Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (5 page)

One person remained after the meeting filed out, and while this individual was trying to be inconspicuous, there was no denying its bulk and weight as it loomed over the biscuit table.

It had waited for the last one to leave, then said, “My name is Gretel.”

Sharon looked up and then, because Gretel was standing so close, she looked up a bit further. Features blurred before her eyes; not so much through a twisting of the light, but from a twisting of the brain, as if it couldn’t process what it was trying to see. She smelled old garbage dump and chilli sauce cutting through even the muddling power of Gretel’s cloaking spell. Resolutely Sharon thrust out her hand, palm open, and exclaimed, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Gretel. I’m so glad you could come to our meeting.”

The thing called Gretel hesitated, then reached out one hand, wide enough to pick Sharon up by the skull, strong enough to crush any living thing it held. Sharon’s fingers brushed a palm of grey hairs bordering on soft quills or spikes, sticky with some orange stuff. For a moment she looked and there was…

Troll didn’t do it justice.

Troll wasn’t the word.

Sure, troll was what this was: undeniably, irrefutably troll, beneath the spell. But the mere word failed to capture the breadth of back, and the thickness of black quills covering face, shoulders, arms, hands, bare feet with yellow nails inclining to claws; elbows wider than Sharon’s waist, face rounder than a blown-up beach ball, and teeth stained the colour of the rubbish dump and sharpened on a diet of ground glass. Troll didn’t capture the stink of it; the head-spinning stench of it, troll didn’t capture…

Her eyes roamed across the creature and, no, the idea of “troll” had never extended to the extra extra
extra
large nightgown, patterned with garlands and puppy-dogs and doubtless the last in the shop that would stretch over Gretel’s prickly form. Sharon heard herself stammer, somewhere between the haze and the smell, “I really… hope to see you next week and that you’ll find the meetings… productive and helpful.”

Their palms parted and Sharon staggered back against the table, gasping down air.

Gretel the troll shifted uneasily. The floorboards creaked underfoot as she transferred her bulk from one foot to another, like a bus driver testing his suspension before a difficult hill. Then all at once, as if there’d only be one chance to speak and this was it, Gretel said, “I really enjoyed the food that you provided, Ms Li. That was very nice of you. I like human food but no one ever serves me not even the takeaway and I try to get the leftovers but people don’t seem to like it if I hang around their restaurants so I was wondering, Ms Li, and obviously I could pay, but I was wondering if you could maybe and you don’t even need to keep the receipts but I was wondering if anyone would mind if next time you or not even you or just someone someone in the group and I should have asked but I feel so ashamed but maybe if someone in the group could bring some pizza?”

It is forty minutes later.

Sharon walks.

The smell of refuse has diminished now, overwritten by the smell of Thai Panang curry and prawn crackers. She’d got a takeaway from the restaurant down the street, and the two of them, Gretel and Sharon, had sat in busy, munching silence on a bench in Spa Fields, a crafted park of unnatural dips and swells, and eaten. Sharon had used chopsticks, and Gretel had tried but couldn’t get them between her fingers, eventually knocking the two sticks together and using them as a very small shovel to push food directly into her mouth. Gretel had offered to share the prawn crackers, but the bag was already stained with the grease from beneath the troll’s fingers where they had smeared the plastic, and Sharon had said she was full up.

Getting into the park hadn’t been a problem. There was a rusty chain on the gate, held together with a thick padlock. Gretel had snapped the lock between her fingertips and tucked a five-pound note into a link of the chain by way of apology. When they were done, Gretel had smoothed out the dent she’d made in the bench where they’d sat by kicking it from below until once again it formed, more or less, a flat surface. Sharon, not wanting to add to Gretel’s modest
vandalism, had taken a deep breath and walked straight through the fence. She found fences easier than walls. Less mortar, more air.

“Can you smell the fish oil?” Gretel sighed. “And the tiniest hint of cumin?”

“It’s very nice,” mumbled Sharon.

“There are so many people who don’t appreciate coconut in their cooking, but I think it’s just amazing. It balances the chilli, absorbs the ginger, softens the garlic, infuses the meat… but you must know all of this, being human.”

“Uh… not really. I kind of live outta the chippy.”

“Oh.” Gretel struggled to hide her disappointment. “Well, that’s very nice too. Do you cook?”

“Me? Not really. Well, my mum taught me a bit, like, Chinese cooking and that, but you have to go miles to get the proper ingredients and actually beansprouts aren’t the world’s greatest vegetable. I know it disappoints her that I don’t really try, because apparently I’m not going to get myself a nice young man like this.”

It had all come out rather fast. Gretel absorbed this information before coming up with the obvious question. “A nice young man?”

“Well, you know. The whole turning-invisible, walking-through-walls, not-cooking-beansprouts thing is really bad for relationships.”

“Is it? Why?”

“I guess… I
think…”
Sharon paused. “Actually, I have no idea.”

When they were done she collected the wrappings and recycled the cardboard boxes in the cardboard bin and the foil boxes in the foil bin; and with surprising speed and litheness for such a large creature, Gretel was gone.

Sharon walks.

Somehow, unnoticed, the hour had crept over the city when the moderately drunk called it a night, and the seriously drunk settled down because it wouldn’t really hurt, for one last pint. The bus stops along Rosebery Avenue were crowded with the two extremes of late-night humanity: those who suspected you were out to get them, and those who knew that you were their best, best friend in all the world. Exmouth Market stood at an unusual crossroads within central London, at a place with Underground stations all around, representing nearly
every line to every place, yet where none was quite within convenient reach.

Sharon waited at the bus stop. Sadler’s Wells was emptying for the night, an audience of ballet lovers in pearls and expensive clothes thronging onto the street. Several examined the machine selling bus tickets, anxious to master it but careful not to let their ignorance look foolish.

The countdown on the bus shelter said the bus was seven minutes away.

Sharon walked to the next stop.

It took her three minutes.

Here the bus was still seven minutes away.

This stop was less heavily populated, partly due to a drunk woman, her skin blue-grey, eyes wide, trousers torn and a smell radiating off her that was much more than beer. She was harmless now, sat in the white fluorescent light of the shelter with her mouth open and a dried sheen of spit tracked down the side of her chin. But those few others at the bus stop kept their distance in case of worse to come.

Sharon walked on by.

Angel lay ahead, brilliantly lit, yellow and red, brake lights and outdoor café tables, pubs and restaurants. No matter what the time of year, crowds of drinkers here spilled onto the street, glass in hand among the ATMs, estate agents and mobile-phone shops, to down a pint or two after their curry, or sushi, or Afghan stew, or Thai platter, or chilli wrap or… almost any cuisine of choice.

The wealth of Islington was almost untouched by its status as a social hub, which pulled in every level of society to mingle opposite the antiques mall or by windows advertising
LUXURY TERRACED HOUSE, BARNSBURY,
only half a million quid per room. Class wasn’t dead; it had just learned to look the other way when queueing at the bar.

As Sharon rounded the corner onto City Road, her bus went by. The next stop was a hundred yards, beyond a set of lights. She considered running, chose not and oddly didn’t feel the spike of rage so common when missing a bus that only ran every twenty minutes.

Hugging the bus route nonetheless in the hope of transport, she headed on down City Road. A small rise created an almost-bridge above an old canal basin; canoes were stacked in neat racks on its far side, and
converted brick warehouses jostled with new glass-fronted apartments that offered studio living to the sound of wavelets slapping against the bollarded waterfront and the rumble of traffic. A square metal shed bore a sign shyly declaring it an electricity substation and hoped no one minded this vital service being so inelegantly sited amid prime real estate. A garage offered twenty-four-hour conveniences and doughnuts of every kind; a bit of graffiti on its wall reminded onlookers to

!!PANIK!!

Somehow the next bus was still seven minutes away, and would probably remain so until the instant of its arrival. The air smelt of rain to come.

Sharon thought without thinking. Distance passed unnoticed, as if she stood still while the city turned, and all because her mind was full of unstoppable, incomprehensible sounds…

So yeah, I turn into pigeons…

   
Dental hygiene is like so important when you’re a vampire!

      
There’s surprisingly little meat on a pigeon.

         
The one time I tried tea tree oil my skin actually just fell off!

He howled, and he howled.

Then they were gone.

She flinched, and didn’t know why.

There had been a moment…

A searing moment, an instant, in which everything had been, the whole city, the world, everything, had been so…
so…

But now it hurt to remember.

And if anyone had been looking, which would itself have been remarkable, they may have observed as Sharon walked a certain… fuzziness about her, a certain… indescribable vagueness, not so much a fading or a vanishing, not exactly an attainment of nothingness, but more a sense that here was a thing…

… which did not merit the observing?

A manner in the walk, a briskness of pace, head down but chin forward, arms swinging but in no sense power-walking off that extra chocolate bar; rather a walk that could only be described as
belonging.
The walk of her who belonged, and if they’d looked…

Or rather, if they’d not looked…

Since not looking was the inevitable next step…

They might have seen Sharon Li begin to disappear.

But by then something would have made them look away altogether.

She rounded the bend towards Moorfields eye hospital, opposite a pub bearing the golden figure of an eagle and the words of a song:

“Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle…”

As a kid, the song had always bothered her. “That’s the way the money goes–pop goes the weasel!” She’d pictured a small twitchy-nosed furry creature exploding in the claws of a bird of prey, and when they’d sung it in nursery school, she’d cried.

All that had been long before the moment, before it had all gone wrong, before everything had changed and the fabric of reality had seemed a little… just a little…

Her pocket was buzzing.

Sharon struggled to free her head of thoughts, or not-thoughts, of this mess of unspoken ideas rattling around inside her brain like a penny in a washing machine. Her mobile phone was a grey brick, given to her when she left home by her dad, even though she already had a phone whose number he could never remember. He’d set himself up as the first number of her speed dial, and added to her contacts list a local doctor, police station, solicitor and sexual health clinic, folding her hand around it and telling her that she didn’t need worry about phoning home too much.

He’d made it all of forty minutes before calling her once she was out of the door, which, by her father’s standards, wasn’t bad.

Now, though, as her phone rang, no number appeared, and when she thumbed it on, it felt cold to the touch.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice answered, conversational, light, friendly. It said, “We’re the one with the flaming wings.”

“What?”

“By the traffic lights.”

She looked up. There were several sets of traffic lights ahead, by the ugly mess that was the Old Street roundabout, a rumbling grey-white place where three boroughs collided like hungover fighting bulls. There were always people waiting at the traffic lights, or walking up a ramp from the tangle of subways below, and at any one moment any number of them could be making a call.

But there was one leaning against the pedestrian-crossing sign beneath the symbol of the walking green man. He looked like someone bored with waiting for a taxi, but he had a phone pressed to his ear and even in the settling night she could see he was looking at her–and there were… there
were…

“Come on if you’re coming,” he said and hung up.

For a moment Sharon stood still and did nothing.

She was confident her father wouldn’t have approved of her following strange men, but then, without actually forbidding anything, her father had never really approved of much. He’d just quietly hoped that his daughter, in her own sensible way, would come round to understanding
why
he wasn’t happy on her account.

To the left lay the road home, back to Trish (the loud one) and Ayesha (the quiet one) and yesterday’s washing-up and bed and sleep, and tomorrow she would go to work in the coffee shop for Mike (the short-sighted one), and nothing that happened tonight would seem real and Magicals Anonymous would be just another Facebook group until the next meeting, and she’d begin to doubt if it had happened, if she’d shaken the hand of a banshee and had dinner with a troll and received a phone call from a man who’d said, “Come on if you’re coming” and…

… and he was already crossing the street, heading towards Goswell Road. Which seemed, Sharon thought with a momentary flash of pride, pretty damned arrogant, like he knew she was going to follow, whereas he really couldn’t because that was kind of psychopathic, and what the hell kind of girl did he think she was anyway? Besides, she could look after herself…