She said, “My son has gone. Please - the police have looked and can’t find anything. His friends have gone. It’s been four days. He’s been gone before, but not four days. And there was . . . things have been . . . please.”
Mothers are the last people you should ask about their seventeen-year-old sons.
The police said he was a kid heading for trouble. Some graffiti, some vandalism, some “anti-social behaviour”. ASBO kid. All hood and attitude, proud to be against the law, proud just to be against. And there was something else - his friends were missing too. Kids he’d met not at school, but at a club, she didn’t know what kind of club it was. Somewhere in North London, a club where the kids went. Or maybe the kidz. You can’t be cool and spell well at the same time.
Never ask a mother about their kids.
Far more sensible to ask their shoes.
It’s a lie that women care more than men about their shoes. Women may buy more pairs, to match up with this or that outfit, or to serve this or that purpose, but they do it easily, with a casual statement of “I’m going to buy some shoes now”.
Men, when they buy shoes, invest body and soul in the effort. This is not just a pair of shoes - this is the pair of shoes, the one and only; they have to be perfect, they have to be right.
Mo was a kid who liked his shoes. Every six months he seemed to have invested what little money he had in a new pair, sometimes Nike, sometimes Adidas, never anything in between, always the right brand, at the right time. This month, gold with blue stripes was in; this month, and black and white football boots, spikes sticking out of the soles, were the only things to have.
“What’s the most recent pair?”
Loren pointed at a pair of red and black trainers, all sponge and wheeze. I tried them on for size. Too big. I put on some more socks, tried them again, shifted round until my weight was right.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Go for a wander.”
“Can you find him?”
“Dunno. I’ll do my best.”
“If you find him . . . don’t say anything, will you? It’ll only make it worse if you say something.”
She gave me a photo. It’s in my bag. The kid is ugly. He has a big head made bigger by having shaven off his hair. His jaw alone could demolish an old wall; his mouth is too small for the length of chin that surrounds it.
I left my shoes with Loren, a promise that I’d come back, and walked out of the door with the kid’s shoes on my feet.
It is surprisingly hard to scry by footware. It requires a submergence of will, an utter belief that your feet know where they’re going. Sometimes magicians learn how to do this by literally blinding themselves, tying rags over their eyes so that they have to trust entirely in the direction their body takes them, and never question, never doubt, that this is where they have to be. The problem about that is that a pair of shoes, while it may remember where it wants to go, is less likely than a brain to stop at a red light.
You need just enough awareness to stay alive, to stay smart, but not so much that you ever take control. Never question, never doubt. Just take a deep breath, and start walking.
So that’s what I did. Let the door to Loren’s flat click shut behind me, and started walking. I was lucky - there was only one way in and out of the flats, and that gave me momentum, got me going in the right direction without having to think about it. I walked out of that council block behind the canal, to the end of the street and kept on walking, past fenced-off football fields, past empty grass greens, past a Costcutters and a grand new development built up from the remnants of a warehouse; and my walk wasn’t my own.
I was swaggering. I was swinging my hips and bouncing at the knees, I was walking to an invisible hip-hop beat and only a second of awareness short of gesturing in the inexplicable, untold language of all wannabe bros out to be cool. That was good - now I knew that I was swaggering, it gave me a