“What’s the point of all this?” I asked at last, as we swung into the mess of up-down streets between Farringdon Road and Fleet Street. “I get that there’s mystical shit going on and all that, but what exactly is the point? Am I supposed to derive some great moral message from all this, become a better person, a nicer Midnight Mayor? From what I can tell, ‘nice’ isn’t the qualifying term.”
“I think,” said Bakker, drawing in that long, slow, thoughtful breath he’d always used as a teacher, just before the answer “maybe”, “I think that you’re supposed to find out what kind of Mayor you’re meant to be. I don’t know. It’s not really my field of expertise.”
“Great. You know, that implies all sorts of unpleasant things about higher powers.”
“Or a lot about your current state of mind. How is your current state of mind?”
“I see no reason to tell you about it.”
“But isn’t that the point?”
“I don’t know. No one has told me the point. And until someone does, I’m just going to assume there isn’t one and keep on walking for the hell of it.”
I kept on walking.
“Matthew?”
“Still here.”
“On the subject of higher powers . . .”
“Yup.”
“I’d like to posit one to you, purely, you understand, hypothetically.”
“I’m paying attention only because there’s nothing else to occupy me at the moment.”
He took a deep breath and went, “The city.”
“Yup.”
“As higher power.”
“I’m still only here out of shitty luck.”
“Well, no. If you see what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“Let me try and explain it.”
“Happy day.”
“A woman gets up for work. Her alarm is powered from the mains, and doesn’t go off this morning because on the other side of the city another woman whose clock was powered by battery missed the wake-up call and didn’t press the right button at the transformer station. She’s running late. She doesn’t have time to make breakfast so she runs to the supermarket where at three a.m. the previous night three students and a disgraced manager loaded freshish sandwiches onto refrigerated shelves so that this woman could run in all a fluster, buy one and get out. She’s still running late. She runs for a bus that doesn’t come. The driver has been caught in traffic because pipes have burst further up the street, and it’s going to take him twenty minutes to get moving past the junction and then five minutes to do double that distance. The bus comes. She gets on. The bus takes her to work. At work, she toils for eight hours without much of a break then has to go and see friends in the evening. They’re going to have a Chinese takeaway. The food is being prepared by a chef, whose cousin runs a Chinese goods import-export on the edge of Enfield. Every day he receives and delivers a whole city’s orders for mandarin duck, chilli sauce and yaki noodles, a fleet of two dozen vans at his command, fifty workers on staff at any time, collecting orders from airports, delivering them to cities within a two-hundred-mile radius. The woman gets her food because the van turned up on time, the driver paid his congestion charge zone fee, the MOT was clean, the engine was full of petrol. She eats her Chinese meal. As she goes home, the streetlamps come on, the rubbish is removed, the buses drive along lines that have been painted, roads that have been laid, the water mains are repaired and it is an easy run back to watch the telly, and so goes her day.”
I waited a moment after he’d finished talking, to see if there was something else.
“Yessss?”
“Matthew - does it not occur to you that even to live in the city as we do, to go day by day and do what is done, see what there is, live surrounded by eight million strangers, dependent on strangers to drive the bus, prepare the food, clean up the rubbish, pipe the water, supply the electrics, answer the—”
“I get the idea.”
“Then you see my point?”
“Not quite . . .”
“Matthew! I taught you better than this!”
“You killed me better than this too, remember?”
“‘You killed me too’ - must we be playground infants? Dead is dead is dead.”
“OK. Your point?”
“My point is this: that the city even exists, even lives, so alive! So gloriously, wonderfully, amazingly alive! That for all this to be so, day by day, is a miracle. And since miracles are by definition rare, is it not possible,