Melvin Burgess - Bloodtide

For a long time there was just a low murmur from the crowd and the steady hissing of the rain on the bricks and pavements, but at last a long convoy of cars and armoured vehicles turned into Bishopsgate and crept over the cracked tarmac. As the sound of the engines grew, there was a strange effect. The hissing began to get louder. The faces of the VIPs turned upwards, looking for the heavy rainfall that must be making the sound, but the rain was falling off if anything. The hissing increased, louder and louder, even over the sound of the engines, as if the rain was insisting on its right to be heard.

It wasn't water; it was people pulling an old schoolboy trick. The thin rows of white faces lifted up from their huddle of rags and bits of plastic to watch an old enemy arrive among them. They didn't dare to boo or shout abuse for fear of Val's gangmen hidden in among them, but no one could tell where the hisses came from. Faces and mouths stayed still as paintings, but hundreds of throats hissed their hatred. The gang wars had crippled London for generations. Conor and his family had fought savagely and cruelly. There wasn't a soul in this crowd who hadn't lost a loved one to the man now driving in to visit them.

The noise began to gather force, to swell. Val was white with rage and frustration, but there was nothing he could do about it. This was his dream! He was putting together the army that was supposed to conquer paradise. These were the people who would break out of the asylum and take the world into the pockets of the poor. The people of the city had shared so many of his dreams, but not this one – not yet.

Conor's convoy, tiny in the shadow of the Galaxy Building, stopped in the square outside and the soldiers emerged from the armoured cars, bristling with weaponry like little toy men in the wide road.

The crowd began hissing again when Conor's personal bodyguard got out of the car. He… it… bared its teeth and its fur stood up on end at the sound until it looked pretty near twice as big. Then it opened its mouth – shouting or barking, who knows. It turned to open the door for Conor.

That was a halfman; Londoners had reason to hate them too, but Conor was the real monster. When he stepped out of his armoured car, the hissing swelled up until it sounded like something was going to burst. Conor pulled his coat around him and looked about as if he stood alone on the rainy street.'

Out from among the umbrellas came Val, dressed all in grey, as usual, as if he was someone's clerk. But around his neck he wore a bright crimson silk scarf, as he always did on public appearances. A symbol of fire and blood.

The crowd began to cheer for their leader. They loved Val even more than they hated Conor. But the cheering faltered as Conor and Val embraced each other. A few seconds later, as Val took his daughter in his hand and handed her to Conor, it was in a stony silence. Signy was fourteen years old, and scared white even though she knew how to kill a man. Conor leaned across and kissed her. Among the guard of honour that led between the convoy and the Galaxy Building, Siggy stood with the rain streaming down his face, but he kept so completely still that no one could tell his face was wet with tears.

Siggy

It was shit. I mean, I never take any notice of the politics but even I could see it was shit. Val was getting old. Doing that to Signy! But he convinced them, same as he always does.

The security arrangements! Conor had to have an army pointing at our throats, we had to have an army pointing at his. What sort of a treaty is that? We should have carried on the war, even if it took another generation. But Val was in a hurry, see. The job he wanted to do was the task of a century, but he wanted it all now, while he was still around to see it. So he ballsed it up.

There were armed thugs wandering around the streets for weeks. People were getting shot up because of fights breaking out between his forces and ours. And for what? For a handful of dreams. Val's dreams. He's a big man, my father, but dreams are just dreams even if you dream them for everyone. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean you just gotta look after Number One. But first of all you got to look after the people you can look after. Like Signy for instance. That's the way I looked at it. If you can't look after your own you can't be trusted to look after the whole world. But that was Val – his dreams were bigger than he was.

Half the city had to be prettied up for the wedding. We'd had old road surfaces broken up and melted down to resurface the car park for Conor's cars. We'd refurbished and decorated whole floors of the Galaxy Building for Conor's guests. It cost millions. If Val wanted to make things so great for everyone else, why didn't he just cancel the wedding and give London enough to eat for a couple of weeks? It would've been cheaper. Had did the money side of things; he told me. He's good at that sort of stuff – Val reckons Had could organise the sun at midnight, but I reckon getting Conor and the Volsons to make a treaty is harder. Had's the one who's supposed to take over from Val when the time comes, but I tell you, if anyone's fit to follow Val it's my sister. She has the brains and she has the vision. She's his true successor. But he'll just sell her off to service Conor and probably half his kitchen staff as well, once things break down.

My job was getting Galaxy in order. I had to supervise the building work and the decorators, clean the place up, get it painted. All pretty boring stuff. The only fun bit was clearing out the street kids from the ventilation system.

See, the ventilation system is such a great place for the homeless kids to live. They came from miles around to get in. Whole gangs live in there, like rats. Well, it's about thirty thousand times better than the street. They were quite happy to climb twenty storeys high or more to get in. Let's face it, Galaxy must be the richest building in town. Just the crumbs on the floor were better than most people's dinners.

Val didn't like it much. He thought it was a security risk, but security's about all he can think of. Show him a cheese sandwich and he'll be wondering about the security implications. Trouble was, though, you'd get more and more of them creeping inside until the place was infested, and it'd begin to stink. Then we had to clear the lot of them out. Actually, it wasn't that smelly when Conor turned up, but we don't want his lady guests being disturbed in the bathroom by a seven-year-old rat-boy jumping out and pinching her powder puff, do we? Those ducts run all over the place and you could hear the kids in the guts of the building, whispering, laughing, chatting, scratching, fighting, from miles away. You never knew where they were. They couldn't hear us, of course, but it did something to your sense of privacy having to listen to them shouting names at you even when you were in your own room.

What you do is, you get the men to cover off the ventilation grids with nets, then you let the dogs in. Pipe hounds, Ben called them. We kept this pack of wiry little terriers just for it. It was so funny! You could hear it all going on – the dogs scampering, growling and barking like little cannons going off. And the kids screaming, yelling, trying to work out where the dogs were and screeching suddenly like demons when the dogs came on 'em, 'It's there! It's there!' Then they'd start howling and running and the whole place would rattle and ring from the inside.

One after the other they'd come popping out of the walls into the arms of the security men. Then I gave them a packed lunch and a blanket and sent them off into the street. They were grateful for the blanket. Val was OK like that He thought it was a good political move, keeping in with the common people, that sort of thing.