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

16 - The Mysteries of Patrick's Son

From Patrick’s son’s position within Victor’s old office, the conversation Oscar, Victor and I were engaged in on the other side of the door must have sound just as foreign and eerie as his mutterings over the last half-day or so had been to us. We heard no noise coming from within the office; good news, as far as we were concerned, as it meant that he was finally acclimatising to his new surroundings and putting the nasty business of last night behind him – I suspected he had learnt to adjust to pastures new quickly judging by the amount of times he was forced to move by the threat of attack. On our side of the door, in the bland, arched corridor that had been formed when the War Office took over the Aldwych platform for its own uses, the conversation was, thankfully, much more audible.

“How long will you be, Victor?” I asked, pushing one hand into the door as a signal that I was in a rush.

“I’ll be away as long as my nerves hold out, Nox,” he replied. “Oscar’s agreed to give me a little support, if I need it.”

“Are you sure you don’t need to be there?” Oscar asked me. I believed he was still a little conflicted; he didn’t know whether to side with Victor or Will in his head.

I considered for a minute. “Before you two go, could you just remind me of the timings?”

“I’ll come and get you when we’re ready to set off,” answered Victor. “We’re going, Nox, but do feel free to come down if you need to know anything else.”

I said nothing, but nodded as cheerfully as possible as the two men disappeared into the distance. Needless to say, the cheeriness did not last. My next task, unfortunately, may well just be the most depressing of my life.

Or it might not. I had no idea. I had no idea what was going on in Patrick’s son’s head and I didn’t know what his life had been like over the six years he had been out of my life. I could hardly remember anything about him from the period I actually knew him, when we both lived in the South, for crying out loud. It was actually beginning to embarrass me that I didn’t know his name.

‘It was something about a street somewhere Patrick used to know... A play on words.’

‘Leave it,’ I told myself. Even he didn’t know what his own name is. What was the point of me worrying about it?

I opened the door. He was sitting in the very centre of the room, bolt upright, doing nothing more than twiddling his thumbs. His eyes were wide open, staring right through me, as if they provided him with a portal into the desires of my soul, and his mouth was slightly ajar on one side. “Nobody else is here,” I told him as I entered the room. I reckon I said what I said more to comfort myself than anything else. I could have just said ‘Hello.’

“Just the two of us?” he responded.

“Just the two of us.”

I sat down on the skin-piercing concrete, facing Patrick’s son eye-to-eye, and prepared my questions for him. Before I could utter a word, though, he began to speak.

“Your eyes,” he said. “They’ve still got those funny colours in them.”

He was observant. I could just about bring myself to piece together a memory of a time about thirteen years ago when a doctor first diagnosed my heterochromia – multi-coloured eyes. Nobody had ever taken any notice of it around here. I couldn’t remember if my parents had even noticed it before it was pointed out to them. “I liked your red hair, too,” he added. “But it’s beginning to go.”

That was as sure a sign as any that I’d been down here too long. In all of the three years since we were sealed into Central London, I’d never seen myself in a mirror, and therefore did not have a clue that the dark, vibrant red colour that I’d always insisted in washing into my hair as a teenager was finally fading to brown. Just as no-one had noticed my heterochromia while I was camped down in Central London; no-one had noticed my hair. I, on the other hand, was observant; I had managed to spot a small abnormality next to his right ear.