That heavy red stump to the far right must be White City fort. Lawrence’s heart jolted in excitement. That blue expanse must be North Kensington basin. It looked tiny. In reality, it was large enough for flying boats—sizeable ones—to land and take off, according to Sarah-Kelly. He guarded himself against sentimentality—it was highly unlikely she was down there. She disliked her family too. It was something basic they had in common, although Lawrence had never been able to pin down exactly what caused her feelings.
He turned away from the view and kept going. About an hour later he grew wary again as the smoking chimneys and long black roofs of an asylum considerably larger than Camden loomed up. As he feared, the path ran up to a check point announcing the gates of Brent Cross industrial asylum together with a list of offenses that carried the death penalty. The frontier was manned by guards dressed in a fanciful uniform of bamboo armour and leather helmets. Their inspection of passports was not fanciful. Lawrence veered off to the right into a scrubby wasteland to consider his options.
There was only one option: scouting. Build up a mental map of the locale to seek out any weak points in the frontier. Time passes swiftly when the mind is so absorbed. The wan sun of late November sped over its arc to beam at him pale orange in a cooling evening. By this time, he had discovered several back ways into Brent Cross. The problem was, they were all dangerous.
West of Brent Cross lay an area of marginal bushland separating the asylum from a considerable extent of gangster petty domains. These petty domains ran as far as the eye could see to the north and west. They were clearly prosperous, featuring groves of redwoods and absurd toy castles streaming banners. In the Public Era, this land had been tiled with the suburbs of the Fatted Masses, however, that old, ordered landscape of houses and tarmac roads had vanished into strip fields and pastures within a couple of generations.
The marginal land was itself home to ‘marginals’, a shadowy population formed of surplus resourceful enough to survive without land or passports. Their paths threaded through the bushland. The whole area was speckled with their settlements of canvas tents and wooden crates. In exploring the network of paths, Lawrence encountered numerous locals, few of whom paid him any attention. They were like him: burly young men in dirty clothes who left a wake of neglected personal hygiene. These marginal locals had their own ways into Brent Cross where there was plenty of casual labour for them to do, such as odd jobs for market traders or one-off jobs for the ultramarines when there was a lack of Night and Fog. The problem was, all the paths disappeared into the back-lanes of workers’ districts; not places where dirty, low-life strangers would have a happy time. There must be some accepted ritual by which groups of marginals could pass through the workers’ districts at specific times. Perhaps they got met by an escort. Lawrence would have to get into the society of the marginals to find out. That was the dangerous part. Even this far from Peterborough, it was possible the ultras had put about a reward for Lawrence’s recapture. With his pierced ear and privileged accent, he would not make a hard ID.
He found a thicket close to where one of the paths entered Brent Cross and settled down for the night, hungry and cold and hoping it did not rain. It was rain that woke him up. He spent miserable hours curled in a ball under a bush, trying to laugh at the ample food he could have had back in the Value System. In the morning the sun rose and a balmy southern wind cheered him up. It could be worse. Blizzards were not unknown in November.
Footfalls, voices, the swish of branches on clothes, a stream of shabby, bearded men trooped past on the path. The amount of them surprised Lawrence. The stream thinned to some final lazybones running to catch up. Lawrence ran after them to find a crowd of perhaps a hundred pooled at the edge of the asylum houses. None of them looked twice at him. There was a core of old hands who joked together, while the rest gave all the appearances of being in the same boat as Lawrence; strangers hoping to hitch a ride. He made sure his hat was pulled well down to hide his pierced ear. Unfortunately he had no way of obscuring his blond stubble.
The escort arrived. A hard-eyed man of about forty in a black leather jacket and gleaming black leather boots stood up on an old stump. He was backed up by four Neanderthal body guards rattling bicycle chains, obviously hoping, oh so hoping, there were troublemakers in the crowd. What he needed was twenty strong men for a day’s hard work, three square meals in return. Most of those who stepped forward got dismissed: I said strong men, not girls. Lawrence tried his luck and got the nod without a hitch. He was in.
Fifteen minutes later, he was following his new gang across a great expanse of gravel and scattered birch copses, surrounded by chimneys and the soul-crushing black sheds of industry. Man-hauled ultramarine wagons came at them from all directions, women lugging canvas shopping bags tottered past in waves,
