Welcome to Malynowsky''s Central London''s West End is characterised by the art of illusion; namely, theatrical illusion, the realm of the Tarot Magician. Couture and masquerade meet here, and who can tell who is hidden beneath the mercurial masks, beneath the guises and styles as enchanting and fleeting as butterflies? The frock-faced baroque façades of Charing Cross exhibit posters of the shows-Hugo''s Les Misérables, the ABBA story Mama Mia, a variety of literary plays. The highest-kicking advertisements with the glossiest smiles solicit the biggest crowds. For such is the art of Hermes, stage iilusionist, vendor of ephemera, celestial salesman who presides over all cities. Hermes, whose quicksilver whim rules London, Paris, and New York. On the steps outside The Albion Theatre, a sprawl of sodden drunks is ever in evidence, little streams I prefer to think of as spilt cider dribbling away from their trouser-end tat. Passers-by thread with catlike care between these rivulets, tightening shawls and stoles around delicate shoulders, casting nervous looks at their Gucci shoes. The happy hoboes loll at Thespia''s portal in a fug of fellowship carried high on fumes of White Lightning and Cutter''s Choice, immune to the thronging crowds to which they have chosen not to belong, comfy in their tangle of odours and grunts and vinous visages whose ruddiness promises friendship.
Despite the constant disgorging of new faces from the tube station at Leicester Square, the regular visitor will recognise the same people over and again. These tipsy dipsos, for example, reclining among the scavenger-pigeons ("flying rats" as Mayor Ken calls them-"a flocking nuisance"), and the homeopathic advisors at Oriental Cures, their mild, full-moon faces ever in orbit around jars of feathery herbs and fungal barks. The Indian owners of the rag and fag and bevvy shops are always present and sober, even at three in the morning. During the day, they lean against their doors like sentinels, espying regulars going into other outlets. One can be reprimanded for this, as I have discovered on occasion. And then there are those of us who are exhibited in windows. Malynowsky''s Central, Specialist in Ancient Cultures and Their Religions is located between Theatreland and Soho, where there is a long tradition of proffering human wares via doorway and peephole. However, fear not.
The artful Mr. Malynowsky has not set me up in the world''s most ancient profession, though he certainly felt that I needed a change. Having spent the past three months as peripatetic priestess of bound and precious parchments, dispensing books across the globe on behalf of the business, vas hermeticums too precious to be entrusted to the mail, I have returned to England, and to work. The wormholes bored into my sanity by events at the Oxford branch (see The Magick Bookshop) had been stoppered up a little, or at least lulled by those long lazy sarong days, though their occlusion was still shaky in the face of the occult. Still, I pressed on with my line of magickal endeavour, treading the tightrope over the abyss with the surety of one safety-netted by the Inevitable. I am now the Tarot Reader at Mr. Malynowsky''s headquarters; an ancient two-story bookshop that sells antiquarian tomes, but which also features an entire floor dedicated to new books. The substance that binds them all is magick.
Every book in the shop is on the subject of esoteric lore and practise. Here, as I say, I sit in the window, a modern Instant Oracle-come-Shopfront Spectacle. My divination table and I are placed on a raised platform clearly visible from the street, along with a chair for the client. It''s great, except on bad hair days. On a cloth of brothel-red rests the emerald silk square that wraps my Tarot cards and keeps their vibrations in. A small statue of Horus guards them when I pop out for a cheap caffeine-hit from the ingratiating Indians opposite. Trade is of the passing sort; together we are the epitome of the Wheel of Fortune, with serendipity in both camps. Between clients, I people-watch and read my own future.
I relish the custom here. There''s more variety than there was in the Oxford branch: actors and artists, ballet dancers, pop stars, witches and magickians, and almost every one an author, apparently. I regularly read for people who know other people who can levitate. We have breathy conversations about such things over their Tarot spreads. How much pranayama does it take to get airborne? Do you think that Vishram is really the reincarnation of Paramahansa Yogananda? When is a guru not a guru? When you can pay for the truth in installments. No dry academics at Malynowsky''s Central as there are at the Oxford branch. Most of Malynowsky''s London customers are thoroughly proficient in the occult, or at least they''re believers. They are shamans, Reiki masters, and disciples of various gurus, famous or infamous.
Well, they would be, breathing the very air that Hermes permeates. The staff here are numerous compared to the Oxford branch I used to manage, and most of them apparently vegan and adept at yoga. Dreadlocked and sandaled, they form an army of good intentions in the centre of the city, rather as the Hare Krishna devotees do. One or two stand out, as I am about to recount, but most of us are hired by Mr. Malynowsky to combat Mammon and to spread positive vibrations in the heart of the metropolis. Mr. Malynowsky hosts us, all-embracing Jupiter, welcome to my kingdom, jovial overlord of magickal skell and misper and shicker, patron boss of the urban drifter, so long as the drifting is in the direction of God. He cuts us plenty of slack en route.
We earn our daily tofu under the sign of the caduceus, the symbol the ancient man of magick has selected to adorn the hanging sign outside this bookshop. It is painted gold on fertile green, and as the sun follows its daily course above the alleyway, the light slides along the snakes entwined around the wand, seeping from dull flat yellow to a brilliant, blinding talisman of burning gold reflected by the windows of the taller buildings opposite. Hermes is pleased to see his sacred symbol so prominently displayed in the heart of his city. Mr. Malynowsky knows this, and, being no fool in either magick or in business, he has even had the carpets designed with a caduceus motif. Despite the threat of larger businesses and online bargain rivals, the shop has thrived for many years now. Less successful booksellers consider it mysterious indeed. Mr.
Malynowsky, the business'' septuagenarian owner and Qabalist extraordinaire, made a cameo appearance of his own in the West End on my first day, a perky sketch in which he introduced me to his staff one by one, leaving much unsaid, but interspersing his external expostulations with subtle phrases and implications via brain radio. "Like many parts of London, this area has a rich magickal history," he explained to me before his assembled crew. "As to this shop itself, Kala, it was founded nearly two centuries ago-before my time, even!-at the suggestion of the great Helena Blavatsky, who regretted that no such magickal bookshop had hitherto existed. She knew the founder well, and I was blessed to be able to take over such a propitious property, and to continue in the same line of endeavour as its original founders. Aleister Crowley shopped here, and the original Golden Dawn used to meet in its basement." I would have looked around, but I was hemmed in on all sides by Mr. Malynowsky''s accomplices. "Of course, Samuel Mathers and Moina Bergson met for the first time in the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum, just down the road in Bloomsbury.
And Dion Fortune knew this area well . indeed, she set many of her fictions here." Mr. Malynowsky smiled, his eyes Yesodic violet beneath Ketherhair. I had missed him, I reflected. "However, enough of my magickal name-dropping! Kala, I''d like you to meet the modern magickal personages with whom you will be working." He led me round them. A gang of Ouspensky devotees, Crispin, Lucas, and Seb, young lads with wild hair who like to go camping together to Devon and Cornwall-in tents in all respects, quipped the mage telepathically.
The part-timers: a raft of hippies of various ages and hues of henna in their hair, a couple of members of The Fellowship of Isis, a lone Thelemite all dressed in black . and now the three full-time staff who stand out most to me. Lanky Sam is the newest of the crew, an awkward art student who stares at breasts when he should be looking into eyes, and whose unfragrant feet have been known to rest upon the counter when the managers are out. Sam talks constantly-usually about sex and drugs, in psychotropic detail. He tries to get in with the Ouspensky gang, but he''s simply too chemical for them. His sexual frustration is palpable. But he draws such fantastic doodles- Michelangelo meets Mad magazine-and tells such sad tales of childhood in Camden Town with punk parents on smack-and not a morsel to eat in the flat-that nobody has had the heart to fire him yet. Sam would take a cigarette-break every twenty minutes if he could get away with it.
He is apparently unable to breathe without the Golden Virginia he''s constantly rolling when he isn''t smoking it. He manages to be outside more often than in, despite the rules-somehow when I look up from my table, his Jack Skellframe is always propped up in the alleyway, his pale eyes scanning parts of passers-by that other eyes wouldn''t,.