“I want a lift.”
“Take the fucking train!”
“The lord of the lonely travellers probably isn’t my friend right now.”
“The what?”
“You should probably rethink your place in the grand picture sometime soon,” I said. “Can I have that lift, please?”
Blackjack grinned. “You’ve gotta get somewhere in a hurry?”
This is the biker’s magic. It is the melding of places into one. In every city, on every road, there is always a loose spot where things seem transient, where for a moment north doesn’t seem to make sense to be in the north, where in the instant before recognition that pub on the corner seems to be exactly like another which you visited some years back, in a different place. There are streets where you wake after sleeping in the back of a car and for a second, no matter how many years you’ve lived here or worked here or travelled this way, you have no idea where you are. In those places, if you know what you’re doing, it’s sometimes possible to slip through the gaps and cover, in a very short time, very large distances.
We were curious to see the biker’s magic at work, and found the thrill of the ride on the back of his bike an excitement that made our heart race as he spun through the empty streets. Nevertheless, inside the confines of the biker’s spare helmet, passing from light to shadow in an endless dazzle under the street lights, the whole thing made us feel rather motion-sick.
A flickering of anonymous streets. He didn’t take us south, despite the fact that this was where we needed to go, but drove north, until the streets faded into one long blur of semi-detached mock-Tudor houses that in my imagination defined so much of outer London suburbia. The roar of his bike’s engine was the loudest thing on the streets, startling the foxes as they rummaged in the bins, and echoing off the sleeping houses. I watched the names run by: Harlesden, Dollis Hill, Neasden, Queensbury, Stanmore; and then, out of nowhere, we turned left and roared into a housing estate, swinging round into an area of locked garages graffitoed over by a mixture of kids and the odd magician, one of whom had covered a whole wall with the image of flowing white horses. Blackjack took us off the road, over a patch of grass that spattered soggy mud and limp grass up around our ankles, and through an alleyway surrounded by dumpsters.
There was a moment of sickness, a tightening in our stomach, and all we could see was an endless dark alley, illuminated by the succession of white, stuttering long-life lamps.
Then we emerged at the other end, and swung into a street that looked exactly like all the others we’d passed through so far on our journey north. But now, when we reached the end of it and Blackjack passed straight through the red traffic light onto the empty curving road beyond, the signs were no longer for the M1, the Midlands and the North, but offered to show the way to Dover, Folkestone and the south-east. In a single cut through a council estate we’d covered over twenty miles of urban sprawl, and were on the other side of the river.
More cuts. Blackheath turned into the green belt with a sickening twist between a pair of trees; a service station’s endless winding internal roundabouts just before Rochester led out into the endless winding roundabouts of an equally depressing service station near Faversham; the monotonous street lights overhead seemed to dissolve into each other faster than a mere failure of eyesight to keep track would have suggested. When we reached the ring road above Dover’s white cliffs, I guessed that no more than forty-five minutes had passed between us leaving Willesden and arriving at the English Channel.
Blackjack took things easily down the long, steep road cut into the cliff’s edge below the castle. Dover sat below all that chalk like a stubborn stain on a perfect white tablecloth, caught between cliff and sea, a thin beady line of orange glow that mixed a history longer than the sea wall around the ferry port with 1950s lumps pretending to be architecture, from when much of the town had been levelled during the war.
Blackjack parked the bike in the ferry terminal’s car park. I staggered off the rear seat, back aching, knees wobbling, and legs hot from being so close to the engine, and sniffed the air. I smelled oil, diesel, seagull and the salt of the sea, whose cleansing rhythm washed against the buzz and flow of magic in the air. We tasted strange, thin magic that hinted at layers beneath it, but which were too unfamiliar to touch. I imagined that a druid would feel as uneasy as I did in that place, where so many different kinds of magic – traditional sea sorcery, the natural magic of the countryside around, the weighty history of the place and lastly the imposed bustle of life and business around the port – collided.
Blackjack said, “You been here before?”
“No,” we answered.
“And what about you?”
“Give it a rest,” I replied. “Come on.”
“Where now? France?” he asked, swinging a heavy sports bag over his shoulder and shoving my helmet into a plastic compartment on the back of the bike. “Holiday time?”
“You’ll feel embarrassed about those words when you’re finished with them.” We walked on into the port.
Tucked behind the maze of ramps and causeways and car parks that made up most of Dover’s ferry port was a small and mostly makeshift customs area, full of little offices, confiscated goods and demolished cars that suspicious customs officers had literally taken apart piece by piece. Beyond that, a small red-brick building was almost built into the cliff itself, with a black metal door and a single buzzing light that sounded like a fly was trapped inside the bulb. I dug into my bag for my set of blank keys and fitted one into the lock.
The magic was slow coming here, even though we could hear the splashing of the sea and smell petrol fumes. We knew there was potential in this place for all sorts of wonders; but it was so unfamiliar to us that we struggled to access it, as if we were caged in walls of perfect glass.
“You OK?” asked Blackjack as I tried to make the key work.
“Fine,” I muttered through gritted teeth. “Give me a moment. It’s just…”
The key sprung in the lock, the door slipped open.
Inside was a long white corridor that smelt of disinfectant. The tiles were chipped and the lino-covered floor, despite regular cleaning, was so ingrained with dirt that its former blue colour had been reduced to speckled brown. Suddenly we were sure that of all the places we didn’t want to be, all the parts of life we didn’t want to explore, this topped the list. I made us step forward carefully, as calmly as I could, in my new shoes. Blackjack hadn’t noticed them. That could be useful.
Off the corridor on either side were small offices, the walls covered by pin-boards dotted with pictures, notes and departmental memos, the chairs small, grey swivel jobs for rocking in when bored after lunch; the whole place lifeless, cold, and hard. It cast a sickly, overwhelming muddy stench across our senses that blotted out our usual perceptions, reduced what we felt, and dared to feel, down to a mini mum, swamped us with nothing. Horrid, magicless nothing.
“Hey – you sure you’re all right?”
“Let’s get it over with,” I muttered.
“Get what over with?”
I pushed back the door at the end of the corridor and walked down a metal staircase. In the basement were stainless-steel beds, trays, tables and knives, and on one wall a bank of steel doors, like a baker’s oven, but too small and too cold.
“Sorcerer?” There was a note of caution in Blackjack’s voice. “What the hell are we doing here?”
“Things must end,” we replied. “And we are all about now.”
I scanned the labels on the steel doors until I found the one I was looking for, swung the handle back and opened it up, pulled the steel handle inside and dragged it out, pulled the sheet back from the face of the corpse and saw…
Once Harris Simmons.
There was still enough of the face left to tell that much.
It had once been Harris Simmons. But they’d probably need to use fingerprinting, just to make sure.
“Oh, God,” muttered Blackjack.
“Things must end,” we repeated quietly, pulling the sheet back over the remnants of Harris Simmons’s face
