Back on the pavement he hesitated and looked back into the newsagents. The man was still watching him. From here he looked far too large to be behind the counter. He lifted one arm and made an odd movement with it, bringing his hand down, then back up, and down and up again.
Spike walked quickly away, too tired and too early in the morning to deal with city weirdness.
It was a long and boring day but culminated in an unexpectedly good evening in a little patch near Charring Cross train station, pubs that were full of people killing time before going home, and already too drunk to realize what they were seeing was not a meticulously-practised fake, but the real thing. After performing for a table of jolly German businessmen, Spike received a tip of a fifty-pound note. Either the guy was too drunk to realize what he’d done, or — more likely — he was trying to impress a nearby table of shop girls by handing over high value tokens of exchange. It probably worked.
At nine-thirty, Spike decided to call it a night and walked back up through Soho towards his ‘home’. Without realizing until the last minute, he took a route that took him right by the newsagent he’d seen that morning.
The door was shut but there was a light on inside. It was probably still open but there was nothing he needed, even if he’d felt like encountering the disconcerting man behind its counter again. He was almost past when he noticed something.
As with most such places there was a large grill obscuring the whole of the front window, holding well-secured examples of the newspapers and magazines for sale inside. At the bottom of this, sitting on the pavement, was something Spike hadn’t seen that morning. A large cardboard box, containing a few rough cords of wood suitable for putting on an open fire.
‘Firewood,’ a handwritten sign said.
Spike stared at it. Had it been there earlier? He didn’t think so. Did people even have old-fashioned wood fires in houses in the middle of London any more? Were they allowed to throw up that kind of pollution?
He went back a couple of paces to take a closer look. The sections of wood were raggedly sawn into one-foot lengths, and had then evidently split with an axe. It looked like silver birch. The papery bark seemed fresh. There was, at least under the streetlights, a slight sparkle to it. There was no price indicated.
Troubled in a way he couldn’t put his finger on, Spike walked quickly home. He wanted to be inside so much that he didn’t even bother to swing by the alleyway to check the doorway there was still locked.
He’d come to fear, perhaps, that it always would be.
Next morning he set off in a different direction. He spent much of the day walking up and down the embankment by the Thames. It was chilly and he needed regular coffees to keep him warm, but after the previous evening’s earnings he didn’t mind the expense too much.
He was still down by the river as darkness came at the end of the afternoon. His bones were cold and damp from a long day close to the slack grey river, and he felt tired and out of sorts. He considered simply going home, shutting the door, and climbing into bed with a book. Taking the evening off. Starting the next day fresh.
He knew himself well enough to know this was a bad idea, however. It was this kind of impulse that had gotten him here in the first place, a tendency to grow tired of one kind of life, of its hierarchies and constraints and rituals, and to think he could flip tracks. It didn’t work. It hadn’t worked because he was the same person over here as he’d been over there. Changing position doesn’t change you: it may simply reveal you in a harsher light. Sometimes when Spike spent afternoons killing time in bookstores he wanted to go up and tap the shoulders of the people earnestly browsing the Self Help section and tell them this fact, that they should give up on the idea of change and try to make friends with who they were before they did something dumb and fucked up what they had. Sure, you can leave your boyfriend or job or move house or go work for the disadvantaged in some hellhole or go on a freaky diet... but then what? Then nothing. It’ll all be the same, except you can’t go back. The door to the way things used to be will be locked.
Everything you do is a one-way street.
And so he wearily decided not to go home, but instead to go straight to work — and that’s where he made his penultimate mistake.
He ended up working the same area he’d been in the previous night, something he’d always avoided doing before. It was right there on his route home from the embankment, though, just south of an oddly-named road called The Strand, and what with it being a Friday night he reasoned that people in the pubs there were even more likely to be drunk and relaxed than the night before, and so his job should be easier. He at least had the sense to reverse the order, starting with the last pub he’d worked the previous night. Pubs have their schedules and routines and migratory patterns. Hopefully this way he’d encounter a different shift of punters than he had the night before.
This first was called the Star of Brunswick, a nice old place with lots of panelling and wooden benches. It wasn’t too crowded yet, which was good. Having people on all sides made it impossible to play the angles. The same two barmaids were on the duty. They recognized him. No surprise. Spike was good-looking and had The Thing. One big, dumb error he’d so far avoided was getting entangled with a girl in the city, however — and he intended to keep it that way. There are a lot of stories about what happens in those circumstances, and none end happily.
He drank a beer to loosen up and then got to work. Forty minutes later and twenty-eight pounds richer, he left and went to the next pub along the street. Again, he couldn’t see anyone he recognized apart from the staff, and again, the session went well. His hands had warmed up and he moved on from coins and foam balls and started mixing in card tricks too, wandering from table to table, enjoying — as always, and despite himself — the looks of bafflement and pleasure on people’s faces.
Most of them, anyhow. Whenever you perform magic, especially in an informal setting like a pub, there will always be a few people (and they’re always men) who won’t smile and laugh and clap when they see the impossible, but scowl and shake their heads instead. Guys who pride themselves on never allowing the wool to be pulled over their eyes, who have to be in control of their reality, who pride themselves as nobody’s fool.
Spike pitied these people but he knew to be wary of them, too. It would be a man of this type who’d mutter something about thumb tips — having at some point spent time on the Internet learning just enough to ruin the illusion forever, which is apparently what they want — or who’d make a point of trying to make the angles difficult, coming around the side, or behind. There seemed to be a lot of them out tonight. Spike called his routine short in the second pub, and moved on after only fifteen minutes.
The next was better, but the fourth was much worse. As soon as he entered it he spotted potential scowlers amongst a loose group of men and women in suits, all recently-sprung from office jobs, starting their weekend by drinking hard and fast. Four female friends, already pretty drunk. Three men from a different company, a tight little predatory formation, smiling thin, brittle smiles and a little too ready to leap up and get the next round of drinks in hopes of finishing the evening with a grope in a cab or club or on the train back to commutersville.
Spike started on the other side of the pub but wasn’t getting any traction and so wound up near the scowlers within five minutes, even though his spider-sense told him they’d be a tricky audience.
‘It’s up his sleeve!’ one of the men shouted, before Spike had even embarked on his first trick.
Spike made a big, slow performance of removing his jacket and hanging it over the back of a nearby chair, revealing he was wearing a tight T-shirt underneath, no sleeves, of course — his standard response to this kind of heckling. It got a giggle from the girls but he knew immediately it had only been half-smart. Two of the women started ogling his body rather obviously, and all three men (only in their late twenties, Spike guessed, but already running to seed) might as well have had the
words “We hate you even more now” written across their faces.
He soldiered on, running a few basic coin routines and disappearing a handkerchief. The girls lapped it up. The men scowled. One went out front of the pub to have a cigarette and on his return made a point of standing to the side of Spike, evidently hoping to be able to catch him palming. Usually if this happened Spike took it as a sign it was time to leave. The girls were still loving it, however — and being free with the pound coins, too, pressing a few upon him after every trick rather than waiting to given him something at the end as was usual. Spike was aware they were doing this as if he was a male stripper at a hen night, and that this was likely to antagonize the males in the group yet further, but found he didn’t care. He realized he was tired of the stupid people in this city, in this entire land. He wanted to call it a night. He wanted to go home. But really home. Not back to his shitty room and its grey promise of doing all this again tomorrow.
‘Yeah yeah, it’s fabulous, mate,’ one of the men said, the one who’d make the first quip about Spike’s sleeve. ‘Very fucking clever. You should go on X Factor or something. But we were talking, okay? Run along now.’
Spike smiled. ‘Fair enough. Just one more, though, okay? You’ll like this one.’
The man rolled his eyes and looked like he wanted to enter an altercation, to get tough in the hope of impressing the womenfolk, but one of the others — the man who’d gone out for a cigarette — held up his hand.
‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Amaze me.’
I couldn’t amaze you, you bastard, Spike thought, you’re too dead for that. He had the sense not to say this out loud, but not enough sense to stop what he did next.
He got one of the girls to pick a card, write her name on it — which was Karen — and return it to the pack. He then involved the entire group in shuffling, cutting, messing the deck around, producing the card as if by accident a couple of times, as a prelude to the real trick — and then had Karen tear it into four pieces. He put everything into the performance, being as charming as possible, turning The Thing up to the max, and even the guys were getting into it. Two of them, anyway — the guy who’d demanded to be amazed was sitting back, watching, his beady little eyes on everything Spike did.
Spike ran the routine round the houses, stretching it out, and then set up the big reveal — getting the Karen girl to close her eyes and pick a card from the pack at random.
She turned it over, clearly expecting it to be the one she’d written her name on... but it wasn’t.
Everyone looked confused. One of the guys laughed harshly. ‘Fucked it up, haven’t you mate.’
Spike held up his finger for silence.
‘I may have,’ he admitted, tentatively. ‘Magic’s unpredictable. But sometimes... sometimes something else happens. Sometimes the magic does its own thing. Now usually... yeah, usually, that card you picked should be your card, madam.’
‘Madam?’ shrieked one of the other girls, and the table laughed. ‘She’s a right madam!’
‘Sometimes, though,’ Spike said, ‘sometimes the card slips into the future. It shows us what it thinks is going to happen. Or could happen, maybe. And...’
He hesitated, turned to the ‘Amaze me’ man, who was still sitting back in his chair, arms folded, still unimpressed. ‘You feeling comfortable, mate?’
‘What?’
‘Just wondered. You’re sitting a bit awkwardly.’
The man opened his mouth to make fun, but then seemed to realize that he did feel uncomfortable. He adjusted the way he was sitting.
‘Thought so,’ Spike said, nodding. ‘Feel a little tight around the... well, I don’t know how to put it. Around the private regions? Do you? That what it is?’
The group sniggered – even the other two guys. Five or six people from other tables had joined the crowd now, too, standing in a ring around them.
‘Maybe something got stuck down there,’ Spike said, and by now there was no humor in his voice. It was soft, considered, serious. ‘Maybe you should check.’
‘Check what?’
‘That everything’s okay. Go on — stick your hand down there. Down your trousers. Won’t be the first time today, I’ll bet.’
More laughter from the girls, and a couple more people drifted over from a nearby table. Amaze Me man was glaring angrily at Spike now, no longer wanting to be the center of attention but knowing that something was up.
‘Twat,’ he muttered, but then — making a show of how jolly okay he was with doing it — he stuffed his hand down the front of his suit trousers. ‘Happy now?’
Then he frowned, and withdrew his hand much more slowly. It re-emerged holding a folded up playing card.
The others around the table fell silent.
‘Ah. That’ll be the problem,’ Spike said, cheerfully. ‘Like to open it for me? Tell your future?’
The man unfolded the card. Stared at it for a long, pregnant moment, and then threw it down on the table.
It landed face up, the girl’s signature obvious for everyone to see. ‘There you go,’ Spike said, into the stunned silence. ‘Looks like maybe you will get Karen in your pants tonight after all.’
The crowd’s reaction was... very big.
Spike held out his collecting bag and listened to coins raining into it. He kept his eyes on the man he’d just embarrassed, and by now Spike was smiling again.
‘Amazed yet?’ he said, and winked.
He left the pub immediately afterward, walking up the street and around a couple of corners to his next intended venue. As soon as he got inside, however, he realized he was done for the night. This pub was virtually empty, the atmosphere dead. That could actually be the best environment for what he did, when he had the energy to create the mood himself: right now, he did not.
He got a pint of strong beer and went and sat in the quietest corner. If he was finished for the night, he should go home. He didn’t want to. Going home meant going past the alleyway with the doorway and finding he couldn’t really go home. His room wasn’t home.
For the first time in weeks he wondered whether there was anything else he could try. There must be places in this city where people like him collected. Meeting points. Notice boards. Ways of getting in contact. Not everyone came here on solo missions. He’d heard rumors of sleepers, too, who lived here for longer periods in case of urgent need of mobilization. Not spying, but spies all the same. The problem was that he didn’t know any of them, or where they might be. If he’d thought this through properly before he came then he could have tried to see if there was any lore on the subject, something specific to London (though of course if he’d thought it through properly before he came, he wouldn’t have come). None of the books he’d pored over in shops and libraries here contained anything beyond old, mangled superstitions. Hampstead Heath had nothing. It was dead under all of the Thames bridges. The remaining scrap of the Stone of London — wedged into a nondescript wall in The City — no longer had any power at all.
It was like being in a dream where you can’t wake up. A dream in which you’ve left your home, having come to despise it, but then realize — with the heart-piercing intensity you only get in dreams – that you were wrong.
The first pint was followed by another, and one more. He lost count after that but he was still sitting in his corner in a now-empty pub when the gangly Australian barman called time. By then Spike’s mood was atrocious, and half of that was knowing how stupid he’d been in the previous pub. The way he earned his living was precarious. If he blew it he was in very serious trouble. He couldn’t do anything else. He’d have no money. He’d be wholly lost.
‘Finish up and piss off,’ the barman said, when he came by the table for the third time.
Spike looked up. The man took a hurried step back. ‘Seriously, it’s gone time, mate,’ he muttered, then retreated behind the counter.
Spike finished his last half-pint in one swallow and got unsteadily to his feet. As he wove his
way past the bar he saw something sparkling on the floor, and bent down to pick up a ten-pence piece.
‘See a penny, pick it up,’ the barman said.
Spike nodded, but only to himself. He slipped the coin into his back pocket and lurched toward the door.
They were waiting for him ten feet away down the street. They must have been there a while because they looked cold and impatient. Men with real courage might have come inside the pub to find him, but these were not that kind.
‘Hello, magic boy,’ the first one said.
Spike half-turned back toward the pub, but he’d already heard the barman locking up from the inside. The three men were walking closer to him now.
‘Look,’ he said.
‘No,’ one of the other men replied. ‘We’ve done enough looking, thanks very much. Completely manked our evening, you did. Any one of us could be screwing any one of those birds by now, if you hadn’t fucked it up.’
‘It was just a little magic,’ Spike said.
‘No,’ said one of the others.
It was the man who’d gone out for a cigarette, the man who’d told Spike to amaze him. He’d gone around behind while Spike was concentrating on the pair in front.
‘My uncle used to piss about with magic,’ he said. ‘Boring cunt, he was, but he wasn’t bad at the tricks. Tried to teach me, too, so I know how it works. I know the tricks. But what you were doing wasn’t tricks, was it?’
Spike eyed him cautiously. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He could see the other two men didn’t understand either. ‘Of course it was tricks. I’m a magician.’
‘I don’t know what you are,’ the man said, thoughtfully. ‘But you’re clever. I caught you using a thumb tip early on, but I didn’t say anything because the way you used it was... weird. It was like you didn’t actually need it. Couple of the things with the coins looked dodgy too.’
‘What’s a thumb tip?’ one of the others asked. The man ignored him.
Everything You Need: Short Stories Page 3