the stairs.
“Matthew, wait!” He struggled to turn the chair in that small space. “Matthew!”
“Matthew?”
The voice came from the doorway of the bar. Its owner held a champagne glass in one hand, and a handbag in the other, its small chain hooked in at her elbow. The bag was the same silvery colour as her dress, and her shoes gave her an extra few inches of height that she didn’t really need. The dress clung to every inch of her like a libidinous friend, revealing that, along with a haircut that had removed all but a short skullcap of red-tinted dark brown hair, she’d lost a lot of weight since I’d seen her last, rounding down in some areas and out in others. She held herself with the same good posture, and had the same relaxed dignity in the curve of her arms and openness of her eyes. But when she looked at me in that moment, as well as weight loss, there was something about Dana Mikeda that meant I hardly recognised her.
I looked from her, to Bakker, to her again, and then, drawn by a nervous tic when I had looked at Bakker, again to him. He stared at me with pain, uncertainty, even a touch of fear on his face, sitting at the top of the stairs on the very edge of his chair, leaning towards me as if at any second he’d leap up and run after me, but unable to do so. It took a moment to realise what was so wrong with that picture – nothing in how he looked or the way he sat, but in the environment around him as, opening one arm out towards me as if trying to call me home, he cast no shadow.
I turned and ran.
I had run once before two years ago, on a cold night quite like this, along the same river, after speaking to the same man. I tried in vain to remember if there’d been a dark reflection around him then, or if the light had just tripped off him like it forgot to notice how he blocked it. My memories were too easily movable – if I wanted, I could paint that image of him in the wheelchair on the night I’d died with no shadow at all, or with a big black shape of himself looming halfway up the back wall. There was simply no way to tell, as my imagination worked overtime, desperately trying to find gaps and plug them, in everything I thought and believed.
I walked as quickly as I could without being called “Thief!” or knocking into the pedestrians still turning out of the theatres, restaurants and concerts along the bank by the river, just like I had two years ago – but this time, I knew what was coming, and watched the image of my own shadow moving under my feet, waiting for it to turn. I was halfway to Hungerford Bridge, the pedestrian walkways bolted onto the original railway bridge lit up like snowy knives, my shadow splintered into a dozen pale blue fractures in front of me from the lights in the trees by the riverside, when a bit at a time, like the hands coming together on a clock face, my shattered shadow started to come together into one pool of me-shaped blackness, and bend
That was when I started to run for real. I slung my satchel as securely as I could across my shoulder and turned into the crowd, keeping close to the silvery rail at the edge of the bridge, snatching up some of the cold from it into my fingertips as I ran, breathing the river air as deep as I could; there was power by the river, an intense, old magic that the druids had been drawing on back in the days when wizards had burnt the colour of forest fires and summoned ivy from the paving stones, instead of barbed wire. I breathed it in as deep as I could as I ran, felt its cold seep down into my lungs and into my blood, pushing away some of the heat and pain from my underexercised legs and filling me with a sense of giddy lightness and strength, so that for a moment I knew,
At the end of the bridge I took the steps down onto the Embankment. I was fearful of how empty the greeny-yellow brick tunnel looked towards Charing Cross station, how easily we might be ambushed in that space, and drawn by the crowd moving towards the station entrance. In the street, with its sandwich bars, cobblers’ shops and dirty news-stands, the sense of the power was different, that we swept up in our fingertips like seaside breeze tickling the palm of our hand. It gave off none of the sense-numbing, consuming balm of the river, but had a lower, hotter sensation to it, through which we could feel the rumbling of trains beneath us and sense, as our legs hit their stride, the pulse of the city. We ran with the rhythm of that road, the commuter’s rhythm, the pace of life you only get around railway stations; that puts the step of every mother, father and child into a regular
I ran up the street, catching the smell of the last sandwich in the bar, spilt beer, the whiff of curry powder from the open door of the tandoori, urine from the door of some lawyer’s firm, rubbish being thrown out from behind the back of an Italian restaurant, and sweat mixed with disco music from the basement window of a gym beneath the station, and still my shadow refused to move with the bending of the light.
At Charing Cross station I dodged past the waiting taxis and paused for a moment at the central spike of sludgy-brown stone that, so legend had it, marked the traditionally central point of the city. Legend or not, the thing burnt in my senses in all its spiky, multilayered tastelessness. I stood in front of it and half-closed my eyes, and for a moment, in that place, I could feel every pigeon like they were hairs on my head, blowing in the wind, and taste every rat like their claws were the serrated edges of my own teeth. It was the same sensation I’d felt at the very top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, or at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or standing in Temple Bar in Dublin; whether or not the place really was the geographical centre, it was still a hub, magical north on the compass. As such, its power sent a tingle through my skin; and for a moment I knew exactly what it was to be the woman remembering the first kiss of her ex-boyfriend on the number 9 bus, or the train driver leaning on his handle underground, or the child eating chips and watching the departures board in the station, or the sleepy passenger in the plane overhead, looking down at the city beneath him as they circled in to land.
For a moment, I considered diving into that sense, just like so many sorcerers had before me, letting go of their own skins and their own feelings and immersing themselves in the city. Wherever I’d gone, I had been told that it was the most dangerous thing of all for two sorcerers to fight in the very centre of a city, at its heart, where it was so easy to forget why you were there, and just sink yourself into the endless magic available in that place. You’d think you were using the magic to your own ends, until you were found days, sometimes months, later, wandering through the city’s streets with the absolute certainty that you were the 91 bus to Crouch End. There was nowhere better in the city to become lost.
We jerked our eyes open but didn’t move; our thoughts were still tangled in the swirling of dirty newspapers caught in the wake of a passing lorry; in the almost inaudible ticking of the traffic lights; in the slamming of shutters over the supermarket windows of the…
So easy to become lost…
… just sink into the city…
We snatched at our satchel to make sure it was still securely there and ran, no longer bothering to see where we were going or whether the cars would stop when we crossed the road; no need to ask or look – we felt the brakes pressing into our flesh, although when we had last checked our arms weren’t made of tyre rubber. We heard the echo of our footsteps from the drains underneath where we were nibbling on dropped chow mein in a cardboard box; we saw ourself running past the side of St Martin in-the-Fields, looking down from our nest in the high gutter of the tall white houses with the big shuttered windows and the poor insulation in the roof that helped keep us warm when it rained – we knew we were running, by all these signs.
We ran towards Trafalgar Square, through the traffic and down the steps into the wide, pedestrianised area around Nelson’s Column and the big stone lions crouched on their pedestals. Pigeons scattered towards the Arab Emirates Bank, and Admiralty Arch, embedded with figures of imperial triumph and heaving bosom, and framing a vista of the Mall and Buckingham Palace. Distances changed perspective in the centre of London: only close to did Nelson’s Column seem to tower up for ever, whereas from a few hundred yards away it seemed scarcely higher
