‘I know what I saw and from now on that’s all that matters. I’ve got to get him back.’
‘And I’ll help in whatever way I can, though right now there’s nothing we can do.’
SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: ST. MATHEW’S CHURCH, ALDGATE
Sometimes, Jimmy thought as he made his slow, spiralling way along the street, they move the fucking bus stops. It was the only explanation he could come up with. He had given it considerable thought as he trudged along stretch after stretch of unfamiliar pavement. It had almost displaced in his mind his own behaviour over the last couple of hours. Tomorrow morning, once the texts and emails began to pour in, the pictures, the proof… then such things would be part of his mental furniture. Until then, he’d ignore them. But now was all about bouncing along this road looking for bus stops. And needing a piss. Yes. Very much about that too.
Taking a short break from pondering shifting bus stops, Jimmy redirected his mental focus towards the possibility of those bastards at Stella Artois (or perhaps the good lady herself) putting something in their brew that fucked up your bladder. He was wrestling with how such scurrilous behaviour could be monetized when he spotted a church ahead. He immediately decided the only thing to do was to hop over the wall into its graveyard and deal definitively with at least one of his problems.
In his drunken state, Jimmy managed the leap over the wall perfectly but struggled on the flat, ending up lodged against a gravestone. Gravity, equilibrium and ancient stone briefly conspired against him.
Finally, escaping the gravestone, he marched forward assuming all would now be well. It wasn’t. After a few seconds the world around him turned on its axis. Jimmy thought he was still walking in a straight line, legs rising and falling, arms swaying by his side. However, his face was recognising it had just been whacked by the ground – which simply didn’t happen when you were walking properly.
It took time for Jimmy to accept that he must have fallen over. He pushed that thought to one side and concentrated on how incredibly sick he felt. It became dominant, he could consider nothing else. Had anyone ever felt so wretched? Jimmy felt a wave of self-pity, so strong he would have burst into tears if he hadn’t suddenly been so busy emptying his stomach’s contents onto the grass that lay above ‘Gladys King, (1919 – 1983) “Alive in our memories” ’. If Ms King objected to this roaring donation of stuffed-crust Pepperoni Bonanza and Belgian lager she kept quiet about it.
Eventually, spent, wet-eyed and feeling as close to death as a person can when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them that twenty-four hours rehydration won’t fix, Jimmy rolled onto his back and looked up at a starless London sky. He had entered that stage of drunken dejection where pride is meaningless. He had neither the will nor the strength to deal with anything more complex than simply existing.
Hearing a scrabbling noise a few feet away, Jimmy decided it was probably a rat come for its nightly prayer. Perhaps even visiting a loved one in a small area of the graveyard especially dedicated to rodents? This struck him as absurdly funny and he spluttered saliva-soaked amusement for a few moments before rolling onto his side to look towards the source of the noise.
His eyes were slow to focus because they were filled with tears. The street lights shed diffused light across the world like a shower of insipid fireworks. The scrabbling noise continued. A sound of dislodged earth. Perhaps it was a badger, Jimmy thought, then asked himself whether badgers lived in cities? Why not? he generously concluded. Everyone else did. Maybe it was building a sett? Burrowing its way through soft soil and old bones. A Gothic lair constructed from ancient remains, a gloomy cathedral roofed with rib cages. Jimmy decided this was a good thing.
Scratch, scratch, scratch…
What was that? It didn’t sound like a badger. Not that Jimmy knew what a badger should sound like, but in the barely used mental file he possessed marked ‘Badger – Likely Sounds’ there was no correlation with this unrhythmic, lazy scrabbling. A fox? A cat? Oh, who knew?
If only he could see properly. He listlessly brushed away from his hands the remains of dead leaves and dirt, smearing his jacket with soil, and rubbed at his eyes. That sorted out the tears but it didn’t help with the lack of light.
‘Hello?’ he called. At least that was what the word had looked like when it had been in his head, by the time it fell out of his drunken, slack mouth it was entirely different. A useless, incomprehensible thing fat with vowels. The scrabbling continued undeterred until, with a larger sound of spilling earth, a shadow bled out across the street-lit sky right in front of Jimmy’s eyes.
‘Big for a badger,’ he said, just before the stench of an open grave washed over him.
Then the large shadow picked up a hefty stone and beat his skull in.
PART TWO: BLACK EARTH
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE FEAR
a) Shad Thames, London
The Fear never really hit me until 2008. I’m not talking about being scared; I’ve been that many times in my life, not least during that spring in Basra when the air was filled with fire and the world a place of smoke and the dead. I’m talking about The Fear. It has capitals. It has teeth.
Looking back on it, I wonder if it was always there. I suppose it must have been. But 2008 is when I met it head on. 2008 is when I gave it a name. I was back in the UK, my life intact, despite formidable odds. I had received a psychiatric evaluation after Basra that had flagged up a possibility of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Naturally, I had denied it. I didn’t want to admit there was anything wrong with me. I didn’t want to be seen as ‘weak’ (and yes, I am perfectly well aware now that suffering from PTSD is no such thing, but I couldn’t make myself believe it then).
I was no longer under threat. I was no longer being assaulted. I was simply watching the television in my apartment. One minute I was sitting on the sofa, idly contemplating ordering a takeaway, and the next I was hunched foetally on the floor in front of the TV, convinced the roof was about to crash down on me.
There is always the sense that the world is shrinking, compressing you. You know the sensation you feel when walking under an object that comes close to bashing your head? That tingle in the back of your skull that says, ‘Careful! You nearly misjudged that and smacked me with something large and painful.’ It’s like that. All the time. When there’s nothing around you. The world has grown teeth and it wants to sharpen them on you. No matter where you move you’re going to graze a knuckle, stub a toe, bend back a finger. Add to that the way the silence seems to roar at you. Everything your body would do in response to a deafening row, the wincing, the flinching, the sensory overload, the inner voice that begs for the sound to stop… all of that, but with no sound actually triggering it. The Fear is an attack without an attacker, being under siege with no external foe. And it’s been with me ever since.
Of course, I didn’t tell anyone. You don’t admit to weakness when you work in intelligence. These days my attacks are rarely so strong that I can’t grit my teeth and weather them until I can get somewhere private, take a few deep breaths and wait for things to settle down. They’d send me for ‘evaluation’. As if I wasn’t managing to sabotage my career just fine without adding that to my file. Was The Fear a problem? Yes. Of course it was. But it was my problem.