Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (3 page)

“Before we begin,” said a voice, “I totally have a question?”

All eyes turned to the speaker. If he’d had the vascular capability, he might have blushed. Peroxide-blond hair on a bone-white face, skinny blue jeans, leather shoes and a tight-fitting white T-shirt all proclaimed the owner, a man of probably no more than twenty-five years old, to be comfortable with his sexuality, even if the rest of the world wasn’t. “So yeah, hi there. I’m just wondering, with this meeting–are we going to change the hours for daylight saving? Only my complexion really takes some looking after and I can’t be having too much sun, if you know what I mean.”

Silence in the hall.

Eyes turned inexorably to Sharon. She rose to her feet. This moment was something she’d been preparing for.

She said, “Uh…”

And stopped. Somehow, in all those hours spent in front of the mirror practising being open-minded and understanding, with help from books carrying titles like
Everything I Ever Needed to Know Was Inside Me Already,
the rallying cry of “Uh” hadn’t been mentioned.

“… these are issues,” she added hastily, because you couldn’t go wrong with a good “issue” or maybe even a “challenge”, “which we can all address. If anyone has any concerns about the set-up of this
group then of course please do say so, and we’ll try to, like, address that.”

It had been going so well.

“Excuse me?” The voice wasn’t loud or aggressive or even particularly projected but there was something in it, an indefinable thickness of sound, that cut through every conversation. The speaker was hard to focus on. There was a sensation of bulk, aided by the fact that the speaker’s chair seemed to be warping under pressure. But as Sharon looked and tried to gain an exact sense of weight or height or skin, or even gender, such information seemed to slip just out of her grasp, like wet soap in a hot bath.

“Excuse me,” he, or maybe she, or perhaps–yes and without wanting to be judgemental–perhaps
it
said, “May I have another biscuit?”

Several gazes flickered back to Sharon. “What? I mean of course. The biscuits are here for everyone to enjoy. Please, help yourself.”

“Thank you,” he/she/it replied, rising with the majesty of a sunken submarine from beneath raging depths. All eyes watched it go to the bar. All eyes watched it pick up a biscuit with a grace and care that surely came from having fingertips larger than a lion’s paw, and all eyes watched it return to its chair, which groaned under the imposition. It ate and, for a moment, there was an impression of teeth in that not-quite-face, teeth indeed that no wishful thinking could deny.

“Well, I think that’s just the kind of thing we should talk about,” said a voice at last, and Sharon nearly shuddered with relief as she turned to the new speaker. This was a man, mid-fifties, with demarcated strands of mouse-grey hair combed across his spotted, massy skull. He wore a navy-blue suit and a red club tie, complemented by a thick leather belt done up several notches too tight. But his face… Somewhere the gods of grease and the gods of time had drawn up their battle lines, and as their wars had raged the mercenaries of wart and spot had joined the foray, fighting to a standstill entrenched in the bags beneath his eyes, under his wattled chin and all around the remnants of his frayed hairline. At the gaze of the others, he bristled, and with petulant pride he declared, “You don’t see
me
coming here in a chameleon spell, and a cheap one at that, do you? I may see the appeal of an occasional glamour, the odd protective enchantment, when in
more refined social circles. But here, surely, we must by definition wear our true colours!”

“There won’t be nudity?” queried someone. This was a question which Sharon had been hoping to posit herself, and so dismiss before the evening could get out of hand.

“I don’t think we should rush into things…”

“How does this work then?” asked a third.

This time Sharon was ready. She coughed, pushed her chair back, stood up with arms folded in front of her, and said, “Uh, yes, so I guess, uh, I should explain.” She took a deep breath and launched, far too fast, into her prepared speech. “Thank you all for coming to this very first meeting of Magicals Anonymous. I’m pleased to see what a good response we got from the Facebook campaign and on Twitter and I’m sure as the weeks go by we can come to help each other and… and stuff. Here we aim to support and assist each other with all our… our…” the eyes of everyone in the room, so carefully avoided, were beginning to burn into her “… our issues and things, and as this is the first time we’ve met I guess we should say a bit about ourselves and why we’re here. So, yeah. My name’s Sharon…”

“Hello, Sharon,” sang out a cheerful voice, into a silence. “What?” asked the speaker. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to say?”

“… and I can walk through walls.”

He is the second greatest shaman who’s ever lived.

At least he thinks he’s the second greatest shaman who’s ever lived, but actually the matter is open to debate. He’s definitely in the top three, but it’s undecided as to whether he, or Blistering Steve, late of Streatham Common, is the true claimant to second place. The argument arises thus: did Blistering Steve succeed, in a moment of transcendent magical brilliance, in crossing the boundary between spirit and flesh and become, in a veritable flash of blinding light, a creature entirely of smoke and air;
or,
less impressively, did he merely contrive his own spontaneous combustion in an experiment gone tragically wrong? The evidence is vague either way, but as Blistering Steve’s rival to the title would point out, if his experiment had gone so well, surely he’d have been back, albeit in ethereal form, to let someone know?

Academic magicians are nothing if not prone to rivalries.

Laying all this aside, for now it is important to note the following:

Firstly, that the second–possibly third–greatest shaman who’s ever lived, has not today got his fix of peppermint super-strength toothpaste, and this has undeniably dented his mood.

Secondly, as he walks in that place between what
is
and what is merely
perceived to be,
with that special walk that only shamans know how to do, he looks down, sees something smoking beneath his feet, and is worried.

His name was Kevin and he was saying,

“… so yeah I mean it’s like so totally uncool what’s happening with modern hygiene. I mean, chlamydia, gonorrhoea, hepatitis, herpes, HIV, and that’s just like the stuff they pick up at the routine screening! You know how hard it is to find decent, drinkable blood these days? Alcohol, drugs, fatty diets, not enough green leaf vegetables and I’m like
hello?!
I’m not even going to drink your good stuff so I don’t see how you’re planning on living if that’s the best your cardiovascular system can produce!”

Sharon leaned a little further forward. This was, she’d concluded after the first ten minutes, the safest look to go with. The act of resting elbows on knees forced her into a position that showed interest, while resting her chin on her hand provided good head support and stopped her mouth from dropping open.

“Anyway,” concluded Kevin, trying not to twiddle his bright blond hair, “I was having some issues with the, you know, the…” He made a whistling sound and with two fingers twiddling in front of his face somehow managed to indicate the place where fangs might be. “So I went to the doctor and she was all like ‘So you’ve got a syndrome’ and I was like ‘Are you fucking kidding me? I’m like the bane of the immortal fucking night or whatever what the fuck do you mean I’ve got a
syndrome?’ and she was all like ‘Yeah but it’s a cool syndrome’ and I was like ‘Lady, don’t give me this it’s a cool syndrome stuff, because I’ve gotta tell you I’ve got some real issues with personal hygiene anyway and if you’re about to tell me that my body is now, like, out to get me, well I honestly can’t tell you what I’m gonna do.’ And she gave me this leaflet and was all like ‘It’s called Seah’s syndrome and you’ve probably had it for a while. So when you were living your blood group was O negative and now you’re dead’–and you know she said ‘dead’ which I thought was just
so
prejudiced–‘and now you’re dead your blood group is still O negative, so that’s like the only blood group you can drink.’ ”

“Is that a popular one?” asked Mrs Rafaat. She was resplendent in a bright orange sari, with greying hair and a collection of thin silver rings on the fingers of her left hand.

“Like fucking no!” moaned Kevin, throwing his hands up in the air. “Only like fucking eight per cent of the population or whatever! And turns out a lotta the guys got this, only it’s not cool to talk about it, which again I think is so like, so stupid? But if you’re AB positive or something like that well then you’re really okay because you can drink like anything but O negative and that’s all you can fucking have, and I don’t know if there’s like, any scientific reason to think this but I really think these O negative fuckers don’t live clean. I have to bring a questionnaire along now and everything. I mean, really, it’s like a fucking dis-as-ter.”

Silence as the room waited for a little of his indignation to clear. Then someone applauded, and the others joined in. Kevin shifted in his chair uncomfortably, flashing the lightly fanged grin of the rarely appreciated, not quite able to believe this moment would last.

“I’m sure we’d all like to thank Kevin for his uh… personal story,” Sharon recited, forcing a rictus smile.

“Thank you, Kevin!” intoned the room. It was curious, Sharon noted, how it only took two or three people to feel the urge to chant their greetings or their praise in harmony, and suddenly everyone else was joining in, just in case their neighbour felt the urge, and then their neighbour’s neighbour felt the urge and, before they knew it, they were being left out or worse being
rude.
It had almost become a competition to respond faster than others, so as not to be last and caught demonstrating a lack of appreciation.

“Does anyone have something they’d like to add?”

Everybody avoided each other’s stare. Then one hand–the strange hand belonging to the strange creature whose features no one could entirely perceive–went up, and that voice that was not he nor she but therefore had to be it and more of an it than the average something dared to be, asked, “What kind of questions?”

“Oh, the questionnaire!” exclaimed Kevin, face lighting up at a chance to explore his problem further. “Well…” A big black sports bag was pulled out from under his chair and opened to reveal, just for a moment, a box of latex gloves, a pack of sterile wipes, a tube of expensive-looking toothpaste and a spindle of dental floss, all floating on a sea of sterile packaging, before from all this a plastic folder containing several sheets of A4 was revealed, neatly typed up and laid out with tick boxes. “Dietary standards
obviously,
sexual history
obviously,
foreign travel of course, visits to malaria sites, iron content, recent hospital investigations, history of needle abuse, history of drug abuse, history of alcohol abuse, history of jaundice… In fact if anyone wants to take one I’ve got plenty of spares.”

“I really don’t think that’s gonna be a great idea,” blurted Sharon. As Kevin’s face fell she added, “But if anyone is interested in helping Kevin out I’m sure they can speak to him after the session.”

“What if we don’t know our blood type?” asked a small woman with mousy blonde hair who’d introduced herself as Jess (Hello, Jess) “and I turn into pigeons”.

“Well, I’d say you should like get yourselves tested and signed up to the donor register,” exclaimed Kevin. “And I hope you’ve all got donor cards too because there’s like thousands of people on the organ donor register who die every year because they can’t get a part and I’m like, guys, charity begins at home, you know?”

The next response came from a woman sitting hunched up, who wore with all the ease and familiarity of a polar bear in a bikini a full-length brown abaya that couldn’t quite disguise knee joints which bent the wrong way. From beneath her robe she produced a small whiteboard and a green marker pen. With her gloved hand–only three fingers in the glove, Sharon couldn’t help noticing, and two of them distinctly curved in a way which might well have been claws–she wrote carefully on the board and turned it to face the group.

Does the blood have to be human?

“Uh,
yeah,”
withered Kevin. “I mean, no offence, I’m sure your blood is like, totally amazing. But if I can’t fucking drink anything except O rhesus fucking negative, then banshee blood is probably like, way out there.”

“Can I quickly ask,” Sharon interrupted, before the conversation could get much more organic, “do you want a stool or something, because you don’t look very uh… very comfortable on the chair?”

The creature in the awkwardly worn robe turned its head slowly and Sharon could have sworn she saw a hint of amber-yellow in the tiny slit across the eyes. The marker pen slipped busily across the board.

Thank you, that is very kind, but I am happy to sit however everyone else sits.

“This is a place for everyone, regardless of their um… their situation… to be comfortable. If arrangements can’t be made for the comfort of our members here, then, uh… I think we can agree we’ve uh… kind of screwed up?”

The woman–if that was the term–hesitated. Sharon sensed that somewhere beneath the fabric a set of mighty teeth longed to chew on the end of the much-gnawed marker pen. Then:

Would anyone mind if I hung from the rafters for a while?

“Uh… that sounds fine to me. Anyone got any problems if…”

Sally.

“If Sally hangs from the rafters?”

There was a chorus of “Sure, whatever” from around the room.

The creature called Sally nodded in what might have been gratitude, slipped her board and marker under one arm, and unfolded. Standing on the rickety chair she unfolded first from the knees, which bent backwards beneath her robe like the hind legs of a horse; a hint of talon curled round the seat of the chair for support. She straightened her back, which may have been long and spindly, and unfolded a pair of arms that may well, to judge by the stretching of the robe from finger to shoulder, or by the hint of protruding greyish-blue leather, have been connected to wings. She threw herself upwards in a single motion, not so much an act of strength against gravity, as a moment of pure intimidation in which the forces of nature considered their adversary and decided it wasn’t worth kicking up a fuss. There was a flap of
black and grey, and a flash of red, and then three claws, each jointed three ways, locked onto one of the horizontal rafters under the sloping triangular roof. The robe flopped backwards, revealing stick-thin grey calves and boney thighs, clad, for the sake of decency, in bright red and white leggings.