The Neon Court (36 page)

We just laughed, and squeezed a little harder, felt his not-flesh collapse beneath our grasp.

Then something moved at the back of the bus.

It picked itself up, stretched.

It had metal skin, silver-steel metal skin, laced with veins of red. Its breath was thick black smoke, its tongue was lizard-licking, its hair metal strands that stood up like poisoned spines, its eyes burning red madness. It said, in a voice that rattled like a misfiring engine in the night, “Mr Mayor?”

We were aware of pain in the palm of our right hand.

Curious, we looked at it.

A pair of twin red crosses, carved into skin.

They ached.

“Mr Mayor?” repeated the creature of metal skin. The light was
bending around it, too frightened to come any nearer than it had to, and in the shadows that formed at its feet, things tried to crawl their way out of the darkness.

I opened our fingers.

Bakker/Hunger collapsed backwards, wheezing, clawing at his throat, gasping for air.

I stared at the crosses in the palm of my hand, then at the thing, not exactly human, not exactly dragon, stuck somewhere in between, that stood at the back of the bus. I whispered, “Dees?”

The blue electric fires began to go out.

The lights outside began to fade, until all that remained was the blue electric glow that rose off our skin.

“Dees?” I added, and there was just a shadow at the end of the bus, still and dark, no red fire in it any more. “I hit my head,” I complained.

And then, even the blue fires went out, plunging the bus into the dark.

There was a sign outside the window.

It was the first thing I saw.

It said:

Halal Open 24/7

Next to it, picked out in little blue and green LEDs was the picture of a happy smiling man eating a hot dog over and over and over again.

Then it passed in the night.

The lights, yellow anonymous lights, flickered back on, one at a time, running up the length of the bus. Theydon was crawling to his feet in the stairwell. He looked breathless, ragged. His hair had fallen free from its perfect slicked-back shape and there were long dark streaks of dye running down his face like blood from a scalp wound. As we looked, we saw traces of grey in the edges of his hair, thin traces of pallor in the former perfection of his looks. He met our eyes, and quickly looked away, sweeping his hands back and over his face: and that was it, all streaks of dye and hints of grey immediately gone, banished as he restored his perfect mask of youth. But we had seen, and he knew it.

Dees said, “Well … that was informative.” She was sat by the
stairwell, doing up the buttons on her sleeve, as normal-looking as a woman with no shoes can ever be on a bus in the middle of the night. She said, “Injuries? Anyone?”

Theydon deposited himself on a seat opposite her and said, “No.”

She looked at me. I mumbled, “Fine.”

“You appear to be bleeding, Mr Mayor,” she replied.

I felt my neck. The blood was already sticky, like half-dried glue. I felt a little lower. The skin felt hot, burnt. I wiped my hands clean on my trousers, tried to pull my coat a little tighter around my neck. “I’ll live,” I said.

“Of course you will, Mr Mayor,” replied Dees. “You’re very good at that.”

I looked round for Bakker.

Not there.

Theydon said, “Is that going to happen again?”

I saw that there was a pair of handprints pressed onto the glass, fingers too long, glass scratched by the too-long nails. I could just hear, over the sound of the engine, the pattering of falling rain, see water being dragged backwards along the glass by the pull of the wind. I took a deep breath, and swept the condensation clear from the glass, obliterating the marks as I went.

Theydon and Dees moved closer, pressing up against the glass to see the world outside.

Rain.

Hard to see for all the rain.

The drains had given up long ago, water pooling in dirty lakes, spilling across the pavements, pushing against doors, ankle-deep. Dead leaves spun and twisted as we swished along roads where the street lamps had forgotten to burn, just a dull wire-thin glow of lingering red within each light. Behind the windows of the houses there was no sign of life. Not a pedestrian walked in the streets. Not a car moved, but sat like crocodiles in deep mud. The only light came from the bus headlamps, slicing out two cones of white in the dark, and from the occasional shop sign. Nothing moved except us, not a man, woman, rat nor fox.

I breathed, “We’re here,” and rang the bell.

*

There was a bus shelter.

On the roof of the shelter someone had thrown a child’s toy, a bright blue rattle, that sat in a black-encrusted dirty pool of water which had overspilt the roof and was now running in waterfalls all around the shelter.

Inside the shelter the light had gone out.

The light had gone out everywhere.

And as the night bus pulled away, its windows the only brightness in this place, even that light faded.

I closed my fingers into a fist, put what little warmth I had into the hollow of my hand, opened it out. Pink-sodium light bloomed, rose up from my fingers, hovered at head height, snapping and fizzing with every drop of water that splattered across its surface. When I moved, it moved, providing a small circle of illumination around me. I could see the timetables and local maps fixed to the inside of the shelter. Their paper was thin and grey, curling up where the rain had got in. Across the timetable, someone had stuck a yellow piece of paper proclaiming:

NO BUSES TODAY.

NO BUSES EVER.

I heard Theydon’s sigh.

I glanced at him, and saw that, even though he wasn’t inside my bubble of light, he still had about him a glow, no source, no colour, but he was still clearly visible as if what little light there was had decided to be his friend, let the rest of the world suffer. My eyes moved to Dees, and her eyes, when she tilted her head to one side, flashed bright like a cat’s in the night, though I had seen no cat’s eyes ever flicker that shade of red.

I looked back at one of the maps on the wall.

Sidcup.

In all the excitement, I hadn’t really noticed us arrive.

“Where now, Mr Mayor?” asked Dees.

“Back to where it all began,” I sighed.

“Back to the tower block.”

Our footsteps were too loud.

There is no silence as dead as the sound of the engine stopping, no silence so complete as the city when the traffic stops moving. For
chirruping country insects the city made human voices constant in the night; for the rustle of leaves and wind there were air vents in the sides of buildings; for the sound of mud underfoot, the clip clip clip of hard soles on tarmac. There should always be something, somewhere, making noise in the city.

Just not tonight.

We didn’t talk as we walked.

We were all too busy minding the sound of our feet, contemplating the simple fact that our light was probably the brightest thing in this black landscape, a beacon to all the nasties that weren’t making themselves known in the dark.

We walked down the middle of the road, following the broken white line, in a place where traffic should have been. The rain was unstoppable. It gurgled and splattered in the gutters, dug momentary craters in the puddles, dripped off rooftops and pooled in abandoned half-dug-out holes in the road. Our wandering light passed over dead curling posters offering beer, six cans for £4, wine, £3.99 a bottle, advertising wholesalers of wigs, makers of bead jewellery, packagers of Chinese rice crackers, purveyors of Turkish olive oil by the gallon, launderettes and chippies, hairdressers showing the same photo of the same bright-eyed man with the same charismatic-yet-domestic haircut beaming out of the window; and local stores where you can top up your mobile phone, your Oyster card, pay your gas bill, call New Zealand and get a special offer on fabric conditioner too.

I took out my A–Z guide to London and turned to Sidcup.

The page, which had been blank, was now full, drawn in black dribbling ink, as if the map itself was turning to liquid.

“It’s fine,” I announced. “Burnt-out remains of a tower block, one of three, near a motorway. Dead easy to find.”

We kept on walking.

After a while Dees said, “Where are the people?”

I shrugged.

We walked a little further.

Then Theydon added, “We’re being watched.”

No one broke stride.

The road was tending downhill; by my pink travelling light I found a large reflective board declaring that this was the way to Rochester,
Dover, Folkestone and the Channel Tunnel, please drive carefully. As we passed the shuttered door of a pub, Dees made a little sound, and we stopped.

There was a figure curled up in the doorway, a sodden sleeping bag drawn up around its shoulders. A thin pale face, lined with thinner blue veins, was visible underneath a stained woolly hat. The eyes were closed, but the woman was still breathing.

“Wake her?” asked Dees.

“If you can,” I replied.

She knelt by the woman, brushed her shoulder, shook her gently. No reaction. She touched the woman’s cheek, leant in, whispered, “Excuse me?” Raised her voice. “Miss? Miss?”

Nothing.

Theydon said, “Let me try.”

Doubtfully, Dees stood back. The man in the red coat knelt down by the woman’s side, considered her face, then leant down and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

Nothing.

“It won’t work, you know.”

Bakker was standing next to her in the doorway, nonchalant as anything, not a hair out of place. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small orange bottle, thumbed the lid off, and tipped a couple of triangular white pills into his palm. Theydon straightened up, a look of confusion passing over his face at his failure to wake the woman. Bakker downed the pills with the ease of habit.

“You can’t wake them up. This is Blackout’s territory now,” explained Bakker. “Endless night. This is what you find on the other side of the wall, this is what the city will be, when the sun doesn’t come up. Sleeping until the rain washes away the streets, the city, and them.”

“It should have …” mumbled Theydon.

“The rules are different here” was the nearest to comfort that Dees could manage.

“You’re all going to drown, Matthew,” explained Bakker as we turned away from the still-sleeping woman. “That’s how it ends, for this city, you know. The lights will go out, the river will rise and wash away the last trace of sleepy mankind, and you’ll all drown.”

“Bakker’s back,” I growled out of the corner of my mouth as we walked on.

“Who?” demanded Theydon.

“He left?” added Dees.

“Is there someone else … ?” Theydon tried again.

“Never mind.”

“And when you – if you – find this chosen one?” asked Bakker, falling into step beside me. “You know,” he went on, when I didn’t reply, “the whole silent treatment is going to get you nowhere. I understand that you’re not in a hurry for our esteemed colleague” – a nod to Theydon – “to appreciate just how mentally unstable you are right now, or indeed, how unstable in every possible way, but this is hardly a profitable attitude to our relationship.” His footsteps did nothing to disturb the surface of the puddles; he was the driest thing in South London.

We kept on walking.

“Murderer,” said Bakker, not unkindly.

Walking.

“Hypocrite,” he added.

Still walking here.

“Inhuman in human skin.”

My fists clenched.

“Human with inhuman thoughts.”

We looked at him then, straight in the eye, and he was grinning, knowing how we’d react, watching it, waiting for us; we could feel the electricity trying to get out of our skin, burn and rage.

“Not coping very well with mortality, are you? And, heaven help you, all the things that come with it! All these feelings, all that pain, skin, flesh –
saliva
. How does a creature as glorious as the blue electric angels deal with the fact that its body is constantly secreting substances: sweat, saliva, piss, tears, snot, puke; it’s utterly repulsive, when you consider it. Which I imagine you don’t. Not if you can help it.”

We dragged our gaze away, focused on each step in front of us.

“Farting is a particularly gross physical reaction,” added Bakker. “I don’t know why people find it funny. Every decent society since time began has been rightly ashamed of the urge to fart. So many bodily
reactions we can’t control! I mean look at the pair of us. You and I, Matthew, could, if we chose, in our lifetimes have set the sky on fire. We can stop the hearts of our enemies, fill the streets with electric flame, summon barbed wire and boiling water from the pipes below us, clad our skins in concrete and still breathe, inhale exhaust off the back of the buses and with it brew a potion of sizzling oil that could power a plane from here to Shanghai and back again. And can we stop a simple little fart? Can we nothing.”

The sole of my left foot itched, an insufferable, impossible itch. In the window of a Chinese takeaway, the outline of a cat’s paw bobbed up and down in a perpetual Nazi salute, promising good luck, or many riches, or a decent dish of sweet and sour, or maybe none of the above. In the back seat of a Fiat parked on the side of the road, a mother lay asleep, child bundled in her arms, uncomfortable posture promising the pins and needles of a lifetime when she woke, if she woke. An opening up of the darkness ahead revealed a sad patch of grass. Wet litter blew through thick mud dotted with thin tufts of green. We could smell an old dead smell on the air, black and dry, cutting through even the wash of the rain. I threw my light up higher, bigger, until it cast a circus-sized tent of light across the ground around us. The shadows didn’t cave away. They scuttled, catching hints of giddy shapes at the edge of the light that bore no relation to nature. The rain stung my eyes.

There was a fence. It was covered with sagging posters for bands, comics, faiths and politics, the inks dissolving one into the other.

If you don’t vote