“You think?!” she chuckled. “
Jesus
.”
As we neared the top of the ramp, her whole form was gently eaten away by the lack of concrete on which to project itself, until there was nothing more than a pair of knees, a pair of ankles, a pair of feet walking beside me, before even that was erased by the lack of wall onto which to walk. Then there were just a pair of painted footprints walking next to mine, that landed with an audible
splat splat splat
as they stepped along beside me, drawn in white paint. As we passed by a lamp-post she was briefly back again, her image keeping track of her footsteps, painting itself onto the nearest handy surface: postbox, telephone box, as we walked on.
Not having a mouth didn’t stop her talking. Her voice drifted out of the air, somewhere above those painted steps on the floor.
“So, how’s it going, Swift?”
“Not too well,” I answered, watching the street around me for someone with a straitjacket and a literal mind. “I’ve wound up Midnight Mayor, been chased, pursued and misunderstood, and now I’m talking to, with all respect, a dead pair of painted footsteps.”
“Yeah. That must be a bit freaky.”
“It could be worse.”
“Seriously?”
“Someone says ‘inauguration’ in my line of work, and you can just bet there’ll be freaky shit. It’s like quests. You get told ‘go forth and seek the travelcard of destiny’ and you know, I mean, you seriously know that it won’t have just been left down the back of the sofa. You read - seen -
Lord of the Rings
?”
“Yessss . . .”
“Ever wondered why they didn’t just get the damn eagles to go drop the One Ring into the volcano, since they seemed so damn nifty at getting into Mordor anyway?”
“Nooo . . .”
“See? Fucking quests! So talking to a dead pair of footprints. Fine.”
We passed a parked white van, and for a moment Vera was back, her painted form shimmering across its glass and metal sides. She looked worried.
“Something bad is going down, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yup.”
“Seriously bad?”
“Pretty much.”
“I know. I guess what you said about the whole quest thing - it makes sense that I should know, yeah?”
“I guess so. Any useful tips?”
She’d vanished off the side of the van. For a while there was nothing but the
splat splat splat
of her footsteps, as the only sign she still walked by me. Then, “End of the line.”
“Thanks.”
“Swift?”
“Yeah?”
“You heard of the death of cities?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he’s real? That he’s been real ever since Remus turned to Romulus and said, ‘hey, cool digs, bro’?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he can be summoned? Sometimes he’s called by the volcano, or the thunder, or the war, but always, something summons him.”
“Yeah. I’d heard.”
“Swift?”
Her voice was fading, the painted footsteps on the ground growing fainter.
“Yeah?”
“Am I really dead?”
“You got shot and turned into a puddle of paint.”
“That’s not normal corpselike behaviour.”
“No. It did occur to me that it was a little unusual. You are - were - leader of the Whites, a clan with a big thing for life, paint, graffiti and all the magics in between. But then again, if you’re not dead, what are you doing here?”
“Good bloody point.”
Her footsteps faded to a thin splatter, then a little smear, then died altogether. We didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to the vibe.
Just above Aldgate, I turned west, heading towards Old Street and Clerkenwell Road, watching offices dissolve slowly into a mixture of shops and flats, piled up on top of each other, joining briefly the ring road that was at all hours laden with traffic, and then heading further along, skimming the northern edge of the Barbican to where those painted statues of those mad-eyed dragons holding the shield with the twin crosses stood guard over the city. The white towers of the churches built after the Great Fire were mainly behind me, twenty-six in all, most of their bodies gutted in the Blitz.
A voice said, “Spare some change?”
A beggar with a big beard sat in the doorway of a recruitment firm, dark eyes staring up at us. I fumbled in my pocket, found nothing, dug into my satchel, felt the desire to keep on walking, the rhythm briefly broken, found my wallet, found the £30 I carried inside, handed it over.
“Cheers,” said the beggar.
“Any time,” I replied, and kept on walking.
A few doorways later and a voice said, “So you like to walk?”
It was the same voice.
It was the same beggar.
“Sure,” I replied, and kept on walking.
By the bolted metal door round the back of a photocopy shop, he was still here, knees huddled up to his chin, blanket pulled over his shoulders. “It’s the new thing, you know. Walking,” he said.
“No it’s not. In the old days people used to walk all the time.”
“Yeah . . . but that was because it was walk or sit behind a shitting horse in a flea-infested coffin smelling of sawdust and widdle.”
“You may have a point, although I imagine that most of the early modern period smelt of sawdust and widdle regardless of your means of transport.”
There was a long brick warehouse ahead, its back turned to the street, no doorways for the beggar to sit in. That bought me a few more moments to gather my thoughts, and sure enough, sat in the next doorway past that, there he was again, lighting a fag.
“You know,” he said, “it’s amazing it took until 1865 for some bright spark to build a proper sewerage system.”
“Antheaps,” I replied. “Or wasps’ nests. With a small nest, you don’t have to worry. It’s got to be big before you wonder if it’ll fall off the tree.”
“Someone’s been using metaphor on you, right?”
I had to wait two more doorways to reply.
“Yup.”
“Sounds to me like a paddle full of shite.”
“You’ve got to admit it has a certain chaotic something. London burnt down in 1666 and everyone went, whoopee, let’s rebuild! A golden city! But look what happened. Chaos and fluster. Everyone was so eager to live in this golden city that they didn’t even have time to build it.”
Goswell Road. Nowhere for a beggar to sit on the junction of the Goswell Road and Clerkenwell Road, just two staring dragons in a traffic island. I waited, leaning against the traffic lights. They changed. I crossed, still heading west. There were very few doorways on this side; a pub ahead, but it was occupied by a group of scruffy trendies in carefully slashed jeans sharing a bottle of wine. I kept walking. An art studio of some kind presented a low, grubby doorway.
The beggar said, “Can I make a suggestion?”
“You’ve got an agenda, right?”
“Sure.”
“OK. Suggest away.”
“Don’t do the walk. Don’t get inaugurated.”
“Why not?”
Art studio to chippy; he was in the door between that and the strip club pretending to be a pub.
“You want to be Midnight Mayor?”
“No.”
“There you go!”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Sure it is. You be free.”
I kept on walking.
He wasn’t in the next doorway.
Or the one after that.
He’d had his say.
We kept on walking.
Keep moving. If you keep moving you might just manage to leave thoughts behind, you might get it done before they catch you.
Keep on walking.
Come be me
. . .
Aching right hand.
We be light, we be life, we be fire!
What would Jesus do?
We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!
I like walking. Each step is a thought without words, a thought without words is a thought without blame, without retribution, without consequence.
Come be we and be free
. . .
I think he did it to control you, to bind you, to curse you with his office.
. . .
we be blue electric angels!
Mr Mayor.
“Mr Fucking Mayor.”
I looked up.
Kemsley’s face was a badly peeled tomato, grilled at a high heat and left to sag. You couldn’t look like that and be alive, and there was no way the Kemsley I had seen a few hours - maybe a day? - ago was up and walking. No way he’d be here, just to talk to me. I skirted south towards Holborn Viaduct, and he fell into step beside me. Boarded-up butchers’ shops, renovated Victorian ironwork painted green, red, gold, with the little dragons guarding the city wall, the shields, twin red crosses on a white background, one cross smaller than the other, one cross a sword;
Domine dirige nos,
the motto of the city, everywhere, once you looked, if you stopped to look.
“You want to know what I really think?” he said.
“Not really, but I guess you didn’t go to all this trouble not to tell me.”
“
You
are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.”
“Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.”
“You want my advice?”
“No.”
“Lie down and die. Let Mr Pinner do his thing. Let someone better take over the office. That’s the best thing you could do as Mayor, for the Mayor. Just lie down and die.”
“You know, people pay therapists to get this kind of abuse.”
He just grunted, turned his back on me, started walking briskly the other way. We called out after, “Where are you going?”
He looked back.
Just a guy. Just some guy in a black jacket, frightened at a stranger’s voice shouting after him in the night.
I raised my hands in apology, smiled, shook my head, turned and kept on walking the way I’d gone.
With my incisive detective skills, I was beginning to notice a pattern at work.
I could see the golden cross of St Paul’s Cathedral peeping above the nearby offices. As I walked, the streetlamps flickered, flashed unevenly when I passed beneath them, splitting my shadow into a dozen different mes that spread out like a sundial around my feet.
I heard a squeaking.
At first I thought it was some sort of cartoon rat.
It would have made a strange kind of sense.
Then the squeaking grew nearer, and now it was more a sound of metal sliding off metal. I kept on walking, figuring that if it was something important, it would catch up with me.
It did. But it gave us a strange pleasure to make it work for the privilege.
For a moment I thought I smelt curry powder and plastic bags, heard the distant muttering of the mad old lady with her trolley of bags,
buggery, buggery, youth today, buggery
. . .
But it wasn’t her. Not tonight.
“Hello, Matthew.”
I looked to the voice, and didn’t stop walking. Our fists curled in anger.
The squeaking came from a pair of big wheels behind two smaller ones. Above the wheels was a black leather chair. Attached to it was a man. Attached to him were two stands on more wheels, trailing along behind. One stand held a bag of some clear liquid, drugs or fluids or whatever; the other held a bag of blood, and I could just guess whose it was.
Pushing the wheelchair was a man dressed all in shadows and my old coat.
Angry.
Don’t look.
Angry.
“Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, “how exactly do think this business is going to end?”
“Terminally,” I replied. “But at least it
will
end. Dead is dead is dead. Especially for you.”
We walked/wheeled on a little further. “Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, with a slightly reproving tone in his voice, “do you really understand what it is to be Midnight Mayor?”
“Nope. Totally winging it.”
“You have to serve the city.”
“Sussed that.”
“Not the people, Matthew. The city.”
“I wasn’t signed up to be Robin Hood, if that’s what you mean.”
“Let’s please not be coy about this.”
“This isn’t me being coy, this is me being angry.”
“Why are you angry?”
“Because I didn’t ask for this gig. Because some
bastard
chose me for it without so much as a cocktail sausage and pineapple on a stick, because Vera was shot and Anissina fell into smog, because Mo is gone and Loren cried, because the spectres stabbed me and Earle sat in his office drinking coffee, because I saw a guy flayed alive and another bastard lumbered in hospital with no skin, and because
you
” - I stabbed an angry finger at the man in the wheelchair - “you, Mr Bakker,
you
are dead. We killed you. We killed you and we did it because you . . . because . . . We killed you and you should stay dead and so should your bloody fucking shadow!”
I was shouting. My voice echoed off the buildings on the empty street, hummed in the cold water pipes. I turned away, looked down at the paving stones, counting my own steps, how many stones they covered with each stride, how many they’d cover in ten, in twenty, how many strides to a mile.
The wheelchair rattled on peacefully beside me. Mr Bakker sat, his pale, spotted hands folded across his belly, his head tilted up and to one side, being pushed by his shadow. His blood-soaked shadow in the bloodstained remnant of my old coat, the one I’d died in. The one I’d been killed in. That coat.
“What’s the point of all this?” I asked at last, as we swung into the mess of up-down streets between Farringdon Road and Fleet Street. “I get that there’s mystical shit going on and all that, but what exactly is the point? Am I supposed to derive some great moral message from all this, become a better person, a nicer Midnight Mayor? From what I can tell, ‘nice’ isn’t the qualifying term.”