Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night Page 3

  "Except Meraud," Nat says, knowing this without being told.

  Guy nods. "Meraud thought he could use this"—he tips water from a plastic bottle into his cupped hand—"to stand for that."

  Nat follows his pointing finger to the river itself. "Ah," he says.

  "A bit of Thames water"—Guy shakes the bottle—"to stand for all the Thames water. And that's presumptuous."

  If magic has any rules – from what Nat understands, Guy's right and every so-called rule has its dozens of caveats and exceptions – then that's the most important. We live in this world, not the other. To lean too hard on the magic that really belongs to another place – that's presumption.

  "And now he's gone," Nat says.

  "Yeah." Guy looks uncomfortable. "Look, this is the part I needed to tell you, okay? You can bring him back."

  "From where?" Layla asks.

  "From wherever. From the place over the water, I guess. He tried to take too much from them and they took him instead. The thing is, you can get him back, but you don't have long."

  "How long?" Nat says sharply.

  "Not sure." Guy looks even more awkward. "I saw this done – oh, about twenty years back, it's not something that people do these days."

  Of course not, Nat thinks. God forbid Meraud do anything that anyone else does.

  "Let's say about a month," Guy says. "Less than that, he's already been gone a while."

  "Fuck," Nat says, again involuntarily. "How? How do we get him back?"

  "There's a token," Guy says. He sounds like he's reading off an internal script, some memorised passage from a magical tome. "A found object. You need to find it, with no help from anyone unbeloved – that bit's important – and make ritual of it. That's just the usual way people put magic together, that bit's easy, and make remedy for return. That'll bring him back."

  Nat wants to ask what the hell all of that means. But again, Layla cuts to the chase.

  "And if we don't do it in time?" she asks.

  "He's not…" Guy gestures. "Not dead. Not now. But after a month—"

  "Fuck," Layla says. "Fucking Meraud, oh my God."

  "Yeah," Guy says. "Sorry. I can't help you more than that."

  "You said he's going to die," Layla says. "And you can't help us more than that?"

  "It's not that I don't want to," Guy says sharply. "It's how it works. I can't."

  Layla looks like she's going to haul off on him, but Nat puts a hand on her arm. Guy hesitates, clearly weighing up if he should say what he wants to say next. "Look… you're his boyfriend, right?"

  This to Nat; he doesn't look at Layla at all, and Nat is about to open his mouth and include her, then stops, horrified with himself. If Meraud hasn't outed himself in that respect then Nat has no right to. Beside him Layla has clearly reached the same conclusion, but Nat feels bad for her anyway.

  "Yeah, that's right," Nat says. Then adds, guiltily, "He told you about me?"

  "Kinda." Guy waves a vague hand. "Doesn't talk much, does he? But I figured he went home to someone."

  Which is exactly what Meraud doesn't do. Nat shakes his head clear of that thought.

  "And he's… you know." Guy makes a particular gesture with his wrist, suggesting a) that Meraud lives comfortably in a queer body and b) despite initial appearances Guy is a homophobic arsehole. Nat's pissed off and almost misses what's really on Guy's mind.

  "I never knew anyone like that before," he says. "But I wasn't into girls much, not when I was young. Never quite realised, not until—anyway. We did the barrier work together and he let an old man waffle on. You'll figure it out. Just get him back, all right?"

  "We will," Nat says. For a moment, he can see it: Meraud, leaning on this barrier viewpoint with his hands stuffed in his pockets, listening to his friend realise something late in life.

  Guy nods and reaches into his pockets again. This time the magic he does is too fast to see and Nat realises that he's not just decent at it; Meraud is fiercely gifted but that doesn't mean no one else is, and Guy apparently does most of the required dowsing for a reasonably-sized utility company. "Here," Guy says, after a moment, and hands Nat a heavy piece of glass, like a snowglobe but without the glitter. "I can't help you, but… okay, just take a look."

  Nat can't tell if this was one of the things in Guy's pockets, transformed for Nat and Layla's benefit, or if he's genuinely conjured it out of thin air. Nat and Layla peer at the unremarkable scene inside it: a tree decked in autumnal colours, some of its branches bare, on a base of mossy ground next to a meander of river. It's photograph-realistic, closer to a bottle garden than souvenir kitsch. As Nat watches, a tiny leaf drifts down from the tree and settles on the moss. It could be a real square metre of woodland, shrunk to a thousandth of the size.

  "It's a timer," Guy says. "You have until all the leaves fall."

  That jolts Nat, the finality of it. "What then?" he asks, but he knows the answer now and doesn't wait to hear it again. Time to start planning. "Guy, you said there's a found object. How do you know it's there for us to find?"

  "Meraud put it there himself," Guy says. "That's what he told me. It was an insurance policy against something like this."

  "Oh, God, Meraud," Nat says. "Guy – thank you."

  Layla looks like she'd rather shoot the messenger than thank him, but murmurs something.

  "Yeah," Guy says, then gestures at the snowglobe again. "Also, you should know, that's a place in the other place. It's autumn there, not winter. Time doesn't run the same way."

  "Okay," Nat says. Apparently he's just going to go with that. He thanks Guy again, though Layla still looks dubious, and walks back across the windswept ground towards whatever the actual fuck they do next.

  ___

  Nat lets his feet take him not home, but to one of the tiny office spaces on the ground floor of his building. He doesn't think about it too hard – he's tired and he needs his people, that's all there is to it.

  The front door to Ari and Kay's office/workroom/haven-for-young-queer-waifs-and-strays is open. The frame is covered in random bits of tat, all glued or pinned or duct-taped to it in a pattern that felt right to Ari as they gently pressed love into the fabric of the building. Not magic – not in the way Meraud does it, all careless instinct – but done with the thought one brings to magic. Nat brings his hand up to touch a postcard he sent them from Brighton last year.

  He checks the sign on the wall, which will be set to orange or red if they have any young people in. It's green, so he calls out, "I'm here to rob your office. Bring me all your capitalist profits and no one gets hurt."

  From the main workroom, Kay shouts back, "Go suck your own cock, Menkes."

  Nat laughs, feels something settle in his chest. He pushes open the door to the main workroom, enjoys the way Ari and Kay both light up when they see him, openly, genuinely happy that he's here.

  "How goes the search for Mr Small, Dark and Pointy?" Ari asks. They've been learning magic for the last year or so and Meraud's helped them out here and there, as a favour to a friend. Little things like saying: no, maybe consider not trying that spell when you're hungry, here, let me help you get all that pasta out of the bathtub, and ye-es, you're kind of right about that ritual, but you still can't substitute supermarket garlic for wild nettles, ouch, that rash does look painful, would you like some salve?

  Nat considers Ari's question. How to summarise everything that's happened since he told the two of them that he was going to go see Meraud's girlfriend and ask if she knew where he was. "Not—not great."

  Ari and Kay exchange A Look, and before Nat can saying anything more, they're up from their seats, embracing him from either side, their chins digging into his chest with love.

  "Shit," Ari says into Nat's armpit.

  Kay mutters something unintelligible into Nat's other armpit, then squeezes him harder before pulling back enough to say, "Do you want Ari to make you talk about your feelings, or do you want me to give you something useful to do?"
br />   "I don't know." It feels – not good, exactly, but a relief to admit it, after a couple of days of trying to match all that brisk and capable coping from Meraud's appallingly focused girlfriend. "Have you eaten? I could make some dinner?"

  He can't tell which one of the two of them is more offended.

  "Make us dinner," Ari repeats, their entire face squinched up in an adorable frown. "You can sit the fuck down and let us get you some tea, is what you can do, you young upstart."

  Nat's at least five years older than Ari, who in turn is a couple of years older than Kay, but he takes their point.

  Kay shoves him – not gently – towards the greying sofa in the corner that might once have been blue. If they happen to tell him to "rest those old bones" while they're doing so, well, he can pretend not to notice.

  The sofa is comfy. The sofa is always comfy. It's old but clean, the worn fabric soft to the touch, the stuffing's unevenness reassuringly familiar. He sits the fuck down and lets them get him some tea.

  He's leafing through a draft of their updated safeguarding policy when Ari emerges with three mismatched mugs. They've got a pack of Hobnobs tucked under one elbow.

  "Don't look at that don't look at that don't look at that!" Ari says all in one breath. "We've already missed the deadline, don't make it worse."

  It's not bad. It looks like it's been put together from a template, but whichever one of them did it, they've been meticulous about the sort of problems that crop up when you're a shoestring charity trying to support the mental health of young queers.

  "It's good," Nat says, trying not to sound surprised. He's helped out with the drafting of enough of their policies to know this isn't one of their collective skills. "I can finish it off for you if you like, cross-reference it against the old policy to make sure you're not missing anything."

  The look of relief on Ari's face is even cuter than their offended frown earlier, not that Nat would dream of telling them that. Ari's gloriously expressive, their face an open book – when they love you, you know it.

  "How long has your not-so-leggy brunet being missing now?" Kay asks, when they've all had a moment to commune with their tea. Whatever they see in Nat's reaction makes them laugh. "Surprise! It was a feelings trap all along."

  Nat tells them about what's happened since Meraud's disappearance, in garbled order. About the mysterious man at the river's edge; about the body that was found on Hampstead Heath; about how magic is more brutal than he ever thought and how time is running out. He shows them the snowglobe. It's not good, it's not good at all. Fuck.

  Somewhere in all that, Ari and Kay squeezed themselves on either side of him on the sofa, which only holds three because two of them are pint-sized. They're leaning against him, love and comfort in every breath.

  "You want to break bread tonight?" Ari asks. Ari's Jewishness is something of a moveable feast, but they bring it out around Nat, like speaking to like. Sometimes they wander over on a Friday evening, with or without Kay, and the two or three of them light some candles and eat some fish and chips and centre themselves a little for the week ahead.

  Whatever he says, they're going to – he doesn't want to be alone with this, he knows it's radiating off him, and however mediocre they are at formal policy documents, they're damned good at spotting a sad queer who needs some support.

  "I'll clean up," Ari says to Kay, taking Nat's silence for the answer it is. "You go get us something to eat?"

  Kay reaches out in front of Nat to high-five Ari, then they both turn their hands to smoosh Nat's face.

  Nat's mum used to clean the house for Shabbat with klezmer playing in the background. She and Nat would sing along, making up their own lyrics. She'd left behind most of that stuff along with Nat's shithead biodad when Nat was three, but she kept Friday nights. And so when she died and Nat was floundering for something, anything to hold on to, Friday nights were there waiting for him.

  Upstairs from their office, Ari cleans Nat's pokey flat for Shabbat with Lady Gaga playing in the background. They inform Nat's kitchen counter that it can't read their poker face; Kay makes it back with three portions of chips, one cod, two hake, one lot of onion rings and a single battered sausage just as Ari chucks Nat's pile of junk mail in the recycling and declares they don't want no paper gangsta.

  Ari, Kay and Lady Gaga all in the same room means dance break. They limit themselves to a single group rendition of Paparazzi, all flailing limbs and warbling voices, Nat yell-singing as loud as the others, before turning off the music and setting the table.

  He does feel a little better.

  Ari takes a coin from Kay's pocket, a leaflet from the recycling bin, and a speck of Saturday night's glitter from Nat's sofa cushions. Metal, wood and light. The three of them sit at Nat's kitchen counter, and Ari does a quick bit of magic to light the candles. Put two Jews in a room and you'll get five opinions on the use of magic in religious practice. All of Nat and Ari's five opinions are in favour: if there's room in Judaism for their messy, queer, ridiculous selves, there's plenty of space for magic, too.

  They all three cover their eyes. Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha‑olam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Shabbat.

  When Nat opens his eyes, he looks automatically to the shelf where his mum's Tanakh sits. He has no memories of her reading it, was more than a little surprised when he found it in her stuff after her death. But he doesn't think she'd mind him taking comfort where he can find it. He nods at the book: Hi Mum. I love you. I miss you. Look after Meraud, will you, if you see him before I do?

  Meraud has a whole shelf of religious texts. The Tanakh next to the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, several versions of each so he can be sure he's got exactly the right reference for this particular spell or that particular ritual.

  Seek and ye shall find.

  Fucking Meraud.

  Nat drops a kiss each on Ari's and Kay's foreheads. "I've got to go. I love you. Let yourselves out."

  ___

  Layla parts ways with Nat from the barrier viewpoint – she doesn't know where he goes after that but she doesn't really care. Katrina is handling the school run, and Layla already called in sick today. She stress-buys a large latte and an almond croissant and heads towards the DLR. Half an hour later she's staring at Meraud's spilling bookshelves, with the sense of urgency draining in favour of dreamy, insurmountable despair. Meraud's books are arranged in some system known only to him, and in any case Layla's not a magician. She has no idea what she's looking for except, is some dude from Thames Water telling us the truth, and if he is, what the shit do we do next.

  Still. She's got to start somewhere. She picks a book at random and reads the first paragraph of a history of the Mughal Empire. Another book: Spenser's Faerie Queen. A pop science thing about magnetism. An account of crossing the Hindu Kush. Brewer's Phrase and Fable. Layla makes an inarticulate sound of frustration as she puts it down. Damn Meraud and his bizarre nut-gathering mind.

  But the next book is actually about magic. It's even a vaguely introductory text, with Meraud's annotations in scrawled ink in the margins. Layla sits on the arm of the sofa and looks through it properly, still dropping croissant crumbs. She reads about the axiomatic principles of magic, about the rule of three – there are always three found objects in a spell or casting – and what a found object even is, if it has to be something you pick off the street or if it can be something you already had in your pockets or at the back of your utensil drawer. This is basic stuff, which Amy will start learning at school in a couple of years, but Layla's still fascinated. Meraud's annotations start off even more incomprehensible than his normal, only somewhat terrible handwriting, but when she gets the hang of deciphering them they're comforting, as though he's in the room with her, offering dry commentary. The next section is about dowsing and particularly laden with marginalia. Layla laughs at a paragraph that has just been marked with "NO", and again at "literally every word of this is wrong".

  A
nd finally, she finds it. It's only a short section, entitled "Tokens for Finding", but token is the word Guy used, and Layla slips down to the couch proper and drops crumbs into the spine of the book. If Meraud objects to food on his books, he can damn well come back from being missing. It's brief, but Layla gathers that this sort of magic is unusual, and conducted only by particularly skilled magicians and those who are what the author insists on referring to as "born in the Elflands".

  (Next to that, Meraud has written: "I am not THAT sort of fairy".)

  There are references at the end of this section to a couple of other books. One of them turns out to be fiction, which Layla only finds because it has slipped to the floor. With a prickle of apprehension, she realises that Meraud might have been reading up on this immediately before his disappearance. It's a collection of short stories, Dunsany's Book of Wonder, and when Layla skims through it has a lot of the same sort of thing: elflands and places beyond water and these worlds we know.

  The other book – again on the front of a shelf, as though recently consulted – is also called Tokens for Finding. It's dry, ancient, with curling page corners, and Layla knows instinctively that this is what she's here for. No annotations here – the paper is onion-skin thin – but the covers are bent back and the leather binding battered to softness.

  Struggling through the nineteenth-century prose, Layla learns that Guy was spot on. What Meraud has done is take a small object – Layla wonders what it is – and hide it in some particular place that has meaning for him. It's meant to be difficult to find, but equally not meant to be lost forever: there will be clues, perhaps a sequence of them, that should bring them to it if they can only follow the trail Meraud has left. Once they've found it, it's a found object, and as such, it's an item of power. Used in a rule-of-three working, which the other two items need only stabilise and refine, it will atone for his presumption in trying to use a bottle of chlorinated London tap water in metonym for the weight and might of the Thames.