Not much room for us all in that boat.
‘Just you two.’ Ahmed’s voice echoed.
‘Where we going?’
‘Wherever they take us.’
Ahmed nodded. Sean stepped into the boat. I got on behind, they handed us a lamp. The bottom of the boat was lined with rugs and soft to sit on. Because there was a mattress below and under that more cushions and a large hessian sack—Ahmed lifted up the mattress to show us.
‘What’s in there?’
‘Stuff.’
Airstrip witch mind terma, to unplug realm fuckwits. The high mission we were all on together.
‘Good luck,’ Ahmed said, shaking our hands, clasping Sean to him for a moment, then grabbing the shoulder of the boatman whose cloudy eyes looked round in not-quite-the-right direction.
‘He’s blind,’ I said quietly.
‘Not totally,’ Ahmed said. ‘He can tell dark and light. He is deaf mute though. Tap him on the head if you need to communicate: once means “stop”, twice means “go”.’
Poor guy.
‘Safer that way,’ Sean said, slinging a rug round me against the chill.
Ahmed reached into the boat and took Sean’s hand again for a moment, palms up and joined, elbows touching. Then Ahmed broke away and tapped the boatman twice on the forehead. The men undid the knot from the ring, threw the rope into the boat, set us adrift.
The boat turned his face nearly to us and he smiled, showing us his gums and neatly-severed tongue. He pulled the engine cord and the motor chugged. We set off, Gums facing us, Sean and I moving backwards, Ahmed and co receding, their lamps and the light from above growing dim.
Incredible spookiness on that boat in the gloom under the desert. We held hands. Our one lamp cast flickering shadows onto cut sandstone. Pale Gums crouched with tiller in one hand, wooden beads in the other. Rotting plants stenched it up and sometimes clogged the engine and our path till Gums cleared them. We scattered bats. The chugging motor echoed down the narrow channel, the tunnel roof above us was sometimes high and sometimes oppressively close with stale air.
Sean held me. He was warm.
‘The underworld,’ he said.
‘Stop freaking me out.’
‘It is. Rivers of the dead. Blind boatmen. The Styx, for real. Ancient tech. Egyptian barques shaped like crescent moons ferrying the dead and their gold to the afterlife. Learn enough in this lifetime and you’ll be reborn through these channels. Built flow networks under every country in the world.’
We chugged along for hours, sometimes moving into light and warmth and fresh air as we sailed under open well shafts and saw round windows of sky high above us like blue planets, plastic buckets dangling down. We came to intersections, sometimes we turned down them.
‘Watch his hands, do you see? That’s his map,’ nodding at Gums’s rosary. ‘Each wooden bead means a well, the metal ones mean a change of direction. He sees enough to count the wells, the change of light. Or sense the change of air or echo if its night or the well’s covered. Different rosaries for different journeys.’
Loving me silently under the rug while Gums crouched blind and barefoot at the tiller like a folded up bird.
We sensed it first by oncoming coolness and how sound changed. A portion of tunnel that was metal, sailing into a metal tube. Gums sniffed and slowed. He felt the metal wall, slapped it, made it ring and vibrate, smiled in our direction and nodded.
‘We’re here,’ Sean said. ‘Wherever that is.’
The tunnel widened, we sailed alongside a railed metal platform. Gums felt for it then cut the motor and tied his rope.
Eerie quiet, apart from our breathing and the water slapping the metal and boat. Everything apart from us metal and modern: steel, I guessed, smooth and regular, giant rivets. Sean held up the lamp but we saw no opening above. Gums smiled and nodded again, then pointed towards the platform. Then he reached forwards with knobbly hands and fumbled for, then lifted, the rugs and mattress, showing the sack beneath.
The booty. Sean reached for Gums, clapped him on the shoulder, a gesture of thanks. Gums bowed his head. Sean pulled himself up and out of the boat onto the platform, reached for me and pulled me up behind him, took the lamp by its metal handle, set it on the platform floor. We grabbed the sack and lugged it up onto the platform next to us. It was heavy.
‘What next?’ Some relay of boatmen, us hanging around down there for who knew how long till the next one turned up, like waiting for tube trains?
We had no food.
It would be fine.
Sean lifted the lamp, shone it at the platform’s back wall and lit a double door shape cut into the metal. I went over, tried to prise open these doors, dug my fingers into their unbudging edges. Sean shone light at a crank handle set into the wall at the door’s right side. Metal, like a bicycle pedal, with a worn leather handle. He went over, put the lamp down, started turning the handle. Above us something high and unseen began its whirring descent. A lift, its hidden weights and pulleys, a hand-powered contraption like a well. Something clattered down behind the wall towards us, with who or what inside? Gums nodded from the boat.
‘Sean,’ I said, but as the lift hit the ground the doors slid open, to reveal nothing. An empty space, a metal floor and shaft, lit by dim light from high above, bare except for a metal chain hanging down.
Sean stopped cranking. The door stayed open but the light from above began to dwindle.
‘Come on.’
He pushed the sack inside. Gums clanged the metal tunnel wall again and threw a pile of black cloth at us. I went over, picked it up. Burkas again, black cotton this time, like our black cotton wraps. One big one, one small one. We put them on, covering everything except our eyes.
‘Looking good.’ He went back over to the boat, tapped Gums’ forehead twice. Gums bowed his head then pulled the motor cord and, turning the boat slowly around, chugged back down the channel into the darkness with his beads.
‘We got his lamp,’ I said.
‘Our lamp. He doesn’t need it.’ Sean took the lamp into the lift. I stayed on the platform by the water.
‘What’s up there? Don?’
He held out his hand to me from the lift. ‘You got us in. I’m getting us out.’
Bonded now, fluids exchanged, sealed together in this experience. I joined him in the lift. He pulled the burka down over my face so my eyes were covered and my mouth exposed. He kissed it through the slit with his tongue. Then he pulled the lift doors shut by their inner handles, grabbed the metal chain and started pulling it down to winch the floor up while I pulled my slit back up over my eyes.
Slowly, working together, we yanked ourselves plus lamp and sack up the long steel lift shaft till we reached the dim bulb at the top and a ceiling and a new set of doors.
It was hot up there and not just because of yanking the lift up. Beyond the doors was Tokyo or Timbuktu, it didn’t matter, we’d sort it. We stopped pulling. He let go of the chain though I was loathe to: what if that’s what held us up? I pictured us hurtling all the way down. But in the chain’s tension I could feel we were safe. I let go as he pulled the new doors apart, letting in searing white light.
Hot desert again, our eyes adjusting through our slits. Different desert though: plants and shrubs, shingle again instead of sand. Somewhere with hills in the distance, the sun to one side, the sense of afternoon. And next to us, stretched out for seeming miles in either direction, to the horizon: two long wide shiny parallel silver tubes, set up on endless metal struts and cradles poking up from the ground.
‘Pipelines,’ he said, nodding at the sleek modern things. ‘For the gas and minerals they suck up to power those clicks and swipes.’ He picked up the sack and stepped out of the lift.
I came after him with the lamp, shy of this pipeline. Such things were Don’s surely, smart coated structures primed to blab despite our burkas.
As I stepped outside the lift doors slid shut behind me.
We both turned.
The lift building we’d stepped out of looked like an old rusting sentry box, its doors set at a slight angle facing the pipelines. Flaky orange exterior, nothing like the smooth steel innards we’d emerged from or the shiny pipeline.
‘Clever,’ he said, about the doors closing. ‘Some mechanism to calibrate the weight. Stops it getting sanded up. I guess.’
‘How does it open though?’ Trusting him and Ahmed and this experience but not wanting us trapped up there in the searing heat.
He touched the hot rough lift doors, tried to pull them open, couldn’t. I tried too and tore my fingertips on the burning rust flakes, drawing blood. A small rusting wheel was set into the side of the sentry box away from the pipeline. I went over, tried to turn this wheel, failed. Jammed in place, maybe he could move it, but he’d moved over to the pipeline. I started to sweat under my black. We didn’t have any water or food, though maybe there was some in the sack. Around us were green shrubs we could maybe chew.
‘Look,’ he called, from over by the pipeline, hidden now by the sentry box. I went over, found him standing next to what looked like a third short pipeline tube about five metres long, jutting out at a right-angle from the pipe closest to us, also supported by struts and cradles. He stood in black cotton by its sealed end.
‘Pig launcher,’ he said. ‘Cleaning capsules. You can send other stuff down. You can send people. This is an Ahmed in, how he sends things.’
‘Down Don’s pipelines?’
‘Probably Chinese. Even if it’s Don’s, Ahmed’ll have sorted it. Safe zone. OK?’
Staring into me, measuring my taint of realm.
‘This is how we’ll travel?’ Hurtling down.
‘I’ve done it before.’
I swallowed. ‘How fast? Where do we end up? We get into some…capsule? How do we get in?’
‘That’s the question.’
We looked at the pipe. The sealed end had a small dial set into its centre, it looked like you could turn it. He reached out.
‘Careful, it’s going to be boiling.’
‘It’s fine.’ He touched the dial.
I fluttered the tips of my fingers onto the sealed end too. It was weirdly cool, for a shiny metal structure sat out in baking desert, especially since the flaking lift had been so hot.
‘Why isn’t it hot?’
‘Tech.’ He was turning the dial but nothing was happening.
‘How did you get in? When you used one before?’
‘I was with people, it was different. A Scritch?’ stepping back to let me fiddle with it.
No Scritch I could remember about a dial in a desert on a tube. Twelve clicks going round.
‘Like a clock,’ I said, but without numbers. Like a safe, or a combination lock. I turned it five clicks, pressed the centre, then turned six more clicks. The five and the six, that tended to work in this business.
The sealed end with the dial began to telescope out towards us slowly.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘What did you do?’
‘The five and the six. Alan’s code. How come Ahmed knows it?’
‘It’s an old number,’ he said. ‘Lots of people know it.’
I stood there watching the inner tube slowly extending, revealing a hinged hatch door at its top.
‘Clever you,’ he said, as the telescoping stopped, going over to open the inner tube’s hinged hatch door.
Inside: a capsule, a grey cushioned space, two berths, an upholstered double coffin.
‘Clever you,’ he said again.
‘But,’ I said, not feeling clever, remembering buttery locks and another number, that I supposedly knew, the one that was about hedgehogs and cracks. ‘What if…they want Don’s number? Maybe this is a trap.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not a trap. Ahmed’s with us. This isn’t Don’s number.’
‘How do you know?’
He took my burka face in his hands, stared into my eyes, nuzzled my veiled lips with his veiled lips. ‘Too simple.’ He went over to get the lamp and sack.
I looked inside the capsule: just enough space for us both. There were buttons on one rounded wall, a control panel.
‘Look,’ he said at my side, blowing out the lamp, pushing it and the sack inside the capsule even though the lamp must have been hot, pushing them in right the way down, showing me the buttons, which one to press to send us hurtling.
‘It’s safe? You’re sure? Where do we end up?’
‘Somewhere together,’ squeezing me hard, lifting me up, bundling me in, climbing in next to me.
I struggled against him, his arms round me, holding me down next to him in our snug vault, the hatch door still open to blue sky above us.
‘So much more than you know,’ he said. ‘Deep tunnels, everywhere in your cities, dug by monsters, massive projects they call civic, public transport, that you only see a fraction of. Huge circuits, smashing things together, black quark arts, impersonating stars.’
‘Sean,’ I said, starting to freak out, but he had one hand over me and with the other pulled the hatch shut over us, latching it from inside, making us dark except for the dim glow from buttons at his side. ‘How we going to breathe?’ I said.
‘Like this,’ fiddling with something in the closed hatch door above us, grabbing and ripping my burka slit, forcing a plastic mask over my nose and mouth.
‘Sean,’ I tried to say, trying to wriggle out from that mask in black panic—almost no space or light, him so close, restraining me.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Gotta be like this. Trust me. Take the leap. We could be here twenty four hours, longer, depends where we’re going, under the sea maybe, you don’t want to be conscious for that, this is pleasant.’
What was pleasant? Still wriggling under the warm plastic but beginning to feel it in my body and that it was pleasant, seeing him watch me unmasked beside me.
‘Well,’ he said.
43
Him and I, in Alan’s bus but not Alan’s bus and not Vengeance Street neither, nor the Skidblad prints. More like a mist: what you touched didn’t crumble and was semi-solid but you could put your hand through it.
‘Not always,’ taking my hand, reaching it up to the mantelpiece, helping me grab the handle of the Toby jug and bring it down to my lips and drink the scalding liquid inside.
Me walking with him through my childhood, because he’d never seen it. Only his spit had, realm-reared Chris who hadn’t been through what we’d been through, come out the other side. How to play Scritch with Alan in the Fall under rain and grey skies. Tal and Flora who was dead now, maybe. Me and Chris on the floor of the broken house, me and Sean watching it. Ann Wynn calling us in for tea as the light changed.
Back in the bus. The pile of books, Alan knowing where every book was. ‘You got to have a scheme.’ Alan’s treasures. Different ways to code and remember, the Alphabet, the Little Key. The Ring of Seeds, the Chinese map. Pictures, numbers, stories. The swan, the hook, the snowmen.
Which numbers, though?
Hard to say.
The old bad feeling of not knowing, not being good enough to crack it. The old pressure.
All about not forcing it, letting things float up, him and I working together. Zoo Wang, talking Zita. Saying whatever, letting your mind guide you. Your body being so much cleverer than you. Alan knitting it into us, turning me into a piano. Full of tunes, if you knew how to play me.
‘That’s where you hid,’ pointing to the cupboard under the stairs.
Going in there myself, into the dark, him coming in too with that black Venetian mask, pushing its long nose into my mouth. Him pulling up my clothes, putting the black nose inside me, putting himself inside me, looking at me with his new yellow eyes.
44
I lay outdoors at dawn somewhere cold and damp with him lying close next to me, his yellow eyes and the dent in his head. Strange and wrong, or what I’d been taught was wrong. My tinkered brain back from its sleep. And where were we, was
I? Out of capsules and gas pipes, somewhere grey but fresh and green and cold with trees near sea, I could smell it.
I was awake, somewhere, by bushes, outside.
I sat up, pushed him away.
Damp, cold, scratchy sand mixed with wet earth, plants, insects, cams, billions of busy things obeying instructions from Don or their inner codes. Too many things, vile and freaky after the blank desert.
He reached over for me. I pushed him off again, he nuzzled into my neck, I pushed hard and kicked him, he held my wrists. I screamed, he put his hand over my burka-covered mouth to keep me quiet in the grassy sand. I bit his stump through the cloth, he rolled away from me and yelped. Something vast loomed over us from down the beach.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘Where are we?’ trying to work out what was happening, why my head didn’t seem to be working, how come I was wearing black sweatpants and a hoodie.
‘We’re in Bacton. Right?’
‘Bacton? What’s that?’ feeling light as air. Just down from us I could see tangled silver tubes, huge drums, floodlights in the dawn light, pipes, barbed wire, an industrial complex jutting into the sea. ‘Are we in Barrow?’
‘It’s Bacton, what are you talking about? Norfolk, you remember? You OK? We came from there, right? Escaped? The men and the bins? Cutting the wire? You OK? Don’t conk out on me,’ leaning over and slapping me hard, stinging my cheeks. I lunged at him, scratched his face with my nails, drew blood.
‘Stop it.’ He held me off, looked concerned. ‘It’s OK, Nim. It’s me. You blacked out. It can happen, after the gas. Breath. Relax. Stay awake. Don’t conk out on me. Don’t panic. What’s the last thing you remember?’
Vengeance Street. ‘Getting inside the tube?’
‘In the desert?’
His stump and face, the nick under his eye that had nothing to do with carting down the Fall, why did he have it? More beard and stubble than before, it seemed to me, a trickle of blood running down near the corner of his eye where I’d scratched.
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