Dead Men's s Boots

same harsh, agonised tone, ‘Oh, the Devil stole the beat from the Lord, and it’s time we put things straight . . .’ I didn’t recognise the tune, but that ragged voice was shredding it pretty effectively in any case.

An involuntary shudder went through me, and with it came a nagging prickle somewhere at the edge of consciousness – the slight sensation of pressure that comes when I’m being looked at by one of the risen dead. I looked around: nobody in sight except the decayed tramp, who was heading away from me and had his back turned, and a woman on the other side of the street wheeling a baby in a stroller. Maybe recent events had put me on something of a hair-trigger: I slipped my hand inside my coat to make sure that my whistle was there and forgot about the psychic twinge. Probably nothing, but if it was something I was all tooled up.

I headed north-west, aiming to grab a train at Finsbury Park. That gave me two choices – the immense dog- leg of Stamford Hill and Seven Sisters Road, or the back cracks. I took the latter, turning off the main drag into a maze of terraced streets and narrow alleys. The sense of being watched – watched and followed – ebbed and flowed as I walked: that wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and it made me wonder if I was experiencing some kind of after-effect from my contact with John Gittings’s ghost. All ghosts impinge on my death- sense, but geists have an intense, indelible presence that you can’t just shake off afterwards. Maybe it had been lurking in the background of my perceptual field ever since.

I took another street, another back alley, tacking alternately north and west so that ultimately I’d break out onto Seven Sisters Road somewhere past the reservoir. Meanwhile the darkness leaked down out of the sky to cover the Earth, and the prickle at the back of my mind became an itch, and then an itch with a sick heat underlying it like the raw tenderness of sunburn.

I turned again, along an alley that ran between the back yards of a row of terraces and a high, blind wall that presumably had the reservoir on the other side of it. I took ten steps forward, then pivoted on my heel and waited, looking back the way I’d come. Now that I wasn’t moving any more I ought to have been able to hear the footsteps of anyone approaching the corner I’d just walked around, but the silence was absolute.

Before me was thick shadow: thick enough so that if something dead or undead rounded the bend I might lose the initiative because I couldn’t get a clear enough look at it to know what it was. Impatient, I took a few steps back towards the corner I’d just turned and my foot came down on something that moved. A black shape streaked past me with a whuff of air that I felt even as I yelled and jumped aside. The squawl of protest reached me a moment later.

Tom cat, big and fat, out on the pull.

With a muttered curse, I ran to the corner, then round it and back out onto the street. Nothing and nobody in sight. I’d have been surprised if there was, after the early warning I’d just given out. As ambushes went, it was a sod of a long way from the Little Big Horn. And as if to confirm the futility of the endeavour, the extrasensory prickle faded out again into nothingness.

Which, for something so liminal and barely-there to start with, wasn’t a long haul at all.

I was about to say that I went home, but when I use that word I still think of Pen’s creepy old place in Turnpike Lane, with its Noah’s Ark freighting of rats and ravens and its Möbius-strip architecture. (It’s built into the side of a hill, so the ground floor at the back becomes a basement at the front.)

Now, though – just for a few weeks, or maybe a month or so – I was living in a flat in a high-rise block just off Wood Green High Road: high enough up in the stack so that I could look out of my window and see the Centre Point tower giving me the finger across the length of London.

The flat belonged to a friend of a friend – a guy named Ronald ‘Ropey’ Doyle, who’d gone back to the Republic of Ireland to deal with some family crisis and didn’t want to lose his place on the council housing list while he was away. He needed a sitting tenant, who could pretend to be him if the need arose, and I needed a place to dump my stuff until I came up with a better idea. It seemed like a sweet deal.

It became less sweet when the lights went out and I discovered that all the utilities were on a meter –  and soured altogether the first time the lift broke down. The flat itself smelled of root vegetables and when it rained the walls wept discoloured tears that left brown-edged tracks down the paintwork. The decor ran to black leather and three-inch-deep orange shag-pile. But, to give it its due, it had four walls and a ceiling. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Tonight, though, walking down Lordship Lane from Wood Green Tube station, I felt a definite desire to be somewhere else. If anything, that feeling only increased when I turned onto Vincent Road and saw what was parked in front of the block: a high-sided blue van with Bowyer’s Cleaning Services written in reverse over the windscreen.

Son of a bitch! I’d been solid-gold certain I’d ditched the Breathers on the M25. Now it seemed that they’d not only stayed with me all the way to Southgate, they’d planted a walking tail on me when I left Carla’s and came home by Tube. They knew where I lived. Taken in conjunction with Louise Beddows’s tales of ambushes and punishment beatings, it wasn’t a happy thought. More than anything, it made me ashamed. How could I have let myself be rolled up by a shower of amateurs? Normally my instincts are better than that.

There was a guy sitting in the driver’s seat of the van. The fractured sodium glare of a street lamp was splattered over the curve of the windscreen, so that all I could see of him was an outline, immobile and sinister. I couldn’t even tell if he was looking at me or not. I fought the urge to wrench the door open and have it out with him there and then: the back of the van was probably stuffed three-deep with his mates.

An even nicer surprise was waiting for me when I got up to the flat. Someone had painted across the door in thick, still-dripping black paint the words EXORCIST EQUALS DISEASED EQUALS DECEASED. I stared at it in dead silence for about half a minute, considering my options. It wasn’t my front door, of course, it was Ropey’s: but still, I was living behind it, and it was my arse he’d want to kick when he saw this. But was it worth getting my head used as a baseball? On balance, still probably not. I’d wait until the odds were more in my favour, and then I’d put these little fuck-ups through some changes.

The first thing I did when I got inside was to call Carla and tell her Todd’s idea about the wake. She was iffy at first, but she talked herself into it: I said I’d call him and tell him it was a goer.

A pregnant pause at the other end of the line, punctuated in the middle by a muffled sob.

‘Fix?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Could you – could you come over and be here, with me? When they bring John’s body back?’

I thought about that one for all of two seconds. ‘I’d love to, Carla,’ I lied, ‘but I can’t. I’ve got too much work on. I’ll have my mobile with me, though. If the geist – I mean, if John gets overexcited, call me and I’ll come over and play him to sleep again.’

I hung up before she could find another angle to come in at me from. A second call to Todd’s office got me the answerphone and I left a message there. That ought to have let me off the twin hooks of guilt and duty and feeling a little better.

It didn’t, though. I wandered from room to room, irritable and unsettled, wanting to pick a fight that I could win but not able to think of one right then. The wind was still high, and the noise it made as it broke on the northeast corner of the block was like a howl of pain, sampled and playeI wled andd back through some aeolian synthesiser: it made me think about the late John Gittings, prowling invisibly around his own living room like a trapped animal. Worse still, the couple next door were in the throes of noisy passion, which meant that they’d be swearing and throwing things at each other some time within the next hour.

I felt the call of the wild. So I put my coat back on and went down to the Lord Nelson. Let the Breathers follow me in if they wanted to. If they did, they were going out through the fucking window.

Okay, ‘the call of the wild’ is a relative term, because this is Wood Green we’re talking about: but you’ve got to love a pub that’s painted like a fire engine, even if the beer is shit; and the alternative was Yates’s Wine Lodge, which for someone born in Liverpool arouses deep atavistic impulses of fear and suspicion.

It wasn’t a football night, so the place was quiet. Quiet felt like what my nerves needed right then. A bunch of students were playing pool for pints over in the corner, and Mike Skinner was talking about his love life on the jukebox. I waited at the bar while Paul put a new barrel on, then when he came over I nodded towards the IPA pump.

‘Usual,’ I said.

‘Someone wants to meet you, Fix,’ he said as he pulled the pint.

‘What sort of someone?’