She waited patiently, not smiling, not moving, just waiting to see what I’d do next, almost as if she knew what had to come.
“Um . . .” I stumbled.
I was aware of Oda coming down the stair behind me. I heard a
voice say, “Do you ever clean round the University of London?” The voice was mine.
“Yes,” she said, as if I was a child asking whether falling was always down. “Do I know you?”
“Um, no. I just . . .”
What would the Midnight Mayor do?
Save the city.
Save the stones, the streets, the roads, the stories, the treasures.
Dead is dead is dead.
(Ta-da! Still not dead.)
“Do you have the time?” I asked.
She looked at me sideways for a moment, trying to hide the scepticism in her face, then carefully raised a latex-gloved hand and pointed upwards. A clock the size of a park playground was projected onto the main wall overlooking the terminal. It said 9.23 p.m. I smiled at her, and said, “Thank you.”
And then, because Oda was at the bottom of the escalator, I turned my back to her and walked away.
“Well?” demanded Oda.
“Well?”
“Is it her?”
“What?”
“Is she the sorceress? Did you see? Is it Penny Ngwenya?”
“She’s Penny Ngwenya,” I sighed.
“Then we have to find a way to get her away from these people - the cleaners must have a supply cupboard, a place behind the . . .”
“She’s not a sorceress.”
Still me talking?
Surprise.
“What?”
“I looked at her. We read her like a book. Just an ordinary mortal, just a cleaner, nothing more. She’s not the cause of all this.”
“But you said . . .”
“I had a good hypothesis and she happened to fit it. But it’s not her. Either the theory is wrong or the Aldermen screwed up. Ngwenya isn’t our woman.”
I started climbing the stairs upwards. We wanted to breathe, proper, cold, rain-drenched London air, get a smell of bus and car, get something pure into our lungs, walk and think, get to the river, give me back my hat, just think.
“Where are you going?”
“For a walk.”
“Where are you walking?”
“Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Don’t know.”
“Sorcerer!”
I turned back so fast she nearly walked into me, tripped at the top of the stair. “You keep shouting that in public and I won’t need to worry about the gun in the dark, the stranger, silence, knife, wire, drug, needle, bomb - the NHS will get there first with a fucking straitjacket!”
Turned again, wanted out, reload, reboot, try again without the psycho shit!
(You should see what’s behind you!)
Oda scuttled after me. I felt the aching in every part of me. Strangers who’d just taken it on themselves to come and cause me pain for no damn good reason, just because I happened to be there, happened to be me, us, sorcerer, us, whatever, pick one.
Out in the cold, good wind, proper wind, a proper coat-flapper of a blast, straight up the nose and down into the lungs, a decent whallumph of a city storm, just what we needed. We ran across Euston Road in front of the angry traffic, picked a street heading away at random, started walking, past suspicious hotels with drooping neon signs, gloomy old B & Bs, Bloomsbury terraces, that could be fit for millionaires, inhabited by students behind plywood and broken glass. We let the shadows drag behind us, could taste them on the air again, just like the night we’d walked and the dead had come for a chat, clutching at our coat-tails, trying to pull us back.
The paving stones bounced loosely beneath our feet; second-hand bookshops, cafés selling suspicious sandwiches, schools of English and plumbers’ supply shops, all poking uneasily round corners where bombs had fallen on the older houses; gated crescents of withered green and leafless trees, neon lights illuminating the black fall of drizzle so thin that if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have known it was falling.
“Sorcerer!”
Oda still behind us.
“Sorcerer!”
Walking and thinking, they went naturally together. Thinking without words. “Sorcerer, stop!”
She grabbed our arm. We grabbed hers, shook her where she stood, pushed her back into the street. “Get away from us!” we snarled. “Get away!”
She fell back, stumbling into the gutter and then to the middle of the narrow street, staring at us in . . . something that on an innocent face might have been surprise and horror, and on hers was nearer contempt.