The Neon Court Read Online Free PDF Page A

that temper thing you’ve got going?”
    Sullen silence on the end of the line.
    “Now I want you to take a deep breath …”
    “Up yours!”
    “Repeat after me: ‘Breathe in with anger … and out with love …’”
    I stuck out an arm, flagged down the bus as Penny started on a list of fluent and medically precise obscenities. It was a little red single-decker, the kind of bus I associated with little old ladies nipping out to do the shopping, or kids who rode the buses for nothing better to do.
    “Going now! In with anger …”
    “I
hate
you!”
    I hung up as the bus came to a sloppy halt in the gutter by the bus stop, eased Oda on board, beeped in with my travelcard, paid a two-pound bus fare all in loose change for her, stuck the ticket in my pocket. The driver was a Middle Eastern-looking man with a mole on his top lip, who studied us in the mirror and refused to make anything more in the way of eye contact. There were five other people on the bus. A black man with more hair than head held up in a woolly sack on the top of his head, wearing a high-visibility jacket and a pair of steel-capped boots. An old man who smelt of sweat and beer and against whose foot an empty lager can bumped and rolled on every corner; his head was bowed, his nose pink, his eyes lost to another world. Three kids, dressed in oversized duffel coats and trousers that started somewhere around the knee. They looked like they wanted you to be afraid of them, without really knowing why.
    I got Oda into a seat papered over with torn free newspapers andcrisp packets. She leant, her forehead resting against the cold, scratched glass of the window, looking paler than ever in the unforgiving white fluorescent light. “Where are we going?” she asked.
    “Hadn’t really thought that far ahead.”
    “Sorcerers,” she muttered sourly. “You never do.”
    “Remember that major owing me thing? You need a doctor.”
    “No doctors.”
    “You need a hospital.”
    “No hospitals.”
    “See, both those things sound irrational to me …”
    “I need a place to sleep.”
    “Yes, because that’ll make everything better.”
    “Just get me somewhere warm.”
    “Oda, I have questions …”
    “Later.”
    “They’re kinda whoppers …”
    “Later.”
    So saying, she turned her face away from me, and closed her eyes.
    I got off the bus to the south of Greenwich, in that dead space where the reconstruction around the white swell of the Millennium Dome ran into the old industrial dumping grounds of the past; where the air smelt forever of rotting eggs and the off-licence never closed its doors. A yellow-brick building that had once been a pub stood on a triangular street corner, its sign flashing in blue and pink neon, ‘HOTEL VACANCIES’, above an open glass door leading onto a thin red carpet. Oda moved like a blind corpse, her head bowed, shuffling as if her feet had become dog-chewed slippers on the end of a pair of matchstick legs. There was an inner glass door, locked. I buzzed the buzzer until a young woman with dyed red hair and a silver pendant around her neck reading ‘Cheryl’ appeared and let us cautiously over the threshold. Inside, the air smelt of baked beans, and carried the sound of a distant TV.
    “Yeah?”
    “Room for two?”
    She looked us up and down a few times, then said, “I gotta get my mum,” and scuttled away.
    I propped Oda against the nearest wall, beneath a picture showing some long-passed grandmother missing a front tooth and smiling broadly with a chubby babe in her arms.
    The girl came back, bringing with her a hard-chinned woman in a large red dressing gown. Her dark thinning hair was held up in a net, and her jaw bore the traces of some grey-green goo that did we could guess not what for her skin. “You want a room?” she asked, looking me and Oda over.
    “Yes. For two, one night.”
    “We’re full.”
    “Sign at your door says you’ve got vacancies.”
    “It’s wrong. We’re