‘Nice place you got here,’ he said.

Someone spat. ‘You’re tenacious, Mr. Joe, I’ll give you that,’ the voice said. ‘A useful attribute in your line of work, I would have thought.’

Joe edged forward, the gun raised.

‘And obstinate. Which is not so useful. Unable to see what’s in front of you…’

Right then he could see nothing. He was going by sound. Two pairs of feet moving behind him, blocking the way out. The voice in front. How many more? He stopped again. Speaking would tell them where he was, but…

He said, ‘Osama bin Laden.’

Someone swore behind him in the dark. He didn’t understand the words. ‘What do you expect to find?’ Joe said. The memory of his early morning conversation with one of these men came back to him. ‘A face in the clouds?’ he said.

‘We are trying,’ the voice said, and it was no longer cool. It was angry. ‘To find paradise.’

‘Don’t you have to die first to get there?’ Joe said.

‘Yes,’ the voice said. ‘That is, precisely, the point.’

‘Where is Osama bin Laden?’ Joe said.

‘Not here,’ a new voice said, ahead of him. The man in the black shoes. It was hard to forget his voice. ‘I tell you before, you no make trouble.’ It sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘Why you make trouble? Now kill you.’

‘I’ll just be waiting ahead for you in paradise, then,’ Joe said. A word the girl in Paris used came back to him. ‘Nangilima,’ he said. It was the name of a land beyond this land – a word for elsewhere. He knew he wanted a cigarette and fought down the urge. The man in the black shoes said, ‘Why he is not here? Why he is not come?’

‘Keep quiet,’ the first voice said. But the other kept talking. ‘You, me, we go. We follow plan. But plan wrong. Where paradise? Why he is not come?’

How many bullets? How many men?

‘Maybe hell,’ the man in the black shoes said. ‘Maybe hell is abandoned station.’

‘Keep quiet,’ the first voice said. And then, ‘Perhaps he is here.’

Joe said, ‘Mike Longshott.’

He inched forward. The voices were closer now. The two at his back hadn’t moved.

The first voice said, ‘Yes.’

‘I could have found him for you.’

‘Perhaps,’ the voice said. And, ‘You shouldn’t have come down here.’

‘Yet here I am,’ Joe said.

‘Yes,’ the voice said again. ‘A pity.’

Joe crouched, gun held in both hands. He heard a scrabbling sound ahead, something heavy being pulled.

‘Kill him,’ the first voice said.

A click.

Yellow lights came alive, blinding him, and he fired without looking, going by sound.

The sound of gunshots, not his. He rolled, turned, fired again, once, twice. Something hit his arm, throwing him to the ground. Blood pounded in his ears.

Something metallic falling to the ground. Joe opened his eyes, blinked tears against the glare of light. He was lying on the platform and ahead of him one man was slumped against the platform’s edge. As Joe watched the man fell slowly forward, towards the ancient rails. As he hit the track his body seemed to disappear.

Joe blinked, his eyes getting used to the light. His arm hurt; he couldn’t move it. He touched it with his other hand and his fingers came back covered in blood. Ahead of him, a man in black shoes, the prone feet vertical. Joe pushed himself up on one arm, stood, retrieved his fallen gun. He walked to the man in the black shoes. There was a hole in the man’s chest, pumping out blood. The man was breathing hollowly. Joe crouched down beside him, put his hand on his forehead, smoothed back the sweat-soaked hair. The man’s eyes opened, focused on Joe. His mouth moved, shaped itself into a smile. ‘I wait ahead for you,’ the man in the black shoes whispered, ‘in other paradise.’

Then he was gone, and Joe stood up and turned and, for just a moment, before the lights faded and died, saw two more empty pools of blood ahead where the silent watchers had been.

Then, ignoring the pain, he pulled out his cigarettes, shook one out, one-handed, and put it in his mouth, letting the rest of the pack fall to the floor.

In the darkness of a tomb his lighter flicked into being, the tiny flame of light dancing.

He lit the cigarette, blew out smoke. For a long moment he stood there, seeing nothing. Then he began to edge his way forward, towards the stairs and the clean lighted night.

the colour of a bruise, 

blue against black

——

Street lights, casting fates along the dark asphalt. Bloodied entrails, animal bones in curious shapes, rattled and scattered, predicting the future. Clouds above, no stars, the moon invisible. Down these streets a man must go, Joe following a trail of entrails, the scent of old blood, his mouth flavoured rust. Above-ground, breathing clean air. In his head: planes crash into buildings, buses explode, trains scream to a halt, an entire public transport network of death.

His arm felt better up here. He looked at it in the light of a streetlamp and almost laughed – the bullet had merely grazed it. He tore a strip of cloth from his shirt and tied it around the wound. It had seemed worse down below. The pain wasn’t bad. What was bad was everything else.

Four men left behind. Need: a drink. Need: sound, music. Need: lives around him. Instead he wandered through a world in black and white. Shadows criss-crossed his face. The stench of blood in his nostrils, clogging.

At St. Giles Circus, almost no traffic – he thought he could see the ancient corpses swinging. Soho Square silent, empty, tall hushed buildings looking down with indifference in their windows.

Joe lit a fresh cigarette, leaned against a dark tree, listened to the silence. Somewhere in the distance, a light, beckoning, the colour of a bruise, blue against black. Four men left behind. Fog: in the street, in his mind. A dank sweet cloying smell. Man in the beaver hat carrying a lantern in the dark illuminating nothing but himself. The blue light beckoned: Joe followed.

Through empty streets. Night is the time of the dead, a graveyard shift. The trains lope home along the tracks, the fog caught in their fur. The lampshades glare. There is respite in quiet night, for restless shades and homeless strays. There is a living coldness in the winds at night, the streetlights mark the passage of the years.

He breathed out a shuddering stream of smoke. Four men left behind. But you are not there. They seek you, seek you everywhere. You are the hand well hidden, and the scalpel that ensures the tumour is removed, the skin is parted so, the ill is healed, the wrong is righted, the world is once more set on course.

Four men left behind. One man ahead, always ahead. The blue light beckoned, not far. Joe thought: God lives in the clouds like smoke, he has a long grey beard.

Not feeling right. Loneliness is magnified at night time. He thought of the long Arctic night, Icelandic suicides, shivered. Pulled out Mo’s notebook: last note, page seven, near the top. Found them. Joe pulled out a pen, crossed it out.

The light ahead, like a police-box calling out safety. He didn’t know where he was, somewhere in the maze of nameless streets. To one side a dirty books store, on the other a bottle store, both shut, Closed signs in the windows coated in dust. A closed door, the blue light above it shaped into a musical notation, the name underneath like a period at the end of a long sentence: The Blue Note.

The card in his pocket. The girl – his employer. A matching card in Mo’s coat, a scribble in his notebook: Joe knocked on the door.

refugees

——

A grille in the door slid back. Eyes regarded him from inside. He could hear the faint notes of a jazz tune. A voice from the darkness: ‘What you want?’

Joe: ‘A drink.’

‘Do I know you?’