The Minority Council (45 page)

Bloodhounds will howl at the night, sirens will wail, and all of this will have been for nothing.

Penny.

(‘Templeman took her!’)

We stand up.

Fingers drip.

(I mean, have you tried getting a night bus from the Isle of Dogs at this hour?)

Time to go.

Look round at silver lights inside silver walls of silver steel and silver glass, of silver water lapping against silver stone, a beautiful tomb, a soulless palace, a place where all the evils are tucked quietly away.

Time to go.

We walk away.

It was a bus with a letter in its name.

We rode it because it was there, and neither knew nor cared where it was going.

I pressed my head against the glass and felt the cold of it and knew I was shuddering and couldn’t stop it and didn’t care.

The place hurt where Templeman had broken our skin with his needle. A dull slow throbbing.

Motorway became A-road, which yielded to wide city street. Name such places, then see if you can taste the stories that come with them—Mile End, where the city had once stopped and which was now firmly, officially, inner city; Victoria Park, by day, at least, a lake and ducks and playing children; Bethnal Green, where the rural cottage had become the urban slum and now, after a hundred years of neglect, the comfortable middle-class idea of a cottage.

On Mare Street, the magic tasted of the local food, sweet potato and chilli and ginger, a medley of unreconciled senses. It was a place for spells of old black time and new sodium streets, where old met new and didn’t like what it saw.

The bus terminated at Hackney Central, at a car park framed by raised railway lines that carried only freight at this hour of the night, and one-way systems laid out to tangle the senses.

Where and why didn’t matter.

No buses, no trains.

I put my hands in my pocket, and walked.

Somewhere between Templeman and Oscar Kramb, I’d lost my bag.

I walked, westwards.

The orange indicator board behind the gates of Dalston Kingsland station proclaims it to be nearly four in the morning. In the locked-up hardware store along the street, a disco ball spins perpetually, sending out dots of purple and emerald light. In the window of the local library are invitations to attend first-aid courses, take up Pilates, learn jiu jitsu, read this week’s book of the week on this month’s theme of American Noir, sign a petition to Save Our Library.

The hairdressers in Dalston will give you any cut you want—so long as you want Afro. For an extra £12 they’ll throw in nails and, for £25, you can have the complete nail and pedicure indulgence. Sets of nails without fingers are lined up in the windows, arranged in rainbow-arcs. The betting shop next door offers £15 free towards your first bet. The pawnbrokers, two doors down, guarantees you a good rate of return, should it all go wrong.

My hand hurt.

Somewhere between Templeman and Oscar Kramb, I’d lost everything.

I held up my fingers to a sodium street light and looked at the twin crosses carved into the palm of my hand. I
turned my wrist this way and that, framing the bubble of sodium between forefinger and thumb, then pinched a little harder, catching it in the hollow of my hand, pinning it there. The street lamp I’d stolen it from hissed and whined irritably, trying to glow. I let it hum, and held up the bubble of stolen light close to my face until I could feel its heat pushing softly against my skin.

Silence in the city.

No.

Not quite silence.

Not quite.

Half close your eyes and listen, and somewhere underground there is the service train rumbling back towards the depot from a night of maintaining the lines; and put your head on one side and listen and there is the delivery lorry come from the warehouses to the north to drop off tomorrow’s bread into the back docks of the supermarkets; and click your heels on the pavement and see if the sound resembles the sharp-snap footsteps of the woman trying to get home after he swore he’d give her a lift and then turned out to be such an arsehole.

These things do not break the silence but, like a coin in a well, are reminders of how far down it goes.

I snuffed out the light between my fingers, and stood in a puddle of darkness beneath the street lamp looking down a long straight road from one unseen horizon to another. In that darkness, the twin crosses on my hand still seemed visible, discolorations in the gloom, a different kind of blackness. There was blood on my sleeves. I looked away.

Need help.

Templeman took everything.

Then again, a nothing so absolute is, in and of itself, a powerful thing.

I knelt down on the paving stones.

Pressed my scarred hand into the dirty ground. Bits of chewing gum, dried and pressed to black, had been so walked on that they were now part of the pavement itself.

I could feel the pipes under my feet, see the steam curling around the sewer grating a few yards further below.

I could feel my heart beating in the palm of my hand.

I said, “Domine dirige nos,” and felt the words shudder through me like hot sickness. “Domine dirige nos, domine dirige nos!”

Need help.

I pressed my head down to the ground, dug my fingers into it, into the cracks between the paving stones. There was a place between the cracks, a world just visible out of the corner of the eye, the thing that mothers invoked when they laughed at their children, saying, “Don’t step on the cracks” without knowing quite where they’d heard the warning told.

“Domine dirige nos,” I whispered, a few centimetres from the stones. “Please, domine dirige nos.”

Footsteps.

They were soft on the ground, but we felt them.

They started from nowhere, and got closer without seeming to grow louder.

There was no light to throw a shadow, but we felt the air move above us as the source of the footsteps stopped. Even had we not known, we could have smelt him. He stank of a life lived without showers, of cigarette smoke and ash.

I looked up.

A cigarette flared orange-red in the night as he drew in a puff of smoke, before letting it out in a long blast from the corner of his mouth and flicking the ash away.

“Hey, Matthew?” he said. “You’re one screwed-up sick pup, you know that?”

If it hadn’t been so funny, we might have cried.

“Please,” I breathed. “Please help me.”

He squatted down in front of me, blew smoke above my head, flicked ash into the gutter. “You’ve still got some blood on your face,” he said. “You should be careful about things like that, you never know where that stuff has been. Haven’t you been watching those government health warnings?” The glowing end of the cigarette stuck the air with each word, to undermine its solemnity. “Chlamydia Is Everywhere.”

I looked up at him, hands still pressed to the ground. The sound the Beggar King made as he rubbed his beard was like snapping bone over splintered wood. “I don’t do interventions for just anyone,” he said. “Beggar Kings aren’t just sprung into existence to solve your problems; only to walk beside.”

“Templeman took Penny.” The words came out fast. To say them slow would have been not to say them at all.

He sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that, I really am. She was a nice girl, you know? I thought she had balls, and I don’t think that about many people.”

“He tricked me. Used me.”

“Come on,” sighed the Beggar King. “Like that’s so hard.”

“He killed your people. He did it.”

A shadow passed across the Beggar King’s eyes, almost too swiftly to see. “Is that right?” he breathed, the
flame burning steadily down on the paper between his dirty fingertips. “And by the looks of you, he tried a little something with your internal soft bits too?”

He straightened up, drew one last firm puff on his cigarette and tossed the butt away. Held out a hand. The nails were ridged yellow bone, cracked and ragged; the dirt was so deeply ingrained it had become part of the skin. His hand was cold as I took it, pulling me up. “Come on,” he said, looking me over. “Jesus, what a mess.” Then he grinned. “Let me take you to my masseuse.”

On a road with a No Entry sign at either end was a low grey building that had once been a primary school. Its windows were boarded up; an area of neglected grass was littered with old plastic bags and Coke cans; and wires hanging off the walls suggested that the electricity board had long since lost control over who powered what where.

But there were some new additions.

These were bright green signs that proclaimed the following:

Security Monitored 24/7

Danger—Children Do Not Play

Live-In Guardians Protect This Building

Next to this sign someone had written with bright red paint:

MY GOVERNMENT DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME

Underneath someone else had written

Underneath that, someone had drawn a quizzical owl, all in black, who stared out as if surprised to find itself so far from the Hundred Acre Wood.

There was a padlock on the main entrance. Either someone hadn’t bothered to lock it, or it knew not to argue
when the Beggar King came calling. The hall inside was dark, the air heavy with the smell of rising mould and settling dirt. Its walls were covered with paint, sometimes pictures, sometimes words, moving in and out of each other, messages from

Anne find me

To:

Caz woz ere

And laced in between, in bright paint that had dribbled down to the floor:

MISERY LOST

TEK 33

HEROES WITH GRIMY FACES

SUFFER IN SILENCE

WE DO NOT FORGET

A gloomy orange-yellow stain of light at the end of the hall led off into a room, student-sized with the remains of a single bed, the stuffing long torn out to make animal nests. In the shell of a metal bin, a fire had been lit from old timber fragments, siphoned petrol and newspaper kindling. Four sleepers were huddled around the flames, on cardboard beds, faces and breathing barely perceptible under a mass of sleeping bag. A big nylon shopping bag stolen from a store offering designer bathrooms at cut-price rates, get your quote now, leant against the wall, its sides bulging.

The Beggar King put his finger to his lips and stepped round the sleepers to the bag, unzipping its top and rummaging through. Even from the door, I could smell it, a mixture of dried sweat and exhaust fumes. He pulled out an armful of clothes from a bit too far down in the bag for its depths to be natural, pulled the zip tight and moved
back past the sleepers, a hand extended over their heads like a priest blessing his flock. At the end of the hall we entered another darkened room, where a fire was burning low in an iron stove. A purple bloom of mould was spreading across the walls, and a dark stain on the floor had been scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and would not be shifted.

Closing the door behind us the Beggar King put the bundle of clothes down on the floor and said, “You’re not one of these guys who goes to the gym, are you?”

I shook my head.

“Didn’t think so.” He leant back against the driest patch of wall he could find, patting down his pockets for another cigarette, which he found in a mess of torn white tissue and old bits of plastic. He ran it lovingly between his fingers and put it to his lips. It waggled like a seesaw as he said, “Okay, lose the clothes, burn them, before the coppers do you. There’s fresh ash on the floor, I suggest you use it and I got…”