The City's Son

by Tom Pollock

  Below her, the machines worked on remorselessly. Immobilised as she was, only when the wind tugged the tarpaulin away could she see glimpses of a crane at the top of its arc, or a flash of yellow tape on the flank of a digger. The sources of the screams stayed mercifully out of sight.

  Chatter floated up: tourists at the Cathedral. To them, this carnage would sound like any other construction work. It did to her, too. Nothing about the sounds was special; it was her hearing that had changed. She heard the cries of pain from the foundations as they were shredded, and they chilled her.

  When the red faded out of the sunrise, the wire decided it was time for her to sleep. Rest, it scratched with her finger in the dust. Then it bent her at the knee and the waist and laid her flat on her back. It was rigid around her, like a wire coffin.

  Maybe it’s nocturnal, she thought, or maybe it thinks I am. After all, when it caught me I was stumbling around in the dark like a drunk girl.

  The wire had been forcing her into strange poses and stretches, reconfiguring her, like a child trying to learn the limits of a new toy. It ran a barb caressingly over her skin, and left her a few seconds to stare at the drab concrete ceiling before its tendrils reached for her eyelids and pulled them shut.

  It was the first time in days it had let her close her eyes, but Pen couldn’t sleep. Her heartbeat went through her skull like nightclub bass. When she was a kid she’d read stories about martyrs under torture who’d dislocated their minds from their bodies. They’d prayed to Allah and transcended their flesh. Inside their minds they had laughed as their tormentors laboured fruitlessly on.

  Pen had never believed those stories, but now, with the metal barbs holding her eyes shut, she started to pray.

  Over the beat of her heart, she could hear Reach, speaking. He hadn’t stopped repeating the same phrases since she’d arrived here:

  ‘I am Reach.

  ‘I am Reach.

  ‘I will be.’

  Pen tried to pretend her body didn’t matter. Your soul is feather-light, she whispered in her mind. It will peel from your body like lantern-fruit skin. But it was no good; she was panicking again, breathing faster – she couldn’t make herself believe it.

  What if the body was all there was? She couldn’t stop herself wondering, what if there wasn’t any soul at all? What if there wasn’t any part of her that the wire hadn’t gripped, torn—

  —stolen. If that was so, then she was entirely its thing.

  ‘I am Reach.

  ‘I will be.’ Reach forced his voice over those of the dying. Pen realised it wasn’t English, or Urdu; it was the language of destruction itself. The words vibrated through the barbs in her scalp, as if the wire monster was dripping its consciousness through them and into her.

  ‘I. Will. Be.’

  With mounting awe Pen realised she was witnessing a birth. Something was hauling itself into being, stamping itself out, and she shuddered at the will it took.

  Reach was carving himself from the living bones of the city.

  Eventually exhaustion washed over her and the voice followed her into darkness.

  Pen woke as a breeze rippled over her and started to reach for her duvet, only to find she couldn’t move. For some reason she couldn’t open her eyes. She jerked and kicked, or tried to, but her skin tore on things that felt like cold thorns and she remembered where she was.

  There was a scratching flick at her eyelids. Instinctively they obeyed and fluttered open. It was night; the moon glimmered sullenly through dirty sepia clouds, far outshone by the brash neon on the sides of the cranes.

  The wire creaked her to her feet and bent her head down. A message was scrawled in the dust: sustenance. A rill of outrage ran through her. It had used her body in her sleep without her even knowing.

  It’s kidnapped you and skewered you and sleep-deprived you – and you lose your temper over this? But the anger remained. Another boundary had been so casually breached. Her body felt less her own than ever.

  Sustenance.

  She felt her arm rise of its own accord to point and an instant later her neck twisted the same way. The wire had brought her presents: a Flintstones-iced birthday cake; three halves of assorted sandwiches; a mound that smelled like cat food; a ragged heap of fur with the rotting stench of roadkill; a squat column of soft red clay; and a battery, with live wires hissing and spitting from it. The smells twisted in her stomach; here was all manner of sustenance. The wire didn’t know what she ate.

  Her feet scratched the ground as she was walked towards the food.

  All the while Reach’s cacophonous monologue went on behind her:

  ‘I will be.

  ‘I will be.

  ‘I am Reach.’

  Flies waltzed in the air over the roadkill, casting fat shadow blots on the wall. She fell to her knees beside it and the smell streaked up her nostrils, down her throat and punched her in the gut. Suddenly the pressure eased in her right arm and she wiggled her fingers. Pins and needles raced down it, but she could flex her hand! She rolled her shoulder and the wire rolled with her, the barbs gently dimpling her skin. Excitement swelled at the bottom of her throat.

  She tried her left arm. ‘Ow!’ The barbs bit deep and blood spread immediately. So the cage around her left arm was staying.

  But she’d been able to—

  It was true: the wire around her jaw had loosened. ‘I can shout – bloody hell, I can talk!’ Pen laughed, and it echoed back off the concrete, sounding scarily manic.

  Her neck was jerked to the side, forcing her to look at the food. Her laughter faded and she understood the reason for her newly granted movement. The wire wanted her to feed. It wanted her to choose.

  Her stomach contracted and she felt sick. Why? Why did the wire monster want to feed her? Why had it made her sleep? The questions rattled around her skull: what was this thing keeping her healthy for?

  ‘No,’ she whispered and the slack around her head gave her just enough space to shake it, a tiny gesture of defiance.

  The coils sighed as they slid over her, almost regretfully tightening up. Pen’s last free breath was cut in half in a silly gulp.

  Her eyes kept peeled wide, she watched her hand reach out towards the food. Every fibre of her wanted to turn away, but of course she couldn’t. The rotting roadkill was half an inch from her hand. She knew the wire wouldn’t hesitate to shove it down her throat.

  ‘Wait—’ She subvocalised the word, hoping the wire would understand even through the mangled consonants.

  The wire froze, and then relaxed again, and this time Pen slumped forward. The bread of the sandwich felt clammy as her fingers closed around it. A trickle of warmth ran down her cheek: a tear. She couldn’t brush it away. The food tasted of ash and mould. The wire flexed around her jaw, helping her to chew.

  Afterwards she lay on the ground and stared out into the night, where the cranes cast their monstrous shadows in the arclights. She could feel herself slipping again. She wondered if she could vanish into herself, forget where she was.

  She wondered if she could make herself go mad.

  But that would be to totally cede her body to the thing that gripped it.

  It needs you, she whispered to herself, you’re its host. It needs your body, and that’s important. That’s a weakness. That’s a weapon. Bide your time, Pen. Bide your time.

  A neon lamp revolved and she stared fiercely into its glare. Below her Reach worked. She didn’t even know if he knew she was there.

  ‘I am Reach.

  ‘I am Reach.

  ‘I will be.’

  Pen sucked her lip in between her teeth and bit down, hard. It was all she could do with her fraction of an inch of freedom. And it felt good.

  Yes, she told herself. I will be.

  CHAPTER 25

  ‘You know what?’ Beth snapped. She folded her arms and glared at him. ‘Piss off!’

  Gutterglass turned and inspected her reflection delicately in a window-pane.

&n
bsp; Beth had only been slightly surprised when the old man made of rubbish had slowly rebuilt itself as a woman this time.

  ‘What?’ Fil asked.

  ‘Piss off,’ she repeated.

  ‘Well … that’s pretty much what we were going to do.’

  ‘I know – piss off with your pissing off. You can’t just piss off. You need me—’

  ‘What for?’ Gutterglass enquired mildly. ‘Your extensive vocabulary?’

  Beth glared at her. ‘You want to hear my extensive vocabulary? You patronising cu—’

  ‘Lizbet!’ Victor cut her off, sounding so scandalised that she actually blushed. ‘Not ladylike!’ The Russian on the pavement beside his huddled glass-skinned soldiers, who’d all promptly yawned and stretched and fallen asleep the moment the sun had come up. He swigged from his vodka bottle and looked mournfully from one to the other, muttering, ‘Not ladylike at all.’

  Fil took a step towards Beth. The edges of his eyes were red-raw, a shockingly human colour on him. ‘Beth, I don’t think you’re listening to me.’

  ‘No? I reckon I heard you tell me to get lost loud and clear.’

  ‘Beth!’

  ‘Fil!’ she snapped, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  His jaw set, he sniffed hard and turned back towards Gutterglass. ‘Well, we are. Come nightfall you can have this place all to yourself.’

  Beth grabbed her backpack. ‘I’ll follow you.’

  He whirled, his face taut and furious. ‘You couldn’t keep up – that’s the whole point: you need protecting all the time.’

  Beth shoved herself towards him, jutting her chin pugnaciously. ‘Why? Because I’m a girl?’

  ‘No! Because you’re slow and weak and bloody …’ He tailed off, grasping the air in frustration. ‘You’re bloody human! And I’ve not got the eyes – and she’s not got the eggshells – and neither of us have the spare arms to keep dragging your skinny arse out of trouble every time we meet one of them.’ He pointed to the twisted remnants of the Scaffwolf.

  He breathed in deeply, then let it out slowly, regaining control of himself. ‘I’m sorry, Beth,’ he said. ‘I thought I could cover you, but I can’t. You were this close to getting bitten in half. I won’t have it.’

  Beth stood eye to eye with him. ‘Oh, you won’t?’ Her throat was tight and dry, and her voice came out in a growl. ‘You’re the one gave me this, remember?’ She tugged her sleeve up to show her tower-block-crown scar. ‘“Give up home”, you said. “Give up safety, forever.” Forever. Not “until we get into a scrape and Beth gets a bit knocked about.” Well, I gave it up, willingly. You can’t make me go back now.’

  He looked away, shamefaced, so she swept her mutinous gaze round to Gutterglass. ‘You put him up to this, didn’t you?’ she accused, her voice climbing shrilly. ‘He was fine with me getting my arse kicked bloody before you turned up. He’d’ve been perfectly happy to have my guts hanging from the nearest one of those!’ She pointed at a crane arching over the Gherkin in the distance.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Gutterglass murmured softly with a wince, as though Beth just had displayed a painful level of naïveté. ‘No, he most certainly would not – quite the opposite in fact.’

  Beth gaped at the wretched-looking boy who was blushing almost black. Her thoughts flashed back to the day before, after they’d delivered their ultimatum to the Mirrorstocracy, that moment their lips had hovered over each other. She felt a twinge in her chest, like someone had tapped her heart with a tiny hammer.

  Gutterglass cleared her throat primly. ‘Indeed, the Prince is so concerned for your wellbeing that in view of your fragility he is reluctant to enter combat for a second time while you are with him. Were you to come to harm, I expect he’d be beside himself, weeping, wailing, beating of breast, et cetera—’

  The Prince fixed his tutor with a glare.

  Beth managed to stop herself from saying the first thing that came into her head. Unfortunately she blurted out the second thing instead: ‘That’s not my fault! That’s him being a pussy—!’

  ‘Oh, for Thames’ sake!’ Fil’s spear clanged off the cobbles as he threw it to the ground.

  Beth rounded on him. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she snapped, ‘did the weak, slow, helpless little girl hurt your feelings?’

  He slumped onto the ground beside Victor, dragged the bottle from his grasp and swigged off a hefty measure.

  ‘Beth,’ he said. Or at least he tried to say, but the booze had apparently scoured his throat and he only managed a lame rasp.

  ‘Beth,’ he tried again. ‘I can’t ask you to— You can’t ask me to— Look, you can’t come, all right? I’ll break both your legs before I let you follow me somewhere Reach could hurt you.’

  Beth could feel herself starting to tremble: a nine-pointnine on the dear-Christ-please-don’t-let-me-cry-now scale.

  ‘I’ll tell the world about you.’ She unslung her backpack from her shoulder and shook it, rattling the paint cans. ‘I’ll tell everyone. If you don’t take me with you, I’ll paint your face forty feet high on the side of every building east of Big Ben. You won’t get any peace. Everyone who sees you’ll harass you. People will come looking for you, searching for the freaks.’

  The word was cruel but she was ready for cruelty now, rejection was sharp in her chest. They couldn’t chuck her out; she’d make it too damned painful for them. ‘Armies of ’em,’ she promised nastily, ‘scientists and tourists and sodding zoos – they’ll hunt you down.’

  Gutterglass was looking at her gravely. Fil’s lip twisted and he thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘They really won’t, Beth,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Go to the asylum in Brixton Road; ask if anyone there’s seen a walking lightbulb, or overheard a statue talking – I guarantee there’ll be one, maybe even a few. Noggin-wranglers’ notebooks all over London are stuffed with the kind of stories you could tell.’

  ‘Some of them even have illustrations,’ Gutterglass interjected. ‘There are already paintings of me, Miss Bradley, forty feet high, and four inches high, and everything between. And yet no matter how loudly a few benighted wretches scream and point at me, no one else takes a blind bit of notice.’

  Beth faltered. She looked from one to the other, suddenly feeling as helpless as a child. ‘How?’ she whispered.

  Gutterglass spread the hands Beth had given her as though to plead ignorance. ‘It’s none of our doing that no one listens to the few people who let themselves notice us. People believe stories, not facts, and we don’t fit into theirs, so they don’t tend to believe in us. We’re easy enough to miss after all.’

  ‘What did you think,’ Fil said sympathetically, ‘we were some kind of secret? We live in your streets Beth; you live in ours – you have done your whole life.’

  Beth felt a pinch in the hollow of her throat. You live in our streets. She remembered him, that night under the streetlights, arms outstretched as if to embrace the whole city’s glow. ‘Home?’ he’d said, ‘I could bed down in any square inch of London town. Welcome to my parlour.’

  That’s what she wanted: not safety, home. To be able to curl into the warmth of that word. To call the city home – to be home, with him, on these streets. She pulled herself up tall, held herself rigid against the tremor that threatened to run through her. ‘Fine,’ she said coldly. ‘Go your own way. But the first place I’m going when you do is St Paul’s. I’ll take on Reach by myself, even if I have to headbutt the bloody cranes to death.’

  Fil snorted. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘YOU DON’T THINK SO?’ Beth yelled at him.

  He stepped back, alarmed, and fury boiled up in her throat like hot tar, the rage at being left behind, at there being nothing she could do about it – and she realised she did mean it. She really would take on Reach alone, just to prove a point. She didn’t know where it came from, this urge to spite the street-urchin, so strong that she would contemplate Suicide-by-Crane-God, but it was there.

  ‘You were going to run,’ she said, swa
llowing against the humiliating advance of tears, ‘remember that? You were going to run and I made you stay. Maybe I can’t run as fast as you or climb as high as you can, but fuck you, Filius Viae, I helped.’

  Her eyes were treacherously wet, but she wasn’t about to blink; she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. He stared back at her for long, long seconds, then he turned and walked away …

  … and then, just when it felt like her heart had fallen down a well and there was no way to get it back, he paused, as if he’d just thought of something. He muttered to himself.

  ‘What was that, Filius?’ Gutterglass asked.

  ‘I said, she’s right.’

  Beth blinked some of her tears back in. ‘What?’ she said.

  The rubbish-woman’s tone was glacial. ‘A good question, Filius. What?’

  ‘Thames, Glas, don’t make me say it again.’ He sighed. ‘She’s right: I was going to run. She was the only reason I didn’t.’

  Gutterglass’ face creased into a nervous smile. ‘But that was then; that was before—’

  ‘That was five days ago – before what? Before her, Glas, that’s the only “before”. We owe her.’ The look he shot at Beth was guilty.

  A thrill prickled her scalp. Whatever his protestations, he wasn’t doing this out of any sense of debt to her – in spite of himself, in spite of his fear, he wanted her there.

  ‘But you said it yourself,’ Gutterglass protested. ‘She isn’t strong enough – she isn’t fast enough—’

  ‘But we can make her faster, can’t we?’ he said. ‘We can make her stronger.’

  Gutterglass’ eyes stretched open, their enamel-white insides turning almost outwards as whatever had just occurred to her ward had touched her mind as well.

  ‘Blood-flowing-Thames,’ she swore.

  ‘Can you make me braver?’ he asked quietly, ‘because given the suicidal bloody nature of the enterprise I’m on, it looks like she can.’

  There was silence then, broken only by a pigeon making a nose-dive for the bit of bun that formed Gutterglass’ left ear.