by Mike Carey
From downstairs I heard laughter, voices, the chink of glasses, and a door being opened. Footsteps on the tiles that led from living room to kitchen, a clink where they still hadn’t cemented in the loose white one in the centre of the diamond pattern; the sound of plates; the roar of the oven fan as it pumped out hot air.
I started walking down. The voices grew louder, a sound of polite gossipy chit-chat, dominated by one woman with a penetrating voice and a laugh that started at the back of her nose before travelling down to the lungs and back up again, and who I instinctively disliked. I glanced down the corridor to the kitchen and saw a man’s back turned to me, bent over something that steamed and smelt of pie. The urge to eat anything, everything, briefly drowned out the taste of blood in my mouth. Like a bewildered ghost who can’t understand that it has died, I walked past the kitchen and pushed at the half-open door to the living room.
There were three of them, with a fourth place set for the absent cook, drinking wine over the remnants of a salad, around a table whose top was made of frosted glass. As I came in, nobody seemed to notice me, all attention on the one woman there with the tone and look of someone in the middle of a witty address. But when she turned in my direction with ‘George, the pie!’ already half-escaped from her lips, the sound of her dropped wineglass shattering on the table quickly redirected the others’ attention.
They stared at me, I stared at them. There was an embarrassed silence that only the English can do so well, and that probably lasted less than a second, but felt like a dozen ticks of the clock. Then, as she had to, as things probably must be, one of the women screamed.
The sound sent a shudder down my spine, smashed through the horror and incomprehension in my brain, and at last let me understand, let me finally realise that this was no longer my house, that I had been gone too long, and that to these people I was the intruder, they the rightful owners. The scream slammed into my brain like a train hitting the buffers and tore a path through my consciousness that let everything else begin to flood in: the true realisation that if my house was not mine, my job, my friends, my old life would not be mine, nor my possessions, my money, my debts, my clothes, my shoes, my films, my music, all gone in a second, things I had owned since a scrawny teenager, the electric toothbrush my father had given me in a fit of concern for my health, the photos of my friends and the places I’d been, the copy of Calvin and Hobbes my first girlfriend had given me as a sign of enduring friendship the Christmas after we’d split up, my favourite pair of slippers, the holiday I was planning to the mountains of northern Spain, all, everything I had worked for, everything I had owned and wanted to achieve, vanished in that scream.
I ran. We didn’t run from the sound, that wasn’t what frightened us. I ran to become lost, and wished I had never woken in the first place, but stayed drifting in the blue.
Once upon a time, a not-so-long time ago, I had sat with my mad old gran on a bench beside a patch of cigarette-butt grass that the local council had designated ‘community green area’, watching the distant flashes of the planes overhead, and the turning of the orange-stained clouds across a sullen yellow moon. She’d worn a duffel coat, a faded blue nightdress and big pink slippers. I’d worn my school uniform and my dad’s big blue jacket, that Mum had unearthed one day from a cardboard box and had been about to burn. I’d cried, an eleven-year-old kid not sure why I cared, until she’d saved it for me.
We’d sat together, my gran and me, and the pigeons had clustered in the gutters and on the walls, hopped around my gran’s slippered feet, wobbled on half a torn-off leg, flapped with broken, torn-feathered wings, peered with round orange unblinking eyes, like glass sockets in their tiny heads, unafraid. I had maths homework which I had no intention of doing, and a belly full of frozen peas and tomato ketchup. Winter was coming, but tonight the air was a clean, dry cold, sharp, not heavy, and the lights were on in all the houses of the estate. I was a secret spy, a boy sitting in the darkness of the bench, watching Mr Paswalah in number 27 ironing his shirts, Jessica and Al in number 32 rowing over the cleaning, old Mrs Gregory in 21 flicking through 300 TV channels in search of something loud and violent that when her husband had been alive she had felt too ashamed to watch, it not being correct for a lady raised in the 1940s to enjoy the Die Hard films.
So I sat, my gran by my side, as we sat many nights on this bench; just her, me, the pigeons and our stolen world of secret windows.
My gran was silent a long while. Sitting here on this bench, with the pigeons, was almost the only time she seemed content. Then she turned to me, looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Boy?’
‘Yes, Gran?’ I mumbled.
Her lips were folded in over her bright pink gums, her false teeth inside the house beside her little single bed. She chewed on the inward turn of them a long while, head turning to the sky, then back to the ground, and then slowly round to me. ‘You sing beautiful in the choir, boy?’
‘Yes, Gran,’ I lied. I may have cried to save my father’s coat, but I had enough teenage self-respect to not be caught dead singing in the school choir.
‘Boy?’
‘Yes, Gran?’
‘You cheat at tests?’
‘Yes, Gran.’
‘I told ’em, I told ’em, but the old ladies all said . . . Angelina has a problem with her left ear, you know? You cheat at tests, boy?’
‘No, Gran.’
‘Always gotta keep your pencils sharp before the ink runs dry!’
‘Yes, Gran.’
Silence a long, long while. I remember staring at my gran’s legs, where they stuck out beneath the nightdress. They were grey, riddled with bright blue veins, large and splayed, like some sort of squashed rotting cheese grown from the mould inside a pair of slippers.
‘Boy?’ she said at last.
‘Yes, Gran?’
‘The shadow’s coming, boy,’ she sighed, fumbling at her jacket pockets for a tissue to wipe her running nose. ‘The shadow’s coming. Not here yet. Not for a while. But it’s coming. It’s going to eat you up, boy.’
‘Yes, Gran.’
She hit me around the ear then, a quick slap like being hit with a thin slice of uncooked meat. ‘You listen!’ she snapped. ‘The pigeons seen it! They seen it all! The shadow’s coming. Young people never listen. He’s coming for you, boy. Not yet, not yet . . . you’ll have to sing like the angels to keep him away.’
‘Yes, Gran.’
I looked into her fading, thick-covered eyes then, and saw, to my surprise, that tears were building up in them. I took her hand in sudden, real concern, and said, ‘Gran? You all right?’
‘I ain’t mad,’ she mumbled, wiping her nose and eyes on a great length of snot-stained sleeve. ‘I ain’t crazy. They seen it coming. The pigeons know best. They seen it coming.’ Then she grinned, all gum spiked with the tiny remains of hanging flesh where teeth had once been. She stood up, wobbling on her feet a moment, the pigeons scattering from around her. She pulled me up, my hands in hers, and started to dance, pushing me ungainly back and forth as, with the grace and ease of a drunken camel, we waltzed beneath the sodium light of the city. All the time she sang in a little tuneless, weedy voice, ‘We be light, we be life, we be fire, te-dum, te-dum! We sing electric flame te-dum, we rumble underground wind te-dum, we dance heaven! Come be we and be free . . .’
Then she stopped, so suddenly that I bounced into her, sinking into the great roll of her curved shoulders. ‘Too early to sing,’ she sighed, staring into my eyes. ‘You ain’t ready yet, boy. Not yet. A while. Then you’ll sing like an angel. The pigeons don’t have the brains to lie.’
And then she kept right on dancing, a hunched singing sprite in the night, until Mum called us in for bed.
Looking back, I realise now that the problem wasn’t that my gran knew more than she was saying. The truth of the matter was, she said exactly and honestly what it was she knew, and I just didn’t have the brains to see it.
I stopped running when my feet
began to bleed. I didn’t know where I was, nor what route I’d taken to get there. I knew only what I saw: the edge of a common or a small public park, a dark night in what felt like early spring or late autumn. Leaves falling from the giant plane trees round the edge of the green - autumn, then. It was drizzling, that strange London drizzle that is at once cold and wet, yet somehow imperceptible against the background of the pink-orange street lights, more of a heavy fog drifting through the air than an actual rain. I couldn’t think in coherent words; it was too early for that. Instead, as my brain registered all my losses, panic immersed it like the splashing of a hot shower, preventing any reasoning of where I might go next or what I might do.
I found a dim, neon-lit passage leading under a railway line, that no beggar or homeless wanderer had colonised for that night, and sank down against the cold, dry paving with my knees against my chin. For a long while I did no more, but shivered and cowered and tried to seize control of my own thoughts. The taste of blood in my mouth was maddening, like the lingering dryness of cough medicine that couldn’t be washed away. I played again the bright blue eyes of a stranger reflected in my reflection, tried to put those eyes in my face. The memories didn’t bring physical pain; the mind is good at forgetting what it doesn’t want to recall. But each thought brought with it the fear of pain, a recollection of things that had been and which I would move to some uninhabited rock away from all sodium lamps and men to escape again.
For a brief moment, I contemplated this idea, telling myself that the loss of everything was in fact a liberation in disguise. What would the Buddha do? Walk barefoot through the mud of an unploughed field and rejoice at rebirth, probably. I thought of worms between my toes, fat wriggling pink-grey bodies, cold as the rain that fed them, and we changed our mind. We would run, but not so far.
Instinctively, as it had always been when afraid, I let my senses drift. It was an automatic reflex, imparted as almost the first lesson of my training, the first time my teacher had . . .
. . . my teacher had . . .
Give me life!
. . . a shadow is coming . . .
runrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN RUNRUN
Breathing was strength, the wall was safety. I pressed my spine into it, my head against it. Fingers would not grow out of the wall, claws would not sprout from the shadows. The more of me was in contact with something solid, the fewer places there were for the darkness to crawl, the better it would be. I imagined a great barking dog, all teeth and slobber, squatting by my side to keep me safe, a loyal pet to stand guard when I grew too tired. There were things which could be done, almost as good as a guard dog; but I didn’t know if they would attract too much attention.
And so, again, as my breathing slowed, my senses wandered, gathering information. Smell of electricity from the railway overhead, of urine being washed away by the rain, of spilt beer and dry mortar dust. Sound of the distant clatter of a late-night commuter train, carrying sleepy one-a-row passengers to the suburbs and beyond. A bus splashing through a puddle swollen around a blocked drain, somewhere in the distance. A door slamming in the night. The distant wail of a police siren. As a child, the sound of sirens had comforted me. I had thought of them as proof that we were being protected, by guardians all in blue out to keep us safe from the night. I had never made the connection between protection and something we had to be protected from. Now the sirens sang again, and I wondered if they sang for me.
My clothes were too thin for the night. The drizzle made them soggy, clinging, itchy and cold to my skin. I could feel damp goose bumps up the length of my arms. We were fascinated by them, rolling up our sleeve to stare at the distortion of our flesh, and the little hairs standing to attention as if they were stiff with static. Even the cold interested us, how disproportionate it made our senses, our freezing feet too large for the space they inhabited, our numbed fingers huge pumpkin splatters across our thoughts; and it occurred to us that the human body was a very unreliable tool indeed.
Crispy bacon.
The smell of pie.
Taste of blood.
Memories of . . . . . . of . . .
Half-close your eyes and it’ll be there, all yellow teeth and blue eyes, looking down at you; press your eyes shut all the way and the blood will roll once again over your skin, pool and crackle across your back and sides, tickle against the sole of your foot, thicken in the lining of your socks.
You really want to remember all that?
Didn’t think so.
Don’t close your eyes.
I rolled my sleeve back down, tucked my chin deeper into my knees, wrapped my hands around myself, folded my feet one on top of the other.
There were other senses waiting to report in.
A little look, a quick gander, where was the harm? No one would ever know; breathe it in and maybe it will be all right, despite the shadows?
I inhaled, let the air of the place wash deep into my lungs, play its revelations through my blood and brain. Here it comes . . .
The feel of that place where I huddled like a child had a sharp, biting quality, thin on the ground, not so heavy as in other places where life moves more often and more densely, but carrying traces of other areas drifting in the air, snatched across the city in tendrils that clung to the commuter trains rattling overhead. What power and texture I could feel had a strong smell, but a slippery touch, retreating from too firm a command like a frightened bird. It gave me comfort, and a little warmth.
I pulled myself up and looked at the white-painted walls, examining the graffiti on them. Most of it was the usual stuff - ‘JIS GAY!’ or ‘PN FOR EVER - but there was across one wall an orange swish of paint, all loops and sudden turns, that I recognised. It felt warm when I pressed my fingers to it, and tingled to the touch like slow-moving sand. A beggar’s mark, delineating the edge of a clan’s territory. It was good to find my senses still sensitive to such things - or even, I had to wonder, more sensitive than they’d been before? Though we could see the advantages, the thought did not comfort me.
I staggered down the tunnel, examining now in careful detail each splash of paint and scratch across the whitewashed walls. Messages like: DON’T LET THE SYSTEM GET YOU DOWN or: ULTRAS or: Don’t líck the brushes melted into each other over the cemented, painted surface of the bricks.
One splash of paint at the far end of the tunnel caught my attention, and held it. It had none of the usual trappings of protection that most who understood such things used to defend their territory, but was written in crude capital letters across the wall in simple black spray-paint. It said: ‘MAK ME SHADOW ON DA WAL’.
It made me uneasy, but other things that evening were taking priority on my list of concerns, so I ignored it. I had no paint, but dribbled my fingers in the sharp sense of that place and, in the middle of the tunnel, started to draw my own mark on the wall, feeling even that slight movement give me comfort as I made the long shape of the protection symbol, my own ward against evil and harm. Not quite a guard dog; but close enough.
When I had finished, my head ached, and my fingers shook. Even something so small took too much out of me, the last vestige of strength left in my limbs. A warmth inside me suggested a hollowness that time, perhaps, might repair, and the weakness was not so much one of exhaustion, but of inexperience, as if every finger was freshly grown, the muscle untested, not yet conditioned to its former use. I slumped against the opposite wall and waited.
It took only a few seconds before the shape I’d drawn started to burn and hiss on the wall, its lines emerging in thin black swirls. I slid back onto the paving stones, tucked my knees up to my chin and shivered. The white strip lights overhead buzzed quietly; I could taste the electricity in them. Lesson one for anyone in my profession was always about electricity.
I took a risk, and with the tips of my fingers snatched a little warmth and light out of one of them, which died into darkness as I drew its energy to myself. The pea-sized ball of light and heat I managed to drag fr
om it was like a match held between two fingers - shockingly hot when I brought my skin close to it, but not enough on which to sustain life. Uncertain which was likely to cause more pain, the cold or the failure of my own strength, I risked pulling down more light, and a few degrees more heat, caressing it into the sphere between my fingers, until almost all the lights overhead were extinguished, leaving just one at either end of the tunnel. The effort left me in a cold sweat, breathless and with a nasty case of tinnitus, but it also left me clutching a fat bubble of white light the size of a small, immaterial football. I lay down and curled myself around it like it was a bag of pure gold, feeling it warm me through and drive some of the wetness out of my clothes, and closed my eyes.
We did not want to sleep - our thoughts raced, our senses strayed out as far as we could reach, into the scuttling of a rat’s claws under the street, the snuffling nose of a ragged-tailed urban fox, while we tried to pick out every shape and sense of life around us. But I was tired - too tired - and regardless of what we wanted, I had to sleep. I felt my eyes sink like an executioner’s blade.
Taste of blood.
Yellow teeth and watery, weak blue eyes.
Give me life give me life give me life give me life GIVE ME . . .
Not quite sleep.
Distant siren, distant cars. Someone was out tonight looking for someone else; crawling through the gutters, talking to the pigeons, stealing the nose of the orange fox seeking its hamburger supper.
