‘Oi!’
The shout sent a jolt of fear down her spine.
Gross enough
, she thought. She stuffed her stencils and paints back into her rucksack, snapped off the torch and ran. Heavy boots thudded on the tarmac behind her, but she didn’t look back, there was no point in showing them her face. She sprinted with her head down, the wind rushing in her ears, praying that the police behind would be laden down with stab vests and truncheons, praying she’d be faster.
She looked up, and panic clutched at her gut. The cops were chasing her into a dead end. The highest wall in the school reared in front of her. It backed onto the dense tangle of scrub and trees around the train tracks: ten
smooth, unclimbable feet of it. She drove her legs harder, trying desperately to build momentum, and jumped.
Her fingers scrabbled at concrete, inches short of the top, and she fell back.
Shit.
Again she threw herself at it; again she came up short. Breathlessness and despair made her chest ache.
‘B.’ A whispered syllable. Beth whirled around. Pen was running along the base of the wall towards her, her headscarf pulled bandit-style over her mouth.
‘
I told you to go
,’ Beth hissed, both furious and relieved.
‘As if. The minute I clocked this I knew you were too short for it.’ She dropped to one knee and cupped her hands.
Beth flashed her a quick grin and stepped into the boost; a moment later she dragged Pen up after her.
‘Split,’ Beth whispered as she hit the ground on the other side. She winced as pain spread over her hands; she’d landed them in a bed of nettles. ‘I’ll catch you up at the usual.’
They could hear their pursuers huffing and swearing on the other side of the wall.
One of the men panted, ‘Give us a boost!’
Pen veered to the right and Beth ran left, zigzagging between the trees. Her breath wheezed in and out, staccato in her ears. Twigs and discarded bottles crunched under her feet. A fence blocked her way, but she saw a ragged hole at the base and she dived for it, wriggling through into a looming concrete estate. She ducked down
behind a rusting old car with broken windows, gasping for breath. A train rushed over a nearby bridge, angled slabs of light rocketing though the darkness. She tried to listen past its dying clatter and her own slamming heartbeat, but she could hear no sounds of pursuit.
She rooted in her backpack for a crumpled leather jacket, slipped off her hoodie and shoved it in on top of the paint cans. Adrenalin made her legs wobble so much she staggered and nearly fell.
Nice, Beth
, she thought sarkily,
very cool. Now if you can just stop walking like a concussed turkey you might actually get halfway down the street before the Filth pick you up.
Pulling her jacket closed, she walked on, casual as she could.
Pen was waiting at the corner of Withersham and Shakespeare Roads, where redbrick terraces with fussy front gardens stretched away on both sides. As she always did when she was nervous, Pen was checking and rechecking her reflection in her compact mirror, studying for the tiniest flaw.
Beth smiled despite herself: only Pen Khan would apply mascara for a night of criminal vandalism.
The postbox Pen was standing next to was probably the most graffiti’d piece of square footage in all of London: a rainbow-riot of obscenities, slogans, cartoon animals and grotesque monsters. It was local graffiti tradition to make a contribution to the Withersham box, so last year Pen and Beth had painted themselves on in ‘Wanted’ posters, pulling
stupid faces. Those mugshots had long since been buried beneath the work of the neighbourhood’s other artists.
Beth flipped a lazy salute as she approached. Pen just stared back. ‘One of these days, Elizabeth Bradley,’ she said slowly, ‘you’re going to get me expelled. My parents will bloody disown me.’
Beth grinned at her. ‘Oh well, I’ll have done you a favour, then. You could come tagging without having to sneak around.’
‘Thanks: when I’m a homeless, starving disgrace to my family,
that’s
the thought that will keep me warm, I’m sure.’
Beth scuffed her trainer along the tarmac and smirked at Pen’s sarcasm. ‘So come live with me,’ she offered. ‘At least you could marry whoever you like.’
Pen’s lips thinned and tension crept into her voice. ‘And your grand total of two boyfriends makes you the world’s wedding guru
how
, exactly?’
‘Two more than you,’ Beth muttered, but Pen ignored the interruption.
‘My folks will help me find the right person,’ she said. ‘It’s about experience, that’s all. They know marriage, they
know
me, they—’
Beth interrupted, ‘Pen, they don’t even know you’re
here
.’
Pen flushed and looked away.
Suddenly ashamed, Beth stepped forward and hugged her best friend close. ‘Ignore me, okay?’ she murmured quietly into Pen’s headscarf. ‘I’m being a cow, I know I am.
I’m just scared your folks will hitch you to some accountant with a beige suit and beige underwear and a beige bleeding
soul
and I’ll have to redecorate the walls of East London all by myself.’
‘Never happen,’ Pen whispered back, and Beth knew it was true. Pen would
never
walk away from her. She looked over Pen’s shoulder. The sky was growing light. Telephone poles stretched down the street, their cables like reins drawing in the sunrise. When day broke, this day, and every day after it, Beth knew it would break over the two of them, side by side.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
Pen gave a fragile little laugh. ‘Yeah. Only— That was all a bit bloody hairy, you know?’
‘I know,’ said Beth. ‘That was backbone, hardcore – proud of you, Pencil Khan.’ She hugged her tighter for a second, then let go. ‘We won’t get much sleep tonight, though.’ Her neck muscles were taut and her eyes wanted to close, but still she felt restless. ‘I don’t suppose I could persuade you to skip the first couple of classes with me tomorrow morning?’
Pen nibbled her lower lip carefully, not smudging her lip-gloss. ‘You don’t think that’d make us a
leetle
bit conspicuous?’
Obvious when you thought about it, Beth conceded, but as always, it took Pen to see it. She was like a small animal, always finding exactly the right spot for camouflage: she had an instinct for anything that wouldn’t blend in.
‘How’s about we tag the rest of the night, then?’ Beth countered. ‘Push on through – I’m feeling inspired.’
Pen had told her mum she was staying at Beth’s tonight. Beth hadn’t needed to clear anything with anyone, of course. Out here in the streets it was easy to forget that she belonged anywhere else.
Pen shook her head at her own foolishness, but she unzipped her hoodie and pulled out her own spraycan. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve got some game tonight.’
They ran west into the heart of the city, ahead of the dawn, dodging between hoardings with peeling posters and boarded-up shop windows.
Beth crouched beside a pile of broken concrete next to some roadworks and sprayed a few black lines. To most people they’d look like tar or shadows; you had to be in exactly the right spot to see the rhino, formed by paint and the edges of the concrete itself, charging out at you. Beth smiled to herself.
The city’s a dangerous place if you don’t pay attention.
She’d left pieces of her mind like this all over London, and no one else knew where.
No one, except maybe Pen
.
She glanced over at the taller girl. When the two of them swapped secrets it wasn’t like the hostage-exchange Beth sometimes saw with other girls. Pen genuinely cared, and that meant Beth could risk enough to care, too. Pen was like a bottomless well: you could drop any number of little fears into her, knowing they would never come back to haunt you.
It started to rain: a thin, constant, soaking drizzle.
Pen wrote her poems on kerbs and inside phone boxes, romantic counterpoints to the pink-and-black business cards with their adverts for bargain-basement sex, carnal specialties listed after their names like academic degrees:
CALL KARA FOR A WICKED TIME: D/s, T/V, NO S, P OR B
‘… you might be the puzzle-piece of me,
I’ve never seen.’
‘That’s gorgeous, Pen,’ Beth murmured, reading over her shoulder.
‘Think so?’ Pen eyed the verse worriedly.
‘Yeah.’ Beth knew eight-tenths of sod-all about poetry, but Pen’s calligraphy was beautiful.
The sun slowly bleached the buildings from the colour of smoke to the colour of old bone. More and more cars passed them by.
‘We should head,’ Pen said at last, tapping her watch. She frowned, considering something, then added, ‘Maybe we should catch separate buses. We don’t normally arrive at school together – it might attract attention.’
Beth laughed. ‘Isn’t that a little paranoid?’
Pen gave her a shy, almost proud smile. ‘You know me, B. Paranoid’s where I excel.’ She led the way out of the narrow alley and they slipped into the hustling crowd.
Pen took the first bus.
Beth felt like a spy or a superhero, sliding back into her secret identity as she waited for the next.
Maybe it was one of his worms that found me, nosing through the thick sludge at the edge of the river, or perhaps a pigeon, wheeling overhead, from one of the flocks that nest on top of the towers. All I know is that when I wake, Gutterglass is crouched over me.
‘My, my, you’re quite the mess, aren’t you?’ the old monster says gravely. ‘Good morning, Highness.’
He – Glas is a ‘he’ this time – looks down at me with his broken eggshell eyes. Old chow mein cakes his chin in a slimy beard. His rubbish-sack coat bulges as the rats beneath it scramble about.
‘Morn—’ I begin to say, then the pain of the burns washes over me, choking off the words. I inhale sharply and wave him back. I need air. He’s nabbed a tyre from somewhere and his waist dissolves into a single wheel instead of his usual legs. Lithe brown rodents race around the inside, rolling him backwards.
I grit my teeth until I reach a manageable plateau of agony, then, groggily, I take in my surroundings. I’m on a
silt strand under a bridge on the south side of the river – Vauxhall, judging by the bronze statues lining the sides. The sun shimmers high in the sky. ‘How long?’ My throat feels as tight as a rusted lock.
‘Too long, frankly,’ Glas replies. ‘Even the foxes came in before you did. Do I need to remind you that you are my responsibility? Assuming, of course, that
responsibility
is a word that your grubby little Highness comprehends? If anything happens to you,
I’m
the one who’ll have to answer to Mater Viae.’
I shut my eyes against the harsh light, biting back the obvious retort.
Mater Viae
, Our Lady of the Streets, my mother – left more than a decade and a half ago. I hate how Gutterglass
still
bloody nearly genuflects whenever he says her name.
‘If she ever comes back,’ I say, ‘do you really think she’ll care which particular pile of London crap I sleep on?’
‘
When
she comes back,’ Glas corrects me gently.
I don’t argue with him, because it’s not nice to call a man’s faith ridiculous.
Most mornings you can find him (or her, if that’s the body Glas makes that day) at the edge of the dump, looking towards the sunrise over Mile End, waiting for the day when stray cats march in procession down the pavements and the street signs rearrange themselves to spell Mater Viae’s true name: the day their Goddess returns.
Air sighs out of his tyre and he sinks down beside me. He opens the black plastic of his coat and chooses one of
the syringes strapped there. He’s been raiding hospital bins again. He slides the tip into my arm, depresses the plunger and almost immediately the pain ebbs.
‘What a mess,’ he mutters again. ‘Sit up. Let’s take a look at the damage.’
I creak gradually into a sort of shell-shaped hunch, which is the best I can manage. Neat cross-stitches lace my cuts together; the needle that made them has been thrust back in Glas’ arm and the leftover thread is waving gently in the wind.
‘Wow,’ I croak, fingering the stitches, ‘I really must have been out cold to not feel those.’
‘Dead to the world,’ Gutterglass agrees. ‘Not
literally
, though, thanks in no small part to yours truly, and in no part at all to you.’
I have to use my spear as a lever to stand up. I can still feel the electric buzz in the iron where I stabbed the wraith. Glas dusts me down, wiping at my cheek with split penlid fingers. Glas is oddly fastidious – I guess having to make himself a new body out of the city’s rubbish every day means he knows where it’s all
been.
‘I was hunting—’ I start to tell him about last night, but he isn’t listening.
‘Look at you, you’re
filthy
—’
‘Glas, this Railwraith—’
‘Doing these stitches has
destroyed
my fingers,’ he moans. ‘Have you no heart at all for a poor old rubbish-spi—’
‘Glas!’ I snap, a little harder than I mean to, and he
recoils and shuts up, staring at me reproachfully. I exhale hard and then just say it. ‘The wraith got loose from the tracks. It got free.’
For a long moment the only sound is the patter of the breeze on the surface of the river. When Glas finally speaks, his voice is flat. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘Glas, I’m telling you—’
‘It’s not,’ he insists. ‘Railwraiths
are
electricity: its memory, its dreams. The rails are their conductors. They can’t survive away from them for more than a few minutes.’
‘Well, take it from the son of a Goddess whose bony arse it kicked around the block,
three miles
from the nearest stretch of track:
this one can
!’ My shout echoes off the bridge’s foundations. I squat down, trying to work the tension out of my temples with my fingertips.
‘Glas, it was so strong,’ I say quietly. The memory of the fierce white voltage of its teeth is seared into my skin. I shiver. ‘I wounded it, but— It must have left me for dead. I’ve never met a wraith like it. It didn’t even try to run, just came right at me …’