by Kate Griffin
The blood, then, that had stained my right sleeve had come from something else. The something, almost lost in the folds of my puffed-up skin, was a thin red cross, carved with a scalpel into the palm of my hand.
We squeaked, “What did you do to us?!”
“Who, me? I didn’t do this!”
“We didn’t . . . it isn’t . . .”
“You’re telling me you didn’t notice that someone’s played Christian symbolism with your hand?” she asked. “You know, if you’re into self-harm then, seriously, don’t.”
“We did not do this, this was not there before . . . until . . . there was nothing there until we answered the phone!”
“Yeah. Now, while every case is, like, unique, I gotta tell you, electrocution by telephone leading to the appearance of a cross carved in the palm of the victim’s hand is unusual even for central London. You seriously have no idea how it got there?”
I hadn’t said that. I didn’t want to think about that. “Hide it,” we whispered. “Do what you have to do. Please.”
“Why do you want . . .?”
“Just do it! Please!”
Dr Seah hesitated, and for a moment there was something on her face that shouldn’t have been there, deep, and serious, and a little bit sad, a sinking of features that were built to smile. Then she shrugged, beamed, showing bright white teeth in a face the colour of hot chocolate on a summer’s night, and said, “Like, whatever.”
She bandaged up my right hand. Whatever drug she’d shot into our veins was now playing games with the ceiling, pushing it slowly up and letting it fall again so low that it almost bumped our nose. We had never felt so degraded. But the drug helped keep us calm, keep us still and made our feelings of rage seem more like a distant story, in which I would tell a childish me, sitting on my lap, of a man who’d been given a drug and who was in pain, in a land far, far away.
We do not handle pain bravely. When she started on the stitches, we looked the other way, and as the needle slid into flesh, we pushed our face into the pillow to hide the tears. Not so much of pain, but at the thought of pain, at the idea of what might be there, but which wasn’t actually except in the churnings of our imagination, worse than any truth. I bit our lip and recited ancient pointless things: song lyrics, shopping lists, bus routes, road junctions, declining verbs in exotic languages, anything to keep our thoughts away from our flesh and wandering in some mundane cage of artificial words and numbers.
Sleep, when it was all done, came easily. Real pain became a foggy memory, a comforting teddy bear that we held to our side like an old and familiar friend.
We slept.
When I woke, it was dark outside. The streetlamp outside the window could have glowed at any hour, but the sounds gave a more precise time. I could hear the distant swish of traffic, too heavy for the deepest part of the night, and from the far end of the street, the sound of a pub, which with each opening and closing of the door turned out gossip and music onto the street in a slow, fading roll. With my eyes fixed upon the slow curve of passing car headlights across the ceiling, I had no more desire to sleep; but neither did I feel the need to get up. So I lay on the bare mattress, stained with smudges of my blood that turned our stomach to look at, and assessed. My right hand was an igloo all in cotton wrapping, my left shoulder and a good part of my chest a shirt-load of bandages. The back of my scalp had been cleaned of blood and disinfected, but the rest of me still bore much of the stain of the previous night, my skin feeling two inches thicker than its natural depth. My tongue was a stiff leather slab in my mouth, my stomach a shrivelled hollow.
These discomforts were at first almost interesting novelties, but rapidly became an itching fury until at last, with a hiss of frustration, I swung my legs over the side of the bed.
On the bedside table were two bottles, one containing pills, the other liquid. A note said, “←THIS one for the pain, →THIS one to clean injuries. Seriously, don’t get them confused. M. Seah.”
There weren’t any other instructions. She gave me more credit for intelligence than I felt I merited.
I looked for my belongings. I was still in my trousers and socks, but my shoes — or rather, not my shoes, merely the shoes I’d been wearing — had been put at the end of the bed along with my coat. My jumper and shirt were nowhere to be seen, nor was my satchel. I staggered from the bedroom into the blinding light of the living room next door, where Vera sat on a dust-covered sofa, eating prawn crackers from a plastic bag and watching TV. She didn’t hear me enter, and as I tried to think of something to say I watched a dozen faces that the audience seemed to think I ought to know, learning how to sing and dance operatic numbers on ice while judges, who again I was supposed to recognise, hurled abuse at the weeping celebrities.
When I spoke, I was as surprised as Vera. I said, “Thank you.”
She jumped, spilling prawn crackers across the sofa, then stood up, pretending it hadn’t happened and glaring as if she dared me to say a word. “Yeah, sure. Hi. You’re up, then.”
“Thank you,” I repeated.
“Gotcha. And you’re welcome, I think. You look sorta crap.” She’d been trying to find something nicer to say.
“Is there a bathroom?”
“Yeah. You need fingers like a safe-breaker to get the hot water to work, and there’s no soap, but there’s a bathroom.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I know. Thank you for that too.”
“Get on before I get all slushy. You want food?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Dr Seah said you were to drink at least two litres of water when you got up, to make up for the stuff you lost when you were attacked . . . Matthew?”
“Yes?”
“About being attacked. We should probably talk. Get cleaned up first. I’ll stick something in the microwave.”
Vera had told no lies about the bathroom. The tap was sensitive to the lightest touch; a breath was the difference between arctic death and fiery combustion. When the neighbour two doors down turned on their shower, the water pressure dropped to a sulky trickle; when they turned it off, it exploded in scalding steam.
I struggled to clean myself with my left hand while keeping both my right hand and most of the bandaging out of harm’s way. I dressed in suspiciously stained towels that smelt of fresh detergent and, poking my head round the door, said, “What happened to my clothes?”
“Disgusting,” Vera’s voice floated back. “A few more days and they’d have started talking. Men have no idea how hard it is to get blood out of clothes, and frankly, it’s not worth my time.”
“Say, no clothes?”
“I left some stuff under the counter. It’s too big for you, but so’s your shoes.”
It wasn’t yet the right time to explain about the shoes. I thanked her and rummaged around until I found the clothes she was talking about. In them I felt like an escapee from a children’s cartoon, all cuff and trailing trouser leg, but at least they were clean.
Food was reheated Chinese takeaway. It was a meal designed to cause stomach cramps. We had never tasted such divinity and, when we thought Vera wasn’t looking, ran our finger round the edge of the plate and licked sauce off our fingers. Vera was silent throughout the meal. She waited until a second after my plate had touched the table to say: “So. Attacked.”
I rolled my shoulder and felt the tightness of my stitches as the muscles stretched beneath my collarbone; I flexed my fingers and felt the taut hotness of that bright red cross carved into my skin, burning beneath the bandages. Not an unpleasant burning. Drugs and fire kept it interesting, alive, rather than the pure pain that dumbs all else.
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
She went straight in with the priorities. “Will your attacker come here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think they’re capable of coming here?”
“Maybe.”
“Do t
hey know about your connection with me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Am I or any of my people at risk for helping you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“All right. What do you know?”
I thought about it long and hard. “Nothing,” I said finally. “Absolutely nothing.”
“I think I deserve more than that.”
“I swear — nothing. I don’t know who, I don’t know why, I don’t even know how. I know that a phone rang, I answered, and the next thing the sky was doing backflips. I know that some time after that, a pack of spectres came hunting and will probably not come looking for me again.”
“Why not?”
“I caught one. They know that I know how. Spectres aren’t stupid.”
“You ‘caught’ a spectre?”
I suppose I should have been flattered by the flat disbelief in Vera’s voice. It wasn’t that she thought I was a liar. She just knew enough about spectres.
“In a beer bottle,” I added for technical clarification.
“Really. Can I see this beer bottle?”
“It’s in my bag.”
She vanished into the bedroom and reappeared a second later with my satchel held out at the end of her arm as if it might start to tick. She put it at my feet. I opened it up and pulled out the beer bottle. The cigarette still burnt sullen inside.
Vera took the bottle gingerly between her fingertips.
I said, “Listen to it.”
She obeyed, holding it up to her ear. I saw her eyes widen. “Christ,” she muttered. “You captured a ghost that’s into heavy metal.”
I took it back from her, put it reverentially on the table between us. “Yeah — don’t open it in a hurry,” I said. “Spectres aren’t known for their humour.”
“Why a beer bottle?”
“Why put a genie in a lamp?” I asked.
“Don’t give me the whole metaphor bollocks. I asked a simple technical question.”
“And got a simple technical answer. You use the container most appropriate. A lamp is a precious thing that grants illumination. A beer bottle is . . . well . . . not. I hate to get all sociopolitical on you . . .”
“Please don’t.”
“. . . but there’s something to the theory that you can drown anything at the bottom of a beer bottle. Even if there isn’t something to the theory, enough people believe it so that there is.”
“Deep.”
“You asked.”
“I was being funny and sarcastic. I can do both.” She sighed, eyes not leaving the bottle. “Spectres aren’t stupid,” she said at length. “And they don’t go around attacking without reason either. You think they went after you specifically?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe in coincidence. The telephone rang and . . .”
“Yeah, what’s up with you and the telephone? I would have thought, what with, you know, you being you . . . blue electric angels, gods of the telephone, song in the wire, fire, light, life, static interference with knobs on made flesh, Swift and the angels and so on and so forth — and now you’re scowling?”
“It was a trap,” we muttered; and saying it, we realised we were angry. “It was a trap designed specifically for us. We hear a telephone ring on an empty road in the middle of the night and we’ll answer it, we’d always answer it, and it would always find us. We are . . . it’s part of what we are. Someone used the telephone to target us. The telephone rang and of course we answered. Then they attacked us down the telephone, and sent spectres to finish us off.”
“Who ‘they’?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Which you?” Her voice didn’t change as she asked the question. Nor did her eyes leave the bottle to observe our face, which was full of surprise.
“I suppose . . .” I mumbled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter to you,” she corrected. “You’ll end up dead regardless of which you ‘they’ were after. But it might matter to ‘them’. Some guy wants to blaze electric fire across the sky, then there’s no point just attacking Matthew Swift, but there’d sure be some credit to the notion of going after the blue electric angels. On the other hand, if some girl is pissed off that Matthew Swift ditched her at a party, then, sure, she might try and hurt him, and the blue electric angels will get caught in the crossfire. Just because you happen to be both entities inhabiting the same brain and the same body, it doesn’t mean other people are going to respect the difference. So the question is . . . did whoever sent the spectres and dialled the telephone want to hurt Matthew Swift, or the electric angels? Or both at once, since you are now, technically, the same?”
“A question we’ll ask,” we replied, “when we meet ‘them’.”
Silence. Then Vera said, “Why are your shoes too big?”
“It’s complicated. I was looking for someone.”
“And that meant you had to wear big shoes?”
“This pair helped, yes.”
“Who were you looking for?”
“Just a kid.”
“You think he attacked you?”
“No. He wouldn’t know how. Summoning spectres, attacking through a telephone, these things are complicated.”
“Yeah,” sighed Vera. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re not talking any nitwit doing these things to you. If you’d asked me a few years ago, I’d have said ‘sorcerer’ hands down. Summoning the monsters, sending fire down the phones — it all stinks of serious magic. But the sorcerers are either dead or mad, except you, and you’re hardly the purest example of the kind. Which leads to the question, who or what else could be after you?”
“The old sorcerers are dead,” I replied. “Doesn’t mean new ones can’t take their places.”
“You taught any newbies how to summon spectres lately?”
I shook my head.
“See? It takes clout and experience to do these things. Some random sparking kid isn’t going to hack it. Who’s this kid you were looking for anyway?”
“Just a kid.”
“Is that it?”
“Pretty much. I made a promise that I’d help — he’s nothing special.”
“OK. You should know.”
Silence a while. I felt groggy again, fat on food and sluggish from the warmth. My skin tingled in a warning of imminent pins and needles. I hugged my knees to my chest, put my chin on them and watched the shadow of the bare trees outside moving across the glow of the streetlights. “What time is it?” I asked.
“Nineish. You slept deep.”
“I am grateful . . .”
“Matthew?”
There was something in her voice. It was a high breath that had rolled out despite itself, a push all at once through a clamped-up throat. I looked round, to find her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Matthew,” she said again, firmer, getting control. “Matthew Matthew Matthew,” she added with a sigh.
“Vera?”
“You believe in coincidence, Matthew? You believe . . . things like this are unconnected?”
“No.”
“No,” she said at last. “Me neither.”
I waited for something more, but by now her gaze was locked, fascinated, upon the ceiling and there was no turning it away. I said, “I’ll be gone in the morning.”
“You think that’s smart?”
“The doctor gave me painkillers.”
“I think she may have mentioned something about taking it easy too.”
“Someone attacked us,” we replied. “We are going to find them.”
“Sure,” she sighed, rubbing the back of her neck with one pale hand. “‘Course you are. Sure.”
She turned the TV back on. There was something more that she’d wanted to say, but she didn’t seem to have the inclination to say it any more, and I was too tired to press her.
I went back to bed.
Through the bedroom door I could hear Vera’s voice, a series of mumbled sounds and shapes on the air. I rolled stiffly out of bed, padded to the door, listened. I don’t know why I listened. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but paranoia was what tied it up in a sack and buried it in wet concrete.
I heard Vera say, “Yeah. Yeah, I know. Didn’t tell him yet. He’s in a bad way . . . Look, I know how it seems, but I don’t believe that he . . . no, don’t do that. No. It’s just his word for it, and the spectre in the bottle. You ever see him summon a spectre, it sound like his style? Don’t give me that bollocks. For Christ’s sake, I don’t believe that for a minute — look, the guy seems genuinely freaked, I don’t think this is the right time to . . . yeah. Yeah, I know. Look, I’ll . . . if you must. But they won’t like it. You say that, you haven’t met them yet. I swear to God, if there wasn’t a fucking sorcerer still in that skin, they’d have ripped the city apart just for kicks. No, that doesn’t mean . . . yeah. I understand. You know where to go? OK then. Bye.”
She hung up.
I slunk back deeper into the shadow of my room, and heard her footsteps approaching the door. Quickly, instinctively, like a child about to be caught reading in the dark, we rolled back into bed, putting our back to the door and forcing ourself to take slow, steady breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. A spike of light spilled over us and up the opposite wall as Vera opened the door, looked in, then closed it again. We counted to ten and sat back up, looking round at the empty neon-washed gloom. Paranoia seems more reasonable when you’ve got twelve stitches in your side. I looked around for my bag and coat, not necessarily with the intent of leaving, not yet; just to have the comfort of them there, with their supplies. My coat was drooped over the end of the bed. Some kindly pair of fingers had even stitched the slash in its fabric back together with bright red thread. My shoes, two sizes too big, were by the bedroom door. On a chair lay a huge green jumper with a saggy hood and a kangaroo pocket; I pulled it on, dragged my coat on over it and looked for my bag.