“Oda. You can call me Oda.”
“Matthew,” I said. “You can call me pretty much anything you like.”
She smiled again, lips shockingly pink in an otherwise dark, finely formed face. Her black curly hair was braided so close to her skull it had to hurt, and her eyes were wide and alert. “Very well. Explain to me – the underground ticket.”
I scrunched my hands into fists and covered my eyes, trying to press some of the fatigue out of my brain. I gave it my best shot. “Everything, everyone and every place has its own unique magic. The underground’s magic is defined by the rhythms that go through it. It’s like a heartbeat, a pulse, the flow of life like blood through its veins, describing in every detail the shape of power in its tunnels. When you go into the underground, you buy a ticket, you pass through the barrier, you enter its tunnels, you take the train, you use your ticket, you exit through the barrier. This is part of what defines it, this is part of what makes the taste of its magic different, heavy, crowded, full of dirt and noise and
“An impassable barrier, to something without a ticket.”
“Pretty much.”
“I suppose that is clever,” she admitted. “In an obscene way.”
“It’s sorcery,” I replied with a shrug. “All that sorcery is, is a point of view.”
Her eyes flashed up to me, and held, and for a second there was a fire in them that scared me. “Sorcery,” she said quietly, “makes men into gods, and men were not meant to be such creatures.”
“You’re… not what people call
“There is a distinction between being nice and being righteous,” she replied primly.
I groaned and slumped back into the tattered embrace of the seats as the bus turned onto Tottenham Court Road.
University College Hospital was new, clean, busy, bright and smelt of disinfectant. The floors and walls were so bright and white they almost hurt, the glass in every window an odd, reflective bottle-green, the potted plants were cheerful plastic in full bloom, the seats padded and pale, the uniforms of the night staff bright blue. Outside the Accident and Emergency entrance was parked a very large, black motorbike.
We didn’t look out of place in A and E: two bedraggled figures stained with blood, staggering in from the street. The receptionist took one look and promptly assured me that a doctor would see to me soon. We didn’t ask where Sinclair was – as two bloody people, looking for a gunshot victim didn’t seem the best way to go about matters. Instead we followed signs on the wall up through the hospital, endless identical-looking corridors of gleaming white and strip lighting, tried intensive care, found no one, and eventually made our way towards the operating theatres.
We found the motorbiker sitting on a bench with a can of Red Bull open in one meaty hand, outside Operating Theatre 3. He grunted as we approached and said, “You took your time.”
“Were you followed?” asked Oda sharply.
“You don’t follow me,” he replied in a voice that left no room for argument. Then with a sudden flash of a smile, “But you’d be welcome to try, lady.” Oda rolled her eyes.
There were no windows or other way of seeing into the operating room, so I sat down on the bench opposite him, every muscle exhausted, every nerve throbbing in reproach, and said, “What do they think?”
“Oh, you know. Police must be called, immense internal damage, may not make it through the night, miracle he got so far, don’t understand what’s keeping him alive will do everything they can so on and so forth yadder yadder yadder, you get the drift?” There was an alert gleam in the corner of the motorbiker’s eye. “You get trouble?”
“A little.”
“Come out OK?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Well, shit, now you’re here, I don’t know about you but I think we should consider buggering off.”
“What about Sinclair?” asked Oda quickly.
The biker burped. “He lives, he dies, we can’t change it, OK? But the police are coming. And I don’t want to deal with the police, do you?”
“You’ll leave him to die?”
“Christ, woman, I signed him in under a false name and like I said, the police will be here soon. If the guy pulls through, he’ll be safe enough.”
Oda glanced at me, eyebrows raised. I said, “We’ll only bring him more danger.”
“I don’t believe that,” she replied.
“Then we will only suffer more inconvenience if we stay,” I corrected, “is that better?”
She gave a snort in reply, but didn’t disagree. The biker stood up in a single quick movement, slapping his thighs cheerfully as he did and tossing the empty can of drink with perfect aim into the recycling bin by the vending machine. “Right! Let’s bugger off out of here before the shit really hits the fan.”
The biker lived, for want of a better description, in a garage, in a scrapyard. If that wasn’t bad enough, it was in Willesden.
Willesden, to most of the population of London, is a place that you pass through on your way to somewhere better. It is a composite, an area whose character is defined by the places around it – by the leafy streets of Hampstead to the east, by the broad avenues of Maida Vale to the south, by the squat, semi-detached homes of Wembley to the north, and by that strange, indefinable area sprawling out, along streets with still-young trees that aspire one day to be great oaks, from the boundary on Willesden’s western edge where city becomes suburb, and stays that way for nearly fifteen miles beyond. London, indeed, can be defined as one big suburb spread around a relatively small core, and at Willesden, every aspect of this suburbia seemed to combine into a mishmash of scrapyards, railway junctions, neat terraced homes, semidetached bungalows, tall terraced houses, giant supermarkets, strange ethnic greengrocers, synagogues, mosques and Hindu temples galore, all pressed together like they didn’t quite know how they’d got there in the first place.
The biker’s shed, for there wasn’t a kinder way to describe the cobbled sheets of corrugated iron that enclosed his home, was near an old canal, a remnant of a more industrial past, opposite a field of dead cars and mechanised hands for crushing them. The walls of his home were hung with tools, jackets, salvaged spare parts from bikes and cars, and pictures of bikes, reminding me of a cross between a garage and a teenager’s bedroom. There were no overt symbols of a mystical nature anywhere to be seen. But as he stoked the small iron stove in a corner and kicked a small electricity generator until the lights stopped flaring up and down and settled for a dull consistent glow, I tasted a certain unique spice on the air, like a flash across the senses, seen and instantly gone. I could only guess at its nature since whenever I tried to catch the sensation again, it was as elusive as a bar of wet soap slipping from my fingers.
The biker gestured at a couch covered with old, stained blankets and said, “Want coffee?”
“No,” replied Oda, not bothering to sit.
“Yes,” I said, slumping across the couch with the sudden, absolute certainty that coffee was the thing around which every ambition in my life revolved.
“Want to talk about what happened?”
“Yes,” said Oda.
“No,” I replied.
“Shit, well, I guess I’ll just make the running,” he said, putting an old iron kettle on top of the stove. “Any of you two think we were sold out?”
“Yes,” said Oda.
“Perhaps,” I whimpered, pressing my hands against my temples with the effort of staying awake.
“Want to guess whether they’ll come after us again?” added the biker, cheerfully spooning a large heap of instant caffeine into a chipped brown mug.
“If they are smart,” said Oda calmly.
