The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [119]
The story was an embarrassment. How does a suddenly little boy, deliberately deprived of privacy, read dozens of pages of typed paper, without drawing attention to himself? How and where could he hide? The story was a necessity. Tom reading Tom Underground was real: Tom avoiding Hunter’s eye, Tom chanting declensions, Tom cleaning washbasins and listening to smutty jokes was a simulacrum, a wind-up doll in schoolboy shape.
He went underground. The school was heated by a bellowing and shuddering system of coke-fired radiators. There were coalholes and boiler-rooms down there, accessible from the basement locker rooms. Tom furnished himself in the village on a school outing, with a little oil lamp on a rocking base called a Kelly lamp. He remembered, in the days when he had been Tom, pursuing the hiding boy through the underground pillars and vaulted arches of the South Kensington Museum. Tom was one of those lonely boys who imagines rapidly and easily that he is the only one of his kind in the whole community, that he is in a sense the unique butt of all mockery, bullying and ordinary spite. So it did not occur to him that other desperadoes might have been driven to take refuge here, amongst the shovels and brooms. But he did find traces of previous fugitives—a chalk drawing of a row of hanged boys on gibbets on a wall, a carefully folded travelling rug, and pillow, with a neatly buckled satchel, under a heap of sacking. There must be, or have been, at least one more like him. So he made his hidey-hole in a very cramped, unpleasant corner behind a roaring furnace, which belched out unpleasant fumes. Even other fugitives might not think first of this as a refuge. There he spread a blanket, put on a sweater, lit his Kelly lamp, and read Tom Underground, smearing the typescript with sooty fingers.
The travelling prince had acquired various companions, some human, some inhuman, some of whom had stalked him for days before revealing themselves, some of whom he had himself tracked through burrows and into crannies. One was a mine-spirit, who was of a kind known as gathorns, and whose name seemed to be, like all his kind, Gathorn. He was slender and pale, and could make cobalt-blue light shine from his hair and the tips of his fingers. He described himself as timorous, but in moments of danger showed a tremulous, but real, courage. There was a scurrying salamander-like creature, as long as Tom was tall, like a small dragon on bow legs, with ivory-coloured scales, and crimson eyes like red coals. He had hissed and reared his crest when he saw Tom, but the gathorn had soothed him, and co-opted him to the company. He could always find fresh water, where it trickled down slate or sprang through fissures in the shale. There was a thing that was sometimes there and sometimes not there, which took the form of a huge, transparent tube, rounded at both ends, with eyes and a mouth that appeared and vanished from time to time in random places on its body. It was known as Loblolly and had dropped like a bead of amber into the prince’s hair, and then had swelled and expanded to line a whole cavern. It could flow along the ground, or diminish to a heavy square of jelly that the young prince could carry in his pocket. It warned of the three lethal damps—Fire Damp, Choke Damp, and White Damp—and would spread its own body as an impermeable tissue to prevent these horrors creeping in through cracks and pinholes.
Other beings were met, and neither trusted nor distrusted. Cutty Soams, very jolly, half-mansize, chipping away with a pickaxe in a green and mustard glow, bared to the waist but wearing a ragged green cap and a spiky beard, warning