remains of a car, bonnet pressed up almost into its boot; wrought-iron back of an old bedstead; a lonely rocking chair, the screws just about to fall free.
“Sorcerer . . .” whispered Oda, a note of urgency in her voice. I glanced back at her, then back again and could see nothing but the towers of broken things all around, like metal hills blocking out the sky.
“Not far,” I muttered, as much for my sake as hers. “Not far . . .”
I could smell the bright warm stench of a sandwich rotting in the rain, see the yellow blur of the rat’s eyes in my own, sense the twitching of its whiskers as if they grew from my face, and there it was as well, another thing rotting, a different kind of rot, the kind that didn’t taste of bright orange rust and broken metal. I remembered the fox in Kilburn. I remembered the way Mr Pinner didn’t smell.
Old kettles turned calcium-white on the inside; half a chimney pot, through which the buddleia was beginning to peek, a shattered TV aerial still carrying traces of pigeon poop on its strands, a satellite dish, face turned upwards to receive a signal, in which now nothing but stagnant water pooled. There would be ice in the night, thick frost in the shadows; our breath was white smoke.
And then the rat stopped.
It looked at something, then looked at me, then scuttled away into a tunnel an inch wider than itself, dug out of a tower of tumbled detritus. At first we couldn’t see what it had seen, but stared at more of the same: rust and black burnt nothings. Then Oda’s hand brushed ours, just for a second, and we, startled by the touch, looked to her, then followed her gaze.
There was something in the rubbish.
It was a shoe. At some point, it had been a trendy shoe, big, white and gold and blue, all the right marks to declare that here was someone who knew who they were and it was all about the feet. That had been then. Now it, like everything else in this place, was rotting, dirt and rain and ragged tears pulling out the soft stuffing of the inner sole, limp sodden brown laces dribbled, undone. It stuck out of the pile of dead machines at a strange angle, like someone had stuck it there on a pole like a defiant flag. I looked closer. There was something in the shoe. It might have been a sock.
Oda whispered, “Oh, God.”
There was something in the sock.
It might have been an ankle.
I snapped, “Help me!”
We scrambled up the sides of the heap and started pulling. Old rusted bike frames, crinkled-up drink cans, broken bottles, a thing, all withered bone and hair, that might once have been a dead cat stuffed inside a cardboard box, a shattered lamp, a gutted radio, the panels for a speaker trailing wires, the drawers of some old filing cabinet, snapped along the lines on which they should have slid. The ankle became a leg, blue slashed jean stained the colour of black rust; the leg joined onto a hip, at the wrong angle, sticking out too far to one side; the hip was half-covered by a T-shirt, soaked through and torn; the T-shirt covered a chest, into which half a broom had at some point buried itself just hard enough to pin the body it impaled to the ground. We threw broken things aside, feeling the great mound of decayed waste shift beneath us, creaking and clanking as old lynchpins of its structure were tossed away; and there were fingers, hands, arms. And they were wrong: black - not the deep rich brown of Oda’s skin that foolish mortals called black, but the black of an ocean night when the stars are lost, coal-black, dead-black, ink-black. I could see black blood pumping through the veins beneath his skin, still moving, still, just alive, and we knew without a doubt, that it was ink-black, black as ink, black, because it was ink.
Some sort of whisk had fallen over his face, its broken wires clinging to his throat and jaw. We untangled them, metal hooks twanging merrily as they came free, and ink flowed from the pinprick wounds. The whites of his eyes were stained with the same ink that ran through his blood, his lips were the colour of festering bruises, his hair was falling from his skull in fistfuls, barely a few handfuls left on