A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (31 page)

 

I didn’t like to say necromancy. It’s a messy art, not entirely without its uses but not for those with a weak stomach or who particularly care about personal hygiene. I could imagine Lee doing it.

 

 

“So your plan is…”

 

I foresaw Oda fast becoming even more of a pain.

 

“Allies. Khay was different, he was in the public eye. Lee is entirely below board; and this time, he’ll know I’m after him. Allies. Help.”

 

“You’ve got the Order.”

 

“I wasn’t about to call you an ally, as such.”

 

“Get used to the idea.”

 

“Whites.”

 

“Who are the Whites?”

 

“The Long White City Clan.”

 

“What are they?”

 

I smiled and stretched, getting up to put the remnants of my ice pack in the sink. “Artists.”

 

 

When I asked the Beggar King how to find the Whites, his answer had been short and to the point: the writing is on the wall.

 

“So what does that mean?” snapped Oda.

 

“Oda, has it ever occurred to you that if in the good old days ladies with bad skin and big hair drew mystic pentagrams and pointed stars on the walls with bits of old chalk, then the invention of spray-paint would only have enhanced this tendency?”

 

That evening, we found the first one sprayed onto the local launderette’s closed shutters in bold white and black: a frog with a huge snout and long, bulbous fingers. With one hand it stroked its beard, while the other pointed a curling finger towards the bus stop. On its head was a big top hat with the price still in it, $1.41, and in its mouth a fat, smoking cigar.

 

We followed the curved finger to the bus stop, Oda’s sports bag clanking with its weight of weaponry. When the 141 bus came, we rode it till we came to a rectangular, railed-in area of grass beneath huge plane trees floodlit in bright green, blue and purple. Oda snapped, “There!”, and we hurried to get off.

 

What she’d seen was a picture of a small girl with angel wings. It was painted on the side of a Unitarian chapel, beneath a dredge of less artful efforts making statements like DaN iS gAy! and
C4D 4ever.
The girl’s face was turned up, studying a large red balloon drifting upwards towards the shiny aluminium venting funnels of a patisserie next door; one small painted white hand reached up in vain for the trailing string.

 

Oda said, “Well?”

 

“Angel,” I replied, trying to sound more confident than I felt.

 

We took the first bus to the Angel. Outside the underground station we looked around for a few minutes, until I spotted a small black-and-white rat, painted below an ATM by the Bank of Scotland offices. It wore a long scarf, carried a suitcase and a bunch of rosemary wrapped in paper like it was a bouquet of roses; and its long black nose was twitching towards the south.

 

We followed the nose of the rat down to Rosebery Avenue, where we found a mock ATM painted in a walled-up window; from its money dispenser there emerged a huge mechanical arm, clutching in its claws a child. She was almost the image of the little angel-winged girl who’d lost her balloon, and held her hands to her mouth in a gesture of surprise.

 

The arm was gesturing towards Farringdon Road, so we walked down that wide, dull artery of traffic, until the yellow brick walls of a railway line grew up on one side and Oda said, “Swift.”

 

She was pointing at a hoarding covered with posters advertising bands, albums, low-budget films and desperate struggling magazines. In one corner was a small stencilled image of a train, forever looping in on itself, round and round until it swallowed its own tail, the carriages blending into each other.

 

Oda, who’d said almost nothing all evening, now asked, “Where does it want us to go?”

 

I groaned. “Circle line.”

 

“Circle line where?”

 

“Where isn’t the important part.”

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“Come on,” I said. “We need to buy a few things.”

 

 

I’d bought a book of sudoku, a biro, a packet of chewing gum and a small trashy romantic novel, placing them all with loving care in a single plastic shopping bag. At the local pub, I was now trying to convince the girl behind the bar that she wanted to serve me coffee, not beer, before Oda’s patience snapped.

 

“What are you doing?” Oda demanded, indicating the bag.

 

“Sacrifices.” I was secretly pleased that she’d asked before I’d been obliged to tell her, and felt determined to make her suffer for her curiosity.

 

“Sacrifices for what? Why aren’t we taking the Circle line and finding the Whites?”

 

“We’ve got to wait,” I replied.

 

“Why?”

 

“For the last train.”

 

“
Why?
”

 

“Because that’s what the symbol means. It’s not just the Circle line; it’s the train that swallows itself again, travelling round and round forever, no stations, no stops – it’s not just ‘Go take the Circle line.’ It’s much more complicated. Sacrifices.” I waved the bag with the sudoku book.

 

“You are deliberately being cryptic,” she exclaimed. “Why?”

 

“Because I don’t like you.”

 

“On my word your friend’s life hangs. And yours,” she added, eyes narrowing.

 

“So you tell us,” we said. “It must frighten you, not being entirely sure what we will do next.”

 

“I’m not afraid of you,” she retorted, her voice cold and level. “You are a dead nothing, whatever forces you’ve made bargains with.”

 

“That’s not the point,” I said in my gentlest, most placating tone. “You are afraid of not being certain.”

 

“No.”

 

“If you say so.”

 

“You know nothing,” she added vehemently.

 

“I know that I want a coffee, and that beer would be a bad idea, all things considered.”

 

“Why? What’s so important about catching the last train?”

 

“I’d much rather let you work that out for yourself,” I said, and resumed trying to order coffee.

 

 

At 11.45 p.m. Oda and I walked down towards Farringdon station. The last train of the evening was written up on the board for six minutes past midnight, in blue marker pen. There weren’t many people waiting on the platform. Some late-night theatregoers lingered, in their pearls and smart suits, at a distance from a group of girls whose feet ached from having got lost hereabouts in the wrong kind of shoes. At the opposite end of the platform, pushed into a brick alcove by their passion, a couple of men soaked in sweat and hormones were engaged in the longest, loudest kiss we’d ever seen. I tried not to stare. We were fascinated.

 

A Metropolitan line train came, heading towards Baker Street, where, selfishly, it had decided to terminate; the girls got on it anyway, as did the theatregoers in their silk scarves. A Hammersmith and City line train didn’t do much better, giving up the ghost at Edgware Road, but that was clearly far enough for the two men, who, to the surprise of the polite Arab-looking couple sitting in the carriage amid piles of free daily newspapers strewn across the floor, resumed where they’d left off.

 

The indicator cleared itself of all but one more train – on the westbound Circle line, its destination picked out in bright orange dots. A group of young men and women ran onto the platform, giggling with the adrenalin of their own having-nearly-missed, until one of the girls, dressed almost entirely in cold pink skin and bra strap, was sick behind one of the benches. Oda scowled and looked away. The girl’s friends clustered around her, patting her, soothing, stroking her hair, and dabbing at the remnants of bile around her mouth until with a final heave she was empty, and sat down on the bench and started to cry. We felt a sudden burning in our face at the sight of it, which we could not understand or control, and it was only Oda’s cold expression that stopped us from sharing the girl’s distress.

 

At 12.09 a.m. precisely, the Circle line train rattled and wheezed into the station. Oda stood up quickly, slinging her bag onto her shoulder; but I caught her arm, pulling her back down. She said, “But the…”

 

“No. Not this one. The
last
train.”

 

“This is the…”

 

“Trust me.”

 

She hesitated, then reluctantly sat back down. The girls and boys staggered onto the train, which with a clunk and a beeping of door alarms slammed its carriages shut and, engine whirring with a rising pitch, rattled its way out of the station. It passed the graffiti on the opposite wall: long, incomprehensible names made entirely of angles, and doodles in green paint. By a board showing you where to go for trains to Luton, someone had drawn a pair of closed black-and-white eyes, each eyelash ending in a long Egyptian curve.

 

After a moment Oda said, “You’ve got a plan, sorcerer?”

 

I nodded as, above us, the indicator board swept itself clean with a single orange asterisk, and didn’t display any more messages. I stood up, and walked down the platform past signs for

“Sensational!!!”

Bollywood Romance – a Love Story for Our Time!

“The Most Amazing Thing I’ve Ever Seen!!” – News of the World

“Astonishing!” – Time Out

and further down.-.-.

The new voice of now! –
Love and Lost
– a heart-breaking album to inspire a generation.

When I reached the end of the platform, I pushed back the swinging “
Danger! Do not cross!
” sign, ducked past the array of mirrors to show the parked train driver the platform’s length, and followed the narrowing, dirty concrete slope of the platform down towards the ballast and electric spice of the line. I could taste the thick, smoky dirt of the tunnel on the end of my tongue, the dryness of it in the air; I could feel the buzz of thousands of volts in the track beside me, feel the cold wind of the last train’s passage still being pumped through the tunnel, fading into the heavy heat of the motionless underground. With my back pressed against the rough, black wall bursting with coils of cabling that hummed even through their once-coloured plastic sheaths, I slipped down onto the narrow remainder of the platform’s edge, into the darkness.

 

Oda stared at me from the light of the platform itself with undisguised surprise and distaste. “What are you doing?”

 

“Oda,” I said, “when Hunger came looking for us at Bond Street station, do you really think he would have left you alive? Do you honestly believe he would not have drunk your blood as well, just to see if it tasted the same as the sweat on your skin as you died? Trust me. Please.” I held out a hand to her. Scowling, she pushed past the “
Danger!
” sign, picking her way down until she squatted next to me. She was straining, I noticed, to avoid the bulky snake of cables locked into the wall, even as her eyes swerved uneasily to the electric rail. In that darkness, we had no space, and we could feel the heat of her proximity on our skin, a strange, living warmth in the stale gloom of the tunnel’s edge. We stared at her, curious and unashamed, until, glancing up, she saw our eyes on her and quickly looked away, muttering, “Jesu preserve us.”

 

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

 

“I can see them in the dark.”

 

“What?”

 

“Your eyes. Like a cat’s – they reflect blue.”

 

“It was an almost perfect resurrection,” we hazarded.

 

She spat into the dark. Her spit fizzed off the live rail.

 

I said, “I can’t help… it’s not… sorry.”

 

She glanced up again, then away before I could see anything but the question in her face. “What are we doing here, exactly?”

 

“Waiting for the guard to inspect the platform.”

 

She only grunted in response, and we felt the heat of her breath tickle our skin again, like the brush of dying sparks.

 

We didn’t have to wait long. The guard came, muttering into his radio, a few minutes after the last train had left. He walked briskly along the platform’s edge, picking up bits of litter with a prong on the end of a plastic stick, opened up the vending machine, took the day’s coins and filled it with tomorrow’s old, overpriced chocolate and cans of drink. That took us nearly ten minutes of sitting, huddled in the darkness at the edge of the platform, trying to limit the sound of our own breaths.

 

When he finished, he turned the lights down, so that the entire place was washed with a low pinkish-orange neon glow rising up from behind the benches, reflecting strangely off the glass panels of the advertising boards. I heard the clattering of the iron gate at the front of the station being drawn shut. At my side Oda whispered, “Enough?”

 

I nodded.

 

She scrambled back up the platform, hastily moving away from me and self-consciously brushing the dirt off her clothes. I looked up at the dead indicator board and said, “We just have to wait now.”

 

“Wait for what?” she groaned.

 

“You wanted to be part of this so badly you had to attack me and kidnap a man,” I said, surprised at how calm I sounded. “Now you just watch and learn.”

 

I sat down on a bench, wrapping my dirty coat around me against the cold and sudden stillness of the place, and waited. Oda paced, jaw set in a tight, angry line. I tried to judge the minutes by the length of her walk – four progressions back and forth seemed to equal roughly a minute. My eyes felt heavy, my skin hot and tired, my hair dirty and my stomach full of lead. I let my head hang down, although we stayed on edge, ears more alert even as our eyelids fell, and drifted. We heard the drip of a water pipe and the distant rumble of a bus somewhere overhead. Our senses drifted without thinking into those of a mouse scuttling along by the electrified rail, sniffing out discarded food. We enjoyed the sensitivity of its nose, twitching it and feeling our entire face change shape slightly with that movement, and the sensitivity of our whiskers as they picked up on the reverberation of Oda’s walking, like each footstep was the last hum of a ringing bell left in the air.

 

“Sorcerer!”

 

Her voice frightened the mouse, so I let its mind go and quickly looked up. Oda’s face was a garish pinky-orange in the light of the platform, and her eyes were turned up towards the indicator board. In large orange letters, it read: