I spent the day with the pigeons, on a bench in Trafalgar Square, my bag of belongings huddled to my chest in case someone thought of taking them, and a pile of breadcrumbs at my feet. I let the pigeons congregate around me, listening to their thoughts, too brief and insubstantial to be anything other than a glimpse of yellow sound or sight. Eventually a local warden came up to me and said, “Sir, we ask people not to feed the pigeons,” with such an expression of civic determination that I pretended not to understand English. Instead, I lisped my way through various “eh?” sounds until, having exhausted his two words of French and three of Spanish, he concluded that, since I was neither nationality, I wasn’t worth the bother.
Though the pigeons’ thoughts were too fleeting to give me anything really coherent, I lingered in their minds, drifting with them over the rooftops, until a tingling on the edge of my senses warned me that my own body was starting to get pins and needles. London from above only emphasised how dense, furious and busy it was; with the height of the houses obscuring the streets, all you could see was building on building, stretching as far as the pigeon’s sight could perceive, way beyond Alexandra Palace on its hilltop to the north, and then beyond that by quite a way, and south as far as the Downs, whose slopes were obscured by sprawling suburbs. At ground level, it was harder to remember that only a few metres away was another street running parallel, and another and another, each filled with as many people as those you could see. Doubtless they had the same sense of significance as I felt when I went about my day, all of them walking at the Londoner’s brisk speed to their own Very Important Meeting Thank You. It was only the pigeons overhead who understood the scale of the city.
The rats were more useful. Their brains were sharper, and as I sat by the dumpsters behind a restaurant in Chinatown, letting them flock around me and nibble at the chocolate I’d bought for their delight, their noses picked out scents that the pigeon brain was simply too harried to consider. A flash of strong, unusual scent – creatures that were sometimes rats and sometimes foxes and sometimes neither. I dabbled my senses in the rats’ memories, felt the claws flex at my fingers and a pelt of dark, greasy fur on my back, remembered how it was to sense the width of the tunnel with the twitching of my whiskers and to smell the tantalising poison of the rat-catcher being laid down three floors above me.
In the evening, I sat by the Regent’s Canal, near Caledonian Road, with a hamburger in a box and waited in the drizzle for the foxes. They came along the towpath, limping in the twilight from badly healed injuries or scampering with uncertain fearfulness out of their holes, and nuzzled at the hamburger with their curious black noses, sniffing through the stench of their own matted fur for a scent of something interesting.
I stroked them behind the ears, and through that contact borrowed their senses, searching their brief memories for a recollection of something out of place. A flash of an unfamilar smell, the sound of unusual movements, the image of a creature that resembled a fox but wasn’t quite of the right mould. Weremen left all sorts of interesting scents across the city, to which the animals were perhaps more sensitive than even the average alert magician. I took the sensations gleaned from the rats, the foxes and the pigeons, who along with the beggars and the dustbin men probably see and know more than anyone else in the city, and followed the wavering smells they’d detected, to where the strongest sense of something out of place seemed to combine; the smell led north, to the wide, tree-shaded streets of Muswell Hill.
To most of the population of London, Muswell Hill is simply a name. An interesting name – unlike many, there is no easy guess at how it arose. Certainly there’s a hill, but was there a Mr Muswell who named it, or was it simply well mussed? It has none of the easy recognition of Bishopsgate or Aldersgate – the gates for bishops and aldermen, in their times – nor of Westminster nor Kings Cross – each with a physical feature to give it a name. More, it was hemmed in by places that had tube stations, whose very presence on the underground map made recognition a hundred times easier – Wood Green, Finsbury Park, Crouch End – so that Muswell Hill tended to exist in relation to somewhere else.
The scents and memories I had gleaned from the animals weren’t enough to pin down the wereman’s location to one particular house, not least since the red-bricked, heavy doorways of every street seemed identical, and the long, curved avenues made it hard to judge which way was north or south.
From the overall impression got from the pigeons, foxes and rats, I focused on a block of four streets. These encased a series of terraced Edwardian houses, whose windows featured rectangles of stained glass set above the larger panes, to give an impression of traditional gentility rendered on a reasonable budget.
The glances of the foxes and the swoops of the pigeons gave me no clue as to street number, and there were too many houses for me to start knocking on doors. But after wandering for a while I found a flat green telephone switchbox tucked into a corner of one road; and with much banging, and levering with the end of my penknife, I finally coaxed the cover off it, to reveal the circuits inside. I pulled out my newly purchased mobile phone and, from my paint-splatted satchel, a thread. I tied the thread round the phone at one end, and round a single wire in the telephone box at the other, turned on my phone, spread out my coat under me and sat down to wait.
In a while, my phone started to talk.
“Hello, love, uni treating you OK? Hum. Hum. Yes, Dad’s here too…”
“I just want you to talk to me! Is that so much to ask? Just talk and…”
“Three pizzas with the mushroom topping and the… no, the mushroom… yes and the… no, crispy crust…”
“Look, I was really sorry to hear about…”
“Tomorrow evening? Yeah, great, what shall I wear?”
As my phone caught the signals travelling through the wire, the sound of it was strangely therapeutic, like a medley of lullabies being sung just for me. I sat on the pavement and waited for something to happen; in the mean time it calmed us down, made us feel stronger for it. This was, after all, where we had come from – bits of life transformed into electrical signals and sent round the planet, all those sighs and laughs and shouts and thoughts and feelings transmitted in electrical bursts until eventually, as these things must, they had become too much for just one signal to contain and had, in their own way, come alive, become us. Perhaps, now we were no longer in the telephone wires, it would all happen again. Maybe even now, a new blue electric angel was starting to grow, fed by all that surplus life in the system, and would eventually become like us, and start to feel alive.
We felt somehow happy at the thought. It seemed like an appropriate development, the right thing. Circle of life doing its revolving thing, all over again, just like it probably should. It made sense.
“Sweet and sour pork, special fried rice… yeah… yeah… black bean sauce…”
“I was in! I was in all bloody day and you people couldn’t just wait for the bell to stop ringing to see if I’d answer the door… you try without hot water!”
“OK, can you see the button in the left-hand corner? Now I want you to click on it just once… look, you rang
“Please press one to top up. Please press two for customer services. Please press three if you wish for payplan details. Please press the hash key for the flight of angels. Please press the star key to hear the options again…”
I shifted my weight, and wished I’d brought a coffee.
“Yeah, hi. No, we don’t know. Yeah. No, we’re going to keep him here a bit. No. I heard. Yeah.”
I sat up.
“Don’t, for Christ’s sake. Not even the sorcerer, he might…”
Clutching my phone, I pressed the call key. “Hi, Charlie?”
There was a grunt on the other end of the line and a tinkling of something falling. Then, a voice trying not to shout but not quite making it: “Who the hell is this?”
“The sorcerer, remember me? Swift?”
“Swift? How the hell did you…”
“Magic.” I managed to bite off the “duh” sound before it could escape my lips, but only just.
“Right. Yeah. Of course.”
“We need to talk.”
“I’m… I’m on the phone.”
“Yes, I noticed that. And hello whoever’s at the other end of the line, sorry for interrupting.”
A woman’s voice, confused but otherwise friendly enough: “It’s fine.”
“Is there going to be a problem?”
Charlie’s voice: “Where are you?”
“Muswell Hill.”
