Kate Griffin - A Madness of Angels

I chose cash withdrawal.

The machine said:

£10 £shadowrun 100

£30 burnburnburnburn £damnedsouldealdealdeal?

£50 £200

£80 £ Any Other Amount

I chose any other amount, and took out £500.

The notes rolled out reluctantly, my cardboard card was returned.

With a sad little squelch, the machine rolled out a receipt. It was black all over, soggy with ink, and tore itself apart in my fingers with the weight of liquid spilt across the thin paper.

I took my money and ran.

By 10 a.m., Chapel Street Market already smelt of cheese, fish, Chinese fast food and McDonald’s. It was a market defined by contrast. At the Angel end of the street, punk rock music pounded out from the stall selling pirate DVDs; from the French food stall, more of a van with a rumbling engine at its back, there sounded a recording of a man singing a nasal dirge about love, and Paris when it rained; at the cannabis stall (for no other name could do justice to the array of pipes, T-shirts, posters, burners and facial expressions that defined it, everything on display except the weed itself), Bob Marley declared himself deeply in love to the passing hooded youngsters from the estate down at Kings Cross. Outside the chippy, where the man with inch-wide holes in his ears served up cod to the security guards from the local shopping mall, a gaggle of schoolgirls from the local secondary bopped badly in high-heeled shoes to a beat through their headphones of shuung-shuung-shuung-shuung and shouted nicknames at their passing school friends in high voices that didn’t slow down for the eardrum. Fishmongers chatted with the purveyors of suspicious rotting fruit, sellers of ripped-off designer gear gossiped with the man who sold nothing but size-seven shoes, while all around shoppers drifted from the tinned shelves of Iceland to the rich smell of the bakery, wedged in between the TV shop and the tattooist’s parlour.

I wandered down the middle of the market, sidestepping the wind-blown papers, dead plastic bags, vegetables and fruit splattered on the road, chubby young mothers with prams, and impatient vendors flapping over their wares, between stalls selling wrapping paper, cheese, mushrooms, batteries, pirate films, pirate CDs, second-hand books (including numberless Mills and Boon titles for 50p a shot), cakes, bread, personal fans, portable radios, miniature TVs, scarves, dresses, boots, jeans, shirts and odd pieces of spider-web-thin fashion that looked like they were too light even to billow in the wind. My clothes here were no problem; there were too many sights and smells for people to care a damn about me.

I checked out the army surplus store, full of hunky boots, camouflage netting and men who loved to own both, the discount fashion store, the cobbler’s, the baker’s, the art shop and finally the costumiers, guarded by a fat black-and-white cat that sat on a wicker chair outside its door, the ceiling heavy with clothes drooping down from the roof so you had to duck to get through the doorway and heave your path clear between the shelves; walls lined with socks and shoes and antlers and old board games and prints of 1930s sporting events and wizard’s hats and all the wonders of the world, in miniature, discount form, hiding somewhere in the dust.

At the army surplus store I bought two pairs of socks, a warm-looking navy-blue jumper with only a few holes in it, a Swiss Army knife replete with more gadgets than there could be use for, including such classics as the fish descaler, impossible-to-use tin-opener, and a strange spike with a hole through the top whose use I had never been able to fathom. At the fashion discount store I bought a plain satchel, which I suspected would earn me the scorn of the shrieking schoolgirls outside the chippy but had the feel of a thing that would never die. At the cobbler’s, with a lot of persuading, I bought a set of ten blank keys for the most common locks in the city and a keyring to hang them on, as well as a small digital watch that could also dangle from the ring; in the art shop, I bought three cans of overpriced spray paint. At the costumiers, I bought my coat.

It was an excellent coat. It was long, grey, suspiciously blotched, smelt faintly of dust and old curries, went all the way down to my knees and overhung my wrists even when I stretched out my arms. It had big, smelly pockets, crunchy with crumbs, it boasted the remnants of a waterproof sheen, was missing a few buttons, and had once been beige. It was the coat that detectives down the ages had worn while trailing a beautiful, dangerous, presumably blond suspect in the rain, the coat that no one noticed, shapeless, bland and grey – it suited my purpose perfectly.

I paid, and tried it out. Back on Chapel Market, I turned up the collar, slung my satchel laden with its goodies over my shoulder, and walked through the crowds. No one paid me the slightest attention. I walked up to the cannabis stall, where I picked up a large plastic pipe with a picture on it of the Pope and three pot leaves against the flag of Jamaica. Slowly and deliberately, I opened my satchel and put it inside. As I walked away, no one even looked. Feeling on the edge of elation, I went over to the discount shampoo store, and put the pipe down on the counter. I leant across towards the tired-looking Chinese man who ran the store and said very loudly, “Boo!”

He jumped, hands flying up instinctively. “Uh?” he squeaked, staring at me with frightened eyes.

I nearly danced on the spot. We wanted to play with electricity, we wanted to throw fire and whoop with joy, delighted to find that the power still worked, that the instinctive use of that magic was still there, binding itself into my clothes, my skin, completing me just as it had in the old days, making me, if not invisible, then utterly anonymous at will: simply not worth noticing. I pointed at the pot pipe on his table and said, “Present.”

Before he had time to ask embarrassing questions, I turned, and sauntered away. We could have whistled.

Eleven a.m. brought us to the Cally Road swimming baths.

What Islington Council had thought would come of putting a swimming pool inside a corrugated-iron shed halfway between a railway terminal and a prison, I could not fathom. What mattered was that within these dark brown iron walls, besides the swimming pool inhabited by complaining children being forced through their weekly lesson by the bald, hook-nosed swimming master, there was a hot shower to be had for no more than £4.99 a throw.

We had thought heaven was some superficial construct of an ignorant humanity.

Standing in the shower, the stench of the litterbug being washed out of our skin, our hair, our bones, we realised this was not so. Heaven was on the Caledonian Road, smelt faintly of chlorine and was blasted out of a slightly grimy tap at 44 degrees Celsius under high pressure. We could have stayed there all day and all night, head turned into the water, but as always the driving fear of staying in one place too long, the memory of what might await me if I was found before I was ready, kept me moving.

By lunchtime, hair clinging damply to our face and new clothes pressed like the cloth of gold to our skin, I was ready. I went in search of some old friends.

My old friends could not be found.

I tried calling from phone boxes, picking numbers out of the haze of memory. I tried Awan first, a good, solid old man who’d always been kind to me in his dryly tolerant way. The number was disconnected. I moved on to Akute, with whom I had once shared a not very serious and rather drunken kiss on Waterloo Bridge, before discovering that she preferred blonds. An old lady answered the phone and informed me, no, sorry, never heard of her. A man shouted abuse at me from the number that should have been Patel’s; and because Pensley’s office was only a few minutes’ walk from the Caledonian Road, set back behind York Way, I went to find him in person, and found the place had been converted into a bathroom warehouse.