The Midnight Mayor ms-2

by Kate Griffin

He just grunted, turned his back on me, started walking briskly the other way. We called out after, “Where are you going?”

  He looked back.

  Just a guy. Just some guy in a black jacket, frightened at a stranger’s voice shouting after him in the night.

  I raised my hands in apology, smiled, shook my head, turned and kept on walking the way I’d gone.

  With my incisive detective skills, I was beginning to notice a pattern at work.

  I could see the golden cross of St Paul’s Cathedral peeping above the nearby offices. As I walked, the streetlamps flickered, flashed unevenly when I passed beneath them, splitting my shadow into a dozen different mes that spread out like a sundial around my feet.

  I heard a squeaking.

  At first I thought it was some sort of cartoon rat.

  It would have made a strange kind of sense.

  Then the squeaking grew nearer, and now it was more a sound of metal sliding off metal. I kept on walking, figuring that if it was something important, it would catch up with me.

  It did. But it gave us a strange pleasure to make it work for the privilege.

  For a moment I thought I smelt curry powder and plastic bags, heard the distant muttering of the mad old lady with her trolley of bags, buggery, buggery, youth today, buggery . . .

  But it wasn’t her. Not tonight.

  “Hello, Matthew.”

  I looked to the voice, and didn’t stop walking. Our fists curled in anger.

  The squeaking came from a pair of big wheels behind two smaller ones. Above the wheels was a black leather chair. Attached to it was a man. Attached to him were two stands on more wheels, trailing along behind. One stand held a bag of some clear liquid, drugs or fluids or whatever; the other held a bag of blood, and I could just guess whose it was.

  Pushing the wheelchair was a man dressed all in shadows and my old coat.

  Angry.

  Don’t look.

  Angry.

  “Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, “how exactly do think this business is going to end?”

  “Terminally,” I replied. “But at least it will end. Dead is dead is dead. Especially for you.”

  We walked/wheeled on a little further. “Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, with a slightly reproving tone in his voice, “do you really understand what it is to be Midnight Mayor?”

  “Nope. Totally winging it.”

  “You have to serve the city.”

  “Sussed that.”

  “Not the people, Matthew. The city.”

  “I wasn’t signed up to be Robin Hood, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Let’s please not be coy about this.”

  “This isn’t me being coy, this is me being angry.”

  “Why are you angry?”

  “Because I didn’t ask for this gig. Because some bastard chose me for it without so much as a cocktail sausage and pineapple on a stick, because Vera was shot and Anissina fell into smog, because Mo is gone and Loren cried, because the spectres stabbed me and Earle sat in his office drinking coffee, because I saw a guy flayed alive and another bastard lumbered in hospital with no skin, and because you” — I stabbed an angry finger at the man in the wheelchair — “you, Mr Bakker, you are dead. We killed you. We killed you and we did it because you . . . because . . . We killed you and you should stay dead and so should your bloody fucking shadow!”

  I was shouting. My voice echoed off the buildings on the empty street, hummed in the cold water pipes. I turned away, looked down at the paving stones, counting my own steps, how many stones they covered with each stride, how many they’d cover in ten, in twenty, how many strides to a mile.

  The wheelchair rattled on peacefully beside me. Mr Bakker sat, his pale, spotted hands folded across his belly, his head tilted up and to one side, being pushed by his shadow. His blood-soaked shadow in the bloodstained remnant of my old coat, the one I’d died in. The one I’d been killed in. That coat.

  “What’s the point of all this?” I asked at last, as we swung into the mess of up-down streets between Farringdon Road and Fleet Street. “I get that there’s mystical shit going on and all that, but what exactly is the point? Am I supposed to derive some great moral message from all this, become a better person, a nicer Midnight Mayor? From what I can tell, ‘nice’ isn’t the qualifying term.”

  “I think,” said Bakker, drawing in that long, slow, thoughtful breath he’d always used as a teacher, just before the answer “maybe”, “I think that you’re supposed to find out what kind of Mayor you’re meant to be. I don’t know. It’s not really my field of expertise.”

  “Great. You know, that implies all sorts of unpleasant things about higher powers.”

  “Or a lot about your current state of mind. How is your current state of mind?”

  “I see no reason to tell you about it.”

  “But isn’t that the point?”

  “I don’t know. No one has told me the point. And until someone does, I’m just going to assume there isn’t one and keep on walking for the hell of it.”

  I kept on walking.

  “Matthew?”

  “Still here.”

  “On the subject of higher powers . . .”

  “Yup.”

  “I’d like to posit one to you, purely, you understand, hypothetically.”

  “I’m paying attention only because there’s nothing else to occupy me at the moment.”

  He took a deep breath and went, “The city.”

  “Yup.”

  “As higher power.”

  “I’m still only here out of shitty luck.”

  “Well, no. If you see what I mean.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Let me try and explain it.”

  “Happy day.”

  “A woman gets up for work. Her alarm is powered from the mains, and doesn’t go off this morning because on the other side of the city another woman whose clock was powered by battery missed the wake-up call and didn’t press the right button at the transformer station. She’s running late. She doesn’t have time to make breakfast so she runs to the supermarket where at three a.m. the previous night three students and a disgraced manager loaded freshish sandwiches onto refrigerated shelves so that this woman could run in all a fluster, buy one and get out. She’s still running late. She runs for a bus that doesn’t come. The driver has been caught in traffic because pipes have burst further up the street, and it’s going to take him twenty minutes to get moving past the junction and then five minutes to do double that distance. The bus comes. She gets on. The bus takes her to work. At work, she toils for eight hours without much of a break then has to go and see friends in the evening. They’re going to have a Chinese takeaway. The food is being prepared by a chef, whose cousin runs a Chinese goods import-export on the edge of Enfield. Every day he receives and delivers a whole city’s orders for mandarin duck, chilli sauce and yaki noodles, a fleet of two dozen vans at his command, fifty workers on staff at any time, collecting orders from airports, delivering them to cities within a two-hundred-mile radius. The woman gets her food because the van turned up on time, the driver paid his congestion charge zone fee, the MOT was clean, the engine was full of petrol. She eats her Chinese meal. As she goes home, the streetlamps come on, the rubbish is removed, the buses drive along lines that have been painted, roads that have been laid, the water mains are repaired and it is an easy run back to watch the telly, and so goes her day.”

  I waited a moment after he’d finished talking, to see if there was something else.

  “Yessss?”

  “Matthew — does it not occur to you that even to live in the city as we do, to go day by day and do what is done, see what there is, live surrounded by eight million strangers, dependent on strangers to drive the bus, prepare the food, clean up the rubbish, pipe the water, supply the electrics, answer the—”

  “I get the idea.”

  “Then you see my point?”

  “Not quite . .
.”

  “Matthew! I taught you better than this!”

  “You killed me better than this too, remember?”

  “‘You killed me too’ — must we be playground infants? Dead is dead is dead.”

  “OK. Your point?”

  “My point is this: that the city even exists, even lives, so alive! So gloriously, wonderfully, amazingly alive! That for all this to be so, day by day, is a miracle. And since miracles are by definition rare, is it not possible, even reasonable to turn what seems a constancy of miracles into the idea of a higher power, and call it simply, the city?”

  “Oh. I get it now. Philosophy 101 for Midnight Mayors.”

  “Life is magic, Matthew. You said it yourself. Even the boring, mundane acts, even breathing, seeing, perceiving, being perceived. Life is magic. That is all a sorcerer is.”

  “I know,” I sighed. “I remember.”

  We were nearing Ludgate. A great joining of places, confused, wriggling in from all sides, monuments to the war dead, supermarkets for the living, and coffee shops for all. The squeaking of Bakker’s wheelchair was growing less. I glanced down at him. His face was sunk, dark, grey, fading into shadow. His chair was fading into shadow, stretching thin and flat across the floor.

  I looked away.

  We had no need to see such things again.

  There was something wrong. It wasn’t that Bakker faded into shadow; it was that he faded into his own shadow, and that shadow faded into my shadow, and my shadow was doing the pencil-thin thing behind me as I walked towards the light, and in front of me, and around me, and it wasn’t so thin as it ought to be and wasn’t so flat on the pavement as the normal laws of optics demanded. If water was nothing more than moonlight on the earth, this is how it would behave.

  My hand hurt.

  It more than hurt.

  I cradled it to my chest. The stitches in my skin hurt. My head hurt. The paper cuts stung across every part of me. We could feel warm blood rolling down from the tiny slice below our eye, feel itching in the palm of our hand. The travelcard of destiny is never behind the sofa, these things are never as easy as a party with pineapples. I opened my hand. The twin crosses were burning, the blood in them turned to warm red flame. I didn’t know if this was a good sign or a bad one. We turned our face away. I walked the southern edge of Gray’s Inn, past shuttered shops and gloomy, lights-out banks, past bus stops declaring on their orange boards:

  1. 341 — North’land Pk — 14 mins.

  2. 11 — Liverpool St — 15 mins.

  3. 17 — runrunrunrunrunrunENDOFTHELINErunrunrunrun run — Due

  4. 11 — Liverpool Street — 18 mins

  Want flexible hours and excellent pay? Be a bus driver! Then you too can become a shadow on the wall! Phone Arriva on 0800 924 7100.

  A splat of a pub was turning out for the night, customers, mostly drunken students, spilling onto the streets, arms full of stolen ketchup sachets and packets of brown sauce, cackling merrily under the streetlights. A couple of taxis went by. A woman was leaning against the window of an electronics store, arms folded, head turned towards me. I recognised her as I approached, but turned my eyes away from her face. She fell into step with me as I passed, saying nothing. It’s hard to say anything when your throat is half missing. In films it’s always neat, a single cut, one slice and that’s it, just another scarlet smile a bit lower than your first. This wasn’t a neat missing throat. This was a five-fingered yawn torn from muscle and flesh, that gaped and laughed obscenely with each rattle of her jaw.

  In life, the woman whom this obscenity mimicked had been called Dana Mikeda. My former apprentice. The half-Russian daughter of a sandwich shop owner in Smithfields. She’d been taken in by Mr Bakker, when I’d died. She’d been the one who cast the spell that brought us back.

  She hadn’t died a tidy death.

  When she talked, her voice bubbled through crimson blood popping out of the gaps in her neck. She said, “You can still run away.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Seriously. Find another city, find somewhere else. The world is big enough, even for you. What loyalty do you have to this city?”

  “I was born here.”

  “And what loyalty do you have to this city?”

  “We were born here too.”

  She smiled, and so did her throat. “Haha. Deep. You should write Christmas crackers. Still, plenty of people stuff their domestic loyalties.”

  “Nah. You get born in London, you get raised in London, sooner or later you’ll put ‘Londoner’ on your passport. Hey — I can even give you a bit of Midnight Mayor pep talk, while you’re here, Dana, not being dead. How’s this for Alderman crap: the city defines you. Or even better — I am born in this city and it makes me who I am. The streets, the stones, the strangers, everything, whether I meant it or not, made me me. Ergo, we will not abandon it. You like?”

  “Christmas cracker.”

  “Yeah. Flawed logic, in my opinion.”

  “Then why’d you say it?”

  “I think it’s the point. Of the walk, I mean. To get that whole sense of perspective. Get whacked up on the conviction that I’m fighting for something and, most likely, being flayed alive for something.”

  “You feeling convinced?”

  I looked at her face. We felt . . . almost pleased . . . to see it again, talking, moving, even above that shattered throat. A mimicry of life, an abomination, but perhaps, a recollection of something living, whose memory had threatened to die. I remembered, so she lived, just like the poets went and said. Easy to forget, when you want to.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “What?”

  “For what happened to you.”

  “Me? You really think I walk around with this shit in my throat?”

  “No, that’s not the point. I fully comprehend that you’re just another metamagical manifestation of whatever crackpot Mayorish madness this particular acid trip is. But you have her face, and I never got to say sorry to the real one. So . . . sorry. I’m sorry. We’re sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Aw,” she said. “Nice of you to say, bit late.”

  Slipping down past Lincoln’s Inn, alone again on the empty streets, following the route of the old wall as best I could, shadows thick at my back. Look out of the corner of our eye and we could see them, bubbling, twisting, rising up the walls, crawling out of the streets, dark faceless masses trying to be heard. Earle had said: so many millions of dead men and dead women buried beneath the city.

  Dead is dead is dead.

  Dead memories, dead names, dead things.

  Dead is dead is dead until someone happens to remember.

  And life was, after all, magic.

  So here we are, heading towards Fleet Street, and the lights are being smothered in the shadows that follow us. Here we are, wandering past old-fashioned terraced houses of black brick and white facings, of thick wooden doors and cross-sashed windows, of pointed roofs and old, disused chimney stacks, past old forgotten greenery tucked into car-filled streets. And here’s the shadows, the memories that no one bothers to remember: who put down the stones and laid the streets and painted the lines and powered the wires and pumped the water and stacked the sandwiches onto the shelves; and who died and were buried and covered over by the spread of the city, and the bones of the more recently dead, whose families could pay for their lot in a currency that buys more interesting things to smother over the smell of sawdust and widdle. And our hand is bleeding and our head is aching and the dead should just stay dead is dead is dead, just like me.

  Now we knew what Vera — the painted cartoon of Vera — had meant. If we stopped walking now, the tidal wave of darkness writhing at our back would fall, tumbling under its own weight, spiral tip-down on top of us and suffocate the life from our chest, press until we couldn’t breathe and that would be it: so long, goodbye, goodnight, farewell. Keep walking and you didn’t have to look, didn’t have to stop and notice the bricks laid by dead
hands on a plan drawn by a dead stranger who was commissioned by another stranger who earned his money off the thoughts of strangers who ate the food of strangers who sat huddled kissing-close every day to strangers on a train, armpit-close because that was what you did, that was how you got around, as intimate as a lover and probably more honest too, blood in our hand, shadows at our feet. And here it is, Fleet Street, the mad-eyed dragon guarding its shield with the twin crosses that burnt brighter than the red glow of the traffic lights, watching us with a spinning chaos in its eyes as if it too had seen the endless hole into which the forgotten dead of the city had plummeted and knew how deep the bones went below.

  And there was someone leaning against the base of the dragon. I couldn’t stop walking, not now, and he didn’t seem inclined to follow; just watched me calmly from where he stood, drinking a cup of coffee. I walked straight by, heading back towards the river, dragging the darkness and the shadows and the memories and painted footsteps and whispered voices along behind me and he, at last, drained the remainder of his cup, threw the thing into a bin, and followed, hands buried in his pockets. He was wearing a coat I’d seen already in the night. He came level with me as I headed down the side of a newsagent’s towards the river, a tight little street of too few lights held too high up above too little pavement.

  I said through gritted teeth, almost too breathless to talk, too busy to slow, “What the hell do you want? This is a walk for the dead.”

  Blood dribbled from my closed palm, splattered onto the street at my feet, slipped into the mad gaps in the tarmac.

  “Oh — I’m totally dead,” he replied. “I mean, totally.”

  “You’re not. Unless we’re talking prophetically.”

  “Noooo,” he said carefully. “No, I think we’re dealing with the past here. See, I got gutted by the shadow of my former teacher. He let me die by a phone box near the river. The last breath left my lungs, my heart beat its last, my internal organs decided to give the open air a try and my brain stopped crackling. Medically, dead. You seen Star Trek?”

  “Of course I’ve seen Star Trek — do you mind, I’m busy here?”

  “You thought about the teleportation stuff?”