Plume

Or more serious than that, and my imagination was disgustingly eager to spill the details into my reverie: a fire in the tunnel, fumes spreading fast, national news, fatalities, this stretch of line closed for days, an inquiry, a slow trickle of consequences over months and years: fund-raising, one or two of the survivors being held up as inspirational figures for saving others or overcoming horrible injuries, marathons completed, popular books written, mayoral bids considered. A plaque at this station, perhaps only feet from this cold stone step, and if I came by this way with someone, I’d go a little quiet and break my pace, and I’d say, ‘I was here that day, when it happened,’ in a voice that really stressed how I didn’t talk about it often but it had stayed with me, picturing a great dignified weight, the memory of those x souls, my gratitude at having escaped in time, tempered with noble guilt at being a survivor, my respect for the emergency services. Perhaps poor oblivious Alan would be among the x, intimately involving me, bringing the whole sad story closer, making it far more authentic.

Or nothing. The same steady procession out of the station. No sirens, no evacuation, no space-suited firefighters, no strengthening fountain of smoke from the depths. I wanted there to be an emergency not for ghoulish reasons, but because the alternative was an internal emergency. The smoke, the suffocating need to escape – for me that was real, but it never happened to anyone else.

There was real smoke out here, though: the darkness in the east, over the roofs of Bishopsgate, behind the spires of finance, where I was supposed to be. Perhaps that was the source of my fascination with the Barking fire – that, at least, was real, really happening; other people around me could see it too, it was in the papers. For the first time in months, the city was in sync with me.

Eleven a.m. – the time Alan and I were supposed to arrive at Pierce’s house. I was cold and my joints were stiff from sitting on the step. Adjacent to the station entrance was a pub.

I had been caught up in station evacuations before, as I suppose every regular Tube user has – or any regular passenger on any subway network anywhere in the world. A couple of times I had seen fire engines arrive. But I had never smelled smoke, not so much as a match’s worth, let alone the thick clouds that had almost suffocated me on the platform with Alan.

When the bombs went off on 7 July 2005, I was living in a shared house in Fulham, and working my first job. My commute, District Line to South Kensington, took me nowhere near the bombs, and I had only just left the house when it all happened. The station was already closed when I arrived, and the pavement outside was filled with a restive and palpably upset crowd. No one knew what was going on, exactly, although the look on the faces of the staff made it obvious it was no signal failure. At that moment, an early report about a gas explosion was being shown to be tragically wrong. We were told to go home, and I did, to find one of my housemates already there and full of rolling news and internet rumour. We watched together. After about half an hour, when it was completely clear that services would not be resumed, I called the office, and the phone rang unanswered. I tried my boss’s mobile – he was at home as well.

Thinking about it now, that was the first time I took an unscheduled day off work. After a couple of hours watching the news, mostly unspeaking but for occasional expletives and blasphemies, I went to the fridge, intending to make us both a cup of tea, and saw that there were four cans of Grolsch in there, left over from the weekend. (The very thought that beer could be lying untouched, forgotten, in the fridge from Sunday until Tuesday dates this memory for me.) I took two of these cans through to the living room and was hailed as a stalwart foe of extremism and a doctor of the human spirit. The kettle boiled, and cooled, without further attention. We finished those cans, and the other two, and went out for more. When our other housemate came back, he found us both convincingly drunk.

The mood took an uncomfortable turn not long after that when my day-long drinking partner made some broad statements about Muslims, and collective responsibility; he alluded to retaliation, without specifics; and he spoke as if confident that we all shared his urge to punish, to strike back. This seemed pathetic and futile to me, the bombers having obliterated themselves, and I disagreed strenuously, impressed with my own tolerance and ardent forgiveness – rather full of it, really. The other housemate sided with me and the day ended on an ugly note of disharmony.

I was at home during the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the bombing. I don’t recall if this was a scheduled or unscheduled absence. Next door had not yet started its renovation; I woke mid-morning and switched on the TV after opening my first can, expecting Homes Under the Hammer. But instead there was a live broadcast of the ceremonies at St Paul’s Cathedral. I watched, disturbed at the mismatch between the ancient ritual and anachronistic dress happening now, and the memories of the very modern catastrophe then. And disturbed at the unsimple range of emotions brought up by the day, the date. Shock, anger, grief, yes, yes, yes. All those, of course. But also that strange sense of liberation when the day’s pattern is broken, and the comfortable comradeship of the beers at noon, on a workday; and the unpleasant way the day had ended; because to call that ‘unpleasant’, could it be inferred that I found something pleasant before then? Which meant awful guilt. I hated the way my housemate had held the bombers’ co-religionists to blame, the way he easily swung his anger around to face a whole community, our neighbours as well as our fellow Londoners and Britons. But I wished my own reaction was that simple and stupid. In the following days I heard the sirens in the streets, felt the tension.

For a year or two after the bombs, I occasionally had nightmares of being caught in an attack or other disaster on the Tube; trying to flee down lightless tunnels, being trapped in carriages filled with smoke, bodies everywhere. In the hellish summer of 2012, those nightmares returned to my waking mind, one of several choice scenarios served up to me as I lay shaking and sweating in bed, completely awake.

We want beginnings. Start late, finish early. Get stuck in. ‘X is running late, and here I talk about how rude their PRs are’, ‘X was born in blah and spent their early years blah-de-blah’, ‘I meet X in this or that restaurant or hotel and here are three paragraphs describing that setting in not-very-amusing detail’ – these are called ‘long drop’ intros and are frowned upon.

But what if a situation can only be understood with reference to the past? What if some behaviour just appears to be senselessly self-destructive without that reference?

And what if you look into that history, knowing the key to be there, but can’t find it? It must be there, for where else could it be?

This day, then, 7 July 2005, more than ten years ago – the first day I stayed home from work and got drunk. Where the nightmares of dust and smoke and burial began. Was that the Rubicon, the tipping point? No; it was a unique and terrible day, and afterwards I went back to work as normal and it was still quite possible to leave beer in the fridge unopened and forget about it, and so it was for months or years after that. Perhaps there were underlying traits and tendencies and pathologies that could be traced back further, but at that point in my life I was only as fucked-up as the average person. Although …

More than ten years ago. Mine was a very long drop.

Alan was not dead, or trapped and blinded in a sweltering hell while rescue workers battled to reach him. He was alive, and above ground, and calling my phone.

I surveyed the pub: a big, bland railway Wetherspoon’s. It was almost empty and nearly silent, no music, no one playing fruit machines, no football, no giveaway background noises. There was only one other customer, a guy about my age, who was using his phone to take a picture of his shoes. A radio was playing in the kitchen, but it was safe to answer the call.

‘What the fuck, man?’ Alan was whispering, in a quiet place himself. There was anger in his voice, but it was not ruling over other emotions: confusion, and perhaps even concern.

‘Alan, hi.’

‘What the fuck happened to you, man?’

‘I was sure I could smell smoke. It was freaking me out.’

‘That’s … There wasn’t any smoke, man.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s Oli you want to be sorry to, you need to get here sharpish. I’m here now, said you were delayed. Where are you, are you on your way?’

‘Yes.’ About a third of a pint left.

‘We’re doing the shoot. Get here fast and I think you’ll be OK.’

‘OK. Thanks. Sorry.’

‘Oli’s a nice guy. You’ll be fine if you get here in the next five, ten minutes.’

‘Sure.’

‘Can you do that?’

‘Sure.’

I didn’t like this ‘Oli’ business one bit. Exactly as I had feared, they were bonding. I gave thought to an additional half-pint, but on this occasion moderation triumphed.

Pierce lived just off a Victorian garden square concealed behind Mile End Road – one of those hidden pockets of the East End that could be mistaken for Chelsea or Islington or my own Pimlico. For a nauseating moment I thought he might have the whole terraced house as his own, but there were two doorbells, with Pierce’s at the top. I rang, exchanged a couple of crackly words through the intercom, and heard feet on stairs.

I had seen Pierce’s picture in the newspaper profiles that had appeared before his seclusion: a round face under a shaved scalp, a combination that verged on the potatoey. But no potato had those eyes, dark and furious, always directed hard at the camera. No soulful chin-stroking or writerly gazing into space – arms crossed like a bouncer, staring you down. Only the photo on the back cover of Mile End Road differed: dark curly hair, retreating a little, glasses, the slightly affronted look of someone caught by surprise. Before he had settled his image. In Night Traffic, Pierce had speculated as to what had made him a target for muggers: he was five foot eight, a couple of inches shorter than me, and a little chunky. When he opened the door, though, he seemed at least my height and more; the slight doughiness of his frame manifested as pure presence and force. The eyes didn’t pin me down or fix on me like a laser or any of those clichés of command. It was as if he barely noticed me, catching my own gaze once, then breaking away, turning back into the hall.

‘Jack, yeah?’

‘Mr Pierce, great to meet you at last, I—’

‘Alan’s just left, surprised you didn’t see him.’

I was relieved. ‘Yes, I’m sorry I’m so late, I—’

‘Close the door, yeah? Just slam it.’ He was three steps up the stairs already, not looking back.

Pierce had the top two floors of the house – a flat more than twice the size of mine. At once I wondered if he owned or rented: the usual London question. Except that’s not the London question, not exactly. The question is: How are you here? How do you make it work? How do you supply what the city demands? More than half my salary went on the rent of my dark little flat and I dreaded the next increase. I was not making it work. How, then, did Pierce? The secret, shameful side of the London question was the accompanying desire to hear that the answerer was not making it work, that they were drowning in debt or crippled by mortgage payments or the flat had untreatable toxic mould or was the site of a recent and savage string of murders. Anything that would make one’s own failure sting a little less.

The flat was, at first, as you’d expect: I was led into a short corridor lined with knee-high piles of books, magazines, loose papers and copies of the Guardian and Standard. Like my own home. I knew at once what I’d find in the living room: a wall given over to bookshelves, either Ikea or built-in, wedged with books and decorated with a self-conscious sprinkling of postcards, invitations, photographs, mementoes and so on.

Wrong. At least two upstairs rooms had been knocked through to form Pierce’s living room, which ran all the way from the front of the house to the back, with big windows at each end. This yielded a long side wall that would have been perfect for metres of shelves. But this wall was instead filled with a huge map of London.

‘Map’ is in fact not a useful term to describe what Pierce had made. In the south, Biggin Hill and Purley were at skirting board level; the northern stretch of the M25, where it runs past Waltham Abbey, was at the ceiling cornice. The outer outline of Greater London was just about recognisable, as was the blue vein of the Thames where it widened in the east, and a few exposed green patches at Richmond, Blackheath, Epping and elsewhere. The rest of the city was obscured by a thick aggregation of matter, which lifted and shivered when Pierce threw open the door and walked into the room. It was a layer of sticky notes, index cards and clippings – several layers, from the look of it, anchored by hundreds of coloured thumb-tacks. Further notes encrusted the wall to the left and right of the map; the room also contained four metal filing cabinets and the usual living-space furniture: a three-piece suite facing a telly at one end of the room, a dining table and chairs at the other.

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘The map?’ Pierce said with a pained expression. ‘I’ve been meaning to take it down.’

‘What? Why? What is it for?’

He didn’t answer, and instead waved an arm in the direction of the cracked brown leather sofa. ‘Sit. Sit. Coffee? Tea?’

‘Coffee would be great,’ I said, taking off my coat. I had to move a couple of magazines off the sofa in order to make a place for me to sit: a TLS and a Time Out. But before I sat I remembered the need for colour. Ignore Pierce’s instruction, check out the room. I approached the map.

The cacophony of information from the wall was overwhelming, and the accumulated ephemera was rarely less than five layers deep, obscuring most recognisable features. I traced the line of the river upstream until I found Pimlico. Notes on the surface included ‘Monster Tavern’, ‘Millbank Prison – Austr.’ and ‘Dolphin Square sex ring’. These were all scrawled in black and red biro on small Post-its and snippets of notepaper, some no larger than postage stamps. But beneath them was a much larger note, an index card inscribed with fat black marker pen, obviously one of the first things pinned to the wall when the map was new. To read it I had to move other accretions out of the way, revealing the letters one by one. It said: MISTRESS CITY.

‘Bick,’ Pierce said, making me jump. An orange Post-it, its adhesive exhausted, floated to the floor; I saw one or two were already there. ‘Unusual name – as in Bic ballpoints?’

‘With a k,’ I said, realising that Pierce must know the spelling perfectly well, having seen my name in emails. ‘As in Bicker. Or Bickle.’

‘Ha,’ Pierce said – definitely said, spoken, not a laugh. ‘“You talkin’ to me?”’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘It’s a pity it’s not Bic like the pens,’ Pierce said. He spoke with his back to me, busy making coffee in a small kitchen through an arch. ‘That would be a good name for a writer. I’m interested in nominative determinism. The idea that your name has power, that it influences what you choose to do in life. You’re, I don’t know, Mr Heal, so you become a doctor.’

Should I be recording this? I wondered. I fumbled one of my digital voice recorders out of my bag, switched it on, and dropped it into the breast pocket of my shirt. ‘Like our mutual friend,’ I said.

Pierce stopped what he had been doing – pouring milk into a little jug – and frowned over his shoulder at me.

‘F.A.Q.,’ I said, surprised he needed prompting. ‘Given that he’s all over the internet.’

‘Aha,’ Pierce said. ‘Well, that doesn’t count. It’s concocted. Francis is his middle name. Eric Francis Quin. He ditched the Eric and added the A in the nineties. The A doesn’t stand for anything.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.

‘Not many people do, I think,’ Pierce said. ‘He doesn’t publicise the fact. I only know ’cause I’ve been to his flat. I saw some post there and asked about it. I think he’s embarrassed by it now. I mean, FAQs are a bit dated. A bit web one-point-oh for Francis. A bit of sleight-of-hand with the facts on some bulletin board twenty years ago and it ends up haunting him like that.’

‘Yeah, embarrassing,’ I said. I was starting to feel a bit wobbly. In the past, my legs had betrayed me when others were watching and it was a misfortune I wanted to avoid with Pierce. Especially as it was all going well so far – my lateness barely remarked upon, not having to compete with Alan, Pierce proving chatty, not the surly, laconic artist-hermit I had expected. ‘He should update it.’

‘Ha, yes,’ said Pierce. ‘S.T.F.U., maybe.’

I returned to the sofa. ‘Did Alan get any pictures of you with the map?’ I asked, full of hope. It would make a great opening-spread image, Pierce against this conspiracy-theorist palimpsest, the city and the surgeon of its dark heart. What a way into the piece. It would write itself.

Pierce approached carrying a tray, on which there were two steaming mugs, a bowl of sugar and a milk jug. This struck me as a touch genteel, the little white milk jug in particular, which isn’t bad as material goes – people acting against type. What would an ‘in character’ Oliver Pierce have offered me? Supermarket whisky? A line of speed? A punch to the throat?

Mention of the map made Pierce wince again. He settled into an armchair. ‘Yeah, he did. But do you have to talk about the map? Like I say, I’ve been meaning to get rid of it.’

‘Sorry. It’s hard to ignore. Perhaps if you told me what it was for, and why it’s not needed any more … Wait, hang on.’ I didn’t want to take any chances with this, and fished my other DVR from my bag. ‘Do you mind if I record this?’

Pierce shook his head, assenting. I turned on the DVR and set it on the coffee table between us. Two DVRs, one on the table, one in my pocket – one would have to work.

‘After I wrote Night Traffic – no, before that, even, I had been lumped in with all that psychogeography lot, Iain Sinclair and Will Self and so on, and I … well, I didn’t like that. There are so many people doing that shit now. All the fucking lost rivers, ghost Tube stations, all that shit – I’m just so fucking sick of that. It makes me want to puke. It was getting boring ten years ago, it’s just intolerable now. And the whole ideological project that goes along with it, all about tracing out the London of the Kray twins and the industrial past as a revolt against the corporate takeover of … I mean, I fucking hate what London is becoming, what it has become. Fucking hate it. This fucking shiny cloakroom for the biggest bastards in the world. But one of the reasons they come here is because of the trendiness, the grit, all that fucking mystique-sludge that’s getting dredged up from the Thames 24/7. Did you read my eels piece, with the Russian girls, the oligarchs’ daughters, Anastasia and that? They fucking loved all that. They had read Mile End Road, that’s why they got in touch with me, like I was a fucking tour guide. One of them had a copy of Ackroyd’s London biography, she brought it along. The East End, that’s what they wanted. The Blind Beggar, sarees, National Front, Jack the Ripper, they wanted all that as much as Knightsbridge and Chelsea. So what could I do? Trying to get the city back by writing about all that stuff, that was doomed. It’s just advertising, it just sucks in more cash. In the end, that’s one of the things that motivated me to write Night Traffic, to do something that wasn’t shabby-chic but terrifying, something …’

He trailed off, staring into space, in the direction of the window. Then he turned his attention to his coffee, putting in a slug of milk and a lump of sugar from the bowl. I wanted him to complete the quote. It was hard to believe how well the interview was going, to have this great mass of quotable, fiery material up front, but I desperately wanted him to finish the thought. My eyes flicked to the DVR on the table, making sure the red light was lit, and the timer was counting upwards.

‘Something real?’ I supplied. ‘Something true?’ If he accepted either of those, I could stitch the word into the quote and make it whole.

‘Do you take yours black?’ Pierce asked, offering me the milk. ‘Anyway. I was trying to think of other strategies. I thought I might try to shut down the psychogeography business in London once and for all. If I could write the ultimate psychogeographical index of London, gathering up and pinning down every mystical wrinkle, backwoods fact and obscure snip of folklore – a psychopedia of London – I could make the field obsolete. A Key to all Mythologies, like Casaubon in Middlemarch. And that’s the problem: the Casaubon Complex. It can’t be done. Not that London is somehow special, although it is very big and very old. But I could take a lifetime doing it and it still wouldn’t be finished. And what if I did finish it? A 5,000-page, multi-volume slab of what amounts to pub trivia; it would only fuel the fire. It would be on the Zaha Hadid coffee table in every penthouse in Docklands.’

He turned in his chair, away from me, towards the map, shoulders hunched, tense. ‘I squandered months, years.’

‘Is that what you’ve been doing since Night Traffic?’ I asked. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. As secret projects went, it was not what I expected, not very exciting, and not even going to happen.

‘No, no,’ Pierce said, looking back at me, scowling. ‘I stopped working on that ages ago. When Quin got involved. He came to one of my readings, for Murder Boards. Said he was a fan. Said he was working on a new mapping system for London, part map, part social network – this was Tamesis, but at the time they had a code name for it, Canny Valley. He wanted my input. Obviously, mapping, maps, I told him about my map. He loved it. He had this place swarming with Bunk staff, photographing, scanning, measuring, indexing, getting everything. Not just the psychopedia, some of the stuff I had gathered for Murder Boards too. Quin in the middle, sitting where you are now, laptop on his lap, issuing commands. Commands I didn’t even understand. Then they left. And they didn’t leave a trace. It was like Burning Man. But they did leave me a toy.’

Pierce leaped out of his seat, and the abrupt movement made me jump. He went over to one of the filing cabinets, opened the top drawer, and took out a tablet computer.

‘An interface for updating the map,’ Pierce said, returning to his armchair. He had switched on the tablet and handed it to me. ‘If I added anything, they wanted to know it.’

The tablet was showing the Bunk logo, cheerful italic sans-serif capitals pushing into the future. The many-pointed star around the B was spinning as the software loaded: a sight familiar to anyone who has used Tamesis, Roamero, Trenchr, or any of Bunk’s other apps. Then, a welcome screen: a picture of the wall-map with HI, OLIVER! In big, friendly letters over it. TOUCH ANYWHERE TO BEGIN. I touched the screen. A login box appeared.

WHOOPS! YOU DON’T HAVE PERMISSION TO DO THAT.

PLEASE VERIFY BUNKMATE I.D.

‘Yeah, it doesn’t work any more,’ Pierce said. ‘I’ve been locked out. I guess F.A.Q. doesn’t want me mucking around in Tamesis now that it’s live and everyone uses it. We had a bit of a falling-out and I don’t think he trusts me any more.’

This was news to me. When Quin had mentioned Pierce back when I interviewed him last summer, it was to name him an inspiration, collaborator and friend. ‘An agent of the true city,’ Quin called him. A couple of weeks ago he had suggested I interview the author, leaving no impression that the ardour had cooled.