I covered my eyes with my arms against the brilliance of his jacket; but I could hear him, smell him only a few inches away: the rank odour of an old bin left out in the summer sun. Numbed, the woman tried to open her purse. I felt movement beside me, saw his hand gloved in thick red leather that oozed ancient blood between the old stitches, as if the fabric itself could bleed. The woman held up a ten-pound note. I grabbed it, turned and, keeping my head bowed against the neon dazzle, pushed it into his outstretched palm.
For a second, the dustbin man just stood there. I knew he was staring at me, but couldn’t raise my eyes to see. Then he closed his fingers around the ten-pound note, which began to wilt, shrivel, and stain with smudged darkness as he slipped it into his trouser pocket. As stately and careful as he had come, he turned, dreadlocks writhing around his head, and walked away.
We stayed frozen in place for . . . I do not know how long.
The engine roared again in the dustbin truck, the wheels turned. I smelt black smoke and the lingering odour of rot. Then it drove away, oil dribbling off its wheels as it sped up the street, yellow light fading until, at the far end, it turned, and vanished from my sight.
Drained, we sank to our knees on the grass, pressed our head into it and trembled.
A hand brushed our shoulder. A voice said, “Um . . .”
We looked slowly up. “This,” I said, “is a really bad time.”
“You OK?”
I looked round me. Oil was dribbling into the drains, and a greasy trail stretched all the way up the street to the drain, that damned drain, outside the chippy.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” I said, and pressed my head back into the grass and felt grateful for how clean the dirt was.
Her name was Loren.
Her world-view had just been shattered, but she was dealing with it the most sensible way she could; by dealing with other things first.
She said, “You owe me a tenner.”
I said, “What?”
“A tenner.”
“Are you seriously telling me, that having just saved your life from a monster made out of grease and fat crawled up from the nether reaches of the sewers, you want me to give you a tenner?”
“When you put it like that . . . it’s just tenners aren’t easy.”
“It was give the guy a tenner, or be consumed by a supernatural dustbin truck.”
There was silence. Fat dripped and pooled slowly around us.
“So why couldn’t you give him a tenner?”
“Because I dropped my bloody bag while trying to save your bloody life.”
“Sorry. It’s all a little . . . you know.”
She flapped. We seethed.
Finally she said, “The thing . . .”
Here it came.
“Yes?”
“You know, I always said to myself, if I go mad, I’ll like, you know, go with it? Because I figure if you’re mad then you can’t really do anything about it so you might as well just . . . It was a monster, wasn’t it?”
We wiped a dribble of fat off our nose. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“Your point of view. In the sense that it would have crushed the life out of you and you would have drowned in a sea of animal fats and other remains, yes, it was a monster. But it meant you no harm. You just happened to be there.”
“You killed it.”
“No.”
“I saw you, you spoke those words, magic words.”
“Brand names.”
“What?”
“Brand names. Waste collection companies. Geesink Norba, Accord, Onyx - they collect rubbish in the city.”
“But . . . you spoke their names and . . .”
“I spoke words that, unless you pay close attention to these things, have no meaning. People don’t pay attention to the rubbish men; they cross over to the other side of the street to avoid them. Geesink Norba . . . they are sounds on the air. Meaningless, unless you know how to look. I invoked an idea.”
“What do you mean, ‘invoked’?”
“Summoned. Commanded. Requested for the cost of a ten-pound note.”
“You’re some sort of wizard?”
“Some sort, yes.”
“So there’s magic? And wizards? And monsters?”
“Yes.”
“In Hoxton?”
“Well, yes.”
“Oh. And the thing that came? The dustbin truck?”
I tried my best. “There are . . . things in this world, made up of other things - ideas - that are given life just by the nature of that idea, by the nature of