I started this fic over 20 years ago now. Tonight, as part of (Inter)National Drunk Writing Night, where the rules are "no editing" and "have fun", I've been poking through my Unfinished Fic and pulling out things to work on. This one was a sentence short of an ending.
Set during "The Wake".
***
I see dead people.
I just wish they’d fuck off.
They say that everyone has their ghosts. Memories, dreams, thoughts… they accumulate over a lifetime. Psychic baggage. But when that lifetime spans more centuries than it ought, the mental broom cupboards get a tad crowded. I’ve lived in London on and off since the time immediately following the Black Death, and there’s precious few places I can go that don’t have some resonance. There’s always some memory, some shade of a distant friend or lover long-dead, some remnant of a building I once called home, a pub I once drank at, an office that once housed a brothel I visited. Everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, there they are.
Doesn’t mean I don’t love the place tho’.
Tonight is my last night in London, in England, for that matter. The old place holds no secrets from me, no new horizons, and so I’m off to the country that worships all things new, where they think that thirty years is a long time. The States don’t occupy themselves with ghosts of times long past, they’re too busy living in the now, eyes fixed firmly on the future. I’ve lived there before, true, got myself involved in some trading of both scrupulous and dubious wares, but there’s space there, places I’ve never seen, even after twelve lifetimes. People who I can look at and not see the tracery of long-dead colleagues in their bone structures, buildings whose doors I’ve never darkened. Streets that have never known my feet, gutters that haven’t been my bed.
My plane leaves at some ungodly hour of the morning, and I’ve been over the River, drinking with the lads, such ‘friends’ as I’ve trusted myself to make. They’re slightly better-known acquaintances, really. Immortality is a heavy burden, sometimes. Those things we define ourselves by – friends, loves, family – they don’t mean shit when you’re six-hundred-odd years old. They don’t last, you see – nothing does – and in the end all you have is a tombstone somewhere and faded, distant memories. Sometimes not even that – Robyn’s face is lost to me now, and all I have is the cold knowledge I was once married to a woman of that name back in the days of Good Queen Bess. That we had a son together, who died stupidly. Then again, aren’t all deaths stupid? Audrey’s certainly was – smashed to bits on the high street by some idiot lorry driver. Then again, isn’t that why I’m still here in the first place? Because I had decided that death was a mug’s game and Someone decided to indulge my hubris?
Collers Wood, Tooting Bec, fucking Clapham North, South _and_ Common, Elephant and Castle… this train seems to be stopping at every station, and a few extra they pull out just for nights like these. The names, too, are old friends, old memories, strange as they are to the tourists I see giggling and pointing at the Tube maps on the walls. London Bridge, with the Tower a spit away… many’s the post-execution drink I’ve had at the ‘Hung Drawn and Quartered’. We pull into Monument and there’s a young bloke sitting on a bench on the platform, coat wrapped around him to avoid the splashes as he casually vomits over the edge of his seat. Shades of an uglier, dirtier time, when people tossed their body waste out the window and into the streets below and the roads ran with shit and offal. Not a time I miss – give me indoor plumbing and a roll of toilet paper any time. People romanticise the past, but I was there, and it wasn’t all chivalry and great deeds and beautiful maidens. It was disease and filth and going hungry half the time. It was clothes that didn’t fit, scratchy undergarments (if you actually had any), having a bath once a year in the summer and stinking the rest of the time. And Death, always Death, be it quick and merciful, or slow and ugly, or any degree between. I’m well out of it, and well out of this place, this city.
And yet… Moorgate, Old Street, Angel, St Pancras… There’s a kind of poetry in those names, their original meanings long-forgotten except by stuffy academics and amateur historians and strange little train-spotting people in anoraks. I’ve travelled this city so long I know them by heart. We pull out of the darkness of the tunnel into the harsh white-glare of the station, not pausing this time, and out of the corner of my eye I see the flash of white skin framed by an unruly mop of black hair, and I start, leaning forward for a better look. It’s not him, but – true he’s got the same underfed frame, and allergy to colour, but the eyes that meet mine are dull, human. No twinkling of distant stars here. But the resemblance was enough to summon the memory, or half-memory, in the way of all dreams, of a ceremony, no, a funeral, and I’m almost sure that I’ve buried yet another friend, one that ought to have outlived me by all accounts.
More dead people. If that one even counts as ‘people’.
The train shudders to a stop at Camden Town finally, end of the line for me, and I stumble out of the train and into the noisome echo of the station tunnels. Losing myself into the vast anonymity of London. For a little while, at least.
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