After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (10 page)

So in the morning, when Zinhle takes the test, she nails it, as usual.

And then she waits to see what happens next.

T
HE
F
LEET RIVER STARTS SOMEWHERE UP ON THE
H
EATH
. I
’VE
never bin there, but Morris has. It’s where the North London drug barons live in
big houses—palaces, like—all ringed with steel security fences and guard dogs and
armed patrols. Morris goes there on business, to get supplies. “You’d never get in
unless they wants you in,” he says, and then he grins a bit, showing his gums, and
says, “nor you’d never get out again neither.”

Well, the Fleet starts there, up in the woods, and then it dives underground and runs
along in drains and sewers for a while, but all the time it’s chewing away at the
bricks and burrowing under old roadways till they sag and collapse, till by the time
it gets to Kings Cross it’s opened itself a nice deep channel, not that you’d wanta
swim in it. There’s whirlpools and sinkholes that’d suck you down hundreds of meters
into the old drowned underground system, and there’s lagoons where buildings have
crashed across and the water dams up and spreads around, and there’s narrows where
the river jist roars along. But the last bit, where it runs into the Thames, is tidal.
Coupla times a day, it heaves itself up and over a quarter mile or so of mud banks
and ruins, and you can take a boat on it then, if you’re careful.

Which is what I’ll tell Morris if he finds out where we are. Which I hope he don’t.
Which he shouldn’t, seeing as my cell’s switched off so he can’t call up with some
little job he wants doing, and we’ve got all day, but it’s took longer than I thought,
weaving through the channels and the shallows. Some of them rocks is sharp. I’ve seen
rusted metal rods poking out of blocks of concrete what would rip holes in the dinghy,
and then Morris would kill me. He really might. If we didn’t drown first, a’course.

Billy’s sitting in the front and I can tell he’s not spotted it yet, the place we’re
headed for—two sharp towers and a dome rising up behind the spoil heaps. I betted
him I’d see it first, but this might be the last thing Billy and me do together for
a long time, and now I kinda want him to win. So I don’t say nothing, and at last
he turns his head—and then he points, and he says, “Charlie, look!
Look!
” He beams at me, and I grin back at him like a dog, coz this is intense. We’ve wanted
to do this forever. Years. We’ve always wanted to go and visit Nelson.

I open the throttle and the dinghy scoots in over the shallows. The tide’s so high
that when we finally touch ground on a tilted shore of red bricks and shattered concrete,
we’re hardly a stone’s throw below Sint Paul’s. We jump out, drag the dinghy clear
of the water—and we stare.

Sint Paul’s is a cathedral—that’s what it’s called, “Sint Paul’s cathedral.” That’s
a kind of palace. Morris says it’s jist a big church, but it don’t look like a church
to me. Hundreds a years ago, Morris says, before the world warmed up and the Flood
began, important people useta get married in there, and then when they died, they
useta get buried; but I reckon they musta lived there too, in between. Be a waste
of space otherwise. It hangs over us like a cliff. Seagulls go drifting from its ledges.
The doorway at the top of the steps is dark as a sea cave. Billy blinks, his mouth
ajar. “Is this where Nelson lives?”

“Lived,” I say, but I know Billy don’t make no difference between
lives
and
lived
, and now we’re here neither do I: it’s Nelson’s palace, that’s what counts, where
he lived an’ where he’s buried, so I say, “Yeah. This is it. Nelson’s house. Let’s
go and find him!”

But first I look around. I’m armed with one of Morris’s little handguns, what he calls
his pocket darlings—coz I don’t want no trouble, not with Billy along. The boat’s
got
DK
, for
Damned Krew
scrawled on it in red and black, and no one wants to mess with the Krew on the west
side of the Fleet, but here on the east side is out of our territory and the between-tides
zone is teknikly no-man’s land, which means anyone can roam here but they hafta be
mad or desperate first, like Hairies and outcasts and refugees from drowned countries,
though I don’t know why refugees seemta wanta get
into
London when most of us spend our lives dreaming of getting
out
.

I look around and I see the flat gray river spreading away for miles with a far-off
cluster of boats riding on it like fleas, and closer in I see the mud banks and the
channels winding out between them, and then with a jab of fright I see a dark figure
shambling away along the tide edge, headed for a heap of rubble where a mob of seagulls
is scritching and quarreling over something to eat.

It’s a Hairy. Has to be.

Billy sees me jump. He puts his arm around my shoulders and kinda hugs me, and he
says, “Don’t worry. Hairies ain’t scary,” and I almost laugh since this is what Billy
always says, but anyway I’m not scared of Hairies, I just
loathe
’em.

“They leaves you alone if you leaves them alone,” Billy says, taking care to get it
right, because this is what Morris has told him. Billy trusts Morris.

When I was just a kid—seven or eight years old—I tried some nirv. I sneaked a pinch
out of one of Morris’s little foil packets. For a second it fizzed on my tongue. Then
it burned a hole right through to the core of me and
exploded
—like I’d swallowed the sun, like light was busting out of my fingertips. I was King
of the Universe. I knew
everything
. It was intense.

Next thing, I was puking up on the floor, with Morris yelling his head off. He throws
a bucket o’ water over me, and then he throws the bucket, and then he lams me some
more, and all the time he’s shouting, “Don’t ever let me catch you taking that stuff
agin,” till me eyes are spinning in me head. He hauls me downstairs. There’s a room
on the ground floor me and Billy was never allowed in, though we’d see the punters
comin’ and goin’. Morris unlocks the door. It’s cold and damp inside. Metal shutters
across the windows, an awful smell. On the floor…

I hate remembering this…

On the floor there’s a girl. Or what useta be a girl. She’s laying there in a skimpy
vest and her skirt all rucked up, making a sorta snorting noise, and there’s hair
growing all over her, black
hairy
hair covering her face and chest and arms and legs. I’m backing away, and she opens
her eyes, sudden. And I know her. Under the hair, it’s Maddalena, who useta come in
and look after me and Billy sometimes when Ma was sick. Morris shoves me on my knees
beside her, pushes my head down to hers. An’ she reaches out fast and grabs my arm.
Her fingers are hot and strong, and her breath is sickly sweet. The fur on her cheeks
and chin is wet with spit. Her eyes burn into mine like she’s seeing to the back of
my head, and she’s gurgling,
“Go ’way, go ’way, go, go, go…”
but she won’t let go, she won’t let go—

—and I scream—

—and Morris drags me out, and he says, “Don’t you never take that stuff again, Charlie,
coz that’s the way it ends.”

I was crying so hard, I was almost choking. He says, “Look at me!” and shakes me till
I do. His eyes are bright red, there’s a muscle jumping in his cheek. He says, “You
want your brain to rot? You wanta grow hair all over your body? That’s what it does,
there’s some kinda hormone in it, some kinda
animal hormone
…” He spits. “In there, that ain’t Maddalena no more. That’s an animal.
No
one in the Krew does nirv. I don’t allow it. And I promised your ma—” He stops. Then
he says, “We ain’t got your ma no more. We got each other and we got the Krew. You
respect me, you respect yourself and the Krew, you don’t take that shit. You hear
me?”

For weeks and months after, I’d check my arms and hands to see if they was turning
hairy. I never asked what he did with Maddalena, though she kept crawling into my
dreams. But I did ask Morris once if he thought it was all right to sell nirv to people
when we know what it does. And he said, “They’re not forced to take it, are they?
They got choice.” He gives me a real hard look. “If they’ll buy it, I’ll sell. It
puts bread in your mouth and mine, Charlie, and Billy-boy’s too. You complaining?”

Well, I wasn’t complaining, coz you don’t cross Morris, and anyway he was right. Anyone
stupid enough to go blowing their mind on nirv deserves what they get. They know what
it does. And yeah, maybe people think they can stop before it gets a-hold of them—but
like Morris says, that’s their choice. I never told Billy how people get turned into
Hairies, though. He wouldn’t’ve understood.

I’m thinking all this as the Hairy starts to run, howling some weird kinda mad nonsense
like they do, and the seagulls spin up in a squealing cloud, and the Hairy—the
thing
—waves its fists and falls down on the stones.

If it was any closer, I swear I’d shoot it dead.

“
Nelson
, Charlie. Charlie!” Billy tugs my arm. “Let’s find Nelson.”

A half-buried flight of stone steps leads up to a platform. We climb them, and I can’t
keep from looking up. Them doors at the top hafta be ten meters high. Billy whispers
to himself, and I say, “What?” and he says into my ear, “Is Nelson a giant?” and a
shiver goes right down my back.

“Nah,” I say, confident enough. “Just—you know—a hero.”

But I don’t
know
. Why else would doors be that high?

Nelson is two things. One is a statchoo a mile or two to the west. He’s bin there
forever, far as I know. Once there woulda bin buildings and stuff all around him;
now he’s right on the edge of the tide, a stone man balancing on a stone column fifty
meters high, leaning on a sword and staring out over the river.

The other thing Nelson is, is a hero. I dunno what he did, even Ma didn’t know, but
it musta bin something big for them to build so high and put him up there. I bothered
away at it for years, till one day I just started making stuff up. Before long, specially
after Morris came to live with Ma and then when she got the cholera and died, I got
to telling Billy tales about Nelson every night. In the stories, Nelson lives in Sint
Paul’s. He fights armies of Hairies, he battles in the sewers with giant rats, he
smuggles people out to the north. Billy loves it. His eyes sparkle and he chuckles
and rubs his fingers like he does when he’s really excited. Far as Billy’s concerned,
it’s all real. Even for me, half the time. I know I made it up, but Nelson’s still
real, ain’t he? Whoever he was, whatever he did, he was alive once, and he really
is buried right here.

The huge doors are open, jammed with rubble. Billy scrambles over it and slips inside.
I’m right on his heels. And we’re inside Sint Paul’s.

It’s
enormous
. A jolt goes through me. Like panic, like I’ve stepped off a cliff. I actually grab
Billy’s arm. I can’t see properly. It’s all dark, deep shadows cut by shafts of white
light falling through high windows. It smells like the bottom of the river. And there’s
a weird soft noise, like someone stroking the back of my neck.

“Birds,” says Billy.

Right. It’s just pigeons cooing overhead and fluttering about. My eyes adjust and
I see we’re standing on a floor of black-andwhite squares, but it’s all grimed and
filthy, and there’s streaks of pigeon shit down the towering whitish walls.

If my mates in the Krew, Beamer and Sam and Kingy, if they knew how I make up stories
for Billy, I’d hafta cut my throat. They don’t know nothing about Nelson and I’d never
tell ’em. But there’s something about Nelson I haven’t told even Billy.

I talk to him.

Two three years ago, Billy was sick in his chest, coughing all winter, couldn’t hardly
get his breath. Morris wasn’t no use, yelling at Billy to shut up coughing,
he
couldn’t sleep—I coulda killed him—and I wished Nelson was there,
he’d
know what to do—and before I knowed it, I was talking to him inside my head. Telling
him how scared I was, and begging him don’t let Billy die. And he
listened
. Don’t tell me any different, he listened, and somehow I just knew then Billy’d get
better, an’ he did.