These were the words Sharon whispered as she stood hugging herself by the central pillar at Seven Dials, alone and impatient:
“I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret.”
The theatres were emptied and shut, the lights still burning above their padlocked doors, and the traffic was thin, with a distant bubble of sound towards Cambridge Circus and St Martin’s Lane. But the pubs were still open and nearby restaurants were serving their finest dessert wine, one thumb-sized glass at £12.80 a sip, excluding service.
Seven Dials was, as the name suggests, a place where seven roads met. There they made a small circle around a pillar, from which blue clock faces dressed in gold looked down at the neighbourhood’s narrow lanes like a warning to mind your seconds and watch your step. According to some local businesses, this geographical anomaly in the larger street plan of London was a village, a corner of Covent Garden that featured not mere purveyors of goods but boutiques offering the ultimate in handbags, shoes and hair for the truly tasteful and shockingly rich.
Sharon knew she was neither of these. Her purple boots clomped on the smoothed stone below the pillar as she walked round and round, murmuring, “I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret…”
A cab crawled round one corner, driven with the caution of somebody who suspects he’s made a mistake but hopes no one will notice.
“I am floating calmly beneath the surface of the river…”
A paramedics’ car paused at the bottom of Monmouth Street, its blue lights silently flashing. It did a circuit of the pillar, then another. On the third attempt the driver made a wrong decision, leaving him with not enough room to turn. The passenger door opened and a medic got out, green bag slung over his shoulder, and began jogging back the way the car had came, while the driver circled again in search of a way through.
Sharon paced, circling the pillar like the second hand on a lethargic clock. In summer tourists sat huddled here while scanning their maps for Trafalgar Square, where they could huddle beneath a larger pillar in greater numbers. By day shoppers not only went in search of high fashion, but sought quirks, strange hold-outs in a sea of universal trend. A shop selling nothing but beads for the enthusiastic craftsman; a theatrical bookshop with a love of musicals and high tragedy; the model shop featuring stormtroopers in all sizes from keyring to lifelike with added comics for the true enthusiast.
“I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, the secret is—”
“You got toothpaste?”
The voice was loud, belligerent and unmistakable. Sharon turned, just in case the universe was about to pull another, unwelcome surprise and, sure enough, there was the goblin in his oversized green hoodie which drooped down to his knees, SKATE OR DIE! blazoned across his back and the image of what looked like a cool penguin in shades performing a trick on his front.
The recollection that this was real and this was happening–or at the very least that this was something she was perceiving to be real and if she was mad she might as well go with it–held her back for a moment, and a default answer of “What?” issued from her like notes from a run-down stereo.
“Toothpaste, toothpaste!” shrilled the goblin, hopping from one foot to the other. “You got the mark of the Midnight Mayor on you so he must’ve talked to you so he must’ve told you to bring toothpaste!”
Sharon looked down at herself, saw no mark, craned to see over her shoulder, and felt down her spine for what she could only assume was the mystic equivalent of a KICK ME sign. The goblin rolled his eyes. “You are as sharp as a bag of boiled potatoes, ain’t you?” Gleefully he bounded forward and before she could object grabbed Sharon’s right hand in his. His skin was leathery, dry, thick, given a rougher edge by a thin coating of black bristles almost invisible against the skin.
“Here!” he snapped, waving Sharon’s hand up and down in front of her face. “Look here!”
She looked.
There was nothing.
“You gotta stop trying,” the goblin exclaimed. “It’s about seeing a thing in the corner of your eye when you is walking down the street and thinking, ‘Fuck me I didn’t see that’ and then when you think you should go back to check you’re running late for a meeting so you don’t and you never know–it’s that, that’s what you gotta see, them things that don’t want you to see them at all!”
Sharon swallowed, thought about Gretel the troll, her face lost behind an ever-changing mask of don’t-quite-want-to-look. She looked away from her hand, then swept it quickly in front of her vision in a single dismissive gesture, pulling free of the goblin’s grip, and, for a moment,
there was something on her hand.
Something red and bright and hot, a pair of crosses that vanished the second she stared, agape. “There’s a bloody—”
“I know!”
“But I didn’t—”
“I know, I know!”
“How did—”
“I know!”
Sharon hesitated, eyes swinging back to the goblin. “Hold on!” she said. “That one was a question.”
“I know!”
“And that isn’t an answer.”
“I know, I know, I’m getting there,” fumed the goblin. “Midnight Mayor’s watching out for you. There’s them that say one guy’s watching out is another guy’s manipulating like a pot of play-dough, but with this one it’s kind of hard to call, like, is he really that pig stupid or is he playing like some fucking long game? Most punters are too thick to tell but I know where I’m gonna stand at the apocalypse, just saying.”
Sharon stared at the goblin, and the goblin had, perhaps, the good grace to look embarrassed. She felt in her pocket and handed over the tube of toothpaste. The goblin snatched it merrily, leaping with surprising vigour into the air and spinning away. The lid was off in a single twist and his head tilted right back as, with every sign of satisfaction, he squirted a fat stream of blue-white goo into his mouth, rolled it around inside and swallowed.
Sharon’s face was a picture of distaste, the goblin’s of delight. “Not too fucking bad,” he concluded, wiping his foaming lips with the back of his hand. “Next time get whitening.”
“Who’s the Midnight Mayor?” demanded Sharon.
“Protector of the city, guardian of the night and all that crap,” sang out Sammy, slipping the toothpaste inside his hoodie for later. “I’m all like ‘You can’t say you’re the protector of the city and not have a big hat’ and he’s like ‘Screw your big hat’ and I’m like ‘It’s your fucking style sense, whatever.’ ”
“But that doesn’t mean anything! ‘Protector of the city’ is the world’s stupidest job description ever! And besides who are you?” demanded Sharon, her hands slamming onto her hips as if by force of gesture alone the conversation could judder to a halt.
“Sammy!” replied the goblin, giving her a look which implied that if she hadn’t worked this out already or, more, been somehow attuned to the very nature of this mystery, she wasn’t worth his time. “I’m Sammy the Elbow, second greatest–second greatest, wankers!–” he shouted at some unknown academic audience “–shaman to ever fucking live. I’ve seen the path and walked the walk, I know the secrets of the sodium night and when I say jump toot sweet you jump toot sweet yeah?”
“What do you mean ‘the Elbow’?”
“You really are ignorant as a cheeseburger, ain’t you? Didn’t you learn nothing at school about goblin tribes?”
“No,” she replied, a glare of defiance seeping into her face. “I know this is like, way out there, but at school we learned about chemistry and geography and how to put a condom on a banana. We did not learn about goblin tribes, because until, like, two minutes ago I didn’t fucking know there were goblin tribes, so cut me a break, okay?”
To her surprise Sammy grinned, revealing a small collection of very large brown teeth. “There’d have been this thing,” he explained. “You’d have been walking along, probably by yourself, only you weren’t by yourself because you weren’t never by yourself but you were probably too dense to know that, and there would have been this thing, this sort of ‘Oh what the fuck’ thing.”
“ ‘Oh what the fuck thing’?”
“Yeah. And you’d have been like ‘Something is happening’ only like I said, you’d be too dense to know what it was and then there’d be this second, and in that second you’d know everything. Everything that is and was and will be in the city, every brick and stone and piece of squished chewing gum, every secret and every dirty party, you’d know it all and then,” his grin widened, “you forgot.”
Sharon stared down at her feet and remembered the feeling of rain on her face, the taste of kebab in her mouth. And something else, something bigger, that she hadn’t been able to bring back.
“Okay,” she said at last. “So what do you want?”
Sammy the Elbow, second (?) greatest shaman to walk the earth, spread his arms wide in delight. “What do you think, carrot-brains? I’m your new teacher!”