Lungdon

by Edward Carey

  ‘That’s a great deal of youth then, isn’t it?’

  ‘And future,’ she said, ‘and hope.’

  ‘Ah well, I am learning things!’

  ‘What are you going to do on Westminster Bridge, Clod?’ she asked of a sudden.

  ‘However did you know about that?’

  ‘Pinalippy mentioned it. She was talking to you but I was in the room.’

  ‘We’re to gather there tomorrow morning at eight of the clock.’

  ‘Who is we?’

  ‘My family, all my family, those of us that are left.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I hardly know. It is Grandfather’s orders and he is the head of our family.’

  ‘Is it something terrible you plan to do, something monstrous?’

  ‘I do hope not. I think, above all else, it is a home that we seek, our own having been taken from us. We need a place in the world, a small portion of that which we may call our own.’

  ‘But why must it be tomorrow morning and no other morning, and why at Westminster Bridge?’

  ‘Truly, I do not know.’

  ‘But I do!’ said Eleanor, slapping her head. ‘I do! Tomorrow is the eighth!’

  ‘Yes, and what of that?’

  ‘I was going to go with Nanny! Oh! We had planned to set out early together so that we’d be able to see her as she passes along The Mall!’

  ‘See who, Eleanor, who?’

  ‘The Queen! The Queen! Tomorrow is the State Opening of Parliament!’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, still rather confused. ‘Oh. Then I suppose we shall be asking for a home.’

  ‘But you’ll never get inside Parliament, there’ll be police and soldiers everywhere. You can’t just walk in, you know.’

  ‘Well, Eleanor, it is not my plan, you see.’

  ‘You’re going to do something, aren’t you? What are you going to do? Why are you all meeting on the bridge?’

  ‘We have just been told to gather there.’

  ‘And will you go, will you?’

  ‘Yes, I think I must.’

  ‘You are a cruel people, I know you are. I saw you for a moment, don’t forget that, all of you in the house opposite ours, all crowded in the dark. You terrified me. You threw things at me. Things were moving in that house, everyday objects, as if they had life. You, Clod, you do not seem so cruel as the others, but how should I know? You may be the very devil himself.’

  ‘We do have a right to life, Eleanor; I think, as much as anyone.’

  ‘You mustn’t do anything terrible. Clod, you must promise me that.’

  ‘Why ever should I do anything terrible? Listen, honestly, Eleanor …’

  ‘Clod Iremonger, look at me.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘Promise me, promise me that you’ll not harm anyone.’

  ‘Well, yes, I … I don’t really understand … but …’

  ‘Promise!’

  ‘Yes then, all right, I do promise. Of course.’

  ‘Clod, if you don’t mind,’ she said a little breathlessly, ‘I’d like to be left alone now. I wish to write my diary.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’

  ‘You need not apologise, not to me at least.’

  ‘Should I go and find Pinalippy, do you think?’

  ‘Yes, I think it might clear the air rather. She is up on the roof.’

  ‘Well then, the roof it is.’

  So slowly, cherishing each steady step before I reached the Pin, did I gradually ascend the fallen great aunt’s house.

  Oh this business of human feeling, of keeping the engines, all the tubes of thoughts and emotions, all the cogs of love and like and hate, what a great effort it all was! How to make sense of how another person tocs and ticks, how to read their eyebrows and lips, how on earth to fathom, for example, the engine that is Pinalippy. There is no instruction manual to that. I’d always found that particular construction hugely complicated and wont to blow up in one’s face, as if there were no set rules to follow and that, well, she made it up as she went along. She was so many different weathers, was Pinalippy Lurliorna Iremonger.

  The door of one of the maid’s rooms in the attic was closed; when I opened it I found there was rubbish all over the floor. I stepped in and shut the door quickly so that those bits shouldn’t find Binadit down below. A chair had been placed by a window. This was certainly where Pinalippy had got up in her brooding, and the rubbish, seizing a brief moment, had rushed in with the hope of finding Binadit. I followed her, pushing the window open and climbing through. Then I was out, out in the thick, dark, London air. There was rubbish all over the roof, skipping rubbish, streams of this and that trying to find the old heapmate. I crawled on through the cold wind.

  She was further over than the mansard roof of the maid’s room, I could see her legs sticking out from behind a chimney stack. I began to crawl towards her on all fours. I hadn’t been up on a roof since the night I ran from a Gathering through the Forest of the roof of Heap House. The thought made me wobble a little, and yet still I must say that it was good to be out of that thick house, high up, on a small part of the top of London, of London Lid, of London skin. As I crawled closer I could hear talking.

  Pinalippy was not alone.

  The further up the roof I travelled the more I began to see the second person there. Two pairs of legs. Both female. I couldn’t hear their words exactly, not for all the noise of the wind up there and the dirt swirling about, hoping to get in.

  ‘I say, hallo,’ I called, because I’d quite made up my mind to talk to her.

  The voices stopped.

  I turned the corner. There was Pinalippy and there, next to her, she was coming into view, a curtain ring hanging from her ear: there on the roof of the Turned Great Aunt, sat my strange Cousin Otta with all her sharp teeth in her mouth, shivering in the cold. Her big head shifted in a terror at seeing me and she was very briefly another chimney stack, and then a grey fox, then a huge mastiff and then she was Otta once again, but the grimace still remained, very dog-like it was.

  ‘Clod!’ she barked.

  ‘Oh is it you, Clod,’ said Pinalippy, not looking in any way pleased to see me. ‘Forgive us if we don’t get up.’

  ‘Hallo,’ I said, ‘it’s Otta, isn’t it? You tried to trick me once, back at the House, you pretended you were one of Tummis’s animals, and your brother, Unry, was disguised as Tummis. Do you remember?’

  ‘Course I do. We did it to bring you in, didn’t we? To reel you in.’

  ‘That wasn’t very nice, was it?’

  ‘Nice! What a baby you are. Still stuck in the past are you?’

  ‘It is where I come from.’

  ‘Still lost in your own little history, I gather from Pinalippy. Still in mourning.’

  She changed very quickly into a box of matches – one with a tape across it marked SEALED FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE – and then she came back as Otta again, all this achieved in the merest seconds.

  ‘How clever you are, Cousin Otta,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘I’m teaching others to shift too, to grow into rats. How they come on, my many charges!’

  ‘Rats, indeed,’ I said.

  ‘She’s dead, Cousin Clod, your matchbox,’ Otta said, and she illustrated this by being very briefly a coffin, before returning to her human shape, ‘and the dead are growing in number all about us.’

  ‘Clod,’ said Pinalippy, ‘Cousin Otta has been so good to look for us, flying through the streets as a seagull, or in and out of houses as a rat and a beetle, but she has found us at last, and she came to report. There are less of us than before.’

  ‘We are being trapped, Cousin Clod,’ said Otta. ‘There have been some murders since we left Connaught Place. Iremongers, poor Iremongers, surrounded in these foreign streets, trapped and shot dead.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ I said. ‘Who has died, if I may ask?’

  Otta illustrated the list of our dead. She was first of all an ink blotter.

&
nbsp; ‘Who’s that?’ I wondered.

  ‘Cusper Iremonger,’ said Pinalippy, ‘from Bayleaf House. A clerk.’

  ‘Poor Cusper,’ I said, ‘I never knew him.’

  Then she was a letter knife.

  ‘Rippit! They’ve taken Rippit. That letter knife is Alexander Erkmann, Tailor of Foulsham. My plug!’

  ‘No, Clod, no. Look closer. This is in fact a butter knife that was Governor Churls Iremonger’s birth object, he that had been in charge of the great Heap Wall.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said, ‘him I’d heard of, but never met. Is it terribly wrong to wish Rippit a little harmed? Not dead perhaps, but he does frighten me so.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry over that if I were you,’ said Otta. ‘It’s Pinalippy who should be the more worried.’

  ‘Pinalippy? Really? Why ever?’

  ‘Because he’s after her. He’s tracking her.’

  ‘Pinalippy? Otta, are you sure?’

  ‘I think he’s gone a little mad. I have seen him over Lungdon setting fire to things and to people. He has lost something of Umbitt’s and has gone searching for it, and now is most especially looking for Pinalippy.’

  ‘Well, Pinalippy, I shan’t let him do anything to you,’ I said.

  ‘Shan’t you now?’ she said, looking away from me.

  ‘There are others dead yet,’ said Otta.

  She was a length of rope tied into a noose.

  ‘Oh, is that Uncle Pottrick’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pinalippy, ‘Pottrick’s no more.’

  ‘Poor fellow, he never was one to love life, poor old man.’

  Then Otta was a tortoiseshell shoehorn.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I think I do know that, that’s Underbutler Ingus Briggs’s, isn’t it? Unless I’m much mistaken.’

  ‘You are not,’ said Pinalippy. ‘Shot dead in the street.’

  ‘Poor Briggs. He loved pincushions, you know; he showed me them once, was ever such a good fellow.’

  ‘Dead now, Clod, murdered.’

  Then Otta was a lead weight with ‘10 lb’ marked on its side.

  ‘Oh!’ I gasped. ‘That’s Cousin Foy. They shouldn’t have killed poor Foy, she never was any harm to anyone, but was ever the gentlest of creatures.’

  ‘Dead now, Clod, quite dead.’

  ‘Poor dear Foy, that’s terrible. Please, please let that be an end on it.’

  ‘No, Clod, not yet.’

  Next Otta was a footpump.

  ‘Not Cousin Pool!’ I cried.

  ‘Yes, Pool is gone too.’

  ‘He was my friend, you see, we sat together in Purgamentum Class, when we studied rubbish, back in the school room. And, oh no, please not, I wonder if, Otta, next you shall be …’

  Otta was a hot-water bottle cover.

  ‘… oh dear. Oh Cousin Theeby! Theeby and Pool together! There never were such young people as loved each other so much.’

  Otta was herself again. ‘I keep the tally, Clod. Our dead, you see, are mounting up.’

  ‘Oh Otta, I do see! Such cruelty, such horribleness, such murdering!’

  ‘That’s it, Clod, that’s it indeed. To your own family.’

  ‘And Moorcus? And his particular toastrack?’

  ‘They’ve not been seen, neither one of them.’

  ‘He tried to get us captured, did you know that?’

  ‘Though there is this,’ she said and was very quickly a wooden doorstop.

  ‘That was Officer Duvit’s.’

  ‘And beside it was …’

  A folding pocket rule.

  ‘Officer Stunly’s. They were in on it too,’ I said. ‘I never wished them dead though. I’d never wish that, though I should indeed have words with Moorcus should I ever see him again.’

  ‘It was Rippit that killed Stunly and Duvit.’

  ‘Why on earth should he do that?’

  ‘For disobeying Umbitt, I shouldn’t wonder. He is such a wild one, Rippit, no controlling him. Umbitt shan’t keep him close and so he burns up here and there, and has gone quite vicious. He has lost something special that he was given to look after, and Umbitt Owner hates him for losing it, so now Rippit murders those he thinks have taken it. He’s broken off from the rest of us. When Umbitt berated him, he tried to set the old governor alight, he even burnt his coat tails until Umbitt, in his fury, banished him from all the family, spat him out. Oh yes, Rippit’s gone wild and lawless, gone very furious and cruel. And now, it seems, he looks for Pinalippy.’

  ‘Why, Pinalippy, whatever have you taken?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, deathly pale, ‘nothing at all.’

  ‘Those are the dead,’ said Otta. ‘No doubt there’ll be more yet.’

  ‘It’s not right,’ I said, ‘it’s not at all proper.’

  ‘Indeed, it is not,’ agreed Pinalippy. ‘It’s quite improper.’

  ‘A terrible wrong. An injustice!’

  ‘That’s it, and then what?’

  ‘Something,’ I said, ‘something must be done about it!’

  Both Pinalippy and Otta were looking at me with fierce intent eyes, and they said in precise union, ‘Yes!’

  There was a silence then, just the wind blowing between us. I was shivering, shivering like I might break apart, but not from cold, from anger.

  ‘That’s my report,’ said Otta.

  ‘How horrid,’ I whispered.

  ‘Be an Iremonger,’ said Otta.

  ‘I am an Iremonger,’ I said.

  ‘Be an Iremonger while there are Iremongers left.’

  ‘I am an Iremonger!’

  ‘Prove it.’

  Otta glared at me once more, shifted her bottom a little on the roof, raised her arms up, jumped and was in an instant a huge seagull, her curtain ring around a foot, heaving herself up into the air and back out into London.

  ‘It’s as if she blames me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do it.’

  ‘No,’ said Pinalippy, ‘but perhaps you may stop it.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You.’

  The Policeman Down There is Getting Fat

  We sat a while up there on the roof, Pinalippy and I, in silence, shivering and steaming at the same time. How cruel it all was. I kept seeing poor Pool and Theeby, and Foy with her horrible weight. It felt so very near the end, sitting up there. Pinalippy was staring hard at me, I knew she was, and I didn’t dare look back at her. At last I muttered,

  ‘She is, you know, Cousin Otta I mean, in her way, quite incredible.’

  ‘Yes, Clod.’

  ‘A very talented personage all together.’

  ‘Yes, Clod, she is, for now, whilst she’s still living. We’re running out, Clod, we Iremongers.’

  ‘Oh, Pinalippy, I don’t know what you all want me to do! I’m just Clod, nothing more. I can move things and hear things, I can do that, but I am no great battle-knight, I am no thunder-god, I am merely … Clod.’

  ‘Hush, Clod!’ hissed Pinalippy. ‘There’s a policeman down below.’

  There was indeed a policeman down there, he was wandering around the square, he had a lantern with him and he was gathering up the unfortunate objects that had been put out of doors by the sad, quarantined people within. We crawled close to the edge of the roof, the better to see him.

  He had stooped down to gather at several houses already, some big objects, some small, and each glistened for a moment under the lantern so that we could vaguely make them out: a lacrosse stick, a decanter, a theodolite, a lectern, a pair of scales. Each time he picked an object up he looked around him briefly before carrying on. He’d been at three doors when I suddenly understood something.

  ‘See, Pinalippy, do you see?’ I whispered. ‘He picks up each object, waits a moment and then moves on.’

  ‘Yes, and so what?’

  ‘When he gets to the next door the object he’s picked up is no longer there, he’s not holding it.’

  ‘That’s right! But where can they have gone? He must have put them down.’
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  ‘No, Pin, no.’

  ‘You called me Pin!’

  ‘They’ve not been put down at all. They’re nowhere to be seen.’

  ‘Then where’ve they gone?’

  ‘Look at him. What’s different about him?’

  ‘He looks just the same to me.’

  ‘No, look properly. See all the doors around the square are the same size – before he was a bit taller than the knocker, but now he’s longer than the door itself.’

  ‘And fatter.’

  ‘Yes, and fatter.’

  ‘But how can that be?’

  ‘He’s feeding on them,’ I said.

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Then …’

  ‘Then he’s a Gathering!’

  ‘A Gathering here in London!’ gasped Pinalippy. ‘I’ve got to tell them, I must send word to the others,’ said Pinalippy. ‘They’ll need to know.’

  ‘There may be many of them.’

  ‘To think what harm one single Gathering did to Heap House. And it is them, these Gatherings, that are coming for Iremongers, they must be the ones who have been shooting us! I must warn them. Grandfather pulled that Gathering apart.’

  ‘How about Otta? She can tell them.’

  ‘But she won’t be back until morning. I know where Umbitt Owner is, she told me, I’m going to send word. Besides which, I think I need to see Umbitt, I have something I must … tell him. If I can do this quickly then all will be well, I must just first get to Umbitt, he’ll protect me. As soon as this fellow has finished his feeding I’m going.’

  ‘I’ll come along too.’

  ‘No you shan’t, we’ll need you tomorrow morning on the bridge.’

  ‘Why, Pinalippy, what on earth is it I’m supposed to do on Westminster Bridge?’

  ‘You’ll think of something.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Think of Pool and Theeby, think of Pottrick and Foy, think of Briggs even and Timfy too, then maybe you’ll itch up a thought worth thinking. We have to stop them or we’ll all be dead, Clod, every last one of us.’

  ‘I must earn my trousers, I do see that now.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s a start.’

  The policeman was done. He’d left the square.

  ‘I’m going, Clod.’