The Midnight Mayor by Kate Griffin Read Free Book Online Page B

electrocution rarely causes bleeding.
    The blood, then, that had stained my right sleeve had come from something else. The something, almost lost in the folds of my puffed-up skin, was a thin red cross, carved with a scalpel into the palm of my hand.
    We squeaked, “What did you do to us?!”
    “Who, me? I didn’t do this!”
    “We didn’t . . . it isn’t . . .”
    “You’re telling me you didn’t notice that someone’s played Christian symbolism with your hand?” she asked. “You know, if you’re into self-harm then, seriously, don’t.”
    “We did not do this, this was not there before . . . until . . . there was nothing there until we answered the phone!”
    “Yeah. Now, while every case is, like, unique, I gotta tell you, electrocution by telephone leading to the appearance of a cross carved in the palm of the victim’s hand is unusual even for central London. You seriously have no idea how it got there?”
    I hadn’t said that. I didn’t want to think about that. “Hide it,” we whispered. “Do what you have to do. Please.”
    “Why do you want . . .?”
    “Just do it! Please!”
    Dr Seah hesitated, and for a moment there was something on her face that shouldn’t have been there, deep, and serious, and a little bit sad, a sinking of features that were built to smile. Then she shrugged, beamed, showing bright white teeth in a face the colour of hot chocolate on a summer’s night, and said, “Like, whatever.”
     
    She bandaged up my right hand. Whatever drug she’d shot into our veins was now playing games with the ceiling, pushing it slowly up and letting it fall again so low that it almost bumped our nose. We had never felt so degraded. But the drug helped keep us calm, keep us still and made our feelings of rage seem more like a distant story, in which I would tell a childish me, sitting on my lap, of a man who’d been given a drug and who was in pain, in a land far, far away.
    We do not handle pain bravely. When she started on the stitches, we looked the other way, and as the needle slid into flesh, we pushed our face into the pillow to hide the tears. Not so much of pain, but at the thought of pain, at the idea of what might be there, but which wasn’t actually except in the churnings of our imagination, worse than any truth. I bit our lip and recited ancient pointless things: song lyrics, shopping lists, bus routes, road junctions, declining verbs in exotic languages, anything to keep our thoughts away from our flesh and wandering in some mundane cage of artificial words and numbers.
    Sleep, when it was all done, came easily. Real pain became a foggy memory, a comforting teddy bear that we held to our side like an old and familiar friend.
    We slept.
     
    When I woke, it was dark outside. The streetlamp outside the window could have glowed at any hour, but the sounds gave a more precise time. I could hear the distant swish of traffic, too heavy for the deepest part of the night, and from the far end of the street, the sound of a pub, which with each opening and closing of the door turned out gossip and music onto the street in a slow, fading roll. With my eyes fixed upon the slow curve of passing car headlights across the ceiling, I had no more desire to sleep; but neither did I feel the need to get up. So I lay on the bare mattress, stained with smudges of my blood that turned our stomach to look at, and assessed. My right hand was an igloo all in cotton wrapping, my left shoulder and a good part of my chest a shirt-load of bandages. The back of my scalp had been cleaned of blood and disinfected, but the rest of me still bore much of the stain of the previous night, my skin feeling two inches thicker than its natural depth. My tongue was a stiff leather slab in my mouth, my stomach a shrivelled hollow.
    These discomforts were at first almost interesting novelties, but rapidly became an itching fury until at last, with a hiss of frustration, I swung my legs over the side of the bed.
    On