The Minority Council (8 page)

The light didn’t exactly explode. Explosion implies sound, and there wasn’t any of that. There was just a silent whoosh-slam that went straight through the belly and sent ripples through the cushion of the brain. Behind my eyelids a flash sent yellow eddies round the surface of my eyes. I heard a wail from the bouncer and felt the light rush outwards, in a tide like lightning in the night.

I opened my eyes. The bouncer was bent double, hands pressed over his eyes; a grunting came from deep in his throat. I said, “It’ll pass, don’t worry.” At the sound of my voice he swung his fists wildly, eyes still scrunched up. As his punches went far wide, he shouted, “Police, police!” I sidled past, pushed at the closed silver door, and let myself in.

It was called Avalon.

It was a nightclub.

There are nightclubs, and then there are nightclubs, and then, finally at the furthest end of the spectrum, there are nightclubs. Some are about the music, some about the dance; some are about the sofas where the various genders huddle in darkness with bottles of fake champagne or jugs of lurid fluorescent cocktails, hoping other genders will notice them and their empty glasses; some are about specialists’ tastes—the music of only the 1980s, the lights of the disco period, men looking for men, women looking for women, men looking for women who are looking for women who are looking for men looking for men—and those who were looking for all of the above in various shades of ultraviolet paint. Some were tribal places, clubs for Goths dressed all in black, faces made up vampire-white and drinks with names like Virgin Blood or Fiery Nights all mixed on a theme of tomato juice, ethyl alcohol and not much else; or clubs for teenagers just discovering that there is a place known as
after
the pub, where the drinks come in goldfish bowls with five straws and a paper umbrella, and the music was acoustic guitar meets electric bass, and the waiters behind the bars juggled their bottles before going in for the serving kill.

In every club across the land, the atmosphere infects the magic, twisting the nature of the spells performed inside them. Here, it was like walking into a gunpowder factory flooded with paraffin and left under a hot sun and a giant lens. The taste of magic was palpable on the first step down from the silver door. As I ducked past the cloakroom before any questions were asked and through a second door into the pounding darkness of the interior, I smelt cantrips flaring and dying in the dark.

The music was, as music is in these circumstances, a pounding anonymity of bass beats and crunching guitar. The bar was lit up vivid blue inclining to purple; lights inside the glass counter revealed glasses of every shape and size, and bottles were hung upside down ready to be tapped for any combination of drink you could imagine. The waiters wore black, and bopped along to a beat that we could not detect in the cacophony of sound. There was a dance floor, distinguishable by the weight of bodies pressed together beneath a rack of speakers, and flashing strobes that gave the dancers a strange out-of-phase look. It was the dance of don’t-you-wish-it-was-sex, hands overhead so that maximum attention could be focused on the midriff. House style for women was tiny dresses that clung to every curve like tin to sardines; men were in black trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves from a day in the office. Some of the men, who worked on such things, had removed their shirts, revealing improbable pectoral muscles, and bellies which probably couldn’t remember digesting for fun. Black leather sofas ringed the dance floor, with candles on tables where non-dancers weren’t even pretending to talk over the noise.

I looked around for Meera. Pushing through the crowd, I tried dialling her phone again. As it rang, another phone started ringing, not five feet away. I couldn’t hear it, but I saw the screen flashing in the dark and as I edged closer I recognised my own number.

The phone was new and smart, black cover and bright screen. It had been left on a low, glasses-strewn table where a group of men in suit jackets and half-unbuttoned shirts were lounging. An ice bucket sat in front of them, and three women in heavy lipstick and straightened hair
were doing more than society required to make themselves amenable.

All ignored me as I approached, and one started clapping at some unheard joke. I stopped dead. As his hands met and parted, sparks flashed between his fingertips. His eyes were giddy and wide, his face flushed with drink and something more, but the ozone tang in the air was unmistakable. There was a sickly yellowness about his eyes, unnatural and bright in the dim light and, as he moved to refill his glass, I saw the condensation thicken on the silver ice bucket.

One of them noticed me. Still laughing at the joke, he said, “You got a problem, mate?”

Not taking my gaze from the man with the yellow eyes, I answered, “I’m looking for Meera.”

They laughed again, a great roar of sound, and the one with the yellow eyes drained a slurp from his glass.

“Not here, mate!” chuckled one. “You just missed her.”

“Where’d she go?” I asked. “It’s important I find her.”

“You her boyfriend or something?”

“Something,” I replied. “Just tell me where she is and I’ll be out of your hair.”

A certain something darkened in the face of the man who’d first addressed me. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but his cufflinks were gold, glimmering with diamonds, and his black leather shoes were mirror-bright. “Why should we know where she’s gone? Sorry, mate, but you’re wasting your time.”

I didn’t move.

“That was goodbye,” he added. “As in piss off, okay?”

“You must be her colleagues from work,” I said. “You’ve got the look.”

He stood up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Is that it?” I asked. “ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ People only say that when they know exactly what it means, but don’t have the wit to come up with an appropriate retort. It’s a holding phrase, and a bad one at that. Well, go on then! Concentrate really hard and see if you can come up with something better.”

He shoved me.

Probably he’d wanted to go straight for the punch, but didn’t have the physical confidence. I staggered backwards, and rebounded off a dancer who didn’t seem to care. As I lurched back towards him, I reached up, grabbed him by the lapels and pushed him backwards onto the table top. Glasses broke; the ice bucket went flying. I saw fear flash up in his eyes as they met ours and, before rage could replace it, we hissed, “You little worm-man. Little spark in a sea of fire, glint and die, little mortal with little mortal mind that thinks if it burns bright enough, it will be seen against the storm. She should be your friend and you don’t even care. I barely know her and I give more of a damn. Where’d she go?”

The others were on their feet, but weren’t rushing into anything.

“She, uh… she went with… the men.”

“Which men?”

“They knew her…”

“Which men?” He looked for a moment as if he wouldn’t answer. We tightened our grip, half drew him up ready to slam him back harder, and he gasped, “The dusthouse! She went to the dusthouse!”

“What dusthouse? Where?”

“I don’t know—they just said they’re from the dusthouse, and she went with them, that’s all I know.”

“Why’d she leave her phone?”

“I don’t know! I swear, man, I don’t know!”

A crowd was gathering; even some of the dancers had turned to watch. In a few minutes there’d be phones ringing and police knocking, and then I’d have to deal with Kelly’s innate enthusiasm as she tidied up another political incident. My gaze met the yellow-stained eyes of the man at the back. He was sat bolt upright now, knuckles white around his champagne glass, all sign of laughter gone. And where others wore faces of doubt and fear, his body quivered with pure, deep, personal terror.

I let go. “Thanks,” I muttered. “You’ve been great.”

Then, before the sirens could start to wail, I pushed my way out, into the open air.

A police car did arrive. It came twenty minutes after I’d left, and the nonchalance of the coppers who got out suggested they weren’t rushing into a serious incident. They talked to the bouncer for five minutes, then stayed inside the club for another twenty-five, before emerging to drive away.

I watched all this from an office across the street, having let myself in round the back. I sat on top of the photocopier, that being the only comfortable vantage point, eating peanuts and waiting.

We were not good at waiting.

We were not good at being still.

People came and went from Avalon, unaware or uncaring about the minor incident that had recently happened. Something in what the man in the club had said—the dusthouse—stuck in my mind, though I could not pin it to any explanation. Frustration met boredom and spun a few turns round the pit of my stomach. Hours had now gone by since Meera’s call.

It wasn’t until half past twelve that the group of tipsy men and eager girls who’d sat with Meera came staggering noisily out of the club. One of the men was unable to walk without the assistance of two others, whom he thanked at repetitive length. I let myself back out of the office, wiping salt and peanut fragments off my jeans, and fell in behind them at a thirty-yard distance. They were taxi-hunting, and soon lucky, flagging down a black cab and giving the address of a nearby hotel where no good happened at bad prices. The man with sickly yellow eyes was among them. Their drunkenness made them not just loud, but blind to observation; I heard the address, let them drive away, then hailed my own cab to take the same direction through the sleeping city.

It dropped me off at a hotel on St Katharine’s Dock, a concrete monster surrounded by a maze of locks and quays, yachts and pubs, and apartments stacked high, with balconies of glass looking towards the water. I pulled my collar up, ruffled my hair, and reeled into the hotel lobby.

A single sleepy receptionist was on duty wearing a badge proclaiming that Emilia spoke both French and Italian.

I staggered up to the desk, overdoing the length of my walk, and burbled, “Hey hey hey hey!”

Emilia looked up blearily, and into her sleep-drenched mind I began to spin a little extra fog. The dozing mind is always easier to influence, and I could feel the gumminess of her eyes as if my own were sticking shut. “Hey hey hey,” I repeated. “Yeah, my friends, yeah, they just came in, yeah, there were like, three of them, yeah, and we were like, you know, together but they, yeah, they went ahead of me uh… can you tell me which room they went to?”

She scarcely hesitated, saying wearily, “Were these the three gentlemen and three ladies?”

“Yeah yeah yeah yeah!” I exclaimed. “Well, actually it’s really the three ladies, I know, you know, I mean, like, Sandra, yeah, she’s like, you know…”

I let the thought trail off and smiled what I felt had to be my most winning smile. If she noticed, she wasn’t wowed; nonetheless she looked down at a computer screen, checking for information.

“Your friends are in 512. Do you want me to call up, let them know you’re here?”

“Hey hey hey hey that’s like really nice of you you know but yeah I’ll just go up and say hi I mean they’ll know I mean of course they will yeah, you know?”

She nodded, her eyes half-drifting-shut, and turned her attention back to the screen. I let my mind linger in hers as I headed for the nearest elevator, and only when the doors were sliding shut did I let the spell go, the fog drifting clear from her thoughts too late.

I rode the elevator to the fifth floor, and walked along a corridor of endless samey doors until I got to 512. I could hear more heavy music and a man laughing the laugh of the alcoholically lost. The lock on the door was a key-card job. In my wallet I found a business card that had once advertised the services of Sexy Babe Nadine, natural blonde and exotically talented, until I’d purloined it from the phone box where it had been placed, and scrawled over it with blue-black enchantments. I slipped it into the lock, pushed with just a bit more than physical strength, concentrated, and heard the lock click. Very gently I pushed the handle down, and eased the door open.

Inside, the living room was in darkness, but I could
still see the outlines of a sofa, a low table, a TV with its red standby light glowing and a minibar. The sounds of music and excitement were coming from the bedroom, through a half-open door which spilt yellow light. The bathroom was full of steam, its light still on, revealing discarded clothes and soggy towels. On the floor of the living room were more clothes. The door to the balcony was open, letting in a cold night breeze. I padded across the carpeted floor, then drew quickly back into the bathroom as a voice in the bedroom said, “Hold on…”

In the steam-dripping bathroom mirror, I saw a man enter the living room. He was wearing a blue dressing gown too small for him and a pair of black socks. He turned on the lights and started fumbling through the pile of clothes on the floor. Pulling a little silver box from the pocket of his trousers, he sat down on the sofa and reverentially opened it. He pinched something inside it, then held one nostril shut and drew in a deep, long sniff. His whole body rocked back, eyes closing with relish. At length he closed the box, leaving it on the table, and stood up.

His gaze roamed towards the bathroom and I recognised him: dark brown hair cut short, thick neck, eyes a sickly yellow stain. His eyes slid right over my reflection in the mirror, and his body seemed to start, as if his limbs recognised something there, but his brain couldn’t quite catch up. As he turned back to the bedroom we marched up to him, grabbed him by the hair and dragged him onto the balcony before he could squeak; there, we pushed him backwards until his head was out over the five-storey drop and his feet barely touched the floor. With one hand over his mouth we leant in until all he could see was our
face. “You,” I hissed, “are going to tell us all about the dusthouse.”