I had begun to see the other writer in too many places, places that I had come to regard as my own. It threatens my status as a writer of reports and if I am not a writer of reports, a chronicler of the city's decline, then what am I?

Bethnal Green Station

High on an elevated section of the railway line, above woodlouse back streets. Here you can see across the roofs of Stepney to the skyscrapers in the renovated docks on the Isle of Dogs.

I was in the platform shelter finishing my report, adding a rather deft analogy where I compared the redevelopment of the docks, the construction of all those glittering tower blocks, to the desperate grafting of a cybernetic device into a dying body.  I started to read through, pleased with myself. It was a fine piece of writing.

I looked up from my notebook and noticed him, stood at the far end of the platform so that I took him to be a train spotter, a kindred spirit documenting the ailing circulatory system of the city. But he was not waiting for the train and making a note. No, he was scribbling without pause.

I came out of the shelter, my own notebook still in my left hand, and took few steps down the platform towards him.

He turned ever so slightly, the skyscrapers in the distance a stage set behind him, a crooked smile on his face. He stuffed his notebook into the pocket of his baggy suit jacket and walked towards me. He had youngish face, slight stubble and that wistful, smug crease that meant I understood who he really was.

He passed me and made his way to the stairs down to the street but by the time I finally decided to follow he was gone.

Here, on the streets away from the high platform, it was dark, all hemmed in by blackened brick and corrugated iron. I made my way to Brady Street and under the arch of the railway bridge. It was time to submit my report.

The dead drop was towards the end of the arch. A loose brick above a small pipe opening. I tore the page of my report from the notebook and folded it the requisite seven times and quickly took the brick out, put the report in the hole and restored the brick. Then I made my way towards Whitechapel.

Later a supermarket receipt caught beneath my tread. The response to my submission. Beneath the list of purchases was the damning verdict disguised as the grand total, 37.21. This decoded as 3.7 out of 21, about 19%. A score of just under two out of ten. My submission had not been accepted and this could only mean that the other writer's report would be used.

I ripped the receipt into pieces and pulled out some hair from the back of my head. I bundled hair together with the paper shreds and dribbled saliva on. I then rubbed the messy pellet onto a wall to collect some brick dust. I swallowed the whole concoction. Another deposit for the bezoar growing inside me.

Tobacco Dock

Off the Ratcliff Highway, one of the smaller old docks. There had been an attempt to redevelop the site into a high-end shopping destination, the Covent Garden of the East End. It had been filled with retail outlets for office drones with too little time and too much money. In their lunch breaks they could browse expensive tat, novelty mugs, dreamcatchers, and snow globes. They would buy hand-crafted wooden toys for nephews who would rather have had something plastic. The whole enterprise had failed and now the 1990s buildings stood empty inside the eighteenth-century dock wall.

Someone stood by the quayside. I assured myself that it was a dog walker, a type I respect, tracers of secret routes, marking the pavements with shit stains, finders of dead bodies and therefore catalysts for those most sacred of urban stories, the murder investigation.
        
But as I waited I realised that there was no dog and even though the man had his back to me there was something about the arrogance of his posture that told me who he was. When he turned I followed. Not this time, I assured myself.
        
I squeezed through a gap in the inner security fencing that barred the wide entrance to the shopping mall. Inside grey daylight strained through pigeon splattered glass roofing. I couldn't see him as I made my way down the central arcade, past the abandoned retail units, with their whitewashed windows. Street people had been there, leaving patches of burning, the waft of bodily wastes, beer cans, chicken shop boxes. For a moment I was enraptured, forgetting about the other writer. The interior felt vast, far bigger than it should be, stretching to a distant vanishing point around some pillared stairs.
        
Here it would be possible to do anything, to defecate, urinate, masturbate, even (given the chance) fornicate.
        
"Shush," he said, "You sound like a bargain-basement Polonius."
        
The voice had been so clear, so firm. I thought such a voice must be in my head but then I saw that he was already here, a silhouette standing beside what I saw now, were not pillars but statues either side of the wide stair. As I reached him I was confused. The way he held himself was not like the supposed dog walker, nor did his face resemble the man at Bethnal Green. I almost asked him, are you the other writer? Please tell me. 
        
"What do you think?"
        
He pointed towards the statues. The largest was of an upright bear, looming, powerful. It held its head back as it roared at the sky. On the other side of the stairs there was a tiger, sat with one of its paws raised, and before it stood a little boy, a Dickensian waif, gazing into the tiger's face as though he had found, at last, the most precious of companions.
        
The voice went on with a low relentless rhythm.
        
"A tiger escaped from the exotic animal emporium on Ratcliff Highway and ran off with a boy who tried to pet it. The tiger carried the child in its mouth until it was finally cornered, beaten but not harmed. The boy too was unhurt, and the tiger was sold to Wombwell's circus and the  owner made a fortune advertising it as the tiger who swallowed a boy. It's a happy story don't you think?"
        
"Who are you?" I said in a timid whisper.
        
"I came here once as a child. It was the last days of the shopping mall. There could only have been one or two shops still open. I don't know why we were here. We must have been in the neighbourhood, mum and me. I was excited at first. I might be bought a toy. But as soon as we entered the mall the weight of its emptiness enveloped me. There were no other customers. The owner of one shop drifted to his window like a fish at the pane of an aquarium. He stared at us with a desperate, baffled look. I wanted to get out but then my mum was pointing ahead to the statues. Every child loves animals and so I ran ahead climbing up on the plinth to join the other boy with the tiger. Then a sound filled the whole space, roaring, commanding. Please do not climb on the statues. Please do not climb on the statues.
        
"Outside my mum explained to me that while there was even one remaining shop there would still be a security team, men watching everything we did in the grey depths of a screen."
        
I left the other writer there and wrote my report with little hope. The bezoar inside grows, an accumulation of hair, dirt and paper that will one day form a gemstone. I tell myself it will be a consolation. And yet I am not quite ready to give up. If only I could be rid of the other writer.

Sundry Places

Whitechapel and the Elephant Man. Sidney Street and the anarchist siege. Back to the Ratcliff Highway and I wrote about the murders of 1812 and the fate of the murderer, buried at the crossroads on unconsecrated ground, dug up sixty years later and his skull ending up behind the bar of a pub.
        
I roamed the streets and the other writer was always there, never the same, altering his height, his hair, the colour of his skin, sometimes a woman, sometimes a child who stared wide eyed at me with the most knowing of looks.
        
I wrote report after report, submitting to dead drops. I read the response on receipts, shopping lists, betting slips and once a lost ace of hearts. Score: one out of ten. I mixed my concoction of disappointment sealed with drools of spit. The bezoar grows.

Ratcliff Beach

Narrow Street where a gap at the end of a warehouse reveals some steps leading down to the Thames. At low tide, a beach is left by the retreating river. As you emerge you feel the air freshen with the tang of the water. But I wasn't alone. Single figures and the odd pairing dotted the foreshore, their heads down, eyes scouring the ground, occasionally dropping to a squat as they reached to caress the sand and stones.
        
I had forgotten about these people, the mudlarkers who come to rummage in the past: the clay pipes, coins, shards of pottery. It was all there amidst the animal bones and the shells of all those oysters that Londoners had once eaten as a staple. I saw other treasures, the remnants of the docks, great rusted chains, bolts and tapering nails, indefinable scraps of vicious looking metal. I chose a wedge-shaped piece of iron that snuggled comfortably into the palm of my right hand.
        
He wasn't here yet but I didn't kid myself that I had discovered somewhere before him. As soon as I started to think about writing my report he would come.

No-one was looking at me. They were all occupied with the ground while the wide sky over the Thames was broken only by the steel and glass skyscrapers of the Isle of Dogs downriver.
        
I must have been shouting. I saw, as though witnessing a rapture, the mudlarkers rise from their squats and stoops, lift their heads from scanning the detritus. All turned towards me, and I looked, from face to face, desperate to identify him, ready to wield my weapon in a final reckoning.
        
I made to lash out but it was a feeble, pathetic, effort. Who would I assault, when they could all be the other writer, when, I understood at last, they were all other writers? Someone rammed into me from behind and I fell to the ground, face down in the mud and bones, mouth touching silt so that I might bite and chew, swallow and ingest my failure.
        
All I can do now is crawl over the debris towards the river. Let it slowly strip away my flesh leaving only the jewel inside, to be at last washed up when the city has moved further into its long majestic decay.