I could see the river ahead, blue lights on the other side, shimmering reflection of a thousand shattered colours on the black racing water.
“But,” I croaked, as the lights went out behind me and the mad eyes of the dragon spun and sunk down for ever in the streets, “if you’re dead, then what the hell am I?”
The man in my old coat shrugged. “Dunno. If I were you I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
“Why not? Dead is dead is . . .”
“Is dead, yeah. But, you feel like Matthew Swift, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And remember like Matthew Swift?”
“Yes.”
“And hate like him, and fear like him, and want like him, and live like him, and marvel like him, and bleed like him?”
“Ticking all these boxes.”
“So I figure, fuck it! Sure, I might be dead,” he said. “But you’re an excellent copy of me.”
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.
They, whoever They are, say you’d go mad if you ever saw the back of your own head. Or the universe would explode or something; paradox and physics and something along these lines. I didn’t see the back of the man’s head. But he had my face, he
was
Matthew Swift, right down to the blood soaked through his clothes and the tears across his throat and chest which had killed him. But his eyes were brown, not blue, and there was no scar upon his right hand.
I said, “This is turning from the surreal to the downright sick. I want my money back. I want to reload, reboot, try again without the psycho shit!”
“You think?” he chuckled. “You should see what’s behind you!”
I wouldn’t have looked.
I really wouldn’t.
But if you can’t trust yourself, even when you’re dead, then who are you going to put your faith in?
I looked.
“Ta-da!” said Matthew, the other Matthew, the one who died and didn’t come back, because you couldn’t, dead is dead is . . .
It was . . .
. . .
dragon
didn’t quite cover it.
Dragon implies something made out of scales, with a nod in the direction of reptilian ancestry: dinosaur meets flamethrower with wings. Sure, it includes anything from fluffy through to ferocious; and we could see a case for this thing fitting into both categories. But it felt impolite to try and tie it to any particular biology. Impolite to impose anything as mundane and boring as up, down, sideways, forwards, back, in, out, here, then, there, now. It would have cocked one black eyebrow bigger than the sky above an eye madder than the tiger, tiger that once upon a time burnt bright in some acid-drenched brain; and looked at you as though to say, “Oh. So you’re
that
small.”
To say it was made of shadows would be to imply that light or darkness even got a look-in. Sure, it had crawled out of them, in the way that the diplodocus had once crawled out of the amoebae of the sea. And if a comet came from the heavens to smash it, it wouldn’t be squished, just spread so wide and thin across the earth that it would look like night had fallen down, dragging all the stars with it - before, with a good thorough shake to push the stardust off its skin, the creature slid back to its brilliant, angry, maddened shape.
If its wings bothered to do something so mundane as beat, they took a hundred years to do it; if its tongue found anything in the air worth tasting, the lashing spike as it sampled the drizzle would knock down every chimney from Fleet Street to Piccadilly; if it deigned to press a claw into the earth, the Underground trains rumbling beneath would screech to a stop as the clatter of their engines became lost in the roaring of the tunnels that cowered from its touch.
And if it found any reason, and it would have to be one hell of a reason, to bother to look at you, in its gaze were a million ghosts who pressed up against the cornea of its eye and stretched their fingers through the blackness of its pupil to try and suck you down.
And it was looking at us.
We, who were born from the chatter of mankind, from the things that got left behind in the wires, who were bigger than any city or mortal, were nothing: tiny, insignificant, footsteps walking on stones where a thousand million feet a year would walk, nothing more than ants in a heap. A blink, and our lives were over. Our voices and our footsteps and all that we were would sink into its great black belly. And, while not lost, we would be too small to merit interest from anyone other than the insignificantly small librarian interested in the history of the insignificant: little stories to comfort little people who liked to believe that the heroes mattered, because otherwise, they would be nothing but forgotten ghosts before the city could even deign to shake itself free from yesterday.
It looked at us; we looked at it.
I didn’t want to know.
I closed my eyes.
And, without us wanting to attribute a digestive system to the beast, it gobbled us up.
Part 3: The Death of Cities
In which a wife is lost, an enemy is found, and a sorcerer expostulates on the cruelty of strangers.
He said, “Fag?”
I said, “What?”
“You wanna fag?”
I considered this. We were almost tempted. It seemed to calm people down. He held out a packet in a hand that had passed the point of being dirty, into the pure cleanliness of compressed earth so ground into the skin that it’s hard to imagine it could ever rub off.
The packet said, “SMOKING GIVES YOU CANCER”.
I said, “Nah. Thanks.”
He shrugged, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a flame from a bright orange plastic lighter. He sucked long and deep, coughed, and exhaled. “Jesus,” he croaked. “Fucking fags.”
I tried to work out what was happening.
I was in a gutter.
Fair enough.
The gutter was on a bridge.
To the left was Tower Bridge, to the right was Southwark.
The guy sitting next to me had my satchel open at his feet. He’d gone through the contents. My wallet lay beside it. He’d gone through that as well, and been disappointed. Now he was offering me a fag. His face was too bloodless for a beard ever to find enough strength to grow. His eyes were lost in the soft tissue round the front brain; his neck was two long tendons on a stick. At some point, and not too far away, he’d messed around with drugs, and they’d messed back. I sat up slowly. I didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected - even my hand, burnt with the twin red crosses, didn’t pain me as it should. I looked up at a sky in which a few shy stars peeped between black cloud and orange wash, and watched the flickering twin lights of aeroplanes passing overhead.
Not dead.
Still
not dead.
Again
.
Something had changed.
Couldn’t put our finger on what it was . . .
. . . but even we knew that being consumed by a metaphysical, metamagical, meta-most-things dragon while on a semi-philosophical LSD trip for Midnight Mayors changed something.
I said, “I need to find the boy.”
The guy smoking the cigarette chuckled. “Whatever gets you off.”
“I’m serious.”
“Sure. Serious guy like you.”
On the other side of the bridge, a taxi swished by. At the end of the bridge, a bendy bus scooted past a stop. I crawled onto the pavement, as it rushed by with the racing glee of night buses everywhere.
We looked at the messed-up man and said, “Where did you find us?”
“Here,” he replied. “Lying in the gutter, looking at the stars.”
“How did I get there?”
“Dunno. Not my business.”
“You didn’t see . . . anything peculiar?”
“Fuck shit hell.”
“No, then.”
“Hey - you got cash?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Watch, credit cards, you know?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on! You gotta have something. I just need a quickie, you know? Just a little.”
I staggered up onto my feet, looked east towards where, in a few hours - quite a few hours, judging by the thickness of the sky - the sun would come up between the yellow-blue pinnacles of Tower Bridge, crawling over the Thames Barrier and sliding across the white bulb of the Millennium Dome, to where I stood.
“I could do you,” said the man with the fag. “I could do you and take your shoes when you’re stiff.”
He didn’t say it aggressively. He wasn’t laughing either.
We half-turned. “No, you couldn’t,” we sighed.
“You ain’t tough.”
“Sure.”
“I got friends who’ve done it, you know? They know places; you send the bodies down and they don’t ever come up, not as anything thicker than soup. A fiver? A quid?”
“Bigger picture,” I said, stooping to pick up my satchel, piling its contents inside, sticking the wallet back in my pocket without bothering to look if he’d taken anything, knowing there wasn’t anything to take.
“I’ll fucking do you!” he called after me, not moving from his perch on the edge of the gutter.
We walked away.
Sunrise in winter, in the centre of town. A quiet greyness rising between the streets; lamps on the edge of extinction, hovering with just that tiny sense of unease, not entirely sure if this is dawn, or dusk, or if the sun really will make it. The light brought a slow hum with it, subtle and growing, one bus on an empty street becoming one bus and a cab, two buses, a cab and a bike, three buses, a cab, two bikes and a delivery van, the streets thickening like porridge as the hot milk of the city was poured back into its veins.
It excited us, that slow wakening, like the dawn chorus thrills the druids skulking in the countryside. This was a choir playing the carburettor and the travelcard beep, tinkling on the brakes of the postman’s van and playing a chorus of ATM dispensers and Underground rattles. It made us feel awake, alive, our heartbeat in time to the turning over of the double-decker’s engine, our breath coming in the slow pumps of the blasts of wind up from the Tube tunnels, our feet moving in that sharper banker’s step that went
click, click, click
at the busy brisk leather walk of the City worker. It would be so easy, so
simple
, to turn our fingers towards the oncoming one-way streets and catch the life building in them, tangle it like water against the dam of our hands, and fly on nothing more than the pressure differential created before the sunrise, and after.
I kept walking.
London Bridge, Monument, Bank, King William Street, Cheapside, Guildhall, Aldermanbury Square.
Harlun and Phelps.
Still open, a rising buzz within its halls.
The security guard just waved me through.
Lift to the top floor, city falling away below you, only gods and great men could feel this big over something so endlessly small. Down the corridor, an office designed to make you work for the privilege of talking in it; and knock me down if Earle wasn’t there,
still
there, sat behind a desk on which a wicker tray of yoghurt, jam, croissants, toast, Danish whirls and boiling coffee had been laid, sipping from a stainless steel cup, eyes turned towards a newspaper open on his lap.
He glanced up as I entered, and for a moment, looked almost surprised.
“Mr Swift!”
“Ta-da!” I exclaimed weakly.
“You’re still . . .”
“Still not dead. That’s me. It’s my big party trick, still not being dead, gets them every time.”
“You . . .”
“Did the walk, talked the talk. Went down memory lane, Tarantinostyle. Where’s the boy?”
“The . . .”
“Boy. The boy. I’ve been out all night and I’m a firm believer in what they say about Big Brother never sleeping. Have you found the boy?”
“As a matter of fact . . .”
“Yes?”
“We just might have.”
I beamed. “Mr Earle,” I said, “I got a good feeling about all this.”
CCTV.
Someone, probably a journalist, claims that there’s one CCTV camera for every twelve people in the UK.
Or in other words, Big Brother could so very, very easily be watching you, if he had a reason. That’s the whole point, really. He, or it, or them, or best of all,
They
, can track you by ATM, by Oyster card, by mobile phone, by CCTV, by loyalty card, by licence plate, by items bought and items sold, by programmes watched and calls made, and while the Good People need not fear - for what reason should their lives be seen and judged by strangers? - the problem arises when no one knows what that reason is. No one even knows who’s going to make that choice.
There are advantages to being legally dead.
So here’s how it goes:
About a day after Nair died and a telephone rang, a blue van, registration LS06 BDL, pulled up outside Raleigh Court. Three hired men with unsympathetic faces and unstable morphic structures, friends of a friend who knew a guy called Boom Boom, got out of the back, walked up to number 53 and pulled a kid out from inside the flat. He wasn’t looking great in the few grainy seconds of footage that the Aldermen had recovered. He wasn’t looking alive. But then if he wasn’t alive, what was the point?
They stuck him in the back of the van.
The van drove south.
The congestion charge cameras caught it entering the zone around 4 a.m. They didn’t care a damn, because at 4 a.m. no one pays £8 to drive, but they were still watching, and even if they weren’t, the Aldermen had
means
. I didn’t want to know, found that I didn’t really care.
Roughly half an hour after entering the zone, the van left it, heading south from Waterloo, and was glimpsed briefly at Elephant and Castle, then caught for a moment heading round Clapham Common. No wonder it had taken a day and a half to find - too many cameras, too much watching, too many things to watch, too much to see; no one mind could take it in. A heap built on a million dead heaps built by a hundred million dead ants on the crunched-down skeletons of their predecessors; who’d track one little van?