London Deep #2
The drawings were detailed plans of the lower levels of The Aerial, and what appeared to be cross-sections of the elevator shaft Simon had built.
The next page contained a chaotic scrawl of lines in several different colors, and it took me a few moments to work out what it represented.
It was a diagram of the network of tunnels he’d mentioned running beneath the building, tunnels that predated it, and presumably predated the Victorian edifice that had been leveled to make way for it too.
It was possible that the colors represented different eras of building, or maybe varying levels within the subsoil; it was impossible to tell.
I could see what he’d meant about the ground being riddled with them, though.
Even my layman’s understanding of the physics of it told me that if the river’s level rose considerably, as it had in recent weeks, then the tunnels would be flooded.
His notes on the page were hardly any more illuminating, although they gave me some inkling of his state of mind.
There was a hurried, slightly frantic tone to them that I was unused to seeing from Simon.
His sentences sprawled where once they would have been clipped and to the point.
There was an unreasonable amount of underlining too, in some cases almost cutting through the paper where he’d highlighted a particular word or phrase and then scored it through again and again.
At one point he’d circled a phrase in red, “these unreasoning fish-men,” which I took at the time to be a misspelled reference, intentional or accidental, to the frogmen who had surely helped him in mapping the flooded tunnels.
He’d highlighted the name “The Aerial” twice, in red.
For the first time, I wondered whether the police officer had been right to question his state of mind.
Simon had always been the calm, rational one throughout our childhoods and into adulthood, but here I saw another side to him, a tributary to the obsessiveness that had made him so successful in his career.
Clearly his brilliant mind had fixated on this job, and it appeared to have magnified the problem beyond all reasonable inquiry.
Maybe it was his own failure to deliver a flood-proof, fully functioning elevator shaft that had caused it.
Simon had never been a boy who liked to lose.
I didn’t feel right removing the book from his flat, so I spread it open on the desk and took photos on my phone of each double page, trying to hold my hand still to prevent his handwriting from blurring into illegible nonsense.
It was as I photographed the final page that I noticed something.
There was another line of text written in the seam where the staples held the notebook together, hidden in the fold.
Turning the book on its side and flattening it with my palms, I was able to reveal it.
The writing was small even for Simon, and somehow careless, at least for him.
Is the Aerial really that? it read. For what?
? The Great Sea God? How far can he transmit/who is listening?
!? The abundance of punctuation alone was a sign that something had unhinged in my brother’s head.
I did my best to capture a close-up, in case anyone should need it as evidence of something, then I closed the book and returned it to its place among the magazines.
I must confess, after this discovery I was convinced beyond all doubt that something had snapped in my brother’s mind, and the worst-case scenario we had not dared to consider might actually be the truth of the matter.
I would never have imagined that Simon could take his own life, but these obsessive ramblings were so unlike my brother that anything seemed possible.
Clearly he had been more troubled than any of us might have guessed.
Like the earth beneath The Aerial itself, the human mind is riddled with unseen tunnels.
I didn’t tell our parents at first, but after a night of attempting to sleep on the information, and failing, I called them and filled them in on what I had found.
I could hear Mum crying in the background as Dad talked practicalities, search parties and Missing posters, what we should tell the police.
We agreed they must be told something, but informing them that my brother, their son, had gone crazy and wiped himself from the face of the planet seemed to serve little practical purpose.
At worst, it might mean that they reduced or cancelled the hunt for him, and that was something we didn’t want.
After all, what did it really mean that Simon was missing?
Only that he couldn’t be found, and had been going through a tough period; but who was to say that he wouldn’t turn up any day, having cleared his head and feeling slightly foolish for the fuss he’d caused?
I had existed so long in his shadow that I couldn’t help but relish the idea of his embarrassment, the prodigal son brought down a peg or two.
In the end, Dad was the one who called the police, telling them we were concerned for Simon’s state of mind, but leaving out the frantic scribblings and the “fish-men.” They would hardly help them in their search, and the picture they painted was not one that my parents wanted associated with the family name.
* * *
To say that I forgot about my missing brother following the conversation with my parents wouldn’t be entirely true.
Sometimes, while waiting on a crowded Tube platform, I’d look for his face among the crowd, as if he might be there, in plain sight, hidden in the impersonal masses of London.
The rain continued to fall too, and as the river rose still further, the newspapers carried stories of flooding and burst banks.
There were two confirmed sightings of dolphins in the murky brown water of the Thames, having swum upstream from the sea.
I would think of the tunnels beneath The Aerial and wonder what had become of them, now Simon was no longer looking into the problem.
Would they have simply given someone else the task? Or had he truly been so irreplaceable?
Even so, he had drifted from the forefront of my mind, so the phone call I received came as both a surprise and a shock.
I had been suffering with a bad head cold for a few days, almost certainly brought on by the damp weather we’d been enduring, so when my phone rang, it took me half a minute to peel myself from the couch and answer it.
I didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line.
A security guard at The Aerial had found Simon’s phone, lying unattended in a stairwell that led down to the building’s basement level.
He hadn’t locked it, and they’d managed to trace me through his contacts list. Would I be able to pass it on to him?
The question unnerved me at first, until I realized the person I was talking to was unaware of my brother’s disappearance, or the police’s involvement.
I knew I should correct their mistake and phone the police station about this new development, but before I was able to blurt it out, I paused.
The police had made little headway over the past few weeks, and indeed, had shown a waning interest in the case.
This might be my one chance to find out what had happened to Simon, or at least to open a few more doors into his secretive, and largely dull, life.
I could imagine the police sitting on the phone for a month or more, keeping its contents from us and effectively closing down my own investigation into his disappearance.
“That’s wonderful,” I said, forcing a false casualness into my tone and trying to sound marginally less ill than I was. “I’ll come and pick it up this afternoon, if that’s okay?”
They said it would be left at the reception desk in my name, then they hung up.
* * *
It won’t surprise you to learn that the rain was streaming down as I set off for Canary Wharf and The Aerial, the hood of my waterproof pulled up over my head, rendering my view of London in tunnel vision.
I was vaguely aware of other pedestrians crisscrossing the pavements, but nobody looked up, each of us locked into our own private world by the static hiss of the falling rain.
As I walked along Montgomery Street I half-noticed a curiously hunched figure, more amphibian than man, as he ran and hopped across the road in front of me, and in my drenched and semi-feverish state I fancied that the face beneath the hood had a silvery sheen, tapering back from his nose like a fish.
Then he was gone, and while I noted a loud splash, as if something, or someone, had entered the canal, I hurried onward.
I feared the police would recover the phone before I did, and that would be the end of the trail.
By the time I entered The Aerial’s lobby I was drenched through once again, and my nose was streaming.
Taking a handkerchief from my pocket, I cleaned myself up before I approached the front desk, so I might at least appear vaguely presentable.
I doubted they would be keen to hand over a lost item to someone who looked like a vagabond, and a half-drowned one at that.
As it happened, though, they didn’t ask any questions, or even for my ID.
When I mentioned my name, the receptionist pulled a small brown envelope from beneath the desk and handed it to me.
From the thickness and the weight it was clear that it contained Simon’s phone, so I nodded my thanks and retreated to a huddle of couches near the elevator doors, to inspect the contents of the envelope.