The Light Ages (25 page)

Smallish, round and white, his plump face topped with a pudding-bowl fringe, and there was an innocence about Master Mather, with his reedy voice, the waddling layers of his flesh, which at first’ had filled me with the same impulse which his neighbours must have felt, which was to prick his jolly bubble, to press my finger and puncture those doughy folds to let out whatever happy gas he seemed to be filled with. Master Mather, who lived alone because Mistress Mather had left him long before, was a blue-overall-wearing member of the Cleaners Purifiers and Aspurgers’ Guild, and he loved his work. One rainy day of the previous autumn in the 98th year of this Age, he invited me in to show me.

Soot greys and grass stains; mildews and nicotines; spillages of Béarnaise or brown perspiration rings, Master Mather filled the cramped rooms of his house with secret packages of the damaged laundry he smuggled out from Brandywood, Price and Harper, the big, gold-fronted dry cleaner along Cheapside where he plied his trade. Swallow-tailed jackets and cummerbunds and feathered boas and christening heirlooms; he could recite the life history of an item of clothing merely from the scents and textures of its folds. And as he fingered an ember-blackened strip of lace and explained the milks and soaps in which he’d simmer it, I’d realised why Mistress Mather had probably left him. Of their nature, most guildsmen were blinkered about their work, but Master Mather took his enthusiasm to the level of a happy mania. Still, sleepwalking through Houndsfleet each morning after several hours wrestling with another article for the
New Dawn,
avoiding the alleys, and returning home on sore feet each night too tired to dream, I’d come to regard my visits to Master Mather as bright islands of relief. I once even called in on Brandywood, Price and Harper, and pinged the polished bell. A shrug, a smirk, and he was summoned, beaming as always, happy to show around even a rent-collecting mart like me. The further back you went though the humming workrooms of an establishment which had cleaned the vestments of London’s archbishops for these last two Ages, the finer the clothes became. A fire-burn on a blouse so intricately pearled it looked like a fairy suit of armour. Ink spilled on the glowing white dress of a near-suicidal bride-to-be. I’d never thought before that the Cleaners’ Guild would have much use for aether, but, with the judicious chanting of the right spell, even such ravages could be unmade. Here were open books and chalked signs I was sure I wasn’t supposed to see. Singing with a tremulous sound like a cracked flute, Master Mather swirled his hands over a copper vat, coaxing eager schools of bloomers to swim up to him through the glowing fluid. His plump arms, face and chins were oddly translucent in the gloom. His was a world which could be perfected in pirouetting swarms of empty clothes. The stains were his, and he absorbed them. As I finally walked back along Doxy Street I could even see them drifting within him, grey and pellucid as the innards of a fish.

Last Christmas, I’d received a handkerchief from Master Mather; triangled green and crimson, it felt newer than it must have done when it left the mill’s presses. Touching it made my skin ache. I put it away uneasily; to him, the whole world was simply so much laundry, and the temptation was always to fling him bodily across the room into a cloud of undershirts, to yell at him and pound him with your fists, to make him understand that grubbiness was part of existence.

‘Brought this home with me yesterday.’

In his dim front room, just a shifterm after, he’d produced a silk box. Someone had written on it in a child’s hand, but with enough residual aether for the words to stand out like the twirl of a cigarette.

CLEAN THIS.

‘Could be quite difficult, don’t you think?’

As the lid creaked off, I expected a powdery waft of Brandywood,

Price and Harper’s air, but instead, nested unmistakably in the pure white of a dress shirt, was a moist human turd. Other boxes and presents and packages came for Master Mather from his workmates through the dark early shifterms of the New Year. Tar and piss and manure, all adorned with messages, scrawls, obscenities. I had to ball my fists as he muttered about how he’d clean them. But Master Mather’s life had probably always been like this, or so I told myself as I managed to ignore the jelly-like luminosity which increasingly seemed to infuse his flesh; the nudges, the sly words, the lunchtime sandwiches strung with saliva. All he’d done by showing me these disgusting treats was to introduce me to a deeper level of the world which he’d always inhabited. But I could feel, share, their frustration.
Surely this will bloody wake him up. This will show him how things really are.
But part of me was like Master Mather, too. The limbless beggars, the dead-eyed children, the old people who quietly froze in their chairs between one rentday and the next. Then the flower-strewn parades, the great parks, the vaulting buildings. Despite the political awareness which Blissenhawk had brought me, I often couldn’t make much sense of the world either. Was the money system really enough to explain what Master Mather’s colleagues were doing to him? There seemed to be some dark but vital underlying counterpoint to the magical song which pervaded all of England to which I was still tone-deaf.

London fell under a deaf blanket of snow. The windows of Houndsfleet grew white beards and its children, made bolder in this changed realm, scurried after me with snowballs and insults as I headed towards Sunrise Crescent one February Threeshiftday morning. A grey pall of steam and noise rose from over the rooftops from the pens of the weather-confined pitbeasts, filling the stiff, soft air. And there was talk at
Parkrise,
number 33, that Master Mather had gone to his dustbin without leaving footprints, and at
The Spinny,
number 46, that he’d made a single line of the devil’s hooves. The children showed me the evidence amid the pee-holes they’d made in his small front garden.

I banged on his door with my fist, half-hoping today that he wouldn’t open it. But Master Mather peered out. His eyes were deep and red and dark. Rot-like discoloration flowered over his face and hands. I forced myself to follow him inside, where the heaps of clothes glowed brighter than ever in the snowy light which washed through the windows as, in wheezing gusts, he showed me a heavy brown carrier bag, sagging and dripping with slurry. The message on it breathed out in glowing letters—
YOU FUCKING TROLL.
To my shame, I took Master Mather’s rent money that day just as I had on every other; the ten shilling note rinsed and pressed as always, the crowns and pennies polished. I hurried out through the dragging snow as the children’s voices—taunting, angry, another shrill part of London’s song—rang after me. I pictured some incident of inspired bullying at Brandywood, Price and Harper. Crowds of jeering faces and Master Mather’s round body spread-eagled; an aether chalice spilling pure white fluid into his mouth.

The snow had thawed and the air was almost biliously warm and bright when I returned to Sunrise Crescent to collect the next shifterm’s rent. Guildays were so common in this area that my first impression as I crossed the swampy football fields towards the row of houses was that one was being celebrated today. Little girls were bustling about the street inside great flags of clothing. Boys were tripping over the arms of suits. The mothers were out on their doorsteps as well, and they looked brighter than usual. One was wearing a puffy-sleeved dress of candystripes. Another was absently polishing a vase with a black feather boa. Ignoring my usual routine of visits, I headed straight to Master Mather’s house, but sensed as I did so a guilty withdrawing, a closing of doors. I looked up at his familiar frontage, numbered but resolutely unnamed. A house, once you come to know it, needs to change little for it to appear abandoned. I rapped his door, and heard the place echo as it had never done when it had been filled with the laundry which his neighbours had now pillaged. The notice pinned to it was rubber-stamped with the cross and C of the Gatherers’ Guild.

It wasn’t so unusual for a tenant to be thrust out from the terraces of Houndsfleet, and the reaction amongst the neighbours—be the cause trollism, disease, bankruptcy or some arcane infringement of their guild’s regulations—was almost always the same mixture of horror and relief.
He’s gone, ain’t he? Pity, but wasn’t our fault … Good riddance, I say. Poor old blighter … Never did much wrong, did he?
And—
Suppose he’ll be off to St Blate’s …

If Yorkshire and Brownheath had Northallerton, London had St Blate’s. In every sense, it was an institution, almost as famous as Newgate or Bedlam and celebrated in the sort of bitterly lamenting musical hall songs which were sung late—on in the last drunken house, although few people ever visited it.

Number 19 Sunrise Crescent was now called
Hill House,
although it stood on no hill, and I wondered today as I banged the new brass knocker and a little boy scurried off to get his mum along the familiar but strangely empty hall if its new residents had been told about Master Mather. I certainly wasn’t going to do so. And here came Mistress Williams, wiping the suds from her hands and scarcely looking at me as she gave me a damp ball of money and closed the door. I ticked my collection book and walked slowly off. After the vanished fog and that brief sense of sunny warmth, London had drifted into one of those becalmed days which seem to hang beyond time and season, when the hours extend and the traffic passes and the faces go by and street turns into endless street without anything ever changing. Summer, this coming New Age, seemed impossibly far away as my satchel bit and blistered. Although my round was less than half-done, I turned towards the estate office.

Beyond the traffic, beyond the iron bars of a counter which I was never permitted to cross, the place had the characteristic smell, part sweat, part paper, part warm metal, of well-handled money. The stuff was there in drawers, piled up in gleaming columns, bound up in rubber bands and weighed in scales like so much sugar as I tipped more of it from my satchel into the worn wooden trough.

‘Hey! That’s not properly sorted!’ A polished-trousered guildsmen scurried out of the gloom. But I’d had enough—part of me even wished that I’d kept the money, although I knew that the prison hulks or the gallows awaited those marts who risked such a thing. I threw down the satchel and collection book for good measure, and banged my way back out through the swing door.

Left with the small freedom of an afternoon to fill, and with no particular way of earning any money, I toyed with the idea of going back along Sheep Street to Black Lucy’s basement, but my article still seemed stubbornly lodged in an interminable first sentence. Contend what? And who cared? My steps, in any case, were leading me in a direction I’d long considered and put off taking. There was an odd profusion of hardware shops on this south-eastern edge of Clerkenwell, and the pans and spades and buckets hung outside them banged in the thin wind. Otherwise, the streets were quiet, and I wandered semi-aimlessly along avenues and cul-de-sacs until I saw twin weathercock turrets pricking above the chimneys. Following three sides of a bluebrick wall, I reached large iron-bound gates over-arched by soot-blackened stone which bore the dim impression of a cross and a C. St Blate’s. I pulled a bell chain and a little door set within the larger one squeaked open. Still fully expecting, and more than half hoping, that I’d be sent away, I began to explain to the woman who poked her plump brown face through that I’d known, albeit remotely, a certain Master Mather. But Warderess Northover practically bundled me in and beamed back at me as she led me down hoops of tiled corridor, her sporran of keys bouncing. And perhaps—a slide of gates, a slam of doors, a faint roar of voices—I’d like to inspect their little museum? She flung back shutters and tugged off dustsheets in a long room filled with dangling bits of iron and glass cases. Nothing was too much trouble.

‘And you
will
sign the visitors’ book before you go?’

She hefted antique chains which could have lifted a drawbridge. More ingenious were these changeling restraints from the Second Age, which seem—go on, feel, master, you shouldn’t just take my word for it—light as a feather in comparison. This little silver hoop at the end, scarcely larger than an earring, was inserted through the client’s tongue. Things of steel and leather and iron. The propped-open pages of logbooks, foxed and splattered with what might have been nothing more than flydirt. And photographs, woodcuts, engravings along the walls much like those I had once glimpsed in that book in Bracebridge library. Ironmaster Gardler here, he was one of their most famous clients. We gazed at the sepia image of something like a lopsided black spider squatting amid a trellis of ironwork. Without him, Hallam Tower would never have been built. I turned away. I’d seen similar images—and worse—flopping out from Black Lucy’s rollers in the times when Blissenhawk had been forced in his search for finance to run off what he called his ‘specials’; in London, in this Age, there was a market for everything.

We crossed a gravelled courtyard. The voices were louder here; something almost like the song of a London morning wafted out through the barred windows of the big building beyond. They were hoping, Warderess Northover confided, nodding towards the dark green vans which leaned on their shafts, that Master Mather would be making what she called
service visits
once his changed condition had stabilised. I nodded. I’d seen such vehicles out once or twice in the streets although, amid all London’s other traffic, they passed otherwise unnoticed. A slam of barred gates. Up a heavy iron stairway. Through an even heavier door. Lines of cells on either side. Once, these had been ordinary men. Now, struggling in horns and veined billows of impossible flesh, flightlessly winged and sprouting sightless eyes, they were angels awaiting a different resurrection. After all, changing could happen to anyone, or at least to those guildsmen who laboured sufficiently close enough to the real means of production to expose themselves to the dangers of aether. Guildswomen, too, although there were few enough of them here. This, after all, was what St Blate’s was for; to provide a haven, a refuge—and there was also Northallerton in the north, which I still struggled to picture, although I knew it would be much the same.