Conjuror Read online

  A second officer was approaching the first, coffee in his hand.

  ‘What the hell took you so long? Didn’t you hear me whistle?’

  ‘Sorry, Lakshmi, not a peep. What’s up?’

  ‘Spotted a guy climbing out on to the roof up there. Could be one of the jewel thieves mentioned at watch this morning.’

  Exploiting the distraction, Rémy turned back the way he’d just come, and then scrambled to the building directly next door. The sound of a soprano practising scales in the building below wafted up through a filthy skylight. The woman’s voice gave him pause, the music calming him a little. He looked down to an empty alley no bigger than a hallway, and across to the church of St Martin in the Fields.

  The roof was newer here and the slates steadier. He backed up four steps and sprinted towards the building’s edge. He leaped, his legs bicycling in mid-air, his guitar case banging against his back. He landed on the flat, tarred roof of one of the church outbuildings. There was no cover. Quickly, he shimmied down the shortest wall to the pavement below and ducked into an empty doorway at the rear of the church.

  Car horns, a plane overhead, a cacophony of city noise, but no running footsteps and loud police whistles. Rémy glanced out from his hiding spot. Although it was still early on Monday morning, rivers of tourists streamed along London’s labyrinth of narrow alleys. He burst from his hiding place, sprinting along the lane towards Orange Street.

  Wrong move.

  ‘Stop!’

  Rémy skidded round the corner into the lower end of St Martin’s Place, not slowing until he’d reached a throng of people. Yanking off his hood, he dodged deep into a pack of white teenagers. Another wrong move. He had no cover among the fair-skinned tourists.

  ‘Stop that kid in the hoodie! The black kid with the music case! There!’

  Rémy bounced off the tourists like a bumper car, ignoring the shouts closing in behind him. More police appeared. Ducking low, he snaked through more pedestrians, quickly cutting towards Leicester Square.

  Rémy dropped his shoulder and rammed into the female officer on his tail. Instead of going down, she whipped out her baton and cracked it on the back of his legs. He leaped at the pain, but it jarred him on. With a second burst of wind, he charged into Irving Street and scrambled into an empty newsagent’s doorway. He reached for his iPod. It wasn’t in his pocket.

  Damn it!

  He must have dropped it.

  Criminal mastermind. Not.

  Still they came for him. Rémy picked up his speed, skidding on his knees behind a row of litter bins. He could see only one way out.

  You’re stronger than I ever was, baby boy.

  Rémy filled his head with sound, imagining in a speeded-up film in his mind what he needed to do. Then he stood up. Rolling forward on the balls of his feet, Rémy lifted his head and began to sing.

  ‘Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma! Tu pure, o Principessa,

  nella tua fredda stanza,

  guardi le stelle

  che tremano d’amore, e di speranza!’

  The swarm of police stopped. Pedestrians and tourists gawked as if a pause button had been hit. Rémy’s rich tenor voice was pitch perfect and completely unexpected.

  ‘Ma il mio mistero chiuso in me;

  il nome mio nessun sapra!

  No, no! Sulla tua bocca lo dire quando la luce splende!’

  A swirl of silver mist began coiling around Rémy’s feet and legs, drifting up over his jacket and around his guitar case. He punched into a sprint, heading towards the statue of Shakespeare at the centre of Leicester Square. Adrenalin exploded into his limbs as he was enveloped in a shimmering silver shroud.

  ‘Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio che ti fa mia!’

  The crowds faded, the police blurred. Rémy ran faster, sang higher, stretching himself out to the music, opening up the sounds in his throat, letting them carry him towards the statue.

  ‘Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle!

  Tramontate, stelle! Al’alba vincero!’

  Translucent pencil beams of light pierced the leather of his boots. All around him an ethereal sheen appeared to pillow the square. His hands became a shimmering bronze glow. His fingers fused together. A wall of sound morphed into a matrix of light. Each line pulsing, changing colours, striving for its crescendo.

  Here goes everything, Mom!

  In three bounding steps, Rémy got big air.

  ‘Vincero! Vinc-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ro!’

  At the ear-splitting, bone-chillingly beautiful high C, every person in the square was brought to their knees, hands pressed to their ears, their cries competing with the final lingering note.

  Their pain played to Rémy’s advantage. Only a handful of people actually witnessed him defy the laws of physics and disappear into the now mist-covered statue of Shakespeare.

  14.

  WHAT DYING SOUNDS LIKE

  Rémy fell fast. His limbs felt loose, boneless, his guitar case pressing into his back as his music carried him through the solidity of the earth. Sensing the end of his fall, he lowered his pitch, slowing his descent, and skidded to a stop in shallow sewer water in an abandoned World War Two air-raid shelter, far below ground level.

  With considerable effort, he dragged himself up against a damp wall. The music flattened to a throb in the back of his head, but his breathing was coming in shallow bursts. If he didn’t get control of himself, he’d hyperventilate and pass out.

  Needing a distraction, he picked up his harmonica, but he was too scared to play again so quickly after what had just happened. Instead, he held the harmonica away from his lips and went through the motions. Fingering the spaces, flexing his lips, filling his cheeks with his breath. He repeated the movements until he felt calmer, his imagination still.

  His left ear was bleeding. He pulled his shirt cuff from under his jacket and wiped it. Even such a small movement caused his stomach to somersault as if he’d just stepped off a roller coaster. Leaning over, he retched, his body heaving violently into the curve of a sewer pipe. Then he tucked his knees to his chest. His head was filling with a cacophony of screams, as if the past inhabitants of the shelter were packed in with him, bereft for the lost world above. Flashes of light flared like white-hot sparklers behind his eyes. Rémy rocked in anguish.

  This is what dying sounds like.

  When the noise finally stopped and the pain dropped to a dull ache behind his ears, he put a shaking hand to the tablet at his chest. It was cool to the touch. He inhaled and exhaled slowly and deeply until his racing pulse settled and he could think clearly again. The Professor was right. Sometimes a deep breath was like an angel’s caress.

  Thank God for the Professor.

  *

  If it hadn’t been for the Professor’s help, Rémy didn’t think he would have survived beyond his first days in London.

  Before making his way into the city from Heathrow, he had busked for an hour outside the Tube entrance to earn some cash, using an old McDonald’s cup to collect the money. He didn’t want to risk using the pre-paid Visa card he’d bought with Tia Rosa’s cash any more than he had to. He was more worried about running out of funds than running into the Camarilla. He didn’t think he’d been followed across the Atlantic. Given the man in the peacoat, he now knew he’d misjudged.

  A young goth couple, with tats crawling up their necks and down their arms, stopped to listen. They were thin but they looked clean, no twitching limbs or hollow expressions like the junkies that often gathered in the stairwell of Rémy’s apartment building back home.

  ‘You’re pretty good,’ said the girl.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Rémy.

  He began another song. Later, when he was packing up he spotted the couple again, leaning against the opposite wall, watching him.

  The girl approached, held out her hand. ‘Cassie. This here’s my cousin, Seymour.’

  Rémy shook her hand and smiled cautiously at Seymour. ‘RD.’

  ‘Do you have a pla
ce to stay tonight, RD?’ Cassie said.

  ‘Sure I do,’ Rémy said warily.

  ‘If you change your mind,’ said Cassie, handing him an address written on the back of a receipt. ‘It’s not the Savoy, but we’d find a space for you.’

  ‘I don’t have any money.’

  ‘Rent’s negotiable.’ Cassie grinned. ‘You could, you know, sing for your supper.’

  Remy knew something was off with these two, but his eyes were burning from a lack of sleep and his whole body ached with grief and loneliness. Despite his misgivings, he said, ‘OK. Thanks.’

  The flat was in a condemned building in Croydon. Inside, the floor was carpeted with old mattresses and one or two foam yoga mats. Teenagers in various states of unconsciousness lay on top of most of them, some tangled in couples, others curled up like children, their arms flopped over their eyes. The few windows were draped with black bin bags. The filthy flocked wallpaper was damp and peeling, hanging from the walls like loose skin.

  In the corner next to the bathroom, someone had rigged up a hot plate beside an electric kettle and a jar of instant coffee. Crouched nearby a kid, not much older than eleven or twelve, was licking the inside of a can of beans.

  Someone had written, ‘ALWAYS KNOCK TWICE’ in black marker on the bathroom door. The place reeked of pain and hopelessness. Rémy didn’t need any more of either. He couldn’t stay.

  Rémy waited until Cassie and Seymour were snoring on the tartan sleeping bags next to him. Then he crept down the stairs. Before he squeezed out through the loose boards barricading the door, Rémy took out his harmonica. He closed his eyes for a second before playing a soft bluesy melody.

  He hoped everyone liked lasagne.

  15.

  BLACKBIRD

  The second and third nights, as he tried to figure out what to do, Rémy slept in parks and busked during the day at the entrances to Tube stations. On the evening of day four, he overheard a commanding voice lecturing from on top of a milk crate in the cobbled apron in front of Paddington Station.

  The Professor was a tall, black man wearing a scholar’s flowing robe, as if he’d stepped out of a lecture hall. Beneath that, he had layered a T-shirt, two cardigans and a brown hooded raincoat with a Union Jack scarf tied like a cravat at his neck. He wore sunglasses, fingerless gloves and stiff dress pants that could have walked on their own. But it was his voice that enthralled Rémy and the crowd that gathered to listen to him.

  When he finally took a break, he strode over to Rémy and regarded him.

  ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘do you know “Blackbird”?’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Rémy, picking up his guitar case. ‘But I’m a quick learner. Why are you asking?’

  ‘It’s one of my favourite songs. I’d be willing to share my shelter with you in return for your musical accompaniment before and perhaps after my lectures.’

  ‘You want me to be your warm-up act?’ said Rémy.

  ‘If it suits your busy schedule.’

  The Professor hummed the tune. Rémy picked it up swiftly. The melody waltzed on the breeze, and people turned to listen.

  ‘Ah,’ sighed the Professor as Rémy played the final notes. ‘They don’t write them like they used to. Now, come with me. I have food.’

  Since conjuring the lasagne at the Croydon squat, Rémy had found he was unable to create anything edible. Perhaps it was fear, or exhaustion, or a dread of calling attention to himself. Whatever the problem, it meant that the rumble in his stomach had been growing louder. It seemed as if the Professor had heard it. His attention and concern was making Rémy feel better than he had felt in ages. The screaming in his head since he fled home softened.

  ‘Sure you’re not a weirdo?’ he checked first, slinging his guitar over his shoulder.

  ‘I am the sanest man in London.’

  For some reason, Rémy believed him. ‘Deal,’ he said, offering a fist-bump.

  ‘Young people today are most extraordinary,’ said the Professor, regarding Rémy’s fist, his robe flowing around him like a hero’s cape.

  Rémy discovered quickly the Professor was an important man to know if you wanted to survive off the grid. The man knew the underbelly of London better than any archaeologist. He was able to travel from Covent Garden to the catacombs beneath St Paul’s faster than any taxi or bus. He travelled the length and breadth of the city at night with the cunning and grace of a sewer rat, sometimes taking Rémy along and sometimes not. After three days sharing his tunnels and his tent, Rémy decided that he was either a genius or truly nuts.

  The Professor gave talks outside Paddington Station twice a day, rain or shine, audience or nought, about everything from the best place to get fresh veggies in the winter to the Peasants’ Revolt in England in the Middle Ages. With his soft baritone voice and his sharp insights, Rémy figured in another life the man had been a history teacher.

  His storytelling reminded Rémy of the Baptist minister from Texas his mother used to watch on late-night cable when she couldn’t sleep. She would drop to her knees in front of the TV, praying for release from the demons that lived in her head, begging for salvation through the transmission of pixels and sound and the preacher’s bright white smile. Rémy would tent his blankets, shove cotton balls into his ears and compose melodies and jazz riffs in his head. He had believed then the salvation his mother was seeking wasn’t coming from God or Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or any other religion. He believed the deliverance his mother sought was from her own mind.

  Man, was he wrong.

  16.

  TACO TUESDAY

  For the last three years in Chicago, Rémy had made it his mission to be normal, to fit in, to conform. Most of all, he had worked on not calling attention to himself or his mother. You never knew who was watching. Birthdays came and went unnoticed by everyone but Tia Rosa, who put a hundred dollars a year into his university fund, regular as clockwork.

  Over those years, he shot up in size and muscle tone, diminishing the bullying and the taunting to the point where he could almost have considered himself popular. Almost. Of course, it didn’t hurt that his landlord Sotto Square was a bad-ass. The local thugs tended to lay off when Sotto had a word.

  His life had become copacetic until his seventeenth birthday. That day Rémy stayed after school in the band room with a couple of band mates, finger-picking a complicated jazz arrangement on his guitar. With no warning, he blacked out. As the world shut down, he slid from his seat to the floor.

  ‘Dude! You a’right?’

  Rémy looked up groggily. ‘Thanks, man. I’m good.’ Floaters were packing his peripheral vision like bombers in a video game. ‘Lunchroom tacos not sitting well.’

  ‘I hear ya!’ His bandmate flipped his backpack over his shoulder. ‘I can give you a ride home if you wanna leave now.’

  ‘Naw, man. I’ll be fine. I’ll walk. Fresh air will help.’

  ‘Fresh air?’ His friend snorted, heading to the door. ‘Where you goin’? Montana?’

  Rémy packed up his guitar and his sheets of music. His stomach churned noisily. Aw, shit. He dashed to the bathroom in time to lose his lunch.

  At the sink, he splashed water on his face and cupped handfuls to his mouth. Then he studied himself in the mirror. He had his dad’s hazel eyes and sharp features, dimples softening his expression, but his mother’s complexion: a blend of African, Spanish and French.

  He ralphed a second time into the sink.

  This time, as he cleaned up, he heard singing in his head. The melody was clear, but the song’s tempo was slow, mournful, a mezzo-soprano voice coloured with melancholy.

  ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…’

  ‘Mom?’ Rémy said aloud.

  ‘…when skies are grey’

  Something was wrong with him.

  With her.

  Rémy ran from the building and chased the city bus as it pulled away from the stop. He scrambled into the first empty seat, his feet and fingers tapping to
his mother’s voice in his head, his heart racing and his palms sweating. He checked his phone. No messages. No texts. Nothing. Dread began melting his insides.

  ‘You’ll always know, dear, how much I love you…’

  He sprinted across the street towards his apartment block, dodging heavy traffic on North Avenue. At the kerb, he checked his phone messages again. Nothing from Tia Rosa, which was unusual. She didn’t like to leave his mother alone in the apartment for long. If she needed anything before Rémy got home, she’d text him with a list of grocery or pharmacy needs, some legal, some not so much. Pot tended to help keep his mom’s crazy at bay.

  Avoiding the lift, Rémy sprinted up the stairwell. His mother’s voice was louder in his head now, trembling with agitation.

  A bluebottle fly the size of a bat buzzed passed his head.

  Jee-zus. He ducked and kept climbing.

  At the third-floor landing, the temperature dipped, crystals appearing when Rémy exhaled. The mark on his neck tingled. The air here was heavy, something bad lingering in the stairwell, a darkness echoing in the ether like the reverb of a chord from his guitar.

  The fourth-floor landing was colder still, the hallway long and L-shaped, his apartment the first one after the turn. Another bluebottle flew at Rémy’s head. He swatted it and the giant fly smacked into the wall behind him with an almost human scream.

  Holeee shit. What is happening here?

  Another fly blasted into the side of his head. Two more slammed against the peeling paint on the walls and screamed afresh. Rémy bobbed and weaved through them, nausea in his throat, skidding to a stop outside the apartment door.

  The sight and the smell crashed his senses.

  17.

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  The entire door was encrusted in bluebottles, thousands of them, each one as big as a fat fist. He couldn’t see the latch, let alone fit his key inside. The air smelled like petrol and puke and tar.