Part 1 (2/2)

There were no tides, no currents moving to and from the indicator board, the ticket counter, the shops. No fractal patterns emerged from this ma.s.s. The flap of a b.u.t.terfly's wing in one corner of the station would create no typhoons, no storms, not a sough of wind anywhere else. The deep order of chaos had broken down.

It looked as I imagine purgatory must. A huge room full of vacant souls milling atomised and pointless, each in personal despair.

I saw a guard, as alone as all the others.

What's happened? I asked him. He was confused, shaking his head. He would not look at me.

Something's happened, he said. Something . . . there was a collapse . . . nothing works properly Looking for Jake, By China Mieville . . . there's been a . . . a breakdown . . .

He was being very inexact. That wasn't his fault. It was a very inexact apocalypse.

Between the time I had closed my eyes on the train and the time I had opened them again, some organising principle had failed.

I've always imagined the occurrence in very literal terms. I have always envisaged a vast impossible building, a spiritual power station with an unstable core s.h.i.+tting out the world's energy and connectivity. I've always envisaged the cogs and wheels of that unthinkable machinery overheating, some critical ma.s.s being reached . . . the mechanisms faltering and seizing up as the core explodes soundlessly and spews its poisonous fuel across the city and beyond.

In Bhopal, Union Carbide vomited up a torturing, killing bile. In Chern.o.byl the fallout was a more insidious cellular terrorism.

And now Kilburn erupts with vague entropy.

I know, Jake, I know, you can't help smiling, can you? From the awesome and terrible to the ridiculous. The walls here are not stacked high with corpses. There is rarely any blood when the inhabitants of London disappear. But the city's winding down, Jake, and Kilburn is the epicentre of the burnout.

I left the guard alone in his confusion.

Got to find Jake, I thought.

You're probably smiling self-deprecatingly when you read that, but I swear to you it's true.

You'd been in the city when it happened, you had seen it. Think of it, Jake. I was asleep, in transit, neither here nor there. I didn't know this city, I'd never been here before. But you'd watched it being born.

There was no one else in the city for me. You could be my guide, or we could at least be lost together.

The sky was utterly dead. It looked cut out of matte black paper and pasted above the silhouettes of the towers. All the pigeons were gone. We didn't know it then, but the unseen flapping things had burst into existence full-grown and ravenous. In the first few hours they swept the skies quite clean of prey.

The streetlamps were still working, as they are now, but in any case there was nothing profound about the darkness. I wandered nervously, found a telephone box. It didn't seem to want my money but it let me make the call anyway.

Your mother answered.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville h.e.l.lo, she said. She sounded listless and nonplussed.

I paused for far too long. I was groping for new etiquette in this new time. I had no sense of social rules, and I stammered as I wondered whether to say something about the change.

Is Jake there please? I finally said, ba.n.a.l and absurd.

He's gone, she said. He's not here. He went out this morning to shop, and he hasn't come back.

Your brother came on the line then and spoke brusquely. He went to some bookshop, he said, and I knew where you were then.

It was the bookshop we found on the right as you leave Willesden Green station, where the slope of the high road begins to steepen. It is cheap and capricious. We were seduced by the immaculate edition of Voyage to Arcturus in the window, and entertained by the juxtaposition of Kierkegaard and Paul Daniels.

If I could have chosen where to be when London wound down, it would be in that zone, where the city first notices the sky, at the summit of a hill, surrounded by low streets that let sound escape into the clouds. Kilburn, ground zero, just over the thin bulwark of backstreets. Perhaps you had a presentiment that morning, Jake, and when the breakdown came you were ready, waiting in that perfect vantage point.

It's dark out here on the roof. It's been dark for some time. But I can see enough to write, from deflected streetlamps and maybe from the moon, too. The air is buffeted more and more by the pa.s.sage of those hungry, unseen things, but I'm not afraid.

I can hear them fighting and nesting and courting in the Gaumont's tower, jutting over my neighbours' houses and shops. A little while ago there was a dry sputter and crack, and a constant low buzz now underpins the night sounds.

I am attuned to that sound. The murmur of neon.

The Gaumont State is blaring its message to me across the short, deserted distance of pavement.

I am being called to over the organic nonsense of the flyers and the more constant whispers of young rubbish in the wind.

I've heard it all before, I've read it before. I'm taking my own sweet f.u.c.king time over this letter. Then I'll see what's being asked of me.

I took the tube to Willesden.

I wince to think of it now, I jerk my mind away. I wasn't to know. It was safer then, anyway, in those early days.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville I've crept into the underground stations in the months since, to check the whispered rumours for myself. I've seen the trains go by with the howling faces in all the windows, too fast to see clearly, something like dogs, I've seen trains burning with cold light, long slow trains empty except for one dead-looking woman staring directly into my eyes, en route Jesus Christ knows where.

It was nothing like that back then, not nearly so dramatic. It was too cold and too quiet, I remember. And I am not sure the train had a driver. But it let me go. I came to Willesden and as I stepped out onto that uncovered station I could feel something different about the world.

There was a very slow epiphany building up under the skin of the night, oozing out of the city's pores, breaking over me ponderously.

I climbed the stairs out of that underworld.

When Orpheus looked back, Jake, it wasn't stupid. The myths are slanderous. It wasn't the sudden fear that she wasn't there that turned his head. It was the threatening light from above.

What if it was not the same, out there? It's so human, to turn and catch the eye of your companion on a return journey, to share a moment's terror that everything you know will have changed.

There was no one I could look back to, and everything I knew had changed. Pus.h.i.+ng open the doors onto the street was the bravest thing I have ever done.

I stood on the high railway bridge. I was. .h.i.t by wind. Across the street before me, emerging from below the bridge, below my feet, the elegant curved gorge containing the tracks stretched away. Steep banks of scrub contained it, squat bushes and weeds that tugged petulantly at the scree.

There was very little sound. I could see only a few stars. I felt as if the whole sky scudded above me.

The shop was dark but the door opened. It was a relief to walk into still air.

We're f.u.c.king shut, somebody said. He sounded despairing.

I wound between the piles of strong-smelling books towards the till. I could see shapes and shades in this halfhearted darkness. An old bald man was slumped on a stool behind the desk.

I don't want to buy anything, I said. I'm looking for someone. I described you.

Look around, mate, he said. f.u.c.king empty. What do you want from me? I ain't seen your friend or no one.

<script>