The Lighthouse at the End of the World, page 19
“Now you’re here again, let’s see what your babby’s got,” said Nonesuch, pointing at Oyster’s armpit before he could ask another question.
“Are you sure this is such a good idea?” said Goswick, sitting up. “Tweedledimmest here could be a Company stooge, for all we know. Could be playing the whole ‘lost human’ card. Getting us onside then calling in the jackdaws on our sorry asses. Subtle-like.”
The dog and gebel regarded each other for a second, then began to laugh.
“Alright, alright,” said Oyster, clapping his fingers on the palm of his hand sarcastically. “Very funny. But as payback, before you two get what you want, you need to find me some garms.”
“Well, it’s hardly our fault that you decided to rock up in your scanties, but lucky for you, you’re about Motet’s size and shape, and that gebel is a peacock. Lemme see what’s to be done.” She stood and walked to a tall wooden wardrobe that lurked at the back of the room, returning moments later with a black woollen skirt, a T-shirt and a blue tartan waistcoat similar to her own. The outfit was completed with some towelling socks and a pair of yellow-stitched Doc Martens that were so ancient the leather was cracking around the toes.
Nonesuch handed them to him.
“And before you start in, we’re out of trews.”
Oyster took the clothes. They were crumpled and smelled stale, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in this situation. He walked to the bathroom to change.
Despite being open to the air, the bathroom still stank with the acrid smell of burned rubber. The lamp lay on the floor, surrounded by the scorch marks and ashes from his last visit. He looked out over the city in the bleak daylight, and as he dressed, he wondered about Primrose and how he figured in all of this, if at all.
The road overlooked by the house was quiet, but a few streets over there were smoke and smells that suggested people. In the far distance, across the river, he caught glimpses of the ruddy gold of the East India Company buildings. He yawned and stretched; his bones cracked and tingled. Time to get a move on.
He returned to the faded grandeur of the lounge. Nonesuch nodded in approval at his outfit.
“Right, now you’ve got your cooch all covered, we need to see Syzygy,” she said.
“Who?” asked Oyster, fumbling with the tight buttons of the waistcoat.
“Motet’s nuajin, the one that’s taken such a shine to you. All kinds of strange, in fact. Ink beetles usually stick for life. Has she nested?”
“If that’s what you call it,” he replied. “I nearly shit a brick when it happened. You could’ve given me a heads up that she was gonna park in my armpit.”
Nonesuch laughed. “Yeah, ’cos that would’ve helped your parlous ’tude, Mr Royston.”
“It’s Oyster,” he corrected.
“Got it. Royston.” Nonesuch flickered a peach colour.
Goswick coughed loudly.
“Hate to be the one that breaks up the hormone party, but this one already took freaking ages to get here. Ain’t we on a clock or something, boss?”
Nonesuch’s lights were a delicate purple for an instant and she nodded.
“Want to catch me up?” said Oyster.
“Cast that mind of yours back to when your sorry arse first washed up,” Nonesuch replied. “Gave you a hit of glimmer to pacify you. So, there are sorts out there addicted to it. Thusly, there are crews who’ll cater to that appetite by capturing my kind and draining us to the point of death. Shineheads can keep a gebel trussed in a basement for months till they finally return to the tree.”
Nonesuch cooed and the nuajin slipped out from her hiding place, beneath Oyster’s arm, climbing across his chest and rustling her wings beneath his chin. Nonesuch pulled a large scrap of crumpled paper from her breeches’ pocket and shepherded the beetle onto it.
Syzygy turned around on the paper, like a cat trying to find the most comfortable spot on a cushion. After she settled, Nonesuch slipped one of her glidefins between the nuajin’s translucent wings. Her fingertip pulsed with gentle blue light and the nuajin wriggled and purred. After a pause, Syzygy scuttled around the paper, scratching out inky letters with her abdomen.
“Is that what happened to Motet?” asked Oyster. “Caught and drained?”
“Unsure. He was onto one of the big shine-rings, trying to break them up. Run by none other than your friends, the Mannish. But pulling such larks makes you enemies.”
Syzygy stopped her dance and Nonesuch brushed her gently from the page, grabbing the paper and waving it in the air to dry. The ink beetle scuttled back towards Oyster. He took a deep breath and raised his arm. She flew up into her nest once more. He grimaced, feeling a nip under his arm as though the cavity there had been caught by tiny teeth.
Nonesuch held up the paper.
“Ha! We got summat, dogsbreath!” said Nonesuch, her lights flaring with excitement.
“Nice,” replied Goswick.
“So, what’s next?” said Oyster.
“Fetch your coat, we’ll fill you in on the way,” answered Nonesuch, already at the door.
FLIMFLAMS
In the daylight, Nonesuch’s crib was no longer covered in retired nuajin, revealing the pitted red brick of the building beneath. The sky overhead was a bluish-green and the air cold enough to turn Oyster’s breath into vapour. He was warmer in the skirt than he had expected, but he was glad of the long grey coat that Nonesuch had lent him. It looked to be ex-Soviet-era military. Just another gift from the beach, no doubt.
Nonesuch had folded her red hair beneath a periwig as much as possible and wore a sweatshirt with a hood pulled over her face. Goswick padded along beside them, his tongue lolling from his mouth.
“Hey kids, just for the record, I am putting it out there that I am fricking hungry.”
“Shhh,” said Nonesuch, leading them to the house’s rear and stepping around the foul-smelling mud beneath the toilet.
“Just saying, if I see a string of sausages anywhere, I’m not going to be able to overcome my own canine nature,” he said. “It’ll just be like an old-timey Tom and Jerry cartoon.”
“Don’t know what you’re gabbing about,” replied Nonesuch, “but do please stubble your muzzle.”
“What’s the deal with you two?” said Oyster. “Is he your pet?”
Goswick growled.
“Nah,” replied Nonesuch, “four-legs is my friend. Helping me out. We goes way back.” She winked at Goswick.
“Okay, then.” Oyster shrugged. He clearly wasn’t going to get any more out of her on the subject.
The air was tinged with its habitual briny smell as the sound of people and commerce grew louder. Nonesuch led them into a narrow alleyway and through a maze of tight-knit streets walled by houses and tracts of mud.
They finally stepped into a thoroughfare so wide by comparison that Oyster felt dizzy. The street was cobbled and thronged with people. Men in powdered wigs, topcoats and knee breeches swaggered purposefully up its length, bantering with each other ostentatiously. Street vendors in mud-spattered smocks and aprons advertised their wares at top volume.
Not everyone was on foot. Here and there were sedan chairs, some ornately gilded, constructed from leftover plastic. There were hand carts, too, trundling to and fro over the rutted street. All the vehicles he could see were hauled or carried by gebel.
Women in brocade dresses, with skirts so wide they blocked traffic, picked their way through the mud and filth littering the street. They stepped daintily around a sewer at its centre, while the sky overhead boiled with ink beetles carrying messages from one place to another.
The smell was overpowering. The city’s fishy undertow was the base note in a stomach-churning medley of raw sewage, cooked food and smoke. He followed Nonesuch’s lead, ducking into the flow of people and keeping his head down.
This was the first time he had seen the human denizens of Greater London, and they appeared, in most respects, to be the same as those in his home city. Every colour, size and shape was represented. The other gebel he saw, though, were poorly fed and ill-treated. They shambled along, none meeting his gaze with the same ferocity as Nonesuch. It was clear that whatever social order existed in Greater London, as Goswick had explained, they were at the bottom.
He turned to Nonesuch.
“So what’s the play here?” he asked.
“Got to locate brother-mine. The deets from your ickle Syzygy said the shinehouse was somewhere in this vicinity. But a gebel and her best friend can’t just rock up at such locations, if you know what I mean,” said Nonesuch.
“What do we do?” said Oyster.
“Nuh-huh, not us. Just you, jack-jonesing. You’ll reconnoitre. Locate brother-mine. Our kind can’t get in there for obvious reasons. But the crew runnin’ this house put word out they’re in the market for a walker. That is to say, someone with your ickle knack. That furnishes you with an in, Dry Bob. So once you’re on the inside, use your glaziers, scope the situation, spring my hive-bro if you can. If not, shickle out of there with the particulars and toot on this.” She handed him an ancient dog whistle. “We’ll find you.”
Oyster nodded and pocketed it.
They pushed through a group of red-tunicked cavalry officers sporting shaved heads and gang tattoos. Oyster was accustomed to using other people’s clothes as a way of measuring their mood, allegiances, and even how likely they were to give him a kicking, but he struggled to find some rule underlying the jumble of styles and periods on show here. It was as though clothes, people – even buildings – just washed up here from time to time and knitted themselves into the city’s fabric.
“Ain’t gonna be straightforward. But split it into three stages. One: an invite to enter. Most houses have flimflams running out front. Hook one of them and work your way in. Two: pretty mouth an excuse to check the place out. Three: get the deets and scram. Worst case, use your knack to do the flit out of there.”
“Yeah, about that,” he grunted. “I’m not so sure I can pull that off on command…”
He was distracted mid-sentence by a glimpse of the great ivory-boned palace he’d first seen on arrival, off in the distance. Then had to duck beneath the outstretched arm of a grubby footman who was using a dead tablet computer as a tea-tray and—Shit. He’d lost Nonesuch and Goswick.
A slippery feeling unwound in his stomach, reminding him that he had no idea how to get back to Nonesuch’s safe house. He scrabbled around in the pocket of his coat for the dog whistle. Suddenly, he was a kid again, letting go of Lucas’s hand to tie his shoelaces on Streatham High Road and losing sight of his dad. Everything had ground to a halt in that moment: his breathing getting faster and faster, adrenaline making him tingle with the sickly realisation that he didn’t know where Lucas was or how to get home.
The tears had welled up and burst out of him. Seconds later, Lucas had come running back out of a nearby bookies. Spotting Oyster, he’d swept him up, clutching the boy to his chest, cursing. He wiped away the boy’s tears and told him to stop snivelling.
Where was Nonesuch?
“Come on, Dry Bob, can’t keep losing you,” said Nonesuch’s voice. She stepped out from behind a sedan that had just been left stranded in the muddy street.
Relief flooded into Oyster.
“According to your nuajin, our destination’s around here somewhere. Leastways their gaffles and games are all this side,” she said, nodding at a scruffy kid at the edge of the road running cups with one of the cavalry types.
“Sausages,” whispered Goswick from the roadside.
Nonesuch shook her head and put a glittering finger to her lips.
“Fade time, let’s allow our man here attend to his business.”
Oyster was not at all sure that he could pull off half of what Nonesuch had mentioned, but he did know about short cons, and cups was one of the oldest in any universe. He looked around, but the dog and the gebel had already ghosted. No doubt they were watching him from somewhere, he just couldn’t be sure where.
What had Marya Petrovna said earlier? Belief is the tool.
Oyster turned it over. If this game picked out by Nonesuch was attached to the shinehouse, then his best strategy was to play it coy, get on the inside and then escalate. Wouldn’t do to be too keen. If they were anything like his crew, marching up to them and asking for a job probably wouldn’t work. One step at a time. He idled up to the boy and stared up into the tinted sky. The clouds above might be artificial, but Oyster was struck that, handcrafted as they were, they were beautiful.
There was a tap on his leg. Oyster looked down.
The kid wore a scarlet brocade jacket and matching silk waistcoat. A pair of trackie bottoms had been cut off at the calf to reveal muddy stockings and a pair of Cuban-heeled shoes.
“Let us play, sirrah!” said the kid in reedy voice, noticing him for the first time. “You strike me as a gent of some fortune.”
He waved at a low folding table and three upturned plastic cups.
“Forget it, young blood,” said Oyster. “I ain’t no mug.”
The kid pulled a face.
Oyster considered it for a moment. Perhaps he could use this to his advantage.
“You wouldn’t know a woman by the name of Ambidexter, would you kid?” he asked. “Runs with the Mannish. All inked up?”
“That name ain’t immediately a familiar one, but then again,” the kid shrugged, “fresh as I am, I ain’t no peach.”
“Okay. Okay,” said Oyster. “I get it. How about we play. If I win, you tell me what I want to know.”
The kid thought about it for a second and then nodded.
Oyster reached into the coat for his wallet, only to realise he didn’t have one with him. Shit. No money.
“Throw me a bone, junior,” he said. “I’m all out of folding.”
The kid looked Oyster up and down, assessing his monetary worth. It rankled to be on the receiving end of that sort of glance for a change.
“Vamp us them creps, sir, that’ll cover your stake,” said the boy.
Oyster shook his head in confusion.
“Those,” said the boy, pointing at his Doc Martens.
“Aw, come on,” said Oyster. He’d already lost enough of his clothes over the last few days.
“Fair enough then, sir,” he said. He shrugged and turned away. Oyster rolled his eyes and tapped the kid on the shoulder.
“Okay,” he grunted.
“Very well, sirrah,” said the boy, indicating the plastic table. “Relinquish said creepers and place them thusly.”
Oyster removed his shoes and stuffed his socks into his jacket. The mud covering the road oozed between his toes. He tried not to think too much about what was in it.
“The best of three makes a win. Keep your glaziers fixed upon the ball and victory will be assured,” the boy squeaked. He rolled a plastic ball not much bigger than a pea under the first cup.
The kid ran through his patter, shuffling the cups in a circular motion, giving his intended victim glimpses of the ball as it rolled between them, but Oyster was looking for the rest of the boy’s crew. He clocked a man, slouched against a street corner, keeping an eye on him and the kid long distance. From his size and bearing, Oyster pegged him as muscle.
“And now, sirrah, the time has arrived to make your choice!”
Oyster picked the middle cup and lost. The kid mock-scolded him for not paying attention, then exchanged the briefest of glances with another man in a tall, white wig and a corn-yellow jacket further up the street. The man was pretending to clean a pince-nez with a dirty handkerchief; his face was powdered and rouged so much he resembled a clown.
Got you.
Sure that he’d located their bag man, Oyster watched the boy’s routine. It was typical cup-and-ball schtick, he knew the drill. Like all short cons, the trick was to avoid listening to the charmer in front of you and consider what was actually going on.
The whole point of the gag was that when the shuffle ended, the ball wasn’t under any of the cups; it was, in fact, in the kid’s hand waiting to be tossed beneath whichever cup hadn’t been chosen. And having lost the first shuffle, Oyster knew this kid was a lefty.
Here we go. The boy ran another shuffle, the ball flying from one cup to another.
“Second chance, the choice is yours!” said the kid.
Oyster reached towards the middle cup, but then grabbed the kid’s left wrist and twisted it up with a jerk that opened their fingers.
“Unhand me, muff buggler!” he squealed as the tiny ball rolled from his hand and plopped into the mud. From here on in it was going to get messy. With his other hand, Oyster knocked the cups from the table.
They hadn’t even landed before the crew muscle was bounding across the street, dodging between pedestrians. Oyster grabbed his shoes from the table and released the boy’s wrist.
“Sorry about this,” said Oyster. “Admire your grift and all, but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.”
He gave the boy a good shove, sending him backwards into the road.
The bag man in the makeup was on the move too, legging up the street at a pace that was as fast as he could go without drawing undue attention. Oyster stepped behind a passing sedan chair, hopping to slip on his muddy shoes while simultaneously keeping Mr Muscle at bay and his eyes on the bag man. If they were anything like his crew, Wiggy here would have standing orders to run back to base with their takings if things went south.
Luckily for Oyster, their muscle was more interested in rescuing his protégé from the mud than catching him. He had no difficulty dodging under one side of the sedan chair and emerging from the other. He flicked his hoodie up over his head and doubled his pace to catch up with the man in the wig, determined to follow him to their crib. This was all going to plan.
Oyster almost ran straight into a pair of clerks in ruby glasses, picking their way through the mud, their iron tongs swinging from their belts. He didn’t think it likely they would be after him, but it wasn’t worth taking any risks.
