CHAPTER 31
I remember the first stories Gutterglass ever told me about my mother. Glas was a woman at the time, and she had her rats stretch her lap out for me, and we lay back on the side of a mountain of tin cans, condoms and mulch. Glas always found the grandeur of the landfill comforting; it was easier to talk about the good old days there, without the sour milk spilling from her shells.
That smell of decay still makes me think of home.
Glas rocked me to and fro, and although I pretended scandalised pride, I secretly loved every second.
‘Your mother,’ she began, ‘is an incredible thing…’
I’d never been able to remember my mother; I’d barely even been aware I was missing one. But I knew this was important. I stopped feeding congealed special fried rice to her rats and listened, and I discovered that my mother was that most incredible thing: a Goddess. I also learned that out of all the things she was, being my mother was by far the least important.
But even with that momentous revelation I got bored and I wriggled out of Glas’ lap and set to work building a castle out of old paint tins. I really didn’t understand.
But later…
Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, and we use rubble of the old to raise up new ones. Some memories are bright glass, blindingly beautiful when they catch the sun, but then there are the darker days, when they reflect only the crumbling walls of their derelict neighbours. Some memories are buried under years of patient construction; their echoing halls may never again be seen or walked down, but still they are the foundations for everything that stands above them.
Glas told me once that that’s what people are, mostly: memories, the memories in their own heads, and the memories of them in other people’s. And if memories are like a city, and we are our memories, then we are like cities too. I’ve always taken comfort from that.
A decade ago, a six-year-old boy raced a glowing-glass girl through the warm brick warrens of the Lots Road Power Station, and if you’d asked him then, he’d’ve said, ‘ ’course I’ve met my mother.’
If you could get him to stop showing off for the horrified lightbulb girl by swimming in the station’s water tanks, if you could get him to tear his eyes away from the spectacle of her plugging herself into the mains and glowing as bright as a tiny sun, and if you could get the inarticulate little squit to shape the words, he’d tell you all about his mother.
‘Are you blind?’ he’d say; ‘are you daft? She’s there. Right there-’
— with him and Electra as they dared each other to do ever more suicidally stupid things for the honour of their genders (never mind their species). He’d tell you how he and his mother had fought side by side against the cranes; how they’d lassoed the moon and dragged it into the sky, leaving it hanging there like an old tyre on a rope. He’d remind you how when she sang it made the river still, and that once she’d baked him a tarmac cake this big (he’d extend his short-arse six-year-old arms to maximum stretch) and he’d eaten all of it — of course he had, were you calling him a girl?
He’d tell you all of this, and it would be true, for him, because he remembered it. He’d built the glass buildings in his mind. And it was a long time before he could tell the difference between these fantasies and the older, deeper truths they reflected.
Once, when I was a lot older and I’d all but forgotten all those almost-memories I’d imagined, I thought I was finally about to meet Mater Viae for real.
I was in an alley in the Old Kent Road, and a dustbin fell over and a stray cat darted out and for no reason I can now fathom I thought, It’s Fleet. I was certain that any minute now cats would spill from the shadows in a purring, hissing, flea-bitten flood. And then I’ll see her, and then I’ll finally know…
But the letters on the street sign stayed the same, no matter how hard I stared at them, and although I waited until long after the lone furball found some tiny, scrabbling morsel to chase, no other cats followed it. A fox did, and a drug dealer who didn’t see me, and a couple of his customers who were too high to care who watched while they screwed against the wall, but no more cats.
And you know what? More than anything else, I felt relieved — because all my fantasies, all those almost — memories, they were safe.
That’s worth something.
CHAPTER 32
‘Do you think you could at least admit you have no idea what you’re doing?’ Ezekiel asks. He doesn’t make the effort to change his overface’s expression, but although the stone mouth is still singing a hosanna, I can see the disdainful curl of his lip beneath.
‘I’m quite serious,’ he repeats, ‘because if you persist in pretending you know how to lead an army while handing out idiotic instructions, I’m going to have to tell my boys their Goddess’ child is an imbecile. It’d be a blow to morale, but I’d take that over the risk of any of them actually listening to you.’
We’re on the Embankment, on the north side of Chelsea Bridge. Ezekiel’s got himself a plinth on the corner outside the Royal Hospital Gardens. The graceless bulk of the old Victorian infirmary looms over us; it’s under heavy repair and I watch the scaffolding surrounding its brick skin nervously, but nothing moves. It’s probably normal, lifeless steel, but all scaff makes me nervous these days.
Calm down, Filius, I urge myself, trying to give Ezekiel my full attention. ‘What’s so stupid about the idea?’ I ask in what I think is a very reasonable tone.
‘That’s a stupid question.’
My remaining patience hisses out in one exasperated breath. ‘Look,’ I snap, ‘we have to find a way to keep the element of surprise, and when you’ve got a hundred tons of ambulant bloody rock on the move, that is easier said than done. All I suggested was since we have to march at night because of the Lampfolk, you stoneskins should make like empty statues: you all shuffle up from one plinth to the next until we get where we’re going and Reach’ll be none the wiser.’
I’m actually quite proud of the idea, but I can almost hear Ezekiel’s eyebrows grazing the inside of his punishment skin as they climb his face.
The tone of his voice could wither lichen. ‘First of all, we are Pavement Priests. We are the honour guard of the Street Goddess; we do not skulk and we do not sneak and we most certainly do not shuffle.
‘Second, do you have any notion of how hard it is to move a punishment skin? That’s why they’re called punishment skins, Highness. If you want us to have any energy left to fight with, we need to go by the most direct route possible, not “shuffle” from plinth to plinth, zigzagging across the city until we can’t even lift our own limbs.
‘And thirdly, you did not “just suggest” it, you said it in front of my men, who are both soldiers and clerics: they take a “suggestion” like that from a deity — which, sadly for all of us, is what you are — as an order. An order which in effect means they are to kill themselves by the most exhausting and humiliating means possible — oh, and incidentally, to hand almost certain victory to the enemy.
‘I had to tell them you were joking, so now they think the son of their Goddess has a sick sense of humour, but that’s better than them realising that he’s either a gibbering idiot or, very possibly, insane.’
‘Look, mate-’ I start, but he cuts me off scornfully.
‘I am not your mate. I am either your mother’s obedient servant, and therefore bound, reluctantly, to serve you too, or else I am the man who will put his limestone gauntlet through your chops for being the annoying little maggot who’s interfering in the running of my order. Either way, mate doesn’t really cover it.’
I’m this close to chinning him — if he thinks he can take me, I’m more than happy to educate him. ‘Fine,’ I hiss, ‘but why are you suddenly so hostile? Gutterglass said you agreed that I could lead ’em with you-’
Ezekiel freezes. Being a statue, he was pretty still anyway, and now he’s even stiller. And that, take it from me, is pretty bloody scarily still.
‘That’s one way to put it.’ He spits the words out between clenched teeth.
