east London, was licking upwards and outwards. Its bright orange tongues snaked with easy grace through the dry kindling of the notes and clippings. With every passing second a score of new leaves curled, smoked and ignited. Many detached from the map, carrying fire down to the lower portions of the wall and the floor.

Pierce stood with his back to me, staring at what he had done. In his hand was a lighter.

‘Shit,’ I repeated. I twisted on the spot, torn between actions – get Pierce away, or combat the fire? It was immediately, instinctively obvious that he would not help. The blaze covered the entirety of the eastern borough of Newham and most of Barking, and had spread as far north as Walthamstow and Epping; flames were licking soot over the cornice and ceiling, which would soon be burning. Meanwhile the fire spread west, marching through the East End, where Pierce’s overgrowth of annotations was thickest. Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs were ablaze, and the inferno had reached Pierce’s home in Mile End – this was what had his attention, watching the fire creep towards the position of his house, even as his real house was on fire.

On fire, and perhaps only seconds away from being beyond hope of control.

I had seen the red cowling of a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. But when I dashed back there, all I found was a fire blanket, fixed to the wall by the stove – good for stifling pan fires, less useful for the kind of conflagration taking hold in the living room. Nevertheless I took hold of the release tags and pulled with such force that the whole affair, plastic cover and all, came off the wall. As I tried to separate blanket and container, I saw the jug of filter water on the side, left there when I gave up making my little cocktail. I grabbed it and ran, as fast as I dared without spilling the water, back into the living room.

It was bad, really bad. Returning to the living room I took a lungful of the smoke, which was thicker and nastier than it had been just seconds earlier, and hung lower in the room. It was as if I had tried to breathe water, polluted water – my lungs revolted, my eyes flooded with stinging tears, and I doubled over, only preserving the water in the jug by a phenomenal act of will.

Pierce appeared unaffected, and continued to watch the fire. Half the map was alight, all of London east of St Paul’s. The fire had caught at the cornice and on spots of the floor. I stamped across the floor, scattering smouldering debris, and aimed high with the water, towards Tottenham, trying to quench the fire at the point that it threatened the ceiling. The jug was exhausted in two large sloshes, the third was a pathetic spray of drops, and while some of the rage was knocked from the fire, it was not exhausted, and its boundaries moved ever outwards.

Increasingly light-headed, I turned to the blanket, first holding it out like a sail to see how wide an area I could smother – not enough. But clutching its upper corners in my fists made me think – it was fireproof, right? I changed my hold, trying to wrap it around my hands as best as I could, and then tried to knock the burning notes from the wall, breaking up the largest patches of the fire and scraping firebreaks, stamping on the flames that fell to the floor. Embers went in my hair and eyes and bit at my cheeks; grey pushed in at the edges of vision. I had to stop, after making what seemed like little difference, to retreat and double over, coughing and retching.

But Pierce had awoken from his trance and had disappeared into the kitchen. He reappeared with a blue plastic mop bucket, much bigger than the jug, even only filled halfway, and directed it at the fiercest points of the fire, across Hackney and Leyton.

Without speaking, we worked together. Pierce hit the greatest concentrations of flame, and I swiped and stamped and snuffed the leftovers and fringes with the blanket. We fought for what felt like an age, though it had been less than ten minutes since he had sparked the lighter, and when we were sure the danger was past and all the windows were open to thin the smoke, we splashed across the sodden floor to the couch, coughing and weeping and spitting.

‘Why did you do that?’ I said, as soon as it was possible to croak out words. ‘You could have killed us.’

‘I’ve been meaning to take that down for ages,’ Pierce said, with a nod towards the map. It was a ruin, two-thirds of it gone, only west London hanging on, damp and sagging from its pins. The cork tiles that had supported the map were blackened and scarred, some no more than charcoal, others fallen away to reveal the shocking, floury white of spalled plaster. A ridge of debris lay along the line of the skirting board, in a wide puddle of sooty water, soaking into a rucked, grimed rug. Despite the open windows, the room stank of smoke, and a haze of particulates perverted the light.

‘The people downstairs are going to be cross,’ I said.

‘I never see them,’ Pierce said. ‘Anyway, they can’t be cross. I’ve had a house fire. A terrifying accident. They’ll have to be sympathetic. There are rules.’

Yes, malign sympathy. There it was, the sensation I had felt in the morning, sitting breathing the exhalations of my own destroyed house. The lure of freedom. But thought of it was cut short by another coughing fit.

‘What were you saying about being followed?’ Pierce asked. ‘Something about the fumes getting into your head …’

I coughed again, and again, trying to dislodge the sack of charcoal briquettes that was crammed in my throat. I could taste blood, a little, and felt as if I were in the late stages of a chest infection. Light-headed, too. Perhaps I should have taken the paramedic’s advice and gone to hospital; perhaps I should go now.

‘It’s gone now, isn’t it?’ I said, unsure of how to approach the topic and fearful of the answers. ‘The column of smoke we followed on Tuesday. It’s gone – you couldn’t see it today?’

‘Today? It had cleared up the day after,’ Pierce said. ‘They put the fire out. Or it put itself out. From the look of the place there was nothing left to burn.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘The thing is – I can still see it.’

‘Still see what?’ Pierce asked. ‘The smoke column?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been able to see it ever since. No matter where I am. At night, even. As if it has been following me around. And getting closer, street by street.’

Pierce didn’t say anything. I had his attention, at least, although it was impossible to read his gaze.

‘It sounds like an invitation,’ he said at last.

Cold though it was, the street air tasted good after the soggy ashtray of Pierce’s flat. I breathed it deep, and was rewarded with another coughing fit. At least my head cleared a little, enough to remind myself that I had nowhere to sleep tonight. But Tamesis could take care of that, and it was not yet late. Pierce was insistent.

‘I’m surprised you haven’t done this already,’ he said, once more alive with volatile energy. ‘Gone to the end of the rainbow, found the pot of gold.’

‘A notoriously futile and misguided activity,’ I said.

‘You said it’s no more than a couple of streets away,’ Pierce said. ‘You must have been tempted? Don’t you want to find out what’s there?’

‘I haven’t wanted to acknowledge it that much,’ I said. Pierce’s persistent questioning was once again putting me under pressure, and a voice within insisted that I was making a mistake. ‘Even talking about it with you gives it more significance than I would like,’ I continued. ‘I don’t expect to find anything, and I don’t want it to mean anything. If it isn’t fixed in a particular place, it must be centred on me. There’s nothing else to find.’

‘If there’s nothing to find, then there’s nothing to worry about, right?’

I didn’t reply.

‘OK, think about it this way,’ Pierce said. ‘Has ignoring the smoke column made it go away?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No. It’s been getting bigger and closer, you said. So ignoring it hasn’t worked. Instead, let’s try tracing it, and maybe that’ll be what makes it go away and leave you alone.’

There was logic to that. But I wished I had never mentioned the plume to Pierce, because I saw now that he had co-opted it as the basis of one of his adventures.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Which way do we go?’

I kicked the pavement. ‘What are we doing here?’ I asked, not concealing my annoyance.

Pierce shrugged. ‘You came to me.’

True. Why had I done that? If it wasn’t to follow a story, what did I want from Pierce?

‘I’ll tell you what I’m doing here,’ Pierce said. ‘I am pursuing a process. We set out to make something happen – to make an event, a real event, to balance out the incident I invented. A truth for a lie. A true interaction with the city. And we haven’t quite got there yet.’

‘You didn’t get that last night? With De Chauncey?’

He shook his head. ‘No. It was great, it felt amazing. But … I don’t like that Quin set it up. It was staged. Tainted. False.’

‘False? And chasing around an illusion, a hallucination, is truth?’

‘Don’t think of it that way,’ Pierce said. ‘Think of it as … pure. Untainted by outside interference. It’s Quin, see. Quin’s the problem. I thought he was trying to help, in his way – that he wanted to help the city, that he was trying to get it back. But he isn’t.’ He frowned hard, biting into a sour thought.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Last night I learned that Quin and De Chauncey were working together. Projects with landlords, with the police – he’s just another scumbag.’

If this was news to Pierce, he hid his surprise. ‘It’s more advanced than that, I think. But Tamesis is certainly not what I thought it was. It’s not going to free the city. Anyway, this plume of yours is different. Nothing to do with Quin, or his little app. It’s from another place, a place inside, telling us which way to go. So, which way is that?’

I pointed. There was no need to hunt around for the plume. It had been there all along, over Pierce’s shoulder – over both his shoulders, a curtain of looping, gulping yellow-black tar in the star-pricked sky, jaundiced light flickering where it squatted on the Mile End roofline.

‘That way, huh?’ Pierce said. His enthusiasm dimmed. ‘Across the road, I suppose?’

I nodded.

‘OK then,’ he said, and he turned to fall into step beside me, and we walked south, towards the plume, towards the cemetery park.

The red lights on the cranes crowded over the City gave the western horizon an industrial, petrochemical look, more refinery than business district. Which suited the half-built financial towers well enough – they dug and clawed and pumped as much as they rose and transcended. They were dirty, extractive objects, pummelling more and more value from the land that rooted them, and purifying it into glass and ineffable space.

The smoke indoors was a product of panic attacks, but I had never decided about the plume. Was it a real phenomenon in the world, or a hallucination that existed only in my head? Neither possibility was very comforting, so I had never sought to reach a decision, keeping it to myself and keeping out of its way. Uncertainty was a more desirable state. No action required, no ugly conclusions.

But now Pierce knew about it, and had pushed me into action. The probabilities were collapsing, and the plume appeared to know it. Our path took us directly south, cutting across Mile End Road, but there were no handy pedestrian lights, and I had to divert my attention from the skyline to the speeding evening traffic. Once we reached the other side, I looked again for the smoke, and could not find it. We walked down the side street that led towards the main entrance of the cemetery park, and I kept my eyes on the southern sky, where the plume had been seen last, waiting for it to reassert itself, perhaps with an apologetic cough.

It did not. It was gone. The night sky was rained out, offensively clear, and I could see all of the twenty or thirty stars that London’s glare permits, and a nail-clipping of moon.

At the entrance to the cemetery, with its gloomy lodge and war memorial, I hesitated. The plume was no longer there – it was pointless to go in. And I did not want to go in. There were no lights to guide us inside, it was a nature reserve, not a landscaped park, a place for birds and bats.

I scanned the surrounding rooftops, to see if the plume might have popped up in another direction. ‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked Pierce.

‘Are you sure?’ Pierce replied. ‘You look lost. Are we going the right way?’

My hunt for the plume continued, but its absence was as stubborn and disturbing as its recurrence had been. Time was slipping by. If I was going to find a place to sleep, I should do it soon. Then I could call my parents, or my sister, and try to make some longer-term arrangements. Make my ruin official. Pierce had evaded me to the last. Polly might still try to get a draft out of me, but even if I wanted to do the work, I doubted I could. I took out my phone to look at the time. Tamesis would know about hotels. Quin: he was the one I wanted to confront, but I could not imagine getting close to him.

A wisp, within. The plume would not simply disappear like that. It had meaning. It had to have meaning. I had shunned it and turned from it, and it had persisted, and that persistence had been a promise, that it would reveal itself. And it had not gone as soon as I told Pierce about it, it had been fuller and stronger and angrier than ever, dominating the sky above him, indisputably centred here, at the cemetery. And it had not vanished when we set out to pursue it, but shortly after, once we were committed.

‘Never mind,’ Pierce said. ‘I see it.’

He was staring past me, into the forested dark of the cemetery. When I turned, I saw he was telling the truth. A pillar of smoke climbed avidly above the trees, twisting and bulging with a fierce hunger, underlit by an infernal orange light. It was not the vast, distant cataclysm I had seen before, but it was, beyond question, real. And I fancied I could hear it: a keening whooping on the icy air.

‘You see that?’ I asked Pierce.

‘Plain as day,’ he said. He was transfixed by it, the expression on his face the same as when he had stood and watched his map burning. I was reminded of the ghastly fascination the plume had exerted over me the first time I had seen it.

‘That’s not possible,’ I said.

‘It’s close,’ Pierce said. ‘Can’t you hear it? It’s so close.’

Thick lines of crooked headstones like fans of fungus. Headless infants, handless angels. Tombs tipping into the dirt, or rearing from it. Even winter-bare, the trees and undergrowth hissed at our intrusion – this was not our place.

There were no lights, and although the path we trod was clear and level, I had to scurry to keep up with Pierce, and feared that I might at any moment trip or slip amid the fallen masonry. But the plume lit our path, or rather the fire beneath it did, a beacon in the heart of the park. Our destination was a rushing geyser of fire, cupped in the black, skeletal hand of a car frame.

The burning car was parked in an uneven clearing where paths converged. We slowed, feeling the heat on our faces. As we came into the glade, a tyre blew out and the car’s body shuddered, coughing up a rush of sparks. All around the naked branches danced and snatched, catching the light of the somersaulting flames. A wet slap of combusted petrol hit the back of my throat and I gagged, feeling again the damage Pierce’s arson had done to my lungs.

Another tyre blew, putting a knot in the plume of smoke. We had entered the clearing, but stayed at its edge, near the line of tombs and trees, circling the car.

‘The fire’s just started,’ Pierce said. ‘Only a minute or two ago.’

‘Should we call someone?’

Pierce was staring into the fire, but his gaze was askew – he was not looking at the funeral pyre of the car, but through it, to the far side of the clearing. The oily light of the blaze had saturated my eyes and at first I took the activity he was watching to be the dancing ghosts of the flames. But it was not – it was people, moving out before the trees. They had tracked us as we circuited the clearing, and now stood in the mouth of the path we had come by, blocking our return: three young men, looped together by volatile youthful energy, jostling and striding and laughing, and looking at us.

Together, thinking the same, Pierce and I turned our heads the other way, to the next path from the clearing. And there were more, another four clustered around a bench, two men and two women, all young, full of strut and angry cheer. Two of this second group broke away and began to approach us. Quite by chance, we were caught in pincers.

Horrid familiarity crept up inside me.

It was happening again.

I looked at Pierce, hoping to see some of the reassuring confidence I recalled from our earliest acquaintance, the good-for-all-occasions cockiness and charm that made him cheek police officers and lad it up with photographers. His face was hollow with horror, mouth a shapeless scrawl.

‘Hey! Hey!’ the nearest youth said, jutting his chin at us. He was, like his companions, wearing a chunky puffer jacket, and it was impossible to place his age – mid-twenties, though the margin of error could be a decade wide each way. Everything in his stance and step was a challenge to us. Though they were dressed almost identically, the trio on that side were racially diverse; the advance party was black, the two behind them white and Asian.

Exactly as Pierce had described in Night Traffic. A few years older, but as he described.

I looked again at Pierce, not that I needed to gauge his thought, not that I needed confirmation.

‘I invented you,’ Pierce said in a whisper.

You only see the threshold once you’re past it. Too late, always too late, you discover that the temper of the moment has passed, and you’re in another place, another city.

‘You calling someone, bruv?’

To my amazement, I found that this was addressed to me. I had had the sensation – the reassuring delusion – that somehow this might all be for Pierce, laid on solely for his benefit, and would flow past me. Perhaps this was an after-effect of last night, with De Chauncey, when I had been a bystander in a bubble of safety. But that was fantasy. I was here. I was involved.

My phone was in my hand. ‘No, not calling anyone,’ I said. I eased my phone into my coat pocket. ‘We’re just leaving.’

‘No, you’re not.’

Familiar.

I was aware of the other two, manoeuvring at the left periphery of my sight.

‘How ’bout you give me that,’ the man said, eyes on my coat pocket.

I breathed in hard, filling my nose and lungs with the rough stink of the burning car. Its warmth was the most comforting thing around.

‘No,’ I said. Not so familiar.

The young man cocked his head to one side.

‘No, no, no, no,’ Pierce said, voice quiet and wavering where mine had been firmer than I expected. He took a messy step backwards.

‘Ffff …’ one of the pair in the rearguard said.

Our challenger turned to him.

‘We fucking know this prick,’ his friend said. ‘From before.’

Pierce took another step back, and I sensed movement behind me.

A smile spread across the lead man’s face, mockingly slanted to one side.

‘You going to write about us?’

Pierce emitted a demi-human groan and spun, clumsily, making to run. The lead youth lunged towards him. As the youth passed me, I moved, taking my hands from my pockets and shoving him in the flank. He sprawled over, off the path, into the graves.

It had all happened in an instinctive moment, feeling like precisely timed force, but the scene it birthed was bumbling farce. Pierce had stumbled, and was bent back, almost seated, in an awkward crab-like pose; his antagonist was also momentarily incapacitated, rolling on his side amid the chaos of stone and bramble around the clearing. Rough hands grabbed one of my sleeves, but ineptly, distracted by the low spectacle. Pierce had scrambled over onto his side, and was reaching into his coat. He gathered himself back to his feet as his opponent did, but now there was a spark in his hand, a flash of fire reflected off polished metal.

‘Blade!’

I tore myself free of the youth who had grabbed my coat; he was too preoccupied with the unfolding confrontation to improve his hold, or to try to stop me.

The knife had come from the wood block in Pierce’s kitchen. He was holding it close to his hip, pointed out, forward, at the young man in front of him. I could see no reason in the writer’s eyes, only frothing animal impulse.

‘Pierce, listen to me,’ I began, but I had nowhere to go.

‘I created you!’ Pierce shouted, with enough ragged force that the young man quailed a little; for a moment I imagined he might be asking himself if he really was a figment of Pierce’s imagination, but it was a quite natural reaction in the face of an unpredictable, distraught person carrying a knife. Even if he was having doubts about his own existence, I found mine melting away. I knew at once that Pierce had invented nothing: Night Traffic was the whole truth.

But Pierce sincerely believed that he had invented it – and if he sincerely believed that the people in front of him were no more than phantasms that he, the author, could summon and dismiss, then we were all in terrible danger, not least the man presently under the point of the knife.

‘Pierce, they’re real, they’re all real,’ I said.

It was too late. Pierce moved, the start of a charge, intent on carving an edit into his ‘creation’. And I moved, incapable of subtlety, astonished that I could be doing the same act twice in less than a minute, no more than a lump of dumb matter, an obstruction that could be placed in the path of disaster.

We crunched together, a clumsy heavy-coated mismatch of joints and weights, and I felt the knife between us, like a toothpick caught in closing jaws; then we hit the ground, Pierce on top of me, and the knife, caught between us, did not turn one way or another but went rigidly in.

Pain, at my lowest rib on the left side. A point of light.

Pierce rolled off me, and I put my hand to the hurt, expecting worse pain and torn cloth and slick warmth. No.

The three men had backed away, nonplussed at what had happened. One was hissing, ‘Fuck sake! Fuck sake!’ to himself.

A white shape swooped over me, slicing through the smoke still erupting from the burning car and sending it coiling and curling. I felt the downbeat of wings against my face.

The shape burst into light. I was dazzled, and night was made day. The long, cold grass around me was made green and lush, and every detail of the scene was made perfect. Was I that badly injured, to have come to the Elysian field? I felt fine, not dead, but how should the dead feel but fine? Standing, I thought I might see that I had left my body behind; but it had stood with me, we were still very much connected. I was alive.

I winced into the light and shielded my eyes. Rotors whined.

‘This is the police,’ said a voice above, an amplified recording. ‘Disperse immediately.’

The drone’s lights swept the clearing, ending their dazzling focus on me and letting me get a good look at the machine: four fat rotors clover-leafed around a hub of cameras and lights, the blue badge of the Metropolitan Police transferred on its white and yellow hull.

‘Disperse immediately,’ the drone repeated, and the youths needed no further invitation – they scattered like birds at a gunshot.

Pierce did not budge. He lay exactly where he had slumped after tumbling off me. His hand was still clasped around the handle of the knife, the blade of which was lost inside his chest. He stared into the open night sky, not looking at the drone or the widening smoke from the wreck of the car, not looking at anything.

‘Disperse immediately,’ the drone repeated in its curt recorded voice. It spoke only to me, and I listened.

I did not go back the way I had come in. I did not fancy returning by the meandering path we had followed from the main entrance, especially if there was any risk that the youths had paused in their flight upon reaching the street – or worse, were being held there by the police. Besides, the nearest gate lay to the north, at the end of a wide, straight path.

Once I was out of the cemetery, I had a clear view along an alley that followed its wall towards the entrance corner, and no blue lights were congregated there, or hooded figures. The smoke from the car was weakening as the blaze burned itself out, and by the time I reached the main road it could no longer be seen. A fire engine streaked past, sirens shrieking, turning towards the park.

There had been no fraud. Night Traffic was the truth, and Pierce’s confession was the lie. I had understood as soon as Pierce had recognised our assailants in the cemetery – our would-be assailants. All the inconsistencies in his account had evaporated at once, and all his evasions had been explained. Quin had uncovered no evidence of deception because there was nothing to uncover; Pierce could not commit to giving details of what he had done, because he had not done it.

Why, then, had Pierce been moved to confess to a crime that he had not committed? To a crime that had not been committed?

I imagined Pierce in his hermitage, and the bright boys and girls of Bunk arriving, sifting his papers, turning up the notes he had made in the distraught days after the attack. He had not feared discovery of a lie – he had feared facing the truth.

The attack described in Night Traffic had been real, and so the intense trauma he described there had also been real. He had told how he turned to writing in order to cope with that trauma. But he had gone further. He had convinced himself that by turning the attack into writing, he had turned it into fiction, that his description was his invention. He wanted it gone from memory, so he smoothed it into the realm of inspiration.

When, though? Did the attack slip from fact to fiction during the writing? Possibly, but I suspected that Night Traffic became a fraud in Pierce’s mind later than that, once it became a success, and he was called upon to talk about it again and again, and to repeat and relive the events of that night over and over. Writing is abandoning. In making a record of our thoughts and experiences, we give ourselves permission to forget them. We put down our words – we leave them. But sometimes they get picked up, and brought back to us. I only knew this sensation in a small way, in my continual efforts to escape what I had written, and its mistakes and borrowings and fabrications. For Pierce the sensation must have been multiplied a thousandfold. At some point, sitting on a BBC sofa, his damaged mind had decided that it had created the pain that he was experiencing. The source of the inner conflict was obvious. There was a fraud in Night Traffic, in a way, a more sympathetic one: the book was an account of how writing had helped him heal. But he was not healed, far from it. There was the lie, or at least the error. And as he was obliged to endlessly repeat it, it contaminated the entire narrative.

So he retreated from view – and then Quin’s unblinking eye was turned on his file cabinets, and the polite burglars started rifling through his office … The cognitive dissonance must have been intolerable. Inventing the fraud had safely bottled up the attack in the realm of fiction; but was the fraud real if it existed only in Pierce’s head, as a story he told only himself? No – stories can’t work like that. It had to be shared, it had to be confessed. And who better to serve as witness to this confession than Quin, pious arbiter of digital truth, the man fanatically sifting London’s facts from its myths?

That prig, Quin.

I halted at the portal of Mile End Underground Station. The bright pool of light at the head of the steps, the sober white lettering of the station sign, the nicotiney tiles, the warm waft of the tunnels, a haven of electricity and dust – it was all so reassuring, it was unbearable. My knees buckled and I retched. Staggering, I struck a recycling bin, and I steadied myself against it, belching swampy fumes, trying to regain control. My head throbbed. When did I last drink? In Pierce’s apartment – but the memory was interrupted, kicked, by bursts of image. When Pierce said he could see the plume. When we saw the burning car. When we saw the others in the clearing, surrounding us. When Pierce recognised them. When I saw the knife in Pierce’s hand. When I saw the drone. They hit me one by one, each a perfect shard of terror – no, facets of a united terror, catching the light in sequence, like a turning gemstone. Only now could I see the whole thing, and find that I could not take it as a whole. I had been in fear, the whole time, and now I was safe. Because there was another light flaring in my gathering recollection of what had just happened: why did Pierce have the knife?

Bent against the bin like a busted umbrella, I drew some censorious glances. But I didn’t care. I had been through a terrible experience and I didn’t care. I could do what I liked.

And there it was again. The feeling. Venomous freedom.

Behind Victoria Station, where Pimlico meets Belgravia, lies a wearying net of characterless streets, distorted around the rail terminus like spacetime around a black hole. A couple of vestigial city grids collide, contorting in the process, with M.C. Escher effect; despite living nearby for years, I often found myself walking a ninety-degree angle to the one I expected, or even the opposite direction. I was never quite able to build a proper mental map of this urban fault. And by a sick joke of planning, this is one of London’s gateways, where tourists and visitors totter off airport trains and coaches. They roam ceaselessly in bewildered herds, suitcase wheels grumbling.

It was the pinnacle of summer. The days were warm and bright, though they grew shorter. Elise and I had been to St James’s Park, to meet friends and enjoy the fringes of the Olympic events at Horse Guards Parade. Fuchsia mazes of hoardings and fences, exhortations to excel and amaze. Cheerful volunteers and crowds. Distant loudspeaker announcements. Clusters of vans and trailers bursting with antennas and satellite dishes, lounging in the heat of throbbing generators. Little space could be found on the lawns, but we sat and ate a late picnic lunch from supermarket bags, and Elise held my hand. I crawled with discomfort and fatigue – not at the hand-holding, which was sweet and well-meant, but at the daily growing realisation that I was only delaying a horrible crash, that the end was coming, that these times, however good, could not last, and my withdrawal could not be endured. I had been sober a week.

When the park staled, one of our friends – our friends then, her friends now – suggested going to a pub off Ebury Street to watch the sport. Elise cast me a troubled look. But I had no intention of drinking, I wasn’t going to give in there. The pub, under her eye and in view of friends, was probably the safest place I could be, which is precisely why I hated it. I watched them with their pints – not Elise, she had orange juice out of sympathy and solidarity, and the ease with which she made that choice rubbed me wrong. I watched them and I held my soda and lime with white knuckles. Every now and then, when the others were diverted, Elise would smile at me and give my hand a squeeze. I hated that. Not because I hated her. On the contrary, I loved her, which made the threatened avalanche of failure all the worse. Not because she was doing the wrong thing. She was doing everything right, precisely as I would wish. She was thoughtful and gentle and generous of spirit – she gave me no excuse, and I hated that. A misstep, a sliver of spite, that was all I wanted, to give me a reason.

When I could take it no longer, I said I wanted to go home. It was a pleasant evening, still light in the sky. Elise was reluctant to leave but prepared to if that was what I wanted, but I suggested that she stay and enjoy a real drink. We had not been there long, and they were more her friends than mine. I was being a drag. I would appreciate a quiet walk home, to clear my head. I expected her to suspect me, because everything I said felt like a lie, even though it was the truth. But she was ready to trust me. And she was right to. I wasn’t going to drink, I just wanted silence and solitude.

I had to traverse the Victoria vortex. Many of the streets there are blind, with no homes or shops, only empty offices or high walls blocking off railway lines. Misjudging my bearings, I made a wrong turn, and found myself having to take a longer route. I was not lost; I gave it little thought.

They might have seen me leave the pub, or they had simply guessed that was my origin, spying a leisure-wearing, unladen young man making his directionless way. My head was down, and I was walking without spirit. Perhaps I looked miserable and vulnerable. Perhaps I looked drunk.

There were three of them. I had been dimly aware of them behind me, laughing and larking, but I had not paid much heed, too tied up in the ligatures of miserable thought, the choice between abstaining and suffering or relapsing and suffering. Then, on a walled-in bridge crossing the railways, they rushed past me, as if in a hurry to be elsewhere, to be off that eyeless street. But they did not rush on, and fell into step around and ahead of me, choking off my pace. One of them asked me the time, which was odd, because even as he asked me he was holding his phone, but perhaps he had no battery, perhaps none of them did. For some acute fears, we are slow to believe they are coming true, because we do not want to believe. I took out my phone and told them the time, but that wasn’t what they wanted of course, as I was late to realise. There was that moment of dislocation, of confusion, as the interaction changed shape, the threshold was crossed and I entered the other city. I was being mugged a second time.

This time, however, it was different. The whole business is supposed to be a fairly straightforward emotional transaction: threat, fear, valuables changing hands. We fear violence against us, but we also fear being held in a prolonged state of fear, being terrorised, as Pierce was. That usually makes mugging a brisk business, which suits everyone – it’s a reliable formula, until it breaks down.

I was not afraid. I laughed. The hard hand on my shoulder made me grin, and the shine on the blade – what was that, a craft knife? – was comic genius. The timing was absolutely faultless. Life was shit, why not get mugged? They were knocked off their script for a beat, as they considered the possibilities: crazy? Druggie? Off-duty police officer? Charles Bronson psychopath? But they quickly regained their equilibrium, and felt the urgent need to push me off mine. I was slammed against the brick wall and a fist connected with the arch of my eye, a blow I can still feel at times. A foot hammered me on the side of the knee, and I was struck again on the face, across cheekbone and nose. But I continued to laugh, even as I fumbled the contents of my pockets out onto the paving slabs, because I had that feeling. I was free.

I could drink again. I had my excuse – it was perfect. I was released. Elise, my own conscience, they would all be powerless to stop me. This was what I was waiting for, and every blow, every bruise, every visible injury, only helped.

I was delighted – giddy, and not just from the head trauma. The second mugging, the second attack, was the worst thing and the best thing that could have happened to me. I still remember the spreading red drop of blood in the pint I was served in the pub I managed to reach, as the landlord called an ambulance. As if it were being reunited with my body.

Elise couldn’t say no to me, and of course she couldn’t stay. She was gone before the leaves went from the trees. I had made my choice and we knew it. It was a relief for us both.

I took the Central Line to Liverpool Street and walked up Bishopsgate. Tamesis knew my destination. I had made sure to tell it. And it obliged, showing its birthplace as a spear of heat, an unbelievable concentration of T-plus potential. I would see someone I knew there.

The pubs were near closing, and multitudes spilled into the streets and alleys, despite the cold, to smoke and vape and whinny at each other. Suits rampaged towards the station, where the trains that would take them back to Chingford and Basildon were unloading excitable young people. In Shoreditch the clientele was beardier, more plaid, but the edge was the same. The night did not have long in it, but neither did winter.

Though it was painted in acid colours, in a fractured dazzle pattern, Bunk’s headquarters had a more sober air. It was a converted warehouse, and, despite the hour, light glowed behind its grid of large windows. The glass front door was unlocked, though the lobby space was illuminated only by the blue neon logo behind the unstaffed reception desk. I knew where to go – I had been here before. I walked up an echoing concrete stairwell to the fifth floor, aware of the winking red lights of cameras and other sensors in every corner above me. The only sound, other than my footsteps, was a ubiquitous low-intensity hum. At every floor, I could see people in darkened offices, faces floating in screenlight, intent on their tasks.

Electronic locks held shut all the exits from the stairwell, but on the fifth floor the door was propped open, despite red signs warning to check in with security and have BunkMate identification ready. What kept the door from closing was a stack of copies of the magazine I worked for. Used to work for. This topmost floor had fewer desks than the others, and they all pointed the same way. Half the space was given over to clutches of mismatched stools, benches and bean bags, surrounding a low dais on three sides. Behind the dais, filling an immense expanse of warehouse wall, was a map.

Quin called it the ‘God Board’. We had been forbidden to photograph it when the magazine came to visit – or rather, it had been temporarily switched over to show an innocuous Tamesis interface. But tonight the God Board was in God mode, showing the seething hive of London. Thousands of symbols and icons crawled and pulsed across its heat-marbled surface – individual Tamesis users, on their way home, out for dinner, going to clubs. Buses, taxis, Tube and trains, even emergency vehicles, all had their own symbols, and information overlays slid and flickered, showing traffic speed, user density and other metrics I couldn’t guess at. Jittering data scrolled at the edges of the map, arcane readings of Tamesis performance, presumably critical to its operators: system latency, request response speed, average social velocity, T-link completion. Just as with Pierce’s wall-map, the bombardment of information was at first overwhelming, and I had to pause and take it in. But it was possible to skim meaning off the surface of this deep, churning well of data. The city was visibly cooling, the T icons trekking outwards and coming to rest. London was going to sleep.

What would it be like in here in a few hours, when it began to wake up? Just imagining it gave me a pop of serotonin.

The room had changed in the months since I was last allowed in. The God Board had been moved to one side, and a second screen of equal size now stood beside it. This showed the entire British Isles, and while the London screen fizzed with information, the new map was cool and grey and empty. Waiting. There was only one readout that was not resting at zero: a countdown, ticking towards a couple of weeks in the future.

‘He’s waiting for you,’ a voice said from the ranks of desks. I had registered that I was not alone – about a third of the desks were occupied. But none of the workers sitting there had so much as glanced at me when I entered. They were lost in communion with Tamesis, suckling on map-glow.

The BunkMate who had addressed me was seated at the far end of the room, his voice carrying easily through the Wi-Fi-heavy hush. His desk was at right-angles to the others, facing the doors, facing me, and he sat back, picked out by a shaded task light. I recognised him, or half recognised, the glitching partial memory of the drunk. He had been Quin’s chaperone in the pub the other night. And we had met before then, exactly here, the first time I had come here.

Behind him was an etched glass wall, containing a private amphitheatre of light. Quin’s office.

Quin’s desk was a long, wide strip of a glossy composite material, supported by four wooden trestles. I was reminded of Pierce’s story about the sheet of mdf he wrote on; but while that was parsimonious and utilitarian, Quin’s set-up had the fingerprints of an architect or a designer on its spotless surface. Money had been spent to make it appear unconsidered and practical. Underneath was a dustless labyrinth of toy-bright cables, canalised in wire trays and banded by fat, colourful zip ties. These fed into the four large screens arranged on the desk – three in a triptych at one end, for private devotions, the last at the other, with a wide gap, giving airspace to facetime. The rest of the office was expensively spartan: unshowy leather seats, a thriving fern, little else. The only decoration was a few old Bunk signs on the wall, salvaged from past offices, showing the leaps the company had made in its graphic design and image management since its days as an early millennium start-up.

At first I thought I was alone, that my quarry was not here after all – which led to the ghastly whisper that he might be nowhere, another apparition of paranoia and software. But, of course not, I had met him before, and there he was, behind the group of three screens, like a birdwatcher in a hide. As I entered, he emerged, sliding along the line of the desk on chair castors engineered to total silence.

‘That was more difficult than I expected,’ he said. ‘But we got there in the end.’

I stared at him, and he smiled back at me, satisfied.

‘Pierce is dead,’ I said.

He glanced back towards his private fan of screens, as if referring to an open document or a video feed. The smile tilted into a rueful expression.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘Not the worst career move. He’ll trend. Terrific numbers. Tragedy and mystery do well together. People like to speculate. He’d have been pleased.’

‘The police will investigate,’ I said. I was only just starting to think it through for myself, and fear building in my gut. ‘They’ll link me to him, I’ll be blamed. Or those guys in the park, they’ll get the blame. They didn’t do anything, not really.’

Quin shrugged, he actually shrugged, and I quaked with restraint, halting short of launching myself over the desk at him.

‘The knife came from Pierce’s pocket, he had brought it with him. His will be the only prints on it. You don’t have a record, do you.’

The last line wasn’t a question – he knew. So I didn’t answer.

‘The police will interpret the business as a freak accident, or a suicide. A man overcome by his demons, returning to the scene of a terrible event from his past, searching for meaning – and, I suppose, finding it. It’s a good story. The investigators will probably be satisfied with it. The loose ends don’t matter, they rarely do. Pierce understood that. He wrote a book about it.’

‘Bullshit,’ I said with vehemence. ‘He’s dead. Don’t you dare try to make that into some satisfying narrative arc. He’s fucking dead. He didn’t find meaning, or get overcome by demons, or any of that crap. He was just … fucked up, he was a fucked-up person and there was a stupid accident, not even a fight, and … he’s dead.’

Quin closed his eyes and gave a single nod. ‘Yes. An entirely reasonable interpretation of events. But not the one that the reporters and obituarists and biographers will choose. As you know. Why don’t you sit down?’

‘Fuck you, Quin.’

Another nod. ‘Fine. You earned that. Please do sit down, though.’

I did not. But I could not be still. My frame shook with undirected energy and tension. Sweat scored a line down my back and stickied my palms. I clenched and unclenched my fists.

‘What do you want to do?’ Quin said, looking at my hands as they worked. ‘Do you want to hurt me? You don’t of course. That would be stupid. Or do you want answers?’

‘I can listen standing up.’

Quin pursed his lips. ‘Listen, then. As it happens, earlier today we were able to regain the signal of the police drone that, ah, went off-grid earlier this week. The Met will be pleased, it was a very costly prototype. Since then we’ve been doing some testing of its systems for them. And you should be pleased as well, because it has video footage that clears you, and anyone else, of blame for Pierce’s death.’

‘You’re such a fucking liar,’ I said, unable to withhold a laugh at Quin’s brazenness. ‘Been flying around on its own all week, has it? Recharging itself from lampposts, I suppose? Only just found it? And it just happened to be over me and Pierce, right? You’ve been using it to spy on me.’

‘We’ve had it running a variety of errands. It did look in on you. But your peregrinations have not been my highest priority. We’ve got a lot to do, preparing to roll out Tamesis nationally. We’re busy.’

An orb of rage spun in my core, throwing off instincts that went nowhere. Quin’s casual, condescending dismissal of the possibility that I might attack him only made me want to lash out all the more. But lashing out would be the sum of the act – a sordid little flash of action that would achieve zero, or worse than zero.

Instead, I sat down in one of the leather armchairs facing the desk. This made Quin smile – not a nasty patronising smile, but one of the more human expressions I had seen from him: undisguised relief.

‘Answers, then.’

‘The truth,’ I said.

He grimaced. ‘Answers.’

‘What did you want from Pierce?’

‘The truth.’

I ran my hand over my face, exasperated, abruptly tired. Sensing my annoyance, Quin cut in before I could say anything: ‘How about you tell me what Pierce told you. Your understanding of his actions.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Pierce was helping you with Tamesis – you were integrating his research into your model, all that esoteric information he had collected. But you were going through the notes for Night Traffic and he became troubled. He thought you had uncovered evidence of fraud.’

I frowned, staring down at my hands, which had long stopped making fists, and were meshing together restlessly. It was hard to stay on top of which version of events was the truth.

‘So he confessed to you,’ I continued. ‘Later you told me that the confession was unprompted. You told me that you hadn’t found any evidence of fraud. That’s because there wasn’t any. He didn’t make it up. It happened as described.’

‘So it appears,’ Quin said with a nod. ‘Not what I expected, but a useful result. And it came from your work.’

Scowling past Quin’s satisfaction with this ‘result’ and the blood it had entailed, I pushed on.

‘You were angry with him and you wanted him to “set the record straight”,’ I said. ‘That was the expression he used, more than once. I was brought in as a tame journalist who could be manipulated or bullied into writing the story that you both wanted. You would have written it yourself in the end, wouldn’t you? That’s why you stole the recordings.’

‘Stole?’ Quin said, wrinkling his nose. ‘I wasn’t going to write anything. Our communications manager here has a way with words, he used to be a journalist like yourself. You would have been pleased with his copy. On deadline, too. But I explained all this to you, in the pub. That’s why you gave us the recordings.’

‘I did,’ I said. It didn’t feel quite right, but the capsizing possibility that that was exactly what happened could not be ignored. Pushing the DVRs across the table, a win-win proposition … ‘So, that’s my understanding of what happened. Except I don’t really understand it.’

‘What part?’

‘Any of it, really. Why were you so furious with Pierce? Or rather, why were you so eager to remedy it this way? If you thought he was a fraud, why have anything to do with him? Why involve me, why go to all this obsessive trouble? You could have just walked away. He didn’t matter. Neither did I. But you kept … messing with us.’

The light around Quin had dimmed while I had been speaking as his various screens went to sleep. They were the only illumination in the room, apart from the cast-off light coming through the glass wall from the God Board, and the technologist had fallen into shadow. With a tiny twitch of one wrist, he woke a screen, and was back, seemingly more pale and stark than before.

‘As I told you, we didn’t have proof of Pierce’s fraud, and I wanted it,’ Quin said. ‘We needed proof he had invented Night Traffic. Because we couldn’t find anything. If it was a fraud, it was perfect. No incriminating detail, no inconsistencies or problems in the chronology. His edit of reality had been exquisite.’

‘Because it was all true.’

‘So it transpires, but we couldn’t tell, and it was infuriating. All we had was his confession, and his apparent sincerity. His emotion.’

A shaving of disgust dropped from the last word. I felt a pang of sympathy for Pierce, to have had this crisis, this fracture, in the presence of the calculating mind of F.A.Q.

‘But why did it matter to you?’ I insisted.

‘When he confessed, when we imagined there was this elaborate fiction in play,’ Quin began, ‘there were possibilities. We were interested in Pierce for more than one reason. But I had to know.’

‘Why me, though?’ This was really the question foremost in my mind, not just for Quin. It’s a routine question for an addict, for whom self-pity comes naturally; and it’s a nasty, sticky question, because all too often there are a number of very convincing answers, and we’re inviting them to carousel around in our minds. What we mean is: Why not someone else?

‘You were pliant, as you say,’ Quin replied, with an apologetic shrug. ‘Sorry about that. After you made that dishonest dog’s dinner of an interview with me … I was annoyed, and I had people go through more of your articles, looking for inaccuracies and plagiarism – we found them, too. We were going to do quite a number on you.’

‘Pierce told me,’ I said. When he had told me, it had come as the most awful news, an abyss opening up. Days later, I hardly cared.

‘You got away with a lot. And it was seeping into reality, doing real harm. Your mistakes had made it through to Wikipedia, for instance. You were corrupting the record.’

‘If you think I’m the only one, you’re more naive than I imagined.’

‘It’s been a steep learning curve, for sure,’ Quin said. He didn’t seem at all annoyed or judgemental about it – a transformation from the infuriated, self-righteous F.A.Q. who had complained to Eddie an Ice Age ago. In fact he smiled, and I didn’t like it. ‘But learn we have, oh yes.’

He rose from his seat and walked around the desk, passing behind me to the door. At the door, he gestured again for me to follow, and left the office.

‘Jonathan, I’m taking her for a little ride, if you don’t mind,’ Quin said to his assistant as he passed. The statement did not leave scope for objection, but Jonathan gave a formal nod anyway.

Quin entered the seating area at the foot of the God Board and perched on a stool. His phone was in his hand and he was thumbing through menus and options at speed, looking up at the board as he did so. The board moved, tiling through overlays, then tracking in on Shoreditch, our location.

‘Here we are,’ Quin said. It was a skyscraper, in data terms, dwarfing the rest of the city, a spire of information. ‘As you can see, there’s a great concentration of active users here – my colleagues.’ His employees. He was scrolling through the pile of icons heaped at this address. ‘Anyone with a BunkMate ID is tinted purple, but – hello! – there’s you in the stack, the regular blue one.’

jack.bick said the icon, and there was my avatar, email address and phone number. Quin selected me. He was not using any Tamesis interfaces that I recognised – I wouldn’t have been able to pull up any of this information. A bright yellow line appeared on the map, trailing down towards Liverpool Street, twisting about, then shooting off east, towards Mile End. My movements this evening. A squiggle in the streets above Mile End Road, around Pierce’s flat. A loop south of that, through the cemetery park. Another, dimmer line also snaked through the same streets – the walk I had taken with Pierce a couple of nights before.

Quin pinched his screen. We hurtled to a satellite’s eye view of the city, a faint veil of information passing behind the geographical overlay. And on top, my life: the yellow line, shuttling between Shoreditch and Pimlico, sweeping out to Barking, dangling down to Elephant and Castle. The line was annotated with pointers and dialogues, and intersections with other lines – my searches, information I had referred to, interactions with other users.

‘You’ve kept Tamesis online a lot lately, which is good,’ Quin said. ‘But as it happens, the software is pretty good at filling in blanks. Tube trips, for instance. When the Tube gets 4G that’ll be less of a problem. Other gaps. There’s a pub you like around here, on Whitecross Street.’

My mouth was open. Little could surprise me about Quin’s knowledge of my activities, but it was no less startling to see it flashed up on a cinema-sized screen.

‘Is there anyone you’d like to look at?’ Quin asked. ‘Your boss Eddie, for instance? Or … You had several recent interactions with another user …’

A search box popped up. K-a-y …

‘Stop,’ I said.

‘We keep these capabilities strictly private,’ Quin said, sensing my discomfort. ‘We didn’t build this system in order to spy on people. But the algorithm has to know all this stuff to do a good job, even if no one else does. This is just a party trick for investors. I didn’t show you when you came to interview me, did I? You got the kiddie tour. But you’re family now. Here’s your search history.’

Quin indexed through my most recent Tamesis enquiries. It was palpably violating, watching him scroll through my insecurities and typos. And he wasn’t idly browsing – he was looking for something.

He found it. Street crime overlays. Colour washed over London. Violent crime rates by ward; icons indicating individual incidents at particular times. We were not in the secret, all-knowing back room of Tamesis any more, this was the data I had seen when I asked about the best place to get mugged.

‘When we first contacted Pierce,’ Quin said, ‘one of the things we were trying to understand was crime. Street crime, burglaries. Tamesis already uses all available police and Home Office reporting and statistics to inform users about crime rates, but it’s very patchy. There’s a psychological dimension that’s all-important and governs how users behave. Call it fear, but that’s not all that it is. And it shapes user decisions: where they go, when, alone or in company. Where they live. And that feeds back into the city. It affects rents and house prices. A street is ill-used at night, so it makes people nervous, they avoid it and it stays little-used. Crime might even rise as the number of possible witnesses falls. Fear isn’t always the result of crime – it can cause crime.

‘Pierce offered a fascinating case study. He was independently building his own map of the city, one of reputation and myth, precisely what our data lacked. And he had, in Night Traffic, written a masterful account of urban fear, of the rippling consequences of a single violent crime. Then he said he had been lying about everything. Infuriating. But, you know, when life gives you lemons, update your seasonal produce model and short-sell Del Monte. Do you know why I built Tamesis, Jack?’

I shook my head. There were all sorts of plausible, reasonable answers I could have given – or insulting ones – but he was just setting up his own, not asking for mine. Let him get on with it.

‘No nefarious agenda – it’s what I’ve always said. To bring people together. To create chance encounters, to synthesise social capital, to make innovation and collaboration happen. Because it works. Bringing you and Pierce together – a real leap forward.’

A zigzag of fingers on the phone screen, and the God Board returned to what it had been when I walked in, the busy real-time overview of the Friday night city.

‘What do you see?’

This time he did want an answer to his question.

‘London.’

‘Sure. But, this is not a pipe. This is data, the readouts. It’s a dashboard. What’s the real city?’

‘Outside,’ I said. ‘Buildings. People.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘The friends we made along the way. Love. The adventure in the heart of a child. I don’t fucking know. You sound just like Pierce, with his fucking riddles. Just tell me.’

‘Pierce did have some compatible lines of thought,’ Quin said. He was unperturbed by my reluctance to cooperate. ‘But you were right, about buildings and people, not the friends shit. Buildings and people are the hardware, or the hardware and the users if you want to go on believing in free will. Really it’s all hardware. There’s also software – the information governing the environment, the rules and laws, the socioeconomic structures. And the information is as important as the physical fabric. Maybe more so. You rent, right?’

‘Used to.’

‘Yes, sorry, forgot. And did you select your flat because it perfectly suits all your needs, or because of the rent?’

‘Because of the rent,’ I said. If it hadn’t been for the rent, I would still be living two floors above, in the flat I had occupied with Elise, occupied subsequently by Bella and Dan. But it was all in the same crater now.

‘And you only rent because you can’t afford to buy, right? I mean, renting is shit. But that’s just the way we’ve chosen to distribute housing, rather than by lottery, or bureaucrats deciding who lives where, neither of which would necessarily be more fair; instead it’s all done by market rationing, there’s a number attached to each property that sets who can and cannot live there. That information is more important than the physical matter. And again, there’s a psychological dimension. Sentiment. Harder to read, to splash up on a big screen, but it’s there. We’re going to be able to do it, soon.’

He paused. His eyes glittered with the reflected light of the board. He gestured to it with a sweep of the arm.

‘London is a machine, running software. And we can edit that software. We can intervene in the city’s thoughts about itself. We know something, Jack: crime’s coming back. The boom’s over, and a crime wave, it fits the political narrative all round. It’s the next big thing. Moped gangs, acid attacks. The Standard will love it. Fear. Contagion. Property prices will fall.’

‘Might not be a bad thing,’ I said, feeling cynical. I couldn’t listen to reminiscences about the crime-ridden, emptying city of the 1970s and 1980s without feeling half jealous.

‘It isn’t!’ Quin said, all of a sudden passionate. ‘I’ve seen amazing, innovative business driven to Berlin, promising start-ups smothered in the crib, brilliant men and women driven away! All because the rent is too damn high. You and Pierce had it! You had figured it all out independently, you knew what had to be done! I knew I was right. We had Pierce in mind at first to help us guide the program, but he was too damaged. You’re even better.’

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

‘You’re not well, I know. I thought you were a liar, a fabulist, a joke. But now I see that you’re a trailblazer. You’ve got what we need: you understand the irrelevance of objective truth. You see that experience is plastic, molten plastic.’

The scent of burning polymers filled my nose and mouth.

‘We can steer it, Jack. Tamesis can. If people are afraid, they’ll rely on us even more. We can make sure the right people are affected, made more afraid, and that the innocent are spared. We can drive out the profiteers and the arseholes. We can make the city ours again. The way it used to be, before it went mad.’

‘You want to use Tamesis to cause crime?’

Quin shook his head. ‘To cause fear of crime, for the right people, and to guide and spare the others. To properly distribute fear. And to ensure that crime happens in the right places. Bring the rents back down, take the pressure out of property, and get into it ourselves. Urban regeneration has run its course, Jack. Urban degeneration, that’s what’s next. Controlled. Tailored. And, for the right people, very profitable.’

I looked from the map, to Quin, and back. Madness, yes. But no more mad than the boiling human pyramid before me, streams of data rising from it into the empyrean of Bunk’s servers. It was the destination, all right, the conclusion: to recognise that the place before us did not exist, that no place did, that it was a fragmenting artefact of 10 million shifting perceptions. To recognise that, yes, what we wrote together in those trails of data could be edited – and would be, whether we participated or not. Here was the future, rising from every phone and computer and device like so much blinding smoke. I could confront it or ignore it, but it was coming. Or I could join it.

But addicts refuse to face the future. Their whole life is a battle against it, one I had been fighting myself for years. And for good reason. The future contains a simple binary: continue and die, or stop and live. That’s the truth, the only truth that matters. You can evade and manage, and scrape another day or week or month, but it will only work for so long – ultimately, there’s that choice, the one you’ve been making every day without knowing. Now I knew, and tomorrow would be different.