The Minority Council (7 page)

I wrote:

IT HAS CLAWS

And as the drips ran down, washing over the perfect white of the eye, I turned and walked away.

We were on our way back to the Tube. As we got close to the station a train was just pulling out, blue-white flashes lighting up the houses clinging to the sides of the track as it screeched off towards Hammersmith.

There was a pause in the traffic on the nearby motorway, rare enough to catch my ear. In that pause, as I happened to look towards Nabeela, in its place there was the sound of hissing, of static hissing, so low and quiet as to be almost unnoticeable except for the lull in other noises. For a moment it was as though it came from close at hand—from where she stood—and…

Then a bus rattled by, and Nabeela was saying, “… so you’ll be okay with that, yeah?”

“What?”

“If I can get something more, you’ll bring the Midnight Mayor down to
see
what’s happening?”

“Uh… I guess so. And, Nabeela?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t do anything… you know…”

“Dangerous? Brave? Noble? Unexpected?”

“Let’s say… in violation of local council health and safety procedures.”

She laughed. “Hey—I totally did that when I went to you for help, right?” At the barrier, ticket in hand, she hesitated. “Hey, Matthew?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know if you’ll turn out a complete jerk or a waste of time. But, for coming down here, I mean, taking a look and all that…”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

“No worries.”

And that was the start of that.

The Hammersmith and City Line crawled out west, past decaying stations held up with scaffold poles and optimism. I had no particular justification in going this way, but felt that if I followed my instinct long enough, it would duly lead me to trouble. After all I was Midnight Mayor.

At Shepherd’s Bush, the low, jagged townscape was disrupted by the great white mausoleum of the Westfield shopping centre, encircled by traffic and moated by car parks. Turning south, the track ran above the street markets of Goldhawk Road, covered over for the night along their alleyways butted against the brick arches of the railway. The approach into Hammersmith was slow and jolting as we waited for a platform to clear.

I thought about the eye staring over the football pitch where, a few weeks ago, a kid had died; killed, seemingly, by a shadow that came and went in a breath. I thought about Callum, staring through me in his gloomy bedroom. I thought about the beggar in the chapel doorway to whom I’d given a few coins, and the note on my chair—
THE BEGGAR KING WANTS TO TALK
—and that other Post-it, left on the corner of my desk where its innocuousness guaranteed it would be seen.

You can’t save those who don’t want to be saved.

Outside the station, and I’d forgotten how much I disliked this part of town. Another shopping centre, this one a faded baby-pink, sat on a huge roundabout fed by yet another main road, this one from Heathrow and packed solid most of the day and night. Oversized pubs spilt out crowds, boozing alongside the stalled traffic, while buses vied to crawl up into the local terminal like a great herd at a watering hole. Hammersmith was a place between worlds, where motorway dwindled into A-road, where grand terraced houses with well-groomed gardens met with flats of immigrants fed on baked beans and Marmite; where great corporate offices shared sandwich deliveries with struggling enterprises whose every month in the black was a triumph beyond compare. It was a place of all magics at once, where, like hot and cold air colliding, the mystical flavour of the city created an unpredictable storm.

I started walking at random, heading south and west past curry houses, pet shops and mobile phone retailers specialising in unlocking without asking. I could taste the river, close but just unseen, its smell sometimes sneaking through gaps between the buildings.

I was nearly at Putney when she rang.

It would be nice to say I knew who and what it was, before it happened. But sometimes the phone just rings.

The number didn’t come up as hers, but when I answered I could hear her breath, hard and slow. Though her voice was distorted by the phone and something more, something worse, I recognised it at once.

“Matthew?” she said. “I’m… in trouble. I don’t want to go.”

“Meera?” I breathed, stopping dead in the street.
Sometimes you don’t need to ask more questions, there was enough in her voice to know. “Where are you?”

“Don’t let them take me!” she gasped, and there was a jerkiness to her voice that suggested it was trying to break. “Don’t let them!”

“Meera, tell me where you are.”

“I’m…” she began, and the phone went dead.

I cursed and redialled.

Her phone rang for nearly a minute and she still didn’t answer. I was already boarding at a bus stop, heading for Putney Bridge station.

I phoned again as I crossed the Thames, remembering the cold of that night we’d taken the boat together from Greenwich, feeling it deeper now in my bones than just memory could recreate. Still no answer. At Putney I got out and beeped my way through the gate onto the mainline platform, leaping down the steps two at a time. The next train was in four minutes.

I pressed the phone between my palms, half closing my eyes, and forced my breath to slow. I slowed my thoughts, slowed my heart, forced the tension out of my arms, and opened my hands again to hold the phone between them like a lotus flower in the palms of a priest. Her number was already on the screen; I thumbed it, let it dial, and as it dialled, turned slowly on the spot, turning the phone to point south, west, north, and finally east. As it reached east it began to ring, loudly, a high tinkling coming from the little speaker. I swung south-east and the ringing faded down, lower; swung north-east and it rang louder. It wasn’t a perfect tracking system, but it would do.

I took the train, heading east towards Waterloo.

At Clapham Junction the phone still rang towards the north-east. I stuck on the train for Waterloo as we pulled out past commuters crowding onto the platforms, headed to such strange, surely promising places as Winnersh Triangle, Epsom Downs or Carshalton Beeches. If Clapham had the largest number of trains going through it of any station in Britain, it was merely where people changed, rather than a place prized for its own qualities. Waterloo, however, was a destination, teeming day and night with crowds impossible to navigate at any speed higher than the platform-hunter’s waltz. A swelling sea of commuters ebbed and flowed, from south London and the Home Counties, with the relentless quality of tidal drift. I wove past shops selling sausage pies, silk ties, mobile phones and novels about shopping and love recommended by people from the TV, and still my phone was ringing towards the north-east.

I dared not go underground and lose the signal, so struck out for the buses across the river. I caught one on the bridge itself, opposite the brightly lit walls of the National Theatre, whose flat grey shapes only came alive at night, under great washes of colour. As my bus headed up Kingsway, between grand buildings made from 1930s pride and Portland stone, my phone started ringing towards the east; I changed at Holborn and headed towards Chancery Lane and St Paul’s. It had been over half an hour since Meera had called. I spent a small surge of strength on turning any red traffic light green as we approached the old city boundary and, when we crossed into the Golden Mile, once encircled by the London Wall and whose symbol was still the dragon holding a shield of twin red crosses, I felt it like a jolt of pure caffeine straight into the
heart. My scarred right hand buzzed: here, of anywhere in London, I was at home. My phone kept ringing towards the east, and I wondered how much further I would have to go: Bishopsgate? Aldgate? Shadwell?

On Cheapside the signal turned south. I jumped off the bus at a stop near the blank stone walls of the Bank of England, and the Merchant Exchange’s temple-like pillars. Tarmac gave way to cobbled stone and a church left over from the age of dark stone walls and low grassy graves peeked out between the glass towers of the city. My signal swung suddenly round and I followed, the sound of ringing accompanying me down an almost empty street. A sushi bar on the right was full of men and women in suits, never less than four to a table, eating expertly with chopsticks; on the left a small dry-cleaner’s offered a forty-minute service for the harried executive. I could feel all the shadows here, taste the power in the streets, deep and dark and waiting, feel it move beneath my feet, a well of time and magic that had no bottom, waiting to be tapped. The old stone city walls may have been mostly demolished centuries ago, but there were other barriers, unseen, wrapped around this part of the city, designed as much for keeping secrets in as enemies out. On street corners or embedded in coats of arms on grand municipal buildings, we could feel the watching mad eyes of the silver-skinned dragons of London.

Close, now. The slightest turn of my wrist changed the ring tone. A small street of older buildings: a tiny sandwich shop with sash windows and an empty lantern-holder of black iron; next to that, a wine bar and, incongruous in this cramped old street, a door of shiny mottled silver. A small red carpet had been rolled out in front, and a man, if
men came in grizzly bear size, stood outside. A badge on his suit proclaimed him a licensed bouncer for a club calling itself Avalon. The closed door behind him, and the bolted look on his face, suggested that Avalon was not a universally welcoming establishment.

But it was in the direction of that door, and that door alone, that my phone kept ringing.

I hung up. My battery was nearly dead, and the silence felt shocking after all that trilling.

I walked up to the bouncer and said, “I’m looking for Meera.”

“Sorry, sir,” he said, not unfriendly, but in the tone of voice of a man hoping he didn’t need to get that way.

I smiled. There are two kinds of bouncers in London: the decent ones, just doing it for a living, who hope you don’t mind that they’ve got a job to do and if you’re going to throw up it’s probably time you went home—and the bastards. This man was not a bastard, and, upon reflection, didn’t deserve what was going to happen to him if he got in our way.

I said, “If I ask you to let me in without a fuss, it’ll be difficult, right?”

“Are you on the member’s list, sir?”

“Amazingly, no.”

“Then I’m afraid I can’t let you in sir, unless a member will vouch for you.”

“Meera.”

“Meera…?”

“I… don’t know her last name.”

He smiled ruefully. “Sorry, sir.”

I sighed, ran my hands through my hair nervously, then stabbed at my chest with my thumb. “Me—Matthew,” I
explained. “These streets,” I added, opening up my arms to encompass the quiet, dark little road, “my streets. This door,”—I pointed, hoping he’d hear the polite determination in my voice that was already in his—“my destination. These pinkies,” I twiddled my fingers squid-like at him, “mega-mystic-tastic pinkies.”

Polite scepticism, inclining towards the thought that he would have to get physical.

“My friend,” I added. “I think she’s in trouble.”

“This would be… Meera?”

“That’s her. Hey—I’ll stay here if you want, so we can send someone to check on her.”

“Can’t leave this door, sir.”

“What about someone inside?”

“You want me to ask someone to go in and look for a Meera?”

“Yup.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m sure if your friend wasn’t all right, the management would take good care of her.”

I nodded in resignation. “Did I mention,” I asked, taking half a step back to put some room between him and me, “these pinkies? Mega-mystical pinkies?”

“You did mention, sir, yes.”

I raised my hand, commanding attention. “Watch
this
,” I said, and spread my arms wide.

It took a moment to come and, when it did, at first it was hardly noticeable. From every lit-up window of every silent office, from every glowing street lamp, from every reflected puddle of light and glimpse of passing car headlamp, out of every passage into every subway and from the glimmer of every wing light of every plane passing overhead, it came. At first it was just a bending, a turning,
a twisting. Then it was more, then it was a snaking: coils of silver-cool office light and sodium-orange street lamp curling out like a solid living thing, washing down through the air, writhing along the cobbled streets, tangling around my feet and then rising back up to bubble between my fingers. At first a glow, then a buzz, then a burning, and still the light slithered, cold and silent through the city night, flickering around my neck and hair, running tendrils of brightness down my spine, wrapping like lovers round my calves, until the bubble of light in the palm of my hands was a football of illumination, growing brighter, and brighter, and brighter until…

We saw the face of the bouncer, eyes wide, skin lit up to a glow by the reflection from our bubble of light. His mouth was hanging open, his body locked rigid, unable to comprehend what he saw.

“This is the cool bit,” I explained, and closed my eyes, and slammed my fingers together.