by Kate Griffin
My plan was easy; so very easy. We were going to burn it.
I spun the gas around me, let it fill and hiss and shimmer against the flesh of the rolling white saturate-slug. I pushed a tendril of it up towards the pink tube of a neon light — all I needed was a spark, just one and that would be it, so long saturate, goodnight and good luck with your next coagulation . . .
. . . and someone muttered, “OhJesusohGod.”
I looked around and saw what I should have seen before: a woman, standing with her back pressed against the wall of a cobbler’s shop, handbag draped in the crook of her elbow, high-heeled shoes and pasty face, staring up at the saturate with the frozen terror of a squirrel in front of a cement truck. There was oil around her feet, staining her shoes, sliding along the pavement like meltwater over sand.
For a moment, just a moment, holding on to the gas, the spark, woven tight into the palm of our hand, we thought about doing it anyway.
Then I crushed out the spark, let go of the gas, let it spill upwards from the street and roll in thick smelly shimmers towards the open air, stopped the spillage from the chip shop and turned my attention towards the woman. She was only a few yards from the main body of the saturate as it rumbled at slug’s-crawl down the street; in a few moments more, she’d be lost behind it. Yellow fat and white drool ran down the walls beside her, shaken off the main body of the beast, and splattered on her black shoulder jacket. I shouted, “Move, woman!”
She didn’t move, couldn’t move, just saw rolling flesh as high now as a bus, stubby white limbs sprouting and shrinking back into the flesh like a hedgehog uncertain about growing spines.
“Move!” we screamed.
I looked up at the saturate, and it was so close now, so close, it didn’t need to grow a mouth or teeth or jaws, it just needed to keep coming and that was it, death by drowning, drowning by fat. It would suck me up and crush me and the only question would be whether it was suffocation or broken bones that stopped our heart.
She was going to die like that too.
I ran. My feet slipped and went out beneath me the second I hit the oil; I crawled back up, human hair tangling between my fingers, warmish brown goo seeping through my trousers, sticking to my knees. I reached the pavement, staggered to my feet, and grabbed the frozen woman by the shoulders. The saturate was only a few feet away, it filled the world, the smell worse here than ever, making it hard to breathe.
I shook her, and she looked at me, jaw moving in silent prayer.
“Run,” I hissed.
She didn’t move.
We slapped her, not particularly hard, across the cheek. She blinked, once. I put my slippery hand into hers, and felt it slide straight out again. I grabbed her by the sleeve.
“Run!”
She jerked, started to move. I dragged her towards the end of the street; and it was right behind us. I could feel a dollop of white flesh dribble down the back of my neck as a limb reached out for us, shedding matter as it went.
At the end of the street was a park, dark and shut up for the night. I pushed the woman off the pavement into the street and shouted, “Get out! Move!”
She staggered back towards the park, half slipped and kept on staring, just staring at the thing coming after us.
No time to bother, too late, much, much too late. We turned to the saturate, thought again of fire, saw the fat and oil dribbling down our fingers and gave up on the idea as a bad one. We raised our head towards the rolling jelly-thing, vile, repulsive, amazing, and I said, “Veolia!”
It kept on coming.
Words have power. You just had to pick the right words. In the good old days, this involved a lot of Latin and some very fruity intonation. These days, the words were different, new, bright, and in this case, plastered on the sides of most refuse collection carts in London.
I raised my hands to the sky and called out, shouted into the air, “Veolia, Accord, Kiggen, ECT, Onyx, ELWA, in accordance with Hackney Borough Council, you are contracted to collect, remove and recycle household refuse and waste . . .”
Still it kept coming.
“. . . all commercial and household refuse and waste produced within the boundaries laid down within Hackney Borough, Veolia, Accord, Onyx, I invoke you . . .”
Not ten yards away, it drew tendrils of dripping fat that crawled out towards me.
I screamed to the heavens, spread my fingers wide and prayed for magic, miracles and a speedy demise, “Geesink Norba collecting and recycling waste and refuse for you!”
And from somewhere behind the creature, there was the diesel-thumping roar of an engine coming to life.
I staggered back from the creature, slipped in oil, crawled towards the hypnotised woman, grabbed her by the sleeve. The roar behind the creature turned into the steady thudathudathudathuda of a badly tuned, unloved engine. It filled the street, echoed off the houses; and with it there was light now, a spinning yellow madness that flashed on-off-on-off too fast to see, an epileptic nightmare, reflecting like a sick sun off the walls. A great white limb of grease descended towards us and I pushed the woman out of the way, skidded to one side. It hit us across our back, we felt our teeth jar, our spine try to hide in our stomach, we felt fat dribble down our back and saw great dollops of it splatter onto the ground beside us. The blow had knocked us flat; on our belly we crawled towards the park, grass and dirt suddenly seeming the cleanest thing in the world. Slime was running down our hair and pooling in our ears. The yellow flashing light in the street cast twisted shadows all around.
“Geesink Norba,” I whispered. “Geesink Norba, Geesink Norba, by the terms and conditions of contract to remove all commercial and household waste within the borough, Geesink . . .”
The roar became a rattling battle cry; with it, there came another sound. It said:
“Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing. Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing.”
I reached the grass, rolled onto my back, looked down the street I’d crawled from and saw the saturate start to turn, infinitely slow, currents and counter-currents spinning within its great belly as it began to think about the thing that was behind it. The woman was fallen a few feet from me. I turned to her and hissed, “Cover your head.”
She obeyed, and I curled up as tight as I could, arms over my skull.
I saw the saturate contort and twist as the flashing yellow light and mechanised voice came closer. I saw it seem to contract downwards and expand outwards, as if it was somehow going to leap. I heard, “Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing,” saw flashing yellow madness, heard wheels sloshing through oil, engine thundering, heard a sucking sound like the whole ocean being pulled down a very small plughole, heard a great grinding as of metal jaws, and whispered, “Veolia, Accord, Geesink Norba, Onyx, rubbish collected on your scheduled day . . .”
And something hit the saturate. It hit it smack in the middle, punched a hole straight through its belly and out the other side, a great darkness that seemed to suck everything in, and the darkness had teeth, heaven help the ignorant, the darkness had teeth made of aluminium and steel, silver flashing teeth that crunched down on all that fat and swallowed it whole into some forsaken black gullet, sucked it all in with a roar of diesel and pumped out black smoke in its place, until the saturate was half its size, a quarter, just rivers of white fat pouring into that darkness, sinking deeper and deeper until with a final splatter . . .
There was just oil and grease spilling across the road. Inanimate liquid, dribbling from the jaws of the beast that had sucked the life from it. Little blobs dripped from the branches of the trees like smelly snow. I got to my feet and looked at the thing that had killed the saturate.
It was a dustbin truck. Its sides were black, not through paint, but time and use. Burnt-black, charred-black, dirt-black, coal-black, every kind of black there could be, all spattered and scratched and scorched onto its flesh. The welding that held it together was brown chipped rust that shed breadcrumbs of reddish copper onto the ground
as it drove; its wheels were the height of a large child; its light, spinning on a roof of twisted, crooked metal, was yellow, too bright and too fast to look at. I shielded my eyes, and saw in the dull remnant of my vision a man get out of the driver’s cabin, a whole man’s height above the pavement, and walk carefully round to the back of the truck. He knelt down beside it, reached under the back wheel, and twisted something. A great gout of black smoke burst from a pipe in the top of the truck’s roof, and slowly, two metal vault doors began to ease shut over the open back of the truck, sliding down over silver teeth gleaming in the reflected light and dripping white fat. They came together with the clang of the doors of Fort Knox. The dustbin man looked up.
His eyes were two blown light bulbs, the little twisted wires gleaming in their sockets. His skin was the same charred blackness as his truck; his hair, which had one time been dreadlocks, was now just living blacknesses, writhing and twisting around his face with the mess of insect life and vermin that crawled from it. When he exhaled, the same black smoke of his vehicle rolled across his silverish lips, and as he walked, his green-yellow neon jacket shimmered and flashed, almost drowning out all other perception. I flinched back from the brightness of it as he approached, three-inch boot heels clanging on the ground, tangled old string tying together their ruptured leather and soles of melted rubber. He was coming straight towards me, impassive, face drained of all feeling. I turned to the woman and hissed, “Do you have a tenner?”
She was a whimpering huddle on the ground. “Uh?”
“A tenner, a tenner! Your purse!”
I covered my eyes with my arms against the brilliance of his jacket; but I could hear him, smell him only a few inches away: the rank odour of an old bin left out in the summer sun. Numbed, the woman tried to open her purse. I felt movement beside me, saw his hand gloved in thick red leather that oozed ancient blood between the old stitches, as if the fabric itself could bleed. The woman held up a ten-pound note. I grabbed it, turned and, keeping my head bowed against the neon dazzle, pushed it into his outstretched palm.
For a second, the dustbin man just stood there. I knew he was staring at me, but couldn’t raise my eyes to see. Then he closed his fingers around the ten-pound note, which began to wilt, shrivel, and stain with smudged darkness as he slipped it into his trouser pocket. As stately and careful as he had come, he turned, dreadlocks writhing around his head, and walked away.
We stayed frozen in place for . . . I do not know how long.
The engine roared again in the dustbin truck, the wheels turned. I smelt black smoke and the lingering odour of rot. Then it drove away, oil dribbling off its wheels as it sped up the street, yellow light fading until, at the far end, it turned, and vanished from my sight.
Drained, we sank to our knees on the grass, pressed our head into it and trembled.
A hand brushed our shoulder. A voice said, “Um . . .”
We looked slowly up. “This,” I said, “is a really bad time.”
“You OK?”
I looked round me. Oil was dribbling into the drains, and a greasy trail stretched all the way up the street to the drain, that damned drain, outside the chippy.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” I said, and pressed my head back into the grass and felt grateful for how clean the dirt was.
Her name was Loren.
Her world-view had just been shattered, but she was dealing with it the most sensible way she could; by dealing with other things first.
She said, “You owe me a tenner.”
I said, “What?”
“A tenner.”
“Are you seriously telling me, that having just saved your life from a monster made out of grease and fat crawled up from the nether reaches of the sewers, you want me to give you a tenner?”
“When you put it like that . . . it’s just tenners aren’t easy.”
“It was give the guy a tenner, or be consumed by a supernatural dustbin truck.”
There was silence. Fat dripped and pooled slowly around us.
“So why couldn’t you give him a tenner?”
“Because I dropped my bloody bag while trying to save your bloody life.”
“Sorry. It’s all a little . . . you know.”
She flapped. We seethed.
Finally she said, “The thing . . .”
Here it came.
“Yes?”
“You know, I always said to myself, if I go mad, I’ll like, you know, go with it? Because I figure if you’re mad then you can’t really do anything about it so you might as well just . . . It was a monster, wasn’t it?”
We wiped a dribble of fat off our nose. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“Your point of view. In the sense that it would have crushed the life out of you and you would have drowned in a sea of animal fats and other remains, yes, it was a monster. But it meant you no harm. You just happened to be there.”
“You killed it.”
“No.”
“I saw you, you spoke those words, magic words.”
“Brand names.”
“What?”
“Brand names. Waste collection companies. Geesink Norba, Accord, Onyx — they collect rubbish in the city.”
“But . . . you spoke their names and . . .”
“I spoke words that, unless you pay close attention to these things, have no meaning. People don’t pay attention to the rubbish men; they cross over to the other side of the street to avoid them. Geesink Norba . . . they are sounds on the air. Meaningless, unless you know how to look. I invoked an idea.”
“What do you mean, ‘invoked’?”
“Summoned. Commanded. Requested for the cost of a ten-pound note.”
“You’re some sort of wizard?”
“Some sort, yes.”
“So there’s magic? And wizards? And monsters?”
“Yes.”
“In Hoxton?”
“Well, yes.”
“Oh. And the thing that came? The dustbin truck?”
I tried my best. “There are . . . things in this world, made up of other things — ideas — that are given life just by the nature of that idea, by the nature of living, life making magic, magic coming out of the most ordinary, trivial bits of life. Like . . . like when you speak into the telephone and your words are life and passion and feeling and they’re in the wires and sooner or later the wires will come alive or else they’d burst, with all that thought and emotion in them . . . or like a dustbin truck, just one dustbin truck because we have no idea how much waste a city can produce, just one tidying up afterwards, asking nothing but a tenner at Christmas and your council tax, anonymous faces picking up anonymous crap that no one wants to pay any attention to and sooner or later you ignore so much, you turn your face away so much, don’t want to think about it so much that . . . even that gets life. Do you see? Furious, passionate life, waiting to be seen, cleaning up afterwards, struggling out of the shadows. And where there’s life, any life, anything that . . .”
I saw her face. She was crying.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s a bit . . .” she mumbled, waving her hands uselessly. “It’s just . . . uh . . .”
I said, “My name’s Matthew.”
“Loren,” she whimpered.
“Where do you live, Loren?”
She flapped a hand in a general direction.
“Near?” I asked.
She nodded.
“With a shower and a lot of soap?”
She nodded again.
“Good. Let me take you home.”
* * *
It was a council block a few streets back from the canal. On the ground floor there were grey metal shutters nailed over the windows, and bars across the front doors. The windows on the higher floors had little balconies with dead flowers withering on them. The stairwell smelt of piss, the lifts were scarred on the inside with who knew what mad burning. She lived on the fifth floor. The lights were on in the flat to her lef
t, and as we went by, the door was opened and a man in a white skullcap leant out.
“Loren!” he exclaimed. “He’s gone out again; I’m sorry.” Then his eyes fell over us, and his look turned to one of brief disgust followed by forced concern. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“Fine,” she mumbled, red puffy eyes and a swollen puffy voice. “Thank you, fine.”
There were three locks on her door. She fumbled with the keys, dropped them, picked them up again, unlocked the door. A narrow corridor, occupied 99 per cent by a black sports bike, all pumps and shallowness; a single bulb swinging from a low ceiling, lampshade long since lost. She waved me towards a kitchen the size of a cockroach’s cupboard and said, “You can help yourself to whatever you want.”
I looked at an array of empty pizza boxes and used tea bags.
She headed into the bathroom. As the shower went on, the boiler above the sink started rattling and roaring, shaking so hard I thought it would pull itself free from the wall. I made do with rubbing my hands on an old dishcloth and my face with some kitchen towel, until I just felt thinly slimy, rather than all-over glooped. From the kitchen window, I could see Hackney, low lights and uneven streets, council estates and long, Victorian-lamp-lit terraces, stretching away.
Loren emerged from the shower, disappeared into the bedroom. Her voice drifted to me: “You can use it, if you want.”
I wandered from the kitchen into a small living room, containing a single brown sofa and sunflower wallpaper that had never been a good idea, even before it started to peel. There were shoes everywhere — men’s shoes, and boys’, strewn in boxes and around every wall, and dirty clothes, tracksuits and baggy jumpers, messy old plates and fallen library books with catchy titles like Pass GCSE IT in 28 Days! and Foundation French for Dummies.
A door opposite the living room had, among a collection of posters featuring everything from dinosaurs to heaving models with extra-heaving bosoms, a sign written in big red letters — KEEP OUT. A boy then — a teenage boy.
