Illustrated by Jenny Watt
Erased in the Margins
by Tim Collyer
Erased in the Margins
London started to smudge on a Thursday.
Not romantic mist over the Thames. The bus timetables went first.
At 6:07 p.m. the board above the stop on Fenchurch Street showed neat columns of numbers. At 6:08 some of the letters dropped out. By 6:09 the whole thing was just grey fuzz.
People tutted and pointed their phones at it. A man in hi-vis announced, “Signal’s gone,” like that explained why the pixels seemed to be burning from the inside.
My stomach did its small, old twist. I’d seen this before. Different place. Same wrongness.
By 6:15 the air felt heavier, like the street had put on an extra layer. There was a faint dusty taste at the back of my throat. I was closing the shutters on my print shop when the first fleck landed on my hand.
It didn’t sting. It was cool and soft and left a faint grey circle on my skin.
Soot. Fine as talc, dark as printer’s ink.
A man in a suit brushed it off his sleeve. “Bloody builders,” he said too loudly, trying to bully the world back into sense.
I locked up, left the lights off, and checked the sign on the door: PENNY DRAKE PRINT & COPY. The letters were still crisp. I ran my thumb over them anyway.
My aunt’s voice flicked through my head, casual as ever: When the air goes grainy, pay attention. That’s when doors slip.
I wrapped my scarf over my mouth and headed home.
The further I walked, the more the city frayed. It wasn’t just the soot drifting sideways into arches. Words were going.
The café chalkboard that had boasted SOUP, TOASTIES and “THE BEST COFFEE IN EC3” that morning now showed only faint loops and scratches. The chalk was there; the message had gone.
Posters at the station had lost everything but the images. A thriller still showed a woman with a torch in a cave, mouth open in a silent scream. No title. No date. No rating. Just her, trapped in a story that no longer knew what it was called.
A charity appeal beside it showed a child holding a teddy. The plea for help had become a grey smear, as if someone had rubbed it with a filthy eraser.
I touched the glass. My fingertip picked up a dull grey stain.
A girl tugged at her dad’s sleeve. “What does it say?”
“Just adverts,” he replied.
“But what do they say?”
He stared at the poster properly then, brow creasing. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, though it sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
For a moment he went blank, like someone who’s lost their train of thought halfway through a sentence. Then he shook himself and led her away.
The tannoy crackled. The usual voice began—“The next train at platform—” and slid into a noise that sounded like words but wouldn’t stick.
A roundel on the wall—red circle, blue bar—had holes in its name. ** NCHUR ST E T**. My thoughts tried to push the missing letters back in and slid off.
By the time I reached my estate, the sign out front was a blur. I knew it had once had a grand name in an ugly font. I could see my aunt standing under it, rolling her eyes and saying, “You’ve lived in worse.” I could see that clearly. The actual name wouldn’t come.
That frightened me more than the soot.
Inside, the lift was dead. The OUT OF SERVICE notice was a blank sheet of laminate.
On my floor a narrow dark streak ran along the skirting boards, from one end of the corridor to my door. Not paint. Not damp. A line of something burnt into the plaster.
I let myself in and slid the chain across, as if that would help.
In the bathroom mirror my face looked normal enough: tired, under-lit, hair refusing to behave. No spectral aunt behind me. Just me and the small crack in the tile.
I turned off the tap.
A soft scrape came from the hallway. Then a hiss, like steam escaping where there are no pipes.
Not this building. I knew every sulk it had.
The sound came again, closer.
“Brilliant,” I muttered. “Haunted by a corridor.”
I opened the door a fraction.
The motion sensors hadn’t triggered. The lights stayed off. The streak along the skirting was thicker now, its edges fuzzy, as if it was breathing.
The sound came from behind me.
I shut the door.
The lamps in the living room dipped, then flared, like the flat had blinked. Dark gathered in the corners, denser than usual.
Soot rose out of it.
It peeled from behind the bookcase, slid from under the radiator, shook loose from the curtains. It climbed to shoulder height and held there, thickening, until I wasn’t alone.
It didn’t drift like fog. Fog wanders. This assembled.
Head. Shoulders. Arms. A person made of fine grey particles, each tiny movement of air sending ripples across its surface. Where the face should be was blank, smoothed flat.
The air around it buzzed, just enough to make my teeth ache.
I wanted to back away. Instead I stood very still and tried not to show it my hands were shaking.
“You’ve picked the wrong flat,” I said. “The woman who talked to things like you died three years ago.”
The shape turned, not towards me but towards the shelves.
It drifted closer to a thin yellow book. Selected Poems. My aunt’s. Spine cracked, corners softened, pencil lines under certain verses, cramped notes in the margins. Years of “I was here” caught in graphite.
The soot leaned in. A fine mist of grey lifted from the paper and vanished into its skin.
I stepped forward. “No.”
It paused.
“You knew her,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
The blank head shifted. I couldn’t see eyes, but I felt the focus, cold and sharp.
My aunt had once, a glass and a half in, talked about echoes. “Not ghosts,” she’d said. “Fingerprints in the air. Bits that get snagged when two worlds brush past. The dead move on. The living keep going. Echoes refuse both.”
She’d laughed afterwards, called herself daft, and the next morning swore she’d never said it.
“You’re caught,” I told the soot. “And you think she can pull you through.”
The lamps dimmed, then steadied.
The shape dipped. Small movement. It felt like agreement.
“She can’t,” I whispered. “Not now. Not the way you want.”
Pressure built in the room, a soft thumb on both eardrums.
“I can’t give you her,” I said. “But I can take you somewhere she left more of herself. If that’s what you’re following.”
The soot shivered.
A thin line of grey bloomed along the floor between me and the door. A path of ash.
“Fine,” I said. “But you don’t keep the book.”
I tucked it under my arm. The soot twitched, then followed.
On my floor the streak on the skirting was thicker, running the length of the wall. As we walked, it seemed to grow along beside us.
We took back streets. The city had that held-breath feel, waiting for weather or something worse.
Signs were wrong all over. The café’s SPECIALS board was blank. Parking meters had lost their tiny instructions. A bus stop map showed coloured lines with no station names. People walked past with their eyes glancing off the gaps, minds quietly smoothing them over.
The soot beside me seemed denser where text thinned.
We cut across a side road by a pub I used to go to with an ex. I tried to remember his surname and hit clean white nothing. I could picture his face, hear his laugh, recall the way he chewed his thumbnail. The name wouldn’t come. It felt like biting on air.
I let it go.
At St Bartholomew’s, the churchyard gate stuck, then gave way. The sign that used to read ST BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT now showed chunks of letters missing, pitted with grey.
My aunt had eaten lunch here for a year, sketching pigeons and gravestones, scribbling faces at the edge of reports. Her “quiet stage”, she’d called it. “Place to rehearse being alive.”
Her bench sat under the plane tree, slick with damp, a faint green line on the slats where algae clung on. The little brass plaque was scrubbed blank.
I set the book on the seat and stepped back.
The soot flowed over the bench and pooled around the covers. Strokes and hooks began to lift off the pages. Not whole words—the bones of letters, rising like steam.
Her pencil marks came too. Underlines, angry question marks, the tiny heart she’d once drawn beside a line she’d claimed not to like. They drifted up and sank into the grey.
As the soot fed, the blank where its face should be started to change. Not into her. Into something layered: several people at once, all half-remembered, like water-damaged photographs.
“Using her notes as a skeleton is rude,” I said, though my voice didn’t sound like mine.
The soot-face turned.
Something rose in my chest, forcing its way up. Words that weren’t mine pressed against my tongue. My jaw wanted to open.
I kept my teeth clenched.
Sound squeezed through them as a hiss. The thing wanted a voice and was quite happy with mine.
“You don’t get that either,” I forced out. Each consonant scraped the back of my throat.
The pressure eased. The soot-face seemed to lose interest in my mouth.
Wind stirred the branches overhead. Leaves rattled. Somewhere a pigeon clattered off a gravestone. The air smelled of stone and damp earth and that faint burnt note you get after blowing out a candle.
The book’s pages lifted and flipped themselves, then stopped on one. Her favourite poem. The one she’d read at my uncle’s wake, hand shaking, voice stubborn.
The soot sank over that page last.
For a moment something measured itself against my ribs, checking fit. Not a hug. Not a possession. Just a quick inventory.
Then the shape began to unpick.
Threads of grey rose from the bench, taking stolen marks with them. The half-built face blurred. The hint of a mouth lingered a heartbeat longer, lips forming a word without sound. It might have been my name. It might have been hers.
The soot thinned, curling into the dark. Some of it caught in the branches and settled on the leaves as a faint black dust, as if the tree had started growing ash instead of blossom.
When it was gone, the bench was only wood. The book lay open.
The printed text remained. The margins were blank.
All the pencil marks—twenty years of small thoughts, arguments with herself, phone numbers, dates—gone.
Not gone from me. I could still feel them in my head like missing teeth you keep probing with your tongue. But the paper was stripped.
“I hope you’re full,” I said.
No answer. Just ordinary air and a distant bus rumbling past the railings.
I picked up the book. The cover was warm.
By morning the bus screens showed letters again. Posters had titles. The Tube roundel at the station displayed its full name, as long as I didn’t stare too hard. The estate sign outside looked right enough at a glance.
In my flat, the skirting boards were bare. The lamps behaved. The dark in the corners looked ordinary, which is not the same as safe.
I made coffee and sat with the book.
Inside, the printed lines were where they should be. Yet certain stanzas felt thin, as if something had been peeled away. I knew she’d once circled a line and written “NO” beside it in furious capitals. I could picture the pen in her hand. I couldn’t remember the exact line she’d fought with.
On the inside cover she’d written in biro: TO PENNY, KEEP THIS WHEN I START TALKING NONSENSE.
Now my name on it ended at PEN.
The ink strokes were unbroken; the meaning had slipped.
Outside my flat, the plaque on the door now read DRA . The missing letters left a small, clean absence.
My bank card still showed my name in full. I looked at it longer than made sense, as if my attention could pin the letters down.
At the shop, the sign over the door still said PENNY DRAKE PRINT & COPY. Inside it smelled of paper, toner and old ink. Most of my income came from printing office arguments in Arial bold.
An office worker came in clutching a memory stick.
“I need a poster,” he said. “For the staff kitchen. Big letters.”
“What do you want it to say?”
“You know. The usual. Wash your own mugs. Or your mum doesn’t work here.” He hesitated. “Whatever we had before.”
“Which one?”
He stared at the counter. “I’ll type it. It’ll come back.”
He tapped out PLEASE WASH YOUR OWN MUGS. I printed it in heavy black capitals. Hard to ignore. He left with it rolled under his arm.
When the door shut, I pulled out a stack of business cards.
PENNY DRAKE, they said. Underneath, in smaller print: PRINT, COPY, DESIGN.
PRINT and COPY looked solid. DESIGN was a shade paler, as if the ink had been thinned.
By the old laminator, a smear of darkness clung to the skirting board. A thumb’s width. Easy to miss.
I didn’t miss it.
I watched it until the clock above the counter clicked over. It stayed exactly the same size. That was worse than if it had moved.
That night, in bed, I tried to list every poem my aunt had read to me. I got most. A couple sat behind frosted glass in my mind, present but unreadable. I could remember us laughing at one line; the words themselves were gone.
Outside the city did what it always does—sirens somewhere, voices, a fox in the alley. Familiar sounds. I listened until they blurred into one low hum.
In the corner of the bedroom, near the patch where the paint never sticks, the dark looked a fraction thicker. Not enough to complain about. Enough to notice if you’re the sort who watches corners after what you’ve seen.
My aunt said echoes don’t care about clocks. They care about chances.
London is full of lost labels and painted-over names. Pub signs in cellars, streets renamed, files shredded, people who used to fit neatly under a job title and now just… don’t. Some nights I lie very still and imagine the air moving through all that absence, learning where it slips easiest.
If something out there has decided tidying us away starts with the margins and the small print, it’s had plenty of practice.
It started with her.
It has started on me.
And somewhere, in the thin places where soot remembers, the world is already editing the parts it thinks no one will miss.