“Oh.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
She gave me a long sideways look. “I spent three years on antipsychotic drugs and being told by an NHS shrink that my dad had clearly abused me as a kid, and this shit still didn’t stop. So I’m either mad and the medicine doesn’t work, or I’m sane and there’s magic out there, because I don’t know what the middle ground is on this one.”
“You’re sane,” I said quickly. “Or as sane as a hormonal teenager can be.”
“I’m twenty-two,” she rejoined. “Just because I live at home doesn’t mean…”
“Sorry. My mistake.”
She was eating cod, I had plaice. She had opened the tip of her ketchup and dipped each chip delicately in the end of the foil wrapping. I sprayed all of my ketchup loosely into the paper bundle of fish and chips and shook vigorously before eating. “How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-eight,” I replied honestly.
“You look, like, older. Sorcery do that for a guy?”
“No, this is just my lived-in face,” I retorted. “Besides, sorry to hit you with the bad news, but you’ve got the sorcerous vibe bouncing off you like you could play pinball with it.”
“I figured,” she said.
“You did?”
“Somewhere between me being a pigeon, and reading the future in the way the litter blew outside my mum’s café, I guessed something had to be up. Sorcery sounds… about right. Is it fatal?”
“What?”
“Like a medical condition?”
“No, not at all! There’s nothing medical about it.”
“What about my mum? Is she…”
“Doubt it.”
“But if she’s…”
“It’s not a genetic thing. Forget
She nearly dropped her fork. “A point of view? Is that what made me spend three weeks listening to the rats complaining about the butchers in the meat market and the nurse on ward three? Fuck that!”
“You’re not exactly trained,” I pointed out.
“Harry Potter? Three-week courses at Hogwarts, how to be a sorcerer?”
“Not like Harry Potter, no. Besides, magicians do the spells thing. Sorcery is more about… seeing magic where most people don’t, and using it. Does that make sense?”
“No. Bugger it,” she added, and took a large slurp from the carton of Ribena at her side. “Bugger it. Am I going to start hearing voices again?”
“Sure.”
“Shit.”
“The river was just a temporary thing. You go in at the changing of the tide and it just… washes it all away. But like all good launderettes, it’s up to you not to spill the tomato sauce on the whites after washing, right?”
“I think I get it.”
“Anyway, the whole sorcery thing, it’s not that bad.”
“I couldn’t remember my name.” There wasn’t any feeling in her voice, just a flat statement of fact. When I looked at her, her eyes were lost on the river. “I was everywhere. My fingers were the streets, my toes were the wires dug into the earth, my breath was the exhaust of the cars, my…”
“You were in a trance,” I said. “It’s always a risk. Sorcerers draw their magic from the city around them. So much magic in one place – it’s easy to get lost – to forget that you’re you, and just… sort of drift off. That’s what was happening to you. Your body was breaking down, your mind was just becoming absorbed. Eventually your consciousness would have become spread so thin across the city you’d probably have just popped out of existence. Something you might want to keep an eye out for, by the way.”
“Oh, crap. And this happens to all sorcerers?”
“Just badly trained ones.”
She gave me a thoughtful look. “So how come you’re doing the sane bit?”
“I’m well trained.”
“Who trained you?”
“A very good sorcerer. Very kind, very powerful.”
“He dunk you in a river too?”
“No, he found me a bit earlier than that. I was about fifteen, I’d run off into the night and just run and run because I could; loved it, became lost in the streets but always found my way home. Blisters, memory loss, daydreaming, the roof practically bleached white with the pigeon shit by the time he found me. He saved my life.”
“And you mine?” she asked quietly.
“Best not to think about it like that.”
“How should I think about it, then?”
“Good luck and the eternal interlinked cycle of life crap.”
“Cycle of life crap?”
“Ever watched
“Sure.”
“Well, think that kind of vibe, but with a fifteen certificate.”
“I see.” Her eyebrows were drawn together in concern. “So… I’m a sorcerer.”
“Right now you’re just a teen… a young woman… who happens to have tendencies.”
“OK. Can I make it stop?”
“You could move to the countryside,” I suggested.
“Is that it?”
“Probably not. Sorcerers tend to pick up on the magical thing wherever they are. It’s very different outside the cities, the tone of it, the quality of the magic. But even the most stubborn sorcerers tend to adapt.”
“So I’m stuck.”
“Pretty much.”
“How’d this happen?”
“There was probably a moment.”
“A ‘moment’?” she echoed. “What does that mean?”
I put my fish and chips to one side. “It goes something like this. You’re walking along minding your own business, or you’re on the underground or you’re on a bus or something, but generally you’re not paying much attention. And suddenly you look around and see all these other people and think, ‘Hey, they can look at me and see me and I can see in my mind what I think they see, and when I’m gone they’re going to keep on walking and they’re going to go and live their lives, and their thoughts are going to be just like mine, but different, but real and solid and alive and full of feeling and confusion and colour just like life, and, hey, isn’t that cool!’ And it is.
“And roughly around this time you’re going to notice that you can feel trains under your feet or pipes bubbling, and you can hear the sound of traffic and voices and stuff; and then you’ll probably look up at the things around you and think, ‘Those buildings with the lights on look almost alive, like giant trees lit up with their own constellation of stars in every window,’ or maybe not if you’re underground; and you’ll realise that you can see the city all around, and it’s so full of lives and life, and they’re all buzzing around you, and every single individual is real and alive and passionate and full of mystery, and it’s not just Joe Bloggs walking by who’s like this, but that every part of the city is crawling with life. And you’ll think, ‘Hey, that’s pretty damn sweet, everywhere I look there’s life,’ and roughly around that point you’ll realise you can hear rats and pigeons and thoughts and spells and colours and electricity, and that’s probably when you started going a bit mad. Am I close?”
She thought about it. Then, “They said you were coming.”
“Who said?”
“Them. In the phones.”
