“This is all very interesting,” I said, “but where did it end up?”
“You won’t like it,” said Earle.
“Hit me.”
“Morden.”
“Morden.”
“Yes. Morden.”
End of the line. We did not like Morden.
“Where in Morden?”
“You won’t like it.”
“Worked that out already. Where?”
He told me.
And no, I didn’t like it.
Morden.
Sometimes there are places so far, so obscure, so unlikely, so implausible and so utterly . . .
. . . well . . .
. . .
Morden
. . .
. . . that there’s no point driving there.
A friend once put it like this: One guy gets on a train to Isleworth, another guy gets on a train to Cardiff, and you can bet the guy going to Wales gets there sooner.
The same rule applies to Morden. A mainline train to Ipswich will get there faster than a driver departing at the same time from Liverpool Street will make it to deepest, darkest Morden.
To even the odds a little, I took the Northern Line from Bank, right down through the strange wildernesses of Monument, Borough, Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Oval, Tooting Bec, Colliers Wood, South Wimbledon and, right at the bottom of the map, Morden.
End of the line.
The driver even announced it as we arrived.
“End of the line,” he said. “All change, all change, end of the line.”
Oda was waiting at the top of the stairs. She had a big sports bag over one shoulder. As I came out through the barrier, she said, “You feeling inaugurated?”
“Sort of. Does that make me a higher priority for the hit list?”
“There’s an argument there. On the one hand, the Midnight Mayor is a magical entity whose very existence is an insult to the works of Heaven. On the other hand, we don’t yet know how to kill
it
, the title, even though the men die easy. So there’s a school of thought that says we should keep you alive, just so we know who you are, and how to hurt you.”
“Goodie.”
“Pleased to see me?”
“Thrilled.”
“Where are we going?”
“The Aldermen have traced our blue van to a place not far from here.”
“Why Morden?”
“It’s the end of the line.”
“Does that mean anything?”
“Maybe. Come on.”
Suburbia. Squalid suburbia, to be exact. Close enough to the inner city for rich retirees seeking a rural dream in proximity to a convenient supermarket to find it unpleasant; far enough away for rich workers in the centre of town to find it unsatisfactory. Morden was a left-over borough for the ones left behind. Streets of white concrete bungalows, and half-timbered semi-detached villas with lattice windows, and panes of fake antique glass in each front door, bulbous and distorted. And, every few hundred yards, a run-down shopping parade boasting the chippy, the betting shop, the newsagent and the launderette. A few unlikely hangovers survived: here the frontage of the little shop where they fixed watches, there the open garage door of the bicycle-repair shop, across the road, the post office selling beach balls, plastic toys, birthday cards with kittens on and, if you were lucky, a first-class stamp as well.
It could have been anywhere, any town in any place; and only the intrusion of the Underground and an old music hall converted for bingo let it still claim to be London.
We walked through the streets of Morden, following the instructions Earle had given me. I counted CCTV cameras, imagined a blue van driven all the way from Kilburn sliding through these sleeping streets. The sky was grey and overcast, the wind smelling of rain yet to come, the lunchtime bakeries selling suspicious sausage rolls: quiet, business not really interested today. Oda said, “No back-up?”
“They’ll meet us there.”
“And where’s there?”
“Not far now.”
“No patience for cryptic, sorcerer. ‘Cryptic’ is something people use in order to feel smug about their knowing and someone else not.”
I sighed, but she had a point. “Earle’s people traced the van to a site near here. We think it’s where the boy, Mo, is.”
“And the boy is still important?”
“Yeah.”
“To whom?”
“To me.”
“That’s what I thought.”
We kept on walking.
“What did you see, last night?”
“What?”
“The Midnight Mayor is supposed to see things. It would be useful information for us to know what you saw.”
“The Order are the last people I would possibly ever tell.”
“But you did see something, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Is there a difference?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I tell you, aren’t I just telling the Order?”
She thought about this half the length of the street. Wheelie-bins, parked cars, delivery vans, mothers with buggies, bright red postbox, pigeons scuttling out of the middle of the street as a learner driver pootled uneasily past. Then, “One day, I’ll kill you.”
“Yup. I know.”
“Because you’re a sorcerer.”
“Yup.”
“And one day you might have to kill me.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Because I’m part of the Order.”
“Pretty much. I think you’ll probably shoot first. But what if you miss?”
“It has nothing to do with my being Oda or your being Matthew. It’s just how it is.”
“Yeah. I know.” We kept on walking. I said, “I saw a dragon.”
“Cheesy.”
“It wasn’t
Jurassic Park
. I mean, I saw a thing that looked like a dragon simply because if it had looked like itself my brain wouldn’t have been able to comprehend it. Things we do not understand . . . the brain does its best to fit them into some sort of vehicle that allows us comprehension, to simplify it down so that the part of us that thinks with words, not instincts, has even a vague chance of understanding. It wasn’t a dragon.”
“OK.”
“It was everything else. Up, down, in, out, forward, back, time, width, length, depth, stone, brick, leaf, pipe, iron, steel, gas, breath, dirt, dust, fear, anger, madness, fury, hurt, life . . .”
“You’re rambling.”
“It was the city. Too big and wild to ever understand, except to call it a dragon and hope your brain doesn’t dribble at the thought.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oda?”
“Yes?”
“There’s a reason I don’t tell
you
things either.”
And then, she smiled. It was such a strange and alien expression on her lips that at first, we couldn’t comprehend it. But it was in her voice as well, a moment, an actual moment, when psycho-bitch wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and there was just a woman with a gun in her pocket. “Matthew,” she said, “if you weren’t already thrice damned and stuck on a spit, it would almost be human that you tried.”
We didn’t know what to say, couldn’t think of anything except a sudden awareness of all the air inside our chest, that slipped over our tongue without being able to take anything but the feeblest of shapes.
Too much thinking, too much trouble.
Our solution for everything.
We kept walking, and said not a word.
And there it was.
It crept out of a corner and announced with a blaring self-confidence, “
Voilà
! Here I am and buggered if you’ll find a way round me!” It lay between two red-brick railway lines racing south towards more exciting, less smelly destinations, and on the chain-link fence someone had stuck up a sign in crude paint saying:
!!!SEAL’S SCRAP, WASTE & REFUSE SERVICE!!!
!!WASTE NOT WANT NOT!!
VAT NOT INCLUDED
Oda looked at the metal fence and said, “If this is a symptom of your sense of humour . . .”
“You make it sound like a disease. And no, it’s not. This is where the blue van went. It’s somewhere in there.”
I nodded through an iron gate.
Beyond it, a long way beyond it, and in it, and over it, and just generally doing its impression of the endless horizon, was rubbish. Every possible kind of decay had been placed within the boundaries of SEAL’S SCRAP, as if iron and steel might, after ten thousand years’ compression, have mulched down into rich black oil to be tapped. Dead cars, shattered and crushed in the vices of lingering, sleepy cranes; dead washing machines, dead fridges, pipes broken and the chemicals spilt onto earth and air, broken baths, old shattered trolleys, torn-up pipes, ruined engines with the plugs pulled out, tumbled old tiles shattered and cracked, skips of twisted plywood blackened in some flame, bricks turned to dust and piled upon bin bags split into shreds, shattered glass and cracked plastic, white polystyrene spilt across the tarmac, cardboard boxes in which the weeds had begun to grow. It seemed to stretch for miles, oozing into every corner between the railway lines, locked away behind its see-through fence and a small cabin for the delivery men to sit in and have their tea.
Oda said, “Where’s back-up?”
I looked for the Aldermen, and saw none.
“Don’t know.”
“We could . . .”
“I’ve seen enough American TV to know what happens to people who go in without back-up.”
“Jack Bauer manages.”
“You’ve watched
24
? Did you denounce that too?”
She pursed her lips. “There’s a forum on the subject, but so far, no.”
“Is this why you’re a psycho-bitch with a gun?” I asked carefully. “You saw too many thrillers?”
“I think we both know that isn’t true, and I think we both want to avoid discussion on the matter.”
No smiles now. Perhaps we’d imagined it after all.
We waited. It started to rain. This is what usually happens when you’re outside and not too busy to notice.
Oda had an umbrella in her sports pack, along with a rifle and a sword. She didn’t offer to share.
I rang Earle.
“H-H-Harlun and—”
“Ask Earle where this fabled back-up of his is.”
The stuttering boy asked Earle.
Earle said, “Swift? What do you mean? They should have been there an hour ago.”
His voice was big enough that Oda could hear it over the phone. She looked at me, I looked at her.
We both looked at the scrapyard.
“Earle,” I said, “if I should die, I want you to know that the phones will scream their vengeance at you when you sleep.”
I hung up. I figured he’d work out the problem all by himself.
Oda said, “What do we do now?”
“Did you denounce
Alien
?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just a film.”
I wagged a finger at the scrapyard, half lost now in the falling rain. I felt dirty just looking at it, and the seeping through my clothes of heavy London drizzle didn’t help. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that back-up has been and gone and it ended badly. The biggest mistake made in
Alien
. . .”
“Was going in after the monster?”
“Yes.”
“Then we should walk away.”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it? A blue van drove into the scrapyard with a kid inside who should hold the key to this entire farcical cock-up of a disaster. It didn’t come out. Now, if we go in there . . .”
“The kid is probably dead.”
“Then why not kill him at Raleigh Court?”
“You want him to be alive.”
“Yes! Of course I do! For so many, many reasons, and only one of them is mine! And if he is, and we just walk away then how stupid will we feel when everything goes splat?”
“You want to go looking for him. Now?”
“Yes.”
“In there?”
“Yes.”
“You know, I never had you for a fool.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“A coward, yes, but not a fool.”
“Wait here, then. You can save your bullets.” She sighed, reached into her bag, pulled out a gun, ugly, big and black. “Thank you,” I said.
“I know where my soul is going,” she replied sharply. “I don’t think this enterprise is helping the cause of yours.”
I was almost touched my soul had a cause to fail.
We went into the scrapyard, as the rain grew heavier.
There was no one inside the gate cabin. I found a kettle, as cold as dead men’s flesh. Our terror had subsided to a calm and level fury, as if every receptor for sense was so bombarded that the whole system had shut down for a diagnostic reboot, unable to believe this was the information it was meant to process. It gave the movement of our hands in front of us, the tread of our feet, a detached quality. We were observers, observing someone else, no more.
Rain pooled grey-black on the uneven tarmac floor of the yard. A few twists, a few turns, and all was lost behind the great piles of stuff, the endless cairns of dead equipment rising up taller than three basketball players with an acrobatic fondness for each other’s shoulders. The railway lines were quickly gone behind the tottering pyramids of broken metal, twisted plastic, rusted iron, pocked steel, rotten stuffing and slashed foam, just dead bits of comfortable lives, left over to no purpose that I could see. The rain helped keep it a bit real, tickled down the back of my neck and bit ice into my spine, oozed through my shoes - still not my shoes, still too big - and started wrinkling itchy around my toes. I buried my hands in my pocket, stuck my chin inside my collar and kept walking, scanning each great mound of abandoned nothing stuff from top to bottom in search of something softer than metal.
There wasn’t a smell, not with the rain and the heavy, sinking cold. There was a taste, salt and dry spilt chemicals, old bleach and broken bottles of things that shouldn’t have had the safety cap removed. Two turns in the maze and the sounds of the road were already a long way off; a train rumbled by distantly, wheels screeching like a maddened witch. I slipped on a torn pile of builder’s bags, sand still clinging to their inner edges; ambled past a wall of shattered safety glass, so safe that the million greenish pieces hadn’t had the heart to fall away from their friends. A fat black-brown rat scuttled away towards the gutted and half-burnt remnants of a sofa, the cushions long since vanished. I scuttled after it, bending down towards the ground and holding out my hands, cooing gentle noises.