Low Life

With every passing year, Andrew's eyes became a shade greyer; by the time of his fiftieth birthday there was no trace left of the piercing turquoise which had characterized him at twenty. The hair too was grey by then, and receding slightly, and his skin was papery and the colour of dust. So much had just drained from his appearance over those thirty years that one who knew him in his youth could have studied him for hours without recognition, though his features were virtually unchanged. Yet his spirit remained as rich and lively as ever, and his voice too never took on the pallor of his face. Sometimes when he spoke I would close my eyes and then he was twenty again, dynamic and beautiful.

Now that he is gone, my memories are threatened by creeping nostalgia. Already it is hard to be sure exactly what he was like. Sometimes I hold imaginary conversations with him, framing his replies as he would have done, interrupting just when he would. But increasingly he speaks with my voice, and his interjections, his humour, his rhyme and meter are replaced by mine.

But I still remember things we did. The sentimentalizing gloss can't -- yet -- suffocate our journeys into the low life.

*

On the morning Andrew found his first grey hair, a terrible storm laid London low. Winds of over 100 miles per hour uprooted trees and overturned buses. By early that afternoon the winds stopped dead, but torrential rains continued until the streets were ankle deep and rivers ran in the gutters. Seventeen people died: most hit by windblown debris, two drowned in the Thames, one carried off by the wind and found three days later on the beach at Lyme Regis with an icicle piercing his lungs.

This was in the days when it was still true to say, like Eliza Doolittle, that "in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen" -- and the south of England was in shock for a week afterwards.

I was working nights at the time, and slept through the whole event. Andrew arrived at my flat at about 2pm, only minutes after the wind had stopped, and almost dragged me out of bed and into my clothes.

"Come on," he urged, as I struggled to tie my shoes, still half asleep, "it's fabulous out there. You can't imagine. We may never get a better chance!"

Andrew's car was parked perhaps 8 feet from my door. Long before I reached it I was soaked to the skin. The rain was so heavy it bruised my scalp.

There was little evidence of destruction on my street, a narrow alleyway without trees, so I was unprepared for the scenes of wholesale devastation beyond.

"Christ!" as we turned onto the main street. "It looks like the day after Armageddon."

And it did. Leaves, branches, entire trees were scattered everywhere. The ground was littered with broken glass and debris. We passed a car lying upside down on the roof of another; a shop window that a lorry had driven into; a motorcycle perched at the top of a denuded tree like some monstrous nesting bird. Many times we had to divert around vast obstacles -- overturned vehicles, trees, once the entire roof of a house, apparently intact in the middle of the road.

Virtually no-one was on the streets. The rain flooding down over this vista of destruction was keeping away the sightseers who would later swarm through the debris like rats. With all the drains clogged with rubbish and leaves, the water level was rising rapidly, and already some gutters were overflowing.

Andrew drove like a lunatic. At the Embankment our way was blocked by more fallen trees; he stopped the car.

"This is close enough. We can walk the rest of the way."

Cursing myself for not bringing an umbrella, I followed him out into the pouring rain, struggling to keep up as he strode cheerfully away.

"For Christ's sake, Andrew, where are we going?"

"To watch the foundations shake! Hurry! This is a magical day, David, can't you feel it?"

"It's a horrible day."

"Yes, truly horrible. There's no time to lose or we may miss it all."

And with that, he was off.

On Westminster Bridge, a dog dangled from one the lampposts by its tail, and a Mini, sheared in two, lay half on the southbound carriageway, half on the north. I was cold and drenched and the constant battering of the rain was giving me a terrible headache.

"There!" Andrew stopped, pointing at the huge lion statue at the south end of the bridge. "Watch. And wait." So we stood there, shivering, for five minutes. Squinting at the statues and wiping the rain out of our eyes. When I glanced at Andrew I saw doubts beginning to flicker in his eyes.

"What are we waiting for?"

"Shh!"

Sirens sounded, and a whole convoy of police cars and ambulances drove past the north end of the bridge.

Andrew gasped, almost inaudibly, and I looked back up towards the lion. The rain was so heavy it was difficult to see clearly, but for a moment it seemed as if the lion blinked. Then -- and this was impossible to mistake -- it shook its head slightly from side to side.

We stood there stunned for ten more minutes, watching intently. But nothing else happened. With a sigh, Andrew turned and we headed back towards the Embankment.

"I was hoping for more," he said after a few moments. "But I guess the disturbance wasn't that big after all. There's a chance with the low life too, but the Coade lion seemed the most likely." Before I could ask what he was talking about, he was out in the middle of the street, squatting down beside a large manhole.

"Come and give me a hand!"

"Are you mad?" I gazed nervously around, but there was no-one in sight. Andrew produced a small jemmy from inside his coat; I boggled.

"Come on, lift up that edge there." Between us we prized up the manhole cover.

"You're not seriously suggesting we go down there?" I was pleading rather than asking. "With all this rain? We'll drown or get lost and starve or suffocate or..."

"David." He flashed those blue eyes at me. "Trust me." And with that he was gone. I hesitated for a moment, but followed.

Like a conjurer with his hat, Andrew produced two powerful torches from his coat pockets with a flourish, handing one to me. "Stay right behind me," he warned. We were in a fairly large tunnel, about ankle deep in water. "Normally this would be completely dry. It isn't a sewer tunnel at all, but a maintenance subway. There are all sorts of tunnels running through the embankment here, but the ones we want are far older."

He led the way through tunnel after tunnel, each smaller, damper and smellier than the last.

"The sewers will probably be pretty full. The overflow should run off into the river but in conditions like today's everything could be screwed up. They're pretty knacked as it is. We'll have to take the longer way around, but it should be more or less safe."

He seemed to know what he was doing, which was reassuring; but I knew Andrew could be a master bullshitter when he want to. I followed him anyway.

Soon it was impossible to stand upright. I was extremely cold and uncomfortable in my dripping clothes.

"How much further?" I whispered.

"Not far. You'll have to keep quiet from here onwards, we can't afford to be seen." I wasn't sure who he thought might see us, but the idea wasn't exactly cheering.

Two or three minutes later, we began to hear a noise up ahead, and stopped. A raucous squeaking, chattering, scratching and scrabbling sound, it gradually got louder as we stood there.

Suddenly they were upon us, bursting out of a small side tunnel: rats, thousands of them, a vast tide of shrieking gray rodents, matted fur standing on end, teeth clicking, yellow eyes bulging out of their little pointed heads.

"Jesus!" They swarmed around and past us, battering against our feet and legs.

"Shh!"

It took almost five minutes for the last of the rats to go by, by which time I had the shakes seriously from standing motionless, hunched over, freezing, in their midst.

"Shit, Andrew! What are we doing here, anyway?"

"Will you shut up?"

"Not until you tell me what the hell's going on!"

"Oh for... not now, please."

"You drag me off down here without so much as a word of explan..." I was silenced by Andrew's hand clamping firmly over my mouth. Suddenly I became aware of scuttling noises all around.

"Not another word," Andrew whispered fiercely in my ear, extinguishing the torches.

We crouched in silence in the darkness for what seemed like hours, listening to the noises of the underworld. Behind the gurgling of water and endless anonymous scratchings and scrapings there gradually rose a distant singing, like a Gregorian chant. Crude and unmelodic, there was nevertheless something immensely beautiful about it, and its effect was very calming as we huddled there, shivering. The strange, mournful chorus seemed to seep through my wet clothes and chilled flesh and aching bones like the memory of warmth. Like a yearning for something whose loss is so huge it can barely be comprehended.

Eventually, the chanting faded away; and when, a little later, Andrew switched the torches back on, I realized we had both been crying.

"That's all, I think. We'd better be going."

We made our way out of the tunnels in silence. The rain was tapering off and people were beginning the long process of clearing up. As we drove home Andrew said: "I guess we'll have to wait for the bombs to drop after all." He sounded so disappointed, but refused to say anything more on the subject.

Over the years, we went down into the tunnels three more times, but never again saw the rats or heard the singing in the deep. Sometimes I could persuade Andrew to talk a little, and the scraps he told me of the low life made a wonderful sense when he spoke; but, when I thought about it the next day, seemed only a scatter of half-remembered fragments, like something in a dream. It never occurred to me to wonder how he knew these things.

Later, when the storms began to come more frequently, I kept hoping he'd appear to drag me on another mystery tour, but he never did; and now he never will.

Sometimes at night, now, on the brink of sleep, I think I hear the chanting once again, a sly little lullaby from the low life; sometimes I think I'm hearing Andrew's snores. Sometimes I stand on Westminster Bridge and watch the lion. But it's only a statue; and if it has any secrets it's keeping them to itself.
Posted by matt at December 12, 2003 12:57 AM