Tom Pollock - The City's son

Think, Beth: what do you know about him? Well, he runs around London’s railway tracks in the middle of the night without a shirt or shoes but with a bloody great iron railing, jabbering incomprehensible cryptic bollocks about light and music and monsters, and he risked getting flattened by five hundred tons of angry freight train just to save you. You’ve got to admit, these are not the characteristics of someone overburdened with sanity.

She slumped, but then a thought struck her: what if the directions weren’t cryptic at all? He hadn’t just looked like he slept in the streets, but like he always had done. It dawned on Beth that street names and house numbers might be a meaningless code to someone who’d never lived in one.

What if he’d told Beth where to find him as clearly and simply as he could?

Beth licked her lips. She wracked her memory for a place that fit. Where the Railwraith’s rush… It had to be near a train line. He’d checked that she was from Hackney, so that narrowed it down. Beth’s excitement mounted as she worked it through — but where was the light itself music, though?

A memory surfaced: a railway footbridge overgrown with brambles, the boards armoured in chewing gum harder than concrete. It was a meeting place she’d shared with Pen, where they’d traded sweets and whispered secrets. When the trains shot past underneath, the sound of their wheels on the tracks was like drums.

There were four streetlamps in the cul-de-sac below. Their light had flickered as they lit up in what Pen described as a ‘fractured harmony’. Beth had always thought that was kind of beautiful; there had been a definite rhythm to their flashes. And wasn’t rhythm all you really needed to dance?

If nothing else, it was as good a place as any to start.

Beth looked back up at Pen’s window and all her excitement drained away, replaced with queasy dread. Sure enough, when she turned away, there it was: a sharp white pain, hard up against her ribs. It’s like that phantom-limb thing you hear about, she told herself sternly, like soldiers get. She tried to make herself believe that the hurt was coming from an empty space, a love already gone.

She made it all of three steps before she ducked back into the alley.

‘You’re a soft idiot, Bradley,’ she muttered as, despite herself, she rough-sketched another figure on the bricks: a skinny boy holding a railing like a spear.

Gone hunting, she scribbled under the picture of her quarry. Look for me in broken light.

Her anger hissed at her spitefully from the back of her mind, but the secret was too big and too lonely to keep to herself, and, in spite of everything, Pen was still the only person she could imagine sharing it with.

Fractured harmony, remember? she scrawled finally, before shouldering her backpack and forcing herself, step by step, to walk away

Night seeps in from the sky. The breath from the manholes starts to steam. The city shivers, and draws darkness about it. This is when the Sodiumites dance.

I stand in a clearing between tower blocks, a pedestrianised island of asphalt beside a railway footbridge, away from the road. Streetlights puncture the pavement at the four compass-points. A couple of kids stand on the bridge, smoking and studiously ignoring me as the warmth ebbs sluggishly from the air.

Slow, slow at first, a light begins inside the streetlamps; the first steps of the dancers behind the glass barely raise a glow, just a few tiny flashes where they plant their heels. A graceful hand twists and beckons inside one of the bulbs, sparks leaping from her fingers.

I crack my knuckles, stretch my back, breathe deep.

All four sisters are awake now, pressing themselves against the glass, blowing fiery kisses, feigning helplessness, coyly pretending to be caged. My heart begins to trip.

Now speed comes to the dance and bright lights flicker. My shadow dances, and I start to move with it, twisting my limbs to the rhythm of the light: visual music. The strobe is hypnotic; I feel drunk but perfectly balanced, high on light.

Thames! This feels good The girls on the bridge toss their cigarettes and one of them laughs as the other mutters something about the ‘junkie tramp’.

They walk away and do not see the lamps, one by one, cut out.

Electra is the first, the boldest, as always. She slides her body smoothly down the length of the dimmed streetlamp until her feet scorch asphalt. Her glassy skin is perfectly clear. The fluorescent dust in her blood is blinding. Fibre-optic hair waves in a magnetic breeze I can only dream of feeling. I glance around; her sisters have all slipped their bulbs too now and they encircle me, swaying in time to the light, laughing soundlessly.

Electra starts clapping and the others pick up the rhythm, light flaring as palm hits palm in a complex syncopated glow-and-dim. Once her sisters have it, Electra stops and stands tall, extending an arm to me in formal invitation.

I take her hand and we dance.

Each strobe is a flash of vision: a motion, a thud of blood in my head.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

She controls my pulse with her fingers. She owns my breath. I slide my hand close over her hip.

Flash flash flash She singes the hairs on my skin. Her neck arches back and her teeth flare as she grins. I can feel their heat by my ear. She dances, she shines, she is alive; I dance with her and so am I.

Eventually I have to stop, panting, and laughing, and she slows, cooling enough to kiss my cheek. The heat of her lips is a shade below painful.

Welcome, Son of the Streets.

The others keep playing. One plucks a spectritar, adding shades of colour to the music while the remaining two sisters laugh and dance together, cheerfully mocking old-fashioned styles.

I sit and find the gravel chilly after her heat.

She turns and paces around me, and then stops and opens her mouth. ‘ What is it? ’

I read the word in semaphore from the pulsing light of her tonsils. ‘What’s what?’ I ask, exaggerating the words so she can read my lips.

‘ You are tense. ’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘ I could drown a rat in toxic waste; it would make a better dancing partner. ’

My cheeks burn. ‘I didn’t think it was that bad.’

She shrugs disdainfully. ‘ You were stiff, and slow, behind the beat even more than usual. Your mind was somewhere else — I hope so at least, because it’s either that, or you have gone- ’ She hesitates, groping for the word, and eventually strobes out the characters in her own language: something like ‘shines-not-brightly-in-contemplation’.

‘Moronic,’ I interpret, and snort. ‘Thanks.’

She sits down beside me. For an instant she is still, and her light almost goes out, then she puts her arm around me and starts tapping my shoulder with scalding fingertips. She pulls me around to face her. ‘ You can talk to me, Filius. ’

I sigh. ‘I ran out on Gutterglass.’

She’s started some platitude, but this gives her pause. ‘ Tell me about it,’ she semaphores.

So I do, and she reads my lips in what passes for her as silence. Barely twitching enough to stay alight, she is almost invisible. She shakes her head when I finish. ‘ I heard a rumour recently, but I did not think there was anything to it. But if Glas believes… ’ Her words are shaded with astonishment. ‘ So she really is coming back? ’

‘And Gutterglass wants to prepare the way for her — wants me to go up against Reach.’ I laugh exasperatedly. ‘She dropped the problem in front of me like a smiling foxcub with a bit of carrion it found behind the bins.’

Electra smiles.

‘Glas wants an army raised,’ I say, ‘like in the old days before she left. She says if we wait for Mater Viae it could be too late.’