Mr Pinner pulled the piece of fishing rod from his chest, and looked at it with an expression of surprise. Small scraps of paper drifted down from the wound, caught in the wind and billowed upward for a moment, before the falling rain cast them down into the puddle at his feet.
Then, quietly and off to our left, something went
He looked up sharply and, just a bit too late, realised. Something else went
A plastic bottle tumbled from a pile and bounced away. A piece of rotting brown string snapped free from a Gordian knot. A sprout of purple buddleia twisted and shrivelled, its roots dislodged. Then came the scuttling. It started as a distant tap dance performed by a flea circus, rose into a tumbling of meltwater, the ice still in it, became a high chattering noise, and only at the last moment did we understand. The rats were coming out of the junk: hundreds of fat brown rats. They slithered from inside the humming piles of twisted debris, plopped down onto the earth, onto each other and scuttled for the exit, worming past my ankles, brushing against my legs, flowing over my feet and past me without even bothering to slow down, streaming around Mr Pinner and away, tumbling into the street and gutters, searching for a way out.
Then I felt something move past my head. I ducked instinctively, shielding my face with my hands. Through my parted fingers I could see what it was. A fishing rod, the end snapped off. It spun past my ear and struck Mr Pinner across the side of the head, too fast for him to dodge. A broken umbrella flew point-first from a pile of rubble and embedded itself in his shoulder; a deflated plastic football spun from the ground and tangled around his feet, a blackened barbecue spun past me and knocked into him; and now it wasn’t just one thing, it was a dozen, a hundred, the whole yard spinning and screaming and rattling and twisting and rising and turning and falling, all falling in, tumbling down from the great pyramids like iron filings drawn to a magnet, like a rocket into the sun.
We threw ourself on the ground as the tarmac cracked and splintered beneath us, covering our head, tucking our arms into our ears and our hands over our eyes and willing fury and life still into the old dead things left to rot around us, pushing every drop of fear and anger and strength we possessed into the rust and mould and telling it,
I couldn’t see; the air was too full of spinning broken objects that, even as they travelled, shed spare parts, clattering to the earth around them. A thick orange dust of metal shavings, sawdust, sand, rust, old spilt chemicals, shattered moulds, ripped-up mosses and bits of thick purple fungus and thin green slime filled the air, turning clear lines of perspective into a maddened oil canvas painted by a drugged-up loon. I breathed through the sleeve of my coat, and even that hurt, my nose burning with the rust that tried to slash and tear the soft tissues, my eyes running and every sense overwhelmed with so much information all at once that I could barely register any thought at all. Just crawl, keep it simple, too much thinking, too much trouble, too much of too much, just keep crawling . . .
I bumped into the chain fence, bent back like a clifftop tree in a storm, and crawled along it, feeling my way to the edge. I half thought I heard Oda again, but it was hard to tell, beneath the tumbling of a thousand dead bits of steel, iron, plastic, brick, concrete, rubber, glass, plexiglas, clay, tin, plywood, chipboard . . . a hand closed over our ankle and we whimpered, glancing back into the storm and half-blinded by the blast of everything that hit our eyes, so weak, small, frail, mortal,
Mr Pinner
his hand was paper
for a moment we blinked and pushed back against the storm and saw
the skin torn away. It was just white paper, covered in tiny illegible writing and the suit, his suit tearing in the wind, was sewn into the paper; I could see the tiny stitches as the cuff was pulled back by the whirlwind. His eyes were full of blue ink; his hair was unravelling, each strand unfolding into a tube, a receipt or a bus ticket or some small marker, that flew away and unfurled behind him. His teeth were rubbers, tiny white rubbers set into a broader rubber gum; his tongue was some sort of thick moleskin or leather, dry, like the kind used to bind an executive diary. It occurred to us quite how much he looked like a thing summoned, a creation of someone’s fury: consequence, not cause . . .
His other hand came up, holding a not-quite-gold-nibbed pen, the end dripping black ink drops that were snatched away into the whirlwind. He was on his belly, an arm, part of a head sticking out from beneath a falling tonnage of rubbish and scrap, which writhed and twisted above him like a great angry worm, bits of old fridge and shattered chair rising to the surface and falling into the depths, like a liquid creature, not a thing of solid mass at all. I kicked at the hand that seized my ankle, grabbed the strength in my chest, the heat and the fear and sent it blasting down my leg, smoking and spitting electric anger off his fingertips. His grip relaxed for just a moment and I crawled free, staggering onto my hands and knees even as Mr Pinner shrieked in frustration and a wardrobe, the doors gaping like jaws, tumbled down on him from out of the whirlwind.
I turned away from the storm and ran, sparks flashing off the surface of my skin as I struggled to control it, too much, too much magic, too much electricity, too much of anything that was too too much . . .
And there was the street, the road, the cars, alarms wailing in furious distress, the windows opening in streets around, the telephone lines swaying and jangling uneasily, and Oda, already halfway up the street and headed for the station, Mo slung across her shoulders, not looking back, never looking back. I staggered after her as behind me the great mound of scrap that had upended itself on Mr Pinner heaved and warped, buckled and screamed and it was going to go.
I ran down the street, staggering and bumping against the sides of the cars, heard the little jangling sound of the iron fence giving out behind me, heard the whooshing of the telephone lines as they tore free from their moorings, heard the distant screech of some passing train slamming on the brakes and an almost sad, gentle,
I threw myself down into the gutter, crawled underneath the bumper of the nearest car and put my hands over my head as behind me, the scrapyard blossomed like a mushroom cloud. It went up into the air, spread out in blissful photographic slow motion, and fell. It rained stuffing, wire, broken pipe, rusted metal, old fridge and split tyre. Half a dresser smashed through the bedroom window of a nearby house; a truck found its roof caved in by an upside-down van, the engine, tyres and windows gone, that fell from the heavens like a burning bush. An armchair managed to catch itself on the sharpened antennae of a rooftop TV aerial; a chimney pot smashed down on a garden gnome. Everywhere there was dust, and dirt, and rust, shimmering like orange snow down onto the ground. It seemed to take a lifetime to settle; it probably took less than five seconds.
I looked around me. A grandfather clock had landed half a foot from my hiding place, top-down, and spilt its ancient blackened gears across the pavement. An old crowbar was buried like King Arthur’s sword in the bonnet of the car in front of me; a sheet of thin insulating foam drifted from the sky to land at my feet. Wherever there was an alarm, it was wailing, on every house, and in every car. I crawled to my feet and looked back at the scrapyard. Black smoke obscured everything, but it seemed like most of the contents of the yard were now spilt across an area roughly five times wider and five times shallower than before. A piece of paper drifted past my feet, turning rapidly grey in the rain. It said:
I looked up.
There was a man standing in the smoke.
Smoothing down his suit.
We ran.
Oda had been knocked flat by the blast. As I caught up with her, she was trying to pick Mo up with one arm while pulling the remnants of yellow sealing foam out of her hair. “Help me!” she snapped, and I guessed she meant with the kid.
I dragged him up and together we staggered towards the end of the road.
“Did you kill him?” she asked.
“Ha ha,” I replied.
“Terrific. Where is he?”
“Smoothing down his suit. If we’re lucky I’ve rattled him and we’ll have a few minutes. If not . . .”
