Druids of London
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When I first met the girl with the pixie eyes, she was a mouse.
The musty air on the platform of Monument Tube station stung my tired eyes, and I fed their tears to a hanky. They said on the news the smog would be heavier today, and they had been right. It always did play havoc with my allergies, but this week had been the worst. Walking back down Fenchurch Street had reminded me of those images of No Man’s Land from the First World War, only with large red buses and cyclists emerging from the blanket of darkness rather than tanks.
I spotted her in between the gaps in the tube tracks, her eyes twinkling like little blue marbles. The coughing and retching from the other commuters and the shrill ringing of the announcers seemed to fade into a dull murmur as my brain tried to process what it was looking at. It was jarring enough seeing an actual living creature in London nowadays that wasn’t a human with its face clamped with one of those air purifiers. The pigeons hadn’t been seen for over a decade. So, a mouse sighting itself was like experiencing an alien visitation. But this mouse.
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I don’t know how I knew. Perhaps it was the blueness of its eyes, or the sudden interest it seemed to take in me. I just remember thinking; that’s a person.
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I found myself smiling at it. It didn’t smile back. It simply stared vacantly back at me, but my mind fancied that its head tilted sympathetically, before scurrying off into the network of tunnels.
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***
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The next night I found myself heavy with the day, my phone jittering anxiously in my blazer pocket, email after email, begging for my attention. I swiped away the one from the grief councillor and pulled up an email from work. It was my head of department, Anwar. He asked how I was getting on, and whether the teacher who’d been covering my lessons had managed to fill me in on where they’d got to with Year 11. It was all very genial and understanding, and he once again offered his sincerest sympathies (he had italicised ‘sincerest’), and that I was to let him know if there was anything he could do to support me. The sentiment was nice, but I couldn’t play dumb to the motive. This was the ‘we can all see you’re struggling’ check in. I swiped it away and turned up the drone of my earphones.
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I felt her hand on my shoulder, and I turned quickly. She began what I assumed to be an apology, though I only heard a few of the mumbled words over the blaring acid jazz. I watched her mouth and face make the movements, and seemed, for a moment, unable to take her in. I knew her instantly from the eyes I had seen the night before, the same shimmering blue. I took to calling them pixie eyes. Enchanting, playful, and yet somehow, dangerous. Not entirely human. Her face was so alive with expression, I could almost understand her without the audio. Her dirty blonde hair danced buoyantly as she moved, and she pursed her lips awkwardly when she realised I was wearing earphones. It was only then, as I removed them and let the violent soundscape of London engulf me again, that I realised she wasn’t wearing a purifier. I apologised for the earphones, and for not hearing what she’d said. She waved it away, and I stood there gawking at her.
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“I just wanted to know how you’d known,” she said.
I followed her eyes as they glanced to the tracks. I told her I didn’t know.
“Are you one of us?” Her voice was soft, lilting, some kind of Northern, I thought.
I told her I didn’t know what she meant.
“Would you like me to show you?”
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***
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That night, I dreamt of Maria drowning in soot.
When I was younger, I’d seen an old Disney film. An animated version of 101 Dalmatians, and I remember a very specific moment where the dogs had covered themselves in soot to hide their Dalmatian spots from Cruella’s thugs. It was that kind of soot. It almost looked animated in the dream, and every time she coughed, a comical cloud of it would erupt from her mouth and cover the living room.
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At first, I think we laughed about it, and I fell onto the carpet and made soot angels. But as she laughed, she started to inhale it from the floor and the air. I didn’t stop to ask why I wasn’t choking, but she started to, violently, throwing her whole body into it, her face flushing purple and thick veins bulging on her face and neck. I tried to calm her down, but she was frantically pulling her shirt off, and underneath her chest cavity lay open. Her lungs were black and heaving with every breath, pushing themselves against her bloodied ribs as the colour in her face began to fade.
I was gasping loudly when I woke up, as though I was trying to breathe for her.
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***
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We met under the soft moonlight at Gunnersbury Park. The smog often inexplicably dispersed at night, but I had to admit, it was rare to see this much of the moon. Though it sat beaming and unshrouded in the sky above me as I walked, it’s rays could still be seen in air as bright shafts lighting up the polluted clouds.
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She’d text me the location and I arrived at a small glade with a large wooden throne with an eagle carved into the top, surrounded by a circle of wooden benches. I did say I was happy to meet during the day, but she’d insisted it be at night. She was wearing a dress bespeckled with tiny daisies, and her feet were bare.
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“This will be strange,” she warned, placing a hand reassuringly on my arm.
I told her I was ready. I didn’t really know if I was.
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She took her mouse shape first, rolling her shoulders into it like a yoga instructor. Seeing her soft skin brown and fold made me feel ill, and I watched her long hair thin and spread over her like lichen. Her dress crumpled into the earth, and a small shape scrambled out. I picked her up and cradled her, gazing into those little blue marble eyes. It was the very same mouse I had seen on the tracks a few nights ago.
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When she folded herself back again, we were embracing. Her head nestled near my collar bone like Maria’s once did. She smelt like summer grass and lavender. She didn’t seem to mind that she was naked. I felt like I wanted to pull away, but she held me, and so, I held her.
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When she finally stepped back, her pixie eyes seemed pitying. Before she could mention it, I asked her how she did it.
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“Most of my people can from birth. But you can learn.” She looked at me and smiled. “You can learn.”
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She stepped back into her dress, her pale skin seemed to reflect the moonlight so vividly, the glade seemed to light up. I asked her why I would want to learn.
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“Because London’s going to end,” she said, plainly. “At least, this London will. It will be good for people like us, but not good for people like you.”
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Next, she showed me her bluebird. Her face twisted and shrunk, and the front of her face crusted over until it was a stout beak. She perched on my shoulder and nuzzled affectionately, and her blue eyes twinkled.
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As she was stepping back into her dress once more, I asked her what she meant about London ending. She explained it, though I didn’t entirely believe her. All of her kind were planning it. She called it a rewilding.
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“Humans will leave, I think,” she said, sitting on one of the benches and gazing up at the clouded sky. “They’ve tried their best to fight it. All this. Recycling and renewable energy, but they crave the city and the smoke and the lights.”
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I sat next to her. “Why?” I asked her, genuinely.
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She turned her eyes to mine. “Because, like all things, they fear the dark. They feared the dark forests, and the animals that prowled them. They wanted to fill the dark spaces with stuff they knew. Familiar stuff. Because they can’t control this.” She gestured widely to the trees that surrounded us. “So, they created a world they could control.”
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I asked her how it felt to be an animal. If it was any different.
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“All that changes is your perspective. You have a sense for things.” She placed a hand on my leg. Her nails were painted cyan blue. “You can sense emotions too.”
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I didn’t look at her then, though I could feel her eyes boring into mine. I looked up at the moon.
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I told her I wanted to learn.
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***
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I was trembling the night I swore the oath to the moon and bathed in its glow. We stood by one of the small lakes in Epping Forest, as two moons fixed their eyes on me, one above me, and one gazing out from the depths of the water.
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The rest of her people had joined us to help. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting – perhaps for them all to be clothed in cult-like priest robes, or for them to all be entirely naked, draped in leaves and bracken, eyes caked with black paint. They looked normal. Some arrived on push-bikes, others walked. One of the older men wore a Pink Floyd T-Shirt.
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She was holding my hand when they began to form a circle. She’d dyed a streak of her hair purple and was holding circular mirror. It was going to hurt, she said. Really hurt. But it wouldn’t last long. I needed to be naked, she said. She placed the mirror on the ground and kneeled down, instructing me to do the same. The moon gazed back at me from the mirror, like a cataractous eye.
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The pain set in almost as soon as the chanting began. My naked body coiled and twisted like clay, and the black feathers came first. Pain like a spear erupted from my face and nose, and I saw the world about me grow.
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That night I flew with her; she as a bluebird, and me as the Raven. The world gaped below us, fished-eyed but clear as the cold air. We ducked through clouds of smog, and flew so high, I almost felt as though I must have had my first taste of actual fresh air.
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I wept when I came back. I told her I didn’t know why, but I did.
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She told me she expected me to take the Raven first. Those with great sadness often did. We lay in the glade in Highgate Woods, my head nestled against her chest as she stroked my hair. I heard the honking of a car horn cut through the still night air.
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“Do you wish I was her?” she said. Her voice was flat and unreadable.
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“Yes,” I said, “But I also wish she would go.”
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“London doesn’t want things to live,” she said, after a moment. “It wants people to succeed. I think those things are very different.”
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She wiped my tears away with a soft hand.
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“I don’t know if I’m ready. To let it all go, I mean.”
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She turned my chin towards her and kissed my lips lightly.
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“That’s okay. It’ll all be gone tomorrow,” she whispered, “They are bringing the forests back. The buildings will fall, the plazas will sink, and the Thames will consume the Docklands.”
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She looked up at the moon.
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Nothing from before will remain, she promised.
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Not even grief.