Wormwood Gate (12 page)

It took off into the air in a flurry of wings. Julie looked up instinctively, only realising afterwards that that was probably a bad idea. Despite the pigeon's proud claim that there were no seagull patrols in pigeon territory, there was a flock of seagulls wheeling overhead, silent except for the beat of their wings. In a dreamy sort of way, she was aware of opening her bag and digging inside it for the stone. She seemed to have lost control of her hands; she certainly wasn't telling them to do what they were doing. With the part of her mind that was thinking, she was aware that it would be a bad idea to throw a stone at a seagull
now
. Those seagulls must have been sent after her by the queen, with sterner orders than usual, since they were venturing into the territory of rival birds. Indeed, Julie could see a flock – or rather, since they were nothing like as coordinated as the seagulls, a messy and disorganised rabble – of pigeons shooting up from the rooftops in the surrounding streets and hurling themselves through the sky at the seagulls. Julie wished she could look at them properly; as it was, she could only see them dimly in her peripheral vision. She had lost control of her eyes as well: they were determinedly focused on one seagull in particular, a seagull that seemed to be leading the flock, or at least was always the first to move.

It was the first one I saw
, she thought, with the part of her mind that was conscious.
That's why
–

The leading seagull flew ahead suddenly, giving her a clear shot, and without being able to stop herself or aim wide or give it anything but her best possible try, she flung the stone at it and hit it squarely on the head.

She couldn't hear the sound the stone made as it connected with the seagull's head, nor the sound the seagull's body made when it fell to the ground. She stayed rooted where she was while the flock of gulls lost its pattern for a moment and then regrouped around a new leader, which gave a long cry and led the remaining gulls away from the pigeons, who turned in the air and followed as their enemies retreated.

Before the pigeon – any of the pigeons – could come back and talk to her, she picked up the runners, slung them over her shoulder by the laces, and ran down along the roof of the house she was on. She leapt more with abandon than confidence onto the next roof, and then the next, and the next, until she reached a roof that sloped low enough that she felt she could jump down without breaking a leg. She tucked herself under the eaves, in a corner that she was pretty sure hadn't been there five minutes ago, and sank down to a crouch, hugging her knees to her chest.

It'll just come back
, she thought.
It'll come back in a different form. It's not really properly dead
.

It didn't help. But brooding didn't help either. She took a deep breath and let go of her legs, rearranging them into a more comfortable position, and unslung the runners from her shoulder. Now that she had them in her hand, she could see that the linings were red as well as the laces; a nice touch. They were good runners, stylish and comfortable-looking. They looked like they were her size too.

She felt around inside them both and pulled out the piece of paper she'd seen sticking out of the left one. It was soft and slightly damp; she wrinkled her nose at the thought that Molly Red, or whoever, had been wearing the shoes and had stuffed the note underneath their feet. At least it didn't smell.

She unfolded the note and read the slightly blurry letters:

Hello there, friend of the pigeons. I know what you're thinking. Yes, these shoes once belonged to Molly Red. But you can take them if you like. She doesn't need them any more
.

Julie looked at the runners consideringly, then at her thin-soled ballet slippers. They weren't meant to be walked in, not as much as she'd been doing, and they certainly hadn't been designed for climbing and running along rooftops. She tucked the note under her armpit and untied the knot in the laces, slipping the runners onto her feet as soon as she'd untangled it. They were wonderfully soft and comfortable, even without socks, and she sighed with relief as she laced them up. That would make things much easier.

She tucked her shoes into her bag – they just about fitted – and resumed reading the note.

Come to the Viking quarter if you want to meet the one who used to wear these shoes
.

Julie looked up from the note. ‘Who would be stupid enough to do that?' she wondered out loud. ‘It's obviously a trap.'

You're probably thinking that this is a trap
, the note went on.
And you're right. But is a trap that you walk into willingly and knowingly really a trap?

‘Yes,' said Julie. ‘Now you're just nitpicking.'

Nitpicking aside
, the note continued,
if you're not a friend of She Whose Title We Will Not Mention Because It Only Encourages Her, the trap will be humane, and you will not be harmed or imprisoned for longer than it takes for me to be sure you're on the level. This I swear by the blood in which I have signed my name below. Yours in solidarity, Molly Red
.

The name was written in a rather shakier hand than the rest of the note, and where the rest of it had been in plain black ink, the signature was a blotchy, faded reddish-brown. Julie held the note up close to her eyes and peered at it. It
could
have been blood. It probably was. There was no way to be sure, but it seemed plausible.

The Viking quarter, then. The pigeons could tell her where it was. She got up, dusted herself off and tucked the note into her bag, just in case she needed it later. It wouldn't prove she was against the queen, but it might be useful to show why she'd come.

She looked up and down the narrow, twisty little street she'd found herself in. There was no sign of a pigeon anywhere; the local birds must have been off harrying the seagulls still. Julie shouldered her bag and walked off in a random direction, keeping an eye on the roofs and the sky in case a pigeon flew by overhead. She kept count of the corners she turned and crossroads she came to, and when she'd been past three crossroads and turned around five corners without seeing a pigeon, she decided to change her tactics: rather than walking around streets she was pretty sure were changing behind her back anyway, she'd stay still in one place and wait for the pigeons to come there.

She walked a short way down the street, until she found a place where the hard-packed earth was white with pigeon droppings, and settled in to wait.

It didn't take long before she got bored and started rummaging through her bag for something to occupy her mind; she considered flipping through her notebook and reading old entries, but a wave of homesickness came over her when she pulled it out. She had some games on her phone but none that she particularly liked playing; but while she was putting it back into the bag, her fingers bumped up against another phone, one she'd forgotten she had.

Aisling's phone was stylish and expensive, a more advanced model than hers. Despite the telephone wires running from house to house, she had not seen hide nor hair of a telephone or anything similar in all the time she'd spent in the City; she suspected that the wires were not really telephone wires so much as convenient perches for the pigeons (and probably also for the seagulls, in other parts of the City). Still, she took Aisling's phone out and took a look at it. Sure enough, it couldn't pick up a signal, and once Julie'd figured out how to use it, there was a lot of stuff on it that either didn't work without a connection or that probably worked pretty well but that she wasn't interested in.

Then there were the things she
was
interested in and probably shouldn't be. Was it all right to look at Aisling's call history? Probably not, but Julie couldn't resist – only to find that Aisling seemed to get and make a lot of calls to people who weren't in her contacts list and came up as unlabelled strings of numbers. Disappointed, Julie took a look in her photo album, hoping for shots of Aisling with her weirdo mates, drunk and acting silly, or just acting silly. But there were no party pictures there, only shots of odd-looking graffiti, a picture of what looked like the beach at Sandycove on a bright, clear day, a street performer in an outlandish costume, and (most puzzling of all) a shot of Julie herself, in her PE uniform, bullying-off at the beginning of a hockey match. She recognised the girl from the opposing team; the picture must have been old, since the game had taken place in the previous season. Julie had barely been aware of Aisling's existence back then.

She turned to Aisling's text messages, swearing to herself that this was absolutely her
last
invasion of Aisling's privacy and she would never, ever do it again. The inbox was full of messages that were impeccably spelled but still cryptic enough that even if they'd revealed Aisling's secrets Julie wouldn't have learned anything from them, apart from the fact that Aisling's friends used proper spelling even in text messages (which Julie thought was a waste of effort). She was about to put the phone away when she noticed that there was an undelivered message in the outbox that had been saved at 9.13 pm, and that had a very familiar number attached to it.

Why would Aisling have been trying to text her?

She checked the message with shaking fingers.

Julie: escaping w/ rabbit who wants my help. If you get out, go where we 1st arrived to City. I'll be there or leave a message. Love & hugs A

Julie bit her lip. If she had seen the message before – if she had thought to
look
for the message … But what did it change, after all? She was lost in a warren of streets and houses that were so unfamiliar and unpredictable that there was no point in trying to find her way out. She had no idea where the quays were in relation to where she was now, and no way of getting there even if she had. No, it changed nothing: she would still have to go to the Viking quarter and meet Molly Red there, and maybe (if she was lucky) Molly Red would help her find Aisling.

She stuffed the phone back into her bag and looked up, scanning the roofs and the overhead wires for pigeons, her arms wrapped around her chest.

Actually, it wasn't completely true that the note didn't change anything. It didn't change what she had to do, that was certain, but now she knew that Aisling was – well, not that she was all right, because who knew what a rabbit might really be in a place like this; but she had escaped and gone with the rabbit of her own free will, and it was better to know that than to know only that she wasn't in a cell. And when Julie had thought that over, she was able to admit to herself that it made her feel better that Aisling had been considerate enough to leave a note.

That was a thought she didn't want to examine too much.

‘Where are those stupid pigeons, anyway?' she muttered to herself, pacing back and forth. ‘Just like Dublin Bus, you are. Or taxis. Or in-service training days for teachers. Never there when you're wanted, all over the place when you're not. How am I supposed to get to the Viking quarter now?'

The sides of her bag started to bulge, as if of their own accord, and something inside seemed to be rustling. Puzzled, she unzipped it, and the note from Molly Red snaked out of the bag and into her hand, where it lay inert, just a normal piece of paper again. She unfolded it and read, at the bottom of the note, underneath what she had already read, in a space she was completely certain had been blank before:

If you needed directions to the Viking quarter, you should have asked. I'm not psychic, you know
.

‘Wha –? Are you – is this paper – are you listening to me?'

Words started appearing on the paper, as if they were being written down by an invisible hand.

Not listening, exactly, but this paper has a limited ability to respond to spoken questions. Now, ask me nicely and I'll tell you how to get to the Viking quarter from where you are
.

‘You want me to ask nicely? That's rich! Why should I be polite? You're only a piece of paper!'

The note instantly folded itself up into a snap-dragon shape, like one of the paper fortunetellers she used to make in boring classes in primary school, and folded a part of itself up and into the mouth of the snap-dragon to make a sticking-out tongue. It didn't actually make a raspberry noise, which would have been hard to do with paper, but the rustling sound it made with its ‘lips' had a similar tone of rude contempt.

‘Now you're just being childish,' said Julie when it had unfolded itself and settled back as a flat piece of paper. ‘Look, I don't owe you anything, you or the person who made you. I don't see any reason to be polite. You obviously want me to go to the Viking quarter, so why don't you just take me there and stop this faffing about?'

The note shifted around a little on her palm before the next message appeared.
Fine
, it said.
But don't say I didn't warn you
.

At that, the note slid up her wrist and arm and down her chest to slip back into her bag, and the tickling sensation was strange enough that for a moment she didn't notice that the laces of her shoes were untying and re-tying themselves, though by the time she had noticed that, and noticed the peculiarly-shaped knots the laces were taking, she had figured out what was going to happen next. Which didn't make it any less stomach-churningly disorienting when her shoes lifted up off the ground, one after the other, and walked her through the narrow winding streets as if she were being pulled around by magnets buried under the ground.

She had once done an exercise in PE class where the teacher had told one girl to lie down and follow the instructions of another girl exactly. The aim was only to get the girl who was lying down to stand up, but nobody was able to manage it, even though the whole class had a turn. ‘You see how complicated your bodies are?' the teacher had said. ‘You see how much you take them for granted?' This was like that: like her body was being ordered around by somebody who was vastly underestimating how complicated a human body was, somebody who thought that all you needed to do to make it walk was to move the feet. And so her feet would move, and the rest of her body would be jerked out of balance, and if she shifted to compensate, she'd be a second or two too slow for the next motion. Her centre of gravity was always slightly off, and the up-and-down-ness of it made her seasick.