but, sensing our fear, she snatched her hand back. “Matthew Swift and Alfred Khan are not the only ones who died these last years. Do you know that? Have you asked? If you want to know who else is dead, and why, go to the Eye tonight, at nine. Things have changed; perhaps you do not know. There are new rules, new… dangers.”
“I’ll work it out.”
“Do you know Robert James Bakker?” I was halfway out of the door and her words stopped me dead. “I think you do.”
“What is your interest in Bakker?”
“If you want to know more about Bakker, what he has done, what he has become, we are the ones to talk to. We can be of great use to you.”
I forced a smile. “And I to you, yes?” Her cold expression was answer enough. I said, “I’ll think about it. Good afternoon, miss. Remember what we said.”
And walked away.
Whether or not I had any interest in the fortune-teller’s proposition, a few things she said had got my thoughts moving.
Without really knowing why, I found myself going towards the river. I walked through Middle Temple Inn, a place of old trees, high brick buildings, sash windows, cobbled streets, enclosed courtyards, lawyers, and film actors, in costumes from roughly 1580 to the present day, at work on some new historical drama (usually Dickens). I made my way towards Blackfriars Bridge, and into the gloomy concrete zone of wiggling, covered alleys, traffic- filled streets, tunnels and pedestrian walkways that link Blackfriars and London Bridges on the north side of the river. I wandered under dull yellow neon lights, watching my shadow stretch across the walls as I walked, listening to the distant rumble of cars passing through the maze of one-way systems and underpasses that had sprung up after the Blitz between what was left of the area’s history and the new, ugly, squared-off buildings compressing the winding byways of the city into ever more unlikely shapes. The Circle line sent up a hum through the pavement as it rattled towards Monument and, overhead, the train to Farringdon wheezed its way through a tunnel of nail-tight buildings pressed up against the railway.
I came to the tiny yard of flagstones and half-hearted container shrubs that jutted out between a giant converted warehouse and an office with walls of black-green glass, and sat down on a bench looking out past a row of iron railings to the river. At low tide, the water lapped against a wide beach of pebbles and brown sand embedded with plastic bags and dropped bottles. Within a few hours, the tide could rise up the tall stone wall on which my courtyard sat, where a green line of weed defined the high-tide mark, a metre or so below my feet.
A part of me was disappointed at how unchanged the place seemed, now that I sat and contemplated my situation while I watched the tide rise. There wasn’t a plaque of remembrance, nor a bunch of wilting flowers tied to the railing, nor even a lurid stain on the flagstones where so much of my blood had been spilled. Even the telephone box hiding in a corner, as if embarrassed to be seen in the mobile phone age, didn’t have a sign inside saying in childish script, “i was ere”. Instead it had the usual cards, advertising sex and, this being the City with a definite article and its own coat of arms, yoga stress support groups for the harried banker, probably at a slightly higher rate than the cruder alternative.
Out of curiosity I picked up the receiver. There wasn’t even a dialling tone, let alone the sounds I’d heard last time I was here. The booth smelled of pee and neglect. I was disappointed that my fingers, scrabbling up its side in desperation as I had tried to dial, hadn’t left scratch marks for posterity. I kicked the telephone with the heel of my foot until it reluctantly gave up £2.40 worth of change into the returned-coins slot. Returning to my bench I contemplated what this could buy me. In this city, I decided, not much.
The tide rose, and the shadows changed direction. I only got up and left when it started drizzling again, the cold raising goosebumps across my skin. I didn’t know if visiting the place of my previous demise had been a good idea; probably it had to be done sooner or later, if only to experience the full reality of my own absence. Here, all unremembered, was where Matthew Swift crawled across the wet paving stones to the telephone booth, dragging most of his exposed organs with him, and where in the morning they found only bloody clothes and pieces of skin.
There could, we decided, be advantages to my former self having been forgotten, even though it seemed that the sorcerer I used to be still had a name worth remembering. Certainly, seeing the place where I had died made what we wanted to do that bit easier.
I spent the rest of the day in the local library, reading newspapers. The world had changed in some ways that I found almost impossible to grasp: regimes different, governments fallen, icons dead, new stars, new soaps, new orders, new ideas. Phones were smaller, computers faster, lives more packed, worlds more messed in together. In other ways it remained constant. The temperature was still rising, and the complaints – tax, the NHS, transport, scandal – were still the same.
And at 9 p.m. I found myself at the London Eye.
At no point had I decided that this was where I wanted to be. Perhaps I simply had nowhere better to go.
I paid for a ride and queued with all the tourists curious to see the city at night. The crowd was dense – the day’s drizzle had cleaned the air so that tonight, at the summit of the giant, white-and-silver ferris wheel, you could see all the way to the North Downs in one direction, and to Alexandra Palace in the other.
I didn’t bother looking for whoever might want to speak to me. If they were worth any conversation, they’d find me. Meanwhile, I would not have been there were it not for the crowds. There is a protection of sorts in numbers – so long as the other bugger is playing by the rules.
I found myself in a capsule with a small flock of Japanese tourists who exclaimed as the floodlit Houses of Parliament dropped away beneath us, marvelled at the watery reflection of the lights on Victoria Embankment, photographed the pools of light sprawling out northwards to the dark splotch of Primrose Hill, ogled the purple and green lit-up walls of the National Theatre, pointed at Tower Bridge and pushed past each other to see the BT Tower sticking up from the West End; there was also a family from, judging by the accent, somewhere in south-east England, whose youngest child was only now discovering her fear of heights.
As for us, we sat on the bench in the middle of the capsule and watched our city expand beneath us, and felt like God. We had never seen anything so beautiful, and could not conceive of more magic in the world.
By the time the ride had started its descent, the staff below were already closing up the capsules ahead of us and turning away the public for the night. On our arrival at the embarkation platform, while the tourists shuffled out through the door, I didn’t move; nor did anyone ask me to.
I heard footsteps on the capsule floor and the swish of the door closing behind me. The river began to drop away again, the capsule making another trip skywards.
Behind me a voice said, “Lovely night, isn’t it? Enough to move a sentimental man to verse, I find.”
I shrugged, wrapping my coat tighter around myself and watching the patterns of neon spread out underneath me once more. By the sound of their steps, there were two of them. The one who spoke had a heavy, breathless voice like the deep snorts of a walrus. It was a cultured voice, well-educated to the point of being overly so. Knowledge so intense it drowns out all common sense. The man also brought with him a smell. It tingled on the edge of my senses: a deep, subtle shade of magic that tasted of cream crackers and the colour of shining oil. However, it wasn’t coming from him, I realised, but from his companion, whose reflection I saw in the glass of the capsule against the night outside – a young Asian man in a smart suit, hands folded in front of him, who stood by the shut door like it was the gateway to a treasury, eyeing me up in my own reflection even as I watched him.
The man who’d spoken sat down on the bench beside me; so I figured that, whatever strange aromas the younger man gave off, he was merely the sidekick to this man’s central act.
He said, “I hope you haven’t minded the delay.”
“No.”
“It is intolerably rude to make someone wait for an appointment. But I fear these are not such civilised times, Mr Swift. I blame the mobile phone, naturally.”
I turned to look at him properly. He was fat – there was no other way to describe it – a belly contained by a shiny waistcoat like a straining bulkhead, any second about to explode a shrapnel of buttons. His suit was a subtle pinstripe, finely cut to disguise the sheer scale of his form. His face, emerging out of the rolling slope of his neck, was friendly, with bright eyes peering from under gigantic eyebrows, the only hair on an otherwise polished pale head. He had a ring on his wedding finger and a pair of black leather shoes, but otherwise no possessions with him
