I stood for a moment to get the hang of things. Everyone wore embroidery here, too, only it was all shabby, with threads hanging out or pieces from other patterns darned in. Even the fat woman’s apron was old embroidery.
She glared at me and jerked her chin. I held out my token. “This gets you nipling and colly or klaptico. That’s all,” she said, tapping the food troughs with her big wooden spatula. “Which is it? Hurry up.”
Klaptico looked swimmy and greasy and gray. Nipling was white and had a sort of look of mashed potatoes. It looked filling, so I chose that. She poured orange colly over it and then snatched my token away and stamped it with a huge black stamp.
“So don’t think you can use it twice,” she snapped, sticking the token into the nipling like an ice-cream wafer. She handed me the plate, token and all. “Spear and spoon on the tray at the end.”
The eating implements were a sort of spike and a minishovel. I picked up one of each and took my plate to a free table. All the other people sort of bent away from me as I went. Then they bent away again when I went to get myself a drink. Yes, I thought, working the spigot, I’m a vagrant. You don’t know where I’ve been!
I was really puzzled by the drink. It tasted rusty and sweetish. “What is this stuff?” I asked the woman at the nearest table, as politely as I could.
She looked at me as if I was mad. “Water,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
I turned back to my plate and took a look to see how other people were using their spike and shovel. They were spiking and shoveling, so I did that, too. And after one shovelful I was wishing I’d had klaptico instead. Nipling was hot, like horseradish, and colly was another kind of hot, like salty chili. I had to keep going for more of the weird water, wondering each time if it was poisoning me, but I was so hungry that I ate every scrap. I swear I could taste nipling for the next twenty-four hours.
I put my plate and my glass in the bins near the counter and left, thankfully. Then, feeling a good deal better but a bit fiery around the middle, I went along the black, blocky arcade until I came to a long brown building with hardly any windows and a large door covered with blue-and-white enamel notices. PUBLIC WORKS OFFICE. OPENING HOURS 08.00–16.00. DO NOT DISTURB NIGHT SHIFT UNLESS AN EMERGENCY. NO LOITERING. NO MONEY EXCHANGED FOR TOKENS, and scads of others. I stared at them all for a while until I saw one notice all by itself in the doorjamb. INSERT PW TOKEN TO OPEN DOOR, it said, and underneath it was a slit like a letterbox.
I thought, I don’t want to do this. But I thought that Important was bound to have phoned up to this place and told them I was on my way. I thought of the prison under the trains. And I got out my nipling-coated token and posted it into the slit.
It went down with an almighty clanging crash. It made me jump.
It made me jump so hard that I realized that I’d been half asleep until then. I’d been doing what I was told like a zombie. Now I was wide awake all of a sudden and quivering. And angry. Why should I be sent to work in a cloth factory like a slave when all I’d done was mistake someone for Romanov? And I still hadn’t found Romanov. I was supposed to help two more people before I could find him, and after that I’d promised to help that girl. Roddy. It dawned on me that I’d have to mean to help her or she wouldn’t count as one of the people I’d helped. Instead I was letting myself be stuck in this awful place. And that was stupid. Pathetic, really.
I turned away from the notice-studded door and ran back along the arcade, past the caffs, until I came to the stairs. I knew they’d look for me going down them. So I dived up the next flight, under the notice that warned about RADIATION.
TWO
My plan was quite simple. I was going to sit on those stairs, just high enough to be out of sight, until I heard the police come up. Then, when they went back down looking for me, I was going to follow them and be behind them when they thought I was in front.
It didn’t work out that way. That set of steps turned out to be quite short. There were no lights in the roof, and the stairs were made of cracked and slippery white tiles. Unlike all the other flights, they curved, and as soon as I had climbed round the curve and was feeling pleased that I was out of sight already, I saw sunset light up ahead. I realized I must have come to the very top of the cliff.
After that I was too interested to stop. I wanted to see what was causing the dangerous radiation. I went on up.
The first thing I saw, before I was really at the top, was a tall wire fence quite a long way overhead and another of those enamel notices fixed to it, beautifully lit by the flaring sun. AIRFIELD KEEP OUT. As I climbed slowly and cautiously up the last steps, I could see that the fence was actually on top of rows of small houses that backed onto the last piece of the cliff. The houses were all different and all sort of cottage-sized. After the buildings on the lower levels, they struck me as more like doll’s houses or dog kennels, and the paint on them was blistered and peeling.
This must be where the poor people live, I thought. I went up the last few steps and saw the poor people.
There were crowds of them, all sitting out on the flat rock in front of the little houses. Every one of the grownups was working away at embroidery, so that the place sort of heaved and flashed as far as I could see both ways, with arms moving and needles catching the light. Kids were darting about, bringing things. Every so often someone would say, “We need more number nine red,” or, “Bring me the one-two-five flower pattern,” and a child would dart off to get it. There wasn’t room to walk among the busy people and the spread-out cloths they were sewing at, so the kids mostly had to run along the very edge of the cliff. There were no pillars here and no wall. It looked terrifying.
I stood where I was or I would have trodden on someone, or put my big, dirty shoe in the middle of a bright flower pattern on one side or a wreathing green-gold embroidery on the other. And I had hardly stood for a second when a plane of some kind took off from the airfield with a huge tinny whirring. I could tell it flew by quite different methods from the ones I knew. It zoomed right over our heads and I nearly fell back down the steps, trying to duck. A boy standing with his toes curled round the edge of the cliff never even swayed. He gave me a jeering look.
I pretended not to see him and watched the plane go whirring away across the flat and sandy tops of all the cliffs. It looked almost like unbroken desert from up here, with just a few dark, wriggly cracks to show where the city canyons were. In the distance, where it seemed to turn into solid desert, I could see something shining orange in the sunlight. The plane seemed to be making for this shining thing.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I said to the man beside my right leg. He was old, and I didn’t really like to look at him, because he had a growth of some kind down one side of his face. It blocked one of his eyes and went on down to mix with his straggly beard.
He seemed quite friendly. He went on sewing away and said, “Ask away, lad,” in what sounded like a strong country accent.
“Then, is the radiation from the planes in the airfield?” I said.
“No, no, that’s from the sun,” he said, and bit off his blue-green yarn and threaded his needle with more, all in one movement like a conjuring trick.
He bent to the embroidery again, and a woman just beyond, sewing at the same cloth—only she was using golden green—said, “You shouldn’t really be up here before sunset, my dear.” She had a growth, too, an oozy one, on her sewing arm.
“Yes, but they arrested me for a vagrant,” I said.
“Ah, they do that,” someone else said, from the flower embroidery on my other side. “They’re always needing workers to make cloth for us.”