route. It was a shopping street doing its very best to be trendy, and not quite making it. Pubs were pretending to be wine bars, condensation on the windows and punters pouring out into the streets, despite the rain; restaurants had hiked their prices up by two quid and added aubergine, even the curry houses, and the newsagents advertised local “cultural events” by amateur theatre groups or community choirs. We walked past it all, feeling water seeping through our shoes and itch inside our socks, shimmering bright blackness sparkling down the streets into the spitting drains. The rain drained away the usual smells of the streets - kebabs and bus exhaust - and left cold numbness in their place, invigorating until it started to stick.
Nor do I know how long we walked. Time was measured in strides, not seconds; distance in the warmth of our legs, rather than metres or miles. It seemed nothing at all. Oda said it was a long way.
And without warning, we stopped and turned, toes pointing in at a street wall. I looked up. The wall was an ordinary terraced house which had had extraordinary things done to it. Its entire surface was covered over with bright aluminium, into which a thousand glittering would-be diamonds had been implanted around a core of plastic purple jewels, the bulbs just visible within them, pulsing out in a hypnotic rhythm the blazing word “VOLTAGE”.
Beneath the sign, a pair of aluminium doors, reinforced on the inside and padded with purple silk, had been swung back. They led into darkness; a red cord strung from a brass stand marked the beginnings of a queue line into this place. A man in black with a radio stuck in his left ear was standing on the door, gloved hands folded across his belly, one on top of the other. He stank of treacle, of deep dark maple syrup without the sugar, all thickness and no charm, a stench of magic that reminded me of Charlie, Sinclair’s loyal assistant.
He was good at not meeting anyone’s gaze, but scanned the street constantly as if we weren’t looking at him, his ridiculous dark glasses pushed up on a great fat nose. Oda, seeing us stare, said, “There? You want to go in there?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” she sighed. “When I last checked, you were a sorcerer, not a Jedi.”
“You’ve seen Star Wars?”
“Seen it and denounced it.”
“You’ve denounced Star Wars?”
She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Hollywood should not glorify witches.”
“I think you’ve missed the point . . .”
“I also denounce Harry Potter.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Because . . .”
“. . . because literature, especially children’s literature, should not glorify witches.”
“Oda, what do you do for fun?”
She thought about it, then said, without a jot of humour, “I denounce things.”
“Let’s forget I asked.”
Anissina, as always, said nothing. I nodded towards the door. “I want to go in there.”
“Do you really think this is the most productive way you can go about . . .” - Oda grimaced, then spat the words, “. . . saving this damned city?”
“You used ‘damned’ in a . . .”
“Purely literal sense. I do not blaspheme nor have a sense of humour.”
“Mo’s shoes want to go into Voltage.”
“You speak as if they have a life of their own.”
“You speak as if you can’t imagine they could. I had a pair of shoes, a few years back, that had been rained on by the Singapore monsoon, got sand in them by the Indian Ocean, run the best part of the Bronx and been scoffed at by waiters in Istanbul. And that was after it was sewn together by a child in rural China, carted on the back of a truck across the country, boxed and flown around the world for me to buy. Find me a pair of shoes that hasn’t got a life of its own, and I’ll find you a blister plaster that actually works. Deal?”
Oda scowled, and looked towards the dark door of the gaudy club. “Voltage?” she asked.
“Voltage,” I said.
The bouncer took one look at us, and said, “Wrong shoes.”
You can’t intimidate bouncers. It’s not just that they’re paid to be tough - it’s that they’re paid and bored. It’s a bad combination.
I said, “Really? You sure?”
“Sorry, mate. You can’t come in with those shoes.”
As he spoke, a gaggle of kids, not out of their teens, were waved through without a glance, bundling down the dark passage of the stairs into the pumping gloom inside. I asked carefully, “Am I too old?”