by Alex Pheby
‘Next time it’s your turn,’ she said to Gam, picking out a piece of bacon with her nails and taking it off to another red, dimpled, leather armchair. ‘Eat up, Nathan – you look like a donkey my sister sold off for glue,’ she said.
Nathan took a piece of bacon, an inch of fat on one side, lifting it by a thick white hair. He bit into it, not releasing it as he chewed but drawing it into his mouth by the inch, squeezing it between his teeth. It was thick enough to choke a dog, but he took it down bite by bite, the brine making him smack his lips.
‘I’m Prissy,’ she said, and she held out her hand. Nathan wasn’t quite sure what to do with it – hold it, stroke it, kiss it – but by the time he’d wiped off the bacon grease and soothed the stinging of the rat bite it didn’t matter: she took the hand away and made a rude gesture with it. ‘Too slow,’ she said.
The other child – whether they were a boy or girl Nathan couldn’t tell, since they seemed to flicker from one to the other in the light of the fire – said, ‘Don’t mind her. She’s just teasing. You’re Nathan, right? I’m Joes. If you join the gang, we’ll show you the secret handshake.’ Joes was lean and jittery, with eyelids that flickered like a butterfly’s wings.
Nathan swallowed the last of the bacon, looked at Prissy, then back at the Joes. ‘I suppose I’ll have to join now. I owe Gam.’
‘Oh, ho! A volte-face,’ Gam said, looking up from a book. ‘About time. You want a drink, to toast the occasion? There’s no water, only wine.’ He passed Nathan a dusty-shouldered green bottle. On the label was the ram’s horn beneath writing Nathan couldn’t read.
‘Is this it, then? The lot of you?’
The three of them shared a look that was only broken when Gam spoke. ‘How many do we need?’
‘One more, I reckon,’ said Nathan.
Prissy looked at Joes and Joes looked at Gam. Only Gam was smiling. ‘That’s the spirit.’
‘But on one condition. My dad needs medicine and he needs it now. We need to get it.’
Gam nodded. ‘Next job, medicine – that’s a fair deal. Can’t go now, though – Merchant City will be swarming with citizens on the lookout. We go back later, when they’ve given up, and then we’ll get it done. You’ll be surprised how easy it all is when you’ve got friends, Nathan, and when those friends know what they’re doing.’
The library was enormous. The room they were in led off to several more. There were endless cabinets with glass doors, all shattered – and though they used the books freely for reading and kindling and fuel, the collection was scarcely diminished. One wall was of blue books, numbered in sequence, another was of red, but mostly there was a mixture with no discernible pattern. If Nathan looked too long, his eyes blurred with nothing to fix onto and the mass of the books became like one huge book, speckled and musty.
The rooms were high-ceilinged, brittle and cold, dark in the corners, so Nathan went back to the fire. ‘Whose was this place?’ he said.
Gam sat silently. His feet rested on an ornamental iron dragon, and he sipped from a bottle, a book open in his lap.
‘Come on,’ said Nathan, ‘if I’m one of the gang you’ve got to let me in on your secrets.’
Joes got up and put another book on the fire. ‘Gam won’t say. He knows. Won’t tell us. Not even Prissy. Big secret. Goes on for miles. Loads of rooms. Bedrooms, bathrooms, billiards – even a pool. The water is black. You can’t drink it. Can you read?’
Nathan shook his head.
‘The books might say. We can’t read either. Gam can, but he’s not talking.’
Prissy sat up cross-legged in her chair, relaxed in a way Nathan hadn’t seen her before. ‘Joes can tell you other stuff though, can’t you Joes? Tell him a story, Joes.’ She smiled and Joes looked down, almost embarrassed it seemed to Nathan.
‘We might do, if he wants to hear one.’
‘Course he wants to hear one. You want to hear one, don’t you, Nathan?’ Prissy nodded her head eagerly, and Nathan found himself nodding along. ‘Tell him the one about you first.’
Joes shifted forward, nearer the fire, into the flickering light. ‘Alright. We tell stories, Nathan, about people, about how they came to be. We’ll tell our story, so you know we aren’t snooty and above it all, and then we’ll tell everyone’s story. Alright?’
Nathan nodded again, and now because he wanted to hear for himself, not because Prissy made him.
Joes went on. ‘Before all this, before the City and the Master and the Living Mud, there was only one way to get into the world. But now there are all sorts of strange things that happen. You might have noticed something odd about us, about how we are, all changing about, and jittery, and never settling.’
‘Jerky Joes we call them,’ said Gam between sips, not looking up from the page he was reading. ‘Unpredictable, which is handy in a knife fight.’
‘They don’t see it coming, do they, Joes?’ said Prissy.
Joes didn’t answer, but a smirk played across their lips. ‘When our mother fell for us, she fell for twins, down along the Promenade, deep down in the slums. The witch-woman could hear two heartbeats in her belly. My mum was a little thing, tiny short, and there wasn’t much room inside her. It was cosy in there – warm and tight and friendly-feeling. She used to fish for flukes with the children in the Circus while she was carrying us, she was so desperate to keep us fed, and that was how the Living Mud got up inside her, or down through her mouth – it doesn’t matter which. One day she went to the witch-woman who said she could hear only one heartbeat now, that one of us was dead and the other one would likely follow next, but she was wrong. What happened was we got so close, and with the influence of the Mud, we came to share the same place. We were born as one child.’ Joes stared at each of them in turn, as if checking their story had settled in attentive minds.
‘Show him the knife trick,’ said Prissy.
‘Not yet. We aren’t finished. Can you think what that must be like, Nathan? To be two people in the same space? We’ve got used to it, in our mind at least, the two of us work as one, but our body has problems sometimes – it flickers about between us, making it look like we can’t control ourselves, or like we’ve got a twitch. Sometimes we are all elbows and knees and gurning, when we get tired or upset. Our speech gets slurred and sometimes we say things we don’t properly mean. Sometimes we come separate, almost.’
‘We don’t mind, Joes,’ said Prissy. ‘Do we, Gam?’
‘Not at all,’ said Gam, and, as if reading from the book in front of him, he intoned solemnly: ‘Which of us is always and forever in control of the things that we say, or think, or do?’
‘That’s right,’ said Prissy, ‘and having two hearts has made you generous and kind and double brave. Now show him the knife trick.’
Joes sighed, but smiling, and took their knife from their pocket. It was a stiletto – thin, shining steel – and they balanced it on the tip of one finger. ‘Watch carefully.’
The knife moved up and down and round and round, from hand to hand, and back again, and then Joes jerked, as if involuntarily, and the knife fell to the floor. A look of dismay came over their face, and if this had been a knife fight, Nathan would have taken the advantage and pressed forward with his own blade, but if he had he would have died, because Joes had a second knife already at his heart, and an evil grin.
Prissy clapped and squealed. ‘What do you think of that?’
Nathan shrugged. ‘It’s easy to hide a second knife. Drop it.’
Gam tutted. ‘There’s no second knife. Just one knife in two places.’
Nathan shook his head and reached to get the other knife, to show them there were two, but the floor between them was empty.
Joes smiled. ‘You’re not the only one that knows a thing or two.’
Gam rose slowly and went to a shelf. He pushed aside some books, took a leather pouch down.
‘You smoke, Nat?’
Nathan shook his head. Gam opened the pouch, took out a pipe and
filled it. ‘Today you will. It’s a gang thing. We eat, we tell stories, we teach you the handshake, we smoke.’
‘We haven’t done the handshake yet,’ said Prissy, ‘and Joes knows loads more stories. They know all the stories of how people came to be. Like that Cuckoo, from the Fetch’s cart, remember him? Had two brothers – Willy and Wonty. How does it go?’ Prissy stood up, clasped her hands in front of her, set her feet apart, as if she was delivering a party piece. ‘There once was a matron of the slums… how does it go, Joes? I learned it once to do at my sister’s Temple, so I didn’t have to… so they wouldn’t… so…’ Prissy sat back down again and scratched beneath her bonnet, suddenly quiet and grim. Gam came over and put his hand on her shoulder.
‘She was separating the dripping from the lard of a joint,’ Joes continued for her. ‘She’d bartered it from a butcher who’d set up stall on the Strand. This meat was of dubious provenance – that’s the bit you like, Prissy, right? – but it was fresh and cheap and gave off a lot of fat on cooking. Some of this fat dripped down to her wrists, and she smeared it on her apron. Later, she washed the apron on the wet rocks, and a seagull shat on it…’
‘I like that bit, too,’ said Prissy.
‘…The matron scrubbed and scrubbed but neither it, nor the lard it fell on, came out. It made a stain that wouldn’t shift. One night, sometime later, after the apron had been used and reused and washed and rewashed, Cuckoo crawled out, stain-shaped, stain-coloured. They found him in the laundry pile, bawling, and set him to work as soon as he was grown enough. Trouble was he was no good at it, and that’s why they sent him to the Master, to get some money out of him at least.’
‘Should say,’ Gam said, ‘Cuckoo don’t recognise that as accurate. Pile of bollocks, he calls it.’
Joes tutted. ‘Some people don’t like the truth.’
‘So,’ said Nathan, ‘what’s my story?’
The others turned their attention to the fire, which suddenly needed tending, more fuel gathering, ashes stirring. When that was done, and there was nothing left to do but answer, Gam opened another bottle of wine and passed it round. ‘We don’t ask questions like that, Nat. The answers might cause offence. Joes knows your mum’s story though, don’t you, Joes?’
‘No!’ Nathan snapped.
‘Don’t worry, we aren’t like Gam,’ said Joes. ‘He likes to hurt people with his teasing, like he’s been hurt. We don’t. Do you want to hear her story?’
Gam got to refilling the pipe and Prissy sat on the arm of his chair. ‘Go on, Nathan. It’s a nice one,’ she said.
Nathan didn’t reply. There was, in him, something that was reluctant – he wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear stories about her, good or bad – but whatever that thing was it didn’t matter because Joes was talking, and Nathan didn’t interrupt.
‘In the Merchant City, as we know, there are all sorts of shops and makers of this and that. There are jewellers, and watchmakers, and tailors, and one day a dressmaker took all the oddments of ribbon and irregular pieces of silk, all the single buttons she had surplus from making suits and ballgowns for the debs, all the tiny scraps they couldn’t use but what were too pretty to throw away, and from these she stitched one perfect, patchwork dress. She put it on a mannequin and so beautiful was it that it surpassed the finest of the dresses she had made for the poshest of the dignitaries of Mordew. She placed it in her window, as an advertisement of her skills, but in the morning, when she arrived at her shop, there was an angry crowd of women. “What bothers you lot?” she said unto them, and each one moaned and whined about how the window dress was so much nicer than the one they had paid her through the snout for only the week before. Did she think they were idiots who would pay good money for second-class items? This went on all day. So, to prevent a reoccurrence on the following day, and to protect the value of her patterns, which this patchwork thing undermined, she flushed it into the sewer, mannequin and all. It washed up in the slums, this exquisite thing, in the Living Mud, and it lay there until the Mud gave her life. Then she crawled, aimless, to the shack where your dad found her, Nathan. Now with him she must stay, for if she returns upstream, they will unstitch her and burn her pieces in a fire, so to protect the prices of their merchandise.’
Nathan sat with his arms crossed, biting the inside of his mouth. ‘Where’s the dress then?’ he said, glaring.
Joes looked at him, and they flickered in the firelight, flickered in the candlelight, flickered between one twin and the other. Both of them were stern-looking. Nathan had expected Joes to be undone by this, by the obvious flaw in their story, but they weren’t. ‘She sold it, Nathan, bit by bit, to buy the food that’s kept you fed all these years. And now, with nothing left to sell, she sells the rest of herself. Bit by bit.’
After that the conversation grew tense and dwindled into nothing. When it came time to learn the handshake and smoke the weed, as Gam insisted, they all did it, but cheerlessly.
Later, when the weed had worn off a little, Gam came over, dragging his chair behind him, catching a rug and pulling threads loose. ‘So, what are you going to carry?’
Nathan had been lying on cushions on a shelf, the displaced books making a staircase up to him. He lay on the side of his good arm; the bitten one was hot and swelling, the wound weeping. He rolled over to face Gam, clutching his arm to his chest, not sure what was expected of him.
‘Perk up – it’s time for work. What weapon are you going to take with you on this job?’
‘Nothing,’ Nathan said.
Gam smiled sourly and nodded. He perched on the edge of the seat, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. ‘No, really. What are you planning to defend yourself with? Your sense of humour?’
Jerky Joes chuckled at this, but Nathan hung his head and said nothing.
‘This isn’t a game, Natty. You need to be tooled. What if you get cornered? What if it’s you or them? What if it’s her or them?’
Nathan looked at Prissy, without meaning to. She met his eyes and then looked down. Gam got up and stepped between them. ‘Don’t you know anything? Joes, throw me your knife.’
Joes slipped it from their sleeve and sent it twirling over at Gam, who knocked it into his other hand, span it by its pommel, flicked it up, then caught it with a swipe. ‘Time for a bit of schooling. The basics is easy – keep your eye on the target and your arm will do the rest. When you want to make a point you slice’ – the knife cut the air in half, whistling – ‘slit something under pressure, so there’s a gush, so that you make a splash, then they know you mean business. If they’ve got a dicky tummy, they’ll pull back, or faint if you’re lucky. So will their mates. If you need to get the job done, and nothing else will do, you poke.’ The knife darted forward. ‘Poke wherever’s softest and keep poking until they don’t move no more. Then poke ’em again, just to make sure. Then leg it, because if they’ve got mates, they won’t stand for it.’
Gam held the knife out for Nathan, handle first, the blade pinched in his fingers. Prissy was watching; Nathan could see her from the corner of his eye. He put his good hand out and Gam slapped the knife into the palm, a smile broadening on his lips. Nathan, once he had the knife, stared at it for a while, then let it fall to the ground, where it stuck blade first into the carpet. ‘If I get angry enough to use it, Gam, I won’t need it.’
Gam raised an eyebrow. He pulled Nathan close, as if he was hugging him, and hissed in his ear – ‘You know your own business best, but if you let us down, friend, and someone gets hurt, I’ll come at you with that knife when you aren’t looking, Spark or no Spark. You’ll find it inside you, up to the hilt. Do you understand me?’
Nathan pulled away and Prissy came over to him. ‘Leave him alone, Gam. He wants this to work as much as you do, don’t you Nat? On account of your dad’s disease and all.’
Gam smiled. ‘Then let’s get on with it then. One last thing, though.’ Gam walked over to the fireplace and from a basket to one side he pulled out tubes about
the length of his forearm. ‘These,’ he said, ‘are chunks of stuff that burn different colours and give off different coloured smokes – red, green, blue. Stick one on the fire, and the smoke comes out of a chimney in the middle of the Merchant City. Prissy found this out, didn’t you?’
Prissy looked proud, and nodded. ‘Yes, I did. I like a nice colour – red’s my favourite – so I put one on the fire hoping it might be fireworks or something, and it was very nice, like I’d hoped – no sparkles, but pretty… except it smelled rank, like camphor. Anyway, I was going to see my sister and what should I see, just up the hill, but a bleeding great cloud of red smoke. I wasn’t in any hurry to get to the Temple, so I wandered over, and what should I smell but the same camphor like what I’d smelled by the fire. It was coming from a tall chimney with a devil head on top just in the Merchant City.’
Gam held out three. ‘We use it for signals. Up top you can see the smoke from everywhere this side of the hill. Blue means keep out – we don’t use it much. Green means we’ve got a new haul, come and see.’
‘And red?’ Nathan said.
‘Emergency: come quick.’
Underground there was no hint as to the time. It was neither darker nor lighter and there was nothing outside – no outside visible at all – in which to notice a change. The clocks were unwound, and each showed a different time, so that glancing between then made hours pass in a second, flicking time back and forth. Gam, as always, had the advantage because he was the only one of the gang who carried a watch, a big round one. He dangled it on a chain in front of them. ‘Teatime,’ he said, ‘the last dash round the shops of the Merchant City.’
