“Not really,” he said. “I never knew him.”
The him was the man who had died: the earlier Billy, the first Billy, the Billy Harrow who had teleported out of the sea-house, in which they had all been for reasons they could all remember, though were not perfectly impressed with. He had been blown into bits smaller than atoms.
“He was brave,” Billy said. “He did what he had to do.” Saira nodded. He did not feel that he was praising himself, though he knew that he, this Billy, must be brave in exactly, precisely the same degree as his predecessor.
“Why did you… he… do it?” she said.
Billy shrugged. “I don’t know. He had to. Like Dane said-you remember Dane?” Dane had died. That he was sure of. “Before the, before Grisamentum did him in.” Grisamentum was gone too. “There are a lot of people who don’t think twice about travelling like that. It’s only a problem if you know.” It all depended on how you looked at it whether you were troubled by the fact that it was always fatal.
“I keep trying to catch myself out,” he said. “I keep trying to suddenly see if I remember things that only he could know. The first one. Secrets.” He laughed. “I always do.” Billy did not feel proprietorial about the memories he had inherited, when he had been born out of the molecules of the air, in the tank room, days before, at the dying end of a catastrophe.
I miss Dane, he thought. He was not sure of anything very concrete about Dane, not even in fact that he missed him, exactly; but whenever he thought of it, Billy was very sad that what had happened to Dane had. He deserved better.
WHEN MARGE AND PAUL RANG HIS BELL, BILLY INVITED THEM IN, but they waited instead on the pavement. He came down. This was a valedictory organised in advance. Everyone trod carefully with each other just then.
Paul was in his old jacket. It was cleaned and patched. It would never look new, but it looked good. The scratches on his face were healing. Marge looked the same as she always had. They greeted each other with awkward heartfelt hugs.
“Where you going?” Billy said.
“Don’t know yet,” said Paul. “Maybe the country. Maybe another city.”
“Really?” Billy said. “Really?”
Paul shrugged. Marge smiled. Every time Billy had spoken to her since he had saved history from whatever, she had been buoyed up, more the more she found out about where she lived now.
“It’s all bollocks,” said Paul. “You think this is the only place gods live?” He smiled. “There’s no getting away from that now. Wherever you go, that’ll be somewhere a god lives.”
Once, Billy and Marge had sat down together, and over emotional hours he had told her what had happened to Leon-his murder at the hands of Goss and Subby, as part of the huge plot, the details of which were still pretty lacunaed. The wrong, the damaged edges of the details frustrated them both.
“You could ask Paul’s back what really happened,” Billy had said. “It was that bastard’s plan. I think.”
“How would we do that?” she said. “You think he’d even know, anyway?”
There were still those in the heresiopolitan wing of London who obeyed Paul as if he were the Tattoo, but not many. Most did not know details, but knew that he was not what he had been. Now Paul was a free operator, a roaming prison for a displaced kingpin. The Tattoo’s troops were routed and scattered after the recent, most confusingly vague near-apocalypse.
“How would we do that?” Marge said again.
They were not watched, the streets contained no one paying attention. Paul untucked his shirt, turned and showed Billy his skin.
The Tattoo’s eyes widened and narrowed frantically as he tried to speak. As if Billy would respect or listen to him. Across the lower part of Paul’s back more ink had been added. He had had inked tattooed stitches, sewing up the erstwhile crime lord’s mouth. Billy could hear an mmm mmm mmm.
“It wasn’t easy,” Paul said, “we had to find a savvy tattooist. And he kept trying to move, to purse his lips and that. Took a while.”
“You weren’t tempted to get him removed?” Billy said.
Paul put his shirt back on. He and Marge smiled. She raised her eyebrows. “If he gives me too much shit I might blind him,” Paul said. Sadism? Really? Billy would have said not. Justice? Power.
“You’re never going to tell us what did happen, are you?” Marge said suddenly.
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “Goss killed Leon. That’s what started this. For no reason at all.” They let that stand. “But then Paul killed Goss. You were there.”
“I did,” Paul said.
“I was,” Marge said. “Okay.” She even smiled. “Okay. And what else? What else happened?”
“I saved everything,” Billy said. “And you did too.”
“THEY’RE HOLDING BYRNE?” SAIRA SAID.
“I think they’re getting her for the sea-house. Have to show the ocean that we’re sorry.”
“Whether or not she did it?”
“Whether or not.”
“I heard the sea’s started filling a new embassy.”
“I heard the same.”
Billy’s flat was his again. He did not know what to make of it; he often wandered its little hallways in amazement. (Of course it was not his again. It had never been his-he had inherited it from his identical namesake. And he did not know why he had to do these prodding little thought-tests.) They looked over the street. It was nearly the end of the year.
“What year was it?” Saira said. “Year of the what? That just went?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said.
“Year of the bottle.”
“It’s always year of the bottle.”
“Year of the bottle and of some animal.”
“It’s always that too.”
So this was the universe, was it? Billy strained, and maybe it was nothing, maybe it was a quirk of his position-it looked through the window as if a fleeting bird stilled in the sky, for a snip of a second. Saira watched. Raised an eyebrow. Humans were still related to monkeys. All sorts of things might happen in that new old London.
Billy looked out at the city that was not as it had been the last time he had looked through the glass. Billy lived in Heresiopolis now, and would know when the next Armageddon came and failed. He drank now in different bars, and learnt different things.
He sipped his wine and poured more for himself and for Saira. It was the year of the bottle, Billy thought, the year of pickling time, flexing himself and feeling the clock hesitate as if he squeezed its throat. It was the year of the bottle once more.
He touched glasses with Saira. It was not the year of anything else. So.
It was coming up to the end of the world again, of course-it always was. But not so frantically as it had been, perhaps. Not with quite such agonies. Billy wasn’t the angel of memory-he was far too human for that-but he could see memory-angelhood from where he stood. Put it that way. Did he have a history to protect? It seemed to him that the streets were no longer starving.
From outside the sky looked in at them. Billy was behind glass.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHINA MIÉVILLE is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; Un Lun Dun, his New York Times bestselling book for younger readers; and The City & The City, named one of the top 100 Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He lives and works in London.
