Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Oblivion by Calvin Klein BY CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

Christopher Fowler has written more than thirty novels and volumes of short stories, including Roofworld, Spanky, Psychoville, and Calabash. He lives in King’s Cross, London.

His work divides into black comedy, horror, satire, mystery, and sets of tales unclassifiable enough to have publishers tearing their hair out. He is now writing the Bryant & May series, a set of classic mystery novels featuring two elderly, argumentative London detectives. In 2009 his autobiography, Paperboy, was published.

About this story, he says, “I had been planning a novel about a shopaholic housewife-turned-vigilante for some while, and it proved to be one of those books everyone seems to love but no one manages to publish—indeed, it recently got to page proofs before the last publishing house collapsed. So with the character still in my head, I freewheeled an urban fantasy around her to create something entirely new. My visions of cities are always happiest in their decline, so it was important to have an exotic, apocalyptic feel to this tale. It’s about a fracture in the consumption cycle that might just turn out to be a good thing.…”

On the dankest, most miserable Saturday afternoon in September, Helen Abbott went shopping in London with a Derringer .25 sub-compact pistol in her handbag.

The term shopping hardly seemed adequate. What Helen did was blast through Selfridges department store like an armed witch on a mission. Spending money was an intimate thing for her, so she made sure she knew the entire history of the places where she shopped, just as it was a point of honor to memorize the names of all the assistants who offered her their services. She was such a familiar face in Selfridges that the store detectives kept an eye on her, thinking she must be part of some long-term thieving reconnaissance party. She did not look poor, of course, so they suspected her less. She always dressed for shopping as if going on a date: smart beige patent-leather heels and a sleek chocolate-toned skirt, never jeans or trainers, because she was anxious to be noticed and treated with respect.

It was not a good idea to shop in a highly emotional state. On that day, frenzied by the latest proof of her husband’s infidelity (a used Durex Fetherlite condom tossed carelessly onto the back seat of his Mercedes—worse than last time, when it was just a gold earring), she was one thin step away from sitting down in the middle of the street and screaming. Convinced that shopping in quantity released pheromones, she ticktacked at a furious speed across the marble floors, ankles flashing back and forth, charm bracelet jangling, begging the buzz to kick in.

The remains of the summer season fashions had been left on the shelves like hard centers discarded in a ravaged chocolate box, the sales staff as listless and fractious as children trapped in class. As she circumnavigated the territory, a hunter-gatherer on a search for hangered prey, she pushed ever deeper into the undergrowth of her desires.

It was a good way to spend the day.

Lately Helen Abbott had become fascinated with the textures of fashion fabrics, and as she walked she mentally alphabetized them into alpaca, astrakhan, batiste, brocade, cotton, calico, cambric, cheviot, chiffon, chenille, crepe de chine, cretonne, and corduroy. By the time she arrived at damask, denim, and dimity she had already made her first purchase and lost her place in the lexicon of luxury.

Helen had given up on her marriage and her dreams, and only the thought of finding new ways to spite her husband kept her from slitting her own throat. She hated Graham and all of his relatives with an intensity that frightened her. The best way to remain calm, she had found, was to fight through every inch of the day. That was why she booked sessions of yoga, pilates, step classes, aerobics, rowing, and weight training. Six months ago her husband tried to strangle her in a restaurant, and she broke his wrist. The fitness kick was wearing off, though. Last week she had been thrown out of her local spa’s flotation tank for smoking in it.

Helen used to work for a small publishing company in the West End, where she became a kind of hero figure because of her inventive rudeness to men, but they took away her job when she got pregnant, and couldn’t restore it to her when she lost the baby, because it would have looked too obvious. Now she worked for a media company where nothing discernible was produced. A photograph of her office would have offered no clues to her purpose in the world. She was paid an astonishing amount of money to send pointless e-mails and sit in meetings saying nothing. Voicing an opinion was a good way to get fired. When people asked what she did for a living—not that they ever did—she told them that she showed up for work.

Helen never watched TV, because TV was for poor people. Besides, the news was all bad. She never went for a walk, because the streets were unthinkable. So she shopped, passing through the outdoor part of her world as quickly and quietly as possible. Shopping at Selfridges was warm rain on bare skin. The cyclamen zephyrs that drifted over her from the perfumery inflamed her membranes. She loved the way ice-blue counters underlit the ceramic faces of the cosmetic clerks, turning them into mannequins. Their frozen tableaux set her pulse racing. They drifted about her with testers and face brushes as if wielding sacrificial tools in some arcane, forgotten rite.

In housewares, the hanging crescendos of copper pots tightened Helen’s chest muscles until she could barely breathe. There were no stains in these stage kitchens, because no food was ever cooked. Sometimes she pulled open the counter drawers and breathed in their emptiness. She studied the beds covered with purple-beaded casbah cushions, the pastel French cotton sheets imprisoned in plastic as smooth as plate glass, the polished maple dining tables laid for guests who would never ruin everything by turning up. When she touched the smokily elegant vases too slender to hold grocery store flowers but perfectly designed for a single arum lily, she felt safe in the arms of manufacturers.

After shopping, she always wanted a cigarette and a soapy wash, because the entire process was about sex. Buying an inappropriate dress was the equivalent to a thoughtless one-night stand, whereas designer shoes constituted a long-term commitment filled with recrimination and at least one decent orgasm. She hadn’t been penetrated for over eighteen months. At first the dull ache of desire would not go away, but after a while it no longer bothered her. These days her clitoris was located somewhere near Harrods.

As she swept through Oxford Street’s great cathedral of expenditure, she pondered on the verb to spend. It had a sexual connotation, of course, to empty the juices, to flush out, but she wondered why people talked about “spending days,” as though everything was currency. She felt spent. The world felt spent.

Helen really wanted a cigarette. She smoked because it annoyed her husband to find cigarette butts left in egg yolks, coffee cups, toilets, and beds. She sunbathed naked in the garden because it annoyed the neighbors, took ages at supermarket tills because it annoyed the staff, and lit up in restaurants just to watch the look of horror on diners’ faces. These days nonsmokers reacted to cigarette smoke as if they had just been involved in a Sarin gas attack. Sometimes they actually screamed.

Fuck ’em, thought Helen. There are bigger things to worry about; we just pretend there aren’t. How well we all pretend.

Everyone agreed that Graham Abbott was an absolute sweetheart who doted on his wife, but the gentler and kinder he was, the more she detested him and the more he fucked around. He sold false ceilings and had a number of gastric disorders that required him to pick at small amounts of food all day so that she never needed to cook for him at night, which was just as well because the only thing she could do was eggs, an egg being the one food source you actually have to damage to eat.

Helen insolently tapped her gold card against capped teeth as she considered different sweater designs. The staff prowled after her like hungry dogs.

There was always an adrenaline rush when she bought something really expensive, a race of blood cells to the brain and heart as she pressed her card into the reader and watched the assistant delicately folding tissue as if packing a rare dead insect for a long voyage by steamer trunk.

On she went, past the TV monitors of starved catwalk girls dipping at the turn of the runway, up into menswear, a square acre of wood, chrome, and marble where everything smelled of citrus, musk, and leather—all the things she had never smelled on her husband, who only smelled of cigarettes and computers. Soon she was carrying so many purchases that the bag ropes left Japanese-prisoner-of-war marks on her arms.

Through the food hall with its aged ham hocks hanging like the thighs of long-dead chorus girls, past rows of shocked fish arranged on ice like jeweled purses, past the jars of exotic pickles as mysterious as fetuses in a medical museum, to the perfume counters patrolled by women like bony cats, where she stood paralyzed, breathing deep the smell of frangipani, honeysuckle, gardenia, jasmine, lavender, carnation, eucalyptus, lemon, sandalwood, and ambergris. The atomizers, sprays, sachets, pomanders, powders, potpourris, balms, gels, oils, soaps, lotions, sticks, and fixatives pumped such a sweet cacophony into the air that the hall shimmered and slipped in her vision.

She breathed deeper.

In fact, she breathed so deeply that she passed out, like an art lover suffering from Stendhal syndrome.

Helen Abbott regained consciousness to find a gold-braided attendant leisurely picking his nose while peering into her shopping bags and evaluating the contents. As she revived, he mimed such an extravagant show of helping her to her feet that he attracted a crowd, which he was then able to disperse by imperiously waving his gloved hands about like a policeman on point duty until she could gather her purchases and make a break for the exit.

Sometimes Helen shoplifted. Today she stuck her hand into her skirt pocket and closed pearlized nails around a pair of earrings. They were golden yellow sunflowers, bright, cheerful, fake looking. She owned a lot of plastic jewelery because there were wonderful colors in plastic that you couldn’t find in nature. Whenever she flew on a shopping raid over the West End, she bought something for her charm bracelet. On this trip it was a 22-carat gold teddy bear with a tiny secret compartment in its stomach, an object of such utter vacuity that it actually defied you to find a use for it.

Helen Abbott understood a fundamental principle, that shopping was the one thing you could do without ever having to be frightened. It was a sacred rite that had become her strength and guidance. Conventional religion offered salvation in the afterlife, but shopping provided immediate absolution. It had the power to heal, to save and restore. Helen felt she would make a fantastic worshipper in a cargo cult.

She stroked the barrel of the gun in her purse and stepped into the street.

As she exited from the main entrance of Selfridges, she felt as though she were leaving the shelter of the church. The edges of Oxford Street were crusted with rough sleepers, like calcium deposits around a drain. Along the tops of the Victorian buildings, running indiscriminately over the once-graceful roofs and windows, were red dot-matrix reports filled with news so bad that no one read them anymore. She passed a Gap store, and the irony of its name did not escape her. The only gap here was the one between rich and poor. She rushed home as if passing through the atmosphere of a hostile planet.

Helen started chain-smoking when outdoors and drinking hard liquor from ten in the morning. There were two blenders in her kitchen—one for her husband’s fruit shakes (he had high cholesterol) and the other for banana daiquiris. The house was empty from 8:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. six days a week, so on her days off Helen was able to spend the day alone, peering through the heavily barred windows, honing her bitterness. At her fitness center she repented with leg weights every morning, but then she came home and sinned again, hitting the drinks cabinet with a level of vengeful punishment that was usually only found among nuns.

That week, while the rainy gales of a London summer scoured the increasingly derelict suburban streets, Helen’s house grew so cold that only her startling bursts of anger could heat it back to life. Her husband stayed out late, then stopped coming home at all.

On the last fishtank-gray Saturday afternoon of the month, Helen headed for a less-exclusive shopping mall on the outskirts of town. Its neon corridors were populated by taut-faced teenaged girls with hoop earrings and bare midriffs, their ponytails threaded through diamanté baseball caps, their plastic push-chairs imprisoning stupefied tots. Consumers drifted in stately distance like Seurat figures. There were nearly a dozen megastores linked by a central car park. With her pupils widened and her tubes unblocked by so many glittering second-rate retail opportunities, Helen set off to smack up her American Express card.

First of all she bought shoes, not real ones for walking in, but a pair for slowly crossing her legs on a bar stool and sending young men into inarticulate conflictions of desire. The sight of the gaudy heels sparkling on a black velvet dais like some rediscovered Peruvian artifact overrode the genetic defenses that governed her ability to think logically. They were so obscenely expensive that she had to screw up her eyes to look at the bill.

Then it was time to hit Inhabit, a furniture shop where she unthinkingly purchased a spindle-legged Regencia table nest, a Locarno foldaway lounge serving unit, a carriage clock, a dozen silver-trimmed tablemats depicting scenes from the Crimean War, and a huge china statue of a leopard scratching its claws on a tree. She arranged to have them delivered and gave a false address: Helen Blimpton, 666 Dingley Dell, Bombokoland. Nobody questioned the delivery instructions. They merely loaded them into the computer with a holding smile and printed out her receipts.

In Petland, she put a deposit on a Borzoi puppy and an inbred hairless cat that you had to wipe down all the time. By the time she reached Sparkles, the discount jewelry outlet, she was being trailed by a suspicious security guard. The assistant refused to let her open an account there because she had become confused about her fake home address and foolishly presented the girl with three options, each of them more ridiculous than the one before.

When Helen surveyed a rack of Diamonique “Catherine the Great” choker necklaces, the strange gleam in her eye made the security guard wonder whether she was on day release, or at least coming off medication. Either way, he watched as she slipped a three-band-clasp wristlet into her jacket pocket on the way to the exit. Seconds later, he pinned her over a display case of rather desirable handbags. The police were called and the manager sent for. When the cops showed up they seemed more interested in discussing the previous night’s football.

The manager of Sparkles was a slender Asian man with thrust-up hair and a permanently surprised look on his face, as though he had just walked away from a car accident. He spoke with the guard, and when he recognized Helen, his expression became even more surprised.

“You know this lady?” asked one of the cops.

“She’s a regular customer. Please let her sit down.”

Helen collapsed on a divan as the manager explained that it was probably just an unfortunate mistake and that he would not press charges. She felt sure he knew she was guilty, but he let her go, preferring to protect someone he considered to be a long-term investment. She would return, he hoped, to gratefully spend a fortune in his store the next time she was afflicted with a shopping brain-cloud.

She needed to clear her head and start thinking straight, so she shared a mug of coffee with the manager, who politely suggested that she might like to arrange twenty-four-month payment plans with him. She agreed so enthusiastically that she felt guilty about climbing out of the window of the ladies’ toilet and legging it across the car park to the next store.

In World of Washrooms, her MasterCard (such a manly, sadistic name) appeared for fresh purchases. Above her, “Material Girl” played from hidden speakers at just the right volume required to send people mad. This particular corporate CD of shopping’s greatest hits had been rescored for bongos, Moog and theremin, making Helen feel as if she had wandered into an old science fiction film.

For the sheer hell of it, she bought a freestanding chrome towel rack, two Rhapsody molded-ceramic toothbrush sconces, an onyx soap holder shaped like buttocks, the Comfort luxury Dralon candlewick pedestal mat available in avocado or pink martini, and a LadyPore magnifying mirror with built-in makeup tray. The staff nearly had to pull her off the shag-covered faux-bamboo laundry hamper and combi-heated towel rail.

She reached the end of the chrome-railed floor and snapped a vacant sales assistant from her reverie. The girl asked her how she would like to pay. With a gunslinger’s wrist-flick Helen withdrew the MasterCard and placked it onto the counter with a sound as satisfying as the snap of her husband’s condom coming off. The assistant rang everything up, then zipped the card through her credit link. While she waited, she stared into the middle distance and touched the edges of her lacquered hair as if gingerly reading braille. When she checked the readout, her cheeks crinkled very slightly, as though she had just experienced the misery of trapped wind.

“I’m afraid this one is invalid,” she explained, returning it. “There might be a fault with the card.” She didn’t believe it for a second and wanted Helen to know that she didn’t, despite the necessity of maintaining the store’s politeness policy. Helen knew her type. She could read more nuances into the guarded smiles of service personnel than Marcel Proust.

Sudden insolvency was an unusual and unpleasant experience. She casually riffled through her purse and submitted a less-scorched card, and when that didn’t work, a third. In a mounting state of mortification, she went through seven more, but none of them registered. She could feel sweat forming in the small of her back. She had no checkbook anymore—who did?—and had no other way of paying. Finally the assistant jealously took back her products, like a peep-show manager deciding that her viewing time was up.

Helen could tell that the assistant was disappointed with her, a teacher marking an F on her favorite pupil’s work. Her customer respect vanished as she desecrated the freshly packed treasures. Helen could not bear it; watching her tear open the tissue wrappings was like watching someone rip orchids apart. She had been cheated of her shopping climax. It wasn’t as though she’d been looking forward to taking everything home—that part of the process was a post-coital duty, like remaking the bed—so she mumbled some excuse about having accidentally demagnetized her strips and fled.

Outside on the street, she felt shockingly exposed. The nonshoppers around her all seemed drunk, stoned, or mad. A fat man with a shaved ginger head was being copiously sick into an octagonal concrete litter bin filled with McDonald’s boxes. Her fingers closed over the Derringer in her bag, warming it. Another man passed her with blood pouring down the center of his face, as if his head had been split in two. The poor always seemed to be fighting each other instead of going after someone rich. They shot up schools instead of storming into financial institutions.

There were no buses in sight. The sky was a strange color. Helen felt unusual.

Her purse yielded seven pounds fifty, not enough for a taxi. She hated the thought of being packed like pencils on a filthy train and arriving home in a sticky sheen of sweat, to sit in the kitchen staring at the spot where her crisp white cardboard bags should be standing. She knew Graham had canceled her cards in revenge for being exposed once more as an adulterer. He was authorized to do that; he played golf with her bank manager.

She needed a drink. She had stopped keeping vodka and orange premixed in a bleach container under the sink after swigging from the wrong bottle. Shopping bred a discontent that could only be assuaged by more spending. Drug addiction would have been a healthier option; at least she wouldn’t have to monitor her weight and would get regular sex from strangers.

Beneath clouds the color of rancid liver, she walked to the nearest vehicle in the car park, a crapped-up blue Renault Megan.

The driver was surprised but made no attempt to take the gun from her. The Derringer was welded to her hand, its steel casing matched to her body temperature. She waggled it at him, opened the passenger door, and slipped inside. She noticed his eyes, brown with black lashes, dirty curls over a single dark eyebrow.

“What do you want?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“What’s your name?”

“Nathan. Who are you?”

“Helen.” She slapped the dashboard with her free hand. “Drive.”

Nathan insisted she should keep the gun pointed toward the floor while they were inside the car, which turned out to be a good move, because the handle was so slick with sweat that she dropped it under the seat when they hit the first traffic-calming chicane. They rode like this for a while, past burned-out homes that backed right up against luxury stores.

“Pull in here.”

“Now what?” he asked, calmly putting the gearshift into park.

“I shop for clothes and you pay for everything.”

“How is this going to work?” asked Nathan. They were walking toward the bright glass entrance of another mall. “How are you going to try on dresses in a cubicle while keeping a gun trained on me?”

“I won’t have to try anything on. I’m just going to buy things. I know my size in seventeen different countries of manufacture, so I’ll only have to use a fitting room if I see something I like from Estonia or Portugal.”

“You’re a retail opportunist.”

“And you’re on my territory now,” Helen warned him. “If shopping was a university course, I’d have a chair at Oxford.” She wondered if she had gone too far this time. Her condition seemed to be getting out of hand.

“I think you’ve got a problem.”

“Nothing I can’t handle. In here.”

They walked into DKNY half an hour before the store was due to shut. Helen kept her eyes on her hostage. Nathan seemed vaguely amused by her behavior.

She swept up a whole new wardrobe: jumpers, jackets, belts, and pairs of jeans from the racks. Whenever Nathan turned around to complain or to ask where they were going next, she allowed the gleaming barrel of the gun to become visible behind her bag, like a flasher exposing himself to a child. She picked up a trouser suit and a pair of rhinestone evening sandals from Dolce & Gabbana, then pushed Nathan in the direction of Marks & Spencer. She no longer cared whether the CCTV could see her.

“What do you think, the gray or the blue?” she asked, holding different brassieres against her breasts.

“I don’t know, I really don’t care,” her hostage replied sulkily.

She let him see the muzzle of the gun. “Make a decision.”

“The blue. This is like being married.” Nathan shoved his hands into his pockets. “Do you want me to sit down over there and leaf through magazines while you rob the till?” He was sexy in a degenerate way, probably about the same age as her but more worn in. He seemed less concerned about being shot than being embarrassed.

She changed her clothes in the cubicle with Nathan standing on the other side and the gun trained through the door. Balancing on one leg like an armed flamingo was not an easy thing to do. Shopping had been her drug of choice, and she had gone for one final overdose, hoping it would now be out of her system. She applied some lipstick while targeting Nathan in the makeup mirror, Annie Oakley attempting a trick shot. As she did so, she caught sight of a cashier peering at them around a rack of remaindered skirts, but when she looked back, the girl had vanished.

“Just stay close enough for me to kill you if I have to.” She piled her hostage high and aimed him at the checkout.

On the way, Nathan’s mobile rang. She nudged him with the gun barrel. “Answer it.”

He listened for a moment. “Hi. No, I’m not going to be able to get there.” He covered the phone. “It’s my mother. She wants to know where I am. Where am I?” He took a look around. “Marks & Spencers. We’re in mixed separates, but I think we’re heading for knickers and pantyhose. No, I haven’t met someone.”

They waited awkwardly by the counter as a listless cashier detagged the items and folded them into carrier bags. Helen felt the burning panic that had been roaring about inside her receding as each purchase received its tissue-paper prepuce. Nathan withdrew a platinum AmEx card and handed it to the cashier. She almost fell in love with him.

“What’s next?” Nathan asked as they moved toward the exit. Overhead, a soothing voice told them the stores were closing and reminded customers to remain security-conscious as they made their way to the car park. Helen was disappointed because there was a Cartier concession on the first floor and she’d have liked a platinum love-bracelet. Nathan had gotten off lightly.

“Give me a minute,” she told him. “I’ll think of something.”

“You’re a very unusual woman.”

“Call me Helen.”

“So, what do you want to do now, Helen?” he asked. “Dinner? Arson? Blackmail? When you abduct someone, it’s a good idea to have a plan.”

She had no answer for him. Now that she had shopped, the familiar thrill was fading to postcoital guilt. They reached the car with a trolley full of purchases, and he began loading them onto the rear seat.

“You don’t know, do you?” He pushed. “Look in the back of the car, all the clothes you don’t want. People get so restless they don’t know what to do with themselves. You have to figure this out. What the hell is it you want?”

“I don’t know how I turned into this horrible person,” she said, trying not to let her face twitch. “We’re given too much and it’s not enough.”

“So go and find yourself.”

“I don’t want to find myself; I want to find someone else.”

“What, you want me to feel sorry for you? I have to go to work. You can come with me, but put the fucking gun away.”

Nathan ran a soup-and-sandwich van for the homeless, under a dripping railway arch. The services were dying out, he said. They had become unfashionable and could no longer find sponsors. He recited the facts, a sermon he had delivered too many times: The average life expectancy of those below the poverty line was forty; two paupers died on the London streets every day; the homeless could stand three weeks of sleeping rough before long-term problems set in; a simple state of divorce was enough to force you into the open air. Perhaps a speech was required before the doling out of food, she thought, like a Victorian lecture.

Helen remembered a mauve cotton sweater, a purchase on her last spree. It had been carefully folded into white tissue with its arms crossed like a mummy carapace, then placed into a stout blue box with a diagonal purple ribbon knotted at one corner. It had cost nearly seven hundred pounds. She watched Nathan serving free day-old cheese sandwiches, donated to make the difference between getting by and going hungry.

A young man in a fur hood leaned against the wall of the arch, noisily pissing. When he realized she was standing nearby he braked in mid-flow.

“Don’t let me stop you,” she said, raising a hand and averting her eyes.

“You’re in my bathroom, lady.” The young man buttoned his fly and spat at her legs.

She waited in the cold as Nathan handed out sandwiches to a line that showed no sign of diminishing. A little after midnight, he closed the van and drove her to the edge of the Thames. They walked across a litter-strewn concourse as bare as a disused runway, to a yellow metal ship’s container butted up against a beech tree. Nathan slipped into a diagonal shadow. Helen hesitated.

Nathan beckoned. “Not everyone is out to hurt you.”

He opened a padlock on a dented steel panel and shoved the door back with a ferrous scrape. “Wait.” He disappeared inside.

A match flared, and gradually the interior of the oblong box was illuminated. The container was constructed of flat steel panels without windows, but it had been decorated like the Bosphorus selamlik of a Turkish pasha. Rolls of handmade silk in sharp shades of purple, yellow, and blue swathed the walls. A carved Emery-wood table was covered in copper bowls and fat stone jugs. A divan covered in crushed crimson velvet stood on a tattered Persian rug. Cupboards were rubbed-down river driftwood, bleached white. A black cat with yellow eyes stretched itself across a pile of cushions.

“It’s all stuff people have chucked away. Have a glass of wine. I doubt it’s what you’re used to. Your skin’s so pale. Is it as soft as it looks?” He teased out the words with his hands.

“You live here when you’re not at the sandwich van?”

“I spend most of my time on building sites. I’m working on the electrics at the mall.” He pulled up his T-shirt to reveal a belt lined with different drill bits, like gun cartridges. His stomach was flat and brown.

“But you have a platinum credit card.”

“It belongs to a dead guy. I found his body in one of the offices this morning. It’ll run out soon.”

“And the car?”

“That belongs to my mother. What do you do?”

“I spend.”

“Is that all?”

“Pretty much.”

“Where did you get the gun?”

“I bought it. I had a fantasy of using it for target practice in Selfridges homewares department. Not on people, on soft furnishings.”

“I thought you loved all that shit.”

“It’s complicated. The things I own usually end up owning me. My signature scent has its own Web site, for God’s sake.”

Nathan smiled. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. This is just what happens when the world collapses. It’s a perfectly natural thing. Gounod said, ‘Our houses are not in the street any more; the street is in our houses.’”

“What happens after that?”

“Oh, both the streets and the houses disappear and we start all over again. I think you’re helping to speed up the process.” He filled two scratched blue tumblers with wine from a box. They touched glasses and drank. Nathan watched her with amusement.

“You say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ve been afraid all my life. You don’t seem afraid.”

“Do you know about the legend of the Green Man? It’s a pagan myth that exists in almost every history of England, but you can find him in many churches. There are sixty depictions of the Green Man in Exeter Cathedral alone. He goes back far beyond Christian legends.”

“Who is he?”

“A forest creature that destroys dying cities and returns them to nature. The result of mixing sex and soil. He’s benign and terrifying. He has a leafy face and tendrils sprouting from his mouth and nose. His hair is made from grass; his body is made from roots and flowers and branches. He is both cruel and gentle. He’s coming back to turn the cities into forests.”

“How do you know he’s coming back?”

“He lives inside everyone.”

“Including you?”

“Including me. And you.”

“I think I should go.”

Nathan suddenly leaned forward and kissed her, pushing hard. His right hand slipped across her stomach and up to her breasts. The left supported her in the small of her back. It seemed a good idea to lie down on the velvet divan, especially as his mouth was still glued to hers and was gently forcing her in that direction. He weighed almost nothing; she could hardly feel him straddled across her. Instead, she felt the warmth of his thighs where they touched her hips, his forearms against the sides of her chest, a wide tongue reaching into the back of her mouth for what seemed like days.

At some point later—she could not remember when—his shirt came off, and she heard buttons bouncing on the floor. His dark, soft skin smelled of sandalwood and underarm sweat that lingered on her fingers. The base of his erection pressed a denim-clad post against her crotch as he unpinned her arms and guided her hands around his hard buttocks. His chest hair formed a perfect black trapezoid, a ladder of tiny curls tracing to his navel and into the low waistband of his loosened jeans. The wide dry palm of his hand covered her pubic bone as he slipped his fingers inside her pants. The shock of a young man’s cool bare hand over her sex was extraordinary; she could not recall the last time someone had cupped her so gently, opening her lightly with the tips of his fingers.

Helen sank deep into the cushions, her chocolate skirt sliding from her legs. For so long she had been constricted by the curse of propriety, strapped into a sensible brassiere and expected to behave as if she were shocked and disapproving all the time, but what was all the respectability for? What had the city given her back, apart from a wider choice of fabric patterns?

She knew she wanted him inside her, and allowed him to push her deeper into musky warm darkness, the muscles in his slim brown arms lifting and widening as he raised his body over hers, each firmly guided stroke burying a hot dark beam farther and farther into her flesh, until she could feel his stomach tense and their raised pelvic bones grate hard against each other, a cauterizing molten center to their joined bodies that could light up the little cabin and provide enough electrical power for most of the shops in Oxford Street.

It was a seduction conducted backward, starting with the fierce, hard culmination, his eyes never leaving hers, his body pulling back and pushing in with decreasing connection, penetrate and withdraw, gentler and gentler, resolving to a faint and tender kiss.

Some minutes later, she realized he was sitting beside her, smoking. She dressed slowly and carelessly.

“Come back if you like,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll be here.” She could not see his smile, but knew it was wide and white and dangerous. She didn’t care how much he had practiced it on other women; she liked the idea of being one of the other women. It made her feel normal somehow, involved, part of something powerful.

Rising carefully to her feet and testing the ground to stop it from swaying, she tried not to lose her balance. She smoothed her hair back behind her ears in an attempt to look vaguely sensible and in control, and pulled the container door open a crack as Nathan refastened his jeans and took a slug of wine.

Outside, she drew a deep breath of dank river air, trying to work out exactly what had just happened. Although it was still night, a warm gray nimbus of never-darkness profiled the skyline of the embankment. In contrast, Nathan’s cabin was a black silhouette. In the center of one of the most overcrowded cities in the world, it could have been a chateau in rural France, beset by cawing crows and claw-branched trees, shunned by villagers, abandoned to old gods.

Her lurid yellow shopping bags lay scattered around the cabin like votive offerings of giant sweets. A stray cat emerged from one of them and yowled.

She looked up at the swirling sky. Something had changed. The air was alive with small insects. She thought she could hear the roots of trees crackling like scalded ice as they meandered beneath the softening tarmac of the road.

Helen Abbott breathed deeply. With each passing second she felt darker than the night and brighter than the stars. Something was kindling and catching within her. She could smell it in her nostrils, a freshness stronger and sharper than Clarins Sheer Citrus Moisturizing Mist or Coco De Mer Bitter Chocolate Body Butter.

In fact, when she tried to think of all those spot-lit branded jars and bottles lined up on the store shelves, she could only conjure images of exploding glass and splattering ointments. Rack after rack of skimpy garments, bursting into flame, shriveling and browning in the heat. Packets of tights spitting droplets of molten plastic. A Plexiglas bathroom shelf unit held up by plastic mermaids, shattering into a million blunt shards. A Devonshire buffalo-grain boudoir chair blasted into scraps and springs and stuffing. A thousand sizzling pairs of nearly identical trainers, a million rugs and glasses, vases and table lamps and coffee machines and computer keyboards all catching alight and melting, lifting and rolling and blowing away.

Each department store flared up in turn with a sudden whump like indoor lightning, followed by the popping of lightbulbs and the gentle bubbling of gilt paintwork. They glowed fiercely and soon burned themselves out into blackened shells.

The city was now dark and dead and windy, washed with the stinging baptism of rainfall, the streets split apart by emerald offshoots springing from the sap of rapidly rising trees.

Helen shook the visions from her head. Her cheeks, breasts, buttocks, legs were burning. She dug into her bag, checked that the gun was loaded, aimed it high and fired a single bullet into the sky. Then she hurled the Derringer as hard as she could in the direction of the river and headed home.

Her high heels were starting to pinch her, so she took them off and walked barefoot across the concrete toward the station. In the warmth left by her departing soles, grass sprouted up through the cracks in the pavement.