The Minority Council (60 page)

“Domine dirige nos,” I repeated and, for a moment, something stood behind me, a shadow that writhed in the light of its own accord, and it had eyes of fire and claws for hands and it had wings.

Kelly smiled.

And it was gone.

The Aldermen lowered their hands and, without another word, they filed out, heads still bowed.

Kelly stood there smiling, eyes fixed on me, waiting until the door had closed. The blood was still welling up between her fingers.

The second the heavy door clicked shut she waggled her hand in the air and exclaimed, “Oh my God, that stuff really works!”

Penny said, for the both of us, “Uh…?”

“I worried they would take too long to come in,” Kelly admitted. “I mean, the nurse said it wouldn’t last forever…”

“Your hand…?” suggested Penny.

“Exactly! Hold on…”

She eased open her briefcase, and pulled out a plastic pack containing an antiseptic wipe and a very large plaster. It was bright blue, and carried a picture of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet walking hand in hand.

“I was a little worried it would show,” explained Kelly, tearing open the antiseptic wipe with her teeth. “I mean, when the nurse applied it, it had this horrible smell.”

“Applied what?” asked Penny.

“Anti-bacterial numbing cream,” explained Kelly, wiping away the blood. “Oh, look,” she added with a cluck of
annoyance. “It’s stained my sleeve; that’s not going to wash out. Ah well, I never liked this shirt anyway. Ms Ngwenya, would you mind…?” She waved the plaster at my apprentice, who dutifully peeled it open and applied it to Kelly’s upturned hand.

“Numbing cream?” she asked.

“Oh God, yes. I really
hate
getting hurt,” explained Kelly. “So I went to the nurse and explained I’d probably have to cut myself and what was the most hygienic, least painful, least-likely-to-leave-a-scar way of doing it? And do you know, she had all these really amazing suggestions. If I was going to self-harm, I’d completely get NHS advice first. I mean, not that I’m suggesting that; the whole ritual is really rather ridiculous, isn’t it?”

Kelly snapped her briefcase shut, admired the bright plaster on her hand with every look of someone who’d dreamt of the Hundred Acre Wood as a kid, twiddled her fingers to test that they still worked and exclaimed, “So, basically, I’ve asked every department—including catering—to help hunt Templeman down, and the Beggar King is going to do a bit of nosing and I’ve bought the Old Bag Lady on board and I’ve asked if the Seven Sisters wouldn’t mind joining in and there’s some guys having a chat with Fat Rat and I was thinking we really should see to actually appointing a consul to the Tribe, and the Neon Court kinda owe us a favour sort of anyway so really, all things considered, I’d say it’ll be fine. It’ll all be completely fine and in fact may I suggest that this could be lunch? Lunch anyone?”

“We kinda just had breakfast…” began Penny.

“Lunch,” we interrupted. “Lunch would be good.”

“Maybe a little lunch…”

“Posh food always comes in small sizes,” explained Kelly. “It’s how you know it’s worth it.”

So saying, she beamed one final burst of perfect dentistry, swept her briefcase off the table and was out of the door before I could remember to breathe.

I breathed.

So did Penny. “She,” Penny said, “is totally fucking awesome. What’s her job again?”

“She’s my PA.”

“You’ve got a PA!” Penny flapped with indignation. “You’ve got a fucking PA; that’s like… that’s like you’re going to get multicoloured highlighters and then, like, maybe those file divider things in all the different colours and that shit! Oh my God, you’ve got a PA!” She clapped her hands over her mouth as if trying to contain a bad thought, then slowly lowered them and breathed, “She’s awesome. What’s her salary like, because you read all these stories, yeah, about how PAs get less than the minimum wage and their bosses are on, like, a million plus bonuses, and that sorta crap makes me sick.”

“Penny,
I
don’t get paid.”

“Yeah, but you get expenses, right?”

The table seemed warm and inviting. I put my head down on it and asked it if it would be my friend. It seemed okay with the idea. “If I passed out right now, would that be okay?”

“So long as you don’t cry. Crying would completely undermine the moment and, besides, I don’t cope well when people cry around me; I get all puffy-eyed and don’t know what to say and it’s shit for everyone.”

“No crying,” I promised. “Just a bit of rest.”

There wasn’t a bed.

But there was a sofa.

The owner of the office it was in agreed to take the afternoon off to play golf, so I stretched out on it in my beggar’s clothes and a clean black coat for a blanket, and slept. The half-sleep of daytime snoozing, where time crawls and flies, crawls and flies, like a drunken woodpecker on a lazy day.

Sometimes shadows came to the door to try and disturb me, to ask questions or make requests, and the shadow of Kelly waved them away, and I thought perhaps I should say something, or do something, or make some noise to show I was interested, and found I wasn’t, and stayed where I was.

Shadows stretch and thin.

Between the glass towers of central London there are still some narrow views through which the eye can catch the city’s weather-vanes. There a boy balanced precariously on one leg, staring at distant horizons. There a galleon, sails swollen at the full; there a tiny golden dragon; and here a black crow in flight. If you know where to look, they’re still there, centuries on from when they once dominated the city, visible until the last light of day.

There were things to do.

I did them slowly.

Hauled myself down to the basement, Penny in tow.

It took a lot of bins, a lot of cleaning cupboards, before I found it.

Something moved in the bottom of the Dumpster.

I knocked politely on the lid before easing it open, and looked down into the stinking depths.

“Hi there!” I sang out.

Something moved in the depths, sending down a small
landslide of packaging and torn plastic. A trio of tiny yellow-stained fingers curled up from the depths, followed by an oversized pair of ink-black eyes.

“Penny, meet imps. Imps, meet Penny.” Fine brown goo slid over the staring eyes from the bin, washing dirt with dirt. “Penny’s my apprentice,” I explained to the creature in the bin. “She really loves small furry creatures that stink of sewage, don’t you Penny?”

“Yeah,” said Penny, shuffling uneasily behind me. “Totally.”

I took as deep a breath as I could, and said what I’d come to say. “So, in recognition of your clan’s fine and sterling work in disrupting the interior of Harlun and Phelps, I, in my senior capacity as Midnight Mayor and keeper of promises, guarantee that should you and your kind be assembled here, at this Dumpster, at, say, eleven-thirty tonight, a pick-up truck will come and transport you and all your kind to the foulest, most pest-ridden garbage site within the Greater London area you could possibly imagine. Your once-in-a-lifetime trip to the dream wasteground of your choice is coming here, now. Well, here, tonight. We good?”

A tiny head nodded, black bristles straightening across a felt-grey skull.

“Fantastic!” I exclaimed. “Tell all your friends. Harlun and Phelps—what a waste of effort. Landfill—hello!”

As Penny and I walked back towards the elevator, she was unusually quiet.

“Okay,” I said as the doors slid shut behind us, “I may have incidentally promised a clan of imps a transfer to their dream rubbish dump in exchange for helping me out with a little problem.”

Silence. It lasted four floors.

“So… you’ve got, like, these kick-ass Aldermen suckers who are supposed to carry guns for you, and you’ve got, like, major-league mega-mystic powers, and you’ve got like, higher urban powers and all that shit on your side and you… went to the imps and promised them a holiday in a landfill?”

The doors parted with a faint ding-dong.

She added, “Is there like a word for anti-style? I mean, in like the way there’s antimatter which is kinda matter itself but sorta like not-matter so it behaves like matter until it hits matter and goes boom? Like that?”

“Mojo?”

“Don’t kid yourself.”

We paused by Kelly’s desk. It was set not quite next to my office, like a guard dog daring a cat to pee in its kennel.

I explained to her the fact of the imps, and my promise.

Kelly blanched. “But imps… rubbish dumps… the breeding cycle…”

“Yeah, I know, there’ll be kids, there’ll be a surge in seagull deaths, but I still think it’d be a lovely thing to do in this new and golden era of generous Aldermen with warm hearts. So if we could add it to the list of shit to get done, that’d be great. Thanks!”

I swept on by before she could argue.

I was getting the hang of management.

There was another duty to perform.

Penny went out and bought clothes.

It took her a long time.

When she came back, she was swaying under a weight of bags.

“So yeah,” she said, “there’s like… shirts for formal shit, and T-shirts for like casual shit, and kinda sports tops for running shit because, you know, you do loads of running, I mean, not like a professional or anything, more like a guy scared of being shot, but seriously, I think if you’re gonna make a habit of pissing off people with guns, you should take up running as a proper hobby, do this whole keep-fit thing. And then there’s smart black trousers because you can’t beat black; I mean, I know it’s a cliché and that, but seriously, black works. Even on you, which is, like, a total fucking miracle or whatever. And then there’s kinda less formal trousers which you can spill tomato sauce on and shit, because, hell I’ve seen you eat and I’m, like, what were you like growing up? And I got you lots of cheap trousers that you can get blood on because I realise now that you
never
do a proper wash or anything. Like, you just wait until you’re covered in blood and then some poor schmuck has to burn your clothes and lend you something and shit, and actually you stink a lot of the time. I mean, you do, not personal or anything mind; I’m just saying.”

I received each garment as gratefully as I could, and Kelly took the receipts, for expenses, with her smile locked in place.

Changing clothes was hard work.

Sweat and odd chemical reactions had glued the Beggar King’s vestments to our skin.

Bandages stretched.

Bones creaked.

When it was done, I looked at my face in the mirror.
The shirt was white, the light was cold; it wasn’t a sympathetic place for a viewing.

I folded my beggar’s garb and put it carefully into a plastic bag.

“Kelly, I need to go out,” I said.

“Is that wise?” she asked. “I mean, obviously you can handle yourself, Mr Mayor, but right now do you really think you can handle yourself? I’ve heard that there’s a point when the body is in so much physical pain that actually it stops hurting, that pain can become euphoria at a certain intensity, but I’m not a doctor, I’ve never tested this and I would feel so much happier thinking that you weren’t personally trying to prove the theory tonight…”

I dropped the bag of beggar’s clothes on the table and waited for her to work it out.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Well, yes, I do see how that might be something you need to do in person.”

“And alone,” I added. “It’s important.”

She slumped, frowning in worry. “Oh, very well,” she sighed. “But if you absolutely must, may I give you this?”

She opened a drawer, and pulled out a small black box, from which she produced: a mobile phone, a pre-paid oyster card, a small bundle of ten-pound notes wrapped in a rubber band, a pack of lemon-scented travel tissues, a pair of tweezers, a penknife, a packet of baby wipes, and a gun. I looked at the gun. It was black, heavy, semi-automatic. Kelly checked the magazine, clicked it back in place, pushed it towards me. I said, “I don’t really do guns.”

“They’re a truly ghastly thing,” she agreed, “but other people do guns, and that’s always the problem, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but that’s kinda like saying other people do muggings and murder and rape, so get with the party.”

“Mr Mayor…”

“I’m going for a very short walk through the heart of my own city,” I interrupted. “You really think a gun and some baby wipes are called for?”

“Templeman does guns,” she answered.

A pause. Moment to think. Then, “If the police do me, you’re going to have to do the explaining, okay?”

She beamed. “You know, I’ve always had this amazingly good understanding with coppers. Some people don’t get them, but I find if you’re just willing to listen to their point of view and speak in a gentle tone of voice, they’re actually very reasonable people.”

I put the gun in my pocket. It was heavier than I’d imagined.

“Back before you know it,” I muttered.

I walked through the night all the way to Holborn Circus before I found what I was looking for. A church that had somehow survived the wartime bombing protruded into a bottleneck of traffic that wound round a monument to great generals and the glorious dead, rifles turned down and heads bowed in prayer. Here, in a narrow locked doorway, the beggars huddled. Eyes flashed up from grimy faces as I passed, took in my clean clothes and washed face, my empty pockets and single plastic bag, and looked away again.