Looking for Jake Read Free Page B

Light Brigade.
    His red jacket was unbuttoned and it flickered around him like a flame. He half stood in his stirrups, crouched low, grasping the reins in his left hand, his right held high with that beautiful blade spitting light into my face. His horse rose into view, its veins huge under its white skin, its eyes rolling in an insane equine leer, drool spurting from behind its bared teeth, its hooves hammering down the deserted tarmac of the Willesden railway bridge.
    The soldier was silent, though his mouth was open as if he shouted his valedictory roar. He rode on, holding his sword high, bearing down on some imaginary enemy, pushing his horse on towards Dollis Hill, down past the Japanese restaurant and the record shop and the bike dealer and the vacuum-cleaner repair man.
    The soldier swept past me, stunning and stupid and misplaced. He rode between us, Jake, so close that beads of sweat hit me.
    I can picture him on duty as the cataclysm fell, sensing the change in the order of things and knowing that the queen he was sworn to protect was gone or irrelevant, that his pomp meant nothing in the decaying city, that he had been trained into absurdity and uselessness, and deciding that he would be a soldier, just once. I see him clicking his heels and cantering through the confused streets of central London, picking up speed as the anger at his redundancy grows, giving the horse its head, letting it run, feeling it shy at the strange new residents of the skies, until it was galloping hard and he draws his weapon to prove that he can fight, and careers off into the flatlands of northwest London, to disappear or die.
    I watched his passing, dumbstruck and in awe.
    And when I turned back, of course, Jake, when I turned back, you had gone.
    The frantic searches, the shouts and the misery you can imagine for yourself. I have little enough dignity as it is. It went on for a long time, though I had known as I raised my head to your lack that I would not find you.
    Eventually I found my way to Kilburn, and as I walked past the Gaumont State I looked up and saw that neon message, garish and banal and terrifying. The message that is there still, the request that tonight, finally, after so many months, I think I will acquiesce to.
    I don’t know where you went, how you were disappeared. I don’t know how I lost you. But after all my searching for a hiding place, that message on the face of the Gaumont cannot be coincidence. Although it might, of course, be misleading. It might be a game. It might be a trap.
    But I’m sick of waiting, you know? I’m sick of wondering. So let me tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to finish this letter, soon now, and I’m going to put it in an envelope with your name on it. I’ll put a stamp on it (it can’t hurt), and I’ll venture out into the street—yes, even in the heart of the night—and I’ll put it in the post box.
    From there, I don’t know what’ll happen. I don’t know the rules of this place at all. It might be eaten by some presence inside the box, it might be spat back out at me, or reproduced a hundred times and pasted on the windows of all the warehouses in London. I’m hoping that it will find its way to you. Maybe it’ll appear in your pocket, or at the door of your place, wherever you are now. If you are anywhere, that is.
    It’s a forlorn hope. I admit that. Of course I admit that.
    But I had you, and I lost you again. I’m marking your passing. And I am marking mine.
    Because you see, Jake, then I’m going to walk the short distance up Kilburn High Road to the Gaumont State, and I’m going to read its plea, its command, and this time I think I will obey.
    The Gaumont State is a beacon, a lighthouse, a warning we missed. It jags impassive into the clouds as the city founders on rocks. Its filthy cream walls are daubed with a hundred markings; human, animal, meteorological, and other. In its