or the rainwater filling the new tarmac streets before us, past fresh green public parks and dully glowing twenty-four-hour convenience stores, past estate agents with little lights still burning in their windows, nurseries with placards all in cheerful red, yellow and blue, past the closed glass arches of the DLR stops raised on their grassy banks, and sixth-form colleges promising to change your life for ever with a diploma in Business Studies with Marketing.
Canary Wharf grew and grew in front of us until the tops of the towers were no longer visible from inside the bus. I leant back againstmy seat and remembered to breathe, forced myself to take it one steady gasp at a time as the magic of the place, silver, glass, light, razored edges, a buzz at the back of the eyes, an ice that ran to the end of the fingertips and turned them blue, washed over me. Every part of the city had its own magic, and the magic of Canary Wharf, of endless towers and shops and steel and clear running water, though still young, was bursting to make itself felt. We pressed our fingers into the glass of the bus and felt frost form beneath our fingertips, the power bursting out of us whether we liked it or not. The bus slowed as it crossed the security checkpoint into the area, and what little sky there had been became lost, a tiny pinpoint between the tops of the buildings, and what few people there had been became none, empty streets and huge glass doors within which were sleeping reception desks, foyers of bronze and silver, palm trees grown indoors, and shopping centres whose lights never went out.
When the bus finally spun its way out of the area and back across the water towards Billingsgate, I let the magic out with a shudder of breath that condensed on the window in front of me. It steamed unevenly across the glass, forming shapes and patterns where grease was thicker or thinner. I turned my face away from it and, as I did, caught the glimpse of something in the fading pattern of condensation from my breath. It looked a lot like a cross, with a smaller cross that might even have been a sword wedged in its top left-hand corner. I swore, and found my left hand unconsciously curling around the palm of my right, biting into the twin scars burnt into my skin, and bundled off the bus at the next stop.
I was close to Mile End, and quickly too wet to care about getting any wetter. I slung my bag across my chest and shoulder, wiped the worst of the rainwater from my eyes, and went in search of a prophet.
Mile End was a confused part of the city.
At one time, as its name suggested, it had been the end of London, the absolute full stop; but then, the history of the city was one of endless ends, of Field Lanes and Gate Roads marking the places where the city had stopped until, with a great geographical shrug, it had decided to expand. So, over time, Mile End had become not so much the end of the city as the beginning of the end, the place where inner met outerLondon, full of terraced houses and council estates, grand royal parks and scrubby little bits of wasteland, overground railway lines leading to Norfolk, Essex and the eastern seaside and little pootling buses that terminated in Aldgate and Liverpool Street. From Mile End it was more than theoretically possible to walk in a straight line into the heart of the city, past Bethnal Green to Liverpool Street. It was equally possible to pick up the end of the Lee River valley and walk with it past canal barges and scrubland until city ended and fields began. It would be a long walk, but a not unpleasant one.
I scampered beneath railway bridges, past stately halls and tumbling semi-detached houses, through grey council estates and down roads of politely austere Victorian terraced houses. My eye wandered over street signs proclaiming:
Slow Down School
and
Residential Parking Zone M – No Parking Without a Permit
and the somewhat vague
Watch Children
and finally came to a pause on the edge of
Canary Wharf grew and grew in front of us until the tops of the towers were no longer visible from inside the bus. I leant back againstmy seat and remembered to breathe, forced myself to take it one steady gasp at a time as the magic of the place, silver, glass, light, razored edges, a buzz at the back of the eyes, an ice that ran to the end of the fingertips and turned them blue, washed over me. Every part of the city had its own magic, and the magic of Canary Wharf, of endless towers and shops and steel and clear running water, though still young, was bursting to make itself felt. We pressed our fingers into the glass of the bus and felt frost form beneath our fingertips, the power bursting out of us whether we liked it or not. The bus slowed as it crossed the security checkpoint into the area, and what little sky there had been became lost, a tiny pinpoint between the tops of the buildings, and what few people there had been became none, empty streets and huge glass doors within which were sleeping reception desks, foyers of bronze and silver, palm trees grown indoors, and shopping centres whose lights never went out.
When the bus finally spun its way out of the area and back across the water towards Billingsgate, I let the magic out with a shudder of breath that condensed on the window in front of me. It steamed unevenly across the glass, forming shapes and patterns where grease was thicker or thinner. I turned my face away from it and, as I did, caught the glimpse of something in the fading pattern of condensation from my breath. It looked a lot like a cross, with a smaller cross that might even have been a sword wedged in its top left-hand corner. I swore, and found my left hand unconsciously curling around the palm of my right, biting into the twin scars burnt into my skin, and bundled off the bus at the next stop.
I was close to Mile End, and quickly too wet to care about getting any wetter. I slung my bag across my chest and shoulder, wiped the worst of the rainwater from my eyes, and went in search of a prophet.
Mile End was a confused part of the city.
At one time, as its name suggested, it had been the end of London, the absolute full stop; but then, the history of the city was one of endless ends, of Field Lanes and Gate Roads marking the places where the city had stopped until, with a great geographical shrug, it had decided to expand. So, over time, Mile End had become not so much the end of the city as the beginning of the end, the place where inner met outerLondon, full of terraced houses and council estates, grand royal parks and scrubby little bits of wasteland, overground railway lines leading to Norfolk, Essex and the eastern seaside and little pootling buses that terminated in Aldgate and Liverpool Street. From Mile End it was more than theoretically possible to walk in a straight line into the heart of the city, past Bethnal Green to Liverpool Street. It was equally possible to pick up the end of the Lee River valley and walk with it past canal barges and scrubland until city ended and fields began. It would be a long walk, but a not unpleasant one.
I scampered beneath railway bridges, past stately halls and tumbling semi-detached houses, through grey council estates and down roads of politely austere Victorian terraced houses. My eye wandered over street signs proclaiming:
Slow Down School
and
Residential Parking Zone M – No Parking Without a Permit
and the somewhat vague
Watch Children
and finally came to a pause on the edge of
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