The City's Son

by Tom Pollock

  Sympathy edges into her voice. ‘I’m sorry, Filius, I really am, but Reach is gathering his strength. There’s no doubt any more: it is him.’

  I feel like I’m trying to swallow a chunk of brick. I hadn’t realised until now just how much I’d been hoping Glas was wrong. ‘I don’t understand,’ I mutter. ‘Why now?’

  She turns her head away. The breeze flaps the strands of her binbag hair against her face. ‘Filius,’ she says carefully, ‘there’s something else you need to know. There have been rumours – if Reach is preparing for war, it can only be because he’s been listening to them.’ She wets her lips with a tongue, made from an old sponge.

  Unease creeps through me. ‘What rumours?’ I ask.

  ‘That soon the street-signs will rearrange themselves,’ she speaks very quietly, ‘and feral cats will walk with their tails high in procession through the streets.’

  For a long moment I do nothing but stand there, feeling, and no doubt looking, heroically stupid.

  ‘She’s … she’s … coming back?’ I’m not even sure I said that aloud.

  Glas looks at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and I explode, all the tension in my chest multiplying as it unravels. I feel dizzy and scared and elated all at once.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I shout at her.

  Glas shrugs wretchedly. ‘There was nothing firm. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, and I didn’t—’ She hesitates. ‘I didn’t want you to be scared.’

  ‘Scared of what?’ I demand. ‘She’s my mother!’

  ‘She’s also a Goddess,’ Glas says, ‘and Goddesses are not kind.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘War’s coming, Filius. The King of The Cranes and the Lady of the Streets will not share the city. The gables and the gutters and manholes will bleed. Reach has been killing her kingdom, for years, tearing it up and enslaving it to whatever he’s building in St Paul’s, and you didn’t stop him. You’re her son, and you didn’t stop him. That Cathedral was her crown jewel, and you gave it up without a fight.’ Her tone is dreadfully gentle. She’s trying not to make it sound like it’s my fault.

  ‘I couldn’t have stopped it,’ I protest, bewildered and frightened now. ‘I was never strong enough—’

  She shushes me, puts her arms around me. I can feel the warmth as her rubbish decays. ‘I understand,’ she whispers. ‘It was right to wait. It was safer. But if Reach is moving against us, we no longer have that luxury.’

  My thoughts are reeling. Glas’ voice turns low, urgent. ‘You need to act, Filius. You’re right, I should have told you sooner. Reach has become strong – too strong – in your Mother’s absence. We need an army,’ she urges. ‘The Pavement Priests, the Mirrorstocracy: the old guard. We need to move, or by the time Mater Viae arrives, the Skyscraper Throne will be occupied, and not by you.’

  But I’m barely listening. All I can think is she’s coming back she’s coming back she’s coming back—

  ‘You should have told me!’ I snap at Gutterglass. She tries to hold onto me, but I tear myself loose and run. I expect her to call after me but when I look back she is just watching me with that desolate gaze: Gutterglass: the spirit of the city’s abandoned, the nursemaid who cared for me in place of—

  She’s coming back.

  I watch the body of garbage crumble like ash and fall.

  CHAPTER 8

  Beth stood at the end of Wendover Road, watching Pen’s familiar shape move behind a window across the street.

  People hurried past, jostling her and tutting. The women were dressed in wildly contrasting styles: jeans and crop-tops, hijabs, the occasional full burkha. It was the end of the day and the cheap DVDs and plastic watches were being packed away on the market stalls. Men held intense conversations in glass-fronted restaurants over bowls of biryani, or watched hockey on the muted TV sets. The air was tinged with the smell of curry and spices and overripe fruit.

  Everything screamed Pen loudly enough to make Beth gasp. She shifted her weight and changed her mind for the fourth time.

  All she had to do was shout – one syllable would probably do it. Pen’s window was cracked open, she’d hear. Just that one syllable and she’d come down and they’d sit with their back against the bricks of the next-door alley and Pen would talk Beth out of this insane thing she was planning to do.

  Beth came up on the balls of her feet; she felt that shout rise up inside her—

  —but it stalled again, because there was a taste in her mouth, the same taste as there had been back in Gorecastle’s office, and it made her want to spit; it made Beth not want Parva Khan anywhere near her.

  Less than a day ago she would’ve thought Pen would believe her. She would have trusted Pen to trust her. That trust was broken now, and realising that was like chewing tinfoil.

  Besides, she didn’t even know if Pen would talk to her.

  B, you made everything worse.

  The memory of Pen’s stone-dead tone made Beth want to turn and run from the street.

  But she couldn’t leave without some sort of goodbye, no matter how much some blistered little part of her wanted to. She slipped her hand into her pocket and rubbed her thumb over the black crayon she kept there.

  Dotted around Pen’s doorframe were a series of pictograms: tiny trains with electric bolts under their wheels. Beth had drawn them in a little procession round the corner into the alley, like a trail of crumbs.

  And there, on the bricks next to the metal bins, she’d drawn Pen’s face, smiling, lovingly detailed: a parting gift.

  Streetlamps flickered on as the daylight faded. Beth struggled to focus on what the boy had said: Look for me in broken light. She’d been puzzling her way around that cryptic phrase all day.

  The dance where light itself is the music, where the Railwraith’s rush beats the drums.

  She turned his words over in her mind, probing them for meaning. They sounded worryingly like the gibberings of a lunatic, which, she admitted to herself, it was entirely possible he was.

  She remembered the shock of him shoving her, and she touched the bruise under her hoodie and winced. Her skin was apparently as determined to retain the memory as her mind was.

  Think, Beth: what do you know about him? Well, he runs around London’s railway tracks in the middle of the night without a shirt or shoes but with a bloody great iron railing, jabbering incomprehensible cryptic bollocks about light and music and monsters, and he risked getting flattened by five hundred tons of angry freight train just to save you. You’ve got to admit, these are not the characteristics of someone overburdened with sanity.

  She slumped, but then a thought struck her: what if the directions weren’t cryptic at all? He hadn’t just looked like he slept in the streets, but like he always had done. It dawned on Beth that street names and house numbers might be a meaningless code to someone who’d never lived in one.

  What if he’d told Beth where to find him as clearly and simply as he could?

  Beth licked her lips. She wracked her memory for a place that fit. Where the Railwraith’s rush … It had to be near a train line. He’d checked that she was from Hackney, so that narrowed it down. Beth’s excitement mounted as she worked it through – but where was the light itself music, though?

  A memory surfaced: a railway footbridge overgrown with brambles, the boards armoured in chewing gum harder than concrete. It was a meeting place she’d shared with Pen, where they’d traded sweets and whispered secrets. When the trains shot past underneath, the sound of their wheels on the tracks was like drums.

  There were four streetlamps in the cul-de-sac below. Their light had flickered as they lit up in what Pen described as a ‘fractured harmony’. Beth had always thought that was kind of beautiful; there had been a definite rhythm to their flashes. And wasn’t rhythm all you really needed to dance?

  If nothing else, it was as good a place as any to start.

  Beth looked back up at Pen’s window and all her excitement
drained away, replaced with queasy dread. Sure enough, when she turned away, there it was: a sharp white pain, hard up against her ribs. It’s like that phantom-limb thing you hear about, she told herself sternly, like soldiers get. She tried to make herself believe that the hurt was coming from an empty space, a love already gone.

  She made it all of three steps before she ducked back into the alley.

  ‘You’re a soft idiot, Bradley,’ she muttered as, despite herself, she rough-sketched another figure on the bricks: a skinny boy holding a railing like a spear.

  Gone hunting, she scribbled under the picture of her quarry. Look for me in broken light.

  Her anger hissed at her spitefully from the back of her mind, but the secret was too big and too lonely to keep to herself, and, in spite of everything, Pen was still the only person she could imagine sharing it with.

  Fractured harmony, remember? she scrawled finally, before shouldering her backpack and forcing herself, step by step, to walk away

  CHAPTER 9

  Night seeps in from the sky. The breath from the manholes starts to steam. The city shivers, and draws darkness about it. This is when the Sodiumites dance.

  I stand in a clearing between tower blocks, a pedestrianised island of asphalt beside a railway footbridge, away from the road. Streetlights puncture the pavement at the four compass-points. A couple of kids stand on the bridge, smoking and studiously ignoring me as the warmth ebbs sluggishly from the air.

  Slow, slow at first, a light begins inside the streetlamps; the first steps of the dancers behind the glass barely raise a glow, just a few tiny flashes where they plant their heels. A graceful hand twists and beckons inside one of the bulbs, sparks leaping from her fingers.

  I crack my knuckles, stretch my back, breathe deep.

  All four sisters are awake now, pressing themselves against the glass, blowing fiery kisses, feigning helplessness, coyly pretending to be caged. My heart begins to trip.

  Now speed comes to the dance and bright lights flicker. My shadow dances, and I start to move with it, twisting my limbs to the rhythm of the light: visual music. The strobe is hypnotic; I feel drunk but perfectly balanced, high on light.

  Thames! This feels good—

  The girls on the bridge toss their cigarettes and one of them laughs as the other mutters something about the ‘junkie tramp’.

  They walk away and do not see the lamps, one by one, cut out.

  Electra is the first, the boldest, as always. She slides her body smoothly down the length of the dimmed streetlamp until her feet scorch asphalt. Her glassy skin is perfectly clear. The fluorescent dust in her blood is blinding. Fibre-optic hair waves in a magnetic breeze I can only dream of feeling. I glance around; her sisters have all slipped their bulbs too now and they encircle me, swaying in time to the light, laughing soundlessly.

  Electra starts clapping and the others pick up the rhythm, light flaring as palm hits palm in a complex syncopated glow-and-dim. Once her sisters have it, Electra stops and stands tall, extending an arm to me in formal invitation.

  I take her hand and we dance.

  Each strobe is a flash of vision: a motion, a thud of blood in my head.

  Flash. Flash. Flash.

  She controls my pulse with her fingers. She owns my breath. I slide my hand close over her hip.

  Flash flash flash—

  She singes the hairs on my skin. Her neck arches back and her teeth flare as she grins. I can feel their heat by my ear. She dances, she shines, she is alive; I dance with her and so am I.

  Eventually I have to stop, panting, and laughing, and she slows, cooling enough to kiss my cheek. The heat of her lips is a shade below painful.

  Welcome, Son of the Streets.

  The others keep playing. One plucks a spectritar, adding shades of colour to the music while the remaining two sisters laugh and dance together, cheerfully mocking old-fashioned styles.

  I sit and find the gravel chilly after her heat.

  She turns and paces around me, and then stops and opens her mouth. ‘What is it?’

  I read the word in semaphore from the pulsing light of her tonsils. ‘What’s what?’ I ask, exaggerating the words so she can read my lips.

  ‘You are tense.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I could drown a rat in toxic waste; it would make a better dancing partner.’

  My cheeks burn. ‘I didn’t think it was that bad.’

  She shrugs disdainfully. ‘You were stiff, and slow, behind the beat even more than usual. Your mind was somewhere else – I hope so at least, because it’s either that, or you have gone—’ She hesitates, groping for the word, and eventually strobes out the characters in her own language: something like ‘shines-not-brightly-in-contemplation’.

  ‘Moronic,’ I interpret, and snort. ‘Thanks.’

  She sits down beside me. For an instant she is still, and her light almost goes out, then she puts her arm around me and starts tapping my shoulder with scalding fingertips. She pulls me around to face her. ‘You can talk to me, Filius.’

  I sigh. ‘I ran out on Gutterglass.’

  She’s started some platitude, but this gives her pause. ‘Tell me about it,’ she semaphores.

  So I do, and she reads my lips in what passes for her as silence. Barely twitching enough to stay alight, she is almost invisible. She shakes her head when I finish. ‘I heard a rumour recently, but I did not think there was anything to it. But if Glas believes …’ Her words are shaded with astonishment. ‘So she really is coming back?’

  ‘And Gutterglass wants to prepare the way for her – wants me to go up against Reach.’ I laugh exasperatedly. ‘She dropped the problem in front of me like a smiling foxcub with a bit of carrion it found behind the bins.’

  Electra smiles.

  ‘Glas wants an army raised,’ I say, ‘like in the old days before she left. She says if we wait for Mater Viae it could be too late.’

  Electra starts to answer, but she is distracted by a flare of light, not the soft amber of her kind, but bright white, like a magnesium flare.

  It’s coming from her lamp.

  Her face takes on an ugly cast. ‘Whitey,’ she snarls in a dim orange.

  Her sisters have seen it too. They crowd around Electra’s lamp. Another glass figure has climbed up the lamppost while we were talking. He emits a pallid white light as he casts fearful looks at them, clutching his limbs around himself as he tries to get inside.

  The Sodium sisters flare bright yellow, displaying their colours. They spit like firecrackers, flashing in their own language, too fast for me to follow. I catch a few phrases though, vile imprecations about parenthood and voltages. The Whitey squirms and shivers, his light uneven. He probably can’t understand half the abuse being screamed at him.

  It’s Electra, always the boldest, who throws the first stone. Her fingers twist around it, weaving a magnetic field that lifts the rock up and it spins in the air, faster and faster, then shoots straight at the glass.

  ‘Lec, no!’ I shout, but she isn’t looking so she’s deaf to me. The others follow her lead and stones start to zip like bullets. The lamppost is dented; glass shatters. The Whitey twists frantically, trying to protect his filaments. I realise he can’t help infuriating them: the faster he moves to avoid the rocks, the brighter he burns, the stronger his colour, the angrier the Sodiumites become …

  … and the faster the stones fly.

  I gape: why is the Whitey taking this? Why doesn’t he run? A look at the sky gives me my answer: heavy thunderclouds are swelling over the city’s orange glow.

  I make a decision.

  Grabbing my spear, I jink between the sisters’ bodies and scramble up the lamppost, waving my spear like a flagpole, trying to get their attention. ‘Stop! It’s going to rain – rain, you get it? There’s only one of him – he’s not invading, he’s only looking for cover.’

  They don’t acknowledge me, but magnetic trajectories shift slightly and the missiles
lose a little momentum as they swerve around me to find their target. The whistle as they fly through the air can’t quite drown out the terrified buzzing of the Whitey behind me.

  Splinters of glass shower me. The tiny cuts heal fast.

  Eventually I feel the heat behind me lessen as the Whitey slides down the back of the lamppost. He hunches for a second on the tarmac, his corona of white light shrinking as the Sodiumites advance on him. Then he shambles away, clutching himself, strobing off little mewls of pain.

  There’s a touch of moisture on the wind. My stomach twists. I know what will happen to him if he’s caught out in a rainstorm …

  … and so do they.

  Electra’s slap burns my cheek. She’s climbed the lamppost as well. Her sisters stand around the courtyard, ostentatiously staring in the other direction.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘It’s going to rain!’ I yell back at her, my skin stinging. ‘He just wanted shelter.’

  ‘He was trespassing. They have their own shelters.’

  ‘On a dozen streets in the centre of the city, five miles away – he’ll never make it in time!’

  She stares at me. Her eyes glow a uniform clear amber from lid to lid.

  ‘Good,’ she strobes. ‘If I ever trespassed on Whitey ground, a stoning is the least I would expect.’

  She looks down at her sisters. ‘They wanted me to throw you out but I told them about Glas, and about Reach. They understand you are upset. They are not happy, not at all, but you can stay – as long as you never ever get in our way like that again.’

  My stomach burns as fiercely as my face. How dare she apologise for me? I want to scream at her, but spots of rain are already kissing my forehead. Alarm flashes across Electra’s face.

  ‘Rest. Recover,’ she murmurs hurriedly. She lays hot fingers on my chest. ‘We will talk when the moon comes out.’ She vanishes into the filament of her lamp, which begins to glow after a second. There is a tinkling sound and the fragments of glass shattered by the stones begin to levitate, floating in her electro-magnetic field, glittering as they catch her light. The glass closes around the filament. For an instant she burns hotter: a bright and unbearable white, almost the same shade as the Whitey she scorned. I turn my face away.