In which the nature of telephones is discussed, a connection made, a curse exposed and a title transferred to an unsuspecting inheritor.
This is the story of the Mayors of London.
Once a year on a usually cold and often drizzling November morning, a heavy carriage of tasteless gold and plump velvet is wheeled out from its resting place in the Guildhall, at the heart of the Corporation of London, the oldest borough of the city. It’s dusted off, given a pair of footmen in white tights and a driver with a big hat, and sent to collect the Lord Mayor of London. In bright red robes and a ridiculous chain of office, this individual will then ride through the centre of town, swear a number of oaths, shake a lot of hands and generally celebrate and make merry for the good of the city. Ludgate Circus and Fleet Street are shut down for his procession; likewise Cheapside, London Wall and Bank are sealed off, cars out and policemen in, along with the tourists and onlookers who come to see the parade. Giant floats of distorted gaseous proportion, dancing bands and singing dancers, jugglers and hot dog vendors take to the streets and generally a fine if slightly pompous time is had by all. As the sun goes down, the Lord Mayor boards a boat on the Thames, between Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridge, and from anchored barges in the middle of the river fireworks are set off, funded by the big financial firms of the city. Champagne is drunk by dignitaries onboard, and the onlookers, as soon as the last boom has died away above the Oxo Tower, are quick to seek out the hidden pubs in the alleys between Fleet Street and Farringdon Road, or behind the National Theatre, Gabriel’s Wharf and Southwark. And so the day is partied away quite nicely thank you and, for another year, the people forget that the Lord Mayor exists.
In the intervening time, the Lord Mayor of London fulfils his duties, promoting the financial district of the city, and making deals with names like KPMG, Merrill Lynch, Price Waterhouse Coopers and other megaliths lurking within their glass towers. He attends meetings with Governors, Committees, Secretaries, Aldermen; he shakes no less than a hundred new hands a week, goes abroad on expenses to promote the wonders of London, snarls quietly at the Greater London Authority and its Mayor, who regard the Corporation of London as something of a historical blip in the history of local councils, and perhaps in his vainer moments remembers that Magna Carta permits him, technically, to ban the Queen from visiting the city within the old London walls. He opens museums, attends parties, networks on behalf of the city and every now and then is invited to a wedding at St Paul’s or tea at the Palace and all things considered, has a good time and does an OK thing.
So a year passes; so another Lord Mayor is chosen by the arcane reasonings of the Guildhall and Corporation staff, with no small interest expressed by the great financial giants of the city.
It is only after the Lord Mayor is in bed that the Midnight Mayor comes onto the streets. He too, like his daylight counterpart, must have his procession. Crawling out of the shadows, he carries around his neck the great black key of his office, an iron monster that once used to lock the gates of the wall of London. In his hand he carries a black staff whose thumping upon the cobbled stones can call rioters to order, on his back he wears a black cloak sewn together out of soot and the shrouds of the plague victims. When he walks past St Paul’s Cathedral, they say the statues turn to watch him go. When he stands by the Monument, the great golden flame on its head flickers and spins with burning fire. When he processes around the old wall of London, the shadows follow him wherever he goes. He too, like the Lord Mayor, has his duties. Like the ravens in the Tower, the London Stone, even the river itself, he protects the city, watches over it and keeps it safe from. . who knows what? It is in the nature of his duty that we never find out what he has protected us from, since to keep us safe, he ensured that it never happened. Some theorists say that he isn’t a man at all, but a creature grown out of stones, a statue come alive from old cobbles and river mud. Others say it’s just a title, just a title as if titles didn’t have power, passed down from one old scrounger to another, generation after generation. Some say that the Midnight Mayor is a man, whose soul has become so consumed by the city that he often forgets he has feet at all, but sees with the eyes of the pigeons and breathes the thick fumes of the double-decker bus and finds in them ambrosia. The Aldermen are his servants — not the mundane, attend-a-few-parties, shake-a-few-hands aldermen of the Lord Mayor, but the other Aldermen, the hat-wearing, gun-toting arseholes of the magical community. And so while the city sleeps, the Midnight Mayor wanders, keeping us safe from all the nasties at the door.
That is, if you believe a word of it. Which under normal conditions, I didn’t.
But these were interesting times.
All of which left me with two major problems:
1. What could possibly be so bad that even the Midnight Mayor (if he was real) took an interest?
2. What could possibly be so bad that the Midnight Mayor was killed by it?
My watch had stopped at 2.25 a.m. and the Mayor died at 2.26.
I wanted to find out why.
Mr Earle had said “by the coroner’s report”.
Say what you will for the Aldermen, they were bureaucratic to an extreme. Of course they’d have a coroner’s report on the death of their boss, the Midnight Mayor, of course they would. A coroner’s report and a receipt for the funeral, if there was anything left to bury, and all of it tax deductible, thanking you kindly.
And in the Corporation of London, I had a fairly good idea where to find a coroner.
Just west of Moorgate and south of Old Street is a great grey vastness where a lot of bombs once fell. Street names reveal more about the city’s past than any lingering hints from architecture or archaeology: London Wall (where the old city defences ran), Bishopsgate (the gate for the bishops), Cheapside (a shopping street), Poultry (a street where chickens were driven to market), and so on. The name of this area is the Barbican, referring to another gateway into the old city of London; and, as any magician, tourist or lost wanderer will tell you, it is a space-time vortex, all in gritty concrete.
Someone had clearly intended it to be a self-contained utopia, and in many ways, this was what it was. At its heart lay a shallow, slightly scummy lake in which the occasional optimistic heron sometimes waded, and from which there extended a maze of flats, cafés, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, conference halls, art galleries, schools, churches, gyms, libraries and gardens, connected to each other by walkways, bridges and tunnels, and mystic yellow lines that invariably led to the roof, even if they claimed to be leading you towards the underground car parks. A music school squatted behind a theatre whose billboards advertised Japanese mime artists and Cuban street bands, a piece of the city’s old Roman wall crumbled mutely in a private garden for local residents, and on every other balcony dangled half-dead geraniums in flowerpots, maintained to the lowest standard the council could tolerate. A single, slightly grungy food and supplies shop loitered beneath a flight of slippery stairs, and among the high towers and tiled walkways, mini-tornados swished and tugged, and tore at even the best-tended haircuts. And because this was a place that had everything for an artistic, well-ordered, middle-class life, it also had the equipment for a quiet, tidy death, so that, wedged on one corner at the end of a bridge across a street some thirty feet below was the coroner’s office.
Quite how the local residents felt about this was hard to judge. Our suspected conclusion was that they simply regarded it in the same way the average punter regarded a beggar: seen, noted, and then carefully, politely and deliberately ignored and forgotten. In many ways, it was hard to believe the sign declaring “coroner” wasn’t a malign trick, pasted up by some local wit with a morbid sense of humour.
So, the wind dragging at my coat, and my right hand throbbing inside its bandage, I walked up to the small blue door tucked away round the side of the Barbican, and rang the bell.
Nothing happened.
I rang again.
A security guard appeared behind the wire-meshed glass. He looked like so many guards in the city: mid-to late forties, tightly cut hair turning greyish, dark uniform, black radio, shiny shoes, skin the colour of deep-roasted coffee. He opened the door, but didn’t stand aside for me. When you look like the Michelin man on a famine diet, trust is not so easy to inspire.
“You looking for someone?” he asked.
I looked him up and down. He seemed like a principled man, the last thing I needed to see.
“Was a body brought here last night,” I asked, “sometime after two in the morning?”
“I’d have to check the records. You family?”
“Yes” was the easy answer, but it led inevitably to the question “what name are you looking for?”. I had no idea. In all the confusion, I only knew of the Midnight Mayor as the Midnight Mayor, nothing more specific.
“No,” I said.
“Can I ask why you’re interested?”
“Journalist” was the next most obvious answer, but unlikely to make me any friends. “Police” would require identification, “friend” would be politely told to go home. We said, “Someone attacked us last night, a minute before the man in your mortuary died. We don’t know of any connection, but other people think there is one and until we find out what it is and why this man died, we are going to be hunted and assaulted and quite possibly die, and however hideous this world is, we would not for all the fire in the wire die and leave it. Please — will you let me see the body?”
The security man blinked at me. “What?” he said numbly.
“I only need a few minutes.”
“You what?”
So much for the power of honesty.
“You could call your colleague,” I added.
“I don’t have a colleague. .” he mumbled, and realised his mistake. I reached forward and grabbed the back of his neck with my right hand, pushed the palm of my left into the gap between his eyebrows and squeezed. The magic of sleep was easy at this hour, the night so quiet, footsteps so loud and lonely; the people of the city were either in their deepest dreams or wide awake, burning up with loneliness and imagination as shadows and sounds twisted into alien forms, untouched by the blanket of daylight bustle. The guard himself was a night owl; the streets in darkness thrilled him, walking down the middle of a road whose traffic by day would be at a standstill, eating kebabs from suspicious shops at three in the morning, watching the secret people of the streets, the cleaners, painters, repairmen, engineers, delivery men, graveyard shift and junior night-time nurses scuttling between the shadows. But he was also bored in his little office above it all, with nothing but the buzzing of the electric lamp to keep him occupied, and with his heart leaping at the sound of a truck swishing down a distant street.
It was easy, easier than I’d expected, to send him to sleep, and fill his dreams with the colour of yellow neon, and the sound of lonely footsteps in the night. A simple spell.
Harder, in fact, to position him behind his desk, dragging him into the uncomfortable tight space and propping him upright in his chair. I turned off all but the desktop lamps and locked the door behind me, from the inside. Then I went in search of the body of the Midnight Mayor.
Death, as an idea, appals us.
As an experience, I cannot say I recommend it. The mind forgets pain, the physical sensation of pain. It doesn’t forget terror.
Down a flight of stairs and into a room smelling of disinfectant and nothing else. I’d half expected rows of stainless steel cupboards, each one labelled with the name of the correct inhabitant, but there was no such thing. Above the mortuary floor of scrubbed grey tile, each member-guest had their own refrigerated coffin. I looked at the name tags pinned to the end of each metal slab and remembered again that I had no idea what the name of the Midnight Mayor was, if he had a name to begin with. So I started pulling the lids off the coffins. The women I ignored, because Mr Earle had called him “he”; and I was grateful for the chance to halve the number of empty faces I had to see: Mr Braithwaite with three lines carved in his chest like a bunch of flowers opening up towards his shoulders; Mr Wang, bile and vomit still clinging with a yellow rumpled thickness to his pouting lips; and, finally, Mr Nair.
We knew it was Mr Nair the second we saw the body, if body is what it was. It should have appalled us, but the flesh of Mr Nair was nothing more than the slabs of meat hanging from the butcher’s hook, hardly a thing human any more. His skin hadn’t been sliced off, but sliced into, a thousand, ten thousand times, with a tiny, thin blade that made the skin stand up from the flesh in little white tufts, like snowy mountain ridges seen from the window of a passing plane. The muscles exposed below looked like something out of a medical textbook, all fibre, but grey now, blood tumbled out of them so they looked for all the world like stringy chicken meat, or pork that had been boiled first and then sandpapered down. Every inch of his body had suffered from this effect, so extensive I thought it might have been a disease, if I hadn’t known better. Beneath the black clinging threads of his hair, the scalp was a churned-up mess of sliced skin and flesh; the cuts went inside his belly button and beneath his fingernails, going under the thin nail though it seemed not even slightly disturbed.
In films, the people with a moral compass throw up at these sorts of things. I didn’t. There was nothing there, no human left. Just dry organic matter. It would have been like being sick at the sight of tofu. I pulled the lid back over the thing that had once pushed air out from between lips and so declared by its vibrations and humming, “I am Mr Nair”, and went in search of personal belongings. They were in a box, each one bagged and wrapped neatly at the back of the coroner’s office. I sat in a big revolving chair designed to give you good posture, and went through his things.
No staff, chain or cloak of office. So much for fairy-tale stories.
All his clothes were drenched in blood, every inch turned red. Not a cut on them. Nair’s fate had befallen him either while he was naked, or regardless of the things he wore. No keys; I wondered if the Aldermen had taken them. No spray cans, no mystic artefacts — travelcards, obscure tickets, penknife, albino pigeon feathers or tail of rat — nothing I would have naturally identified as useful to a magician in their trade. Perhaps the Midnight Mayor was above such things. There was a mobile phone, which didn’t turn on. A bloody fingerprint was pressed onto the screen, and scorch marks stained the otherwise shining, futuristic polish of the little machine. I put it to one side and pulled out Mr Nair’s wallet.
A driving licence declared that this was the property of Nair, Anu; born 07-08-53, United Kingdom; resident at 137A New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, London. The face that stared sombrely out at me from the licence photo had warm chocolate skin, protruding cheekbones and a tiny mouth, beneath straight, cropped greying hair. I tried to imagine it as belonging to a Midnight Mayor, and failed. I flicked through the rest of the wallet. A single credit card given by a bank whose name I couldn’t even recognise, but which was pleased to give an Exclusive Gold Membership to Nair, A., and which seemed the heart and soul of his finances. No loyalty cards to any shops or supermarkets — perhaps this was a man who didn’t do his own shopping. No money either, no receipts, no video or library cards or any of the usual detritus of human existence that tended to pile up inside a wallet. There was only one business card. I read the name with a sinking feeling that went right down through my belly and into my knees: D.B. Sinclair. Plus a telephone number.
Dudley Sinclair. “Concerned citizens.” A man who made the older Orson Welles look trim and cockney. I respected him in the same way I respected the jaws of a lion — from a very long way off. He had been of use to me, in bringing down Bakker and the Tower. I had been of immense use to him. In retrospect, he’d done two parts filing to my ten parts bleeding. But that just made him all the smarter. He knew how to get others to do his dirty work.
I put the wallet to one side.
There was a police report, short, brisk, badly spelt but to the point. It announced that at 2.20 a.m. residents of Raleigh Court, North Kilburn, had called 999 to report almost every misdemeanour happening in their vicinity that could be reported. Windows were smashed, gas was leaking, electricity was going haywire, phones were ringing, TVs were smoking, water was boiling unbidden: the whole shaboom. By the time the police were headed that way, more reports were coming in, of screaming and a fight between two heavily armed men. By the time the police arrived, there was nothing to show but angry sleepless residents, a lot of broken glass, the wailing of car alarms, and a single, skinless body lying face-down in the night.
Not quite skinless.
The coroner’s report corrected the error. The skin hadn’t been removed. It had been cut, somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand times, by a blade no thicker than a piece of paper.
Obviously not a piece of paper, the coroner added, because the death was fairly quick — shock leading to cardiac failure — and it takes a long time to administer ten to twenty thousand paper cuts across every inch of flesh. Some kind of chemical compound, perhaps, or. .
. . or something like that.
Reading the report, I was grateful for a moment to the Aldermen. They had got the body taken to this mortuary to be examined by their coroner. I had assumed that the Midnight Mayor would have died in the City, the traditional prowling ground of the Aldermen. I’d been wrong. I’d got lucky. He’d died in Kilburn.
North Kilburn, to be exact. Willesden is a nowhere everywhere, and Kilburn is a somewhere inside that nowhere.
It was a connection I wished the Aldermen hadn’t made.
I took the wallet and the sim card out of Nair’s phone, left everything else. Lincoln’s Inn was the nearest destination I could think of, but what were the odds that someone wasn’t watching Mr Nair’s house? Police, Alderman — killer? A braver man might have seen this as a good thing: confrontation and an early night. But we could think of only a very, very few creatures walking upon the earth with the mystic fire-power at their disposal to cut a man’s skin beneath the nail, while leaving the nail itself intact. All of them frightened us.
So I went looking for Raleigh Court, North Kilburn.
There was an internet café lurking on the Goswell Road, between a launderette and an all-purpose purveyor of rotting vegetables and cheap biscuits. It was open twenty-four hours, and as in most such places, the computers had been padlocked to the desks and the desks bolted to the floor. A young man reading an A-level textbook and sitting with his feet up on the office desk took a couple of quid with an expression of apathy and gave me a computer for an hour. There were only two other people in the café: one was a woman with prunelike skin and a giant weave of orange fabric on her head, using the internet telephone to talk to somewhere far, far away where the sun was still shining; the other, a pasty-skinned man, had chosen the furthest computer in the darkest corner for what could only, at this hour, be crime or porn.
I sat in the middle of the row of whining machines, proud of my nothing-to-hide, and looked up Raleigh Court. My A-Z covered the Kilburn area, but for specific details, you can’t beat the internet. I found it, a beige blob in the middle of yellow grid streets, and, because no one can know everything, interrogated the machine a little more on how to get there. No Tube trains, but the night buses from the centre of the city understand their basic role — to carry those too drunk to walk, to the most obscure corners of suburbia quickly, cheaply and with no questions asked.
Then, because I’m rarely online, I checked my email.
**!!PILLSPILLSPILLSPILLS!!**
(From: [email protected])
We need to talk. (From: [email protected])
Re: ☝ ✞☜
✞☜ M ☜ ✌
M ✡ ✌❅
(From: Unknown)
I deleted “PILLSPILLSPILLS” on automatic. If we had been in a more malign mood, and less tired, we might have replied with something obscene or cursed the computer from which the message was sent.
“We need to talk” from Oda77 was short and to the point. It said:
Sorcerer -
The Midnight Mayor is dead, the ravens are dead, the Stone is
gone, the Wall is cursed, the city is damned — if you believe the
ramblings of the wicked. I’ll find you.
Oda
I wrote a reply:
Oda -
I’m damned too. I’ll find you. Tell no one, otherwise they’ll kill
me before you get the chance.
Matthew
I wasn’t in a hurry to meet Oda. Psychopathic fanatic magician-murderers with a penchant for dentistry and corrupted Christian theology were not high on my list of confidantes. She’d promised on a number of occasions to kill me, by grace of being a sorcerer, and especially to kill us by grace of being an abomination crawled from the nether reaches of the telephone lines into mortal flesh. God was her excuse, guns were her weapons, and the second I stopped being useful to her and her dentistry-crazed cult, the Order, would be the day I got to meet both. She had helped me only because she feared my enemies more than she hated me.
Besides, the last person who’d helped me. .
. . the last person. .
Had been Vera.
Melted into a puddle of paint.
Hadn’t even stopped to think.
Too much to do. Too damned. Too. . too much too.
Hadn’t even stopped.
Angry.
Sick and angry. Blink and here we are, looking back with a pair of bright blue eyes colder than the iceberg that hit the Titanic. On fire with frost. Angry. Attacked, burnt, attacked, hurt, attacked, fled, attacked, attacked, attacked, gunning for us, gunning for me, gunning for my. . for people who stopped to help.
Angry.
Didn’t know what to do about it, except doing itself. So I kept on doing while we clenched and cramped and twisted in rage.
I kept on at the computer.
The last message was obviously bad news. A sensible user would have deleted it and been done. We didn’t. Maybe it was the arrogance from using an internet café, where the computer about to be infected by bad mail wasn’t our own; maybe it was curiosity; maybe it was inspiration; maybe it was none of these things. Whatever it was, we, in full knowledge that it wouldn’t be good, opened the message.
It said:
END OF THE LINE.
The screen went black.
I swore.
A white pinprick appeared at the very centre of the screen and started to grow. As it grew, it became a white circle, then the white circle grew a black circle within it, that expanded from the centre to fill almost its entire form, then the black circle grew white teeth within it, and the blackness wasn’t just a blackness, it was a void, a great falling void that span off for ever into. . . everything, nothing, senseless perfection, freedom, death, entrapment, jubilation, emptiness, pick one, pick everything, all at once -
— and then the blackness was filling the screen and it wasn’t just in the screen, it was crawling out of the screen, cracking and popping and bursting as the white jaw with its endless open gullet stretched out of the screen, dripping writhing worms of hissing static like saliva from its fanged teeth, straining towards my face and roaring the high background whine of a cooling fan about to burst, a hungry computer virus with jaws open for the skull of a mortal -
— then I pulled the plug.
It vanished. Glass fell with a splatter onto the desk and over my trousers, black smoke rolled in eye-watering sickly sweetness from the gutted interior of the screen. I flapped ineffectually at the smoke, coughing and blinking tears from my eyes, pushing myself away from the desk even as the young man with the A-level textbook stood up and began to shout in three different languages, all of them obscene.
Then he saw our face, and fell silent.
I walked away. No one tried to follow me.
It took two night buses to get where I wanted to go. It was faster than the one-every-three-minute bus routes of the day, despite the fifteen-minute wait, the bus swishing through empty streets, their natures lost beneath a haze of sodium glow. I breathed in the deep, heavy warm air of the buses, smelling sticky beer and old chips. The familiar weight of it comforted me, washed out some of the fatigue from my bones: an elixir almost as good as sleep.
The bus crossed Euston Road at Tottenham Court Road, skirted the southern edge of Regent’s Park and headed towards Marylebone, into little neat streets untouched by chain stores, selling mostly fish and chips, Italian wine and cheese.
Raleigh Court was a nice name for a bad idea. It hadn’t been so much built as slotted together out of old grey cereal boxes pretending to be flats. They were stacked one on top of the other in four flat tombstones around a dead place of concrete and garages with locked doors and no room for cars, just tall enough to block out the sun, though not high enough to see anything but each other. It was a bad place to die, an anonymous, forgotten hole. The air hummed with mobile phones and a tight, pressed-in magic, a magic of black shadows and little rattling things in the night, the kind of power that lent itself to the summoning of rats and invocation of ghosts, to the forbidden enchantments of naughty men who thought of life as just a trick of perspective. It was easy, in this place at 4 a.m., to slip past the police tape and the slumbering copper on duty. The tarmac ate up the sound of my footsteps; the neon bent away from my passing, willing to oblige a grey friend in a gloomy time. It was a place that looked after its own, frightened strangers away.
Signs of battle were scarred on the buildings inside the police cordon. Windows were taped up with dustbin bags, the broken glass either blown inside or already swept away. Scorch marks had burst up from between the gaps in the paving slabs where the gas had ignited, to send blackness crawling a few storeys up the overlooking walls. Electricity cables had been crudely strapped back together; phone lines dangled off the sides of buildings, awaiting repair. The metal shutters of garages were twisted and bent, and rubbish bags split open and blasted flat. A bomb hadn’t exploded here. A bomb had been blasted out of the ground on a volcanic plume of gas, risen up to the height of a man’s invoking hands, and spawned a dozen little scuttling offspring that ran to each corner of the court and exploded.
The whole calamity would be in one of those police reports that D. B. Sinclair and his “concerned citizens” filed carefully under “T” for “Things” at the back of a locked filing cabinet in the vehicle-licensing centre a day before a bonfire got accidentally out of control. Dudley Sinclair and his friends were very good at losing information that they didn’t want to be found. Bureaucracy seems so innocent until it eats you up; but then this mess was pure embarrassment and mayhem written in sparkling mystic letters. Someone had to have seen it.
As it happened, someone had. I found a half-eaten kebab in the spilt litter billowing over the cobbles and, a bit below, a thrown-away end of pizza, nibbled to tatters except for the crusts. The guilty kebab shop was only round the corner, twenty-four hours a day of pulverised cardboard cooked on a spike. I bought two kebabs: one for me, one for my witness. Then I went back to Raleigh Court and sat down on the charred, wobbling remains of a bench, ate my kebab and left the second one open, salad and all, on the ground at my feet.
My witness had clearly been freaked by the night’s activities; he came out reluctantly, not at his usual jaunty trot. I waited patiently, wiping ketchup and suspicious white goo from my chin, stuffing a tattered grey watery vegetable into my mouth that the shopkeeper had claimed was lettuce. We liked all foods, even the kinds that didn’t like us, and at four in the morning, kebab in a bun is food the gods would eat.
My witness snuffled closer. I held my hand out to him, fingers stained in dubious sauce, and cooed, “Hello, come to Uncle Matthew. Come talk to us.”
He was the size of a small dog, not too small to yap infuriatingly, not large enough to bark with any great power. His fur in the lamplight was dark orange heading for auburn, his nose a black wetness with a pair of whiskers sticking out above jaws that looked fit for biting arms off. His tail might once have been bushy, but wars with others of his kind, plus feral cats and traffic, had left it a tatty stump. Personal hygiene was not high among his priorities, and he stank of wet mud, old oils and frustrated alpha-male animal. He looked up at us, we looked at him. He started to eat the kebab at our feet, and we patted him gently on the head.
There’s a long tradition of magicians keeping pet familiars. Once upon a time, an owl or wolf was the companion of choice; but magic, above all else, has to move with the times. For as long as I could remember, you couldn’t do much better than to find yourself a fox.
I scratched the creature behind its ears and said, “Mind if I call you Mr Fox?”
It wasn’t an imaginative name, but he didn’t object.
I let him eat the kebab. He was not an underfed animal, and clearly choosy enough in his diet to avoid the limp salad. When he was done, I patted the wobbly planks of the bench where I sat, and he leapt up, regarding me curiously. I kept stroking the rough, sticky fur on the top of his head, all matted together with slime from the rubbish bins, and dried blood. After a while, my fingers were used to the texture, and the more relaxed my companion grew, the easier it was to. .
meat scraped off plate brown sauce sharp sharp on tongue air rot growing and smell of
Overhead, a pigeon flapped in the darkness. I could feel the claws of the rats in the drains beneath me, their noses itching with mine. I kept on stroking the fox, which nuzzled its damp nose into my ribs, and I got a taste of. .
exhaust from bus car motorbike scooter van truck lorry settled always settled
background brown stench fog on the streets invisible fog weighing down air
lavatory freshener window left open chemical bite in lungs
detergent bubbling in drainpipe
shower gel soaps at overflow
rubber boots on tarmac floor
old blood
new blood
“Come on, Mr Fox,” we crooned. “Show us what you smelt last night.”
taste of scraped-out meat fats and drippings thin meaty blood from frozen meat chicken fluids pale and left on the plate sunflower oil in soggy chips tossed aside peas turning brown yesterday’s mash black mould growing on the top maggot maggot in the bins maggot in the meat maggot sleepy in the cold always maggot worming into the meat fat white body pop
“Come on, Mr Fox,” we heard a voice say that might have been ours. “Come on, come on. .”
smell of blood. fresh. nothing ever fresh fresh blood fresh fresh clean fresh clean blood on dirty floor swept by spinning water wheels that turned the dirt into prettier circles on the dirty concrete fresh clean blood hot
A thousand miles away, at the end of the badly receiving telephone line: “Come on, Mr Fox. .”
human blood not scared not human fear thunder lightning rare things not human common human common car truck lorry bus motorbike scooter human common
human blood — not common
fear stench of blood, silver lance to smell, eyes widen, brain weep, human blood and
Here it came. We could smell the memories, see the stench of it in our eyes, hear the hum of smell in our ears, here it came, all that my precious witness, his fur covered in dirt, had seen. .
human man standing in night. looking something somewhere eyes turned upwards doesn’t see me in the darkness doesn’t care don’t fear human human is. . burning bright warm red fire. smell rat. rats are watching too rats down below smell stinking rat rat dead in jaws rats down below are watching human too pigeons up above feathers stuck in teeth pigeons are watching too and we watch the human because. .
. . human who is not human. . . flesh hiding flesh like you
smells of. . alcohol mixed with smell of flowers (FLOWERS!), silks softened by soaps black leather rubbed with varnish suit caressed with steam hair swept with oil face pampered with cream smells of lighter smoke still city but somewhere the cars do not go so much of contained shut away contained of leather seats and interior of car solid weighty hot heavy shakes door handle sweat sweat running down spine sweat on head sweat fear listen! listen heart listen! smell fear! eat fear!
“Good Mr Fox, good Mr Fox. .”
A thousand miles away, a hand stroking the head of a fox was wired to a brain that might possibly have been our own, and we smelt the fear on Nair, along with expensive aftershave and oiled hair, we smelt terror and heard the beating of his heart and whispered, “What else, Mr Fox, good Mr Fox, come on. . what else? Show me what you smelt.”
flesh hiding flesh. human who is not just human smells like. .
someone else!
runrunrunrun thick night deep
someone else someone else and he smells of
of. .
“What, Mr Fox? Show me!”
of nothing. there is a creature standing there smells of nothing. empty nothing that moves like a living thing and a living thing reacts to it, is afraid of it but it has no smell. it is not living cannot be living has no heart has no blood has no smell but it is human eyes see human eyes see legs arms head
“What else?!”
eyes see legs arms head hair nose mouth skin
“What does he look like?”
no smell. human that smells of oiled hair makes sound at human that smells of nothing sound sound is roar sound is scream sound is shouting sound is thunder sound is smell of burning run but do not run the rats are running! rats are running and pigeons are flying get away get away fire and burning and shouting and want to run want to run nowhere to run rats underground pigeons above and smell of burning and screaming and heart and terror and fear and
And it’s only Nair’s fear. .
. . we can only smell Nair’s fear. .
no smell no smell no smell raises hands and has no smell and human screams and no smell raises arms and human screams screams screams screams and we smell
We smell. .
blood fresh blood human blood blood on nose blood on concrete blood in dirt
We see. .
human human on floor less human less human screams less human meat screams screams screams and
And there was something in his hand?
plastic electric plastic
What was in Nair’s hand?
flesh splitting, flesh splitting, face splitting eyes splitting blood human blood scream face flesh scream
Something in his hand, held up to his ear-
not ear not ear broken flesh scream blood
I knew what it was. Recognised it, even through the confusion of the fox’s memories, saw the little plastic shape, saw the shattered remains of Nair’s lips
blood blood blood blood blood fear
speaking into it, and recognised it, saw the shattered bloody flesh that was Nair speaking with his dying breath into a mobile phone.
Dead.
Just like that. We looked, me, us and the fox, through the terrified haze of its memories, and saw the body of Nair, torn meat inside a neat black silk suit, lying in his own blood, mobile phone the last thing the bloody criss-cross remains of his fingers were going to touch. And then, because the fox had looked, finally, the fox dared to look, we looked up at the man who had killed A. Nair, the Midnight Mayor.
And the fox was right. He was absolutely right. We saw a man, dressed in a neat pinstripe suit utterly untouched by the flames still burning in the rubbish bins, by the glass spilt across the floor, by the swinging electric cables and the spitting remains of electric lightning, by the fallen aerials and shattered metal shutters, by the torn bricks and broken paving stones; not a scratch on him. He wore a suit, the crease impeccable all the way down from his waist to his ankle; a pair of black leather shoes that clacked neatly with every step, a pinstripe jacket done up over a white shirt, the collar ironed and unstained. A white silk handkerchief stuck up from his jacket pocket, his thin dark hair was swept back, not a fibre out of place, from a high pale forehead and on his face was a look. .
no smell
. . a look that a busy plumber might give to a boiler that’s been giving him more trouble than it’s worth and has now been fixed; the conquering contempt of an expert who has proven his worth to a dumb machine.
And he had no smell. To the fox, watching this, Nair had stank from the moment he entered of expensive cleaning products and shaving lotions, of terror and fear. His shoes had smelt, his clothes had smelt, every part of him offering a different tone to the medley. But the man who had killed him, the thing that had killed him, which looked like a man in a pinstripe suit, who now stood over him utterly uncaring for either his triumph or the pity of the dead, had no smell. Not a part of him smelt, not even of cleanliness. He was a walking blank on the fox’s recollection, even the dirt on his shoes. His heart made no sound; nor was there any proof, except that he had just killed a living man, that this man lived at all.
And then he looked at the fox. And the terror that swept through every nerve of the creature nearly knocked us from the seat, the strength of it, the absolute animal certainty that it was run or die. And we ran, us and the fox, we ran through the night with every hair standing up down the length of our back, ran until our paws ached and our spine groaned and our head was a dead weight looking down to the ground and we could smell nothing but our own fears and ran and ran and ran.
Terror broke the spell. Our fear, his fear, we weren’t making the distinction. The fox was a trembling curl of fur beside us; and we weren’t much better, every inch shaking from the shared experience of the creature’s thoughts. Our head hurt, our body hurt, our paws still hurt, although we had none, and above all, and slicing through it to an agony pitch, our right hand blazed furiously inside its bandage and when we turned our hand over to look, pulling the black mitten away from the wad of cotton rolled over our skin, we saw blood was seeping through.
I fumbled in my bag for painkillers, took three in a single gulp, cooed empty noises at the trembling fox. I tried to pick coherent images out of the confusion of the fox’s thoughts: focus on Nair, focus on his killer. I wondered how unamused the Aldermen might feel about being offered up an urban scavenger as a reliable witness for the claim “not me, guv, I didn’t do it”.
Still, it was something that I had seen the face of the man who killed Nair. If I had been frightened of him before, whoever he was, this no-smell in a suit, now I was rightly terrified. You do not walk the earth without a heartbeat and a smell, unless you were not designed for that particular promenade. And sooner or later, whether we liked it or not, we were constrained by the laws of earthly things, even if it, he, whatever it was, was not.
I patted the fox, taking comfort from the warmth of his body and the consistency of his companionship. The fox shuffled closer to me, and I stroked him some more. “There, Mr Fox,” we sighed, and then, because we couldn’t think of anything reassuring, added, “There, Mr Fox.”
We sat there a long while, and might have sat there longer if it wasn’t for the burning in our hand. The fox trembled and whimpered by us, and in time, a trembling became a breathing, a breathing a gentle sleep, and he began to forget the things he had seen. We didn’t.
We had to. .
. . do something.
We just didn’t know what.
A telephone had rung.
I’d answered.
Spectres had come.
The Aldermen had come.
The Midnight Mayor had died.
And as he’d died, at the hands of a whatever-it-was that could flay the flesh off a man without even touching him, who killed with ten thousand paper cuts, he’d used his mobile phone.
I reached into my bag. I had Nair’s sim card, pried from the back of his phone. It didn’t look damaged, but then what could you tell from a piece of plastic and silicon? I put it in my coat pocket, pushed the remnants of my kebab over to the little fox, and stood up.
Not much more I could do.
Dawn and sunset in winter both happen when you’re not looking. You can see the beginnings of daylight, the shimmerings of dusk, the bending of the shadows; but the actual moment when the sun hits the horizon in either direction is lost behind buildings or in a moment of distracted conversation. Blink, and you miss it. The earth spins too fast to wait for your attention.
We sat on a bench on Primrose Hill and watched the sunrise.
There was frost in the grass that would be gone by the time the morning joggers reached us, and a deadness in the trees that the warmth of day would turn to cold billowing. Get away from a road in London, only a few hundred yards, and the rest of the city sounds a thousand miles off, like a distant gust of wind against a castle wall. Darkness, turned yellow-orange-pink from the glow of a thousand thousand streetlights, sprawled away as far as the eye could see. Landmarks, lit up all the colours of technology — the London Eye a distant purple blob, Big Ben in orange, the Gherkin in greens and blacks, the NatWest Tower with a square of vivid dark scarlet on its tip, Canary Wharf all in silver, thin cloud and steam curling off its top where its little red light flashes to warn away the planes. St Pancras, a gothic spike with a light blue arch stretching out into a sidewinder’s paradise of silver railway snakes; the three towers of the Barbican, the lit-up column of the BT Tower, the spread-out rooftops of Soho and Great Portland Street; the sideways-on slab of Centre Point, where not so long ago good people and bad people and the majority halfway in between had died in a fight on the topmost floor. That had been the night that the Tower fell, that Bakker fell, that Dana Mikeda. .
. . dead Dana Mikeda who’d died too fast for me to say sorry. .
. . that had been Centre Point. We turned our eyes from it.
The stop-start artery of Euston Road, carrying flicker-flash headlights from east and west; the slow slope of the North Downs along the edge of sight, a line of darker darkness against the sky where the streetlamps ended and real night, solid, frightening night that crushed imagination down to a pinpoint of darkness and left no space for stretched-out shadows on the street, marked the beginning of the end of the city.
Sunrise was a point of pale greyness at the eastern edge of the darkness, starting over the mouth of the Thames and spreading inwards towards the city. It wasn’t a line of light, more the casting of a shadowy haze over the thickness of the gloom, the sun’s upper edge nothing more than a tiny shimmer of distorted whiteness lost in the haze of the early morning clouds. No one part of the city lightened more than another, but by even degrees, black streets became fragmented, revealed themselves to be thick greynesses pierced by other roads, or changes in buildings, or unevenness in style, and then greyness became sullen blue that picked out the difference between a satellite dish and an air-conditioning vent, pointed out the rooftop apparatus of the buildings in the centre of town, raised up chimneys and revealed roof tiles facing the sky. Then came texture on the tiles; and the brightness of the streetlamps began to diminish, became merely the reflection of starlight on water, rather than the stars themselves, then vanished as the lamps began to flicker and whir out, a few bulbs at a time.
With each turn of my head to scan the city, more streets were in darkness and light all at once, the night-time lamps being replaced by the cold washing pallor of the day, that brightened further now in the east, spread blueness up towards the sky, filling in between the grey puffs of the retreating night clouds, and hinted, maybe hinted, at a bright white-silver sunlight on the horizon that came in sideways at the streets, burst out from behind the haze a dozen times only to fade away coldly, as if embarrassed by its own attempts, before finally making that great bold leap and declaring to every eye that dared to look, GET UP YOU LAZY BASTARDS! and pulling great thin shadows from end to end of every street.
This being winter, and this being London, by the time the sun was properly up, the shops were already open and doing busy trade.
I went to get Nair’s sim card unlocked.
Tottenham Court Road was a strip of overpriced not-quite-illegality slammed into the heaving retail heart of London. The offices of Euston Road lay to the north, the great sprawl of University College and its teaching hospital dominated every grand building to the east, the restaurant-crammed backstreets of Fitzrovia ran behind squares and reconstructed Georgian terraces to the west, and to the south was Oxford Street, shopping hub of the city. And like all good shopping hubs, both it and Tottenham Court Road had learnt two important commercial lessons:
1. Looks aren’t everything, location is.
2. If someone wants it, sell it.
What people wanted who went to Tottenham Court Road was electronics and electronic junk, with a side order of bedsteads and coffee.
As a result, computer shops selling the latest ultra-shiny, zappyzoomy model for a mere grand or a contract on your granny’s soul were crammed into a mixture of ancient buildings and concrete slabs, wedged together with the all the tact of rush-hour commuters piling onto the last train before a strike began. Speakers next to hi-fi next to games next to stereos next to furniture next to TVs next to mobile phones next to futons next to DVDs: this was the order of the street, competing for the know-it-all market that came for its slightly seedy but within-the-law shopping experience.
Almost within the law.
Go a few streets back from Tottenham Court Road, and the haziness of just what the law meant led to the other kind of electronics shop. The kind where you didn’t buy an ink cartridge for your printer at £25 a throw, you bought an ink bottle and a very strong hypodermic needle for £5, and let’s not ask too many questions about the patent. Where the windows were full of hard drives on special offer, wiped clean, one careful owner. Where, if you knew the right place to go and didn’t mind paying cash, a sim card from a stranger’s phone might be reactivated into a new handset, and all its secrets revealed.
Not quite illegal.
Not quite.
The legal system has always been a little behind the times.
The shop I chose was run by two men, one with no hair and the other with so much he’d stuck it in a woven balloon, carrying the colours of the Ethiopian flag and large enough to refashion as a decent-sized skirt. I gave him Nair’s sim card and told him what I wanted.
He didn’t ask questions, I didn’t ask questions.
“Yeah, man, yeah, come back in like, twenty-four hours. Fifty quid, yeah, and twenty for the set?”
“A hundred and twenty and I’ll come back in two hours.”
*
Around Tottenham Court Road there are a thousand different places waiting to be waited in, at no great cost. The University of London Union offered services including free toilets, if you knew where to look, a gym if you felt in a guilty mood and hadn’t found religion, a variety of pubs, and above all, cafés where no one would bother a guy who looked lived in and where the feeble coffee came in at an OK price. I found a gloomy corner behind a bank of snooker tables, and curled up to go to sleep.
It wasn’t proper sleep; but the time passed faster than the crawl of normal senses, and my thoughts ran the hip-hop patterns of a brain that has switched off all higher functions, and sees without being able to look.
Then a woman said, “Mind?”
I was awake without any consciousness of having been asleep; but she had come out of nowhere and her voice was nothing but drifting sound on the air. A finger, bright pink skin underneath, dark chocolate on top, stabbed out towards an empty sandwich wrapper someone had left on an armchair next to me. She said again, “Mind if I. .?”
“Sure,” I mumbled, a default response to polite confusion.
The woman picked up the sandwich wrapper by one careful corner, and dumped it in a bright blue rubbish bag. She was a cleaner. She wore dull grey overalls and had parked a cart nearby, laden with plastic bottles and brushes. Her black hair was done in plaits wound so tightly to the curve of her skull that the fuzzy hair in between each row looked like it was rising to a carved ridge. Her eyes were two perfect brown ovals set in a face that was itself almost a perfect oval, except for the wide protrusion of her nose.
There was something about her — a quality that I couldn’t quite seize upon.
I said, “Hello.”
She glanced over to me, surprised, maybe even a little amused, by this hung-over mature student passed out behind the snooker tables. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no problem,” I said. “Thank you.”
“What?”
“For the. .” I gestured meekly at the blue bin bag, and the chair where the sandwich wrapper had sat.
She shrugged. “It’s just a job.” For a moment, she smiled. It was the weakest little smile I had ever seen, a twitch around a child’s lips after it’s fallen and hurt its knee, but is trying to be brave. We stared in wonder and opened our mouth to say something; but she was already gone, pootling round the room picking up old fallen beer bottles and tossed-aside Coke tins.
And that was it: moment passed. To get up and follow her would have turned us from two polite strangers to a stalker and his prey. I stayed where I was, watching her until she went out of sight.
There was something. . important. .
that I just couldn’t figure.
Maybe later.
A hundred and twenty pounds bought me a flowery handset designed for ladies who liked shopping and which we nearly rejected out of hand, with Nair’s sim card lodged in its plastic depths.
“It works?” I asked.
“Hey, yeah man, like, sure.”
I handed over the cash. My wallet was getting light. If there had been any perks of my relationship with Mr Sinclair, it had been a post office box in Mount Pleasant full of ten-pound notes that I reluctantly dipped into when the desire for a soft bed became too strong.
I left the shop before testing the phone, and found a patch of wall in an alley, with a small play area facing it and an angry declaration of:
ODDAWAJCIE MI MOJ KAPELUSZ
written in three-foot-high white letters. Polish: a relatively new language come to the city.
The phone took for ever to power up. The first thing it did on settling down was send me a text message welcoming me to my new network and inviting me to enjoy many of the wonderful benefits I hadn’t yet signed up to. I deleted this and went thumbing through the details of Nair’s sim card. There wasn’t much. No one had sent him a text message, and he had sent only one, to another mobile phone, a couple of nights ago.
I read it with a sinking heart. It said:
Find Swift.
That was all. Nair was clearly not a man of many words, but when he picked them, he really did.
His phone book was a little more busy. I recognised some of the names: Earle, who had received the one text message ever sent from this phone; Kemsley; Anissina. There were others, which I saw with sinking heart. Sinclair; a few Whites, including Vera; and — of course — Bakker.
Robert James Bakker.
I guessed Nair hadn’t bothered to delete the names of the dead from his phone. I told myself I shouldn’t be surprised, that only a few months ago in London, if you didn’t have dealings with Bakker, you didn’t deal in magic at all. We felt sick.
One other number caught my interest. It was simply “Black Cab”, and a standard 0800 dialling code. I looked at it long and hard. Lots of people had numbers for cab companies on their phones, for that decadent day when, out late, a little tipsy and too far from the bus or Tube, their will, and then their wallets, would break and they’d splurge on a private cab home. But though the black cab was the most common taxi in London, this wasn’t just a cab number. This was Black Cab.
I filed this thought away at the back of my mind under “S” for “Stuff”, to worry about another day.
Then I checked Nair’s call record. There was only one incoming, from Earle, a few nights ago, which didn’t tell me anything I couldn’t have guessed. There was also only one outgoing. It was registered at 2.25 a.m., the night that the phone had rung, and I’d answered.
I called the number, my heart a lump of muscle weighing down my chest.
An old-fashioned ring at the end of the dialling signal, as if a bell actually was being hit with a hammer, rather than a sound effect. Maybe just a very good sound effect. Tingalingalingalingalinga. .
Then a voice answered, with a very, very careful “Yeah?”
I said, “I want to get my car washed.”
“Sure, we can do that. Just bring it up here any time.”
“How much do you charge?”
“£7 for a standard wash, £15 for a full clean, insides, out, with varnish. That takes about twenty-five minutes.”
“And I can just bring it along any time?”
“Sure. We’re open eight till ten.”
“And where are you, exactly?”
“Willesden — near Dudden Hill Lane?”
“Yes,” I sighed, “I know Dudden Hill Lane. Thanks. I’ll find you.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. I’ve been there before.”
“OK, cheers.”
“Bye.”
“Bye!”
I hung up.
Well. .
shit.
Time passed.
A lot of time.
People walked by and I stayed still.
I think I might have laughed a bit, and then stopped laughing, and then laughed again.
We wanted to cry.
Well. .
shit.
runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun
Just stop it.
runrunrunrunrunrun
Stop it. I’m smarter than this. We’re more than this. Just stop it.
runrunrunrun
Better?
Thank you.
What next?
Answers. I didn’t really care who gave them.
I found a public phone, hit it until it obeyed, and dialled the number on Nair’s phone labelled “Earle”.
It was an 0207 landline number, somewhere in the middle of the city. I didn’t want to use the mobile, just in case the Aldermen were the kind of magicians who understood that technology and magic really, really wanted to be friends.
The phone was answered almost instantly, but not by Mr Earle. A nervous, young male voice that stammered on every hard consonant and stuttered on the rest said: “H-Harlun and Phelps, how may I help you?”
I said, “I’m looking for Mr Earle.”
“I’m sorry, M-Mister Earle isn’t here right now, c-can I take a message?”
“I guess so. Tell Mr Earle that Mr Swift called. Tell him — and you need to get this right — tell him I think I know who the new Midnight Mayor is. Tell him I’ve seen the face of the man who killed Nair. Tell him he has no smell. You got all that?”
“Th-th-that you’re Mr Swift calling for Mr Earle, you know who the Mayor is, you know who k-k-killed N-Nair and he has no smell. Is that Nair who has n-n-no smell or Mr Earle?”
“Neither,” I replied, and hung up.
I had an idea, and it was so bad, in so many ways, who the new Midnight Mayor was.
You can’t kill an idea, a title. Not that easily. Nair might have died, skin torn to a thousand kinds of clinging shreds by ten thousand paper cuts, but the Midnight Mayor, the legend and the story, the protector of the city, doesn’t die like that. Doesn’t die at all, while there’s a city left to protect. Just the man dies — just Nair. The title moved on somewhere else, and where there’s an idea, there’s always power lagging along behind, even if it doesn’t like to brag about it.
My hand hurt. My head hurt too, but not with the same hot sharpness of my hand. It cut away all other sense, burnt beneath the bandages for attention.
I thought: make me a shadow on the wall. Let me be secret, safe. Let it be just a bad idea.
We mustered our strength, and went towards Lincoln’s Inn.
Lawyers.
Hundreds and hundreds of lawyers.
I approached Lincoln’s Inn from the south, through a tight grey alley wedged between a barber’s shop and a shop selling barristers’ wigs and judges’ robes. I hugged close to the walls and the gloom, sheltering from the brightness of the winter sun, and watched the people around me.
Quite how the legal profession merited offices and apartments inside one of London’s most desirable pieces of land was beyond me. Great courtyards of grand old houses, and modern replicas of the same, with high chimney stacks and thick oak doors, gazed out onto deep, lush flower beds and grass mown into spacious, do-not-walk-here rectangles. Cobbles ran beneath tall, many-paned windows behind which were bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes, oil paintings of long-dead judges, desks exploding with papers and of course, hard at work or in a sombre-faced meeting, lawyers.
At the lodge gate, uniformed wardens monitored all traffic; beneath an arching fountain, gardeners in rugged shoes planted spring bulbs; inside the great red Gothic belly of the central hall, a lunchtime concert was under way; besides the remains of a medieval church, all pillars and dark echoing staircases worn smooth by centuries of shoes, the tourist guides explained the myths and wonders of this ancient place to awe-struck onlookers. Weaving busily between it all were, of course, more lawyers.
They dressed nearly the same; the women, all young, in tight suits that forced them to walk from the knees, not the hips, and strutting on sensible heels — not too gaudy, but high enough to give them the same stature as the men. The men, mostly young or middle-aged, dressed in matching dark suits, with only the pinkness of their shirts or the stripiness of their ties marking out one individual from another. The youngest wheeled great trolleys stacked with boxes stuffed with paper; the oldest strode along in big coats worn over a watch chain, and drove cars ten years too young for them. Outsiders were mostly the occasional student taking a cut-through to the library, all baggy trousers and bad hair, or a TV scout for the latest docu-drama surveying the Inns of Court in search of “authentic” historical London.
The air smelt of mown grass, and time. Time with a paper-thin edge. There were ghosts playing in Lincoln’s Inn, trailing their fingers along the edges of the old stones, sticking their noses into the shrapnel holes from a fallen bomb, climbing trees taller than the spire of the church or peaked roof of the hall, just waiting for the sun to go down.
Name plaques on the doors announced the occasional private residence among what were almost entirely lawyers’ chambers: here and there Lord and Lady So-And-So, or Major-General X, who lived three doors down from Sir Somethingorother and the charming Dame Thingamajig. You didn’t buy a property in Lincoln’s Inn; money wasn’t the point. Time and tradition were the names of the game. And on that count, it made perfect sense that the Midnight Mayor had found his niche within these walls.
Bright winter sunshine makes most places beautiful. The Inn looked like English good manners made out of ancient brick and weathered stone, all golden reflections, and thin shade lost in the glare. Lurking in the shadows, I had to remind myself that, chances were, there might be nasties hiding behind the windows, and not just the legal kind.
I pulled my coat tighter around my shoulders. Any good private detective out of any good American thriller will tell you that an old, plain anorak is a city’s camouflage paint. Any good sorcerer will tell you that they’re not just right, they’re two incantations short of invisibility.
I stepped out into the sunlight, and strode towards the door of 137A New Court with the brisk pace of an Important Person with an Important Place to Be, and who, as such, shouldn’t be noticed because frankly, it’s none of your business. There was no police tape, no policeman. By the entrance to the staircase I’d been looking for, a white wooden board, lettered in black, listed everyone who worked or lived there. I climbed two flights of echoing stairs, clinging with my bandaged hand to a black iron banister, feeling its coldness even through the layers of wool and cotton and blood. On the top floor the staircase led to a door bearing the number 137A in brass; on the wall beside it, a plaque repeated the fact that here lived A. Nair Esq. I looked back down the stairwell, saw no one following; I also saw no place to hide. Fumbling in my satchel for a ring of blank keys, I found one best suited to fit the lock, slid it in and caressed it, murmuring to it until the metal of the key hissed into the shape of the barrel; turned; opened the door.
A moose was staring at me.
What kind of man sticks the antlered stuffed head of a moose to the wall by his front door? Was it supposed to be a coat rack? Perhaps a psychiatrist could derive some meaning from this.
A small burglar alarm started to beep a warning. I walked briskly over to it, flicked back the plastic panel over the keypad, and slammed my fist, crackling with stolen electricity, into the grid of numbers. The alarm spat black smoke and died.
I looked round the apartment.
It surprised me how much personality had been imposed on such a cream-washed place. The moose was not the only creature to have made its rendezvous with destiny on these walls. Keeping it company was a polar bear, mouth open to roar; also a couple of stags, a reindeer with wide glass eyes, a falcon ready to fly. And of course, at the far end, a fox. I looked at this creature a long while. Its fur was clean, dark orange, with a white band running below its jaw. Its head seemed tiny compared to the great antlers and outstretched wings of its neighbours, and its jaw was locked tight, as if holding in that last breath that would have allowed it to die. We couldn’t look away, and felt. . sad. As I left the hall, the fox’s empty stare watched our back.
The kitchen was all terracotta tile, stainless steel and fresh herbs. The bedroom was 90 per cent book to 10 per cent bed, the texts were serious tomes, on law, history, geography, London. The bathroom was white plaster and stone, not a mark nor shaven hair to show for any inhabitant. Even the toothbrush looked new, and a great oval mirror bore not a spatter of toothpaste.
There wasn’t a TV in the living room; just more books and a computer, the screen smashed, the base scorched black. The glass had fallen outwards, away from the screen in a circle on the floor, as if it had been smashed from the inside.
End of the line.
On the walls were portraits, in outsize carved and gilded frames: dead grandees with a hand absently held out to touch the globe; plumed great ladies, seated against vast gardens; dour-faced dowagers below a portrait of their husband in full-dress uniform. The ugliest object was a figure representing one of the dragons of the Corporation of London — a squat, terrier-sized beast in dull silver, with a red forked tongue curling out of its fanged mouth, that sat up holding in its claws the white shield and twin red crosses of the city. Seen close, the wildness of the eyes and smallness of the wings gave the dragon a comical, circus-act look. It proved to be hollow plastic, which echoed faintly when struck.
This little monster sat by a great brute of a desk, all dark mahogany and green leather trimmings, that smelt almost overwhelmingly of thin polish and thick, reflective varnish. Behind the desk lurked a leather chair, built to dwarf any man who sat in it. Only one of the desk drawers was locked. I stroked it carefully, breathing gentle words into the barrel of the lock and twisting until it snapped open.
There were files inside, proper paper files in manila folders, embossed with the dragons and the shield of the Corporation of London. I flicked through them, and was disappointed by how mundane the majority were. Reports on exhaust emissions within the central, inner and greater areas of London. Details of the maintenance on the Thames Barrier; reports on roadworks near Waterloo Bridge, notes on the progress of the water mains replacement project. I went through them all with increasing frustration; we wanted to find something magical, something definitive, something that linked, once and for all, Nair to the Midnight Mayor and if necessary, the Midnight Mayor to us.
When I found it, I nearly went straight past it in my haste and irritation, and had to flick back to make sure I’d seen it right. Inside a folder just like any other, buried halfway down the pile, was my life on paper.
I pulled it out, spread it across the desk and looked with rising disbelief at the thick, chalky sheets before me. Every detail of my existence — my mum, my gran, who liked to talk to the pigeons; my childhood, my first encounters with urban magic, my teacher Mr Bakker, my apprenticeship, my years as a not very interesting sorcerer, my time spent travelling, my death, our resurrection — everything was there, from former lovers to the average size of my annual gas bill. Lists of friends I hadn’t seen for years, who I hadn’t dare see, to whom I hadn’t known how to explain anything, whom I hadn’t dared put in danger; of extended family I’d never really spoken to, of ex-girlfriends who’d attended my funeral, with their new husband and brand new babies left at home for the sake of good manners. .
Pictures! Where had they got so many pictures? Mum up to her elbows in rubber gloves and dodgy plumbing; Gran waddling down the street in her slippers, the rats all watching her from the grid above the drains, the pigeons from the gutters on the roofs. School photos from back when my eyes were brown, not blue, and I was just starting to grow adult teeth; CCTV shots; the place where I’d died, all blood and torn clothes and of course, most important, no body, just bloody fingerprints on the dangling receiver of the public telephone. A photo of when we came back, wearing someone else’s clothes too big for us, sitting alone on a bench in the middle of the night, then up to our armpits in the internal organs of a litterbug sent to find us, which we had destroyed. We were looking straight at the camera but I swear, we knew, we had not had our photo taken that night, there had been no one there to do it!
On the very last page was a neat typewritten page of A4. It said:
It is our final opinion that the fusion of the sorcerer Swift and the entities commonly known as the blue electric angels during their shared time in the telephone wires, has resulted in the creation of a highly unstable entity in the waking world. The Swift-angel creature, while appearing almost entirely human, is at its core a combination of a traumatised dead sorcerer and infantile living fire, neither of which is fully equipped to handle living as two separate entities, let alone one fused mind.
While we should perhaps be grateful that, to this date, the Swift-angel creature has not caused any more damage to the city, we should not assume that this happy state will last long. The Order claim to be capable of dispatching the Swift-angel fusion, but it would be wise to make our own preparations for the inevitable conflict the existence of such a creature in our city will cause.
Right at the bottom of the page, a neat, small hand had added: Swift has the shoes.
There wasn’t any explanation.
I looked down at my shoes.
Not my shoes.
The shoes I wore, sure. The shoes I had been wearing, yes. But they weren’t my shoes; I hadn’t gone out and bought them. I’d taken them from someone else’s house, put them on with a very precise purpose and gone for a walk.
Swift has the shoes.
I put the file back in the desk. We spun a few spins of the huge chair, feeling its greased bearings slide smoothly over each other. We rocked back and looked at the ceiling; we leant forward and looked at the floor. I put my shoes up on the leather-topped desk and examined them. Red and black, with a hint of gold stripe. Tasteless, flashy, expensive. They puffed every time I walked on them, little pockets of air being sucked in through tiny bellows to give that extra-springy experience. If they’d been two sizes smaller, I might have appreciated what they were about. They made my feet sweat in the two pairs of socks I had to wear. We spun a few more spins. I flexed the fingers of my right hand. Flesh gaped open, then closed, in my palm. Electrocution didn’t do that for a guy. It took something more. Supposition took fact’s bloody hand for the dance, and cha-chaed round the room. The plastic dragon rolled its tongue rudely at some invisible playground rival.
I spun a few more spins.
Why shoes?
Not my shoes. Just the shoes I was wearing.
I stood up and let them carry me a few idle paces round the room. Then a few paces more. They seemed as uncertain about what to do next as we were. On my second circuit beneath the stony-faced portraits of dead white men, I met the eyes of the little plastic dragon again.
I sat down on the edge of the desk. There was a portrait behind the mad-eyed dragon, all white whisker and tight waistcoat. A man in his late sixties, staring out disdainfully at all onlookers, a window behind him implausibly overlooking the Tower of London. One arm held some sort of yappy dog, whose misproportioned features suggested an animal incapable of holding still, especially for an artist. The other rested on the window sill, palm turned upwards, fingers pointing out to the city behind. I looked closer. I leant right in until my nose almost touched the rough canvas. There was a mark on the man’s hand. It was thin, almost lost in the gloomy shadows of the portrait, a tiny stroke of red across the wrinkled gloom of his flesh. It looked like someone had taken a scalpel and carefully carved a shallow red cross into his skin — no, two shallow red crosses. One was smaller than the other, nestling in the top left-hand corner that the first cross made. The cut looked fresh, no pale scar tissue, but neither was there a bandage and I couldn’t imagine the whiskered old man being in a hurry to make a big deal of his injuries. I looked back at the plastic dragon with the mad eyes, at the shield it held in its grip. A white shield with two red crosses on it, one smaller than the other, a sword more than a cross, painted into the upper left-hand corner of its big brother.
I sat cross-legged on Nair’s desk and went through the inevitable. I pulled the black mitten off my right hand and bit and tugged at the knot of the bandage until it came free. I unwound the white cotton, feeling fibres sticking and breaking against the bloody mess of my skin, and with almost no surprise and a good deal of regret, looked at the palm of my hand.
Two red crosses, one smaller than the other, had been carved very carefully by a Catholic graffiti artist into my skin.
I changed the bandage, set fire to the older, bloodier rags, and threw the ashes into the nearest bin. I pulled my glove back over my fist, threw cold water over my face and walked from Nair’s apartment as casually and calmly as if I was a gasman, come to take the reading.
We walked. Where didn’t concern us, and why didn’t even feature. We walked because we could walk. We walked through Lincoln’s Inn and down towards Middle Temple, through grand courtyards and tucked-away alleys, until we came to the Embankment. We walked along by the river, smelling it, watching the high tide rub against the old black stones, west until we came to Cleopatra’s Needle. The smell of greasy hot dog in a paper bag stopped us. We bought one with extra ketchup and, goo dribbling down our chin, kept on walking. We climbed the steps onto Hungerford Bridge, crossed it, trains rumbling noisily alongside, the river churning peacefully below. I stood in the middle of the bridge and turned my face towards the east and breathed in the smell of water, salt, seagulls and tourist boats. At the end of the bridge sat a beggar, huddled over in the cold, wrapped in jumper and duvet both turned the colour of the thin London dirt that billowed in dry winds. I gave him a couple of quid and got a dirty look from a couple waiting for the lift down to the street. We ignored them and trotted down the stairs to the flat square stones of the South Bank.
It was already past lunchtime, but the restaurants beneath the Royal Festival Hall, all shining glass disguising uninspired interior, were heaving. Jugglers competed with ice cream vans parked opposite the skaters who spun and twisted in the uneven concrete ups and downs around the pillars of the Hayward Gallery and National Theatre. I watched them for a while. Kids, average age maybe sixteen. Hoods and thick gloves against the cold, baggy jeans, greens and blues and blacks and dark reds, sports logos and battered old wooden skateboards with the edges splintered off. There wasn’t much room for impressive stunts — a few stairs, a few slopes, a few drains — but that didn’t stop them from throwing themselves at everything that got in their way, people included, while whooping at some achievement only they who knew the secrets of skateboarding could appreciate. Behind them, the walls were so thick with graffiti that the council had given up, determining that this was art, not vandalism. Great splashes of colour thrown over each other again and again until the shadowed depths of the place looked like a psychedelic grammar lesson — words spelt to a careful level of comprehension, so only those in the know would understand — bubble letters of silver, their meaning lost to the detail of their drawing, and here or there, smaller notes along the usual lines of “B IS COUL” or “7JS B 4EVER” and other mystic warnings.
The wall being taken, some graffiti artists had moved on to the pillars, spinning paint round the concrete columns to make snakes, or poisoned twisted ivy, or biting barbed wire, or even, in one case, to say from the ceiling down to the floor in bold white letters:
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
I looked at this a long while, wondering. It seemed like a strange sentiment to go spraying up on any piece of concrete, let alone a pillar beneath Waterloo Bridge.
We kept on walking. Books for sale at stalls under the bridge; outside the theatre, modern art, or twisted bits of concrete depending on your point of view; one busker on the Jamaican drums outside a TV studio, others playing Beethoven outside Gabriel’s Wharf. Oxo Tower, all orange brick and iron banister; grotty concrete flats in the city’s best location, glass fronts looking into open offices where meetings were being held to talk about magazines, covers, content, pictures and staff. Blackfriars Bridges — all three of them, if you counted the row of stubby pillars in the middle of the river, across which no road ran. Tate Modern (more art/twisted concrete), Globe Theatre, restaurants, Southwark Bridge, offices, black reflective glass over a broad stretch of water between bridges, looking out towards a building site and Cannon Street, a forgotten station; the rattling of trains overhead, the rumbling of buses crossing Southwark Bridge. Pubs, restaurants, cafés, cobbled streets, hotels, men holding beer and women chatting in silly shoes; buskers again, jugglers, fire eaters, ranters with their loudspeakers worrying that you haven’t met God yet and now is the time, the smell of curry powder, the smell of chips. Little lost newsagents selling everything you’d expect, at double the price; the Golden Hinde, an extra “e”’ added on for historical authenticity, a ship built for short people next to a shop selling almost nothing but pirate hats and plastic swords; Southwark Cathedral, where in summer all the shoppers at Borough Market sat outside to eat smoked salmon and heart-stopping chocolate cake.
London Bridge.
A grotty bridge, if all truth be told, grizzled concrete and fierce traffic. By night, it was beautiful, lights directed along its length in the colours of the rainbow. From its pavements you could see all the things a tourist might want to see. To the west, the London Eye, Charing Cross station, the BT Tower and Centre Point. To the east, Tower Bridge, the Tower, Butler’s Wharf, HMS Belfast and City Hall, which would always and for ever be known by Londoners after its inaugural mayor as Ken’s Bollock.
We stood on London Bridge and faced the wind and let it wash the pain out of our bones. Here, we felt safe.
I looked towards the Tower of London, and thought without words. Wind and walking were all I needed.
A voice said, “Midnight Mayor.”
My voice.
I tried it again, a few more times, rolled it over for size. “Midnight Mayor.”
Repetition didn’t make it seem any more a good thing, so I shut up.
I kept on walking.
Full circle.
I hadn’t known I was going there, but when I arrived, I knew with absolute certainty that it was the right idea.
The Museum of London sat at the southern extremity of the Barbican. Its white tiles and grey, rounded walls gave it the superficial appearance of a boil-in-the-bag toilet that had got too big for its own plumbing and burst up from street level in a grimy eruption of clay tiling and half-swept dust. Strangers to the city always had a hard time finding it, since the main entrance wasn’t at street level at all, but a storey above it in that network of ramps and walkways that made up the space-time vortex that was the Barbican Centre. Even if you found, at street level, any sign to mark its presence, the idea seemed too absurd that a city council might casually dump a museum beside a roundabout so overshadowed by buildings that to people who worked there, sunlight had become nothing more than a wistful fantasy.
That was good; that meant the inside was peaceful, without the nattering of children to disturb us. Those who had made it inside either knew its secrets already, and were there to wonder and appreciate anew, or were so surprised to discover this well of knowledge that even the most easily bored were silent with respect.
I wandered through the history of London, not paying much attention. I’d been here before, and what I was looking for was very specific.
I found it, sitting on a little stool beside a large display, lit up in shimmering orange and red, of the Great Fire of London. It was snoring, very quietly, very professionally; the snoring that could be dismissed as “heavy breath” at a moment’s notice. I poked it with my toe and said, “Excuse me?”
The snoring stopped. Set within a squashed red face, a pair of almost spherical eyes opened, drifted up to the ceiling and round the walls, and settled on me.
“Uh?” The sound was pumped out by a pair of lungs inside a great bulbous chest inside a security guard’s black uniform.
“You work here?” I asked.
“Sure, yeah, sure. . What?” The security guard resettled himself on his stool. It looked designed to be as hard to sleep on as possible, but he’d pulled it off. “Jesus!” he muttered, as consciousness caught up with the rest of him. “Can I help you?”
I beamed.
“You lost?” he asked.
“No, don’t think so.”
“You sure?”
“Not unless we’re going metaphysical.”
“Jesus!” he added, as the rest of consciousness slammed into the forefront of his brain like a TGV without the brakes. “Right, yeah, fuck, Jesus! I mean. .”
“I’m sure you didn’t mean it to come out like that,” I said.
“Sorry. I’ve got this medical thing. .”
“I can tell.”
“I’m fine now.”
“Sure. I need to have a nose round your archives.”
“Uh, right, yeah, sure. You’ll be wanting to go talk to the lady at reception, she can get you an appointment. .”
“Not those archives. I’m looking for some information, the kind you don’t find in many libraries, or even on the internet.”
His eyes narrowed. “What kind of information?”
“I’m trying to find out a few things about a guy called the Midnight Mayor.”
“Oh,” he groaned, stretching his short arms, whose hands ended in red, clubbed fingertips. “Not the Lord Mayor?”
“No. The Midnight Mayor. The museum seemed like a sensible place to start.”
“Safer to ask about the Lord Mayor. We’ve got his coach somewhere, very swish, very shiny.”
“The Midnight Mayor. I’m absolutely certain.”
His face saddened. “Well, if you’re sure. .”
“I am.”
“. . just remember that I warned you, OK? Health and safety and stuff.”
“Sure.”
He stood up. “You’d better come with me.”
His name was Frank. He had a hard accent coming out of a chubby mouth and said he was from Lambeth. He also said he didn’t like trouble.
“Smart to ask the security guy,” he added, as we rambled through the quiet, dark halls of the museum. “Twenty years in this place, you pick up a few things, and don’t get so fussed as the historians. They give keys to the security guards that they’d never give to the archaeologists. Can’t trust these academic types not to lose them somewhere.”
“I know. That’s why I asked.”
“Oh,” he sighed, jangling his keys absently as we picked our way through a line of panels showing the Blitzed-out ruins of the city. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“One of what?”
“The guys in the know. No one asks about the Midnight Mayor who isn’t already in too deep for the lifejacket to do any good. What are you? Magician, warlock, petty wizard with a thing for the big time?”
“None of those,” I answered, as he unlocked a door behind a display dedicated to the Docklands Redevelopment and led me from the gloom of the museum halls into a white, neon-lit corridor. “But you’re in the right sort of area.”
His shoes snapped loudly on the concrete floor. Mine puffed and wheezed. He spun the keys round and round, jangling on their chain, and grunted at each door he opened. “‘Course,” he went on, “none of my business. I just look after the museum, see? I don’t dabble.”
Another door, heavy, black and metal; a room of dead paper and cold dry air. He shooed me in and closed the door behind us. The room had no windows, just vents and dull strip lighting that failed to illuminate between the long stacks of shelves dividing up the floor.
“Smart not to ask too many questions,” he announced, marching down the rows of files. “You never know who’ll come knocking. I just point them in the right direction, see? That’s all that I can do — just the doorman, just keep an eye out.”
Another door at the end of the room. Two locks, and a keypad on the side. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Thing is,” he sighed, as the locks turned and the door opened, “you’re the second guy this week to come asking about the Midnight Mayor.”
I stopped dead above a flight of metal stairs headed into darkness. “Who else?” I asked. “Who else came looking?”
“Hey — none of my business, remember?”
“Please. I want to know.”
“Knowing’s nothing unless you’ve got the qualification on your CV,” he sighed. “I know the whole fucking history of London but can I get a decent job? Fuck it.”
“A man in a suit,” we blurted. “Was it a man in a pinstripe suit? Thin dark hair, slicked back, dark suit, light shirt, shiny shoes? There’d be. . he wouldn’t have smelt of anything. No smell.”
He waved down the dark staircase. “Hey, I didn’t say anything, OK? You want to know about the Midnight Mayor, it’s your own damn business. I don’t dabble, see? It’s the best way to get by, because otherwise, if you’re just a guy, you know, just doing your thing, that sorta thing would send you crazy.”
I looked at the stairs descending into blackness. “The answers are down there?”
“You wanna know about the Midnight Mayor?”
“Yes.”
“You gotta get in deeper. Sign these.”
He handed me a couple of sheets of paper on a clipboard. I read them over in the gloomy light. “What’s this?” I asked, as their meaning utterly failed to sink in.
“Legal waivers.”
“What?”
“You want to find out about the Midnight Mayor, and you do it on museum premises, then I need your written consent not to hold the museum liable for any damage that may happen to you.”
“‘Damage’?”
“Not my business. You gonna sign? Can’t give you answers unless you sign.”
“Does it have to be in blood?” we asked, curious.
“What? No, Jesus! You’ve got one fucking twisted head on your shoulders.” He handed me a biro. I read, and signed. He snatched pen and paper back from me and gestured down the dark stairs. “Great knowing you, good luck in your research, give me a mention in the credits, right? Byeeeee!”
“What about. .” we began.
He slammed the door.
We stood on a staircase painted black in a black corridor leading down to unending blackness, with any light switches that might have illuminated the blackness probably having been painted black.
We swore.
I let out a long patient breath, pressed the palms of my hands together, as much to calm myself as anything else, then opened them up. Light, the shimmering pinkish-sodium glow of the streets, rippled between my fingers. I let it fold out of my skin, taking warmth with it, pressed it into a bubble and threw it up above my head. Our shadow stretched down to a black door at the end of the black staircase. We walked down carefully, trailing our fingers along the cold walls. I could taste something on the air, old and slippery. It smelt of fishmonger, of thin fog and old forgotten things. It set my stomach turning, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, made my little sodium glow twist and shimmer above me in shared unease. I reached the door at the bottom of the stair, and pushed it open. Not locked. Beyond it was a room. In the middle of the room was a cauldron, placed squarely beneath a single overhanging, metal-shaded lamp.
I said, “You are taking the mick.”
I was talking to the cauldron; but the voice that answered me came from a woman.
She was in her mid-to late thirties, had a haircut that reduced her blonde hair to straight shoulder-length discipline, and wore sensible leather pumps and a neat woollen jumper. She came out of the endless shadows so suddenly that despite her smiling, friendly face I started away from her. Putting her hand, with its short, tidy nails, around my shoulder, she said, “Cup of tea?”
I looked at the contents of the black iron cauldron. A dozen sad, drained tea bags were floating on the surface. I said, “Oh, you have got to be taking the piss!”
“You disrespectin’ us?” demanded another voice. I looked up and saw another woman’s face, younger, not out of her teens, hair dyed black and bright purple, face drilled with metal rings, in her ears, her lips, her cheeks, her tongue, her eyebrows, her nose.
“Erm. .” I mumbled.
“Biscuit?” A third voice, a third woman. This one had steel-silver hair, a cream blouse with gold buttons done all the way up to her drooping chin, a dark blue tartanesque suit and an expression of mild reproach. She held a small plate of assorted biscuits, neatly arranged.
“Um. . thank you.” We never say no to free food.
“You can dunk, you know,” added the old woman, and to prove her point, selected a digestive from her plate, and dipped it in the bubbling black cauldron.
“You know, this isn’t how I imagined the Museum’s archives department. .”
“Huh!” grunted the young woman.
“Oh, dear,” sighed the middle-aged woman.
The old woman looked at me like I was a persistent fly circling closer to the sticky paper.
“. . but I mean I’d heard stories, wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t heard stories. .”
“Of course you have.”
“. . and I suppose in a way, it makes sense. .”
“Well, duh.”
“Maybe we can help, dear.”
“Another biscuit?”
I looked at them. Three ladies in a room beneath a museum, with a cauldron full of tea. There are certain things that never change. Call them Fates, Muses, Furies, Prophets, Seers or just three twisted biddies with a caffeine fixation, the magic of three women and a cauldron will never fade, even when the cauldron is full of PG Tips.
So I bowed, opening my arms wide in a gesture of peace, and said, “Ladies.”
The young one said, “Fucker!” It would have been nice to call her the Maid. I doubted I could.
The middle-aged one said, “So nice to meet a polite young man!” It would have been appropriate to call her the Mother, but I wasn’t sure how she’d take it.
“Society is on the down!” concluded the old woman. We wanted to call her the Hag, and were smart enough to steer clear of the idea.
But whatever we called them, we could recognise them for what they were. Three women with a cauldron — that meant power, ancient and old power, and old power meant old traditions, and that meant rules, and rules usually meant risk, since 90 per cent of the time rules are invented to stop something, that could be bad, from being even worse.
Then the Maid said, “He’s a fucking sorcerer. Jeezus.”
Then the Mother, patting me nicely on the shoulder, said, “They’re the blue electric angels.”
Then the Hag, putting the biscuits down, leant straight over to me and grabbed my bandaged hand. She jerked it towards her and I, still seeing just old woman — forgetting the rules — staggered straight into her grip and half fell at her feet. Turning my hand every which way, she dug her sharp fingers into the bandages until we nearly screamed.
“He’s the Midnight Mayor,” she said. She leant up close, steel-coloured eyes beneath silver hair that didn’t even twitch with her moving. “That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?” I looked into her perfect false teeth made of plastic, smelt tea on her breath and ancient, ancient magic in the dull thick cut of her jacket, and heard her say, “You’re the Midnight Mayor. Say it until it becomes natural, say it until you believe it. You’re the Midnight Mayor, sorcerer. Electric angel. Isn’t that what you needed to hear? That bit of info’s a freebie, take it or leave it.”
She squeezed one last time on our bloody hand and let go. We flopped against the edge of the cauldron, cradling our hand and hunched around the pain until our eyes were no longer full of blue electric fire, biting our tongue to force away everything but staying in control.
“He doesn’t look much like a Midnight Mayor,” sighed the Mother.
“You look kinda a dork, mate,” concurred the Maid.
The Hag grunted, picked up the biscuits and set about carefully nibbling around the sticky centre of a jammy dodger, saving the best for last.
I dragged us back onto our feet, leaning heavily on the edge of the cauldron. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a cup?” I asked at last.
“Of course!”
A mug proclaiming “I really love Mum” was handed to me from the darkness beyond the cauldron. I dipped it in the bubbling liquid.
“Tea, sugar?” asked the Mother.
I shook my head, reached for my satchel, seized a handful of painkillers, drowned them in tea. For a liquid boiled in a cauldron that probably hadn’t seen daylight for two thousand years, the tea wasn’t half bad. They waited for me to drink, draining down the whole mug and putting it carefully aside. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. On my right hand I felt the burning brand ache and stick to the bandages.
“I’m guessing,” I said at last, “that there are rules. I’m guessing it’ll be something like ‘you can have three questions’ and I want to make it absolutely clear right now that I do not believe that rhetorical flourishes or prompting statements qualify as a direct question.”
“Hey — you flunked out too,” said the Maid, with what I guessed was the nearest to understanding I was going to get from her.
“While you’re broadly correct, my pet,” sighed the Mother, “‘three questions’ is so old-fashioned. This is the age of modern educational initiatives!”
“That’s a very unhelpful answer,” I said, “since it doesn’t really answer anything, while still leaving the option open for me to make a pig’s ear of this whole procedure and blow one of my questions on something banal like ‘duh, so are there more than three questions, then?’ — which isn’t, by the way, a question!”
“Sharp, aren’t you?” The Hag spoke from the corner of her mouth, something either a smile or a grimace. “But which one of you is sharp?”
“Please,” I growled. “Let’s establish this right now. I am we and we are me. We are the same thought and the same life and the same flesh, and frankly I would have thought that you, of all entities to wander out of the back reaches of mythical implausibility, would respect this.”
“But it’s not healthy!” replied the Hag. “A mortal and a god sharing the same flesh?”
“You know, this isn’t why we’re here. I can get abuse pretty much wherever.”
“Yeah,” sighed the Maid, “but I bet a tenner I can make you cry in half a minute.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” added the Mother, slurping tea.
“Did you hurt your little handywandy?” crooned the Hag.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “All right,” I said. “Let’s play this game. Statement: I am the Midnight Mayor.”
“Yes,” said the Mother.
“Don’t give the fucker a freebie. Christ!” exclaimed the Maid.
“Sorry, dearest,” muttered the Mother, with every sign of genuine contrition.
“Statement:” I tried again. “I became Midnight Mayor when Nair died.”
Three stony faces stared back at me. I didn’t need an answer to know I was right. “Statement: when Nair died, he made a telephone call. He breathed his dying breath into the wires and with his dying breath went the idea, the title, the power, the brand, everything that makes up Midnight Mayor. But it couldn’t stay as signals in the wire; the Midnight Mayor needs to be flesh and blood. So it went in search of a phone to ring and it found us. It was always going to find us. It is our nature.”
“Isn’t it nice to see that youth can still reason?” sighed the Hag.
“Statement: the Aldermen think I killed Nair because, let’s face it, if we’d known what he was about to do to us, we probably would have. Because they don’t understand what we are; they don’t understand why we are alive. Because. . because they don’t know who else to blame. Because Nair was killed by a man who basically flayed him alive while Nair was still in his clothes, peeled away the skin under his nails without even trimming them down, and that, that isn’t just sorcery. That’s the kind of magic that makes the moon think twice about its orbital path. That’s. . that’s the kind of magic that people don’t want to understand, don’t want to know about, because it makes them tiny.
“Statement: fact! Nair died and I was hit by a curse out of the telephone! One Midnight Mayor is dead and another walks, because you can’t kill a brand on the hand, not while there’s a city that made it.
“Fact! The man who killed Nair had no smell, and men — mortal walking, breathing men — always smell.
“Question:”
“Finally,” groaned the Maid.
“Yes, dear?”
“Well?”
“Question:” I licked my dry lips, tasting of peeled skin and tea. “Who or what killed Nair?”
There was a long silence. Finally the Maid said, “Shucks. You ain’t gonna live long, sunshine.”
“Well, now, you see, that’s an interesting one,” murmured the Mother.
“If you care about these things,” snapped the Hag.
“But you’re three ladies with a cauldron,” we said, managing another bow. “You’d know without needing to care.”
“Hey, sunshine!” snapped the Maid. “It wasn’t a fucking man! You said it like — blokes what breathe and piss and eat don’t fucking not smell.”
“And of course the question is,” added the Mother thoughtfully, “did the man kill the Mayor, or the man’s maker?”
“He’ll be after you now,” concluded the Hag. “It doesn’t matter whose skin it is, it’s the brand on the hand. You could be any little wormy maggot crawling up from the biscuit plate and he’d still come to squish you down. Thought about running away?”
I bit my lip, pulled my hand tighter into my chest. “All right,” I muttered. “OK. Cryptic I can deal with. Sure. Whatever. Statement: you said. . the man or his maker.”
“That’s conversation skills he’s got there,” chuckled the Hag.
“Statement: ergo — the man who killed Nair wasn’t in fact a man. Something else. The possibilities are endless!”
“Pity you’ve only got so much time, then, isn’t it?”
I wiped my forehead with my sleeve. I felt hot. The stitches in my chest ached and throbbed, my hand burnt. The world seemed a mirage away. I stammered, “Question: in Nair’s house there was a file, and in the file there was a note, and the note said, ‘Swift has the shoes.’ What does this mean?”
“Trendy pair of trainers,” said the Maid appreciatively, nodding at my feet.
“Very clever of him to notice, really,” added the Mother.
“You’re wearing the boy’s shoes,” concluded the Hag. “Or didn’t you think it would be important?”
I looked down at my shoes. “These?”
“Was that a. .”
“No, no, it wasn’t a question. It was more. . thinking aloud. It would be fair to allow me to get a little clarification before I blow my next question.”
“Fair!” laughed the Maid.
“Well. .” sighed the Mother.
“Huh!” grunted the Hag.
“It would be moving with the times. .” I added. “Education being what it is.”
“I got an A at Art.”
“All right then.”
“Clarify away.”
“Statement: these shoes” — I twitched my toes inside the flashy trainers — “aren’t mine. I took them from a boy’s room in Wembley. They belong to a kid called Mo. I was using them to find him, for his mum’s sake. He’s been missing. He’s got nothing to do with magic, as far as I can tell, and she certainly hasn’t. Just a favour for a friend. But — still statement — the Mayor’s files mentioned these shoes. Nair thought they were important. So here’s my clarification question: was Nair also looking for the kid who owned these shoes?”
To which, simply and flatly, the Hag said, “Yes.”
We wanted out. We knew it with a sudden and absolute certainty. We wanted a ticket to somewhere foggy, a nice thick green haze to get ourselves lost in, deep tunnels and obedient lights. We wanted out and down and gone, it was nothing to do with us, none of this was anything to do with us and we weren’t prepared to die for it.
So I said: “Question: what the bloody hell is going on?”
The three women exchanged looks.
“Is that fair?” asked the Mother.
“Kinda total disrespect!” added the Maid. “I like your balls, bozo!”
“It’s not about fair,” retorted the Hag. “If it was about fair, none of this would happen.”
I raised a polite hand. “Answer, please?”
The Hag sighed, and put down the small plate of biscuits. She moved carefully round the side of the cauldron towards me. So did the others. Tough guys aren’t supposed to be intimidated by ladies. I guess I wasn’t so tough. She looked us in the eye and said, “City’s damned.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Damned. Cursed. Buggered. Totally and utterly fucked, to use the crude vernacular. It’s going to burn. It’s going to sink. It’s going to crash and splinter and shatter and everything will be dust. Pick one. The ravens are dead. The Stone is broken. The Wall is defaced. The Midnight Mayor is killed and his replacement” — a chuckle like the last gasp of a throttled chicken — “didn’t even know he was in the job. Cursed. Damned. Run away, little electric angels. Run, if you can.”
They were next to me, around me, behind me. Three little ladies who’d been around ever since the first village midwife decided to ask her friends round for a hot cup of something on a foggy Sunday evening, back in the days when the magic came from the earth and the sky, rather than the tarmac and the neon. We were tiny to them. I was afraid.
“What do you mean, damned?” I stammered. “What do you mean, the ravens are dead, the Stone is broken? Why are these things happening? What kind of total tit goes around making us Midnight Mayor? I don’t even believe in the Midnight fucking Mayor! What the bloody hell is going on?!”
A hand whose fingers were all bone and false nails grasped the back of my neck. The Hag leant in so close I could hear her breath, feel it tickling my eardrum. When she spoke, it was with the whisper of the treacherous lover. She said:
“‘Give me back my hat.’”
Then, without a word of apology or flicker of embarrassment, she pushed me face-first into the cauldron of boiling tea.
In times of uncertainty, someone has to take charge.
Her name was Judith.
It was her fingers at my throat, looking for a pulse, that woke me up. Time had passed, without bothering to tell me about it.
The sky was the colour of an old bruise, the sunlight a washed-out yellow reflecting off the topmost windows.
Judith wore a puffy green sleeveless jacket, a matching jumper, sensible boots and a badge. The badge said, “Judith”. In the top-left corner it added, “Here To Help”.
She said, “Mister? Hey — you OK?”
I considered this difficult question. With my left hand I felt at my face. It didn’t feel burnt. A little tender, perhaps, but hardly scalded by boiling tea. I sniffed my fingertips. A faint lingering odour of PG Tips and digestive biscuit? I ran my hand through my hair until I encountered grains, then a grainy surface which announced itself as the ground. I dug my fingers into the surface on which I lay. Dirty, gritty, damp sand parted beneath my fingertips. I looked at Judith. Her face was concern hiding confusion with just a hint of suspicion thrown in for good measure. I looked to my right, and saw offices clinging so close to the river’s edge that there wasn’t space for a rat to scuttle. I looked towards my feet and saw the blue-black waters of the sunset river gnawing at my toes. I looked to my left and saw Tower Bridge. I groaned and let my head flop back on the dirty low-tide sand.
“Bollocks,” I said.
“Hey, mister, you all right, like?”
I turned to look closer at the woman kneeling beside me. Behind, safe on the higher reaches of an embankment, a small crowd of interested passers-by and tourists had gathered to watch this curious scene at the water’s edge; some though were already drifting away, disappointed that I wasn’t a corpse. Behind them stood the low thick walls of the Tower of London.
I looked back at Judith, Here To Help.
I said, “Bollocks buggery bollocks.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied.
I sat up slowly, just in case anything was broken or dislodged. Nothing. Even the stitches in my chest were a comforting ache, a reminder of normality. I looked at my right hand. The bandages, stained a faint tea-brown, were still spun tight. From my new height I could see past my toes, to where the slow waters of the Thames were quietly, secretly edging their way up towards the stone face of the embankment. They’d already washed away the worst of the low-tide debris, plastic bags and old Coke cans. And with it, they’d washed away a message, written carefully at my feet by an extended fingertip. All that remained was:
ACK MY HAT
I looked at Judith. “This sounds strange, but I don’t suppose you saw three mad women with a cauldron of boiling tea pass by this way?”
“No,” she replied. The polite voice of reasonable people scared of exciting the madman.
“Flash of light? Puff of smoke? Erm. .” I tried to find a polite way of describing the symptoms of spontaneous teleportation without using the dreaded “teleportation” word. I failed. I slumped back into the sand. What kind of mystic kept a spatial vortex at the bottom of their cauldrons of tea anyway?
“Have you called the police?”
“No,” she replied. Then casually, “Did you jump?”
Her eyes flickered to Tower Bridge. I shook my head. “No. Pushed. Don’t call the police.”
I staggered up. The rolling waters of the river didn’t wash like the sea, but crawled, by imperceptible advancement. The long straight lines of the “A” filled with foam.
CK MY HAT
I thought about the three women and their cauldron. I looked up at the Tower of London. I looked down at Judith.
I said, “Listen to me. This is very important. I need to know about the ravens in the Tower.”
I had to see it to believe it. I bought an overpriced ticket like all the good tourists who waddled in orderly queues between the barriers guiding you this way to that tower, that way to the crown jewels. The battlemented walls shut out all the city’s traffic noise, creating within the old courtyards of the Tower an eerie stillness. The air smelt of rain to come. A few yards from the executioner’s block, left out as something macabre to please the children, was a chained-off patch of grass. A small sign announced in four different languages that there were nine ravens in the tower, named after Norse gods, and legend held that should ever the ravens leave the Tower of London, then the city would be doomed. Cursed, damned, fire, water, crumble, crash: pick one, pick them all.
Even if the legend was a lie, time and belief gives everything power.
Next to that was a sign saying, Please Do Not Feed The Birds.
The grass was empty.
I took Judith, Here To Help by the arm — customer sales assistant, Tower of London, and incidentally the only person who knew first aid and had the guts to try it on floating bodies — and said calmly, “If you do not show me the ravens, I will throw myself off Tower Bridge and this time the tide will be high and you won’t be able to save me, capisce?”
She was at heart a kind woman. She wasn’t about to say no to a guy she thought had tried to commit suicide.
Below one of the towers in the wall, in a deep whitewashed room that hummed with ventilation fans and poor plumbing, were nine neat little coffins laid out on a neat little table. Inside each coffin was a black-feathered dead bird.
Judith said, “They just died. A few days ago. All of them — just died. We thought maybe poison but they hadn’t been fed by anyone except. . and there’ll be an autopsy but they all just. . we’re getting replacement birds, flown in special, secret like, because we don’t want the tourists to know, but they just. . they all just died.”
We reached out, appalled, fascinated, and touched a feather.
“You mustn’t!” she hissed. “I’ll be in enough trouble already!”
We drew back our hand, hypnotised by the unblinking black eyes staring back at us from the little coffins.
“Was there. . a message?” I stammered. “The night they died, a message. . something written on a wall? Left on a phone? Something you didn’t expect to see?”
She licked her lips. “You didn’t try to off yourself, did you?”
“No, I was pushed into a cauldron of tea and woke up here, and. .” we laughed, “there’s no such thing as coincidence. Not in my line of work. Was there a message?”
Nine black eyes looking up from the sides of nine black heads on nine dead feathered bodies. Judith nodded, sucking in air. “There was something painted up on one of the walls. We washed it off. Don’t know how they got it there, not easy, you know, it is a castle! It said. . someone wrote, ‘give me back my hat’. In big white letters up on the wall where the ravens liked to sit. Just ‘give me back my hat’. . Who pushed you?”
“Three ladies. With a cauldron, like I said. I’ve got to go.”
“Go where?”
“Anywhere,” we replied. “Anywhere that isn’t here. Judith, thanks for all your help, and now take a traveller’s good advice, and get out of the city. Get out now.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s true,” I answered. “All of it. The ravens in the Tower are dead. That’s a curse, that’s damnation. Someone is out to destroy the city and I have no idea who it is.” I chuckled, “Which is terrific, because I’m the one who is supposed to stop them! So run. Because I have no idea how I’m going to do it.”
I don’t know if she took my advice.
There were other things we had to know.
I nearly ran to Cannon Street station, an iron shed in a street one block up from the river’s edge. Opposite its square mouth was a sports shop, a small plaque nailed to the door. The plaque said: “Within these walls is the London Stone, an ancient Roman altar from which all the distances in Britain were measured. It is said that should the London Stone ever be destroyed, the city will be cursed.”
I went inside the shop. A young man with curly blond hair and a Northern tinge to his voice came up to me and tried to sell me a pair of running shoes for more money than I lived on in a month. We took him by the shoulders so hard he flinched, stared straight into his eyes and said, “We have to see the London Stone.”
“Um,” he mumbled.
“Show us!”
“Uh. .”
“Show us!”
“It’s gone,” he stammered.
“Gone where?”
“Someone, um, someone, um, hit it and. .”
“Where is it?”
“Broken.”
“When?”
“A few days ago.”
“The London Stone is broken?”
“Um. .”
“Was there a message? Something written? On the walls, on the windows, was there a message?”
He pointed at a window. “On the. .”
I hissed in frustration, let him go, pushing him back harder than I’d meant into a pile of badminton rackets, and stormed from the shop. The front had a number of metal shutters that could roll down over the windows. One of them was already closed in preparation for the evening. On it, someone had written in tall white letters:
GIVE ME B
We thumped it so hard our knuckles bled.
I ran through the London streets, not caring now about my own aching limbs. I was flying on rush-hour magic, the buzz of neon propelling me along with the swish of my trailing coat lightening the weight of my body, feeding on the raw hum of the city streets. Rush hour was a good time for sorcerers, when the streets shimmered with life, so much life pumped up into the air, just waiting to be tapped. Our shoes — that weren’t our shoes — puffed and huffed as we ran, feeling our way by the shape of the paving stones, smelling our way by the thickness of the traffic fumes, guided by the numbers on the buses, weaving through the commuters on the streets like the deer that had once danced here through the forest. It was the same magic; the same enchantment.
The nearest piece of the London Wall I knew of was tucked down to the south of the Barbican, amidst bright tall offices and renovated stone guildhalls. Its red crumbled stones had been incorporated into an excavated garden where the bank workers and clerks of the city ate their sandwiches, all shiny fountain and well-tended geraniums. As I caught sight of the Wall I thought for a naive moment that it would be all right, saw clean stones, well loved, standing along one side of this little dip full of greenery. Then as I descended the wooden steps to the garden, by the light of the windows all above, I could see more of the Wall, and we laughed, cried, shouted, bit our lip, all and none and everything at once.
On the ancient Roman stones of the Wall of London, someone had written, of course someone had written:
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
I slumped on a bench beneath the wall, and let the pain of my aching body reassert itself over the heady rush of streetside magics. I found my left hand unconsciously rubbing at the sticky bandages of my right. I peeled off my mitten, then unwrapped the tea-stained cotton. Beneath, drawn across my skin, were the two thin crosses, one lodged in the corner of the other, bright red, still a little tender, but otherwise sealed into my flesh, like an old friend left over from my mum’s womb.
We were the Midnight Mayor. Guardian protector of the city. And now the ravens in the Tower were dead; the London Stone was broken; the Wall of London cursed like all the rest. The ancient, blessed, and secret things that had always protected the city. And now someone had destroyed them, defaced them, cursed them, damned them.
Cursed, damned, doomed, burnt, drowned, crushed, crumbled, cracked, fallen, faded, split, splintered — pick one, pick them all.
None of our business.
Not our problem.
What were we supposed to do about it?
I looked down at my shoes.
Swift has the shoes.
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
END OF THE LINE
I am the Midnight Mayor.
Say it a few times until you get used to the idea.
My city.
I put my head in my hands, squeezed back against the aching in my skull. It didn’t make it better. I raised my head to the orange-black sky, saw the flickering lights of a passing plane, turned down to the earth at my feet, the shoes that weren’t my own, looked up at the wall. The ancient wall, protector of the city, magic and history all muddled up in one and I saw it again, what I should have seen before, plastered in great white letters:
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
I reached into my satchel. I pulled out the phone with Nair’s sim card in it. I thumbed it on.
I dialled the number for Dudley Sinclair.
Just because I didn’t trust him didn’t mean he couldn’t be useful.
A while passed before a voice answered. It was surly, with a slight lisp. “Yeah? Who’s this?”
I said, “This is Matthew Swift. I need to speak to Sinclair.”
Silence for a second — the kind of second it takes to recognise a name, dislike it, and muster a polite reply. “OK. Hold on.”
I held on. This involved hearing tunes by the Beatles played on what sounded like a reed nose-flute. I held on a little longer, drumming my fingers. It’s hard to stay psyched up for anything in the face of a nose-flute rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. We nearly hung up.
When Sinclair spoke, his voice boomed out so loud and sudden that I nearly dropped the handset. “Matthew! So good to hear from you! How are you keeping?”
“Mr Sinclair,” I said. “I think you should know that someone has cursed the city.”
Not a beat, not a moment. “Really, dear boy?” he intoned. “How tedious of them. Any idea who?”
“No. But the ravens in the Tower are dead, and the London Stone is broken, and the Wall of London has been painted on in big white paint, and the Midnight Mayor was flayed alive without ever actually being touched, by a man who has no smell and is therefore probably not a man. Someone is systematically destroying all the magical defences that the city has.”
“What a pain,” sighed Sinclair. “And you have no idea who might be indulging in this scheme?”
“No.”
“Pity. I suppose this means that all sorts of nasties are going to get out onto the streets and start tormenting the innocent. Well, so much for the Christmas bonus.”
“Mr Sinclair, there’s something else I think you should know.”
“Of course, dear boy, of course, you know I always enjoy our mutually beneficial working arrangements!”
“Mr Sinclair,” I said, taking a deep breath, “I am the Midnight Mayor.”
“Really? Good grief, when did that happen?”
“About the same moment that the last Midnight Mayor expired down the telephone.”
“Oh, I see. How. . unexpected. Yes, really, that is. . that is most unusual and rather remarkable. I suppose it must have come as something of a surprise to you too?”
“I’m a little freaked, yes.”
“Well, naturally, yes, of course, yes, you would be! But naturally. Yes. .” His voice trailed off. “You know, Matthew, I am very rarely surprised by much I hear these days, and I must admit, in a spirit of frankness and free exchange, your phone call and this somewhat remarkable information concerning your current mythical status is undeniably different. Are you absolutely sure of all this?”
“Yes.”
“Including being the Midnight. .”
“Yes. It makes a sickening sense. Mr Sinclair — I think I might need your help.”
“Well, naturally, anything for you, dear boy, naturally, naturally!”
“I’ve seen the face of the. . the creature that killed Nair.”
“Creature? Not a man, then, a creature?”
“Yes.”
“And you say you saw him?”
“Yes.”
“Remarkable! Yes, that is a remarkable thing, I must admit, I was wondering how you might have. .”
“There was a fox that saw the whole thing. We shared a kebab and a few reminiscences. Mr Sinclair — the creature that killed Nair didn’t even touch him. I’ve never seen anything like it. And we have no reason to believe that, if it killed Nair for being Mayor, then it won’t do exactly the same to us, and we don’t know if we can stop it.”
Silence, a long while. I have almost never known Sinclair to be silent.
“All right,” he said at last. “Let’s meet.”
Purpose.
Purpose meant reason.
Reason meant thought.
Thoughts meant. .
. . dead men not humans just meat dead meat on the slab dead Midnight Mayor ten thousand paper cuts not even touched dead meat lost of all faces and nature and just. .
Stop it.
. . dead ravens GIVE ME BACK MY HAT dead ravens broken stones shattered wards broken protections GIVE ME BACK MY HAT end of the line end of the line make me a shadow on the wall no smell no smell just killed him dead meat and the fox hid no smell end of the line end of the line I am Midnight Mayor Midnight Mayor dead on a slab kill an idea kill an idea kill a city kill a city idea ward protection something coming make me a shadow. .
We didn’t like thoughts.
We tried to muffle them in our walking.
Walking meant rhythm.
Fleet Street. Pinstriped trousers, perfect silk suits, swished-back hair, black leather briefcases. Lawyers and bankers, the common, rich men of the city. Did these men smell? Hard to tell in the exhaust from the buses, the coffee from the open doors, cakes and the smell of yeast from the expensive bakeries, perfect drenched cleanliness from the cafés, stiff cleaning powders from the dry-cleaners. Did their hearts beat, did they breathe, did their throats draw in and out inside the collar of their shirts? To look was to stop walking too fast, to walk slow was to think, to walk slow was to be noticed, and who knew who would be watching? And we saw endless blotchy anonymous faces blurred into pinkish-grey passing shadows moving in and out of the streetlamp glows, sharp polished leather shoes snapping on the paving stones, white shirts and crisp ties, and what colour had the tie of Nair’s killer been? We couldn’t remember, it had been smell and terror and sense and blood. Ten thousand little deaths all at once, every one stinging sharper than the finest razor on the flesh, all at once, ten thousand little deaths from a face. . just a face in a pinstripe suit. And it didn’t get much more pinstriped than Fleet Street.
This was my city.
Royal Courts of Justice. News crews, knobbly stone spikes and bright white lights. Aldwych. St Clement’s Church, ringing out “Oranges and Lemons” above the tree-shaded bus stops, the London School of Economics, all chips, ring-binders and scuttling shoes, a bank, the BBC, statues of big ladies holding burning torches, the Indian embassy, swastikas and curly lettering in stone — and did that kid over there in the hood have a face? Cafés and theatres. Bright lights that drove away shadow and imagination. Cheap sandwiches, packed bus stops. We could taste the magic on the air, bright, hot, red, like strong curry settling over our stomach, filling our veins, pushing us further forward, giving us courage. We couldn’t imagine these lights ever going out, no harm here, too many people, too much brightness, too much we could use.
Drury Lane, one show that had run for ever, one show that would die in a week, five different kinds of restaurant and one warehouse piled full of furniture that no one would ever sit on, and everyone would always admire. I went for the backstreets, wiggling round the back of Covent Garden, watching my back, running my fingers over the railings, round the streetlamps, over the walls, listening with much more than ears, staying smart. I did two whole circuits of Covent Garden before I finally chose to go inside, looping the loop round the back of St Paul’s Church, its yard shut up for the evening, round the cobbled street that threaded its quiet way south of Long Acre, back towards Bow Street, into the Royal Opera House. Glass, steel, marbled pillar and thick red carpet. I rode bright new escalators up past a glasshouse laden with candle-lit restaurant tables. In the bar I ordered a packet of peanuts, a big glass of orange juice and rights to the darkest, tightest corner there was. It cost the price of a small dowry, but we were not in the mood to complain. There we sat and watched.
Theatre-goers in London’s West End are unique unto themselves. Opera-goers are a step beyond. Women in big throat-clutcher necklaces, fat silver brooches pinned above their silk-clad breasts; jackets that looked like shawls, coats that wished they were cloaks left over from some forgotten era when the top hat was still sexy, handbags on gold chains, fine-rimmed spectacles balanced on the end of ski-slope noses. For the men, suit and tie was still the norm, but even here they’d raised the bar. Walking penguins complete with silk handkerchief from a waistcoat pocket bustled against 100 per cent tartan sleeves, who in turn shuffled round with murmurs of “excuse me, excuse me, yes, thank you, excuse me” in suits of sweetcorn yellow and navy blue, to suggest that while they were dressed up for the evening, it was a casual thing that had cost great time and expense in becoming so.
Very few people stood out from this silken medley; I feared I was one of them. There were also an American couple, all big bum bags and open necks; a cluster of Japanese tourists who nodded and bobbed at everything they saw; and a pair of students whose big hair and carefully slashed jeans cried out “arty type”. Whoever had said in the guidebooks that the bum bag was a sensible device against theft had lied; no single item of dressware ever invented cried out “mug me” more than a pouch of zip-up plastic suspended by your groin.
I huddled deeper into the shadows of my corner. There was magic here, expectation, secrets, trickery, illusion, they were the business of the place and that I could use. People were more willing to sink into a spell, more willing not to notice, and both these things could keep me safe. I wrapped myself in the stuff, dragged thick blankets of shadow over me, spun distraction and expectation into the air and let every eye that glanced across my corner see nothing more than a shape in a shadow and then forget and move on to more important things. I drank my orange juice and ate my peanuts: opera house special, coated in spices and roasted in a Mediterranean sun.
Dudley Sinclair arrived three minutes before the curtain went up. He wore full evening dress complete with semi-cloak draped off his great round shoulders; his paunch was warping within the straitjacket waistcoat he’d somehow welded around himself. He wasn’t alone. I recognised Charlie, his usual companion, PA, secretary, assistant, whatever. I smelt Charlie, even in the bustle of the room: the rolling treacle smell of shapeshifters who’d spent too much time as a rat.
They didn’t bother to look for me, and I didn’t bother to introduce myself. I sat and watched and waited, looking to see if they’d brought anyone else. If they had, “anyone” was doing a good job of blending in. The bell rang as a final warning, the crowds sloshed through the open doors to the auditorium. Sinclair went with them, Charlie remained by the door. I waited until he was the last person there; then since he was, and since I was, he saw me.
He gestured impatiently. I finished my drink and walked towards him; he handed me a ticket. “Paranoid,” he snapped.
“Stabbed and burnt,” I explained, gesturing vaguely at my battered skin.
Charlie merely grunted.
Sinclair had got a box. We felt instantly uncomfortable, locked away in a little upholstered cabin with this great fat man and his friend. I had always imagined that when the revolution began and the guillotine went up, people who had their own private boxes at the opera would be the first for the chop.
I sat uneasily in my chair, shuffling it closer to the wall, wanting to get my back against something more solid. Sinclair said, “Matthew! So glad you could make it! Do you like opera?”
“Not sure,” I mumbled. “Never seen any.”
“Well then, this will be an experience. A chance to enlighten the uninitiated. Champagne?”
There was a picnic hamper set on a small folding table in front of us. We began to understand the point of boxes after all. I said, “I’d better not drink,” as we took a sandwich. We never say no to food. I’m always a little surprised to see our reflection looking so thin.
“You look tense.”
I shot him a sour look. “Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre.”
“But at least the assassin was caught, no? Matthew! You are in a dreadful way, aren’t you? You should relax a little. I’m sure all this business with the city being damned and you being responsible will be sorted out without too much fuss, and when it’s all over, you’ll look back and laugh and say, ‘thank goodness that’s over, what an anecdote for the pub’. Now sit back. . and enjoy one of man’s greatest art forms.”
We tried our best.
Man’s greatest art form, if that’s what it was, involved a cast and chorus of approximately forty people dressed in anything from tight tights and a clinging top to Viennese ballgowns of the kind that required you to turn sideways to get through any door. We regretted that we understood so much of it. The music of itself seemed beautiful, even moving, but we couldn’t reconcile ourself to the lyrics, which much of the time seemed to revolve around bickering over who sent who what letter.
I did my best, letting the spell roll over me, trying to wash out all the thoughts of fear and confusion. We had always loved a good story, and I wanted, just for a moment, or a lot of very long moments, as the show turned out to be, to feel safe, and forget to think with words.
Sounds and music helped take the trembling away, helped hold us still, if only for a while. We let it. Sinclair had probably planned it that way. He was smart, when it came to things like that.
At the interval, gins and tonics were brought to the door by a soft-footed man to whom Sinclair tipped a fiver. Charlie gave me a glass. I said, “I’m on painkillers, I’d better not.”
“Never mind,” replied Sinclair merrily, and before we could object he had taken the glass back from us and handed it without a glance to Charlie. Charlie downed it in one, like it was vodka.
The second half didn’t do much to resolve the crises of the first, but seemed to forget about them and carry on in its own strange way with a new story, involving a fool and a priest. All things were eventually sorted, courtesy of two stabbings and a bout of consumption that, for all it killed the woman who sang about it, didn’t seem to get in the way of her vocal control. At the end of each good bit, the audience stood and went as wild as an operatic audience could. We leant on the edge of the box, chin rested on our hands, and watched, fascinated. We had never before encountered the full bizarre, hypnotising strangeness of opera, never imagined it would be so bright and big and loud, and just so much so.
When it was done, the audience cheered and the cast bowed for a brief eternity.
Sinclair clapped nicely and didn’t cheer.
“Rather crude,” he muttered. “Not the finest work.”
Charlie just smiled. It was the smile of a man who’d sat through more opera than the eardrums could take, losing the ability to hear all frequencies in the soprano range, but not missing them one bit.
We drifted out into the departing crowd. It was lateish, that odd hour of the night when it’s justifiable to go to bed, but somehow it’s not honourable. Covent Garden was yellow washes of light and buzzing arcades, open doors and clattering chairs, tinkling music and strumming buskers; still alive, still heaving, despite the biting cold and settling fog, visible as a haze over the streetlamps.
“You won’t say no to a little supper, will you?” said Sinclair, as Charlie carefully wrapped another layer of coat around his boss.
“Supper would be good.”
“Excellent! I know a little place. .”
The little place was a restaurant tucked into the tight dark streets between Covent Garden and the Strand, where long ago Dickens had feared every shadow, and thieves had lurked in alleyways now filled with hissing vents and rotting chips. It was the kind of restaurant that you could only go to if you knew about it. There was no menu on the door, no sign above, no indication in the brown-stained windows that, within this plain black door that could have been any stagehands’ exit, here was a place to eat. The sense of unease, which the music had largely suppressed, returned to us.
Inside the door, taking Sinclair’s coat and hanging it up behind great red curtains, was a man in a top hat and white gloves. We stared at him in amazement. He looked at us with barely hidden distaste and said, “May I take your coat, sir?”
I shook my head numbly. “I’d rather keep it.”
“Of course, sir.”
There were a pair of escalators, clad in bronze. One started as we approached, then carried us up a narrow stairwell lined with mirrors, also in bronze, that projected our warped faces at us to infinity. At the top of the stair was more red curtain, swished back by more white gloves, and an interior of dim lighting, copper and bronze, everywhere everything glimmering with twisted faded reflection. I was relieved to see other diners at the tables, and hear the low burble of good-mannered, wine-fed gossip. We were led to a circular table in the middle of the room, with three chairs already in place. We weren’t given a menu; I guessed it was bad manners to ask.
“It’s a very modern style,” offered Sinclair to my look of bewilderment. “The chef here likes to experiment with some interesting ideas. . not really my thing, of course, but interesting, nonetheless. An experience.”
He knew us well.
I smiled, nudging a piece of cutlery in front of me that looked like it had escaped from an eye surgeon’s trolley.
“So,” said Sinclair calmly, “you’re the Midnight Mayor.”
“Yup.”
“And how is that working out for you, Matthew?”
“Not too well.”
“No, no, of course, no. It is of course none of my business and I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression, naturally, naturally, but as a friend I can’t help but notice that you look a little pale.”
“Yes.”
“May I, in fact, make a great leap of judgement, and forgive me if I go astray here, but were you not, indeed, not planning on becoming the Midnight Mayor? It doesn’t seem like the kind of career path you would choose.”
“I didn’t,” I snapped. “The phone rang and I answered and next thing I know, whack. Some arsehole has gone transferring titles down the telephone line and I’ve got a hand like a boiled beetroot and four angry spectres after me.”
“Spectres?”
“Four of them.”
“How unfortunate. I take it the encounter didn’t end too badly?”
“I got one in a beer bottle,” I replied. “The others scarpered. At the time I thought they were sent by the same person who attacked me down the telephone. But now I think about it. . they weren’t sent to attack me, they were out looking for the Midnight Mayor. Drawn to it. You can’t have that kind of transference of power without some sort of hitch.”
“Spectres. .” murmured Sinclair, “are unusual in this city.”
“Yes.”
Drink arrived — some kind of deep purple goo in a cocktail glass. Sinclair sniffed it and winced. “Yes,” he murmured. “Well, experimental cookery. I believe that it’s supposed somehow to complement the dishes, react with tannins or proteins or some such scientific curiosity. I won’t be offended if you don’t drink it, Matthew. Had you met Nair?”
He knew who the last Midnight Mayor was. Concerned citizens make it their business to know these things.
“No.”
“Interesting.”
I said nothing.
“You know, traditionally, the Midnight Mayor is. . shall we call it a role? A duty, perhaps, a responsibility, something a bit more than a title. Passed on by the will of the previous incumbent to a chosen, well-trained and appointed successor. Usually an Alderman. Nair was an Alderman, before he was Midnight Mayor. It has been the way for generations. So why, dear boy, why do you suppose you have ended up with this. . remarkable predicament?”
“I don’t know.”
“There must be a reason. Mystic powers, metaphysical forces, fate, destiny, choice, and so on and so forth. No such thing as coincidence, not in your particular, special line of work.”
A plate of. . something was brought before us. It looked like mashed intestine garnished with thistles. I poked it nervously with the end of a thing that might have been a fork. I had a feeling the dim light was meant to disguise the full horror of the food. I closed my eyes, we speared a mouthful, and ate it.
Could have been worse.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie sniffing it uneasily. Sinclair tucked in, napkin folded over his collar.
“I assume you’ve done your research, that the city really is damned — not that I doubt it for a minute. I mean, we’ve all heard the rumours, naturally, all seen a few signs and generally agreed that when the Midnight Mayor — I mean Nair — is brutally murdered then things are inclining towards the dubious, if you follow me. You must have seen a few things, asked a few questions — one does not reach these conclusions lightly!”
I said, “‘Give me back my hat.’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“‘Give me back my hat.’”
“Did you have a hat, or is this a metaphor the elaborate nature of which currently evades my higher faculties?”
“It’s everywhere. The words, the phrase. I didn’t notice before, didn’t look. But now I’ve started looking, and it’s everywhere. On the pillars below Waterloo Bridge, on the walls in Willesden, above the dead ravens in the Tower, on the shutters of the shop where the London Stone should have stood, on the Wall of London. Give me back my hat.”
“You are suggesting that this quaint request is somehow linked to your predicament?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But wherever bad things happen, there it is. The ravens in the Tower are dead, the London Stone is broken, the writing is on the Wall. These things have always been protectors. Keeping out the bad things in the night.”
“What ‘bad things’?”
“I have no idea. If I knew that, then odds are the bad things wouldn’t have been kept out to begin with.”
“I see your point.”
“But as you said — spectres aren’t common in London. And they did come looking for me, when I answered the phone. You destroy the defences, kill the ravens, who knows what will come out from beneath the paving stones? Someone deliberately did that, killed the ravens, killed Nair. It can only be bad news.”
“And now you’re in the middle of it,” murmured Sinclair, more to himself than me, prodding a puddle of lumpy goo on his plate that might have been food. “How. . controversial.”
“Yes.”
“And the odds are, Nair chose you.”
“Yes. Odds are.”
“Now why do you think he’d do that?”
I hesitated.
“You must have dedicated some thought to the question.”
“I saw the face of the creature that killed him. That killed Nair.”
“Oh? And what did he look like?”
“Just a guy in a suit. Pinstripe suit, ironed, clean. Slicked-back hair. Just. . just a guy in a suit. He didn’t even touch him, and there was so much blood and Nair was just. . meat and bones by the time he was finished. I’d never seen. . we’d never imagined it was. . we will not die like that.”
Sinclair leant forward, folding his chubby fingers together. “Ah. I think I understand.”
“He had no smell. The fox saw it all, and we asked the fox, and the fox smelt nothing. The creature that killed Nair wasn’t human. A guy in a suit and he wasn’t human. Nair wouldn’t have died if he wasn’t Midnight Mayor. That’s the reasoning, isn’t it? You get a brand on the hand, protector of the city: come gobble me up all ye nasties. Come hunt for me, spectres and shadows. We will not die like that!”
“You don’t know what it was? The thing that killed Nair?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“But he looked like a man.”
“Yes.”
“But wasn’t.”
“No.”
“I see. That could be problematic.” Sinclair sighed, rolled back in his chair. Waiters drifted in, took away the plates. They had class — enough class not to ask how the meal was, but just to take it that you’d never eaten anything like it.
Finally, with a great huff that puffed out his red cheeks, Sinclair said, “Tell me about your shoes.”
He asked it so casually, so distantly, that for a moment I didn’t even notice the question. “What?”
“Your shoes.”
“Why do you want to know about them?”
“They’re hardly your style, Matthew, and that interests me.”
“Give me credit,” I snapped.
He smiled, little neat teeth in a round mouth. “Come, now, Matthew, come. You know that I take an interest in these things. The instant I heard that Nair had been killed, I thought ‘trouble’. Then the ravens died, then the Stone was broken, and I thought ‘how tedious, someone is out to destroy the protectors of the city’; and it seemed, in light of all these facts, a sensible, yes indeed, a most sensible precaution to do a little research. Naturally I checked up on you. Who else, I thought, who else can really muster the kind of supernatural clout to do these things? Who else could have killed Nair? Who else might be mad enough to try it?”
Our fingers tightened on the cutlery. “You know us better,” we snarled.
“Yes, perhaps I do. Perhaps that was where the Aldermen made their mistake. I know about the Aldermen, Matthew. We have. . mutual connections, in times of crisis. This is a time of crisis. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that. I know about the file in Nair’s desk. It says, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Now what exactly does this mean?”
I looked down at my shoes, then back up at him. I said: “I thought it was nothing.”
“Well, that’s what we thought about the graffiti, and now look where we are. Spectres in the streets. Let’s assume for a moment that nothing is something and feel proud of ourselves for a grasp of the quantum, shall we? Tell me about your shoes. They’re clearly not yours. While I would never judge your fashion sense. .”
I snorted.
“. . trendy red and black trainers several sizes too big for you are hardly what I would expect. Nair said, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Why would that interest him so much? Why would he make you the Midnight Mayor?”
So, I told him.
* * *
First Interlude: The Sorcerer’s Shoes
In which the story of a pair of trainers is recounted over dinner.
I said: “The shoes aren’t mine. They belong to a kid. His name is Mo. Actually, his name is Michael Patrick Hall, but you can’t be cool and be called Michael unless you’ve been to prison. So everyone calls him Mo. I’ve never met him. But that’s really the point.”
It happened without bothering to explain itself.
I was in Hoxton, the street market. I can’t remember why. It can be hard, coming back. There are things, rituals, routines, that I had taken for granted. Not any more.
Anyway. Hoxton. The word is “trendy”, but I don’t know if it can be rightly applied. It’s a mishmash. Great rows of terraced houses with new paint, next to boarded-up windows. Council estates rotting from the inside out, mould and crumbling dust dripping with water from broken pipes down the walls. New apartment blocks, all bright paint, fresh brick and steel; art galleries tucked in behind the local boozer, yoga centres nestling in between the old rip-off robbed-radio garages. Tandoori and chippy, Chinese takeaway and halal kebabs, kosher bakeries and low squatting greengrocers selling strange growths that might be vegetables. Clubs hidden away underground, the door just a door by day, a purple-lit cavern at night, guarded by big men in black. Social clubs where no one cares about the smoking laws, snooker tables underneath low neon lights; leisure centres, where every shoe squeaks on old varnished floors. Hoxton is a bit of everything, all at once, a low old grandpa squinting at the scuttling kids. There’s magic in Hoxton, if you know where to look for it; enough to start a fire, although you’ll never quite know what will catch.
There was a chippy in the street market. I went there one night, for no good reason. Because we smelt vinegar on the air and cannot resist fish and chips. It was late, maybe elevenish, the shops shut up, the usual left-over debris of the market billowing in the street. Broken splattered fruits, empty cardboard boxes, torn-up plastic bags. The guy serving up the chips was called Kishan, an Indian name, though he was as white and freckled as dirty snow. He had dreadlocks and dyed black hair, and an earring that wasn’t just a piercing — it was a great round gaping hole, the size of a ten-pence piece, pushed out of his lobe by a plastic hoop. We were fascinated and appalled by it. I did my best not to stare.
I had plaice and chips and sat at a table in the window. Everything about the place was plastic, and just two squeaks short of sterile.
I had been there about half an hour when Kishan said, “Closing up, now.”
I shrugged, and ate up faster.
“Hey, mate, you getting back OK?” he asked.
This is not something I usually get asked. Men don’t ask other men if they’re getting home OK, they just assume that beneath the frail, weak exterior lurks a muscle-building kung fu master fearless of ever being mugged. I said, “I’m fine, thanks.”
He was uneasy, we realised. His eyes kept dancing from us to the window and back again. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Sure.”
I followed his gaze out of the window, but saw nothing but the slow rumpling billow of the litter in the streets. We finished the last chips, wiped our hands on the edge of the greasy paper, stood up.
“Hey, are you sure everything’s OK?” I asked.
He looked at me sideways and said, “Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Just fine.”
These things don’t take much translating.
“Well, OK,” I said. “’Night.”
And we walked out of the chippy.
There’s a phrase — curiosity killed the cat.
We are very curious. The world, this living world is so full of incident, strangeness, experience, event, happening so busy and so fast, that it’s a wonder you mortals don’t go mad. But you learn how to shut it out, to perceive only that which is relevant to you. You say things like — curiosity killed the cat. So very sensible. Such an unforgivable waste.
We are curious and, like I said, I didn’t have much better to do.
We walked about fifty yards, then looked back. The street was bare. I turned up the collar of my coat feeling for those little enchantments sewn into the lining. Then I walked back. There was a doorway between a chemist and a bakery where I snuggled myself out of the wind. Waiting is an innately boring process. In the old days, men who watched and waited would smoke a cigarette, for something to do. We’d read detective books, devoured the films. Philip Marlowe, loitering in some handy bookshop opposite the staked-out joint, would find a girl with blonde hair, and glasses that transformed her when they came off, and they’d drink bourbon and talk about nothing in particular and everything, without it needing to be said.
That was there; this was Hoxton.
When it started, it was a smell. We thought there was an open drain somewhere, the wind carrying the sharp stench of it. Not turn-your-stomach sewage; it was too precise a bite. It went in via the tear ducts, then wriggled down the nose, and by the time it had drifted into pockets in your lungs and writhed down your gullet there was little sense left for the stomach to be repulsed by.
Then came the sound.
It was like plasters being peeled off hairy skin, all crackles and splats and slow ripping of a thousand tiny needles. It was like thick oil being poured out of a can from a great height, a long way off. I saw the lights go out in the chippy on the other side of the street, the shutters go down. Kishan came outside, and there was dread in his eyes, looking down the street, straight over me like I wasn’t there, and now fear on his face, in every part of him. He had seen this before, I realised, smelt this before. In the chippy, he had been trying to warn me, get me away, and I hadn’t gone. Now he stood in the street, frozen with a familiar fear that was no less for being a regular occurrence. I followed his stare, and realised why.
The thing was yellow-white, with a surface ooze of thick olive-brown that sloshed out from its surface skin and trickled slowly down it like water off a fountain. It had no recognisable shape, but crawled up from a drain in the middle of the street in great splats, from a warping bubble of a body which extended limbs like a jellyfish extends its tendrils. It was a squid out of water, liquid but not so: its surface gleamed with slime but its innards were a viscous mass that split and parted and re-formed as it rose up between the grates like it was made of hot rubber. It had no eyes, no ears, no organs at all that I could see, but moved like a great slobbering amoeba down the street, trailing oil and grease. A snail-squid-amoeba-rubber thing, crawling up from underneath our feet, squeezing up from the sewers. I could give it a name; a simple name for a simple thing. It was a saturate.
Kishan stood in the street staring at it, jaw half-open, dribble pooling in one corner of his mouth. The thing was still gathering its dripping mass out of the drain thirty yards away. I walked briskly up to Kishan, poked him firmly in the shoulder and said, “Oi. You.”
His head turned to look at me, his eyes stayed fixed. I poked him harder. “Oi. Sunshine.”
His eyes flickered to me. “You,” we snapped. “Run.”
His body was smarter than his brain.
He ran.
We looked back at the beige-white thing crawling up from the drains. A puddle of yellow oil was building around its base, trickling out across the tarmac to lubricate the mass of not-flesh that composed the creature’s not-body. I turned my fingers up towards the nearest lamp, snatched a bundle of pinkish light from it and cast it over the creature’s head. It didn’t care. Oblivious of me and my doings, it just kept dragging itself up. Now the size of a dog, now the size of a wolf, now the size of a tuna fish, now the size of a small car, the great mass of its dripping body rose from the drain, a pool of goo spreading around its spilling rolls of fat.
By my stolen light, I could see its body in more detail. Beneath the oil that flowed out of its skin, things moved within it. Half an old yellow chip burst to the surface for a second and then sunk back down; a torn condom slid down its flesh and spilt into the expanding puddle of oil at its base; a lost, broken and gouged teaspoon surfaced briefly at the top of its spilt bubble-body, and then sank back down into the churning flesh. We drew more light from another streetlamp, dragging it down close, fascinated by this strange, inhuman stench-splat growing upon the street, the size of a small car, the size of a large car, the size of a small truck. .
Its flesh, if you could call it such, was held together by friction and hair. Not hair of its own, we realised, but human hair, webbed and matted and foul, spun over every part of it like a net, sometimes in thick dirty clusters, sometimes in sticky strands of every colour. It rose up in front of us, liquid fat flowing off and then rising from within, a constantly moving fountain of grease and oil; and now it was almost as wide as the street. And the smell! Its stink knocked us backwards, made our eyes water and our head spin. Now it was almost a storey high, a great wobbling blancmange, and the oil spilling off it had rolled almost as far as my feet, running down the gutters and then filling the centre of the street.
I stared up at it, and it seemed to look back at us, a sort of head-bubble twisting at the summit of its rolling form. There was a good reason why the magicians of the city feared the saturate: the grease-monster, the oil-devil, the demon of fat poured down the drain, of tallow and cookery grime, of burnt-up crispy bits and congealed animal liquids poured down the plughole. It was disgusting, foul, vile, an abomination and, just perhaps, a bit beautiful. Life is magic, and this thing of fat and tallow was so clearly alive.
Alive, and not a little angry.
We laughed, not because there was anything funny, but to have seen this sight. Then we tossed the stolen neon back to its tubes, and retreated a few paces from the bubbling oil at our feet. I threw my satchel to one side and looked for the nearest likely weapons.
And the saturate was shaking itself now, sending splatters of grease and dried fat onto the walls, pulling itself out of the drains with one last great shloooop and rolling forwards in its own liquid.
I looked round at the window of the chippy, threw my arm and my will at it and shattered the glass with a thought. Reaching past, I found the warm, familiar hum of gas in the mains: heat and fire to burn the fat. I dragged at it, pulling faster than I had planned, sucking out the smell and rippling it upon the air until the street was a mirage of twisted neon and competing stenches. Adrenalin kept us moving, backing away from the advancing tide of yellow-brown oil dribbling over the pavement and the tower of fat rippling in its wake.
My plan was easy; so very easy. We were going to burn it.
I spun the gas around me, let it fill and hiss and shimmer against the flesh of the rolling white saturate-slug. I pushed a tendril of it up towards the pink tube of a neon light — all I needed was a spark, just one and that would be it, so long saturate, goodnight and good luck with your next coagulation. .
. . and someone muttered, “OhJesusohGod.”
I looked around and saw what I should have seen before: a woman, standing with her back pressed against the wall of a cobbler’s shop, handbag draped in the crook of her elbow, high-heeled shoes and pasty face, staring up at the saturate with the frozen terror of a squirrel in front of a cement truck. There was oil around her feet, staining her shoes, sliding along the pavement like meltwater over sand.
For a moment, just a moment, holding on to the gas, the spark, woven tight into the palm of our hand, we thought about doing it anyway.
Then I crushed out the spark, let go of the gas, let it spill upwards from the street and roll in thick smelly shimmers towards the open air, stopped the spillage from the chip shop and turned my attention towards the woman. She was only a few yards from the main body of the saturate as it rumbled at slug’s-crawl down the street; in a few moments more, she’d be lost behind it. Yellow fat and white drool ran down the walls beside her, shaken off the main body of the beast, and splattered on her black shoulder jacket. I shouted, “Move, woman!”
She didn’t move, couldn’t move, just saw rolling flesh as high now as a bus, stubby white limbs sprouting and shrinking back into the flesh like a hedgehog uncertain about growing spines.
“Move!” we screamed.
I looked up at the saturate, and it was so close now, so close, it didn’t need to grow a mouth or teeth or jaws, it just needed to keep coming and that was it, death by drowning, drowning by fat. It would suck me up and crush me and the only question would be whether it was suffocation or broken bones that stopped our heart.
She was going to die like that too.
I ran. My feet slipped and went out beneath me the second I hit the oil; I crawled back up, human hair tangling between my fingers, warmish brown goo seeping through my trousers, sticking to my knees. I reached the pavement, staggered to my feet, and grabbed the frozen woman by the shoulders. The saturate was only a few feet away, it filled the world, the smell worse here than ever, making it hard to breathe.
I shook her, and she looked at me, jaw moving in silent prayer.
“Run,” I hissed.
She didn’t move.
We slapped her, not particularly hard, across the cheek. She blinked, once. I put my slippery hand into hers, and felt it slide straight out again. I grabbed her by the sleeve.
“Run!”
She jerked, started to move. I dragged her towards the end of the street; and it was right behind us. I could feel a dollop of white flesh dribble down the back of my neck as a limb reached out for us, shedding matter as it went.
At the end of the street was a park, dark and shut up for the night. I pushed the woman off the pavement into the street and shouted, “Get out! Move!”
She staggered back towards the park, half slipped and kept on staring, just staring at the thing coming after us.
No time to bother, too late, much, much too late. We turned to the saturate, thought again of fire, saw the fat and oil dribbling down our fingers and gave up on the idea as a bad one. We raised our head towards the rolling jelly-thing, vile, repulsive, amazing, and I said, “Veolia!”
It kept on coming.
Words have power. You just had to pick the right words. In the good old days, this involved a lot of Latin and some very fruity intonation. These days, the words were different, new, bright, and in this case, plastered on the sides of most refuse collection carts in London.
I raised my hands to the sky and called out, shouted into the air, “Veolia, Accord, Kiggen, ECT, Onyx, ELWA, in accordance with Hackney Borough Council, you are contracted to collect, remove and recycle household refuse and waste. .”
Still it kept coming.
“. . all commercial and household refuse and waste produced within the boundaries laid down within Hackney Borough, Veolia, Accord, Onyx, I invoke you. .”
Not ten yards away, it drew tendrils of dripping fat that crawled out towards me.
I screamed to the heavens, spread my fingers wide and prayed for magic, miracles and a speedy demise, “Geesink Norba collecting and recycling waste and refuse for you!”
And from somewhere behind the creature, there was the diesel-thumping roar of an engine coming to life.
I staggered back from the creature, slipped in oil, crawled towards the hypnotised woman, grabbed her by the sleeve. The roar behind the creature turned into the steady thudathudathudathuda of a badly tuned, unloved engine. It filled the street, echoed off the houses; and with it there was light now, a spinning yellow madness that flashed on-off-on-off too fast to see, an epileptic nightmare, reflecting like a sick sun off the walls. A great white limb of grease descended towards us and I pushed the woman out of the way, skidded to one side. It hit us across our back, we felt our teeth jar, our spine try to hide in our stomach, we felt fat dribble down our back and saw great dollops of it splatter onto the ground beside us. The blow had knocked us flat; on our belly we crawled towards the park, grass and dirt suddenly seeming the cleanest thing in the world. Slime was running down our hair and pooling in our ears. The yellow flashing light in the street cast twisted shadows all around.
“Geesink Norba,” I whispered. “Geesink Norba, Geesink Norba, by the terms and conditions of contract to remove all commercial and household waste within the borough, Geesink. .”
The roar became a rattling battle cry; with it, there came another sound. It said:
“Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing. Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing.”
I reached the grass, rolled onto my back, looked down the street I’d crawled from and saw the saturate start to turn, infinitely slow, currents and counter-currents spinning within its great belly as it began to think about the thing that was behind it. The woman was fallen a few feet from me. I turned to her and hissed, “Cover your head.”
She obeyed, and I curled up as tight as I could, arms over my skull.
I saw the saturate contort and twist as the flashing yellow light and mechanised voice came closer. I saw it seem to contract downwards and expand outwards, as if it was somehow going to leap. I heard, “Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing,” saw flashing yellow madness, heard wheels sloshing through oil, engine thundering, heard a sucking sound like the whole ocean being pulled down a very small plughole, heard a great grinding as of metal jaws, and whispered, “Veolia, Accord, Geesink Norba, Onyx, rubbish collected on your scheduled day. .”
And something hit the saturate. It hit it smack in the middle, punched a hole straight through its belly and out the other side, a great darkness that seemed to suck everything in, and the darkness had teeth, heaven help the ignorant, the darkness had teeth made of aluminium and steel, silver flashing teeth that crunched down on all that fat and swallowed it whole into some forsaken black gullet, sucked it all in with a roar of diesel and pumped out black smoke in its place, until the saturate was half its size, a quarter, just rivers of white fat pouring into that darkness, sinking deeper and deeper until with a final splatter. .
There was just oil and grease spilling across the road. Inanimate liquid, dribbling from the jaws of the beast that had sucked the life from it. Little blobs dripped from the branches of the trees like smelly snow. I got to my feet and looked at the thing that had killed the saturate.
It was a dustbin truck. Its sides were black, not through paint, but time and use. Burnt-black, charred-black, dirt-black, coal-black, every kind of black there could be, all spattered and scratched and scorched onto its flesh. The welding that held it together was brown chipped rust that shed breadcrumbs of reddish copper onto the ground as it drove; its wheels were the height of a large child; its light, spinning on a roof of twisted, crooked metal, was yellow, too bright and too fast to look at. I shielded my eyes, and saw in the dull remnant of my vision a man get out of the driver’s cabin, a whole man’s height above the pavement, and walk carefully round to the back of the truck. He knelt down beside it, reached under the back wheel, and twisted something. A great gout of black smoke burst from a pipe in the top of the truck’s roof, and slowly, two metal vault doors began to ease shut over the open back of the truck, sliding down over silver teeth gleaming in the reflected light and dripping white fat. They came together with the clang of the doors of Fort Knox. The dustbin man looked up.
His eyes were two blown light bulbs, the little twisted wires gleaming in their sockets. His skin was the same charred blackness as his truck; his hair, which had one time been dreadlocks, was now just living blacknesses, writhing and twisting around his face with the mess of insect life and vermin that crawled from it. When he exhaled, the same black smoke of his vehicle rolled across his silverish lips, and as he walked, his green-yellow neon jacket shimmered and flashed, almost drowning out all other perception. I flinched back from the brightness of it as he approached, three-inch boot heels clanging on the ground, tangled old string tying together their ruptured leather and soles of melted rubber. He was coming straight towards me, impassive, face drained of all feeling. I turned to the woman and hissed, “Do you have a tenner?”
She was a whimpering huddle on the ground. “Uh?”
“A tenner, a tenner! Your purse!”
I covered my eyes with my arms against the brilliance of his jacket; but I could hear him, smell him only a few inches away: the rank odour of an old bin left out in the summer sun. Numbed, the woman tried to open her purse. I felt movement beside me, saw his hand gloved in thick red leather that oozed ancient blood between the old stitches, as if the fabric itself could bleed. The woman held up a ten-pound note. I grabbed it, turned and, keeping my head bowed against the neon dazzle, pushed it into his outstretched palm.
For a second, the dustbin man just stood there. I knew he was staring at me, but couldn’t raise my eyes to see. Then he closed his fingers around the ten-pound note, which began to wilt, shrivel, and stain with smudged darkness as he slipped it into his trouser pocket. As stately and careful as he had come, he turned, dreadlocks writhing around his head, and walked away.
We stayed frozen in place for. . I do not know how long.
The engine roared again in the dustbin truck, the wheels turned. I smelt black smoke and the lingering odour of rot. Then it drove away, oil dribbling off its wheels as it sped up the street, yellow light fading until, at the far end, it turned, and vanished from my sight.
Drained, we sank to our knees on the grass, pressed our head into it and trembled.
A hand brushed our shoulder. A voice said, “Um. .”
We looked slowly up. “This,” I said, “is a really bad time.”
“You OK?”
I looked round me. Oil was dribbling into the drains, and a greasy trail stretched all the way up the street to the drain, that damned drain, outside the chippy.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” I said, and pressed my head back into the grass and felt grateful for how clean the dirt was.
Her name was Loren.
Her world-view had just been shattered, but she was dealing with it the most sensible way she could; by dealing with other things first.
She said, “You owe me a tenner.”
I said, “What?”
“A tenner.”
“Are you seriously telling me, that having just saved your life from a monster made out of grease and fat crawled up from the nether reaches of the sewers, you want me to give you a tenner?”
“When you put it like that. . it’s just tenners aren’t easy.”
“It was give the guy a tenner, or be consumed by a supernatural dustbin truck.”
There was silence. Fat dripped and pooled slowly around us.
“So why couldn’t you give him a tenner?”
“Because I dropped my bloody bag while trying to save your bloody life.”
“Sorry. It’s all a little. . you know.”
She flapped. We seethed.
Finally she said, “The thing. .”
Here it came.
“Yes?”
“You know, I always said to myself, if I go mad, I’ll like, you know, go with it? Because I figure if you’re mad then you can’t really do anything about it so you might as well just. . It was a monster, wasn’t it?”
We wiped a dribble of fat off our nose. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“Your point of view. In the sense that it would have crushed the life out of you and you would have drowned in a sea of animal fats and other remains, yes, it was a monster. But it meant you no harm. You just happened to be there.”
“You killed it.”
“No.”
“I saw you, you spoke those words, magic words.”
“Brand names.”
“What?”
“Brand names. Waste collection companies. Geesink Norba, Accord, Onyx — they collect rubbish in the city.”
“But. . you spoke their names and. .”
“I spoke words that, unless you pay close attention to these things, have no meaning. People don’t pay attention to the rubbish men; they cross over to the other side of the street to avoid them. Geesink Norba. . they are sounds on the air. Meaningless, unless you know how to look. I invoked an idea.”
“What do you mean, ‘invoked’?”
“Summoned. Commanded. Requested for the cost of a ten-pound note.”
“You’re some sort of wizard?”
“Some sort, yes.”
“So there’s magic? And wizards? And monsters?”
“Yes.”
“In Hoxton?”
“Well, yes.”
“Oh. And the thing that came? The dustbin truck?”
I tried my best. “There are. . things in this world, made up of other things — ideas — that are given life just by the nature of that idea, by the nature of living, life making magic, magic coming out of the most ordinary, trivial bits of life. Like. . like when you speak into the telephone and your words are life and passion and feeling and they’re in the wires and sooner or later the wires will come alive or else they’d burst, with all that thought and emotion in them. . or like a dustbin truck, just one dustbin truck because we have no idea how much waste a city can produce, just one tidying up afterwards, asking nothing but a tenner at Christmas and your council tax, anonymous faces picking up anonymous crap that no one wants to pay any attention to and sooner or later you ignore so much, you turn your face away so much, don’t want to think about it so much that. . even that gets life. Do you see? Furious, passionate life, waiting to be seen, cleaning up afterwards, struggling out of the shadows. And where there’s life, any life, anything that. .”
I saw her face. She was crying.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s a bit. .” she mumbled, waving her hands uselessly. “It’s just. . uh. .”
I said, “My name’s Matthew.”
“Loren,” she whimpered.
“Where do you live, Loren?”
She flapped a hand in a general direction.
“Near?” I asked.
She nodded.
“With a shower and a lot of soap?”
She nodded again.
“Good. Let me take you home.”
*
It was a council block a few streets back from the canal. On the ground floor there were grey metal shutters nailed over the windows, and bars across the front doors. The windows on the higher floors had little balconies with dead flowers withering on them. The stairwell smelt of piss, the lifts were scarred on the inside with who knew what mad burning. She lived on the fifth floor. The lights were on in the flat to her left, and as we went by, the door was opened and a man in a white skullcap leant out.
“Loren!” he exclaimed. “He’s gone out again; I’m sorry.” Then his eyes fell over us, and his look turned to one of brief disgust followed by forced concern. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“Fine,” she mumbled, red puffy eyes and a swollen puffy voice. “Thank you, fine.”
There were three locks on her door. She fumbled with the keys, dropped them, picked them up again, unlocked the door. A narrow corridor, occupied 99 per cent by a black sports bike, all pumps and shallowness; a single bulb swinging from a low ceiling, lampshade long since lost. She waved me towards a kitchen the size of a cockroach’s cupboard and said, “You can help yourself to whatever you want.”
I looked at an array of empty pizza boxes and used tea bags.
She headed into the bathroom. As the shower went on, the boiler above the sink started rattling and roaring, shaking so hard I thought it would pull itself free from the wall. I made do with rubbing my hands on an old dishcloth and my face with some kitchen towel, until I just felt thinly slimy, rather than all-over glooped. From the kitchen window, I could see Hackney, low lights and uneven streets, council estates and long, Victorian-lamp-lit terraces, stretching away.
Loren emerged from the shower, disappeared into the bedroom. Her voice drifted to me: “You can use it, if you want.”
I wandered from the kitchen into a small living room, containing a single brown sofa and sunflower wallpaper that had never been a good idea, even before it started to peel. There were shoes everywhere — men’s shoes, and boys’, strewn in boxes and around every wall, and dirty clothes, tracksuits and baggy jumpers, messy old plates and fallen library books with catchy titles like Pass GCSE IT in 28 Days! and Foundation French for Dummies.
A door opposite the living room had, among a collection of posters featuring everything from dinosaurs to heaving models with extra-heaving bosoms, a sign written in big red letters — KEEP OUT. A boy then — a teenage boy.
“Take some of Mo’s clothes! Towel’s under the sink.” Loren’s voice carried from the bedroom.
Clearly Mo was not in residence. I opened the KEEP OUT door, and was hit by the smell of tomato ketchup and hair gel. I rummaged through the wardrobe until I found a T-shirt and a pair of trousers, both too big for me. Whoever, wherever Mo’s father was, he had clearly evolved from another breed of men.
The shower was at once the most pleasurable and most disgusting experience of our life. The water kept drifting from hot to cold, and only scalding hot and the application of half a bar of soap could remove the grease that wanted to cling to every part of our skin. Our hair was like raw slices of chicken in our slipping fingertips, and bubbles of white fat spun in the stained old plughole.
I changed into Mo’s clothes. In the kitchen Loren was wearing pyjamas, a dressing gown, and fluffy pink slippers. She leant pale-faced by the sink, cradling a hot mug of tea between her hands and looking at nothing. I raised my grease-spattered clothes. “Uh. .”
“Just stick them in the washing machine, OK?”
I turned the machine up hot, threw in powder and watched it go. We do not understand why people who watch the workings of the washing machine are mocked. Meditation classes and serene chants have nothing on the slow turning of socks in soapy water.
She gave me a mug of tea and said, “Sorry, I don’t have any. .”
“Thank you. This is fine.”
I felt I should say something more. “Look, I can just go, once. .”
“Are you human?”
The question caught us off guard. “What?”
“Are you human?” she asked.
“Yes.” Mostly.
“Oh. Then, I mean, what happens now? Like in films, and on TV, there’s rules, like amnesia and stuff. I mean, is there. .?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“OK. Uh, I can’t afford counselling; so, if you could just. .”
“I can go,” I said.
She gave up, seemed to shrink into her dressing gown, became, for a second, aged. I wondered how old she was: a young voice from a lined face, dark hair greying at the edges. “Look,” she said, “you seem like a nice guy. I mean, you saved my life, so I figure, you can’t be all shit, unless this is some cunning plan of yours to be like a rapist or something, in which case I figure. .
“I mean, what I’m saying is that I get up at six-thirty every morning to go to work and come back at six-thirty every evening and make pasta for supper and watch the telly and go to bed at ten-thirty and on the weekends I clean up and see some mates and my kid is. . and you know, sometimes there’s guys and that’s nice and I get support from the council and there’s like so much fucking paperwork you would not believe and it’s just. . it’s ordinary, get it? Five hours ago, it was just. .”
“Ordinary?” I suggested.
“Just tell me it was a coincidence. A thing came up from the sewers, and it was just luck, right?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Bad luck, to be exact, but still just luck. There was no reason for you to be there, no reason for it to be there. It just happened. Sometimes things do just happen.”
“You don’t sound like you believe that.”
I shrugged. “I guess sooner or later the rationale is, I just happen to be crossing the road when a car comes and knocks me down, and he’s only there and I’m only there for a world of reasons an infinity apart and because it was going to happen to someone, so why not me?”
“Why were you there?”
“We wanted fish and chips.”
“How come you can do things?”
“It’s just a point of view. I’m a sorcerer. It’s just a way of seeing things differently. That’s all.”
“Sorcerer.”
“Yup.”
“Like, big beards and stuff.”
“Times have changed. You can always tell you’re being sold a bad product if it comes attached to a pentangle star. New times — new magics. Different symbols.”
“Symbols? Like spells?”
“Sort of.”
“Show me.”
“You don’t want to-”
“Show me!”
So I did. I got a piece of paper and drew a sign of power, a protective ward. She looked at it, unimpressed. “It’s the Underground sign.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, God. You are a whack-job.”
“You’re not listening. Life is magic. Ideas, symbols, words, meanings. New meanings, new words. In the old days if you wanted to banish a demon you invoked the powers of the winds, north and south. These days, you summon Geesink Norba. In the old days, a wizard would call on silver moonlight to guide them through a monster’s lair. These days, we summon sodium light and a neon glow, and the monster’s lair tends to have a trendy postcode and pay council tax.”
“You make it sound. .”
“Ordinary?”
“Boring.”
“It’s not boring. Keep away from it.”
And she looked at me, at us, she looked us in the eye, and wasn’t scared. She took our hand. Clean fingers, dry from soap. She said, “Do you have a home?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“I lost certain things.”
“Where do you live?”
“I move around.”
“Do you have a job?”
“Sometimes. It’s not very glamorous.”
“Do you pay income tax?”
“No. I did, though, before. . I did pay tax.”
“What’s your favourite food?”
We licked our lips. “Too many choices.”
“Where did you last go on holiday?”
Hard to remember. A world ago, a different meaning. “Istanbul.”
“What’s your favourite colour?”
“Blue.”
“Worst bus route.”
“91, Crouch End to Trafalgar Square. It gets stuck up at Euston, crawls round King’s Cross, takes for ever — faster to walk.”
“Favourite. .” she drawled, “. . favourite ice cream flavour.”
“Too many choices.”
“Everyone has a favourite flavour.”
“Strawberry. Although it depends on how sunny it is.”
“All-time best memory.”
“Living,” we said instinctively, and was surprised to hear our own words.
“Tad tossy,” she replied.
“There’s a story.”
“Worst memory.”
“Dying,” I said.
“And you’re not smiling.”
“No.”
“You know what — not going there.”
“Probably for the best.”
“Matthew,” she said firmly, “will you stay here tonight?”
She slept in the bed; I slept on the floor.
She didn’t sleep. At three in the morning she got up and pronounced, “Buggerit.”
We watched TV, wrapped in duvets. You haven’t seen bad until you’ve seen 3 a.m. TV. It made EastEnders look like class. At 3.30 a.m. she put on a DVD. It was some kind of fluffy romantic thing, that baffled and bemused us in equal measure. At 4.00 a.m., without ever planning on it, Loren fell asleep at just the right angle to trap my legs and sever blood supply to my left arm. I didn’t move. It wouldn’t have been right.
The boy got the girl, the girl got the boy, they sailed away beneath the Golden Gate Bridge as fireworks went off in the background. I thumbed the DVD player off with the remote control, watched a bit more telly, and eventually, even we fell asleep as the first touch of sunlight slid through the window in the smallest hours of the morning.
*
My friends are dead. That, or they think I’m dead. But most of them are dead. They died. They were killed; murdered. Just like me. The annihilation of everyone who stood in the path of Robert Bakker and his shadow.
Dana Mikeda helped us and died. My apprentice, grumbling, to-the-point Dana Mikeda who had stood over my grave when I died and helped me when we returned and for her pains, her neck had been torn apart by the shadow of Robert Bakker. An act of spite; pure spite. Vera helped us, and her body is paint on the floor, a bullet spinning in the colours. I say sorcerer and people are afraid; we say blue electric angels, and people run from us as though we were vengeance and fire sent upon them for their sins. Why should we care for their failures?
Dead friends dead for me.
We still do not, to this day, understand why I gave Loren my mobile number.
I left after breakfast. She had work to do, was already late. Work is routine, routine is ordinary, and there is always some salvation to be found in the ordinary.
There was some passing time.
A few weeks.
She called me once, in the middle of the night, crying. She was hearing sounds, strange sounds. I came round. The kid’s bedroom was empty again, but she didn’t speak about that. The sound turned out to be from a mouse. I don’t know how it had got in, but the thing was in the kitchen, confused, rattling around trying to find its way out. I crooned pretty sounds at it until it came out from where it was hiding behind the washing machine, stroked its tiny back, not as long as my thumb, let it run into the palm of my hand and told it firmly that here was not the place to be. Then I went away again. Ordinary routine; get up, go to work. Safety in ordinary. Nothing needs to be said or done that isn’t. .
. . ordinary.
Then one day — only a few days ago, it seems longer — she rang me.
She said, “My son has gone.”
*
His name is Mo. He is seventeen years old — just the wrong age to be almost anything. He dropped out of school, wants to be a stuntman. Drives fast motorbikes, none of which are ever his own.
His room is a biological warfare strike zone.
His shoes are two sizes too big for me.
She said, “My son has gone. Please — the police have looked and can’t find anything. His friends have gone. It’s been four days. He’s been gone before, but not four days. And there was. . things have been. . please.”
Mothers are the last people you should ask about their seventeen-year-old sons.
The police said he was a kid heading for trouble. Some graffiti, some vandalism, some “anti-social behaviour”. ASBO kid. All hood and attitude, proud to be against the law, proud just to be against. And there was something else — his friends were missing too. Kids he’d met not at school, but at a club, she didn’t know what kind of club it was. Somewhere in North London, a club where the kids went. Or maybe the kidz. You can’t be cool and spell well at the same time.
Never ask a mother about their kids.
Far more sensible to ask their shoes.
It’s a lie that women care more than men about their shoes. Women may buy more pairs, to match up with this or that outfit, or to serve this or that purpose, but they do it easily, with a casual statement of “I’m going to buy some shoes now”.
Men, when they buy shoes, invest body and soul in the effort. This is not just a pair of shoes — this is the pair of shoes, the one and only; they have to be perfect, they have to be right.
Mo was a kid who liked his shoes. Every six months he seemed to have invested what little money he had in a new pair, sometimes Nike, sometimes Adidas, never anything in between, always the right brand, at the right time. This month, gold with blue stripes was in; this month, and black and white football boots, spikes sticking out of the soles, were the only things to have.
“What’s the most recent pair?”
Loren pointed at a pair of red and black trainers, all sponge and wheeze. I tried them on for size. Too big. I put on some more socks, tried them again, shifted round until my weight was right.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Go for a wander.”
“Can you find him?”
“Dunno. I’ll do my best.”
“If you find him. . don’t say anything, will you? It’ll only make it worse if you say something.”
She gave me a photo. It’s in my bag. The kid is ugly. He has a big head made bigger by having shaven off his hair. His jaw alone could demolish an old wall; his mouth is too small for the length of chin that surrounds it.
I left my shoes with Loren, a promise that I’d come back, and walked out of the door with the kid’s shoes on my feet.
It is surprisingly hard to scry by footware. It requires a submergence of will, an utter belief that your feet know where they’re going. Sometimes magicians learn how to do this by literally blinding themselves, tying rags over their eyes so that they have to trust entirely in the direction their body takes them, and never question, never doubt, that this is where they have to be. The problem about that is that a pair of shoes, while it may remember where it wants to go, is less likely than a brain to stop at a red light.
You need just enough awareness to stay alive, to stay smart, but not so much that you ever take control. Never question, never doubt. Just take a deep breath, and start walking.
So that’s what I did. Let the door to Loren’s flat click shut behind me, and started walking. I was lucky — there was only one way in and out of the flats, and that gave me momentum, got me going in the right direction without having to think about it. I walked out of that council block behind the canal, to the end of the street and kept on walking, past fenced-off football fields, past empty grass greens, past a Costcutters and a grand new development built up from the remnants of a warehouse; and my walk wasn’t my own.
I was swaggering. I was swinging my hips and bouncing at the knees, I was walking to an invisible hip-hop beat and only a second of awareness short of gesturing in the inexplicable, untold language of all wannabe bros out to be cool. That was good — now I knew that I was swaggering, it gave me a way in. If the spell was ever broken, a good swagger, and the shoes could take over again, recognise a familiar step, find the key to the magic.
So I swaggered, past old schools with portable cabins in the playing fields to make room for big classes pressed into a small space, past a swimming pool smelling even on the outside of thick chlorine, past little roundabouts which every driver swept across, careless of the rules of the road, past clamped vehicles and old broken telephone boxes. There was a bus stop, request; and seeing it I started to run, a strange, sideways lope, that made me feel like I had rickets. You can’t be cool and run for a bus; but I did, and got on it, knowing with absolute certainty that this was the right thing to do.
I swaggered to the back of the bus, the bottom deck, and sat myself in the darkest, hottest corner, knees stuck out, one foot propped up on the seat in front of me, hands draped out across the back of the bus like it was a throne and me the king. It’s easier if your whole body speaks the same language as your shoes; it’s another way to keep the spell.
At Old Street, my feet jerked towards the door and I followed, head bopping to a beat that even I couldn’t hear. I ambled down a long curved ramp, past several beggars, and didn’t give them a single penny. I would have — we would have — but not these shoes; they moved too fast, too cool, they weren’t going to stop.
It was late — rush hour dribbling to an end. I bounded down the escalator, elbowing passengers out of my way, swaggered onto the northbound platform, found a bench, sat on it, legs stretched out to occupy two seats with one movement, waited. The shoes hated waiting, tapped and fidgeted, but it was the Northern Line — waiting was what you did.
Train to King’s Cross; there we changed, going west to Baker Street; there we got out, and bought some kind of pasty that burnt through the paper that held it, ate it, crumbs across the seats, and rode the Jubilee Line north to Dollis Hill.
Dollis Hill. The area round the station felt not so much built as dropped down in a game of Monopoly. White houses too small for the floors they contained, streets too narrow for the cars that crawled through them.
Tired. It is tiring, sharing the journeys of a stranger. Late, now, late and no supper. I forced myself to walk like a human being when I came to the first pizza parlour that was open, ordered food, devoured it. It was past eleven when I finished, and my feet in my borrowed shoes felt like soggy prunes.
I walked again. Swaggered to get back into the feel of it, bobbed my head, twisted my hips, let the rhythm of the movement restore my confidence. We walked. . miles. I don’t know how many. There were. . things. Strangenesses. We would come to places and just stop and stare, and our feet would itch and we would see things, that. . that made us uneasy.
A length of wall beside a quiet pub, where drunken youth should have sat, guffawing at passers-by and scaring the old ladies, and where now there was nothing. Just shadow and empty beer cans.
A skater park beneath a railway bridge, the wooden slopes empty, and on the walls, old graffiti.
Δοσ μου πισο το Καπελο μου
Or:
HMT GMO 2
Or:
FREE PALESTINE
There should have been something more. A “Mo was ’ere” wouldn’t have gone amiss. There was. . a strangeness. A bite in the air, like the distant taste of the street from inside the tree-sheltered stretches of an urban cemetery. A sense of something that should have been, but wasn’t any more.
So we kept on walking, our swagger losing some of its confidence as the hours rolled by and all the places where there should have been something — the pub showing the football, the empty skater park, the closed off-licence, the houses with their lights turned down — there was nothing.
And then a telephone rang.
It was the small hours of the morning by then, and we were still walking, just walking and walking and the shoes wanted to go further, but a telephone rang, somewhere near Dudden Hill Lane.
And it was. .
. . of course we were going to answer but. .
. . it is our nature. .
I had no reason.
We just had to.
“Well. You know the rest.
A telephone rang in Willesden, between Dollis Hill and Dudden Hill Lane. It rang at 2.25 in the morning, and I, despite having Mo’s shoes on my feet, I went and answered it. I answered the telephone and after that. .
. . I guess my priorities changed.
I thought he was just some missing kid. We had no reason to think of it as anything else. I went looking for him in order to help a friend. Then the phone rang and we answered and all this began: the Midnight Mayor, the spectres, the dead ravens, the broken Stone, Nair, Vera, the Aldermen. It all happened and we were caught in it and didn’t think, didn’t stop to think that Loren would be. .
. . didn’t stop.
I think that’s all I can really say on the matter.”
* * *
I finished talking.
Sinclair was eating something that looked like a miniature version of Table Mountain, carved out of yellow goo and black grain. He took a careful sliver, and ate it. He put his fork down. He dabbed at his round lips with the end of a napkin. Charlie’s food sat uneaten on the plate in front of him. We scraped something that might have been gravy on the end of our fork, and licked. The restaurant was emptier, people gone on to a sexy midnight time, or maybe just to bed, only a few tables still inhabited in the gloom.
At last he said, “Well. .” And then stopped. Then tried again. “Well, what times you have been living. You know, saturates are. .”
“Rare. Yes. I know.”
“Saturates and spectres.”
“Both rare.”
“And you seem to walk into both — unfortunate, so very unfortunate.”
“We’re rare too.”
He smiled, a knife-thin flash of teeth in a great stretch of mouth. “So,” he said at last, “what do you propose to do about all this?”
I hesitated. “Well, there’s some choices.”
“Such as, Matthew, such as?”
“One — run away.”
“A somewhat ignoble suggestion, perhaps, in light of your otherwise gentlemanly conduct so far.”
“Two — find the creature that killed Nair.”
“That would make some sense.”
“No it wouldn’t. If it could flay him alive without trying I have no reason to believe it wouldn’t do the same to me. It would be madness. Pointless. Suicide by pinstripe suit. Besides, I have every confidence that if I stick around long enough, trouble and abuse can find me out just fine on their own terms. Which leaves option three — find the kid.”
“You’re not interested in this. . this curious writing on the wall? This ‘give me back my hat’?”
“I am interested. But I don’t know what I can do about it. If Nair was looking for Mo, then he must be more important than I thought. He said — Swift has the shoes. Their only use is finding the kid. Nair was killed only a few miles from where I was when I let the shoes carry me walkies. And we promised. . I promised to help her. Loren. What else can I do?”
“So you’re going to, as it were, carry on as normal? Continue doing what you were doing, regardless of the fact that you are now Midnight Mayor, last defender of the city, protector of the magicians and midnight magics of the streets, saviour and general all-purpose valorous champion and so on and so forth?”
“Yes. Pretty much.”
“I imagine the Aldermen won’t be entirely pleased about that.”
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I don’t want the Aldermen involved. I don’t want anything to do with them. I know you have. . connections.”
Sinclair sighed, long and low. “Yes,” he said at last. “I have connections. It is my business, my pension, if you will, to have connections. To keep a keen interest on matters such as these — tiresome though it can be. But you have to understand, Matthew, having connections is about much, much more than being a messenger boy. I can inform the Aldermen that you are the Midnight Mayor, ask them to help you or, if you really feel it is necessary, to leave you alone. Of course I can do this, of course.
“But then how will they feel about me, who let you walk away into an almost certain — as certain as these things can be for yourself — almost certain death, without clarifying what is going on, what the brand on your hand means, what must happen for the good of all? It is a fine balance, keeping my connections. Sooner or later you have to make some sacrifices.”
It wasn’t just the way he said it.
We reached for the nearest knife.
“Bang,” said a voice. “Bang.”
It was a woman’s voice. It was accompanied by a woman’s hand. The hand went round my neck, fingers under my chin, pulling it back. The other hand was somewhere nearby. Probably at the other end of the gun pressed into my skull. We recognised the voice.
“Bang,” she said.
“Oda,” we whispered. “We wondered.”
That’s the problem with psycho religious nutcases. They’re never there when you need them. And when you could really do without, they decide to crash the party. Oda had never been a social animal.
Sinclair stood up, pulled the napkin from his throat and folded it up neatly in front of his plate. “I am honestly sorry about all this,” he intoned. “But while I trust you, Matthew, to come round eventually and do the right thing, or at the very least, the thing that needs to be done, there is no guarantee I can offer in heaven or earth that they won’t take the first option you happened to suggest, and just run. Fire and light and freedom and life, isn’t that how it goes? Terror and love of life, so big and so bright that you think you’ll drown in it? Too big and too bright to ever let go. I am sorry, Matthew, that for their sake this has to happen.”
I tried to turn my head; Oda’s fingers pinched into my throat, her arm pressed against my windpipe. She leant in close, so close her breath drifted over my eyes, and whispered again, “Bang.” I could just see the blackness of the gun out of the corner of my eye; you can’t outrun bullets. The other guests in the restaurant didn’t seem to be paying any attention, were bent over scrupulously studying their dishes, not looking up, the buzz of good-mannered chit-chat continuing in the gloom. A waiter came over, laid down the bill in a leather case by Sinclair’s plate.
“If you kill us,” we hissed, “what will happen then to the Midnight Mayor?”
“You pose an interesting and pertinent academic question,” exclaimed Sinclair. “One that, in truth, I have never really considered until now. No doubt the brand will move on to some other unfortunate, who will no doubt be as confused as you were to discover themselves so cursed. Or blessed, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Traditionally the Midnight Mayor could control these matters, command them before he died — but then, I don’t think you really know how, do you? You have no idea what it really is to be the Midnight Mayor, because as I believe you yourself have suggested, you don’t even believe he exists. Thankfully,” he exclaimed, flicking open the leather case with the bill and glancing down the list, “there are concerned citizens willing to consider this possibility in further analytical depth that I, alas, in my ignorance, cannot.”
He turned his head. I couldn’t see what he was looking at, who he was smiling at; there were just shadows, noise in the corner of my vision. But I could guess. Charlie was on his feet as well, reaching into his pocket for something, a slim black box from which came a slim silver needle attached to a very small glass tube.
We snarled, “Keep away!”
“Bang,” whispered Oda in our ear. “Bang three to the chest two the head. Bang, bang.”
“Oda,” I whimpered. “Please, Oda, this isn’t. .”
She didn’t care. Or if she did, I couldn’t tell.
There was some sort of drug behind the needle.
It had my name on it.
Lights out. Goodnight and good luck with your next coagulation. .
. . sweet dreams my sweet. .
End of the line. .
Darkness.