comingled. You better be okay, she thought. And if you are, I’m fucking livid with you. Where the fuck are you? I need to know what this is.
Although—did she? Not really. It would not have made a great deal of difference.
She had spent some hours watching CCTV footage. Like radiographers, the FSRC knew what to look at, how to make sense of what shadows, which filters to switch on to bring which whats to the fore. What was artefact on the electric image and what a witch really breaking the world.
Rumours and scabby video came through of two figures who did not attempt to stay hidden. Goss and Subby. Goss completely unperturbed by all the salvos against him, unfussed by damage, killing offhandedly. “Where’s my boss?” he demanded of those he crippled, the few not murdered attested. “I’ve counted to a hundred over by the wall and it’s time to go in for tea and he’s still in the garden somewhere, Aunty’s getting tetchy,” and so on. After a strange and blessed absence, he was manifesting with his mute boy all over the place.
Did Collingswood’s less specialist colleagues think it was an endless day and night of causeless burglary, ferocious muggings and dangerous driving? Perhaps they might allow themselves to think here and there in terms of gang fights, muttered about Yardies or Kosovans or whatever, even with the reports of what she knew must be refugees from the Tattoo’s workshop—women and men shambling nude and altered, with lightbulbs, diodes, speakers and oscilloscope screens in them—horrifying everyday citizens who could only tell themselves for so long that they witnessed an art event.
Collingswood leaned on the wall and smoked while her companion zipped through the city looking for trouble like a pig for truffles, so that she could do something to look after London. It was better than nothing, she thought. Really? she asked herself, and, Yeah, really, she answered back.
THE WORLD LURCHED AGAIN. REELED, IN THE WAS PUNCHED SENSE, rather than the dancing. Marge felt it. She had not gone home since the foiled Armaggedons. There were places to stay if you didn’t much care. She did not know if she had a home left, and if she did she assumed it was not safe anymore, that she had been brought back into the attention of the dying city.
You say it best, hmm hmm it best. Boyzone was not one of her iPod-devil’s favourites, but it was muttering its version into her ears gamely enough. This was the track that had kept her safe in the brief moment when she had felt a hungry mammal consciousness of one of the gods notice her.
She was in an arriviste corner of Battersea, where late bars stayed open and proudly displayed doctored B-movie posters, and she could feel the bang bang of dance bass through doors, through the pavement and her feet. There were lights in the windows of offices, people working late as if in a month’s time they would still have a job and the world would still revolve. Gangs outside fast-food restaurants and cafés that pottered along as if it were not after midnight, their premises abutting the alleys that were the conduits to the other city that, over the incompetent supernatural impersonation of Ronan Keating, Marge could hear.
The littler streets were as lit as the main ones, but they were furtive. A landscape of degenerating knackery, violence and eschatological terror. Marge would swear she could hear shots, metres, only metres from where laughing hipsters drank.
She was beyond fear, really. She just drifted, she just went. Trying to ride out the night, which felt to her like a last night.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
SOME HOSPITALS WERE KNOWN TO BE FRIENDLY, TO ASK NO questions about odd wounds and sicknesses. There were quiet wings, where you could get treatment for lukundoo, for jigsaw disease, where no one would be put out if a patient spasmed out of phase with the world. The worst wounded of the Londonmancers were delivered, with whispered warnings that the bullets inside them might hatch.
Dane was lashed in place on the lorry roof like some Odysseus. He was pushed, lit up and darkened by the lorry’s passage. Dane held his Kirk and waved it, called Wati’s name. He made it an aerial. It was a long time until Wati found it.
“Oh God, Dane,” the figurine suddenly said.
“Wati, where’ve you been?” Dane hammered on the hatch. Billy looked through. The wind made him blink. Around him the city, like something fat,