Steam Dragons

They breed them in factories now, of course, hatch them in incubators in the rolling mills, and our young people would be shocked to ever come across one that could use its wings, or that was any bigger than, say, the house of a foundry manager or civil engineer along one of the tree-lined streets that lead out towards the hills from which the things first came. The authorities would never allow it.

But I am old enough to remember the day, when I was a young boy, when we got the miracle of hot water come hissing through the pipes of the terraces in which we lived, the transformation of our lives. We bought a zinc bath with gold-plated dragon’s feet, would fill it with hot water from a dragon’s head jug that was part of the set, the kind everyone bought from the market to herald the coming of the water. My dad would step into that bath when he came home from a shift and would step out of it a different man. We were all different people for a few shiny weeks.

After school we’d walk to the top of the hill to the steamworks and try to catch a glimpse of the dragon. It was difficult because there was a new wall, outside the old iron railings and ornamental gates, but if you stood halfway up the old pit bank you could catch a glimpse. Usually, it would just be the keepers, straining on lengths of the toughest Cradley chain, and we’d follow the chain with our eyes into the darkness of the hangar, the biggest building I’d ever seen, and sometimes see the rippling of a pale, mottled belly lit by the angle of the afternoon sun. A few times, from out of the gloom, there came the extension of one of its wings, articulated like those of the bats that lived in the caves under Dudley Castle, but so many times more vast. It filtered the light that came through it into an ashy grey and we would feel the wind of it in our faces and taste smoky dragon air. When that happened there would be shouting from the yard and more keepers would come running from the outbuildings to pull on the chains. I saw one of the men, once, dangling from the chain, must have been seven or eight feet off the ground, the chain wrapped around his middle, with his mates jumping, trying to catch him by his boots, before he ran in the air and stepped down gently in a far corner of the yard. Then there’d be this sound, like the screaming of the cows you’d sometimes hear from the old slaughterhouse when the wind was in the right direction, but so many times louder, that you had to clamp your hands over your ears. If you waited long enough you might see a huge arc of flame and hear the hiss of steam and the grinding of the gears. Our hot water was the by-product of all this. The whole thing was a miracle. Beautiful white laundry flapped on lines against the hill like so many butterflies. We had arrived in a kind of a paradise

The only inkling we ever got that all wasn’t quite as well as it seemed was from the guards when they came home. My cousin Rhoda’s dad, my Uncle Tommy, would be asleep before his arse hit the chair, the work was so exhausting, or, like all the others, fathers and uncles to the kids in our class, he would sit with his head in his hands at his kitchen table, eyes red from the smoke and ash, the grey lines of it creased into his face. They would argue in their sleep, the guards, call out, or not sleep at all, some of them. If anyone asked them about the dragon they would just shake their heads, mutter something you couldn’t quite catch, even when people clapped them on their backs as heroes. The money was good, the work was hard, people would shrug. Funny, they were the only ones of us to avoid the hot water. You could smell the smoke on them as they came down the road or sat in the pub on their days off, staring into the abyss.

How long did it last in the end, this idyll? A few months at most. Half a winter and into the spring. I don’t need to tell you what came. I was on the pit bank that morning, skiving off school, going in late because my dad was on the early turn and my mom had asked me to take him his piece, and the sun was shining, and we had algebra that morning. I didn’t really need a reason. I saw a pair of wings way out over the hills. It looked like one of the red kites that would hover over the scrap pits on the edge of town, but the proportion was all out, because this bird was miles away, but still looked just as big as the biggest kite.

Our dragon, the largest and most powerful creature any of us could conceive of, had been calling for its mother, of course. And these anguished cries had somehow made their way against the wind and into the far mountains. And she came, came to save him, suddenly, on this warm spring morning, a great, cold shadow as her belly came rippling over me, so close I could touch it, and down towards the streets below.

You know the rest, hundreds dead, the steamworks a ruin, a skeleton of burnt, twisted metal, our houses just rubble. I was the only one of my family left alive, other than my dad, safely in the womb of his furnace down the hill, munching on a corned beef sandwich I had just delivered, looking forward to his bath. My mom had been scrubbing the front step, apparently. I imagine her turning to see what the shadow was, picture her turned to ash in an instant. It was quick is all that I can think now. I was the only survivor from my class at school, which the dragon wiped out with a thrash of her tail.

We lived in tents among the rubble for a while, the survivors, then in pre-fabs in the camp out near Clent, where everyone forgot about us, even when the hill had been re-built. My old man would sit staring into nothingness, like the way the guards from the steamworks used to, all of whom had been obliterated. Tommy had been his eldest brother. Rhoda and all the others had gone with the school. The red kites circled above us. All we had left was each other, which was more than a good many people. There was no running water at the camp for years, let alone hot. I was married, had three children, had buried one, as well as my dad, before I had a hot bath again. And I will watch the western skies forever more.

Anthony Cartwright is the author of five novels, all of them set in the post-industrial English midlands, most recently Iron Towns (2016, Serpent’s Tail) and The Cut (2017, Peirene Press — a commission in response to the Brexit crisis). He works as a writer-in-residence in London schools for First Story and teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at City, University of London.