On Alex's first visit, The British Museum was just a job. He was interviewed by Rochester, who asked his favourite exhibit. All Alex managed was: 'Mummies?' He admitted he'd never been, except for a brief wander about, before the interview. But Alex got the job because he told Rochester that he could get more by guarding empty buildings in Docklands. That's what clinched it, the fifteen pence an hour he was prepared to give up.

Alex soon appreciated the museum as a community - it was more than the relics. There were laboratories in the basements, with X-ray machines and electron microscopes. There were classrooms and visiting curators - and so many visitors, from all around the world.

Of course, some people said the museum was a robber's stash. At the smoking shed, Alex learned the word mahnmal from a visiting academic: it meant a monument to shame. And, yes, Alex understood that not all of the items had arrived in the museum justly; but to him the British Museum was a wonder of the world.

Everyone saw it differently - to the gift shop staff, it was all about retail. The restaurant staff saw it as a catering business with some exhibitions attached. There were archaeological missions using it as a headquarters. The museum even became a homeless shelter, when one guard let people sleep in a delivery area, until being caught.

For some visitors, the museum was a temple. The guards kept watch for people praying or making offerings. Rochester showed him how to remove turmeric marks from wall and floors. It wasn't only the obvious statues - even long-forgotten Mesopotamian gods had devotees.

In his cups one night - the Museum, of course, had three speakeasies - in his cups, Rochester compared the place to a compulsive hoarder's house - Rochester's Uncle had been one, filling his flat with old newspapers and washed-up food packaging. "I've begun to think'," Rochester said, "That someone needs to intervene in this place."

As he was promoted, Alex learned that the museum was an iceberg, the public galleries the very tip. The basements were forever being expanded - so much so, that any underground work in the area had to be cleared by the British Museum, just as with the gas, water, and electric companies. No single person knew everything about the museum - only the guards were aware of Bob's tiny museum in Locker 32, and the treasures stored there.

It was also a place of secrets. Of course Alex knew about the human remains store, and had seen the forbidden Ethiopian altar tablets. But, even in his third decade of work, he learned new things. Rooms he'd not imagined, places where anomalies were kept. Rochester showed him an Egyptian statue that was taken from display because it didn't appear on the CMOS sensors used by modern camera phones.

When Rochester was ill, in his final days, he told Alex that the museum was a slaughterhouse for Gods. This was where the British bought foreign deities, to gut them of power. It turned them from objects of devotion into items for study.

When Rochester passed on, Alex didn't take his place - the role was taken by a senior curator's failson. But Alex had more access than his new boss. He spent a nightshift staring into John Dee's scrying mirror. He sat eye-to-eye with the Lion Man - made four hundred centuries before, it was world's oldest known God. He'd listened to the tape recordings from the Sumerian gallery. Alex had a key to the nuclear bunker, built so that the statues survived, even if Londoners did not. He'd been shown the vault where radioactive items were stored, but declined a chance to enter.

Maybe Alex could have become head guard, if not for his own illness. Visiting HR, he learned one last secret. The British Museum had recommended undertakers for their favoured staff. Alex had been at Rochester's funeral, had seen the coffin ready for cremation, but now he learned Rochester's body had not been inside. At the heart of the British museum was a graveyard for people who'd given their life to it. Alex's body went straight from the hospice to the museum, where it was prepared for the collection.

Background

At the start of the month, I spent a few days in a cabin with no screens. On the way, I realised I was running low on things to read, so visited Dollegau's Sandspout Bookstore. I ignored the irritating conversation about biblical scholarship and picked out something that would carry me through: a 6-book collection of Lord Dunsany's stories.

Dunsany lived until 1957 but wrote in a mannered, archaic style which is something of an acquired taste. I love his shortest stories, particularly those which are best described as urban fantasies. My favourites are A Tale of London and Why the Milkman Shudders When He Perceives the Dawn. Dunsany is an influence in this story, but there also a dash of the SCP Foundation.

Of course, this is secretly a list story, but I've done it through a character, which maybe shows a progression in my writing. I started out by writing down all the ways Alex might perceive the Museum, and then worked them into the story.

I'd sketched out the story before finding Charlotte Higgins' amazing article, The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis?, which took the same view: "the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency".

I folded some of these ideas back in. I love mixing fabrications with things that are real, seeing how they work together. Higgins makes an allusion to Borges' story On Exactitude in Science, so I removed my own Borges reference. I like what I've ended up with, mixing the outlandish with the plausible.

Recommendations

Alison Rumfitt's Tell me I'm worthless is one of the best horror novels I've read. It's disturbing and problematic, deserving the trigger warning that Rumfitt insisted it open with. But it's also a powerful book about modern Britain, and what we've allowed it to become.

The book follows Alice, a young trans woman living in Brighton. She is traumatised by something terrible that happened in a derelict house. Rumfitt produces the most menacing building I've encountered in fiction, a truly malevolent place called ‘Albion’ that has absorbed the worst of England.

A lot of 'political' work is dull and worthy - this is most definitely not. This feels like a warning of where petty cruelties and neglect can lead us. The writing is exquisite. Rumfitt is a poet, and her text benefits from that. She uses some tricks and typography but it's always effective, never intrusive.

Given the subject matter and Rumfitt's uncompromising response to it, this is a tricky book to recommend. Elements of it recalled splatterpunk. It's a great novel, and it's a tragedy that England produced it.

When someone told me about a book with ‘a haunted Morrissey poster’ in it, this wasn’t what I expected.