The Neon Court (24 page)

“Yep. That’s why he’s waiting. Rats are very, very clever, you know. He understands the bargain.”

“A bargain to not eat us?”

“Yep.”

I led her round to the creature’s flank. Great matted strands of tallow-crusted hair hung down from Fat Rat’s belly, but along the top of his back the metal of his fur was softer and smooth. We kept stroking his side, glimpsed a tail of metal serrated joins flicker in the air with what we hoped was pleasure and, still stroking, said, “OK, you’re going to have to climb up.”

I had never seen Penny’s jaw drop, but it made it now. “No fucking way!”

“This is the way to get to the Tribe.”

“Couldn’t we have Facebooked instead?”

“The Tribe are hidden, cut off from the rest of society. The Aldermen don’t have an embassy with them because they don’t want an ambassador on their turf.”

“And these are the psychos you want to have a chat with?”

“Yes.”

“But if they don’t like the Aldermen …”

“I’ve got charm.”

“You’re so whacked, Matthew, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know.” I formed a stirrup with my hands, pressing my back into the warm flank of Fat Rat for support. With every breath he took, I could feel pistons moving inside his belly, which expanded and contracted like a swollen bouncy castle beneath me. “Come on,” I murmured, “this is why you’re a sorceress. Don’t tell me you aren’t excited; don’t tell me that you can’t feel the life here, Fat Rat’s magic. You want to run faster than an Underground train, you want to go places no one else gets to go, see things no one else gets to see? Come on.”

“I hate you so much,” she hissed, and put her foot in my hands. I boosted her up, and she scrambled, fingers tangling in Fat Rat’s fur, up onto his back. He turned his head, all the way, a hundred and eighty degrees to regard us, two bright eyes peeking over the great rolling mound of his slime-greased body. I grabbed a mass of black, oil-coated metallic fur and heaved upwards, felt flesh warp beneath me, saw steam
drift from Fat Rat’s mouth as he watched, felt Penny’s hand curl round my wrist from above as she hauled me up behind her. Her knuckles were white as she clung to Fat Rat, she was bent double, the length of her stomach laid out down his spine for support. I clung on with my knees and fists, tangling my fingers in thin slices of biting metal fur and said, “There? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Then Fat Rat began to move.

Then he began to run.

I bent low and clung on for dear life as my helmet bounced up and down on my head and flying dirt and oil stung my eyes. Within the black walls of the tunnel the world felt as if it was moving too fast around us, while we ourselves seemed to take on an almost static quality, as beneath us Fat Rat lurched and lumbered like a speeding caterpillar on a grill. I saw blue sparks rising from around Fat Rat’s copper claws, smelt electricity in the air, saw little electric bolts arc from the metal fibres of its raised fur, tasted the moment as the live rail spat into furious glory, felt the shock of ten thousand volts come alive below us, so much power, just waiting for us to pick it up and fly with it, blue electric glory waiting to be had and with just one touch we could grasp it and set the world on fire and

and no

we could take hold of that power and

no

burn so bright

I closed my eyes, pushed my face into the oily darkness of Fat Rat’s fur. I could hear a sound like the roaring of the Underground train, the rattle of its claws mimicking the de-dum of wheels on an uneven track, the roar of the wind pulling at my skin, the blast of dust and cold racing air filling my eyes, and Fat Rat ran the unstoppable run of the train with the broken brakes, not going to stop for anything, and we let him, and it was free, and it was wonderful. I could feel the sickly churning of my stomach as geography found itself left all behind; half opening my eyes I saw a solid metal wall ahead seem to cave and curl in on itself like a piece of crumpled paper, revealing a darkness that seemed to stretch out on all sides around. We ran into it and when I glanced back there was just darkness behind too, no hint of wall or tunnel or anything. Pipes ran across an empty black sky, supported by nothing, thin green
seaweed like moss clinging to their edges, water drip drip dripping down from thin cracks, a skyful of pipes above and below, water sloshing beneath Fat Rat’s feet, and the metal of the tracks beneath the water, and beneath that, a universe of yellow, pink, brilliant white and orange stars, the street lights of the city spread below us without bothering to take the architecture of the city with them. I thought I could see a double-decker bus, an old-fashioned red Routemaster with the open doorway at the back, its lights the only thing shining in the darkness, waiting at a red light in the water, black outlines of still figures captured in its windows. A flock of pigeons flew overhead, their eyes red, shedding albino-white feathers. A startled fox passed through the darkness ahead of us, caught in the brilliant light of Fat Rat’s eyes, then scampering away through the water, leaving not a ripple behind. Then a flight of stairs ahead, wide, red-brick, leading up to I couldn’t see what, and up them we went, into a great vaulted cavern of red-brick arches stretching away as far as the eye could see. Cracked cardboard boxes were strewn all across its floor, bearing the faded remnants of labels proclaiming

Oranges 5d

or

MACHINE PARTS HANDLE WITH CARE

or

Amusement, Beauty and Entertainment Products,
import of Taiwan
.

Then these too were gone as we passed down a narrow tunnel so low we had to press right down against Fat Rat’s back to avoid being knocked flat, black metal walls and a floor crispy with curling old envelopes. Thousands, millions, of old paper envelopes, some with the address still written on, some with curling old Christmas stamps, tumbled across the tunnel like ice from a snowstorm. A few sad packages hung by bits of mouldering brown paper from loose bolts in the wall, magazines were caught in old torn cables, their wiring spilt from their blackened plastic sheaths like copper dusters. There was a light ahead, dull orange-yellow, pinpricked with odd flashes of green and blue. I ducked below a sign declaring:

SCHOOL CHILDREN CROSSING

and raised my head again as we burst out of the end of the tunnel
onto thick brown mud beneath a starless orange-stained, drizzling sky. Fat Rat slowed here, turned, looked upwards, looked down, looked back at us. We were on a beach, a gloopy, freshly washed mud beach spotted with the usual plastic bags and abandoned trolleys of the English seaside. The beach was on the estuary. To the left I could see, just where the river began to turn, the silver flat-iron shapes of the Thames Barrier, sticking up from the sea as a great gate against the weather. To the right was the Millennium Dome, a low white swell in the landscape, and, beyond that where the river curved, the towers of Canary Wharf. I slipped down from Fat Rat’s back into an ankle’s depth of wet thick sludge. Penny followed, her eyes bright, a manic look in her face.

“You OK?” I asked.

“That,” she said, “
that
was totally fucking awesome.” Around the rim of her hard hat her hair was standing on end; I could sense the static in her skin; smell the magic flashing off her.

Fat Rat was already walking away, back towards a narrow tiled tunnel exit breaking out of the concrete embankment wall. I called after him, “Cheers!”

He didn’t bother to look back, but slunk into his tunnels with the aplomb of a king.

We were in the East End.

Very much the East End. So much the East End, that technically speaking, the East had ended long ago and we were at that uncertain point where Greater London gave up the ghost and admitted to being Essex.

We found a flight of stained concrete stairs up from the river bank to a flat concrete nothing sprouting weeds between the cracks. A giant arch, rusting metal and broken gears, stood over the old wooden edge of a wharf where once freighter ships had docked. A sheet-iron warehouse, more of a shed for mammoths, sat along the edge of this concrete emptiness. Rubbish tumbled in the wind, littering the waters of the Thames with empty Coke cans and broken plastic bottles. Rainwater dripped off an old sign illustrating that no safety boots + no hard hat = no job. The newest addition was a great mound of blue plastic barrels tumbled down and left to spill across the ground, and a
moped parked casually some distance off, a black helmet slung from the handlebars. I wiped my face with my sleeve and it came away black. I pulled off my hard hat and let the rainwater run into my hair and down my skin, turned my face up to the sky. Penny pulled off her hat, felt around the top of her head and said, “This look is not gonna be good for my street cred.” I looked at her, and failed to suppress a grin. A glare fit to melt steel lanced from her eyes.

Dull yellow light seeped from one of the warehouse’s cracked windows, and thin black smoke drifted from a tear in a bank of rusted pipes set into the wall. Something moved behind one of the windows. Somewhere, a footstep moved on broken glass. I tossed Penny my helmet, dragged off my hi-vis jacket and rolled it up into a bundle.

“We’re being watched, right?” she said.

“Yep.”

“We going to kick ass or what?”

“You know, I’m sure that there’s supposed to be this diplomatic process thing.”

“Yeah, right.”

I gave her the yellow jacket and my satchel, slinging the strap across her shoulder. “This bag,” I said, “contains my whole life.”

“That’s like the saddest thing you’ve ever said ever.”

“Do
not
lose it!”

I pushed my wet dirty hair back from my face and started to walk towards the warehouse. “Hey!” she called from behind me. “Is this another ‘you just wait here’ moment?”

“Yep.”

“I can help you!”

“I know,” I replied. “There’s a phone in the bag. If I’m not back in … oh … two hours … you call the Aldermen and tell them to do whatever the nearest equivalent is to nuking this place, OK?”

“Is that it?”

“Yep.”

“I can help you! Why’d you drag me all this way?”

“To make the phone call.”

“What if you’re dead?”

“Then you’ll get a phone call from us,” we replied. “Death is only a mortal condition.”

She flinched. “Yeah,” she mumbled. “Right. Whatever. Hey – what if someone comes looking for me?”

“I reckon you’ll be up to defending yourself.”

She brightened. “Really? You think so?”

“Yeah. I reckon. Just try not to obliterate Essex, OK?”

It was only a few hundred yards between the riverside and the broken metal warehouse, a thing of fractures and twists. It felt like a year of walking. There were eyes watching from the shadows. I thought I heard footsteps behind me and refused to turn my head, kept my fingers to my side and the magic that wanted to crawl out of my belly and set the air fizzing, deep and tight like a fat meal after starvation. As I neared the warehouse I could see that the dull yellow flicker behind the shattered glass was refracted firelight from inside. The water pooling in the cracked concrete outside was stained silvery-purple from oil spilt across its surface. I found a small door, locked. The windows beyond it revealed a small dark office, desk broken and overturned, the stuffing of the chair long since spilled out.

I kept walking, shivering from the cold and the rain, rounded the corner and stepped straight into them. They must have been waiting for us. There were six of them, forming a circle around me. They were young – the youngest looked not a day over fourteen, and had an ugly swollen red scar running from chin to the corner of his left eye, puckered and fresh. Smaller white scars ran in little rows under his right ear. He wore a grey hoodie and his right hand was still wrapped up in old bandage from I didn’t know what injury. His left hand held a knife, small and nasty. The eldest of them looked as if time had meant for him to be in his twenties and life had decided to kick him along a little bit further. His head was shaved, revealing a skull of interlocking thick plates and a fat red neck. He wore an old black puffed-up jacket, loose white T-shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans. Tattoos stretched across the skin of his left hand, red and vivid and chaotic, and peeked up from the line of his T-shirt to coil around the back of his neck. His right hand was barely human any more; flesh had bent arthritically, but instead of seized bones, metal was sprouting where there should have been fingertips, cruel jagged slices of metal, and green glass stuck up from the back of his hand along the lines of his vein like the spikes of a hedgehog,
vanishing unevenly up his sleeve. But it was his face that commanded attention. Across the top of his skull were stamped in neat parallel lines two rows of tiny metal bolts, like the spikes on the back of a dinosaur; his left ear had a great hole in the lobe where a circle I could have waggled my thumb through had been inserted into the flesh, his right remained intact but was ridged all the way along its curve with hoops of metal. Bars of metal had been inserted at the base and the top of his nose, while from his top lip descended a single silver spike. He was missing a front tooth, and through the little pink remnants of gum I could see that his tongue was equally impaled. His left eyebrow was lined with more silver hoops, and his right eyebrow was also partially lined, while across his cheeks and down the side of his neck were long scars drawn criss-cross without any apparent order, the oldest faded and white, the newest still red and swollen. He looked at me, and the pupil of one eye was round and black, and the other a perfect tiny square, almost imperceptible, unless you knew to look for it. Whatever their shape, their look was one of contempt.

He didn’t speak, didn’t move, but two of his accomplices, the boy and a girl of some seventeen years with hair half shaven from her head and a raised burn mark in the shape of a V stamped on the side of her neck, came at me from either side. The boy swung a punch, without sound or acclaim, and his knuckles were bronze, bronze bones shining beneath thin stretched skin. I flinched away instinctively and felt something sharp and metal bite at my throat. The girl had a knife, a flick blade with the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary on its white plastic handle. I felt thin hot blood at its biting edge, and stayed absolutely still. Her other hand caught me by the back of my head, pulled me by the hair, exposing more of my throat. Not a word had been said, so I said something instead.