Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson Page A

not the only rabbit in the house, and once he had his enemies safely dropped down the hole, he signalled to a few of his friends and relations, and they all came along with twine from their carrot sacks and ran round and round the unhappy pair until they were as tightly bound as wasps in a spider’s web.
    Fisty had tried kicking them at first, but they were all black, all identical, and if he sent one of them flying through the air, another one bit him. Elvis was no use at all. His KILL button had been disabled in the fall, and the rabbits had taken away his remote control. He was a dog without means or purpose.
    ‘What am I supposed to eat?’ demanded Fisty, wondering why he was talking to a rabbit, but Bigamist seemed to understand, and before long half a sack of soft mouldy carrots was pushed down into the cellar. With his hands and feet tied, the only way that Fisty could eat them was to lie on the floor and dig in the sack with his head.
    ‘Fur ’ats, every one of ’em,’ he said to himself between mouldy miserable bites. ‘I’ll make ’em all into ’ats and sell’em on eBay.’
    But no one was listening, because Elvis had lost his ears, the rabbits had gone, and Thugger was in another part of the dungeon having some very unpleasant problems of his own.

Midnight
Everywhere
    The River Thames at Limehouse bows away from the City. The river glitters darkly. The river reflects the starless London sky. The river flows on to the sea. The river flows in one direction, but Time does not. Time’s river carries our spent days out to sea and sometimes those days come back to us, changed, strange, but still ours. Time’s flow is not even, and there are snags underwater, hesitations in Time where the clock sticks. A minute on Earth is not the same length as a minute on Jupiter. A minute on Earth is sometimes a different length all by itself.
    Big Ben was chiming midnight.
    When Silver heard the chime, she thought it was one o’clock in the morning and that she had been running for an hour. But then the clock went on chiming its grave and solemn toll, and she knew it was still midnight, or that midnight had come again.
    The city was still. Faint car noises came from the road behind the old warehouses and wharf buildings, but in front of her was the river, no ships, no barges, only the stretch of water from one side of the bank to the other.
    What should she do now?
    She sat down, her back against a stone wall, her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms round her knees. She wanted to cry, but she knew she mustn’t. She pictured Tanglewreck in her mind, solid and secure and waiting for her, and she had a feeling that the house was doing its best to help. Then she remembered why she had come to London in the first place; because there was something important to do. If it was important, it was bound to be difficult. She wouldn’t cry and she wouldn’t give up.
    Then, as these thoughts began to make her feel better, she sensed that the ground underneath her was shaking faintly, as though a big train was passing below.
    She had the feeling of something enormous, invisible, and very near. Her heart tightened.
    Gingerly, like a cat, she edged forward on all fours. How dark and quiet it was, the city breathing like a sleeping animal.
    Then, she saw it, head down, just underneath her on the bank, drinking from the river, the water pouring off its tusks as its head came out of the water. It looked like a cross between a bull and an elephant. It had dark curly hair all over its body, and huge thighs and shoulders, and legs that sunk into the mud as it walked.
    It took a lumbering step forward and the wall she sat on shook.
    It was a Woolly Mammoth.
    Silver didn’t know what Woolly Mammoths liked to eat but she wanted to make sure it wasn’t her, so she kept verystill as its great head swung round to stare up the bank.
    Then she heard a voice, a boy’s voice, but high and piercing.
    ‘Get thee back into, Goliath! Get thee back