The Narrows

by James Brogden

Plus, of course, the screaming.

  Laura was sitting on the other side of him from Nurse Barton and so didn’t see exactly what happened to the woman’s right hand, nor could she help the police later in figuring out how the syringe had exploded so violently as to tear off most of her thumb and first two fingers. This was only a bit less surprising than the fact that Andy, other than being covered in the woman’s blood, remained completely unharmed – not so much as a pinprick from the needle.

  Because his memory of this was so fuzzy, Andy kept to himself the impression – which was surely just his imagination, even though it had felt so real – that far from having anything injected into his shoulder, something furious had lashed out of it.

  ***

  It was always a relief for Andy to get out of the shop, even if it was on one of Laura’s endless list of wedding-related errands.

  Birmingham city centre on this particular bright, midwinter lunchtime held an odd kind of stillness. The flat, white, directionless light of winter filled the gaps between each building as the city rested from itself, taking a breather from the summer months when everything was so hot and sweaty and rushed that it all seemed to blur together at the edges. The cold made everything draw tighter into itself, to huddle down into the very essence of its own existence – every bin, lamppost, pigeon, or pedestrian – even the individual bricks and the cracks or straggling weeds between them, so that it seemed a miracle that they didn’t just crumble apart, frozen.

  The incident at the travel clinic had been such a randomly violent intrusion into Andy and Laura’s otherwise ordered and sensible lives that it was simply a lot easier to draw a line under it as one of those bizarre and tragic events which sometimes struck like lightning, and just get on with things. It dampened Laura’s enthusiasm over the wedding preparations for almost a week before her sense of urgency renewed itself, and he was sent out on his errand. From his point of view it made more sense to worry about making arrangements for Christmas, never mind next summer, but there it was. A Mission was a Mission.

  He could have caught the bus, but walking somehow made everything more real. In fact, there was no reason he couldn’t have done this every lunchtime – except that he never did. He wandered out for ten minutes, bought something slathered in mayonnaise from the nearest Pret-a-Manger, went back to the shop-floor and got on with more work – though if anybody happened by he made sure that he was doing something far cooler, like updating his Facebook status or surfing for porn.

  He remembered watching one of those How-Foul-is-Your-Workplace-style programmes where a small bespectacled Scottish woman had taken swabs from some poor sod’s computer keyboard and proceeded to demonstrate the wide variety of spectacularly gut-squittering bacterial flora and fauna where he ate his lunch every day. As if that were the point. What did Andy’s head in was the fact that that was what this guy did, every single day. Rain or shine. Never even took a break – because what would have been the point? He didn’t even smoke.

  Ordinarily that was exactly where Andy would have been too, slogging through invoices and emails and playing gastronomic Russian Roulette with his own keyboard – except that today was different. This time he had a reason to get out into the real world. This time he had a Mission.

  Marinated vine leaves.

  This, as Laura’s tone had made clear, was a serious business, and not one to be shirked or taken lightly. A dinner party for their parents – a proper dinner party, one which would celebrate their engagement as a transition to a more mature and sophisticated stage of life (Dear god, he’d thought, I think I’ve just been compared to a pupating caterpillar.) – required actual food – dolmades, to be precise – the preparation of which would at no stage involve reheating anything from the freezer or use of their phone’s speed dial. And absolutely no place for anything random.

  Lost in such thoughts, he didn’t realise how completely blocked the footpath was in front of him until he’d almost walked into a red-and-white striped scaffolding pole.

  Workmen were busy in a deep trench which ran the length of a new office development. The sign propped across the pavement, barring his way, requested him politely to use the other side of the road, even though the road in question was a section of the Smallbrook Queensway: three lanes of fast-moving traffic in either direction and a four-foot concrete barrier between.

  He briefly considered climbing over the pedestrian railing to his left and skirting the edge of the scaffolding, but the traffic was roaring past so closely that he gave it up as tantamount to suicide. (Wage slave kills self to avoid embarrassing dinner engagement; body found covered with marinated vine leaves.) Sighing, he resigned himself to backtracking to the roundabout and taking the underpass, until he noticed the short cut.

  Back past the construction site, between it and the corner of the next building, was a scrubby, litter-strewn strip of ground which couldn’t even be dignified by calling it an alley. It was only a few feet wide – not at all surprising that he hadn’t noticed it before – and he thought it should easily lead him back onto one of those little service streets that ran behind the pubs and nightclubs of John Bright Street. After which it was not much more than a spit and a jump to the Pallasades shopping centre, the Games Barn, and his invoices.

  Congratulating himself on having found such a handy short cut, he stepped off the footpath, and the darkness of the alley’s mouth swallowed him as if he’d never existed.

  The first thing he noticed was that it was much less cold, which he put down to the insulating effect of the buildings on either side. The going was a lot rougher underfoot than he’d thought, too. What had at first seemed to be simply cracked pavement was little more than broken chunks of concrete. The dead, dry-yellow stems of old weeds rattled and hissed as he passed. His shoes were soon badly scuffed and his trouser-cuffs muddy. And by the way, said a small voice inside his head, have you noticed how long this is taking? Yes, but he told himself that it was because he was being forced to walk much more slowly than normal. He looked back towards the Queensway, thinking that this might not have been such a good idea after all.

  Behind, traffic flicked past the alley’s narrow entrance. Up ahead, the alley was choked by a screen of dead, black nettles, but beyond that it seemed to be lighter and more open.

  That had to be John Bright Street. Face it, you’ve still got a big detour if you go back. Plus, your shoes are already buggered anyway. He pushed past the nettles and out into the street on the other side.

  Except there was no street.

  A wide expanse of overgrown waste ground stretched ahead of him: mounds of rubble thinly scabbed over with moss and wiry grass. A faint path twisted away into this humpbacked terrain, and far off (much further than he would have believed possible), ran an enclosing rampart of what looked like the corrugated iron roofs of factories or warehouses. He stopped, at a loss.

  Alright, so he had miscalculated. Either the buildings between which he was walking weren’t quite so wide as he thought, or this city block was bigger than it looked from the street. He wasn’t a bloody chartered surveyor; how would he know?

  Because something wasn’t right here.

  For no reason that he could imagine, his right shoulder – the place where Nurse Barton’s needle had failed to stick him – suddenly began to throb with pins and needles. Absently, he rubbed it and turned back. No way was he heading out into that wasteland, to be mugged or worse.

  The alley seemed darker and more cluttered than before, and there was no longer any glimpses of traffic at the far end. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t hear any, either. At all. The blank white noise which sounded so much like the blood whispering in his ears late at night was absent, and in its place fell an absolute silence which was profoundly unsettling.

  He checked in his coat pocket, took out the jar of marinated vine leaves and squinted at it, unimpressed. ‘
These dolmade things better be bloody worth it,’ he muttered.

  On top of this he now saw the straggling black stalks of dead nettles ahead of him, instead of behind, and his reassuring interior monologue died away in utter confusion. Obviously he’d somehow got himself muddled, probably with too much wool-gathering. Trying to ignore the voice in his head which was asking him how exactly one got muddled walking in a straight line from A to B, he carried on past the nettles to make certain, and, instead of the road, found himself facing the waste ground again.

  It was much wilder than when he’d last seen it. The piles of rubble were now completely overgrown, some even supporting a scrubby undergrowth of small shrubs, and the roofs in the distance were more rusted and rent with holes.

  ‘Right,’ he decided. ‘Um…’

  He about-faced and marched back in the opposite direction – even though he was no longer entirely sure where that was supposed to lead him – determined at all costs not to run. He might be lost, might even be losing his mind, but he would absolutely not panic.

  It was almost more than he could manage, because the alley was now so narrow that the walls scraped against his shoulders on either side and he was forced to shuffle crablike to avoid getting stuck, and when he saw the dead nettles impossibly ahead of him for the third time (deadnettlesdeadnettlesdeadnettles, his mind sang crazily. Good name for a band, that.) the panic burst free, and he ran, even though there was no room for him to run, and so he stumbled, tearing the knees out of his trousers and the skin off his palms, picked himself up and ran on until he broke out into the waste land again, wild-eyed and panting.

  It was unrecognisable as the same place. The distant warehouses were little more than fire-ravaged ruins, their blackened rafters jutting brokenly at the sullen sky. The faint path which he’d noticed the first time was now a clearly defined and well-trodden track which led away into the undergrowth. Waist-high weeds and grass blanketed the rubble completely, punctuated with small thickets of bushes – their foliage green in defiance of the season. Andy suspected that wherever this was, it treated the seasons with the same casual indifference as it did several other fairly important laws of the universe, and this realisation, though he wouldn’t appreciate it until much later, was the start of his acceptance of a wider reality which he had literally only just scratched the surface of. As if to confirm it, he looked back at the alley and saw that it had shrunk to barely a handspan’s width.

  And the silence. Around, between and under everything, the silence.

  ‘Talk about random,’ he said to himself, and he laughed a little, not liking how it sounded. He couldn’t go back, because every time he went back it somehow became forward, even though that was plainly impossible. Not only that, it also became wilder – he wanted to say deeper, without knowing why. This left him with only one alternative, and he found that he really didn’t want to see what was at the end of that trail. There could be anything down there. Anything at all.

  He put his hand in his pocket and felt the smooth, sane glass jar of vine leaves. Suddenly, getting this thing back where it belonged became the most important thing in the world. He imagined the kitchen cupboard where he would put it, inside his normal kitchen, inside his normal flat – like that nursery rhyme about the ‘dark dark house’. He started slowly forward, his heart thumping, and his eyes scanning every branch and shadow for threats.

  After the panic and terror of finding this place, Andy thought that it was all a bit of an anticlimax in the end. The patch of waste ground turned out to be barely more than a few hundred yards wide. Of course, the path was uneven and twisted randomly around the overgrown rubble, but for all that he reached the other side surprisingly quickly. Nevertheless, it was a measure of how tightly strung his nerves were that when he heard traffic murmuring past in the near distance he sobbed aloud with relief. The burnt-out warehouses on either side marched steadily together and met ahead in a ramshackle gate of planks tagged with the inevitable graffiti.

  He dragged it open and went out into the street on the other side.

  At first glance everything seemed to be gloriously, blissfully normal. Pavement: check. Terraced houses: check. Stray cat being sick in a doorway: check. It was a typical, suburban Birmingham street, with bin-bags on the pavement and a blue and white number seventy-two bus rumbling along under a bright winter sky. His relief was so profound that for a long moment the reality of what he was seeing completely failed to sink in.

  He was supposed to be in the city centre. There were no streets like this anywhere near where he should have been. There should be skyscrapers all around him, but he peered at the rooftops and couldn’t even see the BT Tower.

  In spite of the fact that his head felt like it had been screwed on backwards, his watch wasn’t lying to him and it said that he’d taken less than five minutes to cross that waste ground. It had only been a few hundred yards across, not much more than a football pitch, and there was no way that he could be anywhere which looked like this. He wasn’t at all sure where ‘this’ was, anyway. The number seventy-two bus coming towards him (Seventy-two? He didn’t think he’d ever even seen one of those.), read ‘Orchard Road to Lowes Hill via Borton Lane’ – none of which he’d heard of either.

  Andy’s stumbling mind was very nearly at the limit of what it could cope with; he couldn’t seem to hang on to his thoughts; they kept spiralling off in all directions like blind birds with too many wings. The only reason that the bus stopped for him at all was because he simply walked straight in front of it, dazed. He climbed aboard, paid his fare and sat down like an automaton as his brain twittered and flapped.

  It was the maths of it which he couldn’t straighten out – the whole distance-time thing. If he could just work it out, the how of where he’d gone wrong, everything would be okay. But the small ticking traitor on his wrist wasn’t going to have any of it, and by the time he’d got back to work he knew he’d been beaten.

  It had taken him two hours and three changes of bus to return from an outward journey of half-an-hour by foot. Somehow, in a way which hurt to think about, that little five-minute, football-pitch-long detour had skipped him five miles across the city, like a stone across a lake.

  2 Bex

  Bex of the Narrowfolk sat cross-legged on the roof of a derelict tower block and waited for the sun to set. From twelve storeys high, she had an unbroken view across most of Wolverhampton and the Black Country, even as far as the Shropshire countryside, which was a faded golden line at the very limit of sight. At the horizon lay a narrow band of clear sky, which was already beginning to colour in a sunset that didn’t touch her, because here the city brooded under an unbroken expanse of ochre and grey.

  ‘You ready to do this?’ Dodd stood with his arms folded at the fire-escape door that led back towards the ground.

  She shrugged. ‘Meh. I think I’ll give it a miss. Maybe go back home, let Mum’s boyfriend knock me around a bit more.’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘I’m a funny girl. Everybody says so.’ All the same, she got to her feet and shrugged on the small rucksack which contained the entirety of her worldly possessions: a few clothes, her iPod, half a dozen chocolate bars and a huge permanent black marker for tagging her Walk. It was one of the conditions: aside from whatever personal demons you were fleeing, you were leaving behind a world of meaningless acquisition, and if you couldn’t fit your life in a bag, there really wasn’t much point trying to join the Narrowfolk. She huddled deeper into her coat as a light drizzle began to fall, and she turned back to regard the map one last time.

  Spread out at her feet, the entire expanse of the rooftop was a multicoloured tracery of lines and squiggles, rendered in everything from spraypaint to chalk and probably even worse stuff that she didn’t want to think about. Some were crisp and fresh, laid down barely days ago, while others had weathered the decades and faded into illegibility. The c
umulative effect was almost three-dimensional – garish neon serpents and looped grey intestines twisted around each other in what at first seemed to be a haphazard mess, but which mapped routes through the night-time city taken along forgotten paths, overgrown vacant lots, alleyways, canal towpaths, and patches of wasteland. Punctuating the map like route numbers in a road atlas were the tags of those who had gone before – scribbled graffiti signatures in an alphabet which was taught in no classroom.

  Unlike other cities, Birmingham hid its secrets in plain sight. It had neither subway nor skyscrapers – no roofscape to fly up into, no underworld to hide in. For those with nowhere else to go, the only way left to escape was sideways.

  ‘Where do we live?’ he asked.

  She sighed with exaggerated heaviness. ‘Do we really need to do this?’

  ‘Yes we do. Where do we live?’

  ‘I know the whole thing. You know I know it.’

  ‘I know. We’re going to do it anyway. Where do we live?’ It amazed her how Dodd remained calm in the face of her constant whinging. He was the best scavenger she had ever met, knew the Narrows like the back of his hand, and was the closest thing she had to either a brother or a father. Funny, given that he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than she was. The rest of them could go to hell, but Dodd had shown more patience with her than any other human being, and if it meant that much to him, then she could go with that.

  ‘It’s just so bloody corny, that’s all.’ She sighed again. ‘Okay. We live in the narrow places.’

  ‘Where do we walk?’

  ‘We walk where the skin of the world is thin.’

  ‘What do we take?’

  ‘Nothing that was not already lost. Blah-de-blah-de-blah. Happy?’