‘Don’t do that,’ Pierce said, seeing the blue glow of Tamesis on my screen. ‘You don’t need that. That fucking … I’m right here. I live here. I know where to go. Look around you. Look at the city.’

I was chagrined, and quickly re-pocketed my phone. In fact I hadn’t been thinking about where we might go, just about Kay, and about getting to Shoreditch to see De Chauncey. A sickly, acid emptiness in my gut, but it wasn’t the urge to drink, not entirely. It was anxiety about the pub. Time was not on my side: I’d have to leave just as I started to feel comfortable. Obligations, seeing people I didn’t want to see, doing things I didn’t want to do. Things I wanted to escape. Escaping was, for the moment, even more important than drinking. Pierce, he was the key. I wasn’t done with Pierce yet. The interview had led to … What? Whatever it was, it was important, and it meant, with regret, I would have to postpone De Chauncey for a day or two. Plans do change. I would be giving them advance warning, almost an hour’s worth; it wasn’t as if I was standing him up. Any repercussions in the office – well, that was for tomorrow. Or the day after, if I muted my phone, and by that time I might have the full incredible story from Pierce. But what could Pierce and I do together?

The sun was, presumably, somewhere overhead, but it was obscured and ineffectual. Pierce turned towards the garden square, and I followed his instruction and looked around, at the towering plane trees and the handsome stucco and yellow-brick houses. Above the white line of their parapets, darkness unnatural. I had forgotten it, and it had waited out here for me. And at once I felt it, in my sinuses, by taste, on the skin of my face, in my eyes.

‘You want real, authentic?’ I said, stopping. ‘A primal urban event?’

Pierce stopped too, but didn’t reply. He looked at me, waiting for me to continue.

‘That fire in Barking. Where all that smoke is coming from. That’s real. Let’s go there.’

FIVE

We walked to Bow Road Station and caught a District Line train bound for Barking, the seat of the fire.

Pierce lived at the eastern limit of my knowledge of London. This personal, psychic boundary coincided with a geographical boundary. My journey to Pierce was all in tunnels, apart from that unhappy moment at Liverpool Street. But the journey east was only under the sky. Pierce lived where the Underground stops being underground.