Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  Beth ran her tongue against the inside of her teeth. They felt too big, too blocky in her mouth. ‘It was dying anyway,’ she managed

  ‘There might have been a way to save it.’

  ‘There was no time,’ Beth shot back. ‘It was spreading – everyone, everything was in danger. I had to help—’

  She broke off as he arched a dusty eyebrow.

  ‘You did this for everyone and everything, did you?’ he asked sceptically. ‘Go on, finish your sentence. You “had to help—?”’

  She just stared at him.

  ‘It’s okay, Beth. Thames knows you can say her name, here of all places. Her face is graffiti’d fifty feet high on most of the walls.’

  ‘Pen.’ Beth swallowed. ‘I had to help Pen.’ Why was she so shy of saying that out loud? Was it because she knew that if helping Pen had meant giving this whole wretched island to the Crane King’s claws, she would have done that too?

  The grey boy kept looking at her. ‘And that’s why you woke Reach, was it? And in such a hurry, too.’

  ‘There was no time—’

  ‘You have no idea how much time there was.’ His voice was flat, and hard as concrete.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Answer me,’ he said quietly. ‘Is helping Pen the reason you woke Reach?’

  ‘Of course it is, Fil.’

  He frowned and pursed his lips: a pantomime of puzzlement, then he straightened and pushed himself up onto the parapet. He tiptoed up and down the edge of the bricks with his arms thrown out, like he was a tightrope artist.

  ‘Does it make you feel better,’ he asked, ‘calling me that?’

  She glared at him. ‘What else am I supposed to call you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ He lifted one leg up straight and pirouetted to face her, perfect as a music-box ballerina. ‘Childhood outlookss, proclivitiesss and memoriesss?’

  The face remained his, but the voice was Johnny Naphtha’s. He straightened an imaginary tie at his naked throat.

  ‘Bit of a mouthful. I’ll stick with Fil.’

  ‘You can call me whatever you like. Your skull, your rules.’ He squinted up at the clouds. ‘But we both know I’m not Filius Viae. I’m as much as could be saved of him, maybe, but that’s not remotely the same thing.’ His mouth twisted like there was something unpleasant in it. ‘Trust me. I remember the difference.’

  He jumped back down, and his feet crunched in the roof’s flat gravel. ‘So, does calling me that make you feel better?’ he asked again.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the spear you wielded, about the life you took. About killing Filius Viae.’

  Beth stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘You TOLD me to—’

  ‘He told you,’ he corrected. ‘And what possible difference would that make? Does it make you feel better, calling me Fil?’

  ‘Yes!’ she snapped at him. ‘A bit. Maybe. Are you happy now?’

  He made a little noise in the back of his throat and turned back to look at the cranes.

  ‘What was that noise about?’ Beth demanded.

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘That little “hmmm-that-was-interesting” noise.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m just spotting a pattern.’

  Beth had had enough of this. ‘Oh, you can piss off right now.’

  ‘Where to?’ He gestured to the blocky grey towers that rose around them and smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘Why did you wake Reach?’

  Beth glared at him. She felt a blank anger rising in her. She hugged herself, as though that could keep it in. Across the skyline, lights flickered.

  ‘To protect the rest of the country.’

  ‘Why did you wake Reach?’ he asked again, his voice not changing at all.

  ‘To help Pen.’

  ‘Why did you wake Reach?’

  ‘I had no choice—’

  ‘Why did you—?’

  ‘BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT?’ She screamed it at him so hard it ripped her throat raw, so hard the earth under them shuddered and the clouds above them turned black. On the building behind her, the rhino snorted and strained at the bricks that held it.

  Because the city was killing her, and it was in the palm of her hand. Why not squeeze? Finally, after months of feeling so weak, so helpless, just for an instant she’d felt powerful again. Because she was lonely, and it hurt. And yes, it did make her feel better calling this grey-skinned memory by Fil’s name – but not nearly enough to make up for the fact that it wasn’t really him.

  She remembered his warning, whispered inside her skull: don’t say it. Once you say it you can’t take it back. And so she’d said it, safe in the knowledge that after that it would be too late.

  ‘And so,’ Fil went on. His voice carried on seamlessly from the voice inside her. ‘And so the city dies, and you get to wake up the next morning, and the next, and if you’re lucky, maybe one or two more after that, until, starved of the city’s energy, you die too. And you never have to say to anyone – not to Pen or Glas or me or even yourself – that you did it on purpose.’

  His gaze bored into her. ‘Because you gave up,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

  He pursed his lips, then looked thoughtful.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  Beth blinked. ‘What?

  ‘I said okay.’ He propped himself up onto the ledge. ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘Nah.’ He dismissed it with a wave. ‘You just have to un-give up.’

  She gaped at him, her breath taken away by the unfairness – by the presumption – of that statement. ‘I don’t know if I can do that, Fil,’ she said testily.

  He shrugged, as if to say that was up to her.

  She leaned against the parapet next to him, but only, she told herself, because he was warm. He put his arm around her, and she let him. Yes, there was the heat she remembered: like a coal-fired furnace radiating from his ribs.

  She shivered in spite of it. ‘Doesn’t the sun ever come out here?’ she wondered, peering at the clouds. The strange grey light that filtered through them made her eyes hurt.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Want me to wait with you and find out?’

  She snorted. ‘Generous bloody offer. Where else would you go?’

  He looked behind them, down at the crisscrossing streets. ‘This is your mind, right? All those red-hot fantasies you’ve been dreaming up about me must be around here in one of these buildings. I thought I’d take a look.’

  ‘If you can find them,’ Beth remarked drily, ‘let me know. I’ll burn the place down. Also, you’re a dick. Also, yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  She pushed tighter into him and settled her head against his collarbone. ‘Wait with me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The dawn light entered the sky over London like sand in an hourglass, and Pen raced against it.

  She worked as fast and methodically as she could. She knew she’d never get everywhere, so she limited herself to those places where she’d heard of people gathering in large numbers and which bordered the sickness-stricken streets that were about to become a battleground; that left her twelve destinations to cover and almost no time.

  She worked her way anti-clockwise through the city, starting at a shattered bus garage in Lewisham, then moving north to Liverpool Street Station, and then northwest to an old Kosher store in Finchley where the same old couple who had run it for the past twenty years were still brewing up soup for the gaunt-faced people camped outside.

  The people she met were, almost without exception, terrified of her. In fairness, she supposed, I am pretty terrifying: a scar-faced metal Medusa, barbed wire coiling around her head like ophidian hair.

  She felt a brief glimmer of satisfaction at how off-balance they looked when the first word out of her mouth was, ‘Please.’

  She knew by how they reacted to that first syllable whether she had them or not. If they looked puzzled by her
plea, it meant they weren’t so scared they weren’t listening, and if they were listening, they were usually prepared to believe.

  After all, she reasoned, if she were them and a girl cocooned in barbed-wire stilt-walked up to her and told her she’d come to save her life, she’d figure the normal standards of scepticism had pretty much gone out of the window too.

  Breathlessly, she gave directions and instructions to get to Crystal Palace by the morning. You’ve got a few hours, she told them, eight at the most, before this place becomes a killing ground. Head for the radio tower – it’s still standing. You can make it. Go now.

  You can make it …

  For some – the old folks from Finchley and the sweating man from Lewisham who’d seared his foot to uselessness on a Fever Street – that was almost certainly a lie.

  ‘Come with us,’ a black girl with cornrows had asked her. It was her tone that stuck with Pen; she wasn’t begging or demanding, just solemn and certain. ‘If you’re serious about helping, then show us the way. I don’t think we can make it by ourselves.’ She’d spoken softly so the three younger brothers she’d been getting ready to go wouldn’t hear. She’d thrown Pen’s tactical ‘Please’ back at her: ‘Please, show us the way.’

  She couldn’t have been more than thirteen, but there was no time. Pen had apologised, over and over, as she’d backed out of the dusty storeroom, for the first time feeling like the monster she looked.

  The moon was already waning in the sky as she spider-picked her way towards Victoria. Two stops left – and she dreaded arriving at the final one almost as much as she feared running out of time. The last hour of the night stretched around her, and her passage through it felt impossibly slow. The sensation was familiar, but it took her a moment to put her finger on why; when she did, she almost laughed. It was just like the night she’d not been able to sleep before her Maths GCSE, dreading the dawn, while at the same time desperate for the wait to be over.

  Cranes punctured the skyline and at the base of them a supermarket took up the corner of the junction. Back before everything had kicked off, this Sainsbury’s was the poshest place she’d ever set foot in where you could buy a raw turnip. She remembered joking with Beth as they’d walked through the aisles, pretending to guess which of the shoppers were somebody’s butler and whispering in bad fake RP accents about how they’d take that Camembert back to the mansion and let Alfred prepare it for the children. For some reason they’d found the range on offer in the cheese section particularly hilarious.

  Now the windows were shattered and black tentacles of cable dangled from behind the giant neon letters of the shop sign. Voices whispered from inside. Pen hesitated, then picked her way over the broken glass, and started her spiel. ‘Please,’ she announced to the gloomy interior, ‘my name is Parva Khan and I’ve come to warn you that you’re in terrible danger. Tomorrow this place will be a battlefield, and you all—’

  She faltered as her brain caught up with her eyes. There was no all: the aisles stood empty; the shelves had been stripped bare. Even the strip-light covers flapped open, their bulbs salvaged for heaven knew what reason. Pen could only see by the light that washed in through the saw-toothed remains of the windows by the entrance. She walked slowly past row after row of empty shelves. The place was deserted.

  Until she reached the last aisle on the right.

  The woman sat stiff-backed and cross-legged on a pile of cushions at the end of what Pen thought might have been the kitchenware section. A TV set flickered on the floor in front of her, plugged into an extension lead that snaked away behind the shelves. The voices Pen had heard crackled from its speakers. The shelves around her were full of objects, but from where she stood, Pen couldn’t make out what they were.

  She paced slowly up the length of the aisle, making sure her steel-bound feet rang on the tiles. If the woman wasn’t deaf – and the TV was set to a normal volume, suggesting she wasn’t – she had to have heard Pen. The woman looked about seventy, South Asian, with sharp cheekbones and a sharper jaw. Her greying hair was scraped back into a bun. She wore an immaculately pressed dark green jacket and was sipping occasionally from a steaming glass. The medicinal scent of herbal tea hit Pen’s nostrils.

  ‘Er, excuse me?’ Pen said.

  ‘Yes?’ The woman glanced up at her and smiled politely. If the cut-glass accent was anything to go by, she might have been royalty. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I – I thought there would be more people here.’

  ‘There were.’ The woman said, and sipped her tea thoughtfully.

  ‘Er – okay, well, could you tell me what happened to them? There’s something they need to hear.’

  ‘They left. One of those glowing blue dragon things flew down this road one evening, and a few of them got cold feet and departed. That put the wind up a few others, and soon everyone but me had run off.’ She frowned as though this was incomprehensible behaviour. ‘Honestly, it’s not as though the bloody thing actually came in here.’

  ‘Oh – okay,’ Pen said uncertainly. ‘Well, you should probably get ready to go. There’s a battle—’

  ‘A battle coming. Yes, I heard you the first time. Parva, was it? Thank you for your concern, but I’m afraid it’s quite out of the question.’ She stood, straightened out her jacket and busied herself arranging the objects on her shelves. ‘Would you like some tea? Only chamomile, I’m afraid; it’s all they left behind.’

  Pen stared at her. ‘You heard me say battle, right?’ she asked. ‘A big one. If I tell you that the people fighting are the ones who control the glowing blue dragons, not to mention twelve-foot-long wolves made out of scaffolding, you …’ She almost laughed. ‘You still won’t have any idea of how big it’s going to be. Seriously, they’ll tear this place apart, and you with it, if you stay.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ the woman said amiably, and sipped her tea. She winced slightly. ‘Ghastly stuff,’ she murmured.

  Pen stared at her. ‘I’m not kidding, lady,’ she said. ‘You really can’t stay here.’

  ‘I don’t think you are kidding, Parva, but I really can.’

  ‘What are you so attached to it for? It’s a ransacked bloody Sainsbury’s!’ Pen almost shouted it at her.

  ‘Is it?’ The woman blinked at her, her mouth an ‘O’ of mock surprise. She looked at the white-painted shelves surrounding the little den she’d made for herself. ‘So it is. Have that cup of tea, why don’t you? The water’s still hot, and I must say it’s very nice to have a visitor, even if her manners leave a little to be desired.’

  Pen glanced back towards the door. The light coming through it had a definite bluish tinge now: the day was coming on fast. But this place was the second-to-last on her list, and the final one was …

  ‘A quick one,’ she said, wondering if, for some reason, the woman might find her more convincing with a cup of pointless floral water in her hand.

  The woman brightened considerably. She fumbled behind her for a kettle and poured steaming water into a small saucepan, into which she dumped a yellow-tagged teabag. She prodded at it with a wooden spoon for a few seconds, then decanted the contents into a second novelty glass and handed it to Pen.

  ‘Ghastly stuff,’ she said again with a smile.

  ‘Thanks,’ Pen said. And then, ‘But seriously, why won’t you—?’

  She broke off because for the first time she’d seen what the objects on the shelves actually were: two silver-framed photos, brightly polished, showing the woman in her younger days, standing with a man in a hat and smiling, an alarm clock, a string of pearls, a few rings, and a small wooden statuette of the sort that might have been whittled for a little girl by a father who was good with his hands. Pen’s throat was suddenly dry.

  ‘I had to leave my home, you see,’ the woman said. Her voice was quiet and even. ‘The street outside it became so unbearably hot, and Amjad—’ She broke off, frowned a little and gave a small shake of her head, like there was something she didn’t understand
.

  ‘I took what I could – even these cushions are from my sofa – and I left. I thought there might be food here, so here I came and tried to set up again.’ Again, that puzzled frown. ‘I’ve done my best, I really think I have, but it didn’t work. I don’t expect it would work any better somewhere else.’

  She smiled almost apologetically at Pen, like she was inconveniencing her. ‘It was just the two of us, you see. We never had any children, so it was just us.’

  Pen swallowed hard. She sat beside the old woman, her tea clasped in both hands. ‘I understand.’

  ‘I do hope not.’ The woman’s smile didn’t waver. ‘Girl your age – I mean, I really do hope not.’ She cocked her head slightly. ‘Where are your family from, dear?’

  ‘Pakistan. My mum and dad are from Karachi.’

  ‘Ah.’ The woman smiled happily. ‘I grew up in Lahore – have you ever been to Lahore?’

  Pen shook her head.

  ‘Shame; you should go if you can. Parva – that’s an unusual name. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone called that.’

  Pen ran the hot edge of the glass under her lower lip. ‘My full name is Parveen, but no one calls me that any more.’

  ‘Oh really?’ The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘Why ever not? Didn’t you like it?’

  ‘I liked it fine.’

  ‘So why?’

  Pen paused. It occurred to her that this was an odd thing to be telling a stranger, but somehow she felt like she owed this woman a story in exchange for her own. ‘My mum, she had cancer when I was a kid – in her breast to start with, but it spread to her mouth. She had chemotherapy and it went into remission, but for a couple of months she … couldn’t talk very well.’

  The old woman’s gaze was sharp. ‘She couldn’t pronounce your name?’

  Pen nodded slowly, remembering. ‘Something about the wide mouth shape for the “e”. “Parva” was as close as she could get. She tried not make a big deal out of it, but you could see how much it upset her, so—’