by Kate Griffin
“What kind, sir?” he asked. Always be polite to possible murderers: that was the twenty-four-hour-shopping philosophy.
“Cheapest you’ve got. And the strongest painkillers in the shop.”
The least expensive pack of cigarettes was £5.99. On the back it had a picture of a blackened pair of cancerous lungs. The painkillers’ selling point seemed to be how luminously green and futuristic they were, rather than their chemical content.
“And your Sellotape,” I said.
“What?”
“Sellotape.” A roll of the stuff sat by the till, in a plastic device for easy tearing off.
“This isn’t for sale, sir.”
I leant across the counter. The action set my neck on fire and made my hip tremble. “I’ll give you twenty quid for the Sellotape.”
He answered on instinct. When an offer that good comes along, even the innocent suspect a con. “I’m sorry sir, it’s . . .”
“If you do not give us the Sellotape,” we said through gritted teeth, “you will die. The only question will be whether they kill you, or we do.”
He looked into our eyes. Once upon a time my eyes had been the same darkish brown as my hair. That had been then. They were now the bright blue of a summer sky, and reflective like the eyes of a cat. He pushed the Sellotape across the counter. I pulled out my wallet, and saw that a line of blood had run down my arm and over my fingers. I counted out forty pounds in stained notes, pushed them towards him, scooped up my beer, cigarettes, drugs and Sellotape, and staggered back out into the night. Behind me, he dialled 999. Forty quid doesn’t buy you much these days.
What I needed now was a quiet place to work. I found a narrow alley, that had been transformed into the local recycling station. I sat on top of the plastic jaw of a wheelie-bin and prised the lid off each beer bottle. We took a swig from one, just to make sure it was all right, then upended each bottle and let the contents dribble away. It wouldn’t be long before the spectres smelt it, even in the rain. I set down the emptied bottles and from the cigarette packet I slid out four white sheaths, carefully lighting each one. The flame flickered and spat in the rain, but these things were designed to catch in any weather, and soon gave a dull glow. I dropped a cigarette into each bottle, watching the smoke fill it. The Sellotape I put in my jacket pocket, the end sticking out ready to be peeled and drawn like a gunslinger’s pistol. Then I waited.
I didn’t have to wait long.
Dumdumdumdumdumdumdum
Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chi
Shhshhshhhshha shhhshhhshhhshha shhhshhhshh
Boom boom boom boom-te-boom boom
They came all at once, two from one side, two from the other. It’s only in movies that you get attacked by one person at a time. I gasped between the pain and the shimmering sapphire burning over my eyes, our burning sapphire fire, just waiting for me to let it out, “Hello, sunshines.”
The clothes of two were ragged black tissues draped over empty air, every part the traditional haunting ghosts, except for the headphones. A third had tears down the lower parts of his trousers, great gashes in the shoes on his feet. I slid down from the wheelie-bin as they approached, picking up the nearest beer bottle and giving it a gentle shake, feeling the suction of the air dragged in to feed the dull flame of the cigarette.
I picked the spectre who looked least battered, its grey tracksuit still intact, its head bobbing along to a muffled beat, and staggered up to it.
“Hey man,” I intoned, “like, respect.”
Any magician can tell you words have power.
Any urban sorcerer can tell you the greatest language of power is whatever the other bugger happens to speak.
So as I spoke, the spectre, recognising the beginning of a binding spell, drew back a moment askance, and perhaps, in that non-brain behind that not-face drifting beneath its grey hood, realised what was about to happen. Much too late. We were too angry for repentance now. I drove the open lip of the smoking beer bottle straight into the middle of that empty void, stuck into that thick nothingness like it was a spear and this was war. I think it tried to scream, but the sound was sucked straight into the smoky glass; it raised its hands and clawed at the air, too late, much, much too late, whined and whistled as the essence of its not-being got sucked down into the interior of the beer bottle, and wriggled and writhed. The grey hood on its head began to droop as the non-skull supporting it collapsed and shrivelled inside my glass prison, then the shoulders drooped away, the torso began to flop and flap in the wet wind, the gloves dropped away from wrists too loose to support them, the arms withered down to flat nothings, the trousers dropped from the top and collapsed, the shoes seemed to shrink into themselves.
In a second, barely one second, there was nothing more than a pile of flopping grey clothes on the floor. I stuck my thumb over the mouth of the beer bottle, glancing inside it. The cigarette was still burning bright, as it would burn now for ten thousand years unless some idiot went and smashed it; in the smoke of its interior eddying shapes spun back and forth in indignant distress like an miniature ocean storm caught inside a bottle with its model ship.
The other spectres were nothing if not taken aback. I slapped a seal of Sellotape over the mouth of the bottle and picked up another, flourishing it at them. “Come on!” I said. “You want to spend the next ten thousand years stuck at the bottom of the dumpster?”
They hesitated. “Come on!” we shouted. “If you think that shadows and gloom can really harm us, then do what you will! We have no reason to spare you the consequence!”
Our voice echoed, a muffled whisper in the rain. The remaining spectres began to back away. We laughed, shook the beer bottle with its trapped nothing inside, watched the smoke twist and billow beneath the Sellotape seal, watched the orange cigarette flare angry crimson, and roared after them, “Come on!”
Then they were gone.
Even nothingness, it seems, knows how to keep itself alive.
We stood in the rain on a pavement stained with beer and overflowing with litter, not sure if we were going to laugh, cry, or both. In the event, we did nothing; for all our blustering, we were not about to chase after the spectres and finish the job. They knew how to recognise danger when they saw it. At my feet, a sopping tracksuit lay flopped like the rotting guts from a soothsayer’s ritual, turning black in the rain.
I picked up the bottle I’d pressed into the spectre’s face, pressed my ear against the side, and listened. Imagination playing tricks? From within the glass I thought, perhaps, just perhaps, I could hear . . .
Boom boom boom boom-te-boom boom
I shook the bottle for extra good measure, and slapped a half-centimetre thickness of Sellotape over its smoky lips. As I did, I noticed blood had seeped through the bandages on my right hand, and was dribbling into the sticky recesses of my sleeve. The thought that I needed help made us want to cry, like a shameful child.
I went in search of a night bus from nowhere-everywhere to somewhere else.
We figured we’d work out where on the way.
* * *
The bus was a double-decker that advertised itself as being able to seat 36 passengers in the lower saloon, 48 in the upper saloon, and 23 standing. It made no reference to whether you could get a drink in the “saloon”, or if there’d be a man playing the piano.
There were two passengers on the bottom deck, three on the upper. The driver, when I got on, said, “Jesus!”
We pressed our hand over the slash below our collarbone. “What?” we snapped.
“You OK, mate?”
“No,” we replied. “You going somewhere or not?”
“I can call . . .”
“No.”
He shrugged. Night-bus drivers learn not to take too keen an interest. “Sure. Whatever.”
I had a travelcard. Druids say there is no greater wand of power than a unicorn’s horn given willingly to the supplicant. In the city, there is no greater wand of power than a Zone 1-6 tr
avelcard. It is freedom to go anywhere and see anything, and all it costs is a large chunk of your income. Then again, a unicorn’s horn usually involved quests and battling ancient demons, so the changing times weren’t all bad. I pressed my travelcard to the reader, which beeped appreciatively; the driver had the good manners not to look surprised. I half fell up the stairs, and sat down heavily in the back row. The back of the top deck is the naughty seat, where the kids sit to curse and swear when school gets let out. The floor was sticky with spilt beer and scattered with a liberal handful of greasy thin chips made of 40 per cent potato. Yesterday’s half-read paper lay on every third bench, the sudoku finished, the corners torn.
I knew if I lay down across the back seats, I’d never get up again. I shuffled into the darkest, dimmest corner, pressed my head against the cold of the glass, and watched my blue-eyed, grey-faced reflection watch the street as it passed by in a pulse of rippling streetlights and illuminated ads. I fumbled painkillers out of their packet and swallowed them with the last mouthful of spit I could muster, pressed my fingers harder against the folds of my bleeding chest, and watched.
At the very front of the bus, a young couple, probably not out of their teens, sat hand in hand, politely not kissing each other and desperate in their discreet silence to do so. On the seat above the stair, where you can watch all the passengers come and go, sat a guy with close-shaven hair revealing the white lines of a dozen scars on his skull. Fresh stitches were sewn into his neck, where a short and well-placed knife had tried for the jugular vein. A scorpion was tattooed onto his temple, and beneath the sleeves of his denim jacket protruded the ends of a dozen more tattoos besides. We wanted to ask if the scorpion had hurt when the needles went into his temple, who’d saved his life with the stitches in the neck and why so many scars on such a young face. Tattoos in that quantity meant jailbird.
Lights rose and fell across the rain-obscured blur of our vision. A cemetery rolled by, darkness behind closed, sombre walls. Empty wet football pitches for the local amateur team, floodlights still on, endless railway lines over which slow goods trains creaked and clattered on their night-time journeys; depots and working yards and goods yards and storage yards and open spaces for broken-down cars and, taller than the local council blocks, piles of shattered metal and torn-up engines. We were heading towards the sprawl of White City, where flyovers vied with tower blocks and the BBC as to which could be uglier. It’s easy to get lost in White City: shallow streets of identical, anonymous houses merge beneath a roaring motorway; great shopping malls squat above video shops and haberdashers specialising in the sari; council estates leer down at genteel terraced backstreets where media executives plot to steal their neighbour’s precious parking space. North and south play cunning, curving tricks on the unwary traveller, and navigation by a sense of style is nearly impossible. They give White City its own edgy magic, that ebbs and flows with uneasy irregularity, daring you to tap into a thick fist of here, only to have it vanish into a silken vapour two streets away. It was a magic of brick and neon, of solid and insubstantial matter mingling, as if life had forgotten how to make the distinction.
White City.
Whites.
And whether we liked it or not, there was blood seeping into our clothes, and I needed help.
So, since the bus was headed in that direction anyway, I went in search of the Long White City clan.
* * *
I do not know how the Long White City clan came to be founded. To find the answer to that would require a history of graffiti that I never came to grips with, since it is in the nature of the art that no one keeps an official log except the police, and they don’t like to talk about it much.
What I do know is that sometime in the late 1960s, it was observed by those who bother to keep track of such things that a mutual collective of painters and magicians were coming together in the area of London known as White City, and between them practising a new and interesting form of magic. It was the Whites, more than any other group, who pioneered research into the new symbols of magic that were emerging with the urban evolution of the craft. The pentangle star was rejected in favour of the red “stop” octagon as a symbol of power; mystic runes in the Viking style were swept away in favour of the scrawled loop of silver paint plastered across an open wall. It was discovered that it was cheaper to paint a gargoyle protector than to commission one in marble, and that they served roughly the same end; it was realised that the image of a great eye painted at the end of Platform 14 of Clapham Junction station was a scrying tool of infinitely more value than your traditional bowl of silver water, and that nothing bound as effectively as a double red parking line burnt chemically into the earth. It was realised that those who found magic in the words and pictures drawn in the night would be better off as a whole if they stuck together.
So the Whites came into existence, as a rag-tag formation of egoists, magicians, artists and all-purpose mystic dabblers, donating to a common union. I have some time for their methods, since only a fool denies the power of what they do, but generally my interest has been elsewhere.
The development of a new “mega-mall” in White City forced the majority of the clan to seek housing somewhere else. A war with the Tower, which at one time was the single most powerful mystic body in the city, drove them underground into the old tunnels of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange. That had been in Mr Bakker’s day; the bad old days of living shadows, dead sorcerers and broken promises. It was a war that had killed me before I even knew it had started. When we had come back, I and us, we and me, together in the same flesh, we fought back. Mr Bakker had died. So had his shadow. So had . . .
. . . others.
Mortals died so easily.
The ending of the war brought the Whites above ground again, albeit in smaller numbers than before. That the war ended and they survived had more than a little to do with us; we hoped they’d remember that tonight.
I looked for the signs.
An empty spray-paint can tossed onto the top of a bus shelter.
A painted elephant on the side of a house, playing a large trombone whose nose pointed further south.
A wall with four windows added onto it and a front door, from which a child with a red balloon peeked towards the nearest bus stop.
I changed buses.
A message scratched into the glass window of the bus — END OF THE LINE.
Not one from the Whites; they knew that such a message could be a threat, as well as an instruction. I ignored it.
A rat on the side of a green telephone router box, holding in its painted claws a tin of peanut butter, a knife dripping with a compromising yellow blob of the stuff, tip pointed towards the west.
I stayed on the bus.
A post standing up taller than the houses, laden with CCTV cameras, onto which a single white hand mark had been pressed in indelible paint. Another white hand a few doors down, and then more, getting more regular in succession until a school wall covered in a thousand multicoloured hand prints, of which only one was white, a single finger extended and pointing towards a door.
I got off the bus.
My head was the inside of a tumble-dryer, my throat the pipe for hot air. Someone was feeding old socks bound together with static in and out of me through the tear in my chest. My hands were the burning wires through which electric current flowed, my knees were the wobbly suspension springs on which the whole rumbling construction churned.
There was a door between an organic health food shop selling pink crystal lamps in its dark windows and a betting shop selling poor odds on bad investments. There was no name above it, no sign beside it. Just a solid metal door locked shut in a row of padlocked shops. A tiger was painted on it, leaping out of the framework with jaws gaping and eyes wild with fury. I stared at it, it stared at me, frozen for ever in its leap. It’s easy to think that the eyes of a painting are staring just at you. In this case, they were.
I hammered on the door.
Ther
e was no answer.
I hammered harder.
Above me, a window slid back and a voice called out in the melodramatic whispered-shout of all good neighbours out to disturb the peace, “Who’s there?”
I stepped back onto the pavement to see the speaker better, but could only see the shadowed silhouette of a woman against a wash of white neon.
“I’m here for Vera!” I called back in the same quiet-loud call of the night-time streets.
“Who?”
“I’m Swift! Matthew Swift!”
“So?”
“I need help!”
“I don’t know you!”
“Tell Vera it’s Swift!”
“Fuck off!”
Our stomach was a vat in which old bones were dissolved for glue. Each cell of blood in our body had grown little centipede legs that tickled and crawled along the inside of our veins.
I said again, “I need help.”
“Go to the fucking police!”
“I’m a sorcerer . . .”
“Yeah, right.”
So we looked up at her and said, “We are the angels. Help me.”
And the darkness in the window hesitated. We raised our hand towards her and let the blood trickle between our fingers, and as it flowed, it wriggled and wormed, coherent rivers of red breaking away into fat liquid maggots on our skin that writhed and hissed off each other, burning cold blue electricity over our flesh. “We are . . .” we called through gritted teeth, as the light of our blood turned our face electric blue, “. . . we are the blue electric angels. Please — help me.”
The woman in the window said, “Crap.”
The door opened.
We went inside.
The door led to steps, the steps led to a basement.
The basement was a club. The walls were painted with dancing people, most of whom were wearing very little clothing.