So I said: “Question: what the bloody hell is going on?”
The three women exchanged looks.
“Is that fair?” asked the Mother.
“Kinda
“It’s not about fair,” retorted the Hag. “If it was about fair, none of this would happen.”
I raised a polite hand. “Answer, please?”
The Hag sighed, and put down the small plate of biscuits. She moved carefully round the side of the cauldron towards me. So did the others. Tough guys aren’t supposed to be intimidated by ladies. I guess I wasn’t so tough. She looked us in the eye and said, “City’s damned.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Damned. Cursed. Buggered. Totally and utterly fucked, to use the crude vernacular. It’s going to burn. It’s going to sink. It’s going to crash and splinter and shatter and everything will be dust. Pick one. The ravens are dead. The Stone is broken. The Wall is defaced. The Midnight Mayor is killed and his replacement” — a chuckle like the last gasp of a throttled chicken — “didn’t even know he was in the job. Cursed. Damned. Run away, little electric angels. Run, if you can.”
They were next to me, around me, behind me. Three little ladies who’d been around ever since the first village midwife decided to ask her friends round for a hot cup of something on a foggy Sunday evening, back in the days when the magic came from the earth and the sky, rather than the tarmac and the neon. We were tiny to them. I was afraid.
“What do you mean, damned?” I stammered. “What do you mean, the ravens are dead, the Stone is broken? Why are these things happening? What kind of total tit goes around making
A hand whose fingers were all bone and false nails grasped the back of my neck. The Hag leant in so close I could hear her breath, feel it tickling my eardrum. When she spoke, it was with the whisper of the treacherous lover. She said:
“‘Give me back my hat.’”
Then, without a word of apology or flicker of embarrassment, she pushed me face-first into the cauldron of boiling tea.
In times of uncertainty, someone has to take charge.
Her name was Judith.
It was her fingers at my throat, looking for a pulse, that woke me up. Time had passed, without bothering to tell me about it.
The sky was the colour of an old bruise, the sunlight a washed-out yellow reflecting off the topmost windows.
Judith wore a puffy green sleeveless jacket, a matching jumper, sensible boots and a badge. The badge said, “Judith”. In the top-left corner it added, “Here To Help”.
She said, “Mister? Hey — you OK?”
I considered this difficult question. With my left hand I felt at my face. It didn’t feel burnt. A little tender, perhaps, but hardly scalded by boiling tea. I sniffed my fingertips. A faint lingering odour of PG Tips and digestive biscuit? I ran my hand through my hair until I encountered grains, then a grainy surface which announced itself as the ground. I dug my fingers into the surface on which I lay. Dirty, gritty, damp sand parted beneath my fingertips. I looked at Judith. Her face was concern hiding confusion with just a hint of suspicion thrown in for good measure. I looked to my right, and saw offices clinging so close to the river’s edge that there wasn’t space for a rat to scuttle. I looked towards my feet and saw the blue-black waters of the sunset river gnawing at my toes. I looked to my left and saw Tower Bridge. I groaned and let my head flop back on the dirty low-tide sand.
“Bollocks,” I said.
“Hey, mister, you all right, like?”
I turned to look closer at the woman kneeling beside me. Behind, safe on the higher reaches of an embankment, a small crowd of interested passers-by and tourists had gathered to watch this curious scene at the water’s edge; some though were already drifting away, disappointed that I wasn’t a corpse. Behind
I looked back at Judith, Here To Help.
I said, “Bollocks buggery bollocks.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied.
I sat up slowly, just in case anything was broken or dislodged. Nothing. Even the stitches in my chest were a comforting ache, a reminder of normality. I looked at my right hand. The bandages, stained a faint tea-brown, were still spun tight. From my new height I could see past my toes, to where the slow waters of the Thames were quietly, secretly edging their way up towards the stone face of the embankment. They’d already washed away the worst of the low-tide debris, plastic bags and old Coke cans. And with it, they’d washed away a message, written carefully at my feet by an extended fingertip. All that remained was:
I looked at Judith. “This sounds strange, but I don’t suppose you saw three mad women with a cauldron of boiling tea pass by this way?”
“No,” she replied. The polite voice of reasonable people scared of exciting the madman.
“Flash of light? Puff of smoke? Erm . . .” I tried to find a polite way of describing the symptoms of spontaneous teleportation without using the dreaded “teleportation” word. I failed. I slumped back into the sand. What kind of mystic kept a spatial vortex at the bottom of their cauldrons of tea anyway?
“Have you called the police?”
“No,” she replied. Then casually, “Did you jump?”
Her eyes flickered to Tower Bridge. I shook my head. “No. Pushed. Don’t call the police.”
I staggered up. The rolling waters of the river didn’t wash like the sea, but crawled, by imperceptible advancement. The long straight lines of the “A” filled with foam.
I thought about the three women and their cauldron. I looked up at the Tower of London. I looked down at Judith.
I said, “Listen to me. This is very important. I need to know about the ravens in the Tower.”
I had to see it to believe it. I bought an overpriced ticket like all the good tourists who waddled in orderly queues between the barriers guiding you this way to that tower, that way to the crown jewels. The battlemented walls shut out all the city’s traffic noise, creating within the old courtyards of the Tower an eerie stillness. The air smelt of rain to come. A few yards from the executioner’s block, left out as something macabre to please the children, was a chained-off patch of grass. A small sign announced in four different languages that there were nine ravens in the tower, named after Norse gods, and legend held that should ever the ravens leave the Tower of London, then the city would be doomed. Cursed, damned, fire, water, crumble, crash: pick one, pick them all.
Even if the legend was a lie, time and belief gives everything power.
Next to that was a sign saying, Please Do Not Feed The Birds.
The grass was empty.
I took Judith, Here To Help by the arm — customer sales assistant, Tower of London, and incidentally the only person who knew first aid and had the guts to try it on floating bodies — and said calmly, “If you do not show me the ravens, I will throw myself off Tower Bridge and this time the tide will be high and you won’t be able to save me, capisce?”
She was at heart a kind woman. She wasn’t about to say no to a guy she thought had tried to commit suicide.
Below one of the towers in the wall, in a deep whitewashed room that hummed with ventilation fans and poor plumbing, were nine neat little coffins laid out on a neat little table. Inside each coffin was a black-feathered dead bird.
Judith said, “They just died. A few days ago. All of them — just died. We thought maybe poison but they hadn’t been fed by anyone except . . . and there’ll be an autopsy but they all just . . . we’re getting replacement
