The Narrows

by James Brogden

  Andy wasn’t aware that he was going to say anything until it happened. It just sort of slipped out. He’d always been such a polite young man. As the businessman passed him, eyes flicking over his face, unseeing, dismissing, just another wage-slave, Andy leaned in and said, so quickly and quietly that Handsfree might not have been sure he’d said anything at all: ‘Dickhead.’ Handsfree stiffened, reddened, but being the perfect British man-in-a-crowd ignored him completely and disappeared into the shopping centre.

  Andy, along with a few other well-meaning shoppers, stooped to help pick up the scattered change. While he was at it, he dropped in a quid from the petty cash.

  ***

  Bex tried to find the place where she and Dodd had been attacked, in the futile hope that she might be able to discover some clue to his fate. She couldn’t bring herself to start sorting through his belongings until she’d at least satisfied her curiosity on that score. Surely Walter had to understand that.

  The problem was, she simply couldn’t find it. There were half a dozen construction sites in the single square mile of the city centre alone, and all of them owned by Jerusalem Construction. Typically corrupt big business. Somebody on the Council was obviously getting a nice kick-back, which was lovely for them, and she hoped they enjoyed their nice new soulless shopping malls or whatever, but it made her own task impossible. She’d thought they’d been behind Broad Street, but what if she’d been wrong? There were bars and nightclubs everywhere.

  What made it worse was that she couldn’t even locate the Narrow where the skavags had first picked up their trail. She wasted the best part of the day making a series of long detours almost all the way back to the tower block, poking and prodding around with increasing frustration, and eventually had to admit that, impossible as it was, the Narrow had simply disappeared.

  No. The answer was much simpler than that. She’d fucked up. Somewhere along the line, despite her best efforts and intentions, she’d fucked up her Walk and got Dodd killed.

  That night she broke into a house, stole their DVD player, and pawned it at a Cash Converters. The guy who checked it out opened the drawer and removed a Spongebob Squarepants DVD, which he gave to her saying ‘That’ll be yours then.’ She stashed it guiltily in her rucksack, sickened at herself. Still, he gave her enough money to be able to wash away that feeling and most of the next two days with alcopops and Special Brew, so that was okay, and when they ran out she bought a small red craft knife and reopened the safety valves on the underside of her forearm, which had healed up in the months since she’d been with Dodd. Except he was dead now, wasn’t he? She slept under a flyover, sheltered in bushes at the base of a concrete buttress, having just enough sense to wrap up in a sheet of plastic so that she didn’t die of hypothermia. When her clothes became so filthy and foul-smelling that she nauseated even herself, she raided an Oxfam clothes bin, changing right there in the carpark: a pale, shivering creature, too ill-fed to have anything but a child’s body despite her age.

  Just like the good old days.

  She dreamed of the attack over and over again.

  She was trying to pull the train doors open again, staring up at the idiot who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – help, except now it was Dodd, and he was trying to tell her something. Yelling it at her, but she couldn’t hear through the glass. Then the door was suddenly sliding open, and dozens of hands were reaching down to grab at her, pulling her upward by her clothing.

  She woke, but the pulling continued. Something man-shaped was leaning over her, stinking of booze and cigarettes and rancid sweat, trying peel her clothes apart.

  Bex screamed and thrashed, flailing with all four limbs until her knee connected with something soft, and the shape issued a muffled groan of pain. It receded from her, but she pursued it, lashing out with her boots and an empty bottle which came to hand. It didn’t smash like they did in films – just made a series of meaty thuds until the shape stopped moving and it felt like she was beating a wet sponge. She gathered her things from her nest and fled before other manshadows were attracted to the noise.

  The following morning she visited the drop-in centre at St Martin’s church, where she got a hot meal, her cuts tended, and no questions asked. Walter found her hunched over a bowl of tomato soup with chunks of white bread floating in it like little clouds. He had cup of generic McBrand coffee in each hand and sat down opposite her as if the pause in their conversation had lasted only minutes rather than days.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Finished?’

  She looked at the soup, puzzled.

  ‘I meant have you finished punishing yourself?’

  She hmphed. ‘Stop following me.’

  ‘I was just passing. You’re welcome, by the way.’

  ‘I’m serious. Stop following me. I don’t need anyone looking out for me.’

  ‘Okay.’ He sighed and straightened. ‘It’s like this. You’re smart enough to know that all you can possibly accomplish here is to get yourself arrested and draw attention to the rest of us, and frankly, I can do without the hassle. To be honest, it’d make my life a lot easier if you’d disappeared along with Dodd.’

  ‘Ha. You and me both.’

  ‘But the truth is that you’re a resource – a very valuable one, and I can’t bear to see a good thing going to waste. We need you, Bex. We need people who know the Narrows, now more than ever. You have a place at Moon Grove for the moment, but you know that it won’t last. Think about it. You’ve got until Laying Up.’

  ‘Will you please. Just. Go. Away.’

  She listened to him leave and sat huddled in her jacket as the coffee in front of her grew cold.

  ***

  Bex returned to the Grove just long enough to pack a bag with trades and then took to the Narrows again for over a week, dossing down wherever she could earn space in a squat.

  She spent those days revisiting Dodd’s friends and contacts, both to share the news of his death and to pick up where he’d left off. She already knew quite a few of them from having followed him around learning the Narrows, and most were happy to carry on trading with the foul-mouthed, corkscrew-haired brat who’d tagged along with him.

  As a result she found herself bouncing from one side of the city to another, at each stop indiscriminately taking the first trade that came along. She ended up swapping a dozen cartons of cigarettes in Hockley for a pair of orthopaedic shoes in Quinton for ten kilos of oranges in Brownhills for the services of an unregistered Croatian chiropractor in Moseley. The goods themselves were irrelevant – they just bought her a place to sleep each night. What mattered was that she kept moving, trying to purge her body and mind of their respective poisons with the relentless walking. She found Dodd’s A-to-Z invaluable, as it was crammed with tightly scribbled notes of everywhere he’d been in the city and what might be found there. He had also, she discovered over several evenings, been mapping the Narrows – at least, as far as such a thing was possible. Much of what he had scrawled was incomprehensible: weird serpentine routes which seemed to take no account of roads, accompanied by odd symbols and cryptic marginal notations. It didn’t matter; it hadn’t been enough to stop him getting killed.

  The really frightening thing was that they were disappearing at an alarming rate. As the days went by she found that more and more of the Narrows through which she had travelled with him – some as recently as only a few weeks ago – had simply vanished altogether.

  The most obvious effect was that in the various squats she visited, preparations for Laying Up took on an edge of frantic urgency. Goods were being hoarded, and as the days went by it became increasingly difficult to find anything to trade. She knew that soon she would have to return to the Grove before everywhere shut their doors.

  The other, darker effect of these Closures, as they were called, was that journeys began to take a lot longer and became more d
angerous. The strange non-world through which they threaded was not what anybody could call safe at the best of times, but their disappearance was beginning to force the Narrowfolk out onto normal streets, where they were vulnerable to other predators, like gangs and the police.

  It seemed that this was already starting to take its toll of victims, because everywhere she went she heard tales of people disappearing. They might have been invisible and untraceable to the police and other authorities, but the Narrowfolk knew each others’ pitches and territories: who slept in which doorway, who laid claim to the leavings of which shops and tower blocks. At a time of year when everybody was stocking up on resources against the midwinter darkness, every missed trade and broken deal was noticed, and so were the empty nests of old duvets and cardboard boxes left to be blown away into the night.

  Amidst all of this, it was unsurprising that nobody had heard or seen anything of Dodd. Reluctantly, Bex concluded that there was only one remaining avenue of information open to her.

  5 Foundling

  When Andy and Laura’s parents arrived for dinner, she was fretting over the place-settings and he was trying to coax as much space as he could from their flat’s tiny living room, but as long as his X-box and some of the more dubious DVDs were well out of sight he supposed it would be fine. She had done something miraculous with shredded lamb, and even the dolmades were, he had to admit, pretty good. He didn’t feel it necessary to relate the adventure of how he’d come by the vine leaves – bad enough that he was marrying their daughter at all without being an obvious lunatic too.

  There was enough common ground between his own dad’s work as a chemical engineer for various multinationals and Gordon Bishop’s career in the financial sector for them to have a perfectly amicable conversation about what the government had got wrong with the economy, without having to tread the conversational minefield of politics. There seemed to be a tacit acknowledgement between the two men that things were likely to get tricky enough over the wedding arrangements without making things any worse. Even so, Valerie Bishop was content with how those plans were progressing – there was still half a year to go, after all – to be quite relaxed and chatty, but one anxiety was clearly preying on her mind.

  ‘There’s the issue of an announcement,’ she said, after the plates had been cleared and Andy had taken care of everybody’s drinks.

  ‘Announcement?’ asked his dad.

  ‘Yes. A wedding announcement.’

  Laura laughed. ‘I don’t think that’s really necessary. This is hardly going to be the social occasion of the season.’

  ‘Possibly not, but it is traditional.’

  ‘Well, Mummy, if it’s something you want to do, then please feel free to go ahead. I can’t see that it makes a massive difference one way or the other.’

  ‘You may not think so, but there is one thing that I don’t think you’ve considered, which Andrew’s parents might have an opinion about, and I thought it only right that they have some say in the matter.’

  ‘Well that’s very kind of you,’ said his mum, with almost undetectable irony. ‘What might that be?’ Beth Sumner had spent her life working the sharp edge of welfare counselling and citizens’ advice, out of a fiercely keen sense of natural justice. It had been on her suggestion that Andy had dropped out of his accountancy course, despite her husband’s insistence that the boy get some kind of career qualification behind him, on the grounds that if he genuinely had no desire for it, then maybe he was better off doing nothing until he knew what he did want to do.

  Valerie squared herself up in the manner of a person preparing to reluctantly deliver a painful but necessary truth. ‘The issue of Andrew’s birth mother.’

  The room went very quiet. Oh great, thought Andy. Here we go again.

  The nature of his adopted childhood had always held a disproportionately powerful fascination for Laura’s mother. It was usually worth a couple of raised eyebrows with people who didn’t know him, after which it ceased to be a novelty and just became part of the background static of his life. But for Valerie it was a filter through which she saw everything about him, and which for her provided explanations of every aspect of his personality. Had he dropped out of college? Did he lack apparent career ambition? Did he not like cheese? All of it could be explained by what she plainly thought were the emotionally crippling effects of being an adopted child.

  ‘I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at,’ his mother replied carefully.

  ‘Simply that, assuming that an announcement is made, we need to consider the implications should she happen to see it.’

  ‘What exactly might those be?’ asked his dad, who up to now, he could tell, had heroically resisted the urge to laugh out loud at this. ‘Gatecrash the wedding?’

  ‘I hardly think anything quite so melodramatic as that. But it might make things… awkward.’ No doubt she was entertaining a Dickensian nightmare scenario of swarms of reality-show-addicted freeloaders with Black Country accents and spray-on tans descending on the reception to loot the gift table.

  ‘Valerie, you really don’t need to worry about anything like that happening.’

  ‘Oh? Why not?’ She bristled, testy that her concerns should be dismissed so offhandedly.

  His father ticked off the reasons on his fingers. ‘There’s never been any contact from her, and assuming that she’s even alive, in this country, and happens to read the announcement, it’s not going to mean anything to her for the very simple reason that she won’t know what his name is. Andy was what you might call a foundling. He was left with no birth certificate or paperwork of any kind, so he was named after the policeman that found him. You don’t have to worry about him being the cause of anything awkward – well, nothing apart from the usual.’ He grinned at Andy and tossed back the rest of his beer.

  ‘Thanks for that, Dad.’

  Valerie looked at Andy. He shrugged. ‘All true, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well. This is – surprising.’

  Yes, thought Andy. Now she could embellish her Catherine Cookson fantasies with images of forlorn young women staggering, heavily pregnant, across windswept moors and leaving their whimpering, newspaper-wrapped bundles in telephone boxes or on railway stations, before ultimately dying picturesquely of consumption, in cobblestoned alleyways.

  He smiled and reached over with the bottle. ‘Another glass of wine, Valerie?’

  ***

  There was a decided frostiness about Laura in the way she helped him clear up afterwards. Something had obviously pissed her off, but she wasn’t going to tell him what it was; presumably it was his job either to work it out for himself by forensically picking apart the whole evening’s conversation, or to ask her so that she could tell him what he’d done wrong this time. It was the sort of mind-game that irritated him more than anything else. He stayed up late, until long after she’d gone to bed, playing computer games. At least he knew the rules for those.

  Later, he lay as far away as was physically possible on the other side of a rather small double bed, listening to her pretending to be asleep. Through a gap in the curtains, a narrow beam of yellow streetlight fell in a straight line down the middle, lying between them like a prison bar made of gold.

  ***

  Andy dreamt:

  …of a house crowded with twisted hallways, which were distorted by random shifts of perspective, where parallel lines always crossed and things got smaller the closer they came.

  …of a hundred doorways opening into mute rooms of dust and dead leaves.

  …of a great central gallery, dozens of floors high, cathedral-like, surrounded by balconies and gantries, walkways and balustrades, hung with dusty ropes, heavy with mould and warp and rust.

  And lost in its labyrinthine darkness a toddler’s bedroom: largely unfurnished but at least stable in this nightmare, l
ike an air-pocket in a sinking submarine, or an eye in a cyclone which is trying to rotate in both directions at the same time. Largely unfurnished, that is, but not undecorated, because above the bed, a circular brass ornament turns slowly: a series of concentric, spoked rings rotating within each other, indifferent to the fact that this is impossible – lines and circles sliding past and behind and between each other. Its slow dance fascinates the boy who lies naked on the bare mattress – slightly more than a baby; barely a child – watching bars and crescents of gleaming, yellow-warm metal appear and disappear above him.

  But it is not just this which holds him still.

  Andy looks down along his body and sees things sticking out of his skin. Things which look like stones, and in another of those twists of perspective which makes his head spin, he sees that they are both tiny, pencil-sized impalements and huge, full-sized standing stones at the same time, and that his body is simultaneously the size of a normal four-year-old boy but also an entire landscape, miles from one shoulder to the other, entire counties from head to toe. All over him, in him, are those needles of stone socketed in his flesh like old, grey teeth, and it is their combined weight which makes it impossible for him to so much as lift a finger, never mind what he wants to do, which is leap off this filthy mattress and run screaming down those twisting corridors…

  He awoke so violently that his outflung hand caught the corner of his bedside cabinet. Laura stirred and muttered ‘Whuz?’ at him, but by the time he’d stopped muttering ‘fuckshitfuck’ at the pain and mustered enough self-control to say ‘It’s just me. Sorry, shh, go back to sleep,’ she’d already done just that. Doing his best not to rouse her any further, he got out of bed and shuffled painfully into the hall.

  The strange-familiar silence of a living-room in the early hours of the morning settled around him, and he wandered here and there, touching the dimly-seen objects of the daytime world. Bunch of keys. TV remote. His Aston Villa mug. Should’ve washed that up. Bugger. They looked like props from a play that had been interrupted momentarily and were waiting only for the stage-lights to come up so that they could be made real again. He crossed to the window and peered out between the curtains, across the lawn which lay between the block of flats and the garages behind. From three floors up, he could see the ridges of rooftops beyond, outlined in the sodium glow of streetlights, and the shadowed labyrinth of suburban gardens. A heavy frost had fallen, and the blackness glittered.