Joe: ‘I am investigating a murder.’

Madam Seng smiled with her mouth. ‘Please, sit down,’ she said. There was an empty berth beside the projector, facing the far wall. Madam Seng fluffed a pillow and gestured for Joe to sit. He sat down gratefully, his limbs heavy. Madam Seng perched beside him.

Scene: a young woman bursts out crying. A man sits down beside her and looks on in helplessness.

Fade out.

Madam Seng: ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’

The opium smell, strong in the room. Joe blinked; it seemed to take forever for his eyes to close and open.

Joe: ‘You keep cropping up.’

Madam Seng: ‘Like a bad penny?’

Scene: a bat fluttering against a broken window pane. A shutter bangs in the wind.

Joe: ‘Like a question mark.’

Madam Seng smiled; this time it reached her eyes. ‘I have been taught they should be used sparingly.’

Scene: two figures coming down a grand staircase. One is a man. He carries a lamp, held high before his face. He wears a black beaver hat and his face is deathly white and grotesque. There is something unearthly about his appearance. The woman beside him is similarly pale. As they come down the stairs the man in the beaver hat hands the lamp to the woman. At the foot of the stairs they separate.

Joe blinked again; it took his eyes longer to open this time. ‘The opium,’ he said. Madam Seng nodded beside him. ‘It is both a blessing and a curse,’ she said. ‘Rest.’ She put her hand on his brow. Her hand was cool. She smoothed back his hair, gently. ‘It is a door one should not open lightly.’

‘Are you a Snake Head?’ Joe said. Chinese expression: a people’s smuggler. Madam Seng shook her head. ‘Not in that context,’ she said.

What context?

Scene: two men in a library, talking.

Title: You mean a ghost?

‘Rest,’ Madam Seng said again. ‘You should not have come but now you’re here.’

Somehow the words seemed to hold a deeper meaning for Joe. He raised his hand and it was like lifting a tremendously heavy weight from the depths of the sea. When he touched his eyes they were covered in saltwater.

Title: Not a ghost. Worse –

Joe’s arm dropped back to his side. Dimly, he felt himself sinking, the sea claiming him. Dimly, he heard Madam Seng whispering soothing words in a language he didn’t know nor cared to. She eased him down on the berth, arranged a pillow under his head, lifted up his feet.

Title: MIDNIGHT.

Fade in.

Scene: a long-shot of a cemetery, twisted trees bare. Behind, a mausoleum.

Joe’s eyes closed, the silent movie receding into nothingness, taking the opium den with it.

Fade out.

no place like home

——

He was standing on Piccadilly Circus and the cars were wrong. They were like toy cars, like things that ran on batteries. The statue of Anteros still looked down with his bow and arrow. There were still tourists in the Circus but they, too, looked wrong. Strange haircuts. T-shirts advertising brands he’d never heard of, Gap and FCUK and something called Metallica. A guy with long hair, faded jeans and wraparound mirrorshades was strumming a guitar and singing about imagining all the people living life in peace, his voice reedy in the air.

The pollution was worse.

He looked up and the signs opposite were in neon lights and the images moved impossibly and the only name he could recognise was Coca-Cola.

Samsung. Sanyo. Japanese names but not ones he’d heard of before.

People had white-coloured wires trailing down from their ears.

He crossed the road, thinking to go to his hotel, but the Regent’s Palace was covered in scaffolding, its windows empty. He walked down Shaftesbury Avenue and up into Soho and saw things like the beaks of cranes rotating slowly high above street level, glass lenses glinting as they caught the light, moving this way and that as if scanning for prey. On Old Compton Street there were shops advertising pornographic movies but there were no adult cinemas. There were hundreds of titles in the display windows. Boys on girls, girls on girls, boys on boys. The girls had breasts that looked like they had come from the future, they were as large and impossible as spaceships.

A big poster on the corner, an enormous grey eye looking down on the street, a notice: You are watching Big Brother.

Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?

He walked back down to Shaftesbury Avenue. On the way he passed a group of silent dancers: they had gathered by the corner of the street and were dancing with no sound, with no order. They all had the same white wires coming down from their ears. A guy in a suit was playing a mute air guitar. When he came to Shaftesbury Avenue he saw a double-decker bus but it too was wrong, with no pole and open platform at the back, the only way in was through the doors in the front and they were closed and the bus wasn’t stopping. He crossed the road into Chinatown. No Edwin Drood, no Madam Seng, just a row of Chinese restaurants, red naked ducks hanging from hooks in the windows. He walked down Little Newport into Charing Cross Road. The bookshops were still there. He didn’t recognise the names. Up towards Oxford Street, meeting Shaftesbury Avenue for a third time. Large, multi-storey bookshops, but Foyle’s was still there, at least that was a name he knew. He went in. There was a counter to his right with the legend: Information.

‘Do you have any of the Mike Longshott books?’

‘Say what?’

‘Osama Bin Laden?’

The man behind the counter had a something like a television screen in front of him, and a plastic thing with keys. He tapped them, frowning. ‘We have a few,’ he said. ‘Let me print out the list for you.’

He pressed more keys and a small box beside his television screen began to hum and a sheet of paper slid out from inside it and he handed it to Joe. Joe stared at the printed paper. ‘What is this?’ he said.

The man barely glanced his way. ‘What you asked for,’ he said.

‘But this is all wrong.’

‘Complaints department is over there,’ the man said. Joe followed his pointing finger. It was showing him the doors.

Joe shrugged, crumpled the paper into a ball, deposited it on the counter, and left.

Up Charing Cross and across St. Giles’ Circus and into Tottenham Court Road which looked like something out of a science fiction paperback. There were rows and rows of stores with gleaming impossible devices on display. One store he passed was full of television screens in its display window, each tuned to a different station, more stations than he thought possible. A man in an office, dancing. Tiny insects, magnified, mating. Two policemen running from an explosion. A schoolgirl in uniform singing silently into a microphone, all the time staring out of her television as if looking out of a prison window. Gigantic spaceships exploding, men with laser guns firing, a monstrous alien blob with a human captive in a block of ice. Joe felt sick. He doubled back, ran down New Oxford, up into Bloomsbury, the air hot in his lungs, traffic lights blinking at him green and red and yellow, glass eyes above moving slowly to focus on him as he passed.

The British Museum. A man selling sausages outside the gate, the smell of frying onions making Joe’s stomach knot up. Tourists milling about, cameras flashing. The cameras were odd; too small, he thought. As if they had no film inside.

A man in a robot suit walking down the road, a sign above his head: Half-price tickets. ‘There’s no place like home!’ the man shouted. He stopped by Joe, handed him a leaflet. ‘There’s no place like home, mate. Get a ticket while they’re going.’

Joe blinked, his vision blurred. The tin-man walked away. He’d already forgotten Joe. ‘No place –’

‘Joe?’

He blinked and opened his eyes. Madam Seng stood above him.