go,” Wati said from inside next to it, from a gargoyle door knocker. “You could use each different one of them handles to open it into somewhere else. Too small though. All you could do’s stick your arm through.”
These revelations into a paradigm of recusant science, so the goddamn universe itself was up for grabs, were part of the most awesome shift in vision Billy had ever had. But the awe had been greatest when he had not understood at all. The more they were clarified, the more the kitsch of the norms disappointed him.
“There.” There was a key embedded in the tarmac. It had been dropped when the surface was still soft and then had been run over or toughly trodden in. Anxious clubbers and nightwalkers passed them.
“So,” Billy said, “if we could get it to work, with a bit of knacking, we could use that to, like, travel from place to place?”
Dane looked at him. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, and it’s going to be pretty hairy,” he said. “Let’s get somewhere we can put our heads down.” They were nearly out of safe houses. He looked at Billy suspiciously. “How come you figured you could make the key work that way?”
Because, Billy thought, it’ll, oh, unlock the way.
Chapter Forty-Four
MARGE’S PROBLEM, WHEN SHE ASKED ON HER BULLETIN BOARDS where she should go, “as a noob in all this,” to learn what London really was, was not too few but too many suggestions. A chaos of them. She had winnowed with a few questions, and had raised the issue of the cults. The issue, tentatively, of the church of the squid. A few false leads, and she came back again and again to the message that said: “cult collectors old queen almagan yard east london.”
Down this way London felt like a city to which Marge had never been. She had thought the docklands all cleared out, bleached with money. Not this alley in gobbing distance of the Isle of Dogs, though. These felt like moments from some best-forgotten time burped back up, an urban faux pas, squalor as aftertaste.
Where the fuck am I? She looked again at her map. To either side were warehouses scrubbed and made flats for professionals. A channel of such buildings was parted as if grudgingly, an embarrassed entrance onto a cul-de-sac of much grubbier brick and potholed pavement. A few doors, a pub sign swinging. THE OLD QUEEN, it said in Gothicky letters, and below it a pinch-faced Victoria in her middle years.
It was the middle of the day. She’d have thought twice about walking into that streetlet at night. Her shoes got instantly filthy on its puddly surface.
The small pub bottle-glass window made the light inside seem dingy. A jukebox was playing something from the eighties, which as always with tracks from that decade registered in her head as a test. She hesitated: “Calling All the Heroes,” It Bites. Grizzled drinkers muttered at each other, in clothes the same colours as everything else. People glanced up at her, back down again. A fruit machine made a tired electronic whoop.
“Gin and tonic.” When the man brought it she said, “Friend of mine told me some collectors meet here.”
“Tourist?” he said.
“No. Sounds up my street, is all. I was wondering about joining.” The man nodded. The music changed. Soho, “Hippychick.” Whatever happened to Soho?
“Fair enough. Be a bastard of a tourist to get here, anyway,” he said. “They ain’t in yet. Normally sit over there.”
She took her place in the corner. The customers were subdued. They were men and women of all ethnicities and ages but a generally obscured air, as if the room had been painted with a dirty paintbrush. A woman drew in her spilt drink. A man talked to himself. Three people crowded around a table in one corner.
I think I’ll have my next birthday here, she thought coldly. The music wandered on: “Funky Town,” the Pseudo Echo version. Holy shit, “Iron Lung,” Big Pig. Kudos for that, but you can’t catch me with these. You’ll have to up your game—Play Yazz, “The Only Way Is Up”—and then you’ve got me for my wedding party.
She watched the woman draw pictures on her tabletop, now and then adding little splashes of her beer to the picture. The woman looked up and thoughtfully sucked the dirty beer from her finger. Marge looked down, revolted. On the table the beer picture continued to self-draw.