The Midnight Mayor

you kinda need anaesthesiologists and guys with the paddles and you know, things that go ‘ping’ to do a general anaesthetic, so I’m going to do it on local, and it’s going to hurt like ten kinds of buggery. There’s a few odd burns here or there, but they’ll just make you look ugly for a while and I figure, hell, you’re a big guy, you can handle it. The cut on the back of your head is nasty, but keep it clean and tidy and the worst thing that’ll happen is a bit of premature grey and a few banged-up brain cells. The only thing I’m not totally zoomy on is this.”

It took a while to realise she was holding up the beetroot lump of my right hand.

“Uh?”

“I mean, I totally get that you’ve been electrocuted in the last few hours, like, totally. And you know, like I said, if life was shiny I’d have you wired to a heart monitor right now in case anything went pop.”

“Heard of bedside manner?” I growled.

“Sure,” she said briskly. “But I figure, you know, fuck it. But see, there’s this.”

She raised my hand closer to my face so I could see. At first I didn’t understand the problem; the beetroot looked slightly better cooked and less raw than it had a few hours ago, and some of the swelling even seemed to be on the retreat. Then it occurred to me: even in bad cases, electrocution rarely causes bleeding.

The blood, then, that had stained my right sleeve had come from something else. The something, almost lost in the folds of my puffed-up skin, was a thin red cross, carved with a scalpel into the palm of my hand.

We squeaked, “What did you do to us?!”

“Who, me? I didn’t do this!”

“We didn’t . . . it isn’t . . .”

“You’re telling me you didn’t notice that someone’s played Christian symbolism with your hand?” she asked. “You know, if you’re into self-harm then, seriously, don’t.”

“We did not do this, this was not there before . . . until . . . there was nothing there until we answered the phone!”

“Yeah. Now, while every case is, like, unique, I gotta tell you, electrocution by telephone leading to the appearance of a cross carved in the palm of the victim’s hand is unusual even for central London. You seriously have no idea how it got there?”

I hadn’t said that. I didn’t want to think about that. “Hide it,” we whispered. “Do what you have to do. Please.”

“Why do you want . . .?”

“Just do it! Please!”

Dr Seah hesitated, and for a moment there was something on her face that shouldn’t have been there, deep, and serious, and a little bit sad, a sinking of features that were built to smile. Then she shrugged, beamed, showing bright white teeth in a face the colour of hot chocolate on a summer’s night, and said, “Like, whatever.”

She bandaged up my right hand. Whatever drug she’d shot into our veins was now playing games with the ceiling, pushing it slowly up and letting it fall again so low that it almost bumped our nose. We had never felt so degraded. But the drug helped keep us calm, keep us still and made our feelings of rage seem more like a distant story, in which I would tell a childish me, sitting on my lap, of a man who’d been given a drug and who was in pain, in a land far, far away.

We do not handle pain bravely. When she started on the stitches, we looked the other way, and as the needle slid into flesh, we pushed our face into the pillow to hide the tears. Not so much of pain, but at the thought of pain, at the idea of what might be there, but which wasn’t actually except in the churnings of our imagination, worse than any truth. I bit our lip and recited ancient pointless things: song lyrics, shopping lists, bus routes, road junctions, declining verbs in exotic languages, anything to keep our thoughts away from our flesh and wandering in some mundane cage of artificial words and numbers.

Sleep, when it was all done, came easily. Real pain became a foggy memory, a comforting teddy bear that we held to our side like an old and familiar friend.

We slept.

When I woke, it was dark outside. The streetlamp outside the window could have glowed at any hour, but the sounds gave a more precise time. I could hear the distant swish of traffic, too heavy for the deepest part of the night, and from the far end of the street, the sound of a pub, which with each opening and closing of the door turned out gossip and music onto the street in a slow, fading roll. With my eyes fixed upon the slow curve of passing car headlights across the ceiling, I had no more desire to sleep; but neither did I feel the need to get up. So I lay on the bare mattress, stained with smudges of my blood that turned our stomach to look at, and assessed. My right hand was an igloo all in cotton wrapping, my left shoulder and a good part of my chest a shirt-load of bandages. The back of my scalp had been cleaned of blood and disinfected, but the rest of me still bore much of the stain of the previous night, my skin feeling two inches thicker than its natural depth. My tongue was a stiff leather slab in my mouth, my stomach a shrivelled hollow.

These discomforts were at first almost interesting novelties, but rapidly became an itching fury until at last, with a hiss of frustration, I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

On the bedside table were two bottles, one containing pills, the other liquid. A note said, “←THIS one for the pain, →THIS one to clean injuries. Seriously, don’t get them confused. M. Seah.”

There weren’t any other instructions. She gave me more credit for intelligence than I felt I merited.

I looked for my belongings. I was still in my trousers and socks, but my shoes — or rather, not my shoes, merely the shoes I’d been wearing — had been put at the end of the bed along with my coat. My jumper and shirt were nowhere to be seen, nor was my satchel. I staggered from the bedroom into the blinding light of the living room next door, where Vera sat on a dust-covered sofa, eating prawn crackers from a plastic bag and watching TV. She didn’t hear me enter, and as I tried to think of something to say I watched a dozen faces that the audience seemed to think I ought to know, learning how to sing and dance operatic numbers on ice while judges, who again I was supposed to recognise, hurled abuse at the weeping celebrities.

When I spoke, I was as surprised as Vera. I said, “Thank you.”

She jumped, spilling prawn crackers across the sofa, then stood up, pretending it hadn’t happened and glaring as if she dared me to say a word. “Yeah, sure. Hi. You’re up, then.”

“Thank you,” I repeated.

“Gotcha. And you’re welcome, I think. You look sorta crap.” She’d been trying to find something nicer to say.

“Is there a bathroom?”

“Yeah. You need fingers like a safe-breaker to get the hot water to work, and there’s no soap, but there’s a bathroom.”

“Thanks.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I know. Thank you for that too.”

“Get on before I get all slushy. You want food?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Dr Seah said you were to drink at least two litres of water when you got up, to make up for the stuff you lost when you were attacked . . . Matthew?”

“Yes?”

“About being attacked. We should probably talk. Get cleaned up first. I’ll stick something in the microwave.”

Vera had told no lies about the bathroom. The tap was sensitive to the lightest touch; a breath was the difference between arctic death and fiery combustion. When the neighbour two doors down turned on their shower, the water pressure dropped to a sulky trickle; when they turned it off, it exploded in scalding steam.

I struggled to clean myself with my left hand while keeping both my right hand and most of the bandaging out of harm’s way. I dressed in suspiciously stained towels that smelt of fresh detergent and, poking my head round the door, said, “What happened to my clothes?”

“Disgusting,” Vera’s voice floated back. “A few more days and they’d have started talking. Men have no idea