The Clay Dreaming (9 page)

Gradually, they disperse, to sit in clumps by the river steps, as useless and cluttering as fallen leaves, or else to roll about their palace grounds.

Returning along the terrace, past the heady, commingling scents of brewhouse, bakery, and stable block, Cole comes to a fence bordering on to formal gardens. The woods are thick, the trees very big. They shake to warn him away. Something else, pressing close, insists he go in.

This part of the garden is neglected and overgrown. It is, he sees, a burial ground. Cole’s head throbs. He trips, and falls.

Is someone there? He feels afraid, a small child again.

Regaining his feet, Cole drags himself across the rough turf. The grass gives way with a brittle crunch, wasp bodies crushed underfoot. A sudden chill scoops out his lungs. Limbs shivering, he can feel the marrow inside his bones; taste blood, on his tongue. It is the very edge of night and the end is near.

Cole lurches to a dead halt.

Breath comes in puffs of white cloud that blow back into his face. Dried clay caking his features and upper torso, the Thames mud begins to crack and disintegrate. Crumbling, it falls away in a shower.

He stands at the base of an old grave, unkempt and entangled with weeds. The uneven earth at his feet has been turned long ago. There is no headstone, just a short wooden stake driven into the ground. King Cole falls to his knees, clutching at the soil.

Raising his left forearm, he takes up a small blade, concealed in his back pocket, and slits open the largest vein.

His hot blood spatters, smoking, on the turned ground.

King Cole falls back into the long grass, relishing the embrace of earth, the sensation of sinking back in. His night’s journey is ended. Taken together with his first London Dreaming, it has been a life’s journey, womb to tomb – from birth to death and beyond; a vital link between opposite shores of existence found and forged, without his having the least idea why.

He opens his eyes. He has left the old grave behind, making the steep climb up a nearby hill. In appreciation of the elm at whose root he relaxes, its unique outline, he follows the coil and twist of branches. The tree stands alone on the hill. Venerable link between earth and sky world, its limbs thrust upwards, reaching outward to gather in the stars.

Bark fingers weave in and around constellations only semi-familiar. The campfires of his Ancestors, the
Nurrunbung-uttias
, dot the galaxy. Their smoke threads its milky way. Differing entirely from the night skies of his homeland, the cosmic alignments diverge only slightly from the stranger-skies of his Dreaming.

A dark red orb rises but brings no dawn.

Cole wonders if what he has heard is true: that the starlight itself is but a trace of long ago and far away. Looking past the branches overhead, beyond even the light of the planets themselves, he contemplates – with sad longing – the blackness in between the stars.

The sun was strong, back in the World. When he left, summer was at its height.

He mourns the loss of his former team-mates, his clan brother most especially. And then, sinking deeper, he remembers his people, and tries desperately hard not to think of their fate.

Leaving all mortal thoughts behind him, he falls into a deep and dreamless sleep.

And still, the darkness looks on.

The sky to the east turns pale. One by one, the pinpoint lights of distant stars wink out. All the dark solidity of night drains away, troubled memories no more than a haze of sadness.

Before anyone else is abroad, King Cole walks the riverside streets. His limbs ache with the lingering bite of cold. He can count his bones individually, a sensation not entirely unpleasant, for it reassures he is alive, and in brief respite the air seems almost fresh.

He examines the wound, fresh on his arm, the large vein pierced as part of his sacred ritual. The earth gives life, and takes a body back when it dies. He is bound, now, to the earth, the earth atop the grave where he shed his life’s blood; but why this grave over any other?

Dawn announces itself cautiously, sending out a single radiant beam to pierce the dense forest of masts along the waterfront. Awash in monotones, a single ship, broken away from its brethren, sails the leaden tide.

Barefoot, Cole treads light, yet his keen ears mark the noise he does not make. His footfalls, so it seems, go not unaccompanied. Step for step a displaced echo knocks some way behind him. One ear cocked, he minds the steady beat. It rebounds back and forth between surrounding warehouse walls. He pauses to look around and about – but when he stops, so, too, does the echo. No sign, no scent of his counterpart; he stands alone.

King Cole proceeds swiftly, where to, he isn’t sure. He has been following a marked trail; of that much he is certain. He needs help now to interpret the signs.

Past the mid-point of a narrow alleyway, something darts from the shadows at its far end. Cole freezes. No time to turn, to run. It advances too rapidly towards him – a strange, hollow figure. Tall, hunched over almost double, it barrels down the passageway, scraping one wall then the other as it lopes from side to side. A bundle of sticks hoisted over one shoulder, from its scabby claws radiates a burst of filaments, the seedling of a great dark thistle. Only as they close does Cole see it is a man, face blacker than his own. From under the brim of a soot-caked hat, his yellow eyes stare, bloodshot.

The chimney sweep, as he trundles by, salutes with a filial nod.

The retreating figure dwindles, ultimately swallowed back into the brickwork. King Cole checks himself over before continuing, relieved to have survived the encounter.

Solitary cartwheels creak in the distance, and then nothing. The silence that follows is huge and terrifying absence, a vacuum about to be filled.

Faint tremors begin beneath Cole’s feet. The vibrations travel throughout his body, like breeze through a grove of eucalyptus. He sets his jaw, but cannot stop his flesh from quivering. As he hurries towards the alley’s extreme the disturbance only mounts. Metal grinds stone; clashing sounds, like a rapid shower, not of rain but shattered glass fragments.

Cole stumbles into a main thoroughfare. London is alive, the first wave of workers already busy. Massive carthorses strain slab-like muscles, pulling at wagons piled high with fruit and vegetables, sacking, fish; the wheel-rims crunch against cobbles and kerb, while their iron-shod hooves pound, shooting sparks.

Just off the beaten track, a crowd gathers at a coffee-stall. Another warms itself around the oven of a baked-potato man. Still more workers scuttle from out of the side streets, pulling on their outer garments. Bent low with purpose, they add their weight to the turbulent mass.

Cole thinks of the other great cities he knows. Built and inhabited by numberless thousands, they have their own workers, and soldiers, and queen – whole societies, blind, exhausting their lives in darkness, hidden from the eye of
Gnowee
, the Sun. White ants, they scrape out holes to build up their towers, bite after bite, extracting clay particles from the sand. This they mould into upright slabs, hardening one with the rock. Chamber on chamber, piled one above another, they are forever building, building, building, adding to the mound. They never tire of it, and they never stop.

And he thought he had left the nest behind. He is still deep within it.

Performing a neat circuit of the Reading-room, Time looped back around on itself. Wall to opposite wall, like Narcissus in the Styx, the Wisdom of the Ages troubled to stare at nothing bar its own reflection.

Sarah Larkin sat beneath the ceiling dome in her customary chair. Bored stiff, she had meant to calculate the total range of her freedoms, but could not find a number low enough to start.

The British Museum’s library had accumulated texts throughout more than a century of rapid expansion – this latest Reading-room, vast and circular, its seventh successive incarnation. By exceedingly skilful arrangement, it was supposed to enclose shelf-space for a million and a half of books; more than sufficient, one would have thought, to fix her so firmly to one spot.

The curve of the dome sprang from a massive cornice, almost entirely gilded, a golden ring that topped three encircling tiers of bookcases. By her reckoning, these ‘presses’ must contain upwards of 80,000 volumes. Those at ground level, within reach of the public, numbered perhaps 20,000 alone.

Four further bookstacks surrounded the main chamber, a labyrinth running across several floors; perforated iron walkways allowed natural light to filter through from glass roof to basement. Only staff members might retrieve items from the rows above, via these upper galleries. Access doors from external passageways had been artfully concealed, with a variegated stripe pattern simulating the spines of books. Strips of the same design covered over the iron piers supporting the dome. The given impression was of an unbroken circumference of books; intended as an inspiration, no doubt.

Taken all together, the present library obliterated what had once been an open quadrangle within the museum complex. As a small child, Sarah had sat upon the grass there, fashioning herself chains from daisies.

A clerk entering through an upper doorway appeared to step out of the bookcase, a literary phantom. A great clutch of keys hung suspended from his waist.

Looking around at other inmates, scattered amongst neighbouring tables, Sarah recognised many faces – strangers, every one. Oh, she knew their features well enough, but that was all. Their characters remained unknowable. Hearts closed, minds occupied, they met on nodding terms at most.

In the dim light their skin looked old and grey, as hers must do. In this place, only the book-bindings kept their colour.

King Cole finds himself penned, closer than he can stand, between filthy brick walls. He scales the nearest to scurry along the top of it.

‘’Ere!’ says an objecting voice, rapidly outdistanced.

Lofty black viaducts span in either direction. Terraces stretching beneath squirm with indifferent life. Even to the topmost windows, flung open wide, the mealy bodies bulge and spill: listless smokers; small children, protestant at being shut indoors; washerwomen hanging out their sopping rags. Women and children by the dozen are squeezed into every back yard. They kiss at gurgling
babies, corralling more in makeshift pens as they themselves toil, scrub, stir and grind. The menfolk stand in the corners, filling or emptying the great
slop-barrels
there, or squat on the doorsteps, whittling. Others crouch in outhouses joined to the back of each chimneystack, tending smaller chimney-fires between their lips.

Every funnel great and small belches thick smoke.

A goods train screams across the land-bridge overhead. Shocked by the deafening noise, Cole almost falls from his perch. A suffocating shroud, dense and poisonous, descends. The air completely fills with choking fumes.

Straddled, dwarfed, chaos and clamour at every turn, King Cole flees. He runs and jumps from wall to backyard wall. Up ahead, women with gammon limbs queue at a standpipe, blocking his way. Cole spies a square of empty dirt. He drops down, weightless.

It takes but a moment to catch his breath. He has outdistanced the evil black cloud.

Incomprehensible sights and sounds now fill his days as well as his nights. Is this Dreaming? Is he fast travelling, or slow?

King Cole stares, wide-eyed, at the ground: no earth beneath his bruised feet, only more concrete. A stubborn weed pushes up through a crack it has forced in the man-made stone. Is this all it is, his greater Truth? He cannot tell. A parade of imagery, of no consequence, without sympathy, is mere sensation. He is lost: a wandering eye, choked lungs, goose-bumped skin and running feet – nothing more.

In Malling, Sarah had been described as working here at the library. Only men were allowed on staff, truly employed. Mind having no sex, her sex was of no mind.

She had been coming to the Reading-room since the age of sixteen, solely at the behest of her father. Her basic function amounted to little more than that of Lambert’s copyist and personal secretary. In service of the Frankenstein’s monsters that made up his sermons, she laboured over what was, in effect, a work of endless transcription. She trawled through Scripture for stitchings-together of deathless prose, the purloined wisdom and hand-me-down inspiration that had long ceased to be their daily bread and weekend butter.

Sarah had never enjoyed working for her father, most especially not since Lambert had taken somewhat definitively to his bed; in all likelihood, he would never again have the strength to deliver another of his anyway unpopular harangues – not in public. Thus, an exercise she had always felt essentially dishonest had become futile as well. And if it was God’s will that he not recover, then she toiled in vain. Still, she kept coming to the library out of – what? Force of habit, sense of duty; or was it in pretence that his health might improve?
Her everyday visits were enough just to get her out of the house, and its stifling atmosphere of ill health.

She loved her father. She would do anything for his quiet life.

Lambert had always suppressed the works of certain authors, encouraged a chosen few. Working daily in the round, there was of course little in the world of books that could escape her – a bargain binding both ways. Emancipation, in terms black and white; Thomas Huxley had discussed womanly beauty, ‘so far as it is independent of grace and expression’. Sarah knew which she would rather – and that was independence.

The university college in Bloomsbury, she heard, held evening classes opened to women. Maybe, one day, she might allow herself to investigate. What she wished for, most of all, was to be put to proper work – devotions that might amount to something.

No dream was worth having, unless it were impossible.

King Cole pulls together his scattered fibres.

Derby Day, exhibition cricket matches, are nothing more than idle fancies to him now. There can be no going back, only forward.

The shoving and the arguments are almost too much. Treading boots, hooves, cow-shit, and sour, angry faces; he dare not stop, even to think, for fear of drowning. To every side the bodies crush in. It is hard to keep one’s feet. Vehicles, people, animals, impossibly dense, beyond number – moaning bullocks, sheep, and massive pigs – great flocks and herds are being driven down the street. The drovers-boys call and shove, and the dogs snap at their heels. The trusting creatures, though they may mill and complain, let themselves be steered to their doom. Knackers’ carts return in the opposite direction, loaded with carved flesh all lifeless and bloody.

So much dust is kicked up that vision is down to a matter of feet, in front and behind – no telling which is which. Cole keeps an eye to the animals’ backs, and, when in doubt, follows them.

The air clears a little. Cole stumbles to the wall. Looking over, he sees rapid waters far below. He is crossing the river once more.

Somewhere in the crowding city lives the Guardian. She is the Guardian of the Words of Dead Men. He saw number-writing on that stick, driven into the ground above the grave.

He will seek her out, and ask for her help.

Determined to upset her routine, Sarah decided to break early for lunch, perhaps to get some air.

‘Have you finished with the book?’ the Returns clerk enquired.

Sarah considered a moment. ‘I have,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Mr Evans.’

Passing through the Museum doors, Sarah topped the broad stone flight of steps. Following a grey morning the sky had not brightened, nor the air warmed any. No point pausing over a scene she knew too well.

Hurrying, head down, she only marked oncoming feet in order that she might avoid collision; to the well-mannered tip of any gentleman’s hat, she remained oblivious.

‘The Museum’, ‘Mus-e-um’ – asking of directions by intermittently mooing at passers-by, King Cole is directed to the place he most wants to be. A double stockade of spear-points blocks his path. Such is the urgency of his case, he overcomes even this fierce deterrent. Once inside the gates, he waits for her on the stone steps, uncertain she will come – but then she does come!

As Sarah Larkin reached the base of the broad descent, one flickering shadow detached from the rest, to sweep along in her tracks. As she paused, so paused her mimic. Even with her sharpest wits about her, she would never have noticed the hanger-on – not unless he wished it.

Reaching the Museum’s main gates, she turned sharp right, making her way along the outside railings. Looking across Great Russell-street, Sarah regarded the frontage of No.38 – Mills and Wellman, the furnishing ironmongers. The same premises served as a Post Office Receiving House, Money Order Office and Savings Bank – a threshold she only crossed, these days, in order to withdraw funds, never to deposit. Life, the newspapers complained, had become cheap: not last she looked. To run a six-roomed house required a minimum £200
per
annum
. With no longer any income to speak of, she could only watch as their savings evaporated.