by Kate Griffin
“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 D
ana 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, shari
ng 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.
