The Minority Council (56 page)

“Oh my God, is there ice cream? I love sitting in front of the TV, in a blanket, with the fire on, eating ice cream; it’s, like, the only good thing about when someone splits up with you.”

“I think there might be some strawberry ice cream…”

“Can we eat it from the tub?” demanded Penny. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, this meal is like… totally awesome… but seriously, ice cream from the tub in front of the TV—what did you say was on the telly? It’s not that one with the guy with the big hair, is it?”

“I’m sure at some point we’re supposed to do something noble and brave about the state of the city,” I quavered.

“Bloody hell, haven’t you heard of fucking working hours?” shrilled Penny. “You’re like that monster that doesn’t even have a name and I’m shattered and Kelly here has, like, done the cooking and the washing up and I’m just saying, do you think a half-hour sit-down will kill us?”

We sat in front of the TV.

Kelly had the armchair, and flitted in and out with fresh tea, hot water bottles and a seemingly unending supply of biscuits and ice cream.

Penny sat next to me on the sofa, a blanket pulled up to her chin.

We dimmed the lights down low.

On the TV, a detective with big hair strode around the city untangling enigmatic mysteries and foiling deadly plots with a gusto that left me feeling exhausted.

Penny’s head somehow ended up on my shoulder, her legs swinging round and tucking in on the sofa.

Her eyes were drifting shut even before it was revealed
that the cabbie dunnit all along. Kelly sat forward in her chair, fingers pressed to the arms of the seat, eyes wide, mug of tea forgotten at her feet.

I pulled the blanket a little tighter around Penny’s shoulders and didn’t move.

Hero and villain danced around in an intricate and dazzling game of life and death.

Not even the final gunshot woke Penny up.

The credits rolled to the sound of a presenter inviting the audience to change channels now for a celebrity quiz programme on this week’s special theme of male leg waxing.

Penny’s head slipped from my shoulder and bounced against my chest. I started, dragging in breath, and the movement was enough to wake her up. She sat up, eyes rimmed with gum, and Kelly said, “Let me see if I can find a spare toothbrush…” and led her upstairs.

I watched the TV a while longer.

On another channel, a different detective was solving a different drama. Two channels over, and two men and a token woman were talking about cars in the language of drunken magi who’ve seen the Christ-child but weren’t impressed. One channel over from that, and three teenagers with Liverpudlian accents stood on the balcony of a council estate and screamed at each other, a proper circular argument with no beginning, no end, and a touch of mood lighting thrown in. The ice cream was reaching that melted consistency where refreezing would just create soft mush. It was a baby pink colour, with the occasional solid frozen strawberry trapped inside. I licked the spoon when I was done, and dropped it in the empty tub.

Kelly came back into the room just as the news was
doing its regional recap of the Silly Local Story of the Day. Tonight it was a guide to the ten worst potholes in London—which local councils should we hold to account?

“Penny’s in bed,” she murmured, still-house soft.

“Sleeping?”

“Maybe.”

“Good. You should go home,” I said. “Go to the office tomorrow morning, carry on like nothing’s happened.”

“Something
has
happened,” she replied. “Templeman… the Minority Council…”

“The Beggar King has cursed Rathnayake in front of you all. Templeman went up against my apprentice and the final score was nil–nil without extra time. There are three men turned to stone on a commercial estate outside Croydon, Caughey is mad and the culicidae’s heart has been purged and is currently sat in the kitchen fridge. Penny was right. Time to breathe.”

“The fairy godmother…?”

“You’re a good cook, you know that?”

She hesitated, unsure whether to beam proudly or not. “Thank you.”

“How’d you end up in this life?”

A smile teetered on her face, then broke free. “Well,” she said, “with a degree in International Law and Economics and a Masters in Actuarial Science, it was either this or back to the checkout at my local Sainsbury’s.”

It felt like a while since I’d smiled and meant it.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Kelly.”

“Tomorrow, Mr Mayor.”

“And thanks for everything.”

“Just doing my job!” she beamed.

I waited for the sound of the door to close and the snap
of her heels on the pavement outside, before I turned off the TV.

In the bathroom I put my head under, first, the cold tap, then the hot, then the cold again.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

It was hard to use my fingers properly, but I got a fist around the handle of a toothbrush, and scrubbed.

I checked on Penny.

I didn’t know if she was sleeping, or merely pretending.

Either way, I let her be.

My coat and shoes were in the bathroom. Someone had toyed with the idea of cleaning the vestments of the Beggar King, and changed their mind. I pulled them on, left Penny a note by the front door, found a bin bag at the bottom of a kitchen drawer, and opened the fridge.

The culicidae’s heart was still, cold and silent on the top shelf, wrapped up in kitchen foil.

I put it in my bag, tied a knot at the top, picked up the spare keys to the flat, and let myself out.

There is a moment in all big cities when the traffic stops. It may only last a few moments, through a tiny pause, a trick of the traffic lights. But when it happens it is louder than an engine as it backfires, deeper than the roar of the double-decker bus.

It was there, as I stepped out into the dark Osterley night.

A moment when the traffic stops.

I tightened my grip around my black bin bag, pulled the coat of the Beggar King tighter around my shoulders, picked a direction that looked like it might lead towards a main road, and walked.

This was my city.

Midnight Mayor.

Light, life, fire.

Osterley was built from timber and concrete. The flagstones sang where they were loose in the pavement, the cars slept in tiny little drives, the newsagents were local, the cul-de-sacs were residential, and the roads were main.

I walked and the traffic fled before me, though the drivers did not know why.

The lights bent as we passed.

Pigeons watched us from their dens, the rats scampered beneath our feet.

As we moved, our shadow turned and turned again, a sundial’s darkness moved by street glow, and our shadow was not our own. Sometimes we thought it had wings of black dragon-leather. Sometimes we thought its hands dripped, staining the cracks in the paving stones as it passed. I could feel the places where the bikers moved, those thin points in the architecture of the city where
here
became like
there
and it was possible to jump the gap without mucking around with the spaces in between. Ley lines crackled underfoot, following the passage of the underground tunnels, the old water pipes, the silent whirling gas, the dance of electricity. We put our head to one side and could hear the voices in the telephone lines overhead, far-off whispers of

Hey babe

So next week any

Sorry I didn’t call

Missed you

Midnight Mayor.

This was our city.

We caught the last train of the night, heading east, back to where it began.

It was called Avalon.

It was still, against all expectations, a nightclub.

Some nights ago, I’d stood outside its doors and explained to a bouncer about my mega-mystical pinkies, because my mobile phone suggested that Meera’s mobile phone was inside those walls, calling out to me.

Some nights ago, I hadn’t even heard of fairy dust.

Look what had happened.

There was a new bouncer on the door.

I walked up the thin red carpet to the silver door, and he glanced at me and said, “Sorry, sir.”

We looked him in the eye and saw the colour drain from his face. We whispered, “Walk away,” and he carefully reached up to his armband, pulled it off, let it fall from his fingertips, turned, and walked away, to where we knew not.

At our back, our shadow twisted with pleasure, arms flexing, dreaming of flight.

Down the stairs, back down into the pounding, pulsing dark of the club, taste of magic on the air, booming music from the speakers, and drinks that fluoresced in the low blue light.

I looked, and didn’t have to look long before I found a woman with sickly yellow eyes who split from her friends to go into the ladies’ toilet. I followed her, using speed to make up for the incongruity of my appearance, shoved past a drunken woman in six-inch heels who half fell past me out of the door, marched into the glowing dark of the toilet, grabbed the woman with the yellow-tinted eyes by the hair and put my hand over her mouth before she had a chance to scream.

“You’re a fairy,” I breathed. “You’re addicted to fairy dust. Scream and I’ll break your neck, do you understand? Just nod.”

She nodded, once, slowly.

“You’re going to give me the name and address of your supplier. Then I’m going to let you go. First I’m going to tell you this. The fairy dust will kill you. You will turn into dust yourself and your body will be swept up in a nice, clean plastic bag, and sold onto the next punter to sniff. Quit the dust, don’t quit the dust, I really don’t care and doubt I can make a difference, but as a public service and just in case, I figured I’d let you know. Nod if you understand.”

She nodded. Her little red dress had been zipped up so tight that a roll of flesh bulked over its low back. Now it shook visibly with the rest of her body.

“Right. I’m letting you go. Remember, if you scream, I break your neck. Tell me where to find your supplier.”

She was an addict.

She wasn’t stupid.

She told me where.

I let her go.

There was a taxi rank outside Charing Cross station.

The taxis came into the station forecourt, swung round the great neo-Gothic spike, adorned with sombre stone kings, that once marked the very centre of the city, waited, and then swerved back out into the stop-start traffic of the Strand and Trafalgar Square.

I queued.

When it was my turn, I let the people behind me take the first cab that came.

Then I let the next couple take the one after.

Then I waited a little longer.

The third cab that pulled up was black, like all its neighbours, with the yellow “For Hire” sign illuminated above the windscreen, but there was a man already in the back.

He opened the passenger door as I leant down, and said, “You going my way?”

“Sure,” I replied, and got in.

We pulled away.

Inside the cab, the man sat next to me was already busy, snapping open a large briefcase. He barely bothered to look at me as he said, “Okay, let’s talk cash…”

Then he smelt me.

His nose twitched in sudden distress and he looked up and, for the first time, met my eye, and he recognised me and I recognised him. Fear spread across his face. I leant across the seat, clawing our right hand around his face, index and middle finger below each eye. The street lights filed peacefully by as the cab swung round towards Westminster.

He had the good sense not to move.

“Morris Prince,” I breathed. “So you survived the Soho dusthouse.”

“Dudley Sinclair,” he hissed. “Or whatever the hell your name is. You are a dead man.”

We held up our right hand. He looked, and took in the scars carved into our flesh, the twin crosses, the badge of the Midnight Mayor, and his eyes grew wider.

“I’m surprised the fairy godmother is still talking to you,” I said. “After all, you did let me destroy your business. Or is selling from the back of a cab your new demo
tion?” I saw the corner of his mouth twitch, and my smile grew wider. “Oh, it is. Well, can’t look good on the CV, can it? Morris Prince, owner of the Soho dusthouse. At 10 p.m. he was a smug murdering bastard with everything to live for, and by three in the morning he was just a murdering bastard. And why? Because he got played. If it’s any comfort, we all get played. I’ve been played like pipes at a ceilidh—you barely made it to the tambourine.” I reached past him and pulled the briefcase off his lap.

There was a little snap-click behind my head.

The taxi had stopped.

In the reflection on the rear windscreen, I saw the shape of the driver, gun in hand, turned in his seat, ready to pull the trigger. Our eyes stayed fixed on Prince’s.

“Tell him to let us go,” we breathed. “Or everyone and everything in this cab will burn.”