Introducing a new series in which friends who write send me stuff they've written and I host it because they aren't sad enough to be blogging this late in the holocene era. This week - it's twitter and real life chum of mine @psychonaut99 who you should follow. This story reminds me of both Alan Moore and Terry Pratchett. So, you know, it's fucking great.
UPLINE TRAFFIC
Snow was falling in soft, wet clumps, and Fat Angus was talking bollocks again. Banjo had heard it before a hundred times, but he kept half-listening whilst fussing with his mattress. The snow had started twenty minutes ago and now the cardboard was sodden. He was worried moving it too much would make the whole thing would fall apart.
"Everyone together.." Fat Angus went on. He was a dozen or so places upline and Banjo couldn't see hm through the crowd but he could picture the expansive gestures he'd be making with his old Irn Bru bottle half-full of cloudy poitin. "Brought everyone together, you see…"
Banjo tried gently squeezing his mattress. A few drops oozed
out from between the corrugations, but were immediately replaced as new snow
melted into the card. He pressed again, harder, aware all the while that it was
pointless. He'd had it for over a year, which was good run for a mattress made
from a flattened fridge box. They always fell apart in the end and all the
careful drying and optimism in the world couldn't stop it. This one though…his
mum had found it, summer before last, when, over the course of three days,
their place in the queue had shuffled past the stinking entranceway to an alley
next to a Budgens. "Hold my place!" she had suddenly hissed, and
scampered into the alleyway with that spryness that had never left her, even at
the very end. She'd emerged five minutes later, hauling the huge box out of the
darkness, its side already stained green with the cabbage juice that even now
Banjo could see on the board between his fingers.
For an autumn, a winter, a spring, a summer and now another autumn that box had separated Banjo from the greasy pavements and broken tarmacs of London, three centimetres of insulating cardboard between his bones and the stones that sucked the warmth, the strength and eventually the life out of you. Just as they'd done to his mum, not three months after she'd liberated his bed from that yawning alley. He'd woken one November morning and seen her next to him, blue, still and somehow smaller than she'd been the night before, as if the stones had stolen some of her flesh as well as her life.
"I met Her once, you know." Fat Angus was still going, as he always would unless he passed out or someone smacked him one. "Proudest moment of my life, it was."
This was always the crescendo of Fat Angus' bullshit
soliloquy, but Banjo turned towards it anyway, willing himself to be distracted
by it. He couldn't see Angus admidst the upline crowd, but occasionally
glimpsed his bottle when he waved it with particular enthusiasm.
The claim was transparently untrue. Even if Angus' skin hadn't been tattooed with the patina of the queue-born - a worked-in layer of soot and grime, fixed permanently by a lifetime of weather-beating - Banjo's mum had once told him she remembered Fat Angus being born when she was a kid herself. His mum had occupied the same spot that Angus now did, just as Banjo had inherited his own mum's spot when she died. And Banjo's mum had been brought to the queue as a baby by her mum and dad, which meant that Fat Angus hadn't been born until years after the queue started. So Fat Angus could never have met Her. She must had been years dead by the time Fat Angus's mum had squirted him into the world in a flowerbed outside Serpentine Park. God alone knew why Angus always claimed to have met Her, but he'd been claiming it for as long as Banjo could remember.
"When you were in Her presence, it was like nothing else, y'know. As if She was more than human."
It wasn't entirely clear who Fat Angus was even saying all this stuff too. All his adjacents in the queue had stopped listening years ago. There was always Screwface, Banjo supposed. He'd been sat next to Fat Angus since forever. He might be Fat Angus's dad, but no one knew. Some people even said he wasn't queue-born, that he'd been here since the start. But if either of those things were the case, Screwface wasn't saying. Largely because Screwface never said anything. For Banjo's whole life, Screwface had sat in the queue a dozen or so places upline, keeping Fat Angus's place when he went scavenging for poitin, smoking a pipe which he filled with God-knows-what and listening to Fat Angus's endless bullshitting, his face as tanned and motionless as a mahogany carving, all of it in complete silence.
Noises downline drew Banjo's attention in the other direction. Voices, indistinct at first, but growing louder as they got closer.
"Jump tickets! Jump tickets! Hundred! Five hundred!
Thousand! Jump tickets!"
It was Alice's kids, on the return leg of their annual trek. They'd passed by heading downline back in March or April, now they were heading back upline to wherever it was Alice herself was holding their place.
Banjo scanned them as they approached, counting six. Down
two from the outgoing trip. He felt a stab of sympathy. The missing two could
have paired up, but it was unlikely. People didn't pair up downline, as a rule,
because then the upline half of the couple lost their place. More likely they'd
run into trouble.
"Jump tickets! Hundred! Five hundred! Thousand!"
The kids weren't carrying much either, a lot less than Banjo had seen them hauling in previous years. It looked like it had been a tough pilgrimage this time round.
They did it every year, walking almost the whole length of the queue, trading jump tickets for whatever they could get. Bedding, food, lamps, tools. The barter-currency of the queue. The tickets were official documents, each one signed by the Prime Minister themselves, and entitled the bearer to advance a hundred, five hundred or even a thousand places upline, depending on the value stated on the ticket.
Banjo had nearly got one himself, 7 or 8 years back. He had it in his hand and was in the process of handing his knife over to the kid when he felt his mum's hand on his wrist. She'd snatched the card out of his hand, read it, then thrown it into the kid's face with a snarl.
"That silly cow hasn't been Prime Minister for twenty years you little shit. Now fuck off, and if I see you talking to my boy again, I'll cut you from your face your balls."
Banjo missed his mum. All his life, it had been the two of them. He'd never met his dad. Mum said he'd been an upliner, who came wandering down on a foraging trip. They'd tumbled one night, and then he'd buggered off back up the line to where his wife and kids were holding his place. Since then it had been Banjo and his mum, looking after each other, each holding their place when the other went off scavenging. A smiling face in the morning when the sun rose, a soothing word when night fell.
But now she was gone. Banjo was on his own. He'd never paired up himself. He had no one to hold his place, so he couldn't go foraging. He'd been feeding himself by trading what he had, and now he had almost nothing left. His mattress was dissolving. His last possession was his knife, tucked under his jumper, the same one his mum had stopped him from giving to that Alice kid.
"Jump tickets! Hundred! Five hundred! Thousand!"
Alice's kids trudged passed, their faces and their meagre haul both rimed with snow. They chanted mechanically, not expecting an answer and not receiving one. Banjo stared at their faces - pinched, hardened with weariness and sorrow. They confirmed his suspicions. The gaps in their ranks weren't through downline pair-ups. They'd suffered loss. A barter gone awry, or a run-in the prastermengros, or maybe just the endless damp chill of the stones themselves. A lonely death, a long way from home, and for those left, a long walk upline with winter coming on, to a patch of shining pavement and whatever welcome Alice had to offer.
But for them there was at least that. Each other, and a home to go to. For Banjo now there was nothing, and no one. He was never going to make it to the front of the queue. He'd be lucky to make it the next half mile.
The kids passed by, shuffling among the queue, still calling
with no response.
"No point."
The reply came suddenly enough for Banjo to snap his head round and peer through the tumbling snowflakes and the gathering dusk to see the speaker. The tone had been conversational but the voice was wholly unfamiliar.
The queue had parted slightly to allow Alice's kids a way
through, and between the huddled bodies, he saw a solitary kid paused, stooped
over the interlocutor.
A hunched, wizened figure, sitting cross legged, wrapped in a blanket from which a fleshless brown head poked like a sun-dried tortoise.
It was Screwface.
The kid didn't know him, of course, so she leaned in, wholly clueless as to why everyone round was craning their necks in astonishment.
There was a pause during which Banjo could almost hear the kid's mind clicking through her options. Screwface chose to fill the silence himself.
Banjo watched her go, then turned to find Screwface again, but the queue had closed in around him and he was gone from sight.
Snow settled on him, and the night drew round like a shroud. The cold seeped in, and even just sitting there he felt the stones beneath him stealing his life, just as they'd stolen his mum's, and Fat Angus' mum's, and the trekking kids'. His mum had sat in the queue her whole life and never made it to the front. Her hope towards the end was that he would make it her place, but he'd made it less than a year and there were still more places between him and the front than there were stars in the sky. There was no one he could leave his place to, no one to reach the front for him. He'd never see the front.
He gripped his knife, his last possession, the only thing he had to trade, and opened his mouth to call the kids back. He knew the jump tickets were a worthless thimblerig. His mum had told him, all those years back. But what if they weren't? What if his knife could buy him another thousand places up the queue? Or even just a hundred? Would that get him close enough before the stones took him?
But what if his mum had been right, as she'd always been? He'd lose his place, and his knife, for nothing.
Indecision silenced him. His call to the kids died in his throat.
But his fingers remained wrapped round the smooth plastic handle under his jumper. A new idea was forming. For a moment it's components drifted unconnnected round his mind in an unsettling Brownian motion, then suddenly coalesced. An idea, whole and gleaming. A way to move up the queue without losing his place, without trading away what little he had left. A way to make it to the front, to see for himself whether She was still there, and to gaze upon Her if she was.
Silently, he stood up. His fingers clenched tight under his
jumper, and he pulled out his knife.
