Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (14 page)

She half closed her eyes, toothpaste rolling down her chin, and tried to steady her racing heart. She was tired, she was beat, her feet ached, her legs ached, her neck ached, her brain ached. She put down her toothbrush in the jar and spat out the toothpaste. Slowly, methodically, she washed her hands and her face, and dabbed off with a towel. Then she picked up her mobile phone and, for the first time in her life, pulled a sicky.

“Hi, Mike,” she intoned when he didn’t pick up. “Sorry I didn’t call but this major family crisis came up and I’ve gotta take today off. Sorry. Bye.”

The lie, thin as winter sunlight through dusty air, settled over her with a strange unexpected ease.

Then she called Gina.

“Hey, Gina, it’s me. I’m just letting you know I’m okay. Something’s come up and I’m really sorry I can’t be there today. I’ll try not to do it again; call me if you want to and I’ll try to make it up soon.”

Then she switched her phone to silent, swept her hair back from her face and began to run herself a very hot, very slow bubble bath.

Lunch was pizza.

A whole pizza, with pepperoni and extra tabasco sauce.

Sharon ate it in her dressing gown and rabbit slippers, and sat by her computer typing with one hand, feeding herself with the other. The view outside her small window seemed bright and still and friendly. There was a sense in the air of a different world. That strange, unknown world of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. when during daylight hours people moved around the city freely, not trapped in an office or a glass cage. A curious time, which belonged to pensioners going to the butcher, to nannies taking their charges to the park in the holidays, to students wandering between classes, and that strange social stratum known as the self-employed, who felt no need to set their alarms or count the seconds down to the sweaty surge of rush hour, so long as the work was done someday, somehow, somewhere. Sharon wanted to giggle, and the urge to go and do her weekly shopping nearly compelled her out of the house, just to see what the market was like in the middle of a weekday, without men in suits coming back from work or parents with yowling children. She tried to imagine a world without weekend queues and not having to run for the bus. The wrath of Mike Pentlace seemed tiny, the coffee shop far off. She was a shaman and could walk through walls and,
dammit, the art of whisking soya milk to a fine froth would have to wait. There was a city to save!

A city to save.

In the excitement, she’d almost forgotten.

How did you go about saving a city?

She googled it.

It seemed as good a place to start as any.

Recycle more, build less, bicycle more, drive less, build skyscrapers, build terraces, preserve historical housing, demolish unused stock, more parks, fewer car parks, more car parks, fewer bins–the answers seemed numerous and diverse, and not one of them seemed to deal with what she had in mind.

Her good humour was deteriorating, as she logged into Weird Shit Keeps Happening to Me, and posted on the wall.

Sharon Li
: Hey guys, does anyone know anything about the spirits of the city all disappearing or nothing? Drop me a line if you’ve got any ideas!

Well, it was progress of a sort.

She drummed her fingers and waited for a reply.

None came.

It seemed surprising that Sammy the Elbow hadn’t recommended any proactive policy in her quest to save the city–whatever it was that it needed saving from. He hadn’t even suggested she try meditation, which was surely a likely thing for someone supposedly in touch with the spirits.

Sharon sat on her bed and tried to adopt the lotus position.

She could get one foot on top of her thigh, but not the other. She swapped legs and, sure enough, the previously recalcitrant foot rested easily in place, while her other leg got stuck in a frustratingly un-karmic pose. She tried breathing slowly through her nose and on the fourth breath got bored.

She went back to the computer and googled spirit.

Frustratingly, her first few hits seemed to relate to computer software and airlines, and it was a while before pictures of swirling lights, innocent fairies and, to her slight confusion, galloping horses began to populate her screen.

The Internet, she concluded, wasn’t getting her anywhere.

This revelation took a little processing since, in nearly all of her education, she’d been reliant on it to get even a C grade. To be so badly let down at the last would, she concluded, be one of the hardest parts of becoming a shaman.

She tried to think about becoming a shaman, and her mind drew a blank. Don’t go there, it proclaimed. Be smart.

She thought about the empty building in Holborn where Sammy had held forth.

She thought about a man called the Midnight Mayor who’d stood with his back to the light in an empty place in Clerkenwell and murmured, “Don’t look back. Run.”

She thought about the silence, the too-thick silence that had set her teeth on edge. A thought drifted in from the outer edges of her awareness, raised one hand and politely asked if it could get a word in edgeways.

It was a good thought.

It involved more walking.

Sharon reached for her shoes.

His name was Bryan with a y. The y was important–the y marked him out as an individualist. His suit marked him out as one of the crowd, and his work as a letting agent absolutely confirmed him to be a sheep in human form. But still, whenever the darkest doubts crept into his mind and whispered that he’d sold his soul for £39,000 a year before tax and a flat in Fulham, he reminded himself that he was Bryan with a y and thus maintained some integrity.

He said, “So, what do you guys do?”

The woman to whom this question was addressed smiled what he couldn’t help but feel was an overly brilliant smile. She was young–too young to be looking at this particular (very fine) property off High Holborn (rich with potential), and her straight black hair was streaked at the front with brilliant blue. Though she’d clearly tried to dress up for the meeting–arranged with all of twenty-five minutes notice–beneath the hem of her slightly too-short black trousers she wore purple boots, and on her shoulder bag were pinned nearly a hundred badges proclaiming, to Bryan’s growing alarm, messages in favour of peace, brotherhood and social equality.

“Coffee shop,” she replied briskly, looking around the empty hall of the office. “Coffee Unlimited is the company name–we make simply amazing coffee.” Then, as if it had been bugging her for a
while, “It says ‘Coming Soon’ above the door to this place–what’s coming?”

“Well, that depends, Ms Li,” replied Bryan, tugging at his individualistic, borderline-racey blue-and-white-striped tie. “I think you’ll find the price per square foot of floor is very reasonable, considering the superb location—”

Sharon cut in, “So… nothing’s coming?”

“Hopefully, you are! The development potential of this site is absolutely wonderful and I think you’ll find that among its many attractions are–” his voice deteriorated briefly into a jumble of misplaced syllables and grunts as, in his enthusiasm to demonstrate the attractiveness of the space, he stumbled backwards into an overturned paint can, the nearly solid liquid still clinging to the lip and a smell in the air, an odd… almost refuse-like aroma clinging on from the recent past “–are its uh… its…” His voice trailed off. Really, was this what coffee executives looked like these days? But he’d looked up Coffee Unlimited and it had seemed reputable enough, and if they were looking to expand–but her hair was
blue,
and the look on her face as she examined the open-plan floor of this (excellent for the asking price) retail space was…

… disturbing.

But then he’d found this place disturbing for a while.

There was something in it, a muffled quality to the street noises outside, a thinness to the light creeping through the plywood over the windows, a loudness to his step on the dust-covered floor that was disproportionate to the force that made it. A hollowness in the air that made him want to run.

“What was the last business here?” she asked almost too casually.

“Uh… a herbal remedy outlet.”

“And how long did they last?”

“I believe that they moved on for internal administrative reasons.”

“Yeah, but how long?”

“About four months.”

Sharon nodded and didn’t look surprised. “And before that?”

“Before the herbal remedies?”

“Uh-huh. I’m asking cos of the important business data stuff,” she added to assuage his reluctance.

“I believe it was an optician’s.”

“And how long was that here for?”

He hesitated, then blurted, “Coffee shops do very well round here, very well indeed; you’re in the perfect place for the lunchtime crowds and there are so many offices—”

“Yeah, and how long?” she pressed.

Bryan sagged. “Six months.”

He felt hot round the back of his collar. He hated coming here, hated trying to sell this place and hated, above all, hated the fact that in the last three months not one, not
one
customer, regardless of how low he pushed the price, had been remotely interested. He didn’t understand. He was offering prime real estate at a rock-bottom price in a central part of town–a deal which under any other circumstances would have got him fired–and yet people left nervously, as if someone had died and there was a bloodstain on the floor that hadn’t been cleaned up.

He realised Sharon was taking notes meticulously on a flip-up notepad under a heading which looked for all the world, from this angle, like
Saving The City
. Nor did he miss the emphatic double underlining with a ruler.

“Anything… odd happen here, ten months ago?” suggested Sharon. “Any complaints from the neighbours? Chanting? Dancing? Like, did anyone repaint the walls or anything in a way that made you think ‘Yeah, animal sacrifice’ or something like that?”

Bryan swallowed. This was getting a bit
too
individualistic for his taste. He thought about his sales figures and the flat in Fulham and replied, “Uh… not that I’m aware of. The property’s only been on my portfolio for ten months, so maybe the previous management company might know something about that? But they can’t offer you the same deal,” he added, “which is, I must say, absolutely incredible for the—”

“How about uncontrollable screaming? Possession? Like, girls in pyjamas climbing off the walls and their heads doing this thing…” Sharon tried to turn her head all the way round to demonstrate the thing in question, tongue sticking out between her teeth, before returning to a rather more normal manner. “Anything like that?”

“You’d have to speak to the previous management company.”

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion, pen poised over the largely empty notebook page. “Is this freaking you out?” she asked. “I’m okay with subterfuge when you need it, but a lot of the time I figure a direct approach, combined with a sort of doe-eyed charm, probably hacks it. My mate Tom says it’s hypocritical to play the dumb blonde, not that I’m blonde, in order to get what I want
and
be angry about it at the same time, but Tom has had issues ever since the incident with the pogo stick so I’m not so sure if… Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Uh…” It was the long syllable of a man for whom language will no longer suffice.

“I’ve got several management techniques for when things freak me out,” she went on. “I used to get panic attacks back at school, owing to the fact I really wasn’t fitting in. Breathing through your nose helps, and so does counting from ten backwards. I was taught this saying too–‘I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, the secret is—’ ”

“I’m not freaked out,” insisted Bryan with near-asthmatic intensity. “I’m happy to help in any way I can.”

“There are support groups,” offered Sharon. “Just saying.”

Bryan’s glassy-eyed look suggested that, even if a support group had walked up to him right then and offered the secret of eternal happiness, all he could have done was try to sell it a condo. Sharon sighed and went back to her notebook. “So… you come along ten months ago and take over this place, and since then it’s been silent? I mean like… you haven’t been able to rent it?”

“The economic climate,” he replied, recovering himself a little. “The recession. People are so reluctant to take courageous decisions, to see a great opportunity even when it’s laid out before them.”

“Why’d the last lot get rid of it, then? I mean, why’d your company get involved?”

He was sweating now; he could feel a slow stain seeping out beneath his armpits. And, oh God, had he remembered to put on deodorant this morning? “New buyer,” he blurted, though he really wasn’t sure why he felt the urge to be so honest. “A new company bought it but they didn’t really want the place, they were only here for a few days then they moved out but they own it outright so we were brought on board to try and let it but they don’t really seem to care
and I’m just saying it’s a wonderful opportunity for… a wonderful opportunity… a…”