The City's son st-1

by Tom Pollock

  ‘Sure, Pen, what do you need?’

  ‘My compact’s in my jeans — in the back pocket. Can you bring it to me please?’

  Beth pulled Pen’s barb-shredded clothes from the bedside unit and dug around for the compact, a slim square of hinged plastic. She held it out to Pen.

  ‘Open it.’ Her voice remained calm, sterile as the hospital floors. Still she didn’t open her eyes.

  Beth felt her heart begin to beat a little quicker. She swallowed hard. ‘Pen — don’t you think you should wait-?’

  ‘Open it,’ Pen said again, firmly. ‘I’m ready.’

  The compact opened with a tiny click, revealing a palette of foundation and a small round mirror.

  ‘Hold it up for me to see.’

  Wordlessly, Beth lifted the mirror. Pen opened her eyes.

  For a second, Beth thought, it was as though someone had slipped a knife in between her best friend’s ribs. She could see the slight widening of the eyes, the tension that twisted her face. Pen hissed and gritted her teeth to keep from swearing.

  For long seconds, Pen’s gaze roved over the mirror. She lifted her chin, stroking the lines of the bandages, probing the raw wounds underneath with tentative fingers. You could see her tracing the lines of future scars. Her expression, frightened at first, took on a kind of sadness. She looked like she was saying goodbye.

  At last, she shut her eyes again. She leaned back onto the bed. ‘Okay,’ she said, a soft whisper. ‘Okay.’

  Beth snapped the compact shut with trembling fingers.

  ‘Pen,’ she began. ‘I’m so, so sorr-’

  Pen’s voice was like a whipcrack. ‘Tell me you’re sorry, Elizabeth Bradley, and I will kill you dead.’

  Beth blinked in confusion. ‘I never meant to-’

  ‘I know you didn’t, B, but these cuts are mine. Not yours, not ours, mine, understand?’ Pen’s eyes opened again, revealing a mix of pain and fierce survivor’s pride.

  ‘I own them. The barbs bit me. You weren’t there and you’ll never understand what it was like, so don’t try, okay?’

  Beth pursed her lips and nodded, burning from the rebuke.

  ‘They’re my scars,’ Pen said, her tone softening a little. ‘I’ll deal.’

  As Beth stood, a rich smell of curried lamb and spices drifted into her nostrils.

  ‘ You. Get away from my daughter.’ A short, angular man with teak-coloured skin parted the curtains around Pen’s bed. A tiny woman in a shawl and hijab followed him, clutching a Tupperware box.

  Beth drew sharply away from them. ‘Mr and Mrs Khan.’

  Pen’s parent’s actually collided in their haste to reach their daughter’s bedside. Her mother almost collapsed in relief. Her father kissed her forehead and stroked her hair, murmuring something in Urdu that might have been a prayer.

  ‘It’s all right, child.’ Mr Khan spoke in English now. His voice was tightly controlled, but every second he looked at Pen’s injuries aged his lean face. ‘We can fix this.’

  Pen’s mother said nothing as she held her daughter, just wept the tears Beth felt that Pen should be shedding.

  Pen, who simply stared at the wall.

  ‘I know plastic surgeons. There — there is money. We can get you back to-’

  ‘Shhh.’ To Beth’s astonishment, Pen shushed her father. She continued to stroke her mother’s hijab with light strokes of her fingers, murmuring, ‘It’s all right Mum. I’m all right. I’m alive-’ There was no missing the exultant shimmer in her brown eyes.

  ‘And I’m free.’

  CHAPTER 54

  Back in A amp;E, two burly male nurses were wrestling a drunkard into a wheelchair. An irascible old woman was barking incomprehensible hostilities at an unoffending triage nurse, and then repeatedly stealing her fob-watch and giggling as she dropped it on the floor.

  Over the ranks of the sick, beer-soaked and disturbed that occupied the orange plastic chairs, the bandaged head of her father reared like a snowcapped mountaintop. He looked up from the tatty paperback he was reading as Beth approached. The sight of Pen’s facial injuries had scared Paul. He’d looked on with a haunted gaze as they’d wheeled her into the theatre, and accosted everyone in scrubs who emerged with questions and fervent thanks.

  ‘How is she?’ he asked.

  Beth shrugged. ‘Her heart’s in better nick than her face. I think she’ll be okay.’

  ‘Thank God.’ He sagged with relief. ‘And you?’

  Beth looked around a little conspiratorially, and then yanked the collar of her hoodie out past her bra-strap. The fat, jagged wound in her shoulder was sealed over with new greyish skin. An ugly, rippling seam of tar ran through it like a scar.

  Her father stared for a moment, swallowed hard, and then nodded.

  Get used to it, Beth thought. Daddy’s little girl has the city in her skin. She glanced at the book in her father’s lap. The Iron Condor Mystery. She barked an abrupt laugh. ‘You brought that with you?’

  He cradled it defensively. ‘It was your mother’s favourite.’

  Beth sighed. ‘Yeah, I know it was, Dad.’

  He drew himself up, seeming to steel himself. Then he held the book out to Beth. ‘I’m done with it.’

  Beth looked at him, startled.

  ‘You should read it some time,’ he said.

  Beth turned the pages, feeling the paper flake, ready to disintegrate with years of constant reading. She didn’t know what to say.

  He held his arms out to her then, and she embraced him, pulling herself tight into his chest. Uncertain fingertips pattered over her neck for a moment, feeling the pavement-texture of her skin. Then his hug engulfed her. ‘Beth, I know I haven’t- I want to make it up to you- I mean, I know I owe you so much-’

  He fell into a surprised silence as Beth reached back and put a hand over his mouth.

  Deals are sacred. She thought of the symmetrical oil-soaked men. Our equations always balance. Fil’s body, lying in the rubble, his own spear bleeding him dry.

  You saved my life twice. By my reckoning that means I owe you.

  She’d already lost too much to the brutal mathematical economy of debt. ‘It’s not about owing, Dad. This can’t be about owing.’ She pulled back to look him in the face. ‘Let’s just try again.’

  The old drunk in the corner started to make high-pitched yipping noises and they let each other go. Beth sniffed back what felt like a gallon of mucus and looked at the book her father had given her. A sheet of crisply folded white paper was set inside the back cover.

  ‘What’s this?’

  He looked embarrassed. ‘I thought you might want to know a bit more about him.’

  ‘About who?’

  He frowned as though it were obvious. ‘The boy you were following around.’

  A shiver, like a pricking of insect feet, ran down Beth’s back. With numb fingers, she unfolded the sheet. It was a printout of a page from the Evening Standard ’s online archive. The photo showed a haggard-looking woman and man appealing to the camera with their eyes. The headline read:

  Hunt For Williams Baby Called Off

  Beth started to read the text to herself.

  Two hundred and eighty-one days after eight-month-old Michael Williams disappeared from the home of his parents, police have admitted the active search has been wound down.

  Detective Inspector Ian North, leading the case, said, ‘We are not closing the book on the search for baby Michael, but there has been no new evidence in nine months. Our hotline of course remains open…’

  Beth stopped reading and her eyes returned to the photograph. The caption read: Genevieve and Stephen Williams in public appeal for news of missing son.

  ‘I recognised him when you carried his body out,’ her dad was saying. ‘It’s weird — I only printed this out because you went missing.’

  A cold weight had settled in Beth’s gut. She rummaged frantically in her pocket for the sketch of Fil, unfolded it and held it next to the printout: the portra
it of the prince beside the photo of the distraught parents.

  Beth’s dad’s face crinkled in sympathy. ‘The poor kid looks just like his father- Beth, what’s wrong?’

  Beth had sat down hard, missing the orange plastic chair and bruising her coccyx on the concrete floor. She wanted to protest; he was wrong — her own eyes were wrong. Filius Viae couldn’t be these people’s son; it was a mistake — he was the Son of the Streets, the son of Mater Viae. He had powers. He could outrun a Railwraith, tear scaffolding in two, scale the side of a skyscraper…

  All things you can do too, since your dip in the synod’s pool, a quiet voice inside reminded her.

  Questions and doubts bloomed in her mind, but withered again as logic provided the obvious answers. Questions like, Why did Reach try to kill Fil with a Railwraith anyway? Three quick steps carried her to the broom cupboard in the far wall. She reached in and jerked the railing-spear free from where she’d hidden it amongst the pile of plastic sheets. She crashed through the door to the fire-escape and whirled up the stairs, her dad huffing despairingly behind her.

  ‘Where are you going? Please, don’t go, Beth, not again. I’ve made up your room — I-’

  Beth burst onto a fourth-floor corridor. Bleak fury sat in the pit of her stomach like an ember. She’d been lied to — and what was worse, so had Fil, lied to about everything. A rain-spattered window-pane revealed what she was looking for: a slim black telephone wire stretching out from the hospital’s outer wall. The window was one of those that only pivot open about six inches, but Beth had been remade; she undulated, and slid her way out with ease onto the sill, her own oily sweat smoothing her passage.

  Her dad stood inside, hands pressed to the glass, eyes wide. She could see him mouthing, ‘ Come home.’

  Beth hesitated, then she called back, ‘I will, I promise, but there’s something I have to do first.’ She sidled crabwise and settled easily as a pigeon on the insulated phone wire. After the rain, the moon was bright. A sharp wind cut the air, but Beth wasn’t cold.

  ‘Beth!’ Through the glass, her father sounded desperate. ‘I’ll see you soon, Dad,’ she promised, and then raced away, along the cable, into the night.

  CHAPTER 55

  Gutterglass swept the pathways between the rubbish dunes with her stiff-bristle broom, whistling as she went. Her mopstring hair was tied back and her binbag skirts blew in the breeze. She considered it a criminal waste of time to leave spring-cleaning until spring.

  The dump was beautiful on clear winter mornings like this. Its scrap-metal peaks shone in the still-rising sun and chunks of broken glass twinkled like embedded jewels. The fragrance of rotblossom and forget-me-all-too-soon lingered headily in her nostrils. Somewhere in the distance garbage trucks groaned as they spilled further trash tributes, adding to the foundations of Gutterglass’ city.

  A silhouette high on a ridge caught her eye, a scrawny figure with an iron railing over one shoulder. The pose was so familiar that Glas faltered, the tangled worms in her heart missing a beat.

  Then she smiled. ‘I was hoping you’d come,’ she called.

  The figure didn’t answer, but it drew back its free hand and threw. A dark speck drifted through the air. Glas stretched out her hand and the thing came to rest, docile as a pigeon, in her palm: an aeroplane, folded carefully from a photocopied sheet of newspaper.

  As the skinny figure stalked down the hill towards her, Gutterglass unfolded the page and began to read.

  ‘The boy who thought his name was Filius Viae,’ Beth said quietly, ‘was no child of a Goddess.’ She was approaching Gutterglass carefully, a hunter’s walk.

  The rubbish-sculpted woman gave no sign that she’d heard.

  ‘When you know that, you have to ask: who in all London would want to convince him that he was?’ She advanced until the spear was a moth’s-wing’s thickness from Gutterglass’ cardboard throat. Her voice was a dead monotone. ‘Maybe the same person who’d want to plant a rumour that that Goddess was coming back? Maybe someone who’d been on the scrapheap ever since her mistress toddled off, but who now was getting listened to again? Someone who was back in charge? Tell me, Glas, is it nice to be grand again?’

  Gutterglass studied the article. Eventually the broken eggshells looked up. ‘Michael was his name, was it?’ she said. ‘Hmm. I never knew that.’ She knocked the spear aside with a deft flick of her broom handle. ‘Enough of the drama, Miss Bradley,’ she said briskly. She extended a hand in invitation. ‘Walk with me?’

  Beth didn’t take her hand, but she turned anyway and began to hike up the side of the nearby hill. A miniature landslide of broken doorknobs, busted cassettes and rotting banana skins skidded under her feet. ‘There’s something I want you to see.’

  For a moment Beth felt an almost overwhelming urge to run up behind her and plunge the spear in between her milk-carton shoulder blades — but that wasn’t what she was there for. Killing the liar won’t kill the lie. Swearing softly, aware that she’d lost the initiative, she followed. She’d have to wait for her chance.

  The landfill hospital had yet to discharge its last few patients. Lampie heartbeats glimmered from caves in the rubbish. Rats scurried to and fro with hypodermic needles in their mouths. In front of a full-length mirror, a cloud of flying beetles moved a scalpel with extreme precision. On the other side of the glass a tough-looking girl watched an incision climb up her abdomen.

  ‘Let me tell you something about Mater Viae,’ Gutterglass said. ‘She didn’t deserve a priesthood like the stoneskins, or a servant like me, or a son like Filius. She was a coward.’ Her words were steeped in hurt, hurt that had fermented into rage. She knelt beside a shivering Pavement Priest, bashed a hole in his punishment skin with a chisel and poured in some analgesic fluid. ‘Rest softly,’ she murmured, her throat humming with the buzz of flies. ‘Rest well. And may the Lady soon grant you your death.’

  The young priest calmed visibly at Glas’ words and as they moved on, Beth thought she could hear him start to snore.

  ‘His death?’ Beth hissed furiously. ‘How can you keep promising them that? Mater Viae has their deaths, and no one knows when she’s coming back!’

  Gutterglass raised a pipe-cleaner eyebrow. ‘ I know when,’ she said, ‘and so should you — come, Miss Bradley, did you never ask yourself the obvious question? All those deaths of all those Pavement Priests, all those fragile, precious mortalities, paid to the synod: they were a commodity. Did you never ask yourself what Mater Viae bought with them?’

  Beth’s eyes narrowed. She shook her head.

  ‘She bought her own.’

  Beth blinked. It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. ‘ Suicide? ’ she whispered. ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why,’ Gutterglass said soberly. ‘You saw what Reach was.’

  The pudgy, baby face looking curiously out of the rubble swam into Beth’s mind, and with it she heard Fil’s voice. Generation after generation… my mother always took care of Reach.

  ‘She killed him,’ she murmured, ‘again and again — for hundreds of years: burning the same innocent, the same child.’ Beth was staggered, appalled.

  ‘ Her child,’ Gutterglass snorted. ‘He was born of the city, after all.’

  ‘ Thames — God — I can’t imagine- No wonder she couldn’t take it-’

  Gutterglass’ retort was as harsh a slap. ‘She was a Goddess. It was her duty to take it!’ Anger shook her control and liberated insects swarmed madly over her paper face.

  ‘She didn’t die straight away. It took the synod more than three-quarters of a millennium to brew the draught, to blend the petty perishings of mortals into a death strong enough to claim a Goddess. And all that time she lied, blithely.’ Gutterglass spat. ‘When the first generation were reborn into stone she called it punishment. She said they owed her.’

  Gutterglass tilted up her chin, and her voice took on a proud calm. ‘And then, one clear winter’s morning like this one, she was gone. And when the Demolition Fi
elds started erupting in the city again, growing like tumours, it fell to me to give London something to believe in.’

  ‘Fil,’ Beth said.

  ‘He was the first child young enough my rats could find. They carried him on their backs through a carelessly open window. But it was when I drew him out of the synod’s pool that Filius Viae was truly born.’ She smiled at the memory.

  ‘Mater Viae’s substance was still in there, the synod’s fee for their intervention, enough to give a child a shimmer of her aspect.’

  The eggshells took in Beth’s granite-grey skin. ‘Enough to give it to more than one, it appears,’ she said, and her smile grew wider.

  Beth went to speak, but Gutterglass put a ballpoint-finger to her lips. ‘Hush now. This is what I wanted you to see.’ They were approaching a low alcove, rusting railway sleepers supporting a corrugated tin-roof. Beth ducked her head and peered inside.

  Two glass bodies lay tangled in the sleepy embrace of post-coital lovers. One glowed a sooty orange, the other a pure white. Their light mixed and washed over the crushed cans and old springs in the wall. Beth thought she recognised the Sodiumite whose life Gutterglass had saved.

  ‘See what a little faith can do?’ Gutterglass whispered. ‘They’ve been taught from birth to hate one another on sight, and yet here they are. They fought side by side for their Goddess, and now they lie side by side for themselves. Who knows, we might even have a glitter-litter of tiny bulbs soon.’ A broad smile conquered her features; all the anger seemed forgotten. She motioned to Beth to come away.

  Together they crested the top of another ridge and stood on a discarded sofa. London lay below them, an ocean of rooftops glowing in the sunrise.

  Beth stared out over the city, suspecting and dreading what Gutterglass was about to ask.

  ‘They’ll need someone to believe in when they wake, someone who can finish what Filius began,’ Gutterglass said. ‘They’ll need a story to understand and accept. So will the priests and the Masonry Men, even the Mirrorfolk.’ Her voice cracked a little. ‘Even me,’ she said.