by Kate Griffin
I got about halfway, when its nose twitched, its tail wiggled and it turned and scuttled away, something so normal and boringly predictable that I was startled by the fact it had happened at all. Faced with a choice between accepting normal behaviour for what it seemed to be or looking for a reason why things weren’t normal at all, I did as I had been taught, and accepted the latter. Normal is unusual in this line of work, my teacher had always said. If you expect something to happen and it does, it’s usually time to start looking out for the higher powers creeping your way, or the man with the knife. Sooner or later, something dangerous will happen to you, and you can never be too sure – particularly when it comes to the little things.
So I stood in the middle of the square outside the hospital, and looked for something unusual. What I found sat in a neat silent line above the row of stone urns, and the brightly coloured heraldic dragons, that ornamented the roof of the meat market. They weren’t moving: not twitching, nor even hopping from one withered orange foot to the other. I shouted, “Boo!” at the top of my voice and they didn’t even flap. I guessed there were over a hundred pigeons sitting there, and when I crossed through the market by the covered road, past the war memorial and the plaques detailing the history of the area, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that the birds had sat only on one side of the roof.
I crossed back the way I’d come and looked in the direction that everyone of the pigeons was gazing: towards a group of shops including a pub whose sign showed a lecherous bishop, a day nursery, a launderette and a couple of sandwich bars. I picked one of the sandwich shops at random and wandered in. There weren’t any customers, and neither was there any staff, but the fridge showed enough gaps in its display to suggest that this was just a mid-afternoon lull, rather than a symptom of terminal decline. I leant on the glass counter above the bowls of chicken, and tuna, and sweetcorn salad and waited.
There was a buzzing from the glass-fronted fridge, a nasty, unhealthy electric sound like a wasp trapped in a bottle, or the crack of flies hitting an electric lamp. I watched as sparks snapped out of the cabling at its back and the lights faltered along the displays of neatly packed sandwiches. Then, with a hiss, the fridge died. The bulb above my head flickered on and off a few times, and the power points in the corners of the walls spat angry electric sparks from behind the switches. After a few minutes, this too died. During this time I heard a raised voice from somewhere behind a bead curtain: the incoherent sound of a woman shouting at someone whose response was too quiet for me to hear.
My curiosity now completely engaged, I stepped round the counter, and through the bead curtain. Beyond it was a stainless-steel kitchen, and it was a mess. Pots and pans were strewn across the floor, remnants of viscous liquids were splashed up the walls, glass from shattered bulbs crunched underfoot. On the knife rack, the blades were all twisted out of shape.
I moved carefully through the wreckage towards a door at the back; as I did, the voices became louder. The woman’s, shrill and frightened, babbled in a language I didn’t understand but which, by its thick quality and the richness of the sound, I guessed to be eastern European. Another voice answered in the same language: male, quieter, but no less scared. I pushed open the door, onto a crooked flight of stairs. Climbing them, I emerged into a narrow corridor of scuffed paint on cracked plaster. At the far end, outside a closed door with a poster of some anonymous boy band and a sign saying “KEEP OUT!!!” in big red pen, were the owners of the voices: a short woman who seemed far too large for the space she stood in, and a man in the dark shapeless clothes of a priest, with a big black beard. In one limp hand, the priest held a crucifix; and by his gestures he was trying to pacify the woman, and failing. The place buzzed with a sparking, yellow-golden sheen that hissed like fizzy drink on my tongue as I drew it in; wild, rich, and dangerous power, emanating, I guessed, from behind the closed door.
I said, “Excuse me?”
The woman paused, looked at me, said, “We’re shut,” and in an instant was back to shouting at the man.
I waited a few moments; then, since she didn’t seem to have any further interest in talking to me, I raised my voice and bellowed, “Sorcery!”
They both fell silent, more caught by surprise, I suspected, than ready to listen. “Thank you,” I said quickly. “Now, may I have a black coffee, strong, no sugar, and is a member of your family or your household acting peculiar bordering on mystical?”
In the kitchen, with trembling hands the woman gave me a plastic cup of vodka. She watched me down it while she clung to her own drink and said, “You police?”
“This isn’t your business…” began the man in priest’s clothes.
“Stuff you,” I replied, and for her benefit I added, “No, I’m not. My name’s Matthew Swift.”
Mrs Mikeda introduced herself.
“A pleasure to meet you,” I responded. “And this gentleman with the beard is…?”
“What do you want here?” he snapped.
“A priest,” replied Mrs Mikeda in a cowed voice.
“More than a priest, I’m guessing,” I said, looking him over and finding myself unimpressed. “Exorcist, yes? Demonic possession, Satanic vibes, all that kind of thing?”
“Who are you?” asked Mrs Mikeda.
“You can just call me Matthew. Now, let’s throw out the beardy, and why don’t you tell me about your daughter?”
“How do you know about my daughter?” she demanded, her knuckles turning white around the plastic cup.
“It’s the choice of boy band poster on her bedroom door,” I replied. “That tells me that she’s a girl. The presence of the exorcist guy tells me you haven’t got a clue what’s going on, and the sense of uncontrolled and raging magic tells me it’s more than just hormones that gives your daughter bad period pains. So why don’t you tell me what’s happening here?”
Mrs Mikeda downed the vodka, scrunched up the plastic cup without thinking and dropped it in the sink. She looked from me to the priest and back again and said, “Mr Swift, I don’t know why I should trust you.”
“My honest face, my charming, open expression, and the fact that in the end, I’m just so damn right, aren’t I? Nothing like a grasp of the situation to give a guy some cred.”
“Can you help her?”
I thought about it. “Yes,” I replied, feeling as I said it that this was absolutely the correct answer. “I think I can.”
When I knocked on her door there was no answer. I called out, “Dana? You all right in there?”
No reply.
I tried the handle. The door was locked.
“Key?” I said to Mrs Mikeda.
She gave me a small brass key. I turned it in the lock and opened the door. Filthy didn’t begin to cover the room beyond. It had served as bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom for what smelt like weeks; the heat and intensity of it slammed into my face and left no room for compromise or forgiveness. The curtains were half drawn, and at the base of the window were pigeon feathers strewn in dirty heaps. Dana Mikeda lay on the bed, her back turned to me, breathing slowly and steadily. I went over and reached out to touch her. But before I did, the hairs on the back of my hands stood up, at the same time that Mrs Mikeda gave a warning gasp.
I pulled a plug from the wall with a popping of sparks, and cut it at the top and the bottom with my penknife, exposing the metal strands beneath. Holding it by the rubber insulation I touched one end of the wire to the floor, and let the other drop onto the girl’s shoulder. A white spark crawled into the carpet. When I moved my hand again over Dana, there was no longer that feel of buzzing static in the air.
I took hold of her shoulder, and rolled her over. Her eyes were shut, but when I lifted the lids they glowed underneath with the bright orange of a pigeon’s iris; and as she exhaled, every breath carried with it a snort of thick black smoke and the smell of car exhaust, rattling over her lungs like a loose engine on the back of an old truck. Her skin burnt to the touch, and when I li
fted up her fingers, they trailed neon scars through the air, like her nails were about to dig a hole in space itself.
“Can you do something?” whispered Mrs Mikeda.
“Maybe,” I replied. “How long has she been like this?”
“A few days. But it’s never been this bad before!”
“Do you own a car?”
“No.”
“Have you got a friend who’ll lend you one?”
Mrs Mikeda drove. I sat in the back, Dana’s head in my lap. Her hair when I touched it felt like fuse wire. To escape the feelings that must have been attacking her every day and night, she’d sunk herself deep into some form of magical trance or stupor. So lost in it was she that when the pistons of the hydraulic brakes exhaled, she did too, in the same breath and tone as the car itself.
We drove west, inching past Marylebone, speeding down the Westway, and jinking about through grungy Shepherd’s Bush and the genteel streets of Chiswick in the cheerful spring sun. In Chiswick High Street, the schools were emptying, and the cafés had put seats out on the pavement under the big old plane trees to serve coffee and cakes to the locals. By the time we reached Kew Bridge, the rush hour had started; Dana’s heart rate was up, so fast and strong I could see the veins moving in her neck as she responded, her blood moving at the speed of the city as its people switched direction from work to pleasure. We parked the car just beyond Kew Bridge and carried her down, each supporting her by an arm, onto the tidal mud of the Thames. Water seeped out around our feet like we were walking on a sponge, saturated so that water ran off it like oil. I pulled off my shoes, socks and jacket, and Mrs Mikeda did the same for Dana.
“This isn’t… pagan, is it?” she asked.
“It’s all relative,” I replied after a moment of hesitation, reasoning that this would be the least offensive but most honest answer. Mrs Mikeda didn’t look satisfied; but neither did she complain. I struggled to lift Dana up, supporting her by one arm across my shoulders and half-carrying, half-dragging her out into the biting cold river.
I walked out until the water came up to above my waist, and the mass of it had taken up most of Dana’s weight. From a muddy islet in the middle of the river, a heron regarded me with something resembling bird-brained displeasure that another creature was on its patch. Beyond the little tangle of trees and birds’ nests that made up the heron’s home, a large white boat chugging back from Hampton Court Palace had drifted to a gentle cruise, the tourists leaning over to photograph the odd spectacle of Dana and me in the river, while the driver called out, “Hey, you OK?”
“Baptism!” I replied cheerfully; on the bank Mrs Mikeda flinched even at this much profanity.
The boat moved on by, a handful of the tourists waving and whooping cheerfully as it did. Behind the trees on the opposite bank, the sunlight was dimming to a pinkish burn across the sky, stretching out the shadow of each trunk across the water.
I risked wading a few more yards out into the river, the sediment at the bottom swirling in a gritty cloud around my toes.
“What happens now?” called out Mrs Mikeda from the bank.
“Turn of the tide!” I answered in my best optimist’s voice. “Gotta have some magic in that, right?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I’m trying to save your daughter’s life within the tenets of the Orthodox faith. I haven’t a clue!”
“If you don’t know what you’re doing then…”
“Do you have the time?”
“What?”
“The time? It’s freezing out here!”
She looked at her watch. “Six forty-three.”
“Near as dammit,” I muttered, more for my reassurance than hers. I brushed Dana’s wiry hair from her face. Her skin had a pale greyish tint, and around her chin and across the hairline were patches of dry scratchy flesh which were increasingly starting to resemble tar. I leant down so my lips were a few inches from her ear and whispered, “If you can hear me, don’t be afraid. The tide’ll carry it all away.”
“What are you doing?” Mrs Mikeda could make her voice carry like it was a boulder tossed by a giant.
“Don’t be alarmed!” I called back. “Any second…”
… a tugging around my ankles…
“… any second…”
The heron, which had been watching the entire affair with a disinterested look on its unimaginative face, flapped into the sky…
“Oh, stuff it,” I said, pinched Dana’s nose shut with my fingers, took a deep breath and dropped both her and me under the water.
Thames water was once, so I had been told, toxic. Not just slightly unpleasant to drink, but actually lethal to fall into, a straight-to-hospital case. And although news reports still complained about disgusting messes in the water, nowadays these were more about the trash people threw in and the occasional suicide’s body dragged to the surface, rather than the raw sewage defining much of the river’s previous four hundred years.
So it was with a good degree of confidence that I pushed Dana down head first into the water, then let my knees bend and ducked my shoulders down after her. I let the water rush over her head and mine, let it shock my ears into an icy humming, let it tug at my hair and inflate my clothes around me to the size of a hippo as giant air bubbles crawled from under my shirt to pop and burst above my head. Dana didn’t struggle, didn’t squirm; all I had to do was hold her down against the bed of the river against the pressure of her natural buoyancy, and watch the bubbles roll out between her lips. As I held her down for five, ten, fifteen seconds, through the water I could hear Mrs Mikeda screaming, a strange, deep overhead rumble; also the distant thrum thrum thrum of some water bikes scudding past us, and a high splishsplishsplish of oars striking the surface somewhere downstream. Then, just as I was beginning to think I’d got the timing wrong, I heard a sound like a whale burping in the deepest part of the ocean, felt a relaxation all around, followed by a tightening, as, right on cue, the tide changed direction.
Dana exhaled. Her breath was a thick black stain in the water, slipping out to get tangled in the tide and sucked slowly past her towards the estuary, dozens of miles away. A thin metallic shimmer drifted out of her hair, whose strands started to drift loosely around her head. Grey, tarlike flakes spun away from her face, revealing clear, human skin beneath; the colour rose in her cheeks, her fingers twitched and, at the last, a moment before my lungs were going to burst, her eyes opened; and they were distinctly, irrefutably human, and just a bit beautiful.
I pitched her up out of the water just as she started to kick like a drowning person, and held her upright as the water ran off her face and out of her nose and she coughed and hacked and spat liquid, her hair tangled across her face like seaweed caught in a rudder. Mrs Mikeda was already halfway to us, up to her hips in the river, shouting incoherent curses in Russian; but at the sight of her daughter she stopped dead, hands going to her mouth and shoulders shaking. In the water around us, the clouds of trapped magic that Dana had accumulated drifted and faded into the river, and for the first time since I’d met her, she looked up at me with her own senses.
She said, “Uh…”
I said, “Hi.”
Mrs Mikeda said something obscene.
She said, “Have we met?”
“I don’t think so. Have we?”
“Did you just try to drown me?”
“Do I look like I just tried to drown you?” I asked as water dripped off the end of my nose.
“Where is this?”
“Twickenham.”
“What the hell am I doing in Twickenham?”
“Do you think this is really the place to discuss it?”
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m Matthew. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, looking round at the water flowing around us. “I guess it must be.”
Mrs Mikeda’s friend had left blankets in the back of her car that smelt of wet dog, but we weren’t about to complain
. We sat on the edge of the open car boot and ate fish and chips while Mrs Mikeda went in search of a Woolworths that might sell something warmer and fluffier to wrap around her shivering daughter. It took a while for the conversation to get going, but when it did, Dana Mikeda was pretty much to the point.
“So. Twickenham.”
“Yes.”
“I hate Twickenham,” she said, spearing a chip with a savage thrust of her little wooden fork. “I get lost. Always end up in Isleworth, and that’s like Wales.”
“How is it like Wales?”
“One guy gets on a train to Swansea, one guy gets on a train to Isleworth, and you can bet the guy going to Swansea gets there first.”
“I see.”
We watched the sky fade to a pale cobalt blue, and the lights along the riverside start to come on.
“Some shit, huh?” she said finally.
“Does your mother know you swear?”
“Would you like to hear it in Russian?” she asked sharply.
“I’ll live.”
“You’re… what? Like an exorcist?”
“Me? Hell, no. Sorcerer.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
She gave me a long sideways look. “I spent three years on antipsychotic drugs and being told by an NHS shrink that my dad had clearly abused me as a kid, and this shit still didn’t stop. So I’m either mad and the medicine doesn’t work, or I’m sane and there’s magic out there, because I don’t know what the middle ground is on this one.”
“You’re sane,” I said quickly. “Or as sane as a hormonal teenager can be.”
“I’m twenty-two,” she rejoined. “Just because I live at home doesn’t mean…”