Now – 11th March
I didn’t ask his name.
It only strikes me as I’m walking across Vauxhall Bridge, needing the breeze that blows up off the river to sweep the sickroom smell of Ella’s bedsit out of my head. Maybe it’s best I don’t know. It will make the inevitable lying that bit easier.
I look down into the water. There’s a grizzled, grey-haired man walking along the bank, eyes fixed on the mud, prodding at it occasionally with his toe. This isn’t the right place for mudlarking, the bank too narrow, the water too high, but what do I know, anyway?
On the bus home I kept thinking about the people at Ella’s party that night; witnesses, all of them, all carrying their surveillance devices. There will be photographs strewn across social media and blogs already and he’ll be in some of them, if only in the background, in profile. When he’s found and the police realise he’s too well-groomed to have been homeless they’ll start trawling the party footage.
They’ll realise too that he should have been carrying a wallet and phone, but Ella took those before we dumped him and I suppose she disposed of them wisely. I tried to take them, but she accused me of treating her like a child and time was passing so I let her have her way.
Maybe the police will buy it as a robbery gone wrong. No reason to look at either of us if that’s the story.
They have enough reports on file for undesirables at Castle Rise that another one slipping inside under cover of the party is credible. Ella’s friends looked like easy pickings, even to me.
This is what we needed to talk about this afternoon. We should have been working through narratives we could have nudged the police towards. Instead we bitched and sniped at each other. At least she’s getting her head together, though. I need her to be solid.
The old man on the muddy bank drops into a crouch, holding on to his stick with one hand as he digs into the ground with a small trowel. I want desperately to know what he’s found. It’s almost a physical longing in me as I watch him straighten up, wipe the thing clean and examine it, before tucking it away in his pocket.
The urge to go down there sweeps over me. I want to know this man’s life, what draws him to the river and forces his hands into the silt. I want to know what he finds there and where he spirits his treasures home to. An irrational part of me wants him to wipe me clean and tuck me safely away.
I step back into the foot flow and follow the southbound bodies across the bridge.
Ahead of me the grotesque ziggurats of St George Wharf fist the sky and I feel a little stab of nostalgia for Camden, with its rows of dignified townhouses and old corner boozers, an area that still looks like people actually live in it, eat and drink and buy ordinary, everyday things. This is real estate as unreal as plots of land on the moon, square footage most owners will never walk across.
It’s earlier than it feels, the end of lunch hour, but the bars and restaurants along the river path are busy, full of people who aren’t tied to their desks with a homemade salad. I don’t see a single suit among them and it makes me think how much easier it was to tell the ruling class from the rest of us when they all wore Savile Row. Now the entry-level nobody wears the suit and the billionaire dresses like a student and it’s impossible to stake your claim for individuality with anything as basic as your attire.
Everything is harder for this generation.
At the entrance to Castle Rise the very black tarmac is covered in clods of mud and smeared tracks from whatever heavy machinery has been in and out today. Two hefty men in full body suits, high-viz jackets, hard hats and safety glasses are shovelling the dirt into wheelbarrows. I wonder what they need so much protecting from, out there on the open road, before I catch myself. Better they’re safe, I think, remembering the man my dad worked with, who lost his hand because the piece of machinery he operated didn’t have a guard on it. One second’s inattention, that was all it took. No more evenings at the snooker hall or digging his allotment.
Something’s different on-site. There are workers swarming the place, more than usual it seems, and as I get further in, closer to the newest block, I realise they’re tidying the place up, brushing down pathways, clearing away swathes of opaque plastic and lengths of rope, and all the rubbish the wind blows in.
They must be due a visit from the bosses tomorrow. That or someone they consider a very serious buyer, the kind who acquires property by the tower, rather than in mere blocks of two or three.
It would be a good time for us to mount an action.
A call to arms tonight might gather a few dozen supporters. Enough for coverage in the local press, and if we could provoke someone into a rash reaction – one of the executives or the drivers or site security – we might get useful video.
My heart isn’t in it, though.
And the last thing we should be doing right now is drawing attention to ourselves.
Callum is coming out of the main door as I approach, holding a clutch of plastic carrier bags, the cheap, thin kind you can see right through, and I know what’s in them by the greyish-brown bulk. More rats.
He holds them up. ‘Big as fucking cats. Four of them.’
I wrinkle my nose.
‘Do you want to see them?’ he asks.
‘You sick bastard.’
‘I thought you were an artist. Aren’t you creative types into death and decay and that sort of thing?’ He lifts the lid of one of the big bins and drops the dead animals inside, wipes his hands on the back of his jeans. ‘Must be the time of year, they’re coming in from the cold.’ He looks up at the empty sky, like he can read the air. ‘Do you want me to put some traps down in your place?’
‘Have you got enough?’
‘Four more than I had this morning, aye.’ He opens the door for me and we go into the lobby. ‘Or I’ve got poison. But you don’t want poison really, because they take themselves off to die and then you never know where they’re going to wind up. Might find one rotting round the back of your fridge or something. Reckon I’ve got one in my place. Reeks in there.’
My heartbeat stutters and skips at the thought of Ella’s nameless dead man rotting in the lift shaft. I slip my arm through Callum’s for support and resolutely avoid looking at the pair of lifts as we pass them. He’s in the one on the left and I’m sure I can smell him now too, even though I noticed nothing this morning when I went out. The power of suggestion is working on me and I hate it. This is what happens when you’re tired and scared. The fear takes a stronger hold on you.
Is he beginning to ooze? Are his fluids pooling under him, spreading out and spilling into the grooves of the lift’s ceiling, looking for places to settle, little cracks and holes to drip through?
How long before his death becomes something audible?
‘We need to find the nest,’ Callum says, taking the stairs slowly, at what he thinks is my pace.
Callum searching the building is the last thing I want.
‘You won’t stop them coming,’ I tell him, finding my voice again at last. ‘Rats are part of city living. Don’t waste your time. Let’s just try and keep them out of our flats, okay? They can have the rest of the building if they want it.’
On the half-landing he stops, his face showing concern. ‘You’re giving up.’
I grip the handrail. I don’t want to argue with him, don’t even want to talk to him right now, I just want to go into my flat and close the door and sit in silence for a while.
‘Cal, there are probably hundreds of rats in here. You could wipe them all out today and a bunch more would come in tomorrow. This isn’t worth you messing about with.’
‘You won’t say that when you wake up with one on your bed.’ He’s getting agitated, his left leg beginning to jiggle, and I’ve seen this before, know he’s on the cusp of going into one of his odd moods. I don’t have the energy to deal with this on top of everything else.
‘Okay, look, can you come up later on and put some traps down for me?’
‘You need to keep them out,’ he says, eyes bulging.
‘Will you bring the traps up?’ I ask, trying to get him to focus.
He nods. ‘Yeah, yeah, I better go and do the ones for Derek and Jenny first. He caught one yesterday, you know, found it in the bathroom when he got up for a slash. He goes four or five times a night, the poor old fucker, prostate, he keeps sayin’ I should get mine checked, but ahm no’ old enough far tha’.’
He’s slipping back into the accent he’s largely lost, his posture changing in front of my eyes, becoming slouched and sly, his head tilting at a new and wrong angle.
I can’t deal with him as well.
‘I’m going to have a kip,’ I say, pushing past him up the stairs. ‘Give me a couple of hours, yeah? I’m knackered.’
Gratefully I shut the door and lean back against it for a moment, close my eyes, wishing I was somewhere else, far from here. I don’t need a five-star hotel or a sandy beach, just a bolthole would do, any place beyond human contact, freed from worrying about other people, the living and the dead.
But that isn’t how it works.
I retrieve my laptop from its hiding place, switch it on and make a cup of strong coffee loaded with sugar. As tired as I feel, sleep won’t help.
I start with Twitter, find plenty of photographs from the party sent to Ella and a few to me as well, selfies I don’t remember agreeing to but I look drunk enough to have agreed to anything, beaming into high-held phones and mercifully filtered afterwards.
It’s the backgrounds and group shots I’m interested in, though. I blow up each photograph, work methodically, moving and zooming, looking for him among the crowd. I search for his profile, the knit of his hat, the shape of his beard, that army green flak jacket, which wasn’t heavy enough for the cold weather.
Picture after picture of laughter and smiles and frozen conversations, beer bottles poised an inch from parted lips and heads tipped back to empty plastic wine glasses, the odd blue dots of e-cigarettes floating.
There he is.
There they are.
Ella and her dead man standing close together.
She’s lied to me again.