This must be a dream, she told herself. I dreamed, and am still sleeping. And yet she could feel the strap of her backpack against her shoulder; the ache of her sore calves; the dryness at the back of her throat. She could still smell woodsmoke on her clothes, and the residual scent of madcap. What had it been? Some new strain of marijuana? Whatever it was, she felt sober now. She found her water bottle in the pocket of her backpack and drank. The water was cool against her throat, and she felt a little better.
It must have been a fugue state, she thought. That would explain the things she had seen, and her mind had merely attempted to fit them into her reality. But now she felt completely awake, completely sober, and yet this was still not the London she knew. She wanted to go home, but the Tube was closed on both sides of the square. So she started to walk along Piccadilly, conscious of the sound of her feet on the silent pavement, and as she did she remembered the scene she had glimpsed through the paving-crack; and how real it had seemed. How much more real than any dream.
She looked at her reflection in a nearby shop window, seeing herself in the darkened glass, her backpack over one shoulder. Her hair stood out in crazy spikes; her face was smudged with woodsmoke. She came a little closer and saw that, behind the glass, the window display was overrun with the same vegetation she had seen at the Tube entrance; brambles, and bindweed, and Russian vine, and something that might have been hawthorn. Some kind of a Hallowe’en display, thought Fay, seeing rose hips and blackberries growing against the dusty glass. Maybe some kind of conceptual art installation. Maybe it was Fashion Week, and this was some new way of selling clothes. She looked closer and saw that among the vines, there was indeed an array of evening wear, but the dresses looked old and neglected, and there were cobwebs in the lace; a layer of dust on the sequins.
She moved to the next shop window, which seemed to be a jeweller’s. But here, too, there were creepers and vines growing up against the glass; there was dust on the display cases and the velvet lining, and the necklaces, bracelets and rings were all but obscured by sprays of bramble and autumn leaves.
Fay moved past the jeweller’s shop, feeling her heartbeat quicken. Every shop she passed was the same; overgrown with creepers and vines, or branches bearing hips and haws, or thorny clusters of dust-grey sloes. She started to run. Her feeling of dread and her aching muscles drove her to it, and as she ran past the darkened shops – Waterstones, its display of books scattered like heaps of fallen leaves; Fortnum’s, its display of gilded biscuit tins and bottles and chocolates all tangled with briars and foxgloves and rose – she saw that all the shops were the same; their windows dark and overgrown, gleefully bursting with baleful life. Some had broken windows, with scattered fragments of glass on the ground, allowing the creepers and brambles and vines to cascade out into the street. Fay saw a cluster of blackberries growing from a crack in a wall, picked one, popped it in her mouth. The taste was sharp and wild and strong, nothing like the blackberries she bought in shops.
She remembered a snatch of folklore; that at Michaelmas, the Devil spits on autumn’s last crop of blackberries, making them bitter and poisonous. Even so, she took another handful of berries. They were not exactly good, and yet the taste of them was compelling. They tasted of smoke, and Bonfire Night, and cheap wine, and burned sugar. And they tasted real – more real than anything else on that silent street. Reaching Bond Street Station at last, Fay noticed that it too was closed off – and here too there were creepers and vines growing out of the entrance.
That decided it, she thought. Whatever had happened to the Tube, the road was still there, and she knew the way home. She turned back and started to run, slowly at first, then settling into a faster pace. At first her muscles were stiff from a night spent on the London streets, but she soon found her natural rhythm, and the pavement felt good against her feet. Back along Piccadilly she ran, then across the deserted square and up Shaftesbury Avenue. The autumn leaves that papered the ground made brittle, desperate sounds as she passed. Otherwise, it was eerily still. No sound of traffic, no sirens, no voices, no taxis, no passers-by – and now as she ran she realized that apart from the leaves, there was no litter on the road; not even a sweet wrapper. Running past the theatres she saw that the lights were still out on the billboards, and the posters and fliers were faded and torn, and that here and there were creepers and vines growing out of the doorways.
This time she did not stop to look, but quickened her pace and ran faster. The wind was strangely warm, and smelt of sage and samphire, and fallen leaves, and windfall apples, and blackberries. Even the air is different today, thought Fay. It smells of the woods in autumn. I am lost in the wild woods, except that the woods look like London.
By now she was approaching Euston Road. There, at least, would be people, she thought. But turning onto the carriageway, she saw no sign of life; no traffic; no litter but fallen leaves; not even a single pedestrian. And here, too, was that scent on the wind, that wind that seemed so strangely warm, a scent that reminded her of the woods, a distillation of spices and leaves left to moulder and crumble and rot, and beyond it, the salty tang of the sea. And rolling in the gutter, Fay saw something that looked like a child’s red ball, coming towards her, blown by the wind—
She stopped to retrieve it. It wasn’t a ball. It was a single, flawless, red rose, tumbled and travelling with the wind. No florist’s bloom, but an old-fashioned rose, packed with scented petals. Fay held it to her face. It smelt of summer and of endings. The wind must have blown it off a bush, in a churchyard, maybe, somewhere on the Euston Road. She tucked it carefully into her backpack, taking care not to crush the petals. Daisy always loved roses, she thought. The scented ones were her favourites. And Fay had always meant to plant a rose bush by her daughter’s grave, but the task of choosing just one had been too much for her. There were so many, their names as enticing as their colours: Albertine; Grand Siècle; Autumn Damask; Madame Alfred Carrière. They sounded like ladies-in-waiting from some old French fairy-tale. But some part of her knew that once she had chosen a rose bush and planted it over Daisy’s grave, she would have taken another step towards saying goodbye for ever. And Fay did not want to say goodbye. Not even with the pain of her loss like a tangle of thorns in her heart, remembering Daisy was all she had, and was better by far than forgetting her.
Once more she started to run down the road. Home was barely ten minutes away. And however alien London had become, home was still home, and meant safety. Home was where she and Allan had lived, in that little house near King’s Cross with the patchy central heating; home was where Daisy had been conceived; where her childhood room stayed untouched, her toys and dolls all put away, her bed remade and aired every week, with flowers at her bedside. Home was where you went when nothing else in the world made sense, and all you wanted to do was curl up under a blanket and sleep until the stars began to fall and all the world was ashes.
But when Fay finally got to King’s Cross, it was overgrown with weeds, and brambles grew across the road, and elders from the clock tower. And beyond that, there were no houses at all, except for some dere-lict buildings, roofless and empty and vaulted with trees and spreading Virginia creeper, and buddleia, and sycamore, and creeping scarlet roses.