“Damnation. Burn in hell, Oda. Damnation. You kill an innocent, you go to hell, isn’t that how it is? Do you think that your God is up there keeping score - hey, sure, she gunned down an innocent in cold blood, stood and took away a human life; for that, technically, she should spend all eternity suffocating in a vat of elephant dung, sure, but hey! Look! She killed guilty people too! Gunned them down just like the innocents, bang, bang, two to the head, three to the chest, isn’t that how it goes? A simple bit of mathematics, the bigger picture, let the evil live so that the good need not suffer extraordinarily - and look, she sacrificed her principles to let the blue electric angels live, because that way the innocent could be saved by the guilty, and the innocent mustn’t die, mustn’t be gunned down bang!
“Equations - let’s say one innocent soul is worth a hundred guilty ones - have you killed a hundred and one guilty people? Will their deaths buy you the way into heaven, or do you suppose at the pearly gates blood is blood is blood regardless of whose heart it was squeezed from? Greater evil, lesser evil, let’s do a risk-assessment analysis, weigh up the pros and cons, award percentage points based on who is more likely to slaughter the newborn babe, and who’ll settle for a three-week-old with hearing problems? Burn in hell, Oda! Go burn with the rest of the damned! I will not kill her!”
She looked at us like . . . we don’t know. We couldn’t see.
“I’m going to end this,” I said.
“How? If you won’t . . .”
“She’s not a sorceress.”
“You just . . .”
“She’s not. Tell the Aldermen. Scream it until the straitjacket comes. I’m going to end this.”
“How?”
“I’m going to find the damn hat. Keep away from us.”
“Sorcerer . . .”
“Burn, Oda. Let’s vote and kill a stranger. Do the maths. Then burn. Get out of the city. Run. It’s what we would do, if we had the chance.”
This time, she didn’t follow.
We walked.
Didn’t matter where.
Thinking and walking.
Brunswick Square; restaurants, supermarket, cinema - this week’s speciality: Romanian arthouse. Russell Square. Hotels and ATMs. The British Museum - great Doric columns, windows too big for a single floor to contain, posters. Those special shops that cater only for tourists: a hundred little waving Paddington Bears; shortbread at two quid a slice; tartan kilts, and “art” made almost entirely out of masking tape. New Oxford Street; Gower Street; Tottenham Court Road; Oxford Street. The shops still open, even the ones selling “I LOVE LONDON” T-shirts and big leather boots, the cafés buzzing, customers of the pubs in every by-street and up every alley spilt out into the street regardless of the cold and the drizzle. Women with piercings, wearing more metal rings than cotton clothes, men with shaven heads and white T-shirts that warp under the weight of overeating trying to explode from their innards. A thousand bright lights as far as the eye could see: the hot, tight magics of Soho to the south, the easy illusions and enchantments of Great Portland Street to the north; I could taste them, dribble my fingers in them. The shadows dragged behind me, snagged and snared on my fingertips, slipped across the palm of my hand like water blown sideways in a gale. So much magic, so much life; and it was all going to burn.
Penny Ngwenya.
Give me back my hat.
I am the death of cities.
What would the Midnight Mayor do?
Our fault - no, not quite right. Our responsibility. Our problem. Reload, reboot, without the psycho-shit.
We were going to find the hat.
Her hat.
And it occurred to me as I passed Bond Street station, I had an idea where to look.
The Jubilee Line runs through Bond Street. It’s sometimes a detail hard to remember; people think Bond Street and automatically start counting stations the long length of Oxford Street - Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, pleased that in this one case, the map of the Underground and the map of the city actually have some sort of geographical symmetry going for them.
Bond Street is therefore easy to take for granted - an in-between stop for people who don’t quite know where they’re going, unless they’re shopping for something extremely rare and expensive. Jewellers make the streets around the station their own, but the station itself is still on Oxford Street, still just a doorway on