A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (25 page)

Arsenal FC
in red and white across the front. His face was long and angular, not merely stretching down top to chin, but out in odd directions too, so that the tip of his grizzled jaw protruded nearly as far as the end of his nose, and his ears stuck out, even inside the hat, like he had half a lemon on either side of his head. He scratched his chin with long, dirty brown nails the texture of old wood, and surveyed me through a pair of intelligent grey eyes.

 

I found that after a day of silence, the words didn’t come.

 

“New to this?” he asked.

 

I managed to stumble an “In a way.”

 

“You’re not one of us, then?”

 

“No. Not really.”

 

“But you know about things, I’m guessing.”

 

“Things? Yes.”

 

“And I’m just guessing,” he said, rolling his eyes with melodramatic emphasis, “that you’ve got an
agenda
.” He spat the word between his wonky front teeth. “Everyone’s got a fucking agenda these days, too easy just to give money on the street, oh no, we’ve got
social assets
to consider and fucking community spirit. All right. You’ve sat the sitting, drawn the fucking picture, whatever. What do you want,
sorcerer
?”

 

He didn’t like the word sorcerer. That was just fine. I was beginning to understand why it might not be popular.

 

“Well,” I said, pulling myself up one stiff joint at a time and rubbing some of the numbness out of my arms, “ideally I want to destroy the Tower and all its works for the evil it has committed, for its own selfish acts against the magical community of the city among others, and to see the shadows of its making burnt so even the walls can no longer remember their stains. But right now, I’d settle for a cup of tea, a comfy chair and an audience with the Beggar King.”

 

 

He led me to a scrapyard underneath the Westway, a great big sprawling bypass that in five minutes of motorway trundling takes the traveller from Paddington to Shepherd’s Bush, above and parallel to the railway line out of the station. In the grey, smelly shadows underneath the motorway some of his flock were clustered: men in torn jackets, clumped round fires burning in old metal canisters, women with pale, lifeless skin, and thick veins standing out on the tops of their hands, eating chips and sharing a single, depressing cigarette.

 

He lived in an abandoned London Transport maintenance van, whose walls were insulated with more variations on a theme of flearidden blanket than I had ever seen. It boasted at one end a large metal safe, into which he deposited from his pockets two packs of hotel matches, presumably lifted from some expensive side table before he was thrown out, a rusted tin-opener, and some loose change amounting to roughly Ł27. He said, not really paying me much attention, “I accept donations.”

 

I gave him all my day’s takings. There are always rules, always prices to be paid. A day sitting in the cold; an offering of pennies and shiny five-pence pieces. These are rules so obvious, they never needed to be written down. Nothing about the Beggar King is
ever
written down.

 

He grunted and said, “Seen worse,” turned on a tiny paraffin heater, put a tin of tomato soup onto it, and as it started to bubble in the can he sat down, cross-legged on top of a pile of thick, itchy tartan blankets and old stained trousers, scratched his chin and said, “So… I’m guessing you’ve got issues if you’re looking for a chat with the old miser. That’s the word, isn’t it? We aren’t allowed to say
problem
these days.”

 

“‘Issues’ is fine,” I said. “I think the king might even have a few in common with me.”

 

“Such as?”

 

“The Tower.”

 

“Shit, what the hell’s he got to do with it? They don’t bother us much.”

 

“How little is ‘much’?”

 

“He can’t protect everyone,” said the man, eyes flashing.

 

“From what I hear, have read, the Tower takes beggars off the street. San Khay offered me a trip in the senses of an addict on the edge of death. I can think of no better way to get that than from a beggar, alone, unnoticed, dying in the dark.”

 

“We have… the occasional clash. These things happen.”

 

“I saw a warehouse,” I replied carefully. “It was run, maintained, by Amiltech, probably on behalf of Guy Lee. In the basement, I found the body of a beggar. Things had been done to it. Everyone knows Guy Lee has an interest in necromancy. It needs tools. Are you going to sit and wait for Guy Lee to catch an unfortunate disease off one of his badly washed bodies until you say, No more?”

 

“You see what happens to the enemies of the Tower?” he asked, casually scraping a thick nailful of dirt out from under his thumb.

 

“Yes.”

 

“And you’re still looking for a fight. Well, shit.”

 

“I think the Beggar King would understand.”

 

“Why?”

 

He wasn’t looking at me, this man with his huge beard. He gave off the air of a man who just didn’t care, who, above all these things, was lost in fascinated study of the dirt under his nails. Perhaps it wasn’t an act. Perhaps these things really were as tiny to him as dust in the street.

 

I shifted uneasily, licked my lips. “Because, like the Bag Lady and the Boatman, it’s not just a title, is it?” I stared at him, daring him to speak. “Sure, there’s been a lot of beggar kings, a lot of dead bodies left in unmarked graves or thrown into the river. But the Beggar King, the
real
Beggar King, who comes when you draw the image of his crown on the pavement and sacrifice a day of takings to his throne, lives on, generation after generation. The Beggar King is there when the druggie dies alone in the puke and shit of his last shot, holding a bloodless hand until the last breath is gone. The Beggar King is the shadow across the street who smiles up at the window of the refuge when the homeless girl gets given her own room, and tells her it’s all right, you don’t have to fear the walls. The Beggar King… the
real
Beggar King… is the one you offer your prayers to when your jacket is too thin and the stones are too hard, and every penny you have has just been taken away by the spite of people who don’t understand. Not just flesh and blood, yes?”

 

“You should know,” he replied quietly. “They told me, when you went from the telephone lines.”

 

We went cold, and my jaw felt like it was locked.

 

He smiled at us.

 

“Bright blue eyes,” he murmured. “They don’t suit you.”

 

“We are… we… as… we are…”

 

“Tongue-tied?”

 

I stuttered, “Will you help me?”

 

“Just you? Just the little mortal wearing a dead man’s flesh? Or do you want something more? What, you have to ask yourself, but what do the angels want?”

 

“We are… we… we want revenge.”

 

He chuckled. “Join the queue. You get used to that too, on the streets. Gotta be polite. Gotta keep to the rules. Gotta cause no trouble,’cause the second you’re trouble” – he snapped his fingers – “no one will even try to save you.” Then, “What exactly do you intend?”

 

“I need to find the Whites.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Bakker is at the heart of the Tower, but he’s protected. Guy Lee, Harris Simmons, Dana Mikeda…”

 

“San Khay?” It was an accusation as well as a question.

 

“I didn’t kill him.”

 

“I would have.”

 

“I didn’t.”

 

“Nasty way to go, from what I hear; suggests a slightly loopy brain at work and frankly I…”

 

“We didn’t kill him!”

 

He smiled, an expression of unamused interest. “Well,” he said, “at least part of you is honest. Which part, though?”

 

“Guy Lee is master of an underworld army,” we said. “His creatures prey on the ignorant, the innocent; he keeps the clans down under an iron fist, his enemies…”

 

“All enemies of the Tower disappear, little sorcerer!” he snapped. “You know this, I think? But perhaps such people should be fucking controlled, yes? By concerned citizens, maybe, making sure that those who know the secrets of these things don’t go spilling them too easily to the masses? To the piss-stupid fucking people?”

 

“Bakker does it for his own ends, not for others.”

 

“And what ends are those? Does anyone know?”

 

“I can make a good guess,” I muttered.

 

“Can you?” He leant forward eagerly. “I’m all ears.”

 

We met his eyes squarely. “He wants to be like you, your majesty. He wants to be an idea. He wants to outlive his own flesh.”

 

He drew back, face darkening. “Impossible,” he said. “So shit.”

 

“You know it’s not. There wasn’t always a Beggar King, there wasn’t always a Bag Lady. These things have to grow out of something, they have to have a vessel, a beginning, and eventually, a conclusion. He will be like you.”

 

“You know this?”

 

“I know this.”

 

“But do
you
know this?” There was an urgency to his voice, a hungry intensity. “Not
you
, little sorcerer, but
you
, do you know this?”

 

We recoiled, surprised at the force of his gaze, and stammered, “We are not… this world is still strange.”

 

“You’re just a fucking child, aren’t you?” he laughed.

 

“I’m not.”

 

“Sure, sure, whatever,” he said, waving a casual curled, dirty fist in the air. “You’ve lived long enough to die. But them, the other ones with the bright blue eyes – fucking kids! Never seen nothing! Never felt nothing! Christ, and you want my help?”

 

“Yes,” we replied. “We do.”

 

He leant back slowly, a look of dissatisfaction on his face. Finally he said, “If I do anything for you, all my people are put at risk. I have a responsibility.”

 

“The Tower is dangerous,” I repeated.

 

“And you can stop it?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Why? Because Bakker’s shadow slit your throat and with your dying breath you managed to slip into the blueness that he dreams of achieving?”

 

I felt the pain of a dozen old aches, weeks old to my mind, a life ago to the world, the burning in my skin. Taste of blood in my mouth. I thought that, with enough fish and chips, hot tea, crispy bacon, with enough new memories to wipe over the old, it would go. But there it was again, still again, the iron bite of it on my lips.

 

I still needed help.

 

So, I got down on one knee in front of him, and bowed my head in respect to the Beggar King.

 

“If you help me,” I said, “if you would honour us,” we added, “we will stop the shadow.”

 

His eyes flashed up brightly, alert, interested. “The shadow?” he asked quickly.

 

“It grows out of nothing. It has yellow teeth, dead skin, watery eyes,” I replied, trying not to see too clearly the images in my head. “You’ll have heard of it. It says, ‘Give me life.’ Help us. Join us against the Tower.”

 

He thought about it, then put his hand on my shoulder, the skin warm through my clothes. “I offer you a thought to consider, little sorcerer. If Bakker thinks he can beat his own death, have you not considered that, now you are out of the wire, it might be your very blue blood that can help him do this?”

 

We looked up slowly, uncertainly, and were met with an almost fatherly sigh. He patted us on the head, as if we were a young child making innocent remarks that, to a wiser audience, were laced with hidden meaning. “I suggest this, in case you’re wondering who might have brought you back.”

 

We opened our mouth to speak, but he said abruptly, “Right, can’t have you lolling around here, bugger off!”

 

The moment passed, our mind still revolving this interesting, frightening idea.
Who brought us back? Why?
I stood up uncertainly, to occupy the space of my own silence, and said, “Will you…”

 

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

 

“But if…”

 

“You’re going to ask the Whites, aren’t you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“They will help you.”

 

“I don’t know where they are.”

 

“Well, shit!” he laughed. “All you gotta do is follow the writing on the wall!”

 

 

We left him there, the Beggar King in his court of rags and fleas.

 

We navigated while my mind drifted, picking our way through the night with our eyes wandering through every flowerpot, lamp-post, fence and street sign, marvelling that however well we thought we knew these streets, when we looked again we could still find something new in them. I thought about Elizabeth Bakker, sitting with just the pigeons for company in her care home. I thought about the Beggar King, the Bag Lady, and my gran, who liked the songs that the rats sung in the night through the hole in the corner of her floor, and always fed the squirrels. Somehow, thinking about it all made me feel tired, cold, the anger of my certainty fading down to just a flat recognition of things that needed to be done, rather than things that I desired.

 

However, before anything more could be done, there was somewhere we had to go first.

 

If I was going to get help, I wasn’t going to be picky about where it came from.

 

 

Subways at roundabouts and beneath busy streets are, in general, frightening places. It’s not simply the basic London subway with its friendly sign in big blue letters “POLICE PATROLS HERE” to comfort the uneasy traveller; it’s not the strange, translucent stalactites drooping down from the ceiling like warm salt icicles; it’s not even the odd patch of pondlike green mould on the floor to trip the unwary passer-by. It’s the enclosed, hidden nature of the place, which makes human instinct flex its fingertips in uncertainty and distress at the thought of imminent destruction, the utter confidence that whatever happens, in the subways there’s no place you can run.

 

I arrived early, around 2 a.m. in the maze of tunnels underneath the roundabouts, one-way systems and sprawling circular roads on the edge of Aldgate, where the City becomes simply the city, and the signs point to The North as well as to Bow and Whitechapel. In London, places beyond its boundaries are always called The North or The West, too big, too vague and too Not London to merit any more detailed descriptions.