The Midnight Mayor (38 page)

“Mr Pinner?”

“No. Well - Mr Pinner too. But another threat, possibly one even worse.”

“Which is?”

“You.”

“I’m confused.”

“
You
. I think Nair made you Midnight Mayor in order to force you to take responsibility, to
make
you become involved, to drive you to take a side and fight for it. I think he did it to control you, to bind you, to curse you with this office. I think he did it to eliminate the threat of the blue electric angels.”

We stared at him long and hard, too surprised to say anything. He let us stare, then smiled a real smile, cruel and dry. “If you can’t beat them . . .”

“We don’t believe that.”

“That doesn’t matter, does it? What matters, is whether Nair believed it. And there, I fear, is something we’ll never know.”

We didn’t speak. He let out a great, tummy-clenching sigh, and stood up sharply, his leather shoes snapping against the polished floor. “Still, none of this is really to the point, is it? You want to know about the inauguration, how to survive? The answer is I can’t really tell you. It’s always different for each new Mayor. Being, as they are, just a man with a brand on the hand. I know it has to be done, in order for the transfer of office to be complete. And if you are going to survive any more encounters with Mr Pinner, I suggest you take every advantage presented to you.”

“What do I need to do?” A voice that might have been ours, somewhere a long way off.

“You have to walk the old city walls, seal the gates against evil.”

“That’s not just unhelpful, it’s pretentiously vague.”

“It’s what it says on the cards.”

“And how do I do that?”

“I don’t entirely know. Not being, myself, Midnight Mayor.”

“I’m a sorcerer, not a Jedi.”

“Is that something you tell yourself in times of doubt?”

“It’s something a religious nutcase pointed out to me in a moment of prophetic insight.”

He shrugged. “I can only hold your hand so far. You’ll work it out.”

“You’re really not much use, are you?”

He treated me to the crocodile smile. “May the Force be with you,” he said, and gave me a Vulcan V for good luck. And then his smile almost became a chuckle. “No one else is.”

 

Afternoon melted into evening.

Evening asked night if it was free for a coffee.

Night sheepishly went in search of its dancing shoes, having left them somewhere behind the spotlights.

The orange glow of urban darkness slithered over the sky.

We ate Thai fish cakes with sweet and sour sauce.

We felt a bit better.

We ordered more food.

Pad Thai noodles with chicken, lemon and crushed peanuts.

We felt a lot better.

The smiling waitress at the restaurant, a small place shimmering in soft candlelit cleanliness on Exmouth Market, asked us if we wanted anything more.

We thought about it, and said yes. Anything with a theme of coconut.

The evening passed on by nicely.

We almost managed to forget.

That special, subtle “almost”, that drives the fear out of the stomach, leaves only a few claws scratching away at the junction of small and large intestine.

We went to the toilet more often than was our inclination.

We had no reason to believe that there was a God, but if he/she/it existed, it had a sick sense of the silly.

 

Time passed.

Can time take its time?

It did tonight.

Then, just when I was getting used to its saunter, it started to jog, and my Alderman watcher/carer/guardian/assassin said, “We have to go.”

They took me by car to the base of London Bridge. They unloaded me in the bus lane on the south side, and sped off, citing traffic regulations. The tin shed of London Bridge station squatted behind, the yellow towers of Southwark Cathedral across the other side of the street. It was midnight in London, and the city was taking its time, or maybe time was taking it. The wind carried the sound of the bells of St Paul’s as they banged out the hour. Behind HMS
Belfast
, Tower Bridge was lit up in dangling red and green lights. The Tower of London sat squat and orange, like an angry garden gnome in the family too long to care that it was now cracked and ugly. The black lamp-posts along the river, stretching out past Butler’s Wharf, were hung with shining white bulbs; the grey concrete of London Bridge was lit up with shimmering pinks and purples the entire span of its length.

I took a deep breath of clear Thames air.

It made me feel cooler inside, sharper on the edges, drove the weariness out of my eyes and the lead from my brain. They say yogis can live a whole day on just one breath. If it was the breath of the river of the city they loved, then I can see how it might work.

Earle had said: magic is life.

He’d got it only slightly wrong.

The rest of what he’d said seemed, to our mind, utter bollocks.

I started walking.

Or maybe, we should call it processing.

Whatever that walk was that the Midnight Mayor did, I did it that night.

In which various dead things make their point, the ethics of urban planning come under scrutiny, and a new Midnight Mayor learns some important lessons about some old ideas.

 

The Lord Mayor, when he gets inaugurated on that cold, drizzling November evening, doesn’t just get cocktail sausages - he gets champagne, pineapple, cheese on sticks and someone to hold the umbrella.

So much for perks of office.

I wondered, as I walked across London Bridge, trailing my fingers along the railing and watching the water gush and slide beneath me, if Earle was just holding out on the cocktail sausages as a matter of principle. The life of Midnight Mayor seemed a precarious one, obtained for the most part after years of questionable service. And to be Midnight Mayor and face various unnatural and, in my case, unkillable dangers, all of which seemed out to get you, thank you kindly, without even a piece of pineapple on a stick as a reward, seemed . . .

. . . unnatural.

Which was probably the point.

So much for the ruthless application of reason.

I walked.

Earle had said I had to follow the old route of the city wall. All but a few pieces had been demolished years ago, and those I’d seen were nestled away.

Lock the gates against evil, whatever that meant. If I took “evil” in the traditional Christian meaning, 90 per cent of the city’s inhabitants wouldn’t be able to get to work in the morning, ourself included. Even limiting the definition to things actively out to kill and maim, it still presented semantic as well as practical problems.

You’ll work it out, he’d said.

Assuming he even wanted us to live.

Still, any advantage, anything against Mr Pinner, seemed worth getting, and it couldn’t take more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to walk the course of the old wall. Even if it achieved nothing material, it would calm us down, let us soak up some of the older, quieter magics that slithered across the pavement like low mist, as we fed off the rhythm of the wander.

Magic is life, my old teacher had said.

Turn it round, and you begin to get something.

We walked.

Shops, shut; camera shop, TV in the window showing our face in a dozen screens from a single camera as we passed by; shop selling suits and ties; Monument station, shut; the Monument itself, its golden ball of fire peeking over the top of the surrounding buildings; cobbled streets leading to ancient, low, forgotten churches, smothered in the gross concrete buildings bursting up around. A giant chemist, where you could purchase things to make your skin brighter, darker, tighter, softer, gentler, warmer, hairier, smoother - and who knew, even find some medicines too. Spitalfields off to my right, the streets empty, the city workers long since gone home, the traffic nothing more than a lost 15 bus on its way to Blackwall, before the night buses took over. A wide street, concrete buildings edging against black reflecting windows that stared angrily down on the grand decadence of the older Victorian offices squatting in tight streets with names like Cornhill, Leadenhall, Fenchurch Street, St Helen’s Place, Clark’s Place, Camomile Street, Houndsditch, Liverpool Street, Wormwood Street, and all their little friends and relations scrabbling away into the crowded gloom of the night-time emptied city. A few miles to the north and a few streets to the south, the night would be loud and lively, full of partying, drinking and general wassail. Here, where the offices were, no one lived, and little stirred except myself and the occasional passing dustbin man.

I headed for Aldgate, that strange junction where the run-down old window frames of the East End met the pampered corniced doors of the City, no apology, no excuse; just bang and there it was: humming, buying, selling, smelling, bustling squalor and the death of brand names. A subway beneath a broad roundabout where the narrow city roads began to spread out into the urban-planned highways towards the estuary, the east, and the Blackwall Tunnel; newspaper drifted beneath the dull lamps; shops, built underground as part of a cunning scheme that had never worked, lurked behind abandoned blankets too tatty even for the beggars to take. The writing was on the wall, declaring such mystic statements as:

I kept on walking, ignoring the signs that lied about which exit led where with ancient yellow arrows half torn from the walls. The feeling that I was not alone crept up on me with the gentle padding walk of the polite assassin. I let it get close, until I could feel it tickling the back of my neck, then stopped, hands buried in my trouser pockets, and turned.

There was no one there.

I felt like the justifiable fool I was.

I turned back, kept on walking.

I was still not alone.

I reached the ramp up from the subway, and stopped again. This was, I figured, the last chance to check for followers and get it wrong, without making a fool of myself in public.

Still no one there.

There was, however, something on the wall.

I looked at it carefully.

Someone had spray-painted on the image of a woman. She wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt and appeared to be drinking some sort of yoghurt drink from a plastic cup. Her top lip had folded over the pink straw from it to her mouth and the movement had tilted her head down, but her eyes were up, and fixed on me. They were laughing.

They were also blinking. A rhythmic, silent, steady on-off, one-two count, long eyelashes moving over the soft reflected pink of her eyes.

I recognised the painted woman’s face.

I said, “Vera.”

The painted face stopped drinking the painted yoghurt through the painted straw and looked up. Then the two-dimensional flatness said, “Ah, shit.”

Her lips moved; a pink thing wiggled inside the redness of her mouth. No depths to it, just a change in colour to imply an alteration of perspective. A cartoon on the wall, and the wall was speaking. Her voice echoed the length of the subway. I repeated numbly, “Vera?”

She gestured with the plastic cup, which slid silently over the chipped concrete as if paint was nothing more than a sheet of silk to be moved and slid back at will. “You gotta keep walking,” she said. “You don’t walk, and it won’t work.”

I turned, and kept on walking. Never argue with the surreal; there’s no winning against irrationality. The image of Vera slid off the wall behind me and onto the wall by my side. She was walking with me. I could only see her profile, like an ancient Egyptian painting turned sideways in a Pharaoh’s tomb, and her outline was wobbling, uneven, as if the invisible cartoonist sketching her onto the concrete couldn’t keep up with the speed of her swagger. I said, “This is peculiar.”