They are the Friendlies.
Technically, they are the Association of Friendly Members and Concerned Interests but, since none of their members really remember that and “afmaci” sounds like a dangerous Italian drink, they are, by unspoken consent, the Friendlies.
They are the union of late-night workers, of lonely beggars and the widows who sit alone looking out of darkened windows into the lost hours of the night. Their members are the cleaners who leave work at 5 a.m., the men with dirty faces slipping through the midnight tunnels beneath the city streets when the trains have stopped. Night bus drivers and street cleaners whose beat is five square miles of untended turf where the rubbish collects faster than they can clear it; security men who sit in cabins by closed gates watching TV that is meant only for gamblers and the lonely.
The Friendlies is where the lonely may be lonely together and, perhaps more importantly, where they may be told that for all the streets may be empty and the skies may be dark, no one who walks by themself in the dead of night is truly alone.
They have many shrines around the city. Usually these are discreet things at the back of community halls or tokens tied to park railings. A message scratched into the bark of a plane tree; the bicycle wheel left chained to a fence, though all other parts have been removed; the lifeless string of fairy lights that hang from a lamp post, though no one can quite work out why. But they only have one temple and it is…
“Here?” exclaimed Sharon, as they looked up at the sign Sellotaped to the door. “What kind of lame crappy temple is this?”
The sign taped to the glass front read, Association of Friendlies–no flyers please.
A much larger sign remained, faded and cracked, on the hoarding overhead. Its original orange letters had long since been pulled off, with only their pale outline still visible on a black background. This read, EDNA’S TANNING AND BEAUTY SALON.
“How about pinnacles?” demanded Sharon. “How about red carpets, the smell of incense, chanting and all that? I’ve only been doing this magic thing for a while, but no one has chanted at me once! What the hell is that about?”
Rhys hoped his shrug had a degree of consolation about it.
Sharon scowled. She glared around the street they’d come to and her scowl deepened. Since leaving Walthamstow they’d gone from full daylight to darkness, but then, in urban terms, they’d gone from the end of the earth in one direction to the end of the earth in the other.
“Tooting,” she growled. “What kind of stupid religion builds its temple in Tooting?”
“There’s a Hindu mandir in Neasden,” offered Rhys.
“Yeah, but there’s an Ikea near Neasden!”
“Is there a connection between Brahma and Ikea?”
“What I’m saying,” grumbled Sharon, “is you can sort of get Neasden. It’s a dump, stuck between more dumps on the end of a dumpy line which people only use to go from London Bridge to the Dome anyway, but! Even if there’s nothing else about Neasden, at least you know that there you can always find a flat-pack table and an air cooler in the shape of a sunflower. But…” her face fell further yet as she surveyed the entrance to the temple “… Tooting?”
Rhys found he had no comfort to offer. Sharon rolled her eyes, strode forward and knocked on the door, grumbling under her breath, “Tanning salon my arse.”
Whatever the Friendlies had done to Edna’s Tanning and Beauty Salon, it wasn’t for public display. Thick brown blinds hung in the former shop window and, as they waited, a single weak bulb came on over the door.
A woman opened the door. She was… Sharon and Rhys each took a moment to consider exactly what she was. She wore purple. Back in her early fifties this woman had considered her approaching old age, read up the available literature, studied peers and older colleagues, and resolved that not only would she not take being pensioned lying down, she wasn’t going to take it at all. A giant purple cardigan sank almost to her knees; her legs were encased in huge pale blue trousers like a pair of spinnakers; a giant mess of gold and bead necklaces hung intertwined down her chest, while her silver-white hair had been crafted into a balloon style inviting the eye to soar upwards. Her throat was framed by a pair of dewlaps, and her earlobes, aided over time by the clunky gold and shell jewellery pricked into them, had grown so low they nearly flapped against her jaw. Above a superb set of false teeth, a radiant smile fixed itself on Sharon like a searchlight at a prison camp. She was…
“Sorry, sweetie, we’re closed.”
Magnificent?
Was that the word?
Whatever she was, she began at once to close the door. Sharon opened her mouth to say, “Oh no, but wait there’s a—” and the door thudded shut as the woman retreated into the gloom beyond. Behind her the light went off.
Sharon looked at Rhys, who shrugged. Behind them traffic crawled through the blinking traffic lights of Tooting, little farting cars seeking a better place in the narrow backstreets.
“Rhys,” she said, then paused, groping for the right words. “I’m just wondering–and I’d like you to be kind of honest on this one, because it’s gonna be important–do I look… spiritual to you?”
“Spiritual?”
“Do I look…” she ventured, “sagely? When you see me, do you think ‘There is a woman replete with the mystic wisdom of the ages’ and stuff? Do you get a mental picture of ancestors who did drumming, and men who went ‘Aaaah’ whenever asked a question, and not in a sore-throat way? Do I give off… an aura of enlightenment?”
“Um.” Rhys had meant to say this as the opening of something good. Somehow, the rest of the sentence didn’t follow.
Sharon sighed. “No,” she murmured, deflating. “Didn’t think so.”
“Maybe we should try later?”
“I am not trekking all the way to Tooting, to fucking Tooting, to try again later! Do I look like I’m made of Travelcard? Besides!” An angry flap of her arms demonstrated just how besides this besides would be. “Fate of the city, remember? Come on.”
Before Rhys could protest that, actually, he wasn’t a walking-through-walls kinda guy, Sharon grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him after her.
There was a moment of doubt, a sensation of being sucked on like the human equivalent of a boiled sweet, and when Rhys opened his eyes, he and Sharon stood in the one-time Edna’s Tanning Salon, with the woman in purple turning to face them with an expression of horror and dismay.
“How did you…?”
“It’s okay, we’re here to save the city. Nobody panic!” replied Sharon. “You’re… saving the city?”
Sharon hesitated for no more than a second, then proclaimed, “Yep! That’s me, totally on it, saving the city. Me, a goblin, a necromancer and a bloke called Rhys.”
“Hello,” offered Rhys.
“You just walked through my wall!” exclaimed the woman. Not in anger, but in a tone of social embarrassment, as if years of good breeding and experience hadn’t quite informed her of an appropriate response.
“I do that,” explained Sharon. “I was worried about it for a while–I really thought there’d be implications. I mean, not just with my health, but maybe with God and Satan and that, because, actually, how’s a girl to know? But everyone seems to say it’s okay and I’m thinking I should just go with it.”
“Well, dear,” exclaimed the white-haired woman, “that’s all very well, but we really are closed.”
Sharon looked around the room. All apparatus from its previous, commercial life had been removed save for two reclining chairs and a wall of grubby mirrors. The floor had been cleared and re-covered with dirty mattresses, battered cushions and stained pillows. Bits of cardboard were lined up in what might have been pews to face a table converted to what could only be an altar.
It wasn’t just the £1.99 aromatic candles lining the table’s back edge, nor the bunting of cheap plastic flowers Sellotaped around its top. It wasn’t only the neatness of the offerings assembled on its surface, laid out as votives to some god, nor yet the locked donations box tucked away below. All of these were suggestive of themselves. But what clinched it was the sign stuck up with Blu-tack on the wall beyond. In blue felt-tip pen someone had attempted to draw an open hand reaching out to an eager congregation. With the same instrument they had also inscribed the words She Is With You.
It was an altar, inescapable and true, an altar in the shop floor of a Tanning Salon in Tooting.
With the expression of the tactful atheist entering a hushed church, Sharon examined the offerings. None seemed to be dripping blood or glinting with gold, which gave some reassurance. Indeed, however tidily they’d been presented, this collection, laid out for the unknown She of the altar, was more an assemblage of knick-knacks and hand-me-down souvenirs, odd bits of scrap and strange story-weighed mementos of trivial events. There was a plastic sandwich wrapping on which someone had painstakingly written, 3.20 a.m. with thanks, a clean Thermos flask missing its screw-in seal, a pair of old shoes worn through at the toes, an orange fluorescent jacket carefully folded, a navy-blue flat cap with its faded badge buffed up as bright as the metal could go, a megaphone with a hole where the batteries should have been, an old tin whistle and a meticulously stacked collection of train tickets, assembled over the years and held together with a rubber band.
Displayed on this crooked table, they looked more like rejects from a car boot sale than objects of worship, yet the Mona Lisa could not have received more care and attention.
“Can a temple close?” Sharon ventured.
“St Paul’s Cathedral closes,” murmured Rhys.
“Shut up, Rhys.”
“I’m afraid business hours are between 11 p.m. and 5.30 a.m. So if you don’t mind…”
“Business? I thought you were like… religious and that.”
“Religious? Good grief no!” exclaimed the woman. “We’re more of… of a mutual appreciation society, you might say. We appreciate the world around us, the hidden world around us, if you like: the world of the spirits that watch over us in the night. It’s not worship at all–that would be so crude. It’s more… a fan club. A fan club for the spiritually appreciative!”
“You’re Greydawn’s fan club?”
A flicker passed over the woman’s face and Sharon saw it: the shadow that twisted at her back. Sharon shared the clenching in her stomach and knew, without even needing to sense it as a shaman, that the woman was afraid.
Then, louder and brighter than she needed to be, “Well, yes, of course, Greydawn! Our Lady of 4 a.m. is a generous and kind spirit, a protector of the night–vital, in fact, for the well-being of the city! Naturally we like to express our appreciation to her.”
“Excuse me?” Rhys had one hand raised in polite enquiry. “There’s no, uh… human sacrifice in your appreciation, is there? Only I feel I ought to ask, see, because sometimes people say ‘appreciation’ and it means all sorts of sticky practices.”
“Good grief, no! Why on earth would we?”
“How about initiation rituals involving two long sticks and an ice bucket?”
“Sweetie, at my age?”
“Orgies?” he asked with the tiniest glimmer of hope.
“Do you know what that would do for our relationship with the local council?”
“No,” replied Rhys earnestly. “Would it be good?”
“You have to fill out enough risk assessments just to hold a prayer meeting, let alone budget for condoms.”
“Do you?”
“Now look,” barked the woman, and it was an imperious bark when she needed it, “it’s very nice of you to drop by and I do wish you good luck in your future endeavours to save the city and all of that business, but really, I have a lot of things to get on with.”
“Yeah, but,” Sharon shifted uneasily before coming out with it, “Greydawn is, like, missing, yeah?”
A movement over the woman’s face. Not recognition, but perhaps a well-practised substitute.
“Oh, yeah,” confirmed Sharon. “She’s missing. And there’s spirits vanishing from the walls of the buildings and the stones of the street. And you–your name is Edna Long and you used to be a hairdresser here, and I know that because I can hear the snipping of the scissors and, though you can’t see it, your floor is covered in a carpet of human hair. But then, but then…” Sharon grimaced in concentration “… you were going home late one night and you heard these footsteps behind you and there were two men and you thought, ‘They’re gonna mug me, they’re going to rough me up,’ but you didn’t dare run because that’d make them run and they’d outrun you and then…” a certain thinness was apparent around Sharon’s hands and face, a certain fading-into-nothing as she spoke “… and then you felt something move in the air beside you, a hand slipped into yours, though there was no one there, and a voice whispered, Do not be afraid, and when you looked back, the muggers had turned away.”
She paused for breath, an action that pushed her back into three-dimensional full colour. Swaying a little with the effort of inhalation, she grinned at the astonished woman. “So, basically, what I’m trying to say here is that you totally need a shaman.”