by Tanith Lee
The mysterious company. The titled man.
To Wales, to London—Cimmie and Wellington lighting up, thinking perhaps of some real black child they could buy now from Africa—and elsewhere far and wide. An island off Greece, Toronto in Canada, Gothenburg in Sweden. Not to Paris.
But here the letter lay,, and as the door hung open, the winter rain blew in on it, and ate it away.
As the train ran through the muddy landscape, Sharon thought with wonder of her money.
She had gone to the building society and drawn some. Her father had started that account when she was a child. Now, with interest, she had found she had almost five thousand pounds. And you could take two hundred and fifty pounds a day. It was hers. It was Sharon Timberlake’s.
As dusk fell like rain, Sharon got out of the mechanical worm, and walked down into a town she recalled and which, very oddly, had not changed so very much.
They had built up the promenade it was true, but there were still ways to reach the shore, where the sea lay growling like an albino tiger, under the rising winter moon.
Sharon found a bed-and-breakfast that, in the morning, would do her bacon and egg, fried bread, tomatoes and mushrooms, toast and marmalade. And in the neat and not-pink room, by the kettle, were sachets of tea and coffee and sugar and chocolate, and little cartons of cream. All over the town they sold tasty fish and chips.
By night, she walked out unafraid, ignoring the invitations from the pizza restaurant, where later she would eat to her soul’s content.
She took Andrew’s smallest bear down to look at the sea.
As she stood there, on the silver beach, she beheld the fish-smelling waters of the earth, which came so playfully, so black and silken, and lay down before her, and then ran away.
A little snow was falling. Like the TV. Like a kiss.
Sharon Timberlake looked out upon the earth, and found it good.
And when she turned back for the hot lights of the world, for a vast pizza with cheese and ham and sausage and peppers, for a gateau and ice-cream, Sharon found a shell, like the gold of the moon, lying at her feet.
She picked it up.
She held it to the ear of the bear, who listened.
Then to her own.
She heard the rhythm of life, not broken, a plaintive fearlesslness whistling far away, much nearer than the heart.
Chapter Thirty
With a much louder whistling, the other shell had fallen.
It was not a shell, either.
It was a mine.
Some came down silently through the red and black of that blitz night in 1940. This one sang.
It dropped through layers of already crushed and crumbled paving, and down then through the sandwich-like fillings of concrete, rubble, pipes and bricks, into a perfect space below.
Another mine, which dropped and exploded nearby, covered its tracks.
In the warren of its pit, the singing mine buzzed.
The end of the buzzing would be a detonation. Something, some fault or fate, distracted it. The buzz stopped midway.
Like a giant metal bee it lay there, about eight feet long by three feet in diameter. Sleeping.
The city settled round it.
When Lix saw Camillo again he was playing with Janice’s dish-mop dog outside the Pakistani cash-and-carry.
The owner had brought out some past-the-sell-by-date mince pies, and Janice and the dog had been eating these.
‘How I’ve missed you,’ Camillo said to Lix.
Janice waddled over on her bunyons and handed Lix a pie.
Lix took it and ate it slowly, carefully.
Camillo said, ‘She doesn’t remember our night of love.’
‘Oh, did you have one?’ asked Janice. She broke into a sudden creaky rendition of Novello’s Glamorous Night, hitting, surprisingly, a very high top note. ‘Used to sing in the canteen,’ said Janice. Whatever that meant.
Camillo said, ‘The sun will set in half an hour.’
Lix did not respond. There had not, of course, been a night of love. Camillo had left her, those weeks before, on the river beach by the spitting fire, and gone off with Vinegar Tom and Two Hats scrambling after.
Lix looked along the drab street, grey as the heavy sky. Only the cash-and-carry was bright, lit inappropriately by paper-chains and green glitter, to please the Indian’s Western customers.
This was how Lix saw Christmas now, with her blue eyes, in the windows of shops, in Trafalgar Square, where the great tree rose as if to bless the maelstrom below.
Christmas once removed. For ever removed.
A young Indian girl came out of the store. She wore a red wool coat over a red and purple sari. She carried two bags crammed with shopping.
Eyeing Camillo and the women nervously, she hurried up the street.
‘It’s the way they looks at you,’ said Janice.
‘As if you were dirt,’ said Camillo helpfully. ‘We are.’
He watched the slender dark girl cross the road, and turn down where, behind the grey buildings, Two Hats and Vinegar Tom had gone to investigate the dustbins.
There was a dim crash.
“Ere,’ said Janice. Her dog barked.
Lix thought, I used to be wary of people like me. I gave people like me money, and tried not to look.
From the turn-off the Indian girl had backed out again.
After her pranced Two Hats, waving aloft a sprig of mistletoe filched from somewhere.
‘Giss a kiss!’ howled Two Hats. He was high on the cheap aftershave which Vinegar Tom had shared with him.
The Indian girl stood at bay, her large eyes larger with terror.
Lix felt no pity, only a faint compunction, as if she had left the gas on and ought to go back to see to it. She did not move.
‘Bloody fuckin’ pigs!’ shouted Vinegar Tom storming forth into the street. ‘Moved all the bins, Celts! Can’t call the place yer own.’
The Indian girl dropped her shopping, both bags, on the road. She cried shrilly: ‘Take it! Take it!’ And ran past them and away, her long plaît of hair slapping her on the back, whipping her on.
Startled, Two Hats peered at the collapsed bags.
Some eggs had come out and broken, vivid on the pavement. An egg broke in the sky, also, yolk of sinking sun piercing abruptly through cloud.
‘See if her pursey’s in there,’ said Vinegar Tom, squatting workman-like over the bags.
But the Indian girl had callously kept that. She had left them only packets of lentils, broken eggs, spice and wholemeal bread, five peppers and a cauliflower.
The Pakistani owner had stepped from the shop. He stood sorrowfully gazing at them.
‘I feed you, and see this, now, how you pay me back. Scaring off my customers.’
‘Sorry, luv,’ said Janice. ‘Me friends don’t mean nothing.’
Camillo said, ‘It’s so hard being a foreigner, isn’t it.’ The Indian man blinked. ‘An outcaste. A pariah.’
‘I was born here,’ irritatedly said the Indian, ‘in 1943. Wandsworth.’
Camillo laughed, high and horse-like, and the Indian went back into his shop and banged the door.
‘You don’t want to insult him,’ said Janice. ‘He give me dog a packet of ham.’
‘Dogs and ham are vile to him,’ said Camillo.
‘No they ain’t. He’s a nice enough bloke.’
Two Hats stood in the middle of the street eating unbuttered wholemeal bread.
‘You didn’t believe me, did ya,’ he said, ‘about the shell.’
‘Someone could’ve ate them eggs,’ said Janice.
‘Like an egg,’ said Two Hats. ‘I see it come down. I know where it is.’ He hiccuped, swivelled, and puked up the bread and aftershave in one simple gush. Straightening, he seemed unaffected. He wiped his lips with his sleeve and said, ‘Want to see it, do you, Camillo?’
‘The bomb due to go bang. Might do. Tempt me.’
Vinegar Tom said, ‘Let’s go to the kit
chen first. It’s Heinz night.’
Lix thought, An evening of gourmet pleasure. The soup kitchen by the bridge, and afterwards a stroll along the Strand to see a mine.
She thought, I’m thinking the way he talks. Camillo.
The club picked up more of its members at the soup kitchen. Ashy and Pug and black Arthur, pale young Kirstie, who tagged along, two or three others.
Full of floury, watered-down beef broth, they wandered to the artery of the hypnotic river.
Two Hats led the way, he and Vinegar Tom dancing on the sands like the Owl and the Pussy-Cat. (They had found some turned wine.)
The night was very, terribly cold, and Janice, and next Kirstie, began to whine about making a fire. But no one would stop. ‘There were plenty of fire in the war,’ said Pug.
‘I weren’t born yesterday,’ snapped Janice.
The river uncoiled, tide lowered, black glass. There was no moon. Only the orange street-lamps burned above in the other world up the banks.
They came into a sort of special wasteland, where the shore seemed extremely wide and long. One bridge hung in the air behind them on a kind of mist that was rising from the ground. The bridge looked miles off. Ahead was darkness, with the high ghost tips of buildings, none of which looked real or known, painted out in luminous white.
Among the arches was a huge pile of masonry and junk. A hulk of something was there, perhaps an old boat, and even parts of a car seemed to have been thrown down.
They got through it, all but Janice and Kirstie, and the dog, who all sat at the entrance and would go no further. Kirstie said it reminded her of bad dreams she had.
Two Hats pushed metal lids and long rotten laths of wood aside with a proprietory violence.
Then they were in, under the platform of London, for they heard and felt the vibration of it up above.
There was a black channel, dripping with the stench of a cold jungle. Bones lay on the ground, rat carcasses, dogs, bits of human things too, doubtless.
‘I come in here to sleep once,’ said Two Hats. ‘I never slept a wink.’
Camillo said, ‘And then you found the bomb, which you recalled from long ago, descending just here.’
‘Mebbe,’ said Two Hats, enigmatically.
A thick echo took their voices, splashing them on the walls, as if to make a note, like a customer-check in a shop door, registering who went in and out.
Old crates lay in the channel, too. It was the entry to a tomb.
Then, beyond a smashed wall, plastered over once by timbers, now come down, they found, ill-met by match-light, a brick tunnel, arched and bold, its ceiling lost in darkness.
The floor was wreathed by metal pipes, exact, which resounded when struck. Some were large, and others twelve inches around. Cast iron, their joints were tight as crinkled elbows, felt, barely seen. Lines, skeins, of British Telecom cables ran around them, like leaden worms of hair.
The stink now was the excrement of the mud, or the poisoned river itself. Then the floor was gone. It had given way. They passaged down.
Something rose before them, and they struck their matches feverishly.
‘I got a candle,’ said Pug.
Black Arthur cackled. ‘We know where that’s bin.’
But they lit the candle. And by its thin choosy light, they saw Two Hats’ metallic egg, green with moss, stained black, trickled by light like tears.
‘Is it a bomb?’
‘It’s a bomb.’
Pilgrims, they stood before the altar. In silence.
Then Vinegar Tom sprayed a little of the wine upon the slope of it. And now it was wet and it shone.
‘Told you,’ said Two Hats. He paused and said, ‘It sung as it come down.’
‘What’dit sing? “Knees up Muvver Brown”?’
‘Like the sea,’ said Two Hats. In the candleshine he was a mystic. He had led them here, to his secret Holy.
‘Well, Camillo,’ said Pug. ‘Why didn’t it go orff?’
‘It died,’ Camillo said. He smiled. ‘Or it’s asleep.’
He darted forward suddenly and struck the mine a massive blow with a bit of rock he had, somewhere, picked up.
‘Watch it!’ cried Arthur.
‘How long has it been here?’ Camillo said.
‘1940,’ said Two Hats, reverently. His eyes sparkled. He drank Vinegar Tom’s communion wine.
‘Older than that Paki geezer,’ said Vinegar Tom.
Camillo struck the case of the mine again. Then he leaned and set his face against it, as if in kindness. ‘Not a sound. It’s quiet. Doesn’t care.’
Lix climbed over the pipes and put her hands on the mine’s chill husk. She did not know why. She was not afraid. So long since she had cared. She fought to survive on a reflex, for she had no fear of death. She had seen death. After it had been done to you, nothing mattered.
‘Come on,’ said Camillo. He kicked the egg of death.
Lix gave a shout. She too struck the egg with her fists, grazing and bruising them. She kneed it. Hurting herself, and it?
After that the others stumbled over.
Passing the two bottles, they jabbed and thumped. Now and then they would lay an ear to it. It was silent as they had been.
Camillo pulled Lix away from the bomb.
‘That’s enough.’
‘Why?’ she said.
‘I’ve never seen you happy before.’
‘I’m not happy. What’s happy?’
‘Come on. Let me make you sad again. Then you remind me of my mother.’
In a frenzy, the derelict men bashed at the dead bomb. Pug pushed Lix aside and she half fell. With adamant strength Camillo caught her, and hauled her away.
He pulled her back, along the channel.
She felt all at once near to tears. She did not want to go. But she would not resist, no more protests. She walked now at his side.
When they had climbed out over the debris at the channel’s mouth, they found Janice and Kirstie standing in horror at the river’s brink.
Wild noises reverberated from the innards of the concrete, roars magnified, the swiping and kicking raised to an orchestral crescendo.
‘This way,’ Camillo said. He leaned down and scooped up the quivering dish-mop dog, which licked his face uncertainly.
They ran then, the four of them, Janice run-hobbling, along the beach.
‘Why are we running?’ gasped Kirstie.
‘It’s so good for you,’ said Camillo.
‘I got a stitch.’
They ran.
The phantom bridge swam nearer like a vast spangled bird on outstretched wings.
They were under the shadow of the bridge, and its traffic noises drifted down.
They stopped.
‘Will it go up?’ said Kirstie.
‘What?’
‘The bomb thing.’
‘There’s nothing,’ said Camillo.
Janice sat on the shore. Hot now, she wiped her face. The dog, put down, leaped about her.
Kirstie started to cry.
Camillo drew Lix against him.
‘Why don’t you smell bad?’ he said. ‘You’re too clean.’
‘I wash. In the public lavatories.’
‘Stop it. I want you to smell bad. It’s the proper smell.’ Lix said nothing, Camillo kissed her non-existent hair. ‘My mother had blue eyes.’
‘Fuck your mother.’
‘Oh, I might have done. But she died.’
‘Yes, they do die, don’t they.’
The river whispered to the shore that it was coming back. High on the bridge a girl screamed, but it was drink not fear.
‘Who died?’ said Camillo.
‘Piss off.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Everyone.’
‘No. We’re here.’
‘What do you matter?’ she said.
‘Poor old man,’ said Camillo, ‘nobody wants him.’
Lix shoved him away.
She turned, and
saw back along the beach the merry bashing party emerging like black ants from the aperture under the city. Very fast.
They exploded out. They waved their arms, and she heard their squeals.
‘Oh, goody,’ said Camillo.
Lix began to count them off. Black Arthur and Pug were first, she knew them well enough to tell them even over the distance. Then the three men she knew only by sight, in their woolly hats. And then Vinegar Tom, who fell on his face on the ground.
Then the scene changed. It went scarlet, and then a cone of white burst out on it like a snowball, ringed by mauve and green.
Lix felt a blow in her chest. She found herself flat on her back, and Camillo sprawled over her, and she had a mad memory of films she had laughed at, where some muscular hero cast himself over the heroine to save her. Something whined across and dashed into the river. And then all the water was flashing and bubbling like oil in a frying pan.
The noise seemed to come hours later, a long choked growl.
Lix’s ears started to sing.
She turned her head, and a bee-swarm of bits flew over her face, just missing her, and even a chunk of wood went into the water with a crash.
After this, a deafened silence.
Lix sat up, pushing Camillo away. He laughed.
She saw Janice lying on her dog in a passionate paraphrase of the hero position. The dog, also unhurt, was howling. Kirstie, unhurt, was shrieking.
As sounds came back into Lix’s ears, she took in the other evidence, that was visual.
All the men were lying on the shore, but for black Arthur and Pug, who danced there now, not like an Owl or a Pussy-Cat, in strips of clothing and no trousers. The blast had ripped their nether clothes from them, and Arthur was covering himself with one hand even as he yelled in panic.
The red light burned on, but there was no other light. The buildings farther down had vanished. The bridge was only a bulk of night sidelit by fire. Not a lamp burning. Not a scream above.
For a moment Lix was going to run back, to where the men lay, and Arthur and Pug were dancing. But then the impulse faded.
Camillo said, ‘I want you to marry me.’
Janice said, ‘I thought it was the end of the world.’
Up on the bridge, the sandwich-board man, whose placard said the END was NIGH, had been tossed off his feet. He lay, full length, uncomfy on his board, and vapours of fire came down.
