I think of Grace. She won’t miss me; she barely knows me. What am I to her, anyway? A stranger she met once or twice; a man in a cold-lit room where the chairs are bolted to the floor and the air smells of boiled cabbage and bleach.
Marcus nudges me with the barrel again, and I remember his mouth. I snap my fingers and hear the gasp of breath as his lips spring open. The rush is almost enough to knock me off my feet, making me see stars. The kid on the sofa groans as magic calls to magic.
Rudge is grinning now: a great big grin plastered right across his face. It almost makes him look friendly. Almost. He thinks he’s got me, and I suppose he has. He’s got me. But this is going to happen on my terms, not his, and if I’m going down he’s coming with me.
Tomorrow morning, Grace will look out of her window and she’ll find a tree hung with silver bells that sing in the wind. It won’t – can’t – last, but it’s the best I can do for her.
Tonight, I’m going to light up the sky.
Rudge wants magic?
Magic he’ll get.
MAILERDAEMON
SOPHIA MCDOUGALL
Sophia’s first words to me were, “I’m magic.” This was many years ago, long before I worked in genre, at a fancy dress party in Oxford. It was only after I commissioned her story, that I realised that this was the same Sophia I’d met all those years ago. A lovely bit of serendipity then and never were truer words spoken.
LadyJinglyJones on November 28th, 2012, 12:08 am (GMT):
This, I know how to fix. I only wish I was as good with C# or nightmares. If it happens again tonight, then get up. Go into a different room and do something. Nothing too interesting. Don’t get on the internet. If you touch your laptop it had better be to clear out your cache or run a de-frag. Then read a page or two of something boring – I’ve got Wray’s Guide to Electromagnetics, though my old professors would weep bitter tears if they knew I was using it that way. Then try going to bed again. Repeat as necessary: if you’re going to be awake through the night anyway it’s always better to be awake and upright. There’s more opportunity for awful things to get into your head when you’re horizontal.
Seven_Magpies on November 29th, 2012, 12:27 am (GMT):
understand about 60% of what you say as per usual but will give it a go. don’t have other room to go into or know what defragging is but suppose can tidy sock drawer.
Seven_Magpies on November 29th, 2012, 10:00 am (GMT):
hey thanks actually got six hours or so sleep and have very tidy sock drawer. bonus. not seen you around for a bit. RL still poking you? stamp on its toes and say i sent you, i am fighty when nightmares harass my friends.
LadyJinglyJones: on November 29th, 2012, 19:14 pm (GMT):
Oh, well. You saw my last post-of-angst, things haven’t advanced much yet. Efforts remain in vain, etc. Presumably it can’t stay like this forever. In the meantime, I sing “Recession---Recession!” to the tune of Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof, and, yes, have nightmares.
Seven_Magpies: on November 30th, 2012, 12:12 am (GMT):
do you want to try LEVANTER-SLEET? one good turn deserves another.
LadyJinglyJones: on November 30th, 2012, 12:38 am (GMT):
What’s LEVANTER-SLEET?
GRACE WAITS A few minutes for her friend’s reply – she is a little intrigued by Seven Magpies’ sudden discovery of the shift key – but it’s almost one now, and she is exhausted; she’s always exhausted. She closes the laptop, leans over to slip it under the bed, and lies down.
She is very confident in the advice she gave Seven Magpies. Knowing what she can expect, sleep ought to be almost impossible for her, and yet she’s trained her body so well, or is so desperate, that consciousness spills out of her almost at once.
Then it returns, altered.
Her house is on fire. It’s her fault, she left a candle burning. Now she won’t be able to claim on the insurance – is the insurance still even up to date?
Grace wakes and frowns in the dark. That was pretty mild, barely even worth waking up over. She thinks her dream-self ought to have been grateful for actually having a house to burn in the first place. She turns over onto her side, draws her knees up close to her chin, and shuts her eyes again.
She slips straight back into the dream.
Everyone was wrong about the fire. It wasn’t an accident, nothing to do with a candle. Something is following her. She’s in a tiny room, lying on a mattress surrounded by boxes and cases. She tries to move, but she can’t. She can’t see it yet, but she knows the building is burning. The boxes on every side of her begin to smoulder. She scrambles upright at last as the wall of burning boxes falls in and she knows that all the doors are locked...
She thrashes and wakes. She flings herself over to lie spreadeagled, trying to stifle the uproar of her heartbeat against the mattress.
The burning thing pursues her, starting fires wherever she stops to rest. She could camp out beside the Thames, where perhaps it wouldn’t find her, if she could only get there. The streets veer and spiral away from the way she wants to go, and break into flames when she tries to turn back. There were people in the house she left burning. There was a baby she was supposed to look after. Somehow she is there again, back where she started but outside, looking up at the fire pouring from the windows, hearing the screams.
By morning she’s had almost eight hours of sleep, with only brief interruptions of wakefulness, and she’s limp and shattered under the duvet, as if she’s been dropped from a great height. She lies, like an upturned woodlouse, trying weakly to remember how to work her limbs. Nothing comes of it. Tears prick at her eyes. She drags the covers over her face and thinks that being awake is unbearable and being asleep is no better, and this is so far from the first time she’s thought that that she can’t remember what anything else felt like.
She beseeches herself at length to get up, and loathes herself for her failure to comply. Eventually, reaching under the bed for the laptop feels more or less achievable, a halfway house towards entering the day. Even that requires her to spend a good ten minutes gathering the will-power, luring herself out from under the covers with the remote possibility someone will have emailed her good news.
There’s no message about anything she’s already applied for. Her in-box is full of job vacancies that will all turn out to have a hundred applicants already.
There is, however, a notification of a new reply from Seven Magpies:
Seven_Magpies: on November 30th, 2012, 01:13 am (GMT):
Mr LEVANTER-SLEET is a nine-foot skeleton-demon with a body made of the shadows of plague-pit bones and corpse-candles for eyes and teeth like someone’s playing pick-up sticks with meat saws and steel sabres.
“Oh,” says Grace, aloud.
She flexes her fingers on the keyboard, and sucks her teeth, rehearsing ways of replying, before acknowledging herself flummoxed. If nothing else, Seven Magpies has surprised her out of paralysis. She gets out of bed and ponders while she makes tea.
Most of the time, Grace finds it easy to overlook this particular aspect of her eccentric friend’s eccentricity. She met Seven Magpies three years ago on a fan forum for a series of post-apocalyptic games called Angels of the Embers. When the forum split into squabbling factions, they retreated to LiveJournal, where Seven Magpies usually posts Angels of the Embers fanart of superior quality, pictures of the tiny Victorian mourning dresses for dolls she occasionally sells on Etsy, and dispatches from the ongoing catastrophe of her personal life. Occasionally, however, she also posts about the spells she has conducted using bones and seaglass and rowan roots; the spirits she has spoken with on the muddy tideline of the Thames. Grace quietly avoids commenting on those posts, (she doubts it speaks very well of her that she always reads them, fascinated) except when Seven Magpies mentions eating holly berries and cutting herself to get blood to draw on mirrors, then Grace jumps in to post worried comments about the risk of infection and the number of the Samaritans and how she’ll come stra
ight over if Seven Magpies wants, whether just to talk or to walk her to the doctors.
Seven Magpies never takes offence – Seven Magpies treasures kindness, from anyone, for anyone, however expressed. But they have never met in the flesh, even though they both now live in London. Seven Magpies once explained politely that she expects her online friendships to stay online for the foreseeable future, and Grace now only suggests meeting in what seem like emergencies. Yet she counts Seven Magpies as a good friend. She, along with Otherwise86 and From Jupiter whom Grace can’t meet because they live in Vietnam or West Virginia, occupy invisible, weightless places in the web of people to whom she’s close. She certainly knows them better than the people she lives with. It’s one of the things she likes about the meeting places of the internet, that it lets programmers discover that they can make friends with witches.
Besides, she understands Seven Magpies’ cloistered life a little better these days. All her housemates are already at work, and Grace is glad of it. She likes them well enough, but it’s not an arrangement any of them would have chosen freely, and nor is it one she’ll be able to afford much longer, as everyone must know. She’s taken to hiding in her room from them, and she hasn’t seen any of her real friends in months. She tells herself she can’t afford it, and that’s true, but it’s something even more essential, and even more depleted than money that she can’t spare.
When she returns to the laptop, she finds that Seven Magpies is awake and explaining further:
Seven_Magpies: on November 30th, 2012, 09:11 am (GMT):
Mr LEVANTER-SLEET doesn’t like boys, and he doesn’t like other nightmares but he does like girls in trouble, so if any other nightmares turn up on his watch he will tend to stab them. I find him very effective.
Grace stares, and even laughs a little, and tries to look at it from her friend’s point of view. Can Seven Magpies really believe in magic and nightmare-slaying demons? A lot of the time, she sounds so... reasonable, that Grace thinks probably it’s all just a hobby, an elaborate game of pretend that makes Seven Magpies feel better about life.
So Seven Magpies is saying “Play with my imaginary friend, maybe you’ll feel better too.”
On the other hand, sometimes it sounds as though Seven Magpies believes it utterly.
But even in that case, it’s not really that different from Seven Magpies saying “I’ll pray for you.” Grace is an atheist, but not the sort of atheist who gets offended when people offer to pray for her, and she feels bad about having complained to Seven Magpies in the first place: Seven Magpies certainly has it worse.
Politeness, she decides, costs nothing.
LadyJinglyJones: on November 30th, 2012, 09:23 am (GMT):
All right, send me the demon.
Seven_Magpies: on November 30th, 2012, 09:25 am (GMT):
i’ll ask him to head over!
Grace is relieved to have avoided awkwardness, and amused to think she has discovered a new rule of modern etiquette (when offered a demon over the internet, a lady accepts graciously). She gets dressed and heads to the Jobcentre.
The novelty of the exchange enlivens her about as far as the bus stop, but then the dream sours everything again like an aftertaste. God, she hates everything about this. She hates the beautiful gothic houses that overlook the park at the top of Seven Sisters Road and she hates the betting shops and Chicken Feasts at the bottom of it. She hates the perversely bright green of the Jobcentre signs, and the empty ritual of the Jobcentre itself. You have to turn off your phone before you go inside; you can’t take in food or drink – not even a bottle of water – as if it’s a temple you have to enter in a state of penitential purity.
She waits humbly on a citrus green couch, and tries not to focus on anything. Her heart is pounding inexplicably and the details of everything are dangerous as rocks in shallow water; if she lets her attention run against them she’ll overbalance, sink.
After twenty minutes this begins to fade, mercifully, into ordinary boredom. She realises she’s forgotten to bring a book, again, and starts to look around at her fellow unemployed. A fair-haired young man is standing by the wall, damp from the drizzle, clutching the usual plastic folder and frowning anxiously into its contents as if afraid he’s forgotten something. He must have been afraid of being late, too, for he’s slightly out of breath. He radiates nervous energy, so he’s probably new.
“Could you sit down there, please?” a security guard says to him, tone and stance announcing that despite the ‘please’, it’s not a request.
The young man looks perplexed. “Sorry?”
“You can sit down there or stand to use the workstations.”
The newcomer glances at the touchscreens mounted on green MDF plinths at the far end of the room. He tilts his head, incredulous. “You mean I’m not allowed to stand up?”
The realisation that this is exactly what the guard means ignites a mutinous mood among the jobseekers. Jaws drop, eyes meet, everyone is briefly alive with sarcastic fellow-feeling.
“Watch out!” snarls a large tattooed man, “We’ve got a stander in here!”
“Practically a terrorist!” says a thin man in a grey tracksuit.
“We can kneel on the floor, if it’d make you feel safer,” Grace offers the security guard, who huffs ominously. The young man forestalls any further escalation by sitting down next to her, though he accepts everyone’s indignant sympathies with a shake of the head and a roll of the eyes.
“I’m Luke, what are you in for?” he asks Grace. He’s fair, improbably sunburnt for November with a short, square blond beard; he looks like a slender, harried Viking. He smiles at her and Grace feels a very distant twinge of regret that she’s stopped bothering with makeup and doing her hair. Then her name is called, which at least introduces her to him, but they don’t get much further.
The advisor grieves over Grace’s forms. “You always think computer people should be fine come rain or shine, don’t you?” she sighs.
“That was the idea, yes. Might as well have done the arts degree after all,” says Grace, unsmiling.
She takes a mild, spiteful pleasure in making the woman’s eyes glaze over by explaining programming languages, about the differences between Ada and Java and C++ and C#, and how everyone wants a year’s professional experience in C# these days and of course she’s never going to get that if no one gives her a job...
“Nothing’s changed,” summarises the advisor, eventually.
“No,” Grace agrees, and is humiliated at how her voice cracks on the word.
“See you in two weeks,” says the advisor, pretending politely not to notice.
GRACE WAITS IN the rain for nearly half an hour, trying to summon a bus by chanting its number in her brain, and shivers all the way back. The yearning mantra of two-five-three, two-five-three gives way to home home home, and when at last the quiet and warmth of her room enfold her again she nearly weeps, at once with relief and with misery that it isn’t her room, and its safety can’t be relied on. The dole does not cover the rent. She’s paying it out of her overdraft already. Soon she will have to move, and moving will easily cost two hundred pounds in itself.
She crawls onto her bed, resisting – just barely – the temptation to crawl into it, and opens her laptop.
There’s a new email. The conversation about Mr Levanter-Sleet had thus far taken place entirely in comments to Seven Magpies’ post about her insomnia, but apparently Seven Magpies has decided the time has come for privacy, though it’s hard, from her message, to see why:
Here you go. Hope he can help! – Morgane.
There isn’t any attachment.
Grace already knew her friend’s name was Morgane (yes, her realname, but no, not her original name), though she can’t really think of her by anything other than her screen handle.
“So you can capitalise, when you want to,” she says affectionately to the screen, and gets on with the day’s work.
She types:
Please consi
der my application for the position of Digital Architect. I believe I am well-suited for this role.
I am excited by this opportunity to apply for the post of Junior Programmer. I have a proven track record in software engineering and software architecture.
I would like to apply for the post of audio secretary. I am diligent, conscientious and hardworking. I am also educated way above this godawful job, which is probably one reason why you won’t reply to this, but you should give me a chance anyway because I find it spiritually fulfilling when people too lazy to type their own letters drone into my ears, and photocopying excites me. Sexually.
She finds it mildly cathartic to write dash off parody entries while thinking out the real thing, though she sometimes panics at the possibility of pressing ‘submit’ by mistake. She deletes everything after ‘hardworking’ and does it again properly.
It’s only when she scares herself in this way that she recovers any real belief someone might read what she writes. The emails feel as insubstantial as prayer, wisps of incense sent into the sky to appease unrelenting gods.
Nevertheless, she grapples with an online application form for hours, comforting herself a little by sneering inwardly at how cack-handedly it has been put together. At four she remembers that she hasn’t eaten lunch but it doesn’t seem worth it now. She loses a few more hours looking for cheaper places to live on property websites, googling ‘housing benefit’ and trying not to cry, then she microwaves a bowl of instant risotto, and at last, gives up.
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