‘What can you tell me about this Salman al Rasheed?’ I asked Ms Winstanley when she and Postmartin joined the parade.
Almost nothing, as it turned out. He was mentioned in a text from 10th-century Bagdad as having been a worthy successor to the Banū Mūsā, the famous trio of inventive brothers, and as the author of The Book of Cunning Device—and that was it.
‘It’s not that unusual,’ said Postmartin. ‘There’re many people we only really know from their work.’
‘Shakespeare for example,’ said Ms Winstanley. ‘Came from Stratford, went to London, wrote plays, was a genius, retired back to Stratford with the fruits of his pen. His will, his grave, the house he used to live in is just about all we have. And the plays of course, the glorious plays.’
‘You don’t think they might have been—’
‘No,’ said both librarians simultaneously.
‘Our Salman is seven hundred years older still,’ said Ms Winstanley. ‘He could have been the toast of Baghdad in his day, but there’s no guarantee we would have heard of him.’
I wondered how close we’d come to having a magic-robot-based industrial revolution in the tenth century, and what had happened to prevent it. I decided that, for the moment, I was going to add that question to the long list of what my cousin Abigail has taken to calling The Big Bumper Fun Book of Unanswered Questions (001.098).
So we trooped after the Cunning Device as best we could, as it worked its way back down to Basement 2, via the Paternoster book delivery system I noticed, and returned itself to its assigned shelf in the book cage.
‘What now?’ asked Ms Winstanley.
I didn’t think it was a good idea to let an unclassified magical device run around inside the nation’s rare book collection. So I asked Postmartin whether the Folly, under one of its many agreements, had the authority to confiscate dangerous magical artefacts.
‘As a matter of fact, I rather think we do,’ said Postmartin.
‘Now, see here, Harold,’ said Ms Winstanley, but Postmartin held up a placating hand.
‘We’ll call it a loan and craft a nice tailor-made storage facility,’ he said.
Inside a Faraday cage, I thought, inside a room panelled with greenwood and cork boards and other non-magically conductive stuff.
‘You can research under controlled conditions and partake of Molly’s growing range of afternoon teas,’ he said. I think afternoon tea might have clinched it because Ms Winstanley deflated. But only a little.
‘I told you he was a pirate, didn’t I?’ she said.
PART TWO
The Others’ Stories
Introduction to the Others
I suppose it was inevitable that other characters would start to agitate for a piece of the action. After all, everyone is the hero of their own story and doesn’t see why they couldn’t be the protagonist. So I wrote a couple of very short fictions in the hope of keeping them happy. This was a mistake since it neither appeased Nightingale nor Agent Reynolds, and it also led to the creation of a brand new character—Tobias Winter.
But since the principle had been established it meant I now felt free to use different characters for the short stories—much to Peter’s relief since this reduced his operational tempo and gave him some time off.
So prepare to meet a baby river, Germany’s answer to magical policing and, of course, one very dedicated follower of fashion.
Introduction: A Dedicated Follower of Fashion
(Set all the way back in the swinging sixties)
The trouble with London, from a writer’s point of view, is there is so much of it—extending in all directions including into the past. Every time I visit somewhere in the city I’m always asked when I’m going to include their local river in the books. My answer is always the same, the river goes in when I have a story that includes them and whether or not I have a story depends on whether I can find a satisfying personality that fits the river.
So it was only when I discovered that the Huguenot weavers established their cloth factories along the banks of the River Wandle that I had a sudden insight what kind of Goddess would live in a river like that. So having established that she was the Goddess of Schmutter I wondered where she might have come from.
A Dedicated Follower of Fashion
You know that song by The Kinks? Not that one. The other one. No, not that one either. Yeah, that one—‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. You wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, but that song’s about me.
These days my daughter does her best to keep me looking respectable, and I haven’t the heart to tell her that I’d much rather wear my nice comfortable corduroy trousers, with braces, and leave my shirt untucked. But back in the sixties I was the dedicated follower of fashion. And it’s true that they sought me here and they sought me there but, as Ray Davies knew perfectly well, that was probably because of the drug dealing. What can I say? Clothes aren’t cheap.
I was a middleman buying wholesale and supplying a network of dealers, mostly in and around the King’s Road. I rarely sold retail, although I did have a number of select clients. And of course, nothing lubricates a soirée like a bowl full of alpha-methylphenethylamine. It was all going swimmingly until some little shit from Islington stiffed me on a payment and I found myself coming up ten grand short. And, believe me, ten grand in 1967 was a lot of money. You could buy a house in Notting Hill for less than that—not that anyone wanted to, not in those days.
Now, I’ll admit that as an entrepreneur working in such a volatile industry, I probably should have ensured that I had a cash reserve stashed away against such an eventuality. Mistakes were definitely made. But in my defence, not only had I just discovered the joys of blow, I was also distracted by my infatuation with Lilith.
Now, I’ve always cheerfully swung both ways and, to be honest, I’ve always been more attracted by the cut of someone’s trousers than what was held therein. But when I met Lilith it was as if all the cash registers rung out in celebration. She was so like a man in some ways and so like a woman in others. I’d love to say that it was the best of both worlds but looking back it was a disaster in every respect. Although a completely exhilarating disaster, like a roller coaster to an unknown destination. I tried explaining what she was like to Ray Davies and that beardy writer who ran that sci-fi magazine, but they both got her completely wrong.
So there I was, suddenly ten grand down to people whose names you’re better off not knowing—let’s just call them the Deplorables and leave it at that. If I tell you that their nicknames were Cutter, Lead Pipe and Gnasher, that should give you a flavour of their character. You could call Cutter the brains behind the gang but that would be risking an overstatement. Organised crime in the good old days required little in the way of actual brains and relied much more on a calculated defiance of the social niceties vis-à-vis psychotic violence. Terrify your rivals, bully your customers, and hand out a bung to the local constabulary and you were away.
And it goes without saying that aesthetically they were a dead loss.
The Deplorables had a straightforward approach to those that owed them money which I will leave to your imagination—suffice only to say that it involved a sledgehammer and, of all things, a marlinspike.
But I had no intention of losing my knees, so I had arranged a couple of new deals that would net me a sufficient profit to cover both what I owed the Deplorables and the same again to appease them sufficiently to save my poor knees from a fate worse than polyester.
I know some of you are thinking that polyester was hip and groovy back in the Swinging Sixties but trust me when I say that it was an abomination from the start—whatever the elegance of its long-chain polymers.
In order to keep body and wardrobe together while I waited for these deals to come to fruition I decanted, along with Lilith and my faithful sidekick Merton, to a squat in Wandsworth just off the Earlsfield High Street. Now, I normally shun the transpontine reaches of the capital. But my thinking was sound. With
my reputation as a flower of Chelsea and the King’s Road, I reckoned that nobody ‒ least of all the dim members of the Deplorables ‒ would think to look for me across the river.
‘No fucking way,’ said Lilith when she first saw it, ‘am I living in this shithole.’
Squats come in many flavours. But political, religious or student, they are almost always shitholes. However, I could see this one had potential and Nigel, God bless his woollen Woolworths socks, had at least kept it clean.
But not particularly tidy.
Outwardly Nigel was definitely one of the children of Aquarius. Inside he had the soul of an accountant, but alas none of the facility with numbers.
According to Nigel, who could be dull about this sort of thing, the building we were squatting in had been built in the eighteenth century as an inn that specialised in serving the trade along the river. This was news to me, because I had assumed the rank channel immediately behind the house was a canal.
‘There used to be factories up and down the river,’ he told me despite my best efforts to stop him, ‘all connected up with barges. And this is where the watermen used to get their drinks in.’
With the collapse of that trade it was converted into a grand town house, a status it retained for a hundred years or so before providing slum housing for the unwashed multitude. Occasionally, on its hundred-year odyssey, it would surface into the light of respectable society before descending once more into the depths of squalor.
Which is where yours truly arrived to bring a touch of colour and a modicum of good taste to the old place.
Looking back, I believe that might have been the start of the whole ghastly business.
Now, the thing about the drug trade is that it overlaps with the general smuggling industry. As a result, a man with the right contacts can acquire much in the way of valuable cloth—Egyptian cotton and the like—without troubling the good people of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. Then such an individual might use his reputation for fashion to sell on said items to the East End rag trade at less than wholesale, cash under the table, no questions asked, and no invoices raised. Not as lucrative as a suitcase full of horse, but safer and more dependable.
Cloth, even expensive cloth, takes up considerably more room even than Mary Jane, so the fact that the old building had a beer cellar capacious enough to store the stock was the other reason I’d chosen it as a bolt-hole. Merton and I pressed Nigel into service to help us carry the bales, wrapped in tarpaulin for protection, down to the cellar, which proved to be mercifully dry and cool.
It was surprisingly cool—you could have used it as a pantry.
‘That’s because of the river,’ Nigel explained. ‘It’s just the other side of that wall.’
I touched the wall and was surprised to find it cool but bone dry.
‘They knew how to build houses in those days,’ said Nigel.
Once we’d moved the goods in, it was time to deal with the ever simmering domestic crisis that was life with Lilith. In the latest instalment of the drama, she had ejected Nigel from the master bedroom and claimed it as her own. This was less of a distraction than it might have been because Nigel, like nearly all men, was clearly smitten with Lilith and acquiesced with surprisingly good grace.
And so we settled in companionably enough, especially when Lilith and Nigel discovered a common interest in the works of Jack Kerouac. I could see that at some point I would be bedding down with Merton for a night or two. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t find Lilith’s peccadillos upsetting but Merton, bless his acrylic Y-fronts, offered compensation in his own rough manner.
Things started to go wrong the night of the storm and consequent flood. And while our decision to drop acid and commune with the thunder ‒ Nigel’s idea, by the way ‒ probably wasn’t to blame, it certainly didn’t help.
I don’t normally do hallucinogenics as they often disappoint. You go up expecting Yellow Submarine and get a lot of irritating visual distraction instead. My colour sense is quite keen enough, thank you, without having a pair of purple velvet bell-bottoms start to shine like a neon sign.
The master bedroom—now Lilith’s domain—contained, of all things, a king-size four-poster bed that was missing its curtains. But, since I’d arrived, it at least had matching cotton sheets in a tasteful orange and green fleurs-de-lis pattern. They matched the old wallpaper with its geometric tan and orange florets that still showed the rectangular ghosts of long vanished photographs and paintings.
At some point—Nigel said the 1930s—the owners had installed an aluminium-framed picture window that ran almost the length of the room and looked out over the canal, or more importantly, up into the boiling clouds of the oncoming storm.
Lilith started on the bed with all three of us, but I can’t take anything seriously when heading up on LSD, least of all sex. So I quickly disengaged and chose to sit on the end of the bed and watch the storm. I doubt the others were troubled by my absence.
I watched the storm come in over the rooftops of South London with lightning flashing in my eyes and that glorious sense of joy that only comes from something psychoactive interacting with your neurones. I lost myself in that storm and, in it, I thought I sensed the roar of the god of joy, whose acolytes dance naked on the hilltops and rip the goats apart.
But the mind is fickle and darts from thought to thought, and I became fascinated by the patterns the raindrops traced down the window glass. Then the play of light and shadow drew me to the walls, where I found myself pulling at the torn edge of the wallpaper. Like most squats, damp had got into the room at some point in the past and the top layer peeled away to reveal another layer below—a vertical floral design in red, purple and green on a pale background. Carefully I stripped a couple of square feet away. And, while behind me Lilith howled obscenities in the throes of her passion, I started on the next layer. This revealed a faded leaf design in silver and turquoise. The colours pulled at me and I realised that if I could just find the original surface I might open a portal to another dimension—one of style and colour and exquisite taste.
But I had to be patient. Clawing the walls would disrupt the delicate lines of cosmic energy that flowed along the pinstripes of the layer of blue linen-finish paper. Delicately, I peeled a loose corner until I uncovered a beautiful mustard yellow bird that glowed with an inner light. Gently and meticulously I revealed more. A trellis design overgrown with olive and brown brambles sporting red flowers and crimson birds. I knew it at once as a classic design from ‘the Firm’, the company founded by William Morris to bring back craftsmanship to a world turned grey and smoky by the Industrial Revolution.
I was ready for a hallucination then and willed my mind into the pattern in front of me, but nothing happened. The wallpaper shone out of the hole in the wall, the light shifting like sunlight through a real trellis, real branches and real birds, but that achingly rational part of my brain stayed aloof. Chemistry, it said, it’s all chemistry.
At some point Nigel escaped the bed and fled whimpering into the cupboard and closed the door behind himself.
The trellis and its mustard-coloured birds mocked me from the wall.
‘I think we’re sinking,’ said Merton, for what I realised was the third or fourth time.
I was still coming down and it took concentration to focus on Merton, who was stark naked and pacing up and down at the foot of the bed. Lilith was sprawled face down, arms and legs spread like a starfish to occupy as much space as possible. There was no sign of Nigel, and in my elevated state I seriously gave consideration to the thought that Lilith had devoured him following coitus.
Merton rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if testing his footing.
‘Definitely sinking,’ he said, and ran out the door.
I flailed about a bit until I found a packet of Lilith’s Embassy Filters and a box of Swan Vestas, managed to not light the filter on the second attempt and dragged in a grateful lungful. A burst of head-clearing nicotine hel
ped chase away the last of the lysergic acid diethylamide and I was just trying to determine whether I’d hallucinated a naked Merton when he reappeared.
‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘We’re not sinking but we’re definitely flooding.’
The cellar was divided into two parts. The stairs led down to the smaller part of it, essentially a wide corridor which used to house, so Nigel insisted on telling me, the coal chute—now bricked up. A big metal reinforced door opened into the larger part of the cellar—the part with over ten grands’ worth of fabric stored in it. The door was closed but the corridor part was two inches deep in filthy water.
‘Don’t open the door!’ called Nigel from the top of the stairs.
I had no intention of leaving the dry section of the stairs, let alone risking the cuffs of my maroon corduroy flares in what looked to me like sewage overflow. Merton, who’d been trying to force the door open, now splashed back as if stung. For a man who I’d once seen cheerfully batter a traffic warden for awarding him a ticket, it was odd how he never argued with Nigel—not about practical things to do with the house anyway.
Nigel, resplendent in a genuine Indian cloth kaftan ‒ or so he claimed, passed me and stepped gingerly barefoot into the water. Reaching the door, he rapped sharply with his knuckles just above the waterline, then he methodically rapped up the door until he reached head height. After a few experimental raps to confirm, he turned to me and told me I was deader than a moleskin waistcoat.
‘The whole room’s flooded,’ he said. ‘Probably not a good idea to open this door.’
I sat down on the stairs and put my head in my hands. I did a mental inventory of what I’d stored and how it had been packed. It was bad, but if we could pump out the room half of it could be salvaged—especially the silks, since the individual rolls had been wrapped in polythene.
Tales from the Folly Page 8
