although very few people appreciated what they really were.
There were pieces of slogans still visible on the wall. A remnant of:
—ISTIAN LIEBE FAMK—
Or:
Or a sad half-remnant of the CND logo, framed in flowers.
I crawled to the end of the sofa, unable to resist my curiosity despite the fire cha-chaing up my nervous system and the ice weighing the rest down. I reached out to touch the concrete, brushed my fingers over a dozen layers of bright paint, tasted . . . grey dust in the mouth, empty tightness in the belly, neon popping in the ears, crashing delight at the back of the neck, burning heaviness at the ends of the fingers, blue sadness behind the eyes — mostly just sadness, so deep and big you could fall for ever and never even notice you were heading down. The man who owned this particular artefact didn’t need spells to protect him. A whiff of this magic and grown assassins would just sigh away.
I drew my fingers away. I heard the door open behind me in the sense that when he spoke, I was not surprised; but I did not listen to the sound until he actually said: “You like it?”
We didn’t take our eyes from the concrete.
“Yes.”
“Four and a half thousand euros. You believe that? Four and a half fucking thousand euros for a piece of concrete with some paint on. Best buy I ever made. Drink?”
Wrenching my eyes away was like turning away from the dying man who’s just asked you for help. I looked at the man who’d entered the room. He was young, trying to look older than he was by cutting his hair so thin it bordered on the bald, growing grizzle but no beard and wearing carefully aged and scuffed black leather. He leant on the end of his desk with the casual air of a guy who’s seen everything and, while impressed by nothing, is still prepared to be amused by it. We disliked him instinctively.
I said, “I need Vera.”
“You’re Swift, right?”
“Yes. I need to see Vera.”
“She’s kinda busy at five in the morning, you know? How can I help?” His smile was like the spinning mirrored whiteness of the disco ball.
“You can get me Vera.”
“You look sorta crappy, gotta tell you.”
“Help me. I need . . . I need a doctor. I need Vera.”
“I thought that Matthew Swift was like, you know, tough.”
“I’m not tough,” I replied through gritted teeth. “I’m lucky. I’m so lucky that I can be killed by a shadow on the streets and come back without a scar on my skin. I’m so damn lucky that when I hear a telephone ring, I have to answer it and it’s always for me, always. I’m so lucky I can be attacked by a pack of spectres and walk away with all my limbs attached. I’m so lucky that I am we and we are me, and I’ve gotta tell you, we could rip your eyes out and feed them to you right now and forget in the morning that we were even here. You think you’re that lucky? Now get me Vera!”
He made the telephone call while I watched.
It went:
“Hey, yeah, sorry about the time, it’s . . . yeah, before you . . . just listen . . . no, I’ve got this guy here . . . says his name is Swift . . . what? Uh . . . blue. Bright blue. Yeah. No, pretty bad way. Like . . . you know . . . blood. Sure. Sure. Yeah, sure thing. No, I’ll . . . yeah . . . I’ll let him know.”
That was it.
Her name was Vera.
She was the almost properly elected head of the Whites. Almost properly, because it was generally agreed that if there was an election, she’d win, so what was the point of testing it?
She owed me.
She owed
She was one of the only people in London who knew that when the death certificate said I’d died, it hadn’t gone into enough of the details.
The clock on the wall said 5.45 a.m. when she turned up. She was wearing a big puffer coat twice the width and nearly all the height of her small body, and having a bad hair day. A pair of bright green leather boots vanished inside the silver iceberg of her coat, and a pair of pink mittens covered her fingers. She took one look at me and said, “Jesus, you look shit.”
I said, “I’ve been attacked.”
“Know who did it?”
“No.”
“Kill them?”
“Got one of them in a beer bottle,” I replied.
“You kidding me.”
“No,” I said, and then, because it
They bundled me into a car. It was a surprisingly boring car, for the head of the Whites — a trundling little Volkswagen with the charisma of a dry blister. Vera drove, rushing to beat the early morning traffic as we raced through deserted streets.
I said, “I need a safe place. Just a safe place where we can recover . . .”
“It’s fine, I know.”
“I need a doctor . . .”
“It’s being sorted.”
“. . . someone who won’t report to the police . . . no records . . .”
“I know, I know. It’s being taken care of.”
Pink neon lights rising, falling, rising, falling. The rain had eased off into drizzle. The streets were a perfect black mirror reflecting every detail of the lights above. Office lights left on for the night glowed empty white squares on the dark sides of the buildings, men in blue caps were drawing back the gates of the Underground stations. The wheels of Vera’s speeding car threw up great sheets of water from the blocked drains in the sides of the street, spattering dirty brown stains onto the clean windows of the passing shops. In the kitchen windows of the early stirrers, lights were starting to come on, women in thick dressing gowns and furry slippers turning on the kettles, men shivering in their pyjamas scuttling for the heating. The first post vans of the day were rumbling through the streets, to deliver recorded packages and special parcels to the lucky few who merited their attention; outside the hotels, the international tourists going to catch the first flights of the day hurried to waiting taxis. We wanted to sleep; but by now we were too tired to stop our thoughts.
White City became Shepherd’s Bush, a big roundabout leading to everywhere and anywhere, on which sat a large, long-dead barometer, or thermometer, or whatever it had been designed as before the money ran out. Some time, a thousand years ago, there was probably a shepherd who had a bush on this roundabout. Now there were subways and traffic lights and purple-brown hotels with mirrored square windows to admire it all from.
Shepherd’s Bush became Bayswater, Bayswater rapidly became posh — big houses fit for a king and his servants, divided up into apartments fit for barons and their heirs, great trees hundreds of years old whose bare branches drooped twiny fingers between the yellow streetlamps. We followed the course of the Central Line running beneath the street and, as we drove, I could feel the whispered magics of the city changing, growing from that early-morning lull into a rushing, buzzing, humming rise as the city began to wake up for another day, hear it pushing inside my chest and running through my blood, a burst of energy that I didn’t want and couldn’t use but, even then, made me smile. Bayswater became Paddington, a maze of streets too tight for the uses they were put to, in which seedy hotels where you paid by the hour mingled with the mansions of the great and the squats of the
