The City's son

CHAPTER 8

Beth stood at the end of Wendover Road, watching Pen’s familiar shape move behind a window across the street.

People hurried past, jostling her and tutting. The women were dressed in wildly contrasting styles: jeans and crop-tops, hijabs, the occasional full burkha. It was the end of the day and the cheap DVDs and plastic watches were being packed away on the market stalls. Men held intense conversations in glass-fronted restaurants over bowls of biryani, or watched hockey on the muted TV sets. The air was tinged with the smell of curry and spices and overripe fruit.

Everything screamed Pen loudly enough to make Beth gasp. She shifted her weight and changed her mind for the fourth time.

All she had to do was shout — one syllable would probably do it. Pen’s window was cracked open, she’d hear. Just that one syllable and she’d come down and they’d sit with their back against the bricks of the next-door alley and Pen would talk Beth out of this insane thing she was planning to do.

Beth came up on the balls of her feet; she felt that shout rise up inside her — but it stalled again, because there was a taste in her mouth, the same taste as there had been back in Gorecastle’s office, and it made her want to spit; it made Beth not want Parva Khan anywhere near her.

Less than a day ago she would’ve thought Pen would believe her. She would have trusted Pen to trust her. That trust was broken now, and realising that was like chewing tinfoil.

Besides, she didn’t even know if Pen would talk to her.

B, you made everything worse.

The memory of Pen’s stone-dead tone made Beth want to turn and run from the street.

But she couldn’t leave without some sort of goodbye, no matter how much some blistered little part of her wanted to. She slipped her hand into her pocket and rubbed her thumb over the black crayon she kept there.

Dotted around Pen’s doorframe were a series of pictograms: tiny trains with electric bolts under their wheels. Beth had drawn them in a little procession round the corner into the alley, like a trail of crumbs.

And there, on the bricks next to the metal bins, she’d drawn Pen’s face, smiling, lovingly detailed: a parting gift.

Streetlamps flickered on as the daylight faded. Beth struggled to focus on what the boy had said: Look for me in broken light. She’d been puzzling her way around that cryptic phrase all day.

The dance where light itself is the music, where the Railwraith’s rush beats the drums.

She turned his words over in her mind, probing them for meaning. They sounded worryingly like the gibberings of a lunatic, which, she admitted to herself, it was entirely possible he was.

She remembered the shock of him shoving her, and she touched the bruise under her hoodie and winced. Her skin was apparently as determined to retain the memory as her mind was.

Think, Beth: what do you know about him? Well, he runs around London’s railway tracks in the middle of the night without a shirt or shoes but with a bloody great iron railing, jabbering incomprehensible cryptic bollocks about light and music and monsters, and he risked getting flattened by five hundred tons of angry freight train just to save you. You’ve got to admit, these are not the characteristics of someone overburdened with sanity.

She slumped, but then a thought struck her: what if the directions weren’t cryptic at all? He hadn’t just looked like he slept in the streets, but like he always had done. It dawned on Beth that street names and house numbers might be a meaningless code to someone who’d never lived in one.

What if he’d told Beth where to find him as clearly and simply as he could?

Beth licked her lips. She wracked her memory for a place that fit. Where the Railwraith’s rush… It had to be near a train line. He’d checked that she was from Hackney, so that narrowed it down. Beth’s excitement mounted as she worked it through — but where was the light itself music, though?

A memory surfaced: a railway footbridge overgrown with brambles, the boards armoured in chewing gum harder than concrete. It was a meeting place she’d shared with Pen, where they’d traded sweets and whispered secrets. When the trains shot past underneath, the sound of their wheels on the tracks was like drums.

There were four streetlamps in the cul-de-sac below. Their light had flickered as they lit up in what Pen described as a ‘fractured harmony’. Beth had always thought that was kind of beautiful; there had been a definite rhythm to their flashes. And wasn’t rhythm all you really needed to dance?

If nothing else, it was as good a place as any to start.

Beth looked back up at Pen’s window and all her excitement drained away, replaced with queasy dread. Sure enough, when she turned away, there it was: a sharp white pain, hard up against her ribs. It’s like that phantom-limb thing you hear about, she told herself sternly, like soldiers get. She tried to make herself believe that the hurt was coming from an empty space, a love already gone.

She made it all of three steps before she ducked back into the alley.

‘You’re a soft idiot, Bradley,’ she muttered as, despite herself, she rough-sketched another figure on the bricks: a skinny boy holding a railing like a spear.

Gone hunting, she scribbled under the picture of her quarry. Look for me in broken light.

Her anger hissed at her spitefully from the back of her mind, but the secret was too big and too lonely to keep to herself, and, in spite of everything, Pen was still the only person she could imagine sharing it with.

Fractured harmony, remember? she scrawled finally, before shouldering her backpack and forcing herself, step by step, to walk away