The Narrows

by James Brogden

  Boxes filled every available space in the already cramped office and were stacked to the ceiling in the narrow passage which led to the shop floor. He would have arrived sooner if he hadn’t stopped to examine every piece of graffiti he saw on the way. Once or twice he caught delivery workers looking at him oddly, and he hurried on.

  His job should have been very simple: open the box, remove the invoice, key titles and quantities into the shop computer, and then yell for somebody who could actually walk to get the contents out on the shelves. One box, however, proved troublesome; try as he might he couldn’t square the paperwork with the contents (forty copies of a low-budget, first person shoot-em-up whose charming gimmick involved ripping body parts off your victims and sticking them onto your own character. Tidings of comfort and joy, everybody), and so he was forced out to find his good old buddy Nigel and ask him for an executive decision.

  As they stood at the till point trying to find a solution, Andy became aware of one customer in particular who was standing very close to him, and very still. He looked up.

  Mr Handsfree Dickhead glared back. ‘So you work here,’ the man observed. ‘Imagine my surprise.’

  ‘Ah,’ replied Andy. ‘Um. Look…’ and attempted to back in the direction of the office.

  ‘Not so fast.’ Handsfree turned his glare on Nigel. ‘Are you the manager?’

  ‘Yes sir. My name is Nigel Clarke. I’m the branch manager. How can I help you?’ The oiliness in his voice was betrayed by a sharp sidelong glance which he shot in Andy’s direction.

  ‘Excellent. I have a complaint to make about a member of your staff.’

  Now both men were staring at him.

  ‘Perhaps, sir, we should discuss this matter in my office?’ Nigel suggested, but Handsfree was having none of it.

  ‘Oh no. I’d prefer to discuss this right here, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course, sir, I understand that you are angry and upset. It would simply be a lot easier to discuss it somewhere quieter, especially if you wanted to, for example, call our head office and take the matter further with them?’

  The prospect of tearing a few strips off Head Office obviously appealed to the businessman more than a bit of light public humiliation, and he agreed readily, preceding them towards the back of the shop. As they went, Nigel hissed ‘What in God’s name did you do this time?’ to which Andy could only shrug.

  Handsfree surveyed the tiny office with disdain before rounding on them.

  ‘This little snot,’ he barked, stabbing a finger at Andy, ‘was unbelievably and inexcusably rude to me outside the shopping centre yesterday. The name he called me!’

  ‘It wasn’t actually all that offensive,’ Andy commented. ‘I mean, considering. There are worse things you can be called for kicking a homeless guy’s money all over the street…’

  ‘That has absolutely nothing to do with…’

  ‘…arrogant, stuck-up, shit-for-brains springs to mind…’

  ‘Mr Clarke, are you listening to this?!’

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ Nigel interrupted, more assertively than Andy would have believed him capable. ‘Are you saying, sir, that this occurred outside the shop?’

  ‘Yes. On the ramp outside the centre.’

  ‘And has nothing to do with selling you any of our products?’

  ‘Well, no, not as such. But see here…’

  ‘And so, properly speaking, would be better described as a quarrel between two private individuals rather than a disciplinary matter regarding the behaviour of one of my sales staff towards a customer.’

  Andy could scarcely credit that Nigel was actually defending him here. He wondered if Mrs Clarke had been giving her husband a bit of the old Christmas Cheer recently. But Handsfree wasn’t giving up so easily.

  ‘That may be true, but it doesn’t change what he called me just a second ago, does it?’

  ‘No,’ Nigel sighed heavily. ‘No it doesn’t, and I desperately wish he hadn’t said that. Don’t you, Andy? Don’t you desperately wish you hadn’t said that?’

  Andy looked between the two men – the one who wanted him sacked and the other who was unaccountably trying to save his job – then down at the stack of invoices in his hand, and the boxes out in the corridor, and the crowd of shambling idiots out there spending credit they couldn’t afford on crap they didn’t need, and he felt absolutely sick and tired and fed up with whole thing. He was seized with the sudden conviction that right at this moment there was somewhere else he was supposed to be.

  ‘You know what?’ he said, slapping the invoices into Clarke’s hands. ‘As a wise man once said, I wasn’t even supposed to be working today. Thanks for the job. And Merry Christmas, dickhead.’

  It must have been a coincidence, but as he limped out of the shop, he found that his leg didn’t hurt quite so much any more.

  ***

  On the train home, Andy once again tried to spot the embankment where he’d seen the dread-nettle girl, but it was useless. It all looked the same: dead ground, litter-choked and overgrown with filthy, blighted hawthorns. Still, it was at least a novelty being able to see the homeward journey in daylight. It wasn’t even lunch time.

  He told himself that he should be feeling more worried about quitting his job, depressed and angry with himself, but all he could feel was a sort of blank weightlessness, as if he’d been walking for days under a great burden which had just been removed. Disturbingly, he found that the voice in his head which told him these things wasn’t his at all, but Laura’s. He suspected that she was very nearly at the end of her tether; quitting his job less than a month before Christmas might just be enough for it to snap altogether, and he instinctively started rehearsing his apologies and edited explanations of what had happened. But he didn’t have the patience for this, either. The strangeness of the last ten days or so was clamouring for more of his attention, like signals on the line warning of a sudden split in the tracks up ahead, hooded lanterns pointing the way to dark, shadow-strewn sidings.

  He found that he desperately needed to be off this thing and walking, moving under his own power. Bugger the doctors – his leg barely hurt at all. When the train slowed to a halt at University, he popped out of the doors like a man coming up for air.

  ‘Hello,’ said Bex, who was balancing one-legged on a bollard outside the station.

  Andy froze. ‘Oh my god.’

  ‘Shut up, don’t make me lose my… shit!’ She wobbled, lost it, and jumped down. ‘Bollocks. Still, you’re here, so it must have worked.’ While he was struggling to make his brain operate, she was able to get a proper look at him. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, probably quite cute if he got a bit of exercise and lost the tendency to go around gaping like an idiot.

  ‘What worked?’ he asked finally.

  ‘If I can hold my balance from when the first person comes out to the last person, it means I’m going to get lucky and this is going to be your station.’

  ‘But this isn’t my station.’

  She threw her hands up in exasperation. ‘Which just proves that it works, doesn’t it? Duh!’

  ‘You’re her, aren’t you? You really are.’

  She considered this. ‘Well, I’m me, if that’s what you mean. Ta-daa,’ she added helpfully, then looked worried. ‘You are Hi I’m Andrew Welcome to the Games Barn, aren’t you? I’ve got a shocking memory for faces. If you’re not, then I’m going to have to rethink this whole bollard thing.’

  ‘No, no, it’s alright,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Andy Sumner. Hi.’ He stuck out his hand.

  ‘Bex,’ she replied and shook it, amused.

  ‘I can’t believe this. I was beginning to think I’d imagined the whole thing. Are you okay, you know, after the thing?’

  She regarded him soberly for a moment. ‘No,’ she sa
id. ‘Not in the slightest am I okay. I need to talk to you about what happened, but this isn’t the place.’

  ‘I suppose you’d better come back to mine, then.’

  And she was all smiles again. ‘No messing about with you, is there? Chat-up lines like that, I’m surprised the ladies aren’t falling all over you.’ Following her moods was like trying to chase cloud shadows on a sunny day.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’

  ‘Walk, Andrew Sumner, walk! Show me to your little concrete box, and there we shall share tales of strangeness and sorrow.’

  9 Tea

  Andy made tea while Bex hovered nervously, afraid to sit anywhere or touch anything. Everything in the flat looked so clean. Even before she’d run away from home she hadn’t been used to an especially high standard of living. Not that this place was a mansion, but it didn’t look like somebody’s boyfriend had sold the television and half the furniture to pay his gambling debts, for instance.

  ‘Here.’ He handed her a mug. ‘So.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘You stalked me – you first.’

  ‘It wasn’t stalking. I just waited at the station for each train until I found the one you came home on. Talk about bor-ring.’

  ‘But that could have taken days! Why didn’t you just come and find me at the shop? I know you saw my badge.’

  She looked at him searchingly, assessing how much he could cope with, and how much she might need to give away in order to get the answers she needed. Assuming that he knew anything at all. ‘Couldn’t help notice you limping earlier,’ she commented. ‘How did you hurt it?’

  ‘I cut myself shaving,’ he replied.

  ‘Funny. Wondered if it might have been some sort of urban hiking accident.’ When he didn’t answer but instead continued to gaze at her over the rim of his mug, she sighed and went over to the window. ‘Fair enough. Okay then, have a look out there. Tell me what you see.’

  He looked. ‘Houses, trees.’

  She nodded. ‘Uh-huh. And along with them, schools and churches, supermarkets, police stations, shopping centres and all that, yeah?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That’s where you live. Now, what’s behind that?’

  ‘Behind it? I don’t know – alleyways?’ She nodded encouragement again. Keep going. ‘Vacant lots, brownfield sites?’

  ‘Not to mention deserted warehouses, factories, demolition sites, junkyards, underpasses, squats, burnt-out pubs, reservoirs, canals… This is where I live.’

  ‘I understand. What’s your point?’

  ‘Point is, what’s behind all of that?’

  Andy floundered. The common-sense part of him wanted to say nothing, there’s nothing behind that, just more of the same, except he knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t know what was true, exactly, and he had no way of articulating it beyond the crudest of clichés, which he was certain she would just laugh at. But she wasn’t letting him off the hook so easily.

  ‘Come on, Game Boy, say it, even though you know it’s completely mad.’

  He threw his hand up – the one that wasn’t cradling his precious, normal tea – in despair. ‘Okay, it’s like some kind of magic,’ he admitted and waited for her to ridicule him.

  She didn’t laugh – didn’t even smirk. She didn’t call him crazy or foolish or tell him to get his head out of the clouds or even say that she was worried about him. She simply stared back at him very intently with those incredibly blue, amber-flecked eyes, seeming to measure how much he believed what he was saying by how uncomfortable it was making him. He found himself blushing and turned away awkwardly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘For want of a better word, magic. Behind everything, there are places where the skin of the world is thin, and it is possible to travel to other parts of the city through those places, which is what we do. Some are longer than others. Some only go one way. Some don’t go anywhere at all. Some go very deep and take you through places so hellish that even the plants will try to eat you. In a lot of them there are bits and pieces of older parts of the city which have been lost or forgotten about. Birmingham is very old, did you know that?’

  She was channelling Dodd now; this was more or less the same speech he’d given her when she first stumbled into the Narrows. She liked the symmetry of telling it to Andy now and warmed to her subject. There was precious little else in her world to warm to.

  ‘It’s not as big or as pretty as a lot of other places, and if you read some of the books, it’s like nothing existed before the Industrial Revolution. We all love our factories so much. But did you know that there’s a Roman fort under the Queen Elizabeth hospital? Or that Brummies made most of the Roundheads’ swords in the Civil War? It’s not flashy, and it doesn’t bring in the big fat American tourist money, but it’s there, underneath.’ She stopped, somewhat embarrassed at having got carried away.

  Chancing what little knowledge he had, Andy ventured: ‘You’re talking about the Narrows, aren’t you?’

  She looked up sharply. ‘How do you know what they’re called? Who have you been talking to? Where did you hear that word?’

  A little taken aback by her sudden aggression, he said quickly ‘The same place I hurt my leg.’ He told her about his expedition to the canal and his run-in with Gramma – most of it, anyway – as well as his strange shortcut from the week before. He didn’t tell her anything about the pins and needles, nor what had happened to Spike or Nurse Barton – not because he felt guilty, but because the mysteries of what was happening inside his own flesh seemed too personal. He hadn’t even mentioned any of it to Laura; how was he going to tell this total stranger?

  By the time he’d finished, the midwinter afternoon was darkening rapidly over the rooftops and gardens, and several streetlights had already flickered into life. He checked the time nervously; Laura would be home any time soon. Bex was staring at her own darkened reflection in the window, lost in thought.

  ‘It goes without saying that you’re telling me probably less than half of what actually happened,’ she said, ‘but that’s fine. The thing is, most people only ever find the Narrows if they’ve been shown by somebody else. They’re not the kind of thing you can just come across by accident. You’re simply better off not knowing, trust me. They become your whole life if you’re not careful, and this, all of this…’ she waved a hand in a gesture which encompassed not just the contents of his living room, but the world outside and everything with which he was familiar ‘… it all becomes shadows, whether you want it to or not. And if you’ve somehow found one that’s been Closed, well…’ She trailed away. Her own knowledge was woefully lacking in this department. She’d expected to have years more to learn from Dodd, but now she’d been thrown into this nightmare alone. Walter would know more, but he’d refused to help look for Dodd, so fuck him.

  ‘It’s none of my business. If you ever find Moon Grove, look me up. In the meantime, all I need to know is what you saw from the train.’

  This suited Andy fine. ‘You running, mostly.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  Andy shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know. It was dark. I couldn’t see properly. Maybe two figures standing on top of the embankment, but I can’t be sure.’

  Two? Why would there be two? ‘Did you see their faces?’

  ‘No – like I said, it was dark; the light was behind them. I barely saw you.’

  ‘Shit. Shit!’ She slumped against the window, her forehead pressed to the cold glass. ‘That’s it, then,’ she said dully. ‘You were my last chance.’ Then she sniffed and straightened, making a conscious effort to brighten up. ‘Right. Well. Bye then,’ she said and headed for the front door.

  Andy stared after her in surprise and then limped in pursuit down the short hallway. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yep.’ She dragged the door op
en.

  ‘I got my leg chewed half off because of all this and that’s it?’

  ‘I thought you said you cut yourself shaving.’ She was clumping down the stairwell.

  ‘I don’t shave my bloody legs!’ he yelled, his voice echoing up and down all three floors for the benefit of his neighbours. As parting shots went, he’d been hoping for better.

  10 Lacuna

  Andy threw himself onto the sofa and stared gloomily around at the mess, remembering how he’d fully intended to tidy the place up this morning. At the very least he need to wash up the mug that Bex had used, because as hard as it was going to be explaining to Laura how he’d lost his job, that was nothing compared to what would happen if she knew there had been a strange girl in the flat. And she would know. He should also try to air out the room a bit so that it didn’t smell quite so much of unwashed, ungrateful homeless psycho-woman…

  There was a knock at the door.

  Oh great. Just lovely.

  ‘Why darling, you’re home early,’ he said under his breath as he unlatched the door. The knocking became more of a hammering, and he had half a second to wonder if this was such a good idea before Bex barged past him and back into the flat.

  ‘Two men?’ she snapped.

  ‘-?-’

  ‘Two men?’

  ‘Yes, but like I say, I couldn’t…’

  She strode into the living room, switched off the light and stabbed a finger at the window. ‘Something like those two men out there, perhaps?’

  Andy and Laura’s flat overlooked the back of the block, where there was a small patch of lawn and some shrubbery before the long rectangular line of residents’ garages, and a drive lit with security bollards which were just starting to flicker into life in the gathering gloom. Security had been high on Laura’s list of priorities for their first place together.