New York is probably King Kong.
It’s just a way for mortals to understand something too big for the brain.
On the other hand, Mr Pinner did have a point.
What good is a city against its nemesis?
We turned our face away from the darkness in King William Street, and as the paper tumbled gently from the sky, hobbled towards Monument. Behind us we heard . . . sounds not fit for the human ear, sounds we could not explain, comprehend, had not the vocabulary to describe. We call them sounds only because the human brain cannot find another way by which to understand them, did not have the means to grasp, without going insane, the clash between the dragon and the man in the pinstripe suit. Had we been just blue electric angels, just ourself in the wires, we would have known then how to speak of it. But I could not have spoken of the sound without going insane, so will say simply and true — that in King William Street that night, a dragon summoned from the stuff of the city met the creature summoned to destroy it.
And the creature was going to win.
Buying time; we’d seen
We hobbled past Monument as the paper fell, saw our face reflected a hundred times in the window of the electronics store, heard the thud of our footsteps echoing off the glass front of the chemist and the window of the sushi bar, stumbled above the top of a stair leading down to Cannon Street, snaking away below us. Tucked away to the left, a discreet nothing bursting into sight, was the spike of the Monument itself, golden flame sat dull and silent on its top, scaffolding around its base to support the old monument to another time when the death of cities had come to London, another burning, another loss. Office block to the right, symbols carved into the stone — an all-seeing eye, a pair of compasses, a thing that by a different light might have been a swastika, hangovers from a day when London liked to flaunt its mysteries.
A dropping away of buildings.
Neon-filled darkness to either side.
A broad street widening out into a bridge, an empty nothing over
water; on the far side, railway bridges, glassy reflective buildings set all at odd angles: Hay’s Wharf and Tower Bridge to the east, Southwark to the west, Southwark Cathedral poking up above the offices and pubs, the
London is a dragon.
Protector of the city.
Light, life, fire.
London Bridge in the small hours of a winter morning.
No traffic, no buses, no taxis, no lorries. Just an empty street, lit from above by a long line of silent, sad lamps, and by red floodlights illuminating the sides of the bridge. Railings cut off the pavements from the road. I staggered down the side of the left-hand lane, clutching my satchel to my side, gasping and reaching out for the railings to carry my weight. Someone had filled my eyes with empty honeycomb, thick, solid, airy, sticky, all these things at once and none of them natural; the pain that should have been in every part of my skin was just a distant prickling of pins and needles, too much blood between our fingers, some bastard shot us! Too much blood . . .
Where was Oda?
Where was Earle?
Where were the Aldermen?
Digested from the inside out.
Poor Loren alone in her room in Camden.
Vera dead and turned to paint.
And Nair had screamed, just like little Mo had screamed, just like all those dead men had screamed when they were still human to do it.
Give me back my hat.
Light, life, fire.
Protector of the city.
A dragon’s pet.
There was a woman standing alone in the middle of the bridge.
She was looking east, towards the place a sunrise might pretend to be in a few hours or so.
Her hands were turned towards the river, her face towards the sky.
She was breathing in the river air. That beautiful, calming, relaxing, cooling river air, sorcerer’s balm after a hard day with the voltages; time and stillness and movement all rolled into one breath on the bridge.
The palms of her hands were girly pink, the outsides deep, dark brown. Her hair was woven in plaits so tight it must have hurt, had no choice but to hurt.
We staggered towards her.
She didn’t notice.
Her eyes were closed, her heart beating in time to the running of the water below the bridge.
Ten paces, five, three, two.
We stopped a step away from her, leant against the side of the bridge, gasping for breath.
Penny Ngwenya didn’t move, didn’t blink, just stood on the bridge and smiled at the smell of the river.
I said, “Miss?”
Nothing.
“Miss?!”
Nothing.
I fumbled in my satchel, pulled out the traffic warden’s hat, smearing its surface with my bloody fingertips. “Miss Ngwenya?”
A flicker on her face. Her head half-turned, her eyes half-opened, distant, but still there, looking at me, even if she didn’t entirely see.
I held up the hat. “Penny Ngwenya?”
Her eyes went to the hat in my blood-covered hands. Her fingers twitched, her mouth opened to let out a little, sliding breath.
I reached out with one shaking hand, took her hand in mine, pressed the hat into her fingers, closed them, unresisting, over the black fabric. “I brought you back your hat,” I said.
A moment.
A pause.
She didn’t seem to understand.
Her eyes fell slowly down to thing in her hand. “My . . . hat?”
“Yes. I heard you lost it. I brought it back.”
“Do I know you?” she asked, turning it over in her fingers, looking at the yellow “Penny” written inside.
“No,” I replied. “My name’s Matthew.”
“You . . . you look . . .” she began, voice a million miles away, eyes fixed on the hat.
“I happened to be passing,” I said carefully. “No trouble.”
“We . . . haven’t met, have we?”
“No,” I replied. “Just strangers.” And then, because up seemed to be wanting to give down a try, and down was feeling flexible enough just this once to let up have its way, I slid down against the side of the bridge, burying my fingers into the cold concrete in case sideways wanted to try the same trick on me. I saw the edges of my vision start to cave.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Penny, dropping down with me, trying to hold me up. “You’ve . . . you’ve been . . .”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “It’s fine, just fine, it’ll be . . . I had to bring you back your hat, you see?”
“You’ve been fucking shot!”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Don’t move, OK? You’ll just make it worse, I’ll . . . I’ll call an ambulance.”
