The Minority Council (46 page)

Another search in a pocket, and a small glass vial emerged, the label long since rubbed away. Even in the low light, I could tell the colour, and when he opened the lid I recognised the smell.

“Garam masala?” I asked weakly.

He grinned. “You gonna be the sweetest-smelling bum on the block.”

I took the chipped glass vial. “I thought Dr Seah was making it up.”

“Wouldn’t put it past her,” replied the Beggar King. “But sometimes even the truth is funny. Come on, chop chop.”

I struggled out of my blood-stained clothes, huddling
close to the stove for warmth. With the cooling ashes from the floor, I rubbed my hands, my arms, my face, my neck, my shoulders and my feet, working them in well. Sure enough, when it was done, I felt cleaner. The dirt beneath my fingernails was flecked with blood; I scratched in the cinders until they were raw and black, and threw my old clothes onto the fire, to wither and die in a lick of flame.

Then the Beggar King rose, and unfolded my new clothes.

“Kneel,” he said, and I knelt.

He held aloft a pair of shredding jeans, stained down one leg, with the pockets hanging out.

“I give to you,” he proclaimed, “the foul-smelling trousers of my clan. All who see you shall look away, and you shall bring shame, disgust and pity wherever you walk.”

He handed me the trousers ceremonially, which I hugged to my chest.

Then, “I give you the oversized second-hand shirt of the great fat man who went on a diet and no longer fitted his old clothes. He walks now in pride in tailored suits, does not give the beggars change but will perhaps one day donate a pair of torn-up shoes. Wear it with gratitude and bow your head when strangers walk away.”

I took the shirt. It smelt of chemical disinfectant, and something else, faint and sickly.

A large coat was flourished ceremonially.

“I give you a coat of infinite pockets and vile smell. The last man who owned this coat died in a church porch from exposure on a bitter night. But the vicar buried him in the yard beneath a stone cross, and the vicar’s wife laid flowers, and, though she did not know why, one of the paramedics came who had found the body and pronounced it long
dead at the scene, joints stiff before the sun came up. Though you walk by yourself through the city streets, may you never know the truth of what it is to be alone.”

One of the pockets still held a battered plastic cup and the red felt-tip pen that had been used to write,
hungry, please help
.

A pair of trainers was held aloft. The uppers had come away from the soles, so that the last wearer’s toes could stick out, and the laces had each been knotted together from many fragments.

“These are the shoes of the beggar who cannot afford the bus, who does not have the money for the train. They have walked north and south, east and west, laying their footprints upon the earth with the lightness of a feather. We do not walk as others do, we are not the busy clatter of well-shod heels, we do not march with the stride of the rush hour, we are not joggers in a park or running for the bus. Ours is an ancient walk, the oldest walk known to man, down a path that has not changed since the first stone of the first city wall was laid. We walk together, the city and the beggars, until only the city remains. Take them, and be nothing but the city.”

I took the shoes, huddling them into my meagre bundle of possessions, and looked up.

The Beggar King’s open palm caught me across the side of the face hard enough to knock me down, landing awkwardly on my elbow. He stood over us and for a moment there was an ancient darkness in his eyes, as deep and wild as the whirlwind. “You’re one of us now,” he said, and his soft voice filled the room. “Don’t screw up.”

I scrambled back onto my knees and, at his nod, started shivering my way into the stained clothes. They felt sticky
against my skin, dozens of owners embedded into every stitch. When I was done the Beggar King said, “Can you walk without pride?”

I bowed my head and nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Walk with me.”

In the city, there are many ways of walking.

Let me name them:

Rush-hour scurry, retiree’s shuffle, drunkard’s ramble, frightened scuttle, tourist’s wander, shopper’s amble, mother’s purpose, children’s skip. Who needs to see knees-upwards?

This was the beggar’s walk. It was the sideways winding of those who are not there to be perceived.

We walked south, zigzagging between residential streets sealed off from traffic to prevent the rat run, around schools with the lights coming on as the caretaker arrived for the morning, past shop-front shutters coming up. At this time of year, the city began to wake long before sunrise.

“Tell me about Templeman,” said the Beggar King; so I did. “Yup,” he concluded, when I was done, “I mentioned that you were one screwed-up pup. What you want to do about it? Vengeance? I hear you do a good line in vengeance.”

“I want… we want… Penny. I want Penny.”

“Well, that may not be rosily possible.”

“Have to try.”

“I’m guessing that Templeman won’t be giddy that you didn’t kill the fairy godmother. Not like you couldn’t have claimed self-defence.”

“But it wouldn’t have been.”

He waggled his thick eyebrows in demand of an
explanation. I shrugged and immediately regretted it, pressing my hands to my ribs as pain shot through my chest. “Fairy godmother thought he could use our blood, sell it for a profit. Sure, bad idea, no question there. But what we did… what we became… it wasn’t self-defence. Not that.”

“You enjoy it?” he asked, not angry or sad, just words.

I swallowed acid and didn’t answer.

He tutted, and picked up walking speed to just above comfortable. “Well, what you gonna do? Go after Templeman, spells blazing, cowboy style? Bang bang whoosh, ‘You calling me a pussy’ ‘No I ain’t calling you no pussy’ ‘You saying you ain’t calling me a pussy’ ‘Yeah I’m saying I ain’t calling you no pussy’ ‘So you is calling me a pussy’ ‘No I ain’t…’—you get the idea?”

“Don’t know where he is.”

“He’s an Alderman, he thinks you’re dead; where’s the problem?”

“If I was dead,” I replied, “then the Midnight Mayor would be dead. Some poor bastard would be waking up right now with a brand on the hand and there’d be alarms going off all over the city and memos and people would know. The fairy godmother, the dusthouses, everyone will soon bloody know I’m not dead and, in fact, not only am I not dead but there’s a whole great pile of dead behind me that I didn’t bother to tip when paying the bill.”

We kept walking.

The Beggar King said, “You know, I gotta tell you, since you’re one of the flock right now, it’s crap.” I tried in vain to read the meaning in his eyes. “You feel guilt because you think you’re a good man, and good men feel guilt. But I’m gonna tell you, good men don’t have to burn their clothes regularly because there’s too much blood in
them to wash out. Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t do the guilt thing—it’s better than, say, you just taking what you’ve done in your stride, because that would make you a psychopath—but Matthew, as a guy who’s in the know, I’m here to tell you, you’re not a good guy. Sure, it’s sweet that you try, but don’t trick yourself into thinking you can relax. Don’t think that just because you’re beating yourself up about it now, you won’t do it again. You will.”

We said, “We did not…” and stopped.

I said, “I couldn’t…” and realised how futile it was.

The Beggar King tutted. “Hey, I’m just saying, you know. I was never here to judge.”

His footsteps made no sound as he moved.

Neat trick that, if you can do it.

“Got anyone you can trust?” asked the Beggar King.

Penny.

“No,” I replied.

“Lone hero sounds great in the ad, not so good in the picture.”

“Templeman took Penny,” I said. “And he can’t have done it alone. Templeman… had friends, and they took Penny. The Minority Council. What kind of piss-poor bloody Midnight Mayor am I if I can’t even sort out the office politics?”

“Hell, you’ve got other qualities,” he said with a comforting pat on the shoulder. “You’ve got… well… you’ve got…” He shrugged, and gave up. “You’ve got a great sense of humour.”

I thought hard.

“There may be one person left.”

Her name was Kelly Shiring.

Because you had to see it, to believe it.

She lived in a flatshare in Maida Vale. Her flatmates were madly in love. He taught at a primary school, she ran sales for a specialist arts magazine. Neither of them believed in magic, and frankly why should they? Kelly was a PA in a not very interesting accountants office, and if she kept unsociable hours, what business was it of theirs to ask? She didn’t clutter the sink, always took the rubbish out, and only ever watched the TV for her weekly dose of crime drama. Her hobbies were harmless. On Tuesdays she did “hot yoga” at the nearby gym, proclaiming with wonder and amazement on her return from the sessions, “I’ve already had a shower and I still smell!” as if in this single phenomenon, whole schools of medical understanding crumbled. Once a month she attended the local feminist book group, and on the bottom of a very old draft of her CV, underneath the courses in practical exorcism and intermediate spreadsheet software, she listed as her favourite holiday pastime off-road bicycling.

And so Kelly Shiring moved through the world, healthy, hearty, never late with her gas bill, never caught skipping a bus fare, a junior PA in a firm of not much note, the future not simply in front of her, but all around her, just waiting to be seized.

Finding her wasn’t hard.

I lay in wait outside Harlun and Phelps, sitting on the pavement with my knees tucked into my chest, head bowed, hands open to the world, as the sun rose and the city came with it. In the city, with the horizon lost behind office walls, dawn was a shift in colour that happened too slow to see, and so fast you barely realised it had begun before it was finished. The orange-black of night became
a deep blue stained with streetlight. The blue faded to grey, the street lamps dimming in comparison to their surroundings. Ribbons of gold threaded the thick sky, and the summits of the topmost buildings reflected a rising watery glow where the sun peeped from behind the horizon and the clouds.

I listened to the sound of a rising rush hour, to the rhythm of feet moving faster, cars jamming up bumper to bumper, voices growing, the rumble of trains beneath my feet and the clatter of bicycle bells. Automatic revolving doors began to spin non-stop in the expectation of a day of human traffic. A stream of people started moving into the offices of Harlun and Phelps: some of them Aldermen, most not, bankers heading in for the working day, either ignorant of, or oblivious to, the darker operations of the place.

There was magic here. Hot rush-hour magic, and deep old-town magic that went right down to the base of the Roman walls. And another magic, hard to identify, but there, just in the corner of my eye. Beggar magic. I sat with my palms turned upwards for change, and the eyes of strangers and those who should have known me, should have recognised the brand on my hand, slid straight on by. I was an oil slick on water, a spot of coal-black blackness on a soot-black wall.

And Kelly was nothing special; her eye went past me like any other. But as I saw her pass I raised my head and called out, once, “Kelly.”

She hesitated, stopped, turned; but even with my voice in her ears, her gaze still ran over me, unwilling to process what her eyes saw. I stood up and she stared straight at me, straight through, and didn’t seem to recognise me.
Then a flicker of doubt crossed her face as even the magics of a beggar’s smell and a beggar’s coat crumbled in the face of determined scrutiny. But I was already turning and shuffling away, the beggar’s shuffle without purpose or direction, heading towards Guildhall.

And though Kelly was young and quite possibly naïve, she was no fool. She glanced to her left, she glanced to her right, turned her eyes to the heavens in the manner of someone who’s forgotten something vital and can’t believe their own foolish mind, spun on her heel, and marched after me.

In the wide open square by Guildhall, stones had been laid that were centuries old, where the guildmasters of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers had all walked, in the days when the guilds ruled the money, in that part of the city where the money has always ruled. In the streets nearby, dignified plaques declare that here is the Wax Chandlers’ Hall (“The Truth is the Light”) and there the Saddlers’ (“Hold Fast, Sit Sure”). Where a few ancient buildings, in all their proud Gothic glory, had survived the bombs of World War Two, dragons with rolling tongues cling to their rooftops, and spikes of knobbly stone stick up for the pigeons to poop on. Sometimes you can see the rituals of the city still active in this place—clergy with long sticks who both know and care about parish bounds, or officers of the Lord Mayor of London, dressed in red and fur-trimmed hats who will, for £35 and a friendly chat, grant to you the Freedom of the City, bringing with it the right to lead your cattle across London Bridge, but which, please note, does not exempt you from parking tickets.

Linger long enough beneath the red eyes of one of the
guardian dragons that look down from the rooftops and out of the carvings on the wall, and you could begin to feel the well of power buried just beneath the water-swept stones. Like the spire at Charing Cross, Speaker’s Corner where once men had been led to hang, or St Paul’s Cathedral in the quiet hours of the night; you could feel those forces that the druids used to call ley lines, bunching and breathing under city streets. It was a place where here and there, then and now, met and lost their way.