He approached the door the boy had gone through. He knocked and the door opened, just a crack, showing nothing beyond but a face, not Chinese but darker, Hmong perhaps, or one of the Tai groupings, and it said, ‘What you want?’
‘To come in.’
He couldn’t see anything beyond the door but he could smell it. The man in the doorway said, ‘Forget it, mister. No place for you.’
Joe worked on a hunch. ‘I want to see Madam Seng.’
The face, disembodied, as if let loose from any mortal anchoring of flesh, sucked its teeth. ‘No Madam Seng here. You go.’
Joe fished in his pocket, came up with a note. ‘This refreshes your memory?’
The face smiled and, for just a moment, dropped the accent. ‘My memory is just fine as it is,’ the man said.
‘Too bad your manners aren’t,’ Joe said. He lunged for the face, but the man who owned it was faster, and the door slammed on Joe, almost catching his fingers. There was the loud sound of a key being turned in the lock.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Joe said; not without feeling.
the body in the library
——
He knocked hard on the door, but there was no reply, and he didn’t expect one. Passers-by stared at him. He stepped away from the door, glared at it, but it still wouldn’t open. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, which made him feel better, somehow. He glanced across the road at The Edwin Drood, thinking of a drink, but the dilapidated building glared back at him from its dark, stained windows, repelling the notion. Instead he walked down Little Newport, passing stalls selling incense, Buddha statues, posters of Sun Yat Sen, compasses, animal figures shaped in copper wire, cheap makeup, even cheaper perfume, past a door opening onto a stairwell where a hand-written sign said Miss Josette was available for French lessons upstairs, another for a Miss Bianca and Greek, past a dumpling restaurant, a stall where he could have had his name engraved on a grain of rice, and onto Charing Cross Road.
This time he turned right. As he passed the entrance to the underground, he avoided looking at it. He ran into the mass of people passing to and from Leicester Square, kept a hand on his pocket, waited patiently for the lights to change, crossed the road, passed Wyndham’s Theatre, passed Cecil Court with its row of rare book dealers, and went into the Charing Cross public lending library.
Joe had always liked libraries, though he could not remember having gone into one recently. There was something comforting about the intimate space, rows of books marking orderly borders, the only sound that of turning pages, whispered conversations and the dimmed noise of the traffic outside. He went to the reading corner and found the week’s newspapers draped neatly on wooden sticks, looking like an exhausted flock of albatrosses. He liberated a few and retreated to an empty desk by the wall.
Three days ago.
He found nothing on page one for any of the days.
Three days ago and it seemed like a lifetime.
Nothing on page two.
Somebody’s lifetime.
The late edition, three days ago. Page three. A Shoot-out in Soho.
He read through it. Unknown assailants fired shots outside the Red Lion pub in Soho earlier today, breaking glass and frightening customers. One woman was treated for minor cuts. There were no other casualties. ‘We are taking this very seriously,’ a spokesman for the police said, ‘and are following all available leads.’
No Mo. No mention of Joe lying there unconscious. Somehow, he hadn’t expected there to be.
Fuzzy Wuzzies, he thought. The word left a bad taste in his mouth. He thought – refugees. He wondered what leads the police had. Perhaps they were analysing samples of cigarette ash. He imagined them armed with round magnifying glasses, scattered around the city, backs hunched, searching for clues. He reached for his cigarettes, remembered you weren’t allowed to smoke in libraries. No clue for the police, then.
A different newspaper, this one a tabloid. The same story magnified, an opinion piece, an outraged tone, immigrants are to blame, government must increase control of remaining colonies, stronger powers of arrest demanded in the House of Commons. Lords against. How long can we let our children grow up in fear?
Joe looked around him. No one seemed afraid in the busy children’s section. They were drawing in crayons, leafing through bright-coloured books. He wondered what they were reading. He thought about Mike Longshott: the Osama Bin Laden Colouring Book. You could leave the beard page-white. Make the eyes sky-blue and empty.
Back to the broadsheet, the same news item reduced to page four in the next day’s morning issue. Look for it the next day too and it was gone, as if it had never happened. Goodbye Mo.
Even though he didn’t expect it in the paper, it riled him. Invisible people, he thought. Did someone, somewhere, mourn Mo’s passing? Did someone remember him, grieve for him, wish him back? Did he still exist, some parts of him, some fragments, his smell, his smile, the touch of his hand, his voice when he spoke, the way he cleaned his ears, did they still exist somewhere, secret inscriptions on somebody else’s mind?
He put down the paper. The desk before him was a mobile geography of off-blue ink and smudged paper. He had come to the library to find a body, and it wasn’t there. Nevertheless. He felt stubborn, like he had something to prove. A part of him was fighting it, telling him to leave. He didn’t. There was one place at least he knew he could still find Mo in.
The phone book.
an explorer in a silent film
——
When he approached again the Leicester Square tube station the crowds seemed to pull at him, and he had the irrational thought of fighting them. He pushed through the massed congregation instead and found himself at the entrance. Stairs led down underground. A beggar was sitting in the entranceway, slumped over a backpack, reading a paperback, a dog-food bowl by his feet with coins floating inside it. He raised his head when he felt Joe watching, and Joe got a glimpse of the book, and of course it was an Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante, the reading of choice for the homeless, and the beggar, a little more than a boy, Joe thought, said, ‘This is some heavy shit, bro.’
He had not felt the same way in Paris. Yet here, the thought of going underground was suffocating him. He tossed a coin into the beggar’s bowl. ‘Get some new reading material,’ he said. Then he went down the stairs.
He studied a map of the tube network, different coloured lines twisting and intersecting, and realised he had to take the line to King’s Cross and change. The picture on the map looked like spilled intestines. He bought a ticket and went through the barrier and descended again, deeper into the ground, and suddenly it was silent, and strangely peaceful. He waited for the train to arrive, watching the rats scuttling under the platform, in the tunnel. There were adverts on the walls for products he would never buy, or use. The train came and he boarded it. The doors closed with a soft whooshing sound, quite reassuring. He found a seat, occupied it. The walls of the tunnels as they passed were ghostly, the stations unexpected bursts of white light. At King’s Cross he got off and wandered through the station, a little lost, underground caverns opening above him: he had the sense of being an explorer in a silent film, wearing a pith helmet, breaking into a mummy’s tomb. Instead he got directions from a uniformed black woman who pointed him in the direction of the circle line, and he got on the train and counted stations.
At Edgware Road he got off. There were no escalators, and he climbed up the wide stairs and into sunlight, and he wondered if there was a curse on the pharaoh’s tomb and if so, when it might manifest itself. He walked down the station road a short while and then turned right on Edgware Road itself. He went under an overpass and the shops all seemed to change, and as he passed a couple of young people the man said, gesturing for the benefit of his blonde-haired girlfriend, ‘And this is what we call Little Cairo.’