Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night Page 2

  That might be how it goes. Nat isn't sure. The next time Meraud explains it might be different.

  So, wherever it is, that place over the water. To go there one needs a small boat, a scrap of red, a surfeit of foolishness, a fool's luck. When the silly drippy hippies came back they were older, no wiser, and had clearly kept themselves occupied in a place where time had no meaning. Meraud was a solemn five-year-old when they brought him over the water, and once back in England, no different from any other. Meraud went to school, and then university, and at some point, to the queer hipster joint in Soho where Nat first knew him. (Intimately, against a door.)

  And Meraud remains perfectly ordinary, save for two things: he's good at magic, in a way that most people aren't. It's his native language. And – Nat finds this ridiculously, stupidly endearing – he can't follow a story. Apparently this is a thing, among people born over the water. (Ari read a Guardian supplement about it once and texted it to Nat once a day, every day, until he read it.) Meraud doesn't get beginnings, middles and endings, or why a story needs to have them when real life doesn't. Nat once heard him attempt to tell Layla's kid a bedtime story, which went something like this: once upon a time, a silver hare leapt along the bank by the water's edge.

  What then, Amy asked.

  It's still there, Meraud said. Always in motion; always leaping.

  "Where are you, you bastard?" Nat says to the empty room, and this time picks up a discarded pair of reading glasses from the bedside table, letting the chain run through his fingers. "Do you have a pair of these in your kitchen drawer?" he asks Layla.

  "Yeah, how did you—" Layla pauses, then smiles. It lights up her whole face. "You have a pair in your kitchen drawer."

  "Because he can never find them," Nat says, with exasperated fondness. "Back when I first knew him I asked him why he couldn't just do a finding spell on them, or something."

  "I was going to ask you about that," Layla says. "If there's some kind of spell we could do, or get someone to do for us, maybe? That might tell us where he is."

  Nat shakes his head. "There are finding spells, but they're not – how does he put it? They work in space but not time. You get everywhere the thing or person has ever been, not where it is right now. So with Meraud's glasses, it only works if they're literally somewhere he's never left them before. Which is nowhere. Not even in the toilet."

  Layla gets it. "So if we tried to find him, we might get told he's everywhere in London?"

  Nat nods, feeling strange and unmoored again, and stuffs the reading glasses into his coat pocket. He picks Meraud's phone off the bedcovers where Layla left it, thinking that this more than books and sheets and other inanimate objects must tell him something – and then it does exactly that. The lock screen has an emergency option. Nat swipes. Where there should be the name of a next-of-kin contact, it reads: seek and ye shall find.

  Below that, a phone number. It isn't Nat's – and of course it makes sense that it would be Layla's; Meraud has known Layla since forever and was even cared for by her parents when his own were being particularly useless – but amid the dust of a disappearance Nat is still inanely hurt.

  But it isn't Layla's number either. She tells him this in surprise, like she thought it was his number. He likes her a little better and dials in a rush of hope.

  It takes a second to connect. It's the helpline for Thames Water.

  ___

  Layla gets home and barely has time to put her head on her pillow before she has to get the kids up, breakfasted and dressed and have-you-brushed-your-hair and Amy needs her PE kit even though it's a Thursday because of things and stuff and there was a letter home about it last week. She's done more on less sleep, the joys of parenting, but it doesn't get any easier. At least Katrina, her beautiful practical genius wife, may she live a thousand years, has fixed the espresso machine, so there's something to get her over that first hurdle of too little sleep and too much everything else.

  It's all very well Nat searching Meraud's flat for cryptic messages and Clues, but they're a pathologist and a jobbing composer – their blundering about last night could already have missed or destroyed half a dozen signs obvious to an actual investigator.

  "Morning, pumpkin." Katrina kisses the back of her head and leans over to steal a sip of coffee from her mug. "Everything okay?"

  Katrina was asleep when Layla left for Meraud's flat, asleep when she got back in again hours later, but could have woken up any time in between, seen the note Layla left on the pillow then chucked when she returned home.

  "Some nonsense with Meraud," Layla says, unwilling to say anything that would make it more real. They alternate sips of coffee, both keeping one ear open for the sounds of trouble upstairs. This is the third week of letting the girls do their teeth unsupervised, the first so far they haven't had to go up to intervene. Katrina's hand on Layla's shoulder grounds her, reminds her she's a responsible adult, not some amateur detective about to go on a wacky implausible caper. It's Katrina's turn to do the school run – Layla can leave for work a little late, make a quick call to the police and get this all sorted out before anyone (Nat) does anything stupid.

  "You need me to help with anything?" Katrina drains the last of the coffee, puts the mug straight into the dishwasher. "I know I've been busy with this merger stuff, but if it's important enough you're gone half the night—?"

  Five years of marriage, two kids, more parent-teacher evenings than she can count, and Layla's still taken aback sometimes by how much she loves this woman. "It'll be fine," she says, because it will be, and if it won't be, what's the good of worrying anyone now? "I love you. Go, take the children to school and merge some mergings."

  They kiss, brief and coffee-infused. Katrina grabs the kids' bags just as Amy thunders downstairs, Jae hot on her heels, both singing that awful Christmas pop song Meraud inexplicably likes about reindeers and elves and other Christian pageantry. They'll be singing it in the car, and then Katrina being Katrina will have it in her head all day, moving about vast quantities of money while a tiny part of her brain hums a theremin solo.

  A tiny part of Layla's brain, meanwhile, has already looked up the number for the local police station. She waits until she hears the car leave the drive before she calls – again, no point in making this a bigger deal than it is – and gets through to a friendly, young-sounding woman who takes Meraud's details with a brisk professionalism Layla can get behind.

  Once again, she gives thanks that his parents never legally changed their surname to Moonchild – Meraud Sparrowhawk Robinson is quite exciting enough.

  Then they hit his job.

  "A practising magician?" the woman on the other end of the phone asks, her voice distinctly less friendly than it was a moment ago.

  Layla's pause is all the answer the woman needs. She speaks over Layla's attempt at hedging: "I'm sure you're aware that ah, individuals like your friend live very unpredictable lives. Of course, we take every missing person report seriously, but we've found that often people like your friend will turn up as and when they choose to."

  She says a few more things just like that – the word "dysfunctional" gets used, which Layla is allowed to say about him, but not this woman on the other end of a phone who's never laughed at Meraud's dancing until she snorted beer out of her nose, who's never watched six-and-a-half rope bondage tutorials on YouTube for the pleasure of how he absentmindedly rubs the marks she leaves on his wrists, who's never gone to his flat in the middle of the night on the say-so of a feckless blue-haired dickhead who looks at her like she's the worst kind of sell-out.

  But she finishes giving his details, even as she grudgingly acknowledges what Nat already knew, and she has another ring round of various hospitals before heading off to work.

  It's a day of meetings and paperwork, not even an interesting new body to distract her. Every time her mobile goes, she flinches. A text from Katrina at lunch – Naomi caught me whistling that bloody carol and now she keeps sending me links to
buy second-hand theremins. I told her if I wanted to sound like a melting satnav's last scream for help, I didn't need to use a theremin – doesn't raise a smile.

  Finally, finally, after the kids have gone to bed and Katrina's got out her laptop to do one last bit of merger-ing, someone rings from the Royal Free to say they've found a thirty-something man in a ditch somewhere on Hampstead Heath. He's slight, has dark hair and eyes, with chipped green nail polish and strange things in his pockets. Layla is halfway out of the door with the phone still in her hand when they mention the man they've found is wearing a wedding ring. She goes down there anyway, to be sure, and comes back up the hill as the air turns metallic with snow. For the first time, Layla is acknowledging something she's always subconsciously understood: Meraud was never wholly knowable, even to her. He wears no rings and makes no promises and doesn't know how a story should go. He may have walked out of his life with no intention of returning, and she may not see him again.

  ___

  Nat rings the number again a couple of times, because he can't not. It looks like an ordinary London number and he keeps hoping that this time it won't redirect to the helpline, but doing the same thing over and over leads to the same result. Thames Water thank him each time for calling and offer a number of options for switching suppliers or reporting a burst water main while Nat listens amid a wash of despair. Layla's right. This is Meraud's idea of a practical joke and in the meantime he's bled out in a gutter or lying amnesiac in a hospital bed or drunk on a rowboat to Rio.

  Hold for switchboard, says the Thames Water helpline, and Nat hasn't hung up yet so he keeps on holding. While he's number two and number one in the queue, it occurs to him: among Meraud's all-purpose magical competence is a particular speciality, and he might, just might, be onto something.

  "Thank you for waiting, how can I help you?" says Thames Water.

  "I'm looking for someone," Nat says, hesitantly. "His name is Meraud Robinson. I think he works for you."

  "Oh," says the person, not expecting a query unrelated to burst water mains. "Meraud, did you say? Is that a woman's name?"

  "No," Nat says. "Not when it's attached to him. Can you help?"

  "Please hold."

  There's a crackling as though the phone is being passed around. The next person sounds much less bemused. "I'm afraid we can't give out information about our employees over the phone."

  "He's probably a contractor," Nat says, gritting his teeth. "Can you just look in your files or whatever?"

  The General Data Protection Regulation, Nat is informed, exists for a reason. We can't just be giving out people's details willy nilly, how would you feel if anyone at all could ring up your work and ask for your shoe size? Data owners have a responsibility towards data subjects. They have to take it seriously, especially now.

  Nat does not ask why especially now. "Look, I'm not trying to sell him insurance! I'm trying to find out if something's happened to him. His friends and family haven't seen him in a while and they're worried."

  "Hmph," the woman says, and Nat hears her whisper something to a colleague. Several people are talking in the background; Nat makes out Meraud's name, then the sound of typing. Something that might be the whistling of a kettle. Nat wants to yell down the phone at these tea-drinking, leisurely-typing, GDPR-fixated people who don't care that Meraud, whose shoe size is 8½, who can make him laugh when the entire world is a garbage fire, whom he loves, is probably dead in a ditch. He's about to do just that, when there's a scuffle of frantic movement and someone new grabs the phone.

  This time it's a man's voice, breathless and urgent. "How long has he been missing?"

  "Who is this?" Nat says. "What's going on?"

  "How long?" the voice says impatiently. "A week? A fortnight?"

  "A fortnight," Nat says, heart racing, and then again, "Who are you?"

  "God, what is he like," the voice says, despairingly. "We haven't got much time. I'll text you."

  Whoever it is hangs up, and the phone chimes in his hand before Nat has finished redialing. The text just says, come now, and gives a London postcode. Nat heads out the door with his coat over his arm. He's halfway to the Tube before he pauses, curses himself and calls Layla.

  Outside the station, a busker is playing One Night a Year. Badly. Nat composed that song when he was twenty-two years old, fresh out of university and so delighted with his own cynicism. It's an amalgam of every Christmas-Rock-And-Pop musical cliché twenty-two-year-old Nat – pre-Meraud Nat, pre-Ari-and-Kay Nat, still-had-a-mum Nat – could think of, and it pays him enough in royalties every year to be worth how much it makes him want to travel back in time and slap himself.

  Meraud loves it. Every December he sets it as his ringtone. If he were here— Nat catches himself teetering on the edge of an emotion, forces himself back. If Meraud were here, Nat thinks carefully, he'd make them stop and listen to the whole song, and then he'd make Nat go and put a fiver in the busker's open guitar case. His favourite verse is the one about the penguin.

  Half an hour later Nat and Layla are in Greenwich, bickering over how to find an address with no street number. The postcode leads them non-specifically to a kids' play area, unremarkable save for its uninterrupted view of the Thames Barrier. It's deserted in the fierce wind, save for a handful of people walking along the river railing. On impulse, Nat pulls down his hood and texts I have blue hair at the unknown number.

  After a minute a man walks down from the water's edge. "A fortnight," he says to Nat, in the same despairing tone as the phone call. "Jesus Christ. And you've only just noticed."

  It's not accusing, but Nat bristles anyway. "Who are you?"

  "Mmm?" He's nondescript, white, wearing a long coat with way too many pockets. A magician, then. "My name's Guy. I worked with Meraud on that."

  That is the barrier behind him, in the open position right now with its silver-grey piers the same colour as the sky. Nat peers up at it for a bemused moment, then loses his patience. "Look, I'm Nat, this is Layla," he says. "And not to chivvy you along or anything, but what the hell do you know about Meraud? Where is he?"

  "Ah." Guy looks uncomfortable. "It's not—okay, he was doing a thing. It's gone wrong. I think it has. I'm not sure."

  Layla cuts to the chase. "Is he dead?"

  "No," Guy says. ‘Er. Not yet, anyway. I'm not doing this right. I'm sorry."

  "It's okay," Layla says, surprising Nat. She walks them back up to the river railing, towards the abutment of the barrier. "Just… tell us from the beginning."

  Guy glances at her, then at Nat. "Nine thousand tons of water," he says obscurely. "I mean, that's its capacity, that's what hits it when it's closed. But the barrier's planned lifetime was only up to 2040 and, well, you know. Climate change. We're trying to do something about it but it's difficult."

  "Okay," Layla says, in the same tone as before. "And Meraud is working on it?"

  "He's very good," Guy says, more animated, and Nat is impossibly relieved at the present tense. "I mean, I'm the staff magician for Thames Water, I'm decent enough at it."

  He gestures at himself and picks things out of his pockets to show. Shells, metal beads, chunks of quartz. Meraud likes herbs and pressed flowers but his isn't the only way; magic will work with any found object, even if you do happen to have laden your own coat pockets with things to find.

  "But you bring in consultants," Nat says. "You brought Meraud in to help with your problem."

  That's what Meraud does: he helps solve unusual problems. He finds lost things, traces missing people – quelle irony – and sometimes unlocks doors and cracks passwords belonging to people who didn't necessarily want them unlocked or cracked. That's why Nat, lacking Layla's shit-for-brains naiveté, didn't jump to call the police. But first and foremost Meraud is a dowser. He knows where water is and what it's doing and usually where it's going to be. He can tell you when it's going to rain and if you have rising damp.

  Even Meraud's name means ‘gift of the water'. In this mo
ment Nat finds that thought disturbing and he isn't sure why.

  "Mmm," Guy says again. "Look, do you do magic? Do you know what it's like?"

  "Not really," Nat says, after a minute. It's a lie, but more useful than the truth. He has a handful of well-worn spells he does over and over, most of them in that blurred space where ritual and magic sometimes meet. It's all a little too Jewish to explain to a stranger. "I've seen Meraud do it, obviously."

  "Then you've seen how it goes," Guy says. "Like, I just… I can do a bit of magic so we have five more minutes to close the barrier. I could do you a light if you forgot your torch, or help my nephew concentrate better for his exams? Meraud… has ambition."

  "Oh, God," Nat says, involuntarily.

  "He's pretty sure he can keep the barrier open when otherwise we'd have to close it. And we're trying to prolong its life, right? We don't want to close it thirty times a year if we want to last till 2040."

  "What did he do," Layla says. Nat can hear the lack of question mark.

  "Three elements of a spell," Guy says, putting his hands in his pockets and pulling out three items. He sits down on a bench so he can lay things out with a conjuror's deftness. "A bit of cinnabar rock, a horseshoe, yew berries."

  Guy concentrates; Nat and Layla look on.

  "Horseshoe – that's iron, the bones of Wayland. That's from English folklore, if you know it. Yew – that's an omen, it grows best in churchyards. Cinnabar, usually that's blood but not this time: it's a mercury compound. Quick like quicksilver. Put those together, and you might get something workable out. Something to bind metal, something to protect against death, something to grant you just a little more time. That's what I'd do for the barrier."

  Nat's impatient, but listening. Layla is tapping her foot.

  "A thing can't stand for itself, that's the rule," Guy goes on. "Not that there are any rules, really, but. You want something to make your roses grow better, you don't put roses in your spell. So dowsers don't use water."