There was rare purpose in his step as he crossed Kensington. After years of being the victim of circumstance he saw circumstance embodied at last. He would shake sense from it, or die trying.
In his flat Reynolds drew aside the curtain to watch a picture of evening fall on a picture of a city. No night he would live through, no city he’d walk in again. Out of sighs, he let the curtain drop, and picked up the short stabbing sword. The point he put to his chest.
‘Come on,’ he told himself and the sword, and pressed the hilt. But the pain as the blade entered his body a mere half inch was enough to make his head reel: he knew he’d faint before the job was half-done. So he crossed to the wall, steadied the hilt against it, and let his own body-weight impale him. That did the trick. He wasn’t sure if the sword had skewered him through entirely, but by the amount of blood he’d surely killed himself. Though he tried to arrange to turn, and so drive the blade all the way home as he fell on it, he fluffed the gesture, and instead fell on his side. The impact made him aware of the sword in his body, a stiff, uncharitable presence transfixing him utterly.
It took him well over ten minutes to die, but in that time, pain apart, he was content. Whatever the flaws of his fifty-seven years, and they were many, he felt he was perishing in a way his beloved Flavinus would not have been ashamed of.
Towards the end it began to rain, and the noise on the roof made him believe God was burying the house, sealing him up forever. And as the moment came, so did a splendid delusion: a hand, carrying a light, and escorted by voices, seemed to break through the wall, ghosts of the future come to excavate his history. He smiled to greet them, and was about to ask what year this was when he realised he was dead.
The creature was far better at avoiding Gavin than he’d been at avoiding it. Three days passed without its pursuer snatching sight of hide or hair of it.
But the fact of its presence, close, but never too close, was indisputable. In a bar someone would say: ‘Saw you last night on the Edgware Road’ when he’d not been near the place, or ‘How’d you make out with that Arab then?’ or ‘Don’t you speak to your friends any longer?’
And God, he soon got to like the feeling. The distress gave way to a pleasure he’d not known since the age of two: ease.
So what if someone else was working his patch, dodging the law and the street-wise alike; so what if his friends (what friends? Leeches) were being cut by this supercilious copy; so what if his life had been taken from him and was being worn to its length and its breadth in lieu of him? He could sleep, and know that he, or something so like him it made no difference, was awake in the night and being adored. He began to see the creature not as a monster terrorising him, but as his tool, his public persona almost. It was substance: he shadow.
He woke, dreaming.
It was four-fifteen in the afternoon, and the whine of traffic was loud from the street below. A twilight room; the air breathed and rebreathed and breathed again so it smelt of his lungs. It was over a week since he’d left Reynolds to the ruins, and in that time he’d only ventured out from his new digs (one tiny bedroom, kitchen, bathroom) three times. Sleep was more important now than food or exercise. He had enough dope to keep him happy when sleep wouldn’t come, which was seldom, and he’d grown to like the staleness of the air, the flux of light through the curtainless window, the sense of a world elsewhere which he had no part of or place in.
Today he’d told himself he ought to go out and get some fresh air, but he hadn’t been able to raise the enthusiasm. Maybe later, much later, when the bars were emptying and he wouldn’t be noticed, then he’d slip out of his cocoon and see what could be seen. For now, there were dreams –