The way that maleficent ink said those last words, that old-hat kitsch threat, made it something again. If you had heard it you might have shivered. But nothing happened in the sea’s house.
“Think I won’t fight you?” the Tattoo said. “Stay out of my business.”
Had the sea invaded the Tattoo’s own halls it would have been an insult too far, and whatever the cost-and the cost of war against an element was big-the Tattoo would have waged it. There would have been bombs lobbed into the waters, that exploded and left holes of nothing under traumatised waves. Brine-killing poisons. And even though the Tattoo could not have won, the sea’s interest and breach of neutrality might have spread the war.
But no one would count the attack on the despised and disavowed Nazis as meddling, and the Tattoo would find no allies. The downside of employing bogeymen. Which was why the sea had risked its actions. People doubtless knew it had been there, though it had assiduously withdrawn every molecule of saltwater from the caverns carved under the pavement, the new oceanic grottos, but no one admitted it.
“Tell me what you have to say for yourself,” the Tattoo said. “Kick backward,” he said to the body he was on, and the man clumsily did, but the blow connected with neither the door nor with anything. “Fuck with my business again it’s war,” the Tattoo said. “Car,” he said to his body, and the man walked jerkily to the vehicle. The Tattoo was raging because the sea faced it down. Even the Tattoo won’t face down the sea, people said afterward. No one’ll face down the sea. That word found its way all over.
ANOTHER QUEASY LURCH OF HISTORY. IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE, A stutter, a switch, the timeline two-by-foured onto another course that looked, smelt, sounded the same but did not feel it, not in its flesh. In the clouds was more of that strange rage, more fighting, memory versus foreclosure in a celestial punchup. Every blow reconfigured the bits in Londoners’ heads. Only the most perspicacious gathered something of the reasons for their little strokes, their confusions and aphasia: that it was a part of the war.
Marge was part enough now of the hinterland that she felt it. Her head was full of abrupt forgettings and jab recalls.
It was a last night for her already. Resentful of and exhausted by all the impossibles, she had responded, to their great surprise, to a final pitch from some of her friends. A small group from one of the galleries at which she had exhibited-two men, two women who showed together under a collective term, the Exhausteds, they had given themselves based on perceived shared concerns. Marge, on the basis of her art, had once been dubbed a fellow traveller, a semiexhausted, a Somewhat Tired.
She had stopped hearing from her work friends, but one or other of the Exhausteds had been calling her every couple of days, trying to encourage her out to a drink, to supper, to an exhibition of competitors at which they could all sneer. “It’s fucking good to see you,” said a woman called Diane. She made pieces from melted plastic pens. “It’s been ages.”
“I know, I know,” Marge said. “Sorry, I’ve been getting really crazy into the work.”
“Never need to apologise for that,” Bryn said. He painted portraits into fat books opened at random. In Marge’s opinion his work was total shit.
She had thought she would feel herself playing a role that evening. But their rambles from pub to arty pub pulled her back into the life she had thought long gone. She had only a slight sense of watching herself, of pretence, as they went past tattoo parlours and bookshops, cheap restaurants. Sirens of police and fire passed them in tremendous rushes.
“Did you hear about Dave?” they asked her about people she barely remembered. “What’s up with that business with the dealer you were talking about?” “I can’t even believe I had to move, my landlord’s a shit,” and various other bits.
“How have you been?” Bryn asked her at last, quietly, and she just shook her head and rolled her eyes you don’t want to know, as if at a deadline, a heavy workload, time lost track of. He did not push it. They went to a movie then a dubstep gig, shedding Bryn then a woman called Ellen as they went, a late supper, gossip and creative bollocking. London opened up.
Miracle on Old Compton Street: Soho was fucking lovely that night. Crowds danced bad salsa, still clubbing outside Blackwell’s bookshop. The cafés bustled onto pavements, and a stranger with a spare cappuccino turned down by some disdainful prospect handed it with a shrug to Marge, who almost rolled her eyes at the world’s performance, but drank it and enjoyed every sip. Empty temples of finance watched from the skyline: bad times were not yet quite there, and they could overlook with indulgent window eyes as Marge played with her friends and just was in London.
It got close to midnight and seemed to stay there. She drank with the Exhausteds remnants for a long endless late-night moment amid cheerfully gusting paper trash and the lights of cars shunting around zone one as if the world was not about to burn. Marge had an appointment in the early small hours.
“Alright you outrageous flower,” said Diane when the calendar finally turned. “It’s been lovely, and it’s been too bloody long, stop acting up.” She gave Marge a hug and descended into Tottenham Court Road Tube station. “Be well,” she said. “Get home safe.”
“Yeah,” said Marge to her back. I’ll do that. Since when had home been home? She took a taxi. Not to a ghost or trap street, of course: the driver’s very expertise, the knowledge that got him his cab, would have hidden it from him. She directed him instead to the closest main street to her destination, and from there walked to the little east-London shack.
It looked thrown up out of discarded walls, wood, wattle, daub and brick remnants, on a tiny street of such mix-bred buildings, where a man she had found, via a convoluted online route, waited for her.
“YOU ARE LATE,” HE SAID. INSIDE THE MUTT-MADE HOUSE THE rooms were drier, finer and more finished, more roomlike rooms than Marge would have thought. Amid mould-coloured upholstery, paintings the shades of shadows and books that smelt and looked like slabs of dust was a computer, a video-game console. The man in the hoodie was in his fifties. His left eye was obscured by what she thought for a second was some complex Cyberdog-style hat-glasses combination, but was, she realised, without even a flinch or a twist of the lips, these days, the metal escutcheon of a keyhole from a door, soldered or sutured to the orbit of his eye.
It was attached to face toward him. Everything he saw was glimpsed as through a keyhole. Everything he saw was an illicit secret.
“You’re late.”
“You’re Butler, right?” said Marge. “I know, what can you do? Traffic’s a swine.” She took money out of her bag, a roll in a rubber band. If the world doesn’t end, she thought, I’m going to be buggered for cash.
The air in the room eddied, like interruptions in her vision. Things that should not, like ashtrays and lamps, seemed to be moving a tiny bit. “Anyway,” she said. “It’s you who lives where no taxi driver can go.”
“You think this is tricky to find,” he said. “There’s an avenue in W-Five that’s only in the 1960s. You try getting back into that. Protection, right, as I recall? From what?”
“From whatever’s coming.”
“Steady on.” He smirked. “I’m not a magician.”
“Ha ha,” she said. “I’m looking for someone. I’ve been told to leave it alone and I’m not going to. I’m sure you know more than me about whatever, so you tell me what I need.”