A dropping away of buildings.
Neon-filled darkness to either side.
A broad street widening out into a bridge, an empty nothing over
water; on the far side, railway bridges, glassy reflective buildings set all at odd angles: Hay’s Wharf and Tower Bridge to the east, Southwark to the west, Southwark Cathedral poking up above the offices and pubs, the
Golden Hinde
sitting in its dry dock, bow just pointing out over the water, the curve of the London Eye sticking up over the edge of the tallest building, the numberless clock on Waterloo Bridge, the white blade of the Millennium Bridge, the tower of Tate Modern. Please, dear God, please any higher power which may or may not be watching over us, this is the moment to do your thing, please . . .
London is a dragon.
Protector of the city.
Light, life, fire.
London Bridge in the small hours of a winter morning.
No traffic, no buses, no taxis, no lorries. Just an empty street, lit from above by a long line of silent, sad lamps, and by red floodlights illuminating the sides of the bridge. Railings cut off the pavements from the road. I staggered down the side of the left-hand lane, clutching my satchel to my side, gasping and reaching out for the railings to carry my weight. Someone had filled my eyes with empty honeycomb, thick, solid, airy, sticky, all these things at once and none of them natural; the pain that should have been in every part of my skin was just a distant prickling of pins and needles, too much blood between our fingers, some bastard shot us! Too much blood . . .
Where was Oda?
Where was Earle?
Where were the Aldermen?
Digested from the inside out.
Poor Loren alone in her room in Camden.
Vera dead and turned to paint.
And Nair had screamed, just like little Mo had screamed, just like all those dead men had screamed when they were still human to do it.
Give me back my hat.
Light, life, fire.
Protector of the city.
A dragon’s pet.
There was a woman standing alone in the middle of the bridge.
She was looking east, towards the place a sunrise might pretend to be in a few hours or so.
Her hands were turned towards the river, her face towards the sky.
She was breathing in the river air. That beautiful, calming, relaxing, cooling river air, sorcerer’s balm after a hard day with the voltages; time and stillness and movement all rolled into one breath on the bridge.
The palms of her hands were girly pink, the outsides deep, dark brown. Her hair was woven in plaits so tight it must have hurt, had no choice but to hurt.
We staggered towards her.
She didn’t notice.
Her eyes were closed, her heart beating in time to the running of the water below the bridge.
Ten paces, five, three, two.
We stopped a step away from her, leant against the side of the bridge, gasping for breath.
Penny Ngwenya didn’t move, didn’t blink, just stood on the bridge and smiled at the smell of the river.
I said, “Miss?”
Nothing.
“Miss?!”
Nothing.
I fumbled in my satchel, pulled out the traffic warden’s hat, smearing its surface with my bloody fingertips. “Miss Ngwenya?”
A flicker on her face. Her head half-turned, her eyes half-opened, distant, but still there, looking at me, even if she didn’t entirely see.
I held up the hat. “Penny Ngwenya?”
Her eyes went to the hat in my blood-covered hands. Her fingers twitched, her mouth opened to let out a little, sliding breath.
I reached out with one shaking hand, took her hand in mine, pressed the hat into her fingers, closed them, unresisting, over the black fabric. “I brought you back your hat,” I said.
A moment.
A pause.
She didn’t seem to understand.
Her eyes fell slowly down to thing in her hand. “My . . . hat?”
“Yes. I heard you lost it. I brought it back.”
“Do I know you?” she asked, turning it over in her fingers, looking at the yellow “Penny” written inside.
“No,” I replied. “My name’s Matthew.”
“You . . . you look . . .” she began, voice a million miles away, eyes fixed on the hat.
“I happened to be passing,” I said carefully. “No trouble.”
“We . . . haven’t met, have we?”
“No,” I replied. “Just strangers.” And then, because up seemed to be wanting to give down a try, and down was feeling flexible enough just this once to let up have its way, I slid down against the side of the bridge, burying my fingers into the cold concrete in case sideways wanted to try the same trick on me. I saw the edges of my vision start to cave.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Penny, dropping down with me, trying to hold me up. “You’ve . . . you’ve been . . .”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “It’s fine, just fine, it’ll be . . . I had to bring you back your hat, you see?”
“You’ve been fucking shot!”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Don’t move, OK? You’ll just make it worse, I’ll . . . I’ll call an ambulance.”
Her attention had for a moment been taken from the hat, but as she reached into her pocket for her mobile phone, her eyes skated across the fabric again and she froze, mouth slightly open, staring at the little, old-fashioned, ugly black dome.
“Where did you . . .?” she stumbled.
“I heard it was important to you. I thought, since I was in the area, I could bring it back.”
“Why would you do that?”
“It’s your hat. It seemed the least I could do.”
“But . . .”
She had the hat in one hand, was fumbling for the phone with her other.
A voice said, “Get away from him.”
She looked up.
So did I.
A thing that might have once been Mr Pinner stood in the middle of the road. His suit was a raggedy painted thing of badly torn paper trailing down from the thin, uneven ripples of his flesh. His neck was bent in and then sharply out again, like a crumpled old Christmas cracker, his trousers were wrapped up tight in old receipts and bits of soggy newspaper. A thousand cuts had been torn in his flesh, from which dribbled little pieces of paper falling away into the street. One eye had been slashed straight through and was now oozing blue biro ink down his cheek. When he spoke, his voice was a distorted, lumpy thing.
He said again, “Get away from him. Penny. You can’t trust him.”
She stuttered, “Who are you? I don’t know you.”
“I’m Mr Pinner,” he replied. “I’m here to help you. I’m a friend.
He’s
out to use you, Penny. He wants to hurt you.”
“But . . . he gave me back my hat . . .”
“Don’t you wonder how he got it? A little prick on a bicycle stole your hat!” Mr Pinner was shouting; I had never seen that before. “A little arrogant cocksure prick stole your hat and pedalled away laughing and you really think some random stranger would go to any effort at all to bring it back, that he cares, that it matters anything to him? There’s no reason for him to help you: just another fucker in the street, another guy you can’t trust, another harmless man who at the slightest word is going to hit, or stab, or shout, or spit, or do all the things these pricks do because they can, because they’re fucking strangers and you can’t trust them!
Get away from him!
”
Penny looked down uncertainly at me.
Mr Pinner blurted, “You think he just
found
your hat, Penny? There are eight million people in this city! You are tiny, you are
nothing
to them, an infinitely small part of a great machine too big to ever be understood; people don’t care! You can walk down the same street a million times and never see the same faces, never be recognised, never be appreciated, smiled at, laughed with, loved,
known
, because you’re just a nothing to them, another person who happens to live in the city, getting in their fucking way, so why should he bother? Why would anyone ever fucking bother with you?
“You’ve seen it, Penny Ngwenya, stood on the edge of the hill and looked down on the city and known you can just lift up your toes and fall for ever, tumble for ever into the void and no one will ever notice, no one will ever even know! Cretin! Maggot! Scum! Stupid kids in their fucking hoods, stupid fuckers pissing in the street! He’s part of it! He’s come here tonight to hurt you! He’s part of the fall, one of the men who laugh when your back is turned, part of the insanity!
“Give me the hat, Penny. Give it to me, and we can end this. Just like you wanted to, we can end this tonight, just give me the hat . . .”
Penny half-rose, turned towards Mr Pinner. I grabbed her hand as she stood, pulled her back towards me; she jolted at our touch, as if surprised to find us still there.
“There’s no such things as strangers, Penny Ngwenya. Not in the city. Just other Londoners. Not strangers at all.”
She looked at me with a pair of perfect oval eyes in a perfect oval face.
She smiled, and carefully pried her fingers away from mine, wiping the blood off casually on her trousers as she rose.
She stood up, straightened, and turned towards Mr Pinner, who held out his arms towards her, paper frame twitching and shuddering as if short of breath.
She raised the hat in her hands, turned it, dome up towards the sky.
Mr Pinner smiled.
She lifted the hat towards him, and then past him, up in a long, careful arc, and without a word, put it down on her head, twisting it into a familiar, comfortable position.
She let out a sigh, closed her eyes, seemed to relax over every inch of her body.
Mr Pinner made a little sound. It was somewhere between a choke and the rustle of old crumpled paper.
Penny looked up, stared Mr Pinner straight in the eye and smiled.
She said, “You weirdo psychopath. Fuck right off out of here before I call the fucking police, I mean
Jesus
.”
Mr Pinner whimpered. He staggered away from her a few paces, his arms falling limp to his sides. “But I . . . I . . .” he stammered.
“Seriously, I’m not shitting around. I mean, where do you get off with this crap?”
“I meant . . . I meant it for . . . I only wanted to . . .” he gabbled. Paper drifted from the tears in his arm, popped out of his left ear, dribbled down his right nostril in thin pale strands.
“Look, I’m calling the police, seriously,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a mobile phone. “You can do all the shouting and spitting you fucking want; I’ve got community support officer training and I’ve had it up to
here
with weirdo psychopaths thinking they can get away with it. I mean, look at you! You wanna go to jail, arsehole? You wanna? Because I swear that this is the last time some testicle of a male mouths off at me! Look! Dialling!”
She dialled 999, held the phone to her ear.
Mr Pinner held out his hands imploringly. His thumb started to unravel, long white sheets spilling down from his fingers like a mummy’s bandages. “Please,” he whimpered, “I only wanted to help, I was . . . I was . . .”
Paper tumbled down from underneath his tattered trouser, spun in the river breeze.
“Yeah, police and ambulance please. Yeah? Yes, that’s the number. Penny Ngwenya. Yes.”
Mr Pinner’s eyes fell on me, blue biro ink dribbling out of the tear glands. “I’ll . . . I’m . . . I’ll . . .” he croaked, but his mouth was filling with fat reams of paper, choking on it. His jacket had come undone to let out files and sheets that tumbled from his thinning chest like it was skin shaven from a corpse.
“You still here?” she asked, holding one hand over the receiver of her phone.
Mr Pinner tried to speak, couldn’t, his jaw was melting away into spinning thin shards. His shoulders dribbled down his back, his legs crumpled and began to give way, revealing thin tubes of cardboard, that bent and twisted beneath the little remaining weight of documentation on his torso.
“Hi, yeah, London Bridge. The middle of the actual bridge. There’s this guy . . . looks hurt . . . yeah, this other guy’s been mouthing off at me, but . . .” Penny’s eyes rolled over the skeletal paper remains of Mr Pinner. “. . . but I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem. Yeah. Ambulance. Yeah.”
“I . . . I . . . ah . . .” gasped Mr Pinner, and then there wasn’t a throat left to gasp with, a body left to gasp.
Bits of limp paper drifted by me.
I caught a few in my bloody fingertips.
. . .
buy now and save £25 on the initial
. . .
A water meter fitted to your system can greatly reduce . . .
. . . ISA investment profit projection of . . .
- GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS -
The last piece of paper to fall from Mr Pinner’s body was half the size of a sheet of A4, covered in small formal text. It said:
Penalty Charge Notice
Road Traffic Act 1991 (as amended)
(Sections 48, 66, 75, 77, Schedule 3 and Schedule 6)
Notice No.: 0215911Date: 03-10-2009
Time: 15.19
The Motor Vehicle with
registration number: L602 BIM
Make: Volvo Colour: Green
was seen in: Dudden Hill Lane
By Parking Attendent no.: 11092
Who had reasonable cause to believe that the following
parking contravention had occurred . . .
I let the paper go, watched it drift out over the edge of the bridge, spin into the air, fall down into the darkness above the river. Penny, standing on the edge of the pavement, lowered her phone and said carefully, “That guy just turned into paper.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “How about that?”
“Um . . .” she began.
“The city is a dragon, Penny Ngwenya. A great big, mad, insane, dark, brooding, furious, wild, rushing, fiery, beautiful dragon. Do you know what the spleen does?”