The Not Knowing by Cathi Unsworth
Leadtext: The moon was in the gutter…
Reflected in the sky.
Casting its sickly light through a thin smudge of cloud over the dark end of the street. Tonight’s revellers, even the most woozy and determined of them, even the drifters with no doorway to call their home, had long since left this part of town. All that remained on the twisting curve of Agar Grove was detritus: discarded fast food wrappers, crumpled cigarette packets, waste paper fluttering and skittering across the lonely road, hustled along by the wind.
And something else.
Around the corner, footsteps came, a brisk pace, workmanlike. Accompanied by a low whistle, a repetitive little refrain, workmanlike too, but devoid of anything you could actually call a tune. The tall, hunched figure in the black Crombie coat wasn’t really aware he was making this noise, his mind was far away, on other things. He was aware of the plastic bags he’d wound around his hands to keep any last vestiges of blood away from the inside pockets of his coat. It had happened in a bit of a rush, and maybe he was being excessively cautious, but it had seemed a reasonable thing to do at the time. What was it they had said? The Freshest Food Daily? Fresher Than The Rest? Fresh Cut Today? A Porky Prime Cut?
A nervous giggle escaped like a sneeze. His mind was going off track again. No, it was good this part of the city. Railway arches and the empty stretch of the Grand Union canal, the disused York Way tube station and the squat gin palaces all boarded up and empty. An industrial estate to his right and beyond, the vast iron gasworks, bleak against the sulphurous sky, the abandoned crescent of railway houses no one ever got round to redeveloping, the great gothic spires of St Pancras like a monstrous fairy tale castle, and the lines of track, that rumbled out trains to the North.
Behind him was Camden; party town, a place to be easily anonymous among the easily inebriated of all ages. He appreciated Camden. For all its bright lights and distractions, overflowing pubs full of rackety loud bands, its market and its colony of winos and tramps, it had its secret places. Lock-ups used by the market traders, railway arches used as rehearsal spaces and makeshift speakeasies, boarded up places that were easy to break into, once you nosed around a bit you could find them. Underneath, the rattling locomotives constantly hauling commuters here and there, out of the orange glow of the street lights.
But on the other side, the side he had to navigate now, was King’s Cross. He hated King’s Cross. It was Sodom. Hell on Earth. A portal had opened here, spewing out the sick and depraved, the whores and pimps and junkie scum, clawing and clamouring their way out into the filth-clogged streets, shivering and sweating their way around the gaudy strip opposite the station and the carcinogenic ventricles of roads that surrounded it. He could smell its foetid stink as he walked down the long, lonely, slow motion stretch of York Way.
No longer calmed by the nearness of water, images raced in fast-forward through his mind. He didn’t know it, but his whistling got faster, his feet slapping harder on the pavement.
Red gouts of blood.
A bloody fountain.
Flesh falling, yielding to the sharp smile of steel, carving a smile in white flesh. Flesh flapping open, so easily, quivering, soft as butter, all yellow and red inside.
Screams contained by swathes of tape: a gurgling, rattling cacophony.
Reminding him of pigs dying.
And the beautiful arc of silvery steel.
Now sleeping at the bottom of the Grand Union Canal.
A lot of secrets buried there, under a sickly yellow moon.
The noise of his feet was drowned out by the passing traffic, his round-shouldered, skinny frame momentarily illuminated by sweeping headlights. Just another anonymous drifter, alone in the London night, winding his way along the edge of the main road, the lonely streets of 4am. Down, down and down towards Sodom, blurring into the red, green, yellow lights, the confusion of automobiles and human traffic, disappearing in the crowd.
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