Tuesday Falling (17 page)

‘What refuge?’

‘The one off Charing Cross Road, do you know it? That’s what I meant by the other end. I was used to seeing where they’d run from. Not to. The refuge for teenage runaways. It was because of what happened there that I left my job.’

I never think of my body as becoming something; only staying the same. Only not becoming something else.

Too big.

Too weak.

Fertile.

I turn on my laptop and set up a program to search for any new reference to me. Actually what I’m searching for is any
old
reference to me that’s been newly uncovered, but all that’s out there is what’s happening now. I shut it off and fire up the
World Service
, lie back down and let myself drift away to the shipping forecast. I may have no fucking idea what they are talking about, but it makes me feel safe and warm. I reckon when I die this is what I’ll hear; a beautiful voice telling me which way to go.

Or maybe just screams.

Sleepy time now. Shut down. Night night.

***

When I resurface, the radio is talking about penguins. I listen for a while, taking in the ticks of the station. I can hear the scuttle of rats, and just below hearing, I can feel the slight changes of pressure that indicate the tubes are running. I get off my cot and power up my laptop, opening the window that monitors all the mobile activity of the drones.

Oh dear.

I click to a London news channel and there it is. The Roof Gardens, formally Kensington Roof Gardens. The reporter is standing outside the ground floor entrance, underneath the big brass 99s that sit above the doorway. There is a pop-up box in the corner of the screen showing people running about in confusion. The resolution is terrible. It is obviously footage from somebody’s mobile phone. Really, there’s no excuse these days. Every mobile phone should have a hi-resolution camera. Ones that don’t, the phone companies are just dicking you about. The camera is shaking so much it wouldn’t surprise me if one of the flamingos has filmed it. But bad as the pictures are, as stuttered as the images in the corner of the screen come to us, we can clearly see Mr Man being dragged away by some of his drones.

Honestly, between the shuddering camera, the top-notch dub music, and the video wanksta waving his gun about in confusion, I feel the urge to pull up a director’s chair and change my name to Quentin Tarentea-time. What a bunch of posturing pricks. I turn off the news and go back to hearing about the penguins. I take off my beach shoes and put on my hiking boots. I wear something on my feet when I’m asleep in case I have to wake up running, and the DMs are just too big. The beach shoes are lightweight but with a solid sole, so they do the job perfectly. I’d wear crocs, but I haven’t quite given up on life yet.

I go to my workbench. On top of it are a portable stove and a saucepan I borrowed from the department store. I switch on the stove and there is a satisfying whoosh as the gas ignites when I flip the Zippo I took off the Z-boy outside the nightclub. I close the lid of the lighter and put it in a box on the floor with all the other lighters.

They’ll be really gunning for me now. I’ve embarrassed them. They had their little meeting, like they’re James Bond or the mafia or something, and I walked right in and slapped them in the face.

Right through his little army. Right up to him and his assassin and gave them a hug.

He must really hate me now. I bet he’s got his drones searching all over London for me, tearing it apart. I bet he’s got every low-life drug fuck-up and street tally girl scanning the lanes trying to eyeball me. I bet he’s tearing his hair out, trying to get information about where I am.

Except he hasn’t got any hair.

I tap out a message on my tablet, and send it to one of the drone’s phones. I do it in text-speak so they can understand it. If I wrote it in proper English they wouldn’t have a clue what it said. I send it via a free text app rather than SMS, and beg them to let me in to their gang.

Or at least let me have some free coke or some smack.

I tell them that I’ve seen this girl, the one they’re looking for. I tell them that she’s just sitting there, like she’s waiting for someone, and if they want her, come and get her, but remember that it was me who told them where she was and I want paying.

I make up a name and sign off. I do a couple more on the same theme then store them ready to send. I weigh out an amount of potassium nitrate and sugar, mix them together, and throw them in the pan. Potassium nitrate used to be given to prisoners in their tea to reduce their sex drive. It also used to be a main ingredient in gunpowder. Now you can buy it in most garden centres as fertilizer.

Or you can steal it from a large department store.

Once the mixture has turned brown, the sugar caramelizing and the whole thing becoming syrupy, I take it off the heat and let it cool. From under the desk I bring out a few cardboard tubes I’ve saved from the centre of toilet paper rolls and use black Gaffa tape to seal up one end. I love Gaffa tape. I love the sound it makes when you pull a length off. A kind of ripping sound. On the radio the penguins have been replaced by a programme about plants growing round an active volcano. Apparently these plants have such a high level of silicates in them they should not exist.

I fill the tubes with the gloopy substance and use a palette knife to level it off. Then I seal the ends with some more Gaffa tape, and stick a fuse in. I took the fuses from some fireworks.

Actually I took the fireworks as well, then just cut the fuses in half.

I never could resist a pretty firework.

After everything’s cooled down I pack all the stuff I need in my rucksack, set up all my alarms, and head out, a ghost girl in an underground city made for ghosts.

***

To get into Seething Lane Gardens you have to go down four stone steps, worn concave by the feet of the dead. It’s a medieval street next to a medieval church in a medieval town. St Olave’s has three skulls above its entrance, just so you know it’s not fucking about. It also has the tomb of the original Mother Goose.

I love this city. It’s a thousand years old with more blood in its mortar, more history in its stone, and more stories in its streets than anywhere else I can think of.

It’s been half an hour since I sent the texts so I imagine the gang boys should be here any time now. I’m sitting in a cherry tree, hidden by white, genetically modified forever-blossom. I’ve got my rucksack strung over a broken branch just above me and I’m looking down through the petals at the street below. I’m loving the view.

Seething Lane attracts a lot of tourists. It’s one of the few remaining streets that survived from the Great Fire of London, and people enjoy coming here and feeling all olde-worlde, as if they’re living in a film or something. People of all nationalities are walking backwards and forwards taking pictures and videos of themselves and the street. Really, the amount of ambience and culture they’re soaking up, they could just take one photo of themselves against a white background and Photoshop in the scenery. Still, you never know, there might be something interesting to film a little later on.

I spot a few city boys and girls having a quiet toke on their crack pipes. They’re not too difficult to pick out; expensive suits on ghosts waiting to hatch. Since the introduction of e-cigarettes some clever entrepreneur has made an adaptation for our little drug addicts. You put your rock in and suck away and no one can really tell the difference.

At least, not until you fall over dead.

I stare at the entrance to the street. It’s not a real street anymore. More like a mock-up. It’s like a street island: it leads nowhere and comes from nowhere. A street shipwreck, with me in its mast. A boy walks into the street. He’s got on Diesel jeans, £300 sneakers and a Weird Fish hoodie. He’s talking into an android phone, and he’s scanning the street as though he’s the fucking Terminator. I nearly fall out of the tree with fear. He sits on a bench. The woman who’s sitting there takes one look at him, gets up and leaves. Smart girl.

He’s looking for the informant, or for me, or for trouble, and he’s looking hard. The tourists are moving around him like he’s a disease. I bet he’s loving it. Actually, maybe I’m being hasty. Maybe he’s a nice boy. Maybe he’s looking for Wally. I see he hasn’t bent his right leg when he sits down and guess he’s probably got an iron bar down his trousers.

Maybe not a nice boy, then. Maybe a fuck up merchant.

Five more come in and start working their way up the street. The assassin’s not with them. He’ll be doing something cool and assassiny somewhere else. I haven’t set up any cameras because every tourist is a filmographer these days, ready to upload straight to the inter-grid and on into a million brains.

I don’t have to wait for them to start something, this time. Just turning up is enough. I watch as one of them grabs a little Goth girl by the chin and stares hard into her face. She’s Japanese, and could be anything from seventeen to thirty years old. He pushes her away and she falls to the ground.

All the tourists are heading for the street exit, being clocked by a couple of hard boys guarding the arch above the stone steps. Once the street is empty they start checking everywhere, looking for the informant, or me. After a while they stop trying to look hard and kind of mill about, not knowing what to do next.

Jesus fucking Christ. Here I am, sitting in a bloody tree, on a street walked down by Samuel Pepys, looking down on a bunch of rape machines disguised as hurt robots, wondering how I can make them notice me without actually shouting ‘Cooee’!

Fuck it.

I pull on my extremely cool aviator goggles and face mask.

I light the fuse and throw down my first smoke bomb.

Tally-ho.

‘Well, I hope you still feel special, even though she didn’t send it to
you
this time.’

DI Loss and DS Stone are watching footage from Seething Lane Gardens on the TV set up in the incident room. They are sitting at the back, no longer central to the investigation. Since Suzanne’s DNA was uncovered on the cigarette butt found outside Candy’s, Loss has been in a box; a spectacle for speculation.

The viewpoint of the street is from the entrance. It has been taken by a tourist and the quality is just about as good as the BBC. Loss guesses it has been taken by a Japanese tourist, and then wonders if he is being racist. It shows a group of hooded youths, some carrying iron bars, milling around, looking both menacing and bewildered at the same time. Nothing happens for a few moments, then a slight movement of something spinning, and then thick white smoke starts spilling out of the ground, as though it’s just been opened up and steam is coming out.

‘She’s in the tree,’ Stone mutters. The youths stare at the smoke bomb as though it just magically appeared there. Slowly, they edge towards it and then jump back when another one appears a few feet away.

‘She’s in the tree, fuckheads. Jesus. Did these boys forget their brains or what?’ Loss takes his eyes off the screen and looks at the detective by his side, possibly for the first time. At least, properly.

‘Is everything all right, Stone?’

‘Sir?’

Stone is transfixed by the action on the TV. He is grateful for the ‘sir’. His role, somewhere between expert witness and involved party, has thrown his identity crisis into overdrive. The fact that Stone is treating him just the same is helping him stay on the ground.

‘Only I’ve noticed that you seem to be swearing quite a lot and I wondered if everything’s all right?’ When she silently turns and looks back at him for a moment, Loss wonders if he has crossed a line. He can’t get his daughter out of his mind, and he has an urge to hit something and go to sleep at the same time. He suspects he’s having some form of breakdown. Then Stone smiles at him. ‘No sir. Everything’s fine.’ Loss can’t work out the sentence. Does that mean everything is not fine, but she’ll be all right? Or everything is fine and stop asking? He stops thinking about it as another three smoke bombs hit the ground and the gang of hooded youths start coughing.

And then one of them screams and falls to the ground.

‘Here we go again,’ Loss whispers, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette that isn’t there. A ghost cigarette.

I’m not very good with the throwing knife: all I did was smash him in the head with the hilt. Oh well. There go my cool points. I light the fuse that connects up to the fireworks then jump down to the ground. As I land, the tree above me explodes. Twenty exhibition fireworks all going off at once makes quite a spectacle. The bad boy nearest me looks up and I slash him across the throat with my knuckle knife, circa 1914 vintage. While he’s gurgling away I kick the next one in the crotch and start running. There’s swearing and spluttering all around me and I can hear the sound of police sirens a few streets away. I pick up the throwing knife. The drone I threw it at is still on the ground. I stick it in his thigh and move on. There’s sparks raining down everywhere, mingling with the smoke, and the screams, and the coughing.

Lucky I’m wearing my mask and goggles really, isn’t it? There are two left in front of me so I start running towards them.

‘Bloody hell, it’s
Apocalypse Now
.’ The team gathered in the police incident room have gone quiet as they watch the carnage unfold on the screen. It’s hard to see anything clearly after the tree explodes, even with the expensive equipment that was used to film it. The whole scene is wreathed in white swirling smoke and shimmering crackling stars.

‘I’m pretty sure I saw a rocket,’ quips Stone. Loss ignores her, concentrating on the figure running around the gang members. In the oversized goggles her face could be an insect’s, or some alien being’s.

‘One swipe and she’ll be down. That’s all it would take. Why would she risk it?’ he mutters.

‘Well that’s obvious,’ Stone says. ‘She’s laughing at them. She’s making them look ridiculous in the eyes of their peers.’ On the screen, two of the gang boys dive to the ground as Tuesday runs towards them. ‘Plus, according to our friend Drake, she thinks she’s dead already. Who could possibly touch her?’.