Because the Tube line had been dug deep here, the remade station had been fashioned as a slice through history. The walls were lacquered earth, and in the earth were the leavings of past ages of London. Potshards and wooden clogs. A trove of coins. Chicken bones in the ashes of a fire. As I ascended the escalators to street level, so I moved through time, through timbered frames and broken arches, pools of shattered stained glass, swatches of stained brocade. Then ironworks. Pipes and pumps. The homogenous tilth in which the station’s faux-relics had been ‘buried’ (set in lacquer, polished, cunningly lit) vanished entirely, squeezed out by a tangle of ducts, drains and brickwork vessels – the innards of a world coming to mechanical life.
The story these corridors were telling was not subtle. It was coarse, triumphalist and irresistibly exhilarating. As I neared concourse level, iron ceded to plastics and glass and ceramic, and the whole fabric of the building seemed in motion, responding as an anemone might to my passing. The entire subterranean structure was a narrative of human progress, writ according to the Bund’s rigorously materialist creation myth, in which the poor, bare forked folk of the Earth had assembled, out of dirt and heat, generation by generation and oh-so-painfully, a living thing out of dead stuff – a city that first had breathed, then gushed, then felt and cried, and now, at last and with the coming of the Bund, had begun to speak.
I had a moment’s panic while I fished for my ticket, then remembered that Fel’s phone itself would let me through.
I held it up to the plastic barrier, which slid open, letting me onto Tooley Street and a project that, since my last visit, had taken a strange and baffling new direction.
The tram stop was where I expected it to be, and the tram, though wheelless, propelled on a cushion of magnetised air, was in all other respects as I remembered it. The street, however, had quite vanished, broken into pieces and rearranged as if within a giant’s kaleidoscope.
There was no longer any second Saint Paul’s, but fractured pieces of that structure hung about the street as though projected on the air. Look again, and you would see that these shattered baulks were solid enough, artfully suspended by wires thin as silk from distant sky-grey gantries. Some of the rubble was shrunken to the size of a bin or a bench, while other fragments had been blown out of proportion, so that the statue of Queen Anne, for example, which, like its original, had stood at the foot of the cathedral steps, now spanned the entire thoroughfare, with a tunnel for traffic drilled through her skirts. The whole effort here seemed directed against the comprehending eye, destabilising and dethroning it, making every angle as legitimate as every other, as though the whole view were a canvas by Picasso, that avant-garde Parisian artist whose career had been cut so cruelly short by the wartime gassing of that city.
Out from under Queen Anne’s skirts, the vistas rolling by grew stranger still. There were no recognisable streets any more, but only the most fractured arrangements of materials through which we swooped in perfect silence on a raised concrete track, like privileged tourists of the future scouting some terrible and ancient wreck.
As I had understood it on my last visit, these playful zones – colossal filing cabinets like blind high-rises and chairs the size of bridges – had served a psychological function. Such outsize fragments of the real were meant, I had thought, to help the labile and disorientated infants of the Process keep the world in mind. They were props, in other words, for people whose grip on reality would otherwise have been fatally loosened by the Process.
It was clear, however, that this year some new strategy was being tried. Outside, there were no objects, but only the parts of objects; no reality, but only the ingredients of one. My brow furrowed and my head ached as we rolled by acre after acre of incomprehensible stuff: the levers from adjustable office chairs, carpet squares, coat hangers, phone sockets, bicycle handlebars, cotton wool, the lids of take-out coffee cups, fluorescent tubes, paint, staples, sandwich packaging, a pile of faceless wooden men, red and blue, unstrung from table-football games, all of it gargantuan, monumental, none of it readable. It was as though the everyday world had been torn apart and discarded, leaving only the components, as meaningless and minatory as the letters of a sentence were you to jumble them and cram them, spaceless, upon a board.
What breakthrough had Chernoy’s researchers made to necessitate this shattering transformation of their playground? Were they trying to actually ape and echo the psychic disintegration of their patients? To what end? What would be the point of that unless it was to prepare their clientele for an altogether different sort of reality? The weightless, hypermediated, so-complex-as-to-be-chaotic reality of the Bund?
When Betty’s Process was complete, she would wake into a new world, that was clear – and not a world I could ever be part of.
Beyond the cutting, the tram slowed and settled, purring, onto its concrete bed. In my hand, Fel’s phone blinked ‘Brockley’, and I disembarked.
Parties of Processed infants were walking under the lime trees of Ladywell, catching the last of the daylight. The air was fresh, and I was certain that it was only my imagination that filled the streets with the faint ghost of an echo of a dentist’s drill, the fleeting suggestion of mouthwash, the yeasty smell of fresh Band-Aids.
On my first visit, with Stella, it was obvious at a glance how this area had been given over to various ancillary medical services. Aside from anything else, there were signs all over the road, severe speed restrictions, crossings at every junction, lights in the kerbs and ramps up to every door. All that I had seen last August, just eight months earlier, had been removed. Had the Chernoy Process somehow done away with the need for dentists, GPs, sports therapists and all its other hangers-on? Or was Medicine City simply learning the art of disguise? I passed along an avenue of cherry trees. It was easy to imagine that the area was restored to what it had been before the Great War: a leafy and fashionable suburb of the City.
The infants of the Process moved awkwardly along the pavement in bands of between half a dozen and a dozen. They moved too sedately for children, though now and again I saw, pelting in another direction, groups of runners.
They bashed along the pavement together, equally silent, equally serious, as though fleeing for their lives.
Too slow. Too fast. I tried to imagine what Chernoy’s Processed infants were going through as they struggled to come to terms with their strange new bodies. Half-remembered. Half-familiar. Too small. Too strong by half.
Everyone was civil, letting me by on the narrow pavement, but the way people here travelled in groups unnerved me. I wondered what their common purpose was. Half a dozen overtook me at a run. Instinctively, I brought Fel’s phone close to my chest, protecting it. Were all these infants following an exercise regime, I wondered, or something more atavistic? The boast of the Chernoy Process was that the mind lived on in a new body – but what if the body had its own agenda? The body of a child, flexing, expanding into the space afforded it, testing every limit: such a body would have its own ideas. What must it be like, to take a ride in that body? To be tied to it? Committed to it?
I came to a street that must once have been a main traffic artery; now it appeared to have been given over entirely to promenaders and runners. I climbed wrought-iron stairs to a rolling walkway raised above the road. I travelled east.
I tapped Fel’s phone. I was meeting my mother in an indeterminate zone, a white space on the phone’s projected map, near buildings, near a park. Now I understood Fel’s confusion. It was impossible from the map to tell whether I was meeting Betty outdoors or inside. There were no other details beyond a time of meeting.