“Wait here, then. You can save your bullets.” She sighed, reached into her bag, pulled out a gun, ugly, big and black. “Thank you,” I said.
“I know where my soul is going,” she replied sharply. “I don’t think this enterprise is helping the cause of yours.”
I was almost touched my soul had a cause to fail.
We went into the scrapyard, as the rain grew heavier.
There was no one inside the gate cabin. I found a kettle, as cold as dead men’s flesh. Our terror had subsided to a calm and level fury, as if every receptor for sense was so bombarded that the whole system had shut down for a diagnostic reboot, unable to believe this was the information it was meant to process. It gave the movement of our hands in front of us, the tread of our feet, a detached quality. We were observers, observing someone else, no more.
Rain pooled grey-black on the uneven tarmac floor of the yard. A few twists, a few turns, and all was lost behind the great piles of stuff, the endless cairns of dead equipment rising up taller than three basketball players with an acrobatic fondness for each other’s shoulders. The railway lines were quickly gone behind the tottering pyramids of broken metal, twisted plastic, rusted iron, pocked steel, rotten stuffing and slashed foam, just dead bits of comfortable lives, left over to no purpose that I could see. The rain helped keep it a bit real, tickled down the back of my neck and bit ice into my spine, oozed through my shoes - still not my shoes, still too big - and started wrinkling itchy around my toes. I buried my hands in my pocket, stuck my chin inside my collar and kept walking, scanning each great mound of abandoned nothing stuff from top to bottom in search of something softer than metal.
There wasn’t a smell, not with the rain and the heavy, sinking cold. There was a taste, salt and dry spilt chemicals, old bleach and broken bottles of things that shouldn’t have had the safety cap removed. Two turns in the maze and the sounds of the road were already a long way off; a train rumbled by distantly, wheels screeching like a maddened witch. I slipped on a torn pile of builder’s bags, sand still clinging to their inner edges; ambled past a wall of shattered safety glass, so safe that the million greenish pieces hadn’t had the heart to fall away from their friends. A fat black-brown rat scuttled away towards the gutted and half-burnt remnants of a sofa, the cushions long since vanished. I scuttled after it, bending down towards the ground and holding out my hands, cooing gentle noises.
“Come on, come on . . .”
The rat looked back at me uncertainly, hesitated on the edge of a hole chewed through the stuffing of a mattress, which thin orange fungus had long since made its own, then started to edge back towards me, its oval body shimmering and bright in the soaking rain, its pink claws sliding through the rising puddles on the floor. Oda looked at us with distaste, but said not a word as bending down, we picked it up in our hands, smelt slime and old rotting things from its coat, saw tiny sharp teeth in a tiny pointed mouth, felt little sharp claws tap dance on the surface of our palm. Pigeons and rats; no one knows more in a big city.
We stroked its back, our fingers sliding slime-covered off the greasy surface of its coat, whispered gentle implorings and polite commands, and bent down, let it scuttle free, followed it as it passed along small trails through the rising water. It scrambled over old black Victorian pipes dragged up from some forsaken corner of the sewers, past broken pots and vases smashed into a dozen white shards on the earth, over a hundred cracks where the grass had somehow managed to peep its way up from the grey concrete soil, round a rotting slab of sandy clay where the buddleia was trying to take root, little purple flowers crawling out of tough brown roots. I almost had to run to keep up with it; staggering past the broken hull of a yacht, a great fat tear through its belly; the twisted