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Now here’s a question. Do you need your drawing table? Do you need any of the appurtenances of your vocation? Life in London, with all its little disappointments and petty humiliations, came damned close to convincing you otherwise. There you were, pitting your poor, bare, unforked drawings, your set squares and putty rubber, against the generative gambollings of the Bund’s machine-brains. How could you fail to fail?

To Yorkshire, however, no Gurwitsched superbrain will ever come. No Bund-made architectural projection will ever flicker in hologram over the waxed tabletops of local council rooms in Halifax, because even if they did – the speciation of the human race being what it is – no one in Halifax, however handsomely educated, would be able to understand it. Your skills, however crude, however outdated, are still valid here. Here the pencil and the slide rule, rule.

How long, once you set your mind to it, will it take you to turn your skills to account here? How long to learn to wall a furnace, or calculate canteen space for a factory? Not long. Never mind for a moment the accelerated lives of others: in this part of the world, your talents still count. And you have to do something. Anything. You can’t always be freeloading off your dad. Puffing your way up the valley to the pub and back. Poring through your mum’s old Everyman Pocket editions. It won’t be long before your savings run out.

‘Wherever I find work will have a drawing table for me.’

Your father is disappointed. ‘But your books. Your clothes. That chest of drawers—’

You try not to show a smile. Bob once visited the flat you and Fel shared near Cripplegate. He might have been visiting a fairy’s castle. The place astounded him: its size, its light. It was only a flat on the Barbican Estate. A self-igniting hob. An electric piano. Tablets. A phone without a cord. Nobody he knew owned such things as he saw there. Furniture from Fel’s family. A chest of drawers, meticulously painted in the Moldovan folk style.

‘That was Fel’s, Dad. Not mine. Anyway, it’ll be long gone. She’ll have cleared out her things by now. I’ll get to the flat and probably find just a couple of suitcases’ worth of textbooks.’

Bob wants there to be more for you to ferry back. He wants you to fill his house. He wants to come downstairs of a morning and find his living room cluttered with someone else’s clothes, someone else’s furniture, the tools of someone else’s trade. He wants his home filled with the signs of life.

You sense your father’s hunger so suddenly, and with such lurching clarity, that you’re finding it hard to swallow down your fish, and there is a moment, not long, but real enough, in which, unable to breathe, you reach for your teacup only to discover that there may be not enough tea there to clear the batter clagging your throat.

Now that you know how lonely your father is, you also know that you absolutely must not carry on living with him.

‘You want another tea?’

‘No. Ta.’

The way your feet dangle absurdly over the edge of your little truckle bed is surely evidence that moving back in with your dad was only ever a stopgap: a chance to breathe free air again, out of the Smoke. It is time you found your own place. Earning enough to afford it is another reason to pick up your trade. No more paper bridges, no more fancy permeable-walled pavilions on the Bartlett forecourt. It is time for some serious application. Workers’ housing for the spaceship yards and bomb manufactories of Huddersfield (an upwind location would be best, in light of recent reports from the Ministry of Health). Planning meetings to be scheduled with the users of Greenhead Park. Written objections anticipated from the parents of children attending the adjacent grammar school. You read the papers, you talk to people, you even know which firms to approach. You know what the work will be like. You believe it will be worthwhile. The prospect might even excite you, were it not that London has poisoned your love of building things.

Hasn’t it?

Since January you have been breathing Yorkshire air, air you grew up in, air that made you. All year you have been walking these valleys, eating this fish, drinking this beer, rubbing blood and feeling back into your night-frozen feet of a morning. This has been your solid, ordinary life.

Now, again: the Bund. It floods back. It fills you like a tide.

London, and all you have seen there, as street by street, investment by investment, handshake by soft handshake, the Bund’s enclave in London has spread. Not that anyone talks about ‘enclaves’ any longer, far less ‘ghettos’. The Bund has grown synonymous with its constructions – its great shining towers of plastic stuff, all glass curtain walls and weather-responsive bricks – and ‘Bund’ has come to stand for both. Today the Bund stretches from Fenchurch Street to Spitalfields, while on the other side of the river it has turned South London, in the space of a few years, into Medicine City: an incomprehensible medical theme park, a macabre sort of Blackpool for Georgy Chernoy’s undead. (Or pick your term, as the papers do. The nigh-on-dead – the Telegraph. The better-off-dead – The Times. The might-as-well-be-dead – the Sunday Express.) All this building done at a cost so high that most nation-states would break before they had accomplished nearly so much – and done with hardly more effort than it took to push a button on one of those confounded, impossible, incomprehensible keyboards of theirs.

‘Come on, lad,’ says Bob, clapping you on the shoulder, ‘let’s get a jar.’ He’s already up and shrugging on his coat.

* * *

Flowing yourself into bed, five pints the worse, you pull back the curtains in your room. This is the plan: that even through a fug of Friday ale, the morning light will wake you in time to catch the milk train to London.

Five hours later and light wakes you all right: not sunlight, but light from the furnaces. Even at this early hour, the town’s chimneys are belching sparks.

The air in your room is so cold that for a while you lie in bed, pinned under the blankets, watching your breath rising like smoke from a stubble-field. It pinks in the light of a distant steelworks.

Now you stand, hunching in the cold, before the window. The street lamps are out and the road surface, hidden from the furnace-pink predawn, is a river running silently and forcefully under your window, down the hill, towards the beck, and the mill wheels, and the weirs. This is the current taking you away today, back to confront those things that lost you your love and ruined your nerve. This is the river you have no name for, bearing you back into the Smoke.

On the surface the matter could not be simpler, and setting it out, in terms both clear and pleasant, took no more than four lines of standard type on a sheet of legal-sized paper headed ‘Hotblack Desiato’. The letter arrived through the door a couple of weeks ago from the estate agent that manages the flat in the Barbican you’d shared with Fel.

The flat has been lying idle and the lease is finally up. Any remaining personal property must be removed. You had six weeks from the date of the letter so there is still a month to go. There is a number to call in case of problems, and the letter ends, for no especial reason, ‘Warmest regards’.

A gloomy metaphysical river you cannot name is dragging you helplessly off into the difficult past, but here’s a comfort: at least your papers are in order.

You put on travelling clothes. Your best shirt is crisp, and in the minimal, industrial light of belching chimneys, the cotton does not show the stains you know are there: indelible smuts the fabric acquired within days of your coming back home. (Do you remember the look Bob gave you when you asked him if there was a dry cleaner’s nearby? The strangled mess he made of the word ‘Halifax’?)