“Got bones, have you?”
Dictionary paused. He jerked his head and barked wordlessly.
“Tchah—I feel I have bones. Aching bones.”
“I know what you mean.”
The Gunner got to his feet painfully. He tucked the bridle chains into his belt.
The dragon’s head came up at the sound of metal clinking against metal, and there was a shadow of red in its eyes as it peered straight down the center of the street at them.
“He heard that,” Dictionary observed mildly.
“Then he’ll know me next time,” grunted the soldier.
“Where does your path take you?”
“The long path? I got no read on that. But tonight?” He stretched. Took a few steps that were really limps disguised as walking. “Tonight, like snakey there, I need to be on my stone for the day’s turn, or else …”
Dictionary looked at the clock sticking out from the facade of the Law Courts like an unexpected pub sign.
“Fewer than three hours to midnight.”
The Gunner dragged his eyes from the dragon and looked up at the jerking wigged figure.
“Better get a start, then. S’ only a couple of miles, but it feels like it’s gonna be a long slog after the going-over he gave me.”
“And the children?”
The Gunner suddenly sat down again, exhausted. He busied himself with attaching the bridle chains to his belt as if this was what he had sat down for. Actually, he was barely able to stand. He just didn’t want to talk about it. Dictionary watched him, unusually motionless, not twitching at all. A gray bird settled on his head and squittered white down the back of his jacket. When he spoke again his voice was flat and harsh as a church door slamming.
“And the children, Gunner?”
“What must be, must be. And I must get my breath, and be on my stone at turn o’day.”
The Gunner finally met his eye. “—The children are on their own.”
“Not if you send a pigeon.”
The Gunners head came up. He shook it to clear it. He wasn’t thinking straight. He should have thought of that.
“Well?” said Dictionary. “Is that not your conceit? Is that not how the brethren of military spits communicate between themselves?”
“Worked in the trenches. Works in London,” mumbled the Gunner. “You’re right. But I’ll need to get a—”
Dictionary raised his hand. The gray bird hopped off his wig and onto it. He slipped off his plinth and crossed to the Gunner. The Gunner nodded and pulled a stub of pencil from one pocket and a tiny roll of paper from the other. The effort exhausted him.
“Shall I?” said Dictionary, and exchanged the bird for the writing materials.
The Gunner sat against the cool stone, eyes closed, gently holding the bird as Dictionary wrote. Then he took the minute scroll from him and attached it to the bird’s leg. He breathed into its ear.
“All the Jaggers. All the soldiers. Watch out for gargoyles. You’re a messenger, not a taint’s teatime snack.”
He gently lifted his hands, and the gray wings fluttered and the bird lofted gently into the night sky.
The Gunner watched it disappear into the night.
“Thanks, Dictionary.”
Dictionary just handed him back the pencil and paper and harrumphed. The Gunner got to his feet.
“Better make a start.”
Dictionary watched him stagger off. The Gunner turned.
“If I don’t…”
Dictionary nodded.
“It’ll not be just Jaggers and soldier-spits keeping an eye out for the children, Gunner. You have my word.”
The Gunner held his eyes for a beat, then nodded back.
“A word from you. That’s a thing well worth having.” Dictionary inclined his head in something like a bow. “You do me a kindness. Godspeed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TREEE
Mudlark and Frost Fair
There weren’t many people on the Embankment where George and Edie found themselves. Edie had slowed to a fast walk. Ahead of her, George saw a familiar shape silhouetted against the river lights.
“Oh, great. We’re going around in circles.”
“Only because you ran away.”
He didn’t have a good answer for that. They approached Cleopatra’s Needle, both of them watching the Sphinxes. Nothing happened.
George cleared his throat.
“You think we should …”
“What? Stop and say hello? You haven’t got time for that. And remember. The Gunner said they’re half-taint anyway, and that’s half too much for me.”
Nevertheless, George noticed she trailed her hand along the flanks of the Sphinxes as they passed.
“Why did you do that?” he asked, as they left the Sphinxes behind them.
“Show them I’m not scared,” she replied, as if that made all the sense in the world. She suddenly right-angled and sat down on an ornate iron bench, facing the river. The ends of the bench had been cast to look like crouching pack camels, presumably to continue the Egyptian motif along the riverside from Cleopatra’s Needle.
“Now what are you doing?” asked George, watching her take her boots off.
“Making a banana meringue,” she said irritably. “What does it look like?”
“It looks like you’re taking your shoes off.”
“Bingo. Bring the boy a genius badge.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I do. Simon says, take your shoes off, too.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how it works. If I say ‘Simon says,’you just do it, and then we don’t have to have a debate and waste time that you don’t have.”
He opened his mouth.
“Simon says, hurry up. Before that dragon notices us.”
His head snapped around in the direction she was pointing with her chin. A long way down the Embankment—though not long enough to make him anything like comfortable—there was another dragon holding a shield emblazoned with a red cross. This dragon was silver, and stubbier that the one guarding Temple Bar, but stubby in a bunch-of-compacted-muscles kind of way, and the frozen snarl on its face showed teeth that George wanted to see no closer up than this.
He sat on the bench. He took off his shoes. Edie was stripping off her tights too.
“Simon says, trousers too.”
“What?”
There was a sudden hiss and snap from the region of his knees, and the bench bucked as the camel tried to bite him. He stumbled forward, scrabbling away from the hissing creature. Edie rode the convulsion out, gripping the seat with both hands.
“It tried to bite me!”
He leaned back against the lamppost on the edge of the river wall. Something roiled and squirmed under his hand. He moved it away just fast enough to stop the iron fish that wound around the base from closing its gaping mouth on it. He hopped into the no-man’s land between the bench and the river wall.
“What’s going on?”
“They’re little taints, aren’t they? Let’s get out of here before they get the attention of one of the big ones. We got to get past that dragon to get to the Black Friar, and we got to get to the Friar before turn o’day. Meaning midnight, I reckon. It’s what the Gunner said.”
He looked up the road at the dragon, which seemed a lot closer than when he last looked, though it hadn’t moved at all.
“How do we get past it?”
“Simon says, follow me.”
And she crossed to a gate in the river wall, and vaulted over. In two steps she was out of sight. George grabbed his shoes and followed as fast as he could.
Edie was at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, gingerly putting her foot into the inky blackness beyond.
“You’re joking!”
“No,” she said, without stopping as she went knee-deep in the dark water. “I’m wet and I’m cold and I reckon we should get this over with as fast as we can.”
“We’r
e swimming?”
She finished tying her bootlaces together and hung her boots around her neck.
“You swim if you want. I’m going to wade. The tide’s going out, I expect.” She set off along the greasy river wall, one hand trailing along it for balance. “I hope there’s not broken glass here.”
George stepped into the water. His feet sucked into silt below, up to his calf. It was cold and oozy, and in the ooze there were lumps like pebbles and sticks, and when he looked off to his right there was nothing but water between him and the south of London. He had the strong sense of something untamed and dangerous out there beneath the ripples in the center of the river. It felt—in a way he couldn’t quite explain to himself—like walking on the edge of a cliff: only, instead of a gulf of air sucking at him, there was a dark undertow coiling past. He found that, like Edie, he was keeping one hand on the river wall, and not just for balance.
A thought occurred, uncomfortably.
“How do you know it’s going out?”
“What’s going out?”
“The tide. How do you know it isn’t coming in?”
“I don’t.”
“Oh.”
They splashed on, passing under the gangplank leading to an old steamer permanently moored to the river-bank. As they negotiated the canyon between the river wall and the rusting upsweep of the boat’s hull, they could hear laughter and music coming from the deck. A lit cigarette arced into the darkness and fizzed out in the water between them.
“Simon says, think positive.”
“Does Simon say how far we have to do this for?”
“One more bridge.”
He splashed on. He remembered a summer’s afternoon, walking along the river with both of his parents. He remembered looking over the edge to see people walking on mudbanks exposed by low tide, people with spades and buckets. People looking for things.
“People come down here at low tide and look for things,” he said.
Edie grunted.
“It’s like beachcombing, only there’s no beach. Just mud. It’s called mudlarking.”
She didn’t even bother to grunt this time. Just kept on going. He scowled at her and wondered if she was as cold and miserable as he was.
And then she fell and was gone.
George didn’t think. He stumbled forward, lurched into the water, and reached for where she’d last been. His hands closed on nothing but river.
His hands sculled blindly beneath the water. Edie had been snatched from the face of the earth as abruptly as someone throwing an on-off switch.
“Edie!”
He found stuff in his hands and he tugged it to the surface, but it was just a black bin-liner leaking fruit peels and plastic packaging. He tossed it and plunged back into the water.
The blackening undertow winding out in the deeper part of the river was pulling at him.
“Give her back!” he shouted as his arms flailed in the icy water, churning faster and faster. He had no idea, when he later reran the moment, why he was shouting or who he was shouting at—only that it was something out there, something beyond his depth. His hand smacked at the water surface, as if trying to waken her from a sudden sleep.
“EDIE!”
Then his foot hit something and he reached for it, and it was her, and he yanked, and then they both stumbled to the side of the river wall and spluttered for a bit. She looked smaller. Her hair rat-tailed down on either side of a face now streaked with river mud.
“You okay?”
She spat Thames water back into the river and nodded, still coughing too much to speak clearly.
“Hole,” was all she could say, as she wiped slime from her eyes.
“You’re okay.” He smiled encouragingly.
She looked back at the patch where she’d disappeared.
“Sucked me in.”
He lost the smile.
“It didn’t.”
“George, it sucked me in. Something sucked me in.”
George thought. He fumbled at his belt.
“Bit late for that, George. I told you to take them off. You’re soaked now—”
“Simon says, shut up and hold on to this… .” He pulled his belt through the belt loops on his trousers and held one end out to her. His voice was firm. “That way, if you go in again I can find you quicker.”
After a long beat she reached out and wound one end of the belt around her fist. She nodded.
“Or we both get pulled in.”
“I thought Simon said, think positive,” George said, pushing his way in front of her. “I’ll lead. I’ll go first.”
“Simon says that saying Simon was a stupid idea,” she said, almost sounding like she was apologizing. “Not like the belt. The belt’s a good idea.”
Without needing to say another word, they set off along the river wall.
They passed under a complicated switchback pontoon and pier that made creaking noises as the water slapped at it on the river side. On the road above, a police car sirened past, blue light splashing on the underside of the trees that overhung the Embankment above them.
Edie stumbled and got her balance quickly. He started to ask if she was okay, but she got her question in early, as if heading him off.
“So you’re rich, are you?”
He took a moment to register what she’d said.
“What?”
“You’re rich. I saw the street you live on. The house. All shiny modern, like the adverts.”
“We’re not rich. My mum rents it.”
“Gotta be rich to rent it.”
“We’re not rich. She’s an actress.”
“Actresses are rich.”
George thought of his mother and his father and all the shouting, all the arguing about bits of paper that came in long brown envelopes or stiff white ones that had to be signed for.
“Not all the time.”
Edie walked on. Unimpressed.
“How many bedrooms you got?”
“Two. And a sort of third one that’s a sort of study.”
“You and your parents live there, and how many brothers or sisters or whatnot?”
“Just me and my mum.”
“Two of you and sort of three bedrooms? You’re rich. And I bet your dad’s got a house too, right?”
“He’s dead.”
Edie absorbed this.
“Oh.”
They walked on. The water was getting lower again, as if there was a mudbank humping to the surface beneath their feet. Both of them were beginning to shiver with the cold. George clamped his mouth tight to stop his teeth chattering.
“What about you?” asked George through clenched teeth, eager to take the spotlight off himself.
“Me, too.”
“You’re rich?”
“No. My dad’s dead.”
“Oh.”
They splashed on. It felt very lonely down here in the lee of the Embankment, below the lintel of the city, wading through the icy mud.
“So you live with your mum?”
“No,” she replied after a pause. “She’s not around.”
“So where do you—”
“I stay in hostels. For runaways. It’s crappy, okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
“I run away from them too.” She sniffed defiantly. I m freezing.
They trudged on a bit.
“When I’m hungry, I think of food,” she said. “I think of when I was the most stuffed, when I couldn’t eat another thing.”
“Should think it makes you more hungry.” George shivered.
“No. It works. Try it.”
“I’m not hungry,” said George.
“Not hungry, you mung. When were you the warmest?”
“Oh,” said George.
He sploshed through a flotilla of fish and chip wrappers.
“I was in a barn. In the hay. With my dad.”
“Your dad is a farmer? Was a farmer, sorry?”
“No,” said Georg
e, remembering. “He was making a bull.”
“He was whatting a bull?” she asked incredulously.
“He was an artist. Someone wanted a bull. So he got this farmer who had a bull, and he had him put it in a stall, and then we went down and he sketched it.”
Just for an instant he smelled the memory of warm hay and his father’s cigarettes. Then it was gone.
“I wasn’t meant to be there. But my mum had an audition. She’s always having auditions. And so he had to take me with him. It was great. I was quite little and it was winter and you could see the bull’s breath coming out in two snorty clouds when he breathed. He even had a ring through his nose—I mean, he was a real bull.”
“Doesn’t sound very warm,” muttered Edie.
“No, it was. It was great. Dad wrapped me in this blanket from the car and he made a hay bed, like a hole in the hay, and I sat there next to him, and we had thermoses of tea and that bright-orange tomato soup that stains your lips, and he drew and I drew too, except I got so warm in my hay bed that I fell asleep. I mean it was really toasty, and it smelled great, and when I woke up it was getting dark and he was finished and just lying beside me… .”
He remembered it all. The glow of the lightbulb in the roof, making all the hay golden. And the massive black bull, big as a small car, quietly chomping on its feed. And the sound of his dad smoking. He’d always smoked when he was working, but only outside. When George was old enough to know that smoking was a really bad idea if you liked things like lungs and living, his dad had made a pact. He’d half stop smoking. Never inside. Only while working. And never in a pub. So that’s how George remembered him: the sound of his dad concentrating, one eye screwed up against the smoke drifting up his cheek, hands steady, always sketching or making something. And the regular quiet pop-and-suck sound he made on the cigarette parked in one side of his face: the sound of a man smoking without using his hands. Even though smoking was such a bad thing, he still found the memory of the noise soothing.
And it hadn’t been the smoking that killed him anyway.
“That’s the warmest I remember being,” he said to eradicate the next memory that was winging in out of the dark, out of the place where he banished it as often as he could.
“I went to a farm once,” said Edie. “School trip. A goat peed on me.”
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