The City's son

CHAPTER 21

Beth and Fil looked at their new recruits. A hundred walking lightbulbs, ragged and disorganised, looked back.

For a moment the street prince flinched under their gaze. Then he drew himself up and reached for his spear.

‘Victor, will you hang around?’ he asked. ‘Help us translate?’

‘Da.’

‘We won’t be taking you away from anything important?’ Beth put in. She’d taken a liking to the old Russian.

He smirked under his beard, stepped out of his rumpled sleeping-bag and scuffed his shoe over the cobbles, sweeping a crisp packet out of the way. ‘I think housework can wait for few days.’

Beth laughed, then a thought struck her. She rummaged in her backpack for her torch and offered it to Victor.

‘Can you use this to talk to them?’ she asked. ‘In their language I mean?’

Victor snapped the light on and off in a strange syncopated pattern a couple of times. The nearest Blankleit nodded and flashed a response. The tramp pursed his lips.

‘Da,’ he said.

Fil gave Beth a quizzical look. ‘What made you do that?’ he asked.

‘I–I just thought it’d be nice, you know, for us to talk to ’em in their own lingo, you know, more respectful.’

He gave her a small half-smile, and Beth could see he was trying to look amused. She thought she could see a hint of admiration there too.

Victor grinned broadly and slapped Beth on the back. ‘You are sweet girl, I come to make sure you not get too horribly killed.’

Beth was jubilant. Lucien caught her eye and she did a small air-punch for his benefit, which he loftily ignored. It didn’t matter that there were only a hundred of them; what mattered was that she’d won them over. She was proving she belonged here in this strange city.

As Fil led them into the maze of alleyways, the glare of the Blankleits sprang back at them off the bricks, mingling with their shadows: soldiers of light and darkness on the march. Small sounds — London sounds: the growl of a night bus down a deserted road, drunken whoops, bass thumping — echoed distantly. They walked a fine tracery of reality inlaid in the streets. It was a groove worn by centuries of magic, a groove anyone might stumble into.

Anyone might, Beth thought, but I did.

Victor prattled as they walked, ‘I was colonel in KGB. No worry, I have this rabble kicked into shape in no time.’

‘KGB?’ Beth said. ‘I thought you were in the army.’

‘Was in both, my little Tsarina, in Moscow-’

‘You said St Petersburg.’

‘Moskva first.’

‘You in the Russian Ballet and all?’ Beth asked, suddenly sceptical.

‘ Niet, but had girlfriend once who was.’

Beth laughed at the tramp in his musty greatcoat. ‘This girlfriend, was she a much prettier sane girl?’ she asked.

‘Prettier, da. Sane, niet, crazy as squid in vodka. All ballerinas are.’ He chuckled.

They turned onto a narrow road lined with small steel-shuttered windows and battered stairwell doors. Something about it nagged her, striking a dim spark of recognition off the inside of her head, something more than the sense of anonymous familiarity that she got from almost every London street. Then they passed a graffiti’d wall by a corner shop and all of sudden she knew why.

She stopped and stared. Nestled unassumingly in amongst the brighter, brasher graffiti was a patch of writing in black marker pen, so badly faded that only three letters were still legible: o n e.

‘What’cha looking at?’ Fil came strolling up behind. ‘One? One what?’

A little ‘oh’ slipped from Beth’s lips. She felt like someone had slid a fine blade into her chest. It didn’t say ‘one’, not really. She knew exactly what had been written there.

She’d watched Pen do it.

It had been one of those warm September afternoons that summer drags behind it like a lame leg. The sun had pounded down from an infinite sky, and the street had smelled of trees and baking pavements. The two of them had sat on the wall, kicking their heels and watching traffic as they listened to the radio on Pen’s phone, one set of earphones between both of them, alternately singing along and cracking up.

The tracks switched, a ballad crackled through.

‘ You saved me! ’ Beth had crooned daftly into the empty air, recognising the tune, ‘ Girl, your love saved my liiiife- ’

She’d sensed Pen’s mood as it went, an instant before the slim Pakistani girl snorted and yanked the earphone free. ‘What a load of bollocks,’ she’d said.

Beth had sighed and snapped the ring-pull on a can of Coke. There was pretty much only one thing that could get Pen’s mouth into the same postcode as a swearword, even one as mild as that. And if they were having this conversation again, Beth was going to need caffeine.

‘Bollocks love songs with bollocks lyrics, that mean bollocks all!’ Pen snapped.

‘Leon ignored you again, huh?’

‘No.’ After a few seconds silence Pen conceded, ‘Well, okay, so maybe he did kind of blank me after assembly, but-’

‘Pen, you could just ask him out — I mean, I know it’d lead to the eternal shaming of your ancestors, or whatever. But at least it would get it over with.’

‘This isn’t about Leon!’ Pen had protested hotly. ‘It’s just — “ you saved my life ” — Seriously? Who talks about being in love like that? Love isn’t the NHS or the bloody Samaritans; it’s not about saving lives. Love isn’t about keeping people whole. It’s-’ She tailed off, flailing her hands in disgust.

Beth gestured for her to go on. She didn’t often get a chance to hear Pen rant, and it was kind of entertaining.

But a thoughtful frown had crossed Pen’s face and instead of speaking she’d pulled a marker pen from her pocket. She’d jumped off the wall and scrawled on it:

The one you love is the one who breaks you

The one you owe, and the one you own

The one who shatters and remakes you

Sets you crooked as a broken bone.

‘ It’s more like that,’ she’d said at last, lamely.

Beth had read it, and promptly burst out laughing. ‘That’s cheery. Pen, if Leon’s making you feel like-’

‘It’s not about Leon,’ Pen had insisted again, her voice hard. She’d blushed deeply, not meeting Beth’s eye. It was only now that Beth realised she should have stopped laughing then.

The image in Beth’s mind changed to the headmistress’ office, to Pen hugging herself tight, like her arms were all that held her together. Like she’d been shattered and needed someone to remake her.

And Beth had been too full of fury to even try.

She shook her head hard, bringing herself back to now and the autumn night, their regiment of glowing glass soldiers. Their war.

She looked at Fil. ‘My best mate wrote it.’ She was a little surprised at the tears she was sniffing back. ‘It doesn’t say “one”. It’s the end of this poem, it says-’

But he wasn’t listening, he was looking past her, and so was everyone else.

A tall figure was coming up the middle of the deserted road towards them, past the empty restaurants and the window displays of gaudy, mile-high shoes. It lurched with a peculiar, rounded gait, as though one leg was a lot shorter than the other. It was dropping rubbish; scraps trailed behind it like it was shedding them. The figure was too far away to see clearly, especially with the flaring of the Blankleits in her eyes, but the smell…

Beth looked at Fil. His nostrils twitched as an odour of rotting fruit and mildew gusted up the street. He didn’t take his eyes off the man-figure as it stumped into the light. She swallowed hard; she’d never seen the figure before but she knew who it was.

‘Filius.’ The garbage-built man’s voice was weak, squeezed from punctured football lungs. ‘I’m so proud of you.’ Gutterglass tottered forward two more steps, then his lips slipped across each other, giving his jaw a dislocated look. An eggshell slipped from his eyesocket. His body disintegrated from the head down, collapsing into a heap of rubbish on the tarmac.