I left the pub around nine p.m. and spent the next ten minutes standing outside a bus shelter on the opposite side of the road, happy to be outside despite the cold, my chin tucked deep into the zipped-up collar of my coat. A strong, wintry wind blew up from the river, gusts buffeting and breaking against me, full of the scent of rain.
Autumn had come early this year, the leaves turning quickly in the frosts. The change had taken me by surprise, as it usually did. I spent so much time inside the flat, and inside my own head, that I’d barely noticed summer running out of steam until I stepped out of my door that afternoon and found I had to go back for a jacket.
It felt good to be out in the world again, to be pushed about by the blustery wind. It felt good to be an anonymous small cog amongst the countless streetlamps, headlights, cars, passers-by, buildings, roads and noises of the city at nighttime. It felt good not to be talking to anyone, not to be thinking at all.
Is the world you live in every day made more from rocks and grass and trees, or from articles, certificates, records, files and letters?
I pushed Sophie’s question away, focusing my attention on things – on the hundreds of things made of matter, of chemical elements, of sound waves and light waves, standing or driving or strolling or rolling on all around me. Gloriously, none of it – in this city of millions of lives, and bricks, and lights – none of it had the slightest interest in me. None of it depended on my thoughts or ideas. The buildings and the traffic couldn’t care less if I replied to Andrew Black, or finished my Captain Scarlett script, or got a call from Imogen, or if there was a crossed line that sounded like my dead father talking nonsense from the answerphone. It didn’t matter. In the big, magnificent, busy scheme of things – it didn’t matter at all. I closed my eyes, felt the cold wind on my face and smiled deeply into the depths of my collar.
Minutes passed.
A light, ice-cold rain rolled in on the wind, stinging my cheeks and forehead. I didn’t mind at all. A group of teenagers passed by. I watched them weaving their noisy, flirty way off up the road. They were laughing and joking despite the worsening weather, happy and drunk, finding excuses to touch each other – shoving, tripping, fake pushes into the oncoming traffic. I thought about Imogen laughing, the way she’d suddenly leap on me in bed when the alarm went off, screaming think fast at the top of her voice. I remembered her breathless laughter and wild thrashing when I pinned her down and tickled her when we fought, and her hysterical giggling at a YouTube video of a dog called Fenton chasing a herd of deer. I saw her laughing until her eyes were bright and shiny and she couldn’t catch her breath to speak. Then – like an uninvited guest at a party – I saw Sophie’s bright and shiny eyes, her serious expression, saw her knuckles coming down on Andrew Black’s letter.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The knocks were slower and louder in memory, like a Victorian ghost story, like the Ghost of fucking Christmas Yet-to-Come.
Jesus, I thought.
Sometimes, my brain won’t let me have anything.
A little way up the street, one of the boys had picked up one of the girls and was running off through the rain with her – ‘Fuck off, Craig! Craig, fuck off, you fucking, fucking . . .’ she screamed, punching him but not really punching him, as the others trailed behind, laughing.
I smiled and dug my hands into my pockets.
He didn’t dance me off a cliff. He did that to you. That’s what I’d said to Sophie.
Fucking hell.
I felt the familiar fluttering in the back of my mind, the old memories stirring again. You could tell her, said their fat, furry bodies and the bat, bat, bat of their dry, leafy wings in the dark. You could tell her, you could tell her, you could tell her, you could tell her.
After all these years, they still hadn’t given up on their freedom.
I scribbled my fingers through my wet hair to shut them up.
Before meeting Sophie that day, I’d spent the afternoon touring the bookshops. In every single one, I’d picked a book that shared a shelf with Cupid’s Engine, pulled it out, then posted it over the top of the others, so that it dropped with a thunk into the dark, hidden space at the back of the shelf. I’d been doing this for years and usually I chose a Borges to take the fall, if one was available. I’d always thought that he, of all writers, wouldn’t mind it so very much. Anyway, with a single book removed like this, there’s more room on the shelf. I would use this room to create a book-sized gap between Cupid’s Engine and the next book along to the right. It’d become a ritual over time, I suppose. In every bookshop I went to, I’d make a book-sized space, a gap big enough for Andrew Black’s second novel. I don’t know why I started it. Maybe I thought that one of us – Andrew, me, my father – had to publish something. Time’s arrow had to keep making us a past, present and future, and as my father wouldn’t be writing anything else – oh, I don’t know. For years, I made those gaps in every bookshop all over London, even after I became sure that a second Andrew Black book would never come. Recently, I think I’ve come to understand that creating those spaces was less about the giving of room, and more about the recognition of a hole.
I stamped my feet to bring some warmth back and watched the teenagers disappearing into a bar some way up the road. I let out a long sigh that escaped as steam through my collar. Six years ago, Andrew Black sent Sophie Almonds over a cliff, and it was clear that she’d never forgive him for it. The sheer force of her reaction took me by surprise though. And what she’d said about my looking for reassurance from her, that took me by surprise too. Was I really looking for permission to contact him? I didn’t know. When I asked myself that question, I got nothing back but the vague mental image of wading through a patch of brambles. The brambles had no malicious intent as far as I could tell – no hint of Sophie’s raccoon trap – they were just brambles, but it was a dense and thorny tangle nonetheless. And once in, the image seemed to be saying, you might not find it so easy to get yourself back out.
I sucked air in through my collar and fixed my attention on the hypnotic, endless parade of headlights travelling along the road towards me. Before long, a bus rounded the corner at the far end of the street, and I joined the shuffling, rain-glittered queue forming to meet it.
o
Maybe I wasn’t ready to be back inside our empty little flat so soon, maybe I wanted to be out in the world of things a little while longer, or maybe I’d been half planning it all along. Whatever the reason, I got off the bus a couple of stops early that night and struck out on my own to walk the rest of the way home.
My route took me along the edge of Victoria Park, where the wind whipped up great shoals of fallen leaves and sent them tumbling and hissing in racing waves, swirling past my legs as I walked, then spiralling up in tornado spouts, up and up, under the streetlamps. On such a quiet and empty street, the noise was incredible.
As I pushed forward through the leaf storm, head down and blinking, I found myself thinking of a story that Sophie had told me a few months earlier. Almost every time I saw her, Sophie’s little black book would make an appearance, its pages holding the specifics of some new story, a new set of names, dates and technical terms that she’d keep referring back to while telling me something remarkable. Once, she told me about Johann Fust, the shady business partner of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. Apparently, Fust betrayed Gutenberg, got himself arrested for witchcraft, and became – according to some historians – the inspiration for Doctor Faustus. Another time, she told me how a man named Thomas Harvey stole Albert Einstein’s brain, kept it in a beer cooler for thirty years, and studied it by cutting bits off in his spare time. Harvey became drinking buddies with William Burroughs, and Burroughs liked to brag to friends that he could get hold of bits of Einstein’s brain any time he wanted to. There were lots of others