Lunch was pizza.
A whole pizza, with pepperoni and extra tabasco sauce.
Sharon ate it in her dressing gown and rabbit slippers, and sat by her computer typing with one hand, feeding herself with the other. The view outside her small window seemed bright and still and friendly. There was a sense in the air of a different world. That strange, unknown world of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. when during daylight hours people moved around the city freely, not trapped in an office or a glass cage. A curious time, which belonged to pensioners going to the butcher, to nannies taking their charges to the park in the holidays, to students wandering between classes, and that strange social stratum known as the self-employed, who felt no need to set their alarms or count the seconds down to the sweaty surge of rush hour, so long as the work was done someday, somehow, somewhere. Sharon wanted to giggle, and the urge to go and do her weekly shopping nearly compelled her out of the house, just to see what the market was like in the middle of a weekday, without men in suits coming back from work or parents with yowling children. She tried to imagine a world without weekend queues and not having to run for the bus. The wrath of Mike Pentlace seemed tiny, the coffee shop far off. She was a shaman and could walk through walls and, dammit, the art of whisking soya milk to a fine froth would have to wait. There was a city to save!
A city to save.
In the excitement, she’d almost forgotten.
How did you go about saving a city?
She googled it.
It seemed as good a place to start as any.
Recycle more, build less, bicycle more, drive less, build skyscrapers, build terraces, preserve historical housing, demolish unused stock, more parks, fewer car parks, more car parks, fewer bins–the answers seemed numerous and diverse, and not one of them seemed to deal with what she had in mind.
Her good humour was deteriorating, as she logged into Weird Shit Keeps Happening to Me, and posted on the wall.
Sharon Li: Hey guys, does anyone know anything about the spirits of the city all disappearing or nothing? Drop me a line if you’ve got any ideas!
Well, it was progress of a sort.
She drummed her fingers and waited for a reply.
None came.
It seemed surprising that Sammy the Elbow hadn’t recommended any proactive policy in her quest to save the city–whatever it was that it needed saving from. He hadn’t even suggested she try meditation, which was surely a likely thing for someone supposedly in touch with the spirits.
Sharon sat on her bed and tried to adopt the lotus position.
She could get one foot on top of her thigh, but not the other. She swapped legs and, sure enough, the previously recalcitrant foot rested easily in place, while her other leg got stuck in a frustratingly un-karmic pose. She tried breathing slowly through her nose and on the fourth breath got bored.
She went back to the computer and googled spirit.
Frustratingly, her first few hits seemed to relate to computer software and airlines, and it was a while before pictures of swirling lights, innocent fairies and, to her slight confusion, galloping horses began to populate her screen.
The Internet, she concluded, wasn’t getting her anywhere.
This revelation took a little processing since, in nearly all of her education, she’d been reliant on it to get even a C grade. To be so badly let down at the last would, she concluded, be one of the hardest parts of becoming a shaman.
She tried to think about becoming a shaman, and her mind drew a blank. Don’t go there, it proclaimed. Be smart.
She thought about the empty building in Holborn where Sammy had held forth.
She thought about a man called the Midnight Mayor who’d stood with his back to the light in an empty place in Clerkenwell and murmured, “Don’t look back. Run.”
She thought about the silence, the too-thick silence that had set her teeth on edge. A thought drifted in from the outer edges of her awareness, raised one hand and politely asked if it could get a word in edgeways.
It was a good thought.
It involved more walking.
Sharon reached for her shoes.