“Did you tell them?” said Deeba.
“How can I?” said Zanna. “What am I going to say about the animals?”
For the last few weeks, dogs would often stop as Zanna walked by, and stare at her. Once a little conga line of three squirrels had come down from a tree as Zanna sat in Queen’s Park, and one by one had put a little nut or seed in front of her. Only cats ignored her.
“It’s mad,” said Zanna. “I don’t know what’s going on. And I can’t tell them. They’ll think I need help. Maybe I do. But I tell you one thing.” Her voice was surprisingly firm. “I was thinking it when I looked at that fox. At first I was scared. I still don’t want to talk about it, not to Kath and that lot. So don’t say nothing, alright? But I’ve had enough. Something’s happening? Okay. Well, I’m ready for it.”
Outside it was storming. The air was growling and rumbustious. People crammed under eaves, or huddled into their coats and shuffled through the rain. Through Deeba’s window, the girls watched people dance and wrestle with umbrellas.
When Zanna left, she ran out past a sheltering woman with a ridiculous little dog on a lead. As it saw her, the dog sat up in an oddly dignified way.
It bowed its head. Zanna looked at the little dog and, obviously as surprised by her own reaction as by the animal’s greeting, bowed her head back.
3
The Visiting Smoke
The next day Zanna and Deeba wandered through the playground, watching their reflections in all the puddles. Bedraggled rubbish lurked by walls. The clouds still looked heavy.
“My dad hates umbrellas,” said Deeba, swinging her own. “When it rains he always says the same thing. ‘I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society’s usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.’”
From the edge of the playground, near where the respectful fox had stood, they could see over the school’s walls, into the street, where a few people passed by.
Something caught Zanna’s eye. Something strange and unclear. By a playing field at the end of the street, smudges were just visible on the road.
“There’s something there,” said Zanna. She squinted. “I think it’s moving.”
“Is it?” said Deeba.
The sky seemed unnaturally flat, as if a huge gray sheet had been pegged out from horizon to horizon above them. The air was still. Very faint dark stains coiled and disappeared, and the road was unmarked again.
“Today…” Deeba said. “It’s not a normal day.”
Zanna shook her head.
Birds arced, and clutch of sparrows flew out of nowhere and circled Zanna’s head in a twittering halo.
That afternoon they had French. Zanna and Deeba were not paying attention, were staring out of the windows, drawing foxes and sparrows and rain clouds, until something in Miss Williams’s droning made Zanna look up.
“…choisir…” she heard. “…je choisis, tu choisis…”
“What’s she on about?” whispered Deeba.
“Nous allons choisir…” Miss Williams said. “Vous avez choisi.”
“Miss? Miss?” said Zanna. “What was that last one, Miss? What does it mean?”
Miss Williams poked the board.
“This one?” she said. “Vous avez choisi. Vous: you plural. Avez: have. Choisi: chosen.”
Choisi. Shwazzy. Chosen.
At the end of the day, Deeba and Zanna stood by the school gate and looked out at where they had seen the marks. It was still drizzling, and by the playing fields, the rain looked to be falling as if against resistance, as if it had hit a patch of odd air.
“You coming to Rose’s?” Kath and the others were standing behind them.
“We…thought we saw something,” Deeba said. “We was just going to…”
Her voice petered out, and she followed Zanna. Behind them, a scrum of their classmates were rushing by, heading home or meeting their parents.
“What you looking for?” said Keisha. She and Kath stood watching quizzically as Zanna stood in the middle of the road a few meters away, and looked around.
“I can’t see nothing,” she whispered. Zanna stood for a long time, as the others huffed impatiently. “Alright then,” she said, raising her voice. Kath had her arms folded and one eyebrow raised. “Let’s go.”
The stream of their classmates had ended. A few cars emerged from the gates and swept past them as their teachers headed home. The little group of girls were alone in the street. With a sputtering crack, the streetlights came on as the sky darkened.
Rain was coming down hard like a typewriter on Deeba’s umbrella.
“…don’t know what she’s doing…” Deeba heard Becks saying to Keisha and Kath. Zanna walked a little ahead of them, her feet sending up little sprays of rainlike mist.
A lot like mist, a dark mist. Zanna slowed. She and Deeba looked down.
“What now?” said Keisha in exasperation.
At their feet, a few centimeters above the dirty wet tarmac, there was a layer of coiling smoke.
“What…is that?” said Kath.
Wafts were rising from the gutters. The smoke was a horrible dirty dark. It emerged in drifts and tendrils, reaching through the metal grilles of the drains like growing vines or octopus legs. Ropes of it tangled and thickened. They coiled around the wheels of vehicles and under their engines.
“What’s going on?” whispered Keisha. Smoke was beginning to boil out of the sewers. A smell of chemicals and rot thickened in the air. Far off and muffled as if by a curtain, the noise of a motor was audible.
Zanna was standing with her arms out, focusing intensely into sudden fumes that circled them. For a second, it looked as if the rain that was pelting them was evaporating, like drops on hot metal, a few millimeters above Zanna’s head. Deeba stared, but dark drifts hid her friend.
The motor was louder. A car was approaching.
The girls were shrouded in gritty smoke. They spluttered in panic and tried to call to each other. They could see almost nothing.
The noise of the motor grew, and glints of reflected streetlamp-light winked momentarily through the fumes.
“Wait a minute,” Zanna shouted.
Through the fog headlights suddenly flared, heading straight for Zanna. Deeba saw her, turned in to a shadow, sidestepping neatly as the lights bore down, her hands seeming to glow.
“It’s my dad!” Zanna shouted, and moved fast as the car raced into the smoke, and there was a rush as the fumes dissipated and—
—there was a bang, and something went flying, and there was silence.
The clouds undarkened and the rain stopped. The strange fumes dropped out of the air and flooded like thick dark water back into the gutters, gushing soundlessly out of sight.
For several seconds, no one moved.
A car was skewed across the road, with Zanna’s dad sitting in the front seat looking confused. Someone was shouting hysterically. Someone fair was lying by a wall.
“Zanna!” Deeba shouted, but Zanna was beside her. It was Becks who had been hit, and who lay motionless.
“We have to get a doctor,” said Zanna, pulling out her mobile and starting to cry, but Kath was already through to 999.
Zanna’s dad staggered out of the car, coughing.
“What…what…?” he said. “I was…what happened?” He saw Becks. “Oh my God!” He dropped to his knees beside her. “What did I do?” he kept saying.
“I’ve called an ambulance,” Kath said, but he wasn’t listening. Now the light was back to normal and there was no fog lapping at ankle-height, people were peering out of doors and windows. Becks moved uneasily, and made groggy moaning noises.
“What happened?” Zanna’s dad kept asking them. None of them knew what to say. “I don’t remember anything,” he said, “I just woke up and—”
“It hurts…” Becks wailed.
“Did you see?” Zanna whispered to Deeba. Her voice sounded as if it were cracking. “The
smoke, the car, everything? It was all thick around me. It was trying to get me.”
4
The Watcher in the Night
That night, and the two that followed, Zanna stayed over at Deeba’s house. Just then, she preferred it to her own place across the yard of the estate.
Her father was in a bit of a state. The police kept asking him to tell his story again, and telling him there was no sign of the “chemical spill” he thought might explain the smoke that had made him light-headed. While he had to deal with the questions, Mr. and Mrs. Moon gratefully accepted the Reshams’ suggestion that Zanna stay with them.
The police had also asked the girls what had happened, of course, but Zanna and Deeba couldn’t explain what they didn’t understand.
“She’s had a real shock, Mrs. Resham,” Deeba heard one officer say. “She’s not making a bit of sense.”
“We have to make them believe us,” Zanna insisted.
“What?” said Deeba. “‘Magic smoke came out of the drains.’ Think that’ll help?”
Becks had broken a couple of bones, but was recovering. So, at least, Zanna and Deeba understood. Becks herself wouldn’t speak to them. She wouldn’t see them when they came to the hospital, nor would she answer her phone.
And it wasn’t just her. Kath and Keisha ignored Zanna and Deeba at school, and wouldn’t answer their calls, either.
“They’re blaming me for what happened,” Zanna said to Deeba, in a strange voice.
“They’re scared,” Deeba said. The two girls were sitting up late in Deeba’s room, Zanna in the foldout bed.
“And they’re blaming me,” Zanna said. “And…maybe they’re right.”
In the next room the Reshams shouted at the television.
“Idiots!” Deeba’s mother was saying.
“They’re all fools,” her dad said. “Except that Environment woman, Rawley, she’s alright. She’s the only one does any good…”
The Reshams were still having the conversation—the same one they had many times, about which politicians they disliked most, and the much more rare species, which they liked (a shortlist of one)—much later, when they went to bed. Zanna and Deeba were still whispering.
“It must have been an accident,” Deeba said. “Something with the pipes.”
“They said it wasn’t,” Zanna said. “And anyway…you don’t believe that. It’s something else. Something to do with…” With me, was what she didn’t say, but what they both knew she meant.
They had the same conversation every day. There were no conclusions they could come to, but there was nothing else they could talk about, either. They talked themselves out, and eventually fell asleep.
Much later, in the small hours of the night, Deeba woke, quite suddenly. She sat up in her bed by the window and pulled aside the curtains a little, to look out across the estate and try to work out what had disturbed her.
She watched for a long time. Occasionally a figure might hurry by, following the tiny red glimmer of a cigarette end. At this time of night, though, the concrete square, the big metal bins, the walkways were mostly empty.
On the other side of the yard she could see Zanna’s flat, its windows dark. The wind turned corkscrews in the courtyard, and Deeba watched bits of rubbish turn. It was raining a little. The moon glinted in puddles. In the far corner was a pile of full black rubbish bags.
There was a tiny scratching sound.
Deeba thought it must be a cat, searching in the rubbish. There was quiet except for the fingertip drumming of rain and the whisper of wastepaper. Then she heard it again, an insistent skritch-skritch.
“Zanna,” she whispered, shaking her friend awake. “Listen.”
The two girls looked out into the darkness.
In the shadows by the bins, something was moving. A wet black shape, rooting in the plastic. It moved toward the light. It didn’t look like a cat, nor a crow, nor a lost dog. It was long and spindly and flapping, all at once.
It extended a limb out of the shadows. Something glinting and black fluttered. Zanna and Deeba held their breath.
Shaking with effort, the claw-wing-thing hauled itself through shadows, spidery and bedraggled. It approached Zanna’s house. It huddled in the dark by the wall, leapt suddenly up, and hung below the window.
The two girls gasped. The thing was just visible, now, in the faint lamplight.
It was an umbrella.
For a long time it hung like some odd fruit below the windowsill, while the rain increased, until the watching friends began to tell themselves that they had imagined the motion, that there had been an umbrella hooked on the ledge for hours. Then the dark little thing moved again.
It dropped and crawled with its excruciating slowness back to the darkness. It opened its canopy a little way, gripped the concrete with a metal point, and dragged itself along. It was bent, or battered, or bent and battered, or torn, and it crawled like something injured, into the shadows and out of sight.
The courtyard was empty. Deeba and Zanna looked at each other.
“Oh…my…God…” whispered Zanna.
“That was…” squeaked Deeba. “Was that an umbrella?”
“How’s that possible…?” Zanna said. “And what was it doing by your window?”
5
Down to the Cellar
The two girls crept out into the estate night.
“Quick,” Zanna whispered. “It was over there.”
“This is mad,” hissed Deeba, but she moved as quickly as her friend, in the same half-bent run. “We don’t even have a flashlight.”
“Yeah but we’ve got to look,” Zanna said. “What is going on?” They shivered a little in the clothes they had quickly put on, looking nervously around them into darkness and halos of lamplight. They headed for the bins, and the hollow full of rubbish where they had seen the impossible spy.
“So it was some sort of remote control thing, innit?” Deeba said as Zanna looked around in the smelly dark. “And maybe…I dunno, maybe it had a camera or something…and…” Deeba stopped, as what she was saying began to sound more and more unlikely.
“Come help me,” Zanna said.
“What you doing?”
“Looking for something,” Zanna said.
“What?”
Zanna poked about in the rubbish, holding her nose as she prodded the overspill from the bins with a stick.
“There’s going to be rats and stuff,” Deeba said. “Leave it.”
“Look,” said Zanna. “See that?” She pointed at one streak among many across the cement of the estate.
The smear, just faintly visible, stretched from the rubbish tip, towards the dark ground-floor windows of Zanna’s house.
“That thing. These are its tracks.”
Zanna got on her hands and knees.
“Yeah, see?” she said. “You can see scratch-marks. Where it’s dug in with its…you know…metal points.”
“If you say,” said Deeba. “Let’s go.”
“Look. It was watching, or listening or whatever, at mine. Now we can see where it went.”
“We don’t even know what we’re after.” Deeba followed Zanna, who bent carefully over and traced her way through the dark estate. Deeba peered over her friend’s shoulders, trying to make out the tracks Zanna could see.
“You blatantly look like a mad person,” Deeba whispered. “If anyone sees you, what they going to think?”
“Who cares? Anyway, there’s no one. If there was, I’d be out of here.”
“I don’t even see nothing.”
“Marks,” Zanna said. “Tracks.”
She headed into the backs of the estate, between the brown concrete of those huge buildings. They were heading deep into the dead zones behind all the towers, into a maze of walls, bins, garages, and rubbish. Deeba looked around nervously.
“Come on, Zann,” she said. “We dunno where we are.”
“I’ve got a feeling…” Zanna said. She was distracted.
“This way…” she said, glancing down without slowing. In fact, she looked now as if she were following a memory, or an instinct, rather than a trail. She wound between the enormous buildings, lit here and there by inadequate yellow lights.
“I can’t see it,” Deeba said anxiously. “There’s nothing.”
“Yes, there is,” said Zanna dreamily. She pointed, almost without looking. “There, see?” She sounded surprised. “It came this way.” She accelerated.
“Zanna!” said Deeba in alarm, and trotted to keep up with her. “How can you even see that?”
The main road was just out of sight: even at this hour, they could hear traffic. Zanna turned a corner, moving almost as if she were being tugged.
“Wait!” said Deeba, and came up behind her.
In front of them, in the base of one of the monoliths, surrounded by puddles of pretty oily water, below a weakly shining lamp, the girls saw a door. It was ajar. On its threshold, even Deeba could see it was marked with a smear of oil.
“No way,” Deeba said, eyeing Zanna. “You are not going there…”
Zanna stepped inside. Behind her, shouting, “Wait! Wait!” Deeba followed.
“Is anyone there?” Zanna said, not very loud. They were in a narrow corridor below ground level. The only windows were stubby ones by the ceiling, cracked and flecked with cobwebs and fly husks. The one or two bulbs let light out resentfully, as if they were misers who hoarded it.
“We are going,” Deeba said. “There’s nothing here.”
Pipes and wires ran along the walls, and meters ticked.
“Hello?” Zanna said.
The corridor ended in a huge basement. It must have stretched underneath almost the whole tower block. Along its walls were old tools; there was rope in thick puddles; and sacks; and rusted bicycles; and a dried-out warmed-up fridge. Here and there were faint illuminations, and the light from streetlamps came through the filthy windows. The girls could hear the moan of traffic.
Un Lun Dun Page 2