Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (8 page)

“Uh… yes, Mr Pentlace, I was, a little.”

This is the voice of Sharon Li, after four hours sleep, three of those spent in nightmare, who staggered out of bed forty minutes before her shift began and opened the door half expecting to find blood outside. This is the bleary look of Sharon Li as she hangs her head before the wrath of her employer, wondering whether her life is real or if in fact she hasn’t made a terrible mistake to think so.

“Yeah, but you should just tell me these things.”

“I’m sorry, but there was this meeting last night and it overran…”

“Yeah, but I get that, yeah, but you have a responsibility to be fit for work. I mean, I’m not angry, yeah, but you’ve got to come in here fit to work and I mean I didn’t want to say nothing because, yeah, but it’s not really something I usually care about but actually you’re just kinda… You don’t have a good attitude, you know what I’m saying?”

“A good attitude?” echoed Sharon, the milk in her hand gently turning.

“Which I don’t get,” added Mike Pentlace, thumbing his iPhone just to make sure there wasn’t an app which could get it for him. “Because, yeah, but this job is important, yeah? But you seem to think that you’re
not so much one of the team and I’m saying, yeah, but you’re not going to get better than this. I mean I don’t want to sound… but you’re not so you’ve gotta have a positive attitude, yeah, and that doesn’t just mean turning up on time, it means smiling more and looking happy and being, yeah, but being more… I don’t know… more less weird.”

Sharon tried it.

“Yeah, but okay,” concluded Pentlace, disappointed with her wretched attempt. “Well, just go back to work, okay, and we won’t say anything more, yeah?”

She went back to work.

Robin exclaimed in her best head-turning whisper, “Wow, he is like totally an ass!”

Gina added, “You okay, hun?”

Sharon smiled gamely and topped up the espresso machine one bean at a time, placing each one into the grinder with a murmur under her breath of “I am beautiful.”

Pop the bean inside.

“I am wonderful.”

Pop another bean inside.

“I have a secret.”

Push it down into the blade.

“The secret is—”

“Fucking service!” shrilled a voice behind her.

She turned.

There was no one there.

“Are you all like, deaf or what?” added the voice. It was male in that its highest register was still below the normal female range, but so bubbling with indignation that it had nearly cracked on through to a whole linguistic realm of its own.

Sharon looked around. Gina was putting out slightly stale muffins in a row on the cake counter. She liked laying out the cakes, and was continually adjusting them so that whenever someone took a muffin, the display was instantly restored to maximum mathematical neatness, for the next customer’s aesthetic delight.

She didn’t seem to have noticed the furious voice.

“What the fuck does it mean ‘medio’?” ranted the voice, its indignation rising to a new pitch. “Where’s tea?”

Sharon edged towards the sound just as a hand, grey-brown and all knuckle, gestured above the lip of the bar in lurid contempt at the available options. She leaned over and looked down.

A pair of gum-yellow eyes stared back, and a plume of black nasal hair quivered in indignation at the end of a flattened nose the colour of dirty slate. “About fucking time! I want tea. I want it in a mug
this
big.” A pair of four-fingered hands, fingers too long, skin too leathery, made a gesture that was nearly the same size as the creature’s head. “And I want the bag left in to soak. No point having fucking weak tea!”

Carefully, with a nonchalance that she’d cultivated with great care over many years, Sharon examined the rest of the café. If anyone else was aware that a three-foot goblin in a bright green hoodie which proclaimed
SKATE OR DIE!
across its back was attempting to order tea, they weren’t showing it.

“Milk, sugar?” she asked.

“Both, lots!”

“Biscuit?”

“Do I look like I want a fucking biscuit? Why do you people always try to sell me shit I don’t want?”

“I’ll be a few moments.”

She made the tea on automatic, staring vacantly ahead, waiting for the moment when Robin came back from wherever it was Robin went when she got bored, and saw the goblin, and screamed. Or for the clash of Greg dropping the tray as he surveyed the bare-footed three-toed little creature quivering with rage against caffeinated consumerism and all its follies, or for–oh God–for the moment Mike Pentlace swanned back in while trying to make a Very Important Phone Call, only to be stopped in his tracks by the bodily odour of a creature who had heard of this showering thing but thought it was for nonces.

She poured in too much milk and the cup nearly overflowed, its contents held in by surface tension alone. She tipped some away, then remembered the size of the goblin’s gesture when he’d ordered his tea. A thin line of brown now dripped down, sullying the clean white cardboard with the trickle of shame.

Still no screaming.

She turned back to the counter and pushed the tea towards the questing fingertips of the goblin.

“Two twenty, please.”

The fingers stopped mid-curl around the mug. “Two fucking twenty? For a cup of fucking tea!”

“A very large tea,” corrected Sharon, and flinched even as she spoke. “In the mornings we do tea free with sandwiches between 8 and 10 a.m., or in the evenings sometimes we knock down the price on the muffins because if we don’t then we have to throw them away or sell them the next day at the very front and hope no one notices.”

“Where do you think I’m going to get two twenty from?”

Sharon considered. “Aren’t there charities?”

“For goblins?”

“Um… I didn’t know people were allowed to discriminate on grounds of… you know, ethnicity.”

“Are you calling me ethnic?”

“No sir,” blurted Sharon. “I’m just saying you’re uh… you’re probably a minority group and that’s maybe good because you know when you get those forms and it says ‘Do you consider yourself disabled?’ and you say ‘Yes’ because then they have to give you an interview in order to fulfil their quota, well, you being like, you know, a goblin and stuff, you could probably say you’re disabled and discriminated against and that’s really good for these access questionnaires and—”

“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Sammy the goblin, so loud that Sharon knew, she
knew
someone had to hear, someone was going to look, they were going to see her talking to a goblin and that would be it, another ignoble end to another ignoble job, sacked for a reason no one could quite name but everyone accepted, because they could have sworn they saw her turn invisible but weren’t completely sure.

“Discrimination,” she babbled. “I mean I know there’s people who say that positive discrimination is still discrimination just like unpositive discrimination, I mean like negative discrimination but you gotta look at things and go ‘Shit, there are way more rich white dudes than rich black dudes’ but then I guess it’s all proportional and really I don’t know much about it so—”

“Which are you? White or black?”

“What?”

“You?” demanded the goblin. “What ‘ethnicity’ or whatever are you?”

“I’m… well, I suppose I’m ethnically Chinese but I was born in Barnet.”

“Barnet, Barnet, shitty shitty Barnet!” sang out the goblin, and Sharon closed her eyes, waited for the shout, the gasp of horror, the cry of amazement, and it was…

… nowhere.

She opened her eyes and looked–really looked–and saw the world as if through a broken magnifying glass, or a TV screen set to interfere. Someone had sprayed a settling mist over all things, but rather than cause the world to thicken, it seemed to make all things that it touched a little more translucent. The glass shimmered in the shop front like a caged liquid trying to break free, and at the empty tables sat the shadows of those who had sat there before, their features shifting in busy silence. The light from outside made each mote of dust visible, rippling away from her fingers as she moved them through the air. And looking round at the people, she saw…

She saw not one but many, a many that was one…

She saw

Pallid features of the man reading the newspaper, hair growing thin before her eyes, falling away, skin turns white and retracts into bone and he glances up and wonders why she stares and

She saw

Another shyly holding hands with Greg as he speaks words in another language, which she knows though she has never before heard these sounds and

     
Above Gina’s head, in Gina’s head, the sound of music, a song half heard, half remembered, what and where, and the what is Sung by her sister

     
And the where is

        
Richmond Park as a child, barely able to walk, a deer came by and she laughed and her mother was afraid and that made her laugh harder

And she heard

Tick tick tick beneath the streets

And smelt

Burning on the earth

And she felt

Burning in the palm of my hand our hand our hand burning in the palm ours is mine is

And she looked down at the grinning face of the goblin and there was an infinity between her and him, an infinity before and an infinity behind and a world of dust between his toes and she held on to the counter for support but it was barely there, barely real, she was gasping for air, gasping for breath, and he said, the words too far off:

“Do you have any toothpaste?”

She rocked back to normality, the real world asserting itself like a slap on a choking man’s back. The shadows were gone, the sounds were gone, the goblin was gone and he was

No, not quite gone. There was a faint something in the air, a shimmering of movement, a clattering of change and a sulkily paid two pounds twenty was there in front of her where it hadn’t been before and a little voice, far off, was saying:

“We’ll start at Seven Dials, eleven tonight. Don’t be fucking late.”

If she scrunched her eyes up, she thought she could see the walk of the goblin as he waddled towards the door, and trace his passage by the splatter of tea as it slopped over the edge of his cup. Then he was gone, out through the door and into the street.

Although, she noticed, as he left he didn’t bother to open the door.

Some four and a half hours before a goblin walked into Sharon Li’s life and demanded extra large tea with milk and sugar, Sammy the Elbow, second (possibly third, really, who could say?) greatest shaman who’d ever lived, was annoyed if unsurprised to receive a visitor to his den.

The den was in Camden, and had been advertised as a “studio flat”, which was far too small for Sammy with his bed of cardboard, soft beds being for losers, and his extensive collection of tinned food and toothpaste.

This visitor, from whose back blazed wings of blue fire that might have been those of an angel, or perhaps of a dragon, and whose eyes were two endless pits at the bottom of which burned unending madness, said, “Wotcha.”

Sammy had replied, “Oi oi, you look shit, don’t you?”

His visitor considered this proposition. Since it came from a three-foot-nothing goblin whose body had clearly interpreted the genetic command to sprout hair as relating more to ears, nose and belly button than any real growth on the surface of his skull, he wasn’t sure if he was ready to accept Sammy’s diagnosis without querying the perspective from which it was made. Then again, what Sammy lacked in outward presentation, he more than made up for with a certain unstoppable grasp of the situation. So the visitor gave a shrug and said:

“Rough couple of… well… everything.”

“You know about Dog?”

“I love the way you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Just
know
stuff.”

“I
am
the second greatest shaman ever to walk the earth, ain’t I; how thick would it make me if I didn’t know shit? It’s not like you get to be as talented as me without picking up some stuff.”

“It’s killed again.”

“Some prat in Clerkenwell, I know.”

“It—”

“Tore his throat out, ripped off his ear. I know, I know!”

“And last night I went to the place where the spirits were and heard—”

“Its howl, of course you fucking did, it’s been howling for weeks now and you’re just too fucking ‘boom’ to do anything about it, aren’t you?”

“Its footsteps—”

“Burn the earth, I know, I know!”

Silence. Then the man whose blood was fire and whose eyes were an endless storm, said, “Sammy, in all the many things you know, and I get that there’s a lot, has it occurred to you that sometimes it’s just plain good manners to let the other guy finish?”

“I’m a busy goblin, I can’t sit around for everyone else to catch up. Besides, you’re the Midnight Mayor–what you going to do about it?”

The man addressed as the Midnight Mayor sighed. “I’m trying. It’s hard.”

“Fucking lame.”

“I’ve found someone I think you should meet.”

“You wanting favours now? Bad habit to get into, needing favours.”

“She’s a shaman.”

“Any good?”

“Maybe. Maybe very. But she needs training.”

Sammy spat, a single globe of green-tinted spit flying across the floor. Where it hit concrete, it began to smoke, giving off a thin acrid white vapour. “Can’t be handling kids.”

“It’s important.”

Sammy’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, a finger waggling towards the other’s face. “You…
scheming,
Midnight Mayor?” he asked.

“Me? Scheme?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I think you look like a thicko in a bin bag just like everyone else, but then that got me thinking, maybe you
want
to look like a thicko in a bin bag, maybe that’s all part of the game, pretend to be a thicko so that when you stop being a thicko everyone’s so surprised that no one notices you’re not that bright anyway.”

“I can see you’ve thought this through.”