up at a sky in which a few shy stars peeped between black cloud and orange wash, and watched the flickering twin lights of aeroplanes passing overhead.
Not dead.
Still not dead.
Again.
Something had changed.
Couldn’t put our finger on what it was . . .
. . . but even we knew that being consumed by a metaphysical, metamagical, meta-most-things dragon while on a semi-philosophical LSD trip for Midnight Mayors changed something.
I said, “I need to find the boy.”
The guy smoking the cigarette chuckled. “Whatever gets you off.”
“I’m serious.”
“Sure. Serious guy like you.”
On the other side of the bridge, a taxi swished by. At the end of the bridge, a bendy bus scooted past a stop. I crawled onto the pavement, as it rushed by with the racing glee of night buses everywhere.
We looked at the messed-up man and said, “Where did you find us?”
“Here,” he replied. “Lying in the gutter, looking at the stars.”
“How did I get there?”
“Dunno. Not my business.”
“You didn’t see . . . anything peculiar?”
“Fuck shit hell.”
“No, then.”
“Hey - you got cash?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Watch, credit cards, you know?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on! You gotta have something. I just need a quickie, you know? Just a little.”
I staggered up onto my feet, looked east towards where, in a few hours - quite a few hours, judging by the thickness of the sky - the sun would come up between the yellow-blue pinnacles of Tower Bridge, crawling over the Thames Barrier and sliding across the white bulb of the Millennium Dome, to where I stood.
“I could do you,” said the man with the fag. “I could do you and take your shoes when you’re stiff.”
He didn’t say it aggressively. He wasn’t laughing either.
We half-turned. “No, you couldn’t,” we sighed.
“You ain’t tough.”
“Sure.”
“I got friends who’ve done it, you know? They know places; you send the bodies down and they don’t ever come up, not as anything thicker than soup. A fiver? A quid?”
“Bigger picture,” I said, stooping to pick up my satchel, piling its contents inside, sticking the wallet back in my pocket without bothering to look if he’d taken anything, knowing there wasn’t anything to take.
“I’ll fucking do you!” he called after me, not moving from his perch on the edge of the gutter.
We walked away.
Sunrise in winter, in the centre of town. A quiet greyness rising between the streets; lamps on the edge of extinction, hovering with just that tiny sense of unease, not entirely sure if this is dawn, or dusk, or if the sun really will make it. The light brought a slow hum with it, subtle and growing, one bus on an empty street becoming one bus and a cab, two buses, a cab and a bike, three buses, a cab, two bikes and a delivery van, the streets thickening like porridge as the hot milk of the city was poured back into its veins.
It excited us, that slow wakening, like the dawn chorus thrills the druids skulking in the countryside. This was a choir playing the carburettor and the travelcard beep, tinkling on the brakes of the postman’s van and playing a chorus of ATM dispensers and Underground rattles. It made us feel awake, alive, our heartbeat in time to the turning over of the double-decker’s engine, our breath coming in the slow pumps of the blasts of wind up from the Tube tunnels, our feet moving in that sharper banker’s step that went click, click, click at the busy brisk leather walk of the City worker. It would be so easy, so simple, to turn our fingers towards the oncoming one-way streets and catch the life building in them, tangle it like water against the dam of our hands, and fly on nothing more than the pressure differential created before the sunrise, and after.
I kept walking.
London Bridge, Monument, Bank, King William Street, Cheapside, Guildhall, Aldermanbury Square.
Harlun and Phelps.
Still open, a rising buzz within its halls.
The security guard just waved me through.
Lift to the top floor, city falling away below you, only gods and great men could feel this big over something so endlessly small. Down the corridor, an office designed to make you work for the privilege of talking in it; and knock me down if Earle wasn’t there, still there, sat behind a desk on which a wicker tray of yoghurt, jam, croissants, toast, Danish whirls and boiling coffee had been laid, sipping from a stainless steel cup, eyes turned towards a newspaper open on his lap.
He glanced up as I entered, and for a moment, looked almost surprised.