Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (14 page)

B
ona Togs
, was the sign above the dingy little shop.
Bona
: good shiny enviable cool must-have sweet, Everett said to himself.
Togs:
posh togs. Swimming togs. Togged up. Clothing, clothes, gear. Same word in both Londons. They must have a common root in both worlds. In this one it had become the private language of the air freight people: Airish. In Everett's world it had gone underground, like water vanishing into a limestone landscape, leaving a few residue words behind. Airish was easy to pick up, with its almost-Italian vocabulary. It was all about listening for patterns.

The shop looked very far from Bona. Off Morning Lane, in the shadow of the airship hulls, was a warren of alleys and arcades. Tiny stores, no wider than their front windows, huddled under rain-dripping canvas canopies that almost touched in the centre of the alleyway. Narrow but deep: Everett peered into the gloom past the gleam of the neon signs:
FARRIDGE: CORDWAINER; LEDWARD AND OBOLUWAYE: EXCISE AND TAX; ADE: GUNSMITH; WRAY ELECTRICAL; FAT TARTS AND HOT FAGGOTS
. Electric lights flickered deep in interiors that went back farther than the architecture of the streets should allow. Everett and Sen's progress through the crowds—steaming, smelling of hot oils and the unmistakable tang of electricity—that thronged the alleys was slow. Everyone greeted Sen, and she stopped to return the greeting, hail an acquaintance, share a joke, pass a comment or a compliment or good wishes for the season. At every one she riffled through her deck of Everness tarot and showed a card. The people would smile, or laugh, or frown, or kiss their knuckles. Sen scooped up a bag of roasting chestnuts from a brazier.

“Hey!” the chestnut-monger cried.

Sen pulled a tarot card out of her jacket. She frowned at it.

“I see dinari for you. Very very soon.”

“You said that the last time! And the time before that, and the time before that! Go on, freeloader!” The chestnut roaster aimed a kick at Sen, but the banter was good-hearted. As the Airish slang words flew around Everett's head like birds, he gathered the impression that Sen was like a mascot to the people of Hackney Great Port, a charmed child, a street saint, their own Ice Angel. If things went well for Sen, the captain's beautiful daughter, they would go well for them.

“Here.”

“Here?”

Some of the neon tubes outside the dark little shop had failed. ONA OG. Clothes hung on cheap wire hangers with people's faces cut from magazines and catalogues stuck on the handles. The idea was presumably to make the jackets and tops look as if someone was wearing them. To Everett they were more like a display of grinning shrunken heads. Sen pushed through swaying swags of hanging clothes. The shop was cold and smelled of mothballs and damp wool and that same spicy, earthy smell he had caught from Sen. On her it was mystical and electric. Here was it claggy and creepy.

“Olly olly Dona Miriam! Brought a cove.”

A shadow detached itself from the gloom in the back of the shop. A small, dumpy shape waddled up between the ceiling-high glass-fronted drawers and the chipped, horror-movie-eyed dummies, setting the hanging togs swinging. The light of the sputtering neon revealed a squat, frog-mouthed woman, sharp black little eyes beneath an unruly mass of greying curls. She wore a pair of harem pants and a grey woollen cardigan pulled tight around her. Gold half-glasses hung on a chain around her neck.

“Omi needs zhooshing up,” Sen said.

“Oh, the Dear Lor. Where do you find ‘em, Sen?” Dona Miriam put on her glasses and peered at Everett, then over the top of them, then took them off to see if it made any difference. “Oh he does, dorcas, he assuredly does.” She turned on Everett so fast he jumped. “Any handbag, chicken?”

Everett proffered his backpack, Dr. Quantum locked inside. Riding down the drop-line from
Everness's
hold to street level, Everett had felt safer with the Infundibulum at his shoulder rather than leaving it on the ship. Every bump, every jostle, every nudge in the alleys made him less sure of his decision.

“Handbag. Metzas, dinari, gelt.
Money
, honey.”

Everett fumbled his wallet open. Sen seized all the cash and spread the notes before Dona Miriam.

“He needs you, Dona Miriam. Help him.”

“I need that,” Everett shouted. Dona Miriam was already flicking through the notes.

“You're on the company,” Sen said. “You get paid.”

“Dorcas, with me.” Dona Miriam crooked a finger and summoned Everett to the back of the shop. “Stand still, will ye?” She measured him with an eye and thumb-and-forefinger held at arm's length. Then she left Everett among the changing booths, tall and dark and ominous as coffins, and went hunting through the musty stock. She stripped bald-headed shop dummies. She hooked shrunken-head coathangers down with a long stick. She went up ladders and rummaged in glass-fronted drawers. She hummed and tutted and threw away twice as much as she kept. Sen cavorted among the hanging costumes at the brighter end of the shop, emitting squeals of joy with every jacket she felt or pair of boots she lifted up into the wan winter light. This for Everett was what clothes shopping had always been; standing about by the changing rooms while others drew an incomprehensible—and inexhaustible—joy from looking at clothes they had no intention of buying.

“Try these.” Dona Miriam presented Everett with a double armful of clothing.

“There's leggings. I don't wear leggings.”

Dona Miriam looked over her glasses and rolled her eyes.

“Dorcas…”

“In my world…”

“What?”

“He's not from round here,” Sen shouted quickly. “Foreign cove.”

“His accent's very good.”

“He's got an English ma,” Sen called. Everett meekly took the pile of style into one of the changing coffins. It was almost as small and difficult as the toilet at the Sadler's Wells skyport. And the leggings ultimately were no different from his compression sports gear. While he pulled on the shirt, and the long shorts with lots of pockets in fantastic places, and adjusted the jacket lapels and the collar and drew the waist in tight, he heard Sen and the shop owner's conversation.

“Now where did you find that dolly dilly? Don't lie to your Dona. My ogles may be buggered, but even I can varda that omi ain't so.”

“Can't say, Dona Miriam; ‘cept that it is
so
, so.”

“Are you alamo?”

“Bona lacoddy. Bonaroo lallies. Fantabulosa dish. Had a varda when he was in the shower, didn't I?”

“And the chicken? Alamo?”

“Nante.”

“The more fool. Have you considered, dorcas, whether the dally chicken alamos polones at all?”

“You mean, omi-polone?”

“Dorcas, this is Hackney.”

“I do like girls,” Everett interrupted. “Sort of.”

There was a moment of silence; then two female voices exploded in laughter.

“Parlamo palari,” Dona Miriam said.

“Hama saba apan
nij
bh
'
,” Everett said in Hindi. He emerged from the changing coffin.