The Minority Council (4 page)

“Mr Mayor, Harlun and Phelps has invested heavily in this company…”

“Then I suggest you get un-invested soon.”

“The greater good…”

“Don’t even try.” I’d reached the elevator.

“The greater good…”

“You still seem to be trying, Mr Bryce.”

“The greater good of the Aldermen and the city itself will be served by a strong financial sector whose relationship with the magical community is such that a mutually beneficial and reasonably arranged settlement can…”

The doors opened and I stepped inside, turning to cut Bryce off mid-speech. “No,” I said and, for a moment, our eyes met, and his words ran dry. “You do not use the ‘greater good’ speech to try and justify something that you cannot be bothered to fix. You tell the board of Burns and Stoke that either they stop fucking around with higher mystical powers and get back to screwing up the economy in a mundane and sensible way, or I’ll come in and do it for them. Happy?”

The closing lift doors cut off his reply.

The sun was down by the time I left the building, leaving nothing in the sky but a pale grey stain, framed between tall buildings. Behind lit-up windows the city workers were visible, alone or in a group. There, a man
with a loosened tie who’d locked his door but was caught perfectly in the light of his wall-sized window played mini golf on a roll-out green mat. Next door a man and a woman quarrelled, gesturing abruptly in what seemed more than just a professional dispute. Here, seven sat in a board meeting, coats slung on the back of their swivel chairs; there, a woman stood in front of a pie chart projected onto a screen, showing Opportunities and Challenges but absolutely not problems to be overcome. Three floors up, a man sat playing solitaire, and there another kissed his wife, who’d brought in their child, complete with red wellington boots, to collect Daddy from work. The magic in this place was old, rich and silver; it clattered on roads of tarmac laid on roads of stone laid on cobble laid on mud. It oozed up from the shadows between the street lights and steamed off the glowing silver towers. It was a heat haze that made our skin tingle.

Then a voice said, “You’re not one of them, but they let you inside. Why?”

I glanced round.

It was the woman in the purple headscarf who only a few minutes before had been screaming “Nazi!” at the security men of Harlun and Phelps. She regarded me with a look of speculation.

“Sorry. Don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” she replied. “Don’t give me that. Do you work there?” She indicated the building I’d just left.

“Not really.”

“But they do know you. They let you inside, right?”

“It’s not exactly a nine-to-five job.”

“That’s fine, I don’t need to get in nine to five.”

She was a pale, coffee ice cream colour, with long
rounded nails. The scarf that hid her hair was bright purple, shot through with silver threads, and layered so thickly it looked like she was wearing an uneven sponge.

There was a something about her, a crispness to the air, that set our senses itching.

I said, “What’s your beef anyway? What’s so interesting about that place?”

“Nothing,” she replied. “But I need to talk to someone inside it and no one will let me get a foot in the door. I have rights, you know.”

I waited for an indication of irony in her voice, and when it didn’t come I made what would be the first fatal mistake of the night. I said, “Who d’you need to see?”

“This guy called the Midnight Mayor.”

It was ten minutes later. We were in a chain coffee shop, drinking mass-produced coffee on a mass-produced sofa beneath some mass-produced art in a mass-produced frame proclaiming that Originality Can’t Be Bought. The girl was explaining, “… and I said, ‘I’ve been to the local wizards, the local wizards don’t know shit, they’re only into the magic because they think it’ll help them find a girl, as if’ and they were like ‘Look, darling’—can you believe they called me
darling
? I mean what the hell do they think this is, the Middle Ages?—‘look, darling,’ they said, ‘even if we knew this Midnight Mayor bloke, which we’re not saying we do, yeah, but even if we did’—I think they may have put in another ‘darling’ at this point—‘even if we did, you really think he’s going to be bothered with you and your like, little problem or whatever?’ And here, which I realise was wrong,” she added, throwing up her hands in what might have been contrition, “here I said some things which probably weren’t my most polite but
you know, they were such arseholes, I couldn’t believe it, and since then they won’t let me get even a foot in the building. It’s been so fucking frustrating!”

She threw herself back against the sofa. Her fingernails were beating out a rhythm on the side of her coffee mug that wasn’t far off the Ride of the Valkyries.

I put down my black coffee with its layer of scum and said, “Sooo… you want to see the Midnight Mayor?”

She gave me a look, then added, “Yeah, like, wasn’t that the whole point of the story?”

“Does it have to be him?” I asked. “I mean, you’re talking senior dude here, the protector of the city and all that. And the guy, I’ve gotta tell you, the guy is usually a pompous ass. You tell someone they’re the protector of the city and, before you know it, you’ve got ego issues, you’ve got character defects, you’ve got nervous tics—I mean, I’m just speculating, but that’s how it sounds.”

“No!” she exclaimed. “This is important, this is protector of the city stuff! What use is a guy whose job is to watch out for the magical security of this place, if he doesn’t ever get off his arse and do it?”

My mouth was open for a comeback that my brain couldn’t deliver. She broke in with, “So, you going to help me or what?”

“Well, I…”

“I just need five minutes to talk to him, convince him that he needs to get involved. Those fuckers downstairs won’t even let me leave him a note! What arsehole employs people like that? It’s all like ‘Wow I’m the Midnight Mayor, I’m like, cooler and more powerful than you little people, so you little people can fuck right off.’ I mean, don’t you hate that?”

I managed a nod.

She let out a sigh, and shrank back into her seat. She was younger, I realised, than I’d given her credit for, barely in her twenties.

“So,” she said, “what do you… like… do?”

“Uh… things.”

“What kind of things?”

“I’m, like, a… magical consultant.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Well, you know, if there’s spells people don’t understand or problems that people can’t solve, you know, involving monsters or magics or stuff, then they call me, and I come down and clean it up.”

“Does it pay well?”

“Not really.”

“You have to declare to the taxman?”

“What? Well, no, I haven’t for a while, but that’s complicated…”

“I
hate
wizards who don’t declare to the taxman,” she said. “I mean, I get that you’re all busy summoning imps and enchanting elves and all that stuff, but you’re still going to use the NHS, aren’t you? You still want your rubbish collected, you still want your kids to have a decent place to go to school? Or are you just going to magic a stable job market and decent A-level grades into being? I think not, oh-no.”

“Actually there’s more to it…”

“So do you, like, work for the Midnight Mayor?”

I hesitated. Truth shot a sly glance at expediency, expediency waggled its eyebrows significantly, truth made a little noise at the back of its throat, and expediency jumped straight on in there.

“I’m the guy who does all the stuff he can’t be bothered with.”

“Does that mean you can get me in to see him?”

“Maybe.”

“Good. When?”

“Well, I…”

“Tomorrow at nine any good? I’ve got appointments all day from ten, but can maybe do a lunch meeting. He’ll have to come to me, of course.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves,” I ventured.

A look shot across the table that could have snuffed out a stadium flood. “You
are
going to help me, aren’t you?”

I leant forward, clasping my fingers between my knees. “I’m not sure you mentioned your name.”

“Nabeela. Nabeela Hirj.”

“I’m Matthew, nice to meet you. What do you do?”

“I work for the council.”

“Which council?”

“Kensington and Chelsea.”

“And you do magic?” I asked, dropping my voice.

She shifted uneasily. There it was, that taste of cold thin metal on the air. “I… I’ve got a condition,” she mumbled. “It’s nothing. I mean, it’s fine. It’s nothing. But it’s, uh… you know, you have to get answers, don’t you?”

“I get that.”

“It’s not like it’s something I do for a living. It’s just something that’s like asthma, you know?”

“Sure.”

“Anyway, when I was a kid my mum asked around, trying to get a few answers, and she met a few people who
knew stuff, and then one guy said there was this bloke called the Midnight Mayor and he fixed things. Anyway,” she added, “I’m not here about me.”

“Then go on. What are you here for?”

She hesitated, then said, “You want to know what it’s about? Really want to know?”

“I suppose, yes.”

“Then you gotta come see for yourself.”

I tried not to sigh. The sun was undeniably down now. I could feel the Underground rumbling below, the rush hour slipping away into that indoors time when the kettle boiled and oil hissed in the pan. The Beggar King wanted to see me, the Aldermen were pissed off, and the night was about to begin.

“Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not?”

There are three kinds of living in London.

There’s living above stuff. In council flats, great blocks eighteen storeys high with views across same old same old, you live above someone else’s bedroom, you wear slippers, not shoes and lay carpet, not wood flooring. At night people navigate by your sitting room window, using your building as a marker through anonymous streets. Or you live above a shop, a pub, an off-licence, a hairdresser, in a little flat that smells of the trades carried on below.

Then there’s living next to something. In the streets of what’s termed the inner city, terraced Victorian houses look over little brick walls or restored iron railings from sashed bay windows and white-painted porches.

Finally, there’s living beneath something. It can be noisy neighbours walking overhead, life in the shadow of a mobile phone mast or under a flight path into Heathrow.
However you look at it, this is the worst place to be. And in Nabeela’s part of town, there was one particular big thing you could find yourself beneath.

I said, “Oh.
This
part of Kensington and Chelsea.”

Nabeela was buttoning up her coat against the rising night wind sweeping over Westbourne Park Underground station. Not that it was underground here, where Tube trains crawled in the tail-winds of expresses out of Paddington and regional behemoths heading into London from Reading and Bristol. Houses clung to the edge of the railway cutting like chalk cliffs waiting to crumble, while on the other side, looking away north, was the West Way. It showed as dark mottled concrete just high enough that from the pavement you saw only the tops of passing vans. But you could still hear the motorway, the A40 bypass raised up above West London to carry commuters quickly from the suburbs to the city, without having to muck around with the piddling places in between. Nothing could disguise the fact that this was a beneath corner of town. It was where the expensive wine bars of Kensington gave way with a shudder to the council blocks of the Harrow Road; where municipal libraries stocking works by local authors were replaced by Wormwood Scrubs prison, and sports halls yielded to skater parks.

“What do you mean,
this
part?” We’d turned out of the station and were marching down the nearest street crammed in beneath the overpass.

“Well, you know, you say Kensington and I think… big houses, posh cars, shops selling organic Fairtrade baby socks, Conservative central office… you know, Kensington.”

“Yes, because London’s so homogeneous all the time,
isn’t it? I mean, let’s not go jumping out of our little boxes any time soon, shall we?”

“You have lovely toes and I’ve stepped on them…”

“You leave my toes out of it!”

“I’m sure there was a point in this relationship when you wanted my help…”

“I’m still not convinced your help is worth much.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re not even dressed right.”

I stopped and looked down at myself. Charity-shop jeans going through at the knees and frayed round the bottom, a pair of worn-out trainers just thin enough to let me feel the ground beneath my feet, a T-shirt that once had invited people to Save Camley Park and was now only readable in very bright light, and a coat designed to endure all weathers and all flavours of curry sauce. I said, “What?”

“At least the arseholes in that office were dressed like proper protectors of the city.”

“Are you saying I don’t look much like the Mi… I mean, much like much?”