by Kate Griffin
Time passed.
Can time take its time?
It did tonight.
Then, just when I was getting used to its saunter, it started to jog, and my Alderman watcher/carer/guardian/assassin said, “We have to go.”
They took me by car to the base of London Bridge. They unloaded me in the bus lane on the south side, and sped off, citing traffic regulations. The tin shed of London Bridge station squatted behind, the yellow towers of Southwark Cathedral across the other side of the street. It was midnight in London, and the city was taking its time, or maybe time was taking it. The wind carried the sound of the bells of St Paul’s as they banged out the hour. Behind HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge was lit up in dangling red and green lights. The Tower of London sat squat and orange, like an angry garden gnome in the family too long to care that it was now cracked and ugly. The black lamp-posts along the river, stretching out past Butler’s Wharf, were hung with shining white bulbs; the grey concrete of London Bridge was lit up with shimmering pinks and purples the entire span of its length.
I took a deep breath of clear Thames air.
It made me feel cooler inside, sharper on the edges, drove the weariness out of my eyes and the lead from my brain. They say yogis can live a whole day on just one breath. If it was the breath of the river of the city they loved, then I can see how it might work.
Earle had said: magic is life.
He’d got it only slightly wrong.
The rest of what he’d said seemed, to our mind, utter bollocks.
I started walking.
Or maybe, we should call it processing.
Whatever that walk was that the Midnight Mayor did, I did it that night.
Second Interlude: The Inauguration of Matthew Swift
In which various dead things make their point, the ethics of urban planning come under scrutiny, and a new Midnight Mayor learns some important lessons about some old ideas.
The Lord Mayor, when he gets inaugurated on that cold, drizzling November evening, doesn’t just get cocktail sausages — he gets champagne, pineapple, cheese on sticks and someone to hold the umbrella.
So much for perks of office.
I wondered, as I walked across London Bridge, trailing my fingers along the railing and watching the water gush and slide beneath me, if Earle was just holding out on the cocktail sausages as a matter of principle. The life of Midnight Mayor seemed a precarious one, obtained for the most part after years of questionable service. And to be Midnight Mayor and face various unnatural and, in my case, unkillable dangers, all of which seemed out to get you, thank you kindly, without even a piece of pineapple on a stick as a reward, seemed . . .
. . . unnatural.
Which was probably the point.
So much for the ruthless application of reason.
I walked.
Earle had said I had to follow the old route of the city wall. All but a few pieces had been demolished years ago, and those I’d seen were nestled away.
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
Lock the gates against evil, whatever that meant. If I took “evil” in the traditional Christian meaning, 90 per cent of the city’s inhabitants wouldn’t be able to get to work in the morning, ourself included. Even limiting the definition to things actively out to kill and maim, it still presented semantic as well as practical problems.
You’ll work it out, he’d said.
Assuming he even wanted us to live.
Still, any advantage, anything against Mr Pinner, seemed worth getting, and it couldn’t take more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to walk the course of the old wall. Even if it achieved nothing material, it would calm us down, let us soak up some of the older, quieter magics that slithered across the pavement like low mist, as we fed off the rhythm of the wander.
Magic is life, my old teacher had said.
Turn it round, and you begin to get something.
We walked.
Shops, shut; camera shop, TV in the window showing our face in a dozen screens from a single camera as we passed by; shop selling suits and ties; Monument station, shut; the Monument itself, its golden ball of fire peeking over the top of the surrounding buildings; cobbled streets leading to ancient, low, forgotten churches, smothered in the gross concrete buildings bursting up around. A giant chemist, where you could purchase things to make your skin brighter, darker, tighter, softer, gentler, warmer, hairier, smoother — and who knew, even find some medicines too. Spitalfields off to my right, the streets empty, the city workers long since gone home, the traffic nothing more than a lost 15 bus on its way to Blackwall, before the night buses took over. A wide street, concrete buildings edging against black reflecting windows that stared angrily down on the grand decadence of the older Victorian offices squatting in tight streets with names like Cornhill, Leadenhall, Fenchurch Street, St Helen’s Place, Clark’s Place, Camomile Street, Houndsditch, Liverpool Street, Wormwood Street, and all their little friends and relations scrabbling away into the crowded gloom of the night-time emptied city. A few miles to the north and a few streets to the south, the night would be loud and lively, full of partying, drinking and general wassail. Here, where the offices were, no one lived, and little stirred except myself and the occasional passing dustbin man.
I headed for Aldgate, that strange junction where the run-down old window frames of the East End met the pampered corniced doors of the City, no apology, no excuse; just bang and there it was: humming, buying, selling, smelling, bustling squalor and the death of brand names. A subway beneath a broad roundabout where the narrow city roads began to spread out into the urban-planned highways towards the estuary, the east, and the Blackwall Tunnel; newspaper drifted beneath the dull lamps; shops, built underground as part of a cunning scheme that had never worked, lurked behind abandoned blankets too tatty even for the beggars to take. The writing was on the wall, declaring such mystic statements as:
BHN CCI ABP RULZ!
Or:
I LOVE CALIPER BOY
Or in sad scratched letters:
make me a shadow on the wall
I kept on walking, ignoring the signs that lied about which exit led where with ancient yellow arrows half torn from the walls. The feeling that I was not alone crept up on me with the gentle padding walk of the polite assassin. I let it get close, until I could feel it tickling the back of my neck, then stopped, hands buried in my trouser pockets, and turned.
There was no one there.
I felt like the justifiable fool I was.
I turned back, kept on walking.
I was still not alone.
I reached the ramp up from the subway, and stopped again. This was, I figured, the last chance to check for followers and get it wrong, without making a fool of myself in public.
Still no one there.
There was, however, something on the wall.
I looked at it carefully.
Someone had spray-painted on the image of a woman. She wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt and appeared to be drinking some sort of yoghurt drink from a plastic cup. Her top lip had folded over the pink straw from it to her mouth and the movement had tilted her head down, but her eyes were up, and fixed on me. They were laughing.
They were also blinking. A rhythmic, silent, steady on-off, one-two count, long eyelashes moving over the soft reflected pink of her eyes.
I recognised the painted woman’s face.
I said, “Vera.”
The painted face stopped drinking the painted yoghurt through the painted straw and looked up. Then the two-dimensional flatness said, “Ah, shit.”
Her lips moved; a pink thing wiggled inside the redness of her mouth. No depths to it, just a change in colour to imply an alteration of perspective. A cartoon on the wall, and the wall was speaking. Her voice echoed the length of the subway. I repeated numbly, “Vera?”
She gestured with the plastic cup, which slid silently over the chipped concrete as if paint was nothing more than a sheet of silk to be moved and slid back
at will. “You gotta keep walking,” she said. “You don’t walk, and it won’t work.”
I turned, and kept on walking. Never argue with the surreal; there’s no winning against irrationality. The image of Vera slid off the wall behind me and onto the wall by my side. She was walking with me. I could only see her profile, like an ancient Egyptian painting turned sideways in a Pharaoh’s tomb, and her outline was wobbling, uneven, as if the invisible cartoonist sketching her onto the concrete couldn’t keep up with the speed of her swagger. I said, “This is peculiar.”
“You think?!” she chuckled. “Jesus.”
As we neared the top of the ramp, her whole form was gently eaten away by the lack of concrete on which to project itself, until there was nothing more than a pair of knees, a pair of ankles, a pair of feet walking beside me, before even that was erased by the lack of wall onto which to walk. Then there were just a pair of painted footprints walking next to mine, that landed with an audible splat splat splat as they stepped along beside me, drawn in white paint. As we passed by a lamp-post she was briefly back again, her image keeping track of her footsteps, painting itself onto the nearest handy surface: postbox, telephone box, as we walked on.
Not having a mouth didn’t stop her talking. Her voice drifted out of the air, somewhere above those painted steps on the floor.
“So, how’s it going, Swift?”
“Not too well,” I answered, watching the street around me for someone with a straitjacket and a literal mind. “I’ve wound up Midnight Mayor, been chased, pursued and misunderstood, and now I’m talking to, with all respect, a dead pair of painted footsteps.”
“Yeah. That must be a bit freaky.”
“It could be worse.”
“Seriously?”
“Someone says ‘inauguration’ in my line of work, and you can just bet there’ll be freaky shit. It’s like quests. You get told ‘go forth and seek the travelcard of destiny’ and you know, I mean, you seriously know that it won’t have just been left down the back of the sofa. You read — seen — Lord of the Rings?”
“Yessss . . .”
“Ever wondered why they didn’t just get the damn eagles to go drop the One Ring into the volcano, since they seemed so damn nifty at getting into Mordor anyway?”
“Nooo . . .”
“See? Fucking quests! So talking to a dead pair of footprints. Fine.”
We passed a parked white van, and for a moment Vera was back, her painted form shimmering across its glass and metal sides. She looked worried.
“Something bad is going down, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yup.”
“Seriously bad?”
“Pretty much.”
“I know. I guess what you said about the whole quest thing — it makes sense that I should know, yeah?”
“I guess so. Any useful tips?”
She’d vanished off the side of the van. For a while there was nothing but the splat splat splat of her footsteps, as the only sign she still walked by me. Then, “End of the line.”
“Thanks.”
“Swift?”
“Yeah?”
“You heard of the death of cities?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he’s real? That he’s been real ever since Remus turned to Romulus and said, ‘hey, cool digs, bro’?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he can be summoned? Sometimes he’s called by the volcano, or the thunder, or the war, but always, something summons him.”
“Yeah. I’d heard.”
“Swift?”
Her voice was fading, the painted footsteps on the ground growing fainter.
“Yeah?”
“Am I really dead?”
“You got shot and turned into a puddle of paint.”
“That’s not normal corpselike behaviour.”
“No. It did occur to me that it was a little unusual. You are — were — leader of the Whites, a clan with a big thing for life, paint, graffiti and all the magics in between. But then again, if you’re not dead, what are you doing here?”
“Good bloody point.”
Her footsteps faded to a thin splatter, then a little smear, then died altogether. We didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to the vibe.
Just above Aldgate, I turned west, heading towards Old Street and Clerkenwell Road, watching offices dissolve slowly into a mixture of shops and flats, piled up on top of each other, joining briefly the ring road that was at all hours laden with traffic, and then heading further along, skimming the northern edge of the Barbican to where those painted statues of those mad-eyed dragons holding the shield with the twin crosses stood guard over the city. The white towers of the churches built after the Great Fire were mainly behind me, twenty-six in all, most of their bodies gutted in the Blitz.
A voice said, “Spare some change?”
A beggar with a big beard sat in the doorway of a recruitment firm, dark eyes staring up at us. I fumbled in my pocket, found nothing, dug into my satchel, felt the desire to keep on walking, the rhythm briefly broken, found my wallet, found the £30 I carried inside, handed it over.
“Cheers,” said the beggar.
“Any time,” I replied, and kept on walking.
A few doorways later and a voice said, “So you like to walk?”
It was the same voice.
It was the same beggar.
“Sure,” I replied, and kept on walking.
By the bolted metal door round the back of a photocopy shop, he was still here, knees huddled up to his chin, blanket pulled over his shoulders. “It’s the new thing, you know. Walking,” he said.
“No it’s not. In the old days people used to walk all the time.”
“Yeah . . . but that was because it was walk or sit behind a shitting horse in a flea-infested coffin smelling of sawdust and widdle.”
“You may have a point, although I imagine that most of the early modern period smelt of sawdust and widdle regardless of your means of transport.”
There was a long brick warehouse ahead, its back turned to the street, no doorways for the beggar to sit in. That bought me a few more moments to gather my thoughts, and sure enough, sat in the next doorway past that, there he was again, lighting a fag.
“You know,” he said, “it’s amazing it took until 1865 for some bright spark to build a proper sewerage system.”
“Antheaps,” I replied. “Or wasps’ nests. With a small nest, you don’t have to worry. It’s got to be big before you wonder if it’ll fall off the tree.”
“Someone’s been using metaphor on you, right?”
I had to wait two more doorways to reply.
“Yup.”
“Sounds to me like a paddle full of shite.”
“You’ve got to admit it has a certain chaotic something. London burnt down in 1666 and everyone went, whoopee, let’s rebuild! A golden city! But look what happened. Chaos and fluster. Everyone was so eager to live in this golden city that they didn’t even have time to build it.”
Goswell Road. Nowhere for a beggar to sit on the junction of the Goswell Road and Clerkenwell Road, just two staring dragons in a traffic island. I waited, leaning against the traffic lights. They changed. I crossed, still heading west. There were very few doorways on this side; a pub ahead, but it was occupied by a group of scruffy trendies in carefully slashed jeans sharing a bottle of wine. I kept walking. An art studio of some kind presented a low, grubby doorway.
The beggar said, “Can I make a suggestion?”
“You’ve got an agenda, right?”
“Sure.”
“OK. Suggest away.”
“Don’t do the walk. Don’t get inaugurated.”
“Why not?”
Art studio to chippy; he was in the door between that and the strip club pretending to be a pub.
“You want to be Midnight Mayor?”
“No.”
“There you go!”
“It’s not that easy.”
&nbs
p; “Sure it is. You be free.”
I kept on walking.
He wasn’t in the next doorway.
Or the one after that.
He’d had his say.
We kept on walking.
Keep moving. If you keep moving you might just manage to leave thoughts behind, you might get it done before they catch you.
Keep on walking.
Come be me . . .
Aching right hand.
We be light, we be life, we be fire!
What would Jesus do?
We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!
I like walking. Each step is a thought without words, a thought without words is a thought without blame, without retribution, without consequence.
Come be we and be free . . .
I think he did it to control you, to bind you, to curse you with his office.
. . . we be blue electric angels!
Mr Mayor.
“Mr Fucking Mayor.”
I looked up.
Kemsley’s face was a badly peeled tomato, grilled at a high heat and left to sag. You couldn’t look like that and be alive, and there was no way the Kemsley I had seen a few hours — maybe a day? — ago was up and walking. No way he’d be here, just to talk to me. I skirted south towards Holborn Viaduct, and he fell into step beside me. Boarded-up butchers’ shops, renovated Victorian ironwork painted green, red, gold, with the little dragons guarding the city wall, the shields, twin red crosses on a white background, one cross smaller than the other, one cross a sword; Domine dirige nos, the motto of the city, everywhere, once you looked, if you stopped to look.
“You want to know what I really think?” he said.
“Not really, but I guess you didn’t go to all this trouble not to tell me.”
“You are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.”
“Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.”
“You want my advice?”
“No.”
“Lie down and die. Let Mr Pinner do his thing. Let someone better take over the office. That’s the best thing you could do as Mayor, for the Mayor. Just lie down and die.”
“You know, people pay therapists to get this kind of abuse.”
