by Kate Griffin
“Utility.”
“That’s what they said about the nuclear bomb. It’ll come in handy one day — sure, let’s keep it around.”
“Matthew,” she said sharply, and then seemed to catch her own breath, draw it in, as if she could suck the word back down. “Sorcerer,” she added, firmer, “unless you have something useful to say, shut up and work.”
I shut up.
We worked.
It didn’t take long. People go out of their way not to see the cleaners. There’s a shame involved — we let the crap fall from our nerveless fingers, and someone else picks up after.
Look; and ye shall find.
When she shuffled into view, dragging the trolley with its twin bins and collection of brushes and mops hooked onto the side, we knew before I had time even to reason it through. We snapped at Oda, “Wait here a moment,” and tripped briskly downstairs to the lower concourse, elbowed through a gaggle of schoolkids just off the train, ducked the swinging banjo of a musician dressed as Mickey Mouse headed for Disneyland and walked straight up to where she was carefully laying down a yellow sign proclaiming “Caution! Slippery Floor!” She had her back to me.
Sorcerers are good at killing people. It’s not in the job description, it just . . . comes naturally.
We stopped in front of the sign. She looked up. We opened our mouth, and she said, “Can I help you?”
A hundred ways to kill.
Stop it right here, right now. That’s the plan.
Burn out her heart, set her brain on fire, boil her blood, break her bones. A hundred ways to die, a thousand things we could do. Just human.
“Hey — can I help?”
There was a badge pinned to her blue overall. It said “P. Ngwenya — Hygiene Care Assistant”.
I looked into a pair of perfect brown ovals set in a face that was itself almost a perfect oval, except for the wide protrusion of her slightly squashed nose. 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 thin grey paint rising to a carved ridge.
Looking at her, there was something I recognised.
I said, “Uh . . .”
The empty sounds you make to buy time.
She waited patiently, not smiling, not moving, just waiting to see what I’d do next, almost as if she knew what had to come.
“Um . . .” I stumbled.
I was aware of Oda coming down the stair behind me. I heard a voice say, “Do you ever clean round the University of London?” The voice was mine.
“Yes,” she said, as if I was a child asking whether falling was always down. “Do I know you?”
“Um, no. I just . . .”
What would the Midnight Mayor do?
Save the city.
Save the stones, the streets, the roads, the stories, the treasures.
Dead is dead is dead.
(Ta-da! Still not dead.)
“Do you have the time?” I asked.
She looked at me sideways for a moment, trying to hide the scepticism in her face, then carefully raised a latex-gloved hand and pointed upwards. A clock the size of a park playground was projected onto the main wall overlooking the terminal. It said 9.23 p.m. I smiled at her, and said, “Thank you.”
And then, because Oda was at the bottom of the escalator, I turned my back to her and walked away.
“Well?” demanded Oda.
“Well?”
“Is it her?”
“What?”
“Is she the sorceress? Did you see? Is it Penny Ngwenya?”
“She’s Penny Ngwenya,” I sighed.
“Then we have to find a way to get her away from these people — the cleaners must have a supply cupboard, a place behind the . . .”
“She’s not a sorceress.”
Still me talking?
Surprise.
“What?”
“I looked at her. We read her like a book. Just an ordinary mortal, just a cleaner, nothing more. She’s not the cause of all this.”
“But you said . . .”
“I had a good hypothesis and she happened to fit it. But it’s not her. Either the theory is wrong or the Aldermen screwed up. Ngwenya isn’t our woman.”
I started climbing the stairs upwards. We wanted to breathe, proper, cold, rain-drenched London air, get a smell of bus and car, get something pure into our lungs, walk and think, get to the river, give me back my hat, just think.
“Where are you going?”
“For a walk.”
“Where are you walking?”
“Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Don’t know.”
“Sorcerer!”
I turned back so fast she nearly walked into me, tripped at the top of the stair. “You keep shouting that in public and I won’t need to worry about the gun in the dark, the stranger, silence, knife, wire, drug, needle, bomb — the NHS will get there first with a fucking straitjacket!”
Turned again, wanted out, reload, reboot, try again without the psycho shit!
(You should see what’s behind you!)
Oda scuttled after me. I felt the aching in every part of me. Strangers who’d just taken it on themselves to come and cause me pain for no damn good reason, just because I happened to be there, happened to be me, us, sorcerer, us, whatever, pick one.
Out in the cold, good wind, proper wind, a proper coat-flapper of a blast, straight up the nose and down into the lungs, a decent whallumph of a city storm, just what we needed. We ran across Euston Road in front of the angry traffic, picked a street heading away at random, started walking, past suspicious hotels with drooping neon signs, gloomy old B & Bs, Bloomsbury terraces, that could be fit for millionaires, inhabited by students behind plywood and broken glass. We let the shadows drag behind us, could taste them on the air again, just like the night we’d walked and the dead had come for a chat, clutching at our coat-tails, trying to pull us back.
The paving stones bounced loosely beneath our feet; second-hand bookshops, cafés selling suspicious sandwiches, schools of English and plumbers’ supply shops, all poking uneasily round corners where bombs had fallen on the older houses; gated crescents of withered green and leafless trees, neon lights illuminating the black fall of drizzle so thin that if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have known it was falling.
“Sorcerer!”
Oda still behind us.
“Sorcerer!”
Walking and thinking, they went naturally together. Thinking without words. “Sorcerer, stop!”
She grabbed our arm. We grabbed hers, shook her where she stood, pushed her back into the street. “Get away from us!” we snarled. “Get away!”
She fell back, stumbling into the gutter and then to the middle of the narrow street, staring at us in . . . something that on an innocent face might have been surprise and horror, and on hers was nearer contempt.
“I won’t kill her,” I said.
Revelation in Oda’s eyes. “She is—”
“No.”
“She is a sorcere—”
“No.”
“Why won’t you kill her?”
“Damnation.”
“What?”
“Damnation. Burn in hell, Oda. Damnation. You kill an innocent, you go to hell, isn’t that how it is? Do you think that your God is up there keeping score — hey, sure, she gunned down an innocent in cold blood, stood and took away a human life; for that, technically, she should spend all eternity suffocating in a vat of elephant dung, sure, but hey! Look! She killed guilty people too! Gunned them down just like the innocents, bang, bang, two to the head, three to the chest, isn’t that how it goes? A simple bit of mathematics, the bigger picture, let the evil live so that the good need not suffer extraordinarily — and look, she sacrificed her principles to let the blue electric angels live, because that way the innocent could be saved by the guilty, and the innocent mustn’t die, mustn’t be gunned down bang!
“Equations — let’s say one innocent soul is w
orth a hundred guilty ones — have you killed a hundred and one guilty people? Will their deaths buy you the way into heaven, or do you suppose at the pearly gates blood is blood is blood regardless of whose heart it was squeezed from? Greater evil, lesser evil, let’s do a risk-assessment analysis, weigh up the pros and cons, award percentage points based on who is more likely to slaughter the newborn babe, and who’ll settle for a three-week-old with hearing problems? Burn in hell, Oda! Go burn with the rest of the damned! I will not kill her!”
She looked at us like . . . we don’t know. We couldn’t see.
“I’m going to end this,” I said.
“How? If you won’t . . .”
“She’s not a sorceress.”
“You just . . .”
“She’s not. Tell the Aldermen. Scream it until the straitjacket comes. I’m going to end this.”
“How?”
“I’m going to find the damn hat. Keep away from us.”
“Sorcerer . . .”
“Burn, Oda. Let’s vote and kill a stranger. Do the maths. Then burn. Get out of the city. Run. It’s what we would do, if we had the chance.”
This time, she didn’t follow.
We walked.
Didn’t matter where.
Thinking and walking.
Brunswick Square; restaurants, supermarket, cinema — this week’s speciality: Romanian arthouse. Russell Square. Hotels and ATMs. The British Museum — great Doric columns, windows too big for a single floor to contain, posters. Those special shops that cater only for tourists: a hundred little waving Paddington Bears; shortbread at two quid a slice; tartan kilts, and “art” made almost entirely out of masking tape. New Oxford Street; Gower Street; Tottenham Court Road; Oxford Street. The shops still open, even the ones selling “I LOVE LONDON” T-shirts and big leather boots, the cafés buzzing, customers of the pubs in every by-street and up every alley spilt out into the street regardless of the cold and the drizzle. Women with piercings, wearing more metal rings than cotton clothes, men with shaven heads and white T-shirts that warp under the weight of overeating trying to explode from their innards. A thousand bright lights as far as the eye could see: the hot, tight magics of Soho to the south, the easy illusions and enchantments of Great Portland Street to the north; I could taste them, dribble my fingers in them. The shadows dragged behind me, snagged and snared on my fingertips, slipped across the palm of my hand like water blown sideways in a gale. So much magic, so much life; and it was all going to burn.
Penny Ngwenya.
Give me back my hat.
I am the death of cities.
What would the Midnight Mayor do?
Our fault — no, not quite right. Our responsibility. Our problem. Reload, reboot, without the psycho-shit.
We were going to find the hat.
Her hat.
And it occurred to me as I passed Bond Street station, I had an idea where to look.
The Jubilee Line runs through Bond Street. It’s sometimes a detail hard to remember; people think Bond Street and automatically start counting stations the long length of Oxford Street — Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, pleased that in this one case, the map of the Underground and the map of the city actually have some sort of geographical symmetry going for them.
Bond Street is therefore easy to take for granted — an in-between stop for people who don’t quite know where they’re going, unless they’re shopping for something extremely rare and expensive. Jewellers make the streets around the station their own, but the station itself is still on Oxford Street, still just a doorway on the way to somewhere more conclusive.
We caught the train. Jubilee Line, again, swishing new doors, clean blue and red chequered seats, not too much yet scratched into the glass, just the usual statements of:
KEN WAS ERE
Or:
MEGA!!
Or (and of course):
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
Headed north. Baker Street, St John’s Wood, Swiss Cottage, Finchley Road — overtaken by the mainline train to Coventry, whomph and the Underground carriages gently swayed at the pressure of its passing — West Hampstead, Kilburn, Willesden Green, Dollis Hill.
Back to Dollis Hill again.
The indicator board read:
1. Stanmore — 5 mins
2. Damnation — 9 mins
3. ENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHELINE ENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHEL
But by now, I’d got the message.
Out into a dark and sleepy street, the rain falling harder now, the chill retreating on the air, aware that the water was the main business tonight and it wasn’t quite cold enough to make it into ice.
Into the deep dark wilds of windy Willesden, where no traveller dare venture without a copy of the London A-Z, a bus map, a travelcard and ideally, a compass and all-purpose urban survival kit, through streets that changed their nature every five minutes, as if the whole area had lost faith in itself and now needed to ask its neighbour if this style was all right after all, or whether they should have stuck with terraced grot.
Back to the wide high road, with big red buses irregularly lumbering down the middle of the carriageway. Back to the purple sign above the gleaming door — VOLTAGE; and now it was locked shut, no bouncer on the door, no kids going in. A council notice had been stuck up on the front of the door, informing any would-be visitors that this place had had its licence to serve alcohol withdrawn, and if anyone wanted further information they should consult their local borough offices. I hammered on the door, shouted various obscenities until someone paid me attention, a window sliding open upstairs, a head sticking out and a man’s voice saying, “Oi, fuck off out of it!”
I stepped back into the rain, looking up at the face, and said, “I’m looking for the guy who ran this place — the Executive Officer. A prat with a cardiac condition who called himself Boom Boom! You know where he is?”
“Got his arse shifted out of here, didn’t he?” came the reply. “Try doctor.”
The window slammed shut.
I cursed quietly to myself, marched back up to the door of VOLTAGE, pressed my fingers into the padlock and chain and whispered loving placations to it until with a well-mannered click the thing came open and free in my hands. I pulled the doors open, saw nothing but darkness inside, snatched a bubble of neon from the streetlamp above, which hissed and dimmed in complaint, and lobbed it down the stairwell ahead of me.
Few things are as unsettling as a place which should have been roaring with noise, turned quiet. No windows, no lights, no sounds, except the tread of our footsteps. We pushed heat from our fingers into our floating bubble of neon, forced it to expand and blaze to drive away the clinging darkness that slipped in like loose silk from every corner. An empty bar, an empty floor, sticky with old spilt beer. Empty stools and silent speakers, unlocked doors, and switches that when flicked didn’t bother to turn anything on. I could taste the thick, lingering afterburn of that place’s magic, felt the shadows, silent and sad, faces that should have been dancing now fallen into nothing more than a sullen, bored and resentful sleep.
Downstairs. No lights, no sound, just us.
I found an office, which I had ignored last time, following the deDum of the beat. Now the door was open. I went in. Papers on a desk, a computer, an executive toy made out of ball bearings and wire. We picked it up by one bearing, let it drop, watched the whole thing swing. It was hypnotic. How could anyone work, with such distraction? The walls were covered by posters of various DJs, and bands with names like “Thunderchazz!”, “DJ Grindhop”, “The Bassline Slutz” and other excitingly ungrammatical things. I sat down in a chair too big for me, too small for the Executive Officer, twirled a few times, watching my shadow shrink and grow on the walls around me as I moved and my bubble of stolen neon stayed stationary overhead, humming faintly with trapped electric glow. I went through a couple of desks. Strange bits of wire, electronics, jacks and plugs designed to operate on systems that were never, ever as eas
y as it claimed in the manual. Old batteries rolling around on the bottom of a drawer, dead biros, scrap paper, a half-used box of tissues, an unopened box of “Her Pleasure” condoms, a pack of Blu-Tack, a broken keyboard, the front panel ripped off and the number keys mostly gone. Not what I needed. I kept on looking.
The solution was inside a black organiser bound with a thing that wasn’t quite leather, but dreamed of one day making the leap. I flicked through it, tried “D” for doctor, “G” for “GP” and eventually found what I was after under “Q” for “quack”. The entry in the address book said:
Howard Umbars,
158 Fryer Walk,
London W11 58P
(Emergencies call: 0208 719 9272)
I took the contact book, just in case I was wrong. The shadows dragged behind me, empty nothingness turning to watch as we walked out. In a few years, there would be ghosts in that basement, if nothing was done soon, and they’d dance to an invisible beat for the rest of time. It didn’t take much to make these things real.
To double-check my guess, I walked through the rainy streets of Willesden until I found a bus shelter. I climbed up on a ticket machine until I could lean over the top, stretched across the gap and pulled down from the stagnant pool of dirty water on the roof a sodden and sticky copy of the Yellow Pages. Quite how the Yellow Pages found its way on top of most bus shelters in London was a mystery beyond our knowing, and we put the whole thing down to higher powers and tried not to think about it. I sat in the bus shelter, shook the worst of the water out of the soggy book, and peeled my way through the glued-together pages.
What the Yellow Pages was doing on top of the bus shelters was one mystery we didn’t explore; why the Yellow Pages that we found up there happened to contain a directory for “wizards” was a mystery we actively walked the other way from. I was in there, somewhere. Matthew Swift (sorcerer), just waiting for some clumsy oaf to grab a copy of the book from on top of the shelter and read our name.
