by Kate Griffin
“Matthew, wait!” He struggled to turn the chair in that small space. “Matthew!”
“Matthew?”
The voice came from the doorway of the bar. Its owner held a champagne glass in one hand, and a handbag in the other, its small chain hooked in at her elbow. The bag was the same silvery colour as her dress, and her shoes gave her an extra few inches of height that she didn’t really need. The dress clung to every inch of her like a libidinous friend, revealing that, along with a haircut that had removed all but a short skullcap of red-tinted dark brown hair, she’d lost a lot of weight since I’d seen her last, rounding down in some areas and out in others. She held herself with the same good posture, and had the same relaxed dignity in the curve of her arms and openness of her eyes. But when she looked at me in that moment, as well as weight loss, there was something about Dana Mikeda that meant I hardly recognised her.
I looked from her, to Bakker, to her again, and then, drawn by a nervous tic when I had looked at Bakker, again to him. He stared at me with pain, uncertainty, even a touch of fear on his face, sitting at the top of the stairs on the very edge of his chair, leaning towards me as if at any second he’d leap up and run after me, but unable to do so. It took a moment to realise what was so wrong with that picture – nothing in how he looked or the way he sat, but in the environment around him as, opening one arm out towards me as if trying to call me home, he cast no shadow.
I turned and ran.
I had run once before two years ago, on a cold night quite like this, along the same river, after speaking to the same man. I tried in vain to remember if there’d been a dark reflection around him then, or if the light had just tripped off him like it forgot to notice how he blocked it. My memories were too easily movable – if I wanted, I could paint that image of him in the wheelchair on the night I’d died with no shadow at all, or with a big black shape of himself looming halfway up the back wall. There was simply no way to tell, as my imagination worked overtime, desperately trying to find gaps and plug them, in everything I thought and believed.
I walked as quickly as I could without being called “Thief!” or knocking into the pedestrians still turning out of the theatres, restaurants and concerts along the bank by the river, just like I had two years ago – but this time, I knew what was coming, and watched the image of my own shadow moving under my feet, waiting for it to turn. I was halfway to Hungerford Bridge, the pedestrian walkways bolted onto the original railway bridge lit up like snowy knives, my shadow splintered into a dozen pale blue fractures in front of me from the lights in the trees by the riverside, when a bit at a time, like the hands coming together on a clock face, my shattered shadow started to come together into one pool of me-shaped blackness, and bend towards the light.
That was when I started to run for real. I slung my satchel as securely as I could across my shoulder and turned into the crowd, keeping close to the silvery rail at the edge of the bridge, snatching up some of the cold from it into my fingertips as I ran, breathing the river air as deep as I could; there was power by the river, an intense, old magic that the druids had been drawing on back in the days when wizards had burnt the colour of forest fires and summoned ivy from the paving stones, instead of barbed wire. I breathed it in as deep as I could as I ran, felt its cold seep down into my lungs and into my blood, pushing away some of the heat and pain from my underexercised legs and filling me with a sense of giddy lightness and strength, so that for a moment I knew, knew that I could run the length of the marathon, and if I did my skin would be cold and my mouth wouldn’t be dry. My feet slapped with a dull, metallic shudder as I ran, and we savoured our own confidence as we dodged round late-night tourists on their way from eating deep-fried oysters in Chinatown or heading to a grand hotel on the Strand. We were moving with the satisfaction of a mathematician on the edge of solving some mysterious problem, knowing that it can be done, and done that night.
At the end of the bridge I took the steps down onto the Embankment. I was fearful of how empty the greeny-yellow brick tunnel looked towards Charing Cross station, how easily we might be ambushed in that space, and drawn by the crowd moving towards the station entrance. In the street, with its sandwich bars, cobblers’ shops and dirty news-stands, the sense of the power was different, that we swept up in our fingertips like seaside breeze tickling the palm of our hand. It gave off none of the sense-numbing, consuming balm of the river, but had a lower, hotter sensation to it, through which we could feel the rumbling of trains beneath us and sense, as our legs hit their stride, the pulse of the city. We ran with the rhythm of that road, the commuter’s rhythm, the pace of life you only get around railway stations; that puts the step of every mother, father and child into a regular tum tum tum tum leaving no room to pause and consider which way to go or how to get there, but pushes you on towards your destination with no messing or hesitation, thank you. For a moment, I understood a bit more of the bikers’ magic, that fed off these rhythms embedded in the city’s life and was most potent between 5 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. when the entire population seemed to be travelling, like the changing of the tide; even now, at this hour of the night, I could taste some of its potency lingering on the air.
I ran up the street, catching the smell of the last sandwich in the bar, spilt beer, the whiff of curry powder from the open door of the tandoori, urine from the door of some lawyer’s firm, rubbish being thrown out from behind the back of an Italian restaurant, and sweat mixed with disco music from the basement window of a gym beneath the station, and still my shadow refused to move with the bending of the light.
At Charing Cross station I dodged past the waiting taxis and paused for a moment at the central spike of sludgy-brown stone that, so legend had it, marked the traditionally central point of the city. Legend or not, the thing burnt in my senses in all its spiky, multilayered tastelessness. I stood in front of it and half-closed my eyes, and for a moment, in that place, I could feel every pigeon like they were hairs on my head, blowing in the wind, and taste every rat like their claws were the serrated edges of my own teeth. It was the same sensation I’d felt at the very top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, or at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or standing in Temple Bar in Dublin; whether or not the place really was the geographical centre, it was still a hub, magical north on the compass. As such, its power sent a tingle through my skin; and for a moment I knew exactly what it was to be the woman remembering the first kiss of her ex-boyfriend on the number 9 bus, or the train driver leaning on his handle underground, or the child eating chips and watching the departures board in the station, or the sleepy passenger in the plane overhead, looking down at the city beneath him as they circled in to land.
For a moment, I considered diving into that sense, just like so many sorcerers had before me, letting go of their own skins and their own feelings and immersing themselves in the city. Wherever I’d gone, I had been told that it was the most dangerous thing of all for two sorcerers to fight in the very centre of a city, at its heart, where it was so easy to forget why you were there, and just sink yourself into the endless magic available in that place. You’d think you were using the magic to your own ends, until you were found days, sometimes months, later, wandering through the city’s streets with the absolute certainty that you were the 91 bus to Crouch End. There was nowhere better in the city to become lost.
Come be we and be free!
We jerked our eyes open but didn’t move; our thoughts were still tangled in the swirling of dirty newspapers caught in the wake of a passing lorry; in the almost inaudible ticking of the traffic lights; in the slamming of shutters over the supermarket windows of the…
Come be me!
So easy to become lost…
… just sink into the city…
Hello, Matthew’s fire!
We snatched at our satchel to make sure it was still securely there and ran, no longer bothering to see where we were going or whether the cars would stop when we crossed the road; no need to ask or look – we fel
t the brakes pressing into our flesh, although when we had last checked our arms weren’t made of tyre rubber. We heard the echo of our footsteps from the drains underneath where we were nibbling on dropped chow mein in a cardboard box; we saw ourself running past the side of St Martin in-the-Fields, looking down from our nest in the high gutter of the tall white houses with the big shuttered windows and the poor insulation in the roof that helped keep us warm when it rained – we knew we were running, by all these signs.
We ran towards Trafalgar Square, through the traffic and down the steps into the wide, pedestrianised area around Nelson’s Column and the big stone lions crouched on their pedestals. Pigeons scattered towards the Arab Emirates Bank, and Admiralty Arch, embedded with figures of imperial triumph and heaving bosom, and framing a vista of the Mall and Buckingham Palace. Distances changed perspective in the centre of London: only close to did Nelson’s Column seem to tower up for ever, whereas from a few hundred yards away it seemed scarcely higher than the rooftops around it. From its broad, stepped base, in equal measure I could feel the buzzing, gaudy excitement of Leicester Square, and taste the sedate, patient, weighty magic of St James’s Park, even though in my imagination they had always seemed far apart.
Perhaps because our senses were fired up with fear, again, at Nelson’s Column, we felt that focus of magical energy waiting for our attention, sitting at our feet with a big friendly expression and an open maw full of sense, inviting us to forget that we ran or what it was we fled, but to be instead the beggar sitting by the ATM and the actor taking his final bow in the theatre, or even just the hotness in the theatre lights shining down on the stage; whatever we wanted to be, a part of the city.
I ran my fingers across the smooth side of one of the lions and down the rougher edge of the pollution-crunched stone, centring myself with the reality of those textures beneath my hand.
I am…
we are
Or perhaps…
we am me
Already free, already me. Don’t need to fall tonight.
Catching my breath, I turned and ran on, up towards the imposing pillared entrance of the National Gallery and its modern, glassy extension, ducking into the small passage between the two and bounding up the steps while in the other direction, skater kids rattled down the ramps and leapt over the shallow steps the other way, spinning their boards and making grunting sounds whether or not their manoeuvre had worked.
Leicester Square, even at this time of the night, hadn’t stopped; the doors to the cinemas were still opened wide, though the park with its guardian Charlie Chaplin statue was chained up tight, with the lights of a funfair extinguished. I slowed to a walk and struggled to get my breath; then headed past the Swiss Centre with its terrible clock of musical bells and automated figures, whose tastelessness was, nevertheless, an attraction in itself, being tacky enough to embody the spirit of the whole area. I hurried past ticket touts and music shops, and vendors of woolly hats, umbrellas and plaster models of the Houses of Parliament, until I reached Piccadilly Circus. Traffic whooshed up Shaftesbury Avenue, or slogged resentfully the other way. I slowed to an amble, and paused by the sculpted horses exploding out of their fountain on one side of Piccadilly Circus. Running my fingers through the water, I watched the reflection on a hundred pennies at the bottom, as they caught the lights from the flashing billboards over head, reflecting from red to blue to gold to green to burning white as the messages rolled in their metres-high illuminated font. I dug in my bag until I found the jeweller’s little purple box from Bond Street, then took out the single gold coin, heavy and cool in my palm. If you didn’t know it was gold you might have thought it was just a tacky plastic badge painted a certain colour; but there was no doubting the weight, or the texture of the metal. I closed my eyes, gripped it until my fingers hurt, and made a wish. Then, still holding it in my clenched fist, I stuck my arm into the water up to the elbow joint, and let the coin go.
I felt the movement in the air and turned instinctively, knowing what it would be; I had felt the air change like that once before, and I had dismissed it and died – the same mistake would not happen twice.
Hunger was still only halfway out of the paving stones and rising, emerging out of the shadow of a lamp-post in a thin, pale line, his shape only half there, coat billowing in and out of shadowy existence around him. His claws, however, were real and solid and black enough as I raised my arms and caught him by the wrists even as he slashed down towards my face with his curved fingertips. His arms were ghostlike; I could see the traffic barrier behind them, and through his chest a rickshaw man pedalling his latest fare towards Soho, as Hunger rose into the air and I turned to face him.
I hissed, “Do you really want to fight here? In this place, with so many lights and people and so much power? Do you really think this is wise?”
“You forget,” he replied, and his breath was like the cold blast of air when a train is about to arrive at an underground platform. “They will never see me, nor know who I was, when I drink your fire!”
He twisted his arms in my grip; my hands had no difficulty encircling his wrists, they were so thin. But as he twisted, his fingers stretched down to brush my skin, and his black claws gouged through my clothes and into my arms. There was no sudden shock of pain; he dug the tips of his black fingers into my skin with the slow inexorability of a knife cutting into cold butter: a laborious work of strength but one that he would do, breaking the skin, the capillaries, the muscle, the tips of his fingers brushing bone and…
I think I must have called out as my blood rose under his hands, seeping out and staining my jacket an odd dark purple in that reflective, changing neon light, because he smiled and whispered, “I do not care for the rules of your kind; that is what it means to be free, yes? You drove me back too many times, little sorcerer and his blue flames!”
But even though his strength was unstoppable, and I could feel the dull pain starting to throb up my elbows and into my chest as his grip tightened and tightened and I struggled to hold on to his wrists in turn, he still wasn’t all there. He didn’t have feet, merely a trailing-off of coat into the shadow of the lamp-post, as if he was a seal halfway out of water; and his chest was still an incoherent grey smear across the air, not real or solid at all.
I said through gritted teeth, “Make a wish?”
“To feast richly,” he replied. “Always, to feast!”
“Probably have to invest more than a ten pence, then.”
For a moment, he didn’t understand. Then a glint of comprehension entered the sunken, half-there, half-gone eyes. His glance darted up to the horses rearing behind me in their fountain, then to my face, then to the wet sleeve beneath his grasp, turning pinkish red with my blood. His hand was too thin, I realised, too insubstantial even to notice that the thing it held was damp. We grinned triumphantly and exclaimed, “We know now that you are weak!” and with every ounce of strength we had, with every flux of power and magic we could find, digging our toes so hard into the soles of our shoes that the pavement hummed beneath us, we clenched our fingers around the ghosts of his wrists, and turned. We heaved him to one side and threw him straight towards the fountain, twisting ourself head first towards the water line and dragging him along with us. As he was pulled towards it, he stretched. His legs melted into a grey blur within the shadow of the lamp-post, then elongated like elastic pulled taut. We plunged his head into the water, which burst into steam as he touched it, boiled and bubbled around us while he thrashed, his fingers instantly coming free from my arms and lashing up towards my face. But he was blind while his head was driven down as far as I could push it, towards the floodlight lamp that burnt towards the horses rearing overhead. I snarled, “Make a wish, and let there be light!”
And the stretching shadows of the lamp-post thinned, paled, fled. The floodlights scorching upwards at the horses took on the colour of an angry equatorial sun; the neon lights above Piccadilly Circus spat sparks and grew brighter and brighter, until
I had to close my eyes against them; and still the intensity of it grew through my eyelids as every car lamp, brake light, street light, shop light and reflective surface lit like a newly born sun, burning away every shadow and hint of darkness so that for a second, in the middle of the night, it was daytime.
The cold slippery head beneath my hands vanished. It disappeared so suddenly that I staggered and nearly fell forward into the icy bubbling water of the fountain. I heard a sharp electric pop nearby, then quickly dragged my hands out of the water as beneath its surface the floodlights brightened so that the horses’ eyes above me seemed mad, and then snuffed out, the burning wires of the lamps withering into scorched black worms. I heard a snap and a crack like lightning on a hot, rainless summer’s day, and the skid of traffic as the headlamps of vehicles all around, heated to bursting by the intensity of light pouring out of them, burst. Above the junction of Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue the neon lights grew too bright to look at and exploded, showering the street below with hot sparks and light, hurling out fragments of glass. As a final, apologetic encore, the street lamps snuffed out, plunging the Circus into panic-struck darkness.
I sat on the rim of the fountain’s basin as Piccadilly Circus exploded into chaos. As the lights around them popped out into nothing, the pedestrians went quickly from yelping with surprise, to getting on their mobiles and telling their friends and family in rushed, excited voices, that they’d just seen the most amazing thing. The more enterprising of them rushed to take photos with maximum exposure, or film the still-glowing lamps of Piccadilly in contrast to the dead lights of Haymarket, hoping to flog their images to the London Evening Standard. The traffic came to a standstill, after one 38 bus driver, seeing his lights explode, had swerved across Shaftesbury Avenue so that his front wheels had skidded up onto the pavement. With his bus being eighteen metres long, all other traffic had been stopped in both directions. Some drivers trapped by the bus blared their horns; others, seeing that order wasn’t about to be restored, got out to buy coffee and a doughnut from the nearby twenty-four-hour store, paying by torchlight. As with the best curiosities in London, the crowd gathered in half the time it took the police to arrive, congregating to see the strange thing of the lights not being on, and to speculate on what it was that could have blown so many bulbs at once. The police cars eventually managed to crawl their way through via the back streets of Soho, the sirens being audible several minutes before the cars became visible, preceded by several officers in yellow fluorescent jackets, who’d despaired and climbed out to try and make sense of the situation on foot.
