Looking for Jake Part 14

People were eating Christmaspudding, slices of turkey. They were even forcing down brussels sprouts, just on principle. Someone gave me a mince pie. "Blessed be," yelled a radical pagan in my ear, and gave me a leaflet demanding that once we had won back the season, we rename it Solsticemas. He was buffeted away by a group of muscular ballet dancers dressed as sugar-plum fairies and nutcrackers.

I was getting close to the venue where the party was supposed to be, but if anything there were even more people on the streets now. The place was going to be surrounded. How would we get in?

Figures were moving in on the crowd. Oh s.h.i.+t, I thought, the police. But it wasn't. It was an angry-looking, aggressive bunch, smas.h.i.+ng car windscreens as they came. They were dressed as Santa Claus.

"f.u.c.k," muttered someone. "It's the Red-and-White Bloc."

It was obvious that the R&Ws were out for trouble. Everyone else in the crowd tried to draw away from them. "p.i.s.s off!" I heard someone shouting, but they paid no attention.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville Now I could see cops, ma.s.sing in the side streets. The Red-and-White Bloc were drawing them out, chucking bottles, screaming, "Come on then!" like p.i.s.sed-up Footballfans.

I was backing away. I turned, and there it was: the site for the party. Hamleys, the toy store.

The armed guards who normally protected it must have run ages ago, faced with this chaos. I looked up and saw horrified faces at the windows.

I should be up there, I thought. With you. They were the partygoers. Kids and their parents, besieged by the demonstration, watching the police approach.

And oh, there was Annie, shouting to me, standing under Hamleys' eaves. I wailed with relief and ran to her.

"What's going on?" she shouted. She looked terrified. The Yule Squads were approaching the provocateurs of the Red-and-White Bloc, banging their truncheons in time on tinsel-garlanded s.h.i.+elds.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," I whispered. I put my arms protectively around her. "There's going to be trouble," I said. "Get ready to run."

But as we stood there, tensing, something astonis.h.i.+ng happened. I blinked, and out of nowhere had come a young man in a long white robe. Before anyone could stop him he was between the ranks of the Red-and-White Bloc and the police.

"He's mad!" someone shouted, but all the hundreds and hundreds of people were beginning to hush.

The man was singing.

The police bore down on him, the R&Ws made as if to shove him away, but his voice soared, and both sides hesitated. I had never seen anything so beautiful.

He sang a single note, of unearthly purity. He made it last, for long seconds, and then continued.

"Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie."

He paused, until we were straining.

"Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by."

The R&W Bloc were still. Everyone was still.

"Yet in thy dark streets s.h.i.+neth, the everlasting light..."

And now the police were stopping. They were putting their truncheons down. One by one they Looking for Jake, By China Mieville set aside their s.h.i.+elds.

"The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."

More white-clad figures were appearing. They walked calmly to join their friend. With a start, I realised I was s.h.i.+elding my eyes. There was an implacable authority to these astonis.h.i.+ng figures who had come from nowhere, these tall, stunning, uncanny young men. The white of their robes seemed impossibly bright. I could not breathe.

Now all of them were singing. "How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is giv'n. So G.o.dimparts to human hearts the blessings of His Heav'n."

One by one, the police removed their helmets and listened. I could hear the frantic squawking of their superiors from the earpieces they removed.

"No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin..." The singers paused, until I ached to have the melody conclude. "Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in."

The police were smiling and tearful amid a litter of body armour and nightsticks. The first singer raised his hand. He looked down at all the discarded weaponry. He declaimed to the Red-and-White Bloc.

"You should not have tried to fight," he said, and they looked ashamed. He waited.

"You would have been trounced. Where as now, " he continued, "these idiots have disarmed.

Now's the time to fight." And he swivelled, and en ma.s.se, he and his fellow singers launched themselves at the police, their robes flapping.

The helpless cops gaped, turned, ran, and the crowd roared, and began to follow them.

"We are the Gay Men's Radical Singing Caucus!" the lead singer yelled in his exquisite tenor.

"Proud to be fighting for a People's Christmas!"

He and his comrades began to chant: "We're here! We're Choir! Get used to it! "

"It's a Christmas miracle!" said Annie. I just hugged her until she muttered, "Alright Dad, easy."

Behind me the crowd were shouting, taking over the streets.

"That's the trouble with the Red-and-White Bloc," muttered Annie. "b.l.o.o.d.y 'strategy of tension' my a.r.s.e. Bunch of anarchist adventurists."

"Yeah," said a boy next to her. "Anyway, half of them are police agents. It's the first principle, isn't it? Whoever's arguing fiercest for violence is the cop."

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville I was gaping, my head swinging between the two of them as if I were a moron watching tennis.

"What...? " I said finally.

"Come on, Dad," said Annie. She kissed me on the cheek. "You'd never have let me go otherwise. I had to get you to walk here or we'd have been too early. Trapped like them." She pointed at the still-staring prizewinners in Hamleys' top floors. "And then I had to run off or you'd never have let me join in. Come on." She took my hand. "Now that we've bust through the police lines, we can reroute the march past Downing Street."

"Well then it's the perfect opportunity to get out of here . . ."

"Dad," she said. She looked at me sternly. "I couldn't believe it when you won that prize. I never thought I'd have a chance to be down this way today."

"Someone grabbed you," I said.

"That was Marwan." She indicated the young man who had spoken. "Dad, this is Marwan.

Marwan, this is my dad."

Marwan smiled and shook my hand politely, s.h.i.+fting his placard. MUSLIMS FOR CHRISTMAS, it said. He saw me reading it.

"It's not that much of a big deal for me," he said, "but we all remember how this lot came out for us when Umma Plc tried to privatise Eid. That meant a lot, you know. Anyway . . ." He looked away shyly. "I know it's important to Annie." She gazed at him. Ah, I thought.

"Marwan's handful of flowers, Dad," she was saying to me. "Off the internet."

"Look, I have to tell you I'm pretty annoyed about all this," I said. We were getting close to Downing Street now. Marwan had said good-bye at Trafalgar Square, so it was just the two of us again, along with ten thousand others. "I bought you, I, I've lost a lot of, there's a big present in that party . . ."

"To be honest with you, Dad, I don't really need a new console."

"How did you know . . . ?" I said, but she was continuing.

"The one I've got is fine: I mostly use it for strategy games anyway, and they're not so power-hungry. Besides, I've got all the pinkopatches in my machine. It would be a pain in the a.r.s.e to transfer them, and downloading them again is too risky."

"What patches?"

"Stuff like Red3.6. It converts a bunch of games. Turns SimuCityState into RedOctober. Stuff like that. I'm already up to level 4. The end-of-level baddy's a Czar. As soon as I can work out Looking for Jake, By China Mieville how to get past him I'll have got to Dual Power."

I gave up even trying to follow.

At the entrance to the Prime Minister's residence was a huge Christmas Tree, in white and silver. Everyone began to jeer as we approached. The army were guarding it, so people made sure the booing was good-humoured. Someone threw Christmas Pudding, but everyone sorted him out sharpish.

"That's not what Christmas looks like, " we all shouted as we went past. "This is whatChristmas looks like."

As the skies darkened, the crowd were beginning to thin a bit, before the police could regroup.

We went through a contingent all in red bandanas, and joined in with their singing. "Deck thehalls with boughs of holly, tra la la la laaa, la la la la. 'Tis the Season for the Internationale,tra la la la laaaa..."

"Still," I said. "I'm a bit sorry you didn't get to see the party."

"Dad," said Annie, and shook me. "This was the best Christmas ever. Ever. OK? And it was so lovely to have it with you."

She looked at me sideways.

"Have you guessed yet?" she said. "What your present is?"

She was staring at me, very seriously, very intensely. It made me quite emotional.

I thought of everything that had happened that day, and of my reactions. Everything I'd been through and seen-been a part of. I realised how different I felt now than I had that morning. It was an astonis.h.i.+ng revelation.

"Yes . . ." I said, hesitantly. "Yes, I think I have. Thank you, my love."

"What?" she said. "You've guessed? s.h.i.+t."

She was holding out a little wrapped package. It was a tie.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville Now that things have gone the way they have, everyone's got a story. Everyone'll tell you how they or their friend, which you can see in the way they say it they want you to think means them, knew Jack. Maybe even how they helped him, how they were part of his schemes. Mostly though of course they know that's too much and it'll just be how they or their friend was there one time and saw him running over the roofs, money flying from his swag-bags, militia trying and failing to track him down below. That sort of thing. My mate saw Jack Half-a-Prayer once, they'll say, just for a moment. As if they're being modest.

It's supposed to be respect. They reckon they're showing their respect, with everything that's happened. They ain't, of course. They're like dogs on his corpse and they disgust me.

I tell you that so you know where I'm coming from. Because I know how what I'm about to say might sound. I want you to know where I'm coming from when I tell you that I did know Jack.

I did.

I worked with him.

I was lowly, don't get me wrong, but I was part of the whole thing. And please don't think I'm talking myself up, but I swear to you I ain't being arrogant. I'm nothing important, but the work I did, in a little way, was crucial to him. That's all I'm saying. So. So you can understand that I was pretty interested when I heard we'd got our hands on the man who sold Jack out. That would be one way of putting it. That would be mild. I made it my business to meet him, let's put it that way.

I remember the first time I heard what Jack was up to, after he escaped. He was daring enough that he got noticed. Did you hear about that Remade done that robbery? someone said to me in a pub. I was careful, couldn't show any reaction.

I'd felt something when I met Jack, you know? I respected him. He wasn't boastful, but he had a fire in him. Even so, I couldn't be sure he'd come to anything.

That first job, he got away with hundreds of n.o.bles and gave it away on the streets. He scored himself the love of the Dog Fenn poor that way. That was what had people all excited, told them he was something else than your average gangster. He weren't the first to do that, but he was one of few.

What got me wasn't so much what he did with the money as where he stole it from. It was a government office. Where they store taxes.

Everyone knows what the security on those places is like. And I knew that there was no way he'd have done something like that without it being a screw you. He was making a point, and my good b.l.o.o.d.y G.o.ds but I admired that.

It was then, in that pub, when I realised what he'd done, how he must have made that night-raid work, how he must have climbed and crept and fought his way in, with his new body, how he must have been able to vanish, weighed down with specie, that I realised he was something.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville That was when I knew that Jack Half-a-Prayer was no ordinary Remade, and no ordinary renegade.

Not many people see the Remade like I do, or like Jack did.

You know it's true. To most of you they're to be ignored or used. If you really notice them you wish you hadn't. It wasn't like that for Jack, and not just because he was Remade. I bet-I know-that Jack used to notice them, see them clear, before anything was done to him. And that's the same for me.

People walk along and see nothing but trash, Remade trash with bodies all wrong, shat out by the punishment factories. Well, I don't want to be too sentimental about it but I've no doubts at all that Jack'd have seen this woman- whose hands yes were gone and been replaced with little birds' wings-and he'd have seen an old man, not the s.e.xless thing he'd been made into, and a young lad with eyes gone and in their place an array of dark gla.s.s and pipework and lights and the boy stumbling trying to see in ways he weren't born to but still a boy. Jack'd see people changed with engines in steam, and oily gears, and the parts of animals, and their innards or their skin altered with hexes, and all those things, but he'd have seen them under the punishment.

People get broken when they get Remade. I've seen it so many times. Suddenly, take a wrong turn by the law and it ain't just the physical punishment, it ain't just the new limbs or metal or the change in the body, it's that they wake up and they're Remade, the same as they spat on or ignored for years. They know they're nothing.

Jack, when it was done to him, never thought he was nothing. He'd never thought any of them were.

There was this one time. A foundry in Smog Bend, and there was a man there, some middling supervisor-this was years after Jack got free, and I only heard all this-who was causing trouble. Informing on guilders trying to recruit. There was gangs following organisers home, and scaring them so they'd not come back, or maybe retiring them permanently.

I'm not clear on the details. But the point is what Jack done.

One day the workers troop in and they take their places by the gears, but there's no klaxon. And they're waiting, but nothing happens. Now they're getting wary, they're getting very antsy.

They know it's that overseer who's due in that day, so they're nervous, they ain't talking much, but they go looking. And there at the foot of the steps up to the office, there's an arrow put together out of tools. On the floor, pointing up.

So they creep up. And on the landing there's another. And there's a whole gang of men now, and they're following these arrows, soldered to the banisters, up on the walkway, trooping round the factory, until pretty much the whole workforce is up there, and they come to the end of the gangway, and there dangling is that supervisor.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville He's unconscious. His mouth's all scabbed. It's sewn up, with wire.

People know right then and there what's happened, but when the man wakes up and gets unst.i.tched he starts raving, describing the man who done this to him, and then it's certain.

That man was lucky he didn't get killed, is my thinking. There was no more trouble there for a while, I hear. That changed things. I think they called that one Jack's Whispering St.i.tch. It's things like that make you see why people respected Jack Half-a-Prayer. Loved him.

This is the greatest city in the world. You hear that all the time, because it's true. But it's sort of an untrue truth, for a lot of us.

I don't know where you live. If it's Dog Fenn, then knowing that Parliament's a building like nothing else, or that we've riches in the coffers that would make the rest of the world jealous, or that the scholars of New Crobuzon could outthink the b.l.o.o.d.y G.o.ds-knowing all of that doesn't do so much. You still live in Dog Fenn, or Badside, or what have you.

But when Jack ran, the city was the greatest for Badside too.