These are the currents that chiselled the city (dogdaysofsummer Day 07)
Title: These are the currents that chiselled the city
Rating: G
Disclaimer: So not mine.
Prompt: But I love it, I love this city
How slender is the space between love, mercy and ill will
I love to live inside its flesh and blood
To feel its ailing pulse in its hidden veins
--Abd al-Sabūr, Ibhār [1940]
tr. from the original Arabic unknown
Summary: London, 1980. Sirius doesn't want to doubt. Title from U. A. Fanthorpe's Rising Damp 892 words
In a grimy side road off Bedford Row, itself tree-lined and muted with shady spaces, there stand a greasy spoon, a dry cleaners that exhales the mothball and dust stink of cleanliness from white painted slats and a mosaic shop in a building that claims, with hopeless bravado, to be a Tudor House. Sirius lingers outside the dusty windows of the shop and stares at the jars of tiles: pink, green, blue, grey, black.
Not Remus! he thinks at them, miserable, defiant, and his feet carry them away before can wrestle an answer from malachite and glass.
Lamb’s Conduit Street, the pump it’s named for long bricked into a modern wall, like the rivers beneath his feet confined, restrained, rerouted. This is Bloomsbury, Holborn, maybe Camden, tangled into one where the backstreets mesh and mingle, fitting around each other like lovers, unwieldy, unexpected, undeniable. This is his city.
“It can’t be him,” he says to the clock above the funeral directors.
Its hands are in the wrong places, keeping time with a different age, and he skitters away, past a pub called The Perseverance, round the corner, down again, and this is Holborn, can’t be anywhere else, High Holborn running east, grey-glassed and empty because it’s the weekend, and the City and its satellites fall silent when Friday ends.
There’s just the wind chasing a paper down the middle of the road, and glass doors barred against him, and his shadow, hunched and miserable under the bleaching midday sun.
“It isn’t him,” he tells the forbidding oak doors of the Family Court.
Behind these walls of concrete he knows there are older places, bound by their own traditions. Gray’s Inn is to the north of him, Lincoln’s to the south, though neither show from behind their masks. He thinks of all the things that have been here, over the centuries, dancing bears and bawdy houses and bombs falling from the stormy night, shattering the venerable boundaries that survived centuries. Mask upon mask, glass on concrete on steel, storey on storey.
Remus exudes masks like a pearl, each emotion tucked neatly behind another shimmering layer of quiet smiles.
Here’s Chancery Lane tube, steps leading down invitingly. He could go down there, down to the tunnels that cling so close to the trains, down to the maze below the skin of the city. The Central Line, red-blood line, would take him back again. He wonders if any Muggles would notice it stopping at British Museum this time.
There are secret places below London, places only wizards and certain Muggle civil servants know: war rooms, lost roads, hiding places, ghost towns of shadowed stations and cellars sealed off from the city above.
But no, he has to get this clear, up here in the sunlight where the city can’t creep into his blood and make it not matter at all.
It can’t be one of us, Peter had said that morning. None of us would.
Someone has, Sirius had said, bitterly, while his heart bounced and scurried in his breast.
“It’s not him, not him, not him,” he chants as he dashes across the end of Grey’s Inn Road and down High Holborn towards Holborn Circus.
There’s no reason it should be Remus, no reason except the way that everyone but him obviously thinks so (for they fall silent when he enters the room, and look at him with pity dark in their eyes).
He’s on the banks of the Fleet now, long lost river, besmirched and abused, hidden away in pipes and tubes, black sheep cousin of the Thames. Here’s a church, younger than it looks. He remembers his mother bringing them here when he was a boy to watch them restore the nave from bomb-rubble.
Look what they do to one another, she had hissed.
He knows the crypt is still solid rubble. It’s too dangerous to restore, the old plague pit below broken open by the searing shock of the bomb. There are lords and priests down there, shards of their bones mixed with river boys and whores and destitutes.
He should just ask, say casually, Look, people are a bit paranoid - try to be more forthcoming, yeah?
He’s scared, though, that it might be true.
He’s not afraid of Remus lying to him, though the very idea is akin to the raw place he calls family. He’s afraid he might tell the truth, that he might be the traitor and have a good reason for it (because Remus never does anything without good reason).
And if he is, and does, Sirius doesn’t know what to do.
The Holborn viaduct is before him, lined with statues of Victorian endeavour - trade, agriculture, science, art. He can’t bear to cross a bridge, not when he wants to drown, so he goes down the steps at a run, bursting into Farringdon Street.
There are more people here, but none of them look at him strangely. This is London. It’s better not to look.
He wishes, fervently, hopelessly, for the river to come back, exploding out of the wide grey road to wash the grime away, wash everything away. Let come the flood, and there will be no Voldemort, no war, no treachery, no doubts.
Merely the cold, grey water, and the stern walls above, rising like islands from the ruins of his beloved, inscrutable city.
Cumberland Dorset Essex Lincolnshire Middlesex Northamptonshire Sussex
Rating: G
Disclaimer: So not mine.
Prompt: But I love it, I love this city
How slender is the space between love, mercy and ill will
I love to live inside its flesh and blood
To feel its ailing pulse in its hidden veins
--Abd al-Sabūr, Ibhār [1940]
tr. from the original Arabic unknown
Summary: London, 1980. Sirius doesn't want to doubt. Title from U. A. Fanthorpe's Rising Damp 892 words
In a grimy side road off Bedford Row, itself tree-lined and muted with shady spaces, there stand a greasy spoon, a dry cleaners that exhales the mothball and dust stink of cleanliness from white painted slats and a mosaic shop in a building that claims, with hopeless bravado, to be a Tudor House. Sirius lingers outside the dusty windows of the shop and stares at the jars of tiles: pink, green, blue, grey, black.
Not Remus! he thinks at them, miserable, defiant, and his feet carry them away before can wrestle an answer from malachite and glass.
Lamb’s Conduit Street, the pump it’s named for long bricked into a modern wall, like the rivers beneath his feet confined, restrained, rerouted. This is Bloomsbury, Holborn, maybe Camden, tangled into one where the backstreets mesh and mingle, fitting around each other like lovers, unwieldy, unexpected, undeniable. This is his city.
“It can’t be him,” he says to the clock above the funeral directors.
Its hands are in the wrong places, keeping time with a different age, and he skitters away, past a pub called The Perseverance, round the corner, down again, and this is Holborn, can’t be anywhere else, High Holborn running east, grey-glassed and empty because it’s the weekend, and the City and its satellites fall silent when Friday ends.
There’s just the wind chasing a paper down the middle of the road, and glass doors barred against him, and his shadow, hunched and miserable under the bleaching midday sun.
“It isn’t him,” he tells the forbidding oak doors of the Family Court.
Behind these walls of concrete he knows there are older places, bound by their own traditions. Gray’s Inn is to the north of him, Lincoln’s to the south, though neither show from behind their masks. He thinks of all the things that have been here, over the centuries, dancing bears and bawdy houses and bombs falling from the stormy night, shattering the venerable boundaries that survived centuries. Mask upon mask, glass on concrete on steel, storey on storey.
Remus exudes masks like a pearl, each emotion tucked neatly behind another shimmering layer of quiet smiles.
Here’s Chancery Lane tube, steps leading down invitingly. He could go down there, down to the tunnels that cling so close to the trains, down to the maze below the skin of the city. The Central Line, red-blood line, would take him back again. He wonders if any Muggles would notice it stopping at British Museum this time.
There are secret places below London, places only wizards and certain Muggle civil servants know: war rooms, lost roads, hiding places, ghost towns of shadowed stations and cellars sealed off from the city above.
But no, he has to get this clear, up here in the sunlight where the city can’t creep into his blood and make it not matter at all.
It can’t be one of us, Peter had said that morning. None of us would.
Someone has, Sirius had said, bitterly, while his heart bounced and scurried in his breast.
“It’s not him, not him, not him,” he chants as he dashes across the end of Grey’s Inn Road and down High Holborn towards Holborn Circus.
There’s no reason it should be Remus, no reason except the way that everyone but him obviously thinks so (for they fall silent when he enters the room, and look at him with pity dark in their eyes).
He’s on the banks of the Fleet now, long lost river, besmirched and abused, hidden away in pipes and tubes, black sheep cousin of the Thames. Here’s a church, younger than it looks. He remembers his mother bringing them here when he was a boy to watch them restore the nave from bomb-rubble.
Look what they do to one another, she had hissed.
He knows the crypt is still solid rubble. It’s too dangerous to restore, the old plague pit below broken open by the searing shock of the bomb. There are lords and priests down there, shards of their bones mixed with river boys and whores and destitutes.
He should just ask, say casually, Look, people are a bit paranoid - try to be more forthcoming, yeah?
He’s scared, though, that it might be true.
He’s not afraid of Remus lying to him, though the very idea is akin to the raw place he calls family. He’s afraid he might tell the truth, that he might be the traitor and have a good reason for it (because Remus never does anything without good reason).
And if he is, and does, Sirius doesn’t know what to do.
The Holborn viaduct is before him, lined with statues of Victorian endeavour - trade, agriculture, science, art. He can’t bear to cross a bridge, not when he wants to drown, so he goes down the steps at a run, bursting into Farringdon Street.
There are more people here, but none of them look at him strangely. This is London. It’s better not to look.
He wishes, fervently, hopelessly, for the river to come back, exploding out of the wide grey road to wash the grime away, wash everything away. Let come the flood, and there will be no Voldemort, no war, no treachery, no doubts.
Merely the cold, grey water, and the stern walls above, rising like islands from the ruins of his beloved, inscrutable city.
Cumberland Dorset Essex Lincolnshire Middlesex Northamptonshire Sussex