by Pauline Fisk
‘Witch! Bitch! Out, out, out!’
Phaze II heard their spray-cans hissing and heard the girl’s cry. Clouds of startled pigeons flew off into the night and the boys cheered. They sprayed again, and Phaze II caught the stink of paint. He reminded himself that the first golden rule was not to get involved. But the girl cried again, and he flushed red with shame. To think he’d seen this coming but hadn’t done anything! And to think that he sat above it now – and still he wasn’t doing anything!
The girl cried again. Phaze II didn’t know what to do. A bottle smashed beneath him. And then the girl screamed.
For a moment silence fell.
Then, ‘Bloody hell!’
Suddenly, boys were disappearing in all directions – Border Commandos taking to the shadows, crying out in a panic as they melted into the night. No longer were they drunk, but stone-cold sober. Phaze II watched them running off as if they’d never stop. Try as he might, he couldn’t see what had happened to the girl. She wasn’t on the path any more. They hadn’t taken her with them, and she hadn’t run off down the tunnel.
The only place left was the river! Phaze II forced himself to look down, to where it swirled and crashed between the bridge’s rows of iron legs. Perhaps the girl had fallen in by accident. Perhaps the BC boys hadn’t meant to push her in. Perhaps she’d simply lost her footing and failed to see the edge. But she was down there, wasn’t she? Phaze II couldn’t see her, but he knew it in his bones.
And so did the boys.
‘We’re not to blame!’ they shouted as they ran.
‘We didn’t do nothing!’
‘It was all her own stupid fault!’
‘Let’s get out of here!’
Finally they were gone, and silence returned. Phaze II knew that tomorrow they would tell themselves that it hadn’t even happened – that in some drunken stupor they’d imagined the whole thing. The fact that a body was found downriver would be just a coincidence. Nothing to do with them.
He stood upon the girders, red with anger as well as shame. Anger at the boys, and anger at himself. He should be jumping in the river and rescuing the girl. Even now every precious second could count. But he knew he wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t that sort of boy. Wasn’t a hero or the sort to draw attention to himself. And he didn’t trust the water, anyway. Never had done, for all that he lived on a bridge over a river.
Even when he saw the body, Phaze II knew he wouldn’t do a thing. There it was right under him, waves breaking over it. And he knew he couldn’t help. Not with the river in full flood. Not in the dark, with the water as cold as ice, and waves with jagged edges like hungry white teeth.
‘I can’t!’ he shouted, peeling out of his coat.
‘I won’t!’ he shouted, pulling off his boots.
‘NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS!’ he shouted – and he jumped.
Old Sabrina
Abren lay upon a concrete island. Something had got hold of her legs and something else was tugging in the opposite direction, with a grip under her shoulders. She didn’t know where she was or how she had got there. She stared around her, trying to work it out. All around her were other islands in rows, massive iron pillars rising from them into a darkness which smelt cold and bitter. Waves crashed over them, swirling into whirlpools, then chasing each other off down-river.
‘Where …? What …? I don’t understand!’
Abren brushed a hand against her face, and found a swelling over one eye. She must have hit something, but couldn’t remember what. Her hair was wet and stuck flat to her head. Her clothes were sodden and her blanket clung like wet ice to her shoulders. Suddenly a wave broke over her too, running down her and tugging at her legs.
Immediately the tugging under her shoulders doubled its efforts. ‘You’ve got to move!’ a voice cried. ‘You can’t just lie there! You’ve got to help yourself! I can’t do this on my own!’
Abren turned her head, feeling sick and giddy, and a boy came bobbing into her vision. He was as soaked as her, and shivering with the cold, holding on to her and trying to keep them both out of the water.
It was an impossible task. Abren felt his hands under her shoulders again – and understood at last. This was the railway bridge, and she was on one of the concrete islands which held its iron legs. She had fallen into the river, forced over the edge by her confrontation with the BC boys, and now this other boy was rescuing her. Or trying to, if she’d only give him a chance!
‘Don’t just lie there! You can do it!’ the boy cried.
Abren did her best, but it was a feeble effort. It would have been so much easier to let herself go. She kicked against the waves but they were a hundred times stronger than her. Tried to draw up her legs, but they seemed to weigh a ton. Hauled herself backwards, but struck cold iron.
She turned around and found herself pressed against some sort of cage which the boy was squeezing through – an easy task for someone as thin as him.
‘Come on!’ he yelled at Abren. ‘You can’t just stay there – the river’s rising!’
Abren realised that the cage housed a metal service ladder. The boy started up it, and Abren would have been left behind if she hadn’t hurried after him. She squeezed between iron bars and started climbing. Above her she could hear the boy coughing and shivering as if his freezing dip had done for him. She shivered in her wet clothes as if it had done for her too. By now her hands were white and she had lost all feeling. She couldn’t get a proper grip, and had to bite her lip to force herself to keep alert. The higher she climbed, too, the less safe the ladder seemed. Some rungs were missing and others had lost their screws and hung loose.
Shaking with relief, Abren finally made it to the solid safety of an iron-girder walkway. Here the boy was hauling himself into a big black coat and a pair of boots. Then, as if it was understood that Abren would follow him, he started along an iron walkway no more than half a metre wide, which stretched ahead of them without a handrail on either side.
‘I can’t do that,’ Abren said.
The boy turned back. ‘Of course you can!’ he called. ‘There’s nothing to it. All you have to do is tell yourself that there’s plenty of room – and just keep walking! It’s easy once you’ve made a start. Just don’t look down.’
‘You must be joking!’
‘I’m too cold to joke.’
The boy pulled his coat around him, bowed his head and coughed into his chest. Suddenly, Abren realised that she had seen him before. It had been in the market on Christmas Eve. He was the boy who’d stared at her and she’d stared back as if they’d known each other. A tall, thin boy in a black coat – and she’d seen him before that, too, going through the bins at the market.
Now, he returned along the girder, biting back his impatience and offering her a cold hand. She took it with reluctance. Slowly, they edged their way out over the river, Abren clinging to the boy’s words about not looking down. When they reached the end, he didn’t say ‘well done’. He just let go of her hand and started up another service ladder and along a dizzying series of further girders until they reached the central core of black stone arches which formed the bridge’s hidden spine.
Here they came to what seemed like a dead end. There was no way forward on the girders, not that Abren could see. And there was no way back – at least not one that she could face.
‘What do we do now?’ she whispered, a dangerous wobble in her voice.
The boy looked at her coolly, and said, ‘We jump.’
‘We what?’ Abren replied.
The boy grinned tightly. ‘There’s a gap,’ he said. ‘Half a metre wide. Nothing much. You could always try to stretch across it if you want – but you’d probably lose your balance. It’s safer to jump.’
Abren stared into the darkness. She couldn’t see the gap and she couldn’t see beyond it. And the boy could be lying. He could be playing games with her, just like those other boys. She felt herself panic, prickly and hot, forgot his advice and looked down at the ri
ver. There it was, black and full, running underneath her. But instead of making everything worse, it reassured her. The boy had rescued her from those dark waters, at a high cost to himself. He’d risked his life – and he wouldn’t do that just to make her jump into oblivion! It didn’t make sense.
So when he yelled, ‘Jump!’ Abren jumped. And maybe just for a split second she wished she hadn’t, but then something hard rose up and smashed the soles of her feet. It was a floor! A good, solid, cold floor. Abren lay flat upon it as if she’d never get up again.
The boy struck a match. ‘All right?’ he said in a gruff voice which couldn’t hide the fact that he was impressed.
Abren looked around her. She was in a low, stone chasm, its walls oozing stalactites of slimy white-lime mortar.
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘We’re underneath the railway,’ the boy replied. ‘Inside the arches, in the middle of the bridge. The station platforms are above us, and the river’s underneath. But you’d never know it, would you? I mean, listen.’
Abren listened, but all she could hear was the boy shivering. His match went out and he lit another. Then he got up, pulling her after him.
‘Stay close or you’ll get lost,’ he said.
He steered Abren through the darkness, lighting matches as they went. She stumbled over litter, and ducked under service pipes every time he warned her to mind her head. Her ears began to tune in to the silence, which wasn’t as complete as she’d first thought. Distantly, she made out the mumble of an electricity generator, and closer to hand she heard the cooing pigeons in their roosts.
‘And rats too,’ the boy said. ‘There’ll be a few of them about as well.’
They reached the end of the chasm, and the boy said, ‘Mind your head,’ one last time. Abren stumbled up a short staircase and found herself before a metal-plated door, which was stuck ajar. The boy leant against it, shoved deftly with his shoulder and the door scraped open enough for them to slip through.
On the other side, Abren found herself in a space which she realised – with a shock – was actually lived in by someone. The boy switched on a single bulb hanging precariously from a swinging cable, and she saw a narrow room, full of what looked like rubbish, with a tea bar running down the length of it, complete with an old urn and stacks of china cups.
‘British Rail cups, left over from the old days before polystyrene,’ the boy said.
Abren stared around her. Behind the tea bar hung a rusty advertisement for Cadbury’s chocolate, and next to it hung a mirror on a piece of string. The walls were covered with embossed brown paper, which was peeling. There were no windows – at least not that Abren could see. The floor was cluttered with black bin liners and cardboard boxes, and out of them spilled everything from old toasters and books and jumble-sale clothes.
The boy clambered over them to fiddle with a clump of dangling wires and switch on a bunch of plastic, icicle-shaped fairy lights. These hung over a splitting horse-hair mattress, illuminating its greasy cotton-ticking pillows with no covers, and grey stinking blankets, in a grim parody of a Santa’s grotto. Maybe the boy thought that it looked Christmassy with lights, but Abren shivered.
As if he thought that she was cold, the boy reached into the nearest box and pulled out a choice of jumpers and thick pleated skirts, shell-suit trousers and tweedy jackets, all with the same fusty smell.
‘You need to get out of those wet clothes,’ he said. ‘Take what you want.’
Abren took the clothes reluctantly. The boy’s hands were like ice and he was turning blue, despite his thick coat. Even his lips were blue, and his eyes were dead.
‘What about you?’ she said.
Before the boy could answer, a bell rang out. His head shot up and he glanced at a door which Abren hadn’t noticed before, at the end of the room, behind the tea bar.
‘What’s going on?’ Abren said.
The boy didn’t answer, just started rushing about. Abren watched as bread and butter appeared out of a box, followed by a half-opened tin of peaches, a cup of chocolate raisins and a mug of tea. The boy piled them all on to a tray made out of a cardboard lid and headed for the door.
‘What’s going on?’ Abren repeated. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’
The bell rang again, sharp and insistent. The boy pushed open the door and hurried through.
Abren followed, full of curiosity. On the other side she found another room which was as grand as the boy’s was tawdry. Its floor was tiled and carpeted. Its gilt-framed mirror didn’t hang on string. Its light wasn’t a single bulb but a crystal chandelier. And beneath it stood not a tea urn with cheap cups but a fine piano with polished brasses and keys made of ivory.
Abren stared in amazement. Only later did she realise that the gilt-framed mirror was speckled with age, the ivory keys yellow and half the cut-glass droplets on the chandelier either cracked or missing. At the far end of the room stood an ornate marble fireplace, and in front of it sat a throne-like armchair, upholstered in red velvet and carved with leaves.
In the chair sat an old woman.
‘I know I’m late. I’m sorry,’ the boy said.
He hurried to the chair, put down the cardboard tray, removed the bell from the old woman’s lap and replaced it with the bread and butter. The old woman picked at it with spidery little hands, and he danced attendance, throwing a fresh log on the fire to bring it back to life, then giving her the peaches, and then the raisins too, which she ate without leaving a single one.
All the while, she stared through the boy with flint-cold eyes. Stared as if he weren’t there, and stared through Abren too.
‘Do you want your cup of tea?’ the boy asked when everything else was finished.
The old woman didn’t answer, just turned away. The boy looked up and saw Abren watching. He blushed as if she’d caught him out.
‘Meet Old Sabrina, queen of the river,’ he said.
Millennium night
The boy lay covered up in blankets at one end of the mattress, and Abren lay at the other, curled up tight beneath a pile of old coats. The lights were out and in the darkness she could hear things scampering. She tried to sleep but couldn’t. The day ran back through her mind, ending where it had started, with Santa’s chocolates.
Now Dogpole Alley felt so far away, with its half-demolished turkey, its presents scattered everywhere and its glittering tree. Abren remembered Bentley playing ‘her’ tune on his new saxophone. She was sure he hadn’t known what he was doing, but if it hadn’t been for him, she wouldn’t be lying here now, telling herself that she was where she should be, and there was nothing to be frightened of.
Not even Old Sabrina.
Abren pulled the coats around her and thought of the old woman asleep next door. She remembered the boy running at her beck and call. He’d shaken when he’d crossed the floor carrying that tray of tea things. And Abren didn’t blame him. There was something weird about Old Sabrina. She hadn’t thanked the boy for anything, or even smiled at him. Hadn’t done a thing to help herself, just sat on that chair in her tightly buttoned, holey cardigan and long dusty skirt.
The boy had fetched her blankets and pillows and a footstool for her blotchy feet. He’d made her comfortable for the night – far more comfortable than he’d been himself in his wet clothes. But when he left the room, she still hadn’t acknowledged him. It was as if she were a real queen and he her slave. When he’d said goodnight, she hadn’t even answered him.
Abren shivered underneath the coats. Tried to forget the old woman and go to sleep. But how could she sleep when bursts of wheezy coughing kept firing off into the darkness, keeping even the rats awake.
‘You ought to see a doctor with a cough like that!’ she said at last.
The boy didn’t answer, just coughed into his blankets until Abren couldn’t stand it any more. She sat up, switched on the fairy lights, pulled back the blankets and found him fully dressed, boots and all, lying bathed in sweat. His e
yes were bright, his face was white and he was shivering all over. This was no ordinary cough! He had caught a chill. And it was all because of her – because he’d jumped into the river to rescue her.
‘You should have changed out of those wet clothes,’ Abren said. ‘I should have made you. I could see how cold you were, but I didn’t do a thing!’
She leapt off the mattress, overwhelmed with guilt, and went in search of the boy’s grandmother, or godmother, or stepmother, or great-aunt, or whoever Old Sabrina might turn out to be. Never mind that she was weird! She was old, and would surely know how to nurse a sick boy.
Abren pushed open the door between the rooms, switched on the light and found Old Sabrina seated on the velvet chair exactly as they had left her, the only difference being that the fire had burned out. Abren padded forward until she was close enough to see the old woman’s crumpled face, like a piece of thick old parchment, her tight mouth, sharp nose and fuzzy grey eyes. They weren’t exactly dead, those eyes, but they stared blankly, like windows in a house which nobody lived in any more.
‘Excuse me,’ Abren said, ‘but the boy’s ill. I don’t know what to do. I think he needs a doctor.’
The eyes didn’t move. Old Sabrina wasn’t asleep, but it was as if she hadn’t heard. Abren tried again, standing right in front of her, and then again, shouting in her face. But it made no difference. Abren could stay here all night if she wanted, but the eyes would never change. They’d never look at her. Never take any notice.
Abren left the room. Perhaps the old woman was crazy. Perhaps that was what it was. Back next door, she found the boy on his feet, staggering about as if her shouting, though it hadn’t stirred Old Sabrina, had certainly stirred him. A kettle had been plugged in, and he was rummaging through boxes containing magazines, rat poison, bath oil, soap, computer games and mounds of clothes, looking for medicine. This he found at last in a zip-up bag containing everything from aspirins to plasters and honey linctus syrup, which was a wonder cure that ‘did for everything’, according to the boy. He glugged some down, despite the warning on the bottle about proper measurements, dissolved a lemon cold-cure in some water from the kettle and returned to bed.
