Tom knew that look. He knew that he was not normal.
Fillide was beside him, in one of her most extraordinary outfits - a red and gold figure-hugging gown that hourglassed her body as firmly as a lover’s touch. The gown was luscious in texture, and so tight at the calves it forced her to walk with teensy tiny little steps. Its colours were like a sunrise over Table Mountain. And over it she wore a soft velvet cape of scarlet hue, with a red and gold pattern on the underside. She looked as if she was going to a ball in a gown designed by a fairy godmother with a background in couture.
Three days had passed since Tom’s return to work, and Boris Hutchinson was still AWOL.
‘Nice frock,’ the barman said to Fillide, and she smiled, with open seductiveness. Then caressed her breasts gently with her palms, in case the barman had failed to spot them.
Once that would have pissed Tom off. Now he didn’t mind. Not because her behaviour was any the less annoying; but because he no longer cared what other people said or did.
He no longer, in fact, gave a fuck about anything or anyone.
Dougie had visited him twice in hospital, during his painful recuperation process. The encounters had not gone well. Tom had been sullen and angry and had refused to answer any of Dougie’s questions. Gina had come to see him in the physiotherapy clinic, and he’d given her short shrift too. Taff had phoned and invited him out for a pint a few times while he was convalescing, but Tom had refused every invitation brusquely.
So Tom had hardly seen anyone from the force during his six-month hiatus. He’d spent most of his time with his mother in her rambling house in West Hampstead. Listening to her supposedly wise words about the nature of his power, though most of what she said was drivel. Cleaning up after her whenever she had one of her binges, which was often. And learning.
Tom now knew he had a gift. A witch gift; it was rare for a male but by no means unknown. Given the right state of mind and the relevant chants, he could levitate, or even fly. He could also survive wounds that would be fatal for any normal human being. And he had the knack of glamour too; which meant he could alter his appearance with a few silently spoken enchantments. And this was how he was able to conceal the extent of his injuries from the world.
For beneath his glamoured veneer, Tom’s body was wrecked. His face was badly scarred. His nose had been partially pecked off by the avian demons, and only one nostril remained. The skin on his chest and back was ripped and torn, and many of the wounds had turned black with evil. Surgeons had had to hack away at the carapace of dead black flesh that had initially enveloped most of his body, to reveal the pink baby skin below; but then that too had turned black.
It was during the course of this long series of operations that Tom had lost his love of humanity, and his will to live.
Tom knew he was a monster. Yet aside from his mother and his Aunt Harriet and the surgeons, no one knew the true extent of his deformities. He could pass for normal, provided he kept his focus and remained surrounded by a cloud of deception. He was like a walking hologram of his previous self.
‘The photo, do you recognise it?’ Tom nudged. Boris Hutchinson had once bought a lunch in this pub on his credit card. It was a fair distance from his parents’ home though, and it was the forty-third pub that Tom and Fillide had been to. So there was no real reason to suppose it was one of Boris’s regular haunts.
‘Yeah, of course. It’s Boris. Everyone knows Boris,’ the barman sneered.
Tom was startled. ‘Boris Hutchinson?’
‘Don’t know his surname. But he’s a regular here.’ The barman mulled. ‘He’s the one whose mum and dad got murdered. Is he your prime suspect then?’
Tom didn’t answer the question. He just bowled another of his own: ‘And was he here on the night of the twelfth of December?’
‘Why, is that his alibi?’
‘Answer the question, please.’
‘I like Boris. He’s a bit cocky but he’s a funny bloke. Big drinker. Heroic drinker, you might say. And flush. Always puts one behind for the barman when he buys a round.’
‘Answer the question, please.’
‘I can’t remember, can I?’
The barman was a study in working class intransigence. Piggy eyes, a crew cut bullet head, beer belly. Tom felt a surge of anger, and tried to bank it down.
‘Just tell the truth.’
‘Hey, you calling me a fucking liar?’
‘Look, was he here or wasn’t he?’ There was temper in Tom’s voice. And he knew he was on to a loser here.
The barman looked at Tom intently. ‘What’s wrong with your face, pal? It’s –’
‘Just answer the bloody questions,’ said Tom, his features eerily still.
The barman shrugged. Fillide smiled. Mockingly, Tom felt.
‘Forgive my companion’s ill courtesy. But you can tell me, good sir.’ She touched the barman’s arm. And she gave him a smile that promised things a man like him could only dream of being promised by a woman such as her.
‘Look, I’m no fucking grass.’
‘Tell me the truth, and you may kiss my hand.’
She raised her hand to him. The barman was bewildered but up for it. He took her hand and kissed her slender fingers. Afterwards, he almost glowed.
‘Yeah he was here that night, I remember, ’cause that was the night of the murder. He left early, he was drunk,’ the barman said.
This was the third time this witness had been interviewed according to the case log, but the first time he had spoken the truth.
‘Thank you,’ said Tom.
‘Thank you,’ said the barman to Fillide. He’d clearly never kissed a woman’s fingers before, and entire new horizons in life were opening up to him.
‘Pray tell me, which is your finest wine, my good sir?’ she asked him.
‘Beg pardon, miss?’
‘Your best wine. I’d like a glass of wine.’
‘Rioja’s good.’
‘Italian, by preference.’
‘Chianti then.’
‘I’ll have a glass.’ Fillide looked at Tom. ‘Two glasses. Large.’ She smiled. Enchantingly, Tom felt.
‘Bring it to the table please?’ she added.
‘This is a British pub,’ Tom advised her. ‘They won’t –’
‘Yes of course, miss,’ said the barman. ‘I’ll open a bottle of the Reserve. No charge of course.’
Fillide flashed another smile. This one hinted at glorious nights of joy with few if any regrets. The barman loved the smile, and grinned back impishly. He was fifty if he was a day.
Tom was perturbed at this display of middle-aged lechery. And he severely disapproved of the way Fillide sexually manipulated witnesses and suspects, male and female alike. But, as he reminded himself, he no longer cared.
Tom and Fillide sat in the snug, where she positioned herself to have the best view of the clientele. Tom noticed she never stopped looking at people. Observing them. Appraising them. Sometimes, she almost seemed to be painting them in her mind.
‘You use glamour, don’t you?’ she said quietly to Tom, ‘on your face.’
He was impressed at Fillide’s acumen. He tried to smile approvingly, but his expression didn’t change. His mastery of the appearance spell was far from complete.
‘Yes,’ he said, stone-faced.
‘You have powers.’
‘Some.’
‘You flew. From St Paul’s. You flew like a bird, I saw the YouTube footage. Someone caught it on mobile phone.’
‘I glided. Or perhaps I should say, I fell, with style.’ He waited for a laugh but it didn’t come. She hadn’t realised he was making a joke; that was the facial paralysis effect again. It occurred to him he had to start employing tonal changes in his voice when he wanted to convey irony.
He remembered the story of the man in the iron mask. His own mask was made of magic, but it was no less oppressive.
She reached out and touched his face with her hand.
H
er soft fingers stroked his cheeks, his lips, his eyelids. She caressed the bumps and ridges of his scars; tracing the pattern of the longest scar that ran down the right side of his face from forehead to jaw. Her eyes widened when she realised he didn’t have much of a nose left. But she didn’t flinch. She kept fingertip-searching him, exploring his real face beneath the illusion.
‘The scars are bad. Very bad,’ she conceded.
‘That’s why I hide them.’
‘Your eye – one eye doesn’t move, even when I touch the lid.’
‘Glass. I see well enough. I can’t watch 3D movies but what the hey. There are some advantages to this.’ Another failed grin.
She took her fingers off his face and pressed his hand into hers. She squeezed it, softly.
A spasm of lust twitched his body.
‘Tell me more,’ he said calmly. ‘About your life. Back then, I mean. In Rome. The days of your – pomp.’
She tossed her head, making her long hair swirl; clearly pleased that he had asked, but pretending to be bored with the question. ‘Why do you care?’
‘I’m interested.’
‘I don’t believe you. You hate me. They all hate me, the guvnor, Five Squad, all humans. I’m hated by everyone.’ She was sullen; her bitterness palpable.
Tom was about to contradict her. Then he thought twice and realised what she had said was true. ‘You’re not exactly popular. Even, well, compared to me.’
‘I’m alien.’
‘Not technically. You’re – the Other.’
‘You all treat me as a monster.’
‘Many of us think you are. I mean, your kind. I mean –’
Fillide was smiling. ‘You’re a monster too.’
‘I’m still human.’
‘I’m still human, too,’ she said softly.
‘Are you?’
She thought about it. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.
‘Your body – is that the real you? Or just some kind of occult projection?’
‘I don’t know that either. It looks like me. A lot.’
‘Not quite the same. You’ve lost weight. Your face is more oval. You’re more beautiful. More twenty-first century fashion model beautiful.’
Fillide acknowledged it with a nod of her exquisite oval face. She was indeed a vision of perfection.
‘Whenever you look in the mirror you mould yourself. To make yourself look prettier. Is that how it works?’
‘To a degree,’ she admitted, sheepishly.
‘I do that too.’
It was something they had in common. Tom had an empathy moment.
‘So tell me. What was it like back then, in the old days?’ he repeated. ‘I’m not bullshitting, I’d like to know. I’m interested in that period. I’m interested in – you.’
She tipped her head, half frowning and half smiling. Two wrinkles ran across her brow. It made her features less perfect; hence more truly beautiful.
‘It was – what can I say? Different. People had more energy. We walked a lot more. Clothes weren’t cleaned as often. People were dirtier, they smelled more, there was no soap.’
‘You had no soap?’
She laughed. ‘We used perfume. To mask our body odour, or at least, to blend in with our natural stink. You got used to being able to smell yourself. That’s how you knew you were alive. Now, I shower every day, though I don’t need to. I shave my legs, though if I chose I could simply will my leg hairs to stop growing.’ Tom smiled at that notion. ‘I’m bleached clean, but so are all the rest of you. And why! It’s fucking stupid. If you can’t smell yourself, what’s the point, how do you know you’re human, eh, the flesh, we have to smell our own flesh, yes?’ A torrent of words; Tom couldn’t follow it all. But he loved the lilting Italian rhythms of her husky voice. ‘Can you do that?’
‘What?’
Whispered: ‘Smell your own flesh.’
Tom lifted his right hand. He pressed the back of the hand up against his nose, and sniffed it. It was a faint musky smell. Familiar yet strange. He marvelled he’d never done this before.
He licked his hand, from the wrist to the knuckles. And the skin felt the tongue, as much as the tongue felt the skin. The licking sensation made the aroma of himself even sweeter in his one remaining nostril. ‘I smell the flesh,’ he said, ‘of an Englishman.’
She laughed.
She held his hand up to her own nose and sniffed it, more robustly than he had. ‘A dog could smell that and pick you out of a thousand people. I can do better than that. Every smell is unique. That’s how I can identify corpses by smelling their bones.’
She sniffed him, Hannibal Lecter style: sniff-sniff-fava-beans-sniff.
Then she licked her lips, remembering his aroma. ‘And I have you now. I could track you across a river. Across an entire city. As for me –’
She held out her hand. He sniffed it. Nothing. He licked the skin of her hand with his tongue.
Something.
He let go of her hand, abruptly.
‘You got into fights, didn’t you?’ he said casually, trying to distract himself. ‘Back then, in the old days, I mean. With pimps and whores and bravi and suchlike.’
She smiled at the memories.
Tom realised he’d never seen her smile in quite that way before. Usually her smile was arch and knowing, or flirtatious. But this time the smile felt real. A smile of real pleasure, not a weapon or a goad.
‘Not often,’ she said. ‘Not every night. Not even every week. But – yes. If someone challenged me, I would punch them or beat them. Or slash them across the face, like this. Why wouldn’t I?’ As she spoke she gestured; the downward slash of a blade across a face known as the sfrigio was conjured up in a single fluent arm movement.
‘You were arrested. For trying to cut a woman’s face.’
She acknowledged it with pride.
‘I was. Several times. Not always was I caught.’
‘Why did you do it? To teach her a lesson?’
‘I marked my ground. You have to mark your ground. No one can fuck with me. I taught the bitch a lesson.’
‘Like being a cop,’ said Tom. ‘Same idea. No one fucks with us.’
She laughed at that: a bell-peal-like laugh.
‘Yes, you are right, Thomas. This world, it’s not so very different from mine eh? Just, the clothes, they are shit. What the men wear, especially. What you are wearing, most of all. Grey suit. Blue tie. Blue striped shirt.’ She made a ‘vomit’ gesture.
‘What should I wear?’
She considered it.
‘A waistcoat maybe. Something with colour, lots of colour. Boots, for certain. Black or brown. A cape, velvet. Perhaps even a hat?’
He shook his head: appalled.
‘Now Roy, say what you like about him, he’s a man who knows how to dress well.’
‘The lads all think he’s a dandy. Well, “pouff” in police parlance.’
‘He’s a man who takes great care about how he looks. For that, and that alone, I respect him.’
‘What else? What other memories of the past?’
Fillide smiled again.
Chapter 2
‘In those days,’ said Fillide Melandroni, ‘I could drink a flagon of sack in a night. Me and the girls, we’d trawl the streets, looking for men or getting into trouble. We’d knock on doors and run away. We called that “scorning”, we scorned their houses. We’d scorn people too, we’d “slag them off”, as you would say, bitch about them, insult them, make up lies about them. Forget rap, forget Eminem, Snoop Dogg, K Bro and the rest, we dissed the motherfuckas with poetry in the days when it really was poetry. And when we got fed up of scorning someone, we’d throw bricks through their windows for a laugh, and that’s when a window cost more than a man could earn in a month. Jesu, Mary, Joseph, you’ve never lived, till you’ve lived the way that I did back then!’
‘Syphilis in rife in those days, wasn’t it? In your time?’
Fillide nodded.
> ‘Oh yes. I saw plenty of men with that curse. Some say Columbus brought it with him from the Americas, I don’t know about that. But I did see men die of it. I also saw other men give up sex with whores, and then drink themselves to death out of sheer frustration. And the duels. I saw so many duels.’
‘What was he like?’
She smiled, as if expecting the question.
‘Michel Agnolo Cerisi?’
‘Yes.’
Fillide’s eyes ached with the memory.
‘Everyone wants to know about Michel. He was a friend. What can I say?’
‘Gay or straight?’
‘Gay! What is this shit about fucking gay!’ she said furiously. ‘He was a man, a real man, he fucked me many times. Other girls too he swived. He fucked boys too of course. Sometimes, at the same time, a boy, a girl, each side. They all did, back then. We were careful though. He knew how to spill his seed. But me and him were pals. Michel Agnolo loved life.’
When Tom had first realised that Fillide has been a model for the artist Michel Agnolo Merisi da Caravaggio, he had been awed by the thought. He still was.
‘He killed a man for me, did you know that?’
‘Tomassoni? That was for you?’ Tom was breathless. NO ONE knew this.
‘Oh yes. The Tomassonis were bullies, you see. Cocks of the walk, boyz in the hood - you know what I mean? And Ranuccio was the biggest bully of all. Though when I was younger, it didn’t bother me so much. And besides, he knew how to satisfy a woman.’ She patted her crotch, and smiled. ‘He was one of my first. He got me started on my career, did Ranuccio. But then the years went by. I was successful. He became arrogant, and disrespectful to me. He was my pimp, that’s how you’d say it now. He protected me and he made assignations for me with nobles who wanted to make the beast with two backs. And in return, I gave Ranuccio money. A trade, yeah? But one night he was drunk, very drunk, and arrogant, did I mention that? So fucking arrogant! And disrespectful. He said my muff belonged to him. I told him, well, many things. And I told him I wouldn’t take his cock in my fanny, I wouldn’t even milk him in my hand. And he got angry and he forced me, raped me as you’d say now, with his knife to my throat. Knife here, cock there.’ She mimed it; Tom saw it. ‘So fucking disrespectful! Afterwards he left coins, but I threw them out of the window. The other girls said I should laugh it off. After all, I’d been fucking Ranuccio since I was twelve. But it’s respect. It’s all about respect! No one does that to me. No one forces me. For I am Fillide Melandroni!’
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