She stood in a fake rock garden as, all around her, the shadows of past and future swung through the empty air, and exclaimed, “You’re my what?”
Dez Cliff Junior, resplendent in the finest garb forty-five pounds could buy, flashed another brilliant smile. “You, Sharon Li, are the lucky winner of today’s prize draw for not just any ordinary spirit guide, not just some knock-off ghostly replacement, but me! Your very own manifestation of the subconscious, guardian angel ghost of everything you’ve always known but never been able to handle! So tell me, Sharon…” an oversized red microphone appeared out of nowhere in Dez’s hand and was thrust towards Sharon’s face “… how are you feeling about becoming a fully fledged shaman?”
She stared from the microphone to Dez, and back to the microphone. “What?”
“Come on, Sharon,” urged Dez, “for all the viewers at home.”
“What viewers at home?”
“It’s a phrase.”
“No, but really, what viewers at home?”
A flicker of frustration passed over Dez’s face. “Just say something profound, okay; we’ll edit it at Judgement Day.”
“Who the fuck are you again?”
The microphone vanished from whence it had come and Dez stuck his hands on his hips like someone, Sharon couldn’t help feeling, she kept meeting in the mirror. “Now look,” he exclaimed, “I didn’t ask to be manifested like this; it’s your fault for watching too much daytime TV. But I’m here now, and you summoned me, so why don’t you just—”
“I summoned you?”
“I merely follow viewer demand!” he protested.
“I didn’t summon you.”
“Uh–sorry, but you did. You thought, ‘I feel crap and I need direction,’ and what do you know, you flick over to spirit guide Channel 101 and here I am, so you really should start playing ball.” The microphone reappeared and, with a more optimistic expression, Dez thrust it once again at Sharon. “So,” he suggested, “how’s saving the city going?”
“Shouldn’t you be a rabbit?” Sharon’s disappointed voice dripped scepticism.
“Why should I be a rabbit?”
“Sammy said—”
“You think your brain would manufacture rabbits as a spirit guide?”
“Okay, okay,” she conceded. “So maybe not a rabbit, but how about something else? Something… I don’t know, spiritual or something? Like maybe a giant deer or unicorn? Why do I have to get a cheap chat show host?”
“Cheap!” fumed Dez. “Cheap! Do I look cheap to you? Do you think this skin just happens? Do you think my hair is spray-on? I’ve had to fight long and hard to get where I am in this industry, and you know how I’ve succeeded where others failed? I’ll tell you! It’s my charming smile–” a charming smile was duly rendered “–and the willingness to crush the testicles of my enemies in my fists like garlic in a fucking press!”
Sharon realised her mouth was hanging open. “Okay then,” she mumbled. “I guess this is a revelation into my psyche which I should be grateful for.”
Dez still stood poised, microphone thrust towards her, waiting for the quote of the day. She turned away from his gleaming features and forced herself to look at her surroundings.
Still here, still Canary Wharf, but not Canary Wharf. The real world was a mirage: the people moving through it were shadows, and each shadow left an ever thinner echo of itself trailing in the air, and each echo was slightly distorted: here a shadow that wept, here a shadow that laughed. To look too long at anything was to see straight through it, around it: the sculpted rocks of the garden grew liquid and unstable as they were poured into their mould; the water surged back and forth like blood through a living body as an underground pump laboured to keep its silver surface trickling; the air from the vents politely tucked away in the bushes was soot-black and smelt of the tunnels. And look harder, deeper, longer, and there was still more to see, an infinity of layers peeling back before her eyes, if she only dared to stare, and…
And a white suit interposed itself, jolting her with its brightness against that shadow-tangled world.
“Uh, so, this is me putting myself between you and the camera, which I know is highly unprofessional,” exclaimed Dez. “But as your spirit guide it’s my job to stop you making a fool of yourself on the silver screen and getting lost in the oneness of the universe. Now…” He took a step back, opening his arms wide to the world. “Remember at all times this great truth! You are beautiful! You are wonderful! You have a secret! The secret is—”
“How the hell do you know that?” snapped Sharon.
“I am you!”
“I’m nothing like you! I’ve got bloody fashion sense, for a start.”
“I am your subconscious given manifest form by your being at one with creation!”
“I am not at fucking one with fucking creation!”
“Sharon,” chided Dez, “we are not looking for a 10 p.m. broadcast slot here. Of course you’re at one with creation; you’re just not handling it very well. But that’s all right, because…” He swelled again with pride and vocal projection and claimed, “Here, tonight, I am going to take you on a journey of discovery, joy, tragedy, jubilation—”
“Tragedy?”
“Well, maybe not tragedy; not on purpose.”
“What are you doing here?”
Dez folded his arms. “I’m here to encourage, to provoke, to inspire—”
“Cut the crap, what are you doing here?”
“You’ve got to go back into Burns and Stoke.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why–how should I know? I’m just a psychological manifestation of your own subconscious!” wailed Dez. “You know you have to go back in there, so you’re telling yourself to do it the only way you know.”
“I don’t need some… some… some orange dude to tell me what to do!”
Dez raised his eyebrows and said nothing.
“Fine,” she said. “I get that you’re only a manifestation of my subconscious mind, which, by the way, sucks, because I think spirit guides really ought to be bigger on the wonders of creation, but okay. So I totally get that you’re only telling me something I already know, and in that sense I guess I really should listen to you because, in my experience, my instincts are usually right and thinking about things too hard is usually wrong, but none of this changes the fact that I’ve had a really bad couple of days and getting cheap advice from an over-tanned corner of my inner psyche is totally uncalled for. So you can just… just puff off or whatever it is spirit guides do.”
“Back after this commercial break!” sang out Dez, and, indeed, with the slightest crackle of static, he vanished.
Sharon turned and marched straight back towards Burns and Stoke, her face scrunched up in wilful determination. She walked straight through the wall this time, not bothering to slow down for that slight pressure of the world parting around her, and all eyes kept impossibly, but firmly, turned away.
The tiles beneath her feet had been scrubbed to the point where they were almost frictionless; women in high-heeled shoes strode across them, but gingerly. Security men in navy-blue trousers and smart ties scrutinised anyone whose suit was less than 100 per cent silk with a professional eye grown used to a certain standard. Sharon considered the lifts, then rejected them. To take the lift was to stand still and, though she’d seen Sammy do it, she wasn’t sure she herself could stop moving and remain unseen. Instead she passed straight through the glass barriers between her and the nearest emergency stairs and headed up.
Burns and Stoke was on the eleventh floor.
By the sixth she was gasping for breath.
At the ninth floor she looked for the nearest CCTV camera, then paused underneath, out of its line of sight, to bend over and catch a little air. It wasn’t, she reflected, that she was unfit. It was merely that her fitness didn’t extend all the way to her knees. Several self-help books had suggested that a healthy body led to a healthy mind, but as none of them had offered any advice on what to do if both mind and body kept on slipping into the nether reaches of perceived reality, she’d taken any recommendation towards thirty minutes a day of “muscle training” with a heavy pinch of salt. After all, what did these people really know?
She thought:
this is so stupid this is so stupid this is so so stupid why the hell would anyone do this so stupid
And what the hell kind of stupid name was Dez? Why couldn’t her spirit guide wear long flowing robes and say things like “Ah, though confused you are, yet comfort you will find” or other more… spirity things? She’d been exposed for less than two days to the idea of being a shaman and already she was unimpressed.
As if to add to the moment, her phone rang in her pocket. She grabbed it faster than she had ever moved in her life and slammed it against her ear, not pausing to check the number.
“Hello?” she whispered.
“Hello?” roared a voice back. “Hello, are you there?”
She flinched, certain that the CCTV camera would perceive the vibration in the air of the voice on the other end of the line. “Who is this?” she murmured.
“Hello? Hello?!”
“Hi?” she queried, a little louder.
“Oh, you are there,” exclaimed the voice. Then, suspicious, “Why are you whispering?”
“I’m uh… in a library.”
If the caller believed her, he clearly didn’t care. “Okay, yeah, so, basically I’m wondering if you, like, know a late-night solicitor or something?”
“What?”
“A late-night solicitor? Like, a twenty-four-hour Citizens Advice Bureau?”
“Who is this?” demanded Sharon, instinctively straightening up.
“It’s Kevin,” explained the caller, countering her with his own, less certain indignation. “Remember, like, Magicals Anonymous?”
A mental picture. A pasty-faced vampire with complex dietary requirements. Sharon pinched the skin between her eyebrows, trying to block one pain with another. “Kevin, yes, sure. Hi. I don’t remember giving you this number…”
“Uh… Facebook, duh?”
Oh yes. Some part of Sharon’s mind, the part that still knew that it knew everything there was to know and, more importantly, that everything was out to get it, made a note to start hiding personal details.
If Kevin had had any idea of feasting on shaman blood, at the moment he was clearly too indignant to consider it. “So listen, I went to see my dentist and he was all like ‘Man, I can’t be treating you’ and I was all like ‘Why the fuck not?’ and he was like ‘Honestly, you scare the shit out of me’ and I’m like ‘That’s discrimination’ and he’s like ‘Dude, I’m scared you’re going to drink my blood’ and I’m like ‘Darling, I’ve seen what you eat for lunch and I’m telling you, I wouldn’t drink your blood if it was the last pint on the planet’ and he was—”
“You want to sue your dentist?” whimpered Sharon.
“Totally!”
“You don’t think that might be a little… aggressive?”
“I’m being discriminated against!”
“On the grounds of your fangs.”
“Fangs is such a judgemental word—”
“I’m just saying—”
“Until attitudes in this country change,” Kevin barked, “there can be no social progress!”
“And you’re calling me because…?”
“You’re the shaman, right? Like, the one in charge?”
“Okay, so now I think that sounds like discrimination too. Since when did ‘shaman’ mean ‘one in charge’?”
“Uh, so,” she could almost hear Kevin’s wrists flick with each word, “only like, for ever.”
A door opened somewhere beneath her; there were voices on the stairs. “Look, Kevin,” she said, scurrying upwards, the air twisting around her as again she began to fade from sight, “I like, get the community support thing here and I’m really sorry you had a problem with your dentist and I’m sure we can work something out and that Magicals Anonymous is completely behind you on this one but I’ve got this really important thing I need to do now.”
“Hey, like, you okay? You sound kind of… I dunno… breathy.”
“How about I call you back?”
“Hey, I don’t wanna kick up a fuss, but I’m like ‘What the fuck?’ with this guy and teeth are really important so—”
“Bye!” she sang out, flicking her phone off and rounding the corner onto the tenth floor.
At the eleventh she paused, hauled in a breath and glanced down the staircase. Below–not very far–a triad of men and one woman were jogging up and down the stairs. She managed to stop her mouth drooping open. Bloody bankers taking their physical fitness so bloody seriously they were running up and down the stairs… because they could. Some things, she decided, couldn’t be learned from self-help books.
She tried the door. It was locked, so she walked straight on through.
The office was beautiful and wrong.
It was long and narrow, butted up against a great glass window overlooking a foyer full of more glass and polished tiles, and a bank of lifts with panels that lit up to let you know you’d arrived. Someone had conducted a study and decided that the best way to ensure integration between staff and senior management was to arrange long ranks of desks at which, in posture-fixing chairs, bosses and staff could sit pressed forward against their screens, each cut off by nothing from nobody, accessible, observable, their every deed remarked on by passers-by. No space was given over on these pristine desks for the usual distracting detritus of office life–gone were pictures of loved ones, vanished were panels on which to stick magnetic images of Dr Who or the Pink Panther. Post-it notes were for remembering vital thoughts, not sticking on the backs of workmates; computers were for emailing, not playing pinball; and if you felt the need to get up and move, there were designated areas furnished with lime-green sofas for you to perch on, each sofa no wider than a woman’s shin and constructed to ensure maximum discomfort within a minimum time. Meetings happened while walking; coffee was served only in the community area, from the sleek espresso machine behind the bowls of fruit. The fruit was provided by the staff of each department, and while it wasn’t obligatory to meet a quota, nor was it playing ball if you didn’t achieve your weekly delivery of nectarines for the good of the company. The infrastructure of the office operated discreetly behind unmarked doors, and the single message board maintained for this purpose carried only two notices: an invitation to attend team Pilates at 7 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a request to all staff to please observe the new recycling policy.
Sharon gave up counting the people when she got to sixty. It was hard to do anyway, given the near-uniform of tie and suit. Even the women wore the same shades of black and grey, the same shoes, the same sheer tights; and all sat hunched at their desks with the same expression of determination. Numbers rolled down the screens, coded in red or green. The youngest employees toiled across the office pulling trolleys loaded with paper; the eldest leaned back in their chairs, hands behind their heads and phones tucked beneath their chins, and talked.
It was hard to tell what the company did, much less why it should own so many properties across the city from which the very soul had been plucked. Worse, as Sharon moved through the office, whenever she slowed down to examine someone closely, the world began to shift back out of the shadows in which she lurked. If she stood still she could feel the veil that hid her from sight begin to tear. Lingering to peer past one man at his flat-screen computer, she almost grew visible again, and a woman nearby looked up with a cry of “Oh, are you…” before Sharon darted back into the refuge of invisibility. As she made her way through the shadows that had to serve her for privacy, she looked in vain for anything out of the ordinary, the shimmers of illusion which had shrouded members of Magicals Anonymous or the smell of magic trailing after them.
Not only did she have to keep moving; it was harder here. The walk of the city streets no longer protected her, so that she had to adjust her pace, perfectly pitched between urgent stride and easy shuffle, at the exact speed that matched with invisibility within these walls. Sammy hadn’t warned her about this, hadn’t mentioned the changing nature of invisibility as her environment changed, and she cursed under her breath as she struggled to stay unperceived.
“And, back from our commercial break, we ask–what tips are there on staying invisible?”
“Shut up,” she growled as the half-shadow of Dez the spirit guide shimmered into existence beside her.
“If only I wasn’t a manifestation of your subconscious mind, I would be deeply insulted. As it is, this documentary programme only knows as much as you do, so however you look at it, you’re in trouble!” sang out Dez before vanishing once more.
Sharon looked around as a shaman looked and saw…
… nothing of much interest to anyone.
She drifted on through a meeting, where one man slammed his fist onto the table and proclaimed, “I’m not talking about the fucking Italians, screw the fucking Italians, I’m talking about the Hungarian bonds!”
The assembled table cringed from their boss’s wrath. Papers were shuffled–another reason, Sharon noted, for the documents lying all around–it just wasn’t as easy to doodle on a laptop as it was with pen and paper. Even here, it seemed, where productivity was king, the employees found a few small ways to rebel against their working life. She passed through into another meeting room.
“Uh, yeah, so the exposure is seventeen for now, but there’s another two on the table once we get the figures through…”
These people talked, Sharon realised, almost entirely in numbers and acronyms. Fifteen–it took her a while to mentally add the million to the number in question–was being transferred via API through to the PCLL account while the HKL report was going to be converted into a LLI for application to another thirty-two on the move to MNB. She stared hard at the purveyors of this mystical information, and there it was, the truth of the thing, the shadow that lay at their backs and whispered of
bastard’s bonus was fucking bigger than mine fucking arsehole how dare he look at me like that, like he’s laughing fucking bastard
they mustn’t know what I did
will this day never end?
waiting for me she’s waiting for me so sweet…
Jesus, did he just ask me something? Was that something he asked me was that a question I wasn’t listening I was…
“Uh, yeah, I can do that, Tim.”
just play ball, play ball and in four years you’ll have enough to get out four years at full pay then into the account interest 12.1 per cent no tax that’s enough that’s enough don’t need more really do I? Do I need more no of course I don’t… unless I do…
Sharon’s nose wrinkled in displeasure as the magical shadows each danced behind their master’s back. She turned and looked directly at a wizard.
Of course he was a wizard.
She knew this, even though she’d never actually met any wizards, unless you counted Mr Roding the necromancer, but then, who did? No, this man was a wizard, she concluded, because no one walked around with two faces. There was his real face, a perfectly well made thing with a round, curving chin that showed no sign of bone, and slightly deep-set eyes; and there was the artificial face, crafted from whispers and power, stitched into his skin with little tendrils of power. The artificial face, the one the world could see, was beautiful. Unearthly, intimidating, unnaturally beautiful.
There was a word Mr Roding had used for that too–glamour. The wizard wore a glamour, and for a moment Sharon’s fear was subdued beneath the question of what the self-help books would have to say about that. Was it proactive (good) or self-deceiving (bad)? Was it a tool for surviving the hurly-burly of modern life (respectable) or an exercise in shaping yourself to society’s prejudices (unforgivable, the books exclaimed–be yourself)? Perhaps it was all of them at once. Perhaps that was the problem.
She stared at the wizard, and he stared straight back, or rather through her, slamming his fists on the table and proclaiming, “When you lads have finished playing with your dicks, come and do some real work with the big boys, yeah?”
Sharon’s dismay deepened. The others laughed, as if something funny had been said, and she watched his artificial face flicker with the sound of the laughter, as if feeding on its environment, taking strength. His real face, beneath the glamour, was set hard, contemptuous of those who admired his so-called wit. It occurred to her that she need only reach out and tug, and the true him would be revealed.
Then he turned and marched into the main office, barely acknowledging the others behind him, like a departing royal personage. He waved his hand at a lock on an electric door, which clicked open, and stepped through. Sharon slipped through after him, feeling something tug at her as she moved through the door, a weight and a pressure that she hadn’t sensed elsewhere in the building. The office beyond was more of the same–uncomfortable furniture, beautifully displayed; desks with no privacy; people staring at screens; but this time there was a smell on the air, and it smelt of magic. She looked and…
There, in that woman’s tattoo just visible above the line of her shirt, a vein had been drawn above her own; and as the blood flowed beneath her skin, so the tattoo itself pulsed with life and…
There a man stretched his fingers, and as they clicked like castanets thin grey fur tried to push its way out through the wrinkles in the joints, before he frowned and wrung his hands and the greyness retreated.
Sharon passed through the office, now fearing all the more that someone might look up and see her. She came to a stretch of wall on which a notice proclaimed, ACQUISITIONS, and, oh yes but at last, she recognised the pictures stuck to the whiteboard with little magnetic tabs. Here were the properties bought up by Burns and Stoke which, oddly enough, no one else seemed able to buy or sell. The places where even their history had gone quiet.
Then she heard someone say “… because he’s dead!” and things got more interesting.