The umbrella conquered, she glowers up at the grumbling sky, and leaves Rallhurst Court for ever.
The same London sky, grey with a touch of orange from the street lights, unburdens itself of sheets of blinding rain as Joe Spork hurries through the streets of Soho. He has given up on the telephone and decided to make his representations to Billy Friend in person. Since he is here, and since he is very quickly getting soaked through, he is also visiting a stringy, irritating man called Fisher, a former burglar, present fence, and a full-time member of the Mathew Spork nostalgia club. Fisher, not even a member of Mathew’s outer circle, is one of the few people he can turn to on the subject of the unlawful and strange without incurring painful social obligations. Even so, Joe is troubled by a powerful sense of self-inflicted injury, and his grandfather’s voice, now doleful, is telling him I told you so. He hunches his shoulders and buries his chin in the collar of his coat: a big man trying to become a turtle.
A bus—last of the much-despised bendy variety, as doomed as the clockwork business and equally clever and impractical—sprays him with road water and he yells and waves furiously, then catches his reflection in a shop window and wonders, not for the first time of recent days, who this person is who has taken up residence in what ought to be his life.
Fisher’s shop is a merry little place with wind chimes and an aura of shabby hippy mercantilism, squeezed between a tailor and a mysterious bead-curtained place which conducts business entirely in Hungarian. Fisher has a lot of space because his family have lived here since before it was expensive. Customers can sit in an enclosed courtyard for a hookah and a cup of Turkish coffee. Fisher makes it himself, boiling the coffee and the sugar with his secret ingredient, which he allows particularly favoured customers—which is all of them—to learn, and which varies depending on what he’s got in the fridge. Joe has known it to be lemon peel, cocoa powder, pepper, paprika, and on one occasion even a half-spoonful of fish soup. Fisher claims that each of these represents a different member of his Turkish family on his mother’s side, but since his mother was and is from Billingsgate it probably doesn’t matter that this is a lie: no wrathful Stambul cousin is going to show up and demand to know what the Hell crap he is putting in that perfectly good coffee, to the ruination of their shared good name.
“W-hoo is a-that?” Fisher cries out as the chimes go, all Turkic gravitas, but when he pokes his weasel head around the door frame from the back, his face breaks into a wide smile. “It’s Joe! Big Joe! King of the Clockmen! The man in person and himself! ’Ullo, Maestro, what can I do you for?”
“I’m out of the loop, Fisher—” And then, holding up a forestalling finger, because Fisher’s mouth opens to issue an enthusiast’s reproach, “Yes, I know, that’s what I wanted. But now I’ve got a question and there’s only one place I can go, isn’t there? Because you know everything.”
“I do. It’s true,” Fisher preens. And in terms of the life of London’s post-legals, he really does.
“I had a visit,” Joe says, “from two men from a museum which doesn’t exist. One fat, the other thin. Cultured. My heart said police. Titwhistle and Cummerbund.”
Fisher shakes his head. “Nowt.”
“Nothing?”
“Never heard of ’em, never bribed ’em, never even forgotten ’em. Sorry.”
“What about witches?”
“Married one.”
“Monks, then. All in black and—” But Fisher is on his feet and locking the door, closing the shop, and in his eyes is a feverish alarm Joe has never seen before, didn’t think existed in Fisher, who is always chirpy or pompous by turns, and never, ever ruffled.
“Jesus!” Fisher says. “Those fuckers! Brother Sheamus and his bloody ghosts! Christ on a bike, boy! They’re not here, are they?”
“No, of course not.”
“But you’ve seen them? They came to you?”
“Yes, they—”
“Fuck, Joe, but you put a strain on friendship, you do—what do they want?”
“A book.”
“A book? A book? Fucking give it to them, you daft streak of piss! Give it to them and thank them for being so kind as to take it off your hands rather than their preferred option which would be taking your fucking hands off, and then fucking run away and get a proper job in a far-off land. All right? Fuck! And fuck off, as well!”
“Who are they?”
“The sodding Recorded Man, is who they are,” Fisher snarls.
Joe stares. “The what?”
“You don’t remember? I told you when you were a nipper, your mother was so angry she nearly popped.”
Indeed he does remember; it had given him nightmares for weeks. A London ghost story, whispered by the children of the Night Market.
Picture a man, the tale went, in a bed of silk sheets. And picture all around him wires and cameras and men taking notes. Everything about him is written down. They are making a record of him: his breaths, his words, his pulse, his diet, his scent, his chemistry—even the fluctuations of electricity in his skin. As he grows weaker—for he is very old now, and injured, and sick—they press filaments of metal through holes in his skull and into the fabric of the brain itself, and record the chasing flashes of thoughts running from fold to fold of the grey stuff inside his head.
And through all this, he is conscious, and aware. Is he a prisoner? A millionaire? Does he feel pain or horror at his own predicament? Does he have any idea why this is happening? It’s so bizarre. And yet somewhere, somewhere, it is real, and he is lying there. Perhaps, when he is gone, they will need someone else. Perhaps they will need you.
Joe left the lights on for nine days the first time he heard it, and when he finally slept each night, he saw only the eyes of the Recorded Man, glaring at him from his prison of wires. Perhaps they will need you.
Fisher nods jerkily, still angry and afraid. “Right, so Sheamus’s lot are the original. They’re all about machinery and they sit and watch recordings of the bloke who founded their outfit. It’s what they have instead of church. Revered relics of every thought he ever had, or something. I don’t know because I don’t ask because I don’t want to end up in a fucking jar! It’s all a bit Dear Leader, but one way and another it makes them scary as typhus, all right? They’re a power in the world.”
“Since when?”
“Since for ever. Your dad had a run-in with them way back. He got everyone together and showed them the exit. Even then it was touch and go.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, you were little. I was a tiddler, too, but, you know…” Fisher contrives to make it sound as if this means that Mathew considered him Joe’s elder brother, the crook he never had.
“And now?”
“Now it’s different, isn’t it? There’s no one like Mathew, but there’s a lot more coppers.”
“So they’re careful.”
Fisher shrugs yes. “But they don’t ask nicely and they don’t ask twice. Cold and surgical, and not like an aspirin and a lie down, like ice in the bathtub and selling your kidneys for cash. They’ve got a hospital somewhere, or a hospice. It’s a bloody pit. People go in, they don’t come out.”
“Who are they? Where do they come from?”
“For all I know they’re God’s own thugs, straight from the Holy City. I met one once, he come in a place I was thinking of renting, told me to piss off. And do you know what else he said? He said: If I have the mind of Napoleon and the body of Wellington, who am I? Mad as a fucking box of frogs.”