Pompeii
Maybe we can make this work.
The thought feels thin even as I cling to it.
The jazz club in Greenwich is all low light and slow decay, smoke trapped in beams, a piano languidly working through Bill Evans with patient melancholy. Elias sits beside me, half-present, half already gone. He listens the way he always does: as if measuring himself against the music.
I drift back to the beginning, because beginnings are kinder.
The Pepper, upstairs. Pool tables scarred with cigarette burns. The terrace a cantilever construction jutting over the Millwall docks. It's all new now, shiny office buildings and multi-million-pound apartment complexes that nobody but Canary Wharf's city boys can afford.
Pompeii was playing that night. Bastille. Those drums, relentless, tribal, and that chant: But if you close your eyes...
It was everywhere that year. A song about ruins pretending not to be ruins.
Dave, this Liam Gallagher-looking lad, confidence borrowed from lager came striding over. Sideburns impeccably shaped, shaggy fringe framing dark eyes and a sharp nose.
"'Ere. My mate fancies you. Can he buy you a drink?"
"If he fancies me,"I said, "he can ask."
Apparently he was shy. Apparently he was an opera singer. He didn't look like one. He looked like someone bracing for disappointment.
Later, sat on the terrace, with the docks lapping black beneath us, I told him to prove it. He protested. Told me it was a cliché. And then he stood up, holding onto the railing as if he was standing on the deck of a ship bracing itself for a storm, and he began singing:
Nessun dorma
Nessun dorma
Tu pure, o Principessa
Nella tua fredda stanza
His voice cut clean through the noise and chatter. It didn't belong to Docklands. It didn't belong to call centres or Friday pints. It belonged somewhere vaulted and sacred. He hit the high note, Vincero - with terrifying desperation. I will win.
I fell in love with that voice. And then I fell in love with the promise of what it might become.
Promise is expensive.
Headshots. Tube fares. Rent covered when auditions didn't land. Encouragement measured out like medicine. I became the ground so he could attempt the sky.
Now he is leaving.
"Yorkshire was good?"I ask in the jazz club. "Quiet,"he says. "I've just been running in the country. Learning lines. Being with Mum and Dad before I fly."
Before I fly.
"When is it?"
"Soon."
He won't give me the date. As if naming it makes it real. His phone chimes and he steps out to take the call.
By the time we leave he's drunk enough to be honest. He tells me he loves me. That LA is just one job. That once he's done this, once he can finally say he's a success, we'll settle down.
He says it like a vow.
In the Greenwich foot tunnel, our footsteps echo beneath the Thames. He was restless at the club. I forced him home. "You're not meeting Lexi tonight,"I'd said. "You can't even walk straight."I half-dragged him through that white-tiled, liminal artery under the river.
"You've just cost me everything,"he muttered.
Back at the house on Coldharbour, Admiral Nelson's old house, according to the estate agent, as if that meant something...the night fractures.
"I have to go,"he says suddenly.
"You said a week on Tuesday."
"Lexi called. A party. Some contract to sign. The Painted Hall. If I don't show by midnight, the contract disappears."
"You were just in Greenwich,"I snap. "I dragged you home through the tunnel because you were wasted."
"I need to go back."
"It's nearly midnight."
"I don't care."
"You're drunk."
His face twists, frustration, humiliation, something feral. He climbs through the sash window, onto the sill, I assume to smoke, three storeys above the Thames. The river is a black lung beneath us.
He's gripping that brass compass again, the one he found beneath the cellar floorboards today while packing. He hasn't put it down all night.
"Elias,"I say carefully. "Come inside."
"I have to go tonight."
He shifts. I move instinctively, grabbing his wrist.
For a suspended second, we are perfectly balanced between inside and out. His hand crushing mine. The compass cold between our palms.
Then his grip slips.
He falls without a sound. The silence afterward is worse than any scream.
Woodrow shouts from the second floor as I race down the stairs. We burst onto the patio.
There is no body.
No broken shape on the stone.
Only the Thames lapping at the wall.
Sirens swell in the distance.
And someone is hammering at the front door.
The sill tears from my hands.
I expect stone.
I hit mud.
Cold, sucking, tidal mud that swallows my boots to the ankle.
I stagger upright, gagging. The air smells of salt and rot. The patio is gone. The security light is gone. The skyline, Canary Wharf, the O2...erased.
Only fog.
And ships.
Tall-masted silhouettes rocking like ribs in the dark.
The compass is burning in my palm now. I don't remember gripping it. The metal is hot, alive. The needle spins once, then steadies, pointing toward a dull amber glow.
The Gun.
But wrong. Smaller. Squatter. Older. Windows thick with yellowed glass and firelight.
Inside: pipe smoke, damp wool, tallow candles. No television glow. No fruit machines. No craft beers. Just sailors hunched over tankards.
Conversation dies when I enter.
"There you are, Master Elias."
The man by the hearth turns.
Blue naval coat. Gold braid. Right sleeve pinned neatly across his chest.
The painting from our hallway has stepped down into flesh.
"Admiral,"I whisper.
"Come,"he says lightly. "The fog is treacherous tonight."
"I need to get to Greenwich,"I say. "The Painted Hall. My agent. Lexi. If I don't sign, I don't go to Los Angeles."
"Los...Angeles,"he repeats, tasting it. "El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles? The Spanish mission?"
"Yes. California. Hollywood."
"California is wilderness,"he says. "The Pobladores have only just settled it. Dust and friars. Why would you go there?"
"I'm an actor."
He leaned in closer, his eyes narrowing.
"You are performing for the Admiralty on Tuesday. The fleet sails on the tide after your recital. Morale is low. They need to hear you. You know the price of desertion, Elias. Even for a voice like yours."
He pointed to the compass in my hand.
"And I see you have the wayfinder. Good. Keep it close. It's easy to lose one's direction in this fog."
"I was just in Greenwich,"I insist. "At a jazz club. Sarah forced me home through a tunnel under the river. I'm on the wrong side of it now."| "A tunnel?"His brow furrows. "There is no tunnel beneath the Thames. Only mud and the dead."
My heart pounds.
"Then I need a boat."
Nelson studies me. The room stills.
"A trade,"he says. "A song for a passage."
I close my eyes. I reach for the party piece. The crowd-pleaser.
I try Nessun dorma.
It collapses before the first note. Too ornate. Too hungry. It belongs to ego and applause.
Wrong century.
Wrong room.
Instead, the tribal drums return, that insistent beat from the night I met Sarah.
I strip it bare.
"I was left to my own devices... Many days fell away with nothing to show."
The sailors don't know the melody. They don't know Rome or radio. But they know collapse. They know empires turning to dust.
When I reach the chorus, I don't belt it. I offer it.
"But if you close your eyes...Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?"
The fog presses against the windows as if listening.
When I finish, no one speaks.
Nelson nods.
"To the boat."
The Thames is monstrous in fog.
Nelson rows with one arm, relentless. The wherry bucks against the tide.
Halfway across, my chest locks. Air thins. An iron band tightens around my ribs.
"You have paid,"he calls. "Why do you struggle?"
"I have to get back,"I choke. "I have to be someone."
"You already are,"he says quietly. "The question is, which man?"
The river churns black beneath us.
"You may cross,"he continues. "But you cannot carry that hunger with you. The need for applause. The desperate striving. That remains here."
The compass burns once in my palm.
"That is the price."
I think of Sarah's face in the window. Of the way I looked at her, as an obstacle, not an anchor.
I let it go.
Not the music.
The ambition.
The boat scrapes stone.
"Midnight,"Nelson says.
I crawl up the steps toward the Painted Hall of the Royal Naval College, once a hospital for seamen in his day, he'd said. A place where broken bodies were brought to mend or to die.
The doors stand open.
I stagger inside.
No party. No agent. No contract to sign.
The painted ceiling swims above me, gods and sailors and impossible skies. The vast baroque heavens tilt and warp. Figures bend. Light fractures.
The fresco stretches, distorts...blue becoming white, clouds flattening into panels.
The gilded moulding hums.
The sky peels back.
Fluorescent strips blaze.
The painted saints dissolve into ceiling tiles.
The echo of the hall becomes the hiss-click of a ventilator.
Royal London Hospital.
My body is a cage of plaster and pain.
Three days, they tell me.
Police stand at the door.
"About the argument,"one says.
"We've some questions,"says another.
Argument.
I try to speak her name.
Tube. Silence.
The chair beside the bed is empty.
I close my eyes.
I listen.
The aria is gone. The Vincerò, The star.
But beneath the machines; a hum.
Thin.
Cracked.
Still mine.
The Royal Naval College had been a hospital once. Perhaps it still is.
The tide has turned.
And I am not the man who fell.