Foulsham

by Edward Carey

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Sarah Jane.

  But the man stopped, he looked at her a moment, such a cleanliness about him, as if he was not a Foulsham creature at all.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked again. ‘You’re not from here are you?’

  The whistle sounded again, the clean man ran off into the darkness, and Sarah Jane ran too, in a different direction. She slid a little, but was up again. Noises of people behind us. She slowed at last. She stopped. She was panting so. We were crouched down under a bridge of some sort. There was an upturned bucket down there, dented, with a brass ring about its handle. Sarah Jane knocked it over, it rolled under the bridge.

  ‘I think we’re safe, safe here a while.’

  She brought me up to her eyes.

  ‘There you are then,’ she said. ‘I wonder if you’re not James Henry, I think you might be. Oh, you’re definitely someone, I know you are. Are you James Henry, are you? To think at last you come home and we nearly murder you. I’ll keep you safe, James Henry. I’ll hide you somewhere, yes, that’s it! Somewhere that no one can ever find you, but somewhere where I can still get to you. But where is that? Where is that place? Who’s there?’ She suddenly stood up. ‘Who is it?’

  There was a movement in the shadows beneath the bridge. From the darkness a rat scuttled forwards. It did not run from a human in fear but rather sauntered closely, as if we were disturbing it and it had a mind to tell us off.

  ‘Oh, a rat,’ said Sarah Jane, ‘only a rat. You gave me quite a scare. I’d trap you, you’re huge. We’d get a good price for you. Go on now, get out of it, before I put an end on you with my boot. Get on! Get out!’

  But the rat, rather than rushing away, sat down now, scratched its face with a forepaw, and just stayed there, looking up at Sarah Jane.

  ‘Go on!’ she cried. ‘Get!’

  But the rat sat on.

  ‘Go! Get away!’

  The rat’s head moved a little to the side, as if it were purposefully looking at Sarah Jane from a new angle.

  ‘I said get!’ She was up now, and stepped towards it.

  But the rat stayed where it was, looking at her. Then it hissed.

  ‘You great bully, you foul filthy thing! I hate you! I’m going to squash you under my boot!’

  The rat hissed.

  ‘You don’t frighten me,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to be frightened by some rat. My family have killed rats for generations, that’s what we do, we Haywards. We’ve a license for it. I know rats, I know what they look like inside and out. I’ve skinned hundreds on them. I’ve a mind to make you into part of a hat. I’ll use your tail to tie up my boots. I’ll boil your bones up for glue, see if I don’t.’

  Hiss, went the rat.

  ‘I’m going to pop out your eyes, I am. I’m going to hear your bones snap!’

  Hiss, went the rat.

  ‘You’re dead, rat! You are dead!’

  Hiss, went the rat.

  ‘What’s that on you, rat? An old ring, quite caught round your waist, you dirt thing, you, I’ll catch you!’

  I listened out. I heard the big brass ring. It barely murmured, ‘Agatha Peel.’

  ‘Hiss!’

  ‘Come on then! Come on!’

  Hiss, went the rat.

  Hiss, went the rat, and then it lunged.

  ‘Ow!’ cried Sarah Jane, for the rodent had bit into her hand, and she had dropped me upon the ground. ‘You, rat, you shall pay for that! I’m cut! I’m bleeding!’

  The rat was running about on the floor, sniffing at me dreadfully.

  ‘Where’s it gone, where’s my sov?’

  The body around me seemed to grow larger of a sudden.

  ‘What are you? You’re a cat! You weren’t a cat afore! How did you do that?’

  What only a moment ago had been a rat was now a large, fat, scarred, bristling, hissing tortoiseshell cat, rabid with disease, fleas and flies thick about it. The old brass ring, Agatha Peel, fixed high upon one leg.

  ‘Give it back! Give it back!’

  The cat hissed. It dropped its whole body over me, and I could see nothing.

  ‘I’ll have it, I’ll have it now! Get gone you filthy beast!’

  It hissed, it screamed; how it screamed, an awful human scream.

  And Sarah Jane was stumbling.

  ‘You’re not natural!’ screamed Sarah Jane.

  The foul cat screeched to make your blood freeze over.

  And Sarah Jane slipped on the ground as she tried to kick the thing, but the foul cat was rushing towards her, on the attack.

  Help! Oh help her!

  There was a frightful bellow then and the cat went flying. Someone else had kicked the beast, someone else was there. Who was it? Someone tall, some thin new figure, in a dark coat.

  ‘You know me, girl,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, her face white in terror, ‘I never … ’

  ‘You do know me.’

  ‘I know you,’ trembled Sarah Jane. ‘Oh, please, please! Don’t murder me! HELP!’

  ‘Rrrrrun!’ said the terrible emaciated man. ‘While you’re still able!’

  That got her shifting, screaming for all she was able, poor Sarah Jane scrabbled up and was away from the bridge and screaming yet.

  The cat shrieked, and was very suddenly a seagull, a grim looking piece, a very red tip to its beak.

  ‘Ark!’ it screamed.

  ‘Come here, Feathers. I need to unbutton you.’

  ‘Ark! Ark!’ it screamed and up it went, labouring hard to climb high, screaming all the while, ‘Ark, ark!’ A warning, it was screaming a warning, this creature, a call, an alert.

  The thin man picked me up from the dirt, wiped me off. ‘What have we here?’

  He held a pair of scissors, pinking shears they were.

  The Tailor, here was the Tailor.

  And then came the pain.

  7

  THE HEAPS ARE KNOCKING

  Continuing the narrative of Lucy Pennant

  Acid. Acid inside me. Burning. Like someone had lit a fire. Like I was on fire, burning up, that I’d be no more than a mound of ash in a second. Don’t know how long it went on like that, the pain something terrible. I was drowning in it, couldn’t do anything but hurt. I wondered if I was dying, if that was what it felt like. I wondered if this was the end of it, that I should die here, deep in the darkness with this cruel abused thing beside me. No doubt he’d eat me. What a way to end it.

  But I didn’t die, not yet, not then anyways.

  I was dark under the pain, suffocated by it, and there were terrible dreams about buttons and clay and I thought I should be a clay thing, baked of mud, in the earth where it’s all dark and cold. But I was fighting it, striking back, biting my own illness. Clawing at it. I shall not be a button. I shall not do it, get off me. Dreams of matches striking me, of being buried in a box of matches and a thin strict woman with a veil over her face, looking at me straight and saying, ‘Me! Me! Me!’

  ‘Me! Me! Me!’ I called back, and as I called back I came back, back, back to me, I’d fought the thing off.

  ‘Binadit.’

  I was back there in the dark deep. The thing, Benedict I must call him, was beside me. Couldn’t see him, just heard him, and, Lord knows, smelt the fellow.

  ‘Binadit.’

  ‘Get away!’ I cried, kicking out. ‘Get away from me!’

  ‘Binadit,’ he said, but further away.

  ‘Were you trying to eat me, Benedict, were you?’

  ‘Hongry.’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  ‘Hongry?’

  ‘I’m not on the menu!’

  ‘No! Hongry?’

  ‘Do you mean, am I hungry? Are you trying to feed me?’

  ‘Have fed you, you’ve been sickening, I’ve been feeding and drinking. Went up. Got new! You ate, you ate it all.’

  ‘You’ve been feeding me?’

  ‘Yes, yes, Binadit! I thought you’d be a botton. I thought you migh
t. I wanted a botton, but you said you’d get me more bottons. So then get me, get me.’

  ‘How long have I been ill?’

  ‘Long?’

  ‘How many hours, or days?’

  ‘No day down here. No clocks. I went up twice, light the first, dark the second. Space inbetween. Your skin was getting stiff, you started getting small, but I shouted at you and you come back big again.’

  ‘I think I must thank you, Benedict. I think I must, I’m being fought. There’s someone somewhere who has been made a box of matches and I don’t think she likes it. She’s fighting me, Benedict, she’ll keep fighting me. She’s quiet now, she’s just matches now somewhere, but she’s still thinking. I know it. She’s gathering her strength; she longs to be human again.’

  ‘Don’t let her!’

  ‘She’s tough, I felt her. She so wants to live.’

  ‘I want my bottons!’

  ‘And you shall have them. You have earnt them all right.’

  ‘Like bottons. Do like bottons.’

  ‘Benedict, is there any light? I think a little light might help me.’

  ‘No, no, no more light, all light spent.’

  ‘I need light. Can we go up? I want to go up. I must get out!’

  The fear of being trapped down in the darkness was too great for me. I felt all the heaps breathing all about me. I felt so lost deep within it, that I was drowning, drowning.

  ‘Get me out of here!’

  ‘Do you hurt? Is it the match woman coming for you?’

  ‘No, no, it’s the heaps. The feel of them, the weight of them!’

  ‘Don’t fight it. Mustn’t.’

  ‘Please, I must get out!’

  ‘It’ll know if you’re frightened. It’ll know it. It’ll come for you if you’re frightened. It’ll get you.’

  ‘Please, please, which way? I must have light!’

  ‘No, no! Lucy Pennant, listen.’

  ‘Help me! Help me, please!’

  ‘You’ll crush us. It won’t let us be if you hate it!’

  Just then there was a fearsome smash against the metal walls of Benedict’s hovel, things knocking against it from the outside, things scraping against the metal walls, making terrible screeching, screaming noises.

  ‘It heard you,’ said Benedict. ‘It heard your fear and now is come.’

  ‘We have to get out! Right now!’

  ‘No, no, mustn’t. Can’t go now. ’Tisn’t safe. Must stay.’

  ‘I can’t stay! I’m suffocating!’

  ‘Binadit, Binadit,’ he said quietly, stroking my hair.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘You’re frightened, not to be, not to be.’

  The noise of things smacking and shifting against the metal room grew louder and louder, a drumming against the walls, huge things trying to crush us.

  ‘We’re going to die! I’m going to die here.’

  ‘No, no, we’re not.’

  ‘Help me!’

  ‘Trying to help you. Am trying.’

  ‘What then … What was that? Oh God!’ Something was drilling against the walls, the whole room was shuddering, then the boom, boom, boom, we were shaken in our cage, our vault, our trap, our tomb. ‘Tell me, oh please tell me. What will make it stop?’

  ‘You must be stiller, you must not be scared. It knows you’re scared, and that’s what scared it, and when it gets scared it gets fretful and then it pounds and crushes and is a big terrible thing. So, so, Lucy Pennant, not to frighten it.’

  ‘I frighten it?’

  ‘You do,’ he shouted above the noise of all those things come to crush us. ‘Tell me, Lucy Pennant, a nice story. Tell me a story of Lucy Pennant, so to keep us all calm and put away the storming.’

  And so, gasping and shaking, I stammered out the story of my childhood, of the boarding house where I lived, of Father and of Mother, of running up and down that house, of finding things, of stealing a bit here and there, of looking in on the homes of all those different people, and of the man upstairs at the top of the house whose door was always closed, who never came out at all, but we could hear him, me and my friends, moving about inside. I told all of Filching, and of the orphanage and of the red-haired girl Mary Staggs and of coming to Heap House, and of being a serving girl, and of Clod, of my Clod and his plug and of kissing him, and of promising him, no matter what, that I should find him again.

  When I had finished it was a shock to learn that all was calm, that nothing was tapping against the walls, the storm in the deeps had stopped. I was not frightened and, now I must believe, it, the great thing beyond, was not frightened either.

  ‘Lucy Pennant,’ said Benedict quietly, ‘she has talked to the Heaps, and they have listened.’

  And I said, smiling, despite of all, because I could but help it, and it seemed the only possible way to mark the occasion, ‘Binadit!’

  We stayed in the darkness, listening to the heaps growing quieter. The tapping on the walls ever less frequent and fainter.

  ‘Is it going away?’ I asked.

  ‘It is always here, it don’t ever go,’ said Benedict, ‘but sometime it is angry and sometime it is not. Not now. Calm now. What a thing it is!’

  ‘Is it safe to go up?’

  ‘Safe for me.’

  ‘I must get out, I cannot stay here.’

  Something banged against the walls.

  ‘It hears you,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t mind it,’ I said. ‘It may do as it pleases, but I shall not stay in here the rest of my days. I mean to go out and I mean for it to let me. It bloody shall.’

  I listened then, listened for its banging, but no sound came.

  ‘Will it let me go?’ I asked.

  ‘Is your decision,’ said Benedict. ‘Is for you to be calm and unfrit.’

  ‘Well then, I am,’ I said. ‘Well then let us go, I must find Clod. He’ll be waiting for me. He won’t be able to do anything without me. Never could, the booby. I quite miss him. Ow!’

  My leg hurt so when I moved it, as if it had been crushed, as if a part of it had been torn off, and there was a crust of blood there, a scab.

  ‘When you was sleeping,’ he said, ‘of a sudden your leg was bleeding. Wasn’t me that done, it just sprung a leak, most strange.’

  ‘All on its own.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of its own.’

  ‘Benedict,’ I said, ‘you help me and I’ll help you. What do I want: to get out of here and to find Clod and to stop that woman of matches. What do you want: buttons. Very good then, I’ll show you to buttons. We’ll go into Filching for buttons, oh they have buttons there.’

  ‘Filching?’

  ‘That’s right, is it far?’

  ‘Depends on the weather. Up to the Heaps.’

  ‘Well, Benedict, the sooner we start the sooner we arrive. I’ll find my friends there, and I’ll gather my strength up. Yes, that’s it. In Filching I’ll work out just what to do.’

  ‘They put you in a cage there and show you off to crowds. They gives you all sorts to eat and they beat you and laugh at you. That’s Filchin’.’

  ‘They did that to you?’

  ‘Big crowds! All looking in at me. I was in a cage! Different, they says a me, so different you are, as always, not actually a mun, nor either a thing. Want to be wanted. Want to be! Don’t want to be in a cage. Things not mun, things it was that chose me, welcomed me. Free now, free to run and eat as I likes!’

  ‘Over in Filching I’ve friends, Benedict, and they shall be your friends too.’

  ‘I was born out in the Heaps, Heaps is my home. I’d be all at sea anyplace other.’

  ‘Will you help me, Benedict?’

  ‘It’s not Benedict, it’s Binadit. That’s my proper name. That or It, they called me. Binadit, Binadit!’

  ‘Steady now, Benedict, don’t get so excited.’

  ‘Binadit! Is Binadit to call!’

  ‘What sort of a name is that, Binadit? I shall call you Benedict, which
at least is a proper name.’

  ‘Binadit, is Binadit!’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll eat you.’

  ‘No, no, you shan’t. We will need money.’

  ‘Money!’ spat Benedict. ‘Have money!’

  Benedict rattled around in one of his dirty cupboards and came out clinking all about him, and rustling. Coins, coins and even paper money. How much finding in the heaps he had done himself, how much he’d kept away from the Iremonger sorters. He was a rich man living in squalor.

  ‘Well!’ I cried, feeling all them notes. ‘Behold the Bank of England!’

  ‘You laugh at me! Don’t like it!’

  ‘Happily, Benedict, you’re a rich fellow from what I feel all about us, you’re rolling in it. What a person you are!’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes, I truly think you are.’

  He grunted at that, I think it was a happy grunt.

  ‘Well then, Benedict, gather up your money and let us go up to the surface and into Filching.’

  ‘Up? It’s not up for Filchin’. Is down, down for Filchin’, along the pipes, get in the pipes, go along, bit wet as maybe, but is the quickest way. No, it’s down, down is best for Filchin’. Sometimes I sit there, on the edge, and watch them, watch them people peopling. No, no, down, must down for Filch.’

  ‘What pipes, Benedict?’

  ‘Them pipes, the tunnel. The Effra!’

  ‘What’s the Effra?’

  ‘Don’t know?’

  ‘Never heard of.’

  ‘’Tis the lost river, the Effra is! Was once on ground in Roman days they told me, now under the ground. Still flows the Effra does, but underneath, been bricked over and used now much for swidge and such, under it is, flowing still. Is still alive, only buried, still flowing, only out of sight. Flows all the way to the Thames it does, so they says. I ain’t never seen the Thames.’

  ‘Well then, Benedict, let us find this lost river.’

  ‘And catch a lift on it. It’ll take us, the Effra will.’

  8

  TO BREATHE AGAIN

  Continuing the narrative of Clod Iremonger