John Eldritch woke up in the middle of the night to find himself pinned down in his bed, a knee on his chest and his arms grasped firmly below the elbows.
 
“Just tell us where it is and you won’t get hurt.”
 
There were two men in the room. He could see them in the moonlight, which spilled through the gap between the curtains. There was a full moon that night.
 
“Where is it?”
 
The knee pressed down on him with greater force. He felt disorientated, the dream he had been roused from slipped away and became a sensation of pain. The two men were not part of his dream. They were in his bedroom. He knew he had to say something.
 
“I don’t know what you mean.”
 
Elizabeth was awake, lying next to him, silent with fear. She wasn’t being held down. Suddenly she sat up.
 
“Leave us alone. We don’t have what you want. You’ve come to the wrong place.”
 
The other man who had been standing  by the bed sprung into action and roughly pushed her back down.
 
“Shut up and lie down.”
 
Then the one with the knee in his chest spoke again.
 
“You better tell us where it is. You’re running out of time.”
 
The second man was searching the room, rummaging through the chest of drawers, pulling books from the shelf and tossing them to the floor, shaking them first to see if anything was hidden between the pages.
 
Then with a sudden click of the door they were gone.
 
Elizabeth got up from the bed and turned on the light.
 
“My God, what a mess.”
 
She began to pick up the books and close the open drawers.
 
“What did they want? We should call the police.”
 
John was still lying down, relieved that the intruders had gone. But they’d be back. He’d have to find a way to throw them off.
 
“No. I don’t think we need to involve the police. They were obviously given the wrong address. No harm done.”
 
“But what’s going on?”
 
“I have no idea.”
 
But he did. They had not been given the wrong address. He knew what they were after. The irony was that it was right there in plain sight if they had only known where and how to look, though that kind of observation was an acquired skill. It had taken him since childhood to master it—from sensibility to knowledge.
 
Those gangsters were probably in the pay of some unscrupulous wealthy person—an American millionaire most likely, one of those brazen egotists who hoped to leap-frog off his efforts and beat him to the prize, employing all the best equipment that money could buy.
 
They had come looking for his plans, his maps, his notes—but he was not foolish enough to keep anything like that lying around. He had known for years that secrecy was paramount. He hadn’t even told Elizabeth. He trusted her implicitly, though there was always the possibility she might gab. Besides, if she knew what he hoped to discover and exactly how he intended to do it, she might think him mad as a hatter and their marriage would no longer be as secure as it seemed.
 
He wondered about his sanity sometimes but was reassured, because if he was capable of wondering about it he must be sane. It was all part of the life he had chosen for himself, one of the many trials an explorer must face when setting out into the unknown, with only his passion and conviction, and a deep loneliness to accompany him.
 
That questioning of his sanity gave him an idea. If even he wondered about it, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince others. His opponents and competitors would soon lose interest and leave him alone if they believed him to be utterly mad.
 
With that in mind he paraded up and down Saville Row one Saturday afternoon in July, wearing a pair of snow shoes. He spent some time loitering in front of the Royal Geographical Society. He chose that street for its potent symbolism. Gone were the days of those great luminaries Burton, Speke and Stanley who had been his childhood heroes. He could imagine their voices echoing off the walls and he could also imagine himself there too, presenting his case to the members of the society.
 
"Gentlemen, it is my intention to discover the City of London."
 
They would probably have laughed him out of the building, heaping vitriol upon ridicule, for his claim to have discovered a place that they would have considered impossible to discover. A city that had stood for so long could never have been discovered, only built, and then expanded upon ever since. His claim was ridiculous.
 
The heyday of the Society had been the Victorian era—a time when learned men were confident that they understood the framework of knowledge. If there were gaps, they could be filled, hence the trips into the dark continent. They were innocents really, just not pure and unsullied like young children. In this case their innocence was tinged with arrogance—not two words commonly associated, but apt nonetheless. After all, in their day Western science had only coalesced from alchemy, astrology and hermeticism just a hundred years previously. But time had changed the content of minds. That self-assured framework had crumbled and rotted, leaving a ruin that seemed strangely anachronistic with a powerful emotive residue like a lone Victorian folly on a desolate landscape.
 
He loped up and down the street all afternoon until he was moved on by a policeman and was forced to go home, leaving the ghosts of the orgulous gentlemen of the Royal Geographical Society to talk amongst themselves for eternity.
 
They didn’t have to talk that long, as he was so satisfied with his performance that he went back the next day. This time, along with the snow shoes he took a cabbage which he held in one hand at arm’s length from his face and spoke to incessantly. It was harder than he had imagined to keep up a constant stream of gibberish so he resorted to reciting passages in Latin from memory—passages from Julius Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum and the occasional poem by Ovid.
 
Odi concubitus, qui non utrumque resolvunt. Hoc est, cur pueri tangar amore minus.
 
Things had seemed to be going so well—until he was arrested, charged and later convicted for causing a public nuisance, and fined a small amount. His plan had perhaps been too effective. He was employed as a bank teller at Lloyd’s but lost his job when the bank manager found out about his conviction. He was deemed unsuitable to be in the position of handling money. After that his life began to devolve. Funds were tight. A bank teller’s salary had not provided him much opportunity to save and the small amount he had disappeared quickly. When that was gone the house went too, and soon after that so did Elizabeth. He didn’t have family or friends who could help him, so in a relatively short time he went from a stolid lower middle class existence, in a mock Tudor house, to the streets.
 
It was a meteoric descent that would have shaken most people but John Eldritch had a confidence which was founded on an image he had of himself—that of a man with a deep sense of purpose, strong as a horse and keen as mustard, a man bound to succeed through sheer determination and courage alone. His misfortunes were lessons from which he could learn. His life had been a dress rehearsal for this expedition. He taught himself to grow stronger in adversity. He could not foresee all the difficulties he would face but he knew there would be many, and tried to prepare himself as best he could. He urinated on his shoes to soften the leather, because he knew he would walk great distances. The loss of his wife, his house and his job helped him to slough off the impediments to his vocation. He would now be able to set out sooner than he had previously thought, and this prospect made him cheerful.
 
He set forth in the early morning when most people were still asleep. He was going to discover the City of London, he knew it was there.
 
He was no fool. He was aware that London was a functional modern city that had existed in some form since the Roman times, or even before. That could not be denied. His customary reticence was not only due to his fear of being out-flanked by more powerful and unscrupulous operators but also because most people could simply not understand his ideas and would consider him odd, derailed or insane. If he was successful in what he aimed to do, he would deserve a place in history. The impact of his discovery would ripple across the fields of knowledge. It would be a point from which there was no turning back, like the European discovery of America. It would forever change the world. He just had to find it—the London Inside London—the lost city. This was no archaeological rampage. He was not looking backward but around him, for this city was lost in the present, not the past.
 
Years earlier an idea had occurred to him, which he called The Theory of Five Thousand Footsteps. It was more an intuition than an idea, a way of noticing the invisibles—the people who had walked on the streets of a city, and those who were yet to walk there. Surely these people had buildings to enter. They were invisible too. Invisible but present. He was certain of it, and just had to train himself by forging a new connection between retina and brain for them to appear.
 
He had read a lot in order to give substance to that intuition and over the years it had become an idea. Quantum theory, although he could not claim to understand it, seemed to give it possibility. He also read about biology and optics. If light was to bend around an object, then it would render that object invisible to most eyes.
 
The neurobiological mechanics of sight, along with the broadly similar mental equipment of most people gave credence to the assumption that the external world was clearly defined, cut and dried. Any object outside one’s body could be seen and felt. From this co-ordinated trickery of the senses was born a basic certitude. It was suckled and maintained by a body of knowledge that people no longer needed to think about and could just take for granted. It was a bit like money in that regard, where the exchange of tokens becomes a purpose in itself, and the original symbolism is lost to irrelevance.
 
His theory could apply to anywhere in the world but he chose London because he was familiar with it and because of the light there, which he attributed to Its latitudinal position. The light especially on a sunny day had a particular quality that could best be described emotionally—a beautiful, forlorn clarity.
 
He was heading East from Acton, copying the cardinal direction taken by Sir Richard Francis Burton when he walked across Africa from West to East, and who, it is said, was cured of syphilis from the high fever he suffered along the way. The advantage of discovering London, was that its latitudinal position meant that the lines of longitude were closer together for him than for Burton in Africa, as they bulged further apart nearer the Equator. This was an example of how measurement influenced experience, and he presumed that it would facilitate his discoveries.
 
By mid-morning John Eldritch stood before St. Paul’s, gazing up in wonder. It was most likely the same feeling of awe and surprise that Cortes and his men had felt when they first looked upon Tenochtitlan. Some of that shock might have been due to the sudden realization that there were other people in existence who could build such a city. He had a similar feeling. It was said that St. Paul’s had been designed by Christopher Wren. He stood there a long time saying “Saint Paul’s, Saint Paul’s, Saint Paul’s, Saint Paul's... over and over, until the words lost all their associations and meaning. It was a technique he used to unfocus his mind and prepare it for discovery. But there was to be no discovery that day. He noted down the details in his journal.
 
Dome undulating. The smell of wasps but no breakthrough.
 
He had the habit of falsifying his location in his journal. It was an attempt to throw off the millionaire and his thuggish henchmen. They might have supposed he was spending the night in Marylebone, when in fact he was in Shoreditch. The stakes were too high for him to be upstaged. History would be misinformed. It was an unfortunate necessity.
 
He had good intentions for his journal. Aside from listing his progress and discoveries, he wanted to write a detailed report about the sexual customs of the natives. The journal and the knobkerrie were all he had brought with him. The book he carried in a canvas bag, belted to his waist, and the staff he leant upon, or swung as he strode. It could also be used as a weapon should the need arise. It had been useful when he fought off some aggressive geese in Kensington Palace Gardens.
 
The days passed. Many of them. He dispensed with dates in his journal and only used the names of days. So far he had found nothing. The tabulation of dates with numbers was the kind of calibration that kept him in the world he was trying to leave, and he blamed it for his lack of success. The use of names alone was much less constricting. Names could be followed to different places.
 
At some point he began to use the same day for each entry.
 
Wednesday. I have found nothing today. I catch glimpses that confirm my hopes but that is all.
 
Wednesday. Woden. Do I know him? Have I met him?
 
Wednesday. I believe I have found a native who might help me.
 
That native went by the name of Mary Andrews. She came upon him on Whitechapel Road. For some reason, perhaps due to his degenerating physical condition, he broke his own rules and told her that he was searching for the London inside London, and the London inside that. A long recursive list. “The strange thing is...” he told her, “all the cities that contain other cities are themselves contained within others.” It was as if the inside and the outside were the same thing, and that thing was not one but many.  It was such a radical truth that it would change the way life was perceived. All he had to do was find it, and he was close. She listened to him talk without disagreeing or interrupting. It was obvious to him that she had knowledge about these matters, maybe even more than he had, so when she suggested that he accompany her and that she would get him something to eat and take him to a place where he could wash and sleep safely for the night, he went with her meekly. It was only natural that she did not divulge her knowledge. She was protecting it just as he would. Loose lips sink ships. On the way to wherever they were going she asked him a number of times if he drank. Each time he replied that he did not. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. He kept himself in fine fettle. He was also a vegetarian but he didn’t tell her that. These questions about drinking had to be a sign, if he could only work out its meaning. He suspected that it must have something to do with the sea, or a river and he decided that when he had cleaned up and had some refreshments, he should probably make his way over to the Thames.
 
How many times had she asked him if he drank? Was it three times? Three times he had denied it. There must be some significance to that. The clues were presenting themselves to him on their own. Mary wanted to know if he was a veteran. Yes, as far as he knew he had been in North Africa with the 8th Army. They had obviously arrived at their destination. It looked like a social club. A door open to the street revealed a large room with tables and chairs and a few natives shuffling around inside. They were all male. Outside the door another native stood ringing a bell. This intrigued him. He pulled his journal from the bag and quickly scrawled into it:
 
Wednesday—The sound of a small bell.
 
He quickly came to the conclusion that this man, who Mary Andrews referred to as Mr Simpson, was narcoleptic. He rang his bell constantly to keep himself awake. He looked as if he was about to keel over but he was still able to insist that the knobkerrie remain outside.
 
This was an annoyance but there was too much to lose, so he decided to acquiesce and left it leaning against the building. The big room inside smelled of stewed meat and disinfectant. In conjunction with the tobacco smoke it made breathing an unpleasant necessity. He had the sense that he was closing in. This was some interstitial place. He was not expecting to walk through a door into one of the other Londons. That would be too convenient. It was an idea familiar to most people, probably because of the symbolism of doors. The reality was much more complicated. It had more to do with probability and perception. He had always admired science and what appeared to him its epistemological qualities but the objectivity it championed, though a powerful analytical tool, had always seemed flawed to him. It sidelined subjectivity and relegated it to a state of frivolity or human imperfection. But to remove subjectivity was to take the experimenter out of the experiment. One day perhaps it would be possible to conduct experiments with machines, but then the machines would merely be substitutes for the humans they had superseded. In that case they would be subjective machines. There was no getting away from it—objectivity and subjectivity could not be separated. They had to be taken together.
 
It was this uniting of opposites that gave him the blurred clarity he needed to find what he was looking for.
 
Mary Andrews led him in. She was the only female in the place, as far as he could tell. He had to learn more.
 
“Are there any particular sexual customs in this area?”
 
“Come along now Mr. Eldritch.”
 
“My observations have led me to believe that there is a higher frequency of homosexuality in the West End than anywhere else in the city but I wonder if I could be wrong.”
 
“Just go through that door. You can wash and get some clean clothes. There's a gentleman who will help you. Then come back here and have something to eat.”
 
She was avoiding his enquiries. She must be protecting something. And she knew his name. Had he told her?
 
He went through the door and then through another, to find himself in a bathroom with four shower stalls and a line of benches stretching along the opposite wall. There was a sink at the end of the room. No sooner had he entered than an old man came in, wearing a stiff jacket and peaked cap. He was missing some teeth. He held a towel.
 
“Well who do we ‘ave ‘ere then? Lord Abercrombie and Fitch? Take off your clothes mate, and wash off the filth.”
 
They stood looking at each other. The old man showed no inclination to leave.
 
“Well go on then. Don’t be shy. I was like you once, back from Ladysmith, broken, fond of a tipple and nowhere to go, till I came ‘ere.”
 
“And you have been here ever since?”
 
“That I ‘ave. But enough of this glorious persiflage governor. Strip down. The serpent sheds ‘is skin and throws it in that basket over there, see?”
 
When he realized he would get nothing more from this beady-eyed man he took off his clothes and stepped into the shower.
 
The water felt good, not hot but lukewarm. There was a bar of soap, well worn with brown stains that looked like rust and he lathered it up. He couldn’t recall the last time he had washed.
 
“Come on then. This isn’t the bloody ‘ilton.”
 
He turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, reaching for the proffered towel. As he dried himself the old man dragged a bench over to the sink.
 
“Sit down ‘ere and we’ll give you a shave.”
 
For a man so old, his hands were adroit and he didn’t leave a single nick. When he was finished he left the room to put away the shaving things and came back holding a suit on a hanger with a shirt and some undergarments.
 
“Put these on. They look about your size.”
 
The clothes were threadbare but clean. They looked twenty years old. The suit was a little too large but he cinched the waist and cuffed the ankles. The old man stood back and looked up at him with feigned astonishment.
 
“My old aunt! Aren’t we the fancy man. When’s the wedding? Now off with you. Run along up front and get yourself some comestibles. There’s a good lad.”
 
Back in the main room he took his place at the food table. Mary Andrews appeared to have left. When his turn came to be served, he declined the stew and asked just for boiled cabbage. The native with the ladle made no move to fill his bowl and simply stared at him.
 
“It is customary to give thanks.”
 
This was unusual. From where he came it was customary to give thanks after receiving something and not before. If the man would fill his bowl he would thank him. It was merely a matter of a second or two, but that small increment of time seemed to have undue importance in this place. He wondered if he had passed into the version of the city he had expended so much time and effort to find, without having noticed. It was natural enough, he supposed, with multiple places that occupied the same space—the boundaries were not apparent.
 
He held out his bowl.
 
“Thank you very much.”
 
“That won’t do”
 
“I’m sorry. I’m confused. I thought I just gave thanks.”
 
“You must show some sincerity. Thank your maker and apologize for having led a life of sin.”
 
“But I haven’t led a sinful life.”
 
“We are all sinners. If you are too proud to admit it and refuse to abase yourself, then leave now. You are not welcome.”
 
John Eldritch looked around. He was outnumbered and the knobkerrie was outside. It would be best to move on, while he still could. He hastily tied on the canvas bag, which he had retrieved before the old man dispensed with it, and made his retreat. The bell ringer was still tinkling. His stick was where he had left it.
 
As he walked out into the street he felt a delicious disorientation. No food but no matter. Despite his hasty departure, he knew that he was finally reaching his goal. He just had to get further in, and then apply that sturdy objectivity so respected by science. And then he would have succeeded. The Royal Geographical Society be damned.
 
All night he followed the course of the Thames. He was in no hurry, pausing frequently for extended periods to take in the effect of his surroundings. The sound of the footsteps from his urine-soaked shoes hitting the pavement in a rhythm both steady and imperfect, made him acutely aware of himself and then freed him from that knowledge. The river was wet. That he knew. But who could say what wetness was.
 
This metaphor would find the solution, itself a metaphor—homogenous dispersion.
 
By dawn he had reached The Isle of Dogs. His confidence had grown, commensurate with the rising sun.
 
Wednesday. The Island of Dogs. The dogs have all dissolved. Ambiguity is the baseline of information.
 
This was his last entry. The journal was found by Kevin Smith, a schoolboy at George Green’s school. Kevin gave it to his father, who was not particularly interested and left the book outside. Rain soon began to erase the words.
 
Time and mildew did for the rest.
 
 
© Tom Newton 2020