The City's son

CHAPTER 5

They finally let Beth out at three o’clock. Her dad hadn’t called. She walked to the park and spent hours pacing, chewing at the cuticle on her right thumb and squinting at the sky until the last of the colour drained from it. She knew she’d have to face him eventually, but that didn’t make it any easier.

At last, trying to ignore the clenching in her stomach, she forced herself to head for home.

The hallway was dark and she kicked over a mountain of junk mail on her way towards the sitting room door. Her hand was trembling a little when she set it on the doorknob; she hadn’t been inside that room for weeks now. She fought down the urge to run back out into the street.

‘Just try,’ she hissed to herself as she turned the handle.

The sitting room was buried in photographs; they were tacked over every inch of wall space and strewn loose over the carpet like wreckage from a plane crash. Every chair but one was covered in more piles.

A thickset, balding man occupied the remaining chair. He was reading a paperback book; Beth could just make out the title, The Iron Condor Mystery, on the faded spine. He didn’t look up as Beth approached.

Beth’s lungs felt suddenly airless. She’d run this conversation over and over on her way home, trying to make it sound like something they could talk about rationally, but now-?

She looked down at the bald spot on top of her dad’s head and the crumbs scattered on his shirt like an invitation to the birds. All her preparations felt useless. In the end she just blurted out, ‘I’ve been kicked out.’

He turned a page; his eyes narrowed slightly as they followed the print.

The squeezing in the pit of Beth’s stomach grew tighter. ‘Dad, are you listening? Dad, please. I really need you to focus. Social Services could come around, and the police, maybe. Look, I- Dad, I fucked up, seriously. Dad I need hel-’

She broke off as he looked up at her.

One night, three years and some change before, it had been Beth’s mum reading The Iron Condor Mystery. She’d loved old Cold War spy novels, the safely sinister world of Fedoras and secret codes and briefcase-bombs. That night she’d set down the dog-eared paperback with a little regretful sigh, having not quite reached the bit she’d been looking forward to, but happy in the knowledge that it would be waiting for her tomorrow. She kissed her husband gently, turned over and haemhorrhaged while she slept.

Beth’s dad had woken with his arm curled around his wife. She’d been waxy and cold and her limbs were too heavy when he’d tried to move them.

It had been the morning of Beth’s thirteenth birthday.

Ever since that night he’d slept in his chair — Beth knew he was afraid of the bedroom, though she doubted he would ever admit that. Ever since that night he’d read and reread that same book with an almost frantic intensity, until it was all but disintegrating in his hands.

And ever since that night, he’d looked at her like this, with the same desolate, pleading exhaustion in his face.

‘It’s fine,’ Beth stuttered, furious with herself for caving in so easily. ‘I’ll — I’ll find some way to- I’ll sort it.’

He didn’t respond. She realised she couldn’t remember when he had last spoken to her, real words…

She stumbled on her way out, accidentally stepping on the photographs of her mum’s smiling face. Her dad uttered a protective cry and for a moment her anger spilled over, just a little, just enough for her to snap at him, her tone nasty, ‘I left money on the hall stand.’

She felt a shameful little satisfaction when he flinched.

It’s not his fault, she reminded herself forcefully as she grabbed her backpack and plunged back through the hall out into the night. He broke. It’s what people do.

But people also heal, a harsher voice in her piped up: hearts thickened with scar tissue, but they kept beating. Beth’s dad had fallen, that she could understand, but every day he sat in that same bloody chair with that same bloody book was another day he wasn’t getting up. Beth felt her heart plunge every time she looked at him, because even though she didn’t want to admit it, she was teetering on the edge of that same dark hole.

She looked down in surprise at her hand. It was holding her mobile. Her thumb was poised to dial Pen’s number, displayed on the screen: pure muscle memory. She recoiled and hurled the phone away. It clattered onto the pavement. Beth ran down the street as though an army of ghosts marched in her wake.

It had been raining, and the streetlights bled over the pavements like molten copper. Tears blurred her vision and she navigated the streets on instinct.

The chain-link fence alongside the old railway sidings reared up in front of her and she threw herself at it and clambered over, ignoring the rust and the loose wires that snagged her hands. The tracks she dropped onto were disused and inert, part of an old extension no longer served. She stumbled along them, kicking at the crisp packets and rain-melted newspaper that littered the ground. A tunnel entrance opened up in front of her and she ran in.

It was only after Beth had snapped on one of the three powerful torches she kept in the underpass that she finally felt able to be still. She stared around at the walls.

Lithe Chinese dragons chased tiny bi-planes across the brickwork, jesters and skeletons waltzing together in their wake. A massive hand chose from a fruit-bowl full of planets. Octopuses coiled around anchors and wolves reared and snakes fought and cities soared from the strata of dense clouds. This little burrow under the Mile End Road was Beth’s sanctuary: five years of her imagination was sprayed and stencilled onto these walls.

She spread her hands across them, and their texture was like grazed skin. ‘What’m I gonna do, guys?’ Her voice echoed in the tunnel, and she burst out in a strained laugh. She only talked to her paintings when things got bad; it had to be death-of-the-firstborn-bad for her to do it out loud.

Normally she used stencil and aerosol to reshape the city, carving a safe place for herself amid the concrete, room to breathe. Not tonight. Not without Pen to share it with. Tonight she felt shut out of her town.

Pen.

The anger went though her like a spark lighting a gunpowder fuse, leaving her cold in its wake. I fought for you. When did that stop being enough? If you’d only kept quiet, we’d’ve been safe. When had Pen stopped trusting Beth to protect her?

One picture caught her eye: a simple chalk sketch, repeated over and over amongst the more outlandish images: a woman, long-haired, her back turned, glancing over her shoulder as if in invitation.

‘What’m I gonna do?’ Beth asked again, but her mum didn’t answer. She only lived in two places now: in Beth’s mind and on Beth’s bricks, and she wasn’t talking back from either.

Beth pressed her cheek to the cool, rough wall. She stood like that for a moment, and then pressed harder and harder, until hot pain spread from the grazes on her face and hands, as though by sheer force of muscle she could burrow under the city’s skin.

A low sound cut the night, snapping Beth out of her reverie. The sound came again, urgent and familiar. She sniffed her tears back. She was miles from anywhere where she ought to be able to hear that sound.

It came again, echoing off the bricks: the low moan of a train.

Beth felt a sudden heat on her back. She turned and found herself gaping at what she saw.

Two blazing white lights rushed at her from the dark of the tunnel, litter and leaves fluttering alongside them. A bulky shape formed out of the black, all jagged edges and momentum. Blue lightning arced and spat, illuminating clattering wheels. The sound of it crashed in on her ears like close thunder.

Thrum-clatter-clatter Her clothes snapped in a sudden gust of air. She tensed her legs to jump, but it was too late. She screwed her eyes shut.

Thrum-clatter The screech of metal on metal made her shudder. Every muscle in her body locked, but there was no pulverising impact, no shattering of bones…

Barely daring to breathe, Beth opened her eyes.

Headlights, barely inches from her face, blinded her instantly.

She stumbled back in the glare and lost her footing, crumpled and sat on the ground. Her heart was thumping like a pneumatic drill. Slowly her vision dissolved back through the glare. What is it, she thought, a train?

No — not a train, not quite. It was train- like, but more animal, somehow. Its whistle was a howl, it was draped in a pelt of tangled cables and its chassis was scabbed with rust and graffiti. Cataracts of smashed glass covered its windows. Great rents had been torn from its hull as though by massive claws.

The train-thing emitted a hydraulic snort and impatiently shifted its wheels.

Beth wriggled back on her bum, still staring at it, until she felt the wall behind her. She pulled herself up — and then froze.

The headlights were tracking her like the eyes of a suspicious beast. It sounded again, more quietly this time, and turned up at the end like a question, like it was curious.

What are you? Beth squinted through the glare and stumbled forwards. On an impulse she reached hesitantly up past its wheels and patted its side. A whickering sound emerged from the train-thing, a sound of pleasure.

What am I supposed to do? she thought incredulously. Scratch you behind the ears? Where the hell are your ears, and how am I supposed to scratch ’em? She wondered if this was what a total psychotic break felt like. You’ve snapped, she told herself. This can’t be real.

A sinuous curve of blue electricity danced over the surface of the train-beast and Beth jumped back. For an instant it looked new, its chassis gleaming pristine and bright — but only for an instant, and then the pitted metal skin washed back.

‘What are you?’ Beth said softly to it. ‘What do you want? ’

The train-thing lowed again, as if in answer and the doors of the front carriage hissed open.

Beth steeled herself and thrust a hand inside. She half expected it to burst into blue flame. It didn’t. She felt like she was in a trance, adrift on a tide of total unreality. She placed her hands palm-down on the floor of the carriage, ready to push herself on board.

A cold thought jarred her: What if I can’t get back?

She remembered Gorecastle looking down at her, and her dad staring up, and Pen, most of all Pen, huddled in her wounded fury.

Beth looked over her shoulder. From the wall, her mum looked back. She pulled herself inside.