Decay Inevitable

He was sobering by the minute thanks to the cold and this business of remembering. A pervasive mist was reluctant to leave the canal’s dip; it sat deep and itchy in the pit of his lungs. Sean slipped and skidded down to the fence that kept people away from the bank of the canal. As before, he leapt over it – somewhat less stealthily this time – and hunkered in the shadows, listening hard for any movement that his clumsiness might have provoked. The light here was poor, only just reaching him from the opposite bank of the canal, where an illuminated towpath accompanied the journey of the water. The diffuse glow bled through the mist, picking out broken computer monitors and the radiator grilles from cars that had ruled the road during his youth: Capris, Chevettes, Princesses, Cortinas.

At the wall, and the high wooden gates of Boughey’s, the ironmonger’s, he tried to see through the cracks but the light here was not so generous. At least the building looked as dead as last time; there was no flicker of a lightbulb in any of the windows, no sound from a tinny radio station, or rustle of a newspaper page being turned.

Sean rooted around in the grass and found an old carpet with more holes than weave to it. It smelled heavily of soil and mildew. He hauled it to the gates and rolled it as best he could before slinging it over his shoulder. He began to climb, jamming his boots sideways into the gaps between the wooden planks. Nearing the top, he let the weight of his upper body hang on his left hand, curled over one of the stiles that supported the gate against its hinges. With the other hand he shook the carpet open, gritting his teeth against the strain, and flung it as high as he could so that it dropped onto the razor wire, protecting him from it as he scooted over. He waited until his breath quickly returned to normal. Adrenaline was chasing the booze from his system. Again he listened for movement within the building before sidling up close to a window. The view was as inky as that outside. He couldn’t see much beyond a few vague lumps that were outlined against a window on the opposite side of the floor.

The back door was a bastard. No way that was going to budge. Sean had found an iron bar and was considering putting a window through when he saw the black zig-zag of a fire escape camouflaged against the sooty walls. He clambered onto it and skipped up the metal steps, making little ting-tang noises with the toes of his boots. At the top, the landing fed a fire door that was only slightly more substantial than the entrance to a Wendy house. Using the bar as a jemmy, Sean wrenched it away from the lock, almost splitting the puny wooden architrave apart as he did so.

A breath of old things enveloped him. A smell of dryness and polish.

Again, he listened. There was a metronomic plesh of water dripping from a tap or a crack. The fluting of wind through a chimney that had not exhaled smoke for decades.

Sean pulled the door to behind him and let his eyes become accustomed to this fresh dark. He wished he had a torch, and considered coming back in the morning to explore properly, but realised there was no way he could do that now. When Salty saw that the door was broken it would be repaired and a better job made of it next time.

Ahead, a narrow wooden staircase took him down into an open-plan office above what must have been the ironmonger’s proper, where two old desks were arranged, facing each other. There was a Bakelite telephone on one desk, thick cord wrapped around itself. There were also two polished wooden trays, bearing labels upon which were written, respectively, in a cursive hand: IN and OUT. On the other desk sat a bulky Remington Noiseless typewriter, edged with a grin of light that had found its way in from the main road. There was a bowl with a single lemon in it, that had dried and shrivelled before its small wound of rot was able to spread. A game of patience had been abandoned.

Everything was coated with a fine patina of gum and dust. On the wall, a calendar for 1976 was pinned, forgotten. Sean flicked through it for anything to inspire him, but there was nothing beyond the glossy curves of women with bouffant hairstyles and heavy make-up.