A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (59 page)

 

“Can you do something?” whispered Mrs Mikeda.

 

“Maybe,” I replied. “How long has she been like this?”

 

“A few days. But it’s never been this bad before!”

 

“Do you own a car?”

 

“No.”

 

“Have you got a friend who’ll lend you one?”

 

 

Mrs Mikeda drove. I sat in the back, Dana’s head in my lap. Her hair when I touched it felt like fuse wire. To escape the feelings that must have been attacking her every day and night, she’d sunk herself deep into some form of magical trance or stupor. So lost in it was she that when the pistons of the hydraulic brakes exhaled, she did too, in the same breath and tone as the car itself.

 

We drove west, inching past Marylebone, speeding down the Westway, and jinking about through grungy Shepherd’s Bush and the genteel streets of Chiswick in the cheerful spring sun. In Chiswick High Street, the schools were emptying, and the cafés had put seats out on the pavement under the big old plane trees to serve coffee and cakes to the locals. By the time we reached Kew Bridge, the rush hour had started; Dana’s heart rate was up, so fast and strong I could see the veins moving in her neck as she responded, her blood moving at the speed of the city as its people switched direction from work to pleasure. We parked the car just beyond Kew Bridge and carried her down, each supporting her by an arm, onto the tidal mud of the Thames. Water seeped out around our feet like we were walking on a sponge, saturated so that water ran off it like oil. I pulled off my shoes, socks and jacket, and Mrs Mikeda did the same for Dana.

 

“This isn’t… pagan, is it?” she asked.

 

“It’s all relative,” I replied after a moment of hesitation, reasoning that this would be the least offensive but most honest answer. Mrs Mikeda didn’t look satisfied; but neither did she complain. I struggled to lift Dana up, supporting her by one arm across my shoulders and half-carrying, half-dragging her out into the biting cold river.

 

I walked out until the water came up to above my waist, and the mass of it had taken up most of Dana’s weight. From a muddy islet in the middle of the river, a heron regarded me with something resembling bird-brained displeasure that another creature was on its patch. Beyond the little tangle of trees and birds’ nests that made up the heron’s home, a large white boat chugging back from Hampton Court Palace had drifted to a gentle cruise, the tourists leaning over to photograph the odd spectacle of Dana and me in the river, while the driver called out, “Hey, you OK?”

 

“Baptism!” I replied cheerfully; on the bank Mrs Mikeda flinched even at this much profanity.

 

The boat moved on by, a handful of the tourists waving and whooping cheerfully as it did. Behind the trees on the opposite bank, the sunlight was dimming to a pinkish burn across the sky, stretching out the shadow of each trunk across the water.

 

I risked wading a few more yards out into the river, the sediment at the bottom swirling in a gritty cloud around my toes.

 

“What happens now?” called out Mrs Mikeda from the bank.

 

“Turn of the tide!” I answered in my best optimist’s voice. “Gotta have some magic in that, right?”

 

“Don’t you know?”

 

“I’m trying to save your daughter’s life within the tenets of the Orthodox faith. I haven’t a clue!”

 

“If you don’t know what you’re doing then…”

 

“Do you have the time?”

 

“What?”

 

“The time? It’s freezing out here!”

 

She looked at her watch. “Six forty-three.”

 

“Near as dammit,” I muttered, more for my reassurance than hers. I brushed Dana’s wiry hair from her face. Her skin had a pale greyish tint, and around her chin and across the hairline were patches of dry scratchy flesh which were increasingly starting to resemble tar. I leant down so my lips were a few inches from her ear and whispered, “If you can hear me, don’t be afraid. The tide’ll carry it all away.”

 

“What are you doing?” Mrs Mikeda could make her voice carry like it was a boulder tossed by a giant.

 

“Don’t be alarmed!” I called back. “Any second…”

 

… a tugging around my ankles…

 

“… any second…”

 

The heron, which had been watching the entire affair with a disinterested look on its unimaginative face, flapped into the sky…

 

“Oh, stuff it,” I said, pinched Dana’s nose shut with my fingers, took a deep breath and dropped both her and me under the water.

 

 

Thames water was once, so I had been told, toxic. Not just slightly unpleasant to drink, but actually lethal to fall into, a straight-to-hospital case. And although news reports still complained about disgusting messes in the water, nowadays these were more about the trash people threw in and the occasional suicide’s body dragged to the surface, rather than the raw sewage defining much of the river’s previous four hundred years.

 

So it was with a good degree of confidence that I pushed Dana down head first into the water, then let my knees bend and ducked my shoulders down after her. I let the water rush over her head and mine, let it shock my ears into an icy humming, let it tug at my hair and inflate my clothes around me to the size of a hippo as giant air bubbles crawled from under my shirt to pop and burst above my head. Dana didn’t struggle, didn’t squirm; all I had to do was hold her down against the bed of the river against the pressure of her natural buoyancy, and watch the bubbles roll out between her lips. As I held her down for five, ten, fifteen seconds, through the water I could hear Mrs Mikeda screaming, a strange, deep overhead rumble; also the distant
thrum thrum thrum
of some water bikes scudding past us, and a high
splishsplishsplish
of oars striking the surface somewhere downstream. Then, just as I was beginning to think I’d got the timing wrong, I heard a sound like a whale burping in the deepest part of the ocean, felt a relaxation all around, followed by a tightening, as, right on cue, the tide changed direction.

 

Dana exhaled. Her breath was a thick black stain in the water, slipping out to get tangled in the tide and sucked slowly past her towards the estuary, dozens of miles away. A thin metallic shimmer drifted out of her hair, whose strands started to drift loosely around her head. Grey, tarlike flakes spun away from her face, revealing clear, human skin beneath; the colour rose in her cheeks, her fingers twitched and, at the last, a moment before my lungs were going to burst, her eyes opened; and they were distinctly, irrefutably human, and just a bit beautiful.

 

I pitched her up out of the water just as she started to kick like a drowning person, and held her upright as the water ran off her face and out of her nose and she coughed and hacked and spat liquid, her hair tangled across her face like seaweed caught in a rudder. Mrs Mikeda was already halfway to us, up to her hips in the river, shouting incoherent curses in Russian; but at the sight of her daughter she stopped dead, hands going to her mouth and shoulders shaking. In the water around us, the clouds of trapped magic that Dana had accumulated drifted and faded into the river, and for the first time since I’d met her, she looked up at me with her own senses.

 

She said, “Uh…”

 

I said, “Hi.”

 

Mrs Mikeda said something obscene.

 

She said, “Have we met?”

 

“I don’t think so. Have we?”

 

“Did you just try to drown me?”

 

“Do I look like I just tried to drown you?” I asked as water dripped off the end of my nose.

 

“Where is this?”

 

“Twickenham.”

 

“What the hell am I doing in Twickenham?”

 

“Do you think this is really the place to discuss it?”

 

“Who are you?” she demanded.

 

“I’m Matthew. Nice to meet you.”

 

“Yeah,” she muttered, looking round at the water flowing around us. “I guess it must be.”

 

 

Mrs Mikeda’s friend had left blankets in the back of her car that smelt of wet dog, but we weren’t about to complain. We sat on the edge of the open car boot and ate fish and chips while Mrs Mikeda went in search of a Woolworths that might sell something warmer and fluffier to wrap around her shivering daughter. It took a while for the conversation to get going, but when it did, Dana Mikeda was pretty much to the point.

 

“So. Twickenham.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I hate Twickenham,” she said, spearing a chip with a savage thrust of her little wooden fork. “I get lost. Always end up in Isleworth, and that’s like Wales.”

 

“How is it like Wales?”

 

“One guy gets on a train to Swansea, one guy gets on a train to Isleworth, and you can bet the guy going to Swansea gets there first.”

 

“I see.”

 

We watched the sky fade to a pale cobalt blue, and the lights along the riverside start to come on.

 

“Some shit, huh?” she said finally.

 

“Does your mother know you swear?”

 

“Would you like to hear it in Russian?” she asked sharply.

 

“I’ll live.”

 

“You’re… what? Like an exorcist?”

 

“Me? Hell, no. Sorcerer.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“You don’t sound surprised.”

 

She gave me a long sideways look. “I spent three years on antipsychotic drugs and being told by an NHS shrink that my dad had clearly abused me as a kid, and this shit still didn’t stop. So I’m either mad and the medicine doesn’t work, or I’m sane and there’s magic out there, because I don’t know what the middle ground is on this one.”

 

“You’re sane,” I said quickly. “Or as sane as a hormonal teenager can be.”

 

“I’m twenty-two,” she rejoined. “Just because I live at home doesn’t mean…”

 

“Sorry. My mistake.”

 

She was eating cod, I had plaice. She had opened the tip of her ketchup and dipped each chip delicately in the end of the foil wrapping. I sprayed all of my ketchup loosely into the paper bundle of fish and chips and shook vigorously before eating. “How old are you?” she asked.

 

“Twenty-eight,” I replied honestly.

 

“You look, like, older. Sorcery do that for a guy?”

 

“No, this is just my lived-in face,” I retorted. “Besides, sorry to hit you with the bad news, but you’ve got the sorcerous vibe bouncing off you like you could play pinball with it.”

 

“I figured,” she said.

 

“You did?”

 

“Somewhere between me being a pigeon, and reading the future in the way the litter blew outside my mum’s café, I guessed something had to be up. Sorcery sounds… about right. Is it fatal?”

 

“What?”

 

“Like a medical condition?”

 

“No, not at all! There’s nothing medical about it.”

 

“What about my mum? Is she…”

 

“Doubt it.”

 

“But if she’s…”

 

“It’s not a genetic thing. Forget
X-men
,
The X-Files
or anything else really at the latter end of the alphabet. It’s just… a point of view.”

 

She nearly dropped her fork. “A point of view? Is that what made me spend three weeks listening to the rats complaining about the butchers in the meat market and the nurse on ward three? Fuck that!”

 

“You’re not exactly trained,” I pointed out.

 

“Harry Potter? Three-week courses at Hogwarts, how to be a sorcerer?”

 

“Not like Harry Potter, no. Besides, magicians do the spells thing. Sorcery is more about… seeing magic where most people don’t, and using it. Does that make sense?”

 

“No. Bugger it,” she added, and took a large slurp from the carton of Ribena at her side. “Bugger it. Am I going to start hearing voices again?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Shit.”

 

“The river was just a temporary thing. You go in at the changing of the tide and it just… washes it all away. But like all good launderettes, it’s up to you not to spill the tomato sauce on the whites after washing, right?”

 

“I think I get it.”

 

“Anyway, the whole sorcery thing, it’s not that bad.”

 

“I couldn’t remember my name.” There wasn’t any feeling in her voice, just a flat statement of fact. When I looked at her, her eyes were lost on the river. “I was everywhere. My fingers were the streets, my toes were the wires dug into the earth, my breath was the exhaust of the cars, my…”

 

“You were in a trance,” I said. “It’s always a risk. Sorcerers draw their magic from the city around them. So much magic in one place – it’s easy to get lost – to forget that you’re you, and just… sort of drift off. That’s what was happening to you. Your body was breaking down, your mind was just becoming absorbed. Eventually your consciousness would have become spread so thin across the city you’d probably have just popped out of existence. Something you might want to keep an eye out for, by the way.”

 

“Oh, crap. And this happens to all sorcerers?”

 

“Just badly trained ones.”

 

She gave me a thoughtful look. “So how come you’re doing the sane bit?”

 

“I’m well trained.”

 

“Who trained you?”

 

“A very good sorcerer. Very kind, very powerful.”

 

“He dunk you in a river too?”

 

“No, he found me a bit earlier than that. I was about fifteen, I’d run off into the night and just run and run because I could; loved it, became lost in the streets but always found my way home. Blisters, memory loss, daydreaming, the roof practically bleached white with the pigeon shit by the time he found me. He saved my life.”

 

“And you mine?” she asked quietly.

 

“Best not to think about it like that.”

 

“How should I think about it, then?”

 

“Good luck and the eternal interlinked cycle of life crap.”

 

“Cycle of life crap?”

 

“Ever watched
The Lion King
?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Well, think that kind of vibe, but with a fifteen certificate.”

 

“I see.” Her eyebrows were drawn together in concern. “So… I’m a sorcerer.”

 

“Right now you’re just a teen… a young woman… who happens to have tendencies.”