Un Lun Dun

7. Market Day

“Oy!”

A voice came from behind them, and stones began to whistle past them. Someone grabbed Deeba and Zanna by their collars and hauled them backwards out of the alley.

It was a boy. They stared at him as he elbowed in front of them, chucking more pebbles and bits of brick and brandishing a stick at the rubbish. Which was cowering.

“Go on!” he said. He threw another well-aimed stone. The rubbish flinched, retreated. “Get out of it!” the boy shouted. “Disgusting!” The rubbish scrambled to get away.

Zanna and Deeba stared. The boy turned to them and winked.

He was about their age, very thin and wiry, dressed in odd patched-up grubby clothes. His hair was messy, his face shrewd. He was raising an eyebrow.

“What’s that all about?” he said, putting his hands on his hips. “You ain’t scared of a trashpack, are you? Pests like them? Need a much bigger lot’n that to do you any damage.” He lobbed another stone. “If you’re that yellow, why you off walking in the Backwall Maze? You wouldn’t like it if they came swanning into your manor, would you? Mind how you go.”

He nodded and half-grinned, gave them a little salute, then strode off away from the wall, brushing dirt from his already dirty clothes.

“Wait a minute!” Deeba managed to say.

“We don’t know…where…we…” Zanna said. Their voices trailed off as they turned to watch the boy go, and saw the square he had pulled them into.

It was big, full of stalls and scores of people, movement, the bustle of a market. There were costumes and colors. But above all the girls’ attention was taken by the light shining down from above.

In the narrow alleys, they had only seen slivers of sky. This was the first time since emerging from the door that they had had a clear view.

The sky was gray, not blue. Here and there were a few scurrying clouds, unfolding like milk in water. They moved in all different directions, as if they were on errands.

“Deebs,” said Zanna, swallowing. “What is that?”

Deeba’s throat dried as she looked up.

“No wonder the light’s weird,” whispered Zanna.

The orb above them was huge, and low in the sky— a circle at least three times the size of the sun. It shone with peculiar, cool dark-light like that of some autumn mornings, giving everything crisp edges and shadows. It was the yellow-white of a grubby tooth. Deeba and Zanna looked directly at it without hurting their eyes, for long seconds, their mouths wide open.

The sun had a hole in it.

It hung over the city, not like a disk, or a coin, or a ball, but like a donut. A perfect circle was missing from its middle. They could see the gray sky through it.

“Oh…my…God…” Deeba said.

“What is that?” said Zanna.

Deeba stepped forward, staring at the impossible sun shining like a fat ring. She looked down. The boy who had rescued her was gone.

“What’s going on?” Deeba shouted. People in the market turned to look at her. “Where are we?” she whispered.

After a few seconds people went back to their business— whatever that was.

“Okay. Okay. We have to figure this out,” said Deeba.

Behind them was a blank concrete wall, the edge of the maze they had come through, broken by a few alley entrances. In front, the market stretched as far as they could see.

“Why’d you turn that stupid wheel?”

“Like I knew we were going to end up here?”

“Can’t ever leave anything alone.”

Hesitantly, the two girls stepped into the rows of tents, buyers, and sellers. There was nowhere else to go.

They were immediately surrounded by the animated jabbering of a market morning. Deeba and Zanna kept looking up at that extraordinary hollow sun, but the scene around them was almost as bizarre.

There were people in all kinds of uniforms: mechanics’ overalls smeared in oil; firefighters’ protective clothes; doctors’ white coats; the blue of police; and others, including people in the neat suits of waiters, with cloths over one arm. All these uniforms looked like dressing-up costumes. They were too neat, and somehow a bit too simple.

There were other shoppers in hotchpotch outfits of rags, and patchworks of skins, and what looked in some cases like taped-together bits of plastic or foil. Zanna and Deeba walked farther into the crowd.

“Zann,” Deeba whispered. “Look.”

Here and there were the strangest figures. People whose skins were no colors skin should ever be, or who seemed to have a limb or two too many, or peculiar extrusions or concavities in their faces.

“Yeah,” said Zanna, with a sort of hollow, calm voice. “I see them.”

“Is that it? You see them? What are they, for God’s sake?”

“How should I know? But are you surprised? After everything?”

A woman went by above them, pedaling furiously as if she were on a bicycle, striding on two enormous spindly mechanical legs. Strange little figures flitted by at the edges of the market, too fast to clearly see. Deeba murmured an apology as she bumped into someone. The woman who bowed politely to her wore glasses with several layers of lenses, lowered and raised on levers, seemingly at random.

“Lovely arrangements!” the girls heard. “Get them here! Brighten up the home.”

Beside them was a stall bursting in flamboyant bouquets, carefully arranged in colored paper.

“They’re not flowers,” Deeba said. They were tools.

Each was a bunch of hammers, screwdrivers, spanners, and levels, bright plastic and metal, carefully arranged and tied together with a bow.

“What on earth are you wearing?” someone said. Zanna turned as someone picked at her hoodie. The man was tall and thin, with a jagged halo of thick, spiky hair. His suit was white and covered with tiny black marks.

It was print. His clothes were made from pages from books, immaculately sewn together.

“No, this won’t do,” he said. He spoke quickly, tugging at Zanna’s clothes too fast for her to stop him. “This is very drab, can’t possibly keep you entertained. What you need—” He flourished his sleeve. “— is this. The hautest of couture. Be entertained while you wear. Never again need you face the misery of unreadable clothes. Now you can pick your favorite works of fiction or nonfiction for your sleeves. Perhaps a classic for the trousers. Poetry for your skirt. Historiography for socks. Scripture for knickers. Learn while you dress!”

He whipped a tape from his pocket and began to measure Zanna. He yanked at his head, and Zanna and Deeba winced and gasped. What had looked like hair was countless pins and needles jammed anyhow into his scalp, a handful of which he pulled out.

The man did not bleed or seem to suffer any discomfort from treating himself as a pincushion. He wedged some of the pins back into his head, and there was a faint pfft with each puncture, as if his skull were velvet. Busily, he began to pin bits of paper to Zanna, scribbling measurements on a notebook.

“But what if it rains, you say? Well then rejoice as your outfit cuddles you in its gentle slushing, and you’re given the opportunity for an entirely new book. How wonderful! I have a vast selection.” He indicated his stall, crammed with volumes from which assistants tore pages and stitched. “What genres and literatures are to your taste?”

“Please…” stammered Zanna.

“Leave it,” said Deeba. “Leave us alone.”

“No thank you…” Zanna said. “I…”

The girls turned and ran.

“Hey!” the man shouted. “Are you alright?” But they did not slow down.

They ran past chefs baking roof-tiles in their ovens and chiseling apart bricks over pans, frying the whites and yolks that emerged; past confectioners with jars full of candied leaves; past what looked like an argument at a honey stall between a bear in a suit and a cloud of bees in the shape of a man.

At last they reached a little clearing deep in the market containing a pump and a pillar. They stopped, their hearts pounding.

“What are we going to do?” said Deeba.

“I don’t know.”

They looked up that empty-hearted sun above them. Deeba dialed her home once more.

“Hello Mum?” she whispered.

There was that frenetic buzzing. From a little hole in the back of her phone burst a handful of wasps. Deeba shrieked and dropped the phone, and the wasps flew off in different directions.

Her phone was broken. She sat heavily at the pillar’s base.

Zanna stared at her, and her face began to crease.

“It’ll be okay,” said Deeba. “Don’t. It’ll be alright.”

“How?” said Zanna. “How will it?”

Zanna and Deeba stared at each other. From her wallet, Zanna drew out the strange travelcard she had been sent, weeks ago. She stared at it as if it might contain some clue, some advice. But it was only a card.