CLACK BANG CLACK BANG.
‘What time is it?’ I shouted.
Blissenhawk scratched his beard and looked up at the barred windows. ‘Must be coming up for seven. Sure I just smelled the nightsoil cart going by.’
I wiped my pen. ‘I’d better leave this. I’m not getting anywhere. At least Black Lucy seems to be behaving.’
‘That she is …’ Blissenhawk wandered over to her, lovingly stroked the warm sleeve of a piston, adjusted the drip of a reservoir. I could see his lips moving although the sound was too quiet to carry. For all that his guild had cast him out, he still kept to himself the coos and phrases he used to urge his failing machine to produce one more edition.
I was almost sure there hadn’t been any fog when I’d arrived in the dark at the printshop three hours earlier, but now Sheep Street, Ashington was thickly veiled. The shabby buildings floated, the traffic was a blur of shapes and sounds. A typical London fog. But I was a Londoner now, and I could tell its types and flavours as well as the Eskimo is said to distinguish a thousand kinds of snow. There were brown fogs which left you choking. There were the cold grey ones which wormed beneath your clothing. There were the fogs of hot summer afternoons that stung your eyes, and the greenish stuff which crept slyly up from the river. But this fog was white, pure as milk. It beaded the threads of my worn coat and the brass buckle of my satchel. It tasted, as I licked my lips, almost spring-pure. The fog did something to the colours, to the bricks, to the faces. Changed, both faded and intensified, they flooded out. On a workhouse wall, quick with practice, I pasted up a poster advertising this Noshiftday meeting of the People’s Alliance. On another, I ripped down a rival poster put up by the New Guild Order. The factories were tooting. The trams were clacking and flashing, dark and light. Everything was new and misty and bright. On a morning such as this, it really did seem as if the New Age was already dawning. The buildings looked pale, pristine; the dreams of young architects. The children, as they scurried by towards the dripping iron gates of their school, were all laughing.
Yes, for once, the whole world seemed clear to me. I recalled Grandmaster Harrat’s words about the lazy lures of working with aether, the rigid conservatism of the guilds, about England’s inbuilt resistance to any kind of change which would cause the high guildsmen to adjust their grip on the haft of power, let alone risk having to lose it. And not only England. Throughout Europe, there were guilds much like our own, and there was industry, and there was aether. I had seen the produce coming in to the big wharves, borne on the same secret signs and whispers. With the spread of aether, France and Saxony and Spain—even Cathay and the Indies—had sunk just as we had into their dreams of industry, these same endless Ages, whilst beyond, through the haze of time and distance, lay lands remote, scarcely mapped and grossly underexploited; Thule and the Antipodes, the unknown heart of Africa, the frozen legend of the Ice Cradle. The world, the time, was ripe for us citizens to move out, to move on and grasp it …
But such thoughts couldn’t last. The mist was clearing as quickly as it had arrived. Smelling of mud and dogshit, the old London arose. Guildsmen who’d been laid off by Biddle and Co., the local maker of coils and springs, were standing outside the gates in Flummary Square, wandering in their workclothes even though there had been chains across the gates for two shifterms. I moved quickly on as they hawked and spat, smacked their fists and glared at me. To them, I was just some mart who had work when they didn’t. I’d grown used to such hostility. It was no use my stopping to explain that the collapse of the industrial markets was a symptom of the wrongness of society. Even Blissenhawk and the other orators who rose and fell from their soapboxes in the Easterlies on Noshiftdays would have kept their counsel here.
But at last the weather was warming. Spring was here. Soon, it would be summer. Blissenhawk had a theory that the New Age could only come in summer. Demonstrations and marches fizzled out too easily in rain, cold and darkness. I bought a copy of the Guild Times and studied its bland lies over breakfast in the booth of a local chophouse. Outside the window, a ragged family was dragging a cart filled with furniture. A clock fell off and shattered in an explosion of springs. They looked lost and heartbroken. But I had warm beer, cold meat, a roof and a bed to look forward to. I knew that I was lucky, and that these troubled times had mostly been kind to me.
The New Dawn was going well; nowadays it paid for itself and sometimes even generated a surplus. But all of that money had to be channelled back into the People’s Alliance, into booking rooms and paying off the police and helping out the members who’d lost their work or been injured in brawls and demonstrations. Saul and I still earned most of our living doing the sort of drudge duties which guildsmen and their apprentices were either too proud or too lazy to perform for themselves. Over the years, there had been items which needed collection, lunchtime deliveries of jugs of beer and warm pies which we had longed to drink and eat. There had been kingrats to trap; the beasts could leap prodigiously, and seemed always to go for the fingers, genitals and eyes. There had still been occasional borrowings. The work was always hard, dangerous, foot-aching, and the London of my Bracebridge dreams receded into tramstop waits and worn shoes and weary nights in tuberculosis boarding houses. Occasionally, pricked by sentiment, I would send my father and Beth a small cheque and a telegraph to assure them that I was still alive, but I kept the details of my life secret, just as any good citizen should, especially when using the telegraphs. What kept me in London now was a different vision to the one which had brought me here, although occasionally—just as this morning, and in the gleaming roofs of tenements and warehouses, in the impossible rise of Hallam Tower, in the wyreglow of sunset—I still sometimes glimpsed it. But life went on. The years had passed for Saul and Maud and I in that surprising way that they do. We still went each Midsummer to the fair in Westminster Great Park, but I never saw Annalise there, or anywhere.
I was fortunate. I had enough time and change in my pocket to eat my breakfast, stare out of the chophouse window, and shake my head over the fantastic nonsense they still printed in the Guild Times. Not that my life was easy. Not that I was remotely rich. Apart from anything else, I had no ambition to succeed in a Age which would soon be upturned, uprooted. The fog had gone entirely when I left the chophouse and the sky had settled low above the rooftops and was dimly pulsing. I shouldered my satchel and headed north and west across Doxy Street towards Houndsfleet, where I now collected rent. Money was evil stuff; the root of so much that was wrong with our society. I understood that all too well. How could I not do so, working in place of a previous rentman who’d got his brains clubbed out in an alley?
In Houndsfleet, behind terraces with house names hung above tiny porches—Larkrise, The Willows, Freida’s Farm, Greenforest—lay the pens where London’s Guild of Works kept its armies of pitbeasts, and their curious smell hung in the air. Each morning, a dire circus parade of these animals trundled past the net curtains on dray-pulled wagons. Horny and savage, uniformly blind and scarred, they dribbled trails of shining ordure through the slats of their cages across which Houndsfleet’s prim residents would step as they headed off to go about the business of their many guilds. In physical terms, being a rentman was easy work for me. I hopped across flowerbeds. I ignored the shouts of aggrieved horticulturists and truanting children. I made my peace, through bribes of biscuit and the ends of my boots, with the cowardly and pompous little dogs. At least I wasn’t catching kingrats. Ah, it’s you … I was scarcely a face to these people, and I watched the guildsmistresses’ slippers flop into back kitchens and listened for the chime of the broken-spouted teapot where they innocently kept their money. Then back again that evening for those who were out, or pretended to be. The youngest child sent to the doorway. The pause and tinkle and the rumble of drawers in search of what should, should, should—if only I hadn’t married the bastard—be there …
I’d come to understand the warning signs of a forthcoming eviction. The slight extra
tension in a guildsmistress’s fingers before the last precious shilling was released, the sleek off-meat odour of a bubbling sheep’s head when the rest of the street were tucking into chops. A glance outside along the pebbledash, work-callused hands pushed through hair, then reaching towards me, although often as not at that moment the dog would start barking, the baby crying, the kettle singing, and the dim idea of some other exchange which would put right the columns of their rentbook would remain the ghost of a possibility. These guildswomen offered their bodies like tear-stained parcels of regret, and I scarcely needed my inherent caution to refuse them. Over the years, since my near-priceless encounter with Doreen, I had learnt to take the occasional relief which I needed with cheerful efficiency from the women who openly plied their trade. Money changed hands there, too, but at least there was something straightforward—almost clean, medicinal, hygienic—about those exchanges.
After a non-existent lunch, I reached Sunrise Crescent. There were tight distinctions along these Drives, Gardens, Walks and Avenues, where members of the Copyists’ Guild shared bedroom walls and dustbins with Actuarial Registrars and Lesser Certified Accountants. They all thought that they were above each other, and especially above the sorts of non-guildsmen (they couldn’t bring themselves to think of me as a mart) who made his living collecting rent. So I always noticed the ones who treated me like a human being. For this reason, Master Mather, who’d lived alone at number 19 on Sunrise Crescent before his eviction last winter, had come to my attention.
Smallish, round and white, his plump face topped with a pudding-bowl fringe, and there was an innocence about Master Mather, with his reedy voice, the waddling layers of his flesh, which at first’ had filled me with the same impulse which his neighbours must have felt, which was to prick his jolly bubble, to press my finger and puncture those doughy folds to let out whatever happy gas he seemed to be filled with. Master Mather, who lived alone because Mistress Mather had left him long before, was a blue-overall-wearing member of the Cleaners Purifiers and Aspurgers’ Guild, and he loved his work. One rainy day of the previous autumn in the 98th year of this Age, he invited me in to show me.
Soot greys and grass stains; mildews and nicotines; spillages of Béarnaise or brown perspiration rings, Master Mather filled the cramped rooms of his house with secret packages of the damaged laundry he smuggled out from Brandywood, Price and Harper, the big, gold-fronted dry cleaner along Cheapside where he plied his trade. Swallow-tailed jackets and cummerbunds and feathered boas and christening heirlooms; he could recite the life history of an item of clothing merely from the scents and textures of its folds. And as he fingered an ember-blackened strip of lace and explained the milks and soaps in which he’d simmer it, I’d realised why Mistress Mather had probably left him. Of their nature, most guildsmen were blinkered about their work, but Master Mather took his enthusiasm to the level of a happy mania. Still, sleepwalking through Houndsfleet each morning after several hours wrestling with another article for the New Dawn, avoiding the alleys, and returning home on sore feet each night too tired to dream, I’d come to regard my visits to Master Mather as bright islands of relief. I once even called in on Brandywood, Price and Harper, and pinged the polished bell. A shrug, a smirk, and he was summoned, beaming as always, happy to show around even a rent-collecting mart like me. The further back you went though the humming workrooms of an establishment which had cleaned the vestments of London’s archbishops for these last two Ages, the finer the clothes became. A fire-burn on a blouse so intricately pearled it looked like a fairy suit of armour. Ink spilled on the glowing white dress of a near-suicidal bride-to-be. I’d never thought before that the Cleaners’ Guild would have much use for aether, but, with the judicious chanting of the right spell, even such ravages could be unmade. Here were open books and chalked signs I was sure I wasn’t supposed to see. Singing with a tremulous sound like a cracked flute, Master Mather swirled his hands over a copper vat, coaxing eager schools of bloomers to swim up to him through the glowing fluid. His plump arms, face and chins were oddly translucent in the gloom. His was a world which could be perfected in pirouetting swarms of empty clothes. The stains were his, and he absorbed them. As I finally walked back along Doxy Street I could even see them drifting within him, grey and pellucid as the innards of a fish.
Last Christmas, I’d received a handkerchief from Master Mather; triangled green and crimson, it felt newer than it must have done when it left the mill’s presses. Touching it made my skin ache. I put it away uneasily; to him, the whole world was simply so much laundry, and the temptation was always to fling him bodily across the room into a cloud of undershirts, to yell at him and pound him with your fists, to make him understand that grubbiness was part of existence.
‘Brought this home with me yesterday.’
In his dim front room, just a shifterm after, he’d produced a silk box. Someone had written on it in a child’s hand, but with enough residual aether for the words to stand out like the twirl of a cigarette.
CLEAN THIS.
‘Could be quite difficult, don’t you think?’
As the lid creaked off, I expected a powdery waft of Brandywood,
Price and Harper’s air, but instead, nested unmistakably in the pure white of a dress shirt, was a moist human turd. Other boxes and presents and packages came for Master Mather from his workmates through the dark early shifterms of the New Year. Tar and piss and manure, all adorned with messages, scrawls, obscenities. I had to ball my fists as he muttered about how he’d clean them. But Master Mather’s life had probably always been like this, or so I told myself as I managed to ignore the jelly-like luminosity which increasingly seemed to infuse his flesh; the nudges, the sly words, the lunchtime sandwiches strung with saliva. All he’d done by showing me these disgusting treats was to introduce me to a deeper level of the world which he’d always inhabited. But I could feel, share, their frustration. Surely this will bloody wake him up. This will show him how things really are. But part of me was like Master Mather, too. The limbless beggars, the dead-eyed children, the old people who quietly froze in their chairs between one rentday and the next. Then the flower-strewn parades, the great parks, the vaulting buildings. Despite the political awareness which Blissenhawk had brought me, I often couldn’t make much sense of the world either. Was the money system really enough to explain what Master Mather’s colleagues were doing to him? There seemed to be some dark but vital underlying counterpoint to the magical song which pervaded all of England to which I was still tone-deaf.
London fell under a deaf blanket of snow. The windows of Houndsfleet grew white beards and its children, made bolder in this changed realm, scurried after me with snowballs and insults as I headed towards Sunrise Crescent one February Threeshiftday morning. A grey pall of steam and noise rose from over the rooftops from the pens of the weather-confined pitbeasts, filling the stiff, soft air. And there was talk at Parkrise, number 33, that Master Mather had gone to his dustbin without leaving footprints, and at The Spinny, number 46, that he’d made a single line of the devil’s hooves. The children showed me the evidence amid the pee-holes they’d made in his small front garden.
I banged on his door with my fist, half-hoping today that he wouldn’t open it. But Master Mather peered out. His eyes were deep and red and dark. Rot-like discoloration flowered over his face and hands. I forced myself to follow him inside, where the heaps of clothes glowed brighter than ever in the snowy light which washed through the windows as, in wheezing gusts, he showed me a heavy brown carrier bag, sagging and dripping with slurry. The message on it breathed out in glowing letters—YOU FUCKING TROLL. To my shame, I took Master Mather’s rent money that day just as I had on every other; the ten shilling note rinsed and pressed as always, the crowns and pennies polished. I hurried out through the dragging snow as the children’s voices—taunting, angry, another shrill part of London’s song—rang after me. I pictured some incident of inspired bullying at Brandywood, Price and Harper. Crowds of je
ering faces and Master Mather’s round body spread-eagled; an aether chalice spilling pure white fluid into his mouth.
The snow had thawed and the air was almost biliously warm and bright when I returned to Sunrise Crescent to collect the next shifterm’s rent. Guildays were so common in this area that my first impression as I crossed the swampy football fields towards the row of houses was that one was being celebrated today. Little girls were bustling about the street inside great flags of clothing. Boys were tripping over the arms of suits. The mothers were out on their doorsteps as well, and they looked brighter than usual. One was wearing a puffy-sleeved dress of candystripes. Another was absently polishing a vase with a black feather boa. Ignoring my usual routine of visits, I headed straight to Master Mather’s house, but sensed as I did so a guilty withdrawing, a closing of doors. I looked up at his familiar frontage, numbered but resolutely unnamed. A house, once you come to know it, needs to change little for it to appear abandoned. I rapped his door, and heard the place echo as it had never done when it had been filled with the laundry which his neighbours had now pillaged. The notice pinned to it was rubber-stamped with the cross and C of the Gatherers’ Guild.
The Light Ages Page 19