This Census-Taker

by China Miéville

  —

  She whispered to you the story of when you came down, to calm you. You had a childish hope of sanctuary right there in that airy ruin but Samma knew better and pulled herself all the way awake and warned you, finger to her lips. She thought. She put her hand on Drobe’s chest and brought him instantly out of sleep. They murmered.

  She said to you, “Is anyone coming?”

  “I think someone was on the hill.”

  Some other gang children looked up from where they lay at the quiet caucus. Drobe and Samma pointed them back to sleep and they pretended to obey.

  Samma leaned out and scanned the bridge. A light rain now fell. “Come on,” she whispered to you. “Come on right now.”

  Watched by those silent comrades, Samma and Drobe took you to your dismay back out into the night. You could see the lines of the country now, rising into quickly ebbing darkness, the hills’ shoulders coming visible. Each streetlamp wore a corona.

  Your guides surprised you. They took you left, above the bats’ arches, to cross the bridge. Past that dark cart, as absolute in its aspect as any rock, into the southern half of the town. A street slanted up. They took you higher. Your skin was wet.

  It was as if dawn had been told to come quicker on that side, as if the greater emptiness of the streets sucked the light in. What watchers you noticed may as well have been dispassionate observers from some austere alternative, so opaque were their regards. Destitutes lying but not asleep under leaves in a graveyard, marking you from their locations, cozied up to the railings as if to give the dead their room. In a chair by her open doorway a woman waited for the sun and nodded as your escorts took you past. You cried out because something terrible clawed from her mouth, a dark tangle, as if something hookfooted was emerging from her and she didn’t care.

  “Hush,” Drobe said. “We have to be quick and quiet.”

  To the east there are beetles the size of hands and their shells tell fortunes. If you boil them you can chew their dead legs, as did the woman, and suck out narcotic blood. But you didn’t know that then.

  “Ah now,” whispered Samma. She spoke in Drobe’s ear and he thought a moment and whispered back and her eyes widened and she nodded.

  Perhaps someone was behind you, glancingly visible as the town came into its gray self. You tried to keep watch of any watcher. Drobe yanked you so you lost your grip on Samma’s hand and he pulled you into alleys, and you reached back but Drobe was too strong and fast, and Samma kept on in plain sight on the main way while you left her and headed into the snarls of the south side.

  “She’ll come for us, she’ll come,” Drobe said, patting down the hands with which you reached back in her direction. “She’s getting things you’ll need. Come with me.”

  Need? It was light so quickly. Drobe rushed you in through the windows of a barely musty cellar. From there, when the rain slowed, through a fence of barrel hoops, by a junction past two big men in butcher’s aprons who put down their tools at the sight of you and came after you yelling, chase instinct provoked by your speed.

  In a foundation pit, the weeds were thick so you knew the building was stillborn. You hid while the men hunted. When they were gone, Drobe sniffed as if he could smell empty places. This early the sky looked like an ash version of itself. The air already smelt of diesel and there was smoke to run through.

  “Samma’ll bring what you need to go,” he said. Then in a rush he said, “Hey, maybe I’ll come too.”

  I didn’t want to go. “And Samma?” I said.

  “Well, she can’t, can she?” he mumbled. “She can’t just walk out, can she?”

  A big windowless brick hall rose on slanting foundations. Drobe pulled aside corrugated metal and led us into a dusty, still room, where water and wan light angled through the ceiling holes. The floor was deep in bird shit and down. It sloped gently to a stage and a wall of ragged canvas. Things roosted.

  “It used to be a picture-house,” Drobe said. I imagined what that might be. “No one’s here,” he said. “Good,” he said.

  He hallooed and got no answer.

  “Whose house is this?” I said.

  “No one’s,” he said. He thought that over. “Sort of.”

  We steamed. He went to the stage and lifted a flap of canvas as gently as if it were ripped skin. Behind it was wadded-up cloth and a pile of other things.

  On his knees, Drobe picked through someone’s hide. He showed no surprise to find a box of papers covered with ink, some kept pristinely flat, some torn and crumpled, some printed, some handwritten. He touched them. Carefully he examined a stiff envelope banded with red, the remains of its seal visible. I went to pick something up too but he stopped me, made me lean over and look without touching. They weren’t written in my language, and Drobe couldn’t read.

  “All right, let’s wait,” he said at last. “Until she comes.”

  “Samma,” I said.

  “Samma,” he said, “or who these belong to.”

  —

  There were stairs to where bricks were missing, so you could lie on your tummy and look down at the street, to where a woman prodded a donkey past, dragging a big machine.

  “You want to know who lives here for the moment?” Drobe said. “A traveler. I met her.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “In the streets. She’s a visitor. I ain’t seen her here but she told me this is where she was and this stuff’s hers.”

  He pointed at the papers.

  “She had a boss, but things went wrong. He thinks he’s done for her but he don’t know her. Don’t know she’s here, watching. She could get away and keep moving. She came here. He took her away from something bad, years gone, so it was like she owed him, she told me. It was all right for a long time, till it weren’t, till she could read all the paperwork and realized things were off.”

  I couldn’t follow what he was telling me and I don’t think he understood his own words at all fully; was, rather, trying to accurately repeat someone else’s intrigue. Whoever slept here, he recited, was trying to find someone, not her boss, no, but someone who tracked him, in real authority. To present evidence of a crime. “She could read instructions.” He shook the envelope he still held.

  He pointed in the direction, he said, of the places about which he was trying to inform me. “That way,” he said. “They come from there to count.”

  I had chalk in my pocket and I gave him a piece. He kept hold of the red-trimmed paper with his left hand to draw frogs in houses and people with wings with his right. I drew my father’s keys and my house and me alone. The rain stopped.

  “Samma’ll have a plan,” he said. “We have to get you away.” But I wanted to stay with her and Drobe in their bridge house.

  I grew hungry. I sat and was quiet and watched the men and women on south-side errands swigging from flasks.

  Drobe startled me by whispering.

  “That lizard,” he said. “They put them in the bottle when they’re newborn or even eggs and they put food and water in for them, and they shake it out carefully to clean out their shit, and they grow in there till they get too big to leave.”

  I stared at him but he was looking away from me.

  “I seen them do it with fish too,” he said. “Fill a bottle with water. Put it in there when it’s fry. I heard they did it with a hare too but I never saw that. A hare in a bottle.”

  He looked at me at last.

  “Close your mouth,” he said. He was teasing: it wasn’t harsh. I felt light in my head.

  We froze then because we heard a rattle and the wrench of metal. We scuttled to a little balcony inside above the main room. Right at its center, her back to us, watching the stage with bags in her hands, was Samma.

  “Hey,” Drobe said. But before she turned to look at us someone shouted, “Stop!” and a man walked out of the shadows.

  The window-cleaner in his sash again. For one dreadful instant I thought Samma had brought him but I saw her face as she saw his a
nd I knew that he’d followed her without her knowledge.

  Two others emerged behind him: one of the butchers, his smock black with blood smears; and a policeman, a real policeman, from the coast.

  I’d never seen one before. He was young and fat with long hair and glasses. His uniform was shabby but it was full: I could see the official sigil on his breast. On his right thigh he wore a pistol. His tour had brought him here. It was our town’s turn.

  “What, you got nothing better to do?” Samma managed to say as the men approached. She looked at me in anguish.

  “I told you,” the butcher said to the window-cleaner. “Didn’t I say I saw him?”

  “Boy,” the window-cleaner called up, “what are you doing?”

  “I said if you followed her you’d find him, didn’t I?”

  Drobe and Samma tried to insist that I was with them now, but the officer simply gestured impatiently for me to come. Then Drobe started on about my father, about how they couldn’t leave me with him, and the window-cleaner grew angry and stamped up the stairs for me, and Drobe started screaming that he was done, that he was going to light out and leave and come by the key-maker’s house for his mate, that he was done with this town, shouting so loud that Samma dropped whatever it was she’d brought to help me escape and ran to quiet him, and knowing how fast someone might withdraw the indulgence of allowing their presence in the houses of the bridge, Samma and Drobe, as he calmed, in agonies and protesting, let the men take me.

  —

  There were three other full-time and uniformed officers using the schoolroom as their temporary headquarters. They muttered to each other, they seemed edgy. They all but ignored me, except for the big policeman: he beat me. His attack was offhand and calm. He explained with passionless ill-temper that this was what I got for disobeying the law that made clear I was my father’s.

  This was the first time any adult had hit me.

  The window-cleaner winced with every strike. I felt better and worse that even a man such as he counted this punishment unfair. He did not intervene.

  When he was done, the policeman made me wait while he discussed paperwork and plans with his colleagues. I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I’ve thought of him like that often since, as if he’s still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return.

  It was early afternoon when they got word to my father and he came to fetch me.

  I was sitting red-eyed and fearful when I heard a noise and looked up and he was standing in the schoolroom’s doorway, flanked by part-timers in their sashes, a man and a woman I didn’t recognize, and two of the visitors in full uniform. My father carried bread. His expression was solicitous.

  He said, “Boy.” He stepped forward and stopped when he saw my face.

  My father turned and screamed at the officers, “Which of you did this?” in a voice much louder than any I’d heard him use before. He slung the bread away and it bounced into a corner where I eyed it. “I’ll kill you if you touch my boy ever again,” my father shouted. “I will kill you.”

  The officers blinked at each other in shock.

  “It’s those bridge rats he runs with,” the window-cleaner said. “They been scrapping. We ain’t touched him.”

  “Calm down, mate,” said the officer who’d beaten me. “Take your damn boy home.”

  My father bared his teeth at them. I saw him compose his face and turn to me as calm as he could make it. “They lost me your breakfast,” he said. He smiled at me. “I’ll get more.

  “Come on,” he said. He held out his hand. “Time to go.”

  —

  The shutters were up, the shops open, the roads full. Men and women swept away dust. My father pulled me out into the last few hours of that day—the square was crowded—and I saw Drobe and Samma and the others. They stood by a wall in my line of sight as if they might be there by chance. My father saw them too, and without expression gestured at them to keep away.

  He held your hand tight while you stared at them. He rushed you across the square, disturbing greedy birds.

  People watched him. He went to a bread-maker’s and called for a loaf but the woman shook her head. “No bread,” she said, and turned from him. There was plenty visible through the flecked window.

  My father approached a man frying skewers on a big metal plate but he too shook his head at our approach and sort of reached his arm around his food as if it were a child that he was protecting.

  Every vendor refused my father’s custom. They gathered, they watched us with implacable faces, no warmer to me than to him. I don’t know if he did, but even with my face still hurting from the policeman’s blow I felt stung by the indignity of their shunning. I suppose it meant they believed me, but I felt shame.

  Samma and her gangmates watched me and I them. They shadowed us as one at a time the shopkeepers refused my father, and all their customers folded their arms and went silent until he took me away.

  What about me? I thought. Can you take me? Please, let me stay. But the law had said I was his and they had a lot of respect and fear for the law in that town.

  My father didn’t stare anyone down but nor did he wither under their disapproval.

  He judged the sky. “You’ll have something at the house,” he said. “We have food there. Good long walk and we’ll build an appetite.”

  As my father led me from the square toward the edge of town, Drobe motioned to me. He looked strained and he kept staring up and out beyond the town with an immense, furious eagerness, but he made sure to catch my eye, and indicated, as he had before, for me to wait. He looked hunted.

  —

  In the foothills, we rounded the last turn and passed out of sight of the main street. I kept turning to glance, to see a last glimmer of the bridge over the gulch with early anglers lined up on the railings ready for the first bats, washing flapping from high windows like flags. My father knelt before me.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  He shook my hand gently and made me look up at him while my feet picked over stones and the air went thin. “That’s enough. These’ve been bad days I know and I know you’ve been scared and you haven’t known what’s happened or what to do. I don’t blame you. I understand. But this stops now. No more running away. No more hiding in the town. Or anywhere. No more. All right? You understand me?”

  He shook my hand again until I answered yes.

  “Good. There’s just the two of us now, we need each other,” he said. “We need to look out for each other, don’t we? So. We’ll learn. No more running away. Good. If you ran away again I’d have to come and find you and I’d be upset and angry.

  “Now, you, come and eat. Those bastards in town…”

  He checked himself. As if I hadn’t learned from the gang any word he might use. As if I hadn’t known them before that, from books my mother had me read.

  And I did not run away again, though I thought of doing so many times, and made one more half-attempt.

  Again I took to the topmost room.

  As soon as my father left me alone, and too fast to reconsider, I took a candle and crept back up into that attic for the first time in months. And though I was quivering as I climbed, when I entered, even despite the dark, I felt no fear, no shock. Only a hollowness.

  What the hunter had said was true: the blood was wiped away. So were my own drawings, which I’d thought secret.

  The room would shake in the strongest winds, and I’d look many times across the night and the ruckusing air of the uplands and imagine being out in that, heading away from the hills, but I always stayed. I can’t say I chose to stay as I felt quite without traction, without capacity to find myself or anything. A gusted thistle! That’s what I thought I was like, for weeks. Thinking my own past self is mostly a mystery story.

  My father continued to make his keys. For himself, I supposed.

  During the daylight, I wandered. More than once,
from far off, from somewhere in the steepening zone between the town and my part of the uphill, I heard that chattering call. I heard the complaints of animals carrying loads. Once more I heard the boom-snap of those two distinct and distinctive shots.

  —

  I can’t tell you what my father wanted from me; it may be that all he wanted was me. He loved me, but he had loved my mother too, and that love didn’t preclude me watching him and waiting for any shift to come over his face. It didn’t stop me wondering.

  I can’t tell you what he wanted from me because he asked so little. Now that I was back, my father was content for me to kick my stones through the fence and over the edge again. To explore up and down, to watch fighting chuckwings and rock rats hunting for worms.

  I took a last few of my mother’s papers up to the windy top room where I read them several times, or tried to—some were beyond me. Instructions for wall building; an allegory about selfishness set among animals; a description of a carved box that was supposed to contain a person’s soul, kept in a museum, in a city of which I’d not heard.

  Mostly my father cooked but sometimes he had me do it. He’d stand covered in key dust in the kitchen doorway, murmuring to himself. He would offer advice on what to put into the pot with what. I obeyed as if he was issuing orders. I’d always be quiet in his company. He never told me to take our garbage to the hole in the hill.

  I didn’t know how to tend the garden: I’d watched my mother do it but had asked no questions. All I could do now, with a growing sense of duty, was prod at the dry earth with her trowels, mimicking as closely as I could the motions I’d seen her make. I patted dying beans. Turning over the dirt, sometimes I would bring up trash.

  Once I said to my father, “Why do you want me?”

  I still think that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done. I was outside and he was in his key room. I saw him as I dug and I stood before I could hesitate and I shouted it through the window. When he looked up, I thought for a moment it was with the open face, his blank face, but it wasn’t.