The upshot of this has been a scurrying of the middle classes for shelter, and a less-than-learned discussion of historical villains and in particular of Joe Spork’s safe-cracking, train-robbing, art-thieving father, the Dandy of the Hoosegow, Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork. Joe has a greater horror of this chatter than he does of the Tosher’s Beat. Under normal circumstances he shies away from the idea that he is what a certain class of crime novel calls an habitué of the demi-monde, by which it is implied that he knows gamblers and crooks and the men and women who love them. For the moment, he is prepared to acknowledge that he still lives somewhat on the fringes of the demi-monde in exchange for not having to talk about it.
Inevitably, in crafting a thumbnail sketch of himself, he finds that it has turned into an obituary, to be held in readiness. Joshua Joseph Spork, son of Harriet Peters and Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork the noted gangster, died childless before the age of 40. He is survived by his mother, now a nun, and by a small number of respectable ex-girlfriends. It must be acknowledged that his greatest achievement in life lay in avoiding becoming his father, though some might assert that in doing so he went too far towards his grandfather’s more sedentary mode of being. There will be a memorial service on Friday; guests are requested to bring no firearms or stolen goods.
He shakes his head to clear it, and hurries over the railway bridge.
Between Clighton Street and Blackfriars there is a cul-de-sac which actually isn’t a cul-de-sac. At the very end is a narrow gap and a pathway which leads to the railway line, and immediately on the left as you face the tracks there’s a doorway into the underworld. Through this little door goes Joseph Spork like the White Rabbit, and down a spiral stair into the narrow red-brick tunnels of the Tosher’s Beat. The corridor is absolutely black, and he scrabbles in his pocket for his working keyfob, from which depends a small selection of keys and passcards, and a torch roughly the shape and size of a pen lid.
The blue-white light shows him walls covered in grime, occasionally scarred with someone’s only immortality: Dave luvs Lisa and always will, at least down here. Joe breathes a sort of blessing and passes by, stepping carefully around knots of slime. One more door, and for this he wraps a handkerchief around his mouth and smears some wintergreen ointment under his nose (“Addam’s Traditional Warming Balsam!,” and who knows why a balsam is exciting enough to merit that exclamation mark, but it is to Mr. Addam). This one requires a key; the toshers have installed a simple lock, not as a serious barrier to entry, but as a polite statement of territoriality. They’re quite content that people should use the road, but want you to know you do so by their grace. The Tosher’s Beat is a webwork, but you can’t just go where you will. You need permissions and goodwills, and sometimes a subscription. Joe’s keyfob will grant him passage through perhaps twenty per cent of the safe tunnels; the others are held aggressively by official and unofficial groupings with a desire for privacy—including the toshers themselves, who guard the heart of their strange kingdom with polite but effective sentries.
Ten minutes later he meets a group of them, bent double over the noxious ooze and combing through it in their rubberised suits.
Back in the day—when London was pocked with workhouses and smothered in a green smog which could choke you dead on a bad night, or before that, even, when open sewers ran down the middle of the streets—the toshers were the outcasts and opportunists who picked over the ghastly mix and retrieved the coins and jewels lost by chance. Even now, it’s amazing what people throw away: grandma’s diamonds, fallen down inside their box, and Auntie Brenda taken for a thief; rings of all descriptions, cast off in a passion or slipped from icy fingers on a cold day; money, of course; gold teeth; and on one occasion, Queen Tosh told the infant Joe at one of Mathew’s parties, a bundle of bearer bonds with a combined value of nearly ten million pounds.
These days, toshers wear gear made for deep-sea divers—well, the filth itself is bad enough, but there’s worse: hypodermics and other gruesomenesses, not to mention the chemicals which are changing the world’s male fish into females and killing all the toads. The average corpse lasts a fortnight longer than it used to, pickled in supermarket preservatives. The work gang look like astronauts from another world, landed badly and picking through what they take to be primordial muck.
Joe waves to them as he hurries by on the raised pavement, and they wave back. Don’t get many visitors, and still fewer give them a thumbs-up in the approved Night Market style, knuckles to the roof and thumb-up pointed at forty-five degrees. The leader returns the gesture, hesitantly.
“Hi,” Joe Spork says loudly, because the helmets don’t make for easy comprehension. “How’s the Cathedral?”
“Clear,” the man says. “Tide gate’s shut. Hang on, I know you, don’t I?”
Yes, he does: they played together as children in the velvet-hung torchlit corridors of the Night Market. The Tosher Family and the Market are cautious allies, tiny states existing within and beneath the greater one that is Britain. Gangster nations, however much diminished now from what they were when Joe was young. The Night Market, in particular, has suffered, its regents unable to inspire the kind of rambunctious, cheeky criminality which was the hallmark of Mathew Spork and his friends: a court without a king. But let’s don’t talk about those days, I’m in disguise as someone with a real life.
“I’ve just got one of those faces,” Joe mutters, and hurries on.
He slips through a door into the old Post Office pneumatic railway (at one stage, Mathew Spork owned a string of Post Office concessions around the United Kingdom, and used them to distribute and conceal all manner of unconventional wares), then down a side tunnel and a flight of stairs and into Cathedral Cave. Dug as the foundation of a medieval palace which was never finished, subsided now into the mud of London’s basin, it’s wet and very dark. The arched stone has been washed in mineral rain over so many hundreds of years that it’s covered now in a glutinous alabaster, as if this place were a natural cavern. When London’s Victorian sewers overflow, as they do more and more in these climate-change days, the whole thing is under water. Joe suppresses a shudder of claustrophobia at the thought.
A rickety metal gantry leads through the room and through into the lower reaches of the railway, and then abruptly to an ancient goods lift which comes up near the riverbank: a highway for smugglers, ancient and modern.
The whole journey takes less than half an hour. You could barely do it faster in a car with an open road.
The dog’s name is Bastion, and it is without shame or mercy. Any dog worth the name will sniff your crotch on arrival, but Bastion has buried his carbuncled nose in the angle of Joe’s trousers and shows no inclination to retreat. Joe shifts slightly, and the dog rewards him with a warning mutter, deep in the chest: I have my mouth in close proximity to your genitals, oh thou man who talks to my mistress over coffee. Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for the rest were buried long ago in the flesh of sinners. Behold my jaws, upper and lower in righteous, symmetrical poverty. Move not, man of clocks, and heed my mistress, for she cherishes me, even in my foul old age.
It’s a tiny animal, the shrunken remains of a pug, and as if poor dentition is not enough, it has absolutely no natural eyeballs. Both have been replaced with substitutes made in pale pink glass which appear to refract and reflect the interior view of Bastion’s empty sockets. This ghastly decision lends considerable sincerity to the growling, and Joe elects to allow the animal to continue drooling on his groin.
Bastion’s owner is called Edie Banister, and she is very small, and very wiry, and apparently goes back slightly further than the British Museum. She has a tight cap of silver hair through which, in places, the freckled skin of her scalp is visible. Her face—proud eyes and strong mouth suggesting powerful good looks in her day—is so pale that Joe imagines he can actually see the bone through her cheeks, and the wrinkles on her arms are folded around one another like melted plastic, all scrunche
d up in unpredictable directions. Edie Banister is old.
And yet she is profoundly alive. Over the past few months, she has found reason to call upon the services of Spork & Co. on several occasions. Joe has come to know her a little, and in this respect she reminds him of his grandfather, Daniel: she is almost vibrating with rich, distilled energy, as if the process of living all those decades has made a reduction of her spirit which is thick and slow in her chest, but sweeter and stronger for it.
Bastion wears his age less well. He is uglier than anything Joe has seen outside a deep-sea aquarium. He seems an unlikely companion for a woman like Edie Banister, but the world, Daniel once observed, is a great honeycombed thing composed of separated mysteries.
Joe has cause to know this for the truth. When a child, he inhabited a variety of secret places, courtesy of his bad dad, and though he has very firmly left those places behind, with their daring characters and picturesque names—the Old Campaigners, the Sinkhole, Kings Forget—he has discovered that every aspect of life is a strange gravitational system of people-planets, all orbiting unlikely suns such as golf clubs, theatres, and basket-weaving classes, falling prey to black holes like infidelity and penury. Or just fading away into space, alone.
And now they come to him in their droves. Dotty, aged, and absent-minded, they file through his doors clutching little pieces of broken memory: music boxes, clocks, fob watches and mechanical toys they once played with or inherited from their mothers, uncles and spouses, now gone to dust and ash.
Edie Banister offers him some more coffee. Joe declines. They smile at one another, nervously. They’re flirting; the elephant in the room—apart from Bastion’s unremarked grip on Joe’s nether parts—is a laburnum-wood box about the size of a portable record player, inlaid with paler wood around the edges. It is the reason for this latest visit to Edie Banister’s home, the reason he has locked up early and come out to Hendon, with its endless rows of almost-pretty, boring houses decorated in little-old-lady chic. Coquettish, she has drawn him here repeatedly and disappointed him, with bits of spavined gramophone and an unlikely steampunkish Teasmade. They have played out a species of seduction, in which she has offered her secrets day by day and he has responded with quick, strong hands and elegant solutions to the intractable problems of broken machinery. All the while, he has known she was testing him for something, weighing him up. Somewhere in this tiny set of rooms there is something much more interesting, something which sweet, ancient Edie clearly believes is going to knock his socks off, but which she is not quite ready to reveal.
He trusts devoutly that what she has in mind is clockwork rather than flesh.
She wets her lips, not with her tongue, but by turning them briefly inward and rubbing them together. Edie Banister comes from a time when ladies were not really supposed to admit to having tongues at all; mouths and saliva and the oral cavity proposed the possibility of other damp, fleshy places which were absolutely not to be thought of, most particularly by anybody who had one.
Joe reaches down to the box. Touches the wood. Lifts it, weighs the burden in his hands. He can feel … moment. A thing of importance. This sweet, dotty old bird has something stupendous, and she knows it. She’s been leading up to showing it to him. He wonders if today’s the day.
He opens the box. A Golgotha of armatures and sprockets. In his mind, he assembles them quickly: that’s the spine, yes, the main spring goes here, that’s part of the housing and so is that … dearie me. Much of this is just so much dross, extra gears and the like. Very untidy. But all together, the useful parts … Oh! Yes, good: early twentieth century by the style and materials, but quite refined in its making. An artisan piece, a one-off, and they always get more, especially if you can link them to a known craftsman. All the same, it’s not … well. Not what he was expecting, though he has no idea what that was.
Joe laughs, but quietly, so as not to waken the canine volcano burbling between his thighs.
“This is very fine. You realise it could be worth quite a bit of money?”
“Oh, dear,” Edie Banister says. “Do I need to insure it?”
“Well, perhaps. These automata can go for a few thousand on a good day.” He nods decisively. On a bad day, they can sit like a dead fish on the auctioneer’s pallet, but never mind that for now.
“Can you fix it?” Edie Banister says, and Joe brushes aside his disappointment and tells her that of course, yes, he can.
“Now?” she asks, and yes, again, because he has his kit, never leaves home without it. Soft-arm clamp to hold the housing. Another as a third hand. Tensioners. There’s no damage, actually, it looks as if someone took it apart on purpose. Quite carefully. Snickersnack, as it were, the thing is assembled, except … hmph. There’s a bit missing—ain’t it always so? It would crosslink the legs … hah! With a piece like that, this would have a veritable walking motion, almost human. Very impressive, very much ahead of its time. He’s seen a robot on the television which works the same way, and is considered a brilliant advance. This could almost be a prototype. No doubt somewhere the ghost of a dead artisan is fuming.
He glances at Edie for permission, ignites a tiny blowtorch, heats a strip of metal and twists, crimps, folds. Snickersnack again. He blows on it. Crimps once more. Yes. Like that, around there, and … so. Consumatum est, as his mother would have it.
Joe looks up, and Edie Banister is watching him, or perhaps she is watching her own life from a great distance. Her face is still, and for one ghastly moment he imagines she has expired right there. Then she shudders and smiles a little fey smile, and says thank you, and he winds the toy and sets it marching, a wee soldier trump-trump-trumping around the table and rucking up the cloth with miniature hobnail boots.
The dog peers back at him: eerie blind hound, stubby ears alert, straining to look through glass eyes. Not perfect, horologist. It drags one foot. But it will suffice. Behold: my mistress is much moved. This, for your pains. And now—begone.
Joe Spork hurries away, suddenly quite certain she wanted something else from him; she has some other secret, a grander one which requires this endless testing of J.J. Spork before it can be unveiled. He wonders a bit wistfully how he failed, considers going back. But perhaps she’s just lonely, and recognises in him a fellow isolate.
Not that he’s alone the way she is.
And not that he’s alone now, not entirely. In the corner of his eye something flickers, a dark shape reflected in the windows of a passing bus. A shadow in a doorway. He turns and looks both ways before crossing the road, very alert as he sweeps the street to his left. Almost, he misses it completely. It’s so still, it’s hard to make out; his eyes are seeking joints and movements where there are none. But there, in the shadowed porch of a boarded-up bakery, it seems that someone watches: a bundled figure in a dress or a heavy overcoat, with a veil like a mourner’s. A beekeeper or a widow, or a tall, thin child playing at being a ghost. Or most likely an old burlap sack hanging on a rack, deceiving the eye.
A moment later a long green estate car nearly runs him over. The angry maternal face behind the wheel glowers at him resentfully for being in the world, and the watcher—if there really was one—goes right out of his head.
Moody and unsettled, Joe stops in at the corner shop to see whether Ari will sell him some cat poison.
When Ari arrived in London, he called the shop Bhred nba’a. He had come to the conclusion from watching English television that the people of London were fond of both puns and corner shops, and he reasoned that a combination must inevitably be a big success. Bread and butter became Bhred nba’a, and it emerged almost immediately that although Londoners do indeed admire both puns and convenience, they’re not keen on shop owners who appear to be taking the piss out of them while looking foreign. Correct use of the apostrophe to denote a glottal stop was not a defence.
Ari learned fast, and shortly painted over the offending sign. It’s not clear to Joe whether his name actually is anything like Ari, or wheth
er he has just selected a comfortably foreign-yet-English noise which doesn’t startle the natives with complexity or suggestions of undue education.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ari is reticent on the poison issue. Ari regards cats as lessons in the journey through life. Cats, he explains, are divine messengers of patience. Joe, one shoulder still sore from a near miss two weeks ago, says they are Satanic messengers of discord and pruritus. Ari says this is possible, but by the workings of the ineffable divinity, even if they are Satanic messengers of discord and pruritus, they are also tutors sent by the Cosmic All.
“They are of themselves,” Ari says, clutching this morning’s consignment of organic milk, some of which is leaking through the plastic, “an opportunity for self-education.”
“In first aid and disease,” mutters Joe Spork.
“And in more spiritual things. The universe teaches us about God, Joseph.”
“Not cats. Or, not that cat.”
“All things are lessons.”
And this is so close to something Grandpa Spork once said that Joe Spork, even after a sleepless night and a bad cat morning, finds himself nodding.
“Thanks, Ari.”
“You are welcome.”
“I still want cat poison.”
“Good! Then we have much to teach one another!”
“Goodbye, Ari.”
“Au revoir, Joseph.”
II
Two Gentlemen of Edinburgh;
the Book of the Hakote;
Friend in need.
He is nearly at his front door when he hears the shout. It is a breathy, asthmatic shout, more a gasp, but it is penetrating all the same in the stillness of Quoyle Street. Pigeons scuttle nervously in the alley round the side.
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