The Midnight Mayor (22 page)

“Sorry. It’s all a little . . . you know.”

She flapped. We seethed.

Finally she said, “The thing . . .”

Here it came.

“Yes?”

“You know, I always said to myself, if I go mad, I’ll like, you know, go with it? Because I figure if you’re mad then you can’t really do anything about it so you might as well just . . . It was a monster, wasn’t it?”

We wiped a dribble of fat off our nose. “That depends.”

“On what?”

“Your point of view. In the sense that it would have crushed the life out of you and you would have drowned in a sea of animal fats and other remains, yes, it was a monster. But it meant you no harm. You just happened to be there.”

“You killed it.”

“No.”

“I saw you, you spoke those words, magic words.”

“Brand names.”

“What?”

“Brand names. Waste collection companies. Geesink Norba, Accord, Onyx - they collect rubbish in the city.”

“But . . . you spoke their names and . . .”

“I spoke words that, unless you pay close attention to these things, have no meaning. People don’t pay attention to the rubbish men; they cross over to the other side of the street to avoid them. Geesink Norba . . . they are sounds on the air. Meaningless, unless you know how to look. I invoked an idea.”

“What do you mean, ‘invoked’?”

“Summoned. Commanded. Requested for the cost of a ten-pound note.”

“You’re some sort of wizard?”

“Some sort, yes.”

“So there’s magic? And wizards? And monsters?”

“Yes.”

“In Hoxton?”

“Well, yes.”

“Oh. And the thing that came? The dustbin truck?”

I tried my best. “There are . . . things in this world, made up of other things - ideas - that are given life just by the nature of that idea, by the nature of living, life making magic, magic coming out of the most ordinary, trivial bits of life. Like . . . like when you speak into the telephone and your words are life and passion and feeling and they’re in the wires and sooner or later the wires will come alive or else they’d burst, with all that thought and emotion in them . . . or like a dustbin truck, just one dustbin truck because we have no idea how much waste a city can produce, just one tidying up afterwards, asking nothing but a tenner at Christmas and your council tax, anonymous faces picking up anonymous crap that no one wants to pay any attention to and sooner or later you ignore so much, you turn your face away so much, don’t want to think about it so much that . . . even that gets life. Do you see? Furious, passionate life, waiting to be seen, cleaning up afterwards, struggling out of the shadows. And where there’s life, any life, anything that . . .”

I saw her face. She was crying.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s a bit . . .” she mumbled, waving her hands uselessly. “It’s just . . . uh . . .”

I said, “My name’s Matthew.”

“Loren,” she whimpered.

“Where do you live, Loren?”

She flapped a hand in a general direction.

“Near?” I asked.

She nodded.

“With a shower and a lot of soap?”

She nodded again.

“Good. Let me take you home.”

It was a council block a few streets back from the canal. On the ground floor there were grey metal shutters nailed over the windows, and bars across the front doors. The windows on the higher floors had little balconies with dead flowers withering on them. The stairwell smelt of piss, the lifts were scarred on the inside with who knew what mad burning. She lived on the fifth floor. The lights were on in the flat to her left, and as we went by, the door was opened and a man in a white skullcap leant out.

“Loren!” he exclaimed. “He’s gone out again; I’m sorry.” Then his eyes fell over us, and his look turned to one of brief disgust followed by forced concern. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“Fine,” she mumbled, red puffy eyes and a swollen puffy voice. “Thank you, fine.”

There were three locks on her door. She fumbled with the keys, dropped them, picked them up again, unlocked the door. A narrow corridor, occupied 99 per cent by a black sports bike, all pumps and shallowness; a single bulb swinging from a low ceiling, lampshade long since lost. She waved me towards a kitchen the size of a cockroach’s cupboard and said, “You can help yourself to whatever you want.”

I looked at an array of empty pizza boxes and used tea bags.

She headed into the bathroom. As the shower went on, the boiler above the sink started rattling and roaring, shaking so hard I thought it would pull itself free from the wall. I made do with rubbing my hands on an old dishcloth and my face with some kitchen towel, until I just felt thinly slimy, rather than all-over glooped. From the kitchen window, I could see Hackney, low lights and uneven streets, council estates and long, Victorian-lamp-lit terraces, stretching away.

Loren emerged from the shower, disappeared into the bedroom. Her voice drifted to me: “You can use it, if you want.”

I wandered from the kitchen into a small living room, containing a single brown sofa and sunflower wallpaper that had never been a good idea, even before it started to peel. There were shoes everywhere - men’s shoes, and boys’, strewn in boxes and around every wall, and dirty clothes, tracksuits and baggy jumpers, messy old plates and fallen library books with catchy titles like
Pass GCSE IT in 28 Days!
and
Foundation French for Dummies
.

A door opposite the living room had, among a collection of posters featuring everything from dinosaurs to heaving models with extra-heaving bosoms, a sign written in big red letters - KEEP OUT. A boy then - a teenage boy.

“Take some of Mo’s clothes! Towel’s under the sink.” Loren’s voice carried from the bedroom.

Clearly Mo was not in residence. I opened the KEEP OUT door, and was hit by the smell of tomato ketchup and hair gel. I rummaged through the wardrobe until I found a T-shirt and a pair of trousers, both too big for me. Whoever, wherever Mo’s father was, he had clearly evolved from another breed of men.

The shower was at once the most pleasurable and most disgusting experience of our life. The water kept drifting from hot to cold, and only scalding hot and the application of half a bar of soap could remove the grease that wanted to cling to every part of our skin. Our hair was like raw slices of chicken in our slipping fingertips, and bubbles of white fat spun in the stained old plughole.

I changed into Mo’s clothes. In the kitchen Loren was wearing pyjamas, a dressing gown, and fluffy pink slippers. She leant pale-faced by the sink, cradling a hot mug of tea between her hands and looking at nothing. I raised my grease-spattered clothes. “Uh . . .”

“Just stick them in the washing machine, OK?”

I turned the machine up hot, threw in powder and watched it go. We do not understand why people who watch the workings of the washing machine are mocked. Meditation classes and serene chants have nothing on the slow turning of socks in soapy water.

She gave me a mug of tea and said, “Sorry, I don’t have any . . .”

“Thank you. This is fine.”

I felt I should say something more. “Look, I can just go, once . . .”

“Are you human?”

The question caught us off guard. “What?”

“Are you human?” she asked.

“Yes.” Mostly.

“Oh. Then, I mean, what happens now? Like in films, and on TV, there’s rules, like amnesia and stuff. I mean, is there . . .?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“OK. Uh, I can’t afford counselling; so, if you could just . . .”

“I can go,” I said.

She gave up, seemed to shrink into her dressing gown, became, for a second, aged. I wondered how old she was: a young voice from a lined face, dark hair greying at the edges. “Look,” she said, “you seem like a nice guy. I mean, you saved my life, so I figure, you can’t be all shit, unless this is some cunning plan of yours to be like a rapist or something, in which case I figure . . .

“I mean, what I’m saying is that I get up at six-thirty every morning to go to work and come back at six-thirty every evening and make pasta for supper and watch the telly and go to bed at ten-thirty and on the weekends I clean up and see some mates and my kid is . . . and you know, sometimes there’s guys and that’s nice and I get support from the council and there’s like so much fucking paperwork you would not believe and it’s just . . . it’s ordinary, get it? Five hours ago, it was just . . .”

“Ordinary?” I suggested.

“Just tell me it was a coincidence. A thing came up from the sewers, and it was just luck, right?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Bad luck, to be exact, but still just luck. There was no reason for you to be there, no reason for it to be there. It just happened. Sometimes things do just happen.”

“You don’t sound like you believe that.”

I shrugged. “I guess sooner or later the rationale is, I just happen to be crossing the road when a car comes and knocks me down, and he’s only there and I’m only there for a world of reasons an infinity apart and because it was going to happen to someone, so why not me?”

“Why were you there?”

“We wanted fish and chips.”

“How come you can do things?”

“It’s just a point of view. I’m a sorcerer. It’s just a way of seeing things differently. That’s all.”

“Sorcerer.”

“Yup.”

“Like, big beards and stuff.”

“Times have changed. You can always tell you’re being sold a bad product if it comes attached to a pentangle star. New times - new magics. Different symbols.”

“Symbols? Like spells?”

“Sort of.”

“Show me.”

“You don’t want to—”

“Show me!”

So I did. I got a piece of paper and drew a sign of power, a protective ward. She looked at it, unimpressed. “It’s the Underground sign.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God. You are a whack-job.”

“You’re not listening. Life
is
magic. Ideas, symbols, words, meanings. New meanings, new words. In the old days if you wanted to banish a demon you invoked the powers of the winds, north and south. These days, you summon Geesink Norba. In the old days, a wizard would call on silver moonlight to guide them through a monster’s lair. These days, we summon sodium light and a neon glow, and the monster’s lair tends to have a trendy postcode and pay council tax.”

“You make it sound . . .”

“Ordinary?”

“Boring.”

“It’s not boring. Keep away from it.”

And she looked at me, at us, she looked us in the eye, and wasn’t scared. She took our hand. Clean fingers, dry from soap. She said, “Do you have a home?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“I lost certain things.”

“Where do you live?”

“I move around.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Sometimes. It’s not very glamorous.”

“Do you pay income tax?”

“No. I did, though, before . . . I did pay tax.”

“What’s your favourite food?”

We licked our lips. “Too many choices.”

“Where did you last go on holiday?”

Hard to remember. A world ago, a different meaning. “Istanbul.”

“What’s your favourite colour?”

“Blue.”

“Worst bus route.”

“91, Crouch End to Trafalgar Square. It gets stuck up at Euston, crawls round King’s Cross, takes for ever - faster to walk.”

“Favourite . . .” she drawled, “. . . favourite ice cream flavour.”

“Too many choices.”

“Everyone has a favourite flavour.”

“Strawberry. Although it depends on how sunny it is.”

“All-time best memory.”

“Living,” we said instinctively, and was surprised to hear our own words.

“Tad tossy,” she replied.

“There’s a story.”

“Worst memory.”

“Dying,” I said.

“And you’re not smiling.”

“No.”

“You know what - not going there.”

“Probably for the best.”

“Matthew,” she said firmly, “will you stay here tonight?”

 

She slept in the bed; I slept on the floor.

She didn’t sleep. At three in the morning she got up and pronounced, “Buggerit.”

We watched TV, wrapped in duvets. You haven’t seen bad until you’ve seen 3 a.m. TV. It made
EastEnders
look like class. At 3.30 a.m. she put on a DVD. It was some kind of fluffy romantic thing, that baffled and bemused us in equal measure. At 4.00 a.m., without ever planning on it, Loren fell asleep at just the right angle to trap my legs and sever blood supply to my left arm. I didn’t move. It wouldn’t have been right.

The boy got the girl, the girl got the boy, they sailed away beneath the Golden Gate Bridge as fireworks went off in the background. I thumbed the DVD player off with the remote control, watched a bit more telly, and eventually, even we fell asleep as the first touch of sunlight slid through the window in the smallest hours of the morning.