Night buses were failing to arrive in threes on every conceivable point along the Holloway Road. An icy cold blew in from Cassiopeia in a Ptolemaic sky of failing streetlamps.
“The average is actually two,” said Sally. “A statistician did some work on it, and they are supposed to clump in threes.”
“I think he actually said 2.2, so we’re getting some fractional packets bundled together,” I explained. “It’s like the cosmic background; it’s lumpy and uneven.”
Sally accepted this with bad grace and lit up a Rothmans. Where probability was working against us, it was, she often felt, best to resort to carcinogenic magic. The name’s Walton. My name that is. Felix Walton. That winter I was working on a case, and as is my habit under such circumstances, I was garbed in a Crombie denoting my rank of investigator.
“What’s a turnpike anyway?” said Sally.
“You know what a tollbooth is?”
“Uh huh. You know I don’t like Wood Green?”
“You’ve told me.”
“Is that where Waldeck Road is?”
“We’re not going to Waldeck Road. We’ve already been there.”
“You do know that a Moebius strip is just a twist of paper, don’t you? It’s not some kind of accumulator.”
“That’ll be our bus.”
It’s one of those corner houses. The windows make no sense. Two were removed and filled in to avoid a long forgotten tax regime, and two thirds of the height of the façade is pebble dashed with white noise. Yellow light spills out onto the street along with revelers undressed against the November cold. Upon entering, Sally joins the toilet queue that already snakes down two flights of stairs.
“You should have taken a pee in the pub,” I tell her.
“Who’s peeing? They’ve most likely got a bucket-bong set up In the bath.”
I leave her to it and shouldered my way through the crowded corridors in search of my quarry. I have an instinct for this. A roadmap. The gravity thickens towards the basement as the bass daubs around a large space splattered with strobe lights. The faces of people I had been in college with, ex-boyfriends and professors, are revealed momentarily in their skeletal forms.
Something gives in the music and the crowd swells into a mosh pit. A man could die in that ocean. Is there someone on the decks? The smoke obscures the far end of the room. Not dry ice. My fight or flight is triggered and I try to push back against the party. There’s no reason to believe he’s down here in any case.
Someone grabs my arm, and I feel hot breath against my ear.
“Walton! The fuck? What you doing north of the river?”
“Jonesie! Long time no see!”
Soma Jones is as close to me as the Paleozoic. He clutches a can of Żywiec in his other hand. His pupils are Druilletesque and he is still wearing his overcoat in spite of the tropical climate down here. I miss his next two sentences as the DJ drops something dense into the mix. The crowd has unaccountably calmed as the sounds have become more hectic. He leads me deeper in, further from the door that leads back up to the ground floor. How close to the bathroom is Sally by now? I strain back against his tug, but he grasps my hand tighter and gives my arm a yank that almost brings me to the floor. Smashed glass and cigarette butts, a cushion with an owl motif.
“Through here!” He opens a door labelled Staff Only on some far wall and we are through.
It is always a mistake to take Wassgotterspeck at his word. He has a beard these days and the aspect of a Hollywood auteur. His hieratic instruments are a cheap corner shop cigar in one hand and a pocket calculator in the other. He is spread across three seats of a sofa that is the colour of long neglect, in spite of his posture which is upright and with his legs spread like a samurai.
“Pay no attention to my form!” he reminds Soma Jones, as he draws our attention to the cardboard boxes that are scattered, without apparent order, from here into the chthonic darkness. He chuckles to observe my curiosity. “A former tenant tunneled all of this from the London clay. It’s a wonder that he didn’t bring the whole pile down on himself. He paid no rent during that whole period. Indeed I had new tenants in the house and had filed a report with the police that he had vanished.”
“You’re nothing but heart,” says Soma Jones.
“Not this current crowd, you know? They’re three guys who are studying social sciences at the Polyversity. One of them has moved his girlfriend in. She’s not out of school yet. I’ve got someone keeping an eye on her mum. She works for the NHS…”
“Mr Walton already knows that. He’s your someone on that case,” says Soma Jones.
“Are you indeed? Nice to finally meet In person.”
“I’m not,” I remind them both, “I’m not strictly speaking a person. I’m the narrator.”
“So you are,” says Wassgotterspeck. “Then again, our friend Soma Jones here is not by nature consistent either.”
Soma Jones gives this little more than a shrug. Wassgotterspeck rises from the sofa. He appropriates the whole of the space. He strides towards us with tectonic ease, knowing that his merely presence will force the issue to a head.
Abruptly, with a leap quite out of keeping with his characteristic slouch, Soma Jones arches out one boot at Wassgotterspeck’s hand and kicks the calculator from his grasp. The behemoth registers the loss of his instrument with a low bellow, and turns to follow its trajectory out into the darkness, where Soma Jones is already fast-forwarding across the plain of cardboard boxes, upending them to spill their contents across the ground.
“On that, you cunt!” he yells from some far cavern.
Each and every box was filled with a hundred pocket calculators. Four by five by five. Each pocket calculator was identical to the instrument that Wassgotterspeck had only seconds ago held in his enormous hand.
He turns his attention back to me. “Find my Casio!”
“It’s like a needle in a…”
“Be the magnet!”
By the time I caught up with Sally she had met the bucket-bong. She was gurning threateningly at a lad with a shaved-head who insisted on the fairness of the queue. A fake rasta had attempted to reason with her, but had found it difficult to argue with a woman. He took this as an ethical point in his favour and it allowed him to play down his primal fear of her absolute ferocity.
“Ms. Kitchener!” I called, “we have a problem.”
“Nah, mate!” she grinned, “I’m mellow. Not a problem in the world.”
“The emperor has lost his orb.”
“I think you’ve lost you orb.”
“Not everything is a metaphor, Sally.”
The lad with the shaved-head briefly tried to contend this point, until I showed him my badge.
Wassgotterspeck had gone by the time we came through the Staff Only door. Sally reached down and picked up a pocket calculator from the floor. “This one!”
“Why this one?”
“Why not?”
She took a few steps. “This one!”
I became uncertain why I felt that Sally would be any better at this than me.
“Why are we doing this?” she gave a sudden flash of lucidity.
“I’m in Wassgotterspeck’s pocket.”
She nodded at that. “This one!”
I had been there on that fatal night. Of that they had made sure. I had been sitting in a Ford Capri the colour of a sucked cough sweet on the other side of the street. The Capri couldn’t have driven away if I had wanted to; the engine had been removed. That, they felt, had been an important point in the scene setting exercise. They had spent weeks establishing the pizzeria, down to the shabby, laminated menus and the horrible mosaic tiles in the bathroom. The devil, they say, is in the details.
The assassin had been set up with an ostensible motive. Soma Jones would recognize her and be put off his stride sufficiently to prompt him to transform. Instinctively. If he did not transform, then the assassin would be carrying the means to inflict a transformation upon him. In my line of work I’d only seen an asci-iser once before. Nasty pieces of work: the grip and chassis were formed from vintage Lego wrapped in Woolworth’s sticky tape. In the case of this one, I couldn’t say where the brass bell of the muzzle had originated. I only saw it for a moment as she raised it to his face.
“Shift, Jonesie! Fucking shift!” I hissed unheard in the Capri. Jackson, who had been charged with keeping a watch on me didn’t flinch. He carried on loading coffee and doughnut into his face. Soma Jones wasn’t his concern. Who was watching Jackson, and who was watching them? It was impossible to say what layer of the onion any of this was happening on.
By four in the morning most of the crowd who could still walk had already left. Sofas and carpets were littered with spilled ashtrays, the dying, and the former contents of their stomachs. The tenants were mostly tucked away under duvets, either sleeping or shivering toxins out of their nervous systems. The girlfriend who had recently moved into the flat, was in Leytonstone with a psychology graduate who knew some guys in an EBM band.
Sally turned over the Casio in her hands. The case was half-split and there was a bruise to the plastic from where Soma Jones’s boot had struck. She sniffed it. “Does that smell like Wassgotterspeck?”
“I have no idea. This is the first time I’ve met him.”
She handed the calculator to me. I tried the power button. Nothing.
Two weeks later the house was emptied. The tenants had been accommodated elsewhere and the furniture had been removed. The wallpaper had been stripped from the walls and the carpets had been ripped up from the floors to reveal the wooden boards beneath. They were sanded-down almost white and the walls were painted regulation magnolia. Even the pebble-dash had been removed. Something that the contractors had insisted was impossible until they had been offered the unprecedented rate of pay that makes miracles occur.
I was reading the local paper in the kitchen when Soma Jones strode into the room. All of the windows were open and fresh, cold air and a winter sun filled the room. He gave the unused fittings for gas and water a glance before noting the Casio sitting on the wide window sill.
“They did a good job with the place,” he said.
Cigar smoke preceded Wassgotterspeck into the room. “We were hoping you could sign the contract today.” He handed him a Manilla envelope of A4. “You’ll want to read the terms, of course.”
Soma Jones handed the envelope to me.
Wassgotterspeck squinted. “Is this really how you want to do this?”
Soma Jones smiled and strode back out of the kitchen. There was a black Citroen waiting outside. Sally waved from the driver’s seat.
I didn’t see Wassgotterspeck all week. He left the keys with me, and I installed myself at The Duchess of Landsdown at the top of the road. It was one of those pubs where they had cleared out everything but the dark wood of the original bar. The tall windows let in a lot of white light and the silhouettes of bare trees. They served the usual bar food in there and I developed a taste for Theakston’s to the extent that the landlord didn’t even need me to ask for The Usual.
It was two days before I opened the envelope. It hadn’t been gummed down. That much seemed obvious. The middle sheaf of pages were the usual impenetrable legalese, but the first page was clear enough: the address, the owner’s details and the tenant’s. And there it was: Mr Saklas Jahweh. That was the prospective tenant. I turned to the bottom of the last page: spaces for the owner and tenant to sign and date the form. One witness each.
Who was being set up here? I had been manoeuvered into a position where I would watch this farce with the pocket calculators play out at the party. Was Sally in on this too? She had found the Casio too easily, it seemed to me. I put all of the pages back into the envelope and ordered a steak and kidney pie from the bar.
I had bought a camp bed from the Army and Navy Store on the company account. I set it up in the highest room in the house to avoid the glare of the streetlights. Curtains were impossible without curtain rails and these had of course been thoughtfully removed from the place. I had aired the upper floors for days. The lower parts of the house I had kept closed since the standoff in the kitchen, so as to avoid the attention of burglars, potential squatters and psychogeographers. In spite of this the house still smelled of fresh paint and stripped pine. Johoba Avenue was quiet enough, although you could always hear traffic on Green Lanes at any time of the day or night.
Wassgotterspeck had thoughtfully set up mail forwarding with the Post Office for the previous tenants, and the only contact the house had with the outside world was through the local paper. There wasn’t much to read it that, but I took it to the pub with me to calculate the magic squares of the Sudoku for an hour or so in the afternoons.
There was good enough connectivity everywhere but the basement. I scrolled past Soma Jones and Sally in my contacts several times a day before returning the phone to my pocket. Sometimes during an after dinner doze Sally would wink at me from the driver’s seat of the Citroen. Usually it was Soma Jones climbing into the passenger’s seat but sometimes it was Wassgotterspeck or sometimes it was me. Other times I was sitting in the driver’s seat while Jackson loaded endless doughnuts and coffee into his mouth.
On the fourth day a pizza flyer was put through the letterbox. The boy who posted it half-ran, frightened as I gazed at him through the bay window of the living room.
By the weekend I had settled into a routine between the house and the Duchess of Landsdown. It was on only leaving for a lunchtime pie that I noticed a feature of the house I had never seen before; a tower on the corner of Johoba Avenue and Pinwheel Street. The reason I had never seen it before was that it hadn’t been there. There had been no time during my excursions to the pub to erect this extension, and I’m certain that I would have noticed its farcical conical summit.
I turned on my heel, only by inches avoiding the taxi who had not been able to anticipate my sudden change of plan. The stairs spiraled up the tower, on many turns there was little headroom and I had to crouch to continue. It would be impossible for Wassgotterspeck to climb up here. At the top was a small carpeted landing with a window that looked out at the opposite corner house: a crest dated 1882. The only other thing up here was a coaxial socket in the wall for a television. It had started to rain a little outside.
When I came down I found that I had left the front door wide open. Several pizza flyers, all from the same place as the first had been left in the hallway. I checked up and down the street, but there was no sign of the delivery boy. The floorboards around the door had become muddy with my comings and goings. A few leaves had drifted inside. I went out to the pub closing the door carefully.
At the Duchess of Landsdown someone was setting up a mic and a PA for a pub quiz later in the day. I barely had time to catch the landlord’s eye when someone grabbed my arm.
“So how are you settling in, Felix?” Sally escorted me to the bar where a pint of Theakston’s was already waiting. “I’ll have what he’s having!”
“Where have you been?”
“Uh, in the real world? What sort of question is that?”
“Sorry, it’s been a strange week. Do you remember if the house had a tower on the corner?”
“What house?”
“The Jojoba house. Where they had the party.”
Sally accepted her Theakston’s from the bar and turned to give me a theatrical wink. “How would I remember a thing like that?” I remembered her in the bathroom. Defending the bucket-bong from a queue of undergraduates. How I’d managed to extract her from that situation, I’d never know.
“Yeah, that thing they say about the nineties being the sixties upside down. Are you staying for the quiz?”
“I might stay and watch. I’m not good with questions, you know?”
In the end our table won. Two Irish lads, who Sally got talking with, were good with the football questions. I wasn’t much good for much other that old TV cop shows. The landlord gave us an envelope containing forty quid in Luncheon Vouchers. We shared them out equally between the team.
“Who’s the stern-looking guy on the money?” asked Ardal, the older of the two lads.
“Wassgotterspeck,” I told him. “I met him a couple of times.”
“You must be pretty high and mighty,” said Cathal. “Friends in high places and all that.”
“I’ve never been Up There,” I told him.
“I’m not practicing either,” said Cathal.
“Practicing what?” said Sally.
“He doesn’t go to church is what he means,” said Ardal. “I did my communion, got confirmed and all that. Used to be able to recite the Nicene Creed too. Sticks in my throat these days.”
Cathal noticing that his friend’s glass was empty said, “I’ll get you another one. Anyone else need anything.”
“Yes,” said Sally. “Yes, I need you to sit back down.” She leaned in towards him. At first he leaned in as well, until she grabbed the back of his head which set up a struggle. Ardal stood and stepped back as Sally and Cathal’s chairs went over together rocking the table at an angle sufficient to spill glasses onto the carpet. Soma Jones kicked away from her as Sally held the mask of Cathal’s face aloft for all the pub to see.
“The fuck, Sally!” Soma Jones stood up brushing beer off his jacket.
“Where did you learn so much about footie, Soma Jones?” Sally flung the mask onto the bar. “Or should I say Saklas Jahweh?”
Ardal backed away. “I’ll phone in the week. I’ll…” he shook his head, “I’ll not want to be paid in Luncheon Vouchers.”
I didn’t go back to the Jojoba house after that. I left the keys with the company and handed in my licence. I knew I’d probably never find work as a narrator in this town again. Then again, was it worth my peace of mind? And all of this only comes to mind because of something I found in the RNLI Shop on Holloway Road last week. I guess you probably know what it was. This one worked though. As soon as I thumbed on the power, up it came on the screen in red LED characters: 0.7734. I turned it upside down. I guessed that soon I’d find my face on money of my own.