The Great and Dangerous

n the maisonette on Middleton Road, I took a microwave dinner through to the living room and put on the TV to drown the noise of a neighbour’s stereo, as Mum often did when she was home.

Sometimes the TV lulled her to sleep at night, and twice before she’d flown to the Canaries with her friend Ellie I’d found her napping on the sofa when I came down in the morning. The place had felt empty while she’d been gone, but Mum was due back from her holiday soon.

There wasn’t much on TV tonight, and I was still buzzing from the after-school shift, so I turned the TV off and went up to my room, lifting my sketch pad from the shelves where I kept my prize possessions, my collectible comics, annuals and action figures.

The most recent additions were a tin trinket box containing the four-leaf clover chain Mr October had given me in Victoria Park and a pocket-sized volume of Ministry dialect, The Pandemonium Guide to Apocalypti Idioms & Phrases, a book of enormous power which I wouldn’t be ready to read until the words on its pages stopped moving about.

I carried the sketch pad to the bed and flicked through it. Sooner or later everything I saw, imagined, or felt ended up here. The last thing I’d done was a portrait of Dad, which I’d drawn while sitting on his bench in the park before winter took hold and the park became too chilly to sit in. It was a good enough likeness that when Mum first saw it she wept.

‘You’re his spitting image,’ she said, and I realised that whenever she looked at me she was seeing him too.

On a fresh page I roughed out a head and shoulders of Alice, the 32374. I wanted to show her as I’d first seen her, smiling like her photo outside the newsagent’s, not as the petrified child we’d found in the cemetery. I softened her outline with my thumb and roughed out the eyes and nose, but I must have fallen asleep before I started on the smile. When I woke to a startling crash of bricks and stone outside, I was still fully dressed with the sketch pad beside me and Alice Edritch had no mouth.

Not long after we moved to Middleton Road, council workers had set about restoring a building across the street. Their chipping and drilling began every morning at eight on the dot, so on school days I didn’t need an alarm. They were back for the Friday shift.

In the first week of November the numbers of hard hats had doubled and the two-storey building had started climbing another level, cutting off our view over Lansdowne Drive. Now the work at the top looked set to rise to yet another floor.

Wherever you looked, London reached for the sky. Past the construction site, above the rooftops across the park, the horizon was broken by many more tall buildings, still rising, and an army of cranes stood above the city like dinosaur skeletons. How much taller would it all go, and how would the city know when to stop?

Downstairs, I sat with tea and toast at the kitchen breakfast bar, trying to ignore the building opposite. Its front wall had once been a playground for graffiti artists, covered top to bottom with stencilled cats and rats and police and thieves. For a time Mr October had left private messages for me there, messages no one else could see. But ever since the enemy started using it to make threats against Mum and me, I’d avoided looking that way at all.

A cold gust rattled the window behind me, as if something were trying to feel its way indoors, and I stiffened, hearing the front door thump.

The post had come early, bringing three bills and a postcard from Mum in Lanzarote, her second card in a week. On the front was a sculpture by an artist called Manrique, a face constructed from blocks of stone with car hubcaps for eyes. On the back, Mum’s scribble was even more legible than last week’s. Either she’d mastered left-handed writing or the change of climate was doing her more good than the two months of clinics back home had. We couldn’t pretend she wasn’t still sick – the gradual loss of use of her right hand and arm had only been a symptom of something more serious – but the signs were good.

Darling, she’d written. You don’t know what you’re missing! Wish I’d been able to persuade you to come. Time’s going too fast here – and I’m loving it. Great views, sun shining, good food. Went for a camel ride yesterday! I’m so much better. They say sometimes you have to be in another place to really find yourself. And I think I have! Will explain all when I see you.

Much love, Mum xxx

PS: Hope Ross is taking good care of you. Otherwise he’s in trouble!

Ellie’s husband Ross had been assigned to keep an eye on me while they were away. Mum had refused to go unless someone did, and we’d argued about it – I didn’t need nursemaiding, but I couldn’t go with them. The Ministry’s work took up all my spare time. In the end I’d given in, and Ross either phoned every day or visited with food parcels. He was a Spiderman fan, so we always had something to talk about when he came over.

Anyway, Mum sounded great, happier than she’d been for ages, happier than I’d expected her to sound so soon after the trauma of seeing Dad for the last time, knowing she’d lost him forever. Leaving the postcard in the kitchen, I grabbed my school things and hurried out across the chilly balcony and down the stone stairwell to the street.

Winter was closing in, bringing darker mornings and biting air. House lights burned along Middleton Road and drivers travelled with their headlamps on. On Queensbridge Road, work traffic crept by at walking pace and a 236 bus blocked the crossing between the lights and the safety island. Towards the back of the bus, three faces with hollow, dark eyes stared out through the grubby windows.

It’s just the gift, I thought. It’s always there. You try to forget about it but it never forgets about you.

I’d seen more and more of this lately. Those were the faces of the unnamed dead, lost souls who travelled the city night and day on journeys that had no end. They were everywhere among us, but the Ministry could only help those whose numbers and names were on their lists. Those anonymous ones, too many to count, were out of reach.

Edging around the stalled bus, I waited on the island while a taxi rolled past in the other direction towards Dalston. The taxi’s fare light was on. Its driver had no passengers as far as he knew. He wasn’t aware of the two bedraggled grey-faced females seated behind him.

They were probably in their mid to late forties and the state of their hair and shabby clothing suggested they’d been homeless when they died. They were looking straight at me, and one of them waved and mouthed something to get my attention.

After that I had to stop looking and move on. There was only so much I could take. It still amazed me that these two worlds existed side by side and I could see both, but I often wished the gift would be still, stop yelling and leave me alone.

But I couldn’t ignore the unnamed. Most days I’d see them in traffic queues or sitting in greasy spoons. Some would wink and doff their hats, others would hang their heads, knowing there was nothing I could do. I saw one now on the outskirts of De Beauvoir Town, sitting at a tin table outside the Portuguese café where I sometimes came with Becky. They served the best hot chocolate in town here.

The man’s blueish complexion and sopping wet clothing told me he must have drowned.

He didn’t look up but stared forlornly into the gutter. Music drifted out from the café, a 1960s pop song which I knew from somewhere but couldn’t quite place. Another figure stepped outside, a wiry man wearing a snappy dark suit and carrying a double espresso. His cropped black hair and steely eyes were instantly familiar. This was Joe Mort, one of our field team leaders.

‘It’s OK, he’s with me, and he does have a number,’ Joe said, seating himself at the man’s table to take his first shot of morning espresso. ‘Damn, that hits the spot! How’s tricks, Ben?’

I was never too sure what to say to Joe Mort. There was something hard and edgy about him that made me glad to know we were on the same side.

‘Heard you did good last night,’ Joe said. ‘By the way, this isn’t a 3618, in spite of appearances. His name’s Freddie Bannister and he’s a 78414, strangled and dumped in the canal.’

‘Came at me from behind. Never saw his face. Took my wallet too,’ Freddie said. ‘Not that I had anything in it.’

‘Perpetrator. Out of our jurisdiction. Wish we could follow these things through, dish out a little poetic justice, if you catch my drift, but payback isn’t part of our remit. So I’m going to have a little confab with Freddie here . . . figure out what I can do for him.’

‘Maybe see you on the next shift,’ Joe said as I started away. ‘Hey, but watch your step till then. Word is, the enemy are coming back strong after the kicking we gave ‘em at Halloween. Take care, Ben.’

There were diversions like this every morning on the way to school, encounters with colleagues, looks and stares from strangers, always a feeling of being observed. The shorter days gave the enemy cover. They lived in the dark, and while you never knew when they’d come out, you could be sure that, at some point, they would.

Today I felt watched more than ever – from every shop doorway and every empty side street I passed. And from higher up, too, from the gaping windows of unfinished skyscrapers miles away across town, their black skeletons standing tall against the morning sky. Watchers everywhere.

Looking up, I suddenly remembered where I’d heard the song in the café. Dad used to have it on vinyl when I was little. He’d bought it in a second-hand record shop and played it on an old Dansette record player. ‘The night has a thousand eyes,’ the song went, and I thought, Yeah, and so does the morning.