“Oh no. We do stuff for them. I mean,” and her tone of voice implied that this was something that might never have occurred to Richard unassisted, “there are some things rats can’t do, you know. I mean, not having fingers, and thumbs, an’ things. Hang on—” She pressed him against the wall, suddenly, and clamped a filthy hand over his mouth. Then she blew out the candle.
Nothing happened.
Then he heard distant voices. They waited, in the darkness and the cold. Richard shivered.
People walked past them, talking in low tones. When all sounds had died away, Anaesthesia took her hand from Richard’s mouth, relit the candle, and they walked on. “Who were they?” asked Richard.
She shrugged. “It dun’t matter,” she said.
“Then what makes you think that they wouldn’t have been pleased to see us?”
She looked at him rather sadly, like a mother trying to explain to an infant that, yes this flame was hot, too. All flames were hot. Trust her, please. “Come on,” she said. “I know a shortcut. We can nip through London Above for a bit.” They went up some stone steps, and the girl pushed open a door. They stepped through, and the door shut behind them.
Richard looked around, puzzled. They were standing on the Embankment, the miles-long walkway that the Victorians had built along the north shore of the Thames, covering the drainage system and the newly created District Line of the Underground, and replacing the stinking mudflats that had festered along the banks of the Thames for the previous five hundred years. It was still night—or perhaps it was night once more. He was unsure how long they had been walking through the underplaces and the dark.
There was no moon, but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars. There were streetlights too, and lights on buildings and on bridges, which looked like earthbound stars, and they glimmered, repeated, as they were reflected with the city in the night water of the Thames. It’s fairyland, thought Richard.
Anaesthesia blew out her candle. And Richard said, “Are you sure this is the right way?”
“Yes,” she said. “Pretty sure.”
They were approaching a wooden bench, and the moment he set eyes on it, it seemed to Richard that that bench was one of the most desirable objects he had ever seen. “Can we sit down?” he asked. “Just for a minute.”
She shrugged. They sat down at opposite ends of the bench. “On Friday,” said Richard, “I was with one of the finest investment analyst firms in London.”
“What’s a investment an’ a thing?”
“It was my job.”
She nodded, satisfied. “Right. And . . . ?”
“Just reminding myself, really. Yesterday . . . it was like I didn’t exist anymore, to anybody up here.”
“That’s ‘cos you don’t,” explained Anaesthesia. A late-night couple, who had been slowly walking along the Embankment toward them, holding hands, sat down in the middle of the bench, between Richard and Anaesthesia, and commenced to kiss each other, passionately. “Excuse me,” said Richard to them. The man had his hand inside the woman’s sweater and was moving it around enthusiastically, a lone traveler discovering an unexplored continent. “I want my life back,” Richard told the couple.
“I love you,” said the man to the woman.
“But your wife—” she said, licking the side of his face.
“Fuck her,” said the man.
“Don’ wanna f**k her,” said the woman, and she giggled, drunkenly. “Wanna f**k you . . . ” She put a hand on his crotch and giggled some more.
“Come on,” said Richard to Anaesthesia, feeling that the bench had started to become a less desirable neighborhood. They got up and walked away. Anaesthesia peered back, curiously, at the couple on the bench, who were gradually becoming more horizontal.
Richard said nothing. “Something wrong?” asked Anaesthesia.
“Only everything,” said Richard. “Have you always lived down there?”
“Nah. I was born up here,” she hesitated. “You don’t want to hear about me.” Richard realized, almost surprised, that he really did.
“I do. Really.”
She fingered the rough quartz beads that hung in a necklace around her neck, and she swallowed. “There was me and my mother and the twins . . . ” she said, and then she stopped talking. Her mouth clamped shut.
“Go on,” said Richard. “It’s all right. Really it is. Honest.”
The girl nodded. She took a deep breath, and then she began to talk, without looking at him as she talked, her eyes fixed on the ground ahead of her. “Well, my mother had me an’ my sisters, but she got a bit funny in the head. One day I got home from school, and she was crying and crying, and she didn’t have any clothes on, and she was breaking stuff. Plates and stuff. But she never hurt us. She never did. The lady from the social services came and took the twins away, an’ I had to go and stay with my aunt. She was living with this man. I didn’t like him. And when she was out of the house . . . ” The girl paused; she was quiet for so long that Richard wondered if she had finished. Then she began once more, “Anyway. He used to hurt me. Do other stuff. In the end, I told my aunt, an’ she started hitting me. Said I was lying. Said she’d have the police on me. But I wasn’t lying. So I run away. It was my birthday.”
They had reached the Albert Bridge, a kitsch monument spanning the Thames, joining Battersea to the south with the Chelsea end of the Embankment, a bridge hung with thousands of tiny white lights.
“I didn’t have anywhere to go. And it was so cold,” said Anaesthesia, and she stopped again. “I slept on the streets. I’d sleep in the day, when it was a bit warmer, and walk around at night, just to keep moving. I was only eleven. Stealing bread an’ milk off people’s doorsteps to eat. Hated doing that so I started hanging around the street markets, taking the rotten apples an’ oranges an’ things people threw away. Then I got really sick. I was living under an overpass in Notting Hill. When I come to, I was in London Below. The rats had found me.”
“Have you ever tried to return to all this?” he asked, gesturing. Quiet, warm, inhabited houses. Late-night cars. The real world . . . she shook her head. All fire burns, little baby. You’ll learn. “You can’t. It’s one or the other. Nobody ever gets both.”
“I’m sorry,” said Door, hesitantly. Her eyes were red, and she looked as if she had been vigorously blowing her nose and scrubbing her tears from her eyes and cheeks.