The Minority Council (42 page)

A wide set of white doors had been folded back at the
far end of the room. Beyond, the music was quieter, with a pulsing beat that might at some point accompany French lyrics in a husky voice about love, disappointment and regret. The lighting was heading for ultraviolet, low and embedded into the wall. A brighter sky-blue glow came from the centre of the room: an oval swimming pool, too small for exercising in, but almost steaming hot, with bubbles rising in the middle. Men and women were littered around its edges, some with glasses in hand, others lying back in a yellow-eyed daze, while girls with tanned skin inclining to orange padded round the heated floor tiles bearing more drinks, more wine. The pool was set into a corner of the building, so that three walls were windows, each a dark glass that blurred outside light and looked across the river to the white glow of the Millennium Dome.

The men put hands upon us | pushing me to my knees

behind the not-quite-bald head of a man who reclined, in the shallow end of the pool, arms stretched out along its rim, surveying the scene like a king watching over his aquatic court. Hands pressed down on my shoulders, keeping me there, and one or two occupants of the pool spared me a look whose meaning was unclear. All I could see of the man was the back of his head, folds of fat on a short neck that joined a hairy white back, grey hair thinned to a half-tonsure, and flabby arms that formed a kind of cushion on the tiles. Not grossly overweight, but a man who received the occasional chiding from his GP, and orders to keep an eye out, please, just in case.

He ignored me. I stayed where I was, back bent and head bowed, trying to pin down

Then, “I don’t suppose you’re the kind of man who appreciates cava.”

“Personally,” he went on, “I’ve always thought champagne was just champagne. I don’t have time for people who talk pretentious twaddle about this vintage or that region. I imagine that before I die I’ll insist on drinking nothing but rosé, or would it be ginger beer? Not much in keeping with what marketing men call ‘image.’ But I think that’s a load of crap. Make the image what you want it to be, that’s true power.”

Smell of chlorine, heat of the swimming pool. Someone refilled a glass that wasn’t empty; someone else laughed loudly at an insider’s joke about football, or maybe rugby, in which the punch-line was an insult and the build-up was a smear. Who partied with the fairy godmother? The naïve or the guilty?

“I thought you’d talk more,” he said, leaning back and giving me half a glance. “Everyone said you were a talker, the kind of man who, at great length, never says what he means. To be honest, I couldn’t give a flying fart why you’re here or what you think. You had your chance and you rejected it and I’d be a crap businessman if I didn’t take the hint and say, well then, thank you very much, but that’s it for you and me, journey over, job done. I’d have your throat cut right here, if it wasn’t going to upset the guests.”

He smiles at his own wit, at the instinct of the civilised
host, and tilts his glass to his lips. The journey is long between his flabby hand and his open mouth; he drinks a sinful drink [uncaring guests glance at me and show no surprise], throat moving, up and down, cartilage and blood beneath the flesh [only so many ways to read a man in chains].

Guilty, then.

“I want you to look at it, Swift,” he said, tilting his glass towards the room, encompassing the bubbling pool and the girls with the drinks, the musicians and the partying, the view of the lights on the river and beyond. “I want you to look long and hard and, while you’re looking, I want everyone here to look at you. I want you to see everything that you could have had.

“You think all this is evil? There isn’t evil in this world, not any more. There’s no divine retribution, there’s no absolute right and absolute wrong, God is dead and the world became too fat on its own overfeeding to keep to the narrow path a long time ago. There are always going to be the poor, the broken, the desperate, and there will always be the rich, the powerful and the ambitious. Not you, nor any like you, any pigheaded pompous crusaders who think that they have been chosen by Jesu upon high to come down and judge us busy men by their own petty standards, will change that. You’re not some kind of fucking hero, Swift. You’re deluded. You’re mentally sick. You think that everything happens like a fairy story, a fantasy of perfect equality where all the happy bunnies roam and the grass tastes of chocolate. You think that once you’ve killed the bad guy with the magic sword, that’s it, problem solved, all the pixies will live in la-la land after and there won’t ever be need and hunger and
desire and revenge ever, ever again. You think people aren’t people. You’re fighting a war against the human fucking soul, and you know what, Swift? You weren’t ever going to win. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

“At this point people try to negotiate,” he added. “Or are you too high and mighty to barter for your life?”

I couldn’t even meet his eye, found my head bent staring at the lapping water on the edge of the pool as it sloshed overboard with the addition of a pair of women to the opposite end of the pool.

Oscar Kramb, the fairy godmother—he seems to consider himself powerful. We want to laugh, and find that we were laughing, silent laughter that shakes our shoulders, makes our face ache. And now heads are turning, ignorant eyes in ignorant faces; they turn to stare at us, marvelling, wondering, and their faces make us laugh the more. And the fairy godmother [what a silly name] he doesn’t speak, doesn’t have any words to say as we laugh
at him. He looks angry, as if he might want to skewer some piece of our flesh and eat it before his guests; act of pride on a cold night [place where warmth should have been]. He makes sounds, promises of pain, promises of death and we laugh the harder.

His hired helps take our arm, pull us to our feet. They whisper that they are going to take our blood. The blood of the blue electric angels. Will you get high on that, mortals? Will you not choke on it? Will you not burn?

Well, it was a nice party while it lasted but hey, so it goes. No idea how you are going to get home after all this, I mean, have you tried getting a night bus from the Isle of Dogs at this hour?; seriously, they have letters in front of the numbers; that’s always a bad sign.

A lift.

It’s playing something twinkly. Sounds like falling glitter on cold stone. Fairy dust! Sparkle sparkle sparkle—make a wish! It makes me smile, and I look to the men—three of them—who are keeping me company. [They are going to take our blood.] The blood of gods and all that they can perceive from it is profit. Our head, turning as we are bumped into the lift, catches the eyes of one of the men. He has the thick arms of a man of the flesh, muscles fed on protein and pain. He tries to meet our stare. Then he looks away. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “Would you like us to tell you about death?” we ask. “Will knowing how it is make you less afraid?”

[… what the hell was I talking about?]

The mortal who calls himself Hugo, stink of slippery magic coating his skin, sighs and breathes, “Now Mr Swift, there’s no need for that kind of talk.”

Our head turns, our bones are full of air, our blood of
heat, there is something inside us that was not there before, something wild and reckless and free. Hugo smiles, and smiles, and smiles as if willing it so; we can smell the stink of fear rising from them all. [I’ve got this splitting headache coming on. Do any of you have a paracetamol?]

The lift door opens, four floors below ground.

[Hello! Paracetamol?]

They pull us out and down a corridor of pipes and concrete, black and yellow warning signs to those scuttling slaves who have made it their business to tend to their master’s welfare, their services hidden in the dark.

[No? Nothing? How rude.]

Infuriating mortal senses can barely perceive it, this dancing on the air; for all we can judge it may be no more and no less than a trick of light, a curious creation of the too-impressionable mortal brain.

A door at the end of the corridor. It, like all other doors, is anonymous, grey, metal. Mortals building things the same in the hope that conformity will set them free. Hugo unlocks it. It has a lot of locks. The door slams shut behind us and this room is a place for people to die in. The walls are coated with plastic sheets. So are the floors. When people die in this place, their dust is gathered in those plastic sheets like so much spilt paint.

[so thin I can barely see it but there it is, catching in the light, thin, eddies of dust and hello there! See how it swirls swirling swirling swirling]

It is a place for mortals to return unto the dust.

[it has faces too]

There is a chair set in the middle. There are chains attached to it. Chains for the hands and chains for the feet and chains for the neck. They have been kept clean and sterile, scrubbed down with surgical fluids so as not to affect the quality of death that shimmers down through their workings. [The dust has faces and it talks to me.]

They bring over a tray of metal tools for playing games with mortal bodies. Needles, knives, tubes and bags for
catching the fallout. One of them pulls up our left sleeve, observes the little mark turning to a red bruise where Templeman stung us with his firefly needle of fairy juice. They tie a tourniquet around our arm to force a vein to the surface. It is fat and blue and ugly, a liquid worm beneath our skin; it repulses us. The way our flesh goosebumps in the cold, the way our ribs still ache through a cloud that encircles

some petty party of us | my thoughts

They disinfect our skin of germs before they plunge the needle in.

My thoughts! There’s something a bit funny with my thoughts. Comic funny? Comic funny. Comical. It’s not a huge intellectual leap to say that yes, all things considered, something a bit strange is going down but well, shit, not like I can do anything about it and hey

[why’d I get all the crappy sense data shit anyway?]

Hugo leans in close as they attach the first blood bag. He is looking into our eyes, trying to read our truth as if the soul of a god could be understood by men. “Mr Swift?” he says. “Mr Swift, have you ever taken fairy dust?” There must be something in our eyes more than our burning blue.

“Mr Swift,” repeats Hugo, “I understand that the present circumstances are less than ideal, but please be assured that, while exsanguination is not the death we would wish on any man, we are not savages in the dusthouses. I for one wish your death to be as painless and
comfortable as possible. Therefore I must ask again—have you ever taken fairy dust?”

We laugh, but Hugo stays leaning over us, trying to read our eyes. We say, “We be light, we be life, we be fire!” He tuts, shaking his head at us, pulls away. “We be sunset blazing, we be heaven burning, we be darkness falling, we be sky cracking, we be earth shaking, we be…”

“We don’t need him awake,” barks Hugo. “Just alive.” A mortal advances towards us, a new needle in hand but his hand is shaking and we laugh the harder and turn our head upwards and taste