It had stopped raining, so when they left Bill and Sarah’s house, Ron and Nuying decided to walk back to their flat on Bickley Street.
‘Urrgh, I didn’t like that spaghetti Bolognese, did you?’ said Nuying, as they walked hand-in-hand down Church Lane. ‘It tasted of nothing but tomato paste.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Ron. ‘Sarah’s never pretended that she’s Nigella. She served up a roast chicken once but she’d forgotten to take out the plastic bag with the giblets inside it.’
‘Tomorrow I will make you Szechuan chicken to make up for it,’ said Nuying.
They reached Amen Corner and started to walk along the main Mitcham Road. It was nearly two in the morning now, and the road was deserted, although most of the shop fronts were still lit up, and their lights were reflected in the shiny wet pavements. Somewhere they could hear a dog plaintively barking.
Ron and Nuying had been together for a year as of the previous Saturday, which was why Bill and Sarah had invited them around for an anniversary celebration. Ron was a manager for Budget Car Hire in Battersea – twenty-nine years old, tall and lanky with large ears and a cow’s-lick of mousy hair. His three-year marriage to his first girlfriend Kayley had ended in divorce when she had slept with his best friend Pete, and so he had looked for a new partner online, and found Nuying. She was twenty-five, petite but plump, the daughter of a Chinese restaurant owner in Croydon. Both she and Ron were awkward and shy, but they both enjoyed cycling, and Ed Sheeran songs, and watching TV, and in the evening they would sit for hours together – not talking but just pleased that they had somebody to sit with.
‘It was nice of them to give us those table-mats, though,’ said Ron.
‘Yes,’ said Nuying. ‘All we need now is a table.’
‘Don’t you worry. I’ve beaten all my repair targets this year and I’ll get a good bonus at Christmas.’
They had nearly reached Bickley Street when they heard a loud crack, and then another, and then the explosive sound of a shop window being shattered. Only twenty metres in front of them, like a furious ice-storm, thousands of fragments of glass burst out across the pavement. At the same time, the shop’s burglar alarm began to ring.
‘Bloody hell!’ said Ron. ‘What the hell was that?’
Nuying tugged at his hand and said, ‘We should run! We should run! Maybe it’s a gas main!’
‘That wasn’t a gas main,’ Ron told her. ‘That was more like somebody smashing out the window with a hammer.’
Nuying tugged at his hand again, harder. ‘We should still run!’
Ron took a few steps back, but then stopped and took out his iPhone. He tapped out 999, and he was answered almost instantly.
‘Emergency, which service?’
‘Police, I think. Maybe the fire brigade too. There’s a shop window on Mitcham Road that’s blown right out all over the pavement. It could be a gas explosion, something like that. Or maybe somebody’s broken it out on purpose. I’m not sure which.’
Before the operator could ask him any more questions, a dark figure clambered out of the front of the shop. It was strangely fluid, more like a large black animal than a man. It was followed by another, and another, all of different colours, and then so many more that Ron couldn’t count them. A whole crowd of them were standing outside the shop now, on top of all the thousands of sparkling fragments of glass, except that they didn’t seem to be treading on them. They seemed instead to be hovering above them, and jostling silently against each other.
Ron took another step back. Nuying whimpered and held onto his arm. She thought that the figures looked like all the washing that her grandmother used to hang out in her back yard, when she was a little girl in Hong Kong. When the wind had blown and the black and white mandarin shirts had all flapped their arms they had terrified her, and these figures terrified her now. She pulled at Ron’s arm so hard that dropped his iPhone onto the pavement.
‘Sir? Can you hear me?’ said the emergency operator.
Ron bent down and scrabbled to pick up his phone. ‘Yes – sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just—’ but before he could say any more, the figures started to rush towards them, making almost the same sharp flapping sound that had terrified Nuying so much when she was small.
As they came nearer, Ron could see that the figures weren’t people at all. They were shirts and jackets and coats and dresses. They had nobody in them, no heads and no arms and no legs, but they still came flooding forward with their empty sleeves flailing in the air, and they showed no sign that they were going to slow down or stop.
Ron grabbed Nuying’s hand and together they started to run back the way they had come. Neither of them spoke: they were both panicking and they both knew that they would need every last gasp of breath to get away. They could hear the flapping coming closer and closer up behind them, but they didn’t dare to turn around.
They reached the corner of the next street, Rookstone Road, and Ron pulled Nuying sharply to the right. The pavement here was much narrower, with parked cars all the way along it, so that the clothes wouldn’t be able to chase after them in such a wide-spread pack. Then – if they could make it to the end of the road and take another right, and then a left, and then another right, they would find themselves in Bickley Street, and have a chance of reaching their own front door.
As she ran, Nuying hit the wing-mirror of a parked Toyota, and tripped, and staggered, and nearly fell forward. Ron pulled her upright and they kept on running, but they had lost precious seconds. They were less than a third of the way down the road when a long khaki trench-coat billowed up behind Ron with a soft thunderous sound and dropped onto his shoulders. It was only a coat, but it felt as heavy as if a man were wearing it, and Ron was slammed face-first onto the concrete.
Nuying screamed, ‘Ron! Ron! Get up!’ and she snatched at one of the trench-coat’s epaulettes and tried to wrench it off him, but as she did so a writhing bottle-green dress wound its sleeves around and around her head, so that she could neither see nor breathe. The sleeves of a dark grey sweater tugged at her ankles, and she fell sideways, cracking her skull against the kerb.
Now the pack of clothes began to attack the two of them with blind ferocity. The trench-coat struck Ron’s face against the pavement again and again, until his nose was smashed flat and his forehead was split apart and both of his eyeballs were knocked out onto his cheeks. At the same time, three jackets levered off his shoes and dragged down his trousers, and then entwined their sleeves around his legs and started to twist them around in the same way that Philip Wakefield’s legs had been twisted. As his femurs were rotated, his hip-joints crackled like a freshly lit fire.
A hunchbacked grey anorak and three thick sweaters crawled crabwise over to Nuying. They rolled her over so that they could drag off her overcoat and then rip the buttons off her dress. Then they wrenched off her bra and dragged down her Spanx. Two of the sweaters wound their sleeves around her thighs and opened up her legs until she was almost doing the splits, and then the anorak forced its sleeve up inside her, right up to its elbow. It pulled and pulled at her womb, its back humping up and down with effort, and at last, in a welter of blood, it tore it right out of her. It waved it around as if it were a scalp that it had taken as a trophy, and then dropped it into the gutter.
It took nearly an hour for the clothes to finish dismembering Ron and Nuying. They clustered over their bodies and ripped them apart layer by layer – skin, fat, muscle, tendons and connective tissue. They heaved out their intestines and unravelled them all the way along the pavement like long slippery hosepipes. Finally they broke open their ribcages and pulled out their lungs and their hearts.
There was no sound except for the squelching of flesh and the snapping of bones.
Eventually, the clothes gathered close together, almost all of them heavily bloodstained, and sat amongst the human devastation that they had created. Anybody who had seen them from a distance and who didn’t realise that they were nothing but empty clothes would have thought that they were religious penitents, meditating perhaps, or praying for forgiveness.
After a while lightning flickered in the distance and thunder began to rumble. As the wind grew stronger, the clothes rose from the pavement in twos and threes and started to blow away. They rounded the corner at the end of Rookstone Road like a flock of migrating birds, and then they were gone.
