Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (52 page)

A chair pushed back.

The owner getting to her feet.

“Hi there.” Sharon’s voice rang out into the hall. “It’s so good to see how many of you there are here tonight. Before we begin, a few quick notices. While rebuilding of the hall is going well, any contributions to the church’s restoration fund are greatly appreciated, and we would ask that everyone stacks their chairs under the dust covers at the end of the session.

“If you are attending Yoga for Magicians on Tuesday evenings, can I please remind you that all clothing must be fireproofed before you are allowed to practise; and Friday night’s quiz, Mystics, Mythics and
Magic, has been moved to the Ferret and Fishcake on Essex Road, owing to a clash with karaoke night at the original venue.

“Also, the Society of Friendlies will be handing out leaflets tonight. Their temporary temple will be based in the former Roger’s Eel Bar until a new tenancy can be agreed elsewhere, and I’m sure we’ll all want to attend their first-service drinks and nibbles. There is also a memorial service for Edna the following Friday. I know many of you have expressed a desire to contribute to this occasion, so Rhys here is going to start a kitty, and once we see how much we collect we’ll buy some flowers, or if we have more than that, Rhys may look at buying something better, something that Edna would have liked. I’m sure we all miss her and remember her fondly. If there’s no other business, then let me all welcome you to this meeting of Magicals Anonymous. My name’s Sharon…”

“Hello, Sharon!”

“… and I’m a shaman.”

In the streets outside, a shadow moved across a wall and settled down beside the hunched-up shape of a man in a grubby coat sheltering from the drizzle.

“Oi oi,” said the shadow.

“Wotcha,” said the man.

“You gonna sit outside or you going in?”

“Don’t really know what I’d say,” admitted the man. “ ‘Hello, my name’s Matthew Swift. I’ve been dead a few years now but actually, I think I’m okay’?”

“But are you okay?” countered Sammy. “Only you look like you’ve been dragged through a cheese grater, and you’re sitting out in the rain. I don’t need to be the second greatest shaman what ever walked the bloody earth to draw a few conclusions, you know.”

“Sammy…”

“Yeah?”

“About your people skills…”

“Screw ’em.”

“No, but really.”

“I’m a frickin’ goblin!” Sammy shrieked. “Jesus, if that doesn’t buy you a few perks then what’s the friggin’ point?!”

“Have you ever considered, though,” suggested the sorcerer, “how goblins could, in fact, be
cute?”

“Cute?” Sammy spat the word, which was promptly chased by a ball of greyish spittle.

“Well, you’re small, you’re occasionally furry, you’ve got these big eyes and a kinda button nose. If you got over the poor body hygiene and the rending of your enemy’s raw flesh with your teeth, you could have serious market potential.”

“Up yours, sorcerer!”

“That’s what everyone says,” he conceded.

They loitered, watching the lights moving within the scaffolded hall.

Swift said, “I’m in serious shit, Sammy.”

“Like that’s new.”

“No, but I mean… serious shit. I’ve been getting lucky for a while, pulling favours, sacrificing… sacrificing things I shouldn’t have sacrificed, things I didn’t have the right to give away. Making compromises. Sooner or later, my luck had to run out.”

“Still here, ain’t you?”

Swift sighed, pinching the top of his nose. “That’s just it,” he muttered. “I’m still here by the skin of my teeth. And now… there’s something coming, Sammy. Something… moving beneath the streets. I don’t know what it is. I can’t… I can’t name it, can’t see it. And if I can’t see it I can’t fight it, and that scares me.

“But we can feel it moving. There are whispers, shadows at our back, and we look over our shoulder all the time now. All the time we’re on guard and we don’t know what it is. I think something’s coming. Coming for me. And I don’t know how to stop it.”

Sammy sucked a judicious lungful of air through his crooked teeth.

“Well, then,” he said, “in my professional and highly trained opinion, you’re kinda stuffed, ain’t you?”

“Thanks.”

“You gonna sit there moping or you gonna do something about it?”

Swift hesitated. Then a slow grin spread across his face. “Well,” he said with a half-hearted shrug, “no harm trying, is there?”

Time passes.

Sharon sits in the entrance to an office.

There is a small collection of magazines on the table in front of her. They have tag lines such as:

THE PERFECT FACIAL–WHAT WORKS FOR YOU?

and:

OUR DREAM CYCLING HOLIDAY–
NIGHTMARE.

The door to the office opens, and a woman dressed all in black, with a high collar and long sleeves, sticks her head out and beams at her.

“Hi there!” she exclaims, and her gaze is a lighthouse on a foggy night, her smile dazzling and white, her hair bright auburn and her handshake warmer than spring after a long winter. “I’m Kelly, I’m Matthew’s assistant here at Harlun and Phelps? You must be Sharon, yes? I love your work, just love it, really, everything you’ve done, it’s so marvellous–I hope you haven’t been waiting long?”

“I, uh… no?”

“So glad, so glad,” Kelly sang out, sweeping Sharon through the door and into the office beyond. It was, Sharon briefly noticed, a bombsite. Paper on the floor, paper on the desk, and paper pinned to the walls, on which more paper had been pinned bearing messages such as:

You really have to deal with this Mr Mayor!

Followed by a reply in another hand:

How about carpet-bombing?

Sat amid this scene of destruction, as best he could considering his chair was also covered in paper, was Matthew Swift, with his head buried in a report.

“Kelly!” he barked before realising that his assistant was already back in the room with Sharon herded before her.

“Oh,” he added. “Yes, right, of course. This,” he waved the report at the woman in black, “is a pile of horse manure and I can’t be buggered, okay?”

“Absolutely, Mr Mayor. Shall I file it under M for manure or B for buggered?”

“You!”

Sharon realised that Swift’s finger was directed at her. “You desperately want to have coffee, don’t you?”

“Actually, I had—”

“Good! Let’s get out of here.”

They had coffee.

Sharon felt guilty about hers, as it was her second in an hour. But then Swift was buying, and who was she anyway to argue with the Midnight Mayor?

She sat in a padded chair which leaned too far back while being simultaneously too close to the table, and waited for Swift to collect his order from the counter. Men and women in suits flowed around them, busy busy busy at the height of the day. Sharon half-closed her eyes and whispered under her breath,

“I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, the secret is—”

“What the hell is that?” demanded Swift, plonking himself down opposite her like a duck onto ice.

“What? What’s what?”

“ ‘I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret.’ I’ve heard it somewhere before.”

“Oh,” mumbled Sharon, flushing crimson. “It’s uh… it’s this secret, the secret to being confident and comfortable in yourself, I mean. It’s like a life-coach thing, only you can teach yourself and that. Whenever you’re worried or stressed or don’t feel confident or anything, then you can say it and you’ll feel, you know, better.”

“Better?” queried Swift, as if this was a concept he couldn’t quite handle.

“Yeah.”

“Because you’re… beautiful, wonderful and have a secret?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“But… but… what exactly is your secret?”

“Oh that’s easy. The secret is me.”

A silence followed, punctuated by the sound of the Midnight Mayor slurping his coffee. “Ah,” he said, when it was clear no more was going to be offered. “Well.” Then, as if the words could no longer restrain themselves, “But that’s total bollocks!”

“Um… well, it’s, uh… it’s…” Somehow everything Sharon wanted to say wasn’t quite happening. She sat up a little straighter, surprise showing on her face. “Actually,” she declared, “it really is.”

“Oh good.”

The Midnight Mayor cleared his throat as if he intended to project an air of authority. “So, Sharon,” he ventured, “how are you?”

“What?”

“How are you? It’s something polite that people are supposed to ask on this sort of occasion.”

“What sort of occasion?”

“Well… you know, professional meetings.”

“Is that what this is? A professional meeting?”

“Of course it is! I bought coffee! With money! Which I had to sign for and everything!”

A moment of sympathy passed over Sharon’s features. “Actually, I’ve been kinda thinking, what with me being a knower of the truth and that… Do you
like
being Midnight Mayor?”

“I think it’s a question of options,” replied Swift primly. “If you’re asking ‘Would you rather be Midnight Mayor than, say, a smear of coagulating blood on some street corner?’ well then I love it. Somehow, in all the excitement, those two seemed to be the only options. Too late to do anything about it now, anyway. Besides! We’re not here to talk about me; we need to discuss Magicals Anonymous.”

Sharon gave a shrug. “Okay, so, yeah, I know you’ve got problems with it. But before you say anything, I think you should know that we’ve got way more members joining now. And if you do try and shut us down, then I think there’ll be letters, and maybe we’ll have to get a solicitor and that, and it’d be really shit of you anyway.”

“Actually—”

“And don’t think you can intimidate me with this ‘I’m the Midnight Mayor’ crap, because I’m way past the point where that’s impressive. And actually, just because you’re good at fire and lightning doesn’t mean you know shit about where to shoot it, so really…”

“What I wanted to say—”

“And Facebook is a useful tool of social media!” she insisted. “I mean, we get like, all these hits there, and so far no one’s posted to say ‘Whoa, you mean magic’s real?’ And Rhys is putting in a new spam protection system anyway, to prevent anyone who can’t complete a basic TFL ward from accessing the group, and I think that’ll make a massive difference and—”

“Sharon!” Swift gestured violently to get her attention. “Ms Li,” he corrected himself as the shaman raised her eyebrows expectantly. “While, naturally, I think you and your support group are possibly the most whacked-out thing I’ve heard in a long while, and while obviously times are hard with the financial crisis being what it is, and while I really think you should consider getting beanbags, not chairs, for Gretel to sit on, because your furniture budget is just gonna soar otherwise, what I meant to say is, all things considered… would you like a job?”

The words took a while to sink in.

“What?”

It came out before Sharon could stop it, an involuntary splutter of incomprehension. Swift pushed his coffee aside and leaned towards Sharon. “I’m thinking of a title–something like community support worker. The salary’s not great, and the hours are… a little unusual, and I can’t promise much in the way of expenses or anything like that, though I think I can swing you something reasonably okay from the Aldermen’s fund. But you can decide for yourself what it is you want to do, since, I figure, you invented the job anyway.”

“I… I did?”

“Yup.”

“You… want to pay me… to run Magicals Anonymous?”

“There might,” he admitted, “be memos too.”

Time passes.

The lights fade across London.

Office lights switching off on a timer; pub shutters pulled down over the last glow of tungsten. Cars parked and headlamps extinguished for the night; the grey dancing of televisions going out behind window panes; the golden glow of bedside lamps snapping out behind curtains. The great tourist lights–the orange lamps of Westminster, the purple circle of the London Eye, the green washes of the Westminster Clock Tower, the silver spires of Canada Water, the spilt colours from the bridges that stain the river washing beneath them–all fade as the night progresses. The streets fall silent, a kingdom where rats and foxes scuttle through the dark.

Here–a lonely security guard paces beside a shuttered multi-storey car park.

There–the cleaning woman in her bright blue gloves runs a vacuum cleaner across the floor of a deserted office.

Below–the railway maintenance man checks there is no power left in the track before stepping into the waiting maw of the Tube’s coal-black tunnels.

The dead-shift nurses pace through the silent wards of the hospital, clipboards in hand, and struggle not to sleep.

The duty fireman, left awake in the empty crew room, flicks from quiz show to porno movie in search of something to fight back the drowsiness that no amount of caffeine will prevent.

A lorry rattles across the empty space of Waterloo Bridge.

A woman pulls off the heels that she has worn for eight hours continuously at an utterly worthless party and steps barefoot onto the ground, sighing with relief as her ankles relax and her toes curl against the cool wet paving stones.

A night-bus driver accelerates into fifth gear down Oxford Street, tearing past the empty stops, and whoops in triumph as he jumps the red light and passes forty miles an hour at the top of Dean Street, honking his horn at the sleeping silence.

Sharon Li walks alone.

She walks the ordinary walk, the tired-man’s shuffle, the walk of 4 a.m. and a long journey home, of a mind that has thought too long and too hard, and now can’t remember how to think at all. Easily–so easily–she could walk the spirit walk and drift through the time and shadows of the city, tangling her toes in the bones of the dead and listening to the stories spat out with the chewing gum stuck to every stone beneath her feet. Easily too she could walk the dream walk, tangling her mind in the thoughts of others, riding the great snore of the sleeping city, the flashing white coat of Dez at her side, her spirit guide, lighting the way. Easy to fade, easy to turn invisible, easy to become a part of the city.