“The dragon slashed me.”
Her face showed no emotion. It was as blank as if people told her that dragons slashed them every day of the week. As soon as he’d said the words, George started laughing again. He repeated his words, just to see how deranged they sounded.
“The dragon slashed me!”
She watched him get up, wipe the tears from his eyes, and stumble off down the alley toward the river.
“Where are you going?”
He stopped at the pavement edge, looking at a red and blue Underground sign that shone out against the dark glitter of the Thames beyond the traffic on the Embankment.
“Home.”
She stood in front of him.
“You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
“We can’t go home. Not from all this.” I can.
He looked for a break in the traffic.
“We can’t just pretend this isn’t happening, you have to get to the Black Friar—”
“You go to the Black Friar. I’m going home.”
Edie actually stamped her feet in frustration. He hadn’t thought people really did that, but she did. She did it again. She looked as if she were going to explode.
“Listen, you idiot, we—”
“Hey, you’re the one who said there’s no ‘we’! I’m agreeing, you’re right, okay? I’m just not doing this anymore… .”
He waved at a taxi that was pulling away from the Temple tube station across the street. The driver saw him, waved, indicated for a U-turn and waited for a gap in the traffic. Something flapped between George and the streetlight, and he flinched, but when he looked up he saw it was just a big black bird, not a dragon or anything made of stone or metal, so he relaxed.
Edie looked desperate. He felt guilty, but he didn’t know why, or if he did, he didn’t want to know. He felt his brain was about to melt anyway, and the pain in his hand was rising again.
“I’m just stopping this. I’m just going home. And I’m just going to crash out, and then I’m just going to wake up tomorrow and this will—this will just be … over.”
“What about me?”
“I don’t know. You should go home, too. Everyone should go home and this should stop.” It won’t.
“You don’t know that.”
Edie jutted her jaw. The streetlight glistened in her eyes. At her feet the black bird swooped in and tugged the guts out of a discarded burger in a bright wrapper. She took a deep breath.
“I do. It never stops.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t know that. You’re just—just a kid.”
The taxi found its gap and U-turned to park next to them. She put a hand on his shoulder.
“So are you. You can’t go home, George. I’m sorry, but you really can’t. The Gunner said—”
The bird hopped with them as George pushed past her to the driver’s window. It left the burger uneaten. George shook off her hand and leaned into the taxi.
“Thirty-seven St. George’s Square, please.”
“All right, son, hop in.”
Edie reached for him, but the black bird chose this moment to launch itself into the air between them in a flurry of black feathers, and Edie stepped back for an instant, and in that instant George slipped into the taxi. She reached an imploring hand across the gulf of air between them.
“Look. Don’t do this—it’s dangerous—” I m sorry.
He closed the door. The window was open. So was Edie’s mouth. She couldn’t believe this was happening. He tried to find something to say that would make what he was doing feel better.
“Good luck.”
“Good luck?”
She stood there as if she’d been hit. George looked at her and tried to say something better, but the taxi moved off, and he didn’t have the words, so he just shrugged and held up his hand in half a wave, and their eyes stayed locked on each other until the taxi turned onto the Embankment and George couldn’t see her anymore.
He took a deep breath. Then another. Then he curled himself around the pain in his hand, the hand still thrust deep in his coat pocket, and sank down in the corner of the seat with his eyes closed.
Of course, if he’d looked back he’d have seen the bird flapping lazily along behind the taxi until the big dark mass of Waterloo Bridge swept up and over them, and the bird wheeled north, up and over the brightly lit classical pillars of the long building on the side of the bridge, in the general direction of St. Pancras station.
Edie wiped her eyes. She felt in her pocket. The glass was still there. It just reflected the lights of the city. It had no inner warning flame now. She reached beyond the glass, to the scrabble of coins that jingled like shrapnel at the bottom of her pocket. She counted the heavier coins into one hand, dropped the others into her pocket, and took off her shoe. There was a banknote inside. She slid it out carefully. Her hand closed around the paper and the coins as she wriggled her foot back into the shoe and set off toward Temple station.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Walker in the Circle
Beside the steep gothic roof of St. Pancras station and its highly decorated brickwork is another big red-brick building. They are as alike as chalk and Chinese food. Brick color and size is all they have in common. Where St. Pancras sweeps the eye into the curve of its facade and then throws it upward to enjoy the exuberance of its peaks and spires, the other building stops the eye dead with windowless slopes of brick bunkered down in a defensive hunch, as if expecting something nasty from the road in front.
Between it and the wide raceway of Euston Road is an open stone and brick piazza, which feels less like a pleasure spot than a featureless killing ground for the giant brick fortress squatting on two sides of it. Of course, it isn’t really featureless. There is a massive statue of a heavy-browed man crouched over a pair of dividers, as if measuring the world—or at least the few yards in front of his feet. And it isn’t actually a fortress, either. It’s a library. The British Library. You can tell that because there is a tall gate and a metal screen where it announces itself repeatedly in a frozen cascade of thickening fonts.
And there is also a sunken circle.
The sunken circle has stone benches all around its interior. On the top rim, there are roughly round boulders. If you were to look closely at the boulders you’d see there are crudely carved human figures that appear to be starting to emerge from them.
The descending black bird took no notice of the statue or the stones. It did, however, fly through the gates because it was no ordinary black bird. It was a raven, and it chose to fly beneath the arch because it did have, among many things rooks didn’t come equipped with, a sense of style.
It banked right and overflew the sunken circle. The Walker paced back and forth on the curved bench, a thin roll-up cigarette smoldering in the side of his mouth, eye squinted against the smoke.
The Raven sideslipped down to land on his shoulder. The Walker didn’t look at all surprised that a large black bird had alighted by his ear.
The Raven shuffled up closer. Its beak clacked quietly. The Walker listened.
“St. George’s Square, you say? By the river.”
He turned decisively. The Raven pushed off and hung in the air in front of his head, flapping unnaturally slowly, lazily defying all laws of gravity and several of the general advisory guidelines of nature as it did so. The Walker pointed to the rookery of gargoyles on St. Pancras.
“Tell him not to fail this time, rain or no rain—or by the first stone and the chisel that cracked it, I’ll be the one he answers to.”
High above them, the cat-gargoyle with the flaked wing and the corroding waterspout watched the Raven rise toward it. It shook itself in anticipation. It stretched its wings, and when it looked around it saw that all the other gargoyles were very busy not looking at it at all.
Back in front of the bunker building, the only sign of the Walker was a pinched-out dog-end of cigarette smoking slightly on the brick floor of the stone ci
rcle.
On the other side of the Euston Road, a man walking down Judd Street with earphones on had the sudden sense that he should take them off because he wouldn’t be able to hear someone coming up behind him. But when he turned quickly, there was no one there.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Going Home
George paid the cabbie. He got back very little change from the ten pounds he gave the driver, and he realized that his lunch money for the rest of the week was gone. He didn’t care a bit. He was home. He winced as he reached for the change with his bad hand.
“You okay, son?” asked the cabbie.
“It’s just this,” said George, holding up his hand.
The cabbie shrugged. George realized with a shudder of horror that the man couldn’t see the mark on his hand.
“Looks okay. You sprain it or something?”
George nodded. Of course the man couldn’t see the scar. There was no scar, not in the real world. This was, in some way he didn’t understand, all in his mind. He just wished his hand was not where all the pain still was.
“Yeah. A sprain.”
“Tiger Balm,” advised the cabbie. “You tell your mum to get you Tiger Balm. Works every time. G’night.”
George stepped back as the cabbie drove off, and looked up at a modern apartment block wedged in the middle of a terrace of older buildings, like a gate-crasher at a party. He punched the number into the security pad on the door and headed across the gray foyer to the lift. He got in and hit the top button. As the door slid shut he felt something relax inside him and realized he felt strange, and he realized the strangeness was that he was safe.
He felt in his trouser pocket and pulled out his house keys. A small bronze airplane, a Spitfire hung off the key ring. His dad had made it for him. They’d both loved making plastic models, but George had kept breaking the planes when he played with them afterward. His dad had made him this “unbreakable” for his tenth birthday. He decided to stop thinking about his dad, and stopped looking at the plane. He held it by its side and impatiently tapped the elegant sweep of its wing against the metal wall instead.
The elevator announced the top floor by saying “Top flat” in a tone that always seemed to George to be ever so slightly boastful. The door sighed open, and George walked across the narrow hall and unlocked the door to his apartment.
“Hi, Mum,” he said as he entered.
All the lights were off, except for in his mother’s room. He walked along the corridor and looked in. A white bed sat on a white carpet. White blinds blocked out the night. A white cupboard door in the white walls stood slightly ajar. But apart from that, there was nothing to disturb the calm absence of color except the picture on his mother’s white bedside table—a picture of her, in tasteful black-and-white.
George walked to the cupboard, peered inside. He saw the gap where the suitcase was usually rolled in and parked, and knew that his mother was not home. He turned off the lamp and walked into the kitchen, knowing what he was going to find on the microwave, knowing so well that he didn’t even bother to turn on the lights. He peeled the sticky-note off and cracked open the fridge. In the blue light from within he read familiar words:
Sorry G, an audition came up! Kay will keep an eye. Turn your phone on and I’ll explain! Love M
Auditions came up quite a lot for his mum. Kay was a friend who lived in the flat below—another actress. In fact, Kay was the reason that his mother had moved to the apartment after his parents split up. Kay was a very old friend, and supposedly good at “keeping an eye,” which is what his mother called babysitting. Kay was actually less keen on keeping an eye than his mother thought, but his mother was good at keeping focused on what she thought rather than what others did, so Kay got asked to watch George more often than either of them liked. The advantage was that she left George alone, and he didn’t bother her much. In fact, he stayed in his mother’s flat and—humiliatingly—they switched on a baby monitor that reached Kay’s flat underneath.
“We’re as close as if you were just upstairs in my house,” Kay always said, and George knew that it was fine and easier, and meant that she didn’t have to have him in her guest room, which she used for yoga and not guests. She was good at waking before him and coming up and being sure he ate something before he went to school, he had to admit that. He wasn’t what his mum called a latchkey kid. Like most things, however, it just reminded him of the times when he’d had other stuff. Like a dad and a garden and a rabbit and no need for neighbors to babysit when his mum’s career came calling.
He picked up the phone. After the shock of the day, dropping into the rut of familiar routines felt okay. More than okay. It felt calming. He’d call Kay, say he was home, say he was okay; she’d ask if he wanted to come down for his tea; he’d say no thanks, and then he could be alone until tomorrow, when the sun would rise and a new day would begin and life would be back to what it was.
“Hi, Kay.”
“Hey, G, I heard you come in up there. You okay?”
He suddenly wanted to tell her no, wanted to tell her everything: tell her about the pain in his hand, about the nightmare he’s just lived through… .
“I’m fine.”
It came out by itself. No matter; she’d ask if he wanted to come down and then he’d tell her… .
“That’s great, love. Listen, bang on the floor if you need anything. I’ve got people to dinner, but we’ll try not to keep you up with sad middle-aged dancing, okay?”
“Okay,” he lied.
“I got a summer pudding. I’ll save you a slice for breakfast. Your mum left your supper, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Sleep tight, not too much screen time, come down if you get the weirds, okay? You can always curl up in the yoga room—it’s quite comfy.”
It wasn’t. This was just part of the ritual.
“I’m fine. Thanks.”
“G’night, superstar.”
“’Night.”
He noticed the light blinking for messages when he hung up. He listened, in case it was his mum. It was Killingbeck, explaining that George had walked off a school trip and would his mother call this evening if he wasn’t at home, and call tomorrow if he was, to discuss the seriousness of—”
George deleted the message.
He went back to the fridge, opened it, and stared in for a bit. Then he retrieved peanut butter and jam, and took some bread from the white bin on the white counter, and made some brown bread into a sandwich. And then he took some milk and turned that brown with some cocoa powder, and then he took the sandwich and the chocolate milk across the white carpet, past the bronze head of his mother placed center stage in the living room, past the dark picture window and the balcony, and into his room.
He hit the lights and stopped in the doorway. His room was a jumble of color. It was a jumble of everything. It looked like burglars had been through it in a hurry. They hadn’t, of course, but that was how he kept it most of the time. The walls had shelves, and on them were his toys and models—the ones he’d made and the ones his father had made, and the ones they’d made together: soldiers and goblins and ores and knights and space marines and skeleton armies and Spitfires and Tiger Moths and Totoros—and then on the upper shelves the grown-up things his dad had made, the things from his studio, the castings, the clay models, and the imaginary animals he used to make for George when he was a very little boy indeed. There were even little busts of George at different ages, quickly made “clay sketches” his dad had called them. They were all there, where they should be, in his room, on the upper shelves, where they could come to no harm, or indeed good or anything else, not now his father’s studio was gone.
He wandered back into his mother’s room, chewing his sandwich. He picked her cordless phone off the side table and went and slumped inside the cupboard, sitting in the little slot of space where the suitcase lived. He’d started doing this a long time ago. He must have noticed that he was the same size as the suitcas
e-shaped hole on one of his mum’s earlier absences. He used to like the smell of his mother’s clothes above him, because it reminded him of her, he supposed. Now it just smelled of dry-cleaning. He still liked the podlike safety of the space, though he knew he’d be really really embarrassed if his mum caught him picnicking on the floor of her cupboard. As she’d once said, “Peanut butter and Prada don’t mix.” He stared out at the white room and munched his sandwich. He felt calmer, but his hand still hurt. He decided he’d go and get one of his mother’s aspirin when he’d finished eating.
He dialed the number. It rang and rang, and just when he knew the answer-message was going to click in, his mother answered.
“MIGUEL?”
She was shouting. He could hear the noise of a party or a bar behind her, glasses clinking, people talking and laughing, music thumping in the background. He had no idea who Miguel was. The voices in the background didn’t sound English.
“Hi, Mum.”
He could hear the gears switching in her head.
“G! My darling. I thought you were Miguel. I’m in Madrid. It’s a thriller. Just the kind of thing you like!”
He presumed the thriller was the audition, not Madrid. As it happened, he didn’t like thrillers much either.
“G? Are you okay? I tried to call. You get my messages, darling?” The phone went a bit muffled, but not enough to stop him hearing her say, “Stop it. It’s my son,” and giggle throatily. The phone unmuffled and she continued. “So you’re okay with Kay and everything, yeah? And how was your day?”
He felt it all welling up inside him, all the madness and the terror, and he wanted to tell her about it, he wanted her to tell him what to do, he wanted her to listen and tell him it was all a dream. He wanted it with a sweet, sad pain that rose in his throat like a sudden wave.
“So you’re okay, baby?”
“No,” he said quietly.
“Didn’t hear that, darling. I’m with some people. So you’re okay?”
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