by Tom Pollock
‘Would the two of you please stop talking about me like I’m not here!’ Beth yelled.
Gutterglass’ eggshell-eyes didn’t stray from her prince’s face. ‘You had better tell her, then,’ she said. ‘Tell her what you’re asking her to do.’
She turned away and crouched over the Blankleits, muttering and petting them, checking none of their hairline cracks had opened up.
Fil looked pale, elated and scared all at once. ‘Come on then.’ He took Beth by the arm.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’ll explain on the way, but we need to get going now. I really don’t want to meet them in the dark. Glas, Victor,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘look after the Lampies for us while we’re gone.’
Victor grunted and swigged from his bottle, but Gutterglass answered acidly, ‘Oh, absolutely your Highness! And should I wash your jeans for you too? Maybe you’ve got time for a foot-rub before you go? What with having only your babysitting to do I can’t think what I’ll do with all my spare time!’
He glared at her, but though worms writhed through the eggshells, she didn’t blink. The street prince caved first. ‘All right,’ he said at last, ‘what are you going to do, then?’
‘What you should be doing instead of running off on a wild wraith-chase. I’m going to put together an army. I’ll start with our Mistress’ priesthood.’
‘Our first port of call,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t listen.’
A beetle tugged a thin smile across Gutterglass’ lips. An unmistakable new confidence infused her shape. ‘They will listen to me.’
Beth dragged her arm from his grip. ‘Fil, please, tell me where we’re going.’
The smile, when it finally made it onto his face, was the very opposite of reassuring. ‘We’re going to get you what you want.’
Paul Bradley paced the streets of Hackney in a kind of aggravated daze. The light from the streetlamps made his hands look jaundiced. Early evening frost crunched under his feet. He spoke to himself in an angry mumble, sometimes rising to a frightened shout. Tramps eyed him from their sleeping-bags. He knew the couples hustling past him, huddled into each other, were assuming he was drunk, but though he’d been tempted, he hadn’t had anything stronger than coffee. He knew he wasn’t mad – madness would be to stop talking to himself, to stop urging himself on. Madness would be to succumb to the almost irresistible urge spreading from the pit of his stomach to curl up in a doorway and shut his eyes until the world went away.
‘Think, Bradley, think,’ he hissed to himself, over and over, ‘think: you can find her.’ Walk, Bradley, walk, echoed the unspoken instruction to his legs, and obediently he shoved one foot in front of the other.
When the glowing woman’s last light had faded he’d stumbled away from the shattered place behind the railway, walking until his knees gave way. He sat on the pavement outside a closed internet café on a ganja-scented high street, clutching the picture of the boy with the railing. He’d not smelled the sweet dough rising in the Caribbean bakery next door, or noticed the taunts of the kids strutting past in their hoodies and baseball jackets. The sound of passing police sirens did register, and he’d felt a pang – but what could he tell them? That his missing daughter’s best friend had been kidnapped by a cloud of barbed wire? If he was banged up in a cell for wasting police time his chances of fixing this fell to zero.
When the café opened he scanned Beth’s sketch of the skinny boy and posted it on as many message boards as he could find, then, seized by a horror of inaction, he ran back out into the street to walk London’s endless, twisting pavements until he was as breathless as he was bewildered. But he had to keep walking, because the one time he’d stopped, just for a moment, just to ease his aching feet, he’d fallen asleep. In his dream a kindly-faced woman in a headscarf had demanded, over and over again, in his own voice: ‘Where is my daughter?’ He woke soaked in sweat, and as cold as the morning frost that webbed the tarmac.
He knew exactly how Parva’s parents would be feeling now: the way they’d be reassuring themselves, repeating, ‘I’m sure she’s fine’ over and over because although they weren’t sure she was fine at all, they had no idea what to do if she wasn’t. He knew the symptoms; he was a carrier. Having a lost child was a disease he was spreading.
But he wasn’t looking for Parva, even though the guilt for that fact sat, toxic as bleach, in his belly. His only goal was to find Beth.
When he recognised a hardware shop on a street corner he realised his feet had automatically marched him close to home. ‘Think, Bradley, think; where would she go?’ But he didn’t know; his mind was a blank. He didn’t know where she hung out, where she ate, where she shopped; apart from Parva, he didn’t even know her friends.
Marianne would have known. Oh, love, where are you? Where have you gone? He hadn’t spoken to his wife in the silence of his head like that in months. She had always known what to say. Whenever Beth had been sent home from school with a torn shirt and a bloody nose, it was always Marianne who made the long walk up to the little room in the attic and brought their daughter back to them. When he’d asked her what she’d said to Beth, she’d smiled and said, ‘I backed her up. It’s what mothers do for their little girls.’
He curled his fist around the photo of Beth’s drawing of the boy, now bent and street-soiled. To his deep shame, this was all he knew of his daughter.
He almost stumbled over a pile of concrete scraps and stopped. Tyres hissed over tarmac on the road behind him. He didn’t sit down because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get up again. But the darkness came over him like a suffocating blanket, and another step seemed impossible.
Walk, Bradley, walk. But he didn’t. A poisonous, paranoid voice in his mind said, There’s no point. She’s already dead. You’ll see her body. You’ll see her dead body.
The pile of broken lumps of concrete that had tripped him sat in the middle of the pavement. It looked like some kid had scribbled over it in black paint—
He froze. He tilted his head and slumped, trying to bring it into focus. Slowly, the sharp angles of concrete and paint materialised into a shape:
A rhino, horned and heavy-hoofed, was stampeding out at him.
He let out a tiny whimper. He recognised it instinctively, that sense of damage and violence that lurked in the everyday, waiting to ambush you. Slowly he let the picture of the street-boy uncurl from between his fingers. He barely dared to breathe. He could see it there, in the whip-lines of ink: the rhino-in-concrete was by the same hand.
You know one more thing, he thought, wherever she is, she’s painting. She was leaving a trail of ink and paint like breadcrumbs.
Walk, Bradley. But he didn’t walk. He ran.
CHAPTER 26
‘Gutterglass won’t say so, but I’m fairly sure my mother was ashamed of me. Now, now, no need to choke up. I’m not looking for sympathy; I only want to explain, give you the context, so you’ll understand why she did what she did.
‘She must have been gutted when I was born, with these fingers with their bones so easy to break, these eyes that can see only seven colours. I was so small compared to her – she was this Goddess, this city, and me? I was a tear-and-turd-squirting bundle constantly yammering to be fed.
‘I once asked Glas if my father was human and though she always said she didn’t know, I think either my old man or one of his relatives must have been. The weaknesses bred true.
‘I know, I know, brings a tear to your eye and all that. But that’s how it was. Of course, I was still the son of a Goddess, and that had its perks. If she’d just left me to grow naturally my arms would have been as strong as girders and I’d have outrun the trains. But for what she wanted me for, that wouldn’t have been enough.
‘Mater Viae needed more: she needed me to shine like the Thames on a summer’s day. She needed my bones to outlast the city foundations, and more than that, she needed me to be proof of her, to carry her name.
‘She took me
out east, out to the docks, though London’s old port belonged to Reach then. She walked wrapped in rags, with only Fleet, the bravest of her retinue of Cats, beside her. As she passed, the street signs yearned to change, but she bid them hold.
‘She kept to the brickways, the roads of fish and sewage and opium and knotted rope, the old paths – as hard as Reach tried, he could never gentrify the docks. They were loyal to her spirit, even while he reared his towers up over them.
‘She walked beside the canals and the wrecks of the old tea clippers raised themselves out of the depths, eager to relive their memories of bringing her tribute. She shushed them down again, gracious but urgent: she wasn’t there to be noticed. Fleet wound her way, meowing, around her mistress’ ankles, and my mother stroked her with slate-skinned fingers. They crept along, me in her arms, my mother cooing road-shanties to keep her infant child becalmed, her voice low enough that the vibrations in the air wouldn’t disturb the crane-struts.
‘—what? What? I’m building a picture up, all right? I’m “setting the scene”. You want me to get on with it? Fine. It’s night. It’s dark. It’s enemy territory. They’re sneaking. It’s risky. Get it? Good. Excuse me for trying to make it interesting.
‘So anyway, there’s this old abandoned dye factory, hunched over the river like a hungry old man scouring it for fish. The men that live there, the Chemical Synod, they exist beyond my mother’s sway, but she’d done deals with them before – making deals is their reason to be.
‘She’d given me all she could of her own power, but to challenge Reach’s growing strength, to be her champion, I needed more.
‘And they smiled their oil-black smiles and rubbed their frictionless palms together. They bowed deeply and in their quiet, courteous voices they named the price.
‘You see, this city is built on a lot of things: brick and stone and river clay, but under that, under everything, this city is built on bargains. Those’re the true foundations of the city, those intricate contracts. Deals are sacred here.
‘Behind the factory lies the chemical marshes, where the effluent of the docks has seeped into the city’s flesh. These are the synod’s cauldrons, where they brew their experiments. They mix liquid chaos in carefully measured quantities, pouring it from rusted drums, peppering it with more exotic ingredients – splinters of skull from road accidents, or a vial of rainwater that flowed through London’s gutters in Roman times.
‘And then, at eventide, with the Thames at low ebb, they sit in their fields inhaling the mist of the alkali fens and discuss in slick-tongued sibilants the markets they can make for that day’s brew.
‘These men showed my mother through one gate and then another, laughing as she slipped over the sodden ground and swayed giddily through the gas. Her hands went numb and I nearly slipped from them, and the synod reached out, eager to catch me, to claim their most exotic ingredient yet. But she gripped me tighter, set her shoulders and walked on.
‘They led her in circles, letting the poisons they farmed seep into her blood, until she was impossibly weak when they arrived at their destination: a ragged-shored pool slick with a rainbow sheen.
‘My mother unwound the billboard scraps that she’d swaddled me in. Fleet flattened her ears and hissed, threatening the synod, and they smiled their black smiles and spread their hands and stepped away.
‘My mother held me by the ankle, her all-too-human child, and she stared her defiance at the cranes on the horizon as she lowered me into the pool.
‘And then what, you ask? What do you think? Then I changed. I took on those aspects of the city the synod had hoarded. My sweat became petrol to keep me warm on the coldest night. I could flow as silently and as fast as shadows. My wounds would close as fast as oil over a stone.
‘And their part of the deal given, the Chemical Synod demanded their payment.
‘Gutterglass found me, the way she always has. Her pigeons spotted the baby lying in the marshes and bore her to me. Fleet was still hissing and yowling to keep the synod at bay. Glas always says I wasn’t crying, just staring up at the clouds, giggling, drunk on the fumes. I wasn’t even aware my Mother had gone.
‘No one but the synod knows what was demanded, but whatever the price was, Mater Viae didn’t have it. That’s why she went, had to be: she had to go hunting for it. That’s why she disappeared.
‘Not long after, Fleet vanished too, following her, and from that day to this, from Shepherd’s Bush to Cripplegate neither Mater Viae nor her Cats have been seen.
‘And now she’s coming back – who knows why? Perhaps she’s completed the task the synod gave her, retrieved whatever rare commodity they need for their next experiment in mortal chemistry.
‘But still, she’s been gone a long time. And sometimes I catch Glas’ reflection in a window-pane, when she thinks I can’t see, and her face … Well, I can’t help but wonder if she thinks that I cost her a Goddess, for all those years at least.
‘So that’s where we’re going, Beth, if you’re willing: out to the chemical marshes, to put petrol in your sweat and steel in your bones. We’re going diving for a new you amidst the opium and tea and the old bloody brick. I asked you to give up home, give up safety, and you did, and I’m grateful. Now I need you to give up this one more thing. It’s double or quits, Beth – I just hope it’s not sudden death.
‘Do you really want to be like me?’
CHAPTER 27
Docklands: the eastest of the East End, where the dense tangle of office blocks and high-rise flats peters out, diminishing into miles of low concrete with a few desultory parks and stagnant ponds full of water.
The City’s three tallest skyscrapers rise hundreds of feet above the squalor, with the lesser towers, each a glittering palace of law or finance, clustering around them on a small island in the docks. Canary Wharf is like a mask, a false-face, shouting that all in the East End is prosperous. But in the shadow of the towers the warehouses groan empty, and haggard-looking regulars have almost grown into their seats in the chilly pubs.
Do you really want to be like me?
The two of them stood on the riverbank, in front of the old dye factory. Beth’s brain buzzed. She looked Fil now and saw her future.
He avoided her gaze, and Beth’s heart tightened in her chest.
Give up home.
Give up safety.
I need you to give up one more thing …
A sound made her look towards the factory. Six completely black figures slipped away from the rusting hulk and strode towards them across the marshes, seagulls wheeling around them. The midday sun shrivelled pools of shadow to nothing.
The men’s oil-slicked faces had a rainbow sheen. Their lips made faint sucking noises as they parted for breath. Click click click went the cigarette lighters – each of them had one, and they snapped them open and shut as they walked, open and shut, open and shut—
Their acrid stench cut through Beth’s sinuses like sandpaper and tears stung her eyes. Fil had told her about their appearance, the smell, even the lighters. The one thing she hadn’t expected was the symmetry.
They tilted their heads and smiled their black smiles identically. When one of them raised his right hand in greeting, another on the far side raised his left. They spread across the marshes like ripples on a pool of oil, graceful as dancers in their pitch-black tailoring.
Fil leaned on his spear and watched their display, his attitude all show-off cocky, but Beth saw his jaw clench. Maybe he wasn’t afraid, she told herself; maybe he was only fighting the smell.
The tallest of the Chemical Synod stepped forward from the centre and the others stepped back and out in precise formation.
‘Johnny Naphtha.’ Fil’s smile was tighter than a violin string.
‘Filiuss Viae,’ the oil-soaked man acknowledged. His deep voice was smooth, pleasant. ‘The Sson of the Sstreetss. Pipssqueak of the Pavementss. Visseroy of the Viaductss. Sswame of the Ssidewalkss. Malingerer of the M25—’
Fil sig
hed and interrupted. ‘Could you possibly stop taking the piss, Johnny?’
‘Sstunned that you would ssuggesst I would commit ssuch ssacrilege, Filiuss.’ Johnny turned to Beth and the synod bowed to her in unison. Oil dripped from their foreheads to splash on the pebbles. ‘And who is this Kissmet-kisssed courtessan who iss kind enough to accompany your Highnessss?’
‘I am not,’ Beth said flatly, ‘a bleedin’ courtesan.’
Fil’s brow wrinkled. ‘A what?’
‘It’s a nice word for a hooker,’ said Beth, who’d learned it from Pen.
‘Sso ssorry, a ssimple ssemantic sslip.’ Johnny inclined his head. ‘A conssort, then.’
‘Not one of them neither.’
‘Ah.’ Johnny Naphtha’s smile widened, and a strange thought occurred to Beth, that that smile was indestructible, that you could put Johnny Naphtha through a car-crusher and his grin alone would come out whole on the other side.
‘I’d certainly ssooner commit ssuicide than distress such a ssoul further,’ he said smoothly. He gestured back towards the dye factory. ‘So pleasse, come insside.’
The door of the dye factory led through to metal-walled cloisters covered in oceans of rust and continents of dead brown moss. The Chemical Synod formed up around Beth as they walked, wrapping her in dizzying fumes. The snap of the lighters filled her with a thrilling premonition of fire. She was beginning to feel light-headed, and she snarled inwardly at herself to stay alert.
Johnny Naphtha and Filius Viae loped side-by-side up ahead, apparently haggling over the price of her transformation. Johnny Naphtha bent his head, listening closely while Fil described what he wanted.
Beth studied his sinewy back, noting the oily sweat that slicked it, the way his sharp shoulder blades protruded. Then his shoulders slumped and he gestured once, as though protesting, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.
Johnny Naphtha produced a clear bottle from inside his jacket and Fil resentfully took a long swig—