The Minority Council (24 page)

Tightness, burning, falling, dropping.

In another place, I staggered out of a different toilet cubicle, and nearly walked into a woman wearing a dead fox round her neck, and obscenely large pearl earrings. She opened her mouth to say something indignant, saw the blood rolling down my hand, and went instead for a well-meant cry of “Help, someone!”

It was hard to breathe, as if all the slipping through walls had drained me of lung capacity. I’d stumbled into a box office area, almost empty now except for where a few ushers were setting up for the interval drinks. I made it to a wide flight of stairs, dragged blood across the brass handrails, heard the howling of a dog and doubled back. I sensed a softness in a patch of wall beside a screen advertising art from Soviet Russia and free Pilates for the over-sixties, went through it, fell out of the other side onto my knees, gasping down breath: where now?

A ramp, mirror panels overhead, dull white light. At the top, a pair of golden face-masks were, respectively,
laughing and crying. I headed for the sound of the street, for open air at the end of the passage. I was nearly there when the first gun was fired, shockingly loud, unrealistically loud, making me wonder if it hadn’t been fired at all, if I’d imagined it, since it seemed absurd that reality might pull off that effect. I saw the bursting mortar as the bullet buried itself in the wall in front of me, ducked down, and made it round the corner as two more slammed into the wall, and struck sparks off a metal column. Running feet behind me; in front, a free-standing information kiosk, with a map designed to confuse and a large red blob declaring “You are here.” I ran at the map, closing my eyes just before impact and skidded through to the other side of the darkness, heart pounding in my ears.

I felt a blast of cold, damp wind. For a while I lay on the ground heaving down air. At length I risked opening my eyes and leaning over to look down. A very long way down. We drew a sharp breath and recoiled: we were on the roof of one of the three towers, having fallen out of an air vent in a clustered mess of heating units and aerials.

Down was so far down that nothing came close to a similar scale of up. The city shone all around. If someone had taken the Milky Way, turned it on its head and spread it across the earth, it might just have competed with the starscape of city light stretched out around, disrupted by nebulas made from office towers lit up LED blue and green, or the dying sun of a sodium-orange-floodlit monument, sliced through by the silver-black ribbon of the river. We stared, feeling the icy blast rush at us and wash us clean. Then there was another howl below, far off. I reached into my bag for tissues, wrapping several round my thumb, my fist, my hand, until I looked like I had a beach-ball for fingers.

I felt rather than heard the movement behind me, the twitch of warmth as reality opened and closed in busy silence at my back. I was turning, a fistful of icy high-up air ready to throw, but he was already upon me, blocking out the light. He caught me a kick to the side of the head that bounced my brain against the inside of our skull and set off a high singing in our ears. As we fell he grabbed us by the hair and pulled us back up, only to hit us again across the jaw, sending the music in our ears to play in our eyes, our nose, our face.

For a moment, all we could see was Hugo’s face as he said, not with rage or resentment, “Now Mr Swift, did you think you were the only one who could do that?”

I opened my mouth to make reply and he hit it. I went limp, and he let us go: we bumped with the impact of the roof, and our clumsily wrapped hand flopped out over the edge of the tower.

I managed to wheeze, “Could we talk about this?”

“Mr Swift, I would like to point out,” he said, shaking his knuckles as if distressed by the pain
his
punch had caused to
his
hands, “that it was your action which precipitated this whole situation.”

I rolled a little distance from the edge. We felt pressure behind our ears, as if they were trying to burst from the inside out. Hugo spared me minimal attention; having taken out his mobile phone, he was dialling.

“Good evening. I require extraction,” he said cordially to the unseen recipient. I crawled onto my hands and knees, and as I managed to drag my hand from the floor, grey concrete dust came with it, surging around my fingers like iron filings to a magnet. I drew my hand back ready to throw—and he was there, too fast, much, much
too fast, no one moved like that; but he was there, his foot coming up and straight into my midriff. I felt something hot explode inside and wondered if this was how it felt to drink boiling oil down one lung.

Show me that sorcerer who throws spells while hyperventilating, and I’ll find a zombie who reads Proust. Our body was flesh; we gritted our teeth and looked up at a sky blurred by our own failing senses.

A voice muffled by all the other sounds hammering for attention in my ear—mostly blood and inaudible screams—declared, “I do apologise, Mr Swift. We will administer appropriate medical attention to you as soon as can be feasibly arranged.”

The breath for speech was two lungfuls too many. I wheezed, turning my head away from him and looking down towards the drop, deep and long and into an uncertain darkness. A thought flared at the back of my mind, a thought so hideous that, briefly, we didn’t even notice the pain. Somehow I was still wearing my shoulder bag, strung across my chest. It was trying to slip now, trying to fall from the edge of the tower, and only my body weight was preventing it. Hugo was putting his phone back into his pocket, apparently satisfied with his night’s work. I felt blood seeping through the tissues around my hand. I tried taking a deep breath, and it turned into a gasp as the ribs on the left side of my body announced they weren’t having any of it. I closed my eyes, felt the cold high air pushing back against the burning in my cheeks, felt the slow slide of my bag into the drop, and below—a very long way below—a certain peculiar darkness on the earth.

There was a rattling overhead, the sound of engines getting closer. A helicopter, heading our way. I felt Hugo’s
arm brush my shoulder as he said briskly, “Now Mr Swift, please let’s not be difficult about…”

I rolled to the side, pushing myself with the palms of my hands, feet flopping first, then knees, until there was suddenly no choice about where the weight was going and, feet locked together and arms pressed to my sides, I fell off the tower.

Monumentally stupid.

Just about enough distance between here and there to think, monumentally stupid.

Right up there, in fact, for flagrant opportunism mingled with pig-headed imbecility.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to mull much more on the subject, because there was the ground below and the darkness of the tower rushing by and Hugo looking down and just a moment before I hit and it was all over, there was…

… a darkness below, a softness in the join between the tiles…

… a crack in the ground…

… that opened as we fell…

… and swallowed us whole.

Reality had a moment of uncertainty.

Gravity had a very serious moment of uncertainty. It still wanted to do its thing, but suddenly the solid pavement that it had been intent on dropping me onto had become a darkness, a space between places, a hole where A met Z and decided that the alphabet in between didn’t count. In that time the world considered what to do, then opened up a hole beneath me and dropped me feet-first onto the bonnet of a silver Mercedes.

Reality had a sense of style, if nothing else.

My feet gave out instantly, my knees buckling; the car alarm beneath me began to wail, as did those of its two neighbours. A large me-sized dent took up most of the roof, following an impact severe enough to shear the metal frame away from the windscreen and cause two windows to shatter.

But not dead.

Still not dead.

Somewhere between here and there, gravity had become confused and decided to let someone else sort it out.

I lay on top of the car, until its wailing got too much.

Then I fell off the car and lay on the floor.

I tried getting up.

In vain. Pain exploded across my ribs and down my spine, sent aftershocks into my knees and tingled at the funny bone in my elbows.

I lay back down on the concrete and focused hard on breathing.

Were they following?

Almost certainly. But while Hugo might have been able to move through the Barbican’s magical gaps, he didn’t strike me as being so monumentally

monumentally

stupid as to try replicating what I’d just done.

At the sound of the car alarms, a man with black shoes and blue trousers was now heading towards me. “Hey, what the…?”

“Police!” I gasped. “I’ve been attacked, call the police!”

He hesitated, then cried, “Don’t move, okay. I’ll be right back…”

Time to move.

One leg at a time, one muscle at a time, holding our screaming sides as if they might develop mouths and express their pain independently to the world. I made it four whole cars towards the exit before I had to stop, and drag down air. Each gasp brought water springing to my eyes. A few more steps, another pause, then there was the exit and beyond it a short tunnel, with cars streaming to and from somewhere better. Out onto the pavement, which smelt of trapped fumes, and, with one hand pressed to the wall, I began the journey towards the end of the tunnel.

Smithfield.

Had to get to Smithfield.

Not far on normal legs; but tonight someone was doing high-temperature metallurgy in my lungs, and just how long would it be before Hugo and his bloodhound found where I’d gone, how much more time until the howling started again?

We pulled ourself up straighter, nearly shrieking at the pain.

Midnight Mayor.

This was our city, this was our bloody city, this was our place of power, it was ours!

I dug my fingers into the nearest wall, felt heat and dry layers of invisible soot, scratched my nails along and pulled it under my fingers, dragged it in. I let the sound of the cars flood into my ears, felt the engines beneath my feet, tasted the dirt of their exhaust pipes on the air, sucked in lungfuls of it, let the blackness fill me up from the inside. I could feel the rumbling of the Underground below in the pit of my belly, smell the garbage truck on its evening rounds, taste the sweat of the gym a few hundred
yards away, hear the singing of the telephone wires, feel the crackling of the mains cables overhead and, below, brush the old ley lines of the old city wall, feel their power shudder up my spine.

My city.

I dragged it all in until my breath was turning sootgrey on the air, until there was a silver-metal shimmer to our skin, until our heart beat in time to the de-dum of the railway over the tracks, until our stomach grumbled to the frequency of engine noise, and then I dragged in more until our head nearly burst with it, until every breath tasted of it and flesh was nothing now, just a thing that had to be moved, a tiny dot inside an ocean, to be swept up by the tide.

I walked, and watched myself walking from the CCTV cameras, and in the yellow eyes of the pigeons, and felt myself walking in the dusty memories of the paving stones, and heard myself walking in the scratched surfaces of the tunnel walls but, in that instant, nothing about me seemed to matter.

Smithfield.

Smell of meat and sawdust.

Smell of coffee and tuna sandwiches.

Bicycle rack, not much traffic, the rumbling of the Underground where the trains briefly emerged somewhere down out of sight.

The Victorian meat market, restored to sparkling new, the dragon of the city watching over it.

St Bartholomew’s the Great, hidden beyond a deep archway in its grassy churchyard. Black flint walls faced with white stone, a battlemented tower of red brick above the west door. A saint holding a model of the church
looked down serenely, his hand raised in blessing as I limped my way up to the heavy door and pushed it open.

Smell of candles and polish.

Colder in here than outside.

Thin light, barely making the effort.

A thick door of blackened oak, tucked away in a corner and almost hidden behind a sweeping red curtain.

Down a narrow, sloping corridor.

A flight of steps, only one naked bulb shining above it. A ceiling so low, I had to duck my head.

Another door at the bottom, even thicker and smaller. Around it, within a square sculpted frame, ancient carved stonework. As a cruel joke, some medieval mason had included a grinning gargoyle, its tongue rolled out, eyes bulging, like it was being throttled.

This door was locked. I leant on the door for support, raised my fist and, clumsily, I knocked.

An eternity later, someone answered.

“Uh… yeah?” asked a female voice. It had the disbelieving tone of all decent people who, at three minutes into extra time with the scoreline at 0–0, or whatever extremity was their equivalent, had been called away to deal with a spider.

“Help me!” I rasped. And, this job done, I collapsed.

The era of government cutbacks had not been kind.

In the good old days—and how magicians longed for the Good Old Days—magicians had got healing from wise old folk who knew the secret words to do the secret deeds, and all very lovely it was.