Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (18 page)

Beth gaped at her dad. One eye was matted shut with blood; the other didn’t even seem to see her.

‘
He
’
s not
.’

‘Well, I don’t know what else to call it when someone’s blood doesn’t clot.’

‘
It
’
s just a scratch
—’

‘I know it’s just a scratch!’ Gutterglass spat. ‘It’s like he doesn’t have any platelets, not a single damned one.’ The anger ebbed out of her voice, leaving her fear, naked, in its wake. ‘It just kept bleeding. In the fight – I didn’t see, and he was two and half pints down before I realised. Shit!’

She threw the flasks against a tower strut in fury and they shattered. Liquid oozed down the metal. Then she barked, ‘Stand back!’ and reached into her carpet-coat. She pulled out a short metal rod. A squat gas lighter appeared in another hand and she ignited it; the flame above it looked like a blue arrowhead. She lowered the metal into the flame and after a few seconds it began to glow, first red, then white-hot.

‘
Glas
—’ Beth started to protest, but the trash-spirit ignored her and pressed the incandescent metal against her dad’s skin.

He shuddered hard under her hands; his mouth opened, but no scream came out, only a gurgle that broke off too quickly. Beth’s nostrils filled with the scent of burned blood and seared skin.

Gutterglass pulled her branding iron away. The skin over the cut was charred black, giving off little wisps of steam and darker curls of smoke.

Beth stared, and Glas stared too, all the while keeping her fingers on her father’s skin. The blood kept coming.

‘I don’t understand,’ Gutterglass murmured. She sounded utterly lost, and Beth felt herself lost along with her. ‘That at least should have cauterised the wound. I—His blood vessels—It’s like his cells aren’t responding at all. His—’ The eggshell eyes flickered sideways, shifted focus.

‘His
hair
’
s
not growing,’ she whispered. ‘Nor his nails.’

Beth stared at her in astonishment. ‘
You can see that?
’

‘There’s not even the tiniest bit of growth – his hair, his skin – nothing’s renewing, nothing’s dividing. He’s not growing at
all
.’

‘The glass,’ Pen said in a stricken voice behind her. ‘The broken glass on the floor – I didn’t think … I didn’t
know
—’

‘
Glass? What “glass”? What about his hair?
’ Beth looked desperately from one to other of them, desperate for someone to explain, to make sense of this, to tell her what she should do. ‘
What are you two talking about?
’

Neither of them elaborated.

After too long, Pen began to speak again. ‘He’s not healing,’ she said. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, Beth – it was the synod’s pool. He said it felt like something had been taken out of him—’

Beth gripped her dad’s hands and looked into eyes that didn’t look back. She felt horrifyingly useless: second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat, she could feel herself failing him. She wanted to speak to him, but she had no idea what to say. She started to form some platitude, to tell him it
would be all right, but another gurgle in his throat stopped her.

‘N—’ he managed, and then, just audibly, ‘not alone.’

To Beth, it sounded like a plea. ‘
No, Dad
,’ she said. ‘
We
’
re here
.’

She squeezed his hands tighter, but it wasn’t his
hands
that were leaving. She looked back at his face. His eyes had closed. His chest rose and sank shallowly.

She barely heard the pigeons flap in behind her. Glas shunted her out of the way and lunged at the cut, a tiny tube of superglue pinched in her Biro-fingers. Beth watched the pulse in her dad’s neck as the glue dried over the cut and the blood finally stopped. A few minutes later, Glas took her fingers away from the wound and got a cloth to mop up the blood. Beth just kept watching that pulse, watching her dad’s chest rise and fall and rise again, each time just that little bit more shallowly.

She put a hand beside her dad’s ear, and let the city in it whisper to him, ‘
Not alone. You
’
re not alone. We
’
re here. I
’
m here
.’

If he heard her, he gave no sign of it.

Beth had no sense if minutes or hours passed, but dew formed under her knees. Pen came and sat beside her and held her hand but didn’t say anything.

Once, Gutterglass tried to speak to her. ‘Lady Bradley. He’s alive, but – please understand, I’ve no wish to distress you – but if his cells aren’t dividing … he won’t be able to replace that lost blood …’

Beth didn’t answer her, and Gutterglass didn’t speak again. She stood with her arms crossed and her chin dipped into her chest while Beth just knelt beside her dad and told him that she was with him and that she loved him. With eyes that felt as empty as his, she stared at the weak tic of a pulse on the side of his neck.

Later, when the night had grown colder and fiery cramp had set in behind her knees, the pulse stopped.

‘It’s strange—’

Pen looked around, but didn’t leave off leaning against the tree. The bark was comfortingly rough and solid against her shoulder. Gutterglass stood a few yards back up the hill, the radio mast a black shadow spike behind her. Fastidious as ever, the trash-spirit had had her rats scavenge new pieces of garbage to replace the bloodstained ones and now wore a stylishly cut dress of plastic bin-liners. Smoke curled up from a lit cigarette clenched between twisted coat-hanger fingers. Pen felt a stab of almost lunatic anger at her neatness, at her
collectedness
. Just how cold did you need to be to play tailor on a night like this? She said nothing, but the tips of the wire tendrils beside her face twitched.

‘—I mean,’ Gutterglass went on, ‘I’m a doctor, but I’m an epidemiologist, not a shrink, so I’m hardly an expert, but still …’ She paused and drew on her cigarette. The smoke billowed out from all the gaps in the framework of her skeletal head as she tilted it to one side to consider Pen. ‘I
would have thought that when your best friend has been bereaved, it might be helpful to stay within earshot.’

The glare Pen gave her was one of Beth’s specials:
You
’
re not funny
, it said,
you
’
re not scary, and you
’
re not welcome. Piss off
.

Gutterglass didn’t flinch.

Pen sighed and turned to put her back flat against the tree. ‘You came out here just to be passive-aggressive at me?’

‘You’re packing sixty feet of spiked steel whip, and there’s a shade under six tons of garbage in the vicinity I could mobilise at a push,’ Gutterglass observed.

‘What’s your point?’

‘That you can’t blame me for wanting to keep any aggression between us as passive as possible.’

Pen heard footsteps through damp grass. She didn’t look back, but the strengthening scent of mouldy vegetable peelings told her Gutterglass had come to stand just behind her.

‘Go to her,’ the trash-spirit said, her sickly-sweet breath gusting past Pen’s ear.

‘I can’t.’

From up here on the hill, Pen could see over the treeline; beyond it was an ocean of darkness. In the distance, the lights of Canary Wharf burned bright: a solitary tower, illuminating the streets around it like a bonfire.

‘You can,’ Gutterglass insisted. ‘Go to her.’

‘And say what?’ Wires uncurled from Pen’s back and shivered their barbs like rattlesnakes, but her tone didn’t change. ‘I sent him there, Glas. I put the idea in his head. I
gave him the means. I told him I could get him out – and I believed it too …’ She faltered, and then recovered herself. ‘Even the weapon that killed him was mine: “a spiked steel whip” that I bloody well
dropped
.’

She closed her eyes for a moment and the memory of Canada Square rose up in front of her. The mind that she’d been so immersed in was gone. It was incomprehensible. She’d seen Paul’s personality from the inside; it was too big, too
complex
, to have just vanished like that. It was like hearing that the Atlantic Ocean had dried up. It was absurd.

‘I saw the broken glass and I
knew
something wasn’t right, but I just ignored it.’

Gutterglass walked around until she was standing directly in front of Pen, her eggshells just inches from Pen’s eyes.

‘You asked me the wrong question.’ The statement came on a gust of rubbish-scent.

‘What?’

‘The other day, in the kitchen: you asked me why I was following Lady Bradley, but the question
should
have been, “Why does she
let
me?” After all, Her Ladyship did genuinely love the young prince, for all it was a brief time that she knew him, and he died in a conflict I sent him into under a – well, a
massaged
pretext.’ The woven drinking-straw muscles in Gutterglass’ face contorted to show how awkward that was.

Pen snorted. ‘You conned Fil into attacking Reach before he was ready, and you sent
Beth
into the Crane King’s lair with a weapon that didn’t work: that about the size of it?’

‘Approximately,’ Glas conceded.

‘Yeah, Beth told me about that.’ She sighed. ‘She also told me that when Fil died, he knew what he was doing, that it was his decision, and however much she hated him for it, in the end, he was
right
.’

She pressed her lips together in an expression that wasn’t quite a smile. ‘One phrase about you sticks in the memory. I quote: “I trust that devious crap-mannequin about as much as a fairground coconut shy, but every lie she’s ever told seems to be based on faith, and it looks like her faith’s in me now”. And besides,
Doctor
’ – Pen shrugged – ‘you’re the only one who understands her symptoms. She needs—’

‘She needs
you
!’ The snapped interruption, coming from Gutterglass’ still smiling face, was like a crocodile surging out of calm water.

Pen felt all the air rush out of her lungs.

‘Paul Bradley knew what he was doing when he volunteered too, Miss Khan,’ Gutterglass continued, calm but relentless. ‘And it was
his
decision. You weren’t the only one who saw that broken glass, nor the only one who gave him the means to be there. We all played our part. Your guilt is your problem; deal with it in your own time. Right now, Our Lady has just lost her father, so you give her what she
needs
to keep functioning.

‘
What do you say to her?
’ Gutterglass’ voice was incredulous. ‘You’re her best friend, Miss Khan, for Thames’ sake, what do you
think
you damned well say? You say you love her. You say you love her, and that you’re there for her, and
that with your help she’ll get through this, and every other damned cliché that’s saved from being a banal platitude purely by the fact that it happens to be true!’

Her eyes were ghostly white under the shadows of the trees. ‘And even if it isn’t true, you say it anyway, because
she
is all we’ve got. And if she falls now because you didn’t hold her up, all the barbed wire in the world won’t protect you from me.’

Pen eyed her for a long time. ‘You think I’m afraid of you?’ she asked at last.

‘I sincerely hope you don’t have to be.’

Pen didn’t answer but turned and hurried back up the hill towards the tower.

Gutterglass’ voice carried across the night to her. ‘Miss Khan?’

Pen paused.

‘I’ll be here when you’re done. There’s something I think you should see.’

*

Beth sat with her legs dangling over the side of the gantry. Her head rested against one of the tower struts and the steel was mercifully cool on her fevered cheek. She was facing away from Canary Wharf and the night-time city was a blanket of textured darkness spread out before her. Inch by inch, street by street, the rising sun drew that blanket back, steady as a mortuary nurse, revealing the city’s scars.

Beth watched and felt … nothing at all. She didn’t know
how that was possible, but she didn’t. She slumped down a little further. She’d forced herself to climb up here, even though her muscles felt like strings of cooked mozzarella and her hands and feet were slippery with sweat. She’d hoped that the sight of her devastated home might do something to shift the emptiness in her.

Dad just died
. She kept thinking it, over and over. She jabbed herself with it like it was a needle.
Dad just died
. He was gone, forever, shouldn’t she be crying or something? But she couldn’t. Her heart felt flat and grey as slate. She looked desolately inside herself and found nothing but a chill.

She was an imposter. She was doing everything wrong. She even – and she knew this thought was nonsensical but she couldn’t shift it – thought she was letting him down.

A frightening idea occurred to her: maybe she was broken.
Permanently
broken. Maybe her emotions had snapped like overstretched elastic. Maybe she’d never cry again, or
maybe
 …? Her lumpen pulse quickened for a moment. Maybe her instincts were telling her something else. Maybe he wasn’t really gone forever; maybe there was a way back for him, under the rules of this asylum she’d helped usher into her world. Maybe her body knew something her exhausted mind didn’t and
that
was why the plumbing in her face was being so uncooperative.

She held onto that hope for a moment that felt like a thousand years, and then she let it go.

Somewhere, crammed down in her chest there was …
something
, a pressure. Maybe tears, maybe screams, maybe laughter; whatever it was, it was buried too deep for her to tell. She tried physically straining her muscles, but she couldn’t bring it up into her throat where she could voice it.

A clanking sound brought her back to the present. A head wrapped in a black hijab and a wreath of steel wire appeared between her feet, leaning out from the gantry below.

‘Hey!’ Pen called up.

‘
Hey
.’

More clanking, and then Pen settled herself in beside her.

‘
Took your time
,’ Beth said.

‘It’s quite the climb,’ Pen replied.

Beth waved one overheated hand at her. ‘
If the girl dying of non-specific urban fever can manage it, you can. What really kept you?
’

Pen chewed her lower lip for a second. ‘I thought you might want some time alone with your dad.’

‘
You mean the body?
’

‘Yes.’

‘
It
’
s at the bottom of the tower
.’ She looked at Pen. ‘
I don
’
t know why people do that
.’

‘Do what?’

‘
Confuse people with their bodies. I mean, look at me. My body
’
s changed beyond all recognition. It’s brick and slate and asphalt now. Am I those things? Am I brick, Pen?
’ She felt a ferocity enter her gaze. The something in her chest shivered for a second, but then was still again.

‘No,’ Pen said quietly.

Beth nodded. ‘
You think I blame you
.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘It wouldn’t be unreasonable.’

‘
No, it wouldn
’
t
.’

‘So do you?’

Beth paused, then she ran a tile-clad finger through the air above Pen’s face, tracing the scars that discoloured her skin.

‘
Do you blame me for these?
’

Pen hesitated.

‘
Truthfully, Pen
.’

‘No. A bit, once, maybe. I honestly don’t know.’

Beth shrugged. ‘
Me too
.’

Pen relaxed slightly, as if in acceptance. She opened her mouth, but it was still several seconds before she spoke again. ‘This is probably the dumbest question in the history of the universe, but how do you feel?’

Beth snorted, and car exhaust fumes blew out of her nostrils. ‘
Like my dad just died. I mean, I assume. Having no previous experience, maybe this is just how every Wednesday morning feels when you have a city for a body, but I really, really hope not
.’

Pen didn’t say anything, but she put her hand into Beth’s and her arm around Beth’s shoulders and Beth let her.

‘
He wasn
’
t ready, Pen
,’ Beth said. ‘
He was so scared. You saw the way he put away that chocolate. He used to do that at home all the time when he was nervous. You could judge his mood by how happy the guy who ran the sweetshop on the corner looked
.’

‘I know,’ Pen said.

‘
I feel like I
’
ll never go home again
,’ Beth said suddenly. She didn’t know what had put those words in her mouth. For an instant the emptiness inside was replaced by sheer, paralysing fear. She felt very fragile, and very small.

‘You will,’ Pen said. ‘You
are
home, B. Home’s with me.’

Beth tightened her grip on her best friend’s hand and then moved closer. ‘
What am I going to do, Pen?
’

‘Bury him.’

‘
And then?
’

Pen didn’t answer.

Beth looked up, and her green eyes lit up the painful sympathy in Pen’s face. ‘
Carry on, right? Just carry on – because whatever happens, we only ever have two choices: carry on, or stop. And you can
’
t stop. You can never stop, because they have another name for that
.’

‘Yes,’ Pen said simply.

‘
Tell you the truth?
’ Beth said. The fear had ebbed away. The emptiness was back. ‘
The truth is, I don
’
t think I feel anything at all
.’

‘It’s okay, B,’ Pen whispered too, matching Beth, but there was none of Beth’s doubt in her voice. ‘I’ll still be here when you do.’

Without letting go of Pen’s hand, Beth shifted until she could put her head into her lap. She shut her eyes and concentrated on her breathing. She concentrated on the way that feel of Pen’s hand and Pen’s pulse and Pen’s familiar smell were all telling her this place – halfway up a radio
mast above a shattered city – this place was safe and indestructible. She didn’t know if she managed to convince herself, but she closed her eyes, and with the gentle weight of Pen’s hand on the back of her neck, she let exhaustion claim her.

*

The sun was high in the sky by the time Pen descended the tower again. She trudged back towards the wood feeling wrung out but alert.

‘How is she?’ Gutterglass asked the moment Pen stepped into shadow of the trees.

The air in the wood smelled of spring, and Pen took a moment to fill her lungs with it before she answered, ‘Angry, but I don’t think she knows it yet.’

The trash-spirit stepped forward. In the dappled light from the foliage she looked like some kind of nymph from an old story. ‘If she doesn’t know it yet, how do you?’

‘She’s Beth Bradley. You bet on angry, you never lose.’ Pen sighed. ‘She’s asleep, Glas, and given everything that’s happened in the last few days, I don’t think I can hold that against her. Now, what did you need to talk to me about?’

Gutterglass inclined her head and stepped to one side, revealing something that flashed in the green-filtered light.