by Kate Griffin
We walked through the streets of Morden, following the instructions Earle had given me. I counted CCTV cameras, imagined a blue van driven all the way from Kilburn sliding through these sleeping streets. The sky was grey and overcast, the wind smelling of rain yet to come, the lunchtime bakeries selling suspicious sausage rolls: quiet, business not really interested today. Oda said, “No back-up?”
“They’ll meet us there.”
“And where’s there?”
“Not far now.”
“No patience for cryptic, sorcerer. ‘Cryptic’ is something people use in order to feel smug about their knowing and someone else not.”
I sighed, but she had a point. “Earle’s people traced the van to a site near here. We think it’s where the boy, Mo, is.”
“And the boy is still important?”
“Yeah.”
“To whom?”
“To me.”
“That’s what I thought.”
We kept on walking.
“What did you see, last night?”
“What?”
“The Midnight Mayor is supposed to see things. It would be useful information for us to know what you saw.”
“The Order are the last people I would possibly ever tell.”
“But you did see something, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Is there a difference?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I tell you, aren’t I just telling the Order?”
She thought about this half the length of the street. Wheelie-bins, parked cars, delivery vans, mothers with buggies, bright red postbox, pigeons scuttling out of the middle of the street as a learner driver pootled uneasily past. Then, “One day, I’ll kill you.”
“Yup. I know.”
“Because you’re a sorcerer.”
“Yup.”
“And one day you might have to kill me.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Because I’m part of the Order.”
“Pretty much. I think you’ll probably shoot first. But what if you miss?”
“It has nothing to do with my being Oda or your being Matthew. It’s just how it is.”
“Yeah. I know.” We kept on walking. I said, “I saw a dragon.”
“Cheesy.”
“It wasn’t Jurassic Park. I mean, I saw a thing that looked like a dragon simply because if it had looked like itself my brain wouldn’t have been able to comprehend it. Things we do not understand . . . the brain does its best to fit them into some sort of vehicle that allows us comprehension, to simplify it down so that the part of us that thinks with words, not instincts, has even a vague chance of understanding. It wasn’t a dragon.”
“OK.”
“It was everything else. Up, down, in, out, forward, back, time, width, length, depth, stone, brick, leaf, pipe, iron, steel, gas, breath, dirt, dust, fear, anger, madness, fury, hurt, life . . .”
“You’re rambling.”
“It was the city. Too big and wild to ever understand, except to call it a dragon and hope your brain doesn’t dribble at the thought.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oda?”
“Yes?”
“There’s a reason I don’t tell you things either.”
And then, she smiled. It was such a strange and alien expression on her lips that at first, we couldn’t comprehend it. But it was in her voice as well, a moment, an actual moment, when psycho-bitch wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and there was just a woman with a gun in her pocket. “Matthew,” she said, “if you weren’t already thrice damned and stuck on a spit, it would almost be human that you tried.”
We didn’t know what to say, couldn’t think of anything except a sudden awareness of all the air inside our chest, that slipped over our tongue without being able to take anything but the feeblest of shapes.
Too much thinking, too much trouble.
Our solution for everything.
We kept walking, and said not a word.
And there it was.
It crept out of a corner and announced with a blaring self-confidence, “Voilà! Here I am and buggered if you’ll find a way round me!” It lay between two red-brick railway lines racing south towards more exciting, less smelly destinations, and on the chain-link fence someone had stuck up a sign in crude paint saying:
!!!SEAL’S SCRAP, WASTE & REFUSE SERVICE!!!
!!WASTE NOT WANT NOT!!
VAT NOT INCLUDED
Oda looked at the metal fence and said, “If this is a symptom of your sense of humour . . .”
“You make it sound like a disease. And no, it’s not. This is where the blue van went. It’s somewhere in there.”
I nodded through an iron gate.
Beyond it, a long way beyond it, and in it, and over it, and just generally doing its impression of the endless horizon, was rubbish. Every possible kind of decay had been placed within the boundaries of SEAL’S SCRAP, as if iron and steel might, after ten thousand years’ compression, have mulched down into rich black oil to be tapped. Dead cars, shattered and crushed in the vices of lingering, sleepy cranes; dead washing machines, dead fridges, pipes broken and the chemicals spilt onto earth and air, broken baths, old shattered trolleys, torn-up pipes, ruined engines with the plugs pulled out, tumbled old tiles shattered and cracked, skips of twisted plywood blackened in some flame, bricks turned to dust and piled upon bin bags split into shreds, shattered glass and cracked plastic, white polystyrene spilt across the tarmac, cardboard boxes in which the weeds had begun to grow. It seemed to stretch for miles, oozing into every corner between the railway lines, locked away behind its see-through fence and a small cabin for the delivery men to sit in and have their tea.
Oda said, “Where’s back-up?”
I looked for the Aldermen, and saw none.
“Don’t know.”
“We could . . .”
“I’ve seen enough American TV to know what happens to people who go in without back-up.”
“Jack Bauer manages.”
“You’ve watched 24? Did you denounce that too?”
She pursed her lips. “There’s a forum on the subject, but so far, no.”
“Is this why you’re a psycho-bitch with a gun?” I asked carefully. “You saw too many thrillers?”
“I think we both know that isn’t true, and I think we both want to avoid discussion on the matter.”
No smiles now. Perhaps we’d imagined it after all.
We waited. It started to rain. This is what usually happens when you’re outside and not too busy to notice.
Oda had an umbrella in her sports pack, along with a rifle and a sword. She didn’t offer to share.
I rang Earle.
“H-H-Harlun and—”
“Ask Earle where this fabled back-up of his is.”
The stuttering boy asked Earle.
Earle said, “Swift? What do you mean? They should have been there an hour ago.”
His voice was big enough that Oda could hear it over the phone. She looked at me, I looked at her.
We both looked at the scrapyard.
“Earle,” I said, “if I should die, I want you to know that the phones will scream their vengeance at you when you sleep.”
I hung up. I figured he’d work out the problem all by himself.
Oda said, “What do we do now?”
“Did you denounce Alien?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just a film.”
I wagged a finger at the scrapyard, half lost now in the falling rain. I felt dirty just looking at it, and the seeping through my clothes of heavy London drizzle didn’t help. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that back-up has been and gone and it ended badly. The biggest mistake made in Alien . . .”
“Was going in after the monster?”
“Yes.”
“Then we should walk away.”
“But that’s the
point, isn’t it? A blue van drove into the scrapyard with a kid inside who should hold the key to this entire farcical cock-up of a disaster. It didn’t come out. Now, if we go in there . . .”
“The kid is probably dead.”
“Then why not kill him at Raleigh Court?”
“You want him to be alive.”
“Yes! Of course I do! For so many, many reasons, and only one of them is mine! And if he is, and we just walk away then how stupid will we feel when everything goes splat?”
“You want to go looking for him. Now?”
“Yes.”
“In there?”
“Yes.”
“You know, I never had you for a fool.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“A coward, yes, but not a fool.”
“Wait here, then. You can save your bullets.” She sighed, reached into her bag, pulled out a gun, ugly, big and black. “Thank you,” I said.
“I know where my soul is going,” she replied sharply. “I don’t think this enterprise is helping the cause of yours.”
I was almost touched my soul had a cause to fail.
We went into the scrapyard, as the rain grew heavier.
There was no one inside the gate cabin. I found a kettle, as cold as dead men’s flesh. Our terror had subsided to a calm and level fury, as if every receptor for sense was so bombarded that the whole system had shut down for a diagnostic reboot, unable to believe this was the information it was meant to process. It gave the movement of our hands in front of us, the tread of our feet, a detached quality. We were observers, observing someone else, no more.
Rain pooled grey-black on the uneven tarmac floor of the yard. A few twists, a few turns, and all was lost behind the great piles of stuff, the endless cairns of dead equipment rising up taller than three basketball players with an acrobatic fondness for each other’s shoulders. The railway lines were quickly gone behind the tottering pyramids of broken metal, twisted plastic, rusted iron, pocked steel, rotten stuffing and slashed foam, just dead bits of comfortable lives, left over to no purpose that I could see. The rain helped keep it a bit real, tickled down the back of my neck and bit ice into my spine, oozed through my shoes — still not my shoes, still too big — and started wrinkling itchy around my toes. I buried my hands in my pocket, stuck my chin inside my collar and kept walking, scanning each great mound of abandoned nothing stuff from top to bottom in search of something softer than metal.
There wasn’t a smell, not with the rain and the heavy, sinking cold. There was a taste, salt and dry spilt chemicals, old bleach and broken bottles of things that shouldn’t have had the safety cap removed. Two turns in the maze and the sounds of the road were already a long way off; a train rumbled by distantly, wheels screeching like a maddened witch. I slipped on a torn pile of builder’s bags, sand still clinging to their inner edges; ambled past a wall of shattered safety glass, so safe that the million greenish pieces hadn’t had the heart to fall away from their friends. A fat black-brown rat scuttled away towards the gutted and half-burnt remnants of a sofa, the cushions long since vanished. I scuttled after it, bending down towards the ground and holding out my hands, cooing gentle noises.
“Come on, come on . . .”
The rat looked back at me uncertainly, hesitated on the edge of a hole chewed through the stuffing of a mattress, which thin orange fungus had long since made its own, then started to edge back towards me, its oval body shimmering and bright in the soaking rain, its pink claws sliding through the rising puddles on the floor. Oda looked at us with distaste, but said not a word as bending down, we picked it up in our hands, smelt slime and old rotting things from its coat, saw tiny sharp teeth in a tiny pointed mouth, felt little sharp claws tap dance on the surface of our palm. Pigeons and rats; no one knows more in a big city.
We stroked its back, our fingers sliding slime-covered off the greasy surface of its coat, whispered gentle implorings and polite commands, and bent down, let it scuttle free, followed it as it passed along small trails through the rising water. It scrambled over old black Victorian pipes dragged up from some forsaken corner of the sewers, past broken pots and vases smashed into a dozen white shards on the earth, over a hundred cracks where the grass had somehow managed to peep its way up from the grey concrete soil, round a rotting slab of sandy clay where the buddleia was trying to take root, little purple flowers crawling out of tough brown roots. I almost had to run to keep up with it; staggering past the broken hull of a yacht, a great fat tear through its belly; the twisted remains of a car, bonnet pressed up almost into its boot; wrought-iron back of an old bedstead; a lonely rocking chair, the screws just about to fall free.
“Sorcerer . . .” whispered Oda, a note of urgency in her voice. I glanced back at her, then back again and could see nothing but the towers of broken things all around, like metal hills blocking out the sky.
“Not far,” I muttered, as much for my sake as hers. “Not far . . .”
I could smell the bright warm stench of a sandwich rotting in the rain, see the yellow blur of the rat’s eyes in my own, sense the twitching of its whiskers as if they grew from my face, and there it was as well, another thing rotting, a different kind of rot, the kind that didn’t taste of bright orange rust and broken metal. I remembered the fox in Kilburn. I remembered the way Mr Pinner didn’t smell.
Old kettles turned calcium-white on the inside; half a chimney pot, through which the buddleia was beginning to peek, a shattered TV aerial still carrying traces of pigeon poop on its strands, a satellite dish, face turned upwards to receive a signal, in which now nothing but stagnant water pooled. There would be ice in the night, thick frost in the shadows; our breath was white smoke.
And then the rat stopped.
It looked at something, then looked at me, then scuttled away into a tunnel an inch wider than itself, dug out of a tower of tumbled detritus. At first we couldn’t see what it had seen, but stared at more of the same: rust and black burnt nothings. Then Oda’s hand brushed ours, just for a second, and we, startled by the touch, looked to her, then followed her gaze.
There was something in the rubbish.
It was a shoe. At some point, it had been a trendy shoe, big, white and gold and blue, all the right marks to declare that here was someone who knew who they were and it was all about the feet. That had been then. Now it, like everything else in this place, was rotting, dirt and rain and ragged tears pulling out the soft stuffing of the inner sole, limp sodden brown laces dribbled, undone. It stuck out of the pile of dead machines at a strange angle, like someone had stuck it there on a pole like a defiant flag. I looked closer. There was something in the shoe. It might have been a sock.
Oda whispered, “Oh, God.”
There was something in the sock.
It might have been an ankle.
I snapped, “Help me!”
We scrambled up the sides of the heap and started pulling. Old rusted bike frames, crinkled-up drink cans, broken bottles, a thing, all withered bone and hair, that might once have been a dead cat stuffed inside a cardboard box, a shattered lamp, a gutted radio, the panels for a speaker trailing wires, the drawers of some old filing cabinet, snapped along the lines on which they should have slid. The ankle became a leg, blue slashed jean stained the colour of black rust; the leg joined onto a hip, at the wrong angle, sticking out too far to one side; the hip was half-covered by a T-shirt, soaked through and torn; the T-shirt covered a chest, into which half a broom had at some point buried itself just hard enough to pin the body it impaled to the ground. We threw broken things aside, feeling the great mound of decayed waste shift beneath us, creaking and clanking as old lynchpins of its structure were tossed away; and there were fingers, hands, arms. And they were wrong: black — not the deep rich brown of Oda’s skin that foolish mortals called black, but the black of an ocean night when the stars are lost, coal-black, dead-black, ink-black. I could see black blood pumping through the veins beneath his skin, still moving, still, just aliv
e, and we knew without a doubt, that it was ink-black, black as ink, black, because it was ink.
Some sort of whisk had fallen over his face, its broken wires clinging to his throat and jaw. We untangled them, metal hooks twanging merrily as they came free, and ink flowed from the pinprick wounds. The whites of his eyes were stained with the same ink that ran through his blood, his lips were the colour of festering bruises, his hair was falling from his skull in fistfuls, barely a few handfuls left on the grey dome of his head. Alive. Still alive, bleeding, wheezing, freezing, shivering, dying, pick one, they were all leading in the same direction, racing each other for the prize.
“Is that . . .” whispered Oda.
“What do you think?”
I dragged him up by an arm and he came, a puppet without the stuffing. Oda took the other arm, slung it across her shoulder and between the two of us, we pulled him free. A rusty screwdriver was embedded in his back, just offset from his spine, sticking out like some obscene fashion accessory. Oda pulled it free with a thick pop of dead muscle, and black ink began to flow from the hole down to the seat of his fouled pants. He stank of urine and shit, dragged uneven and lumpy in our arms as we pulled him along. His legs didn’t move, his head didn’t rise; there was nothing in him to suggest life except the slow beating of black blood in his veins. I turned my head, looking for the way out, trying to judge by the distant rattle of trains the way to the exit. Picked a direction; staggered, walked, ran, dragged, tripped, stumbled, all at once, towards the way out.
“Ambulance?” whispered Oda.
“Can’t save him now.”
“The . . . hospital place?”
“Maybe. They have means at Elizabeth Anderson . . . can you reach the phone in my bag?”
My satchel was swinging uncomfortably from my shoulder; to grab it was to drop the ink-stained boy. As Oda snatched for it, I glanced at his face and saw, through the black stain under his skin, that his cheeks were still slightly puffed with puppy-dog youth; just a kid, and he was going to die. Oda grabbed my satchel, reached inside, pulled out the mobile phone.
“Black Cab,” I said. “He’s the only one who can get us there in time.” She thumbed it on. Continents drifted in the time it took the phone to power up. “Sorcerer . . .” Fear, unashamed, numb-the-senses fear. “. . . there’s no signal.”