The Midnight Mayor

without the psycho-shit.

We were going to find the hat.

Her hat.

And it occurred to me as I passed Bond Street station, I had an idea where to look.

The Jubilee Line runs through Bond Street. It’s sometimes a detail hard to remember; people think Bond Street and automatically start counting stations the long length of Oxford Street — Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, pleased that in this one case, the map of the Underground and the map of the city actually have some sort of geographical symmetry going for them.

Bond Street is therefore easy to take for granted — an in-between stop for people who don’t quite know where they’re going, unless they’re shopping for something extremely rare and expensive. Jewellers make the streets around the station their own, but the station itself is still on Oxford Street, still just a doorway on the way to somewhere more conclusive.

We caught the train. Jubilee Line, again, swishing new doors, clean blue and red chequered seats, not too much yet scratched into the glass, just the usual statements of:

KEN WAS ERE

Or:

MEGA!!

Or (and of course):

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

Headed north. Baker Street, St John’s Wood, Swiss Cottage, Finchley Road — overtaken by the mainline train to Coventry, whomph and the Underground carriages gently swayed at the pressure of its passing — West Hampstead, Kilburn, Willesden Green, Dollis Hill.

Back to Dollis Hill again.

The indicator board read:

1. Stanmore — 5 mins

2. Damnation — 9 mins

3. ENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHELINE ENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHEL

But by now, I’d got the message.

Out into a dark and sleepy street, the rain falling harder now, the chill retreating on the air, aware that the water was the main business tonight and it wasn’t quite cold enough to make it into ice.

Into the deep dark wilds of windy Willesden, where no traveller dare venture without a copy of the London A-Z, a bus map, a travelcard and ideally, a compass and all-purpose urban survival kit, through streets that changed their nature every five minutes, as if the whole area had lost faith in itself and now needed to ask its neighbour if this style was all right after all, or whether they should have stuck with terraced grot.

Back to the wide high road, with big red buses irregularly lumbering down the middle of the carriageway. Back to the purple sign above the gleaming door — VOLTAGE; and now it was locked shut, no bouncer on the door, no kids going in. A council notice had been stuck up on the front of the door, informing any would-be visitors that this place had had its licence to serve alcohol withdrawn, and if anyone wanted further information they should consult their local borough offices. I hammered on the door, shouted various obscenities until someone paid me attention, a window sliding open upstairs, a head sticking out and a man’s voice saying, “Oi, fuck off out of it!”

I stepped back into the rain, looking up at the face, and said, “I’m looking for the guy who ran this place — the Executive Officer. A prat with a cardiac condition who called himself Boom Boom! You know where he is?”

“Got his arse shifted out of here, didn’t he?” came the reply. “Try doctor.”

The window slammed shut.

I cursed quietly to myself, marched back up to the door of VOLTAGE, pressed my fingers into the padlock and chain and whispered loving placations to it until with a well-mannered click the thing came open and free in my hands. I pulled the doors open, saw nothing but darkness inside, snatched a bubble of neon from the streetlamp above, which hissed and dimmed in complaint, and lobbed it down the stairwell ahead of me.

Few things are as unsettling as a place which should have been roaring with noise, turned quiet. No windows, no lights, no sounds, except the tread of our footsteps. We pushed heat from our fingers into our floating bubble of neon, forced it to expand and blaze to drive away the clinging darkness that slipped in like loose silk from every corner. An empty bar, an empty floor, sticky with old spilt beer. Empty stools and silent speakers, unlocked doors, and switches that when flicked didn’t bother to turn anything on. I could taste the thick, lingering afterburn of that place’s magic, felt the shadows, silent and sad, faces that should have been dancing now fallen into nothing more than a sullen, bored and resentful sleep.

Downstairs. No lights, no sound, just us.

I found an office, which I had ignored last time, following the deDum of the beat. Now the door was open. I went in. Papers on a desk, a computer, an executive toy made out of ball bearings and wire. We picked it up by one bearing, let it drop, watched the whole thing swing. It was hypnotic. How could anyone work, with such distraction? The walls were covered by posters of various DJs, and bands with names like “Thunderchazz!”, “DJ Grindhop”, “The Bassline Slutz” and other excitingly ungrammatical things. I sat down in a chair too big for me, too small for the Executive Officer, twirled a few times, watching my shadow shrink and grow on the walls around me as I moved and my bubble of stolen neon stayed stationary overhead, humming faintly with trapped electric glow. I went through a couple of desks. Strange bits of wire, electronics, jacks and plugs designed to operate on systems that were never, ever as easy as it claimed in the manual. Old batteries rolling around on the bottom of a drawer, dead biros, scrap paper, a half-used box of tissues, an unopened box of “Her Pleasure” condoms, a pack of Blu-Tack, a broken keyboard, the front panel ripped off and the number keys mostly gone. Not what I needed. I kept on looking.

The solution was inside a black organiser bound with a thing that wasn’t quite leather, but dreamed of one day making the leap. I flicked through it, tried “D” for doctor, “G” for “GP” and eventually found what I was after under “Q” for “quack”. The entry in the address book said:

Howard Umbars,

158 Fryer Walk,

London W11 58P

(Emergencies call: 0208 719 9272)

I took the contact book, just in case I was wrong. The shadows dragged behind me, empty nothingness turning to watch as we walked out. In a few years, there would be ghosts in that basement, if nothing was done soon, and they’d dance to an invisible beat for the rest of time. It didn’t take much to make these things real.

To double-check my guess, I walked through the rainy streets of Willesden until I found a bus shelter. I climbed up on a ticket machine until I could lean over the top, stretched across the gap and pulled down from the stagnant pool of dirty water on the roof a sodden and sticky copy of the Yellow Pages. Quite how the Yellow Pages found its way on top of most bus shelters in London was a mystery beyond our knowing, and we put the whole thing down to higher powers and tried not to think about it. I sat in the bus shelter, shook the worst of the water out of the soggy book, and peeled my way through the glued-together pages.

What the Yellow Pages was doing on top of the bus shelters was one mystery we didn’t explore; why the Yellow Pages that we found up there happened to contain a directory for “wizards” was a mystery we actively walked the other way from. I was in there, somewhere. Matthew Swift (sorcerer), just waiting for some clumsy oaf to grab a copy of the book from on top of the shelter and read our name.

We tried “H” for healers, “M” for mystics and, with growing frustration, went back to “Q” for “quacks”.

Howard Umbars was there, in the Yellow Pages on top of the bus stop.

Higher powers had a sense of humour after all.

I tossed the book back into the puddle on top of the shelter, and went to see him.

Acton.

Acton is a borough that prides itself on not being Acton. Wherever you live in Acton, it is your noble and firm