Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  It was very faint, a classical piece: strings and flutes and deep, brassy horns. Pen thought she’d heard it before, but it was off somehow. All the notes were in tune, but there was something indefinably odd about how they sounded. Pen hurried down the steps to the basement, something between eagerness and anxiety pinching at her throat.

  In her pocket, she rolled a cold glass marble between her fingers.

  A pair of overstuffed bin bags flanked the doors to the kitchen like squat guard towers. As Pen approached, a stinking fountain of garbage erupted and an arm articulated from bits of an old bike frame emerged from the top of the bag on the right. The arm ended in a hammer-head made from old paint cans. It waved threateningly over Pen’s head.

  The second bin bag split slowly up the middle and a tiny makeshift crossbow crept from the gap on matchstick spider’s legs. Pen didn’t have to look at the pinkie-sized bolt to know the nail on the end of it was poisoned. She sucked her teeth. It was like being faced down by the Heavy Armaments division of Blue Peter.

  ‘Glas,’ she protested, keeping her voice as mild as she could manage, but never taking her eye from the nail, ‘it’s only me.’

  With apparent reluctance both the hammer and the crossbow returned to their black-plastic posts, and Pen pushed through the smoked glass double doors. The music swelled and enveloped her. She stared, open-mouthed despite the stench.

  Selfridges’ kitchen was teeming with hands.

  Hands made of old Biros, hands made of sucked lolly-sticks, hands made of broken scissors and bent umbrella spines and used syringes and de-pronged forks, all scrambled hither and thither across the stainless-steel work surfaces born by teams of beetles lashed to their wrists with garden wire. Their improvised fingers held flasks and bottles and cardboard boxes. Yet more hands extended in a chain down the kitchen’s rubbish chute, passing hunks of brick and concrete and tea cups of shimmering sewer water from one to the next. The last hand in the line sealed each sample in a plastic pouch and carefully wrote out a label with an expensive-looking fountain pen. Other hands selected previously prepared pouches, dumped their contents into Pyrex beakers and held them over the gas rings of the great industrial cookers until the chemicals inside changed colour to dark blues and bloody reds.

  The orchestra occupied the far corner: yet more hands, drawing bows over the strings of violins hammered from broken bed-frames. Punctured footballs sealed with condom lips blew air into flutes carefully fashioned from old curtain rails, producing pure, sweet notes. The music swirled and dipped in the air, making Pen giddy. She put out a hand to steady herself, only to have another passing hand take it in a genteel shake; she couldn’t stop herself recoiling from the worms that articulated its braided pipe-cleaner fingers.

  A three-dimensional model of the city took up most of the kitchen floor. Juice cartons and ripped-up cardboard boxes stood in for houses, blackened bananas for bridges. Hands spider-picked their way over narrow streets, shifting them into new configurations based on the information from the latest samples, pushing over loo-roll tower blocks or flooding avenues with filthy water, continually mapping the city’s transformation. In the centre a mineral water bottle stood stubbornly upright, emerging from a nest of shredded plastic: Canary Wharf.

  Wings fluttered by her ear and she ducked instinctively as a petrol-grey pigeon flew past. It circled the room, a pair of broken eggshells clutched in its claws. The pigeon’s gyre grew tighter, the music swelled, the hands disintegrated into their component parts and the beetles under them took flight. The air filled with a fever of wings. The pigeon wheeled tighter still, and Pen shied as something buzzed past her ear. As she watched, a cloud of insects, each clasping a fragment of rubbish, whirled into formation under the pigeon and spun faster and faster: a black tornado dancing over the kitchen tiles. Pen squinted as the buzzing mass slowly morphed into a vague human shape.

  The pigeon cawed once, then dived into the heart of the cloud. The music crescendoed, then cut out. Every beetle flipped sharply over in the air, dragging their garbage over them. The wings felt silent.

  Pen blinked. With a sudden sleight of eye, Gutterglass had a skin.

  He wore a tailcoat patched together from dozens of carpet sample squares. His skeletal face was built of split Biro pens. His hands, one also made of Biros, the other of long screws, rested on a mop he held in front of him like a cane. A third – disembodied – hand, the last remaining on its beetle conveyor, scuttled over his shoulder, planted a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a taper before scuttling away again.

  Gutterglass drew slowly on the cigarette, and the smoke billowed from the gaps in the plastic frame of his skull. ‘Miss Khan.’ His voice still carried the notes of the music. ‘Always a pleasure.’

  ‘Dr Goutierre.’ Pen inclined her head respectfully.

  ‘Gutterglass is fine.’ The trash-spirit waved away the title. ‘It may be a name She gave me, but I’ve lived with it for long enough that I think I can call it mine.’

  There was a wistfulness to the way he said She that twisted Pen’s heart. ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ she said.

  Glas smiled. His mouth was full of penny-sweet milk-bottle teeth.

  ‘What’s with the arts-and-crafts artillery?’ Pen jerked her head at the door and the garbage guard towers.

  Gutterglass made an indelicate sound. ‘In spite of the amnesty very kindly extended to me by Lady Bradley, there still appears to be a certain amount of resentment towards me among the Pavement Priests,’ he said. ‘What with our Lady having been a little distracted lately with affairs of incipient Godhood, I thought it only prudent to make arrangements for my own security.’

  You were their Goddess’ closest advisor. You told them She’d flounced off and it was their fault, when She’d actually conned them and killed Herself. When they rumbled you, they were always going to be pretty pissed off, Pen thought, but she didn’t say it. She was here for a favour, after all.

  ‘So how goes the diagnosis?’

  Gutterglass turned to face the map, the beetles under his skin chittering as they reoriented him.

  ‘Well, analysing the samples and judging by what my pigeons and rats have seen, the last twenty-four hours have brought us five new Tideways.’ He pointed to a tangle of streets flooded with an inky-grey liquid. ‘There’s a muscle spasm under Victoria’ – he indicated a large box with Queen Victoria’s head inked on it, now rucked up on a patch of old carpet – ‘and eighteen miles of new Fever Streets.’

  The spidery hand on his shoulder dropped its taper onto the model. Blue flame licked out along the roadways, tracing the afflicted roadways.

  ‘In my unparallelled medical opinion,’ Gutterglass said drily, ‘the city is sick.’

  ‘Still no idea what’s causing it?’ Pen asked.

  ‘Well, since it started the same night that Mater Viae’s deranged twin arrived in town, one rather assumes She is. But as to how She’s causing it, on a medical level? I confess I am stumped.’

  ‘And we stop it by … ?’ Pen couldn’t hide the hope in her voice.

  ‘If it even can be stopped,’ Gutterglass murmured, his eggshell eyes intent on the map. ‘To be honest, I have no idea.’

  Pen snorted. ‘Well, aren’t you just made of optimism?’

  Glas pursed his balloon lips speculatively. ‘At the present moment? Eighty-seven discarded writing implements, two rusting jerry cans, a pair of football bladders and eleven feet of rubber hose – but no, no optimism, since you ask.’

  Pen shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘I’m just saying, you know, keep a little faith.’

  Glas rounded on Pen. His tone hardened. ‘Oh, faith, is it? Faith is something I’m all out of, and not freshly, I’m afraid. I am a physician and a scientist, Miss Khan: a realist. Faith was never in the job description. In a hospital, all faith yields is false hope and broken hearts.’

  Pen was shocked: Gutterglass never raised his voice. He controlled himself almost immediately, but Pen sti
ll caught the eggshell gaze flickering towards the Evian tower in the centre of the map.

  ‘You weren’t any less of a scientist when you believed,’ she said quietly.

  Glas didn’t meet her gaze. ‘My apologies,’ he said at last. ‘Working conditions aren’t ideal.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Pen hesitated, then put a hand on his mouldering carpet arm. ‘How’s the … um … the other project going?’

  Gutterglass raised his head slowly. The white insides of the eggshells looked at her. He reached inside his carpet tailcoat and produced a phial of clear liquid. ‘I made up the latest batch last night, but I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.’

  Pen eyed the phial. She felt her heart swell in her chest until it threatened to cut off the air to her lungs. ‘Then let’s test it now.’

  *

  The highly polished side of the stainless-steel oven range made an only-slightly-distorted mirror. Pen looked past her own reflection into London-Under-Glass. She was breathing fast, she realised, anticipating. She braced herself and finally focused on her own scarred face. She remembered cold tiles under her palms and her hands curled. She remembered a dusty mirror in an abandoned bathroom in a school. She remembered her image reflected back at her as the mirror-glass sealed the doorway and shut Espel’s face out.

  Espel. The memory was a tiny piece of shrapnel, embedded close to her heart, flaring painfully at every beat.

  ‘Ready?’ Gutterglass asked softly.

  Pen nodded.

  The trash-spirit spun the lid off the phial and flung the contents against the side of the oven.

  The liquid spattered across the stainless steel and Pen stared into the spreading distortion, willing the metal to disappear and leave only the reflection – willing the doorway to the inverted world to open – but as the chemical dribbled to the floor, the steel stayed as solid as ever.

  Pen let out a shuddering breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gutterglass murmured. He stood awkwardly for a second, then reversed his grip on his mop and began to prod at the pooling concoction. He mumbled, embarrassed, ‘I really don’t understand what’s wrong. The city’s sickness – it’s denaturing the reactants somehow. I can’t get untainted ingredients. I’m trying to work around it, but …’ He gestured helplessly at the puddle.

  Pen nodded. Sudden tiredness weighed down her limbs and her eyelids. Gutterglass was turning back to the model of the city when she asked, ‘Why are you here?’

  The trash-spirit looked around. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Why are you here,’ Pen repeated, ‘with us? Why aren’t you with Mater Viae?’

  ‘Mirror Mater,’ he insisted, a little primly. ‘I am serving the will of my Goddess.’

  ‘No, you aren’t.’ Pen contradicted him. ‘Your Goddess is dead – She has been for decades. She killed herself. You’re serving the will of Beth Bradley, who – much as I love her – is an imitation patched up from the scraps your Goddess left behind.

  ‘But her?’ She jerked her head at the Evian-bottle Canary Wharf. ‘She’s the real deal: an exact copy – just as powerful, just as implacable. Tell me, Glas, with Her around, why are you working for the knock-off version I just put to bed under a panda duvet?’

  Gutterglass sighed out a fug of sweetly corrupted rubbish. ‘Well, I guess I’m just a knock-off, patched-up kind of guy.’ He smiled tightly and affected an accent, but neither accent nor smile held against Pen’s gaze.

  ‘I thought She could be,’ he said at last. ‘I thought the reflected Goddess could be the one. When I heard She’d come through the mirror, I hurried to the Shard, my plastic skirts clutched in both hands, my heart bubbling over with the promise of it, but then I … I saw Her. I looked into those green eyes …’

  The piping in his neck flexed as he swallowed. ‘The first time I met my true mistress, it was like falling in love, and like falling in love, I just knew. This was who I wanted to spend my life serving, this was what I wanted to define me.’ He licked his lips nervously. ‘But that night, when I looked at Her mirror-sister, well – you tell me, you’ve met her – is She a thing to love?’

  Pen looked into the eggshell eyes and slowly shook her head.

  Gutterglass matched the motion with his skeletal plastic face. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Fear – fear is all you can do: fear Her jealousy, fear Her anger, fear Her pain … but not love.’ He shrugged, but his indifference was unconvincing. He went back to mopping the floor. ‘You just know,’ he repeated.

  Pen stared at the reflection on the side of oven and thought of a blonde girl with a silver seam dividing her perfectly symmetrical face. ‘You just know,’ she echoed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  To most people it would look like graffiti or shadows, a web of darkness cast across the concrete of the distant tower blocks. You had to be in exactly the right place to see the rhino – formed out of the edges of concrete walls and patches of occluded light – charging out at you.

  Beth shaded her eyes with one hand and looked up from her street corner. There was a chill breeze and her forearm was puckered in gooseflesh, the hairs glowing like embers in the evening sun. She peered at the rhino on the towers. There was something not quite right about it.

  ‘You’re blind.’ She said it aloud. The city was silent around her, no cars or trains or footsteps or music to break the quiet, and her voice, high and human, carried clear through the air.

  Beth pointed at the rhino. ‘You’re blind,’ she said again. It felt important, though she couldn’t have said why.

  Her free hand, she was abruptly aware, held an aerosol can. She raised it and sprayed a cloud of fine white paint droplets into the air. The wind picked up, catching the paint spray and bearing it over the gables and peaks of intervening rooftops to settle, at last, against the wall that held the rhino.

  Beth felt a satisfaction verging on delight, a sense of the world working with her, for her: now there was a rough oval of white emptiness in the animal silhouette, just where its eye would be, and it was staring straight at her.

  That oval of white closed, and then opened again. The rhino snorted.

  The sound echoed through the silent city, shaking the towers by their steel and concrete roots. The rhino began to advance. Beth didn’t move, but her perspective on the creature shifted somehow and now it was erupting from the shadows of a nearer cluster of towers, and now it was nearer still. Beth’s delight froze inside her. The world shuddered under the impact of hooves made of nothing but darkness. Beth threw out her arms, desperately trying to keep her balance.

  Another snort, close and deafening; a gust of wet breath hit the back of her neck. Slowly, she turned to face the houses behind her. Their walls were invisible – she couldn’t see. Everything was blackness but that one oval eye. She recoiled, teetering backwards on her heels. The pavement spasmed under her once more and as she fell, she screamed the first word that came into her head—

  ‘PEN!’

  A pair of scarred, slender hands caught her.

  ‘Beth?’

  Beth opened her eyes slowly. Pen was sitting on the edge of her bed, holding her shoulders as though she’d been trying to shake her awake. The light from Beth’s eyes highlighted Pen’s scars.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Pen asked. She pulled her hands off Beth and shook them in the air as if to cool them. ‘You’re boiling.’

  Beth nodded blearily and peeled back the duvet. Her throat was parched and her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She looked around. Every other bed in the showroom was empty, sheets rumpled as if hurriedly thrown off. She threw a questioning look at Pen.

  ‘That’s why I woke you,’ Pen said. ‘They’re trying again.’

  *

  Pen usually avoided the electronics department, but it was where many of the human refugees tended to cluster. Voices in a dozen languages blared loudly from the display TVs as trapped tourists fought to keep the news from their home countries audible. It wasn’t the jaw-clenching decibel level that ma
de Pen steer clear of the place, though; it was the faces of the men and women as they watched the feeds coming in from Beijing and Moscow and New York and Delhi. She’d watched the disbelief, then the anger and then the hurt in their expressions as the rolling twenty-four-hour coverage of the crisis in London had given way to stories about house price rebounds and livestock health scares and a (Pen had to admit, truly terrifying) twelve-year-old boy who had a six-pack like a male stripper. London now rated only a thirty-second segment each night on most overseas stations, if that. The world had got bored of them; it no longer cared about the fates of the people stranded here. They were expendable, and Pen found it too painful to watch them realise it.

  Tonight, though, all the screens were black except for the sixty-inch plasma on the back wall. Pen saw Beth fumbling with her hood as though her fingers were numb, and like a mother with a small child, she pulled it up for her. Without a word, the two of them slipped into the edge of the crowd clustering around the one active television.

  Above the scrolling BBC News banner was a placid suburban street: semi-detached houses, manicured gardens, branching trees and electricity pylons. The moon was bright and clear, etching every shape in silver and shadow.

  The picture went to split-screen, the left side staying on the street while the right cut to a doughy man in an ill-fitting suit, standing on the steps of some town hall and speaking into a collar of microphones.

  ‘Once again’ – some problem with the Beeb’s sound-mixing rendered the man’s voice weak and tinny – ‘I am calling on the acting Prime Minister to abort this operation now, before it’s too late. Too many of our brave servicemen and women have already given their lives in pointless raids.’

  Someone behind Pen booed at the telly. Next to her, Beth huddled closer into her hoodie.

  ‘This is just another sign of a government that is both reckless and out of ideas,’ the doughy man went on, ‘and frankly, yet more evidence that the acting Prime Minister’s previous position as a junior minister cannot possibly have prepared him for his present responsibility, nor’ – there were spots the colour of raw bacon in his cheeks – ‘can the British public be reasonably expected to have ever anticipated his ascension to the leadership of the Conservative Party when they voted for it. The acting government has no legitimacy. We need a general election, and we need one now!’