by Kate Griffin
Jean pulled her wrist carefully free of our fingers and met our eyes without flinching. “Fascinating,” she murmured at last. “You know, you really should have informed me that you were sharing your consciousness with the stranded memory of the telephone wires, it qualifies as relevant medical history.” Her voice was level, her hand was shaking.
“We know you,” we whispered.
“Do you?”
“We know what you said.”
“How?”
“It’s…”
somewhere in flying thoughts
blue memories of what we are of
hello!
you there?
anyone there?
hello?
gotta go, darling, gotta go now
don’t hang up
bye
good night, sweet dreams!
hello? i’m looking for this number it’s for this guy
hello?
“We are the thoughts you left behind,” we murmured. “We-are… the feelings in your voice, even if he didn’t hear. We are…”
“Responding interestingly to what should really just be dizziness,” she said briskly. “Does your blood usually turn blue and wriggle like maggots in the presence of oxygen?”
We glanced at the trickling blue sparks crawling across our skin where the medicine had met our blood, and I felt suddenly sick, the world a spinning vague thing seen through a heat haze, tinnitus in my ears and my head aching, no longer a hot-air balloon but stuffed with lead, dragging me down with the sound of
hello!
anyone there?
never had a chance to say…
look i know this shouldn’t be done by phone but i want
you to know that
looking for someone is there operator?
hello? Hello? HELLO?
“Help me!” I blurted through gritted teeth. “Please, help me!”
“Well now, that all depends on the problem,” said the nurse in a voice of infinite patience.
“I can’t remember! I can’t remember what… what I was before! I can’t remember being me!”
“You’d be wanting a shrink more than a nurse,” she explained, and she had got her composure back, in an instant switched back into professional, businesslike mode. “I can give you a referral.” Then, quieter, sharp little words to be spoken and forgotten again, “You still want the bleeding to stop?”
“Don’t know, don’t know…”
“I don’t want to cast a shadow on your evening, but it’s that or a slow and anaemic death, which, may I add, will do nothing for your complexion…” The smile gleamed, not exactly cruel, but neither bursting with compassion. She leant in close and murmured, “… unless that’s a tempting thing?”
I hesitated.
We said, “No.”
And we were surprised that we had spoken, surprised to hear ourself sound so confident, so sure of it, surprised that I hadn’t spoken sooner or more certainly.
“You sure? I mean, if you want the shrink…”
“No. We want… no. Please. Help us.”
“Help us, or help me?”
“We are the same.”
“You sure?” she asked nicely. “Only it seems to me that one of you has blue blood, and one of you has red, and one of you knows about the things that were in the phone line and one of you, probably the clinically dead one, has a better grounding in the personal ego – not that I want to speculate beyond my training, you understand. You may share the same skin and the same voice, but I’m really not entirely sure that you’re working on the same track.”
We thought…
But then I thought…
“I… am sorry,” I said.
“We’re sorry,” we added.
“I… please, forgive me, I… spoke…” I mumbled.
“We did not think that… we are…” we explained.
“Other arm,” she said, switching the iron grip from one wrist to the other. “This time, try not to drip electric blue sparks everywhere, please? It’s really not my place to judge my patients.”
“Why not?” we asked. “Would you treat a murderer?” I added.
“Yes,” she said flatly. “If he was ill.”
“Why?”
“Medical oath, vows of service, duty, legal reasons, NHS policy, all that.”
“But why?”
“You should know. One of you.”
“Which one?” I asked, smiling despite myself and the pain in my head or on my skin. “It’s not how it is,” we grunted with a wince.
She paused, staring down at us, black splotch running down the edge of the wooden spatula in her hand. “Life is magic,” she replied. “That’s all there is to it. You’re losing it, aren’t you, sorcerer? You can’t keep control.”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean… no.”
“Which one?”
“That depends on whether the question was rhetorical.”
“Oh, a wisecracker as well as magically confused.” She shrugged. “Oh, well.”
“That’s it, ‘Oh, well’?”
“Not my place to…”
“… to judge, I know.”
“I’m going to finish up here, and bandage it.” She beamed. “Change them every twelve hours for the next three days, then you might consider going with plasters. Men in bandages feel so righteous it’s almost unbearable. Not having period pains every month gives them a whole superiority complex, but when they’re in bandages they just want to be loved.”
“Are you talking about me, or is this a general piece of medical observation?”
“I suspect you wouldn’t complain to my supervisor, if you didn’t like my attitude,” she replied.
“Who is your supervisor?”
“Oh…” She waved the wooden stick with airy abandon, splattering gobbets of sticky black goo around the room. “Higher powers would give them too much ego, demigods brings in this whole religious aspect, spirits seems a bit Peter Pan-esque, so we’ll just go with…”
“Mystical forces?”
“Smart button.”
“Thank you.”
“Feel better now? Less gyrating black spots, fewer screaming voices and uncontrollable magical memories?”
“A bit, yes, thank you.”
“All part of the service,” she said. “Now – I’m going to get bandages. Please don’t evaporate into your constituent parts before I get back.”
“I’ll do my best,” I replied, and, to our surprise, we meant it.
She got bandages. She let the black slime settle on our arms, and set into a thin crust, before brushing it off briskly with a rough cloth that tugged and strained against the cuts on our skin until we thought they’d bleed all over again just from the sheer vigour with which she cleaned. However, as we looked again at ourself, we saw in the half-moon marks left by Hunger’s attack no sign of more bleeding, and the beginning of thick, dark scars instead. Such a sight had never seemed more of a relief, or more natural to us.
She bandaged up our arms with prompt efficiency, then patted us on the shoulder and said, “All right, show up the next patient.”
“There’s another patient?” we asked.
“Cursed with severe acne,” she replied.
“Is that a threat or the patient’s condition?”
“Would you like to find out? Bugger off, will you; I’m working to a tight schedule, and haven’t you heard that there’s not enough doctors per patient in this country?”
And that was it. She didn’t seem inclined to talk to us any more. With a shrug we picked up the satchel, and walked to the doorway.
In it, we turned, saw her putting the jar of medicine back in the cupboard and said without thinking, “Can I ask something?”
She didn’t answer, didn’t move, didn’t flinch.
“If we become… all that this body is, if we become…”
“Me?” she said, not glancing up. “I mean in the metaphorical sense – if you plural become you singular
, rather than actually growing breasts, should you accidentally find yourself thinking like a human, feeling like a human, instead of like a medically unsound mess of crossed wires…”
“… will we be so bad?”
She hesitated, then turned, looked straight at us and said, “Life is magic. Magic is not life. You’ll be fine. Now bugger off before I call security.”
“Thank you,” we said.
“Thank you too,” she replied, but she didn’t sound like she meant it.
I sat on the bus heading south from the derelict hospital, my bandaged arms hidden inside my coat, and resisted the temptation to roll up my sleeves so that everyone could see, and I could feel righteously injured, like a wounded soldier walking with pride.
I resisted.
Or possibly we resisted.
The distinction was becoming harder to make. Or rather, it had always been hard to make – we had always been me – but lately we were not so sure if we were any more than a useful set of memories, magics and ideas that I accessed at whim. Or was I nothing more than a strange recollection of Matthew Swift that we thought was ourself, but who had in fact died some two years before? We knew that Matthew Swift had died, his dying breath entering the phones and spinning into our domain. We knew that we had decades of memory and experience and thoughts and feeling and that, more and more, these guided us, shaped who we were in the world and what we did and how we behaved. Or so it seemed, as we came to understand why the strange, singular sorcerer that had been Swift had done what he did; but we did not know if this signified more than just memory.
We are me, we are Matthew Swift.
And I am the blue electric angels.
Did the distinction really matter?
It’s very simple, Mr Swift. Can you keep control?
I don’t understand.
And in the end, so what if I was, technically, dead? I felt pretty damned alive: I felt the breaths I drew tickle the inside of my lungs, I felt the beating of my heart in my veins, I felt fear and sorrow and happiness and pain and uncertainty and dread and hope and all the other good and bad tick boxes of humanity that, no matter how bad bad might be, at least proved that the depth of feeling and emotion I could experience now were as I remembered experiencing them. Was that not enough? If we were me and we could experience such pangs, did that not make us alive, or human? The technicalities of whether we were genuinely human seemed increasingly irrelevant, since we felt, more and more, that we were the oh-so-human I. The blip that perhaps Matthew Swift had died with no way of coming back and that possibly the blue electric angels were nothing but the gods of lost voices in the wire increasingly did not concern us.
Did not concern me.
We will not bother with such distinctions.
I sat on the bus and looked at the world through my blue eyes and felt the ache in my burning arms and knew that I could understand every language spoken on the top deck of that vehicle as we rattled down Gower Street; knew also that inside me was the capacity to blaze burning blue fire so fast and so bright and so far that it could, for an instant, eclipse the sun, and this felt … natural.
Life is magic.
I knew, without having to ask, what she meant. Life was not the magic of spells or enchantments or sorcery; or, it was, but that was not the point. Life created magic as an accidental by-product, it wasn’t, definite article, absolute statement, A = B, magic. Life was magic in a more mundane sense of the word; the act of living being magic all of its own.
This was something we instinctively understood – it simply hadn’t occurred to us that it might need explaining.
I went south, towards Holborn.
Vera and Charlie met me in a small sandwich shop made of linoleum; it was round the back of Drury Lane and advertised itself as Tasty Cafe in big blue letters above a squeaking door with a bell on it that clunked more than it rang. We sat at a small orange plastic table, while around us large men in fluorescent jackets from a local building site drank tea and ate dried-out ham sandwiches.
Vera looked tired but alert; Charlie was his usual implacable self.
She said to me, not unpleasantly, “You buggered off something royal in the Exchange, bastard.”
“I’m sorry. I was hurt.”
“They told me.”
“Who they?”
“The bloody fucking Order, thanks a million for getting them involved, by the way.”
“Is there a problem?” demanded Charlie.
She glared at him. “No sooner have we smashed the massed undead army of Lee to a thousand itty pieces, wereman, than we’ve got a group of religious nutters sitting on our doorstep who know exactly where we live and what our tricks are.”
“They’re causing trouble?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Then is there a problem?” I hazarded, uncertain of where her anger was coming from or what she wanted.
Her hand tightened round her cup of coffee until the knuckles were white. “When there is, are you going to come and make it all better, sorcerer?” Her voice dripped acid. We felt oddly ashamed.
“Oda didn’t tell me how many died.”
“Plenty.”
“But are… did it…”
“Did it make a difference?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps. With Lee dead, with his men beat… there’s only so much power that you can have at the end of a gun. First you’ve gotta fear it, and perhaps… that’s changing.” Her grip relaxed, her shoulders rolled forward. She looked drained; we wondered if she’d slept. “What’s next?” she asked.
“Harris Simmons.”
“Do you know something new?” said Charlie.
“Perhaps. I think he’s on the run.”
“How does that help?” asked Vera.
“He’s being followed. Bakker knows that I’m looking for him, cleared out the house and left a message for me.”
“You didn’t mention a message.” Charlie looked reproachful, edgy.
“It was personal.”
“I thought we’d gone past that.”
“Oh, get real,” snapped Vera. “You blind?”
“If they know you’re looking for him, things will not be so simple,” pointed out Charlie reasonably.
“Thank you for the profound insight,” groaned Vera. “What do you want, sorcerer?”
“Your help.”
“Again?”
“I think we can bring down the Tower.”
“What, exploding concrete, or in a more organisational sense?”
“Harris Simmons can lead us to Bakker.”
“Doesn’t seem very likely,” murmured Vera.
“Bakker is hard to find; he keeps moving all the time,” added Charlie. “Especially now that Khay and Lee are dead – he’ll be alerted to the danger, won’t stay more than one night in one place until you’re…”
“Deader than a decapitated zombie!” shrilled Vera. “Deader than old Marley’s ghost, deader than a tombstone on Mars, deader than…”
“Thank you, we understand the image,” we said. “Besides, ‘dead’ isn’t quite the full story, as far as Bakker is most likely concerned.”
“Is he a zombie too?” hazarded Vera.
“He is not,” said Charlie firmly, as if Vera’s question was a foolish thing asked by a child to annoy. “But he is dying.”
“And he was very interested in talking to us before,” we added. “So I think that, given this information, a few risks might be worth taking.”
“What kind of risks?” Vera’s eyes were instantly narrow.
“I think Harris Simmons is going to be a trap,” I replied. “It makes sense; he knows I’m coming, on the run, being tracked by a shadow…”
“… a shadow?” Charlie’s voice was hard.
“Are you an important person?” Vera asked Charlie quizzically. “Sorcerer, why is the wereman here?”
“He’s an important person,” I sighed. “Please be nice to each other, I still need your hel
p.”
“Just our help? Not the biker, the Order, the warlocks, the…”
“You’re the two I trust.”
“Thanks,” said Vera with a grunt. “Touched, but a little surprised, since we hardly know each other.”
“All right, put it another way. You,” nodding at Vera, “have too much to lose, and have lost too much already; and you,” nodding at Charlie, “come with good credentials and an honest face, when it hasn’t got whiskers. Therefore, I’m talking to you both.”
“What about Oda?” asked Vera. “You seem quite pally with the psycho-bitch.”
“I trust her utterly,” I replied, surprised to find that it was true, “but only up to the point where she no longer needs me. Which, if what I suggest can be made to work, could be quite soon.”
Soon was three days.
I spent each night at a different hotel, not least because in every case my relentless casting of wards around the bed, and the mess this left, didn’t please the management.
In those three days, Charlie called by twice. The first time he provided £100 and a note from Sinclair that read simply, “Try legality, and best wishes,” as well as a change of clothes and a first-aid kit for the scabbing nail marks on my arms. The second time, he came by with a pair of shoes.
After I’d looked at them, I said, “You’re joking.” We added, “Are you sure it’ll work?”
“These things don’t just grow on trees,” he replied.
“The image is ridiculous enough already,” I retorted. “Besides, what if someone takes the shoes?”
“There is another option.”
“Which is?”
“Surgery.” We turned pale. “They can slice your skin open, implant the chip just below your…”
“You’re not as humourless as you look,” I said.
“In point of fact, I am.”
I took the shoes. They fitted perfectly, and when I walked on them, there wasn’t a bump or a lump to suggest the thing hidden inside. Charlie beamed. “Magicians,” he said brightly. “Always so busy doing the magical thing they never bother to think about technology.”