by Kate Griffin
Dorie was lost to sight in a matter of seconds; so was Hunger. Instinctively I ducked the whirling mass of birdlife, crawling on all fours while the rats flowed up my back and across my head, and dropped down around my face like beads of fat living sweat. Little tiny pink claws bit into me and released; twitching noses snuffled through my hair, whiskers tickled over my skin, fat hairy bodies pressed down across my back. I was grateful that I had already been sick; there was nothing left inside for any worse horror. We couldn’t…
we couldn’t…
couldn’t…
… so I did. I closed my eyes and felt the creatures around me, on hands and knees following their swirl of life which, all the powers have mercy, parted around me. Where I put my hands down, the creatures moved aside, hurried out of my way, so there was no breaking of tiny mouse bones as I pulled myself along, no squishing of snake’s tail; a path opened up in front of me, its end obscured by the hurricane of creatures, but still distinctly a path. I crawled along it; then pulled back sharply, spilling a snake off my shoulder as a shadow loomed across my path: for a moment a corpse-white hand solidified out of the blackness of the paving stones, its fingers reaching up and becoming flesh, before they were swamped by the scurrying mass of creatures, that bit and scratched at the hand even before it was entirely there, until it collapsed back into whirling obscurity among the animals. I risked raising myself up and realised that, if I did not flinch from the birds swooping around my head, they would not actually hit me. At this, I straightened up and, scattering the odd clinging mouse and dripping with inky water, I ran.
I didn’t know how far, nor where, they led me, until I was actually there: Ludgate Circus, where Fleet Street, Blackfriars Bridge, and Farringdon Road all run into a whirlpool of people, lights, cars, taxis and buses. Blinking, I staggered from the creatures’ embrace into the sudden light of the street. The birds swooped skywards as if they’d only just discovered that up as well as sideways existed, while the land animals were halfway into the bins, drains and gutters, and the narrow places between buildings and under doors before I even realised that my escort was melting away.
I stood, alone and confused, an inky soaking figure, looking somewhere between a woad warrior and a clown; pigeon feathers stuck to my head, and tufts of fur clung to my coat. Self-consciously I picked off the worst and, as I did, felt a stirring in my coat pocket that, to my shame, made me jump. Reaching in with an imagination full of teeth, I found a small white mouse. Contentedly sitting in the palm of my hand, it was the only proof now left – apart from the general state of my appearance and smell – of the tide of vermin that had probably saved me from whatever untimely fate Hunger had had in mind.
Of Dorie, there was no sign; nor did my shadow bend. I got down on one knee and put the mouse down on the pavement. It scampered away, unconcerned, down the street towards a bus stop where, as ordinary, boring and mundane as anything we could have wished to see, a night bus was pulling up.
The driver said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m paying, aren’t I?”
“You smell like the zoo,” he replied. “And you’re covered in feathers. I can’t let you on this bus.”
We leant forward so he could see into our eyes and said, “We’ve not had our most successful evening. Are you going to make it worse?”
He let us ride his bus and, content in the security of the back seat on the upper deck, we let it carry us wherever it would, and curled up in our wet clothes, and didn’t sleep.
The bus terminated in Streatham, a suburb between nowhere in particular and somewhere less than distinct.
I walked through the sleeping streets of large terraced houses and wide pavements, neat and repetitive, until I found a small office building with a red fire hydrant sticking out of a side wall. I coaxed the end off, and the water on, with a little magic and a lot of hitting, stripped off my coat and shirt and knelt under the force of its pressurised gout of ice-cold water until I thought my skin would turn to stone.
I still looked like I’d been involved in an industrial accident, and was grateful that my hair was dark already so that it hid the streaks of colour running through it, although my face still resembled a tattoo job gone wrong.
I found a small area of scuffed grass with a couple of giant plane trees round the back of a vast, shed-like Homebase, stole a metal dust-bin from a nearby house, emptied out its bulging black bags, put in as much old newspaper as I could carry from the local recycling bin and a few odd twigs from beneath the plane trees, and lit a fire. I huddled by it until it burnt down to nothing just before dawn, feeling the heat dry out my clothes and burn some of the ice out of my flesh. Perhaps we slept; we could not tell.
We had failed San Khay, and we were still no nearer to killing the shadow.
But perhaps we were closer to killing Bakker; and that, I felt, might well become the same thing.
As the sun rose across south London, my thoughts began to turn towards Mr Guy Lee.
Part 2: The Allies of the Kingsway Exchange
In which allies are made, enemies revealed, trains taken at late hours of the night, and an unusual use suggested for paint.
In the morning I managed, through much sweet persuasion and a hefty amount of money, to get myself into a small hotel in Merton – a place that I had always regarded as something of a fiction spread by the enemies of London and was surprised to find so real and large.
I had another shower, and scrubbed until my skin was raw and not a trace of ink or dye remained, I rubbed at my scalp until the shampoo sluicing down across my face was no longer tinted blue.
Then, at least, I felt less dirty. I went out and bought new clothes; the old ones I abandoned in a recycling bin. Even wearing my old clothes to the charity shop made me feel unclean again, their smell of rat so strong that the scrupulously polite girl behind the counter cringed at it.
I took my coat to the dry-cleaner, who offered to scrap it for free, but in the end accepted twelve pounds fifty to do a rush job on a repair. When it came back, the colour was faded and still splotched across the shoulders and cuffs – irredeemably so, the manager told me – but when I put it on again the fabric was warm and smelled clean, and for the first time that morning I felt just a bit human.
The day’s headlines blamed the Amiltech stalker for the brutal murder of San Khay, but the papers made no mention of how he’d died, nor of the inks that covered his skin. I didn’t know if that was the police being careful, or the Tower covering its tracks. Perhaps it was arrogant not to care, but at that moment we didn’t want to think about it.
We decided to take the rest of the day off.
We had croissants, hot chocolate, coffee, jam, bread rolls and fruit salad for breakfast, and went to the cinema. We had never been to the cinema before. The plot was something about a genius arms dealer who discovered redemption, cardiac conditions and an interesting and potentially lethal use for spare missile components in a cave. It wasn’t my thing. We were enthralled, and staggered out blinking from the cinema two and a half hours later with our mind full of pounding noise and our eyes aching from the overwhelming brightness, resolved to see more films as often as possible. During school hours we sneaked into an empty playground and rode the swings, so high we thought we’d fall off, then spinning on the roundabout until the world was a blur; sliding down the silver slide while trying not to whoop with glee; letting the sand in the pit trail through our fingers and, finally, resting to catch our breath at the very top of a roped climbing frame, from which we could see across a wide common of mown grass, great trees and dog walkers, all the way to the big old houses beyond the railway line. I hoped no one would see me.
We went to a bookshop, and sat reading graphic novels, fascinated by the style, the strange inhuman faces that were nevertheless so readable, the worlds in those pages made up of strange, twisted things, the buildings all out of proportion, the bright colours too bright, the dark sweeps of shade too deep – and yet, for all
their fantastical properties, the pictures that we saw were somehow recognisable, and provoked in us feelings that matched the creatures in those pages.
When we were asked to move on, we took a train into the centre of the city, found a ticket booth and joined the queue. We bought a ticket for the first thing that was available, which turned out to be a musical. Still not really my thing, but we were determined to give it, anything, everything a try – and while we waited for the hour of its performance, we wandered into Chinatown and ate crispy duck with pancakes, and drank green tea and listened to the waiters chattering in Cantonese. We found that, without consciously translating, we could understand what they were saying: an unexpected side effect of our resurrection.
We saw the musical, and even though the lyrics were absurd, we came out burning with the energy of the place. We had not become lost to a spell, but with so many minds around us enthralled by what they saw, we too let our thoughts sink into that illusion. It thrilled us, the intensity of that buzz in the blood, and the light in the eyes of every face that came out from it. For a brief while, we forgot that we were wearing mortal flesh, mortal skin, mortal hurts, and were gods again, watching a world full of stories. As a treat to end our first proper day of life, we bought fish and chips, and ate it, with ketchup, on the bus back to the hotel. For the moment, we could ignore revenge, anger, pain, desire, hunger, want, fright, fear and hope; all we could hear was the gentle heartbeat of the city, and when we walked, we walked in time to its rhythm.
Next day, I went back to work. I checked out of the small hotel in Merton, and wandered up to the nearest supermarket, from one of whose dumpsters I removed a large sheet of cardboard. I also bought a tatty blue jumper, a pair of fingerless black gloves, a woolly hat, soup in a white polystyrene cup and a small packet of child’s coloured chalks. Feeling pretty much equipped, I caught the bus, heading north.
My dilemma was simple. I didn’t know where Bakker was. And even if I did, the knowledge wouldn’t do me much good, since, if Sinclair’s files were right, Amiltech was just one of the many organisations run by the Tower which protected him. While I felt perfectly comfortable tackling the lesser thugs of the institution, it was pure arrogance to assume I could handle more than one thing at a time. San Khay had died before he could tell me what I needed to know about the Tower and Bakker; that meant I would have to ask someone else. I had chosen Amiltech as my initial target because owing to its relatively high profile, I felt it would be an easier target to focus on without too many risks of reprisal than some of the other Tower-affiliated organisations. Now, my attention had been forced to move to an altogether different source of information, and danger: Guy Lee. Master of an underground network of… pick a name and it would be there, accountant through to zealot who worshipped at the altar of Lady Neon and other spirits of the city. San Khay had been arrogant enough to assume that he could handle us alone. It would be unlikely Guy Lee would make the same mistake, now that San was dead. He would be on guard; that meant I would have to change my tactics. I would need help.
I had a vague idea where to start.
The patch I’d chosen for the day’s work was near Paddington station. A medley of worlds joined here – the Arab community from the Edgware Road merging into the giant white terraces and quiet mews of the wealthy, bordered in turn by the council estates and student digs overlooking the railway lines crawling in and out of the station itself, in a deep cutting, as if embarrassed to be taking up so much space and hoping no one would notice their progress.
Like all terminus stations, Paddington attracted a roving population of tourists, travellers, squatters, prostitutes, muggers, racketeers, smugglers and beggars. It was this last that interested me, because, after the pigeons and the rats, it’s the beggars who tend to see the most.
So it was that on a cold, clean morning as winter was beginning to make itself known to autumn, and autumn was looking bashfully towards the door and explaining it had to go and wash its hair, I put my sheet of cardboard down in the service doorway round the side of a restaurant near St Mary’s Hospital, unfolding it as protection against the hard coldness of the pavement. I pulled on my hat and gloves, dragged my coat up tight around my chin and patted my pockets for the coloured chalk. Sitting still on the pavement for hours, if you aren’t properly dressed, lets the cold crawl all the way into the bones, twining itself around the spine with the grip of rooted ivy. I knew this from experience – begging for a day had been one of the things Robert James Bakker had instructed me to do; and back then, without question, I had obeyed; and back then, he’d been right.
In a small fountain outside Paddington station I had rinsed the empty polystyrene cup that had contained my soup and now put it on the ground in front of me. On the pavement I scratched in careful capital letters, HUNGRY PLEASE HELP, and with my coloured chalks, pale smears on the stones, I started to draw. I took my time, ignoring the footsteps of passers-by as they ignored me, using the rectangular shape of one particular paving stone as my frame, and putting in every detail of what I drew: not just in the face and clothes, but in the background, fading it from red to blue, smudging the strong colours where they met into a waving line of purple. I drew a face in profile with a curved yellow beard like some sort of inverted horn, a sharp triangular nose, a beady blue eye, and a smile – a distinctly smug smile. I filled in the tiny black diamonds on the figure’s blue collar, and shaded its shoulders with red sweeps of colour to suggest the richness of its clothes; finally, I gave it a pointy crown. The drawing eventually resembled a king in a pack of playing cards, all odd angles and confusing shapes and colours. I don’t know how many hours it took; but by the time I finished I’d got 57p in my polystyrene cup, and cramp in my arms from too much leaning on my elbows.
With the cup by my side, I curled up on the doorstep behind my chalk picture and my message on the floor, and waited.
There are several kinds of beggars in London. There are the lone aggressive ones, usually with thick beards and big duffle coats, who approach passing strangers with “Please, I just need 80p, please” – and sometimes that works. Perhaps it is a more honest approach; but for the ordinary passer-by, these open appeals can be as frightening as they are direct, and too often the answer no is followed by cursing that only confirms the stranger in their opinion of the beggar as frightening and dangerous.
A subcategory of this class of beggar, who perhaps inspires the greatest fear, is the stranger who comes up to you and asks for money while behind him or her, two friends lurk right in your path. It is not begging as such – there is no appeal to charity or understanding. Instead, it is a psychological mugging.
The majority of beggars are the silent huddled ones sitting alone near an ATM, or in shop doors when the shutters are drawn, or outside an expensive jewellery store until the police are called to move them on, or near the railway stations, or outside a café in the hope that enough money may become a sandwich, or a cup of coffee, or that the stranger will be more inclined to believe the cardboard sign with the words “not on drugs, hungry, poor, please help”, or that the staff, at closing-up time, might give them a packet of something about to pass its best-before date, or let them use the bathroom. Passers-by don’t just not see these people; they go out of their way both to ignore them, and then to forget that they ignored them, to drive away from their shamed recollection the shape of the huddled girl with her pet dog and tatty boots, or the image of the old man with the tangled beard who they didn’t even smile at, not wanting to admit that they failed to take pity. If asked why they did not give charity, the standard reply is “They would only have spent it on drugs”. Unkind as this is, the bastard’s reply is even worse: “It’s their fault they’re here; why should I waste my money on someone who can’t be saved?”
Thus, with a single swoop, the entire population of old, young, black, white, frightened, bold, subdued, cowering, cold, ill, hungry, thirsty, dirty or addicted are classified as self-destructive, and every ignored face, e
very shadow blotted out of the memory of the stranger on the street, can be classed by a single word – failed.
Perhaps they are worth saving, as people are always worth saving, sigh the compassionate.
But perhaps, whispers the voice of cynicism, lurking just below, just perhaps the beggars cannot or worse, do not want to be saved.
Pity and compassion walk a fine line hand in hand, but one will always be a more welcome guest than the other.
At the time, I didn’t understand why Robert James Bakker made me spend a day of my education begging. By the evening of that lesson, I understood entirely.
I watched the faces of those few people who glanced at me and then quickly walked on. A beggar must be humble; must keep his eyes to the ground so as not to frighten the easily afraid. As so many people went by in shiny shoes and comfortable clothes, with big bags and big coats, concerned with how many hundreds of pounds must go out this month to pay the mortgage, rather than with how many pennies will combine to the next cup of tea, my emotions progressed slowly from chilled self-pity to anger at the faces that from four hundred yards away braced themselves to avoid meeting my eye.
