passers-by. Those few mansions that had fallen victim to the war had been replaced with council apartments, but they were few and far between, and polite mews between grand, whitewashed houses still peeked their cobbled noses out into the paving stones.
The sun wasn’t yet up. All of London seems surprised, when winter comes, how little sun there is — day crawls its embarrassed way into existence sometime between seven-thirty and eight, when most of the city is underground or too zonked to notice, and then waves its good-byes around the 3.30 meetings, when most of the city is too busy working to realise the day has gone. Winter seems to last for ever, if it is measured by the staying power of the sun.
Vera parked in a residential bay in front of a white house on a neat white street of houses that could only have been in Paddington. She unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. I unbuckled mine, put my hand on the door handle and found it slipped off, leaving an ugly swipe of blood. Vera opened the door on my side and helped me out. My legs were a long way off, and somewhere between me and them there was a satellite delay. She slung my arm over her shoulders and walked me like a granddad up the stairs to the black front door of the white building, groped in her pocket for a set of keys, found one, opened the door. The corridor inside was all echoing tile and bare walls. A lift the size of a fat man’s coffin was at the far end. It climbed upwards like it resented the service, discharged us onto the third floor. Another black door, another set of keys. An apartment, furnished in plywood and polyester straight from Ikea, no pictures on the wall, nothing to mark it out as individual except on the inside of the door, where someone with a spray can had painted a giant picture of a lollipop lady, hat drawn down over her eyes, sign turned to “stop”. The Whites understand how to paint a good protective ward.
There was a sitting room that was also a kitchen, a bathroom with barely room enough to fit the bath, and a bedroom, mattress without any sheets. Vera didn’t bother to offer any, but deposited me straight down on the bed. There were thin net curtains across the window that filtered out the shape of the streetlamps outside while letting in all their yellow light, that stretched great shadows across the floor and up the wall.
I stammered, “Doctor . . .”
She said gently, “There’s one coming.”
I nodded, then let my head fall back on the mattress and closed my eyes, not bothering to peel away my ragged clothes.
“Jesus, Matthew,” muttered Vera. “What the hell happened?”
“Attacked,” I stumbled. “Attacked. A phone rang and I answered and . . . and it burnt me. I hit my head. A phone rang and . . . then creatures came. They came for us. It rang for
“I’ll put the kettle on,” she said.
Or perhaps we imagined it.
We closed our eyes.
Dawn was grey and sullen.
Whoever was pulling the watch off my wrist did so by the light of a lamp by my bedside. The plastic made a sound like velcro as it peeled away from my flesh. I opened my eyes. Vera stood at the end of the bed, drinking a mug of coffee. On the mug someone had written “I ♥ London” in large pink letters. With her duffle coat off, underneath I saw that Vera was still wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. We felt the sudden and odd urge to cry.
Seeing our eyes open, Vera said, “Go.”
It turned out not to be directed at me.
A sudden searing agony indicated that the target audience had done as commanded, and ripped, like a plaster from flesh, the burnt remnants of the watch from my wrist. A thousand pinpricks of blood welled to the surface, and we looked away, sickened at the sight.
“Cool,” said a voice by my left ear.
I risked a glance at its owner.
The creature of torment who had pulled my watch free was roughly the same height as her stethoscope would be, if it was unwrapped to its full length. She had a round, cheerful face, short dark hair that somehow managed to be both straight and bouncy at the same time, and a casually merry attitude towards my distress that marked her out immediately as a member of the medical profession. I half-recognised her. She said, “Have you been getting into shit or
“I know you,” I breathed.
“Really? You know, that happens to me a lot.”
She opened a bag. There were things in there that only a genius with no moral compass could have invented. She pulled out a syringe. Perspective plays tricks on things that are going to happen to you: a three-inch syringe when it’s intended for someone else’s arteries is just a three-inch syringe. When it’s coming for you, it’s a foot long and gleaming.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Vera answered. “This is Dr Seah. You can trust her.”
“You can’t . . .” I began.
Dr Seah knew the sound of a refusal when she heard one, and knew that the only way to get round these things, was to ignore them before they could become admissible in court. She slid the needle into the skin of my exposed elbow vein without a sound, and pushed. We half imagined we’d see our arteries pop as whatever was in there rushed into our body; they didn’t. “Hold,” said Dr Seah briskly, putting a piece of cotton wool over the entry point. Vera held it.
“What did you give us?” we whispered.
“It’ll help with the pain. Well . . . in a way.
“There’s . . . I was attacked,” I said. “I was attacked, they found me, I picked up the phone and then they came for me, they found me before, they might find me, I need to stay, to be . . .”
“You’re as safe as you’re going to be here,” answered Vera. “If they find you here, they’ll find you anywhere, and at least then they can throttle you quickly with your own body parts before you bleed to death.”
Drugs straight into the vein. I found it hard to raise my head, heard my own words as if they were being hummed through water, felt my lips, huge and someone else’s, flopping fat as I tried to speak.
Fingers that had been trained how to heal on plastic dolls that couldn’t scream poked the slash down from my collarbone. “You’re a lucky guy,” said Dr Seah at last. “Long and shallow. Looks bad, but from a medical point of view, completely nah.”
“Yeah,” I croaked. “I’m just lucky.”
“Ever had morphine?”
“They gave it to me once. It made me feel sick.”
“Yeah, I know, crazy like that, isn’t it? Hey, Vera, can I ask you to put some more water on the boil?”
“You need it for cleaning?” asked Vera with the enthusiasm of someone already anticipating the gratitude.
“Cuppa tea,” was the reply.
As answers went, this was disappointing for the almost properly elected head of the Whites, who strutted from the room with the cool manner of someone far too sensible not to be of use, but who was not used to menial.
Dr Seah waited until she was gone, then leant in close. “Well, what do you want, good news or shiny news?”
Since we weren’t entirely sure what “shiny” news was, we went for the good news first. “You’ll live,” she said.
“Terrific,” I mumbled with a tongue made from sodden sponge.
“Want to know the shiny part?”
“Sure.”
“Apart from this” — fingers of steel prodded the slash down my chest, a thousand miles away from my watching brain — “you’re OK. You’re going to need stitches, and while it’d be just so sexy to put you under for that,
