Steph Swainston - Dangerous Offspring

The poverty was obvious here; many lived in the streets. Everyone wore hats, endless designs of cloth caps and liripipes. A beggar was shouting, ‘Fists and daffodils! Swans and shells!’ I riffled through my wallet and dropped him a couple of ten-penny notes with the Summerday shell.

I glanced over to the shield factory’s covered courtyard. Boys from the workhouse were laying out unpainted shields for their glue to dry. I could just see onto the factory floor where craftsmen were making them by hand.

I stopped and looked around. I knew I was still heading towards Old Town because the university’s tower, with turrets at each of its four corners, projected above the shambling roofs. I was deep in Galt now but I felt weirdly disorientated. I had expected to recognise my old haunt, but it bore no resemblance to the Galt I knew. There was no ground plan left of the streets, no trace whatsoever of the old docks. It’s been two hundred years, Jant, I told myself; what do you expect? It was unfamiliar…no, so nearly familiar, that it was giving me the creeps.

A cart laden with rubbish went past; the whiskery driver bellowing, ‘Raag and Bo-one! Raag and Bo-one!’

What was that about? Where were all the wharves? All this used to be open ground-it seemed impossible-how could so many houses have been fitted into it?

I was sure I should have passed the Bird in the Hand Awian strip joint, but there were just more houses. Either I was completely in the wrong place or the very roads had changed. Well, I thought, the chemist’s shop where I used to work would have been over there. I’ll walk down and see if I’m right.

When I lived here, the city way of thinking trapped me, narrowing my horizons just as the factories block out the sky. I didn’t even want to leave. I put all my energy into misguided actions and negative reactions until I couldn’t pull myself from the mire. Back then, the roads out of Galt led in two directions. To the left, the streets thinned out and one road wound over Pityme Bridge into the beginning of grassy hills in the distance. I could have taken that road and escaped, but I never did; not until I was forced out. That road may as well have not existed. Every night I went right, down the other alley to the strip joint with a sign promising ‘Great Tits!’ in the window. I convinced myself that I’d had enough of travelling, should stay in the shop and read books, and visit whores. It never even crossed my mind that the Castle would want my talent, until my life in Hacilith was in ruins.

I had liked working in Dotterel’s chemist shop, it was dim and quiet; the gang’s fear of employment made it a safe refuge. With the shutters down, every customer who entered saw me, a boy slouching on the counter who had already looked them over, a freak perhaps, tall and skinny even for adolescence, but a perfect confidant.

My time looking for Cyan was nearly up. It’s hopeless, I thought-I’ll go and see Rayne instead, if she hasn’t already left for Slake, and then I’ll head back. At least I’ll be able to tell the others when Rayne should be arriving.

I reached an open plaza and stopped. This should be Cinder Street. Maybe…that row of shops was along the same line. I looked around. If this was Cinder Street, then the Kentledge pub would have been at the far end…And my chemist’s shop would have been…there. And the Campion Vaudeville! That should be on the next street over! I ran quickly towards it, remembering the peeling playbills fluttering on its boards, the shards of glass that topped the walls around it, the masks and scrolls around the windows in its leaking mansard roof.

The street ended at an empty plaza with a row of smart boutiques and some sort of trendy wine bar. The Campion Vaudeville had totally gone.

They’ve redeveloped my street! How dare they? Yes, it had been run down but I had liked it! There was no trace of the second-hand shops full of individual texture I had loved so much. That corner was where I busked with Babbitt-and now it had all been swept away.

The new shops had no character; time hadn’t given them any unique pattern of wear. They blocked my view of the canal towpath, pressed up tall and narrow against each other as if someone had put a hand at each end of the plaza and squeezed them together. Their colour-washed fronts were rose pink, yellow, pale blue, chalky green and grey. They proudly announced they’d passed inspection, with firemark, ratmark and lousemark tin badges tacked to their walls.

I walked along the row, half whited-out by drizzle. Streams of water dripped from the sign of the horrendous new bar at the far end and pattered into concentric rings on the paving stones. That bar would be more or less on the place where the Kentledge pub used to be, where our gang leader carved the Wheel scar into my shoulder. The power of the memory made me shudder: I outlast whole streets, and now Cinder Street and everything I remembered was no more.

This must have been exactly where Dotterel the chemist picked me up; when he made me his apprentice. I stood and stared at the row of shops until I could call up an image of the Campion two hundred years ago. It seemed larger in memory, closer and brighter than the shops it overlaid. Its smoke-stained stone had flaked off here and there showing clean, biscuity spots.

I heard a whir, a paddletram!-It sounded like it could be…but it wasn’t. Simply flocks of starlings screaming and swirling in to roost.

A vision of my younger self jumped down from the Campion’s portico and ran past me, soundlessly though his footsteps should have splashed. He vanishes. He reappears again in the alley by the Kentledge; transparent-then solid-a lanky fifteen-year-old in a filthy parka. He ducks his head and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Lines of coaches are waiting outside the Campion Vaudeville, and wisps of smog are curling through and around their wheels. Oil lamps are guttering out with gin-blue flames since it is three in the morning and the late show is just ending. The act closes to half-hearted acclaim and people begin to stagger out into the street. Linkboys hang around in a curious cloud, their tapers scribbling lines of smoke into the air above them. The Rhydanne boy hates them, because they understand each other. They know how to buy bustard burgers and tablet fudge. They swagger with the all-encompassing importance of their job.

From the end of the street there are raised voices, lads shouting to each other about the can-can dancers. Paddletrams groan past in the background, grinding cabbage leaves and hawked-up chewing tobacco into a black sludge between the rails. The boy is faster than sight; he pauses to draw breath and ducks behind the frame of a waiting coach. The nearest human moves on and the boy relaxes.

He moves in quick bursts, waiting behind lamp post and coach wheel, doorway and alley. He crooks his elbow and tears the Insect wing windows of all the coaches along the line.

‘I saw you!’ calls a voice from somewhere in the fog. Quick as a rat the boy leaps onto the top of the carriage, which hardly rocks at all on its flat springs. He crouches, nose streaming, piercing eyes in a grimy face.

An old man emerges from the porch of the Campion. His head is bowed and his face is in shadow. This is a trick the boy very much admires. The man looks up; his face is padded, deeply wrinkled and his nose veined cranberry red. Wisps of hair too white for Galt adhere to his bald head. He is wearing a long, grey coat and carrying a cane with a silver handle, which he points at the boy. The boy simply crouches further on thin haunches and spreads his wings.

The man knows that if he takes a step or even stares too hard, the boy will run. Very querulously he says, ‘Who are you?’ but he says it in Scree.