Cuthbert jerked away.
“Cuddy, no. Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Your darling brother—don’t you remember?”
But Cuthbert was getting out of there. He jumped to his feet quickly. He brushed dark, oily crumbs of Dundee cake from his trousers.
“I have to go, Becks,” he said. “Tararabit!”* He scampered out of his weeping cousin’s house. He yearned for the safety and florid possibilities of the streets—and for the next half century, it was the best home he’d ever had.
the ￡10 talisman
OUTSIDE THE ZOO, WHERE CUTHBERT HAD REMAINED, the man with the two ginger-haired daughters set them back into their own stroller, their legs kicking all the way in. A bobby who stood near the head of the poky stroller-return queue held one of the stroller’s handles to stabilize it. The girls sat, blinking at the officer, and one of them touched his steadying hand. The copper, who wore the red armband of the Watch Auxiliary, looked up and frowned at Cuthbert, who was getting closer to the head of the queue. The Auxiliary were nowhere near as antagonistic as the Watch, but they would not hesitate to message a Watchman if faced with Indigents who called attention to themselves.
Cuthbert tried to picture himself, in the queue, with his own make-believe family, but he could imagine only vague human figures with blanked-out faces like the owl kite. There was Rebekka, but she was a little older now, at age 101, and unreachable. To Cuthbert’s despair, she’d moved prematurely into a Calm House almost as soon as they opened, after the Property Revolts, and like almost everyone in them, she received no visitors and neither sent nor acknowledged messages. She lived shut away, Nexar-hooded for hours on end.
That last time he’d seen Rebekka, in the mid-2020s, before she’d gone to the Calm House, he’d taken a rare train trip up from London to her former home in Hemel Hempstead. In the early 1980s, he had moved back to London, telling everyone he was going to “have a look for my brother,” but by that time he was out of his mind so often, he scarcely understood how, when, or why he’d even come back to the Big Smoke.* He had brought Rebekka a strange gift from the British Museum gift shop.
He considered the museum a hallowed ground so overstuffed with charmed talismans, angel-made objets d’art, and consecrated monuments that one in need could not help but be aided by all those healing powers. During one of his many visits, he’d spotted in the gift shop a silly old ￡10 zinc-nickel rendering of the Undley Bracteate. The reproduction was authentic-looking enough for tourists and fashioned into a handy key chain. He’d rubbed his thumb over the image of Constantine the Great on the obverse, and then the she-wolf suckling the two boys. He eventually wrapped it in a huge leaf from a plane tree, dropped it in his pocket, and, on a relatively halcyon summer day in 2024, brought it with him to Hemel Hempstead for Rebekka.
At the time, Rebekka shared a semidetached twin condominium with a chubby middle-aged school headmistress from Scotland named Louise.
He, Rebekka, and Louise sat for an awkward tea in the women’s sitting room. Cuthbert, who smelled of urine and sour Flōt, gulped his tea and ate one handful after another of thick wedges of a sticky Dundee cake; the two women asked him if he needed new clothes and shoes and handed him an envelope with ￡150 collected from their church. In the context of the 2020s—the Great Reclamation had just eliminated the Bank of England, and the violent Property Revolts were in full effect—it was an almost unthinkable act of bigheartedness, and Cuthbert felt unworthy. He was inebriated enough to fend off withdrawal symptoms, but comparably lucid.
“I don’t need this,” he’d said.
Louise rolled her eyes. “Yes you do!” she said to Cuthbert. He didn’t know Louise well, but he appreciated her robust, youthful personality. At least twenty years Rebekka’s junior, she had a short graying Afro and a pair of the new golden cloud-earrings hovering on either side of her neck.
“She’s right,” said Rebekka. “Don’t be a silly gorbie.”
When Rebekka hugged him, he didn’t want her to let go. Normally, he couldn’t deal with hugs. She was only in her seventies at the time, and remained quite attractive, with a petite frame, drowsy blue eyes, and pretty almond freckles on her arms and neck. Her voice was exceptionally breathy, almost hyperfeminized. She had never married, nor was she out as gay, and she exuded a delicate, muted sexuality that, for Cuthbert, came across as simple human tenderness.
“I don’t need a thing,” he said. But he kept the envelope without looking inside it.
He pulled the Undley Bracteate key chain from his pocket and unfolded the plane-tree leaf he’d wrapped the talisman in. He handed it over to Rebekka, who examined it almost too politely. He explained how he had heard about it, years ago, on a news program.