The Minority Council (17 page)

Then Mr Dixon came back on the line and said he didn’t know what all the fuss was about anyway but yes, he’s got the company, do you need to write it down or something?

No, she didn’t need to write it down.

He told her.

She said, please come home.

He said, have you been drinking? I’ll be home at eight, and hung up.

She put the phone down with trembling hands and looked at me. Tears were beginning to well in her eyes. Alone in the house with a man who would not leave, who stood over her while she talked on the telephone to a husband who didn’t understand, and who had given her a few words to say that could, for all she knew, be the last she ever spoke. Her lips trembled as she tried to speak.

I smiled. “Don’t be afraid. I’m here to help.”

She stammered, “R-Rumina works for a company called H-Harlun and Phelps.”

I let myself out of the house.

The chain clanked shut on the door behind me.

Harlun and Phelps.

By day, financiers to the vastly overfunded and mysteriously well-invested.

By night, cover office for the Aldermen themselves, protectors of the city of London, guardians of magic, defenders and ostensible all-purpose good guys, battling the unnamed things that are out to get you, in the bleak and lonely corners of the dark.

Harlun and Phelps.

Corporate cover company for the Midnight Mayor.

The big white eye was watching from the back of the football pitch on the other side of the street.

A big white neighbourhood eye, on which no paint could dry, watching without blinking.

Had it watched, the night four kids lost their souls and a fifth was torn apart by a murderer no one had seen?

I walked without direction, and called Nabeela.

She said, “Hey, you got news?”

“Sort of. Look, you know when you went to try and get the Midnight Mayor to help before? At the office?”

“Yes…”

“Did you tell anyone there what it was specifically about?”

“I tried to, but they didn’t listen, wankers.”

“Nabeela, this is really, really,
really
important. Have you heard of a thing called the Neighbourhood Eye?”

“Uh, yeah, sure. It’s like this group of local residents and stuff who look out for each other. They, like, call round if they think there’s trouble. Why?”

“When you went to Harlun and Phelps, did you tell anyone about it?”

“No, why the hell should I? Hey, what’s this about?” Her worry was starting to bleed through the telephone line.

“Trust me?” I asked.

“Dunno. Guess I don’t have much of a choice.”

“I need you to do two things. I need to meet, and I mean, soon, and I need you to absolutely, under no circumstances, say a single bloody word about any of this to any Aldermen, anyone connected to the Aldermen, or anyone you think may be connected to the Midnight Mayor.”

Now her voice was ice-hard. “Okay, freaking me out now. What the fuck is going on?”

“What are you doing this evening?”

“I dunno, chilling? Watching the TV, having a microwave meal, chatting with my mates? I’m guessing you’ve got something particular in mind, right?”

An idea was forming; a horrible, cold idea.

It had a high-pitched sound that echoed inside my head, and when the street light cast its shadows along the twisted places of my mind, this idea had claws.

But first I had a meeting to attend.

I caught the bus into the centre of town.

Tottenham Court Road was the street of a thousand TVs, slicing past the heart of Bloomsbury like a strip of solder along a sea of silk. Clots of buses and cars lurched north from the tight corner of Oxford Street, too tight for the bendy buses cranking their way around it. By the same corner loomed the tower of Centre Point, where not so long ago my sometime teacher and I had discussed blood and betrayal and it had not ended well. To the north, University College Hospital sat like a child’s picture of what a hospital should be, all green and white with big potted plants in the foyer and a shop by the door selling peanuts. On the stretch of road between, you could buy anything you wanted, so long as it sparkled, shimmered or beeped.

But so much affluence attracted others. In Warren Street Underground station, or pressed up by the walls of the big glassy banks, huddled in tattered sleeping bags or with bits of cardboard at their feet saying “Hungry, please be generous,” were the beggars. The city flowed around them like a river rolling over pebbles. Some passersby would tut and proclaim, “Why should I give up my hard-earned wages for people who can’t even pick themselves up?”—while the response from those who thought themselves not so much cruel as merely practical was, “They’ll only waste it on drugs.”

With individuals playing so poor a role, caring for the city’s beggars fell to institutions. Behind a plot of tarpau
lined market stalls, selling rucksacks, embroidered scarves, and mobile phone cases fallen off a lorry, a low redbrick church was half hidden by the bare branches of a group of plane trees. At the back, narrow steps led down into a small public hall, designed in the belief that versatility trumped character any day. Steam rose from a large vent and, inside the hall, long trestle tables stood in rows. The sound of conversation bubbled, and the smell of bread, leeks and tea washed over me like a hot shower on a cold night.

It was a soup kitchen. It even served soup, out of a great bubbling vat full of potatoes, but an effort had been made to diversify the menu, adding pasta in tomato sauce, and bread and butter. This was a place for the down-and-out of every form. Old men with vividly broken blood vessels in their bulbous noses, young women with tired eyes and ragged hair, men in donated suits far too smart for their perished trainers, women in two coats over cardigans down to their knees who chatted about getting to the next place, and young men hiding the places where they’d recently been cut. A priest in black vestments and white dog collar moved between the tables, ready to hear stories and tell tales; two women in pink aprons and blue rubber gloves washed up dishes beneath a sign that said “Jesus is My Light”; and by the door of the chapel a pair of plain-clothes detectives drank tea and talked quietly with the rector, trying not to look out of place.

A woman came up to me and said, “Can we help you?”

“I’m, uh… looking for someone.”

“Among the homeless, or one of us?”

Surprise showed briefly on our face, but her smile was innocent enough.

“I’ll just look around for him,” I mumbled. Our eyes swept the tables, but the familiar face was nowhere to be seen.

Something cold brushed by my arm. I jumped, fingers tensing, mind reaching out for the nearest source of power, ready to strike.

Nothing there.

I thought I heard…

… a pair of footsteps, heavy hard boots moving on the floor…

… and for a moment the rank smell of skin so unwashed that sweat and dirt had solidified into a secondary layer.

I forced my hands to my sides, and said at the empty air, “Don’t muck about.”

I heard the snap of a cigarette lighter just behind my left ear. He was leaning against the wall, hands cupped around the flame against a wind that wasn’t there. His beard was big and dark, flecked with grey-white and dirt, his hair was scraggy and long, thinning to a bald patch, his eyes were stained with yellow gum, his skin so mulched over with the dirt of the city that it gave him an almost caffeinated quality, his clothes the remains of a once-pricey waxed coat, corduroy trousers worn shiny in places, and a thick sweater full of holes. The cigarette lighter was stamped with the words SMOKING KILLS, and as he dropped it into his bulging coat pocket he drew a long breath and snorted out a thick white cloud.

“Most people don’t bother to look,” he said at last, through crooked brownish teeth.

I followed him up the stairs to the outside world. He had a torn heavy bag on his back, all flaps and half-
glimpsed tubs of 12p pot noodle and a smell that the open air did nothing to alleviate.

“How’s being Midnight Mayor treating you?” he asked as we turned down a little street full of cheap mobile phone shops and the smell of chips.

I shrugged. “You know. Everyone’s got a problem and muggins has to fix it. How’s being Beggar King?”

“Cold for the time of year.”

“Sorry I missed you earlier…”

He waved it away dismissively. “You’ve been busy,” he replied. “Running, fighting, leaping, blowing up dusthouses, all that. But hey—try not to do it again, okay, it’s not like I’m made of money or whatever, you know? You eaten yet?”

“What? No. No, I’m okay, though, thanks.”

“Cool, because I wasn’t offering.”

We headed west into Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury’s disreputable sibling, along a street of terraced houses, their grandeur diminished by the pizza parlours and sandwich shops in their gutted ground floor. The city was turning out for lunch: students queuing at little vans smelling of chilli and beef, men and women in sharp suits debating whether to go for French on the grounds of quality, or Chinese, where it might be quieter at the back, builders with steaming mugs of tea pausing beneath their scaffolds and couriers grabbing a quick sandwich.

“So you know about the dusthouse,” I said.

“Of course I know,” he tutted. “Bloody stupid, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. I think that’s fair.”

“How long until you reckon the fairy godmother finds you?”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t yet know that it was me.”

“Don’t be bloody dense. Phone rings in the middle of the night, hi there’s this guy here says the Midnight Mayor is out to get me and whoops, what do you know, the dusthouse just sinks into a hole in the ground; you think he’s not going to make a few connections?”

“I can hide.”

“Not forever, you can’t.”

“You think he might hold a bit of a grudge?” We passed the open door of a curry house, smells of saffron and cumin washing out onto the street.

“You’re funny, Swift,” said the Beggar King with an idle flick of cigarette ash from his wrist. “Not many Midnight Mayors are funny—I like that about you.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t ask me to come for a wander just to talk about my career prospects.”

“You know what? In my infinite wisdom and because I’m public-spirited, I actually did.”

We rounded a corner, heading through the back streets south of Marylebone Road, houses growing taller, cars growing sleeker and parking enforcement even more strict. People passed us by and didn’t even glance our way. It was something more than blithe ignorance; a slick turning away of the eyes before they’d registered the thing to avoid, a calm change of course that meant people crossed the street a good fifty yards away without fully comprehending what they did. And there it was, the smell behind the smell, something in the Beggar King’s odour of dirt and sweat that was more than just biology, more than just time; it was a signal straight to the brain that whispered,
nothing to see, nothing to know, walk on by
. It was a spell of invisibility, rolling off the Beggar King, as natural as tears by the graveside.

“My career?” I heard myself ask. “What do you mean?”

He chuckled. “I like you, Swift,” he explained. “I mean, you’re about as fucked up as they come, but you’re my kinda fucked up. You’re a self-destructive infant with the power of a giant, but you’ve got respect for the little guy, for the fuck-ups like yourself, and I like that. Takes one to know one, and that.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“It’d be a real shame if you were killed too soon.”

“I feel the same way.”

“And thing is,” he concluded, scratching his ragged beard with nails like thick yellow bone, raced through with dark grey fault lines, “I really hate the dusthouses.”

I said, “Is it… the way they walk and the way they talk, or something a little deeper?”

“They fuck up lives,” he replied, voice darkening. “I know what they say—if someone wants it, someone’s gonna provide—but that’s not it. They choose to provide. They look at the whole of human existence and go ‘Yeah, we’ll do that, and it’s someone else’s fault that they get fucked, because we don’t make them take, we don’t make them buy, we just provide.’ And that is shit. That is a lie. That is the words of that man who isn’t human, who isn’t one of many, part of a city; men should walk lightly on the earth, for the millions of others who must follow where they have trod, and the dusthouses, they do not tread light.”

I said, “Okay. So we agree. What now?”

“I need to know what you saw when you went inside. Into the dusthouse. What did you see?”

“I saw… someone die. I saw men in overalls gather up fairy dust that had… I… we saw enough that… we… why?”

“I need to know if you saw my people.”

“Why?”

“Did you?” he growled, and there it was, that sudden stillness in the air, that smell of something inside the smell; he was the Beggar King, he’d been in these streets since the first man starved for want of a coin and the first child wrapped rags around its feet to stop the bleeding, he was as old as the cobbles themselves—no, much much older—and he was glaring right at me.