The Light Ages (19 page)

I shrugged. These were wealthy men by any normal standards, and, citizen or not, I was still conscious that by the standards of my Age I was nothing but a guildless mart living in a great and uncaring city. But in this, in everything, I turned to Saul for guidance.

‘You see this?’

Saul had borrowed—in the changed sense that we used the word—a box of chalks which an unwary warehouseman had left too close to a window. He scratched a large white square on the tarpaper roof.

I nodded.

‘Well, that’s you and me. And this …’ He drew an arrow from the square, and then a big circle beside it. ‘This is all we produce.’

‘Just us?’

He waved a hand, startling several gulls. ‘I don’t mean
just
you and me. I mean the whole great mass of the working citizens of England.’

I nodded again. I already knew that you didn’t have to live in a city to be a citizen. I knew, in fact, that you didn’t have to do anything beyond being born, although, like some strange food, the idea still left an odd aftertaste after I had swallowed it.

‘And this—this other square here represents the high guilded.’ It was a smaller square, drawn through the sticky tar. ‘And this .. He made a marginally smaller circle.
‘This
is the amount of our labour that the high guilded take from us ..

The squares and the circles and the arrows multiplied across the roof as the shadows of the gulls floated over them and Saul struggled to explain the complexities of the labour market. The bright heat, the blazing sky, those scraps of shade passing across my face too quick to be felt, and all of us citizens trapped below it. But I loved Saul and his muddled explanations. For my whole life, it seemed to me now, everything had been a total puzzle to me. Bracebridge. The mysteries of the guilds. The death of my mother. My father’s disappointments. But here, dusted on a hot roof, fragmentary and chased by shadows, was the beginning of an answer.

On other lunchtimes, Saul would take out a pencil, peel off slivers of pale wood with a knife. With a few lines on a scrap of borrowed paper he could somehow capture the entire view which Tidesmeet spread before us. The coiled ropes and the endless spars and funnels, the cages of the cranemasters, the octagonal fortresses of the hydraulic towers which drove the lifts and hoists, the great pepperpot tower of the Dockland Exchange, all the buildings which crowded west across London like ruffled birds on a perch. He’d hold the drawing up, smile, then tear it into shreds. Nothing, after all, could really belong to anyone. Not here. Not in this Age.

‘Tell me more about Brownheath. I mean, about living in the countryside. What’s it really
like ..

Saul somehow imagined that, because I hadn’t been born in a huge city I must have spent my early life in some sweet-scented barn surrounded by amiable cows; a sunny place where life was somehow far kinder and easier than it was for the poor citizens of London. But I didn’t want to disappoint him, and distance soon lent even Brownheath its own kind of charm. Saul’s ambition, which he shared far more freely with me than any concrete facts about himself, was to run a farm—not, of course, that he would
own
it—and I found it easy enough to help him in his vague plans by embroidering my mother’s stories of her early life with byres and haystacks and flower-strewn meadows, although for me rural life had always seemed to consist of backache and manure.

Another yellowed scrap of parchment, a resharpened pencil, and Saul’s nicotined hands conjured up undulating pastures, winding rivers, avenues of stately trees; cartoon visions of a country landscape from a city dweller who was proud never to have been beyond the allotments of Finsbury Fields. His cows looked like horses in those days, and he could only do one kind of tree. But it was incredible to watch. Over the smoky dockyard clamour, you could almost hear the birds singing, smell the fresh-mown grass. He pinned the pictures he was most pleased with to the beams in our lair in the rookery. At night, as the hot wind dragged over the Easterlies, they rustled around us like the leaves of a forest.

There was a fire blazing in the Caris Yard one summer’s evening, and the street musicians had combined to form a discordant band. The prim guild charities with their stalls and leaflets had long hitched their skirts and gone back to Northcentral, the soapbox prophets had returned to their chapels, and even the speakers on the Rights of Mankind had vanished in flurries of leaflets, fights and accusations. But there were always fresh arrivals; day or night, the far Easterlies seemed to exert a strange attraction to the rest of London. A braying herd of young guildsmen in caps and narrow-waisted suits from one of the marine colleges had arrived for no obvious reason other than their drunkenness.

‘Bet you do!’

‘Bet you
don’t.’

‘Do!’

‘Don’t!’

I was sitting beside Saul, but for once I was no longer the prime focus of his attention. His back was turned from me as he engaged in this music hall call-and-response with a girl called Maud. I was used to seeing her about. Although she was scarcely older than me, she ran, almost single-handed, a nursery in a barn-like building which lay on the downward side of Caris Yard, where the women of the parish could leave their babies whilst they went to gut herring. Maud was hardly a pretty girl—she was thin, and her pale hair stuck out like a dry floormop even when she’d attempted to comb and tame it with ribbons as she had tonight—but she was feisty, quick, and resolutely independent. I’d also always thought her defiantly unfeminine until she’d turned up in this yard wearing dyed straw sandals and started this do-ing and don’t-ing with Saul.

‘You
tell her ..

‘No it’s
not.’

‘It’s true, isn’t it, Robbie?’

‘You know what—I really don’t care!’

Disappointed with both of them, I shot Maud a look of what was probably intense hatred as I stomped away from Caris Yard. Around the next corner, there was a bar. Anywhere in the Easterlies, and just around the next corner, there was always a bar, although it was hard to see exactly what was inside this one and the prevailing smell which emanated from it was of gin, piss and vomit. But I was flush tonight—we’d just borrowed a whole display of keyrings—and I’d found that drink was a useful way of bringing the illusion of forgetfulness at those times when, as even happened in that first happy summer in London, both the present and the past seemed to conspire against me.

I sat in a dark corner, nursing a thick-rimmed tumbler which, true to its name, wouldn’t stand up on its own. The dimly shaped citizens around me coughed and chattered in that strange accent of which, Saul’s being an oddly prim example, I could still turn my understanding off and on at will. Outside, somewhere, a pump kept clanking and a pig or some other animal seemed to be screeching its death throes. The men in these parts kept kingrats for fighting, and one was displayed, its hood stretched out in front of the bar’s only lantern as it squealed and snapped, turning the whole room into a blood-red vision of some minor hell. A discussion about the sharpness of its teeth developed into a desultory argument, then an even more desultory fight. Sometimes, London seemed almost eerily quiet, its earth impossibly still.

‘Why you sitting here alone aren’t you be?’

I turned to see that the source of that tumble of vowels had sat herself down beside me.

‘Finished your drink couldn’t get ourselves another we?’

The girl’s face was powdered an aethereal white within which her dark eyes and mouth and nostrils looked like the holes punched in a mask. Her hair was black, too, and she smelled of patchouli and a need of washing. We sat there somewhat dumbly, she with her drink and me with mine.
Got a new one, Doreen?
She gave a shrill snarl at that comment, reminding me of the kingrat. I was drinking freely, spending my keyring money so successfully that the barman lumbered over to serve us from his jug.

This Doreen had been making a furtive motion in her lap which I’d thought was a nervous habit. I now saw that she was clutching a painstone, the nearly worn-out facets gleaming dimly like grit in the bottom of a well. There was a ready market for these in the Easterlies, just as there was for everything.

‘Keeps me safe in case there’s trouble and the stories like you hear.’ She blinked her black-rimmed eyes and offered the painstone. ‘Want you to try it might as well?’

I’d never touched one before, and it felt smooth and warm and—yes—somewhat soothing. Like laying your hand on the head of a friendly dog. But the drink was better. I returned to it. ‘Where is you from?’

I think I told her. My accent was probably as impenetrable to her as hers was to me, but unlike Saul who only cared about my rural fictions, she actually seemed to take an interest in my talk of moors and factories and the pounding earth. At some point, I discovered I needed to get up and piss. Wobbling outside, bumping a table and raising a scatter of yells, I leaned against the wall that seemed to be most used for my purpose. When I’d finished, I swayed around, and saw that Doreen had come as well and was just straightening her skirts.

‘Walk now shall we?’

I stole glances at Doreen’s white face as we swayed arm in arm past lighted windows. It was hard to gauge her age. She’d dressed herself up in a way which suggested a young woman trying to look like an old one. But whatever else she was, she was stopping me from falling over as I rambled on about changelings in crystal houses as a pink summer moon swam around the rooftops.

‘Here that’s like creepy is that don’t to talk about things that. Like Owd Jack and he’s out nights …’

I swayed to face her. ‘Did you say Owd Jack?’ We were now alone in a back alley. ‘What do you know about …’ I suppressed a liquid belch and leaned against the mossy brick for support. ‘Him? Tell me—’

But Doreen had pushed against me as if to smother my questions. ‘And what about this is you like?’ she cooed. There was a surge of cheap velvet, gin, sweat, mothballs, and my flailing hand made contact with something soft. It was too dark in the alley for me to be able to see, but I was starting to understand.

‘You want you need perhaps.’

My hand was steered down towards the portion of a woman’s anatomy which I’d only ever had a chance to study in classical sculptures, and which I scarcely expected to be hairy, or wet. I was still recovering from my surprise when Doreen’s hands went to work on my trouser buckle, burrowing inside to find the erection which certainly wouldn’t have been there if I’d had time to think about it. The rest of the business was quickly done as Doreen parted the necessary bits of her clothes with surprising proficiency. The full London moon hung over her shoulder, riming with pink and gold the slates of the houses which fanned across the Easterlies towards Ashington in back-to-back rows. Imagining that this was what people did on such occasions, I attempted to kiss her, but my jaw was rudely knocked away. Then we were finished.

‘That’ll be then ninepence going rate.’

Amid everything else she was saying, I kept detecting references to money. The moon looked amused now as it hung over the chimneys and the effect of the drink was changing. I knew about dollymops—they were impossible to avoid in the Easterlies—but I’d failed until then to make any connection with what Doreen and I had been doing. Taking my puzzlement as an attempt at bargaining, a one-sided argument ensued, with Doreen shouting things at me which I didn’t need to fully understand to get the gist of. Nine whole pennies was more than I had left after the drinks I’d bought, but I was happy to offer what I had left in my pockets, and to put up with the surprisingly hard punch she threw at my shoulder in a final flounce, just to be rid of her.

I wavered back towards Caris Yard, then up the ladders and stairs of the rookery. When I reached our roofspace there was no sign of Saul in his usual corner. I stood for a while at the archway, feeling lonelier than I had in all the time since I had arrived here. This was it. London. Hallam Tower, rising at it always rose, flashing misty bright. And the guildmasters sleeping in their houses. The poor in their hovels. Tidesmeet. Stepney Sidings. Dockland Exchange. The cranes. The funnels. The distant snow-white hills of World’s End. The swooping, murmuring telegraphs. The greatgrandmasters, even, in their palaces. The spires of the churches, and the endless, endless factories.

Saul was uncharacteristically subdued one summer morning as we wandered the quiet markets up by Houndsfleet. It was a relief to get back to the roaring tramtracks of Doxy Street, where large guildsmen, hotly dressed in suits and hats and knotted ties, barged uncaringly past us. Then he turned without explanation into a quieter road. Here, at the furthest end of a cul-de-sac, behind stalky masses of untended privet, stood a gabled house. Taking the alley beside the dustbins, he worked open the back gate and ducked through a maze of underskirts on washing lines to enter a brown kitchen. A woman dressed in little more than a vest and bloomers was frying an extremely late breakfast.

‘We’re not open—’ She saw Saul, let out a shriek, ran over to hug him. ‘Saul Duxbury! Where have you
been?’
She studied him admiringly. ‘You’ve
grown
so. What have you been
up
to?’

I watched as Saul and this woman patted and admired each other. Even in the unadorned state that she was in now, she was very pretty, with black wavy hair and fine white skin. I did the obvious calculation and decided that she couldn’t possibly be his mother.

‘I suppose you’ll want to see Marm,’ she said finally as my mind churned with possibilities. What was she—actress, dollymop, dancer? ‘She’s just upstairs. Same as ever ..

A stairway, a landing. The air grew thick with the smell of old and greasy carpets and stale toilet water—and, beneath that, a sharp, medicinal odour of burning. Saul knocked lightly on the door at the far end of the top flight of stairs.

‘I
told
you
—
’ a quavering voice began.

‘It’s me, Marm …’ Tentatively, he stepped inside. ‘Saul.’

‘My darling!’ A big woman in a bright dressing gown swept herself up from the window couch of a crowded room to engulf him in breathy giggles. The two of them squirmed and wrestled for a moment as I stood in the doorway. Then the woman’s face, round as the moon’s and almost as mottled, studied me over Saul’s shoulder.