We stood on London Bridge and faced the wind and let it wash the pain out of our bones. Here, we felt safe.
I looked towards the Tower of London, and thought without words. Wind and walking were all I needed.
A voice said, “Midnight Mayor.”
My voice.
I tried it again, a few more times, rolled it over for size. “Midnight Mayor.”
Repetition didn’t make it seem any more a good thing, so I shut up.
I kept on walking.
Full circle.
I hadn’t known I was going there, but when I arrived, I knew with absolute certainty that it was the right idea.
The Museum of London sat at the southern extremity of the Barbican. Its white tiles and grey, rounded walls gave it the superficial appearance of a boil-in-the-bag toilet that had got too big for its own plumbing and burst up from street level in a grimy eruption of clay tiling and half-swept dust. Strangers to the city always had a hard time finding it, since the main entrance wasn’t at street level at all, but a storey above it in that network of ramps and walkways that made up the space-time vortex that was the Barbican Centre. Even if you found, at street level, any sign to mark its presence, the idea seemed too absurd that a city council might casually dump a museum beside a roundabout so overshadowed by buildings that to people who worked there, sunlight had become nothing more than a wistful fantasy.
That was good; that meant the inside was peaceful, without the nattering of children to disturb us. Those who had made it inside either knew its secrets already, and were there to wonder and appreciate anew, or were so surprised to discover this well of knowledge that even the most easily bored were silent with respect.
I wandered through the history of London, not paying much attention. I’d been here before, and what I was looking for was very specific.
I found it, sitting on a little stool beside a large display, lit up in shimmering orange and red, of the Great Fire of London. It was snoring, very quietly, very professionally; the snoring that could be dismissed as “heavy breath” at a moment’s notice. I poked it with my toe and said, “Excuse me?”
The snoring stopped. Set within a squashed red face, a pair of almost spherical eyes opened, drifted up to the ceiling and round the walls, and settled on me.
“Uh?” The sound was pumped out by a pair of lungs inside a great bulbous chest inside a security guard’s black uniform.
“You work here?” I asked.
“Sure, yeah, sure . . . What?” The security guard resettled himself on his stool. It looked designed to be as hard to sleep on as possible, but he’d pulled it off. “Jesus!” he muttered, as consciousness caught up with the rest of him. “Can I help you?”
I beamed.
“You lost?” he asked.
“No, don’t think so.”
“You sure?”
“Not unless we’re going metaphysical.”
“Jesus!” he added, as the rest of consciousness slammed into the forefront of his brain like a TGV without the brakes. “Right, yeah, fuck, Jesus! I mean . . .”
“I’m sure you didn’t mean it to come out like that,” I said.
“Sorry. I’ve got this medical thing . . .”
“I can tell.”
“I’m fine now.”
“Sure. I need to have a nose round your archives.”
“Uh, right, yeah, sure. You’ll be wanting to go talk to the lady at reception, she can get you an appointment . . .”
“Not those archives. I’m looking for some information, the kind you don’t find in many libraries, or even on the internet.”
His eyes narrowed. “What kind of information?”
“I’m trying to find out a few things about a guy called the Midnight Mayor.”
“Oh,” he groaned, stretching his short arms, whose hands ended in red, clubbed fingertips. “Not the Lord Mayor?”
“No. The Midnight Mayor. The museum seemed like a sensible place to start.”
“Safer to ask about the Lord Mayor. We’ve got his coach somewhere, very swish, very shiny.”
“The Midnight Mayor. I’m absolutely certain.”
His face saddened. “Well, if you’re sure . . .”
“I am.”
“. . . just remember that I warned you, OK? Health and safety and stuff.”
“Sure.”
He stood up. “You’d better come with me.”
His name was Frank. He had a hard accent coming out of a chubby mouth and said he was from Lambeth. He also said he didn’t like trouble.
“Smart to ask the security guy,” he added, as we rambled through the quiet, dark halls of the museum. “Twenty years in this place, you pick up a few things, and don’t get so fussed as the historians. They give keys to the security guards that they’d never give to the archaeologists. Can’t trust these academic types not to lose them somewhere.”
“I know. That’s why I asked.”
“Oh,” he sighed, jangling his keys absently as we picked our way through a line of panels showing the Blitzed-out ruins of the city. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“One of what?”
“The guys in the know. No one asks about the Midnight Mayor who isn’t already in too deep for the lifejacket to do any good. What are you? Magician, warlock, petty wizard with a thing for the big time?”
“None of those,” I answered, as he unlocked a door behind a display dedicated to the Docklands Redevelopment and led me from the gloom of the museum halls into a white, neon-lit corridor. “But you’re in the right sort of area.”
His shoes snapped loudly on the concrete floor. Mine puffed and wheezed. He spun the keys round and round, jangling on their chain, and grunted at each door he opened. “‘Course,” he went on, “none of my business. I just look after the museum, see? I don’t dabble.”
Another door, heavy, black and metal; a room of dead paper and cold dry air. He shooed me in and closed the door behind us. The room had no windows, just vents and dull strip lighting that failed to illuminate between the long stacks of shelves dividing up the floor.
“Smart not to ask too many questions,” he announced, marching down the rows of files. “You never know who’ll come knocking. I just point them in the right direction, see? That’s all that I can do — just the doorman, just keep an eye out.”
Another door at the end of the room. Two locks, and a keypad on the side. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Thing is,” he sighed, as the locks turned and the door opened, “you’re the second guy this week to come asking about the Midnight Mayor.”
I stopped dead above a flight of metal stairs headed into darkness. “Who else?” I asked. “Who else came looking?”
“Hey — none of my business, remember?”
“Please. I want to know.”
“Knowing’s nothing unless you’ve got the qualification on your CV,” he sighed. “I know the whole fucking history of London but can I get a decent job? Fuck it.”
