The Light Ages (23 page)

‘It’s
really
true, then?’ Sadie muttered as we spiralled again, intricate as clockwork, across the shining dancefloor. ‘All those stories Anna’s told me over the years …’ She had an easy confidence with her body; a plump substantiality, I decided with the air of new connoisseur, so unlike Anna’s airy lightness. At some point all the lights were turned down and every door was flung open, and I realised as we swept out into the darkness that many of the evening gowns were threaded with aether. It was a beautiful scene as they all began to glow. I seemed to be hovering high over everything on this starstruck night, looking down on the ballroom which was almost invisible now in the darkness, so that the shining, dancing shapes of the women floated unaided above the river.

Eventually, the evening faded. Tired and footsore, I passed people retching over the railings into the water, and sniggering couples straddling each other in hidden alcoves. The older and more staid contingent had already departed for their beds, and the air inside the ballroom smelled faintly like the sleeve of the dress I had sniffed in the hotel; of sweat and wine, stale smoke and perfume. The band ended the final tune with ironic discord. Ribbons and spillages of wine and squashed food and cigarette butts smeared the dancefloor. A tall, eager young man with a weak blond moustache pumped my hand and introduced himself as Higher master—something-or-other. He gazed at me for a couple of seconds, blinking and puzzled, then retreated.

Sadie giggled. ‘You’re popular tonight, Robbie. Yet the thing is, nobody really knows who you are. You could be a thief, a murderer ..

‘I can be, if that’s what you want.’ I suppressed a burp. ‘If you really want to hear—’

‘Here
you both are.’ It was Annalise, still looking entirely unwilted.

‘I think Robbie here was just about to tell me all your secrets.’

‘You should never believe a word anyone says when it’s this far past midnight. Especially not Robbie.’

‘And here was I expecting him to disappear on the first stroke of the clock.’

I gazed about me at the women fanning themselves and swinging their shoes from their toes as they rested their feet, at the men with ties awry, buttons undone. They looked ordinary now, just bodies which happened to be encased in soiled but expensive clothing which the eyesight of seamstresses had been sacrificed to make. Sadie sat down on the mezzanine at the band’s abandoned piano. She plonked, semi-aimlessly, at the keys.

‘Come on Anna!’ There were voices all around. ‘You do this better than any of us ..

There was a general murmuring of assent as Anna Winters stepped to the podium and tucked in her dress. She looked puzzled at first as she studied the keys, and I wondered if she really was able to play, or if this too wasn’t a part of the charade. But surely that sour aunt of hers had encouraged her to study music; I could still hear the scales she had had to practise echoing along the damp corridors. Then a chord rippled out, eerily serene, and then another; cool scatters of notes which shivered down my neck. Voices stilled. The notes seemed to hesitate and stutter, never quite becoming the melody you expected of them; always beautiful, yet pushing at the edge of confusion and silence. But of course Annalise could play—what was I thinking of? Even all those years before, she’d played for me on that frozen piano in that room in Redhouse, the recollection of which seemed to quiver and break for a moment against the vivid sense of that non-existent aunt with her house beside the waterfall.

Standing alone as the crowd of young people drifted closer around Annalise, I could feel myself receding. What secret game, anyway, had I been playing? And who
were
these people? What did I know of them, and what should I care? Of course, it was easy to envy their composure and smooth accents, but that was the very trap that Saul had warned me about, and which the guilds laid for us all, offering these bright glimpses though guildhouse doorways and into shop windows of a world which, of its very nature, could never belong to more than a parasitic few who feasted on the blood and sweat of the many. Balling my fists, I turned across the empty dancefloor and headed outside and east along the embankment.

Morning light was already beginning to haze the horizon. The air was sharp, breezing in from the sea, more salt than freshwater. A small ceremony was taking place as two guildsmen, fine in the dark green apparel of the Ironmasters’ Guild, exchanged their duty baton. I looked over the railing, and saw how thin the embankment’s stanchions were; a feat of impossible engineering. Aether here was everything. The draining of all dreams.

‘Robbie, wait!’

I turned. Annalise was running out from the ballroom. Her dress was the same colour—without-colour as the rising mist and she seemed to have almost as little substance as she came rustling up to me.

‘I didn’t want you to go without speaking.’

‘Well …’ I shrugged. ‘Here I am.’

‘And you
did
ask, didn’t you? You really did want to know about my life.’

‘There was so much you didn’t tell me, Annalise … Anna. Your name for a start. About that old house. That aunt. But I seemed to know it all anyway. Isn’t that strange?’

‘I have to protect myself.’

‘From what?’

‘The truth. A certain kind of truth, anyway. What do you think those people in that ballroom would say, if they knew that I was … ?’ She paused. A dark well that I longed to touch formed in the hollow of her throat as she swallowed. Behind me, grey in the mist, loomed London. And the river pressed on, the heedless water laughing and chuckling beneath us. I felt a ridiculous urge to be away from Annalise, to get on with my life and change the world and find my destiny. And yet my heart ached—that anatomical condition really did exist. I thought of that day at Redhouse, of us two children wandering its glittering corridors. Now, I seemed to be wandering in another kind of mansion; one within which no matter how many times I negotiated the same passageways and turnings, I always remained lost.

I looked down at myself, the patent shoes, the trousers seamed with werrysilk, the buttons and fine linen of my shirt. ‘And now I’ve lost my best old clothes back at that hotel you dragged me to…’

Annalise smiled, and seemed to draw fractionally closer to me through the mist without physically moving. It was like a soft fire, the warmth which seemed to come from her flesh. And she seemed so womanly in this grey light. That hollow in her neck. The down of her cheek. A seagull rose, its wings beating the first currents of morning air. Our eyes followed it as we wondered what to say next. I wondered about Saul, too, and about Maud, and the many stories of their day they would be waiting to tell me back in Caris Rookery, tales of ordinary life to which I couldn’t possibly contribute. Who, after all, would ever believe me, even coming back in those ridiculous clothes? Yes, I’d risen far to be here, standing on this dawn-lit pier outside the giant sea urchin of a ballroom with a lovely woman, yet I knew enough to understand that my rising was entirely illusory.

‘Annalise, have you ever thought of what happened back in Bracebridge? There was a time when the engines stopped beating. I think it might have something to do with the both of us …’

Both of us … Bracebridge …
The words seemed to echo back at me. I’d intended them as a gift of sorts, some knowledge which might lead to the beginnings of understanding, but it was plain even as I spoke that I was making a mistake.

‘I’m sorry …’ Still, I continued. ‘But I’ve
seen
things, Annalise. I’ve had—I don’t know—these visions, dreams ..

Her whole presence, her eyes especially, seemed to shrink and darken. It was as if Annalise was pure aether, a wyreflame about to be extinguished by the sun’s gathering light.

‘What makes you think I come from Bracebridge, Robbie?’ she hissed quietly.
‘This
is my life. Here ..

I’d lost her entirely. Her eyes were black as that gull’s, and she was breathing with animal rage. She was strange and terrible to me then, a savage creature veiled in a dress that swirled as if all that remained of the night had rushed into her. Roseate sparks played over the water as the rim of the sun lifted from the horizon, and fragments of it flashed in the corner of her eye, then trickled down. For a moment, that tear was the only thing human about her. Then, she re-gathered, re-condensed. She was a beautiful young woman in a silk ballgown.

‘I’m Anna Winters. Can’t you see that?’

And I realised then what the truth was—that Anna herself believed the lies she had spun about her.

‘What is it?’ I muttered, stepping back in shock, disgust. ‘What
are you?’

Moments later, I heard voices, and a cluster of figures emerged from the pillared doorway of the ballroom along the pier. Bright young things, trailing ties and collars and bottles. They were calling for her with almost desperate need.

Where’s Anna … ?

Anna …

Look, can’t you see … ?

She’s there …!

‘I’ve got to go.’ She fished a handkerchief from some hidden pocket of her dress, and dabbed her eyes, and blew lightly at her nose, and gave me a sort of brave smile that girls of her class give which both mocked and acknowledged the situation. She looked just like her friends again, but better, more real, more beautiful. Anna. Annalise. It was I, not her, who was the stranger here. So I gave a wave and enjoyed my own small moment of mystery as I turned and walked off down the pier. All the buildings of London were still cast in fizzing shadow. But, as I headed towards them, they began to glint and catch in the morning’s first light.

C
LACK
BANG
CLACK
BANG
.

PHYSICAL FORCE OR MORAL FORCE?

Some might argue that the debate which has long been waged between those who believe that violent upheaval is not only necessary but inevitable and those who contend that…

But contend what? From the glistening lines of watery ink, my eyes wandered across the basement printshop. Black Lucy flapped and turned, flashing her wet rollers as next shifterm’s edition of the
New Dawn
was birthed. It was around six in the morning and the light was a smoggy mixture of what little of the grey spring dawn had penetrated the barred high windows and the sooty blaze of the printshop engine. CLACK
BANG
CLACK
BANG.
The sound in here was enormous and the light was worse than useless, but I still found that, balanced on a stool before a scarred workbench, I could make my best progress with an article. CLACK
BANG
CLACK
BANG.
I felt as if I was feeding Black Lucy, producing the words which Blissenhawk would typeset for her to squeeze out between her steel and rubber plates. And from there, the damp bundles of print would be trussed up in string, tossed on wagons, sold, lost, confiscated, borrowed, argued over, eaten out of, nailed in torn scraps to toilet walls and, above all, read. There was always a special sense of purpose when a fresh edition of the
New Dawn
was being put to bed. It was the time when the feeling that we were close to a New Age was most palpable; when Black Lucy, stretched to and beyond her capabilities, was most likely to crack a platen, when Blissenhawk most needed my help, and when the guilds, the police or the landlord were most likely to come barging in with fresh notices of prohibition or eviction.

Who contend that …
The paper before me, off-white even in the best light, seemed scarcely lighter than the trails of my soaked-in ink. I’d ruin my eyesight doing this, as Saul had often warned me, but at the same time, I quite liked the fading insubstantiality of these words, and the gritty ache behind my eyeballs which came from my work of these early mornings. I didn’t hold any great illusions about my skill as a writer—Blissenhawk surreptitiously tidied up the more serious crimes I committed against the English language before he printed them—and I found that it helped not to have anything too sharp and precise staring back at me. The words were there, they were gone, and next shifterm there would have to be others. Beyond them, beyond the arguments and the fights and the lock-outs, beyond the calls to arms and the bright banners and the tramp of boots and the endless arguments in draughty meeting halls, I was sure that a New Age was awaiting, and it was an Age which could never be described in the pale terms of this old one.

CLACK
BANG
CLACK
BANG.

It had been five years now since I had reached London. Just as Saul had predicted, that first summer, the sense of warmth and prosperity, had been an illusion. London, England, was a far harsher place. Winter had come, and the ancient buildings of Caris Rookery turned black and wet. Life had thinned and emptied as many of its inhabitants headed for the workhouses or to relatives in the countryside. I grew a fever, and lost track of days and shifterms amid the click of rainwater into tin cans and the wet flutter of Saul’s ruined drawings. Maud brought in pots of gruel whilst I muttered from my dreams about piers and hotels and strange aunts in thorny houses. Her face was distracted when I grew properly conscious; this same fever killed several babies in her nursery. But the weather finally cleared with my health. London grew colder and brighter. Icy fogs snaked out from the gutters and the waters of the Thames broke and froze into a jigsaw through which ferries, aethered braziers flaming at their prows, cut and re-cut their channels for the season’s lesser trade. My stomach growled and my head swam—hunger and cold simplify even your dreams, which revolve around the hot ovens of bakeries until you awaken with frost on your face.

As much as Saul had done, Blissenhawk had saved me. That first winter, in a hall we visited more for the illusion of heat than the poster nailed to the door, he was standing on a pile of boxes over a smog of breath and pipesmoke, his raw voice carrying passion above the hecklers’ snarls. For Saul, the wrongness of the world had always been obvious, but for me, still at heart a guildsman and forever puzzled at the way things were never quite how they should be, explanations chalked on a bondhouse roof would never be enough. I needed purpose, I needed structure, I needed a sense that, even though I was a mart, I could still
belong.
After his talk, Blissenhawk had rolled up his posters, scratched his curly hair, and lumbered over to offer to buy us a drink in a booming voice which, for all that he’d come from distant Lancashire, had enough of the north about it to bring in me a twinge of homesickness. He’d once been an upper guildsman, still was in the manner and the look of him. In his big, cracked-bell tones he told us of the strike he’d organised at the printing firm he’d worked for up in Preston, when all he and his fellow-workers had ever wanted was the same pay and working conditions as the panel-beaters down the road. His greasy curls quivered. The system was mad, and he’d been driven from it. Down, in fact, as far as London, but not because there was anything worth having here, but because London was the cause of most of what was bad about England, and this was thus the best place to bring it all down.