The Midnight Mayor

Come be me . . .

Aching right hand.

We be light, we be life, we be fire!

What would Jesus do?

We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!

I like walking. Each step is a thought without words, a thought without words is a thought without blame, without retribution, without consequence.

Come be we and be free . . .

I think he did it to control you, to bind you, to curse you with his office.

. . . we be blue electric angels!

Mr Mayor.

“Mr Fucking Mayor.”

I looked up.

Kemsley’s face was a badly peeled tomato, grilled at a high heat and left to sag. You couldn’t look like that and be alive, and there was no way the Kemsley I had seen a few hours — maybe a day? — ago was up and walking. No way he’d be here, just to talk to me. I skirted south towards Holborn Viaduct, and he fell into step beside me. Boarded-up butchers’ shops, renovated Victorian ironwork painted green, red, gold, with the little dragons guarding the city wall, the shields, twin red crosses on a white background, one cross smaller than the other, one cross a sword; Domine dirige nos, the motto of the city, everywhere, once you looked, if you stopped to look.

“You want to know what I really think?” he said.

“Not really, but I guess you didn’t go to all this trouble not to tell me.”

“You are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.”

“Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.”

“You want my advice?”

“No.”

“Lie down and die. Let Mr Pinner do his thing. Let someone better take over the office. That’s the best thing you could do as Mayor, for the Mayor. Just lie down and die.”

“You know, people pay therapists to get this kind of abuse.”

He just grunted, turned his back on me, started walking briskly the other way. We called out after, “Where are you going?”

He looked back.

Just a guy. Just some guy in a black jacket, frightened at a stranger’s voice shouting after him in the night.

I raised my hands in apology, smiled, shook my head, turned and kept on walking the way I’d gone.

With my incisive detective skills, I was beginning to notice a pattern at work.

I could see the golden cross of St Paul’s Cathedral peeping above the nearby offices. As I walked, the streetlamps flickered, flashed unevenly when I passed beneath them, splitting my shadow into a dozen different mes that spread out like a sundial around my feet.

I heard a squeaking.

At first I thought it was some sort of cartoon rat.

It would have made a strange kind of sense.

Then the squeaking grew nearer, and now it was more a sound of metal sliding off metal. I kept on walking, figuring that if it was something important, it would catch up with me.

It did. But it gave us a strange pleasure to make it work for the privilege.

For a moment I thought I smelt curry powder and plastic bags, heard the distant muttering of the mad old lady with her trolley of bags, buggery, buggery, youth today, buggery . . .

But it wasn’t her. Not tonight.

“Hello, Matthew.”

I looked to the voice, and didn’t stop walking. Our fists curled in anger.

The squeaking came from a pair of big wheels behind two smaller ones. Above the wheels was a black leather chair. Attached to it was a man. Attached to him were two stands on more wheels, trailing along behind. One stand held a bag of some clear liquid, drugs or fluids or whatever; the other held a bag of blood, and I could just guess whose it was.

Pushing the wheelchair was a man dressed all in shadows and my old coat.

Angry.

Don’t look.

Angry.

“Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, “how exactly do think this business is going to end?”

“Terminally,” I replied. “But at least it will end. Dead is dead is dead. Especially for you.”

We walked/wheeled on a little further. “Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, with a slightly reproving tone in his voice, “do you really understand what it is to be Midnight Mayor?”

“Nope. Totally winging it.”

“You have to serve the city.”

“Sussed that.”

“Not the people, Matthew. The city.”

“I wasn’t signed up to be Robin Hood, if that’s what you mean.”

“Let’s please not be coy about this.”

“This isn’t me being coy, this is me being angry.”

“Why are you angry?”

“Because I didn’t ask for this gig. Because some bastard chose me for it without so much as a cocktail sausage and pineapple on a stick, because Vera was shot and Anissina fell into smog, because Mo is gone and Loren cried, because the spectres stabbed me and Earle sat in his office drinking coffee, because I saw a guy flayed alive and another bastard lumbered in hospital with no skin, and because you” — I stabbed an angry finger at the man in the wheelchair — “you, Mr Bakker, you are dead. We killed you. We killed you and we did it because you . . . because . . . We killed you and you should stay dead and so should your bloody fucking shadow!”

I was shouting. My voice echoed off the buildings on the empty street, hummed in the cold water pipes. I turned away, looked down at the paving stones, counting my own steps, how many stones they covered with each stride, how many they’d cover in ten, in twenty, how many strides to a mile.

The wheelchair rattled on peacefully beside me. Mr Bakker sat, his pale, spotted hands folded across his belly, his head tilted up and to one side, being pushed by his shadow. His blood-soaked shadow in the bloodstained remnant of my old coat, the one I’d died in. The one I’d been killed in. That coat.

“What’s the point of all this?” I asked at last, as we swung into the mess of up-down streets between Farringdon Road and Fleet Street. “I get that there’s mystical shit going on and all that, but what exactly is the point? Am I supposed to derive some great moral message from all this, become a better person, a nicer Midnight Mayor? From what I can tell, ‘nice’ isn’t the qualifying term.”

“I think,” said Bakker, drawing in that long, slow, thoughtful breath he’d always used as a teacher, just before the answer “maybe”, “I think that you’re supposed to find out what kind of Mayor you’re meant to be. I don’t know. It’s not really my field of expertise.”

“Great. You know, that implies all sorts of unpleasant things about higher powers.”

“Or a lot about your current state of mind. How is your current state of mind?”

“I see no reason to tell you about it.”

“But isn’t that the point?”

“I don’t know. No one has told me the point. And until someone does, I’m just going to assume there isn’t one and keep on walking for the hell of it.”

I kept on walking.

“Matthew?”