The Narrows

by James Brogden

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Have you got any professional qualifications? Can you offer legal advice, medical help, private tuition, psychotherapy, etcetera?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Do you know anybody who does, and who’d work for free as a personal favour to you?’

  He thought about this. ‘No,’ he decided.

  ‘Crystal clutcher? Tarot cards? Acupuncture?’

  ‘God, no.’

  She blew out her cheeks and carried on walking. ‘This is going to be a long night for you, my dear.’

  ***

  When the pressure of too much history squeezes down on a place, sometimes bits of it escape out of the edges. There had been markets in Birmingham’s Bullring since the twelfth century, built on the lower southern side of the ridge which ran through the town centre, and almost certainly for many centuries before that.

  Successive generations of civic planners had demolished whole streets to make room for them, then torn them all down to be rebuilt not twice, but three times (with a bit of help from the Luftwaffe in between), the dust of each one settling into the bones of its predecessor over almost a thousand years. It was inevitable that some odds and ends would escape the waves of demolition. A piece of building here, a yard of street there; a lamp-post, a horse-trough, an archway. They fell through the gaps and drifted under their own peculiar gravity to collect like beach debris in a short remnant of a long-destroyed road called Spiceal Street.

  Andy had never seen anything quite like it. If he’d ever travelled in Eastern Europe or the third world, he would have had some frame of reference to understand the jumbled chaos which Bex lead him through, but his immediate reaction was to wonder how anything remained standing.

  He saw the left-hand side of a pub called The Dog, completed on its right by part of a medieval cloister, which sat across a cobbled passageway from market stalls patchworked out of everything from wrought iron to wattle-and-daub. It was crowded and busy with people, brisk and business-like rather than the slow herds further up the road, and most of them had rucksacks like Bex. Some were haggling with the stall-holders over the contents, but most were bartering directly with each other in pairs and small groups.

  Bex worked her way from one knot of traders to another, chatting, swapping news, and evidently looking for something or someone in particular. Eventually she called Andy over.

  ‘Andy, I’d like you to meet Aston Stirchley the Third. He’s going the same way as us, and he has a job that you can do to earn your bed for tonight.’

  The man she introduced him to was at least a head taller than either of them, possessed of a rangy athleticism which was evident even through his layers of brightly patterned woollen clothes. Red-blond hair tumbled out from a pointed, Tibetan-style hat which dangled with bells and pompoms, and he smiled lazily through sleepy eyes and a goatee – he was what Andy imagined Jesus would have looked like if he’d taken up surfing instead of crucifixion.

  ‘Hey,’ said Aston Stirchley the Third. ‘So you’re the mule, yeah? Excellent – I’d’ve hated to see these things go to waste. Wait right here.’ He sauntered off.

  Andy turned to Bex. ‘Mule?’

  ‘Well, what do you expect? You’re good for nothing else, are you?’

  Stirchley soon returned, equipped with his own pack and carrying a large burlap sack in his arms, which he dumped at Andy’s feet.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Brussells sprouts, man. Food of the gods. Twenty kilograms of stinky green gold.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to do what – carry them?’

  Stirchley laughed – an easy, friendly sound. ‘Well what do you expect them to do – fly themselves there? Of course carry them! Can’t have Christmas without brussells, now can you? Let’s get going, yeah? I’m freezing my tassles off here.’

  ***

  You’re good for nothing else, are you? It stung but he couldn’t deny that she had a point.

  Andy trudged along behind them, hefting his sack of sprouts and reflecting on the frightening speed with which his life had fallen apart to this degree. He was just starting to get an idea of how fundamentally ill-equipped he was to survive in any sense that mattered.

  Being able to defend himself against physical attack had been a matter of simple knee-jerk reaction; he’d had no more control over it or idea of what he was doing than if he’d swatted at a stinging wasp, just on a slightly larger scale. He was more acutely aware of the layers of safety net which had lain between him and where he was now – not that this was rock bottom, but he guessed it was pretty close. With his job gone, there’d been social security to fall back on, maybe, but what if he was refused it for having quit rather than being sacked? He knew that Laura would support him, galling though it was to his pride, but if they split over this, what then? Back home? That too was only temporary inasmuch as his Mum and Dad weren’t going to live forever. Nothing he could consider held the promise of security or permanence.

  In an oddly comforting way it felt like he’d simply cut to the chase, dropped right to the very heart of the matter without having time to build up his hopes as each intermediate safety net frayed and broke beneath him. He shifted the sack and decided that if this was all he was good for, then he was going to be bloody good at it. Better this than whatever waited at the bottom.

  Bex and Stirchley had stopped and were arguing.

  ‘It was open last time I came by here,’ he protested.

  ‘Well it’s closed now, isn’t it?’ she shot back, flipping through Dodd’s A-to-Z. Now more than ever she wished she knew what his funny little squiggles and symbols meant. What were you doing, Dodd? What were you looking for? ‘I want to check this out, just while we’re passing.’

  ‘Whatever, Little Bee. We’re not going to get to the Grove much before midnight at this rate, so I guess a few more minutes aren’t going to make a world of difference.’

  Andy dumped the sack, glad of the rest. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘There should be a Narrow here. Not a big one, just shallow enough to shave off half a mile or so. But it’s closed. A lot of them have been closing recently. I want to see if there’s any sign of how or why.’

  ‘Don’t you think that might be dangerous?’

  She gave him a look.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said.

  Using her torch, she peered to and fro on the ground and in the bushes on either side of the lane in which they were standing, but the shadows which its light threw obscured more than it revealed. She had no realistic expectation of them finding anything; it had just seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. On the map Dodd had marked this spot with something that looked like a cross bisected with an arrow. It meant nothing to her, but he must have found something here.

  Andy sat and caught his breath while Stirchley busied himself rolling a cigarette. Pages from a discarded local newspaper flapped at him close by, muddy and torn, catching his casual glance. He couldn’t quite read it properly in the darkness, but what he thought he saw paralysed his breath with the sensation of the Pattern spinning itself around him in the darkness like a spider’s web, or a net slowly closing.

  ‘Stirchley,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘Do you mind if I borrow your lighter for a second?’

  ‘Sure,’ he replied, and tossed it over. Andy used its flame to read the pages that just happened to have flapped open right next to him.

  Community announcements. Church news. Births and Deaths.

  Weddings.

  ‘It’s here!’ he yelled, jumping to his feet.

  Bex spun around in alarm. ‘What? What’s here?’

  ‘Whatever you’re looking for. It’s here. I know it.’

  ‘That’s rubbish. How can you just know it?’

 
‘How do I know anything about this? Look, just trust me, okay, it’s here. Keep looking.’

  He helped, sweeping the lighter flame close to the earth, and it didn’t take long to find. ‘What about this?’

  She found him crouched a little way further on, having scraped mud and leaves away from a pale, circular patch of ground just to the side of the pavement. Closer, she saw that it was concrete, a plug of it buried in the earth for no obvious reason. From its centre protruded several inches of a thick metal bar.

  ‘It looks like when they cut away iron railings, like in front of buildings,’ he said. ‘You know, when they needed metal for the war?’

  ‘Yeah, but this isn’t part of a railing. One bar?’ She took hold of the sawn-off end and gave it an experimental tug. ‘Nope. It’s in there pretty solid.’ She straightened up. ‘I don’t think this is anything. Probably just coincidence.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said grimly and tried it for himself. Smoothly, and without apparent effort, he pulled a three-foot-long iron spike from its anchoring concrete. As its gleaming tip cleared the ground, a massive explosion of pins and needles crashed through him, causing him to yelp and drop the bar with a clang. The three of them were so startled that it took them a few moments to realise that a gap had opened up in the bushes and that the sky was no longer its customary shade of sulphur orange.

  Stirchley was staring at it wide-eyed, with an unlit roll-up dangling from his lower lip. ‘Now that’s cool,’ he said slowly. ‘Does this mean it’s open again?’

  ‘I have no idea what any of this means,’ replied Bex, looking at Andy with a strange expression. He thought it might have been respect. ‘But apparently there is something you’re good at. Come on. Better bring that thing with you. Walter’s going to want to see it.’

  ‘No way. I’m not touching that bloody thing again.’

  ‘You broke it, you pay for it,’ she said, shouldering her rucksack and heading cautiously into the Narrow.

  ‘Whatever that means,’ he muttered, glaring at the spike as if it might leap up and strike him. He prodded it with his toe. Nothing happened. He gritted his teeth and gingerly picked it up by the very end using only thumb and forefinger. Still nothing. Hefting it more confidently and reclaiming his sprouts, he set off after her.

  ‘Hey, you know what this means?’ said Stirchley, loping along beside him.

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘It means you’re King, man!’

  ‘King? King of what? How’d you figure that?’

  ‘Surely you’ve heard the prophecy? Whomsoever draweth the pointy, metally thing from the concrete block shall be crowned rightwise king over all the scutters!’ They both laughed, and if there was anything nearby in the darkness to hear the sound, it did not disturb them.

  PART 2: HOUSE

  1 Taken In

  The dining room of Moon Grove was dominated by a huge, oak refectory table, braced and bracketed with iron, which looked massive enough to provide the raw material for another entire building all on its own. People crowded around, on, and in some cases under it; sitting, chatting, occasionally eating. Things seemed even more chaotic on the other side of the serving hatch from which people were taking their meals, each one accompanied by a blast of steam and a din of clattering and shouting.

  A sign above the kitchen door read ‘Strictly Kitchen Tarts Only. Trespassers Will Be Dinner’. Andy didn’t think it was an idle threat, either.

  Bex waved him to an empty space at the table. ‘Wait there,’ she said. ‘I’ll get us some food,’ and bypassed the queue to go straight through the door, leaving him to perch somewhat anxiously.

  Stirchley had taken his sprouts – and, almost as an afterthought, tipped Andy for his hard work with a spliff – before ambling over to the other side of the room where one wall was completely dominated by a blackboard the size of a railway station departures board. It was covered with job rotas, to-do lists, and a calendar; oddly, nine days between December sixteenth and the twenty-fifth were completely blank, without even the dates, just the words ‘Laying Up’ written across them.

  Around this were chalked a host of other more cryptic messages, which read somewhere between shopping list, car-boot sale, freight manifest and labour exchange:

  Stechford Arch: bag spuds for 2 gal. red diesel

  Spire Oak: bed & board for plumber

  Happy chickens (good layers) for 80W UV bulbs. Will accept dancing pole.

  Everything imaginable was being offered by someone, somewhere. Cigarettes, booze, drugs by a hundred names, flour, legal representation, joinery, reiki healing, turnips, pasta, solar panels, dildos, pickled onions… and every so often one of the squatters would check the board, scribble something down on a scrap of paper or the back of a hand, and leave; or else a new arrival would come up, still bundled against the outside cold, and either erase something or make an addition before setting to a bowl of stew at the great table. He wondered how many other Moon Groves there were across the city to support such a tortuously complex network of barter and favour-trading. It could in no way be described as organised, but it obviously worked.

  Bex came back with a tray bearing two bowls of stew and a can of Vimto each, and great doorstop slices of bread. The stew was rich and delicious, but, as he was finding with most things recently, not in the conventional sense. The thing which he had just fished off his spoon, for example, could have been sweetcorn or a lemon-flavoured Skittle. It was hard to tell. Bex was obviously feeling more relaxed now that they were safely indoors, and he felt safer about pressing the questions which he’d been biting back during their journey.

  ‘Most of the people who come through here are just ordinary old homeless folks,’ she said. ‘Squatters. They earn a meal and a bed for the night by bringing in something we need – it’s usually food – and then they move on. Next night they might be in a hostel, or kipping on a friend’s floor, or sleeping rough. Most can’t bring enough to afford more than two or three nights at a stretch, but lots of them come back. Take Laying Up, for example. Our doors are shut for nine days, which is a lot longer than it sounds, and this place will be heaving to begin with, but by the end most of them will have moved on and just us Narrowfolk will be left.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Oh we’re the hard-core crazies,’ she grinned. ‘We choose to live this way. We’re off-grid, underground, between the cracks. If there was a safety net, we didn’t fall through – we jumped.’

  ‘Why on earth would anyone choose this?’

  ‘Lots of different reasons,’ was all she replied, without looking at him. ‘When you’ve slept rough for a few weeks, you’ll be entitled to ask that question.’ She tore off a chunk of bread and munched darkly.

  Sensing that he was treading on dangerous ground, Andy tried changing the subject. ‘So who decides how long someone can stay?’

  ‘Walter has the last say. He’s got this big list of all the stuff we need, except it changes day by day, so one week someone will bring, say, a bag of limes worth three days and the week after that the same bag of limes will be worth nothing because we’ve had a glut. Plus we’ll have been eating Thai chicken curry for a week.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem very fair.’

  ‘No, it’s okay, I quite like Thai food.’

  He threw a crust at her. ‘I mean it doesn’t seem very fair, because how’s he supposed to know it’s worth nothing?’

  ‘Fair doesn’t enter into it. It’s not the London Stock Exchange. You check the board, you scavenge what you can, sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you don’t.’

  ‘It just seems a bit haphazard, that’s all.’

  She flourished her spoon. ‘Ta-daa!’

  ‘Hello, Bex,’ said Walter and sat down next to her with a bowl of stew, ignoring her startled reaction. ‘And Andy, very glad to meet you. I’m
Walter Lyttleton. Welcome to Moon Grove. Do you know you smell of sprouts?’

  Andy struggled for a response which didn’t involve opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish. ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with a young man called Aston Stirchley the Third, about, amongst other things, the opening of closed Narrows. Admittedly he doesn’t strike me as having a particularly strong grip on reality, but I am intrigued, to say the least.’

  This was not the Fagin-esque figure Andy had imagined. Walter Lyttleton had a long, good-humoured face and a slightly distracted manner, as if while he was talking to you, the other half of his mind was somewhere else, making connections and associations to a vast body of obscure knowledge acquired over decades of ranging the streets and the spaces in between. For Andy, who’d never been terribly good at reading other people, it was the most frighteningly clear first impression of another human being he’d ever had. He was seized with the impossible, and equally unshakable, conviction that he’d met this man somewhere before.

  ‘Of course, your first question,’ Walter continued, ‘is “What are the Narrows?” Unfortunately, as is the way with first questions, the answer is neither simple nor short. I hope you are sitting comfortably.

  ‘You are aware, I assume, of the existence of such things as leys – or as they are more commonly known, ley lines? A silly tautology, like pin number or scuba gear, but be that as it may. Good. These are imagined as a network of channels which carry and regulate the earth’s life energy, in exactly the same way as the lung mei meridians of acupuncture circulate a person’s ch’i.

  ‘From the dawn of humanity, the earliest neolithic traders and herdsmen instinctively followed leys, like birds navigating by the earth’s magnetic field, and later the Romans appropriated many of these ancient ways into their road-building programmes. Two intersect in Birmingham as a matter of fact, and there was a fort at Metchley to keep peace between the squabbling tribes of Britons hereabouts, though there never was a Roman town as such. But, leys. And the Narrows. Imagine, if you will, a ley as a smooth but swiftly flowing river. A river of life energy, yes?’