“But it’s not healthy!” replied the Hag. “A mortal and a god sharing the same flesh?”
“You know, this isn’t why we’re here. I can get abuse pretty much wherever.”
“Yeah,” sighed the Maid, “but I bet a tenner I can make you cry in half a minute.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” added the Mother, slurping tea.
“Did you hurt your little handywandy?” crooned the Hag.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “All right,” I said. “Let’s play this game. Statement: I am the Midnight Mayor.”
“Yes,” said the Mother.
“Don’t give the fucker a freebie.
Christ!
” exclaimed the Maid.
“Sorry, dearest,” muttered the Mother, with every sign of genuine contrition.
“Statement:” I tried again. “I became Midnight Mayor when Nair died.”
Three stony faces stared back at me. I didn’t need an answer to know I was right. “Statement: when Nair died, he made a telephone call. He breathed his dying breath into the wires and with his dying breath went the idea, the title, the power, the brand, everything that makes up Midnight Mayor. But it couldn’t stay as signals in the wire; the Midnight Mayor needs to be flesh and blood. So it went in search of a phone to ring and it found us. It was
always
going to find us. It is our nature.”
“Isn’t it nice to see that youth can still reason?” sighed the Hag.
“Statement: the Aldermen think I killed Nair because, let’s face it, if we’d known what he was about to do to us, we probably would have. Because they don’t understand what we are; they don’t understand why we are alive. Because . . . because they don’t know who else to blame. Because Nair was killed by a man who basically flayed him alive while Nair was still in his clothes, peeled away the skin
under
his nails without even trimming them down, and that,
that
isn’t just sorcery. That’s the kind of magic that makes the moon think twice about its orbital path. That’s . . . that’s the kind of magic that people don’t want to understand, don’t want to know about, because it makes them tiny.
“Statement: fact! Nair died and I was hit by a curse out of the telephone! One Midnight Mayor is dead and another walks, because you can’t kill a brand on the hand, not while there’s a city that made it.
“Fact! The man who killed Nair had no smell, and men - mortal walking, breathing men - always smell.
“Question:”
“
Finally
,” groaned the Maid.
“Yes, dear?”
“Well?”
“Question:” I licked my dry lips, tasting of peeled skin and tea. “Who or what killed Nair?”
There was a long silence. Finally the Maid said, “Shucks. You ain’t gonna live long, sunshine.”
“Well, now, you see, that’s an interesting one,” murmured the Mother.
“If you care about these things,” snapped the Hag.
“But you’re three ladies with a cauldron,” we said, managing another bow. “You’d know without needing to care.”
“Hey, sunshine!” snapped the Maid. “It wasn’t a fucking man! You said it like - blokes what breathe and piss and eat don’t fucking not smell.”
“And of course the question is,” added the Mother thoughtfully, “did the man kill the Mayor, or the man’s maker?”
“He’ll be after you now,” concluded the Hag. “It doesn’t matter whose skin it is, it’s the brand on the hand. You could be any little wormy maggot crawling up from the biscuit plate and he’d still come to squish you down. Thought about running away?”
I bit my lip, pulled my hand tighter into my chest. “All right,” I muttered. “OK. Cryptic I can deal with. Sure. Whatever. Statement: you said . . . the man or his maker.”
“That’s conversation skills he’s got there,” chuckled the Hag.
“Statement: ergo - the man who killed Nair wasn’t in fact a man. Something else. The possibilities are endless!”
“Pity you’ve only got so much time, then, isn’t it?”
I wiped my forehead with my sleeve. I felt hot. The stitches in my chest ached and throbbed, my hand burnt. The world seemed a mirage away. I stammered, “Question: in Nair’s house there was a file, and in the file there was a note, and the note said, ‘Swift has the shoes.’ What does this mean?”
“Trendy pair of trainers,” said the Maid appreciatively, nodding at my feet.
“Very clever of him to notice, really,” added the Mother.
“You’re wearing the boy’s shoes,” concluded the Hag. “Or didn’t you think it would be important?”
I looked down at my shoes. “These?”
“Was that a . . .”
“No, no, it wasn’t a question. It was more . . . thinking aloud. It would be fair to allow me to get a little clarification before I blow my next question.”
“Fair!” laughed the Maid.
“Well . . .” sighed the Mother.
“Huh!” grunted the Hag.
“It would be moving with the times . . .” I added. “Education being what it is.”
“I got an A at Art.”
“All right then.”
“Clarify away.”
“Statement: these shoes” - I twitched my toes inside the flashy trainers - “aren’t mine. I took them from a boy’s room in Wembley. They belong to a kid called Mo. I was using them to find him, for his mum’s sake. He’s been missing. He’s got nothing to do with magic, as far as I can tell, and she certainly hasn’t. Just a favour for a friend. But - still statement - the Mayor’s files mentioned these shoes. Nair thought they were important. So here’s my clarification question: was Nair also looking for the kid who owned these shoes?”
To which, simply and flatly, the Hag said, “Yes.”
We wanted out. We knew it with a sudden and absolute certainty. We wanted a ticket to somewhere foggy, a nice thick green haze to get ourselves lost in, deep tunnels and obedient lights. We wanted out and down and gone, it was nothing to do with us, none of this was anything to do with us and we weren’t prepared to die for it.
So I said: “Question: what the bloody hell is going on?”
The three women exchanged looks.
“Is that fair?” asked the Mother.
“Kinda
total
disrespect!” added the Maid. “I like your balls, bozo!”
“It’s not about fair,” retorted the Hag. “If it was about fair, none of this would happen.”
I raised a polite hand. “Answer, please?”
The Hag sighed, and put down the small plate of biscuits. She moved carefully round the side of the cauldron towards me. So did the others. Tough guys aren’t supposed to be intimidated by ladies. I guess I wasn’t so tough. She looked us in the eye and said, “City’s damned.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Damned. Cursed. Buggered. Totally and utterly fucked, to use the crude vernacular. It’s going to burn. It’s going to sink. It’s going to crash and splinter and shatter and everything will be dust. Pick one. The ravens are dead. The Stone is broken. The Wall is defaced. The Midnight Mayor is killed and his replacement” - a chuckle like the last gasp of a throttled chicken - “didn’t even know he was in the job. Cursed. Damned. Run away, little electric angels. Run, if you can.”
They were next to me, around me, behind me. Three little ladies who’d been around ever since the first village midwife decided to ask her friends round for a hot cup of something on a foggy Sunday evening, back in the days when the magic came from the earth and the sky, rather than the tarmac and the neon. We were tiny to them. I was afraid.
“What do you mean, damned?” I stammered. “What do you mean, the ravens are dead, the Stone is broken? Why are these things happening? What kind of total tit goes around making
us
Midnight Mayor? I don’t even believe in the Midnight fucking Mayor! What the bloody hell is going on?!”
A hand whose fingers were all bone and false nails grasped the back of my neck. The Hag leant in so close I could hear her breath, feel it tickling my eardrum. When she spoke, it was with the whisper of the treacherous lover. She said:
“‘Give me back my hat.’”
Then, without a word of apology or flicker of embarrassment, she pushed me face-first into the cauldron of boiling tea.
In times of uncertainty, someone has to take charge.
Her name was Judith.
It was her fingers at my throat, looking for a pulse, that woke me up. Time had passed, without bothering to tell me about it.
The sky was the colour of an old bruise, the sunlight a washed-out yellow reflecting off the topmost windows.
Judith wore a puffy green sleeveless jacket, a matching jumper, sensible boots and a badge. The badge said, “Judith”. In the top-left corner it added, “Here To Help”.
She said, “Mister? Hey - you OK?”
I considered this difficult question. With my left hand I felt at my face. It didn’t feel burnt. A little tender, perhaps, but hardly scalded by boiling tea. I sniffed my fingertips. A faint lingering odour of PG Tips and digestive biscuit? I ran my hand through my hair until I encountered grains, then a grainy surface which announced itself as the ground. I dug my fingers into the surface on which I lay. Dirty, gritty, damp sand parted beneath my fingertips. I looked at Judith. Her face was concern hiding confusion with just a hint of suspicion thrown in for good measure. I looked to my right, and saw offices clinging so close to the river’s edge that there wasn’t space for a rat to scuttle. I looked towards my feet and saw the blue-black waters of the sunset river gnawing at my toes. I looked to my left and saw Tower Bridge. I groaned and let my head flop back on the dirty low-tide sand.
“Bollocks,” I said.
“Hey, mister, you all right, like?”
I turned to look closer at the woman kneeling beside me. Behind, safe on the higher reaches of an embankment, a small crowd of interested passers-by and tourists had gathered to watch this curious scene at the water’s edge; some though were already drifting away, disappointed that I wasn’t a corpse. Behind
them
stood the low thick walls of the Tower of London.
I looked back at Judith, Here To Help.
I said, “Bollocks buggery bollocks.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied.
I sat up slowly, just in case anything was broken or dislodged. Nothing. Even the stitches in my chest were a comforting ache, a reminder of normality. I looked at my right hand. The bandages, stained a faint tea-brown, were still spun tight. From my new height I could see past my toes, to where the slow waters of the Thames were quietly, secretly edging their way up towards the stone face of the embankment. They’d already washed away the worst of the low-tide debris, plastic bags and old Coke cans. And with it, they’d washed away a message, written carefully at my feet by an extended fingertip. All that remained was:
I looked at Judith. “This sounds strange, but I don’t suppose you saw three mad women with a cauldron of boiling tea pass by this way?”
“No,” she replied. The polite voice of reasonable people scared of exciting the madman.
“Flash of light? Puff of smoke? Erm . . .” I tried to find a polite way of describing the symptoms of spontaneous teleportation without using the dreaded “teleportation” word. I failed. I slumped back into the sand. What kind of mystic kept a spatial vortex at the bottom of their cauldrons of tea anyway?
“Have you called the police?”
“No,” she replied. Then casually, “Did you jump?”
Her eyes flickered to Tower Bridge. I shook my head. “No. Pushed. Don’t call the police.”
I staggered up. The rolling waters of the river didn’t wash like the sea, but crawled, by imperceptible advancement. The long straight lines of the “A” filled with foam.
CK MY HAT
I thought about the three women and their cauldron. I looked up at the Tower of London. I looked down at Judith.
I said, “Listen to me. This is very important. I need to know about the ravens in the Tower.”
I had to see it to believe it. I bought an overpriced ticket like all the good tourists who waddled in orderly queues between the barriers guiding you this way to that tower, that way to the crown jewels. The battlemented walls shut out all the city’s traffic noise, creating within the old courtyards of the Tower an eerie stillness. The air smelt of rain to come. A few yards from the executioner’s block, left out as something macabre to please the children, was a chained-off patch of grass. A small sign announced in four different languages that there were nine ravens in the tower, named after Norse gods, and legend held that should ever the ravens leave the Tower of London, then the city would be doomed. Cursed, damned, fire, water, crumble, crash: pick one, pick them all.
Even if the legend was a lie, time and belief gives everything power.
Next to that was a sign saying,
Please Do Not Feed The Birds
.
The grass was empty.
I took Judith, Here To Help by the arm - customer sales assistant, Tower of London, and incidentally the only person who knew first aid and had the guts to try it on floating bodies - and said calmly, “If you do not show me the ravens, I will throw myself off Tower Bridge and this time the tide will be high and you won’t be able to save me, capisce?”
She was at heart a kind woman. She wasn’t about to say no to a guy she thought had tried to commit suicide.
Below one of the towers in the wall, in a deep whitewashed room that hummed with ventilation fans and poor plumbing, were nine neat little coffins laid out on a neat little table. Inside each coffin was a black-feathered dead bird.
Judith said, “They just died. A few days ago. All of them - just died. We thought maybe poison but they hadn’t been fed by anyone except . . . and there’ll be an autopsy but they all just . . . we’re getting replacement birds, flown in special, secret like, because we don’t want the tourists to know, but they just . . . they all just died.”
We reached out, appalled, fascinated, and touched a feather.