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CHAPTER TWENTY-TREEE

Mudlark and Frost Fair

There weren’t many people on the Embankment where George and Edie found themselves. Edie had slowed to a fast walk. Ahead of her, George saw a familiar shape silhouetted against the river lights.

“Oh, great. We’re going around in circles.”

“Only because you ran away.”

He didn’t have a good answer for that. They approached Cleopatra’s Needle, both of them watching the Sphinxes. Nothing happened.

George cleared his throat.

“You think we should …”

“What? Stop and say hello? You haven’t got time for that. And remember. The Gunner said they’re half-taint anyway, and that’s half too much for me.” Nevertheless, George noticed she trailed her hand along the flanks of the Sphinxes as they passed.

“Why did you do that?” he asked, as they left the Sphinxes behind them.

“Show them I’m not scared,” she replied, as if that made all the sense in the world. She suddenly right-angled and sat down on an ornate iron bench, facing the river. The ends of the bench had been cast to look like crouching pack camels, presumably to continue the Egyptian motif along the riverside from Cleopatra’s Needle.

“Now what are you doing?” asked George, watching her take her boots off.

“Making a banana meringue,” she said irritably. “What does it look like?” “It looks like you’re taking your shoes off.”

“Bingo. Bring the boy a genius badge.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I do. Simon says, take your shoes off, too.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s how it works. If I say ‘Simon says,’you just do it, and then we don’t have to have a debate and waste time that you don’t have.” He opened his mouth.

“Simon says, hurry up. Before that dragon notices us.” His head snapped around in the direction she was pointing with her chin. A long way down the Embankment—though not long enough to make him anything like comfortable—there was another dragon holding a shield emblazoned with a red cross. This dragon was silver, and stubbier that the one guarding Temple Bar, but stubby in a bunch-of-compacted-muscles kind of way, and the frozen snarl on its face showed teeth that George wanted to see no closer up than this.

He sat on the bench. He took off his shoes. Edie was stripping off her tights too.

“Simon says, trousers too.”

“What?”

There was a sudden hiss and snap from the region of his knees, and the bench bucked as the camel tried to bite him. He stumbled forward, scrabbling away from the hissing creature. Edie rode the convulsion out, gripping the seat with both hands.

“It tried to bite me!”

He leaned back against the lamppost on the edge of the river wall. Something roiled and squirmed under his hand. He moved it away just fast enough to stop the iron fish that wound around the base from closing its gaping mouth on it. He hopped into the no-man’s land between the bench and the river wall.

“What’s going on?”

“They’re little taints, aren’t they? Let’s get out of here before they get the attention of one of the big ones. We got to get past that dragon to get to the Black Friar, and we got to get to the Friar before turn o’day. Meaning midnight, I reckon. It’s what the Gunner said.” He looked up the road at the dragon, which seemed a lot closer than when he last looked, though it hadn’t moved at all.

“How do we get past it?”

“Simon says, follow me.”

And she crossed to a gate in the river wall, and vaulted over. In two steps she was out of sight. George grabbed his shoes and followed as fast as he could.

Edie was at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, gingerly putting her foot into the inky blackness beyond.

“You’re joking!”

“No,” she said, without stopping as she went knee-deep in the dark water. “I’m wet and I’m cold and I reckon we should get this over with as fast as we can.” “We’re swimming?”

She finished tying her bootlaces together and hung her boots around her neck.

“You swim if you want. I’m going to wade. The tide’s going out, I expect.” She set off along the greasy river wall, one hand trailing along it for balance. “I hope there’s not broken glass here.” George stepped into the water. His feet sucked into silt below, up to his calf. It was cold and oozy, and in the ooze there were lumps like pebbles and sticks, and when he looked off to his right there was nothing but water between him and the south of London. He had the strong sense of something untamed and dangerous out there beneath the ripples in the center of the river. It felt—in a way he couldn’t quite explain to himself—like walking on the edge of a cliff: only, instead of a gulf of air sucking at him, there was a dark undertow coiling past. He found that, like Edie, he was keeping one hand on the river wall, and not just for balance.

A thought occurred, uncomfortably.

“How do you know it’s going out?”

“What’s going out?”

“The tide. How do you know it isn’t coming in?”

“I don’t.”

“Oh.”

They splashed on, passing under the gangplank leading to an old steamer permanently moored to the river-bank. As they negotiated the canyon between the river wall and the rusting upsweep of the boat’s hull, they could hear laughter and music coming from the deck. A lit cigarette arced into the darkness and fizzed out in the water between them.

“Simon says, think positive.”

“Does Simon say how far we have to do this for?”

“One more bridge.”

He splashed on. He remembered a summer’s afternoon, walking along the river with both of his parents. He remembered looking over the edge to see people walking on mudbanks exposed by low tide, people with spades and buckets. People looking for things.

“People come down here at low tide and look for things,” he said.

Edie grunted.

“It’s like beachcombing, only there’s no beach. Just mud. It’s called mudlarking.” She didn’t even bother to grunt this time. Just kept on going. He scowled at her and wondered if she was as cold and miserable as he was.

And then she fell and was gone.

George didn’t think. He stumbled forward, lurched into the water, and reached for where she’d last been. His hands closed on nothing but river.

His hands sculled blindly beneath the water. Edie had been snatched from the face of the earth as abruptly as someone throwing an on-off switch.

“Edie!”

He found stuff in his hands and he tugged it to the surface, but it was just a black bin-liner leaking fruit peels and plastic packaging. He tossed it and plunged back into the water.

The blackening undertow winding out in the deeper part of the river was pulling at him.

“Give her back!” he shouted as his arms flailed in the icy water, churning faster and faster. He had no idea, when he later reran the moment, why he was shouting or who he was shouting at—only that it was something out there, something beyond his depth. His hand smacked at the water surface, as if trying to waken her from a sudden sleep.

“EDIE!”

Then his foot hit something and he reached for it, and it was her, and he yanked, and then they both stumbled to the side of the river wall and spluttered for a bit. She looked smaller. Her hair rat-tailed down on either side of a face now streaked with river mud.

“You okay?”

She spat Thames water back into the river and nodded, still coughing too much to speak clearly.

“Hole,” was all she could say, as she wiped slime from her eyes.

“You’re okay.” He smiled encouragingly.

She looked back at the patch where she’d disappeared.

“Sucked me in.”

He lost the smile.

“It didn’t.”

“George, it sucked me in. Something sucked me in.”

George thought. He fumbled at his belt.

“Bit late for that, George. I told you to take them off. You’re soaked now—” “Simon says, shut up and hold on to this… .” He pulled his belt through the belt loops on his trousers and held one end out to her. His voice was firm. “That way, if you go in again I can find you quicker.” After a long beat she reached out and wound one end of the belt around her fist. She nodded.

“Or we both get pulled in.”

“I thought Simon said, think positive,” George said, pushing his way in front of her. “I’ll lead. I’ll go first.” “Simon says that saying Simon was a stupid idea,” she said, almost sounding like she was apologizing. “Not like the belt. The belt’s a good idea.” Without needing to say another word, they set off along the river wall.

They passed under a complicated switchback pontoon and pier that made creaking noises as the water slapped at it on the river side. On the road above, a police car sirened past, blue light splashing on the underside of the trees that overhung the Embankment above them.

Edie stumbled and got her balance quickly. He started to ask if she was okay, but she got her question in early, as if heading him off.

“So you’re rich, are you?”

He took a moment to register what she’d said.

“What?”

“You’re rich. I saw the street you live on. The house. All shiny modern, like the adverts.” “We’re not rich. My mum rents it.”

“Gotta be rich to rent it.”

“We’re not rich. She’s an actress.”

“Actresses are rich.”

George thought of his mother and his father and all the shouting, all the arguing about bits of paper that came in long brown envelopes or stiff white ones that had to be signed for.

“Not all the time.”

Edie walked on. Unimpressed.

“How many bedrooms you got?”

“Two. And a sort of third one that’s a sort of study.” “You and your parents live there, and how many brothers or sisters or whatnot?” “Just me and my mum.”

“Two of you and sort of three bedrooms? You’re rich. And I bet your dad’s got a house too, right?” “He’s dead.”

Edie absorbed this.

“Oh.”

They walked on. The water was getting lower again, as if there was a mudbank humping to the surface beneath their feet. Both of them were beginning to shiver with the cold. George clamped his mouth tight to stop his teeth chattering.

“What about you?” asked George through clenched teeth, eager to take the spotlight off himself.

“Me, too.”

“You’re rich?”

“No. My dad’s dead.”

“Oh.”

They splashed on. It felt very lonely down here in the lee of the Embankment, below the lintel of the city, wading through the icy mud.

“So you live with your mum?”

“No,” she replied after a pause. “She’s not around.” “So where do you—”

“I stay in hostels. For runaways. It’s crappy, okay?” “Okay,” he said.

“I run away from them too.” She sniffed defiantly. I m freezing.

They trudged on a bit.

“When I’m hungry, I think of food,” she said. “I think of when I was the most stuffed, when I couldn’t eat another thing.” “Should think it makes you more hungry.” George shivered.

“No. It works. Try it.”

“I’m not hungry,” said George.

“Not hungry, you mung. When were you the warmest?”

“Oh,” said George.

He sploshed through a flotilla of fish and chip wrappers.

“I was in a barn. In the hay. With my dad.”

“Your dad is a farmer? Was a farmer, sorry?”

“No,” said George, remembering. “He was making a bull.” “He was whatting a bull?” she asked incredulously.

“He was an artist. Someone wanted a bull. So he got this farmer who had a bull, and he had him put it in a stall, and then we went down and he sketched it.” Just for an instant he smelled the memory of warm hay and his father’s cigarettes. Then it was gone.

“I wasn’t meant to be there. But my mum had an audition. She’s always having auditions. And so he had to take me with him. It was great. I was quite little and it was winter and you could see the bull’s breath coming out in two snorty clouds when he breathed. He even had a ring through his nose—I mean, he was a real bull.” “Doesn’t sound very warm,” muttered Edie.

“No, it was. It was great. Dad wrapped me in this blanket from the car and he made a hay bed, like a hole in the hay, and I sat there next to him, and we had thermoses of tea and that bright-orange tomato soup that stains your lips, and he drew and I drew too, except I got so warm in my hay bed that I fell asleep. I mean it was really toasty, and it smelled great, and when I woke up it was getting dark and he was finished and just lying beside me… .” He remembered it all. The glow of the lightbulb in the roof, making all the hay golden. And the massive black bull, big as a small car, quietly chomping on its feed. And the sound of his dad smoking. He’d always smoked when he was working, but only outside. When George was old enough to know that smoking was a really bad idea if you liked things like lungs and living, his dad had made a pact. He’d half stop smoking. Never inside. Only while working. And never in a pub. So that’s how George remembered him: the sound of his dad concentrating, one eye screwed up against the smoke drifting up his cheek, hands steady, always sketching or making something. And the regular quiet pop-and-suck sound he made on the cigarette parked in one side of his face: the sound of a man smoking without using his hands. Even though smoking was such a bad thing, he still found the memory of the noise soothing.

And it hadn’t been the smoking that killed him anyway.

“That’s the warmest I remember being,” he said to eradicate the next memory that was winging in out of the dark, out of the place where he banished it as often as he could.

“I went to a farm once,” said Edie. “School trip. A goat peed on me.” He smiled, and then felt something sharp under his foot and skipped sideways before it broke his skin. Off balance, he yanked them both away from the wall. The mud got thinner under his feet and he dipped in, falling on one knee.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted.

Edie stumbled after him—falling down on all fours, dropping her end of the belt in the effort to stay upright, chin above the water. I m not— And her hand closed on something solid in the mud, something that felt like old slimy wood, like an ancient stump or a piling, and she felt a surge of energy weld her hand to it, and she couldn’t pull it away, and then … “Oh, no,” said George, seeing her with her eyes wide and her chin barely breaking water.

And the rippled surface of the water blew flat around her, the shock wave of the past winnowing out from her at the epicenter, and her wet hair fanned wide in dripping spikes, and her eyes convulsed shut, and the two-century-wide gap between where they were and what she was seeing hit her like a down-bound freight train.

It was dark but it was lighter.

There were fewer lights across the wide river but there were many more on it, and what lights there were were softer. No sharp-edged electric light reflected off the fast moving ripples on the Thames, because there was no electric light at all, and more important, no ripples, only white ridges of ice—and they didn’t move a bit.

The river was frozen.

And covered in snow.

The lights were lanterns and flares and braziers, and in their light, reflected off the snow and ice beneath, there were people.

There were men in top hats with their necks swaddled in scarves. There were women in bonnets and long wide skirts that trailed on the ice as they walked carefully, hands hidden in fur-trimmed muffs that hung in front of them. Everyone’s eyes reflected the torch flares and the fires and a general excitement at the otherness all around them. Everyone seemed happy, and there were laughing children everywhere, running and sliding, long mufflers flying out behind them in the night air.

A child launched herself into a slide, her bonnet snapping back off her head, held on by the ribbons, her red cheeks and red nose framing the redder hole of a mouth stretched wide in an excited shriek. She stopped herself by grabbing on to a thick pole set upright in the ice, and hung there, laughing as her friends caught up with her.

From the top of the pole stretched a banner, with crude writing swirled across it in blue and green, reading: FROST FAIR, and below it, in smaller script, the invitation: COME ONE, COME ALL!

It all looked like a dream, and the unreal quality was heightened by the mist that seemed to rise from the ice and surround everything, softening the edges of people and things, creating haloes around the burning torches illuminating the street that ran down the center of the river toward the bridge ahead of them.

It was a street of tents and rough shelters, in all shapes and sizes. From the back, most of the structures had a hurried shipwreck quality to them, but at the front, in the mouth of each one, there was light and painted billboards and colored lanterns and cheery activity. Beneath flags and looping swags of bunting, London’s merchants and innkeepers had taken to the ice, and wherever Edie looked it seemed like there was someone selling or shouting or serving hot drinks that gave off thin skeins of steam that added to the eerie fog hanging in the air.

And there was laughter and shouting and the sound of different kinds of music fighting each other to be heard. Edie could hear the distant skirl of bagpipes and the rattle of snare drums, and closer, she could hear fiddle players, and something like a barrel organ jigging and popping away in between.

She heard a chunk to her left, and when she looked she saw three men with pickaxes chopping ice out of a channel dug between the river ice and the bank. The men were thickset and unshaven, with outdoor faces and high boots turned back at the knee. They all had brass badges hanging from their necks, which swung as they threw the picks into the ice. Farther along the channel, another group of similar-looking men had put a plank across it, and were busy charging finely dressed people for the privilege of crossing the water onto the snowy pleasure ground beyond.

As Edie watched, she saw a heavy-jowled man question the charges, as if he thought that paying for crossing three feet of water the lowest and most impertinent sort of insult. They showed him the brass badges and mouthfuls of discolored teeth. She heard a snatch of what they said, and heard that they said it with pride.

“Watermen, sir—with your leave—ancient custom and tradition of the river. Safe and efficacious carriage across the hazardous flow, sir.” The jowly man was about to continue his protest when a little girl in a green cape started jumping up and down at his side and pointing to the ice beyond.

Edie followed the line of her finger and saw that everyone was now moving in that direction, drawn as if by a large magnet to the spectacle now progressing down the impromptu tented mall in the center of the ice.

First came a drummer. Then men carrying large flaming torches that smoked darkly into the air. Then came three bagpipers in full Highland dress, cheeks bulging as they played, long horse-tail sporrans swinging in time as they marched slowly ahead of another pair of torchbearers. And then there it was, its massive feet lurching it forward in time to the leisurely swing of the sporrans ahead of it.

An elephant.

A white elephant.

Edie was used to horror and pain when she glinted the past, but sometimes the past didn’t come in sharp hurtful jags that sliced at her. Sometimes, very rarely, it was even close enough to something else for her to actually enjoy it and not be too scared.

But it had never, until now, seemed to be like this.

She exhaled. Some knot deep in her chest loosened, and she took a breath of air that felt cleaner and almost refreshing, despite, or maybe because of, the sweet and smoky smell of roasted chestnuts that came with it.

“It’s beautiful.”

She heard the words before she recognized the voice, and knew that she had said them herself.

And the elephant on the ice was indeed beautiful. Walking with slow deliberate steps, it swayed past the open mouths and the garish bunting with an other-worldly dignity. On its back it carried a howdah, which was a sort of tented castle that swayed from side to side as it moved. More flaming torches were fixed to each of the four corners of the little pavilion, and from inside, a very beautiful woman in a white fur cloak and bejewelled turban waved at the onlookers.

A small dark-faced boy in a smaller fur coat sat behind the elephant’s ears, waving at the crowd and flashing his own white teeth at them as they passed.

The elephant was not only white, but patterned. In the torchlight Edie could see that someone had painted garlands of flowers along its sides and on its face, and even made bands of pale colors all down its trunk. As it moved through the crowd, every eye was on it, and the low-hanging ice-smog only added to the dreamy beauty of the spectacle.

Edie was transfixed.

And then she thought she heard someone call her name. She looked up and saw someone, someone shorter than a man, running toward her, away from the crowd, the only face against a sea of backs.

And he seemed to be shouting something, hands cupped in front of his face to make a megaphone—and she couldn’t hear, and then she could, just an urgent snatch: “Don’t look at the elephant!” And then the beauty stopped, and time went jagged and the past ceased to be a soothing dreamy flow, and hit at her in juddering slices.

The running figure tripped and fell before she could make out its face in the fog.

There was a shout to her right.

Her head snapped around.

Another figure, a girl in a bonnet was running toward her, arms waving, shouting and shaking something bright. And behind the brightness, Edie caught a glimpse of something big and burly and man-shaped lurching out of the fog.

And then time sliced.

And, closer now, a big man was struggling with something that was fighting like a wildcat.

The something broke free and was, suddenly again, the girl, running for her life straight at Edie.

The man bent and pulled steel from inside his double-caped coat.

The steel of a long burnished knife.

Torch-flare reflected redly off it as he started to run after the girl.

Time sliced again, and the girl ran toward Edie, stumbling blindly, really close now. Her bonnet had been mashed forward over her face by the struggling.

Edie saw her.

Saw the three-foot-wide channel of freezing water in front of her.

Saw the girl could not see it through the bonnet blindfold.

Edie tried to shout a warning but her mouth was already at full stretch, just screaming with the unexplain-able pain of the past flowing through her.

And then time jumped forward again, and the girl was in the water and under it, and her face broke into the air covered in hair like a thick flap of seaweed, and the one visible eye seemed almost to see Edie, and she was shouting something, and all Edie caught was: “He’s not what he seems! Tell—” And then a rescuing hand reached over and grabbed her hair, only it wasn’t rescuing at all. It was pushing her back under, and all there was were bubbles and splashing and black water, and then the girl broke free for an instant and fishmouthed for air; and Edie heard her scream like she was shouting directly into the core of Edie’s being without going via the ears. And the words had the terrible panicked urgency of last words: “… gates in the mirrors …” Then the man’s hand spread once more and grabbed the bonnet and plunged the spluttering face under the water for the last time, and the hair spread apart, and Edie saw the distorted face suddenly clean and white under the water, eyes wide in terror, mouth still shouting and then breathing water. Edie couldn’t tell why, but she felt she knew the face, and then the mouth stopped moving and the eyes went still, and something dark swooped between Edie and the “then,” and she was gasping for air in the “now.” The Frost Fair and the elephant and the drowned girl were gone, and she was staring across a moving river and electric light made hard edges of everything, even the blackness.

George was at her side, looking sick and perturbed.

“What happened?”

And all she could say, with a heart full of a new and inexplicable sadness, was: “I missed it.” “What? What did you miss?”

She lurched out of the deeper water and stood for a moment, gazing across the river as if she were trying to conjure the past back into being one more time. Then she shook her head and wiped her face.

“I don’t know.”

She started walking toward the bridge louring over the water ahead of them.

“I was looking at the elephant.”