Every detail of my existence - my mum, my gran, who liked to talk to the pigeons; my childhood, my first encounters with urban magic, my teacher Mr Bakker, my apprenticeship, my years as a not very interesting sorcerer, my time spent travelling, my death, our resurrection - everything was there, from former lovers to the average size of my annual gas bill. Lists of friends I hadn’t seen for years, who I hadn’t dare see, to whom I hadn’t known how to explain anything, whom I hadn’t dared put in danger; of extended family I’d never really spoken to, of ex-girlfriends who’d attended my funeral, with their new husband and brand new babies left at home for the sake of good manners . . .
Pictures! Where had they got so many pictures? Mum up to her elbows in rubber gloves and dodgy plumbing; Gran waddling down the street in her slippers, the rats all watching her from the grid above the drains, the pigeons from the gutters on the roofs. School photos from back when my eyes were brown, not blue, and I was just starting to grow adult teeth; CCTV shots; the place where I’d died, all blood and torn clothes and of course, most important, no body, just bloody fingerprints on the dangling receiver of the public telephone. A photo of when we came back, wearing someone else’s clothes too big for us, sitting alone on a bench in the middle of the night, then up to our armpits in the internal organs of a litterbug sent to find us, which we had destroyed. We were looking straight at the camera but I swear, we knew, we had not had our photo taken that night, there had been no one there to do it!
On the very last page was a neat typewritten page of A4. It said:It is our final opinion that the fusion of the sorcerer Swift and the entities commonly known as the blue electric angels during their shared time in the telephone wires, has resulted in the creation of a highly unstable entity in the waking world. The Swift-angel creature, while appearing almost entirely human, is at its core a combination of a traumatised dead sorcerer and infantile living fire, neither of which is fully equipped to handle living as two separate entities, let alone one fused mind.
While we should perhaps be grateful that, to this date, the Swift-angel creature has not caused any more damage to the city, we should not assume that this happy state will last long. The Order claim to be capable of dispatching the Swift-angel fusion, but it would be wise to make our own preparations for the inevitable conflict the existence of such a creature in our city will cause.
Right at the bottom of the page, a neat, small hand had added: Swift has the shoes.
There wasn’t any explanation.
I looked down at my shoes.
Not my shoes.
The shoes I wore, sure. The shoes I had been wearing, yes. But they weren’t my shoes; I hadn’t gone out and bought them. I’d taken them from someone else’s house, put them on with a very precise purpose and gone for a walk.
Swift has the shoes.
I put the file back in the desk. We spun a few spins of the huge chair, feeling its greased bearings slide smoothly over each other. We rocked back and looked at the ceiling; we leant forward and looked at the floor. I put my shoes up on the leather-topped desk and examined them. Red and black, with a hint of gold stripe. Tasteless, flashy, expensive. They puffed every time I walked on them, little pockets of air being sucked in through tiny bellows to give that extra-springy experience. If they’d been two sizes smaller, I might have appreciated what they were about. They made my feet sweat in the two pairs of socks I had to wear. We spun a few more spins. I flexed the fingers of my right hand. Flesh gaped open, then closed, in my palm. Electrocution didn’t do that for a guy. It took something more. Supposition took fact’s bloody hand for the dance, and cha-chaed round the room. The plastic dragon rolled its tongue rudely at some invisible playground rival.
I spun a few more spins.
Why shoes?
Not my shoes. Just the shoes I was wearing.
I stood up and let them carry me a few idle paces round the room. Then a few paces more. They seemed as uncertain about what to do