by Kate Griffin
They were frozen on every wall and across every counter, stretched out over every pillar and rippling up onto the ceiling. The place stank of paint, magic, beer, smoke and sweat. A few hours earlier, these pictures would have danced with all the rest; the floor was stained with a thousand prints set in paint of high heel, trainer, loafer, boot, sandal and every kind of shoe that knew how to party. Some of the marks were still wet, and as we walked, our shoes — not our shoes, no, not quite — left blue footprints across the floor. Up was trying to be down, colour was trying to be sound, sound was trying to be sense, all things playing tricks, the painkillers nothing more than a cobweb through which the pain slashed.
The bouncer who met me at the bottom of the stairs had skin turned almost purple with the weight of tattoos on it. Unlike the tattoos of the jailbird on the bus, these stank of raw, sweaty power burnt into the skin. He looked me over in the half-gloom of the silent, stinking club floor and said, “This way.”
I followed him without a word behind the bar to another metal door guarded this time by a furious polar bear whose fanged teeth dribbled silver saliva that rolled as I watched down his flat frozen skin, and whose eyes never left mine. The door led into a corridor whose walking space was 80 per cent empty beer bottle. White strip lighting hummed and buzzed irritatingly overhead. The corridor led to an office, all leather sofa and important desk, cluttered with empty coffee mugs and more abandoned bottles. The bouncer pointed at the sofa and said, “There,” and I obeyed, sticking my legs up over one arm and my head back over the other. More painkillers. From where I lay I could see a brass-covered coffee machine, a photo of some minor celebrity whose name I couldn’t remember, and a monolith-sized chunk of concrete. I didn’t need to smell the power coming from it to guess what it was — magicians of every generation have always collected artefacts of power. I wondered how much the Whites had paid, or if they’d paid at all. Pieces of the Berlin Wall fetched a good price, these days, and for good reasons, although very few people appreciated what they really were.
There were pieces of slogans still visible on the wall. A remnant of:
—ISTIAN LIEBE FAMK—
Or:
GEBEN SIE MIR MEINEN HU—
Or a sad half-remnant of the CND logo, framed in flowers.
I crawled to the end of the sofa, unable to resist my curiosity despite the fire cha-chaing up my nervous system and the ice weighing the rest down. I reached out to touch the concrete, brushed my fingers over a dozen layers of bright paint, tasted . . . grey dust in the mouth, empty tightness in the belly, neon popping in the ears, crashing delight at the back of the neck, burning heaviness at the ends of the fingers, blue sadness behind the eyes — mostly just sadness, so deep and big you could fall for ever and never even notice you were heading down. The man who owned this particular artefact didn’t need spells to protect him. A whiff of this magic and grown assassins would just sigh away.
I drew my fingers away. I heard the door open behind me in the sense that when he spoke, I was not surprised; but I did not listen to the sound until he actually said: “You like it?”
We didn’t take our eyes from the concrete.
“Yes.”
“Four and a half thousand euros. You believe that? Four and a half fucking thousand euros for a piece of concrete with some paint on. Best buy I ever made. Drink?”
Wrenching my eyes away was like turning away from the dying man who’s just asked you for help. I looked at the man who’d entered the room. He was young, trying to look older than he was by cutting his hair so thin it bordered on the bald, growing grizzle but no beard and wearing carefully aged and scuffed black leather. He leant on the end of his desk with the casual air of a guy who’s seen everything and, while impressed by nothing, is still prepared to be amused by it. We disliked him instinctively.
I said, “I need Vera.”
“You’re Swift, right?”
“Yes. I need to see Vera.”
“She’s kinda busy at five in the morning, you know? How can I help?” His smile was like the spinning mirrored whiteness of the disco ball.
“You can get me Vera.”
“You look sorta crappy, gotta tell you.”
“Help me. I need . . . I need a doctor. I need Vera.”
“I thought that Matthew Swift was like, you know, tough.”
“I’m not tough,” I replied through gritted teeth. “I’m lucky. I’m so lucky that I can be killed by a shadow on the streets and come back without a scar on my skin. I’m so damn lucky that when I hear a telephone ring, I have to answer it and it’s always for me, always. I’m so lucky I can be attacked by a pack of spectres and walk away with all my limbs attached. I’m so lucky that I am we and we are me, and I’ve gotta tell you, we could rip your eyes out and feed them to you right now and forget in the morning that we were even here. You think you’re that lucky? Now get me Vera!”
He made the telephone call while I watched.
It went:
“Hey, yeah, sorry about the time, it’s . . . yeah, before you . . . just listen . . . no, I’ve got this guy here . . . says his name is Swift . . . what? Uh . . . blue. Bright blue. Yeah. No, pretty bad way. Like . . . you know . . . blood. Sure. Sure. Yeah, sure thing. No, I’ll . . . yeah . . . I’ll let him know.”
That was it.
Her name was Vera.
She was the almost properly elected head of the Whites. Almost properly, because it was generally agreed that if there was an election, she’d win, so what was the point of testing it?
She owed me.
She owed us.
She was one of the only people in London who knew that when the death certificate said I’d died, it hadn’t gone into enough of the details.
The clock on the wall said 5.45 a.m. when she turned up. She was wearing a big puffer coat twice the width and nearly all the height of her small body, and having a bad hair day. A pair of bright green leather boots vanished inside the silver iceberg of her coat, and a pair of pink mittens covered her fingers. She took one look at me and said, “Jesus, you look shit.”
I said, “I’ve been attacked.”
“Know who did it?”
“No.”
“Kill them?”
“Got one of them in a beer bottle,” I replied.
“You kidding me.”
“No,” I said, and then, because it was 5.45 a.m. and we hadn’t slept for far, far too long, and every part of us hurt and bled and ached and was burnt and dirty and stuck to its own clothes with dribbling blood, we started to laugh.
They bundled me into a car. It was a surprisingly boring car, for the head of the Whites — a trundling little Volkswagen with the charisma of a dry blister. Vera drove, rushing to beat the early morning traffic as we raced through deserted streets.
I said, “I need a safe place. Just a safe place where we can recover . . .”
“It’s fine, I know.”
“I need a doctor . . .”
“It’s being sorted.”
“. . . someone who won’t report to the police . . . no records . . .”
“I know, I know. It’s being taken care of.”
Pink neon lights rising, falling, rising, falling. The rain had eased off into drizzle. The streets were a perfect black mirror reflecting every detail of the lights above. Office lights left on for the night glowed empty white squares on the dark sides of the buildings, men in blue caps were drawing back the gates of the Underground stations. The wheels of Vera’s speeding car threw up great sheets of water from the blocked drains in the sides of the street, spattering dirty brown stains onto the clean windows of the passing shops. In the kitchen windows of the early stirrers, lights were starting to come on, women in thick dressing gowns and furry slippers turning on the kettles, men shivering in their pyjamas scuttling for the heating. The first post vans of the day were rumbling through the streets, to deliver recorded packages and special parcels to the lucky few who merited their attention; outside the hotels
, the international tourists going to catch the first flights of the day hurried to waiting taxis. We wanted to sleep; but by now we were too tired to stop our thoughts.
White City became Shepherd’s Bush, a big roundabout leading to everywhere and anywhere, on which sat a large, long-dead barometer, or thermometer, or whatever it had been designed as before the money ran out. Some time, a thousand years ago, there was probably a shepherd who had a bush on this roundabout. Now there were subways and traffic lights and purple-brown hotels with mirrored square windows to admire it all from.
Shepherd’s Bush became Bayswater, Bayswater rapidly became posh — big houses fit for a king and his servants, divided up into apartments fit for barons and their heirs, great trees hundreds of years old whose bare branches drooped twiny fingers between the yellow streetlamps. We followed the course of the Central Line running beneath the street and, as we drove, I could feel the whispered magics of the city changing, growing from that early-morning lull into a rushing, buzzing, humming rise as the city began to wake up for another day, hear it pushing inside my chest and running through my blood, a burst of energy that I didn’t want and couldn’t use but, even then, made me smile. Bayswater became Paddington, a maze of streets too tight for the uses they were put to, in which seedy hotels where you paid by the hour mingled with the mansions of the great and the squats of the passers-by. Those few mansions that had fallen victim to the war had been replaced with council apartments, but they were few and far between, and polite mews between grand, whitewashed houses still peeked their cobbled noses out into the paving stones.
The sun wasn’t yet up. All of London seems surprised, when winter comes, how little sun there is — day crawls its embarrassed way into existence sometime between seven-thirty and eight, when most of the city is underground or too zonked to notice, and then waves its good-byes around the 3.30 meetings, when most of the city is too busy working to realise the day has gone. Winter seems to last for ever, if it is measured by the staying power of the sun.
Vera parked in a residential bay in front of a white house on a neat white street of houses that could only have been in Paddington. She unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. I unbuckled mine, put my hand on the door handle and found it slipped off, leaving an ugly swipe of blood. Vera opened the door on my side and helped me out. My legs were a long way off, and somewhere between me and them there was a satellite delay. She slung my arm over her shoulders and walked me like a granddad up the stairs to the black front door of the white building, groped in her pocket for a set of keys, found one, opened the door. The corridor inside was all echoing tile and bare walls. A lift the size of a fat man’s coffin was at the far end. It climbed upwards like it resented the service, discharged us onto the third floor. Another black door, another set of keys. An apartment, furnished in plywood and polyester straight from Ikea, no pictures on the wall, nothing to mark it out as individual except on the inside of the door, where someone with a spray can had painted a giant picture of a lollipop lady, hat drawn down over her eyes, sign turned to “stop”. The Whites understand how to paint a good protective ward.
There was a sitting room that was also a kitchen, a bathroom with barely room enough to fit the bath, and a bedroom, mattress without any sheets. Vera didn’t bother to offer any, but deposited me straight down on the bed. There were thin net curtains across the window that filtered out the shape of the streetlamps outside while letting in all their yellow light, that stretched great shadows across the floor and up the wall.
I stammered, “Doctor . . .”
She said gently, “There’s one coming.”
I nodded, then let my head fall back on the mattress and closed my eyes, not bothering to peel away my ragged clothes.
“Jesus, Matthew,” muttered Vera. “What the hell happened?”
“Attacked,” I stumbled. “Attacked. A phone rang and I answered and . . . and it burnt me. I hit my head. A phone rang and . . . then creatures came. They came for us. It rang for us. I just need a safe place . . .”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” she said.
Or perhaps we imagined it.
We closed our eyes.
* * *
Dawn was grey and sullen.
Whoever was pulling the watch off my wrist did so by the light of a lamp by my bedside. The plastic made a sound like velcro as it peeled away from my flesh. I opened my eyes. Vera stood at the end of the bed, drinking a mug of coffee. On the mug someone had written “I ♥ London” in large pink letters. With her duffle coat off, underneath I saw that Vera was still wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. We felt the sudden and odd urge to cry.
Seeing our eyes open, Vera said, “Go.”
It turned out not to be directed at me.
A sudden searing agony indicated that the target audience had done as commanded, and ripped, like a plaster from flesh, the burnt remnants of the watch from my wrist. A thousand pinpricks of blood welled to the surface, and we looked away, sickened at the sight.
“Cool,” said a voice by my left ear.
I risked a glance at its owner.
The creature of torment who had pulled my watch free was roughly the same height as her stethoscope would be, if it was unwrapped to its full length. She had a round, cheerful face, short dark hair that somehow managed to be both straight and bouncy at the same time, and a casually merry attitude towards my distress that marked her out immediately as a member of the medical profession. I half-recognised her. She said, “Have you been getting into shit or what?”
“I know you,” I breathed.
“Really? You know, that happens to me a lot.”
She opened a bag. There were things in there that only a genius with no moral compass could have invented. She pulled out a syringe. Perspective plays tricks on things that are going to happen to you: a three-inch syringe when it’s intended for someone else’s arteries is just a three-inch syringe. When it’s coming for you, it’s a foot long and gleaming.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Vera answered. “This is Dr Seah. You can trust her.”
“You can’t . . .” I began.
Dr Seah knew the sound of a refusal when she heard one, and knew that the only way to get round these things, was to ignore them before they could become admissible in court. She slid the needle into the skin of my exposed elbow vein without a sound, and pushed. We half imagined we’d see our arteries pop as whatever was in there rushed into our body; they didn’t. “Hold,” said Dr Seah briskly, putting a piece of cotton wool over the entry point. Vera held it.
“What did you give us?” we whispered.
“It’ll help with the pain. Well . . . in a way. Well, put it like this — you’re less likely to remember the pain afterwards, which is sort of like the same thing if you’re not too hung up on semantics, right?”
“There’s . . . I was attacked,” I said. “I was attacked, they found me, I picked up the phone and then they came for me, they found me before, they might find me, I need to stay, to be . . .”
“You’re as safe as you’re going to be here,” answered Vera. “If they find you here, they’ll find you anywhere, and at least then they can throttle you quickly with your own body parts before you bleed to death.”
Drugs straight into the vein. I found it hard to raise my head, heard my own words as if they were being hummed through water, felt my lips, huge and someone else’s, flopping fat as I tried to speak.
Fingers that had been trained how to heal on plastic dolls that couldn’t scream poked the slash down from my collarbone. “You’re a lucky guy,” said Dr Seah at last. “Long and shallow. Looks bad, but from a medical point of view, completely nah.”
“Yeah,” I croaked. “I’m just lucky.”
“Ever had morphine?”
“They gave it to me once. It made me feel sick.”
“Yeah, I know, crazy like that, isn’t it? Hey, Vera, can I ask you to put some more water on the boil?”
“You need it for cleaning?” asked Vera with the enthusiasm of someone already anticipating the gratitude.
“Cuppa tea,” was the reply.
As answers went, this was disappointing for the almost properly elected head of the Whites, who strutted from the room with the cool manner of someone far too sensible not to be of use, but who was not used to menial.
Dr Seah waited until she was gone, then leant in close. “Well, what do you want, good news or shiny news?”
Since we weren’t entirely sure what “shiny” news was, we went for the good news first. “You’ll live,” she said.
“Terrific,” I mumbled with a tongue made from sodden sponge.
“Want to know the shiny part?”
“Sure.”
“Apart from this” — fingers of steel prodded the slash down my chest, a thousand miles away from my watching brain — “you’re OK. You’re going to need stitches, and while it’d be just so sexy to put you under for that, you kinda need anaesthesiologists and guys with the paddles and you know, things that go ‘ping’ to do a general anaesthetic, so I’m going to do it on local, and it’s going to hurt like ten kinds of buggery. There’s a few odd burns here or there, but they’ll just make you look ugly for a while and I figure, hell, you’re a big guy, you can handle it. The cut on the back of your head is nasty, but keep it clean and tidy and the worst thing that’ll happen is a bit of premature grey and a few banged-up brain cells. The only thing I’m not totally zoomy on is this.”
It took a while to realise she was holding up the beetroot lump of my right hand.
“Uh?”
“I mean, I totally get that you’ve been electrocuted in the last few hours, like, totally. And you know, like I said, if life was shiny I’d have you wired to a heart monitor right now in case anything went pop.”
“Heard of bedside manner?” I growled.
“Sure,” she said briskly. “But I figure, you know, fuck it. But see, there’s this.”
She raised my hand closer to my face so I could see. At first I didn’t understand the problem; the beetroot looked slightly better cooked and less raw than it had a few hours ago, and some of the swelling even seemed to be on the retreat. Then it occurred to me: even in bad cases, electrocution rarely causes bleeding.