‘I’ll show you the way,’ the kid said and smiled at Morag. I’m not sure if it was some protective instinct, jealousy or just the urge to smack the smug little bastard in his pus that I felt. ‘My name’s Elspeth, by the way.’ Fortunately he’d turned away and didn’t see Morag and I trying to stifle laughter at this.
Elspeth led us through the building that I had initially thought was a hotel. Now I thought it must have been something more institutional. The whole place smelled of damp and the low-tide stink that I was already used to from living on the Rigs. We clambered up some stairs and onto the roof. From there we could see all the way down Marlborough Avenue.
‘Pagan lives on Westbourne,’ Elspeth said as if that should mean something to us.
The water came up to about the halfway mark on the ground floors of the pre-Final Human Conflict terraced houses. Most of the buildings were three or four storeys high, many of them with balconies or large window ledges, almost every single one of which had some kind of garden on it, most growing vegetables to my untrained eye.
I assumed that the majority of these buildings once had attics, but the roofs had been removed, flattened and then used as farms. Some of them were planted with crops and vegetables. Others had chickens, sheep and even a few cows and pigs grazing on them. There was even what looked to be a small orchard on one roof. All the houses had been shored up with material salvaged from the deserted rest of the city.
Between the two sides of the street, over the turgid Humber water. were a series of scratch-built, rickety-looking catwalks. Many of them had solar panelling strung between them. I could also see the smoke of stills and hear the rhythmic thump of alcohol-burning generators, and on some of the roofs small wind turbines added to the electricity generation.
‘We’ve also got some wave-powered generators further out in the Humber,’ Elspeth said. He was obviously proud of his community. Morag was looking around in awe. I saw some more of the clean-water pens fenced off from the dirty river.
‘What are you fanning there?’ I asked.
‘Not sure in that one. We’ve got different ones, a fair amount of kelp, various types of shellfish. We’ve had less luck with fish though.’ I was impressed despite myself. This was quite an undertaking. ‘There’s more pens back in Pearson Park,’ he said, gesturing back to the open body of water that we’d seen on the way in. ‘And more at what used to be the Spring Bank West Cemetery.’
I’d also noticed the trunks of dead trees sticking out of the water, but these had been carved into various shapes and forms. I was looking at one that seemed to be an angel holding a globe. It looked ancient and pitted.
‘Those were sculpted before the FHC and the rivers rose. We’re doing our best to maintain them,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked, almost involuntarily. The practical side of me was saying that they had more pressing things to do. Elspeth just looked at me disdainfully as he took us out over the river on a corroded metal catwalk that shook with every step. It probably would’ve bothered me if I hadn’t lived on the Rigs. We passed by a couple of cows that paused from grazing to look up at us with their sombre, watery eyes. We crossed from the roofs of Marlborough Avenue and onto the roofs of what was presumably Westbourne Avenue.
The set-up of Westbourne Avenue was pretty similar only more of the rooftops seemed to be given over to greenhouses and what looked to me to be hydroponic gardens, though again they’d had to scavenge what gear they could find.
Below us in the water-filled avenue an off-white monument of some kind stuck out of the water. It looked to me like a giant chess piece, like a bishop or something. Two people standing in a boat seemed to be cleaning it. The monument or whatever it was stood in a circle of houses with a flooded road leading off opposite from where we stood.
Elspeth took us towards a house just past the little circle, which had presumably once been a roundabout. We climbed down a metal ladder bolted to the side of the house and through the remains of a window. As well as the ever-present smell of damp and the Humber there was a strong earthy smell here. The roof garden above was supported by a reinforced ceiling and further shored up by supports made from scavenged steel beams. There were cracks where dirt had spilled through.
‘These things ever collapse?’ Morag asked, half joking.
‘Every so often, though nobody’s died in over a year in a collapse,’ Elspeth answered in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Actually the main problem is salvaging the earth afterwards,’ he added as we headed down a flight of stairs to the house’s first floor. It seemed that the house had at one point been converted into separate flats.
‘Huh?’ I said intelligently. Once again Elspeth gave me a look of condescension that only cocky teenagers are truly capable of giving.
‘Good soil is actually quite difficult to find,’ the precocious little sod said. ‘We had to search quite far and wide for it – we even sent out raiding parties.’
‘Outstanding,’ I said. Elspeth and presumably the rest of the inhabitants of the Avenues seemed very proud of their community, and grudgingly I could see why.
We came into a hall that had been extensively decorated with a mural of some kind. I couldn’t really make it out, but it seemed to be a series of interconnecting spirals bordered with knotwork. I could hear raised voices on the other side of the door. I probably could’ve tried to listen in if I’d boosted my hearing but I decided against it. Elspeth hammered on the door and the voices stopped. He turned and raised his eyes at us and took one last lingering look at Morag, which caused my blood to boil. She smiled nervously back at him and he left as the door opened.
If someone was going to call themselves Pagan I would pretty much expect them to look like Pagan did. The face that greeted us from the door was old, tanned and leathery. His features were pinched and angular but the half-smile beneath the black lenses that replaced his eyes went some way towards softening the hardness of his face. Half his head sprouted fiercely orange dreadlocks. The other half was the restructured ugly military tech of his integral computer. Tattooed on his face and disappearing into the neckline of the tatty, dirty T-shirt were spirals of knotwork. I later found out that the knotwork was made from implanted circuitry.
He wore a leather biker’s jacket that I assumed was armoured, and some old combat trousers. In his ears were the rather predictable multiple piercings, though he didn’t have any others that were visible at least. The biggest and most obvious affectation was the gnarled wooden staff held in his left hand, various fetishist objects hanging off it. It was tribal but had an old look. It reminded me of Buck and Gibby, the two cyberbilly Night Stalkers on Dog 4. My initial impression was: trying too hard.
He looked us both up and down, nodded to himself and opened the door wider. His expression had become worried.
‘You Pagan?’ I asked. He nodded.
‘Tea?’ Behind him I heard what I could only assume was cursing in German.
Morag and I followed Pagan into a lounge area. The damp and earthy smell mixed with the pungent aroma of burning incense. The room looked like a museum: it was filled with clutter, old armchairs and a suite with its stuffing spilling out. Books, actual real paper books and a lot of them, lined one wall. Pictures of fantastical landscapes and creatures covered another. Lying around was a mixture of high-tech and what I could only assume was ritual paraphernalia. My second impression was that this guy was pretty far gone.
Stood in the middle of the lounge glaring at us was a tall, raw-boned, athletic-looking, black woman with a Mohican. Her eyes were polarised lenses like mine. She wore a leather top and I could see she only had one breast. The other, presumably, had been surgically removed.