Marm rubbed my shoulders gently, pressing me down towards a chair in the corner. It was heaped with cushions and a headrest, and bore the smell of other bodies. In a daze, I slumped back and watched as Marm busied herself. She struck a match and set its flame to a small spirit stove. Medicinal breezes wafted as she unstoppered jars and extracted their contents with fine long-handled spoons. A small retort filled with black-brown syrup soon began bubbling. Waxy, resinous, clouds filled the air; that harsh, sweet smell of burning.
‘Fine in mind and body are you, my dear?’ Marm asked as she fluttered about. ‘Heart strong—but then of course it is.’ A long needle like a hatpin glittered, and she stirred its tip in the bubbling retort, then played the glossy bead which formed under the blue spirit flame until it darkened. ‘A few sweet seeds from the sun-warmed tropics. What could be more natural? And aether, too, comes from the ground. It rises and grows and flowers. But then I don’t need to tell you that, do I? You of all people, Robbie. You’ll have to tell me what it’s like in Bracebridge sometime. Do you fly about in the air like changeling sprites, where there’s so much aether?’
The pigeons cooed outside the window.
‘It’s simple, really. We all have dreams, don’t we?’ Marm produced a pipe. It was long and thick-stemmed, although the bowl at the end was tiny. Then she made a sign in whispering silk and withdrew a small inlaid box from the cabinet. I felt a tug within me, a burning on my wrist of my long-forgotten Mark. Even before she opened the lid and wyredarkness wreathed out, I knew that it contained aether.
‘So you must tell me what you want, Robbie …’ Marm swirled the hatpin into the aether and then thumbed the darkly gleaming bead into the pipe’s tiny bowl. The silks shifted as she sucked at the flame. A tiny black-white star, the bead bubbled and ignited. She let out a jet of dark-white smoke.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised—although I, of course, never will be—at the requests that are made here in this dreamhouse. You men never do quite want the obvious thing that every young girl seeking a husband or a client imagines. It never is quite that, although that may be part of it. But if you have a girl you’re sweet on, or one you’re hoping for—then I can give her to you in every way that you’ve ever dared imagine. Or is it money you’re after? Or the comfort of fine things? Or something else …’ Shadows flashed as Marm blew out the smoke again. ‘Or is it fear that tingles you? A little pain to go with the pleasure? I understand the need for that too. A little shit to flavour the banquet, some piss in the wine … ?’
She puffed again.
‘Open your mouth.’
There was a new tenderness in Marm’s eyes as she stooped to press her lips against mine. She tasted of wine, cigarettes, buttery flesh, and of the sweet-bitter smoke which came pouring into me. I felt a flowering of well-being, a glow which continued to expand until it became so large that the distinction between physical and mental joy dissolved, and with it all my usual sense of self, although I remained conscious of the room, of the sparking carpet dust and the slow waves of aether-curdled smoke which wafted out of the window past the summer-intoxicated pigeons. Cooo Coo. Cooo Coo. And Marm was still with me, sharing the exquisite brush of these new senses. Suddenly, everything was laughably frail. And what did I want? What did I desire?
Easy as a ghost, I lifted from the chair and passed through the wall above the spirit flame. All the windows were open along the carpeted corridors of the dreamhouse beyond. A fresh breeze had risen up from the Thames, quenching the heat of the afternoon. Heavy-leafed ferns nodded in their pots like undersea weeds. The air pressed me on, gently insistent, as I floated on through flock walls. This was indeed a strange and complex building. Here was Saul, holding court amid the flypapers of the kitchen with the other dreamhouse mistresses who remembered him growing up as a lad here; a sweet novelty to be kissed and tickled until his growing bulk and the male croak of his voice, which would have upset the customers, forced him out into the streets.
Thistledown, I floated on, passing through a window. There was London, green and gold and floating on this warm early summer afternoon. I laughed and spiralled in the huffing updrafts of an engine house, and watched the insect traffic, the pinhead people. The rooftops grew mountainous towards Northcentral, punctuated by spires and domes and the cool recesses of courtyards, the dark flash of Hallam Tower. Here, the landscape was surprisingly green, jewelled with ponds and the intricacies of rooftop gardens, all set around the vast and jagged emerald of Westminster Great Park. I would happily have dived down to float in the wake of the striped buggies and the flecked umbrellas, or danced with the kites which floated above the lawns, but the streaming air of London still bore me upwards until the sky dimmed and I was tumbling and lost. The wind was colder up here, and I could tell from its scent, its persistence, that it was blowing me north. England was teeming below me, and I struggled against it, but the power of the aether spread its dark wings and bore me onwards.
SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.
There it lay; Bracebridge, curled once again in the lazy warmth of a summer Halfshiftday. I saw that the ashpits had still barely began their climb up Coney Mound and that the old warehouses on past the allotments were standing. I had fallen once more into the past. SHOOM BOOM. The rivermeads. The glinting brown river. Rainharrow’s grey-green flanks, swirled by ruins and sheep paths. The grey strip of High Street. The tile and brick blur of Coney Mound. And at the centre of it all, neat in this sunlight as a map, a blueprint, a vision of this industrial world, lay Mawdingly & Clawtson. Roofs and yards. The spreading arms of tracks and depots. The black glow of the quickening pools. There was East Floor, where my father worked, and this bigger roof with its proud chimneys could only be Engine Floor, beneath which, far down on Central Floor, deep in the riven earth, the pistons still flashed and hammered even on this Halfshiftday afternoon as figures shouted and scurried across the far fields and picnic squares of blanket paved the path beside the river. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM. Then something, somehow, changed. The amazed air fell silent. The figures on the football fields halted. The river seemed to stop flowing. Even the sunlight froze. There was a rumbling, followed by a series of huge but dull detonations which rose and grew louder, drumbeat by drumbeat, pouring up into the thunderous, drifting silence which had fallen over the town. Then, in a wyrewhite torrent of gas and pressure, the roof of Central Floor exploded. Flames fountained, their light blackening in the onrush of steam and aether. There was chaos and smoke. Girders flew. Dust plumed. The darkness shivered, the sky shook, and I was tumbling back through it into nowhere, driven by the breaking air.
‘You’re a strange one for sure.’
I could feel a chair, a smoky rasp in my throat, as the elements of the dreamhouse room slowly gathered themselves around me. The sun was still shining, the pigeons were still cooing, I was in London, and Marm was flapping about me like a fallen kite in her bright dressing gown. My eyeballs were stinging. I felt ill and giddy.
‘Don’t think I’ve ever travelled so far with a client.’ Cleaning her implements, she blew her pipe clean with a little toot. ‘Or got so little out of it. Oh, here it comes …’ With an expert movement, she grabbed a tin bucket just as I leaned forward, my stomach lurching. ‘Perhaps it’s the money that makes the difference,’ she continued, stroking my head as I vomited. ‘Perhaps you should have paid—not that you could afford it. But despite all the rubbish Saul talks, nothing’s ever quite so good when you get it for free, is it?’
IV
LOOK AT ME NOW. Robbie, not Robert. Warehouse ink staining my fingers, borrowed money in my pockets, dressed in a waistcoat almost as fine as Saul’s. Look at me, and look at Saul, and look at Maud, too, hopping from toe to toe in a pink skirt of surprising finery as bracelets tinkle at her wrists on this Midsummer day as we cluster around a shared cigarette by the dustbins between two Doxy Street boarding houses, watching the trams go by as we debate the wild moment for the leap which will take us to the fair in Westminster Great Park.
‘It’s easy for you lads—I’ve never done it. And look at these skirts!’
‘Neither have I. How do we know it even works?’
‘Well, it’s up to you.’ Saul’s smile is caught in a slot of noon light. ‘We can always just get on the tram ..
But that would be unthinkable. I take a long drag through wet strings of tobacco and pass it on to Maud. Of course, I have to do what Saul says, and so does Maud, although her hands shake as she puffs the cigarette, and for that alone I feel more warmly towards her. Another tram clashes by. Then it’s gone, and all that’s left is the sunlit bustle of Doxy Street—and that tramline; a deep, six inch-wide metal gutter, within which, rattling and gurgling, churns a wyrebright coil of iron.
Maud goes first. She dives out through a lull in the traffic like a lacy bullet and stands astride the rail. Then, elbows tugging the corners of her skirts, she bends. Her fingers, miraculously, are still attached to her hands when she darts back to us. But they are gleaming.
‘You didn’t say this would be dirty.’
‘Quick—now it’s your turn Robbie.’
Dazed, I push off, dodging a cart and nearly toppling a cyclist until I’m standing astride the tramline as all Doxy Street swarms about me. I can feel the driven metal, those twisting flecks of oil and aether which hiss and clatter between the churning engine houses that punctuate the city in smoking exclamation marks. But the thing is not to think—the thing is to submit to the will of whatever it is that still drives me and to remember that Saul and Maud are watching. And then it’s done, and I’m running back, tumbling dustbins, and Saul is dashing out. When I dare to lift my arms to look, I find that I still have palms and fingers instead of sobbing stubs.
‘It’s coming … !’
A tram is swaying through the Midsummer crowds, black wyreflames and white sparks spluttering beneath its belly. One, two, three carriages, all full to bursting with sweating feastday passengers, and then the last, by which time we are yelling like mad as we dodge the intervening wagons and jump at the tram’s retreating rear, which is at least twice as high and grimy as I expected, and sloped without any place to grip for the very reason of this trick we are trying. But we cling on as the track tunnels beneath us, murmuring under our breath the circle of sound which we have been practising and scarcely believing all morning. My palms are holding as if glued, welded against the rivets, and my breath cannot stop the chant. We cling on, spread-eagled and singing above the turning rails as Doxy Street unwinds in shining fresh-washed pavements, the very stones flushed and steaming with all the bustle of this Midsummer, until, without any change in its direction, or halt in its flow, Doxy Street ceases to be Doxy Street at all, and becomes Cheapside, and finally Oxford Road. The signs, the buildings, the rooftops over the towering windows, the sky itself, all seem to expand and dilate in the sweetly gathering outrush of wealth. Scented with shop produce and brass polish, the Northcentral air lifts and surrounds me as I cling to the jolting back of our filthy tram. Here rise the chapels of the lesser guilds, grey-white or golden, spired and domed; antique churches pillaged from the Age of Kings and re-made with aethered statuary and bolted doors for a God who, along with all the rest of England, took the best and most obvious choice when the world changed and joined up and became a guildsman.
We jump down at Northcentral Terminus, scurrying from the tramaster’s shouts until we reach sudden and amazing tracts of grass, huge sunlit eruptions of tree and water and statuary. There, we catch our breath, and Maud inspects the substantial oily stains on the front of her dress. I look about me. The greatest of all the guildhalls on Wagstaffe Mall rise beyond silver-white avenues of impossible trees in their mountain domes; coppered and silvered and glazed, winking in the sunlight over the rivers of top hats, straw boaters, piggyback children.
‘Come on, Robbie—what are you staring at?’ Saul hauled me on through the crowds. ‘They’re only buildings for God’s sake! This is only a park. We’re here to have fun, aren’t we … ?’
But it was more than that. Weaving past the stalls, the spivs and the pickpockets and the scrambling lesser urchins, even on the day of the Midsummer Fair, it was the extraordinary nature of the trees in Westminster Great Park which most entranced me. In the Easterlies, just as in Bracebridge, blooms too big and lurid to be the fruit of simple good husbandry would sometimes make it to the baskets of the flower-sellers, and there was always the waterapple and the sea-potato to remind us of the guildsman’s art, but here, bright and solid, were whispering, living creations of dream. Perilinden, which rose tall and silver and chattered its leaves. Cedarstone, far squatter, with its massive red trunk, which was gnarled and polished, the grain beautiful and intricate as sunset caught in the currents of a river. Firethorn, which was an ugly-spined bush up in Brownheath planted for deterrence and protection, was here a chaos of heraldic flowers. And sallow, even sallow, that common herb, became a tree of greenish-white beauty with a scent like bitter honey. As the bands of several guilds struck up brassy waves, I breathed these names like spells. Leaves red and gold, and heart-shaped to the size of trays. Trunks wound with pewter bark. Flowers like downturned porcelain vases. I resolved to come here again—in fact, to leave the Easterlies—and wander more quietly and perhaps forever with the ghost of my mother. But the bustle of the Midsummer was puffing at me, and everywhere, there were promises of greater wonders if you stepped through a turnstile, entered a tent, touched a pretend haft; just as long as you paid, paid, paid. I sat with Saul and Maud, groaning and clapping as white rabbits vanished and reappeared amid fanfares of smoke and gong—all, so it said on the prestidigitator’s sign outside the smelly tent, without the aid of a single drop of aether. It was a hot thy. Passing burlesques, clowns, familiars dressed like little sailors, strange monologues and dioramas of journeys through distant lands, gazing over heads, I bought a wrap of sherbet ice and sucked it greedily. Wiping my numb lips, I looked around for Maud and Saul. I could see no sign of them. But the plan had always been that we would meet up by Prettlewell Fountains at three that afternoon. I had no watch, and no idea of where those fountains actually were, but no matter. I wasn’t lost—lost wasn’t something which happened when you were wandering under the astonishing trees of Westminster Great Park amid balloon-sellers, dancing familiars and spinning acrobats. Not at Midsummer. Not in London. Not when you were Robbie. This Midsummer Fair, I decided, was like London itself. By turns brash and sad, quiet and teeming, stinkingly ugly, heart-stoppingly lovely … And, like London, there were things more easily stumbled across than actually found.
I tried my luck shooting tin birds. I inspected the giant bones of monsters said to have been spawned in a distant Age. There were red-scaled beasts and ravening balehounds. There was an incredible tooting machine like a madly enlivened forest which had been made by the guildsmen of Saxony. I must have wandered for several thoughtless hours, spending what money I had, letting the crowds lead and buffet me, taking in all the horrors and wonders and disappointments of the fair. Then I saw Annalise. She was walking alone, in her own quiet space amid shouting groups of lads, tired families. She stopped by a carousel ride and I caught my breath in the shadows behind, waiting for my heart to stop pounding. She was dressed in a light blue skirt and a puffy white blouse which was bunched at the neck and the sleeves. She had the shape of a woman now, and her hair, pale blond, and coiled, ribboned, plaited, lay across her shoulders. Everything about Annalise was different, and impossibly fine, down to the curve of eyelash which drooped and rose as she watched the children swirling by on their painted drays, but at the same time she hadn’t changed. I’d have been happy to stand there forever, watching Annalise through ride after ride. But if it’s possible for someone’s back, the line of a cheekbone, to convey a knowing amusement, then that was what she managed to do. The colours swept by, the scared and laughing children’s faces, and I became aware that Annalise had noticed me long before I had seen her.
The ride slowed. Annalise turned towards
me as the shapes unblurred.
‘So it’s you …’ She paused. ‘Robbie.’ Those green eyes. ‘I hadn’t expected to ever see you here in London.’
So many things, so quickly. Robbie. And I hadn’t expected—as if, occasionally, she had thought of me over all these years.
‘Neither had I.’ My heart was still racing. ‘Me—or you, I mean.’ I knew that whatever I said would come out as stupid. ‘I haven’t been here long. Just this summer.’
‘So we’re both strangers here.’ Her lips grew an ironic tilt. ‘I’m almost surprised, really. I mean, that you recognised me.’
‘You’re not so different, really, Annalise.’
Those green eyes darkened slightly.
But it was ridiculous, really, to say that she hadn’t changed, when she so plainly had in every shape and detail apart from the one essential part of her which would never change.
The Light Ages Page 16