The City's Son (11 page)

‘No offence, Mr Bradley, but Beth told me about your singing. She says your rubber duck’s about the right audience for it.’

‘Oh, well— Okay.’ He turned back to his car.

‘Mr B, wait!’ She saw him stiffen, snared by the urgency in her voice. She was staring at her front door – or rather, the door
frame
. Tiny trains had been drawn around its edge, a trail that led away along the bottom of the wall like black breadcrumbs.

They followed it around the corner into a drab alleyway and peered closed at what had been painted onto the bricks.

‘What’s that supposed to—?’ he started. ‘
Fractured harmony
? I don’t—’

‘I do,’ Pen said. She creased her stiff, sore hands into fists and then released them slowly. ‘I know what it means, Mr Bradley. I’ve been there.’ She paused, and then found herself saying, ‘I’ll show you.’

‘Who’s that?’ He pointed at the sketch of a skinny boy using a spear to pick his fingernails with a nonchalant air.

Pen shook her head. ‘Never seen anyone who looked anything like that,’ she admitted. ‘Tell you what though, if Beth’s looking, she’ll find him.’

She dipped into her pocket, lifted out her phone and snapped a photo of the boy. ‘And that means we need to find him too.’

It was only on the way out of the alley that she saw her own face, daubed on the brick, and all the anger she’d been nursing towards her best friend changed into
something else, something no less sharp, that caught in her throat.

‘Gosh, is that you?’ Mr Bradley murmured. ‘It
is
– it
is
you. She did that from memory? Heavens, it looks just like you. I mean …’ There was no mistaking the pride in his voice. Pen wondered if Beth had ever heard it.

‘Yes, Mr Bradley,’ she said, but it was hard to breathe. ‘She’s very good.’

It was morning: the daylamp’s rays pouring into the bulb fell in rainbows, refracted by the glass. Voltaia shifted, the glow of her blood washed out by the surfeit of light.
Day
. Her eyes stung in the light.
Why am I awake?
The world outside was a seamless wall of glare.
Too early
. She shook herself and settled her head back onto her arms, feeling her consciousness ebb away.

The lamppost shook and her eyes snapped open again. It was too bright; she couldn’t see anything, but she could
feel
vibrations coming through the metal. The filaments in her bones trembled. She started twitching and shifting, moving just enough to build up some magnetism, until she could stretch her fingers forward, and push the field out, teasing the air.

Voltaia recoiled in horror;
something
was crawling up her lamppost. Her heart began to trip, faster and faster, until it was so beating quickly that even through the light of the daylamp she could see the yellow glow reflecting off the glass.

Lec!
she strobed, but her elder sister had run away in disgust at the street-boy’s behaviour and hadn’t come back.

Galva! Faradi!

It was too bright, and she was blind. The daylamp was like a thousand furious Whities, battering on the glass. The lamppost jerked again, as though in the grip of a fit, and she flared off another distress call.
Useless
, she cursed herself; her sisters would be blind too. She could
feel
the tremors of the thing, whatever it was, dragging itself up the lamppost towards her. She shrank into the back of her shelter; wires pricked her skin.

A black shape smacked hard against the glass: a long, thin shadow studded with thorns. The whole bulb shuddered. The thing receded, moving nightmarishly slowly, vanishing into the blur of light like ink being sucked out of water …

—and smacked in again …

Voltaia tumbled backwards at the impact. The thin barbed shape vanished behind cracked glass and she braced herself, her lungs burning as she held her breath.

The thing struck again, and the lamp shattered.

Voltaia leapt from her home, falling for an instant, surrounded by a glittering rain of glass. Concrete drove the breath from her. She shoved herself to her feet, shaking off the impact and casting about. Everything was indistinct dark lines, swamped by the glaring sun;
everything
looked like a monster, reaching for her. She fled to her
left, towards Galvanica’s lamp, probing through her fields, but she couldn’t feel them.
She couldn’t feel them
.

Calm down
, she told herself,
calm down.
Her heart was beating so fast she was scared it might start to smoke.

Galva! Faradi!
She knew they wouldn’t see her cries in the light, but she couldn’t stop herself calling for them. She reached into the space where Galvanica’s post should have been and her fingertips groped empty air. She stumbled and fell onto something metal. Her hands trembled as she felt her way along it. It was twisted, pockmarked with dozens of tiny holes.

A cloud passed in front of the daylamp and suddenly she could
see
: she was holding Galvanica’s post. It had been torn from the ground, leaving just a stump. The broken-off end was jagged and sharp. A glass girl was lying halfunfolded from the broken bulb, her light extinguished. Her nose and kneecaps were shattered and her skin was frosted with tiny cracks.

Voltaia stumbled towards her, barely noticing the pain as the shards of metal and broken bulb cut her feet. Her powdered blood spilled on the ground.

Galv—

As Voltaia approached, her sister’s hair started to sway in the magnetic breeze she carried. It was a mean mockery of life.

Through her fields, she felt the metal of the thing behind her brush her field and she turned. Its coils flew in fast, extinguishing the light.

I want to help you – I want to help you do more than just run.

Her words are like river silt, clogging up my ears. I look back at her arm, at the mark I gave her. City dirt has entered it; it will be a scar – it was meant to be a
scare
, but though she swore fancily at my clumsiness as I swabbed it with disinfectant and stitched it with a splinter of railway sleeper, she wears it patiently enough.

We weave through the crowds on Church Street. I’m ostentatiously invisible: people take pains not to look at me, I suppose because I look so much like the figures huddled in sleepingbags in doorways that they are also careful to ignore.

Is that how you’re going to live up your mother’s legacy? Run?

It was an idiotic question, frankly. I can no more live up to my mother’s legacy than I can wear her estuary-water skirts, or match her cruelty, or fill her Docklands throne with my bony arse. I’d be a laughing-stock before I died.

Except now there are two of us laughing-stocks: me, and my idiotic, brave, scarred girl with a conscience. And that
makes the odds against us half as bad. So here we are, entering the gates of a graveyard in Stoke Newington: a graveyard left to become a wilderness, and the last gathering-ground for my mother’s damned priesthood.

It was Beth’s idea. ‘You’re the son of a Goddess, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Doesn’t your mum have a vicar or two to help us out?’ It sounded so simple, so logical.

I’m going to have to talk very fast, and I’ll try to sound confident, but the man I need to convince peddles bullshit by the steaming ton, so he knows it when he hears it. We plunge deep into the bracken, where the just-turning leaves filter the light gold. My tongue feels like a lead slug in my mouth. I’m desperately trying to work out what it is I’m going to
say.

‘A graveyard,’ Beth said flatly as Fil closed the gate behind them. Weeds had grown everywhere, making the railings more a hedge than anything. ‘Seriously? A graveyard?’

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, tunnelling through the foliage. The growl of the traffic on the main road became muffled.

‘Oh, nothing – having seen what you’ve got crawling around radio-masts and lampposts, I can’t bloody
wait
to see what you manage to pull out of a graveyard. If it’s just ghosts and zombies I’m going to be sorely disappointed, Fil.’

She was still in a temper after the spiders, and her feet were starting ache. They’d taken the long route from Crystal Palace to Stoke Newington to avoid the cranes that reared
beside the main road in Dalston. Fil wouldn’t go near them. Beth had never noticed them before and wondered idly when they’d appeared. They were sprouting like malign winter trees across the skyline.

She still hadn’t seen Fil eat. In fact, she was starting to think he didn’t. She’d ducked into a shop with a revolving sign and ordered food off a revolving spit – and now she was sheepishly readying herself for a revolving stomach. She’d offered to buy him a kebab too, but he’d politely declined. Last night, under the tower, his skin had been covered in oily sweat, but just walking barefoot over the tarmac seemed to revive him, as if he was drawing sustenance from the exhaust-heavy air. It suddenly struck Beth that the grey colour on his skin wasn’t dirt, it was
him
– and it was growing deeper the stronger he got.
He’s feeding off the city
, she thought,
like a plant, living off the sun.
She groped for a term and came up with
Urbosynthesis.

The undergrowth gave way to a clearing filled with gravestones where life-sized statues stood sentinel. Granite monks stood side by side with scholars in stone togas. The Virgin Mary bent over her baby. Two marble angels wrapped their wings around one another as they kissed, and a statue of a blindfolded woman held a sword above a grave with the inscription:
John Archibald, justice. Hanged 1860.

There were almost as many statues as headstones, arranged in a rough circle. A stone monk stood at the heart of the crowd, his heavy granite cowl shading his eyes. He held one finger in the air and his lips were carved slightly
open, as though the sculptor had captured him telling a joke – a dirty one, judging by the lascivious twist to his mouth.

‘Well.’ Fil gave a resigned sigh. ‘We’re here.’

‘Where’s
here
?’ Beth asked. ‘Apart from the set for a bad vampire movie?’

‘The garden of my mother’s temple.’ A wry smile flickered across his lips. ‘Say hello, Beth.’

‘To who?’

‘To your ghosts.’

‘What are you saying, Filius – that we’re dead to you? I’m hurt.’

Beth started. The voice was, well,
gravelly
– and it had come from the stone monk.

Fil bit his lip sheepishly and said, ‘Petris – I didn’t recognise you.’ He looked at the statue. ‘Have you lost weight?’

‘Indeed.’ The voice coming from the statue sounded parched. The monk’s stone lips didn’t move. ‘Off the face. Little vandals.’

‘Oh, a chisel job? I— I like it, very sleek. It makes you look …’ He tailed off, looking awkward.

‘Yes?’

‘Um …’

The statue’s sigh was like tumbling shale. ‘Clearly,
tact
wasn’t one of the lessons I actually managed, by some Herculean effort, to hammer through your skull. Who’s the young lady?’

The statue hadn’t moved. Its stone eyes, behind their
cataracts of moss, didn’t twitch. But now Beth could
feel
it looking at her.

‘Have you fallen foul of that lamp-lass’ temper already, Filius?’ the statue went on. ‘Or is the young prince sampling daytime delights as well now?’ His tone was heavy with innuendo.

‘She’s just a friend, Petris,’ Fil said, ‘and I can’t imagine how I failed to learn tact from someone as well-versed in sticking his nose in as you are.’

‘Alas, if only I still had a whole nose to stick in,’ Petris said mournfully.

‘Yeah,’ said Fil, ‘you ugly bastard.’ He stepped forward and threw his skinny arms around the statue. Beth half expected the granite arms to enfold the boy, but they remained fixed in place as he hung around the stone monk’s neck with his legs kicking in the air.

A grating laugh issued from the statue’s mouth.

‘Beth,’ Fil said, ‘this is Petris. He taught me nearly every dirty trick I know.’

‘Er … Pleasure.’ Beth looked quizzically at the statue. ‘I thought you said your teacher was called Gutter-something?’

‘Gutterglass. Different teachers for different things. You get a lot of tutors when you’re royalty. Glas was like an uncle to me, and an aunt, and she did a bang-up job. This filthy old priest here’ – he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the statue – ‘was responsible for my – uh –
moral
education.’

‘I did my best to show you the difference between right and wrong,’ Petris said grandly.

‘And “wrong” you thought best shown by example.’

The statue spluttered, and Beth could see little flecks of saliva wetting the stone around its mouth. ‘That’s not fair, Filius.’

‘No? That garbage gin nearly killed me.’

‘You were a damn sight more interested in that than nineteenth-century gaslamp theodicies,’ the stone monk said snippily. ‘I was merely doing what any good teacher would and linking the lesson to what you knew.’ His tone grew conspiratorial. ‘Can you honestly tell me you didn’t have a religious experience with that magnetic massage I taught you? If you didn’t then your electric girlfriend certainly would have.’

Fil laughed, but he blushed a little too. ‘Admit it, you were a terrible influence.’

‘Maybe, but a superb taker of confession. You never held anything back.’

‘There was no point! You were there with me while I was sinning!’

‘I just teach the rules, Filius; I never claimed to be good at following them.’ A coughing sound came from the statue’s immobile mouth and little clouds of powdery grey dust puffed out in front of his lips.

Fil winced, but said nothing.

‘Anyway,’ Petris said when the coughing fit had subsided, ‘not that it isn’t marvellous to see you, you little terror,
but why in Thames’ name are you here now? I haven’t had word of you in months.’

Behind his back, Fil had both hands on the haft of his railing. His grubby thumbs started to rub over one another. ‘I—’ He glanced back over his shoulder at Beth. ‘
We
need your help.’