Broken Homes

stuff left me weirdly energised, so when one of the other officers suggested we go clubbing I tagged along. We ended up in a UV saturated cattle shed in Romford where I may, or may not, have got off with the goddess of the River Rom. Not in a serious way, you understand, just a bit of clinch and some tongue. Which is what happens when you overdo the WKD. I woke up the next morning in one of the chairs in the atrium with surprisingly little hangover and Molly looming over me. She looked disapproving. I would have preferred a hangover.
    My trusty Ford Asbo was parked safely in the garage, so after a breakfast and a bucket bath I departed for Hendon once more. As I climbed into the driver’s seat a powerful vestigium rushed over me. I tasted vodka, smelt machine oil and felt the slip slide of lip balm. There was shouting and screams of excitement and illegal acceleration that pushed you back into your seat while your engine growled like something big and endangered.
    There was an open lipstick on the dashboard – shocking pink.
    I didn’t know about Goddess of the River Rom, but I’d definitely brushed up against something supernatural. Maybe it hadn’t been the vodka after all.
    That’s it, I thought. No more clubbing without a chaperone for you.
    I revved up the Asbo, but despite the tweaking I’d given the engine it did not cry like a panther.
    It did get me all the way back up to Hendon on time for the start of day two, which was officer equipment safety. The morning lecture was on stop and search with reference to spotting suspicious behaviour. The lecturer who gloried in the full name of Douglas Douglas illustrated the weird stiffening of the limbs exhibited by shoplifters known as ‘the robot’, or the exaggerated mime-like behaviour adopted by the truly guilty when they unexpectedly encounter the police. ‘You can’t go wrong,’ he said, ‘by searching anyone who engages you in conversation.’ On the basis that nobody willingly engages the police in conversation unless they’re trying to deflect attention from something. But he did warn us to make an exception for tourists, because London needed the foreign currency.
    After that we were back in the gym being reminded how to use our handcuffs properly. We use the ones with a solid middle which you can grab hold of and twist to put pressure on your suspect’s arms, and ensure what our instructor called compliance and co-operation. In the afternoon one of the instructors donned a padded suit and adopted a mad aspect and challenged us to subdue him with our extendable batons. This bit used to be called the ‘nutter’ training but now it’s officially called ‘the person with differences’. It’s useful stuff. You never know when you’re going to have to ensure compliance and co-operation from people with differences, in a state of excited delirium or not.
    When we’d finished I was invited out again but I declined and drove slowly and carefully home instead.
    Lesley got out of hospital and turned up unexpectedly while I was trying to perfect a forma called aqua which, for those of you who didn’t have a classical education, is a base forma for manipulating water. It used to form the empedoclean along with lux, aer and terra – two of which went out of fashion when the four-element theory of matter failed to survive the age of Enlightenment.
    It’s a lot like lux in that you shape the forma in your mind, open your palm and, hopefully, find yourself with a globe of water the size of a ping-pong ball. Nightingale claimed not to know where the water came from, but I assumed it was drawn out of the surrounding air. It was that or it was being sucked out of a parallel dimension, or hyperspace or something even weirder. I hoped it wasn’t hyperspace because I wasn’t ready for the implications of that.
    In my case, so far, I’d managed a small cloud, a frozen rain drop and a puddle. And that was after it had taken me four weeks to get anything at all. Nightingale was supervising me in the teaching lab on the first floor when the vapour haze above my palm shrank down to a wobbly globe. The trouble with this stage of mastering a forma is that it’s almost impossible to tell why what you’re currently doing is working better than what you were doing two seconds ago. That’s why you end up doing a lot of practice and why it isn’t easy maintaining a new forma – particularly when someone decides to start singing the chorus of ‘Rehab’