“Nooo . . .”
“See? Fucking quests! So talking to a dead pair of footprints. Fine.”
We passed a parked white van, and for a moment Vera was back, her painted form shimmering across its glass and metal sides. She looked worried.
“Something bad is going down, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yup.”
“Seriously bad?”
“Pretty much.”
“I know. I guess what you said about the whole quest thing — it makes sense that I should know, yeah?”
“I guess so. Any useful tips?”
She’d vanished off the side of the van. For a while there was nothing but the
“Thanks.”
“Swift?”
“Yeah?”
“You heard of the death of cities?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he’s real? That he’s been real ever since Remus turned to Romulus and said, ‘hey, cool digs, bro’?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he can be summoned? Sometimes he’s called by the volcano, or the thunder, or the war, but always, something summons him.”
“Yeah. I’d heard.”
“Swift?”
Her voice was fading, the painted footsteps on the ground growing fainter.
“Yeah?”
“Am I really dead?”
“You got shot and turned into a puddle of paint.”
“That’s not normal corpselike behaviour.”
“No. It did occur to me that it was a little unusual. You are — were — leader of the Whites, a clan with a big thing for life, paint, graffiti and all the magics in between. But then again, if you’re not dead, what are you doing here?”
“Good bloody point.”
Her footsteps faded to a thin splatter, then a little smear, then died altogether. We didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to the vibe.
Just above Aldgate, I turned west, heading towards Old Street and Clerkenwell Road, watching offices dissolve slowly into a mixture of shops and flats, piled up on top of each other, joining briefly the ring road that was at all hours laden with traffic, and then heading further along, skimming the northern edge of the Barbican to where those painted statues of those mad-eyed dragons holding the shield with the twin crosses stood guard over the city. The white towers of the churches built after the Great Fire were mainly behind me, twenty-six in all, most of their bodies gutted in the Blitz.
A voice said, “Spare some change?”
A beggar with a big beard sat in the doorway of a recruitment firm, dark eyes staring up at us. I fumbled in my pocket, found nothing, dug into my satchel, felt the desire to keep on walking, the rhythm briefly broken, found my wallet, found the £30 I carried inside, handed it over.
“Cheers,” said the beggar.
“Any time,” I replied, and kept on walking.
A few doorways later and a voice said, “So you like to walk?”
It was the same voice.
It was the same beggar.
“Sure,” I replied, and kept on walking.
By the bolted metal door round the back of a photocopy shop, he was still here, knees huddled up to his chin, blanket pulled over his shoulders. “It’s the new thing, you know. Walking,” he said.
“No it’s not. In the old days people used to walk all the time.”
“Yeah . . . but that was because it was walk or sit behind a shitting horse in a flea-infested coffin smelling of sawdust and widdle.”
“You may have a point, although I imagine that most of the early modern period smelt of sawdust and widdle regardless of your means of transport.”
There was a long brick warehouse ahead, its back turned to the street, no doorways for the beggar to sit in. That bought me a few more moments to gather my thoughts, and sure enough, sat in the next doorway past that, there he was again, lighting a fag.
“You know,” he said, “it’s amazing it took until 1865 for some bright spark to build a proper sewerage system.”
“Antheaps,” I replied. “Or wasps’ nests. With a small nest, you don’t have to worry. It’s got to be big before you wonder if it’ll fall off the tree.”
“Someone’s been using metaphor on you, right?”
I had to wait two more doorways to reply.
“Yup.”
“Sounds to me like a paddle full of shite.”
“You’ve got to admit it has a certain chaotic something. London burnt down in 1666 and everyone went, whoopee, let’s rebuild! A golden city! But look what happened. Chaos and fluster. Everyone was so eager to live in this golden city that they didn’t even have time to build it.”
Goswell Road. Nowhere for a beggar to sit on the junction of the Goswell Road and Clerkenwell Road, just two staring dragons in a traffic island. I waited, leaning against the traffic lights. They changed. I crossed, still heading west. There were very few doorways on this side; a pub ahead, but it was occupied by a group of scruffy trendies in carefully slashed jeans sharing a bottle of wine. I kept walking. An art studio of some kind presented a low, grubby doorway.
The beggar said, “Can I make a suggestion?”
“You’ve got an agenda, right?”
“Sure.”
“OK. Suggest away.”
“Don’t do the walk. Don’t get inaugurated.”
“Why not?”
Art studio to chippy; he was in the door between that and the strip club pretending to be a pub.
“You want to be Midnight Mayor?”
“No.”
“There you go!”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Sure it is. You be free.”
I kept on walking.
He wasn’t in the next doorway.
Or the one after that.
He’d had his say.
We kept on walking.
Keep moving. If you keep moving you might just manage to leave thoughts behind, you might get it done before they catch you.
Keep on walking.
