“’Allo, boys,” he said.
There was swapped between the boys, only half-secretly, a snicker, then a girlish tittering, and a showy punch on the arm. But the moment Cuthbert started to turn around to look, the giggling stopped. He could feel his heart thumping, his chin trembling. A kid with huge, watery eyes stepped into his way. “You’re not allowed out here, now are you, fat man?” he said to Cuthbert.
Cuthbert said nothing and kept walking.
“Give us a pound.” The wet-eyed boy ran in front of Cuthbert and stood there.
Cuthbert leaned in close to the boy and reached to put a hand on each of his shoulders but stopped short. “Now beware, child. The tigers are coming, and lions and bears. They’ll be all over the estate by tomorrow—you’ll see.”
The boy’s lips formed an oval, then he pulled back and grinned furiously. “’E’s off his fucking chump!” The others laughed at the remark. “Off his fucking chump! Off it! I bet e’s the one the Watch was ’round for to have a pop at. A facking scrote!”
The skinny-faced boy thrust himself in front of the other, with a trace of fear on his face, and said to Cuthbert:
“Excuse me fucking dicksplat, gent. ’E’s sorry, isn’t he?” The skinny-face punched the other boy in the side, who screwed up his face in agony.
Cuthbert started to tug on his own earlobes and fumble with his hands. He sidled around the boys, rubbing sweaty fingers together and trudging forward. He imagined what it would feel like to be hit on the back of the head by their hurtball. What if he found himself on his knees on the pavement, dizzy? He would kneel as placidly as a churchgoer, blinking his eyes, watching bits of light swarm like flies across the IB.
Finally, a spiral of whispers unwrapped itself behind him as he moved along, keeping his eyes closed.
“Why’d you do that?” he heard. “You stupid cunt! You stupid cunt! Why’d you do it? You want the fucking Watch here?”
He heard the sound of scampering feet, and finally silence. He opened his eyes, steadied himself, and opened the battered front door of the IB, entering the murky atrium. Voices, supple and slippy, suddenly came into his head again: Remeowbrooow, Cuthber-yeow. It was otterspaeke—weird, dunked language. Remember St. Cuthbert. That’s what it really meant. He took a deep breath. His heart was pounding. He whispered, “I hear, I do.” There was a malfunction in the lift to his flat—it did not stop at the eleventh floor. It had not for the past year, as far as he knew. A note from the parish, in a special Plexiglas wall-slot, assured residents that the conveyance was “perfectly safe.” He did not doubt this. But still, he did not like having to go to the tenth or the twelfth floor, then taking the stairs. He was, after all, a nonagenarian—and even his EverConnectors didn’t change that. He could not escape a feeling that he and the other dwellers of the eleventh had been singled out for isolation.
He hit “12.” There was a delay before the poorly lit compartment lurched up. There were 144 IBs in Building 3. Most of the other floors’ main hallways appeared worse than his, yet all were sunless shafts that stank of mammalian urine and cigarettes. The floors were littered with an excreta of Wimpy Burger papers and KFChwa boxes, flattened milk cartons, shattered bottles. He frequently thought about how the dirt of the place would have been unbearable to his mother, who had considered filth and religion low-class, despite her own soiled and fey peasant pedigree. Cuthbert had once dragged his fingernail along a wall for a few feet, just to see what would happen; it came back furred with a brown gluey grime, and he did not mind it. It was a new kind of English soil. On walks through the building he discovered other Indigent wanderers. There was an old man from the north who liked to tell nasty jokes and who suffered fainting spells. There was another, round-cheeked man who always wanted Cuthbert to come into his flat for a curry. He encountered people who did not appear to see him.
On Friday nights, many young Muslim Indigent men laughed and talked in their long, moon-white prayer shirts in the hallways after service at the venerable nearby North London Central Mosque, now managed by a group of Aga Khanian Fatimids called The Life, or Al-Haya. The mosque, its radicalism long softened yet under close scrutiny for decades, remained open under King Henry’s reign only as a cynical exhibit of Windsor tolerance. The Privy Council felt it had its royal plate full with English republicans and suicide cultists, and it couldn’t be bothered to persecute a harmless religious minority.