INSOMNIAC CITY

Part One: Loud Mouth Julie

(1994)

The River Jacks have been at it since half three, and I’m gonna flipping kill someone. That’s the long and short of it.

The wood chip they slapped over the cracks is a joke. The draught excluders the council gave me don’t muffle a bloody thing. The bass drops straight out the Artex, right through that damp ring above me bed nobody’s ever coming to fix.

Thirty-one stories of soggy concrete, and the pipes just drag the racket all the way up. The whole rotten tower hums with it.

And then it’s in me fillings.

Three nights now, or is it four? I’ve lost count, and the council won’t ruddy pick up. The phone’s got that doily on it me mum left me, and I want to rip the whole lot out the wall. I grab me box of fags instead. The ashtray on the sill’s full again and gone black round the rim.

Chelsea’s up. Course she is. Stood in the kitchen doorway in her Tammy Girl pyjamas, cat hairs down the front, cuffs bobbled as me nan’s settee. Keep meaning to get her a new one.

“You need to sleep,” she says, and it comes out like a GP, like someone twice her age who don’t need any help filling in forms and the like. Christ knows where she learned that; I’ll never know. Not from me.

“I’m fackin marvellous, darlin. Go back to bed.”

“Mum.”

“Bed.”

She doesn’t move. She’s got her dad’s eyes, and that’s a cunt of a thing to see at four in the morning. The telly’s on full, the BBC2 test card, that one long beep, loud as I can stand it, and then underneath it, breaking through.

The siren.

I get me coat. Chels says Mum, and I’m already on the walkway.

The City’s right there, glass dropping out of the towers a pane at a time, weeds knee-high in the car parks, pigeons on every ledge shitting on all sides. The suits did a runner.

Past that, the Thames. What’s left of it. And standing up out of the muck, the River Jacks. When I was a girl, one stopped right outside our school. The whole street went quiet, waiting for it to start again, and it never did. None of them did. Me mum said, “Right, who wants chips?” and that was that.

Then, a few months ago, it started up again. Just the one. No face on it, just a long flat head and arm sticking out in the water. Rusted to nothing now, chest caved in. But it was black once. You remember that if you’re old enough. You don’t forget it. Because when they moved, the whole of the East End heard it in our chests before it reached the ear.

Just that facking ruckus. A blown-out foghorn. On and on. Quietish at first, then it winds up, drops right out the arse of it, and starts all over. And up in the bastard’s noggin, its eyes are still at it. Red. Blue. Red. Blue. Too thick to realise it’s the last one left.

Size don’t mean shit to me, neither. Some bloke twice my weight tried his luck outside the Carpenters. I put him flat on the floor with one crack to the jaw, stepped on his head, and finished me Stella.

Forty-two years on this earth and nothing’s got the better of me, not the old man, not his fists, not burying him, not bringing her up on my own, watching that leccy meter swallow me last fifty pence and spending a solid hour warming half a tin of beans on the radiator just so Chels could have her tea.

Nothing.

This has got the better of me.

I strike a match on wet brick outside me front door. The wind tries to nick the flame, but I cup me hands, get a Lambert lit, and pull the smoke right down to me boots. I push off the railing and start walking. The concrete stairs stink of stale piss, and for the first time all night, I let me shoulders drop.

Every window’s lit up. Whole block’s awake. Through the walls, kettles going, the shuffle to the kitchen, making cuppas in their slippers. They ain’t out chewing the insides of their cheeks to raw meat, and none of them are going down to Baz on the third floor.

We don’t talk. He sorts me, I sort him, and I go up with my jaw grinding and my nose burning, and for one beautiful hour, the siren’s just one more noise in a city full of shit, and I can stand it.

The hour ends. The siren comes crashing back, doing me nut in. I drag meself under the duvet and stay there. Daylight slides across the wallpaper, goes black, and does it again. Along the hall, the post piles up on the mat. Red gas bills. The Littlewood’s catalogue. Stacking up till it wedges the front door shut.

The zip goes on me purse. It’s Chels digging out a fiver, not saying a word about the notes that ain’t there no more. The front door bangs. Half hour later, the lock turns. Click, click, wump. The gas ring catches, and the smell of cheap sausages drifts into the bedroom. The tap runs. The telly volume goes up, and that little shit PJ from Byker Grove starts up, and she’s in her element.

The theme tune rolls and the telly clicks off. I jam both thumbs hard in me ears and pull the duvet right over me head. Not a scrap of difference. The noise is inside me now, going round and round, whether that big iron bastard is at it or not.

Chelsea comes in with her coat over her nightie and her shoes on the wrong feet, and she’s crying. My Chels. The day we put her dad in the dirt, she stood there with bone-dry eyes, locking her arm tight under mine to take me weight.

And she says, Mum, please, none of us hear it the way you do, just lie down for me. I look at her, and I love her so much it comes right up me throat and stops there. The whole of it, every single word, jammed tight. And what comes out instead is fuck off to bed, Chelsea.

So she does.

Her door clicks shut, and the siren roars. I rip the drawer open, clawing through hair grips and dead lighters, tearing the place apart for them yellow pills the doctor gave me for the funeral.

Me fingers scrape a paper wrap wedged right at the back. Last week’s.

The noise is splitting me in two. I don’t even unfold the corners. I tear the paper in half and dump the lot into me palm. It piles up thick. I snatch me emergency fiver, roll it, jam it up me nose, and drag the whole lot straight up into the noise.

And then it’s gone. The siren, the building, the grinding, all of it. I’m on the floor. Can’t feel me face. Can’t feel me body. Through the gap in the curtains, the ones with the crooked hem I never got round to, the lights still come and go. Red. Blue. Red. Blue. Sliding across the woodchip, catching the damp ring, soft as anything.

I could watch them all night.

I keep me eyes on them, only now they’ve gone soft, red bleeding into blue, and I can’t tell where one ends and the next begins. Me heart moves in me chest. Not pain, not really.

Don’t matter, though. I’m floating, miles off.

Me mum. Stubborn old bag. Always said I’d end up like me dad, and here I am, spitting fucking image.

You happy now, Mum?

Doesn’t matter though. I’ve got me little angel in there, probably be better off, she’ll be alright, what if she ain’t alright?

Chels. Chels, I—

Part Two: Big Joe & Little Jo

(1995)

The sound came clearest at the foot of the garden, where the grass gave out, and the tideway began, so that was where they carried the two kitchen chairs.

“It’s closer.” Little Jo said.

“It’s not closer, love. We’ve got used to it. That’s all.”

Little Jo’s bob was dyed a sweet pink, and Big Joe’s was the dirty gold it had always been, and they sat in the going light with the two of them almost touching, listening to it come up the water.

That night, neither of them could sleep, and neither could the thing across the river, so they did what they always did when sleep wouldn’t come, which these days was more often than not.

They put the kettle on.

“My mother would have hated this house,” Little Jo said, the corner of her mouth going. “She’d have hated you most of all.”

“I’d have grown on her.”

“You’d have said something unforgivable at the dinner table, and I’d have loved you more for it.” She found Big Joe’s hand under the blanket. “I don’t miss it. The old life. The big house. Any of it. I want you to know that. I’d do it again tomorrow.”

“You gave it all up for a charity shop and a woman with no prospects.” Big Joe turned Little Jo’s fingers on her own. “There’s nothing left for you to give, love.”

“Then I’d give that, then.”

They chuckled, the pair of them, in the dark. Across the water, the industrial drone from the River Jacks rose and sank.

“I’d have wanted yours,” Little Jo said.

“What. A big gold lump of a thing with my temper?” Big Joe said.

She tucked a strand of Big Joe’s hair behind her ear. “Do you remember? We had the appointment letter and everything. And that was the closest we ever got. Got you instead, didn’t I?”

“If we’d had one, it’d be walking by now,” Big Joe said.

“Tearing the shop apart, more like.”

“Right. Get your coat.” Big Joe nodded. “It’s driving us up the wall. Let’s go find out what it is.”

“The shop?”

“Nobody’s been in that daft shop in a week.” She looked at the paintings going up the stairs, five frames, the same stretch of river, each one a little different.

“Darling liste—

“There were docks at the end of our road,” Big Jo said. “Nobody came looking for me, so the ships had to do.” She reached out. “I always said I’d love a kid so hard it’d never—” She stopped. “Come with me. The going’s free, and it’s the one thing we’ve still got.”

So they went, because it cost nothing and nothing else was free anymore.

Out past the wall and the old steps, and onto the foreshore, the Thames gave up twice a day. Once at seven in the evening, when they’d watched it from the chairs, and once now, at three in the morning.

The mud took everything the water ever swallowed, a pram frame, a till drawer, the long bones of barges nobody came back for. The tenements on both banks loomed in the dark, glass reflecting what little light there was. Warehouses with the roofs missing and cranes sat in neat rows, gulls clawing at the rust, and the power station’s chimneys black against an overcast sky.

The sound came off the brick on both sides and lingered in the middle, so it seemed to come from the water and from behind them at once, never the way they turned to look. They walked it in step, Little Jo’s thumb over Big Joe’s knuckles. Big Joe would raise an arm at something in the mud, and Little Jo would look, and they’d walk on.

“There’s the lido,” Little Jo said.

And there it was, drained, the tiles green. The morning they’d climbed the fence to swim before anyone was up, and Big Joe went in first off the high board with all her clothes on, surfaced laughing, and Little Jo waited at the edge in the cold, deciding she’d marry her.

“There’s the church hall.”

The jumble sale where they’d met, Big Joe behind the bric-a-brac table selling the same teapot Little Jo had donated the week before, the two of them clocking it at once and laughing till they were wet through, hanging off each other in the car park, married in everything but the paperwork before either knew the other’s surname.

The sound was always ahead of them, and they walked on the vibration. It climbed as they drew closer, moving up their legs, snapping their teeth together on every downbeat. The same six notes, wanting in as they drew closer.

“Nearly there,” Big Joe said, though neither of them knew where there was.

And there, at the end, where the docks gave out, it lay in the torrent. They stopped together without deciding to. Little Jo’s fingers tightened in hers.

The water came halfway up its legs, two great rusted shanks ending in feet too big for the eye to settle on, sunk in the mud, covered in chains heavy with their own age. Up top, where a head ought to go, was a visor, featureless but for the two lights set into it.

One red. One blue.

“It’s looking at us,” Little Jo said. Quiet.

“It’s not looking at anything, love. It’s been dead for years.”

One arm reached across the water, an empty container hanging from it, the load it had been lifting the day it stopped. The dome and the clock tower and the cranes behind it came up no higher than its waist, grey in the rain, and it did not shrink as they came on.

“All this time it’s been right here,” Little Jo said. “And we never walked out to have a look.”

Big Joe looked up the height of it, up past the containers to the two cold lights. “Well. We’re here now,” she said.

The only way across to it was the old loading wharf, a long tongue of concrete reaching from the bank to a hatch hanging open in the base of the machine. The walkway had cracked end to end, and partway out, a whole section had dropped into the murk.

They made their way along the buckled concrete. In front of them, the wharf stopped, and started again a good way off, the width of a bus. Between the two, the long fall at the bottom.

They came to the broken edge and stopped.

“Shame, isn’t it?” Big Joe’s voice had dropped. “Coming all this way.”

Little Jo looked at the gap.

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Don’t be soft, love.” She stepped back. “It’s miles down. We’ll come again in the daylight. There’ll be a way round then.”

“We both knew there wasn’t a road, and we came anyway.”

Big Joe opened her mouth, and shut it, and looked at the gap instead of at Little Jo.

Little Jo took her hand and held it the way she’d held it off the high board, and at the bric-a-brac table, and the night the shop flooded, and they sat up by candlelight till dawn and laughed about the ruined stock instead of crying.

“You sure about this.” Not really a question, the way she said it.

“Sure? I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

“You’ll be the death of me, you will.”

“On three.”

“You don’t make three.”

“One,” said Little Jo, and stepped off the edge, and took Big Joe with her, the two of them falling hand in hand, laughing as they went.

For the length of a breath, they hung there, out past the edge, the river under them and the grey sky above.

The two of them dropped through it, and somewhere in the dark and the cold, their grip came apart, and Little Jo went down reaching for a hand that was no longer there.

And high above them, two lights glowed on, one red, one blue, and the sound went on pouring out across the city, into every wall and every ear that couldn’t shut it out.

Part Three: Darn from the Barn

(1996)

At the base, in the stink and the cold, Darn gripped the first rung. Sol had made the River Jack and a thousand more. Almost beautiful, back when he oiled their steel joints with his bare hands and let the dockworkers starve. They spent their boyhoods with their heads inside the cabinet of the same dead Marconi radio. Then the city handed Sol the dockyard. And he built them an iron army. Darn bought a barn in Kent. He never cursed Sol but took great pleasure in cursing the machines.

The country called itself rich while its labour walked on metal legs. Then every joint locked mid-stride, and the big silence swallowed the capital. But the silence was a lie. It was a long wait while the pressure built. One of them woke up, planted in the mud past the last of the wharves. Month after month, it flung its noise across London. Never tiring. Never changing. Loud at four in the morning and loud at noon. The noise parked behind his eyes and pushed. But a machine thirty-three years dead does not wake itself. No broken gear holds a note for months without slipping. Sol did this.

He started up.

Inside, the dark went up forever. He climbed the bones of old ladders bolted to the spine, one arm to the rail, mindful of his knee, which decided to speak to him at every second step. He passed the winch house. The drum could swallow a train car. The air tasted of tar, and the freezing metal pulled the heat from his bones. Rust seized the works solid around chain links that no human could lift. One arm reached out across the water, its final load still hanging in the air.

Grey light bled from the hatch below. The hip joint was a cavern of rotting catwalks. He kept his boots to the solid rims and climbed. He read the dead signals by touch. It was the only language he ever mastered. His fingers traced the cold, the arrogant perfection of the design.

You built a masterpiece just to starve us.

Sol was the best of them. He was also the worst.

The feedback poured into the shaft, gaining weight with every rung, and settled in his chest. He stopped on a landing to steady the pounding and listened to the mechanical suffering. He tuned in past the noise. The rhythm held perfect time and looped without a stutter. Broken gears stagger, but this sound was consistent. It held. It worked.

The River Jack was making the sound.

Higher up, a dry heat drifted down. A stench thickened with it and twisted his stomach as he climbed. The shaft opened into the head. Lights pulsed above. Red. Blue. Red. Washing the walls purple. He stepped inside. Two lamps burned without rest. As he moved, his shadow swung against the struts, the chamber matching his cadence in the same red, blue, red.

He stepped into a makeshift camp. A mattress on the floor, a nest of blankets turned black, and a dry paraffin lamp beside a wooden chair worn pale at the arms. Beside the controls, a box hummed.

An electric heart.

He reached for the casing, but the air caught in his throat. Against the curve of the hull, hidden under a heaped coat, the smell found its centre.

Darn stepped forward. He had put beasts and men in the ground plenty of times, but this stopped him a yard short. He pressed his fist to his mouth. The body had lain there for months. Dry heat had outrun the rot, the flesh pulled tight against bone. Brown leather skin clung to the skull, and the teeth showed through shrunk lips. He looked small beneath the coat, curled against the cold.

“All right,” Darn said to nobody. “Let’s have a look.”

It was a thing he had said his whole life, over a stalled engine or a downed ewe, the words a man puts between himself and the work before he goes in. He did not know the man he hovered beside. In the set of the ruined head, a remnant of gentleness remained beneath the leather. He let it lie. The dead kept their own business, and he had climbed this far to cut the feed.

So he went to the wall of dials, and for the first time in more years than he would own to, he knew the road without being told. He was Sol’s equal once, though while Sol played politics, he built. His work lacked spark, and the industry knew it before he did. He traded his shop for a barn in Kent, and the name followed him there, a label people used when he passed. He stopped correcting them. He just answered.

He pressed his palm flat against the casing. The hum of the circuits travelled through his fingertips, and the years fell away. The vibration matched the buzz of the colossal harvesters that had once cooked the soil, bleaching the fields to yellow husks until the earth gave nothing back. He had walked off the dead farm with one bag, leaving that life behind for a London he did not recognise.

Darn traced the noise through the gauges into the warm glass valves and wound copper. His fingers hunted the signal in the dark. Beneath the loud carrier, he found a quieter pulse. The carrier was only a wall of noise—a blind. The true signal rode hidden inside it.

He traced the copper to a glass relay. Silver knots marked Sol’s handiwork. Darn read the sequence in the wiring. A tension spring held a steel pin above a gap. The initial surge would drop the pin, sever the connection, and put the River Jack to sleep.

He wiped soot from the casing. The pin rested at the bottom of the chamber. The trap had sprung. But the current carried too much heat. The contact points had melted into a lump of slag, and the falling pin struck the fused metal and jammed.

The weld kept the connection alive. For months, the line had trapped the signal in a loop. He unscrewed a blank plate and found an unmarked switch spliced into the copper. He worked blind, between the pulsing light, rerouted the feed to the horn, mastering the machine that outlasted its maker.

The roar stopped.

A voice rose out of the horn. A man, singing. Sol.

Six soft notes, amplified to an industrial roar. A lullaby, at a volume built to wake the dead. Not to settle a child.

Darn froze in the red and blue.

He knew the melody. He’d heard it once before, in Sol’s workshop. The great man bent above a cot, his back turned. Not drawing. Not shouting. Singing. Softer than Darn ever heard him. In the cot lay a small boy with a broad face and almond eyes, his neck short and his head large.

The boy reached up. A love that asked for nothing in return. Sol couldn’t bring himself to pick the child up. A man who could not bear a flaw in his engines would not bear one in his son.

Darn turned to the body. The red and blue moved across the dead man’s skull. Hair, thin and grey at the root. Still curled. Still fair.

He had grown up and come here anyway. Up the inside of the thing Sol loved best and made his bed in its head. Toby. The red-blue heart radiated above. The same burn that greyed the fields had greyed his skin.

Darn stood with his blackened hands at his sides, and the father’s song poured out of the horn above him. Sol had built it into the kill switch. From his deathbed, he had sent it out across the whole country, to every Jack, all at once. He could not sing it to Toby, so he had sung it to the world instead.

Toby slept under it for years. He never knew it was his.

Darn left the voice singing and went down through the dark. When he stepped out of the hatch, the song came with him and drifted over the black water. The six notes that had hammered the sleepless city for months were soft now.

The song moved out over the foreshore, up the flanks of Trellick Tower, and along the river to the dark terraces where the lights had long gone out.

Darn turned his collar to the wind and walked home along the river, the only one alive who knew the song for what it was, built into the bones of the greatest thing Sol ever made, sent out to the whole world, and never sung to the one boy it belonged to.