by Kate Griffin
As all this went on, I sat and rolled up my shirtsleeves. Four perfect crescent moons had been incised on the underside of each forearm, and all were bleeding copiously. I was tempted to wash the injuries with water from the fountain, but it seemed inappropriate to the magic of that place to use wishing water for cleaning wounds. Instead, I drew out a penny from my pocket, offered up a thought of thanks to whatever spirit of urban magic had blessed the waters of that place with the wish-maker’s mark, and dropped the coin into the water, watching it sink. In the darkness of the Circus I couldn’t see my gold coin, and half suspected there wouldn’t be anything left to see.
I crossed over the road and went to the all-night pharmacy. There I bought a roll of bandages and some disinfectant liquid that stung so badly we almost ran outside again in search of water. Sitting in a passport photo booth for privacy, we wrapped up our bleeding arms in rolls of bandage too thick to be covered by the remnants of our shirtsleeves. With just our coat protecting the bandages from the queries of the police as they struggled to organise the traffic, we went home.
When we woke in the morning, our arms were still bleeding; in fact the bandages were soaked through. It was a bad start to what, we thought, should have been a day of relative triumph.
By mid-morning, with no sign of clotting, we checked out of our hotel and went in search of a doctor.
At the hospital south of the river, Dr Seah studied our bloody arms and said, “Uh-huh. OK. You know, they train us to be like, you know, all sympathetic and comforting and shit? But looking at this… you’re kinda totally fucked.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Haemophilia?” she suggested in a pained voice.
“It’s not very likely.”
“It didn’t seem very likely, seeing as how you were here last week and didn’t bleed out. Know what, just for kicks, shall I call an ambulance?”
We raised our bloody arms to the light and studied the blood still trickling into the crooks of our elbows. “It may not be enough,” we replied. “Perhaps a taxi would be better.”
Weakness. Human weakness, frail, pale, failing. How could we be ourself, trapped in dying flesh?
Time to take charge of myself. Be practical, businesslike; keep a level head in a situation of growing tension, keep the voice steady, the eyes locked, the chin down and the shoulders back. If you start to sound afraid, start to look afraid, you’ll be scared before you know it.
Dr Seah ordered a taxi. We climbed in the back, our hands starting to shake, and I gave an address. The driver said, “You sure you don’t need a doctor? You don’t look…”
“There’s a doctor friend at this address.”
“OK, if you’re sure.”
He took me to where I wanted to go: Chalfont Street Market, flanked on one side by the reflective grey glass of Euston station, and on the other by the red bricks of the British Library as it tried to blend in with the fairy tale castle towers and arched windows of St Pancras station. I got out, thanked him, paid with what little money I had left, and staggered enough up the road to make him think that I was serious about continuing on it. When the taxi was gone, I turned back the way I’d come and, feeling the tremble in our knees as we walked
to fear is not to be free
we are…
… I am…
come be me…
I walked, I made us walk, because I knew what it was like to be this weak and we had no conception of it, round the corner to the boarded-up, broken windows of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Its tea-coloured walls were cut off from the public street by high chipboard hoardings, plastered over with ads for concerts, magazines and, in the odd place here or there, the scrawling graffiti of the Whites, the snouts of their crawling black-and-white crocodiles pointing towards the Kingsway Exchange. Round the corner, towards the main doors overhung by a drooping green entrance sign welcoming you to the hospital, were notices warning “danger” and “keep out” and “no children”. The doors themselves were covered over with corrugated iron, and padlocked; on them someone had painted the face of a white-skinned nurse, with eyes shut, and over that someone else had added in big black letters, “WERE HAV WE VOICES??”. I knocked, but the corrugated iron just banged loudly against the empty door frames behind, while broken glass crunched under my feet like thick snow.
I kicked at the iron barrier, and shouted, “Hey!” up at the hospital’s broken windows, but my voice was snatched away by the passing of a bus, crawling round the traffic lights away from Euston station.
Losing our patience, we reached into the satchel for our skeleton keys, and fumbled at the padlock with slippery, bloodstained fingers. At length we found the right key, coaxed it into shape, turned, and opened the lock. We pulled the chain off the door, and dragged it back, the heavy metal squeaking and scratching painfully across the pavement, before ducking through one of the broken glass door panels.
Inside, traceries of overcast daylight seeped in around plywood panels boarding up the window panes. Though the corridors were bare, they were full of broken glass, water dripping from shattered pipes, and rotting pieces of splintered wood, all suggesting nonetheless what this place had once been. The tiled floor was discoloured from years of floods and droughts and more floods, staining it with moulds and interesting tufts of vivid green moss that gave the place a cold, sharp smell of decay. At a crack in the wall I pulled a few purple buddleia flowers off their stem, and crunched them in my palm to a handful, before slipping it into the frontmost pocket of my satchel. Buddleia grew in London wherever buildings were left neglected; they sprouted through every wall by every railway cutting and out of every derelict site, spreading roots into the stone itself. As such, buddleia flowers had their own special properties within any urban magician’s inventory; wherever they were found, they weren’t to be ignored.
With the last fragment of purple in my bag, I chose a left turning at whim, and splashed my way through puddles of stagnant water stained with clouds of chemical whiteness. I found a flight of stairs, with half the tiles missing from their treads, and the scarred concrete showing underneath. It led past a wall supported by scaffolding; on the first floor was another empty, airless corridor.
I called out, “Hello?”
My voice was eaten up so quickly by the dead silence of that place, I half-wondered if I’d called at all.
At random I turned right, then left. I was about to climb the next flight, when behind me in the corridor I heard a click. I turned. A woman stood there in a nurse’s uniform. Her face was the same near-perfect white of the graffiti image on the iron door downstairs, her hat the same old-fashioned, almost theatrical blue of the painted nurse’s cap. Her expression was one of immense seriousness.
“And who are you?” she asked in a prim voice.
Her hair was silvery-grey. A nurse’s watch hung from her apron; she wore black tights and black sensible shoes, had skinny legs, and old hands, folded neatly in front of her.
When we didn’t answer, she repeated, “Well, come, come now, I haven’t got all day.”
“Swift,” I stuttered. “My name’s Swift.”
“Well, Mr Swift, can I help you?”
“I’m looking for the hospital.”
“As you can judge for yourself,” she said, voice not changing, expression not wavering, arms not moving, eyes looking down at me across the length of her nose even though she had to be half a foot shorter than I was, “this is a hospital.”
“Yes. Sorry, yes. I can see.”
“If you can see, why did you ask?”
“I… need help.”
“That is why most people come to a hospital. What exactly appears to be the problem?”
I rolled up a coat sleeve to reveal one of the blood-bandages. Her lips thinned. She made a little ummm noise, tutted, then barked, “Very well, come this way, chop chop.” Turning on one heel, she set off down the corridor. I struggled to keep up, striding as fast as I could without breaking into a
run. “I suppose you have tried the regular services; there is a waiting list, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And? Please don’t waste my time with the usual inadequate excuses, Mr Swift. ‘I just happened to be playing with the bones of the dead’ or ‘It just so fell out that I accidentally summoned the spirit of a thousand shards of falling glass’ or other feeble tales. I really don’t care how the injury was inflicted, I simply need the full information to make a good diagnosis.”
She turned into a room as mouldy and dark as the others; but unlike them, it was possessed of a large wooden cupboard with another padlock across its doors, and a dentist’s chair set in the middle, with a bright lamp lit up above it. Although the lamp had no electrical lead, it grew brighter as the nurse approached it. She waved me to the chair, and as I sat down she added another “Well?! What happened?”
“Honestly – I was attacked by the living shadow of a sorcerer, a creature of darkness and hunger that longs to drink my blood and which I managed to defeat by the use of a wish-spell and a lot of burning light. It dug its nails into my arms; and now they won’t stop bleeding.”
“Interesting,” she said in a voice of a woman who couldn’t care less. She reached into her apron and pulled out a pair of glasses that she rested at the end of her nose, and a pair of very sharp-looking scissors. “But nothing special. I don’t suppose you killed this living essence of darkness?”
“I doubt it.”
“Wouldn’t that have been the most sensible reaction?” she said, peering at me over the tops of her glasses straight down the sharp tip of her nose as I lay on the chair.
“It’s a shadow,” I replied. “It dies when the man that casts it dies.”
“How terribly tedious,” she intoned. “You know, sometimes, I don’t know why I bother – they all come back here eventually.”
She started snipping neatly at the bandages around my arms, and when they came away, tutted at the bloody half-moon indents in my skin. “Yes, well…”
“I… do not know what it is I should offer you for your help,” I said as we turned our head away and half-closed our eyes against the sight of our own blood.
“Offer me?” A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. “Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports.”
“How does that make Britain great?”
“Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!”
I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my own blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing.
“The second,” she went on, “is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptations, the Today programme and Doctor Who, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!”
“Oh,” I said, feeling that something was expected. “Oh” was enough.
“And lastly, we have the NHS!”
“This is an NHS service?” I asked incredulously.
“I didn’t say that; I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still.” I lay still and tried not to flinch as her fingers probed the tender flesh on both my arms. She tutted again.
On a whim I asked, “What about the Beatles?”
“What about them?”
“Do they make Britain great?”
“Don’t play silly buggers in my hospital, thank you.”
“Sorry.”
After a while she said, “Did you collect some buddleia?”
“Yes. Was that OK?”
“There’s plenty around, why should I care?”
“But… you asked.”
“A nurse is supposed to put the patient at ease during unpleasant procedures, in order to facilitate a calm and quick medical process.”
“You haven’t done anything too unpleasant…” I began, then hesitated.
“The word you caught your tongue up on was ‘yet’,” she said with a small-toothed grin. “I’m glad you thought it through before making a rash utterance.”
“This is a reassuring medical procedure?”
“You survived – badly – being attacked by a living shadow, essence of darkness,” she said. “A little honesty isn’t going to hurt. Not as much as the medicine.”
“Do you enjoy what you do?”
“It’s a living.”
“How?”
She pulled a key out of her pocket and undid the heavy padlock on the cupboard. Inside, the shelves were in shadow. “You’re scared of doctors,” she said briskly to the clinking of jars. “You’re frightened by medicine. It’s fine. You’ve also had a couple of splintered ribs, a twisted ankle, a lot of bruising and been clinically dead sometime in the last two years. So I can understand your point of view.”
“How do you know all that?”
“I read your palm, do you really want to know?” she retorted in an uninterested voice. Turning, she revealed a large glass kitchen jar containing some sort of dark, sludgy goo. “Crushed rat’s skull, desalinated Thames water, ground dried moss scraped from the base of a leaking pipe in Kings Cross station, a pinch of mortar dust and a vestige of unleaded petrol drawn from the top of a puddle of torrential August rain; ground together, microwaved for ten minutes and filtered with the light from a photographer’s lamp for three days and three nights – sound all right to you?”
“For what?”
She tutted again at my impertinence. “Mr – Swift, wasn’t it? Mr Swift, did you bother to consider some of the medical implications of being injured by a creature of pure darkness before you rashly engaged it in mortal combat? I doubt it. Young people never do. You all think you’re immortal. Lie still.” She popped the top off with the hiss-snap of escaping pressure, and from one of her pockets, which I was beginning to suspect were not nearly big enough for all the things that she seemed to fit in them with perfect ease, pulled out a small wooden spatula. She scooped a large dollop of the slippery, shining dark gunk from the jar, took a grip of my right wrist, pulling my arm straight with a hand like an iron clamp, and started smearing the stuff across my wounds with the casual air of a grandmother icing a birthday cake.
The effect was like eating hot Vietnamese curry: for the first few strokes of the spatula, there was no sensation beyond that of thick soap bubbles moving on the skin, or of sticky flour being washed off the fingertips. Only when the mind had been fooled into thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad did the burning hit. It started as a dull itch, quickly rising to an intense, fiery pulse that went right down to the bone and shot up past the elbow joint and into the shoulder blade; my fingers burnt and my neck cramped. We jerked at the shock of it, but her grip was unrelenting, and her face showed no sign of humour as she muttered, “Don’t be a baby.”
“It hurts!” we whimpered, mostly for the relief of having breath in our mouth and sound in our ears; any sort of sense to distract us.
“And it’ll be over soon,” she said. “If it was really that bad I’d have thought about giving you an anaesthetic; but you know how it is with budget cutbacks these days.” On our skin the dark substance started to mix with our blood, in brownish-black whorls the colour of treacle. “You’ll get a little dizziness,” she added, “but please try and control any latent sorcerous urges you might have to incinerate my hospital. Despite its infinite patience, the NHS isn’t that understanding, and we have to serve everyone equally.”
We squeezed our eyes shut and bit our lip until we could taste blood. It wasn’t dizziness; not quite. It was… more of a loosening of thoughts, a disintegration of the straight, neat lines of thoughts-with words, of structured reasonings and human sounds, splitting down, as our mind inflated like a hot-air balloon, into its component parts, like the dream-state just before sleeping or wakening when
it seems perfectly logical for the goldfish not to like to peel its own potatoes on the bus. I thought of my thoughts, those conscious processes and pains, as thoughts-with-words, as understandings and rationales within the constraints of language; but in that state, our thoughts were nothing of the sort, they were…
hello hello? yeah hi i’m looking for jeff yeah jeff the guy with the no I can’t hang up will you just listen he’s
mum died on thursday. yeah next week its
three poppadoms no three. three. well if they said that
look move the thing to tuesday, i’ve gotta go and
help me! he’s in the house and he’s coming for me and oh god oh god if you
yeah miss you too
hello?
hello?
HELLO?
We opened our eyes. We grabbed the nurse’s arm as she reached across with another dollop of gunge, and hissed, “When did you last make a phone call?”
“Mr Swift, is this entirely…”
“Your name was Jean but then your father died. He was a doctor. You cried down the phone and said help me, help me, please, but she was in Paris, she couldn’t come in time, there weren’t any tickets, it was Christmas she said baby, it’ll be OK, it’ll be OK, and you found the costume and you knew about magic you knew what made it tick, you told your friend on the phone that you were going to make it work and he said, what are you doing, what do you think you’re talking about and you said goodbye. Sorry I have to leave you goodbye. I’ll always think of you and then you hung up. You haven’t picked up a phone since. You fell silent, you don’t want to know, nothing that isn’t in front of you, no one that isn’t there, no voices, no distance, no responsibilities, just this, just goodbye Alex, I’ll sometimes think of you, but don’t think of me, goodbye.”
