Neverwhere

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.
The marquis had been amusing himself while he waited for her to collect herself by playing a game of knucklebones with some old coins and bones he kept in one of the many pockets of his coat. He looked up at her coldly. «Indeed?»
She bit her lower lip. «No. Not really. I’m not sorry. I’ve been running and hiding and running so hard that . . . this was the first chance I’ve really had to . . . » she stopped.
The marquis swept up the coins and the bones, and returned them to their pocket. «After you,» he said. He followed her back to the wall of pictures. She put one hand on the painting of her father’s study and took the marquis’s large black hand with the other.
. . . reality twisted . . .
They were in the conservatory, watering the plants. First Portia would water a plant, directing the flow of the water toward the soil at the base of the plant, avoiding the leaves and the blossoms. «Water the shoes,» she said to her youngest daughter. «Not the clothes.»
Ingress had her own little watering can. She was so proud of it. It was just like her mother’s, made of steel, painted bright green. As her mother finished with each plant, Ingress would water it with her tiny watering can. «On the shoes,» she told her mother. She began laughing, then, spontaneous little-girl laughter.
And her mother laughed too, until foxy Mr. Croup pulled her hair back, hard and sudden, and cut her white throat from ear to ear.
«Hello, Daddy,» said Door, quietly.
She touched the bust of her father with her fingers, stroking the side of his face. A thin, ascetic man, almost bald. Caesar as Prospero, thought the marquis de Carabas. He felt a little sick. That last image had hurt. Still: he was in Lord Portico’s study. That was a first.
The marquis took in the room, eyes sliding from detail to detail. The stuffed crocodile hanging