The Midnight Mayor (15 page)

When I found it, I nearly went straight past it in my haste and irritation, and had to flick back to make sure I’d seen it right. Inside a folder just like any other, buried halfway down the pile, was my life on paper.

I pulled it out, spread it across the desk and looked with rising disbelief at the thick, chalky sheets before me. Every detail of my existence - my mum, my gran, who liked to talk to the pigeons; my childhood, my first encounters with urban magic, my teacher Mr Bakker, my apprenticeship, my years as a not very interesting sorcerer, my time spent travelling, my death, our resurrection - everything was there, from former lovers to the average size of my annual gas bill. Lists of friends I hadn’t seen for years, who I hadn’t dare see, to whom I hadn’t known how to explain anything, whom I hadn’t dared put in danger; of extended family I’d never really spoken to, of ex-girlfriends who’d attended my funeral, with their new husband and brand new babies left at home for the sake of good manners . . .

Pictures! Where had they got so many pictures? Mum up to her elbows in rubber gloves and dodgy plumbing; Gran waddling down the street in her slippers, the rats all watching her from the grid above the drains, the pigeons from the gutters on the roofs. School photos from back when my eyes were brown, not blue, and I was just starting to grow adult teeth; CCTV shots; the place where I’d died, all blood and torn clothes and of course, most important, no body, just bloody fingerprints on the dangling receiver of the public telephone. A photo of when we came back, wearing someone else’s clothes too big for us, sitting alone on a bench in the middle of the night, then up to our armpits in the internal organs of a litterbug sent to find us, which we had destroyed. We were looking straight at the camera but I swear, we knew, we had not had our photo taken that night, there had been no one there to do it!

On the very last page was a neat typewritten page of A4. It said:

Right at the bottom of the page, a neat, small hand had added:
Swift has the shoes
.

There wasn’t any explanation.

I looked down at my shoes.

Not my shoes.

The shoes I wore, sure. The shoes I had been wearing, yes. But they weren’t my shoes; I hadn’t gone out and bought them. I’d taken them from someone else’s house, put them on with a very precise purpose and gone for a walk.

Swift has the shoes.

I put the file back in the desk. We spun a few spins of the huge chair, feeling its greased bearings slide smoothly over each other. We rocked back and looked at the ceiling; we leant forward and looked at the floor. I put my shoes up on the leather-topped desk and examined them. Red and black, with a hint of gold stripe. Tasteless, flashy, expensive. They puffed every time I walked on them, little pockets of air being sucked in through tiny bellows to give that extra-springy experience. If they’d been two sizes smaller, I might have appreciated what they were about. They made my feet sweat in the two pairs of socks I had to wear. We spun a few more spins. I flexed the fingers of my right hand. Flesh gaped open, then closed, in my palm. Electrocution didn’t do that for a guy. It took something more. Supposition took fact’s bloody hand for the dance, and cha-chaed round the room. The plastic dragon rolled its tongue rudely at some invisible playground rival.

I spun a few more spins.

Why shoes?

Not my shoes. Just the shoes I was wearing.

I stood up and let them carry me a few idle paces round the room. Then a few paces more. They seemed as uncertain about what to do next as we were. On my second circuit beneath the stony-faced portraits of dead white men, I met the eyes of the little plastic dragon again.

I sat down on the edge of the desk. There was a portrait behind the mad-eyed dragon, all white whisker and tight waistcoat. A man in his late sixties, staring out disdainfully at all onlookers, a window behind him implausibly overlooking the Tower of London. One arm held some sort of yappy dog, whose misproportioned features suggested an animal incapable of holding still, especially for an artist. The other rested on the window sill, palm turned upwards, fingers pointing out to the city behind. I looked closer. I leant right in until my nose almost touched the rough canvas. There was a mark on the man’s hand. It was thin, almost lost in the gloomy shadows of the portrait, a tiny stroke of red across the wrinkled gloom of his flesh. It looked like someone had taken a scalpel and carefully carved a shallow red cross into his skin - no, two shallow red crosses. One was smaller than the other, nestling in the top left-hand corner that the first cross made. The cut looked fresh, no pale scar tissue, but neither was there a bandage and I couldn’t imagine the whiskered old man being in a hurry to make a big deal of his injuries. I looked back at the plastic dragon with the mad eyes, at the shield it held in its grip. A white shield with two red crosses on it, one smaller than the other, a sword more than a cross, painted into the upper left-hand corner of its big brother.

I sat cross-legged on Nair’s desk and went through the inevitable. I pulled the black mitten off my right hand and bit and tugged at the knot of the bandage until it came free. I unwound the white cotton, feeling fibres sticking and breaking against the bloody mess of my skin, and with almost no surprise and a good deal of regret, looked at the palm of my hand.

Two red crosses, one smaller than the other, had been carved very carefully by a Catholic graffiti artist into my skin.

I changed the bandage, set fire to the older, bloodier rags, and threw the ashes into the nearest bin. I pulled my glove back over my fist, threw cold water over my face and walked from Nair’s apartment as casually and calmly as if I was a gasman, come to take the reading.

 

We walked. Where didn’t concern us, and why didn’t even feature. We walked because we could walk. We walked through Lincoln’s Inn and down towards Middle Temple, through grand courtyards and tucked-away alleys, until we came to the Embankment. We walked along by the river, smelling it, watching the high tide rub against the old black stones, west until we came to Cleopatra’s Needle. The smell of greasy hot dog in a paper bag stopped us. We bought one with extra ketchup and, goo dribbling down our chin, kept on walking. We climbed the steps onto Hungerford Bridge, crossed it, trains rumbling noisily alongside, the river churning peacefully below. I stood in the middle of the bridge and turned my face towards the east and breathed in the smell of water, salt, seagulls and tourist boats. At the end of the bridge sat a beggar, huddled over in the cold, wrapped in jumper and duvet both turned the colour of the thin London dirt that billowed in dry winds. I gave him a couple of quid and got a dirty look from a couple waiting for the lift down to the street. We ignored them and trotted down the stairs to the flat square stones of the South Bank.

It was already past lunchtime, but the restaurants beneath the Royal Festival Hall, all shining glass disguising uninspired interior, were heaving. Jugglers competed with ice cream vans parked opposite the skaters who spun and twisted in the uneven concrete ups and downs around the pillars of the Hayward Gallery and National Theatre. I watched them for a while. Kids, average age maybe sixteen. Hoods and thick gloves against the cold, baggy jeans, greens and blues and blacks and dark reds, sports logos and battered old wooden skateboards with the edges splintered off. There wasn’t much room for impressive stunts - a few stairs, a few slopes, a few drains - but that didn’t stop them from throwing themselves at everything that got in their way, people included, while whooping at some achievement only they who knew the secrets of skateboarding could appreciate. Behind them, the walls were so thick with graffiti that the council had given up, determining that this was art, not vandalism. Great splashes of colour thrown over each other again and again until the shadowed depths of the place looked like a psychedelic grammar lesson - words spelt to a careful level of comprehension, so only those in the know would understand - bubble letters of silver, their meaning lost to the detail of their drawing, and here or there, smaller notes along the usual lines of “B IS COUL” or “7JS B 4EVER” and other mystic warnings.

The wall being taken, some graffiti artists had moved on to the pillars, spinning paint round the concrete columns to make snakes, or poisoned twisted ivy, or biting barbed wire, or even, in one case, to say from the ceiling down to the floor in bold white letters:

I looked at this a long while, wondering. It seemed like a strange sentiment to go spraying up on any piece of concrete, let alone a pillar beneath Waterloo Bridge.

We kept on walking. Books for sale at stalls under the bridge; outside the theatre, modern art, or twisted bits of concrete depending on your point of view; one busker on the Jamaican drums outside a TV studio, others playing Beethoven outside Gabriel’s Wharf. Oxo Tower, all orange brick and iron banister; grotty concrete flats in the city’s best location, glass fronts looking into open offices where meetings were being held to talk about magazines, covers, content, pictures and staff. Blackfriars Bridges - all three of them, if you counted the row of stubby pillars in the middle of the river, across which no road ran. Tate Modern (more art/twisted concrete), Globe Theatre, restaurants, Southwark Bridge, offices, black reflective glass over a broad stretch of water between bridges, looking out towards a building site and Cannon Street, a forgotten station; the rattling of trains overhead, the rumbling of buses crossing Southwark Bridge. Pubs, restaurants, cafés, cobbled streets, hotels, men holding beer and women chatting in silly shoes; buskers again, jugglers, fire eaters, ranters with their loudspeakers worrying that you haven’t met God yet and now is the time, the smell of curry powder, the smell of chips. Little lost newsagents selling everything you’d expect, at double the price; the Golden Hinde, an extra “e”’ added on for historical authenticity, a ship built for short people next to a shop selling almost nothing but pirate hats and plastic swords; Southwark Cathedral, where in summer all the shoppers at Borough Market sat outside to eat smoked salmon and heart-stopping chocolate cake.

London Bridge.

A grotty bridge, if all truth be told, grizzled concrete and fierce traffic. By night, it was beautiful, lights directed along its length in the colours of the rainbow. From its pavements you could see all the things a tourist might want to see. To the west, the London Eye, Charing Cross station, the BT Tower and Centre Point. To the east, Tower Bridge, the Tower, Butler’s Wharf, HMS
Belfast
and City Hall, which would always and for ever be known by Londoners after its inaugural mayor as Ken’s Bollock.

We stood on London Bridge and faced the wind and let it wash the pain out of our bones. Here, we felt safe.

I looked towards the Tower of London, and thought without words. Wind and walking were all I needed.

A voice said, “Midnight Mayor.”

My voice.

I tried it again, a few more times, rolled it over for size. “Midnight Mayor.”

Repetition didn’t make it seem any more a good thing, so I shut up.

I kept on walking.

 

Full circle.

I hadn’t known I was going there, but when I arrived, I knew with absolute certainty that it was the right idea.

The Museum of London sat at the southern extremity of the Barbican. Its white tiles and grey, rounded walls gave it the superficial appearance of a boil-in-the-bag toilet that had got too big for its own plumbing and burst up from street level in a grimy eruption of clay tiling and half-swept dust. Strangers to the city always had a hard time finding it, since the main entrance wasn’t at street level at all, but a storey above it in that network of ramps and walkways that made up the space-time vortex that was the Barbican Centre. Even if you found, at street level, any sign to mark its presence, the idea seemed too absurd that a city council might casually dump a museum beside a roundabout so overshadowed by buildings that to people who worked there, sunlight had become nothing more than a wistful fantasy.

That was good; that meant the inside was peaceful, without the nattering of children to disturb us. Those who had made it inside either knew its secrets already, and were there to wonder and appreciate anew, or were so surprised to discover this well of knowledge that even the most easily bored were silent with respect.

I wandered through the history of London, not paying much attention. I’d been here before, and what I was looking for was very specific.

I found it, sitting on a little stool beside a large display, lit up in shimmering orange and red, of the Great Fire of London. It was snoring, very quietly, very professionally; the snoring that could be dismissed as “heavy breath” at a moment’s notice. I poked it with my toe and said, “Excuse me?”

The snoring stopped. Set within a squashed red face, a pair of almost spherical eyes opened, drifted up to the ceiling and round the walls, and settled on me.

“Uh?” The sound was pumped out by a pair of lungs inside a great bulbous chest inside a security guard’s black uniform.