The Neon Court (4 page)

“And then all you have to say is, ‘dunno’ and ‘I’ll get back to you’! I mean some sort of fucking mentor you are.”

A pair of bright lights at the end of the street, the low hum of an engine doing too much work for too little maintenance. I held the phone away from my ear and let Penny rant a little. Oda raised her head from a contemplation of her shoes, shied away from the approaching light. I patted down my pocket, found my Oyster card, put the phone back to my ear.

“… so that’s it, I mean what the fuck, it’s like so totally …”

“Remember what we said about that temper thing you’ve got going?”

Sullen silence on the end of the line.

“Now I want you to take a deep breath …”

“Up yours!”

“Repeat after me: ‘Breathe in with anger … and out with love …’”

I stuck out an arm, flagged down the bus as Penny started on a list of fluent and medically precise obscenities. It was a little red single-decker, the kind of bus I associated with little old ladies nipping out to do the shopping, or kids who rode the buses for nothing better to do.

“Going now! In with anger …”

“I
hate
you!”

I hung up as the bus came to a sloppy halt in the gutter by the bus stop, eased Oda on board, beeped in with my travelcard, paid a two-pound bus fare all in loose change for her, stuck the ticket in my pocket. The driver was a Middle Eastern-looking man with a mole on his top lip, who studied us in the mirror and refused to make anything more in the way of eye contact. There were five other people on the bus. A black man with more hair than head held up in a woolly sack on the top of his head, wearing a high-visibility jacket and a pair of steel-capped boots. An old man who smelt of sweat and beer and against whose foot an empty lager can bumped and rolled on every corner; his head was bowed, his nose pink, his eyes lost to another world. Three kids, dressed in oversized duffel coats and trousers that started somewhere around the knee. They looked like they wanted you to be afraid of them, without really knowing why.

I got Oda into a seat papered over with torn free newspapers and
crisp packets. She leant, her forehead resting against the cold, scratched glass of the window, looking paler than ever in the unforgiving white fluorescent light. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“Hadn’t really thought that far ahead.”

“Sorcerers,” she muttered sourly. “You never do.”

“Remember that major owing me thing? You need a doctor.”

“No doctors.”

“You need a hospital.”

“No hospitals.”

“See, both those things sound irrational to me …”

“I need a place to sleep.”

“Yes, because that’ll make everything better.”

“Just get me somewhere warm.”

“Oda, I have questions …”

“Later.”

“They’re kinda whoppers …”

“Later.”

So saying, she turned her face away from me, and closed her eyes.

I got off the bus to the south of Greenwich, in that dead space where the reconstruction around the white swell of the Millennium Dome ran into the old industrial dumping grounds of the past; where the air smelt forever of rotting eggs and the off-licence never closed its doors. A yellow-brick building that had once been a pub stood on a triangular street corner, its sign flashing in blue and pink neon, ‘HOTEL VACANCIES’, above an open glass door leading onto a thin red carpet. Oda moved like a blind corpse, her head bowed, shuffling as if her feet had become dog-chewed slippers on the end of a pair of matchstick legs. There was an inner glass door, locked. I buzzed the buzzer until a young woman with dyed red hair and a silver pendant around her neck reading ‘Cheryl’ appeared and let us cautiously over the threshold. Inside, the air smelt of baked beans, and carried the sound of a distant TV.

“Yeah?”

“Room for two?”

She looked us up and down a few times, then said, “I gotta get my mum,” and scuttled away.

I propped Oda against the nearest wall, beneath a picture showing some long-passed grandmother missing a front tooth and smiling broadly with a chubby babe in her arms.

The girl came back, bringing with her a hard-chinned woman in a large red dressing gown. Her dark thinning hair was held up in a net, and her jaw bore the traces of some grey-green goo that did we could guess not what for her skin. “You want a room?” she asked, looking me and Oda over.

“Yes. For two, one night.”

“We’re full.”

“Sign at your door says you’ve got vacancies.”

“It’s wrong. We’re full.”

“Lady,” I snapped, “my friend here is diabetic. She’s just had an incident. The paramedics came and shot her full of stuff, and now she can barely stand, but they say she’s fine. I don’t want to try and get her back to Walthamstow tonight, I can pay, we’re not druggies or pimps or whatever, I just need to get my friend to bed, OK?”

Mum looked at Kid, Kid looked at Mum. Neither looked happy.

“Hundred and fifty quid a night,” said Mum.

It was a silly sum. I said, “Sure, no problem.”

“Paid now.”

“Fine.”

I saw Kid’s mouth twitch with displeasure that their bluff had been called, but Mum’s eyes were that little bit brighter. A piece of paper was shoved my way. I made up an address off the top of my head, and signed myself in as Dudley Sinclair. I fumbled in my satchel until I found my wallet, complete with twenty pounds in cash and a receipt for takeaway pizza. Behind it was a card. On the front was a picture of a woman wearing nothing but superimposed black stars over the strategic areas. On the back was a phone number, and a lot of carefully scribbled enchantment in blue biro. I shielded it as best I could with the palm of my hand, and slipped it into the credit card reader that Mum shoved my way. The price being asked on the reader was £175.

I said, “Hundred and seventy-five quid? You said it was fifty.”

“VAT,” she intoned.

“Right.” I entered a random four-digit PIN, and mentally apologised to whatever god of economics I was slighting by this quick and illicit
piece of enchantment. The machine thought about it; the machine accepted.

Mum said, “Top floor,” and gave me a key attached to a wooden yoke. “Breakfast is seven till nine.”

“Got a lift?” I asked.

“Uh-uh.” She held out a small clear plastic bag. I took it. Inside was a pink toothbrush, a stubby, half-used roll of toothpaste, and a beige face flannel. “Compliments of the house,” she explained.

We smiled the skull smile of death come upon the earth, and helped Oda up the stairs.

Our room had one double bed, a TV on a small wobbly stand, a bedside table the size of a frying pan, a tattered copy of the Bible, a tattered copy of the Yellow Pages, thick curtains, a window that didn’t open, a radiator turned up to blasting temperature, and no room to stand. It was, in short, a wallpapered attic, the roof sloping down to within half a centimetre of the headboard. Oda flopped onto the bed, curling up childlike. By turning sideways in the bathroom it was possible to fit yourself in; so long as you had short arms and no desire to move them, there was indeed space inside for you, the toilet, the sink and the plastic shower cubicle. A mirror, cracked and stained mortar grey round the edges, revealed a washed-out ghost, hair singed and eyes too blue for my soot-smeared, rain-streaked face. I looked away, unwilling to spend too much time in this shadow’s company, and filled the single plastic cup on the sink with cold water. I took it to Oda, knelt by the bed, said, “Drink?”

No reply.

She seemed already asleep, eyes closed, fists bunched up to her face like the portrait of a frozen scream. I unwrapped the flannel from its bag, dipped it in the cup of water, mopped at her face. The corner of the flannel turned red-black. I eased her out of my coat, threw it into the bottom of the shower cubicle and set the water to run on cold and wash away the worst of the blood. I rolled her onto her back, and she didn’t stir. Feeling every part the leery criminal, I peeled the shirt away from her skin.

The little knife-sized hole in her shirt was stiff with dry blood.

Beneath it, there was another knife-sized hole. It went through her skin and flesh, and passed between two ribs and straight down into her
heart. Blood had clotted in it, a thick dark plug, and the flesh all around it was swollen and red. It wasn’t a slash or a slice, it was a puncture wound to the chest; it went deep.

I cleaned her up as best I could, and folded her under the blankets. Then I cleaned myself up. My fingers stung, were sore and red. The twin crosses ached where they were scarred into the palm of my hand. I sat on the end of the bed, knees tucked up to my chin, and thought. I could think of nothing good in this situation.

And, though I didn’t wish it, and the floor didn’t encourage it, eventually I slept.

I woke to the buzzing of my phone.

The only illumination in the room was reflected street light slipping round the curtains, and the occasional passing of white headlights outside. Oda lay where I’d left her, though at some point in the night she had rocked and rolled, and dragged the blanket almost over her head. I answered the phone blearily.

“Yeah?”

The voice on the other end was as sharp and precise as the shaved pencils that lined its owner’s desk. “Mr Mayor?”

“Uh,” I replied.

“Good morning, Mr Mayor, it’s Dees here, at the office.”

“What time is it?”

“Five forty-three a.m. – did I disturb you?”

“I don’t need to be wound up, Ms Dees, I’m already pretty cranked.”

“Mr Mayor, I’m afraid something rather important has come up.”

“And here was I thinking you’d rung at silly o’clock for something trivial.”

“May I ask where you are?”

“Is this a philosophical question?”

“I need to know how quickly you can get to Sidcup.”

I sprung upright like a target at a shooting alley. “Sidcup? Why Sidcup?”

“I believe it’s where a war which could destroy this city is about to break out. Really, Mr Mayor, I would be happier explaining the details in person; where can I meet you?”

I looked at Oda, still sleeping in the bed. “I’m a little tied up here …”

“Shall I reiterate the part about a war which could destroy the city, or are you genuinely handcuffed to a brick wall and unable to secure your own speedy release by the many tools available to you?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. The pain helped a little. “Ms Dees,” I said, “when I was lumbered with the job of being mystic protector of this city, I could have sworn I was told that the Aldermen were on my side.”

“We are, Mr Mayor. I think if you look closely, you will see that we are. Can I interest you in a business breakfast?”

The city slept. The rain had paused, leaving silvered-reflective sheen across the blackness of the pavement, and the
drip drip drip
of water off the trees. I walked to the nearest bus stop and waited.

The bus was a double-decker, almost empty. The windows were scratched with names inscribed in the glass.

B n L

Sal
Pete

I caught glimpses of night workers packing up. Barrels of smoking tar being loaded back onto trucks at the end of freshly relaid roads; buckets of steaming hissing paint being covered over and put away. Trucks pulling their doors shut on a few remaining racks of fresh milk. Lorries swooshing away towards the warehouses beyond the M25, the driver’s head bouncing to the unheard sound of a radio.

The suburban streets east of Greenwich began to give way to the tall, proud terraces of Greenwich itself. I could see the darker shadow of the observatory on top of its hill. A green laser thinly clipped the sky from its top, shining out to mark the place where the east of the world met the west. The lights were out in the low white-brick enclosure of Greenwich Market, and the shutters drawn across shopfronts selling brass maritime antiques, knotted ropes, maps and compasses, for the home that needs everything. I got out of the bus by the Underground station and walked down the high street, past darkened restaurants and the half-lights of fashion store windows. I could smell the river, a clear coldness on the air that pushed away the usual dirt of the city, which announced its presence only by its absence, like the engine on a ship when it stops running.