“What?”
“It’s important.”
“Yes. Why?”
I smiled, standing on tiptoe to brush the ceiling, feeling the warmth seep into my fingers from the cables clustered within it. “Friends are coming. We need to get you out.”
“Me? Why?” Then she thought about it some more and added, “Friends? How?”
“Because they’re not very sympathetic,” I replied. “And you’ve been keeping bad company. What were the other questions?”
“Is this about your shoes?”
“Yes.”
“Thought it might be.”
“Good. Which way to out?”
The map of the London underground system was an elegant bit of design by any standard. In other cities, the equivalent looked like a faded imitation, full of implausible destinations highlighted in unsuitable colours, and confusing junctions between overlapping stations, where dotted lines were indistinguishable from coloured blobs meant to inform the viewer that here you could get three escalators, or just walk between stops without violating the terms and conditions of your ticket.
Be that as it may, on the map of the London underground there were only two places where the Central and the Northern lines met, as they ran through the city nearly at right angles to each other. The first was the strange vortex of direction-distorting tunnels, platforms and winding white-tiled stairways that made up Bank station, a place in which even the shrewdest geographers armed with compass and map could get lost while trying to track their way between DLR and Circle line platforms. A place indeed, so some practitioners said, where the borders between spaces were more flexible than usual, and where the bikers swore that, even at the slowest speed, it was possible to find those weak points and slip through to a destination entirely different from any on the map.
But the buzz of magic in the place where I stood, feeling the warm, familiar rumble of the trains under my feet, wasn’t that of Bank. That left one other station: Tottenham Court Road, serving an area of suspicious computer shops, hi-fi warehouses and dodgy second-hand dealers, together with the megastores and brothels of Oxford Street and Soho.
And there was a tower. It amazed me that I hadn’t thought of it before; there was a tower, and it wasn’t just a giant building stretching up into the sky, it wasn’t just an expression of power or, as some feminists would have it, a symbol of masculine insecurity, as so many tower blocks in so many cities seemed to be. It was the Tower; it featured on postcards; and the air inside it buzzed with all the magic that such a position entailed.
If I hadn’t been certain before, I was by the time Dana helped me up a flight of stairs, pushed back a door with the words “Danger!! High Voltage!!” plastered in big yellow letters on it, and led me out into a concourse that smelt of sweat and chlorine. Opposite me was a sign. It read:
Men’s Toilets→
←Women’s Toilets
**
Dana said, “What d’you think?”
I laughed.
“Thought you’d say that,” she grunted.
“Bakker lives here?”
She shook her head. “He moves around.”
“But he’s here, tonight.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. How’d you know?”
“He wants our blood,” we replied. “He’s trying to make it catch fire, he wants us to give him life. I knew he wouldn’t want to be too far from us, once he found us.”
“You… wanted to be found?”
“I knew Simmons was most likely dead. I knew Bakker wanted us alive. I knew that, with San Khay and Guy Lee both gone, the shadow would have to deal with me myself. I knew I was going to be betrayed, and a process of elimination led me to think it would be by my friend. With such a wonderful array of information at your fingertips, what would you have done?”
“But… you were… there were needles and…”
“I was keeping my fingers crossed that you might let me go.”
“You didn’t know?” she asked sharply.
“Didn’t seem good manners to presume.”
She scowled. Then, sharply, out of nothing asked, “Can you?”
“What?”
“Give him life? Can you cure Bakker?”
We shook our head. “Not as he’d see it.”
“He said that you could save his life. He’s dying,” she added, with reproach in her voice.
“I know, and no one can,” I replied gently. “Least of all us.”
“Then what can you do? Sorry to sound like the naive one, but wouldn’t it have saved a lot of trouble if you’d told him this?”
“We are creatures of the life you leave behind. We feed off the feelings you forget, we were born of the thoughts that faded the moment they were spoken, of the unseen things, of the unspoken things that got trapped in the wire when the phone was cut off or the words lost in interference, or when the mouth that spoke them lied, but on the other end of the line they couldn’t see their faces. We
“Forever doesn’t sound so bad; I mean, if you’re not such a bad man. What’s the catch?”
“Apart from the fact that he’s been leeching my blood?” I asked.
“Apart from that.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Oh, please. I think I got way past that lesson on day one.”
“Which way?” I asked.
She nodded round the curve of the dimly lit passageway. I grinned.
“What?” she asked, seeing my expression. “What’s so funny?”
“I’ve always liked this place.”
“You know that it’s a disgraceful example of the greed of the property industry, a crappy piece of planning and, until dead recently, a dive for druggies, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It fits the vibe.”
“Is this the right time to criticise some of your teaching techniques?”
A rumble somewhere not too far off, a ripple of sensation, a shudder of the lights, a moment where we thought we heard
“No,” I said firmly. “Come on.”
The tower’s foundations had been set deep, and there were more than on the official map; tunnels spread around the water mains, and between the passages of the underground station almost immediately beneath it. We seemed to walk, stagger, jog on our irregular progress through the maze of seemingly identical passageways under Centre Point, the smell of the underground gym – all body odour and chemicals – being replaced by the stench of urine that defined the subways passing beneath its concrete struts, which in turn faded down to the distant
We found a service lift, its panels rusted, its floor uneven, its wall of cardboard stuck on with gaffer tape.
