paused, as if he’d just thought of something. He muttered to himself.
‘What was that, Filius?’ Gutterglass asked.
‘I said, she’s right.’
Beth blinked some of her tears back in. ‘What?’ she said.
The rubbish-woman’s tone was glacial. ‘A good question, Filius. What? ’
‘Thames, Glas, don’t make me say it again.’ He sighed. ‘She’s right: I was going to run. She was the only reason I didn’t.’
Gutterglass’ face creased into a nervous smile. ‘But that was then; that was before-’
‘ That was five days ago — before what? Before her, Glas, that’s the only “before”. We owe her.’ The look he shot at Beth was guilty.
A thrill prickled her scalp. Whatever his protestations, he wasn’t doing this out of any sense of debt to her — in spite of himself, in spite of his fear, he wanted her there.
‘But you said it yourself,’ Gutterglass protested. ‘She isn’t strong enough — she isn’t fast enough-’
‘But we can make her faster, can’t we?’ he said. ‘We can make her stronger.’
Gutterglass’ eyes stretched open, their enamel-white insides turning almost outwards as whatever had just occurred to her ward had touched her mind as well.
‘ Blood-flowing-Thames,’ she swore.
‘Can you make me braver?’ he asked quietly, ‘because given the suicidal bloody nature of the enterprise I’m on, it looks like she can.’
There was silence then, broken only by a pigeon making a nose-dive for the bit of bun that formed Gutterglass’ left ear.
‘Would the two of you please stop talking about me like I’m not here!’ Beth yelled.
Gutterglass’ eggshell-eyes didn’t stray from her prince’s face. ‘You had better tell her, then,’ she said. ‘Tell her what you’re asking her to do.’
She turned away and crouched over the Blankleits, muttering and petting them, checking none of their hairline cracks had opened up.
Fil looked pale, elated and scared all at once. ‘Come on then.’ He took Beth by the arm.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’ll explain on the way, but we need to get going now. I really don’t want to meet them in the dark. Glas, Victor,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘look after the Lampies for us while we’re gone.’
Victor grunted and swigged from his bottle, but Gutterglass answered acidly, ‘Oh, absolutely your Highness! And should I wash your jeans for you too? Maybe you’ve got time for a foot-rub before you go? What with having only your babysitting to do I can’t think what I’ll do with all my spare time!’
He glared at her, but though worms writhed through the eggshells, she didn’t blink. The street prince caved first. ‘All right,’ he said at last, ‘what are you going to do, then?’
‘What you should be doing instead of running off on a wild wraith-chase. I’m going to put together an army. I’ll start with our Mistress’ priesthood.’
‘Our first port of call,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t listen.’
A beetle tugged a thin smile across Gutterglass’ lips. An unmistakable new confidence infused her shape. ‘They will listen to me.’
Beth dragged her arm from his grip. ‘Fil, please, tell me where we’re going.’
The smile, when it finally made it onto his face, was the very opposite of reassuring. ‘We’re going to get you what you want.’
Paul Bradley paced the streets of Hackney in a kind of aggravated daze. The light from the streetlamps made his hands look jaundiced. Early evening frost crunched under his feet. He spoke to himself in an angry mumble, sometimes rising to a frightened shout. Tramps eyed him from their sleeping-bags. He knew the couples hustling past him, huddled into each other, were assuming he was drunk, but though he’d been tempted, he hadn’t had anything stronger than coffee. He knew he wasn’t mad — madness would be to stop talking to himself, to stop urging himself on. Madness would be to succumb to the almost irresistible urge spreading from the pit of his stomach to curl up in a doorway and shut his eyes until the world went away.
‘Think, Bradley, think,’ he hissed to himself, over and over, ‘ think: you can find her.’ Walk, Bradley, walk, echoed the unspoken instruction to his legs, and obediently he shoved one foot in front of the other.
When the glowing woman’s last light had faded he’d stumbled away from the shattered place behind the railway, walking until his knees gave way. He sat on the pavement outside a closed internet cafe on a ganja- scented high street, clutching the picture of the boy with the railing. He’d not smelled the sweet dough rising in the Caribbean bakery next door, or noticed the taunts of the kids strutting past in their hoodies and baseball jackets. The sound of passing police sirens did register, and he’d felt a pang — but what could he tell them? That his missing daughter’s best friend had been kidnapped by a cloud of barbed wire? If he was banged up in a cell for wasting police time his chances of fixing this fell to zero.
When the cafe opened he scanned Beth’s sketch of the skinny boy and posted it on as many message boards as he could find, then, seized by a horror of inaction, he ran back out into the street to walk London’s endless, twisting pavements until he was as breathless as he was bewildered. But he had to keep walking, because the one time he’d stopped, just for a moment, just to ease his aching feet, he’d fallen asleep. In his dream a kindly-faced woman in a headscarf had demanded, over and over again, in his own voice: ‘Where is my daughter?’ He woke soaked in sweat, and as cold as the morning frost that webbed the tarmac.
He knew exactly how Parva’s parents would be feeling now: the way they’d be reassuring themselves, repeating, ‘I’m sure she’s fine’ over and over because although they weren’t sure she was fine at all, they had no idea what to do if she wasn’t. He knew the symptoms; he was a carrier. Having a lost child was a disease he was spreading.
But he wasn’t looking for Parva, even though the guilt for that fact sat, toxic as bleach, in his belly. His only goal was to find Beth.
When he recognised a hardware shop on a street corner he realised his feet had automatically marched him close to home. ‘Think, Bradley, think; where would she go?’ But he didn’t know; his mind was a blank. He didn’t know where she hung out, where she ate, where she shopped; apart from Parva, he didn’t even know her friends.
Marianne would have known. Oh, love, where are you? Where have you gone? He hadn’t spoken to his wife in the silence of his head like that in months. She had always known what to say. Whenever Beth had been sent home from school with a torn shirt and a bloody nose, it was always Marianne who made the long walk up to the little room in the attic and brought their daughter back to them. When he’d asked her what she’d said to Beth, she’d smiled and said, ‘I backed her up. It’s what mothers do for their little girls.’
He curled his fist around the photo of Beth’s drawing of the boy, now bent and street-soiled. To his deep shame, this was all he knew of his daughter.
He almost stumbled over a pile of concrete scraps and stopped. Tyres hissed over tarmac on the road behind him. He didn’t sit down because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get up again. But the darkness came over him like a suffocating blanket, and another step seemed impossible.
Walk, Bradley, walk. But he didn’t. A poisonous, paranoid voice in his mind said, There’s no point. She’s already dead. You’ll see her body. You’ll see her dead body.
The pile of broken lumps of concrete that had tripped him sat in the middle of the pavement. It looked like some kid had scribbled over it in black paint He froze. He tilted his head and slumped, trying to bring it into focus. Slowly, the sharp angles of concrete and paint materialised into a shape:
A rhino, horned and heavy-hoofed, was stampeding out at him.
He let out a tiny whimper. He recognised it instinctively, that sense of damage and violence that lurked in the everyday, waiting to ambush you. Slowly he let the picture of the street-boy uncurl from between his fingers. He barely dared to breathe. He could see it there, in the whip-lines of ink: the rhino-in-concrete was by the same hand.
You know one more thing, he thought, wherever she is, she’s painting. She was leaving a trail of ink and paint like breadcrumbs.
Walk, Bradley. But he didn’t walk. He ran.
