Heaven Eyes (15 page)

“Whatever he called it, it would still be murder.”

“Hell’s teeth, Erin. Let’s just find out first, then think what to do.”

We came to the quay. Since last night’s digging, the tide had come in and gone out again. The raft rested on the mud. The holes in the Middens had been smoothed out. Over on the other side of the river, a couple of early-morning joggers bounced along the cycle track. Jan laughed.

“Ghosts, eh?” he said.

We looked down. Jan muttered, trying to work out exactly where Mouse had been digging last night.

“We’ll never find the right spot,” I said.

“Giving up?” he said.

“Course not.”

I shrugged.

“We’ll find it. Come on.”

He stepped down onto the ancient ladder. I followed him. He led me out toward the water, toward the edge of the dry land, to where our feet started to slither and sink into the soft surface.

“Round about here, I reckon,” he said.

I stared at him.

He laughed.

“Come on, Little Helper,” he said. “Get that shovel digging!”

We started to dig. We lifted great spadefuls of oily, silty, stinking mud and water. Our shovels slopped and sucked. Within seconds we were filthy. We slithered down into the holes we dug. We were ankle-deep, shin-deep, knee-deep. We heaped up mounds of the stuff at our sides. We dug deeper, deeper. I looked across at Jan and he whooped and was like a crazed black creature made of the mud itself. The sun rose higher and the morning grew warmer and the stench of oil and rot and waste intensified. We gagged. We spat out mouthfuls of silt. It gathered in our eyes, in our ears, in the creases on our skin. I asked myself what I was doing. I told myself that Mouse was mistaken, that there was no body, that there was nothing here but the stones and broken pottery and lumps of rubbish that we found and flung away. I told myself we should just go back to the office and try to get Heaven Eyes to leave with us. Or
we should go to the police and bring them here and get them to sort out the mystery. We should do anything but dig in the filthy Black Middens for a body that was the last thing in the world I wanted to find. But I dug and spat and wiped my face and dug deeper, deeper till I was sick of it all and was just about to tell Jan that I was giving up when I saw the tips of the fingers in the black black mud.

I scrambled out of the hole. I stared upriver to the real world, to the bridge with the glittering traffic moving across it, to the rooftops and spires of the roaring city.

“Erin!”

I swung my head to him.

He scrambled, slithered out of his own digging.

“Erin?”

I nodded. I couldn’t look down.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”

He knelt there.

“Where?” he said.

“There. In there.”

He slithered in. He lifted mud from the bottom of the hole with his hands. And I knew by his groans that he had found it.

“I
T’S NOT REAL
,” he said.

“Eh?”

“It’s not real. It’s a model or a statue or something. It’s made of leather or wood or something. It’s not a body. It’s not real.”

He was out of the hole again, kneeling beside.

“Go on,” he said. “Go on down and see for yourself.”

I still couldn’t look down.

“Go on, Erin,” he said.

I took a deep breath and went back down. Now a whole hand was exposed. It was half-submerged in the mud. It glistened beneath the sun. I saw the loops and whorls on the fingertips, the lines crossing the palm. I touched, and yes it was like some kind of leather, something not skin and flesh and bone. The hand rested
there, as if waiting for a gift, an offering, for something to be placed on it.

“See?” said Jan.

“Yes.”

I dug around the hand with my own hand. I exposed a forearm, an elbow, all covered in the smooth, delicate, leatherlike skin. It glistened in the sunlight. I stared, and saw how beautiful it was, so lifelike, but like a copy of life, left here in the Black Middens waiting for someone like January and me to find it. I scraped away more mud. An upper arm, a shoulder, a chest, a beautifully formed rib cage with the strange skin draped over it. Jan watched and gasped. I turned to him.

“What did Grampa mean?” I whispered. “What did he mean by saying it was a saint?”

His eyes were wide. I saw that he too was entranced by this beautiful thing emerging from the Middens.

“Dunno, Erin.”

I pushed more mud away. There were fragments of some fabric resting on the body. They broke up and came away with the mud. A fragment of metal, a catch or something. I held it in my fingers, held it up to the sun, passed it up to Jan. I found little coins in the mud. I wiped them and passed them up to Jan. I found another catch resting on his chest and passed it up to Jan.

“What is it?” he said. “What have we found, Erin?”

I kept on lifting away the mud. I paused. I prayed. I
whispered to Mum. Then I lifted the mud from where the face should be.

His head rested in the black mud. The cheeks were sunken, the eyes were closed. The lips formed a calm straight line. Black hair was tangled on his brow. The face shone, reflecting the light. It was still as still, still as still, but it rested there in the mud facing the sun like it was waiting, like at any moment the eyes might simply open and gaze into mine. I ran my fingertips across the beautiful face. I knew now that it wasn’t a model or a statue. It was a dead man who had been lost for many years in the Black Middens, who had been preserved by the silt and oil. It was a beautiful young man from a long time past.

I climbed up to January.

“It is a man,” I whispered. “It’s just that he hasn’t rotted away.”

We looked down.

“We should be terrified,” I said.

“I know.”

“But he’s lovely, isn’t he?”

Jan smiled, shook his head.

“Lovely as lovely, eh?”

“What should we do?”

“God knows, Erin.”

We rubbed the clasps and the coins and looked at them.

“Not ages past,” said January. “Maybe a hundred years, something like that.”

“Not murdered by Grampa.”

“Not murdered by Grampa.”

He stared at the empty river running past.

“Probably the time when the river was full,” he said. “Loads of ships. Loads of men working on the quays and in the shipyards. Maybe he just fell into the water and nobody knew until it was too late.”

“Maybe they searched for weeks and couldn’t find him. They thought he was at the bottom of the river or washed out to sea.”

January stared at the clasps.

“They’re from overalls,” he said. “That’s what they are. They were to fasten his overalls.”

“A working man,” I said.

“A working man.”

We looked at the banks of the river, the places where the warehouses and workplaces had gone. The banks opposite were landscaped and turfed. There were footpaths and cycle tracks. Upriver there were wastelands, dilapidated quays, all waiting to be cleared, too. There were new pubs and clubs where there used to be great cranes and loading bays. Behind us were more ruined workplaces, the printing works, all waiting to be demolished and swept away. We looked down again at
the beautiful young man in the mud, the man from an age that had been wiped away.

“He’d have children,” I said. “He’d have a wife. They’d be waiting for him to come home again, and he wouldn’t come.”

“Who was he?”

“No way of knowing.”

“A mystery.”

“What should we do?”

“We could leave him. We could cover him again. We could bring him out.”

We said nothing else. We slithered down together and carefully uncovered him. We worked slowly, gently. We eased our hands under his body and loosened him from the Middens. We smiled to see that his leather boots, preserved like his body, still clung to his feet. We lifted him, carried and dragged him up to the dry land. We thought he would be stiff and awkward, but his body arched as we raised him. There was still a looseness in his joints. We laid him on the raft, facing the sky. We crouched beside him and ran our hands across his skin. We touched his face, stroked his brow. We arranged his hair tidily on his head. We scooped handfuls of water from the river and washed the mud from him. Moment by moment he became more lifelike, more beautiful. Then we lifted him between us and carried him up the ancient ladder to the quay.

W
E TOOK HIM TO THE OUSEBURN
and washed him clean. We washed the Middens from ourselves. We cleared a space of litter and laid him on the printing floor, close to the office, beneath the outstretched wings of an angel. We arranged the coins and clasps beside his head. We laid out his name in metal letters at his side:

As we worked, the sun rose higher. It streamed down onto him through the ruined rafters and the dancing dust.
A
hidden bird began singing somewhere in the works. The man lay there like he was sleeping, like at any moment he might open his eyes, stretch his arms and legs, sit up and take his place in the world again.

It was afternoon before we went back into the office.
Heaven Eyes and Mouse still gazed at Heaven’s treasures. Grampa sat above them at his desk, turning back the pages of his great book.

“Come and see,” we said.

We led Mouse and Heaven through the alleyways between the ancient machines and showed him lying there.

“Who is he?” they whispered.

“A mystery,” we said. “A working man.”

They stared, in dread and fascination.

Then Grampa came. He walked slowly, with the filth of the Middens still clinging to him. He eased himself to the floor and he knelt there, looking at the dead man.

“Great joy,” he said. “Great joy, Little Helper. You has truly found a saint.”

“A saint?” said Mouse.

“There is secrets and there is treasures and there is saints waiting to be found. These saints is them from way back, way way way back in the past, afore Grampa, afore Heaven Eyes, afore us all.”

He looked at Mouse. He reached out and touched his cheek.

“One day way back I did hear that such saints was waiting to be discovered in these Middens. But it did take one like you, with great goodness in his heart, to find one. I must thank you, Little Helper, for finding this saint in the deep deep dark and bringing him to me.”

He closed his eyes. Perhaps he prayed. My head reeled as I looked at this strange circle around this figure on the printing floor below the ruined roof. I told myself that I was dreaming, hallucinating. “This is impossible,” I whispered to myself. Then I remembered Wilson Cairns’ words just before we ran away: It’s possible. It’s possible. I thought of the way his eyes stared through us to a stunning place beyond. I thought of his last words: Keep watching. I watched. And then from somewhere outside us there came a great roaring and clanking, like some huge machine was coming near.

Grampa reached out to Heaven Eyes.

“I has been a good grampa?” he whispered.

She clung to him.

“You is a lovely grampa,” she said.

“You has seen your treasures now.”