Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m Detective Constable Grant,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Mrs Thames.’

The girl looked me up and down and, having judged me against some theoretical standard, folded her arms across her breasts and glared at me. ‘So?’ she asked.

‘Nightingale sent me,’ I said.

The girl sighed and turned to yell down the communal hall way. ‘There’s some geezer here says he’s from the Wizard.’ Printed on the back of her t-shirt was TINGZ NUH RUN WE.

‘Let him in,’ called a voice from deep inside the building. It had a soft but distinctive Nigerian accent.

‘You’d better come in,’ said the girl, and stood aside.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘My name’s Beverley Brook,’ she said, and cocked her head as I walked past.

‘Pleased to meet you, Beverley,’ I said.

It was hot inside the building, tropical, almost humid, and sweat prickled on my face and back. I saw the front doors in the communal corridor were wide open and the heavy bass beat came floating down the wrought-iron staircase that linked the floors. Either this was the most neighbourly block of flats in English history, or Mother Thames controlled the whole building.

Beverley led me into a ground-floor flat, and I tried to keep my eyes off the long legs that emerged slender and brown below the hem of the t-shirt. It was even hotter inside the flat proper, and I recognised the smell of palm oil and cassava leaf. I knew exactly the style of home I was in from the walls, painted hint of peach, to the kitchen full of rice and chicken and Morrison’s own-brand custard-cream biscuits.

We stopped at the threshold to the living room. Beverley beckoned me down so she could murmur in my ear: ‘You show some respect now.’ I breathed in cooked hair and cocoa butter. It was like being sixteen again.

During the 1990s, when the architect who built this place had been commissioned, he had been told that he was designing luxury apartments for thrusting young professionals. No doubt he envisioned power suits, braces and people who would furnish their home with the bleak minimalist style of a Scandinavian detective novel. In his worst nightmare he probably never considered the idea that the owner would use the generous proportions of the living room as an excuse to cram in at least four World of Leather three-piece suites. Not to mention a plasma television, currently showing football with the mute on, and a huge plant in a pot, which I recognised with a start as being a mangrove tree. An actual mangrove tree , whose knobbly-kneed roots spilled over the edges of the pot and had gone questing through the shagpile carpet. I looked up and saw that the topmost branches had thrust up through the ceiling. I could see where the white plaster had flaked away to reveal the pine joists.

Arrayed on a leather sofa was as fine a collection of middle-aged African women as you’d find in a Pentecostal church, all of whom gave me the same once-over that Beverley had. Seated incongruously among them was a skinny white woman in a pink cashmere twinset and pearls, looking as perfectly at home as if she’d wandered in on her way into town and had never left. I noticed that the heat wasn’t bothering her. She gave me a friendly nod.

But none of this was important because also in the room was the Goddess of the River Thames.

She sat enthroned on the finest of the executive armchairs. Her hair was braided and threaded with black cotton and tipped with gold, so that it stood above her brow like a crown. Her face was round and unlined, her skin as smooth and perfect as a child’s, her lips full and very dark. She had the same black cat-shaped eyes as Beverley. Her blouse and wrap skirt were made from the finest gold Austrian lace, the neckline picked out in silver and scarlet, wide enough to display one smooth plump shoulder and the generous upper slopes of her breasts.

One beautifully manicured hand rested on a side table, at the foot of which stood burlap sacks and little wooden crates. As I stepped closer I could smell salt water and coffee, diesel and bananas, chocolate and fish guts. I didn’t need Nightingale to tell me I was sensing something supernatural, a glamour so strong it was like being washed away by the tide. In her presence I found nothing strange in the fact that the Goddess of the River was Nigerian.

‘So you are the wizard’s boy,’ said Mama Thames. ‘I thought there was an agreement?’

I found my voice. ‘I believe it was more of an arrangement.’

I was fighting the urge to fling myself to my knees before her and put my face between her breasts and go blubby, blubby, blubby . When she offered me a seat I was so hard it was painful to sit down.

I caught Beverley snickering behind her hand. So did Mama Thames, who sent the teenager scuttling for the kitchen. This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there’s someone else to do the housework.

‘Would you like some tea?’ asked Mama Thames.

I declined politely. Nightingale had been very specific: don’t eat or drink anything under her roof. ‘Do that,’ he’d said, ‘and she’ll have her hooks in you.’ My mum would have taken such a refusal as an insult, but Mama Thames just inclined her head graciously. Perhaps this too was all part of the arrangement.

‘Your Master,’ she said. ‘He is well?’

‘Yes ma’am,’ I said.

‘He does seem to get better as he gets older, does our Master Nightingale,’ she said. Before I could ask what she meant, she had asked after my parents. ‘Your mother is a Fula — yes?’ she asked.

‘From Sierra Leone,’ I said.

‘And your father no longer plays, I believe?’

‘You know my father?’

‘No,’ she said, and gave me a knowing smile. ‘Only in the sense that all the musicians of London belong to me, especially the jazz and bluesmen. It’s a river thing.’

‘Are you on speaking terms with the Mississippi, then?’ I asked. My father always swore that jazz, like the blues, was born in the muddy waters of the Mississippi. My mother swore that it came from the bottle, like all the devil’s best work. I’d been taking the piss a little bit, but it suddenly occurred to me that if there was a Mother Thames, why not a god of the Old Man River, and if that was so, did they talk? Did they have long phone calls about silting, watersheds and the need for flood management in the tidal regions? Or did they email or text or twitter?

With that reality check, I realised that some of the glamour was wearing off. I think Mama Thames must have sensed it too, because she gave me a shrewd look and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see how it is now. How clever of your Master to choose you, and they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’

Two weeks of similarly impenetrable remarks from Nightingale meant that I had developed a sophisticated counter-measure to gnomic utterances — I changed the subject.

‘How did you come to be Goddess of the Thames?’ I asked.

‘Are you sure you want to know?’ she asked, but I could tell that she was flattered by my interest. It’s a truism that everybody loves to talk about themselves. Nine out of ten confessions arise entirely out of a human being’s natural instinct to tell their life story to an attentive listener, even if it involves how they came to bludgeon their golf partner to death. Mama Thames was no different; in fact, I realised, gods had an ever greater need to explain themselves.

‘I came to London in 1957,’ said Mama Thames. ‘But I wasn’t a goddess then. I was just some stupid country girl with a name that I have forgotten, come to train as a nurse, but if I am honest I have to say I was not a very good nurse. I never liked to get too close to the sick people, and there were too many Igbo in my class. Because of those stupid patients I failed all my exams and they threw me out.’ Mama Thames kissed her teeth at the barefaced cheek of them. ‘Into the street, just like that. And then my beautiful Robert, who had been courting me for three years, says to me, “I can no longer wait for you to make up your mind, and I am going to marry a white bitch Irish woman.”’