Sharon thought she heard…
… but it was nothing.
She trailed behind Sammy the Elbow, falling into step automatically, and half-listened as he explained.
“In the good old days we got treated with proper respect, it was all like ‘You know shit, wow!’ and we were all like ‘Yeah so give us your virgins’ only virgin has always been this really dodgy term, especially, I gotta tell you, especially in north London. Then there was this thing with the Tower and everyone was a bit like ‘Wow, we should’ve done something’ and that kind of didn’t do the rep any favours, which is crap because I was in Derby so didn’t have nothing to do with all that shit but by the time I come back to London you’ve got amateur magicians, you’ve got shit mystics talking like they know shit, you’ve got untidied hexes everywhere and the Midnight Mayor is some bloke who isn’t even totally dead yet. I mean amateurs! Shoddy spellcraft everywhere and when people come running ‘Oh, Sammy, there’s unbound shades on the loose in Kennington’ I’m like ‘You’ve only got yourself to blame’ but do they listen do they?”
“I don’t know, do they?”
“No!”
“And uh… is that… for any particular reason?”
“What’s that meaning?”
“Well, I’m just saying–I mean, it’s nothing to do with you as a person, I’m sure you’re really cool and that–but I’m just saying…” She hesitated. “You’re not really giving off positive vibes and I’m guessing people do like that, especially when, and I know this is going to sound really bad and I don’t mean it in a discriminating way, yeah, but especially when you’re three foot tall and a goblin.”
Contemplative silence.
Then, “Is you saying it’s cos I’m short?”
“The height… may be a thing, yeah.”
“Is it you’re saying it’s because of my… ethnicity?” Sammy savoured the word as a food taster might enjoy the professional satisfaction of that first tinge of cyanide.
“My sociology tutor told me how ethnicity was only a social construct,” she announced. “It’s like as how, it’s not just about your race and that, it’s about your culture and your social identity.”
“What social identity?”
“I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not because you’re a goblin, it’s because you’re… kind of negative about everyone else. Sir.” The “sir” was thrown in as an afterthought, as Sharon’s brain offered up the view that, sure, even though Sammy barely came up to her waist, that didn’t mean he couldn’t bite.
“You ain’t met many goblins, squishy-brains.” It was a statement delivered with the certainty of someone who not only knows the answer to his own question, but can see the wretched consequences of it right before his eyes. “I’m fucking civil.”
“Why are you teaching me?” demanded Sharon, the words dropping before she could stop them.
Sammy shot a glare at her. Even at this hour St Martin’s Lane was busy with people wondering how they were going to get home, as clubs and bars began disgorging the tipsy, the sozzled and the truly smashed into an ear-wringing night. Sharon and the goblin scurried past a tapas bar where the bouncers wore badges on their sleeves, and on a wall by the door a motley collection of mojito-fuelled revellers sat enjoying a quick fag. No one seemed to notice Sammy and, as Sharon realised with a faint jolt, nor did anyone seem to see her. It was the walk, that very special walk where all eyes fell straight through them, an invisibility by default usually known only to security guards and cleaners. Sammy was doing it on automatic.
“I am trying to tell you about the way things are,” he shrilled, “and you just keep asking stupid questions!”
“It’s not a stupid question,” she insisted, moderating her voice to keep it level as they turned up Long Acre. Mannequins stared out from behind sheet glass; the local council were again drilling in the middle of the street just in case they’d missed a deposit of famed Soho crude. “A lot of shit has been happening the last few days and I thought it was because of Magicals Anonymous and how people might get interested in that, but now I don’t think it’s about that, I mean, not just about that, because sure it’s weird but this is a whole different level of weird.”
“First you called me short, and now call me weird?” demanded Sammy.
“No! I’m saying that weird, like ethnicity, is like… in the eye of the beholder, you know? So there’s probably guys out there who are like ‘Wow, I’m talking with a goblin’ and that’s completely cool but, like I’ve been trying to say, this is my first time and so yeah, I’m allowed to say it’s a bit weird and in fact–” she puffed up with sudden, revelatory pride “–in fact, yeah! This is something difficult I’m going through and I think you should be fucking supportive about it and not give all me this grief, which isn’t to say I’m not grateful for the teaching thing if it happens because I am yeah, but this is exactly why I used to get into trouble because people weren’t understanding when things were weird and exactly why we need Magicals Anonymous, so yeah!”
She stopped so suddenly that the air seemed to bend around her as reality tried to work out what the game was. Sammy paused, looking back at her with his oversized, over-round eyes, and for a moment Sharon wondered how he did that, how he stayed unseen and stationary at the same time and if he’d ever got it wrong; then the rising tide of her indignation brought another burst of defiance.
“I’ve got a job to do, you know!”
“What job?”
“I’m… I’m a barista!”
Sammy snickered.
Sharon felt small and rather alone.
There was a flicker of something in Sammy’s face that might almost have been him relenting. If perhaps he’d spent a happier youth among the garbage heaps of whichever big city, he might have held out a trembling hand in support. If he hadn’t learned at a tender age that emotional intelligence had nothing on good athletic skills over a 400-yard sprint, he might even have ventured a word of consolation. As it was, he had, so he didn’t, but kept on striding invisibly through the night, tutting under his breath. Sharon hesitated, then moved to catch up, swinging back into that rhythm where all things became a little bit thin, and a little bit soft around the edges, and the world went out of its way not to perceive.
Then he said, “This is the shaman’s walk. You’re crap at it but what’s a goblin to expect?”
Sharon swallowed more than just air and ventured, “Are there like… medical implications and things? Like, am I going to wake up one day with, you know, cancer in my brain or that, because I noticed how sometimes I turn invisible and can walk through walls and things, but they say mobile phones have been linked with cancer and you don’t know do you? Because I’ve seen those movies where wizards throw fire from their hands, and I think they must have like, really bad internal problems for that to work, like they must have horrible skin or like, be allergic to lactose or something, but it’s not something they talk about on NHS Direct.”
Sammy’s mouth opened to say something rude before Sammy’s eyes caught the earnest look on Sharon’s face. He closed his mouth, took a steadying breath and declared, “I ain’t never met a shaman what’s died of cancer never!”
Sharon looked relieved.
“Dragon, yes. Met a shaman what died of a dragon,” added Sammy, eyes drifting into some recollecting place. “Drowning, once. Being impaled on a tribal spear; crushed by an Underground train; electrocuted in a substation; eaten by a cockatrice although I think that weren’t what dunnit, I think it was the manticore’s sting what was the problem; spontaneously fucking combusted; shot at close range by a killer from the Order; and pneumonia, sure, all of that! But never, not once, not never, cancer.”
“Oh,” murmured Sharon. Seeing that this was Sammy’s best shot at comfort, she added, “Good.” Then a thought hit and she gestured furiously at the empty air. “I am not sticking feathers through my nose!” she exclaimed. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful or whatever, but I’m not having any of that! My mum would do her nut!”
“Feathers in your nose?” shrilled Sammy as they rounded the Royal Opera House and headed east towards the imperial architecture and health-aspiring coffee shops of Kingsway. “Why the hell should you stick a feather up your nose?”
“I googled shamans,” she explained weakly. “And mystic dancing–I mean, I’ll give it a go if it’s like, really important, but last time I went to the disco my mate Sue was all like, ‘Hun, it’s nice that you’re trying’ which meant I had two left feet and everyone else was way sexier and, like, knew what they were doing but if it’s absolutely essential then I guess I can try.”
“Dancing?” Once more Sammy’s indignation rose towards its default level of fever pitch. “Feathers?!”
“Wikipedia said—”
“Wikipedia! Wikipedia!” He threw up his hands, and there was a change to his walk, faster, slightly too fast for the world around him, invisibility straining against the righteousness of his anger. “Wikipedia is what’s wrong with modern wizardry!” he shouted. “Everyone’s like ‘Wow, I can do that’ and then what do they do? They cross their secondary summoning circle with the shield line, and they invoke with sodium instead of fluorescent and they’re all like ‘Wow we’re so good at what we do’ and then who has to clean up the bits of brain splattered up the walls? Experts! Experts have to fucking do it and I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you!” His whole body trembled with outrage and as he walked, Sharon couldn’t help but notice. The air seemed to shimmer around him, lights flickering in the street as if the universe yearned to help him endure his heightened emotional trauma, but couldn’t quite work out how. “It’s always the goblins that get blamed! Racist, that is! Racist discriminatory ethnic social fucking whatsit!”
Sharon glanced around to see if anybody had noticed. There was no one around, which was lucky considering that Sammy wasn’t just verging on visible, he was heading for inflamed. But there was something watching: shapes in the darkness, shadows that hid between the light of the street lamps, figures that turned away when she raised her head to examine them, the passing image of a cleaner sweeping away the dirt before Sam’s bare three-toed feet, the flicker of a head turning in a window above to see what all the fuss was about, the scuttle of a fox pausing in its passage across the street to marvel and disappear. None of it real, and yet all watching.
And even as she watched back, Sammy’s pace slowed again, and they all began to fade, receding into the same shadow world through which the goblin moved. “Mr Elbow sir?” murmured Sharon, once the tide of Sammy’s indignation had retreated, to reveal a little pool of potential calm. “Do you… I mean, you probably don’t but have you ever… There’s this webpage I run, okay, it’s called Weird Shit Keeps Happening to Me—”
“Sounds crap.”
“We’ve got this help group going.”
“Bollocks!”
“You say that,” pressed Sharon, warming to her theme, “but I don’t think you’re the only one who feels discriminated against because of your… your appearance and your… well, your smell and stuff, which is fine. I mean it’s totally cool, and my mum always said that collective action was the only way to achieve lasting change and I always thought that sounded a bit… But if you feel like you need to talk about anything then we hold meetings once a week and the first one went really well I think and you know you’re… you’re not alone is what I’m saying. I guess.”
To her surprise, Sammy’s silence was almost thoughtful. Then, “You got a tribe?”
“What? Uh, no. I mean, I used to hang out with the girls down the shopping centre, after school and that, but security said we had to move on, which I was so angry about, yeah, because we weren’t any trouble to no one and I actually wrote a letter!”
“You’re a shaman–you gotta have a tribe.”
“Well, uh… I don’t think I do. Sorry. Is that a fail?”
Sammy grunted. “There’s almost no shamans never. I mean, people always talk about how there’s never many sorcerers, but there’s less shamans. Sorcerers are just wankers who get that life is magic, like that’s a big deal. They’re all into their special effects, their boom bang boom shit–any old tit can be a sorcerer once they learn how to feel the city beneath their feet. And there’s the shamans of the Tribe, the guys who get all bonded on self-mutilation and that, but they’re only shamans because they lead, not because they know, and half of them are dead anyways. But proper shamans, real shamans–you and me–we got the other thing. The deeper thing. We don’t feed on the city like sorcerers do, we don’t use it for our power. Us and the city, we’re the same. We’re one. You gotta get used to two things when that happens.”
“What things?” asked Sharon, almost in a whisper.
“First thing is that you ain’t never gonna be alone. Wherever you go, it’ll be with you, in you, you in it. No one’s never alone in a city.”
“And the second thing?”
“You’re always gonna be alone,” he replied with a little shrug. “Cos no one else will ever get it, and cos you’ll always know how much bigger everything is. You can try and explain it, but you can’t, because you’re a shaman and they ain’t. Now, you may be into your self-help shit but, as a goblin who is like pretty fucking good at what I do, and I’m not just saying that because I am, I’m gonna give you the best ever advice ever. Deal with it.”
Sharon deflated.
They walked on together in silence. The gate was shut across the entrance to Lincoln’s Inn. Sammy swaggered through its black wood without breaking stride. Not noticing what she did, Sharon followed him. Lincoln’s Inn was a place of grass (not for walking on) and stone terraced mansions (not for cluttering) scarred with shrapnel from one of the very few bombs to fall on London in the First World War. And there it was again, the sense of eyes watching though nothing living stirred: a figure running up the steps to the high red-brick chapel, the rattle of a trolley, laden with paper, on the paving stones, though nothing moved to make such a sound, the hiss of gas from a wrought-iron lamp long since extinguished. There were shadows here trying to be seen, but afraid to go that final step and be perceived.
“It’s not about power,” explained Sammy. “Leave power to wizards and sorcerers and that. It’s about knowing the things beneath. Stop!”
He stopped so suddenly, Sharon walked into him. He staggered forward, cursing, recovered himself, spun around; and then there he was in his full three-dimensional glory. A goblin, an actual goblin, stood in the middle of Lincoln’s Inn with his hands on his hips like an angry aunt. For a moment the sheer absurdity of it overcame Sharon and a single giggle escaped her before she pressed both hands over her mouth as if to deny the merest squeak.
Sammy’s eyes narrowed, and beneath her hands Sharon tried to fix her features in what she imagined shaman apprentice after shaman apprentice had attempted as their “Really, that mushroom?” expression in the face of their aged, possibly feather-touting, probably mystic-dancing shaman master’s ire.
Sammy, looking like someone who’d seen it all before, let it pass. With a finger punctuating every vital word, he exclaimed, “There’s lotsa walks you gotta learn! The walk you’ve figured is the piss-easy walk and if you hadn’t figured it, you wouldn’t be worth the bother. It’s the shadow walk, cos you are part of the city and the city is part of you so why should them that look see you cos all they can see is the fucking city, get it?”
Sharon nodded energetically, and risked easing her hands away from her mouth.
“That’s what they see when they see you, cos they are seeing you when you do the shadow walk, but they ain’t seeing you, they’re just seeing the city and who bothers to fucking look at that? No one!” he answered before Sharon could offer a response. “No one bothers to look because the old skills are dead and the younger generation are all like ‘I’ve got an app for that’ or whatever. It’s a disgrace.”
Sharon went with nodding again, as her safest option.
“There’s the other walks too,” he went on. “There’s the spirit walk, which is deeper than the shadows. It’s the walk where you can see what really is but you gotta remember,” wagging the finger, “them things what you can see are gonna look straight back at you and that can freak out the incompetent wankers but–” another stab with a quivering, many-knuckled joint “–you’ll be okay because your teacher is just that bloody good!”
Nod, nod went Sharon. It really seemed the best way to avoid trouble.
“There’s the dream walk. Like the title kind of bloody suggests, you’ve gotta be dreaming to do the walk but don’t think it ain’t as real as any of the others because what the fuck is a body without a mind, yeah? You walk through the dreams of others and they’re gonna dream some freaky shit so you just be fucking careful when you walk. Your spirit guide will protect you a bit, but again it’s just a product of your brain so don’t treat it like it’s gonna pull anything special any time soon.”
Sharon raised a querying hand.
“What?” demanded Sammy, stamping a foot at the interruption.
“My spirit guide?”
“You ain’t met your spirit guide yet?”
“Um… I dunno. Would I know if I had?”
“Course you’d fucking know! It’s a fucking spirit guide!”
“What does it look like?”
“Different for everyone. It’s a part of you, it comes from you. Like me,” Sammy puffed up a little, “my spirit guide is no less than a psycho-mystic representation of Benjamin the Eye–I don’t expect an ignorant pink thing like you to know ’bout him–but Benjamin the Eye was only one of the greatest shamans ever and I see him because that’s the level I’m playing on! You’re probably gonna see like… rabbits or something.”
“Rabbits?”
“Or something!”
“My spirit guide looks like rabbits?”
“How the hell should I know–do I look like I waste my talents on shit like that?”
“I thought you said a shaman was supposed to know things.”
“Important things! Important fucking things!”
“Okay then, okay,” replied Sharon, her indignation rising in the face of Sammy’s. “So tell me something knowy.”
“Blue is a stupid colour for hair.”
“That’s not knowy, that’s an opinion and it’s a rubbish opinion too,” she retorted. “You can’t just come up to me and go like ‘I’m your teacher’ and not have an Ofsted file or nothing, or a CV or those little cards with quotes on it saying things like ‘I used to walk among the living dead but then Sammy taught me how to control my necromantic powers and now I do yoga’ and all that shit–so you convince me that you’re all you’re talking about.”
Sammy hesitated, looking about the street. They’d emerged from the Inns of Court onto High Holborn, an arterial road with delusions of grandeur unsupported by its tendency to sell mostly stationery, and now as Sharon folded her arms and waited beneath the glare of the red traffic lights commanding stop to the absent traffic, Sammy the Elbow cast around for inspiration.
“Right,” he declared and, grabbing Sharon by the hem of her jumper, dragged her towards a nearby stone wall.
“Hey, you can’t just—” she began. But, without slowing down for the wall’s thickness, Sammy walked straight on through, pulling Sharon after him.