It was the bookshop we found on the right as you leave Willesden Green station, where the slope of the high road begins to steepen. It is cheap and capricious. We were seduced by the immaculate edition of
Voyage to Arcturus
in the window, and entertained by the juxtaposition of Kierkegaard and Paul Daniels.
If I could have chosen where to be when London wound down, it would be in that zone, where the city first notices the sky, at the summit of a hill, surrounded by low streets that let sound escape into the clouds. Kilburn, ground zero, just over the thin bulwark of backstreets. Perhaps you had a presentiment that morning, Jake, and when the breakdown came you were ready, waiting in that perfect vantage point.
It's dark out here on the roof. It's been dark for some time. But I can see enough to write, from deflected streetlamps and maybe from the moon, too. The air is buffeted more and more by the passage of those hungry, unseen things, but I'm not afraid.
I can hear them fighting and nesting and courting in the Gaumont's tower, jutting over my neighbours' houses and shops. A little while ago there was a dry sputter and crack, and a constant low buzz now underpins the night sounds.
I am attuned to that sound. The murmur of neon.
The Gaumont State is blaring its message to me across the short, deserted distance of pavement.
I am being called to over the organic nonsense of the flyers and the more constant whispers of young rubbish in the wind.
I've heard it all before, I've read it before. I'm taking my own sweet fucking time over this letter. Then I'll see what's being asked of me.
I took the tube to Willesden.
I wince to think of it now, I jerk my mind away. I wasn't to know. It was safer then, anyway, in those early days.
I've crept into the underground stations in the months since, to check the whispered rumours for myself. I've seen the trains go by with the howling faces in all the windows, too fast to see clearly, something like dogs, I've seen trains burning with cold light, long slow trains empty except for one dead-looking woman staring directly into my eyes, en route Jesus Christ knows where.
It was nothing like that back then, not nearly so dramatic. It was too cold and too quiet, I remember. And I am not sure the train had a driver. But it let me go. I came to Willesden and as I stepped out onto that uncovered station I could feel something different about the world. There was a very slow epiphany building up under the skin of the night, oozing out of the city's pores, breaking over me ponderously.
I climbed the stairs out of that underworld.
When Orpheus looked back, Jake, it wasn't stupid. The myths are slanderous. It wasn't the sudden fear that she wasn't there that turned his head. It was the threatening light from above. What if it was not the same, out there? It's so human, to turn and catch the eye of your companion on a return journey, to share a moment's terror that everything you know will have changed.
There was no one I could look back to, and everything I knew had changed. Pushing open the doors onto the street was the bravest thing I have ever done.
I stood on the high railway bridge. I was hit by wind. Across the street before me, emerging from below the bridge, below my feet, the elegant curved gorge containing the tracks stretched away. Steep banks of scrub contained it, squat bushes and weeds that tugged petulantly at the scree.
There was very little sound. I could see only a few stars. I felt as if the whole sky scudded above me.
The shop was dark but the door opened. It was a relief to walk into still air.
We're fucking shut, somebody said. He sounded despairing.
I wound between the piles of strong-smelling books towards the till. I could see shapes and shades in this halfhearted darkness. An old bald man was slumped on a stool behind the desk.
I don't want to buy anything, I said. I'm looking for someone. I described you.
Look around, mate, he said. Fucking empty. What do you want from me? I ain't seen your friend or no one.
Very fast, I felt hysteria. I swallowed back a desire to run to all the corners of the shop and throw piles of books around, shouting your name, to see where you were hiding. As I fought to speak the old man took some kind of contemptuous pity on me and sighed.
One like the one you said, he's been drifting in and out of here all day. Last here about two hours ago. If he comes in again he can fuck off, I'm closed.
How do you tell the incredible? It seems odd, what strikes us as unbelievable.
I had learnt, very fast, that the rules of the city had imploded, that sense had broken down, that London was a broken and bloodied thing. I accepted that with numbness, only a very little astonished. But I was nearly sick with disbelief and relief to walk out of that shop and see you waiting.
You stood under the eaves of a newsagent's, half in shadow, an unmistakable silhouette.
If I stop for a moment it is all so prosaic, so obvious, that you would wait for me there. When I saw you, though, it was like a miracle.
Did you shudder with relief to see me?
Could you believe your eyes?
It's difficult to remember that, right now, when I am up here on the roof surrounded by the hungry flapping things that I cannot see, without you.
We met in the darkness that dripped off the front of the building's facade. I hugged you tight.
Man . . . I said.
Hey, you said.
We stood like fools, silent for a while.
Do you understand what's happened? I said.
You shook your head, shrugged and waved your arms vaguely to encompass everything around us.
I don't want to go home, you said. I felt it go. I was in the shop and I was looking at this weird little book and I felt something huge just . . . slip away.
I was asleep in a train. I woke up and found it like this.
What happens now?
I thought you could tell me that. Didn't you all get issued . . . rule books or something? I thought I was punished for being asleep, that's why I didn't understand anything.
No, man. You know, loads of people have just . . . disappeared, I swear. When I was in the shop I looked up just before, and there were four other people in there. And then I looked up just after and there was only me and this other guy, and the shopkeeper.
Smiles, I said. The cheerful one.
Yeah.
We stood silent again.
This is the way the world ends, you said.
Not with a bang, I continued, but with a . . .
We thought.
. . . with a long-drawn-out breath? you suggested.
I told you that I was walking home, to Kilburn, just over the way. Come with me, I said. Stay at mine.
You were hesitant.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, I'm sure it was my fault. It was just the old argument, about you not coming to see me enough, not staying longer, translated into the world's new language. Before the fall you would have made despairing noises about having to be somewhere, hint darkly at commitments you could not explain, and disappear. But in this new time those excuses became absurd. And the energy you put into your evasions was channelled elsewhere, into the city, which was hungry like a newborn thing, which sucked up your anxiety, assimilated your inchoate desires and fulfilled them.
At least walk with me over to Kilburn, I said. We can work out what we're going to do when we're there.
Yeah, sure man, I just want to . . .
I couldn't make out what it was you wanted to do.
You were distracted, you kept looking over my shoulder at something, and I was looking around quickly, to see what was intriguing you. There was a sense of interruptions, though the night was as silent as ever, and I kept glancing back at you, and I tugged at you to make you come with me and you said Sure sure man, just one second, I want to see something and you began to cross the road with your eyes fixed on something out of my sight and I was getting angry and then I lost my grip on you because I could hear a sound from over the brow of the railway bridge, from the east. I could hear the sound of hooves.
My arm was still outstretched but I was no longer touching you, and I turned my head towards the sound, I stared at the hill's apex. Time stretched out. The darkness just above the pavement was split by a wicked splinter that grew and grew as something long and thin and sharp appeared over the hill. It sliced the night at an acute angle. A clenched, gloved fist rose below it, clutching it tight. It was a sword, a splendid ceremonial sabre. The sword pulled a man after it, a man in a strange helmet, a long silver spike adorning his head and a white plume streaming out in his wake.
He rode in an insane gallop but I felt no urgency as he burst into view, and I had all the time I needed to see him, to study his clothes, his weapon, his face, to recognise him.
He was one of the horsemen who stands outside the palace . . . Are they called the household cavalry? With the hair draped from their helmet spike in an immaculate cone, their mirrored boots, their bored horses. They are legendary for their immobility. It is a tourist game to stare at them and mock them and stroke their mounts' noses, while no flicker of human emotion defiles their duty.
As this man's head broke the brow of the hill I saw that his face was creased and cracked into an astonishing warrior's expression, the snarl of an attacking dog, idiot bravery such as must have been painted across the faces of the Light Brigade.
His red jacket was unbuttoned and it flickered around him like a flame. He half stood in his stirrups, crouched low, grasping the reins in his left hand, his right held high with that beautiful blade spitting light into my face. His horse rose into view, its veins huge under its white skin, its eyes rolling in an insane equine leer, drool spurting from behind its bared teeth, its hooves hammering down the deserted tarmac of the Willesden railway bridge.
The soldier was silent, though his mouth was open as if he shouted his valedictory roar. He rode on, holding his sword high, bearing down on some imaginary enemy, pushing his horse on towards Dollis Hill, down past the Japanese restaurant and the record shop and the bike dealer and the vacuum-cleaner repair man.
The soldier swept past me, stunning and stupid and misplaced. He rode between us, Jake, so close that beads of sweat hit me.
I can picture him on duty as the cataclysm fell, sensing the change in the order of things and knowing that the queen he was sworn to protect was gone or irrelevant, that his pomp meant nothing in the decaying city, that he had been trained into absurdity and uselessness, and deciding that he would be a soldier, just once. I see him clicking his heels and cantering through the confused streets of central London, picking up speed as the anger at his redundancy grows, giving the horse its head, letting it run, feeling it shy at the strange new residents of the skies, until it was galloping hard and he draws his weapon to prove that he can fight, and careers off into the flatlands of northwest London, to disappear or die.
I watched his passing, dumbstruck and in awe.
And when I turned back, of course, Jake, when I turned back, you had gone.
The frantic searches, the shouts and the misery you can imagine for yourself. I have little enough dignity as it is. It went on for a long time, though I had known as I raised my head to your lack that I would not find you.
Eventually I found my way to Kilburn, and as I walked past the Gaumont State I looked up and saw that neon message, garish and banal and terrifying. The message that is there still, the request that tonight, finally, after so many months, I think I will acquiesce to.
I don't know where you went, how you were disappeared. I don't know how I lost you. But after all my searching for a hiding place, that message on the face of the Gaumont cannot be coincidence. Although it might, of course, be misleading. It might be a game. It might be a trap.
But I'm sick of waiting, you know? I'm sick of wondering. So let me tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to finish this letter, soon now, and I'm going to put it in an envelope with your name on it. I'll put a stamp on it (it can't hurt), and I'll venture out into the streetâyes, even in the heart of the nightâand I'll put it in the post box.
From there, I don't know what'll happen. I don't know the rules of this place at all. It might be eaten by some presence inside the box, it might be spat back out at me, or reproduced a hundred times and pasted on the windows of all the warehouses in London. I'm hoping that it will find its way to you. Maybe it'll appear in your pocket, or at the door of your place, wherever you are now. If you are anywhere, that is.
It's a forlorn hope. I admit that. Of course I admit that.
But I had you, and I lost you again. I'm marking your passing. And I am marking mine.
Because you see, Jake, then I'm going to walk the short distance up Kilburn High Road to the Gaumont State, and I'm going to read its plea, its command, and this time I think I will obey.
The Gaumont State is a beacon, a lighthouse, a warning we missed. It jags impassive into the clouds as the city founders on rocks. Its filthy cream walls are daubed with a hundred markings; human, animal, meteorological, and other. In its squat square tower lies the huge nest of rags or bones or hair where the flying things bicker and brood. The Gaumont State exerts its own gravity over the changed city. I suspect all compasses point to it now. I suspect that in the magnificent entrance, framed by those wide stairs, something is waiting. The Gaumont State is the generator of the dirty entropy that has taken London. I suspect there are many fascinating things inside.
I'm going to let it reel me in.
Those two huge pinkish-red signs that heralded the Gaumont's rebirth as a temple of cheap gamesâthey have changed. They are selective. They ignore certain letters, and have done ever since that night. Both now scorn the initial B. The sign on the left illuminates only the second and third letters, that on the right only the fourth and fifth. The signs flicker on and off in antiphase, taking turns to blaze their gaudy challenge.