The Actuality Read online

  She hears Simon quietly huff – it is why she did not run it past him – but it is a plausible narrative nonetheless. Besides, for the last hour Simon has offered no piece of useful guidance so has no right to judge or criticise when Evie is doing her best on her own.

  Daniels blinks and for a moment the determined expression on his face slips. Her proposition appears to have moved him. It is a peculiar thing how the years have pressed on their relationship, slowly shifting it from one thing into quite another. Taking a buttoned-down longing on his part, that could never have been realised, and changing it into something rooted in mutual affection.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘we’ll go with that.’ Then adding gruffly, locking away his feelings, ‘We’ll work out the details as we walk. We’ve a few miles ahead.’

  He slowly opens the door onto the lobby and, peering around, turns to her with a finger over his lips. ‘Follow me.’

  The full-height glass doors to the outside provide her with her first view of the street. The snow is still falling. The lobby is unlit and the only illumination comes from the window of the shop opposite – flashing yellow and pink neon tubes twisted into a female hourglass outline – dress on / dress off. The entrance alongside is masked by a ragged curtain through which glows a red light. If it really is a retailer of women’s clothing, which is the only thing she can imagine it to be, it is an uninviting place.

  Daniels presses a button and the doors click. He opens one with his shoulder, forcing back a wedge of snow.

  Outside, a breeze funnelled by the buildings smacks her face. Flakes of snow cling to her hat and scarf.

  As they descend the steps to the road, her shoe collides with something under the snow. It stirs and rises, shedding ice. A bearded face with deep-set eyes and toothless mouth leers up at her. An emaciated hand grabs for her ankle but she jumps back and its fingers only brush her shoe.

  Daniels takes Evie by the elbow and guides her around its head.

  ‘Who was that?’ she whispers, horrified. She glances behind. The man watches them go, then collapses back with a groan.

  ‘Some homeless devil,’ he mutters.

  ‘How can he survive in this?’

  ‘He likely won’t.’

  They pause to stare as the grey shape merges back into the snow. The possibility that someone could freeze to death only yards from her home is the most disturbing thing she has seen so far.

  Daniels hesitates at the foot of the steps, before climbing back. He works the keypad and pulls the door fully open, jamming it against the wall. Together they watch the man become conscious of the chance being given to him, raise himself onto his knees and crawl inside.

  10

  Reaching the corner, Evie and Daniels turn into another small road and from there onto a broader one, passing the frontage of a mosque and the husk of a burnt-out library. The wind is lifting the snow and tumbling the crumbs along at ground level. ‘At least our prints will be covered,’ Daniels says.

  Evie has seen roads from above from Matthew’s window, and at night they have appeared to thread the city like bright embroidery but at street level it is all different. It feels as if she is travelling within an inflexible high-sided and dimly-lit conduit.

  She trudges with her head down, passing, without looking up, a row of what would have once been elegant villas facing onto a small garden square enclosed by iron railings topped with barbed wire.

  They turn another corner, marked by the limbless trunk of a tree, and cross over a carriageway wide enough for several cars to pass at once. ‘This is Horseferry Road,’ he says, making an effort to divert her. They are getting close to the river and the snow, driven by the east wind, is bitter.

  ‘Do all the roads have names?’ she asks, attempting to be responsive, despite how she feels. Under different circumstances her curiosity would be insatiable.

  ‘Yes, everything has a name. This area is Pimlico, as you may already be aware. Do you know what that is?’ He points towards the tip of a tower poking above the trees. Massive green numbers – 03:17 – luridly smear the clouds.

  ‘Big Ben,’ she replies. In the right mood, she could win a quiz on the names of everything it is possible to see from her husband’s room.

  ‘Very good. The old clock that once struck the hours is still up there but no longer works. You used to be able to hear it in the garden when the wind was right.’ They were both already thinking and referring to their home in the past tense.

  ‘Yes, Matthew told me,’ she says. ‘He said it was a national disgrace that they gave up on it.’ They had laid her husband’s body on his bed and covered his face with a blanket. There was so much blood that in the end she had to take the risk and use the shower to get her skin and hair clean. The blood had stained the grout a murky pink.

  ‘Yes, it was the sort of thing he cared about, but that’s what they did. It stopped working and the government of the day got it into its head that it was a symbol of the injustices of the past. Besides, they’d already moved where parliament sat after the original building started to slide into the river and no one had the will to spend the dollars required to shore it up when the country was so poor. People at the time were divided as to whether replacing the old clock was a good idea but a bold new holo-digital display was presented as embracing the future. I bet now most can’t remember what the argument was all about.’ Daniels’s chatter has a brittle quality and she suspects his need to talk is as much to distract himself as her.

  ‘You know what that is?’ He is pointing at the carcass of a huge vertical disk the other side of the river.

  She shakes her head. It makes her think of a giant water wheel, but one that was mounted too high for the water, even at evening flood, to turn.

  ‘Princess Charlotte Wheel. Built over a hundred years ago. People used to pay to go up in it for the view. Hasn’t operated for quite a few decades – too expensive to keep running when the tourists stopped coming. There were observation pods to stand in as it revolved but they were removed last century and repurposed as pre-fab housing. All turned into a bit of a horror unfortunately when after the fanfare of moving dozens of grubby inner-city families to the green fields of Essex, quite a lot of the pods were washed away and sank with said families inside them. Huge uproar as you can imagine. Big court case but the developers got off scot-free as they always do. The high tide was apparently an Act of God and not something they could have been expected to have foreseen. You can still see some bobbing in the marshes, if you search hard enough, and a few have ended up as upmarket houseboats in places like Kew and Richmond.

  ‘Up ahead, that’s Lambeth Bridge, that’s where we’ll cross. But we’re going to have to be careful as there’re security cameras on the gantry and we don’t want to be filmed. Pull your scarf as high as you can and keep your head down.’

  The structure looms towards them, lit by beams of piercing white light.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Here we go. Remember what I said: don’t look up.’

  They cross the bridge quickly. The fierce wind blows the snow into their faces, coating their clothes and deterring her from looking over the parapet. They keep their heads down until they reach the southern bank and are a good distance beyond the range of the cameras.

  Here they stop behind a tree and look back. ‘Can you see anyone?’ Daniels asks.

  Evie shakes her head. Visibility is poor but if someone was following, she would have heard them.

  Daniels lowers his scarf and indicates that she can too. ‘Well, we’ve made it to Lambeth at least.’ He sounds relieved and his sudden lighter mood infects hers moderately too.

  ‘We’re walking in Lambeth,’ she says. ‘Who would have thought it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Because of the song!’ She starts to recite in a monotone, quickly realising she can’t remember the lyrics and must improvise. ‘All the lovely Lambeth gals, with their lovely Lambeth boys, dud-d’dud, d’duh, you can see them all, walking the
Lambeth walk.’ She ends with a single muffled clap with her gloved hands and looks up for a response, but he appears confused.

  ‘You sang it for us once in the garden, for me and Matthew,’ she says, ‘and did this funny sideways dance with the edging tool, kicking out your legs from below your knees.’

  ‘The stuff you remember!’ He turns his face away but not quickly enough to hide his wiping his eye with the side of his glove. Now she wishes she’d kept her mouth shut. The past is too painful. Like walking barefoot in the garden in the dark and treading on thorns.

  Ahead of them a rail bridge crosses over the road. The glow from a fire flickers over the steelwork beneath.

  Daniels halts and pulls her over. ‘Let me check what’s happening,’ he says. ‘We may have to take a different route. Stay here.’

  From the doorway of a Victorian terraced cottage, she watches him creep down the road until he is just twenty yards short of the bridge. Beside her, pasted to the brickwork, is a poster promoting a boxing match depicting two burly men going at one another with bare fists, luridly tinted blood splattering their shoulders and chests.

  Daniels sneaks back towards her, keeping close to the shadows cast by the buildings.

  ‘What’s there?’ she asks, as he catches his breath.

  ‘A group of homeless navvies. They’ve got quite a bonfire going. Mattresses and packing cases and god knows what else. Their preoccupation seems to be keeping warm and if there’d been any women or children amongst them, I might have chanced it but as it is, it’s too much of a risk. If they wanted to play difficult, we’d be in trouble. Happily, we’ve other options.’

  They take a turning to their right and then one to their left and approach an arch heaped with abandoned battery packs leaking a wide pool of acid which they skirt around by keeping their backs to the bricks.

  Daniels forces a smile. ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be easier from here. We’re going to cut through Lambeth until we reach the Thames again and then cross back using Tower Bridge. Going this way will save a couple of miles at least.’

  ‘I’ve heard of Tower Bridge,’ she says, ‘but I thought it fell down . . . or was that London Bridge?’

  ‘I don’t know about any of that but none of the bridges are in great shape.’

  The snow has finally stopped and the air is still and silent. The only sound is from the tramp of their feet.

  ‘So what do you make of it all so far?’ He gestures ironically at their surroundings.

  ‘I don’t know what to think. It is all just so different.’ A whole strange, curious and almost unbelievable world has been unfurling around her. On her own, even in daylight, without the protection and guidance of Daniels, she would be petrified.

  ‘I guess it probably is.’ The snow crunches under his boots and her shoes. ‘We need to start making plans for what we’re going to do. We’ll go to Iz’s first but we can’t stay long, it wouldn’t be safe nor fair on her. Matthew owns a cottage out in the sticks. It’s empty and the only person who’s been there for years is me to check on it. We’ll be okay there for a bit. Who knows, if it proves safe, we may not have to move on again. Or at least not for a while. Hopefully it’ll be a chance to draw breath.’

  The thought of finding somewhere safe and holing up has an irresistible appeal.

  A yellow and black hova glides up behind and, swerving, passes at shoulder level, just a few inches from Daniels’s head. Both of them duck. The car continues on without paying them attention.

  ‘That could have been messy,’ Daniels says, cramming his hat back down and glaring after it. ‘Could’ve taken my head off.’

  ‘There was no one in it,’ she says.

  ‘You saw inside?’ He always forgets that her senses are better than his.

  Evie nods. The car reaches the corner and glides around it.

  ‘It’s a driverless then. They’re programmed not to hit anything, but that’s not to say they don’t.’

  ‘Why would it be going around without anyone in it?’

  ‘Making its way to its next pickup most probably, though sometimes the software goes haywire and they end up circling the same route for days until a dispatcher summons them back.’

  This gives her pause for thought. Last summer, one afternoon, she’d emerged from a daze with Simon shouting furiously in her ear. She’d been unconsciously looping the garden for an hour.

  In the distance a spike rears above the rooftops.

  ‘You wouldn’t know it now but that building was famous once for its dazzling glass exterior,’ Daniels says.

  ‘What happened to it?’ she asks, staring up at its blackened and bent tip, almost lost to view in the thick clouds.

  ‘The glass sheets started shearing off and in the end it got so dangerous, no one dared get close. They were going to rebuild it or demolish it, one or the other, but before they could make their minds up there was a big fire.’

  ‘I remember,’ she says. ‘It was just after I arrived.’ The blaze had lit up the sky and a black column of smoke had extended for miles. Then when the wind got up, the ash blew everywhere, coating the windows of the apartment and leaving a sticky sooty layer over the whole garden. Daniels had scrubbed at the paving with a wet broom for days.

  ‘Yeah, it probably was. Anyway it scattered sparks onto the roof of London Bridge Station and the adjacent hospital, setting them on fire too. The area has never properly recovered and because most of the roads have still not been cleared of debris, we’re going to have to cross the railway lines ahead by going over the tracks, or face a long detour. In daytime I’d use the tunnels but not at this time of night, they’re too unsafe.’

  ‘What about trains?’

  ‘There won’t be any, not at this hour.’

  They climb a steep bank, slippery with snow, following a well-worn path through the brambles. Going ahead of them, he lifts the stiff wiry branches free of her path. Coming to the top, they crawl through an opening cut in a mesh fence.

  ‘There’s a warning sign here about the tracks being charged,’ she says.

  ‘That’s ancient,’ he says, kicking the snow from it with his foot. ‘We wouldn’t have been able to do this when they still ran electrics, but there’s no danger now.’

  She follows him out onto the network of lines. Overhead lights above the distant station platforms cast a ghoulish glow.

  The rails are nearly invisible, no more than mounds under the snow. She catches the toe of her shoe, wrenching it off, and he holds her elbow to steady her as she slips it back on. After that, they lift their knees high at each step in a prancing motion. He is out of breath by the time they reach the other side and she is reminded of her own dwindling power level. From the ordeal in the apartment to this journey through the night, she has never consumed energy at such a rate and she was not fully charged at the outset.

  If we don’t make it, we’ll be stranded and left on our own to perish, Simon observes.

  I know that, she replies. Although to be honest she hadn’t thought about it in such bleak terms.

  Daniels brushes the snow from the top of a metal box and, sitting, reties one of his laces. ‘How’re your shoes holding out?’ he asks.

  ‘Wet, but it’s not a problem.’ The bottoms of her trousers are soaked through too and flap around her ankles.

  ‘Iz will have something you can borrow.’ He stands up and bangs the snow from his coat. Icicles hang from the scarf below his mouth like a beard, turning him with his large grey silhouette into some kind of phantom.

  ‘Daniels,’ she says, ‘my energy levels are getting really low.’ She gazes up at him helplessly. She feels like a foolish child laying its problems on an adult at an inconvenient moment.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘how long can you keep going?’

  ‘Maybe another couple of hours.’ She feels embarrassed discussing such a personal matter.

  ‘Presumably you charged yourself up last night – I thought you could last a day or two easy.’
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br />   ‘When I was new, maybe, but nothing like that now for years.’ She has gone quite red, although he won’t be able to see that in the dark. ‘If we walk more slowly it will help me conserve what I have.’

  ‘Once we’re back across the river and we’re off the beaten track, it’ll be safer and we’ll be able to take it easier.’

  ‘Maybe I can lean on you a bit as we walk,’ she says, wondering how far she would go in exploiting his generosity to preserve herself – she suspects she would be prepared to be quite shameless – but then it is the relationship he signed up for.

  ‘If it comes to it, I’ll carry you,’ he says, adding with emphasis, ‘I won’t be leaving you behind, not under any circumstances.’

  They cross Tower Bridge ten minutes later. Passing under the first of the huge old towers is like entering a gothic castle. The snow on the roadway is unmarked; not even a single set of prints.

  Evie looks west back down the river, hoping to see her apartment building in the distance, but the view is obscured by a cluster of massive grey blocks, shrouded by fog.

  Below, a barge loaded with coal chugs along the centre channel. The pilot, military cap dragged down over his ears, stands hunched in the stern, one hand on the tiller, the other gripping the glowing ember of a cigarette.

  Beyond the bridge, they find themselves negotiating a chicane of concrete barriers and electrified razor wire, with 360-degree cameras revolving on the heads of steel poles. The road is lit from the Tower walls by racks of lights casting hard shadows over the blinding snow.

  Daniels maintains a steady pace but his anxiety is mounting and as a result hers does too. Negotiating a reinforced slab substantial enough to stop tanks, they come face to face with a camera on a motorized trolley. It stares unblinkingly at him before turning to her. It lowers its telescopic arm, focus ring whirring, until its lens is only a few inches from her nose.

  Daniels’s hand closes around her arm and, drawing her to the side, he steers her behind it and through the gap between the final barriers.

  The camera trolley is mounted on caterpillar tracks suited to the soft snow and turning in a tight circle it follows quickly, its telescopic arm stretched forward, the camera held steady as it jogs along.