A Madness of Angels

than the rooftops around it. From its broad, stepped base, in equal measure I could feel the buzzing, gaudy excitement of Leicester Square, and taste the sedate, patient, weighty magic of St James’s Park, even though in my imagination they had always seemed far apart.

Perhaps because our senses were fired up with fear, again, at Nelson’s Column, we felt that focus of magical energy waiting for our attention, sitting at our feet with a big friendly expression and an open maw full of sense, inviting us to forget that we ran or what it was we fled, but to be instead the beggar sitting by the ATM and the actor taking his final bow in the theatre, or even just the hotness in the theatre lights shining down on the stage; whatever we wanted to be, a part of the city.

I ran my fingers across the smooth side of one of the lions and down the rougher edge of the pollution- crunched stone, centring myself with the reality of those textures beneath my hand.

I am…

we are

        Or perhaps…

                we am me

Already free, already me. Don’t need to fall tonight.

Catching my breath, I turned and ran on, up towards the imposing pillared entrance of the National Gallery and its modern, glassy extension, ducking into the small passage between the two and bounding up the steps while in the other direction, skater kids rattled down the ramps and leapt over the shallow steps the other way, spinning their boards and making grunting sounds whether or not their manoeuvre had worked.

Leicester Square, even at this time of the night, hadn’t stopped; the doors to the cinemas were still opened wide, though the park with its guardian Charlie Chaplin statue was chained up tight, with the lights of a funfair extinguished. I slowed to a walk and struggled to get my breath; then headed past the Swiss Centre with its terrible clock of musical bells and automated figures, whose tastelessness was, nevertheless, an attraction in itself, being tacky enough to embody the spirit of the whole area. I hurried past ticket touts and music shops, and vendors of woolly hats, umbrellas and plaster models of the Houses of Parliament, until I reached Piccadilly Circus. Traffic whooshed up Shaftesbury Avenue, or slogged resentfully the other way. I slowed to an amble, and paused by the sculpted horses exploding out of their fountain on one side of Piccadilly Circus. Running my fingers through the water, I watched the reflection on a hundred pennies at the bottom, as they caught the lights from the flashing billboards over head, reflecting from red to blue to gold to green to burning white as the messages rolled in their metres-high illuminated font. I dug in my bag until I found the jeweller’s little purple box from Bond Street, then took out the single gold coin, heavy and cool in my palm. If you didn’t know it was gold you might have thought it was just a tacky plastic badge painted a certain colour; but there was no doubting the weight, or the texture of the metal. I closed my eyes, gripped it until my fingers hurt, and made a wish. Then, still holding it in my clenched fist, I stuck my arm into the water up to the elbow joint, and let the coin go.

I felt the movement in the air and turned instinctively, knowing what it would be; I had felt the air change like that once before, and I had dismissed it and died – the same mistake would not happen twice.

Hunger was still only halfway out of the paving stones and rising, emerging out of the shadow of a lamp-post in a thin, pale line, his shape only half there, coat billowing in and out of shadowy existence around him. His claws, however, were real and solid and black enough as I raised my arms and caught him by the wrists even as he slashed down towards my face with his curved fingertips. His arms were ghostlike; I could see the traffic barrier behind them, and through his chest a rickshaw man pedalling his latest fare towards Soho, as Hunger rose into the air and I turned to face him.

I hissed, “Do you really want to fight here? In this place, with so many lights and people and so much power? Do you really think this is wise?”

“You forget,” he replied, and his breath was like the cold blast of air when a train is about to arrive at an underground platform. “They will never see me, nor know who I was, when I drink your fire!”

He twisted his arms in my grip; my hands had no difficulty encircling his wrists, they were so thin. But as he twisted, his fingers stretched down to brush my skin, and his black claws gouged through my clothes and into my arms. There was no sudden shock of pain; he dug the tips of his black fingers into my skin with the slow inexorability of a knife cutting into cold butter: a laborious work of strength but one that he would do, breaking the skin, the capillaries, the muscle, the tips of his fingers brushing bone and…

I think I must have called out as my blood rose under his hands, seeping out and staining my jacket an odd dark purple in that reflective, changing neon light, because he smiled and whispered, “I do not care for the rules of your kind; that is what it means to be free, yes? You drove me back too many times, little sorcerer and his blue flames!”

But even though his strength was unstoppable, and I could feel the dull pain starting to throb up my elbows and into my chest as his grip tightened and tightened and I struggled to hold on to his wrists in turn, he still wasn’t all there. He didn’t have feet, merely a trailing-off of coat into the shadow of the lamp-post, as if he was a seal halfway out of water; and his chest was still an incoherent grey smear across the air, not real or solid at all.

I said through gritted teeth, “Make a wish?”

“To feast richly,” he replied. “Always, to feast!”

“Probably have to invest more than a ten pence, then.”

For a moment, he didn’t understand. Then a glint of comprehension entered the sunken, half-there, half-gone eyes. His glance darted up to the horses rearing behind me in their fountain, then to my face, then to the wet sleeve beneath his grasp, turning pinkish red with my blood. His hand was too thin, I realised, too insubstantial even to notice that the thing it held was damp. We grinned triumphantly and exclaimed, “We know now that you are weak!” and with every ounce of strength we had, with every flux of power and magic we could find, digging our toes so hard into the soles of our shoes that the pavement hummed beneath us, we clenched our fingers around the ghosts of his wrists, and turned. We heaved him to one side and threw him straight towards the fountain, twisting ourself head first towards the water line and dragging him along with us. As he was pulled towards it, he stretched. His legs melted into a grey blur within the shadow of the lamp-post, then elongated like elastic pulled taut. We plunged his head into the water, which burst into steam as he touched it, boiled and bubbled around us while he thrashed, his fingers instantly coming free from my arms and lashing up towards my face. But he was blind while his head was driven down as far as I could push it, towards the floodlight lamp that burnt towards the horses rearing overhead. I snarled, “Make a wish, and let there be light!”

And the stretching shadows of the lamp-post thinned, paled, fled. The floodlights scorching upwards at the horses took on the colour of an angry equatorial sun; the neon lights above Piccadilly Circus spat sparks and grew brighter and brighter, until I had to close my eyes against them; and still the intensity of it grew through my eyelids as every car lamp, brake light, street light, shop light and reflective surface lit like a newly born sun, burning away every shadow and hint of darkness so that for a second, in the middle of the night, it was daytime.

The cold slippery head beneath my hands vanished. It disappeared so suddenly that I staggered and nearly fell forward into the icy bubbling water of the fountain. I heard a sharp electric pop nearby, then quickly dragged my hands out of the water as beneath its surface the floodlights brightened so that the horses’ eyes above me seemed mad, and then snuffed out, the burning wires of the lamps withering into scorched black worms. I heard a snap and a crack like lightning on a hot, rainless summer’s day, and the skid of traffic as the headlamps of vehicles all around, heated to bursting by the intensity of light pouring out of them, burst. Above the junction of Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue the neon lights grew too bright to look at and exploded, showering the street below with hot sparks and light, hurling out fragments of glass. As a final, apologetic encore, the street lamps snuffed out, plunging the Circus into panic-struck darkness.

I sat on the rim of the fountain’s basin as Piccadilly Circus exploded into chaos. As the lights around them popped out into nothing, the pedestrians went quickly from yelping with surprise, to getting on their mobiles and telling their friends and family in rushed, excited voices, that they’d just seen the most amazing thing. The more enterprising of them rushed to take photos with maximum exposure, or film the still-glowing lamps of Piccadilly in contrast to the dead lights of Haymarket, hoping to flog their images to the London Evening Standard. The traffic came to a standstill, after one 38 bus driver, seeing his lights explode, had swerved across Shaftesbury Avenue so that his front wheels had skidded up onto the pavement. With his bus being eighteen metres long, all other traffic had been stopped in both directions. Some drivers trapped by the bus blared their horns; others, seeing that order wasn’t about to be restored, got out to buy coffee and a doughnut from the