Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (15 page)

Something in Sharon’s smile, her fixed, radiant smile, was making the sweat prickle down his spine. “This company,” she sang out sweetly, “what’s its name?”

He said, “But they—”

She said, “Now Mr Mayor…”

He said, “They’re a bunch of total—”

She said, “Now really, Mr Mayor, may I suggest, just suggest, that before you suggest the sponsors of the biannual Aldermen’s dinner, stakeholders–and serious ones at that–in our very own Harlun and Phelps, suppliers of half our weaponry, and the gentlemen who pay for the golf memberships of senior staff–may I suggest you think before suggesting that these gentlemen engage, as a universal collective, in acts of a socially untoward sexual nature?”

He seethed, fingers drumming on the edge of his desk. A
desk,
how he
hated
having a desk; it reminded him every day of how easy it was to fall, how quickly you could forget the things that matter and throw them into the trash can to eternity that lay tucked beneath his damn desk. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Kelly. Leaving aside, for a moment, the sponsorship and the dinner and the shares and the golf; leaving aside, in fact, any reference to sex or death, can I just say this: they are
evil.”

“Mr Mayor—”

“And before you say anything, may I just add, I didn’t call them tossers or wankers or festering warts on the arse-end of the devil’s
rotting behind. I didn’t say that they were irredeemable gits, blaggards no less, nor the sewer that lies beneath the nether pit. Oh no! I kept it simple, I kept it pure, I kept it almost polite; you could have tweeted my views and still had characters to spare! Burns and Stoke,” he concluded, with his arms flailing in their grubby coat, “are evil bloody bankers!”

There had been some time spent on the Internet.

Then there had been some time spent on the phone.

Sharon discovered, to her annoyance, that by being flappy and vapid she got much better results than if she phoned up and just asked a simple question.

It took three hours, but the answers began to come through.

Retail space, High Holborn, unoccupied. Owner–Burns and Stoke.

Industrial unit, Clerkenwell, unoccupied. Owner–Burns and Stoke.

Brownfield site, Bromley; empty residential estate, Kentish Town; abandoned sixth-form college, Deptford; rotting community hall, Mitcham–the more she looked, now she knew what she was looking for, the more they began to emerge. All across the city Burns and Stoke owned properties with nothing much in common except that they were all empty, all abandoned, and no one seemed to want to do anything with them.

What had Sammy said?

“It ain’t a good death; it ain’t fire or flood; it’s a declining death that don’t bother to say hello or bye bye and you don’t even notice you’re dying until you’re already dead.”

Sharon sat back in her chair in a small Internet café off Holborn Viaduct–
We Repair Computers & Sell Fresh Smoothies!
–and considered. She
was feeling, it has to be said, remarkably on-it. She hadn’t felt this on-it, in fact, since that time during sociology AS level when the teacher asked the class what social construct meant and she hadn’t only given an answer, it had been a good answer, and everyone had seemed very surprised. Was this, she wondered, what having a fulfilling career was like?

There only really seemed one thing for it.

She googled Burns and Stoke.

The Internet and Sharon Li had had good times and bad times, but if there was one truth about their relationship, it was that they had had a lot of times. There was nothing html could hide from her for long.

Burns and Stoke–three years ago, a small investment company struggling with the fact that the debt it had bought in London and sold in Hong Kong to be sold to Shanghai to be sold to Paris to be sold to New York to be sold to New Delhi to be sold to Washington to be sold to Tokyo… had turned out not such a solid debt after all.

She flicked through articles warning of closure, whispering of redundancies and, ultimate sin, no Christmas bonuses. The imminent demise of this company didn’t seem to have attracted much more attention from the press than as another sob story waiting to happen in a time of crisis until, at the very last moment…

New Faces at Burns & Stoke

Shares recover on the news of a new management team taking over at the beleaguered investment firm Burns and Stoke. The new chair of the board, Mr Ruislip, promised to overhaul every aspect of the company’s portfolio in an attempt to see where interests may be broadened in these difficult times…

And without any real warning or explanation, without any deal or bail-out or tangible change at all, from what Sharon could see, suddenly it seemed as if Christmas was back on the menu for Burns and Stoke.

It occurred to her that she knew nothing about banking.

She wondered if this would be a problem.

Hell, no, after all…

“I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret,” she muttered.

She wrote down the address of the head office, picked up her bag, her notebook and Travelcard, and went in search of trouble.

Two Underground changes and forty minutes later, and Sharon stood on the street opposite the front door of Burns and Stoke and wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake.

“Door” was in itself inaccurate. “Door” implied a nicely made pair of tall wooden panels that swung out on hinges, with maybe a matching frame and a brass knocker. This wasn’t a door. This was a gateway, made of glass, all of it, not a single steel support in sight. It was a doorway for the king of the giraffes to parade through, flanked by his minions the overweight elephant and the portly bear. It was a spinning blade of a door, a perpetual swishing entrance to wonders, guarded by a man in white gloves and a bowler hat. Visible beyond him at a reception desk sat two women more beautiful than anything Sharon thought she had ever seen, who flashed smiles brighter than a full moon on a cloudless night. Their perfect nails clattered over keyboards as they noted your name, visiting office, date of birth, present address, National Insurance number, retinal pattern and political intent. A palm tree hung over a pool of pebble-lapping water, fed by a silver waterfall that fell from three storeys up with the same impossible silence as that of the opening door. The wall beyond the reception desk was also glass, revealing a hint of private pavement that led straight out onto the river, though, Sharon noted, no one seemed to have felt the urge to install tables or chairs for any workers wanting to admire this view. Clearly all they needed they already had within these crystal walls.

She felt tiny standing outside this monument to wealth, a gnome in purple boots. She hugged her bag to her chest and waited for the man with white gloves to look at her and call security, who were doubtless discreetly scattered around the half-hearted rock garden that ran down the centre of the square outside. The offices of Burns and Stoke felt no need to vaunt their presence on the building itself, but signs quietly pointed, with an old-fashioned innocence, from around the former docks of Canary Wharf, indicating which silver-clad embodiment of wealth lay above which private gym or behind what exclusive wine bar. Overhead, the Docklands Light Railway was as politely subdued as the
signs themselves; underneath, subways bustled and hummed with shops full of the swish of silk on leather, the buzz of men buying expensive ties and women searching for designer handbags. It was a paradise, a testimony to wealth, health and clean living–bright, brilliant and utterly soulless.

Look and see, as only a shaman can.

There are shadows here, memories of things that went before, but they are crushed, buried beneath the reflective surface of the streets. When as a shaman she moves, when she walks and the boundaries grow thin between what is seen and what is perceived, the shapes of the creatures burrowing just beneath the surface become visible, like the shadows of fish beneath murky water. It is a place for cold zephyrs, for the spirits of the icy wind. Beneath the underground tunnels a greedy-eyed minotaur lurks, chewing on gold watches and playing the markets, while in the warm server rooms fire salamanders with flickering tongues warm themselves on the mother boards; all unseen, unknown, but no less real for that. Torn sheets from the daily newspapers swirl across the ground and sometimes, as the wind catches them and throws them up, they have a shape, form and limbs.

Sharon took a deep breath and walked towards the building. The man with white gloves eyed her, polite but doubtful, as she stepped into the revolving doors. They spun at precisely the speed to knock little old ladies off their feet, but not fast enough for the raging impatience of anyone late for a meeting. Inside, Sharon looked up, then up a bit further, through a shaft of glass: glass walkways linking glass offices which looked out onto elaborate glass sculptures. She shuffled up to the desk where the most beautiful receptionists in the world smiled their lighthouse smiles and felt, if possible, even smaller and possibly a bit spotty.

“Uh…” she began.

“Hi, how can we help you?”

“Well I…”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Um, no.”

“Who are you visiting today?” The voice was sparkling, the smile was blinding, everything about them was sensory overload, the words hardly registering.

“Well, I, uh… I’m… I’m writing an article on urban… urban redevelopment and I was wondering if I could uh… like talk to someone in Burns and Stoke about their uh… their stuff. Yeah.”

The smile shimmered like a mirage.

“And who would you like to talk to?”

“Um. The development guy?” she hazarded.

“Do you have his private extension?”

“No.”

“An appointment–oh no, you already said. How about press credentials?”

It occurred to Sharon that for a smile to stay that fixed and that brilliant must have taken months of training and possibly surgery. “Are you fulfilled by your job?” she demanded, and couldn’t quite believe the words had come out.

The smile stayed fixed, the eyes unnaturally wide.

“Pardon me?”

“Your job,” she repeated. “Are you fulfilled by it?”

“I love my job!” sang out the receptionist in a voice worthy of the worst automated lifts. “I am completely fulfilled by my career and the life choices I have made. My life coach tells me so!”

“Your… life coach?”

“I’m sorry, if you don’t have an appointment then I really must ask you to leave.”

Sharon wondered if she was being insulted. The sheer quality of the smile, the beauty of the face, the perfection of the uniform and brightness of the long painted nails, made it hard to focus on the details of what was actually being said. “I’ll come back later, shall I?” she mumbled, feeling her face flush bright red, and before the receptionist could charmingly wish her the best or perhaps invite her to have a truly splendid day, she gripped her bag more tightly and nearly ran out of the building.

Sharon Li sat by herself in a fake garden composed of fake concrete rocks between which rolled a fake gleaming stream and fumed.

She fumed at the receptionists of Burns and Stoke for making her feel like an idiot, at Sammy for making her look like an idiot, at Mike Pentlace for being an idiot yet to come, at the man with blue electric
wings for talking to her like an idiot, and most of all at herself for being, above all else, a complete and utter plonker. What the hell did she think she was going to achieve? What the hell did she think she could do?

“Hi there!” sang out a chipper voice.

She spun round on her seat.

No one there.

“In this week’s episode,” the merry voice went on, “we discuss the fate of the city. Sharon’s problem or not?”

She turned again–the voice was right beside her, filling her world, yet no one was speaking. Beneath her she felt the rumble of the Jubilee Line crawling out towards the bubble of the Millennium Dome and heard the slow electric whistle of the Docklands Light Railway overhead. She stood up, peering into a border of thick spiny bushes mulched with fake wood chippings, just in case it hid the owner of the voice.

“In this groundbreaking exposé of the weakness of the human psyche, we take you on a voyage to the deepest parts of the unconscious and ask–shamans, what are they good for really?”

She straightened up sharply, and barked, “Right, you! Wherever you are, whatever you are, stop mucking around or I’ll do you! I know bloody tae kwon do and this is like your fair and legal warning!”

Silence from the shrubbery.

A woman dressed for jogging, music player strapped to her arm, smiled nervously at Sharon from across the path. Sharon flushed scarlet and stepped further from the border. Overhead a twin-engined plane whirred as it approached the runway of London City Airport; cars circled in concrete tunnels beneath her feet. She walked, slipping unconsciously into invisibility, fingers clenching and unclenching with growing rage. Rage at Sammy, at the world, at herself, and at the voice which she couldn’t get out of her head, the faceless voice which proclaimed:

“A little bit further and you could win a piece of your very own understanding!”

She snarled silently at the words, then her expression changed in response to a flicker of thought. A little deeper, she told herself. She raised her head, looked around at the glass-walled streets, where even
the twee signposts mimicked American style in a celebration of London’s wannabe-New-York and all its riches, and walked, and looked deeper.

A little deeper, a little bit further through the glass, and if you look and if you listen there is…

       
pop of lid being pulled off pills

argument in the office

           
telephone rings

fireworks victory at solitaire!

woman alone in the toilet who weeps at the mistake that others shall soon know

              
flick out the grime from beneath his teeth with a piece of peppermint floss, date tonight, date with the chick gotta look good