Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne)

by Tom Pollock

His smile didn’t change. It was only from this angle, with his face tilted up at her, that she realised how sad he looked. He stood and kissed her fiercely, one hand on the small of her back, the wiry strength of him pulling her in.

  Her lips opened under his. He tasted the way she remembered, exactly that way. She could have been kissing her own memory of him.

  Eventually he let her go and took a step backwards. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Fil?’

  He turned away and sat on the lip of the building, his legs dangling over the side. There was something angry in the way his shoulders were hunched up. ‘Gutterglass told me once that all we are is memories,’ he said. He spoke so quietly that she could barely hear him. His voice turned as hard and brittle as slate. ‘She lied – just like she lied about everything else.’

  Beth slid down and sat beside him, kicking her feet out over empty air. Cautiously, she slipped an arm around his shoulders. He leaned into her, but kept staring at the horizon. He didn’t blink, and none of the tension left his frame.

  ‘Johnny Naphtha said he took a complete copy of your mind – your memories, your beliefs, what you liked and what you didn’t,’ Beth said.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘So it is you then. It must be – what else is there?’

  Fil’s laugh was quick and harsh. ‘What else is there? Everything!’ He looked at her and she saw with a shock that there were tears in his eyes, clouded with limestone dust.

  ‘Sight and scent and sound, the texture of the world on my skin, the feeling of my friends in my heart, you, for Thames’ sake … My future, Beth, that’s what else: my whole future.’

  Beth fell back a pace at the ferocity in his voice. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  He looked at her, and his gaze softened, but his tone didn’t. ‘Right now,’ he said, ‘your body’s sleeping and your mind – that bit of you that’s still human – is walking the quiet streets of your brain with me. But when you wake, you’ll be back out there, in the world, changing things and making things. And me? I’ll still be in here, because this is all I am now. I’m a passenger. I have no body of my own, no way to interact with the world, no way to be in it. I’ve got no eyes to see new things, nor ears to hear them, no brain to form new synapses. I’ll never learn anything, ever again, except through you. I’ll never see anything new, ever again, except how you see it. A body is a future, Beth – don’t you get that? I’m frozen. I’m all memory. I’m the past.’

  He looked around at the immaculate empty buildings and the empty grey sky. ‘Your body is a city now, Beth. Your heart, lungs, skin, bone and brain are all riddled with streets. Your consciousness is a citizen of that city, but mine? Mine is just a refugee.’

  He cocked his head and then very quietly he said, ‘I have no home.’

  Beth didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You remember the first time we kissed?’ he asked her. ‘On Canary Wharf, sitting on the Skyscraper Throne.’

  Beth smiled. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Beth started to protest, ‘That doesn’t make sense. How do you—?’

  ‘I know about it because you remember it – but it’s your memory, not mine. I know what it was like for you, but not for me. Know what the last thing I remember is?’

  Beth shook her head.

  ‘Standing in the synod’s factory with that recording substrate washing past my lips, looking down the length of the bottle at you and praying to my Mother you got out of that pool alive. Then I woke up in that car park, with no idea who I was, where I was or what I was doing.’

  ‘You worked it out fast.’ Beth kicked her legs. ‘Smart move with the Pylon Spiders, by the way. I never thought of calling them.’

  He snorted, and it echoed off the towers in a way that made Beth look back at the rhino.

  ‘You’re their only food-source now. Free-range voice? They’ve never had it so good. They were never going to risk losing you.’

  ‘Put like that, I feel like a right plank for not thinking of it.’

  ‘Ah well, don’t beat yourself up. I’ve known them a lot longer than you have.’

  ‘Fil, you said you’re just a passenger,’ Beth started, a little nervously, thinking of Pen and the Wire Mistress riding her, ‘but back in the car park – well, it felt a lot like you were driving.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he sighed. ‘Sorry about gate-crashing back there. It was all on instinct. If it makes you feel better, you were always in control.’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘You could have shoved me off with a flick of a synapse – they’ve been your muscles for seventeen years. Who do you think you’re going to listen to, me or you?’

  Beth thought back to the moment his mind had surged into hers; that desperate moment when their consciousnesses had touched and she hadn’t known whether she was Beth Bradley or Filius Viae or both. He was right: it had been her decision, even then. It might have been made on instinct, a split-second choice, but it had been her choice nevertheless, to scramble to the back of her own skull and let him pilot her, because she trusted him, because unbelievably, there’d been hope again—

  ‘My body,’ she said.

  ‘Yours,’ he confirmed, ‘and it could never be anyone else’s. They’re your eyes, your ears, your taste buds; everything is filtered through you.’ His tone twisted through wistfulness into something bleaker.

  ‘It’s why I’ll never be alive again, not really. You need to grow to be alive, and you need a body to grow. And that’s where I come up empty.’

  ‘You do have a body,’ Beth said, softly.

  ‘You mean the kid in the statue?’ He smiled at his lap, not at her. ‘I’m sure he’s a lovely fella. Maybe – if the claylings didn’t snatch or throttle him, which they almost certainly did – he’ll grow up big and strong; maybe he’ll even grow up into just the boy I remember being. Or maybe not – either way, it means nothing for me because I’m just a copy, a photo gathering dust on a shelf. Or at least I was until you happened along.’

  Beth looked at him sharply. Just a photo? The Fil she knew would never have used that metaphor. He hadn’t even heard of Hobnobs until she introduced him to them.

  That phrase had come from her.

  To never learn anything else, to never change at all except through her … She tried to get her head around that level of dependency, but she couldn’t. Maybe he was right: maybe he wasn’t really alive at all.

  The wind picked up, the way it always seemed to when they were up there. She heard it rushing down between the buildings beneath their feet. It moaned hollowly and carried the sounds of distant construction: diesel-powered diggers and creaking cranes and rumbling dumper trucks, all overlaid with the roar of traffic, the music of car-horns. The wind gusted and grew stronger and stronger, louder and louder, Beth strained to listen to it, the way it rattled the windows and hissed in the leaves; it was intelligible, it was a voice.

  ‘Beth,’ it said.

  She looked back at Fil. If this was a dream, she didn’t want to wake up. She didn’t want to leave him, not with that look in his eyes.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here when you get back.’ His lip twisted. ‘Where else can I go?’

  ‘Beth—’

  Beth’s eyes flickered open. She was lying on her back. Grass tickled the back of her neck; cool air drifted across her face. Metal gantries crossed her vision like spiderweb strands, stretching up away into the night. Somewhere in the distance above her a light was blinking. It took her a handful of muddy seconds to recognise the place. She was lying directly under the Crystal Palace radio mast.

  Something tickled the skin of her throat. A glittering little spider scurried off her neck and across to her ear where it let itself down by a thread from her earlobe, whispering, ‘I love you,’ to her as it passed.

  ‘Yeah,’ she muttered back, ‘for getting us out of that I think I love you too.’

  ‘Beth.’ Pen’s vo
ice. The familiar, scarred, anxious face pushed into her field of vision.

  ‘How long was I out?’ Beth creaked up into a sitting position.

  ‘Only about five minutes, at first. Glas said to let you sleep. She said we were safe for now, and you needed the rest—’

  ‘She had a point,’ Beth grumbled. ‘I feel like I’ve been hit by a lava flow. I must have picked up another dose of that fever from the streets outside. Next time, maybe listen to the doc’s advice and let me snooze?’

  ‘But – but I couldn’t.’ Pen’s eyes were huge in the darkness.

  Beth frowned. ‘Christ, Pen. I was kidding, I wasn’t really having a go—’

  ‘No, B.’ Pen put a hand on her arm to silence her. ‘It’s your dad.’

  *

  He was sitting propped up against one of the tower’s metal feet with Gutterglass bending over him. Beth could see his splayed legs, his lolling feet, but everything from his waist up was obscured by a blur of frantically darting trash-arms.

  ‘Dad!’ She ducked in next to Glas, feeling the warmth of decaying rubbish radiating through the carpet-coat, and stopped dead. Her dad’s hands, clasped together on his stomach, were fish-belly white, his knuckles trembling. The left side of his face was as pale as his hands; the right side was a bright glistening red. His hair was soaked with still-wet blood.

  Even then, it wasn’t the sight of her father that gave her the deepest chill, but Gutterglass’ fretful muttering as she worked. ‘I didn’t know – I didn’t know … I didn’t think to check – I didn’t see – I didn’t know. Stupid, Gutterglass, stupid.’

  ‘What? What didn’t you know – what? Glas?’ Beth lifted her hands and put them down again. Her fingers felt thick and clumsy in her lap. ‘Did a Masonry Man do this?’

  ‘No.’ One pair of trash-hands was pressing down hard on the skin of her dad’s forehead. Glas’ rubber-hose thumb and forefinger were clamped in a ring around the nick just above his right eyebrow, the one Mater Viae had given him – the nick that Gutterglass had already stitched with tight loops of black thread, and yet fresh red blood was still seeping out of the seam. A blood-soaked plaster lay curled on the grass beside him.

  Gutterglass’ own brow was stained with sour-milk sweat. Her four remaining arms frantically mixed and stirred phials of cloudy liquid; she briefly glanced at each and hissed in disgust before continuing to stir the next.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered, and then snarled in frustration, ‘These are useless. Where are those brick-fucking pigeons?’

  ‘Pigeons?’ Beth shook her head, not understanding. She laced her slate-covered fingers into her dad’s, trying to ease the trembling. He felt dreadfully cold.

  ‘Glas sent out pigeons for some kind of ingredient,’ Pen replied, her voice tight.

  ‘I’m trying to blend a dermal adhesive,’ Glas snapped, ‘but there’s nothing here that’ll set fast enough. You could have told me he was a haemophiliac!’

  Beth gaped at her dad. One eye was matted shut with blood; the other didn’t even seem to see her.

  ‘He’s not.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what else to call it when someone’s blood doesn’t clot.’

  ‘It’s just a scratch—’

  ‘I know it’s just a scratch!’ Gutterglass spat. ‘It’s like he doesn’t have any platelets, not a single damned one.’ The anger ebbed out of her voice, leaving her fear, naked, in its wake. ‘It just kept bleeding. In the fight – I didn’t see, and he was two and half pints down before I realised. Shit!’

  She threw the flasks against a tower strut in fury and they shattered. Liquid oozed down the metal. Then she barked, ‘Stand back!’ and reached into her carpet-coat. She pulled out a short metal rod. A squat gas lighter appeared in another hand and she ignited it; the flame above it looked like a blue arrowhead. She lowered the metal into the flame and after a few seconds it began to glow, first red, then white-hot.

  ‘Glas—’ Beth started to protest, but the trash-spirit ignored her and pressed the incandescent metal against her dad’s skin.

  He shuddered hard under her hands; his mouth opened, but no scream came out, only a gurgle that broke off too quickly. Beth’s nostrils filled with the scent of burned blood and seared skin.

  Gutterglass pulled her branding iron away. The skin over the cut was charred black, giving off little wisps of steam and darker curls of smoke.

  Beth stared, and Glas stared too, all the while keeping her fingers on her father’s skin. The blood kept coming.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Gutterglass murmured. She sounded utterly lost, and Beth felt herself lost along with her. ‘That at least should have cauterised the wound. I—His blood vessels—It’s like his cells aren’t responding at all. His—’ The eggshell eyes flickered sideways, shifted focus.

  ‘His hair’s not growing,’ she whispered. ‘Nor his nails.’

  Beth stared at her in astonishment. ‘You can see that?’

  ‘There’s not even the tiniest bit of growth – his hair, his skin – nothing’s renewing, nothing’s dividing. He’s not growing at all.’

  ‘The glass,’ Pen said in a stricken voice behind her. ‘The broken glass on the floor – I didn’t think … I didn’t know—’

  ‘Glass? What “glass”? What about his hair?’ Beth looked desperately from one to other of them, desperate for someone to explain, to make sense of this, to tell her what she should do. ‘What are you two talking about?’

  Neither of them elaborated.

  After too long, Pen began to speak again. ‘He’s not healing,’ she said. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, Beth – it was the synod’s pool. He said it felt like something had been taken out of him—’

  Beth gripped her dad’s hands and looked into eyes that didn’t look back. She felt horrifyingly useless: second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat, she could feel herself failing him. She wanted to speak to him, but she had no idea what to say. She started to form some platitude, to tell him it would be all right, but another gurgle in his throat stopped her.

  ‘N—’ he managed, and then, just audibly, ‘not alone.’

  To Beth, it sounded like a plea. ‘No, Dad,’ she said. ‘We’re here.’

  She squeezed his hands tighter, but it wasn’t his hands that were leaving. She looked back at his face. His eyes had closed. His chest rose and sank shallowly.

  She barely heard the pigeons flap in behind her. Glas shunted her out of the way and lunged at the cut, a tiny tube of superglue pinched in her Biro-fingers. Beth watched the pulse in her dad’s neck as the glue dried over the cut and the blood finally stopped. A few minutes later, Glas took her fingers away from the wound and got a cloth to mop up the blood. Beth just kept watching that pulse, watching her dad’s chest rise and fall and rise again, each time just that little bit more shallowly.

  She put a hand beside her dad’s ear, and let the city in it whisper to him, ‘Not alone. You’re not alone. We’re here. I’m here.’

  If he heard her, he gave no sign of it.

  Beth had no sense if minutes or hours passed, but dew formed under her knees. Pen came and sat beside her and held her hand but didn’t say anything.

  Once, Gutterglass tried to speak to her. ‘Lady Bradley. He’s alive, but – please understand, I’ve no wish to distress you – but if his cells aren’t dividing … he won’t be able to replace that lost blood …’

  Beth didn’t answer her, and Gutterglass didn’t speak again. She stood with her arms crossed and her chin dipped into her chest while Beth just knelt beside her dad and told him that she was with him and that she loved him. With eyes that felt as empty as his, she stared at the weak tic of a pulse on the side of his neck.

  Later, when the night had grown colder and fiery cramp had set in behind her knees, the pulse stopped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘It’s strange—’

  Pen looked around, but didn’t leave off leaning against the tree. The bark was comfortingly rough and soli
d against her shoulder. Gutterglass stood a few yards back up the hill, the radio mast a black shadow spike behind her. Fastidious as ever, the trash-spirit had had her rats scavenge new pieces of garbage to replace the bloodstained ones and now wore a stylishly cut dress of plastic bin-liners. Smoke curled up from a lit cigarette clenched between twisted coat-hanger fingers. Pen felt a stab of almost lunatic anger at her neatness, at her collectedness. Just how cold did you need to be to play tailor on a night like this? She said nothing, but the tips of the wire tendrils beside her face twitched.

  ‘—I mean,’ Gutterglass went on, ‘I’m a doctor, but I’m an epidemiologist, not a shrink, so I’m hardly an expert, but still …’ She paused and drew on her cigarette. The smoke billowed out from all the gaps in the framework of her skeletal head as she tilted it to one side to consider Pen. ‘I would have thought that when your best friend has been bereaved, it might be helpful to stay within earshot.’

  The glare Pen gave her was one of Beth’s specials: You’re not funny, it said, you’re not scary, and you’re not welcome. Piss off.

  Gutterglass didn’t flinch.

  Pen sighed and turned to put her back flat against the tree. ‘You came out here just to be passive-aggressive at me?’

  ‘You’re packing sixty feet of spiked steel whip, and there’s a shade under six tons of garbage in the vicinity I could mobilise at a push,’ Gutterglass observed.

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘That you can’t blame me for wanting to keep any aggression between us as passive as possible.’

  Pen heard footsteps through damp grass. She didn’t look back, but the strengthening scent of mouldy vegetable peelings told her Gutterglass had come to stand just behind her.

  ‘Go to her,’ the trash-spirit said, her sickly-sweet breath gusting past Pen’s ear.

  ‘I can’t.’

  From up here on the hill, Pen could see over the treeline; beyond it was an ocean of darkness. In the distance, the lights of Canary Wharf burned bright: a solitary tower, illuminating the streets around it like a bonfire.

  ‘You can,’ Gutterglass insisted. ‘Go to her.’