The Minority Council (5 page)

Nabeela looked us up and down, contemplated a fluent reply, and settled for a burst of laughter. She turned, and kept on walking. We seethed; I scuttled after. A short way on lay impounds for the dubiously parked, MOT garages specialising in people carriers upwards, depots for holding concrete sacks, and the rusted funerals of unlaid train track. Beyond rose once-grand terraces with pillared porticoes and seven doorbells each. We passed a gym in a converted two-storey factory which was now making its industrial heritage a selling point, and a barber’s shop with advertisements showing the same three male models
whose faces adorned every such window from Harringay to Hounslow.

Nabeela was saying, “I did social policy at college, you know, and helped out at this youth group as a kid. It was all about getting kids involved in their local area instead of, like, knives. Anyway, I graduated into this, like, dire recession and got a job working part-time on youth projects for the council, which pays nothing, I should add, but you know, you meet people, you do things, it’s a living, isn’t it?”

“And this brings us into Midnight Mayor territory… how?”

She tutted something I didn’t catch, and turned the corner into an estate of little redbrick houses. The street was very much of the area: old married couples who’d lived there all their lives, taking care of their window-boxes and sweeping their little concrete patios; and families of unruly children and screaming parents who’d been dumped there with not much better to hope for. We came to a house whose one distinguishing feature was a wind chime of blue and green glass tinkling in the breeze. A buzzer by the door was taped over and inscribed in ancient blue pen with the words
‘NOT WORKING.’
Nabeela marched up to the door and banged the letter box a few times.

A light went on behind the blurry glass in the top of the door. A shadow obscured the peephole, a chain was drawn back, and the door opened. A voice said, “I thought you’d be back yesterday,” and a blast of centrally heated air and yellow tungsten light spilt out.

The owner of the voice was a woman, who time had placed in her early thirties but wear had pushed into her fifties. She had peroxided hair pulled back in a ponytail,
brown eyes sunk above purple bags, and a smell of cigarette smoke around her like a fallen angel’s halo. Her accent carried the memory of Northern Ireland, but time in the city had dulled it into a rough grumble along the edge of her words. She let us in with a look of resigned wariness and, as Nabeela bent down and pulled off her shoes, she said, “Who’s this, then?”

“Matthew’s with the specialist services I was telling you about.”

The woman eyed me up suspiciously, but offered me her hand and said, “Izzie.”

Then a voice from the living room boomed out, “Who is it?”

It too had a Northern Irish accent, but harder and stronger, and carried along by a pair of powerful male lungs. Izzie shouted back, “It’s the council! They’re here about Callum.”

There was a thump in reply, and the sound of footsteps. A door opened, bringing a stronger blast of cigarette smoke and the sound of TV. I heard a voice proclaiming, “and tonight’s winner, taking home a grand prize of…” before the door slammed again. A man appeared, dressed in a duffel jacket and oversized jeans sporting a glimpse of tattooed ankles. He saw me and glared instinctively, saw Nabeela and glared habitually. “Have you got money?”

“For Christ’s sake, they’re here about Callum.” Izzie’s voice was naturally high, as if shouting had become the default mode between them.

“I’m asking for him,” retorted the man, shoulders going back and chin up. “You think I don’t fucking care, I’m asking for him, so we can look after him properly, yeah?”

“Well they’re not here about the money, okay?”

“I didn’t know that, how’d you expect me to know that, I’m not psychic, you didn’t fucking say!”

“I was going to say but you had to come in here and be rude, I mean for fuck’s sake it’s not like you even waited, did you, you never wait…”

Nabeela said, “Actually, if we could just…”

“Is that what this is, is that what this is about? It’s about your ego, you’re the one who has to do everything, isn’t it, a precious little martyr you are…”

“If we could just…” tried Nabeela again.

“Well maybe if you ever got your arse off that sofa you could actually help in this house, actually do something…”

“We just want to…” Nabeela offered, to no avail. I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off going to a council meeting. The row was, as most rows are, nothing if not dull, an endless reiteration of established opinions. It showed no sign of faltering, even after Nabeela murmured, “We’ll just go say hello to Callum…” and grabbed me by the sleeve, and dragged me up the narrow stairs.

Three doors led off the landing. A smell of shaving foam from one announced the bathroom; the second was shut tight and the third had on it the teenage standard signs of “KEEP OUT!” and “BEWARE OF THE DOG” and “PRIVATE—DO NOT DISTURB.” Nabeela knocked and, though no reply came, turned the handle and went inside.

It was indeed a teenager’s room. Posters and pictures covered every surface including the ceiling, where pages from magazines had been stuck above the bed. There were pictures of men with almost more piercings than skin, striking poses of musical manliness by racks of
electric guitars. Posters showed women baring a lot of skin, in poses that might have been erotic to a monk being force-fed aphrodisiacs. There were a lot of pictures of motorbikes. Somewhere in the mind of the teenager called Callum, the forces of Environmental Awareness and Being Cool had met and gone ten bouts in the ring, before Being Cool had whopped Environmentalism out of the ring.

Callum himself was sat on the bed. He was fifteen, with hair shaven to near-skinhead at the back and top, but left at the front in a curly quiff, created by a hairdresser who didn’t believe in showing them the back. He was barefoot and wore jeans and a T-shirt with a faded logo showing a pair of open hands. As we entered he looked slowly round, turning only his head, and said without expression, “Hello. You are Ms Hirj of social services.”

Nabeela smiled and said, “Good evening, Callum. How are you today?”

She pulled up a chair, carefully depositing a pile of biohazard clothing onto the floor, and sat down in front of him.

“Thank you, Ms Hirj,” he intoned, his voice neither rising nor falling. “I am well.”

Nabeela went on, “This is Matthew. He’s a consultant.”

“Hello, Matthew.” Callum seemed to have grasped the necessary details of speech without tackling its full potential.

“Would you say you were a wanky little squirt?” asked Nabeela suddenly.

I raised my eyebrows, waiting for a torrent of abuse, but Callum only replied, “I will do better.”

“How can you do better?” Nabeela’s voice didn’t rise,
but had an edge to it that warned of anger. “You’ve only got one leg.”

Callum’s eyes didn’t flicker, and both hands stayed in his lap, on his two functional legs with their perfectly functional feet. “You are here to help me,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Help you? I’m not here to help you. Why should I care about you? In fact, you’ve become such a pain in the backside that I’ve hired Matthew here to kill you. That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it, Matthew?”

“Uh…” I began.

“He’s going to strangle you with his bare hands. Come on Matthew, let’s kill him.”

“Sure,” I mumbled, not shifting from where I stood. “Bare hands. Strangulation. Right up my street.”

Callum still didn’t move, didn’t even blink. Nabeela slapped him, not particularly hard, and snapped, “Come on, Callum, you’ve got a view on that?”

His head drifted back to its former position, one cheek faintly red from the slap. “You are older and work for the government. You know best.”

Nabeela straightened up, and shot me a look of pure “what do you think of that, then?”

I edged closer, squatted down, and looked into Callum’s vacant face. If this was an act, it was brilliant. His eyes drifted towards me and seemed to focus just behind the back of my nose. I said, “You heard of psychotic breaks?”

“You are a consultant,” he replied. “You are an expert.”

“It’s not psychological,” Nabeela murmured. “And no, it’s not an act.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Well,” she sighed, the expert dealing patiently with the layman, “there were no psychological warning signs, no history of mental illness in either him or his family, no causes, no gradual break, none of the typical symptoms of depression, psychosis or schizophrenia, no drug abuse, no crisis moment; nothing you would expect.”

“But sometimes…”

“And there’re twelve other teenagers in the North-West London NHS trust area alone who are suffering the same symptoms.”

Callum went on blinking with clockwork regularity, staring through me. “Okay,” I said finally. “Why the Midnight Mayor? This could be… a disease, it could be food poisoning, it could be…”

“Are you really that thick?”

“… I’m just saying…”

“Callum,” interrupted Nabeela. “Tell Matthew about what happened three weeks ago.”

“Was there a fight?” asked Callum.

“Tell Matthew about the sound you heard.”

Something glimmered behind Callum’s eyes, and his head twisted as if looking around to seek a memory. Then he said, “I was out with my friends. We were not doing our best. We were wrong. I heard a sound. It gave pain. Some of us were afraid but I think it was a good fear. It made me better. Then it went. Did I remember well?”

“What did you see?” asked Nabeela gently.

“It hurt,” he replied. “Hurt.”

“I know it hurt,” she said, leaning forward and resting her hands gently on Callum’s own. “I know it is hard, but I need you to remember for Matthew here. What did you see, the night it hurt?”

“We were doing bad,” he breathed. “We are better now.”

“You and your friends weren’t being good? What were you doing?”

“Drinking.”

“You were drinking alcohol?”

“We were drinking… beer.” He stumbled over the word, spitting it out like a loose tooth.

“And then what?”

“Sound.”

“The high-pitched sound, and then what?”

“Hurt.”

“What did you see?”

His tongue darted over his lips, the first sign of anything other than dead neutrality. “Callum,” murmured Nabeela, fingers tightening over his, “this is so important. Tell me what you saw.”

“A shadow. Fell. Fell on us. Sound and hurt and shadow.”

“What else?”

“Don’t want to.”

“Callum!”

“Don’t want to.”

“You want to be good? You want to be better?”

He hesitated, then nodded dully.

“Then tell us.”

“Shadow fell on us. Sound. High sound. Sound hurt.” Callum scrunched up his eyes in a mimicry of pain. “Here.” He bent over double. Then straightened up and added, “Shadow had claws.”

Nabeela’s hands stayed resting on his. She smiled. “Thank you, Callum.”

“I did good?”

“Yes. Very good.”

“You are good,” he concluded, like one reaching the end of a long and difficult thought process. “I did good. I hope to do good. Thank you.”

Nabeela stood up, glanced at me and said, “Any further questions?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Maybe now you can get your boss into gear.”

The parents were still arguing as we let ourselves out. We closed the front door to a scream of “… bills? You think this is about the fucking bills…?”

Nabeela and I stood in the settling gloom of an early London night, breath steaming.

“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the deal?”

She started walking, and I fell into pace beside her. As she walked, she talked.

“Callum used to run with a bunch of kids from the local estate. There were five of them, aged fourteen to seventeen, used to hang out together. They did a bit of graffiti, smoked a bit of pot, drank a lot of beer, were loud at night. We sometimes got complaints from the neighbours—those kids were up at midnight drinking and shouting and I’ve got work tomorrow—those kids overturned a Dumpster—those kids pissed on my front door—that kind of stuff. It’s horrid—if you experience it, I mean. Rubbish, pee, noise, it all adds up, and so yeah, we had the odd word with them. But they weren’t criminals, they weren’t into knives or skunk or meth or any of that. They were just… you know… noisy pain-in-the-arse kids.

“So three weeks ago I get a call from the local coppers. One of Callum’s mates has turned up dead. He’s lying on his back on the local football cage where the boys like to
hang out. He’s seventeen years old, and there’s blood in his ears, and running out of his nose, and he’s just staring straight up at nothing and there’s these marks all over him, like animal marks, claw marks, but—and get this—no animal they’ve ever seen. I mean when the cops tell you that, you start thinking okay, banshee, werewolf, let’s get out the garlic and the ginger or whatever. But when the cops arrived, the other kids were just standing there. Four of them, just stood in the middle of the pitch, and they’re not upset, or shouting, or defiant, or covered in blood, or nothing. The police psychologist does as a shrink will and diagnoses them all with post-traumatic stress, but seriously? Four boys all with the exact same symptoms, all at once, just stood next to the corpse of their best mate? And they all say the same thing. There was a sound, there was a pain, there were claws, and then they felt better. I mean, my God, next to a corpse and they felt better. That’s not werewolves, and it’s not just their brains. That’s something else.”