Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  She turned, and her heart lurched to see Paul Bradley, Beth’s dad, smiling his worried smile. His wide cheeks had turned pink in the heat put out by Gutterglass’ burners.

  ‘Is everything all right, Parva?’ he asked.

  Pen felt unbalanced by his presence. She hesitated. She couldn’t do this, not in front of him. He was Beth’s dad; it would be too cruel. She heard brick-soled feet in the corridor outside and a green glow showed through the bubbled glass in the doors, growing brighter with every step. She felt a sick kind of relief. She’d lost her chance; Beth was here and she’d stop her, and then she would stay and keep her secret and die here, Beth would die and—

  ‘Beth’s dying,’ she blurted just as the door swung open again, framing her best friend. Beth’s city-face was etched in a kind of sad resignation.

  ‘W-w-what?’ Paul Bradley’s lower jaw was trembling, making him stammer. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What’s happening to the city,’ Pen said, ‘it’s happening to her too, in that new skin of hers.’

  There was a long silence. Petris shifted, his stone feet grinding over the tiles. And now Pen could see his eyes, the way the mica glittered in them as he stared at her. ‘Urbosynthesis,’ he grunted.

  Then the air blurred and he was suddenly facing Gutterglass. The trash-spirit put a hand to the front of her makeshift dress as Petris demanded, ‘Why in the fucking River’s name didn’t you tell us, Glas?’

  ‘Why?’ Gutterglass countered mildly. ‘What precisely would you have done, old man? Vibrate with worry against the inside of that rock suit of yours until you liquefied yourself? The only one of us qualified to act on the information is me, and I am already acting on it. Trust me,’ she added, with a brittle smile. ‘I’m a doctor.’

  Pen stared at her, remembering the frenzied energy with which she’d attacked the diagnosis of the city, the dozens of hands that must have been so exhausting for her to animate, the way she never slept. She remembered, too, that though the two statue-skinned men she stood by were both members of the priesthood, their zeal had never matched Gutterglass’. She’d lied for her faith and betrayed people for it, and ultimately she had cradled all the scraps of it that were left in her garbage hands and put it all in the girl who was now embracing her shaking father a few feet away.

  Most of all, Pen remembered the cold anger in Gutterglass’ voice as she’d said, ‘Faith I’m all out of, and not freshly, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You told her.’ Pen sounded stunned, even to herself, as she turned to face Beth. ‘Her, but not him’ – she nodded at Paul, who tightened his embrace on his daughter – ‘her, but not me.’

  Beth stayed within her dad’s arms as she said, ‘Like she said, Pen, she’s a doctor.’

  Pen swallowed. She felt like she was going to be sick. She was panicking. She looked at tearful Paul Bradley and at Beth, and then she turned back to Gutterglass. She’d lost control. There was no making this right; there was only what she’d come down here to do.

  ‘As a doctor then, you have to tell her to go,’ she demanded. ‘It’s the city that’s making her sick – she can’t save you, none of you. She needs to leave. Tell her to go, all of you!’ she demanded, looking from face to unreadable face. ‘She needs to hear it from you, so tell her to get out. She won’t listen to me,’ she snarled, ‘so you have tell her to go!’

  That last shout seemed to suck all the noise out of the room and left a heavy silence in its wake. Pen’s vision blurred. She felt moisture streak down her face. She tasted salt.

  ‘I told you, Pen,’ Beth was speaking as gently as she could. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘But … but why not?’ Pen didn’t understand. ‘They know now – they know. If you stay, in a few days or weeks or months you’ll be dead and then they won’t have anyone to protect them anyway. So what are you staying for?’

  ‘A few days, or weeks, or months,’ Beth said. She left off hugging her dad, but left a hand on his arm. ‘You’re right, Pen: the city is killing me. Every time I feed on it it makes me sicker – but that doesn’t magically mean I can live off anything else. London’s become my substance, Pen. If I step off these streets, I starve.’

  Her green eyes reluctantly met Pen’s teary gaze. ‘That’s what I couldn’t tell you, Pen. That’s what I didn’t know how to say – not that I’m sick, but that there’s no way for me to get better.’

  Pen stared at her. She lifted a hand towards her, but it felt clumsy, useless, and she let it drop.

  ‘Oh, B,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Beth came to her then and wrapped her arms around her. Pen returned the hug fiercely, feeling the warmth of their cheeks next to each other, street to scar. Something bubbled up in her chest and Pen was mortified to find she was laughing and there was nothing she seemed to be able to do about it. ‘I’m sorry, I just … don’t know what I … I thought I was … I—’ She managed to fight her breath back under control. ‘I’ve really screwed this up, haven’t I?’

  Beth shook, laughing silently herself. ‘Yeah, a little bit. It’s okay, Pen.’

  Behind her, Pen heard stone grinding against stone as the Pavement Priests moved. ‘This doesn’t leave the room,’ Petris was saying. ‘If it gets out we’ll have fifty per cent desertion by sun-up and we’ll lose the rest before Monday.’

  ‘Gutterglass’ – this was Ezekiel’s haughty drawl – ‘does your expertise with chemicals run to a memory solution?’

  ‘A crude one,’ Glas replied, in a tone that suggested she was making a show of modestly inspecting her nails. ‘I’m not Johnny Naphtha, but I can manage a little amnesia if pressed.’

  ‘Consider yourself pressed,’ Ezekiel said. ‘Best prepare several doses, just in case. If word gets out, it would be nice to have at least a chance of containing it.’

  ‘Who do you think’s going to tell?’ Paul Bradley asked.

  ‘I couldn’t possibly say, but there are six of us now who know, and that’s usually five more than can keep a secret for any length of time. Isn’t that right, dear seneschal?’ he added to Gutterglass with a waspish snap. ‘You’re our resident expert on secrets.’

  Pen barely heard all this; she was focused on stalling the tremor in her limbs, focused on breathing in and out, slowly and regularly. ‘Forgive me?’ she whispered to Beth. She was still holding her.

  ‘Of course, Pen. Always,’ Beth answered.

  ‘Okay.’ Pen looked at Beth’s dad. His face looked bruised, swollen with grief, and to her shame she felt herself recoil from it.

  ‘I’m going to leave you and your dad to …’ She faltered. ‘I’ll be back upstairs afterwards if you want to talk.’

  ‘No,’ Beth said in her shushed tyre whisper. ‘You won’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have to go, Pen.’

  Pen’s heart thudded in her chest. She pulled back against Beth’s hug and felt Beth’s concrete-textured fingers come away from the back of her neck. ‘Beth, I’m sorry, I really am. But it’s me – you can trust me. Please don’t do this.’

  Beth looked puzzled for a moment, then her eyes widened in appalled sympathy. ‘You think I’m punishing you? God, Pen, no! I would never … It’s just – you were right.’

  Pen shook her head, not understanding. It was like there was a sudden loss of air pressure in the room. Beth sounded muffled; she could barely hear her.

  ‘If She’s coming for you, you run. You said that, and you were right. But we can’t.’ The light from Beth’s gaze fell on Petris, Ezekiel and Gutterglass in turn. ‘We’re of the City, all of us. We have nowhere else to go.’ Her gaze came finally back to Pen. ‘But you do.’

  ‘B, please don’t do this—’

  But Beth’s right hand had already dipped into Pen’s pocket, quick as smoke, and now she held it out in front of her. Resting in the cross-hatched grey palm was a glass sphere, no larger than an ordinary marble. A ribbon of dark images twisted through the heart of it like a stormcloud. ‘Take it
to the Chemical Synod and sell it to Johnny Naphtha. Get your parents’ memories back. Go to them. It’s time to leave us behind.’

  Pen just stood there, blinking and stammering and feeling like a fool and not managing to say anything.

  ‘Go home, Pen.’

  Pen stared at her, shaking her head, not even in denial, just astonishment. ‘You are my home,’ she said at last.

  Beth flinched, but didn’t look away.

  ‘B, I already made this choice.

  ‘Make it again.’

  Pen felt sick and heavy, like she’d drunk liquid lead. ‘If I don’t,’ she asked, ‘what are you going to do? Have Petris throw me out?’

  Beth didn’t answer. The muscles in Pen’s stomach locked up. She felt humiliated.

  ‘If you do this,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive you.’

  Beth pursed her lips. She was weighing the threat, taking it perfectly seriously. ‘If it will keep you alive,’ she said at last, ‘I can live with that.’

  ‘Screw you, Beth,’ Pen mumbled around a throat full of tears. ‘You aren’t the one who’ll have to.’ She snatched Goutierre’s Eye from Beth’s hand and shoved past her to the door. She stumbled on the steps and the glass Eye clacked loudly on the stone as she put her hands out to catch herself. Blurrily, out of the corner of her eye she saw a little pile of cigarette ash and the ground-out dog-end of a roll-up, but she barely registered it. She pushed herself back up and with an angry burst of energy threw herself onwards.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Come now, My Lady, just one more time.’

  Beth concentrated, focusing on the shapes in her mind: the human outlines, clad in a skin of concrete grey. She stretched out her hand towards the floor as though she could physically pull them out of it. The muscles in her arms trembled, beads of sweat stood out on her forehead, the floor under her rippled like a puddle in an earthquake.

  Dizziness swept over her and her concentration broke. The rippling stopped. ‘I can’t.’ She rocked back against the corner of the kitchen counter and slid to the floor, the air aching inside her lungs.

  Gutterglass pursed her rubber lips speculatively and poised a pencil-tipped index finger over a small notepad half hidden amongst the morass of her forearm. ‘What exactly feels like the problem? Describe it as fully as you can.’

  Beth shook her head. ‘I just can’t. I can see them, hold them in my head, but when I try to make them in the world, they just don’t come up.’

  Gutterglass scribbled, then tapped her finger against her cheek. ‘Hmmm,’ she murmured in a voice made from the low buzz of beetle wings. ‘It could be a new progression in your pathology. It could be weakness due to your lack of sustenance, or,’ she mused, ‘it could simply be stress. Has anything happened recently to cause you any stress, My Lady?’

  ‘Really?’ Beth said. ‘You’re doing that joke?’

  Gutterglass shrugged, a complicated manoeuvre involving the scurrying of half a dozen rats under her shoulder blades; it was one of the human gestures she was least accomplished at.

  ‘In my experience, in situations like this one you can’t be too picky about where you pick up your laughs, My Lady.’

  Beth peered at her from under her drooping eyelids. ‘You actually have experience of situations like this?’

  ‘Not exactly like this,’ Gutterglass admitted, ‘but over the years you’d be surprised how close I’ve got.’

  ‘How did they turn out?’

  ‘Varied,’ Glas replied, ‘but I’m still here, aren’t I?’ She crouched and patted Beth’s knee. ‘There’s usually a way out. Just because we haven’t seen it yet doesn’t mean it’s not there.’

  Beth nodded at the floor beside her. ‘Sit down.’

  Gutterglass obeyed by simply allowing her lower body to collapse in a miniature landfill. Her torso emerged from it like some salvage-sculpture bust.

  ‘Petris and Zeke are pretty pissed off at us.’

  ‘They are,’ Gutterglass confirmed.

  ‘Think we did the right thing, not telling them?’

  ‘I think that the speed with which they’re taking measures to keep the news from their followers implies that they think we did, whether they’ll admit it or not,’ Gutterglass said.

  ‘Yeah – but what about you? Would you have told them? If I hadn’t ordered you not to?’

  ‘Would I have told them that, in our best but by no means expert opinion, we are woefully overmatched in a battle against an Urban Goddess who is an exact copy, except, if possible, slightly more callous and sadistic than the one who stole their deaths and condemned them to an eternity under rock? And that the girl on whom all their hopes depend as a challenger to this demonic entity is a rotten apple-skin’s thickness from the grave herself?’

  Gutterglass considered it. ‘If I’m honest, I think it might not have been the best morale booster I could think of.’

  ‘Still, it might have given them a chance to prepare.’

  ‘They’re soldiers, My Lady. They live prepared.’ Gutterglass paused. ‘Mater Viae’s mirror-sister is stronger than you,’ she said, ‘that I grant, but there is at least this: She is alone. We have three hundred and fifty-nine streetlamp spirits and Pavement Priests and garbage avatars and,’ she added with a smile, ‘dying semi-divine graffiti artists.’

  Beth peered at her through half-closed eyes. Gutterglass’ rats covertly counted every non-human resident of the department store in the morning and again in the evening. One body too many, Glas had pointed out, and there could be a spy in their midst. One unaccounted for could be the first sign of a rout.

  ‘Three hundred and fifty-nine, huh?’ Beth said wearily. That was less than a third of the force she and Fil had led against Reach, and not even the Crane King himself had been a match for the enemy they faced now. ‘That’s not a lot.’

  ‘Not a lot,’ Gutterglass conceded, ‘but it is something. Three hundred and fifty-nine smart, scared, motivated minds. And maybe, just maybe, one of them will think of something.’ She paused. ‘As long as we can keep their faith alive.’ She turned her eggshell eyes towards the counter. Lined up under the spice rack in plastic bottles were a dozen carefully measured draughts of a dark metallic liquid.

  ‘And if keeping their faith means stealing their memories,’ Beth said, ‘then that’s what we’ll do, huh? No, Glas. I’m not crossing that line.’

  ‘My Lady, it is wise to have contingency plans. Petris and Ezekiel both feel—’

  ‘I don’t care. Destroy it.’

  She thought about the conical flask in her rucksack upstairs, about the memories that churned and crawled under the glass. The pang in her chest was like a broken rib.

  Gutterglass bowed in acquiescence. ‘Shall we go again?’ she asked. ‘Try for only one Masonry Man this time?’

  Beth shook her head. ‘Later. There’s someone I want to see.’

  *

  In a bay in the lowest level of the car park lay a hunk of rock bleached by strip-lighting. It might once have been human-shaped, but it had been heavily eroded by rain and wind and whittled by knife-point graffiti. A muffled crying came from inside the stone.

  Beth tapped the worn statue with the butt of her railing, and it crumbled. The crying grew louder for a moment and then stopped altogether. A pudgy baby with slate-grey skin and storm-grey eyes regarded her seriously from his crevice inside the stone. He always looked at her like this, Beth thought, no matter how much she changed, no matter that her eyes were full of lights and her skin scaled with tiny roofs and speckled with little sodium lamps, he always recognised her.

  ‘You’re growing, Petrol-Sweat,’ she said to him, and he gurgled delightedly at the urban sounds that made up her voice. ‘It’ll be getting cramped in there in a bit.’ In truth, the space inside the statue grew along with him. This was normal for a Pavement Priest, Petris had told her.

  When they’d brought him here, Beth had insisted on trying to take him out of the statue, to ha
ve him with her in the dormitory, despite the monk’s protestations, but over the course of four hours the stone had grown back, out of him and around him like fast-swelling tumours. He’d shrieked and shrieked, and though Beth had sat with him the whole time, there’d been nothing she could do.

  This, Petris had assured her, was also normal.

  ‘Not growing fast enough,’ Beth thought ruefully. She showed him the conical flask and he gurgled and reached for it.

  ‘Whoa there!’ She pulled it out of his reach and he made a disgruntled little fist. ‘Not until you’re older.’ She thought of the memories pent up in the flask: the rangy teenager with brick dust in his hair who’d raced Railwraiths and fought against the Crane King. She felt a flush of heat through the subways under her cheeks as she remembered the texture of his hands under the trees of Battersea Park.

  ‘A lot older,’ she repeated. She sighed. There was more than her embarrassment to think about. Gutterglass didn’t know what would happen if you fed seventeen-year-old memories to a six-month-old child, but in the words of the trash-spirit: ‘I wouldn’t anticipate anything good.’

  So Beth waited, and waited some more, and prayed she could last out the days of the war and still be here when the Son of the Streets’ reborn body caught up with his bottled dreams.

  ‘I did a bad thing today,’ she said. ‘I hurt a friend. I did it on purpose. I’m telling myself it’s because her safety’s more important than her feelings and that’s true as far as it goes. Only, I can’t help remembering that you told me to go home so many times, to keep me safe, and I never went. And even if I’d known then about what would happen to me, about all this …’

  She turned her tiled hand over, inspecting it in the light of her gaze. ‘I still would have killed you, Filius Viae, if you’d tried to make me leave.’

  She stopped talking then, pierced through by loneliness and the bone-deep knowledge that the girl she’d just pushed out of her life was utterly irreplaceable. She felt it go through her like a needle pulling thread, tightening and drawing her in on herself. Worst of all, she knew that Pen was hurting this exact same way, and Beth had done it to her, and she’d done it on purpose and there was nothing she could do to fix it. She trembled as she breathed. Her eyes fell on the flask and the label that read Childhood outlooks, proclivities and memories.