Fil raised his tea cautiously back to his mouth, darting furtive glances at Beth to check that he was doing it right.
‘They pull us apart like an overfull binbag,’ he replied. ‘Probably.’
‘Oh, so we’re only
probably
totally boned.’
‘Exactly.’
There was a long silence.
Neither of them had mentioned the kiss. That moment on Canary Wharf was stranded in time, like a lonely shout that needs to be taken up before its echoes fade, or be forgotten.
Be careful of that kiss
, Beth cautioned herself harshly. They were at war. She thought of her dad, frozen in grief at his kitchen table. How could you ever let yourself love someone – yes, she let herself think the word
love –
when they might not survive the night?
Fil was engrossed in a one-sided staring contest with the last remaining HobNob.
‘It all seemed such a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘Simple: meet a girl, round up a ragtag army, carry out an all-out assault on a skyscraper God.’ He gazed at the biscuit. ‘Discover HobNobs.’
Meet a girl
. Beth stared carefully ahead and said nothing.
‘Fair point,’ he said into the silence, ‘put like that it sounds like a really terrible idea. But it’s at least half your fault. I was all for scarpering. I’d’ve been out of here faster than a sewer rat down a pipe. It was you got me to stay.’
Beth’s smile was tight-lipped. ‘That’s me, a siren call to self-destruction.’
He gazed out over the water for a while, and then, later enough that it was almost a non sequitur, he said, ‘I’m glad, though. Glad I did stay.’
Beth looked at him. ‘Even if it was a terrible idea?’
‘Even if.’
Beth studied the paving between her feet as though following the cracks might show her the branching of her possible futures. She splashed the dregs of her tea onto them and stood up. ‘Fil,’ she said, ‘a word?’
She mouthed goodbye to the Blankleit and led Fil through the treeline, under the cover of the massive beeches. Fallen leaves crunched under her feet. Finally, she turned to face him. Her heart was clamping up hard in her chest, but she saw he already knew what she was going to say.
His expression was neither wounded nor indifferent, both of which she’d feared. Instead, his grey eyes were intent. ‘This is about last night?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You think it was a mistake.’
Beth swallowed a boulder of empty air. ‘Yeah.’
‘You think – what? It’ll distract us? It’s too risky?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You think we should just be friends?’
‘Yeah.’
He stepped in close to her. The frost-cloud of his breath washed over her face. ‘You wanna do it again?’
‘Yeah …’
There was supposed to be a
but
somewhere on the end of that, but somehow Beth never got it out, because his lips with their rough pavement grain were already against hers, and she was tasting the heat of his tongue. Their hands rose, and they held each other’s heads as though the kiss were a promise they were holding each other to: a promise simply to be there, a promise to survive.
But they couldn’t keep that promise, could they?
Beth wound her fingers into Fil’s hair and pulled him back, hard, and he came away from her, gasping. She looked at him, r
eally
looked, into his wide eyes, and saw him for the
trap
that he was. His voice sounded in her memory:
Reach is going to kill me
. It was like standing above some unimaginable precipice, her toes curling over the edge. This was too much of a risk. An image flashed into her head, a floor littered with photographs. Now was the time to stop. Little detonations were filling her veins. The blood in her ears was artillery-loud. Now was the time to back away. Her head was ringing.
Now
.
They fell in an awkward tangle of limbs into the chill leaves, their hands hovering uncertainly on one another’s
bodies. For a fraction of a second Beth thought she wouldn’t have the nerve. Then she pushed her fingers inside his clothes and as her hoodie rode up she felt the shocking heat of his palms pressed up against her bare skin. Then he was tugging at her T-shirt and she was pushing it off over her head. And it was happening, it was happening so fast, and she was going to let it happen—
No
, she thought,
no, she was going to
make
it happen
. She pushed into him and kissed him, determined to be bold, guiding his hands to her bra.
Unfortunately he struggled a bit with that, and she broke away after a few moments. ‘Christ’s sake, Fil, it’s a bra, not a Rubik’s cube.’
‘A what?’
‘A puzzle—’
‘Puzzle? You mean like a test? I have to pass an
exam
for this?’
‘It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,’ she laughed. ‘Here, let me.’ She unhooked it and then hesitated, suddenly aware of him looking at her in a way that made her shiver all over. She’d never simultaneously wanted and not wanted something
anything
so much as for him to look away …
Okay
. In her head it sounded more like a prayer than a decision.
Okay
.
‘Take your jeans off, then,’ she said as she wriggled out of her own. Nerves made her voice haughty and she winced inwardly, but he didn’t seem to mind.
He didn’t look away, of course, and neither did Beth as he stripped. She studied the play of his muscles under the skin intently, and the sharp lines of his hips. It would have been rude not to.
They stepped towards each other tentatively, like new dance partners. Beth blushed as they each put cautious hands on the other’s hips, and she saw his face colour too. They broke into enormous, jaw-straining grins.
‘Wow,’ he said.
A sound came through the trees: a commotion, blowing the silence apart. She could hear shouting, and the crackle of branches broken by running feet. From overhead came the thud of churning air, stirred by heavy stone wings.
Fil dropped to a crouch, pulling Beth down with him. For a moment Beth was certain they’d been busted, and a burning tide of embarrassment went through her, halted abruptly by the chill realisation that it was much more likely they were under attack. She cocked her head, probing with her newly sharpened senses, listening for the enemy.
And then she heard Ezekiel’s voice over the beat of his wings, pealing out again and again with evangelical joy: ‘It’s the Cats! Filius, come quickly, it’s
Fleet
! The Cats are here!’
Fil stopped rooting through the undergrowth for his clothes long enough to turn to Beth with a sheepish little shrug, but she cut him off before he spoke.
‘Later,’ she said, vibrating with a mix of relief and aching
disappointment and a kind of anticipation that made her knees feel like untied knots. ‘I know.’
Four lithe feline shapes threaded their way over the grass, following the indirect and mysterious paths that cats always do. Pavement Priests and Lampfolk and Masonry Men all stood back in awe as the four-footed legends slid through their ranks, imperiously swishing their tails.
Names were whispered, passing through the ragtag army like a breeze through rushes, names from never-quite-forgotten stories:
Cranbourn, the Herald
.
Wandle, the Dream-guide
.
Tyburn
, they whispered fearfully,
the Executioner
. A black Cat bared its teeth as it passed.
Fleet …
Fleet!
Now and then one of the Cats would stop and stretch and rub itself along the inside of somebody’s leg, and that fortunate soul would immediately collapse in religious ecstasy.
Fil shoved his way through the milling crowds into the clearing where the Cats circled. Beth raced in a fraction of a second behind him, pulling her hoodie over her head, only to find she’d got it on the wrong way. She clawed the hood out of her eyes in time to see him fall to his knees.
The mangy tabby at the head of the group bounded into his scrawny arms.
‘Fleet,’ he whispered, ‘
Fleet
– dear Thames, we’ve needed you.’ The tabby purred back at him, loud as a motorbike.
The other Cats, one black, one black and white, and a Persian grey with a chunk of her ear missing, rolled on the grass and chased the rippling light spilling from the Blankleit skins. The Persian sat down, put its hind leg behind its head and licked itself clean with long strokes of its bright pink tongue.
‘Um, Fil,’ Beth said, watching the infamous feline war party with growing unease, ‘aren’t they just, you know … cats?’
He didn’t answer, but an indignant voice from inside a bronze of a World-War-Two fighter pilot shouted ‘Blasphemy!’
Beth ignored him; she was following Fil’s gaze. He was looking past Fleet, past the eager soldiers, straining to see into the dark. Beth knew what he was looking for: a shimmer of vast estuary water skirts, a smile of church-spire teeth, hands that had cradled the fabled Great Fire. He was searching for some sign of the One these feline bodyguards ought to be
protecting
.
But as they stared together into the darkness of Battersea Park, only the darkness looked back.
Paul Bradley stood on the dead tracks and gazed at the walls of the abandoned railway tunnel. His mouth was drier than the brick dust in the air. He’d run from picture to picture, street to street, scouring walls, phone boxes, billboards – anything that Beth might have used as her impromptu canvas. Once he had grown accustomed to her style, he could instantly spot when graffiti was hers.
He’d followed a running ostrich here, a flamenco dancer in a black hat there – there must have been hundreds of them, always half-hidden, coyly poking out from behind bushes or imprisoned behind drain-gratings. Their sheer number shocked him.
He was surprised at the jealous ache that suffused him, for the time his daughter must have spent with the pictures, then sneered at himself,
Why? You were hardly clamouring for her attention at the time, were you?
Exhausted and enervated, he’d entered a kind of fugue state, aware of the pattern of every manhole cover, the thin shadows cast by the naked branches of every tree. Beth’s
paintings had been hidden in the random jumble of Hackney’s mass of graffiti like code words in a cipher text, but now he knew how to decrypt her. There were places where the pictures were more numerous, places where he’d
felt
her presence more strongly, and he’d followed those feelings like a pilgrim.
Eventually the trail dead-ended at the fenced-off abandoned railway. He had threaded his fingers through the wire loops and gazed blankly up the length of the tracks, to where they disappeared into the tunnel under the main road, when he had spotted one of the stones between the sleepers had been painted with a tiny, stylised black rabbit, scurrying into its burrow.
Paul had smiled, wedged his toe into the fence and started to climb.
Inside the tunnel he’d found a torch, still working. When he’d switched it on and seen the pictures he’d swayed a little on his feet – so many fragments of Beth’s mind – but none of it
meant
anything to him. In that moment of panic, an impossible distance seemed to stretch between them …
He remembered fretting when she’d been late learning to talk, lying awake, imagining his daughter grown but still emitting the same baby-gurgles, trying to work out how he’d cope if he couldn’t
talk
to her. Marianne had laughed at him, but his fear had felt so
real
.
And now, here in this strange deserted tunnel, there was so much violence in the shapes on the walls, as though
Beth had discharged all her anger into the bricks. Here was a black bull charging, there a snake coiled around a clarinet, and skeletons and stars and butterflies danced across mountain-ranges, and—
Marianne
.
He exhaled hard, as though he’d been punched. Marianne, his wife,
Beth’s mother
, appeared over and over again, smudged and pale as a ghost.
The other graffiti was a garden of bright neon dreams, and amongst it, the white chalk lines that brought Marianne to life were so unassuming that he’d almost missed her – he would never have believed that, but he’d
missed
her.
He looked again at the charging animals and flying planets and soldiers and monsters, and this time he saw the battles Beth had fought, the world she’d escaped into, and the memory, etched in chalk, that haunted it.
He reached into his jacket pocket and his fingers brushed paper. He pulled out a crumpled paperback from his inner pocket. Yes, he understood.
He exhaled hard into the tunnel’s chill. ‘Beth,’ he began, ‘I’m so—’ Then he stopped and bit the apology back. When he said sorry, he promised himself, he’d make sure she heard it. He looked up at one of the chalk sketches of Marianne and swallowed.
‘I’ll find her,’ he said. This time his voice didn’t waver. He knew he wasn’t the first person to have spoken to that image of Beth’s mother, and warmth spread through him. For the first time since she’d disappeared he felt like he
understood a little bit of the girl who had drawn her, over and over again, in this dark, safe place.
He turned off the torch and started for the mouth of the tunnel. His wife’s chalk gaze watched him go. Despite the tiredness settling like silt in his limbs, he found he could manage a shambling run. He had a lot of ground to cover in his search for fresh paint.
‘Is this sign of her favour enough to satisfy you, Stonewing?’ Gutterglass’ speech was oddly formal. ‘Our Lady of the Streets has sent her most trusted warriors to herald her arrival.’
They were gathered inside a shuttered ice-cream stall in the middle of the park. Ezekiel had knelt in front of his prince as soon as he’d landed, leaving his stone robe riven with cracks. Beth guessed that the gesture of respect was as much for the threadbare tabby Fil was petting as for the Street-Prince himself.