great, sleeping machines; vinyl store, rare enough now to be guaranteed a nerdy audience; locked metal door down to a snooker club; locked wooden door up to a discreet acupuncture clinic; shut post office selling kids’ toys and birthday cards; pharmacy promising YOU a better body; billboards, advertising action movies with strutting heroes, and perfumes worn by women with an elegant naked back.
My own back might end up with a knife in it before the evening was out.
When I saw him, it was almost too late. He stepped out of the doorway without a sound, driving his knife up towards my ribs. We caught it by reflex, snatching his wrist and twisting. But all that twisted in response was an empty sleeve; there wasn’t any flesh beneath it to hurt. And still the knife kept coming. I stepped aside - and realised the futility of all my usual responses. There was nothing to kick, no flesh to hurt, nothing to shock nor batter nor damage. I looked into the spectre’s face. It rippled for a moment, then spat hot ash and black exhaust straight back at me. We covered our face, felt the ash burn our sleeves and thick dirt blacken our skin, tripped as we staggered back, half blinded by heat and dust, and sprawled useless in the gutter. Through rising tears, the spectre was a blur coming towards me. I raised my hands and, just this once, the pain helped, gave focus and determination to what must be done. The pavement ticked like metal expanding under a summer sun, cracked, and broke apart. Grey wires sprouted like ivy from the earth. I dragged them up, fuelling their growth with will and fear even as I crawled away from the gutter into the middle of the street. The wires grew, divided, rippled, grew again, wildlife photography speeded up a thousand times; they spread, and uncoiled a flower of barbs. I flung the wires up from beneath the spectre’s feet and ordered them to dig deep into his feet, his legs, crawl up his ankles and wrap around his knees.
The spectre ignored them, his trousers tearing with a slow crunch as he kept on coming, revealing the nothing beneath. But his shoes were a harder proposition: the barbs caught deep and wound down into his trendy trainers, tangling with the shoelaces, which strained but did not tear with the spectre’s uneven lurches towards me. I rolled onto my hands and knees, then got up on my feet; and once more the spectre, trapped by his feet, raised his head to scream, and I was bending beneath the sound and covering my ears, then running down the street at the sound of a thousand brakes locking against old metal casings.
A beggar sleeping in the door of a church looked up as I passed by, somewhere between running and falling. I snapped, “Get out of here!” and kept on going. He just stared. A light came on in a window overhead and a woman’s voice shouted, “What the fuc . . .”
I skirted a small grassy rubbish dump that the council called a “community green space” and turned onto a road overhung by old trees. A maintenance truck was parked ahead, its orange platform raised up high to a broken streetlamp that one guy in a neon jacket was replacing, cold and miserable in the rain. I ran past it, and he ignored me, knowing better than to ask questions of bleeding strangers running through the night.
They were behind me; I didn’t need to look to know. The pain below my collarbone that shock had kept off now began to make itself known. With every step I could feel my flesh open and close like the regular gulp of a goldfish. It was oddly electrifying, as if our body were not our own, but something we carried with us, and our distress someone else’s that we experienced at a remove, like secondary smoking. Given time, that would change, and the thought of what was to come only weakened us further, made our stomach ripple. I saw a square of light off to my right, ignored it, then looked again, and could have laughed or cried.
The place was called “Qwickstop” in bright orange letters on a garish green background. Set out front of its lit-up window was a graveyard of unlikely vegetables and fruit, from the standard bruised apple to fossilised butternut squash, all overhung by a limp