The Gateway to the South. This was where Joe had lived and he could tell you with some certainty that it wasn’t the gateway to the south any more than it was the gateway to anywhere else, except maybe Streatham if you waited around long enough for a 315. Amazing how some names just stick. It was unlikely you could find more than a handful of Balhamites who had the slightest idea how or when it had acquired its epithet. He knew, though. It was important to know things like that.

Joe had spent much time attempting to define his neighbourhood’s modern-day role, looking for a better subtitle for the age. He liked “everyone’s favourite brother”. If London was a big, sprawling family – dysfunctional, in many ways, but thriving nevertheless – then that was the position Balham occupied. Despite numerous and varied siblings strung around the parental core, there was no obvious rivalry, no jealousy, no undercurrent of fraternal conflict, even with those closest in geography and age. When Joe let it be known, in conversation, that this was his home, he was always met with an indulgent or appreciative response. Nobody had an axe to grind with Balham, it appeared.

People came from round and about and even further afield to spend days and evenings in the relaxed ambience. They arrived with no point to prove, and they left refreshed. Its easy charm was natural and unadulterated: it had matured from a knowing, rosy-cheeked child to a well-adjusted adult with feet firmly on the ground and a mischievous glint in just the time that Joe had been resident. He couldn’t take much credit for the transformation, but he had been there to witness it. He also knew that if Balham ever looked like being bullied by a misguided bigger borough, there would be no shortage of support, and any conflict would soon be quashed.

Such was the affable district he had once called home and which he had irreversibly left two days ago. Now he was back, of course, but only for the time it took to pass through under the surface. They had passed the spot where he would habitually stand and wait for the train, and there had been no sign of his ghost. Admittedly there wouldn’t be room for all the ghosts of the forgotten commuters, schoolchildren, excursionists or blitz-ravaged civilians on a single tube platform, but he was a touch disappointed not to at least find his own. Balham had other ideas.

What he had left was a rather smart Victorian terrace with a stair runner and floating shelves. A lot of his time had gone into the creation of the home. A lot of his time, but none of his soul. It was a paragon of tasteful modernity with a hint of edge, just like his young wife, made of bricks and plaster, antique wood and plastic. It would never feel love or devotion for him like she did; it could never synchronise breathing when everything else in the world was silent in those last seconds before sleep; it might well become structurally unsound or creak but would never lose its grip on rationality or scream like a fishwife because it really did care. Rather, sitting within wave upon wave of cohorts in a sea of similitude, it acquired a character both compelling and empty, a faithful agent of the complacency of which Joe was so terribly afraid.

He was desperate for his wife to not fall into a similar sea, and he was far from confident in his ability to prevent it.

 

They had first spoken in the second term of university. He had seen her around, at faculty buildings and in the bar, and taken note of her, but the opportunity had never arisen to strike up a conversation. And Joe needed an opportunity. How odd the way things happen: he had been dragged along by a Russian conversation classmate to an identity parade at the local police station. They paid a fiver to all the non-suspects to stand there and not giggle for five minutes. Easy money. Joe presumed that the suspect himself didn’t get a penny. Having discharged their duty to the justice system, he and his pal were waiting in the lobby to collect their payment, when Eve appeared from an interview room. She smiled and sat in the plastic chair next to Joe. She had to wait for her paperwork to be completed: she had just accepted an official caution for possession of class B drugs and had to sign something. She hadn’t realised that it was against the law for drama students to have drugs like that. How the hell was she supposed to make sense of some of that stuff, or stay awake at other times, without a bit of help? Did they really think that most of her subject matter was created under the influence of nothing stronger than a glass of chilled sherry and a love of performance art? These philistines were the sort that would happily strip the world of everything instinctive on the grounds of suspicion of subversion, and replace inspiration with laws. Fascist scumbags… Joe managed to halt her train of speech before the desk sergeant cottoned on.

 

That had been the start of the journey. They had both felt somehow drawn to the uncomplicated and unselfconscious charms of Balham, and, sure enough, they fitted in as if they were part of an organic extension of all the values it stood for. Without trying to, and without much considering it, they brought to life the ideals they became steeped in, and nobody could envisage them anywhere else.

Two days ago, returning from the office just before midday, Joe had paused on the pavement across the road from his home and stared, half blindly. He continued for so long that he had to sit. Right there on the pavement, for over an hour, unable to fully focus and unable to move from that particular spot.

His thoughts lacked an obvious purpose or even a recognisable form. Ordinarily, Joe would have been frustrated by the confusion. But not now – this was something he felt had to happen. And, indeed, as time progressed, those same unruly thoughts and ideas began to organise themselves. Their magnetism had attracted more and more of their comrades from neighbouring and further-flung areas of his consciousness; first came lonely stray fancies who readily joined the kaleidoscopic jumble and were happy to fall into line whichever way they were directed. The additional mass conferred then exerted enough force to wrest whole concepts and paradigms, some of them months and years in development, from well-established and discrete corners of his self. The house itself dissolved into the greater mass of the street, gently pulsing as a minor organ of the city, above it a number of ever straightening and neatly parallel lines of consciousness, although the logical train of what they were trying to tell him was still too obscure to comprehend. Now he really was frustrated. He knew he had made some form of breakthrough, and yet he couldn’t have told you what that breakthrough was.

Last night’s dream. It was a recurring dream, one which he had been hosting for years, but he had never given it much thought until the previous night, when it had taken a new and auspicious turn. It was a dream he had never shared, partly because of the subject matter and partly because of its meaninglessness. It wasn’t very interesting. It would come perhaps once a month, perhaps less often, since young adulthood, although he thought he could identify dreams in a similar vein, differing only in specific details, since the very beginning of his memory.

This is what he dreamed: he would be somewhere, alone. Nobody else was present in his field of vision, and he supposed that he was alone in a room. There was a blockage in his nose. A mass was stuck firmly to the inside of his nostril. Looking back on it, on the pavement in a semi-aware daze, he fancied it was always the left, although he could sense no significance in that distinction. It affected his breathing and he could feel it uncomfortably if he screwed up his nose or pressed on the side, which he now couldn’t stop himself doing. There was only one thing for it: the index finger was sent in to liberate the culprit and restore normality. If only it had been that simple: the digit located the target and made to drag it clear, only to meet unexpected resistance: the root of the problem was clearly located further back in the nasal cavity. Trying increased force only had the uncomfortable effect of exerting more pressure on the bend in the cavity as it graduated to the pharynx. It was an unpleasant sensation. Further efforts just gave the impression, and this is where his ignorance of anatomy was undoubtedly a drawback, that the whole blockage was eventually connected to some vital part of his whole physiology. Maybe the optic nerve or the brain, although this was probably just because the constant tugging of the index finger and counter-tugging of the deep-rooted body was making his eyes water. Still, the fear of this always stopped him short in his efforts before he caused any irreparable damage.

And that was it. He would wake. Each time maddened at his inability to clear the blockage or to establish the exact cause. But still, however many times the dream returned, it never bothered him badly enough to affect his ability to get back to sleep. It was just one of those benign dreams that come, and leave no discernible impact. There was no obvious trigger, either. But with each visitation, he knew it was a dream and he knew how it would turn out. There was no trepidation, and the pre-ordained struggle with the recalcitrant blockage took on an almost ritual quality. Nothing to worry about. Until last night.

He couldn’t be sure how long it had been since the last instance of the dream, but he thought pretty recently. In fact, was it not was arriving more regularly than ever? He greeted it, anyway, like a dog might greet its master’s lodger. The scene progressed as expected for a while. Then, with no warning, the blockage began to slide smoothly down the inside of the left nostril. There was no pain, no discomfort, no watering eyes, no resistance. Its roots appeared inch by creeping inch right under the eyes of a dumbstricken Joe. Life Joe or Dream Joe, their astonishment matched each other’s.

Eventually it was fully extracted. What a vision. A huge mucus-caked feather, black as tar and longer than an ostrich quill. It sat there between his finger and thumb, drying out and spreading its crackling branches from the spine as it did so. It was almost beautiful in its loathsomeness; certainly the sensation of having removed it from inside his head was a positive one. He woke up.

Nothing was clear, except that something had changed forever.

He struggled to his feet, steadied himself for a second on the lime tree, slowly stretched out his numb muscles, deposited his keys down a nearby grating and set off south-westward. He could stay at Duncan’s until he’d managed to decipher the meaning of those thoughts galloping along their parallel tracks, taunting him with their secret.