The Minority Council (51 page)

“As a matter of fact, there is something you should probably…” began Kelly.

She was interrupted by Dr Seah snapping on a new pair of gloves with every look of relish and demanding, “So which part of bed rest are you still not clear on?”

She wiggled her fingers inside the latex and waggled her eyebrows and grinned a malicious grin.

“I promise,” I intoned, “that as soon as I’m not being hunted, chased, betrayed, abused and neglected, I will find somewhere, possibly with room service, and do the bed rest thing.”

“Sweetie, it’s your body, I can’t be here all the time to stop you destroying it. I’m just saying, sooner or later you gotta take responsibility for these little things like, I dunno,
breathing
.”

“Actually, on that subject…” began Kelly.

“Where’s the culicidae’s heart?” The thought struck too hard for me to let Kelly finish; the words just tumbled right out.

“Um, the…”

“The culicidae’s heart, Kelly, the thing that I went to all this trouble to recover from Caughey, who is, by the way, completely mad.”

“Mr Caughey is mad?”

“Well, yes. Bit too much exposure to the beating heart of a creature fed on bile and rage will do that to a guy, and I’m not one hundred per cent convinced he had a psyche of stone to begin with.”

“But he only had it for a few hours…”

“He helped make it, helped create it, had a longer exposure to the whole affair, and besides, I only had it a few minutes, and here I am,” I retorted, brandishing my scorched and gloopy hands.

Dr Seah tutted, swatted them back down. “Professional at work here!” she chided. “This is me,
bandaging
and all that crap, on a
house call
and all that crap, but don’t you worry, I’ve got my professional face on.”

“Which does raise the question of where
here
is,” I added, looking round the room.

Baby-pink walls, featuring a total of two pictures—one a Japanese print of a wading bird in still waters, the other a faded photograph of a school gathered in their best bow ties. A wardrobe, white, shut; a dresser, beige, empty; and a large mirror, cracked at the edge and framed with plastic gold. Somewhere outside, but not far enough outside to be civil, the roar of planes passing overhead, wheels locked to land.

“It’s a safe house,” explained Kelly. “Basically, my ex-flatmate has a cousin whose boyfriend has a house…”

“Where in London?” I asked.

“Osterley.”

“How the hell did I get to Osterley?”

“Well, I managed to convince two very nice young policemen to carry you from the station to my car, and then when I got here I convinced a passing dog-walker to help carry you from my car to the house, and then I convinced Dr Seah…”

“Have you found Templeman?”

“No, but actually…”

“What about the fairy godmother? He about to come storming in here, guns blazing?”

“Well, he might,” admitted Kelly, “but actually you’re sitting inside a very fine specimen of its type, a series of anti-scrying wards constructed mostly from wire ties, Post-it notes and kitchen forks balanced together in that way, you know when you get three of them and they all support each other but don’t really support each other, that kind of counterbalanced thing that boy scouts learn to do…”

“And Brownies,” added Dr Seah. “Youth activities are all about the magic tricks.”

“If we can call it a
trick
…”

“The bit with the forks is a trick. Obviously the anti-scrying ward is more magical but you gotta ask, where’d you draw that fine line between amazing tricks and basic magic? Or maybe you’re not asking, but you should.”

“Point being,” concluded Kelly, raising her voice, “no one knows except you, me, Dr Seah, and my ex-flatmate’s cousin’s boyfriend where you are, so even if Templeman or Mr Kramb have sources still active within the Aldermen, which I must admit is a rather distressing thought, even if they did, I can’t imagine they’ll be doing anything about it soon. Which actually does bring me to my final point…”

There was a thud from the end of the hall, the sound of a heavy door being shut. Our fingers tightened instinctively. A footstep in the hall, the sound of plastic bags being put down on a lino floor.

“You, me, Dr Seah… and who?” I asked.

“I was trying to explain,” said Kelly. “You see, the anti-scrying ward…”

The footsteps came closer, a hand pushing back the door to the tiny bedroom. The fingernails were long and painted, the pads on the fingertips warm pink, the skin above the nails, deep-baked brown.

“… wasn’t actually cast by me…” babbled Kelly.

A foot, wearing a boot laced up to the knee, a knee clad in black, an arm in blue denim, a head covered with an explosion of frizzy black hair. A voice.

A familiar, unbelievable voice.

It said, “Yo, what the sister’s saying is that this…”—a gesture taking in the shape of the room and its unseen defensive magics—“… is no ordinary fucking spell.
This
is a totally
awesome
fucking spell.”

Penny.

Penny Ngwenya.

Once upon a time, she’d stood on London Bridge and looked towards the east and said, as a curse, give me back my hat, and things had gone downhill from there.

Ex-traffic warden, ex-cleaning lady, six GCSEs, grades A–D, one higher education diploma in art and media studies, two years’ experience in retail at her local supermarket, one point on her driving licence from that time when some total wanker, like, cut her up at the traffic lights or whatever; wannabe sorceress; my apprentice.

Penny Ngwenya.

She stood in the door and stared at me, and, by the look on her face, all the clever things she’d been practising saying weren’t so clever any more.

I stammered at the others, “Out. Please.”

Dr Seah was already at the door, pulling Kelly into the corridor with a cry of, “So where’d you get cake round here…?”

She closed the door behind them on the way out.

Penny hooked her fingers into her pockets and said nothing.

Then, “Fuck it, I hate, like, fucking awkward fucking silences anyway, so I’m just gonna say, Matthew, you look like totally shit. Sorry, I know we should be all like ‘It’ll be fine’ or whatever, but you look really crap.”

We felt it was our turn to speak, and found we couldn’t.

Penny blurted again, “So yeah… Templeman is, like, a psychopath. But I figure you’ve worked that out, right, because if you haven’t then you are such a twat you, like, deserve to lose.”

“We thought… I thought… we… he told us the fairy godmother had you. He told us you were dead.”

Something swept over Penny’s face, something I hadn’t seen before, couldn’t name. She nodded slowly, biting her lip, folding her arms. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess he would. He lied.”

Third Interlude: Sometimes, You Can’t Be Saved

 

In which Penny tells her story.

She said, “It was fine. It was all going fine.

“I was with Nabeela, we were…

“… I was with Nabeela.

“We followed you to your meeting in Covent Garden. Watched you talk with the Aldermen, watched you get into the car with Templeman. Nabeela said, ‘Uh… should we follow the car?’

“I told her you didn’t look frightened or scared or enchanted, and it would probably be okay. And it was okay, wasn’t it? You called, we talked, you said it was fine and we went shopping. I mean, I know it’s a bit clichéd, okay, two girls, out together, going shopping, but it wasn’t like we were going to buy anything and it’s Covent Garden, you know; it’s not like you can’t really not go shopping in Covent Garden, everything smells of soap and chocolate, it’s like going to Edinburgh and not having haggis. And I liked Nabeela. I did. She was cool. Sure, she’d got the medusa thing, but she handled it in a groovy way; I liked that.

“So we went shopping. And we must have pissed off so many people because we didn’t buy anything. I mean, we tried everything on, moved it all around and messed it all up, but have you seen how much these things cost?

“I really think it was good for her, you know, what with her condition, she almost never got to dress down with the girls and there was one shop, and we were looking at the dresses and she saw this purple one with, like, long sleeves and this amazing skirt with these, like, waves sown onto it and she wanted to try it and we went into the changing room and there were these mirrors and we were the only ones there and she said, so long as you only look at the mirror you’ll be okay, just look at the mirror, and so I did and she…

“I guess she ‘let down her hair.’

“I hadn’t really seen it, close up, I mean, before.

“I’d only seen it in that crappy mobile phone screen. But I stood right next to her in this tiny little changing room with these mirrors on every side, close enough to touch, and she said it was okay, because I was a girl and because I was a sorceress and I would understand.

“The… things on her head… they were part of her. Her hair was cables, thin and silver, each one ending at a lens, and they moved and writhed like living things, but where the cable met her skull it wasn’t like it plugged in or anything, but like it just melted into her. Like, if you looked, you could see tiny wires running along her head like veins, before they vanished down deep, and if you touched one of them it’d twitch like a frightened rabbit, but if you ran your finger down it, it’d sorta relax, like a cat.

“She said, ‘There’s a recessive gene somewhere in my family. My great great great aunt had it too, but it wasn’t like this for her. She had black iron snakes on her head that wheezed coal dust when they turned, and their gaze turned all who looked at them into carbon monsters. And
her great grandmother before that, she had the whole proper snakes-on-the-head thing going, I mean, real proper adders and stuff, and the people would come to her for advice and teaching, and call her an imam, a teacher, one who knows the path.

“ ‘We—I mean, my kind—don’t have kids. My great great great aunt didn’t have kids and I won’t. It’s not that we can’t, I think, it’s just… you know… you don’t want to take the risk, do you? But the boys are carrying it, the gene I mean, and have you tried stopping boys doing their thing? I mean, God, it’s so depressing.

“ ‘My family’s from Lebanon originally—well, we moved around a lot—but my grandmother wanted to move here. I think she thought, maybe it wouldn’t happen in the city. Maybe it would be different, another land, another place.

“ ‘And yeah, she was right, it was different. But it didn’t stop. I was home-schooled until I was old enough to wear hijab. It keeps me safe. My Mum wears it too sometimes, when we go out to big dinners. She always said, when I was growing up, it was really useful—men would see it and they’d sorta talk to her, like she was a person, you know? A someone, not a
something
, without trying to get a snog or anything like that. Seems to me that guys my age are either so desperate to get off with you they can’t say anything at all, or so busy thinking you want to get off with them that they still don’t say a word. Now that she’s married, she says she kinda doesn’t feel like that any more. She loves my dad, and he loves her, and they’re comfortable together, and that’s all that matters. But she wears a scarf when she’s with me. I think she does it to keep me company. Silly, really.’

“She looked at herself in the mirror, hair all writhing around her head, glass catching the light. She was beautiful in that dress, she had this figure, I mean, proper hourglass stuff. But she was sad, and she said: ‘I will never have a husband. Too risky. One day, he’ll want to see my face, touch it, and I’ll turn the wrong way and he’ll look at me and see and then he’ll… it is a curse. I know that. But there must be a reason.’

“She started putting her headscarf back on, smoothing her hair back down beneath the cotton. I watched, and then I said, and I don’t know why, ‘I summoned the death of cities.’

“She looked at me, surprised, in the mirror, like, but didn’t need to ask. Her face was doing the questioning.

“ ‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ I explained. ‘I was… hurt. I was lonely. My friends were scared of me, they didn’t understand what I was going through and as they became more scared, they stopped being my friends at all. And I had this shit job and I didn’t know what I wanted or who I was or why all these things… and then one day this total bastard hit me, and I was just doing what I was meant to, and he called me all sorts of shit things and I know it was, like, a little thing but you know how little things add up after a while? And a kid stole my hat. The kid was called Mo. He stole my hat and I was so angry and so confused I went to the river and stood on London Bridge all by myself and raised my hands to the sky and screamed, I just… I just screamed it, “Give me back my hat! Give me back my hat give me give me give me back my hat!” And something heard. This… parasite… this thing that feeds on the death of cities, it heard and it came crawling out of the shadows, out of paper and rage
and it… it killed people. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know I couldn’t have I didn’t… but it killed, and I made it. It killed the kid. It killed the last Midnight Mayor. It nearly killed Matthew but he… he was supposed to kill me, you know? The Aldermen, those fuckers in black, they wanted to kill me, to break the spell and he just swanned up and said, “I brought you back your hat” and I was like, “What the fuck?” and he said, “I heard you lost it. I brought it back” and I knew… fuck, I don’t know what the fuck I knew but I knew… everything. Everything that had been, everything that was, everything that might be. Not like God or shit, not like parting of the clouds stuff. Just something solid, here, inside. But the thing is, what I’m trying to say is… I nearly destroyed the city. How screwed up is that? How screwed up does that make me?’