Take Back The City - Part One of the 'Life in London Town' series

11 - The Boy on Fouberts Place

  “We’re here.”

  Victor and I seemed to be staring into a misty abyss. The heavy rainfall had mixed with the smoke and the scorched remains of the coat shop at the opposite end of Newburgh Street, where it met Fouberts Place at the T-junction where I so nearly suffered the terrifying humiliation of capture, to create a grey barricade through which the rest of the world was nothing more than an invisible blur. The windows of the shops around us were covered in dewy condensation formed as the waters of the sky vaporised in the sauna-like conditions created by the coat shop’s rocky, red-hot remains struck the cold, inanimate, ghostly glass which looked upon the rubble.

    I took the first step into the mist and the smoke. Although my eyes were swiftly made redundant by the lack of visibility, my feet, covered only with shoes with the thinnest of soles, told my brain more than my eyes ever could. I could feel every single fragment of brick, every wooden beam and every sharp dagger of metal below me as I walked tenuously from one end of Newburgh Street to the other. Victor followed me about twenty seconds after I set off, but he had a far harder time navigating the jagged undulations of the invisible alleyway.

    “How much further, Nox?” asked Victor as he wobbled his way over a particularly high peak of rubble.

    “Oh, it’s not a long street, Victor,” I replied encouragingly. “We should see the silhouette any minute now.”

    Unfortunately, as I reached the T-junction with Fouberts Place and the rather gigantic hole I’d created in the row of buildings which unveiled themselves in front of me, the silhouette that had been secretly burning its image into my head for the last few hours of my life was nowhere to be seen. I dived into the mess of wooden beams and rubble filling the floor of the shop, but no matter where I looked, or how many singed coats I slung out of my way, nothing of human form could be seen.

    “Nox!” yelled Victor from the cocktail of mist and smoke behind me. “Is everything okay?”

    “There’s nobody in here,” I replied with genuine concern and fear. “I swear I saw the silhouette stooped in the corner here,” I continued, pointing at a corner of the open-fronted room covered in burnt wallpaper before realising that he wouldn’t be able to see my hand anyway. “It must be in here somewhere.”

     Victor’s dust-covered face poked itself through the white and grey purgatory a few moments later. He was spluttering a little, but thankfully still perfectly healthy. “What exactly did you see after you blew this place up?” he asked, stifling a small cough which had probably been waiting to burst from his lungs ever since entering the bleak abyss. He stared around the room looking for the source of the silhouette, making a comparatively half-hearted effort considering the rather animated fashion in which I was thrusting aside random rubble.

    “I saw a silhouette crouching in the corner of the room,” I replied. “That’s all I saw. I had to leave quickly. There was still a chance of another ambush and besides, I needed to meet the two boys back at Centre Point.” I turned back to my work. “I should have attempted a rescue when I had the chance,” I muttered to myself.  

   “Nox!”

   “What is it, Victor?” I asked with an aggravated yell as I attempted to filter some of the dust from a mound of quickly disintegrating leather coats. “You know, you could at least give me a little help here instead of just standing around out there. Start shifting this rubble,” I commanded. “Someone’s trapped in here, you know!”

    “Well, that’s just the thing, Nox,” he responded calmly, standing rooted to the spot just on the other side of the uneven, jagged archway which used to contain the rubble which had been blown outwards onto the T-junction. “What if...”