The Minority Council (25 page)

Then some bright spark had pointed out that, actually, most sagely healers only knew ten or so combinations of sacred words and, in this modern age, did you really want
a spell cast over you to cure, say, gallstones when in fact what you were dealing with was appendicitis? It wasn’t just bad medicine, it was bad litigation. Fairly soon there was a movement to have the practice of magical medicine institutionalised into a more sensible and, above all, monitored form.

Thus the NHS took over the running of medicine for the magically inclined.

The first ward was, by all reports, a shining triumph of modern magical engineering. From dialysis machines designed to leech curses straight out of the blood, through to scanners that could detect any form of parasitical sprite, modern medicine embraced the challenge with vigour and, of course, at taxpayers’ expense.

Then cutbacks began. Soon the magical unit found itself downgraded to an abandoned wing of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital and told that for anything less than life-threatening wounds, the patient should probably seek to go private.

When the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was demolished to make way for union offices, the unit had to move again. In an act of institutional defiance, it made its way towards St Bartholomew’s, the oldest hospital in Britain.

Not, though, to the hospital itself.

Far too indiscreet.

However, a transfer to the crypt of the church next door—that could be arranged.

I opened my eyes.

Somehow, in the time since I’d knocked on the door, a person or persons unknown had managed to drag me by, I suspected, the armpits, and haul me onto a stone slab. I
looked up into a low vaulted ceiling lit medicinal white, from whose medieval corners the stone faces of various mythical beings leered, grimaced and generally took unnecessary satisfaction in the distress of all they beheld. The last time I was here, I’d been temporarily blind; now, I was beginning to regret the clarity of sight.

Then a voice by my ear said, “You know, you’re only really supposed to come here if you’re, like, being screwed over by magic or shit. I
am
a specialist.”

At four foot eleven, Dr Seah was only a little taller than the height of her unfolded stethoscope, even given a pair of black high heels beneath her brilliantly white medical coat. Yet when she moved, the question was not whether Dr Seah could handle high heels—but whether the heels could handle her. Her obsidian-black hair was cut to a straight bob around the line of her jaw, and as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves, she wiggled her fingers inside them with a little too much relish. A stool nearly as tall as she was brought her up to slab-height, where she perched and treated me to a smile brighter than a meteorite and just as quickly gone.

I stuttered, “Being… followed.”

“Uh-huh,” she replied, winding off the tissues still wrapped around my bloody hand and throwing them into a bin. “And you thought ‘I know what! It’ll be totally groovy to, like, go bleed out on someone else’s time, yeah baby!’ ”

“They’ve got bloodhounds…”

“Oh, I see,” she cut in. “So you didn’t think ‘It’ll be totally groovy to go bleed’ or, shit—sorry about that, that was totally me jumping to conclusions there, when will I learn?—you thought ‘It’ll be totally groovy to go get, like,
this major-league spa treatment on the NHS to throw off the bloodhounds so that I can continue on my shiny yet quaintly rugged way.’ Am I right? I’m right, aren’t I? I can see that I’m right; go on, am I right, yes?”

“Gist,” I admitted.

“Well!” she announced, prodding my ribs hard enough to make us gasp. “Don’t be a baby! I can see why you came here. Oh yes, because for a worried moment there, I thought you might have come to the magical unit, the place where we deal with, like, magical shit, for
mundane
complaints like…” She did a tally on her fingers. “Possible concussion, bit of light blunt-force head trauma, fractured ribs and a bleeding bloody thumb… instead of all the totally groovy things that I could be diagnosing you with.” She leant forward, head bobbing earnestly. “Do you know… I have a syndrome named after me?”

“Uh…”

“It’s the way to go. I mean, you train as a doctor for forever, and then it’s like exams this year and exams next year and everyone’s trying to work their way up the chain and it takes years to get to the top, so the thing to do, yeah, the thing to do is get yourself some sort of condition that only you know about. I mean, not get it yourself personally, I don’t mean, like, infect yourself with these majorly weird things that combine into one majorly mutated super-condition or something… although actually, now I mention it, that sounds kinda cool…”

“Dr Seah?” I quavered, raising a hand. She saw the hand, gave an “Oh!” of realisation, hooked a trolley with one foot, pulled it across and, before I could squeak, started swabbing at my cut thumb with what felt like the spit of a basilisk dipped in Tabasco sauce.

“Vampirism,” she explained as she slapped a large pad over the end of my thumb. “It’s where all the new and exciting medical research is at. I thought about going into lycanthrope—I did write a paper about the eccentric meiosis of lupine cells in the renal system, you’ll be excited to know—but you know what, and this is, like, really sad, but it’s the smell. I can handle the blood and the puke and the piss and the moonlight and all that, but wet dog and me? It just cramps the style. Hold this.”

I found myself holding the end of a long cotton bandage attached to my thumb, as Dr Seah rattled among the contents of her trolley, eventually finding a large pack of alcoholic-smelling tissues with which she started mopping away the blood on my hand and wrist. All the time she worked, she talked.

“You know, I had this one patient, came down here with a punctured lung, broken arm and radiation sickness, and when I suggested that what he really needed was A and E, he started shouting at me that since it was an encounter with a supercharged banshee that had caused the injury, this was the department in which to get treatment. I mean, it’s like me saying that because your GI tract infection caused a blood clot in the brain, you need a gastroenterologist instead of a neurosurgeon; can you believe that?”

I nodded and smiled.

“Now,” a prod to my screaming ribcage, “if I prescribed bed rest you’d give me one of those looks, wouldn’t you? Don’t bother denying it, I can see the beginning of a look, one of those ‘would if I could but there’s this epic evil out there and I gotta deal with it’ kinda looks; I know your type. Then again, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t prescribe you bed rest, and I’d probably actually get into,
like, major-league legal shit or something if I didn’t write it down somewhere or something; it’s just that I can’t be held responsible for whether my patient acts on it. Actually,” a thought struck her, as it seemed many did with more regularity than the chimes on a cuckoo clock, “I sort of
could
be held responsible, but only within reasonably defined terms, and anyway”—a flap of her hand as the thought was dismissed—“there’d be legal wrangling and bitching and everyone would be like ‘what were we talking about?’ or whatever, so basically you,” another pointed prod, “need bed rest!”

I gave her a look.

She rolled her eyes. “Okay then. Painkillers!” A bottle was rattled somewhere above my head. “No more than eight a day or your liver will go all squishy, and there’ll be talk—try to use less but, you know, I get it, you’ve got like, cracked ribs and those hurt, you know? Look out for concussion as well: you’ll be feeling fine, fine fine, fine fine fine, and then everything will kinda stop making sense, and you’ll be a bit like…
whoa…”
“Whoa” was illustrated by Dr Seah swaying in a wide circle from the perch of her high stool, “… and then you’ll, like, collapse. Whatever.”

The bottle of painkillers was duly pressed into my trouser pocket, and two oval pills dropped neatly into the palm of my hand. A pink plastic cup of water was proffered and, as I drank, Dr Seah asked slyly, “I don’t suppose you’ve got…
complications
… you need to tell me about?”

I drained the last of the cup and handed it back. She threw it at a bin with the same perfect accuracy of her previous attempts. “Um… not as far as I know,” I mumbled. “Why, should I?”

“No,” she sighed. “Just one of those moments of hope.”

“About being followed…”

“Oh yes! Bloodhounds, wasn’t it? I assume you left a false trail, bits of your own blood in odd places. Did you? Of course you did. Just hang on in there…”

Dr Seah dropped down off the stool, clopped over to another tomb, this one depicting a man lying with a sword resting the length of him and a dog under his feet, and rummaged in a giant orange shopping bag that was resting on top of him. Things clinked inside. There seemed far too much depth to the bag, and far too much time spent exploring it, for just a simple shopping trip. I lay, trying not to breathe too deeply in case something exploded inside my chest. At last there came a cry of “ah-ha!” and Dr Seah trotted back to the slab, holding a small bottle of something. She gave it a good shake, flicked back the lid with her thumb and—with a cry of “Best bit!”—threw a cloud of brown powder over me. I spluttered as the smell rammed straight to the back of the tear ducts.

“What the hell is this?” I squeaked, wiping the powder from my eyes and neck.

“Garam masala, of course.” Dr Seah took a long, pleasurable sniff from the bottle. “I mean, when I cook, baking is where it’s really at—but sometimes, on special occasions you know, it’s just gotta be curry time.”

“And you’re throwing garam masala all over me… because you like curry?”

“Oh sweetheart,” she said, face crinkling in disappointment. “If I
wanted
curry, I’d
have
curry. You know how vampires are allergic to garlic?”

“Yes…”

“And werewolves to silver?”

“Yessss…”

“And banshees to ginger?”

“You’re making this up.”

“I’m sorry, seven years’ medical training,” she replied, “and you’re just some git with fractured ribs, so whatever. Only, you see, bloodhounds…”

“You are kidding me.”

“Bloodhounds…”

“No, seriously.”

“
Bloodhounds
just can’t take their garam masala.”

She let me stay long enough for the painkillers to kick in.

She wrapped my thumb in many layers of plaster, with a cry of “Just a scratch, but a stupid scratch and we don’t want those nasty bloodhounds coming after you, oh no…”

Night in Smithfield.

Not yet deep night, not yet the night of silent streets made quieter still by the distant swish of traffic. A night of emptying restaurants and pubs, just on the turning point when it was no longer cute-but-strange of the man to walk the woman to the bus stop; at this hour it became chivalrous.

We hurt.

Lying still for so long had been a mistake; it had given time for the adrenaline to get out of our system and for our brain to re-establish communication with our nerve ends. Now they were reporting in an overload of information, and none of it was good.

It took a while to learn how to walk again. Limping helped with nothing, and slouching just made the pain in our middle feel worse. Standing up straight, hands pressed to our sides, seemed the only way to do it. I shuffled off into the night, towards St Paul’s Underground.

There was one more thing left to do.

The first place was Stratford.

The name often caused confusion. Americans seeking the birthplace of Shakespeare would jump on the Central Line train to Stratford and, instead of finding Tudor cottages, canal boats and mugs proclaiming “
Ye Olde Shakespeare’s Heade,
” would discover a bus station, a portaloo, a vast building site, and not much else.

Then there were the Olympics. For years the prospect of the Games had turned the whole area into a chaos of torn-up earth. If all went to plan, there would emerge a landscaped, integrated series of developments, pure if soulless; but to make the future, today, the past not only had to get back out of sight, it had to burn the calendar too.

In line with these ambitions, Stratford International station had also been upgraded, so that mainline, Underground, Docklands and over-ground platforms ran over and under each other like a sailor’s knot. Here I caught the Docklands Light Railway, and headed south, towards where Canary Wharf was an arctic silver beacon, catching the clouds in its towers and lighting them from beneath. A motorway sliced through the overbuilt landscape, heading
for the Blackwall Tunnel. The last mile of my journey was on a single-decker night bus, the public transport equivalent of a red wheelie bin for humans.

I got off by a half-acre of scuffed grass containing three benches and a litter bin. In an estate of newish terraced houses and struggling little front gardens, a ramp led down behind a row of derelict garages. An open patch of concrete was framed on four sides by once-white blocks of flats, raised up on concrete pillars. The doors to every stairwell had been bolted, and covered with a metal grille; the windows had been boarded over, and nothing stirred here but fungal spores, rats, and the occasional graffiti artist with a sense of adventure but not much audience. Grass was sprouting between the cracks in the concrete paving, and thick woody stems of buddleia forced their way through the brickwork.