Neverwhere

R. B. MAYHEW

"Lucky bastard," said Gary, affectionately.

He wandered off, and Richard went through the door, utterly bemused. The room was no longer an executive supplies and file room: it had been emptied of files and supplies, and painted in gray and black and white, and recarpeted. In the center of the office was a large desk. He examined it: it was, unmistakably, his very own desk. His trolls had all been neatly put away in one of the desk drawers, and he took them all out, and arranged them around the office. He had his own window, with a nice view of the sludge-brown river and the South Bank of the Thames, beyond. There was even a large green plant, with huge waxy leaves, of the kind that looks artificial but isn't. His old, dusty, cream-colored computer terminal had been replaced with a much sleeker, cleaner black computer terminal, which took up less desk space.

He walked over to the window and sipped his tea, staring out at the dirty brown river.

"You've found everything all right, then?" He looked up. Crisp, and efficient, Sylvia, the MD's PA, was standing in the doorway. She smiled when she saw him.

"Um. Yes. Look, there are things I have to take care of at home… d'you think it'd be all right if I took the rest of the day off and-"

"Suit yourself. You aren't meant to be back in till tomorrow anyway."

"I'm not?" he asked. "Right."

Sylvia frowned. "What happened to your finger?"

"I broke it," he told her.

She looked at his hand with concern. "You weren't in a fight, were you?"

"Me?"

She grinned. "Just teasing. I suppose you shut it in a door. That's what my sister did."

"No," Richard began to admit, "I was in a fi… " Sylvia raised an eyebrow. "A door," he finished lamely.

He went to the building he had once lived in by taxi. He was not sure that he trusted himself to travel by the Underground. Not yet. Having no door key, he knocked at the door of his flat and was more than disappointed when it was opened by the woman Richard last remembered meeting, or rather, failing to meet, in his bathroom. He introduced himself as the previous tenant, and quickly established that a) he, Richard, no longer lived there, and b) she, Mrs. Buchanan, had no idea what had happened to any of his personal possessions. Richard took some notes, and then he said good-bye very nicely, and took another black taxi to go and see a man in a camel-hair coat.

The smooth man in the camel-hair coat was not wearing his camel-hair coat, and was, in fact, a good deal less smooth than the last time Richard had encountered him. They were sitting in his office, and he had listened to Richard's list of complaints with the expression of someone who has recently and accidentally swallowed whole a live spider and has just begun to feel it squirm.

"Well, yes," he admitted, after looking at the files. "There does seem to have been some kind of problem, now you mention it. I can't quite see how it could have happened."

"I don't think it matters how it happened," said Richard, reasonably. "The fact of the matter is that while I was away for a few weeks, you rented my apartment to," he consulted his notes, "George and Adele Buchanan. Who have no intention of leaving."

The man closed the file. "Well," he said. "Mistakes do happen. Human error. I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about it."

The old Richard, the one who had lived in what was now the Buchanans' home, would have crumbled at this point, apologized for being a nuisance, and gone away. Instead, Richard said, "Really? Nothing you can do about it? You rented a property I was legally renting from your company to someone else, and in the process lost all my personal possessions, and there's nothing you can do about it? Now, I happen to think, and I'm sure my lawyer will also think, that there is a great deal you can do about it."

The man without the camel-hair coat looked as if the spider was beginning to crawl back up his throat. "But we don't have any other vacant apartments like yours in the building," he said. "There's only the penthouse suite."

"That," Richard told the man, coldly, "would be fine… " The man relaxed. "… for living accommodation. Now," said Richard, "let's talk about compensation for my lost possessions."

The new apartment was much nicer than the one he had left behind. It had more windows, and a balcony, a spacious lounge, and a proper spare bedroom. Richard prowled it, dissatisfied. The man-without-a-camel-hair-coat had, extremely grudgingly, had the apartment furnished with a bed, a sofa, several chairs, and a television set. Richard put Hunter's knife on the mantelpiece. He bought a take-away curry from the Indian restaurant across the road, sat on the carpeted floor of his new apartment, and ate it, wondering if he had ever really eaten curry late at night in a street-market held on the deck of a gunship moored by Tower Bridge. It did not seem very likely, now that he thought about it.

The doorbell rang. He got up and answered the door. "We found a lot of your stuff, Mr. Mayhew," said the man who was once more wearing his camel-hair coat. "Turned out it'd been put into storage. Right, bring the stuff in, lads."

A couple of burly men hauled in several large wooden packing cases, filled with Richard's stuff, and deposited them on the carpet in the middle of the living room.

"Thanks," said Richard. He reached into the first box, unwrapped the first paper-covered object, which turned out to be a framed photograph of Jessica. He stared at it for some moments, and then he put it down again in the case. He found the box with his clothes in it, removed them, and put them away in his bedroom, but the other boxes sat, untouched, in the middle of the living room floor. As the days went on, he felt increasingly guilty about not unpacking them. But he did not unpack them.

He was in his office, sitting at his desk, staring out of the window, when the intercom buzzed. "Richard?" said Sylvia. "The MD wants a meeting in his office in twenty minutes to discuss the Wandsworth report."

"I'll be there," he said. Then, because he had nothing else to do for the next ten minutes, he picked up an orange troll and menaced a slightly smaller green-haired troll with it. "I am the greatest warrior of London Below. Prepare to die," he said, in a dangerous trollish voice, waggling the orange troll. Then he picked up the green-haired troll, and said, in a smaller trollish voice, "Aha! But first you shall drink the nice cup of tea… "

Someone knocked on the door, and, guiltily, he put down the trolls. "Come in." The door opened, and Jessica came in, and stood in the doorway. She looked nervous. He had forgotten quite how beautiful she was. "Hello Richard," she said.

"Hello Jess," said Richard, and then he corrected himself. "Sorry-Jessica."

She smiled, and tossed her hair. "Oh, Jess is fine," she said, and looked as if she almost meant it. "Jessica-Jess. Nobody's called me Jess for ages. I rather miss it."

"So," said Richard, "what brings, do I have the honor, you, um."

"Just wanted to see you, really."

He was not sure what he ought to say. "That's nice," he said.

She closed the door to his office and took a few steps toward him. "Richard. You know something strange? I remember calling the engagement off. But I hardly remember what we were arguing about."

"No?"

"It's not important, though. Is it?" She looked around the office. "You got a promotion?"

"Yes."

"I'm happy for you." She put a hand into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small brown box. She put it down on Richard's desk. He opened the box, although he knew what was inside it. "It's our engagement ring. I thought that, well, maybe, I'd give it back to you, and then, well, if things worked out, well, perhaps one day you'd give it back to me." It glittered in the sunlight: the most money he had ever spent on anything. He closed the box, and gave it back to her. "You keep it, Jessica," he said. And then, "I'm sorry."

She bit her lower lip. "Did you meet someone?" He hesitated. He thought of Lamia, and Hunter, and Anaesthesia, and even Door, but none of them were someones in the way that she meant. "No. No one else," he said. And then, realizing it was true as he said it, "I've just changed, that's all."

His intercom buzzed. "Richard? We're waiting for you." He pressed the button. "Be right down, Sylvia."

He looked at Jessica. She said nothing. Perhaps there was nothing she could trust herself to say. She walked away, and she closed the door quietly behind her.

Richard picked up the papers he would need, with one hand. He ran the other hand across his face, as if he were wiping something away: sorrow, perhaps, or tears, or Jessica.

He started taking the Tube again, to and from work, although he soon found that he had stopped buying newspapers to read on his journey in the morning and the evening, and instead of reading he would scan the faces of the other people on the train, faces of every kind and color, and wonder if they were all from London Above, wonder what went on behind their eyes.

During the evening rush hour, a few days after his encounter with Jessica, he thought he saw Lamia across the carriage, with her back to him, her dark hair piled high on her head and her dress long and black. His heart began to pound in his chest. He pushed his way toward her through the crowded compartment. As he got closer, the train pulled into a station, the doors hissed open, and she stepped off. But it was not Lamia. Just another young London goth-girl, he realized, disappointed, off for a night on the town.

One Saturday afternoon he saw a large brown rat, sitting on top of the plastic garbage cans at the back of Newton Mansions, cleaning its whiskers and looking as if it owned the world. At Richard's approach it leapt down onto the pavement and waited in the shadow of the garbage cans, staring up at him with wary bead-black eyes.

Richard crouched down. "Hello," he said, gently. "Do we know each other?" The rat made no kind of response that Richard was able to perceive, but it did not run away. "My name is Richard Mayhew," he continued, in a low voice. "I'm not actually a rat-speaker, but I, um, know a few rats, well, I've met some, and I wondered if you were familiar with the Lady Door"

He heard a shoe scrape behind him, and he turned to see the Buchanans looking at him curiously. "Have you… lost something?" asked Mrs. Buchanan. Richard heard, but ignored, her husband's gruff whisper of "Just his marbles."

"No," said Richard, honestly, "I was, um, saying hello to a… " The rat scurried off and away.

"Was that a rat?" barked George Buchanan. "I'll complain to the council. It's a disgrace. But that's London for you, isn't it?"

Yes, agreed Richard. It was. It really was.

Richard's possessions continued to sit untouched in the wooden packing cases in the middle of the living room floor.

He had not yet turned on the television. He would come home at night, and eat, then he would stand at the window, looking out over London, at the cars and the rooftops and the lights, as the late autumn twilight turned into night, and the lights came on all over the city. He would watch, standing alone in his darkened flat, until the city's lights began to be turned off. Eventually, reluctantly, he would undress, and climb into bed, and go to sleep.

Sylvia came into his office one Friday afternoon. He was opening envelopes, using his knife-Hunter's knife-as a letter-opener. "Richard?" she said. "I was wondering. Are you getting out much, these days?" He shook his head. "Well, a bunch of us are going out this evening. Do you fancy coming along?"

"Um. Sure," he said. "Yes. I'd love it."

He hated it.

There were eight of them: Sylvia and her young man, who had something to do with vintage cars, Gary from Corporate Accounts, who had recently broken up with his girlfriend, due to what Gary persisted in describing as a slight misunderstanding (he had thought she would be rather more understanding about his sleeping with her best friend than she had in fact turned out to be), several perfectly nice people and friends of nice people, and the new girl from Computer Services.

First they saw a film on the huge screen of the Odeon, Leicester Square. The good guy won in the end, and there were plenty of explosions and flying objects on the way. Sylvia decided that Richard should sit next to the girl from Computer Services, as, she explained, she was new to the company and did not know many people.

They walked down to Old Compton Street, on the edge of Soho, where the tawdry and the chic sit side by side to the benefit of both, and they ate at La Reache, filling up on couscous and dozens of marvelous plates of exotic food, which covered their table and spilled over onto an unused table nearby, and they walked from there to a small pub Sylvia liked in nearby Berwick Street, and they had a few drinks, and they chatted.

The new girl from Computer Services smiled at Richard a lot, as the evening went on, and he had nothing at all to say to her. He bought a round of drinks for the party, and the girl from Computer Services helped him carry them from the bar back to their table. Gary went off to the men's room, and the girl from Computer Services came and sat next to Richard, taking his place. Richard's head was filled with the clink of glasses, and the blare of the jukebox, and the sharp smell of beer and spilt Bacardi and cigarette smoke. He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table, and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying, and, which was worse, that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.

And it came to him then, as clearly and as certainly as if he had been watching it on the big screen at the Odeon, Leicester Square: the rest of his life. He would go home tonight with the girl from Computer Services, and they would make gentle love, and tomorrow, it being Saturday, they would spend the morning in bed. And then they would get up, and together they would remove his possessions from the packing cases, and put them away. In a year, or a little less, he would marry the girl from Computer Services, and get another promotion, and they would have two children, a boy and a girl, and they would move out to the suburbs, to Harrow or Croydon or Hampstead or even as far away as distant Reading.

And it would not be a bad life. He knew that, too. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.

When Gary came back from the toilet, he looked around in puzzlement. Everyone was there except… "Dick?" he asked "Has anyone seen Richard?"

The girl from Computer Services shrugged.

Gary went outside, to Berwick Street. The cold of the night air was like a splash of water to his face. He could taste winter in the air. He called, "Dick? Hey? Richard?"

"Over here."

Richard was leaning against a wall, in the shadows. "Just getting a breath of fresh air."

"Are you all right?" asked Gary.

"Yes," said Richard. "No. I don't know."

"Well," said Gary, "that covers your options. Do you want to talk about it?"

Richard looked at him seriously. "You'll laugh at me."

"I'll do that anyway."

Richard looked at Gary. Then Gary was relieved to see him smile, and he knew that they were still friends. Gary looked back at the pub. Then he put his hands into his coat pockets. "Come on," he said. "Let's walk. You can get it off your chest. Then I'll laugh at you."

"Bastard," said Richard, sounding a lot more like Richard than he had in recent weeks.

"It's what friends are for."

They began to amble off, under the streetlights. "Look, Gary," Richard began. "Do you ever wonder if this is all there is?"

"What?"

Richard gestured vaguely, taking in everything. "Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?"

"I think that sums it up, yes," said Gary.

Richard sighed. "Well," he said, "for a start, I didn't go to Majorca. I mean, I really didn't go to Majorca."

Richard talked as they walked up and down the warren of tiny Soho back streets between Regent Street and the Charing Cross Road. He talked, and talked, beginning with finding a girl bleeding on the pavement, and trying to help, because he couldn't just leave her there, and what happened next. And when they got too cold to walk they went into an all-night greasy spoon cafe. It was a proper one, the kind that cooked everything in lard, and served cups of serious tea in large chipped white mugs shiny with bacon grease. Richard and Gary sat and Richard talked while Gary listened, and then they ordered fried eggs and baked beans and toast and sat and ate them, while Richard continued to talk, and Gary continued to listen. They mopped up the last of their egg yolks with the toast. They drank more tea, until eventually Richard said, "… and then Door did something with the key, and I was back again. In London Above. Well, the real London. And, well, you know the rest."

There was a silence. "That's all," said Richard. He finished his tea.

Gary scratched his head. "Look," he said, at length. "Is this real? Not some kind of horrible joke? I mean, somebody with a camera isn't about to leap out from behind a screen or something and tell me I'm on Candid Camera?"

"I sincerely hope not," said Richard. "You… do you believe me?"

Gary looked at the bill on their table, counted out pound coins, and dropped them onto the Formica, where they sat beside a plastic tomato ketchup container in the shape of an oversized tomato, old ketchup caked black about its nozzle. "I believe that, well, something happened to you, obviously… Look, more to the point, do you believe it?"

Richard stared up at him. There were dark circles beneath Richard's eyes. "Do I believe it? I don't know anymore. I did. I was there. There was a part in there when you turned up, you know."

"You didn't mention that before."

"It was a pretty horrid part. You told me that I'd gone mad and I was just wandering around London hallucinating."

They walked out of the cafe and walked south, toward Piccadilly. "Well," said Gary, "you must admit, it sounds more likely than your magical London underneath, where the people who fall through the cracks go. I've passed the people who fall through the cracks, Richard: they sleep in shop doorways all down the Strand. They don't go to a special London. They freeze to death in the winter."

Richard said nothing.

Gary continued. "I think maybe you got some kind of blow on the head. Or maybe some kind of shock when Jessica chucked you. For a while you went a little crazy. Then you got better."

Richard shivered. "You know what scares me? I think you could be right."

"So life isn't exciting?" continued Gary. "Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight. I'll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?" He turned and looked at Richard.

Richard nodded, hesitantly. "Yeah."

Gary looked at his watch. "Bloody hell," he exclaimed. "It's after two o'clock. Let's hope there are still a few taxis about." They walked into Brewer Street, at the Piccadilly end of Soho, wandering past the lights of the peep shows and the strip clubs. Gary was talking about taxis. He was not saying anything original, or even interesting. He was simply fulfilling his obligation as a Londoner to grumble about taxis. "… Had his light on and everything," he was saying, "I told him where I wanted to go, he said, sorry, I'm on my way home, I said, where do all you taxi drivers live anyway? And why don't any of you live near me? The trick is to get in first, then tell them you live south of the river, I mean, what was he trying to tell me? The way he was carrying on, Battersea might as well have been in bloody Katmandu… "

Richard had tuned him out. When they reached Windmill Street, Richard crossed the road and stared into the window of the Vintage Magazine Shop, examining the cartoonish models of forgotten film stars and the old posters and comics and magazines on display. It had been a glimpse into a world of adventure and imagination. And it was not true. He told himself that.

"So, what do you think?" Gary asked.

Richard jerked back to the present. "Of what?"

Gary realized Richard had not heard a word he had said. He said it again. "If there aren't any taxis we could get night buses."

"Yeah," said Richard. "Great. Fine."

Gary grimaced. "You worry me."

"Sorry."

They walked down Windmill Street, toward Piccadilly. Richard thrust his hands deep into his pockets. He looked puzzled for a moment, and pulled out a rather crumpled black crow's feather, with red thread tied around the quill.

"What's that?" asked Gary.

"It's a-" He stopped. "It's just a feather. You're right. It's only rubbish." He dropped the feather in the gutter at the curb, and did not look back.

Gary hesitated. Then he said, picking his words with care, "Have you thought about seeing somebody?"

"See somebody? Look, I'm not crazy, Gary."

"Are you sure about that?" A taxi came toward them, yellow for-hire light burning.

"No," said Richard, honestly. "Here's a taxi. You take it. I'll take the next one."

"Thanks." Gary waved down the taxi and climbed into the back before telling the driver that he wished to go to Battersea. He pulled down the window, and, as the taxi pulled out, he said, "Richard-this is reality. Get used to it. It's all there is. See you on Monday."

Richard waved at him and watched the taxi drive away. Then he turned around and walked slowly away from the lights of Piccadilly, back up toward Brewer Street. There was no longer a feather by the curb. Richard paused beside an old woman, fast asleep in a shop doorway. She was covered with a ripped old blanket, and her few possessions-two small junk-filled cardboard boxes and a dirty, once-white umbrella-were tied together with string beside her, and the string was tied around her wrist, to keep anyone from stealing them while she slept. She wore a wool hat, of no particular color.

He pulled out his wallet, found a ten-pound note, and bent down to slide the folded note into the woman's hand. Her eyes opened, and she jerked awake. She blinked at the money with old eyes. "What's this?" she said, sleepily, displeased at having been woken. "Keep it," said Richard.

She unfolded the money, then pushed it up her sleeve. "Whatchyouwant?" she asked Richard, suspiciously.

"Nothing," said Richard. "I really don't want anything. Nothing at all." And then he realized how true that was; and how dreadful a thing it had become. "Have you ever got everything you ever wanted? And then realized it wasn't what you wanted at all?"

"Can't say that I have," she said, picking the sleep from the corner of her eyes.

"I thought I wanted this," said Richard. "I thought I wanted a nice, normal life. I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane. You know?" She shook her head. He reached into his inside pocket. "You see this?" he said. He held up the knife. "Hunter gave this to me as she died," he told her.

"Don't hurt me," said the old lady. "I ain't done nuffing."

He heard a strange intensity in his own voice. "I wiped her blood from the blade. A hunter looks after her weapons. The earl knighted me with it. He gave me the freedom of the Underside."

"I don't know anyfing about that," she said. "Please. Put it away. That's a good lad."

Richard hefted the knife. Then he lunged toward the brick wall, next to the doorway in which the woman had been sleeping. He slashed three times, once horizontally, twice vertically. "What you doin'?" asked the woman, warily.

"Making a door," he told her.

She sniffed. "You ought to put that thing away. If the police see you they'll run you in for offensive weapons."

Richard looked at the outline of a doorway he had scratched on the wall. He put his knife back into his pocket, and he began to hammer on the wall with his fists. "Hey! Is there anyone there? Can you hear me? It's me-Richard. Door? Someone?" He hurt his hands, but he kept banging and flailing at the brickwork.

And then the madness left him, and he stopped.

"Sorry," he said to the old lady.

She did not answer. She had either gone back to sleep or, more probably, pretended to go back to sleep. Elderly snores, real or feigned, came from the doorway. Richard sat down on the pavement, and wondered how someone could make such a mess of their life as he had made of his. Then he looked back at the doorway he had scratched on the wall.

There was a door-shaped hole in the wall, where he had scratched his outline. There was a man standing in the doorway, with his arms folded theatrically. He stood there until he was certain that Richard had seen him. And then he yawned hugely, covering his mouth with a dark hand.

The marquis de Carabas raised an eyebrow. "Well?" he said, irritably. "Are you coming?"

Richard stared at him for a heartbeat.

Then Richard nodded, without trusting himself to speak, and stood up. And they walked away together through the hole in the wall, back into the darkness, leaving nothing behind them; not even the doorway.