Broken Homes pg-4

by Ben Aaronovitch

  I had Sasha pegged at about fourteen, fifteen tops — so I asked where he was going.

  ‘Oxford,’ said Kevin with obvious relish. ‘Cambridge, somewhere like that.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Computers?’

  Kevin gave a little bark of laughter.

  ‘Computers?’ he said. ‘I wish. God that would have been so useful. Nah. I got him a computer, state of the art and he just uses it for his homework. Pure mathematics, that’s what Sasha does, he’s taking his A-level this year.’

  God, he was proud — I didn’t blame him. I would have been too.

  We came out at the garage level and Kevin led me to one of his two official garages, both of which he used for storing just about anything other than a car.

  ‘I’m doing up a nice semi in Thornton Heath ready for when they throw us out,’ he said. ‘Get away from this shit hole.’ He unlocked the padlock on his garage and threw it open to reveal stacks of boxes. ‘See anything you like?’

  Most of the boxes were small-ticket consumer items but I found a compact flatscreen TV with built-in digital which Kevin let me have for a ton now and a ton by the end of the week — a saving on the retail of about fifty per cent, not counting VAT. I didn’t ask him where it all came from, because he would have just told me it was a mystery.

  As Kevin locked up again, I noticed that there were signs that fresh tarmac had been laid down in the last couple of months. It looked like a narrow trench had been dug from the base of the tower to the garages and then filled in and resurfaced. In fact, it was trenches plural. And, although I couldn’t be certain, I was pretty sure that they matched the lines of fresh cement I’d seen inside.

  ‘What’s all that about?’ I asked Kevin.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Kevin. ‘Something to do with electrics I think.’

  Afternoon tea was not a concept much practised in my household. After school I had tended to get fed according to my mum’s schedule, not mine, although my dad, if straight, could whip up a mean cheese on toast. In the Folly, tea was available on demand to all members named Thomas Nightingale — me and Lesley had to get our own. So without any clear guidance, I turned up at Jake Phillips’ front door at seven minutes past five.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Jake when he opened the door. ‘Lesley not with you?’

  ‘She’s out job hunting,’ I said.

  ‘It kills me,’ said Jake. ‘To see young people like you thrown on the scrap heap.’

  Jake lived in a two-bedroom flat with the same layout as mine and Lesley’s but it was obvious as soon as I walked in that he’d been there for decades, and that the only way Southwark Council were going to extract him was feet first.

  The narrow hallway was lined with framed photographs while the far end was dominated by a faux movie poster for Gone with the Wind starring Ronald Reagan sweeping Margaret Thatcher off her feet while a mushroom cloud bloomed behind them. She promised to follow him to the end of the world. He promised to organise it.

  ‘We can have tea, or would you prefer a beer?’ asked Jake.

  I took the beer which turned out to be something called Young’s Special London Ale. We chinked bottles in the kitchen and walked through to the living room. Unlike everyone else I’d ever met, Jake still had thick shag pile carpet in his flat. To my professionally trained eye, professionally trained by my mother that is, it looked worn but scrupulously clean — here was a man who shampooed his carpet regular. A rare individual. Two of the walls were covered floor to ceiling with pine and steel bracket bookshelves and, despite being jammed solid, the books had spilt over onto an antique gateleg table and were piled on the side tables that stood beside a pair of venerable green leather armchairs which would have fitted right in at the Folly. A third wall was dominated by a huge reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica — and in case you’re wondering, we did it at school in year nine as part of an integrated project on the Spanish Civil War.

  ‘Since it’s a nice day,’ he said, ‘why don’t we go out into the garden?’

  So we took our beers out through the patio doors and into his garden. The first thing I noticed was the fricking palm tree growing in the far corner. Its trunk, at least three metres high, curved over the end of the balcony so that its fronds framed the view over the Elephant and Castle and the fraudulent wind turbines of the Strata building opposite. The trenches at the top of the walls were planted with pink and yellow flowers and a cascade of honeysuckle that fell down to the impossible lawn that covered the floor of the balcony.

  I squatted down and dug my fingers into the grass and the soil underneath.

  ‘Welcome to how Skygarden was supposed to be,’ said Jake. ‘What old Erik Stromberg really intended.’

  Two red, blue and white striped deckchairs were propped up by the patio doors. We unfolded them on the lawn and, after a couple of collapses, sat down.

  ‘All the balconies were originally built with a foot of clearance, especially to lay down topsoil,’ said Jake. ‘They’re waterproofed and designed to drain slowly — look,’ he pointed at the underneath of the balcony directly above us. ‘You can see the drainage channels.’ These were three raised ridges in the concrete that fanned out from where the main waste water drop pipe ran down the length of the tower, adjacent to the two-metre thick support column.

  ‘The lawn I believe,’ I said. ‘But what about the trees?’ I pointed my beer at the three metre palm and, in the other corner, what looked like some kind of ornamental fruit tree.

  ‘There’s an additional foot of depth of soil at the end so you can plant trees,’ said Jake. ‘Stromberg knew you’d need the trees as cover to protect the rest of the garden from the wind.’

  ‘But our balcony’s just concrete,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well, they lost their nerve,’ he said. ‘They’ being the Greater London Council, London’s city government as it was before getting abolished in the 1980s. ‘Some of the early tenants complained and they concreted over the lot.’

  ‘Except for yours?’

  ‘No,’ he said ‘I had to dig mine up, bit by bit. Took me the best part of six years. Then I had to make sure the drainage system still worked, not to mention having to shift all the soil in.’

  ‘God,’ I said. ‘No wonder you don’t want them to knock this place down.’

  ‘That and it’s a waste,’ he said. ‘You see those blocks? The Council said they were going to provide Housing Association build for those tenants, but have they fuck. They all got told six months to find alternative flats in the system or they was out — so they took what they could get.’

  ‘Those blocks were rubbish, though,’ I said.

  ‘They were as good as any system-built block in London,’ he said. ‘And it’s not like they’re going to replace them with country cottages, is it? The trouble with people is they’ve got a romantic view of the past.’

  I doubted that I did, but I was enjoying the garden and the beer and it’s rude to stop people talking.

  ‘I’ve lived here for over forty years but I can still remember what it was like before,’ said Jake and then proceeded to tell me in great detail, including with statistics, about the outside toilets, the damp, the overcrowding, the bomb sites and just how vile a sublet terraced can be when there’s a lot of you sharing the same bathroom. Assuming there is a separate bathroom and not a bath in the kitchen that serves as a table when not in use.

  Bath in the kitchen? I could hear my mother saying. Luxury! In Sierra Leone we used to dream of a bath in the kitchen. Only obviously not in a Yorkshire accent.

  For Jake, the problem was not in the design but in the people.

  ‘People were proud to get a flat,’ he said. ‘They appreciated having all the mod cons.’ This being the proper working class who did a day’s work with their hands and scrubbed their front step. Who understood the importance of education.

  ‘If you went into the library in them days it was full of men who’d just come off the morning shift,’ he sai
d. ‘You could have heard a pin drop in there.’ And they were all diligently improving their minds and occasionally buying the Daily Worker on their way out.

  ‘I used to sell half my copies outside the library,’ said Jake. ‘That’s the kind of working man who used to be allocated a council flat. Back then it was a privilege, not a right.’ He finished his beer. ‘Not that decent housing shouldn’t be a human right, you understand? But in those days people appreciated what they had.’

  And what they had were streets in the sky with indoor plumbing. High above the noise and smell of the traffic, where the elongated artist’s impression of young white mothers with strollers waved to their friends from improbably clean concrete walkways under a sky of Battle of Britain blue.

  ‘If we’d had the right political structures in place,’ said Jake, ‘proper local democracy, we could have kept the communities intact. Now everything’s handled at arm’s length through contractors and agencies.’ He practically spat the last word. ‘There used to be people you could hold to account. But now it’s all call centres explaining that your job doesn’t seem to be on the system. Nobody is accountable any more.’

  ‘Contractors like County Gard?’ I said. Normally I’d have tried to avoid asking such a direct question in case it garnered suspicion, but I didn’t think Jake would notice. He was one of those people who constantly seems to be having a conversation with someone other than the person he’s actually talking to — presumably someone much more politically committed. And interested.

  ‘Lackeys of the capitalist class,’ he said. ‘Although it has to be said they are full service lackeys, offering a comprehensive range of products and services designed to keep the working class in their place.’

  Because they didn’t just secure the flats against squatters. They were also the debt collection agency responsible for collecting rent and poll tax arrears. ‘Although you only find that out if you’re willing to spend some time in Companies House,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole series of nested shell corporations it takes ages to work through.’

  ‘Suspicious,’ I said.

  ‘Par for the course really,’ said Jake. ‘All part of the tax avoidance merry-go-round.’

  County Gard, along with the companies behind them, were desperate to get the development going. ‘There’s no commercially owned land this close to the City that wouldn’t be so expensive it would cut into their profits.’ So instead they looked to gull cheap land out of local councils desperate for cash.

  ‘Why pay full whack when you can get it off the back of the lorry cheap?’ said Jake. ‘Council land is essentially cheap land because the councils are desperate to increase their housing stock, but don’t have the funds to do it. All these developers have to do is promise to have some so-called affordable housing and it’s money in the bank.’

  ‘They must have been pissed off when this place stayed listed,’ I said.

  ‘That was down to the trees, that was,’ said Jake. Because English Heritage, being a bastion of middle class privilege, were that much more concerned with rare trees than they were with common people.

  ‘But they’re just plane trees,’ I said.

  Apparently not, because we got through another beer on the subject of the local arboreal diversity before I could make my excuses and leave. I did wonder whether this diversity had something to do with the presence of our favourite wood nymph. Or vice versa.

  Once I got back to the flat I called the inside inquiry team at Bromley MIT and suggested they check to see whether the recently cooked-from-the-inside Patrick Mulkern had any connection to County Gard. It was a long shot, but the rule of a major investigation is always throw everything into the pot. You might not find that bit of okra tasty, but somewhere deep in the bowels of the investigation some DC on a mission might snap it up.

  I remote-checked my messages at the tech cave and found that I had three. Two from my mum re: my dad’s teeth and one from Professor Postmartin who, having trawled through the list of Stromberg’s books provided by English Heritage, had found one that was of interest.

  ‘It’s called Wege der industriellen Nutzung von Magie,’ said Postmartin when I called him back. ‘I’ve already asked them to deliver it to the Folly.’

  ‘What does that translate as?’

  ‘Towards the Industrial Use of Magic,’ said Postmartin.

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Never heard of it before,’ said Postmartin. ‘But, by a stroke of good fortune, we’re listed as having a copy here.’ Here being the semi-secret stacks of the Bodleian Library. ‘I thought I might spend today and tomorrow reading it so I can give you a precis. Although I believe I can make a wild guess based on the title that it’s a treatise on the industrial uses of magic.’

  ‘Impressive deduction,’ I said.

  ‘Merely an outgrowth of my mad academic skills,’ said Postmartin.

  ‘Indubitably,’ I said.

  When Lesley hadn’t returned by early evening I decided I might as well get some practice in. I figured that casting in the flat, with the consequent effect on the surrounding electronics, would be anti-social. So I went downstairs to what I now thought of as Sky’s garden. That way it would be a combination practice, dog walk and wood nymph observation.

  Having been lectured by Jake Phillips on the arboreal variety of the gardens I’m fairly certain that I correctly identified the shorter bushy rowan trees, including a couple of small ones that looked like they’d grown from seeds. And the crab-apples were easy to spot, with their purplish bark and hairy buds. I was also pleased to note that what I thought earlier were silver birches were really silver birches. Nightingale would have been proud of me.

  I chose the dismantled children’s playground, making sure I stood with my back to the cherry trees so I could keep an eye on the tower and avoid accidentally shredding the blossom.

  When I first started my apprenticeship, practice was a slog. And, while my appreciation and skill have improved, running through your formae again and again as you strive to perfect them is never going to be a laugh a minute.

  And you don’t even get to do cool martial art stances while you do them. Although me and Dr Walid have speculated that the formae somehow represented the interaction between our electrochemically powered nervous system and the magical — field? Subspace dimensional manifold? Banana flavoured milkshake? — that creates observable effects in the material world. If that was the case, then surely it might be possible to generate the same effect through gesture, stance and movement. Certainly it seemed natural to enhance a spell-casting with gestures. Even Nightingale had his quirks — the little flick of his hand for impello, the admonitory finger wag for aer and the opening hand movement that accompanied the first spell I ever learnt — lux.

  What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost in the tops of bamboo trees.

  Toby lay on his back in the grass while I worked my way through lux, aer and aqua, but stirred when I started adding my second-order effects with impello, iactus, palma and my personal favourite scindere. Then he jumped up and started chasing my little globes of water around the playground. He seemed to particularly enjoy the way they burst when he bit them.

  Just as I’d expected she would, Sky appeared and chased after Toby and the water globes. I added a couple of low level werelights to follow them both — for fun and because it was good practice. When I paused for breath Sky rushed over and grabbed my hand.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  She put her hands on her hips and pushed out her lip. ‘Just follow, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said and when she skipped off I followed. When we reached the edge of the playground she did a sharp turn and followed its perimet
er. Once we’d completed a circuit and returned to where we’d started, she turned and gave me a cross look.

  ‘You’ve got to do the dance,’ she said.

  It’s a sad fact of modern life that sooner or later you will end up on YouTube doing something stupid. The trick, according to my dad, is to make a fool of yourself to the best of your ability.

  The sun dropped into the dark slot between the blocks and the garden was filled with a dusty orange light. Sky danced around the dismantled playground and me and Toby followed. He yapped at my heels as I tried to match her turns and stretches and suddenly I was feeling it — feeling that now familiar change in the phase state of existence, like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.

  And then she jumped and spun sideways, lifted whirling into the air like a leaf on the wind. Or like Zhang Ziyi in a flying rig. She touched down a few metres further away and, spinning, danced on. I caught up and matched her step for step, move for move and when she jumped again I followed.

  And for a second I felt the wind lifting me and experienced a surge of joy at my escape from the constant pull of the earth, my freedom.

  And then the ground smacked me in the gob.

  I lay face down for a while, soil and grass mixing with blood in my mouth. Two metres away Sky had collapsed in a heap and was laughing hysterically, drumming her heels on the grass and pausing only to draw breath and point.

  I spat the grass out of my mouth and sat up. I’d bitten my lip, not badly but just enough to draw blood.

  ‘It’s not that funny,’ I said but obviously Sky thought it was. Toby did a lap of honour around the playground, yapping occasionally.

  The shadow of the blocks had stretched across the gardens, except for the strip of sunlight we were sitting in. I looked up and saw that the dirty brown concrete had been shaded russet by the sun, which reflected a brilliant orange off the windows. Now I knew what to look for, I could easily spot Jake Phillips’ balcony with its palm and trails of honeysuckle and ivy.