“And you were dancing with him, Redders, in the club.”
They were sitting on a fence overlooking a bowling green belonging to a social club. A bottle of port nobody could remember buying was doing the rounds. As was a cold doner kebab. Danny’s eyes were doing figures of eight.
“I pity the poor sod who’s getting married,” he said. “You’ll never catch me at that game.” Then he leaned over to vomit gracefully in the rhododendron bush, slipped and was asleep before he hit the deck.
“I need to take a piss,” Sean said, and leapt down from the wall, landing a foot either side of Danny Chant’s head. Norman raised the port bottle in acknowledgement.
“Don’t mind me,” he said, taking a swig.
Sean staggered deep into the trees, enjoying the gentle striping of wet twigs against his face. The canal emerged through the knot of branches, coils of reflected white light mixing into the treacly water. Something thrashed against the surface, a pike maybe, before becoming submerged again, leaving only a cluster of bubbles and a spreading ripple to suggest a presence in the first place. It was impressive to think anything could survive in that soup. From here, the smell was brown and oppressive; it lingered like the urinous reek of scorched dinners in your clothes. Sean unzipped himself and added to the rich stew. He watched steam from his waste rise lazily and drift off to the row of gleaming black railings that separated the banks of the canal from a clutch of depressed shops and upper-floor bedsits.
Sense descended on him; he recognised this place. He had rescued Emma from the bushes over there. Remembering what he had been doing around here was harder to dredge, but it came, when he recalled the route he had taken while running that morning, and the defunct ironmonger’s that he had observed Ronnie Salt enter.
He was sobering by the minute thanks to the cold and this business of remembering. A pervasive mist was reluctant to leave the canal’s dip; it sat deep and itchy in the pit of his lungs. Sean slipped and skidded down to the fence that kept people away from the bank of the canal. As before, he leapt over it – somewhat less stealthily this time – and hunkered in the shadows, listening hard for any movement that his clumsiness might have provoked. The light here was poor, only just reaching him from the opposite bank of the canal, where an illuminated towpath accompanied the journey of the water. The diffuse glow bled through the mist, picking out broken computer monitors and the radiator grilles from cars that had ruled the road during his youth: Capris, Chevettes, Princesses, Cortinas.
At the wall, and the high wooden gates of Boughey’s, the ironmonger’s, he tried to see through the cracks but the light here was not so generous. At least the building looked as dead as last time; there was no flicker of a lightbulb in any of the windows, no sound from a tinny radio station, or rustle of a newspaper page being turned.
Sean rooted around in the grass and found an old carpet with more holes than weave to it. It smelled heavily of soil and mildew. He hauled it to the gates and rolled it as best he could before slinging it over his shoulder. He began to climb, jamming his boots sideways into the gaps between the wooden planks. Nearing the top, he let the weight of his upper body hang on his left hand, curled over one of the stiles that supported the gate against its hinges. With the other hand he shook the carpet open, gritting his teeth against the strain, and flung it as high as he could so that it dropped onto the razor wire, protecting him from it as he scooted over. He waited until his breath quickly returned to normal. Adrenaline was chasing the booze from his system. Again he listened for movement within the building before sidling up close to a window. The view was as inky as that outside. He couldn’t see much beyond a few vague lumps that were outlined against a window on the opposite side of the floor.
The back door was a bastard. No way that was going to budge. Sean had found an iron bar and was considering putting a window through when he saw the black zig-zag of a fire escape camouflaged against the sooty walls. He clambered onto it and skipped up the metal steps, making little ting-tang noises with the toes of his boots. At the top, the landing fed a fire door that was only slightly more substantial than the entrance to a Wendy house. Using the bar as a jemmy, Sean wrenched it away from the lock, almost splitting the puny wooden architrave apart as he did so.
A breath of old things enveloped him. A smell of dryness and polish.
Again, he listened. There was a metronomic plesh of water dripping from a tap or a crack. The fluting of wind through a chimney that had not exhaled smoke for decades.
Sean pulled the door to behind him and let his eyes become accustomed to this fresh dark. He wished he had a torch, and considered coming back in the morning to explore properly, but realised there was no way he could do that now. When Salty saw that the door was broken it would be repaired and a better job made of it next time.
Ahead, a narrow wooden staircase took him down into an open-plan office above what must have been the ironmonger’s proper, where two old desks were arranged, facing each other. There was a Bakelite telephone on one desk, thick cord wrapped around itself. There were also two polished wooden trays, bearing labels upon which were written, respectively, in a cursive hand: IN and OUT. On the other desk sat a bulky Remington Noiseless typewriter, edged with a grin of light that had found its way in from the main road. There was a bowl with a single lemon in it, that had dried and shrivelled before its small wound of rot was able to spread. A game of patience had been abandoned.
Everything was coated with a fine patina of gum and dust. On the wall, a calendar for 1976 was pinned, forgotten. Sean flicked through it for anything to inspire him, but there was nothing beyond the glossy curves of women with bouffant hairstyles and heavy make-up.
Sean went to the window and looked out at the main street, feeling an itch beginning in the back of his mind that wouldn’t go away. Something wasn’t right. Across the road, saplings in a garden had been wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect them against the cold. Down on the shop floor, there was still a great deal of unsold stock. Grates and bedsteads and ovens formed solid shadows. Sean walked the narrow aisles between them, breathing air that was heavy with the clean, almost animal tang of the metal. There were drawers from old chests that were used to store different gauges of screws, nuts and bolts. A huge ledger was open on a crate, balancing a mug and a pencil within its pages. Saws on a rack winked at him as he went by. A heavy cash register sat on the counter, its tongue out. Post was still being delivered to the shop. A glut of it was fanned out by the door, ignored by Salty or whoever else locked and unlocked it.
Sean ducked under the counter and checked the recess for anything that might give him some edge over his colleagues. Three cardboard tubes were tied together with string, leaning against the back of the register.
It was while he was trying to make sense of the charts within the tubes that a key trembled through the lock and the front door swung open.
It was Ronnie Salt. Sean hunched under the counter and watched the older man stride through the shop, a mass of rope looped around one shoulder. Level with Sean, he stopped and sneezed. Sean watched him press a nostril closed with his thumb and blow the contents of the other nostril onto the floor. He repeated this process with his other thumb before climbing the stairs to the office. Sean was wondering whether to take the charts and escape when Salty came back. He retraced his steps through the shop and relocked the door. From outside came the snarl of an engine and the sweep of headlights across the shopfront as Ronnie departed.
Breathing raggedly, Sean nipped up to the office with the charts and, throwing caution to the wind, wrapped his jumper around the shade of a table lamp and snicked it on. Under the crepuscular flood, at first glance, the charts resembled blueprints or schematics, or architectural drawings, so clean and precise was the presentation of their lines. Yet Sean soon realised that he was looking at a series of maps, though they were constructed along the rules and regulations of no projection that he knew. The lands that were represented did not stir any recognition; they were unlike any countries he’d seen in an atlas.