by Kate Griffin
“Where did you . . .?” she stumbled.
“I heard it was important to you. I thought, since I was in the area, I could bring it back.”
“Why would you do that?”
“It’s your hat. It seemed the least I could do.”
“But . . .”
She had the hat in one hand, was fumbling for the phone with her other.
A voice said, “Get away from him.”
She looked up.
So did I.
A thing that might have once been Mr Pinner stood in the middle of the road. His suit was a raggedy painted thing of badly torn paper trailing down from the thin, uneven ripples of his flesh. His neck was bent in and then sharply out again, like a crumpled old Christmas cracker, his trousers were wrapped up tight in old receipts and bits of soggy newspaper. A thousand cuts had been torn in his flesh, from which dribbled little pieces of paper falling away into the street. One eye had been slashed straight through and was now oozing blue biro ink down his cheek. When he spoke, his voice was a distorted, lumpy thing.
He said again, “Get away from him. Penny. You can’t trust him.”
She stuttered, “Who are you? I don’t know you.”
“I’m Mr Pinner,” he replied. “I’m here to help you. I’m a friend. He’s out to use you, Penny. He wants to hurt you.”
“But . . . he gave me back my hat . . .”
“Don’t you wonder how he got it? A little prick on a bicycle stole your hat!” Mr Pinner was shouting; I had never seen that before. “A little arrogant cocksure prick stole your hat and pedalled away laughing and you really think some random stranger would go to any effort at all to bring it back, that he cares, that it matters anything to him? There’s no reason for him to help you: just another fucker in the street, another guy you can’t trust, another harmless man who at the slightest word is going to hit, or stab, or shout, or spit, or do all the things these pricks do because they can, because they’re fucking strangers and you can’t trust them! Get away from him!”
Penny looked down uncertainly at me.
Mr Pinner blurted, “You think he just found your hat, Penny? There are eight million people in this city! You are tiny, you are nothing to them, an infinitely small part of a great machine too big to ever be understood; people don’t care! You can walk down the same street a million times and never see the same faces, never be recognised, never be appreciated, smiled at, laughed with, loved, known, because you’re just a nothing to them, another person who happens to live in the city, getting in their fucking way, so why should he bother? Why would anyone ever fucking bother with you?
“You’ve seen it, Penny Ngwenya, stood on the edge of the hill and looked down on the city and known you can just lift up your toes and fall for ever, tumble for ever into the void and no one will ever notice, no one will ever even know! Cretin! Maggot! Scum! Stupid kids in their fucking hoods, stupid fuckers pissing in the street! He’s part of it! He’s come here tonight to hurt you! He’s part of the fall, one of the men who laugh when your back is turned, part of the insanity!
“Give me the hat, Penny. Give it to me, and we can end this. Just like you wanted to, we can end this tonight, just give me the hat . . .”
Penny half-rose, turned towards Mr Pinner. I grabbed her hand as she stood, pulled her back towards me; she jolted at our touch, as if surprised to find us still there.
“There’s no such things as strangers, Penny Ngwenya. Not in the city. Just other Londoners. Not strangers at all.”
She looked at me with a pair of perfect oval eyes in a perfect oval face.
She smiled, and carefully pried her fingers away from mine, wiping the blood off casually on her trousers as she rose.
She stood up, straightened, and turned towards Mr Pinner, who held out his arms towards her, paper frame twitching and shuddering as if short of breath.
She raised the hat in her hands, turned it, dome up towards the sky.
Mr Pinner smiled.
She lifted the hat towards him, and then past him, up in a long, careful arc, and without a word, put it down on her head, twisting it into a familiar, comfortable position.
She let out a sigh, closed her eyes, seemed to relax over every inch of her body.
Mr Pinner made a little sound. It was somewhere between a choke and the rustle of old crumpled paper.
Penny looked up, stared Mr Pinner straight in the eye and smiled.
She said, “You weirdo psychopath. Fuck right off out of here before I call the fucking police, I mean Jesus.”
Mr Pinner whimpered. He staggered away from her a few paces, his arms falling limp to his sides. “But I . . . I . . .” he stammered.
“Seriously, I’m not shitting around. I mean, where do you get off with this crap?”
“I meant . . . I meant it for . . . I only wanted to . . .” he gabbled. Paper drifted from the tears in his arm, popped out of his left ear, dribbled down his right nostril in thin pale strands.
“Look, I’m calling the police, seriously,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a mobile phone. “You can do all the shouting and spitting you fucking want; I’ve got community support officer training and I’ve had it up to here with weirdo psychopaths thinking they can get away with it. I mean, look at you! You wanna go to jail, arsehole? You wanna? Because I swear that this is the last time some testicle of a male mouths off at me! Look! Dialling!”
She dialled 999, held the phone to her ear.
Mr Pinner held out his hands imploringly. His thumb started to unravel, long white sheets spilling down from his fingers like a mummy’s bandages. “Please,” he whimpered, “I only wanted to help, I was . . . I was . . .”
Paper tumbled down from underneath his tattered trouser, spun in the river breeze.
“Yeah, police and ambulance please. Yeah? Yes, that’s the number. Penny Ngwenya. Yes.”
Mr Pinner’s eyes fell on me, blue biro ink dribbling out of the tear glands. “I’ll . . . I’m . . . I’ll . . .” he croaked, but his mouth was filling with fat reams of paper, choking on it. His jacket had come undone to let out files and sheets that tumbled from his thinning chest like it was skin shaven from a corpse.
“You still here?” she asked, holding one hand over the receiver of her phone.
Mr Pinner tried to speak, couldn’t, his jaw was melting away into spinning thin shards. His shoulders dribbled down his back, his legs crumpled and began to give way, revealing thin tubes of cardboard, that bent and twisted beneath the little remaining weight of documentation on his torso.
“Hi, yeah, London Bridge. The middle of the actual bridge. There’s this guy . . . looks hurt . . . yeah, this other guy’s been mouthing off at me, but . . .” Penny’s eyes rolled over the skeletal paper remains of Mr Pinner. “. . . but I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem. Yeah. Ambulance. Yeah.”
“I . . . I . . . ah . . .” gasped Mr Pinner, and then there wasn’t a throat left to gasp with, a body left to gasp.
Bits of limp paper drifted by me.
I caught a few in my bloody fingertips.
. . . buy now and save £25 on the initial . . .
A water meter fitted to your system can greatly reduce . . .
. . . ISA investment profit projection of . . .
— GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS —
The last piece of paper to fall from Mr Pinner’s body was half the size of a sheet of A4, covered in small formal text. It said:
Penalty Charge Notice
Road Traffic Act 1991 (as amended)
(Sections 48, 66, 75, 77, Schedule 3 and Schedule 6)
Notice No.: 0215911Date: 03-10-2009
Time: 15.19
The Motor Vehicle with
registration number: L602 BIM
Make: Volvo Colour: Green
was seen in: Dudden Hill Lane
By Parking Attendent no.: 11092
Who had reasonable cause to believe that the following
parking contravention had occu
rred . . .
I let the paper go, watched it drift out over the edge of the bridge, spin into the air, fall down into the darkness above the river. Penny, standing on the edge of the pavement, lowered her phone and said carefully, “That guy just turned into paper.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “How about that?”
“Um . . .” she began.
“The city is a dragon, Penny Ngwenya. A great big, mad, insane, dark, brooding, furious, wild, rushing, fiery, beautiful dragon. Do you know what the spleen does?”
“No, I . . .”
“No,” I sighed. “Me neither.”
And then, because it seemed like the right and most sensible thing to do, I closed my eyes, put my head down on the pavement, and let the gentle rustling of the river below me and the whispering of paper falling through the air sing me into an endlessly falling darkness.
Epilogue: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
In which all things end, and something new and unexpected begins.
The Lord said, “Let there be light.”
And lo, mankind decided to capture said light, put it in a neon tube, install it in all hospitals everywhere, and leave it on at unwholesome hours when sensible members of the Homo sapiens line should have been sleeping.
For this reason, rather than because we felt like it, we opened our eyes.
A hospital.
Again.
Life suspended.
Not our favourite place.
A private room; nice. A wristband proclaiming “John Doe”. Also nice. A heart monitor that went “ping” without any good reason and with no explanation at random intervals. A woman asleep at the end of the bed. This is the sort of thing soppy single men in need of mothering dream about.
I said carefully, “Oda?”
The woman stirred slowly, looked up, said, “Who’s Oda?”
Next to the woman was a traffic warden’s hat.
An Alderman came to visit.
I didn’t recognise her, but the big black coat and hard expression were a giveaway.
She said, “Ms Dees. I’d offer to shake hands, but maybe when you’re not wired up to machines that go ‘ping’?”
I said, “Where’s Mr Earle?”
“Mr Earle . . . did not make it. We’re having a memorial service tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have some flowers sent in your name. Don’t worry about the cost. We’ll settle these things when you’re feeling better.”
“Did many . . .”
“Aldermen died; Aldermen lived. The details are unimportant,” she replied.
“Kemsley?” I asked. “Did Kemsley . . .”
“Mr Kemsley is in a stable condition. He has been moved from Elizabeth Garrett. He is scheduled for major reconstructive surgery to . . . iron out . . . some of the consequences of his encounter with Mr Pinner, just as soon as his body is strong enough to survive the procedure. You need not concern yourself with Mr Kemsley either.”
“What should I concern myself with?” I asked carefully.
“At the moment, very little!” she replied. “The city is saved, Mr Pinner is gone, the Midnight Mayor lives. I’d say that was deserving of a Christmas bonus, yes? There is only one question outstanding.”
“Well?” I asked.
“The city is saved. But for how long?”
I shrugged, feeling stitches pull. “A while?” I suggested.
“While an untrained sorceress wanders the streets?”
“You mean Penny?”
“If we are being so informal about the woman who summoned the death of cities to our streets, then yes, Ms Ngwenya.”
“You know she’s sat in the corridor outside eating takeaway curry, right?”
“I know,” she said. “The Aldermen are watching.”
“Ms Dees?” we asked carefully. “Do you know what the spleen does?”
“Part of the immune system,” she replied calmly. “Stores blood reserves, breaks down old blood cells from the body. Why do you want to know? You’ve still got one, I believe.”
“We just wished to understand you a little better,” we told her.
“That’s all.”
She smiled, leant forward across the bed until her face was a few inches from mine. “Mister Mayor,” she said, “everything changes, sooner or later. Especially the city. You look after yourself, Mr Mayor. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to discuss these things later.”
And she left.
The next day I got a bunch of flowers, too big to put anywhere except against the opposite wall, in a wide wicker basket.
Three weeks later, I got the bill.
* * *
There were other things that needed to be done.
Blood is hell to shift from clothes that aren’t soaked immediately.
The hospital declared my old clothes a write-off and graced me with a set of surgeon’s slacks that made surprisingly comfortable pyjamas.
On my release, I bought a new pair of shoes.
I also indulged in a few nights at hotels. Pampering has its place.
Sometimes, when I was trying to go to sleep, the twin crosses on my right hand ached.
We got used to it.
There was a phone call that had to be made.
I didn’t think about it until it happened, at 10 p.m. on a raining Tuesday night. I just picked up and dialled without looking at the numbers.
The phone rang, and kept on ringing, until at the last, someone answered.
She said, “Yes?”
“Loren?”
Silence. Then, “Who is this?”
“Matthew. It’s Matthew.”
Silence.
“Loren?”
“Goodbye, Matthew.”
She hung up.
We didn’t call again.
There was supper with Sinclair.
It was polite, pointless, and pompous.
We felt better for having had it.
We never say no to free food.
There was Oda.
Her hair had been burnt off, one side of her face was crinkled and withered. She said she was only there because the Aldermen had asked her. One hand was wrapped in bandages, thicker than the skin they protected. The skin drooped over her right eye like the skin of an old prune. She wouldn’t look at us, wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t say a word, except one. When we stopped her at the elevator, said, “Oda . . .” she looked up at us and replied, “Damnation,” and walked into the lift, and didn’t look back.
Time passed.
It’s something time is good at doing.
Impersonal, passive, just rolling along like the river, too big to notice the bits of paper that get dragged along with the tide.
There was one thing left to do. Not for the Midnight Mayor, not even for us and our fears or desires. One thing I had to do, and get it done with.
I went back to London Bridge.
Walked to the middle, drooped my arms over the edge of the railing, felt the stitches pull in my side and didn’t care. Breathed beautiful river air, let it swim through my body like liquid diamond, purifying all that it touched. I don’t know how long I waited there; but it wasn’t long.
Penny Ngwenya draped her arms over the edge of the bridge beside me, and said, “Hello, sorcerer.”
“Hello, sorceress,” I replied. “How are you feeling today?”
She shrugged. “OK, I guess.”
We watched the river in silence. Finally she said, “A woman called Ms Dees talked to me today.”
“Really? What did she say?”
“She offered me a two-week away-break, all expenses paid, job guaranteed when I came back. Just walked up and said, ‘Take it, and it’ll be OK.’”
“What did you say?”
“It’s in Scotland.”
“Scotland can be very pretty, when it’s not raining.”
“It’s in the countryside — and when does it not rain in Scotland?”
I sighed. “Don’t take it,” I said. “Ms Dees will ship you up to Scot
land and you’ll never come back. She’ll make sure you never come back, never return to a city ever again. It’s part of her job.”
“OK.”
Silence a while longer. Then she said, very quietly, “The . . . they tell me I nearly destroyed the city.”
“How tactful of them.”
“The Aldermen.”
“I know. I recognised their lack of tact.”
“They tell me I’m a threat. A danger. That for me, good people have died.”
I thought about it. “People have died,” I said finally. “‘Good’ . . . who knows? But yes, people have died. And yes, you dunnit. I’m sorry to tell you, but you dunnit fair and square. You stood on this bridge and cursed the city, damned it to burn and suffer for what it had done to you, called forth the death of cities to plague the people within. He was your vengeance, your curse. And you were utterly and completely innocent of it. You couldn’t help it. You’re a sorceress. Sorry. Kinda stuffed on that front.”
Silence.
Then, “Should I go?”
“Go? Where?”
“Like . . . Scotland, like the lady said?”
“Seems a little hard on Scotland.”
“If I did this, if I somehow . . .”
“You know you did. If you didn’t know it, feel it in your belly, hear the shadows tell you and the river whisper it, if you couldn’t feel it in your blood and bones, you’d be shouting a lot more abuse right now. You know what you are. You just didn’t have anyone to explain it at the time.”
She nodded slowly, eyes fixed on the water. “What should I do? I . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
“There are other sorcerers,” I said. “They can train you, help you get a control and, say, not summon primal forces of darkness and death — something you should keep an eye out for, by the way. You could try Fleming, in Edinburgh, she’s excellent, or Graham, in Newcastle. Or, how’s your French? There are some top-of-the-line sorcerers practising in Paris right now — Aod is a sweetheart; I mean, the flavour of the magic there is very different, much more stylised, I guess, not the same sodium stuff of London. But it’s a nice city and you can learn some useful skills there.”