“What can you do?” he said plaintively, turning to Tom. “I’ve tried to brung her up lady-like, but she won’t learn. She’s a good girl though. I look at her sometimes and almost wish I hadn’t shot her mum…” He sniffed and dabbed at his eyes with a huge skull-and-crossbones hanky, and Cortina came trembling back with fresh sandwiches.
“The fing is,” Peavey explained, through a mouthful of bread and cucumber, “the fing is, Tom, I don’t want to be a pirate all me life.”
“Um, no?” said Tom.
“No,” said Peavey. “You see, Tommy boy, I didn’t have the advantages what you’ve got when I was a kid. I didn’t get no education or nuffink, and I’ve always been ugly as sin…”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Tom mumbled politely.
“I had to look out for meself, in the dust-heaps and the ditches. But I always knew one day I’d make it big. I saw London once, see. From a distance, like. Off on its travels somewhere. I fought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, all them tiers, and the white villas up top all shining in the sun. And then I ’card about them rich people what live up there, and I decided that’s how I want to live; all them posh outfits and garden parties and trips to the theatre and that. So I become a scavenger, and then I got a little town of me own, and now I got a bigger one. But what I really want…” (he leaned close to Tom) “what I really want is to be respectable.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” agreed Tom, glancing at Hester.
“You see, what I’m finking is this,” Peavey went on. “If this hunting trip works out like I hope, Tunbridge Wheels is goin’ ter be rich soon. Really rich. I love this suburb, Tom. I wanna see it grow. I wanna ’ave a proper upper level wiv parks and posh mansions and no oiks allowed, and elevators goin’ up and down. I want Tunbridge Wheels to turn into a city, a proper big city wiv me as Lord Mayor, sumfink I can ’and down to me sprogs. And you Tommy, I want you to tell me how a city ought to be, and teach me manners. Ettyket, like. So I can hob nob wiv’ other Lord Mayors and not ’ave them laugh at me behind my back. And all my lads as well; they live like pigs at the moment. So what do you say? Will you turn us into gentlemen?”
Tom blinked at him, remembering the hard faces of Peavey’s gang and wondering what they would do if he started telling them to open doors for each other and not to chew with their mouths open. He didn’t know what to say, but in the end Hester said it for him.
“It was a lucky day for you when Tom came aboard,” she told the mayor. “He’s an expert on etiquette. He’s the politest person I know. He’ll tell you anything you want, Peavey.”
“But…” said Tom, and winced as she kicked his ankle.
“Lovely-jubbley!” cackled Peavey, spraying them both with half-eaten sandwich. “You stick with old Chrysler, Tommy boy, and you won’t go far wrong. As soon as we’ve scoffed our big catch you can start work. It’s waiting for us on the far side of these marshes. We should reach it by the end of the week…”
Tom sipped at his tea. In his mind’s eye he saw again the great map of the Hunting Ground; the broad sweep of the Rustwater, and beyond it… “Beyond the marshes?” he said. “But beyond the marshes there’s nothing but the SeaofKhazak!”
“Relax, Tommy boy!” chuckled Chrysler Peavey. “Didn’t I tell you? Tunbridge Wheels is specialized*.” Just you wait and see. Wait and sea, get it? Wait and sea, ha ha ha ha!” And he slapped Tom on the back and swigged his tea, his little finger delicately raised.
18. BEVIS
A few days later London sighted prey again; a scattering of small Slavic-speaking tractionvilles which had been trying to hide among the crags of some old limestone hills. To and fro the city went, snapping them up, while half of London crowded on to the forward observation platforms to watch and cheer. The dismal plains of the western Hunting Ground were behind them now, and the discontent of yesterday was forgotten. Who cared if people were dying of heat stroke down in the Nether Boroughs? Good old London! Good old Crome! This was the best run of catches for years!
The city chased down and ate the faster towns and then turned back for the slower ones. It was nearly a week before the last of them was caught, a big, once proud place that was limping along with its tracks ripped off after an attack by predator suburbs. On the night it was finally eaten there were catch-parties in all the London parks, and the celebrations grew still more frantic when a cluster of lights was sighted far away to the north. A rumour started to circulate: that the lights belonged to a huge but crippled city; that it was what Valentine had been sent to find, and radio signals from the 13th Floor Elevator would lead London north to its greatest meal ever. Fireworks banged and racketed until two in the morning, and Chudleigh Pomeroy, the acting Head Historian, reduced Herbert Melliphant to Apprentice Third Class after he let off a fire-cracker in the Museum’s Main Hall.
But at dawn the happiness and the rumours died away. The lights in the north belonged to a huge city all right, but it was not crippled; it was heading south at top speed, and it had a hungry look. The Guild of Navigators soon identified it as Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, a conurbation formed by the coupling together of four huge Traktionstadts, but nobody else cared very much what it was called; they just wanted to get away from it.
London fired up its engines and raced on into the east until the conurbation sank below the horizon. But next morning, there it was again, upperworks glinting in the sunrise, even closer than before.
Katherine Valentine had not joined in with the parties and the merrymaking, nor did she join in the panic that now gripped her city.
Since her return from the Deep Gut she had kept to her room, washing and washing herself to get rid of the awful slurry-pit stink of Section 60. She hardly ate anything, and she made the servants fling all the clothes she had been wearing that day into the recycling bins. She stopped going to school. How could she face her friends, with all their silly talk of clothes and boys, knowing what she knew? Outside, sunlight dappled the lawns and the flowers were blooming and the trees were all unfurling fresh green leaves, but how could she enjoy the beauty of High London ever again? All she could think of were the thousands of Londoners who were toiling and dying in misery so that a few lucky, wealthy people like herself could live in comfort.
She wrote a letter to the Goggle-screen people about it, and another to the police, but she tore them both up. What was the point of sending them, when everyone knew that Magnus Crome controlled the police and the Goggle-screens? Even the High Priest of Clio had been appointed by Crome. She would have to wait for her father’s return before anything could be done about the Deep Gut—providing that London hadn’t got itself eaten by the time he came home.