Laura McTavish was exceptionally good at her job. She was never late to work, rarely took any time off, not for sickness nor for holidays. Aside, that is, from when she was pressured to do so by management who did not wish to see her contractually allotted days off roll over into the following year. She regularly put in extra hours and was always happy to cover for her fellow workers when they were ill or on holiday; and always worked with a professional yet friendly demeanour. She was a manager’s dream employee and was both liked and respected by her fellow workers –even if some grumbled that she made them look lazy by comparison. Laura McTavish was a good worker who loved her job. It was this that led to her downfall.

Laura worked for the City Counciltm in the Department for Town Planning and City Centre Management –formerly the departments of Corporate Planning, Retail Management, and City Development. The last of which being where Laura worked before the mergers and resulting redundancies. Laura’s job consisted of checking planning applications, initially just for the city centre area but since expanded to encompass the wider metropolitan district, and evaluating whether they merited passing on to her managers who made the final decisions on such matters. Her days were mostly spent poring over application forms, maps, and architectural plans, and cross referencing them against current planning policy, existing and approved applications and, generally, a whole lot of administrative paperwork.

It wasn’t the paperwork that Laura loved about her work. It was the maps. She had spent her entire life in the city, with the exception of a school trip to Calais: an experience she hoped never to repeat, and had watched it change and grow through the course of her life. When she was in school she excelled at Geography and would always choose her beloved home city as the subject of school projects. She would gather together old maps and photographs and use them to illustrate how the city had developed over the course of hundreds of years. Upon leaving school she managed to get a junior position in what was, at that time, the Department of Planning and Works and remained in the department, slowly rising in responsibility and pay grade, until, within five years, she achieved her current position as Administrative Assistant (Planning) (Grade 3). In nearly two decades of working for the department she had seen many changes: seen department heads come and go and, on occasion, come back again. She had seen phases and fads in planning, in architecture, in social policy rise to prominence and fade back into an embarrassed obscurity. It all fascinated her and she felt a sense of completeness being so involved in the evolution of the complex beast that is the city.

The downfall of the good worker Laura McTavish began on the 24th of April, a Friday, when planning application 18-2-15-BRI-X-X-CC4 came across her desk. It was late morning before Laura was able to look at the application. First she had to deal with numerous applications for the addition of solar panels to residential and commercial properties –all of the residential applications bar one had to be returned to be properly completed, and an application for a road closure for essential maintenance work to a listed building. Before opening the thick plastic wallet that contained application 18-2-015-BRI-X-X-CC4 She made herself a cup of coffee in the staff kitchen and took a naughty chocolate cookie from the tub that her workmate Chris had brought in the day before. Once she had returned to her desk, taken a sip from her mug –still bearing the branding of the city council from when she had first begun work there, and nibbled at the edge of the cookie, she opened the plastic folder.

The first page of the application bore an artist’s illustration of the planned construction. It was an odd looking building –not a style of architecture with which Laura was familiar. The main body of the building was one storey high and shaped like a diamond with a large diamond shaped courtyard filled with grass and trees. The northernmost corner of the building consisted of a tall, four storey, cylindrical tower with a viewing platform on the top –something that she doubted would make it through the planning process if the application got passed up to her managers. It looked to her like a mosque. A mosque that was twisted out of proportion and had the minaret exchanged for a lightless lighthouse. She raised her eyebrow and flipped to the rearmost section of the application –the main body consisting of detailed architectural plans, construction time scales, pre-construction reports, and the like. The final section was what mattered to Laura: the bones of the application. Here she would find out whether the company, Vrai Enterprises –which sounded French to Laura and may, she thought, have explained the strange style of the building– to ensure that Vrai Enterprises had completed the form properly, that they were aware of relevant legislation and local policy and had referenced everything correctly. For an application of this size Laura envisioned herself being busy with the form for the rest of the day.

As she looked over the first relevant page an anomaly caught her eye. She flipped back to the front page to confirm what she had seen and, sure enough, the address on both the front page and the application form itself were the same. She was surprised she had not noticed the address on the front page –she supposed she must have been distracted by the odd building design.

01-35 Dalchrist Terrace and 02-28 Applewood Avenue (inclusive)

Laura had never heard of Dalchrist Terrace and whilst there was an Applewood Avenue that was part of a new build housing development on the outskirts of the metropolitan area; it certainly wasn’t in an already built up, seemingly central, location as depicted in the artists impression on the front page. That Laura had never heard of it surprised her. She knew the city as well as any taxi driver, probably better given the amount that now used GPS to navigate the city streets. In fact there were few who knew the city anywhere near as intimately as Laura McTavish.

She flipped through the rest of the application and absolutely everything else seemed, at first glance, to be in perfect order. She pulled out the map sheet from the centre of the application –unfolding the delicate thin paper across her desk until it made an L-shape where it leaned against her computer monitor. Sure enough there was Dalchrist Terrace and Applewood Avenue leading at 45 degree angles from Corporation Road not five minutes’ walk from the council offices in which she sat. How could she have never heard of these streets? She distinctly remembered dealing with a variety of applications involving Corporation Road in her time in the department yet never had she noticed these two streets. She traced the path of Dalchrist Terrace with her finger to where it joined Green Street, another street with which she had had many dealings over the years.

Not believing that she could have never encountered these streets before she folded the map back into the plastic wallet and brought up a map of the city on her computer. Zooming in to Corporation Road she was relieved to see that it matched her mental image of the area exactly. At the place where Dalchrist Terrace and Applewood Avenue supposedly met one another on Corporation Road there was only Gable Street. A small street that had been pedestrianised in the 1990s as part of the redevelopment of the district.

Closing the plastic wallet Laura pushed her chair back slightly from her desk and dipped her remaining cookie into her cooling council branded cup of coffee. Glancing at the clock in the corner of her monitor she realised that she should have left for her lunch break already. Laura slipped the plastic wallet into her desk drawer, turned off her monitor, and picked up her handbag and raincoat, having decided to get a coffee to go as she investigated this anomalous map. She knew that these streets didn’t exist, and, indeed, the council mapping application had confirmed this, but such a huge mistake on a seemingly perfectly completed and thoroughly supported application seemed unthinkable to her.

Laura pulled her raincoat tight as she stepped out of the staff entrance at the side of the council offices and into the biting spring wind. It had been raining heavily when Laura had arrived to work this morning but the clouds had dissipated leaving a somewhat impotent sun attempting to take the sting out of the wind’s chill gusts. Laura always loved the feeling of stepping from the relative quiet and calm of the office into the noise and hubbub of the city centre. She let the noise and smells of the traffic, both human and vehicular, wash over her as she leaned into the wind. Store fronts carried displays of clothes, games, and all the latest electronic equipment, a dozen different places offered food from all over the world, and there was a veritable plethora of soaps -both the exotic sounding and the comfortably familiar and homey- and luxuries from places Laura could only imagine. This was another thing that fuelled Laura's love for her home city: she did not have to imagine the wider world as the wider world seemed veritably eager to come to the city and bring with it all of its wonders. Perhaps if Laura had grown up somewhere smaller, somewhere more provincial, she may have felt the itch to explore the world beyond the council boundaries but living in the city the thought had simply never occurred to her.

Laura turned onto the bustle of High Street where she stopped off to pick herself up a large latte and a sandwich from Costa Coffee. Having slipped the sandwich into her handbag to eat back at her desk she sipped the froth from the top of her coffee through the plastic lid of the cardboard cup. Crossing back across High Street, ducking between shoppers and people rushing to get their lunch she made for the narrow entrance to Graeme Lane which ran between High Street and Porkmarket Way which in turn would take her onto Corporation Road. Graeme Lane was deserted but for the multicoloured plastic bins belonging to the stores of High Street. She passed the boarded up frontage of the Victoria Tavern; a pub that had been notorious in Laura’s youth for violence and all manner of illegal goings on. It had lost its license even before she had begun to work for the council and its reputation was still so bad that no one had wanted to try and reopen it; even all these years later. It still had the look of a traditional British pub: small square panes of glass sat in a black wooden lattice, the paint now sorely decayed and the panes of glass missing for the most part, a hand painted sign hanging high out of arms reach from a corroding iron arm. It was a wonder it had never been boarded up; something that she may bring up at the next staff meeting in the department for it was surely, she thought to herself as she passed, a fire hazard.

Emerging onto Porkmarket Way she made her way towards the Old Market Hall –redeveloped as restaurants and high class bars and bistros to cater to the city’s growing commercial and business district– behind which lay Corporation Road and the source of the mystery. She was actually beginning to enjoy herself as she walked up Porkmarket Way: cars inching forward in the snarled up traffic and pedestrians, though lesser in number than on High Street, still bustling around her going about their business whilst she was on something of an adventure. Laura McTavish and the Case of the Disappearing Streets. That sounded like the sort of thing she would have read as a girl.

The Old Market Hall sat halfway along Porkmarket Way and across the road from where Laura walked. Set back from the road, with sad and damp looking tables and chairs sat before it, the building was an impressive Victorian design full of Grecian columns and featuring three impressive copper blue domes topped by bronze statues of Brittania with her shield. The front doors had once been made from imposing iron studded oak but now the Roman arch of the doorway was filled with slick glass and an industrial looking rectangle of steel bearing the acid etched name of the building. The hyper modern squeezed into the enduring stone of permanence and tradition, much like the city itself. Laura had only had had cause to go into the building a few times herself –birthdays and co-worker’s leaving do’s– as, even with the salary raises she had gotten as she had advanced in the department, it still seemed too expensive to go to on a regular night out with the girls.

She crossed the road towards the Old Market and, a minute later, turned right onto Corporation Road. From here she could clearly see, on the other side of the road, Gable Street, blocked to traffic by a set of retractable silver bollards, where a group of well dressed men stood smoking outside Baba Riley’s Bar; its rainbow flag wrapped around the flagpole by the wind. It was clear that reality matched both her recollection of the area and the council’s mapping software. One pedestrianised street linking Corporation Road and Green Street and no Terrace or Avenue heading off at wonky 45 degree angles.

Still, Laura was nothing if she was not diligent and so she crossed Corporation Road and popped into the newsagents on the opposite corner of Gable Street from Baba Riley’s. The door chimed as she entered and the young man behind the counter looked up from his phone.

“Hi, I was wondering if you could help me?”

“Sure, what do you want?” He set his phone down by the till.

“Um, I’m looking for either a street called Dalchrist Terrace or Applewood Avenue. Are they around here?”

“Never heard of them pet, sorry. I could look them up...” he reached for his phone.

“No, no, that’s fine. Someone told me that they were near here and, for the life of me, I can’t think where they meant.”

“Yeah, sorry, I’ve not heard of them.”

“Thanks anyway.” With that she left the shop and headed up Gable Street towards Green Street where, once she had satisfied herself that there was nowhere that looked even remotely similar to the planning application at this end of the street, she turned around and headed back to work.

Upon her return to the office Laura placed the puzzling application into the top drawer of her desk. Deciding to leave the matter until after the weekend when her department head would be back in the office.

She spent the remainder of that afternoon working her way through some of the applications that had landed on the desks of her colleagues in order to ensure that everyone was up to date before three o’clock arrived and the office closed. As always she was careful to ensure that the applications carried her colleagues initials so that it didn’t look like she was trying to make them look bad. She really didn’t care who did the work so long as everything was tied up before they went home for the weekend. Because of this need to have everything tickety-boo for the close of business the anomalous application from this morning played on her thoughts all afternoon. The distraction of application 18/2/15-BRI-X-X-CC4 caused Laura some consternation as she found herself making elementary mistakes in application processing and so, for a change, she was really rather happy when the end of the day arrived.

All the way home on the 54X Laura couldn’t take her mind off the strangeness of the application. She watched the city slide slowly past as her bus made its halting way through the city centre’s one way system. Before the bus had made it past the limits of the centre is had begun to rain and by the time Laura was back in Langstance, on the northern edge of the city, it was raining so hard it sounded like thunder on the roof of the bus.

Holding her handbag over her head Laura ran from the bus stop below the red sandstone tenements of Edward VII Terrace and onto Smithy Street. She reached her front door just as her downstairs neighbour Mr Fife was leaving and as the rain abruptly stopped.

Mr Fife glanced up at the sky as a very sodden sodden Laura squeezed past him into the close. “Typical eh?” Laura smiled at him and shook the water from her handbag. “Aye, typical.” She smiled again, turned and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Friday evening, for Laura, consisted of a quick meal -reheating the frozen chilli from last Thursday night- followed by a quick phone call to Simon, her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend, before chatting to her girlfriends on Facebook whilst the television ctalked, mostly, to itself in the background. At one point she did ask the girls if any of them had heard of either of the mystery streets but no one had. Emily A (Emily A for Atters as opposed to Emily R for Rogers) said that there was one in Dublin, one in Sioux City, and one in Ottawa but they were obviously not the streets that she was looking for.

With Facebook still open in a browser tab she opened Google Maps and searched for Applewood Avenues to see if any of them looked similar to the streets on the planning application. None of them did; though her search did lead to her admiring the regimented street plan of Sioux City which reminded her in places of her own beloved city. Laura found herself thinking that if she did find streets that matched those on the map in her desk drawer at work then she may actually go and visit them. That was such an unusual thought for her that she shared it on Facebook, thinking to herself that a second opinion on something so odd was probably a good idea.

Her suggestion that she go and visit somewhere outside of the city limits was met with a mixture of frivolous jokes and encouragement. It seemed that her lack of a desire to travel was something that her friends had taken notice of.

The next evening Laura headed back into the city center to meet the Emilies and their friend Debs for their girls’ night out. As the bus wound its way through the city the spring day was dimming towards night and Laura could still not stop thinking about application 18/2/15-BRI-X-X-CC4. The bus passed through housing schemes and skirted the edges of industrial and retail estates, the street lights snapping to life as she neared her destination. She wondered, looking at the highrises and metal clad industrial units whether there were forgotten streets below and what would replace these streets and structures when their usefulness had faded. Was that the explanation for the mysteriously anomalous planning application? Was there a larger plan afoot to restructure the area that she hadn’t heard about? That was certainly possible but then why would an application like this come in before there had been any announcement of the plans? The plans certainly weren’t based on any earlier maps. The buildings in that area all dated from the 1870s and 1880s and before they were built the area was a common on which cattle would be kept before being sold at the nearby markets.

So lost in her thoughts of Applewood Avenue and Dalchrist Terrace was Laura that she very nearly missed her stop. She shuffled off the bus along with the other Saturday night revellers and made her way through the crowds, many already well on their way to inebriation, and towards the train station where she was to meet the Emilies. Emily R was standing under the decorative cast iron frame of the canopy at the front of the building. People thronged in and out of the station, being accosted by young people handing out fliers offering cheap drinks and free entry to the various night spots around the town, beggars asking for spare change and white vans full of fluorescent yellow police officers watching with bored anticipation of the chaos which would inevitably erupt throughout the night. Emily R stubbed her cigarette out on the top of a bin and walked to meet Laura. They hugged and Emily told Laura that the others had been delayed and would meet them in the pub.

Laura and Emily R were just finishing their first glasses of wine by the time that Emily A and Debs arrived. As the evening, and the wine, progressed talk soon turned to Laura’s thoughts about travelling somewhere beyond the city. The girls had a seemingly, to Laura, endless list of places that she should visit. They seemed to think that she should go everywhere from Bangkok “to see the ladyboys” to Tromsø to see the Northern Lights. Laura laughed and nodded along as their suggestions got more and more outlandish. She did not want to admit that she had only wanted to visit places that reminded her of, or that were connected in some way, to her home.

Over the course of the evening the girls visited a number of bars. They danced in one bar to rock music, to cheesy 1980s pop in another, and eventually found themselves nearing the Merchant District. It didn’t take much to convince the girls that they should go along to Baba Riley’s, both of the Emilies had a thing for looking at the “pretty gay boys” and Laura just hoped that they weren’t quite drunk enough to make a scene like they had in Wilde’s where Emily R had gotten them thrown out for repeatedly groping guys, who obviously didn’t want to be groped, on the dance floor.

The bouncers raised their eyebrows as the girls sauntered in to Baba Riley’s but made no attempt to stop them. Baba Riley’s was also a fusion of the modern and the old. Old dark stained wood sat side by side with smooth, flawless, mirrors and industrial looking tables and chairs. The bar, where the girls quickly procured more wine, was an original fixture but the drinks were all hyper modern, specialist vodkas and, for the most part, city based micro-brewery beers. Wine in hand they pushed through the crowded bar to the dance floor so that the Emilies could ogle the men dancing there.

Eventually Emily R finished her drink and gestured to the rest of them that she was going outside for a smoke. Laura finished the last of her glass and followed her out into the chill air outside. Laura didn’t consider herself a smoker, not really, but she did have the occasional smoke when out with the girls. This also gave her the perfect excuse to have another look at the street outside and to wonder about the mysterious Applewood Avenue and Dalchrist Terrace.

When they were outside Emily R rolled a cigarette and passed it to Laura before rolling her own.

“You really should learn to roll your own hen.” Laura lit her cigarette and passed Laura the lighter.

“Aye, but I don’t smoke.” Laura said before putting the lighter’s flame to the end of her own cigarette.

Stolen story; please report.

This, as always, made Emily R laugh.

“See that what I was on about last night? The weird streets I got on that application at work?”

Emily R exhaled smoke and then breath mist into the chilly night air.

“Aye, aye, that was here wasn’t it? No wonder you wanted to come here. You’re not as much of a perv as me and Emily.”

“Haha, you’re right there. But aye, this is where the streets were supposed to start. Or finish, depending on where you are I suppose.”

“And, I suppose, you want to have a wander around whilst we’re not smoking? Aye?” Emily R grinned. “Come on then.”

As they walked up Gable Street Laura told Emily R what she had been thinking about on the bus and about the idea that there may be some, as yet unannounced, plans to redevelop the area.

“Have you considered the idea that the people who sent in the application just fucked it right up?”

“Aye, of course, but everything else about it was perfect. Everything.”

“What if, say, it was sent to the wrong place? Like, they were wanting to build that thing but in a different city and someone in the company cocked up and sent it to your department rather than the planning department elsewhere?”

“That would be a fail of epic proportions.” Laura laughed. “But if that was it then why couldn’t we find those streets when we were looking online last night? And why do the other streets match our maps. It’s only this street that isn’t on their map and it’s only those two that aren’t on ours.”

“Fair point hen.” Emily R dropped the end of her cigarette to the floor and ground it underfoot. “Come on, let’s get back.”

The girls walked back to Baba Riley’s and before heading in Laura took a long, deep, final drag on her cigarette and turned to stub it out on a nearby bin when her head began to swim. She felt like she had stood up too quickly.

The world tilted.

The flat grey paving slabs of Gable Street seemed to swell and then collapse in on themselves, disintegrating into a fine sand. Laura staggered as her heels sank into the shifting surface. She felt as though she had been pushed forward rapidly only to be pulled backwards equally rapidly as the world seemed to split before her. The sands of Gable Street shifted and parted before her and she felt as though she was falling over, forwards and inwards, until suddenly she stood in a small park or, more accurately, a shadow of a small park. A park that was both there and not there, or maybe, she thought, it was she who wasn’t quite there. She could see shadows of people in the park but they didn’t see her.

“Laura? Hen? You ok?

“She alright? You want us to call someone?”

Laura looked up into Emily R’s concerned looking face. Behind her a couple of guys were leaning in. One of them slipped his arm under hers and helped Emily R lift Laura to her feet.

“Jesus pet, you took a hell of a tumble.” The guy sounded like a Geordie.

“Are you ok hen? Laura?”

“I, I think so.”

“Do you want us to get your pals?” The Georgie guy’s mate.

“Could you? They’re...” Emily R began to reply.

“Aye, I know who they are.”

The Geordie guy and Emily R lead Laura over to a bench and sat her down. The Geordie guy handed her her purse and a moment later Emily A and Debs came rushing out and over to them.

“What happened?”

“I dunno, she just fell over.” Emily R was rolling another cigarette.

The Geordie guy smiled, said “I’ll leave you to it” and headed back to his friend who was talking to the bouncers.

“Let’s call a cab and get you home.” Debs was already pulling her phone from her handbag.

“No, no I’ll be fine. I’ll make my own way.”

“Don’t be bloody daft. We’ll all head back to yours. Emily, you want to call Dial-a-Booze and get some wine delivered, make sure we can carry on at Laura’s?”

The Emilies both reached for their phones.

****

The next morning Laura woke in her bed with a sore head wedged in between Emily A and Debs. Both were snoring and Debs was cuddling the remains of an open bottle of wine.

Laura gently wiggled her way down under the covers between her friends until she was able to slide off the bottom of the bed. Neither of them stirred. Still fully clothed Laura stood, wobbling as she did so, and made her way to the kitchen. Laura’s kitchen was really just a small kitchenette to the one side of her living room. In the living room Emily R lay on the sofa wrapped up in the throw that normally covered her tattered old armchair. The room was a mess of spilled ash trays and glasses, and empty bottles on wine. More than one call to Dial-a-Booze had been made.

Laura filled the kettle and, once it began to boil, Emily R stirred on the couch.

“Two and a coo please hen.” she croaked as she sat up.

They sat on the sofa drinking milky coffee and sharing a cigarette. The morning after the night before still counted, so far as smoking went, as the night before Laura reasoned.

A little while later Emily A and Debs emerged from the bedroom and Laura put the kettle back on.

After everyone was caffeinated Emily R suggested that Emily A and Debs tidy up whilst she and Laura went to the supermarket for breakfast supplies. When Debs groaned Emily suggested that she go to the shop instead; after which Debs seemed more than happy to go about the domestic chores.

The streets were quiet as Laura and Emily R made their way down Edward VII Terrace towards Halting Road, the main road through Langstance and the location of the supermarket Laura was grateful for the quiet given quite how out of sorts she was feeling after last night. Out of sorts because of both the unusual incident on Gable Street and the unusual amount of alcohol she had consumed.

“So, you never did say exactly what happened last night, outside Bab’s.” Emily R was smoking the last of her roll ups.

“I dunno, it was weird. I don’t think that I really want to think about it right now.”

“Alright hen, but listen, Laura, that was strange. You hadn’t even drunk that much, and not enough to collapse like that. All of a sudden like.”

“Aye, I know. Shall we just get stuff for breakfast?”

As quickly as they could they gathered bacon, eggs, black pudding, sausage, tattie scones, baked beans and made their way back to the flat.

After devouring a cooked breakfast and more, much more, coffee the girls all made their own ways home leaving Laura alone with her thoughts about last night and the shadow park she had seen.

****

The next morning Laura arrived to work early, planning to get to the bottom of planning application 18/2/15-BRI-X-X-CC4 only to find an email from her manager marked urgent. A large number of planning applications had come in over the weekend for a new commercial park being developed on the outskirts of the city and it was now Laura’s responsibility to process them all as quickly as possible. She was to pass her workload on to her colleagues and deal with this exclusively for the next couple of days.

By rights Laura should also have passed on application 18/2/15-BRI-X-X-CC4 but she was determined to figure out what was going on by herself. She intended to work on it through her lunch break, and possibly stay late, but the number of applications she had to deal with was monstrous and so it was Wednesday before she knew it and she hadn’t had the chance to look into the mysterious application at all.

On Wednesday morning, just as she was dealing with an application for a children’s play area that contained so many flaws she was going to send it straight back to the developer, a notification popped up on her screen. An email from Vrai Enterprises. Laura gasped, she had been so fixated on the strangeness of the application and the mystery of it she hadn’t considered that the company would be waiting for a response from her. She hadn’t even emailed them to confirm receipt of the application.

She opened her email program and saw that the subject line indeed read Query: 18/2/15-BRI-X-X-CC4. Opening the message it was simply a politely worded request to confirm that the application had indeed been received. She sent back a short and apologetic response confirming that the application was currently being processed. It was then that she noticed the email address. It didn’t look like any email address that she had ever seen before. Normally an email address from a company like this would be along the lines of ‘[email protected]’ or something similar. This didn’t even have the ‘at’ symbol. Instead it looked more like a line of computer code or something from a filing system.

planning18/2/15-BRI-X-X-CC4:Vrai-Enterprises:wednesday29april:priority

As she sat there looking at the strange email address another notification appeared. “Unable to deliver mail, email address not valid.” Which, she thought to herself, was understandable. It didn’t even have an ‘at’ symbol. Of course it wasn’t an email address. She got the application out of the drawer where she had kept it whilst trying to find the time to investigate further, and found a normal looking email address. She sent her reply to that and hoped that it was good enough.

Laura carried on working on the commercial park applications through the rest of the day but as the morning wore on she found herself thinking about everything to do with the application and, on a whim, decided to cut and paste the strange ‘email address’ into Google to see if she could find anything similar.

The results of the search turned up only one result. Something that Laura had never seen before. The lone result was a link to a video. Clicking the link Laura was taken to a blank web page with a streaming video in a small square in the middle. It looked like YouTube but with everything aside from the video removed. It was streaming video of the location from the planning application. Well, of the streets as mapped out in the planning application. There was the small park at the intersection of the streets, there on the corner of what was referred to on the map as Dalchrist Terrace was a pub that looked just like Babs Riley’s though at a different angle and looking rather shabby. People were milling around and some were sat in the park looking as though they were on their lunch break. It looked so, well, so normal.

The video player looked just like the ones she was used to seeing elsewhere on the internet and just like those it had a small progress bar along the bottom. This one looked to be about three quarters of the way long. Every few moments it would skip back slightly so that the bar never progressed despite the video continuing on. Laura hovered her mouse over and the date and time appeared in a little black bubble above the mouse pointer. She moved the pointer back along the progress bar until the date changed to Saturday night and the time that she and Emily R were walking along Gable street smoking.

She clicked.

The video paused and buffered for a moment, a small translucent circle spinning in the middle of the screen, before changing abruptly to a view of the same scene but at night. There were people milling around outside the pub that looked like Babs Riley’s and there, in the park, walking along by herself was Laura. She appeared to be talking to herself and gesticulating around herself with her cigarette. She hadn’t realised she did that. Then she saw herself walking back towards Bab’s and suddenly collapsing outside. She saw two men, but not the men from Saturday night, helping her to her feet and helping her to a bench in the park, one of them picking up her purse and slipping something inside before passing it back to her.

She closed her web browser and pushed her chair back from her desk. None of this made sense. Laura was so shaken by what she had just seen that she stood up and walked to her managers office to ask for the afternoon off. Her manager was somewhat taken aback by this as Laura has never asked for time off and so agreed, assuming that something extremely important must have occurred; a death in the family or something equally tragic.

Back at her desk Laura picked up her coat and, after picking up her handbag, she retrieved the application and slipped it inside. On leaving the office she walked back to Gable Street, past the Old Market, hardly noticing the crowds around her. At Gable Street nothing had changed. It looked just as it had the two previous times she had visited. Quieter perhaps but then none of the bars were yet open.

Confused and disoriented she made her way through town and got on the bus home. She sat on the bus watching the city slide by in a blur through the filthy window. By the time she got back to her flat she was feeling relatively normal again but still the first thing that she did when she got in was pour a big glass of the wine left over from the weekend and curled up on the sofa with Netflix. Her phone pinged a few times as messages from co-workers came in asking if she was ok, she swiped away the notifications as they arrived.

Once she had finished the glass of wine she decided to go to the shop for another bottle and, on her way back with two bottles, she remembered that the man in the video, the one who wasn’t the Geordie man, had slipped something into her purse.

Coming back into the flat she picked up the purse she had with her on Saturday night from where it hung beside the door. After she had poured another glass of wine she sat down and tipped the contents of the purse onto the coffee table.

Everything was as it should be. A crumpled five pound note, a handful of tickets, some condoms, some make-up, and two lipsticks. Two lipsticks where there should have only been one. Laura picked up the odd stick and opened it, it wasn’t even her colour. The writing on the side was strange, the letters unfamiliar yet she felt as though she *should* recognise them. One looked sort of like a B if the bottom curve were backwards, another was like a Y but with too many parts sticking out.

Laura rubbed the nub of the stick along the back of her hand to see how it looked against her skin. As she put pressure on the stick it crumbled in her hand, turning to a fine sandy substance and spilling all over her hand and onto the carpet below. She watched, confused, as the pile slowly grew outwards from where it lay. It took Laura a moment to realise that it wasn’t the pile that was growing but the carpet around it that was turning to sand.

This was, finally, too much for Laura. She swallowed the glass of wine in one and, sliding the two bottles into her handbag, she walked out of her flat. She didn’t want to be in there by herself. With whatever it was that the lipstick had disintegrated into.

As she left the flat it was beginning to rain, a light drizzle that she barely noticed. From Halting Road she boarded the X74 bus and bought an all day ticket. She knew this service wound a circuitous route through the outskirts of the city before heading back to the centre and starting all over again. Taking a seat at the back of the top deck she drank wine and watched the city slide past. Naming the streets and districts to herself as they passed, reminding herself of what had changed and what was going to change. Some parts of the city seemed frozen, a development desert where there hadn’t been any money spent for decades, sometimes longer, other areas were in the process of, or had already been, modernised. Crumbling tenements replaced by new build housing for modern families and the ever present “young professionals”. Modern gave way to old gave way to modern to old. Derelicts and dive bars merged seamlessly into bistros and boutiques. This was the city she loved. Past and present piling up together into one glorious whole.

She rode the bus twice along the entirety of its route until the driver stopped at the bottom of Porkmarket Way. Laura heard the door to the driver’s compartment open then close, followed by the sound of footsteps on the stairs to the upper deck. The driver reached the top of the stairs and called to her.

“Sorry love, this is the last stop. I’m going back to the depot now, there’ll be another 74 along soon though. If you want to keep going around in circles all day that is.”

Laura looked at the two empty bottles poking out of the top of her handbag and, steadily as she could, walked off the bus. The rain had stopped and, as it was still only mid-afternoon, the streets were thronged with people and traffic. The noise and bustle after the quiet drunken contemplation of the bus made her head spin. Pulling her coat tight around her and gripping her handbag close under her arm she walked towards the Old Market Hall thinking to herself that she deserved another drink after the day she had been having.

She walked with purpose up Porkmarket Way hoping that she didn’t look as drunk as she felt. She was nearly at her destination when a poster caught her eye. Near the Old market Hall were a series of wooden hoardings erected by the council as areas for fly-posting in an attempt to deter people from pasting advertising posters anywhere they felt like. For the most part it didn’t work.

It wasn’t the content of the poster, a heavily stylised and almost cubist representation of the city skyline advertising an upcoming music festival, that she noticed but the way in which it appeared to be peeling away from the hoarding whilst at the same time not. She touched her fingers to the poster, picked at the edges until it started to actually peel away the way it already appeared to be doing. As she lifted the edge of the paper it flaked away in her hands and fine sand began to pour gently from the space behind.

Laura recoiled, this sand looked the same as the disintegrating lipstick at home. She took a step back as the sand continued to flow. She looked around at her fellow pedestrians to see if anyone else was seeing what she was but the few who were looking her way were looking at her, not what she had uncovered.

Gripping her handbag tighter, the empty bottles clinking against one another within, she hurried up the street her mind reeling. Everywhere she looked she saw the phenomenon over and over again. Parts of the city appearing to peel away from itself, or to be trying to peel away. As she reached the Old market Hall the modern industrial sign and the, more than a century old, Roman arch that it straddled seemed as one, flimsy and tattered and covering something else, something older maybe.

In her confusion she grasped the one thought that made any sort of sense. That it was Gable Street where this all started, if there were answers, if there was a way to make this stop then it would be found on Gable Street. Surely.

Within minutes she had reached Gable Street and, for a moment, considered going in to Babs Riley’s for a drink. The thought of walking through the doorway deterred her for even the vacant space of the open door seemed to be warped as though it too was covering something and was desperate to be peeled away.

Reaching into her handbag she pulled out planning application 18-2-15-BRI-X-X-CC4 and slid the thin paper of the map from the plastic folder. She paced back and forth across the street trying to figure out exactly where the various features marked were in relation to the world around her. People passing by were giving her strange looks by now and, though she didn’t realise it, she was talking to herself.

Eventually she managed to work out where the entrance to the park from the video footage was. The park, of course, wasn’t marked on the map as it was, according to the plans, to be built over. She lay the map on the floor and knelt down before it, twisting it around so as to have it line up as best she could with the surrounding features.

It was only then, on her knees before the map, that she realised the ground was also attempting to peel away from itself. She jumped to her feet, bringing the map with her and, as she did so, she pulled the ground, thin and fragile as the map itself, away with it.

She let the map go but the damage was done, she looked around wildly for help but those who shared the street with her were giving her a wide berth. As the map was lifted away by the breeze it pulled more and more of the space around it apart. Tears spread outwards through the air, across the ground, up and along the buildings around her as everything fell apart. It seemed to her that she was stood inside a photograph of the world, only a photograph within which people moved and talked, and someone was tearing the photograph up and scattering it to the wind.

As each fragment pulled away it revealed something new, new buildings, old ones in new places, the park, people that looked wan and worn, and everywhere, everywhere a thin film of sand blowing on the breeze. Laura turned and ran along Gable Street, no, Applewood Avenue, she ran past the sickly looking trees and passed the washed out looking people. One of them called after her, the words alien to her ears, and their voice was far from sickly or worn out. Their voice was rich and melodious and full. It was unlike anything Laura had ever heard. Laura ran. She ran until she didn’t know where she was any more. The streets looked familiar but the sign posts were all in that same strange alphabet that adorned the disintegrating lipstick. Familiar but strange.

Laura found a quiet side street and leaned against a wall catching her breath. Once she had done so she began to calm. The street she was on looked really familiar, it looked like Byrebarn Way and, if it was, it would lead to Rosemount Hill. From there she could cut across the top of town towards home. Home, home where she had first seen this sand that was everywhere now. Home that wouldn’t be home, not really, this wasn’t her city. Her city of lights and life. This place was quiet, this place was just a shadow of her city. She couldn’t face going home, not if it was going to be like this.

Laura turned and walked away from home, she walked away from the city centre. She walked until she reached he very edge of the city. The place where her city gave way to fields and hills. She walked until the edge of her map, until this city gave way to nothing but rolling dunes of sand and the cold grey sky of spring.

fin

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