rats, she is the lady of all dirty puddles. She has been in the city since the first old woman left alone in the dark decided to tell the dark why she was crying, and she is, of course, myth, and no one believes a word of it, including me.
However, when the pigeons were nested for the night, it was to the Bag Lady that my gran would always offer her prayers.
Dorie looked at me, she looked at the shadow, she looked back to me and said, “All right, you stupid bastard, piss off out of here!”
I said, “What the bloody hell are you doing here?”
“Fucking trailing you, fucker!” she shrilled. “You dense like the kids say?”
“We didn’t see you,” we complained.
“That’s because you’ve got all the brains of a concussed cod!” she shrilled, flapping her pink fingerless woollen gloves furiously in the air. “Shit, and you’re supposed to be a saving fucking grace?”
“You smell of… nothing,” hissed Hunger, head twisted on one side, his attention momentarily diverted. “You taste of… nothing.”
“You going to smell shit in the sewer?” she asked, glaring straight into Hunger’s empty eyes without even blinking. “Oi, sorcerer?”
“What, me?”
“You want to be someone else?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Fucking run already, nit!”
I began feebly, turning in Hunger’s direction. “Evil creature, essence of darkness and undying hunger…” Already I felt like I was losing momentum overall.
Dorie’s attention flashed to me in an instant, and for a moment her eyes were the colour of the pigeons’, yellow-orange, intense, bright, alert. She said, in a voice as sane as I had ever heard it from her lips, “I only do this for you once, blue electric sorcerer. Next time, you’ll burn.”
And with that, she leant over her trolley, and opened the plastic bags.
Out of the first came the twitching nose of a rat, climbing up and over the edge of the trolley before landing with a big flop in the middle of its body onto the pavement of the square and looking round with confused, blinking eyes. Then came another rat, and another, and another, half a dozen, a dozen, two dozen; they swarmed out of the battered old Sainsbury’s bag in a writhing mass of black bodies, streaming down the sides of the trolley, flopping onto the ground into a teeming, twitching mass, spreading out from her like a pool of black blood, scuttling and scampering, and still they kept coming, a hundred, two, more than I could count, crawling across the pavement, along the walls, up Dorie’s legs, her middle, until her whole body was covered in rats and there wasn’t a body there at all, just a heaving tower of blackness and there were more rats in the bag than could get out, a hill of rats building up around the half-obscured hub of the trolley, spilling towards me, towards Hunger.
That was one bag.
The second bag released the pigeons. They exploded upwards in a shower of feathers, one, half a dozen, two dozen, the same crowding and swiftness as the rats, and whirled overhead, and level too, the sky somehow not big enough for them, flying across my face, obscuring Dorie from my sight in moments. It snowed feathers, blinding me with the touch, smell, taste of dirt-grease pigeon as their wings beat at me, their claws scraped my shoulders, their feathers brushed my nose; while at my ankles the rats scuttled, flowing round me like I was an island in their black sea.
From the last bag came the other creatures. A swarm of big black bluebottle flies, the skulking ginger bodies of young foxes, a scampering contingent of mice that ran easily across the backs of the ratty mass like pebbles skimming the sea. Sinuous stray cats, missing a tail or half an ear, teeth bared, cruel, fur in tufts; the black feathers of crows, brown sparrows, flashing yellow breasts of a flock of great tits, even the curved necks of a pair of herons, hopping mottled frogs, the swooping shapes of swallows, the coiling gleam of a snake, teeming gleaming shells of the cockroaches, the long, arched back of a deer. They scrambled, flew, writhed, twisted, leapt, lurked or scuttled out of Dorie’s bags, out of the trolley, until the world was so full of moving creatures that it was as if the sky had become a solid mass, or we were trapped in a tornado, lost in a spinning torment of feather, flesh and fur.
Dorie was lost to sight in a matter of seconds; so was Hunger. Instinctively I ducked the whirling mass of birdlife, crawling on all fours while the rats flowed up my back and across my head, and dropped down around my face like beads of fat living sweat. Little tiny pink claws bit into me and released; twitching noses snuffled through my hair, whiskers tickled over my skin, fat hairy bodies pressed down across my back. I was grateful that I had already been sick; there was nothing left inside for any worse horror. We couldn’t…
we couldn’t…
… so I did. I closed my eyes and felt the creatures around me, on hands and knees following their swirl of life which, all the powers have mercy, parted around me. Where I put my hands down, the creatures moved aside, hurried out of my way, so there was no breaking of tiny mouse bones as I pulled myself along, no squishing of snake’s tail; a path opened up in front of me, its end obscured by the hurricane of creatures, but still distinctly a path. I crawled along it; then pulled back sharply, spilling a snake off my shoulder as a shadow loomed across my path: for a moment a corpse-white hand solidified out of the blackness of the paving stones, its fingers reaching up and becoming flesh, before they were swamped by the scurrying mass of creatures, that bit and scratched at the hand even before it was entirely there, until it collapsed back into whirling obscurity among the animals. I risked raising myself up and realised that, if I did not flinch from the birds swooping around my head, they would not actually hit me. At this, I straightened up and, scattering the odd clinging mouse and dripping with inky water, I ran.
I didn’t know how far, nor where, they led me, until I was actually there: Ludgate Circus, where Fleet Street, Blackfriars Bridge, and Farringdon Road all run into a whirlpool of people, lights, cars, taxis and buses. Blinking, I staggered from the creatures’ embrace into the sudden light of the street. The birds swooped skywards as if they’d only just discovered that up as well as sideways existed, while the land animals were halfway into the bins, drains and gutters, and the narrow places between buildings and under doors before I even realised that my escort was melting away.
I stood, alone and confused, an inky soaking figure, looking somewhere between a woad warrior and a clown; pigeon feathers stuck to my head, and tufts of fur clung to my coat. Self-consciously I picked off the worst and, as I did, felt a stirring in my coat pocket that, to my shame, made me jump. Reaching in with an imagination full of teeth, I found a small white mouse. Contentedly sitting in the palm of my hand, it was the only proof now left – apart from the general state of my appearance and smell – of the tide of vermin that had probably saved me from whatever untimely fate Hunger had had in mind.
Of Dorie, there was no sign; nor did my shadow bend. I got down on one knee and put the mouse down on the pavement. It scampered away, unconcerned, down the street towards a bus stop where, as ordinary, boring and mundane as anything we could have wished to see, a night bus was pulling up.
The driver said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m paying, aren’t I?”
“You smell like the zoo,” he replied. “And you’re covered in feathers. I can’t let you on this bus.”
We leant forward so he could see into our eyes and said, “We’ve not had our most successful evening. Are you going to make it worse?”
He let us ride his bus and, content in the security of the back seat on the upper deck, we let it carry us wherever it would, and curled up in our wet clothes, and didn’t sleep.
The bus terminated in Streatham, a suburb between nowhere in particular and somewhere less than distinct.
I walked through the sleeping streets of large terraced houses and wide pavements, neat and repetitive, until I found a small office building with a red fire hydrant sticking out of a side wall. I coaxed the end off, and the water on, with a little magic and a lot of hitting, stripped off my coat and shirt and knelt under the force of its pressurised
