Alice quickly did her housecoat up, her undone bra flapping against her sides, and took a step toward her bag. Apollo grabbed it and hugged it to him.
“Oh,” said Alice. “Apollo. Could I have my bag, please?”
“No,” said Apollo.
“Please,” said Alice. “I really need it to go home.”
“No,” said Apollo again. “You’re not going home.”
“Well, no, I think I am going to go home now, Apollo,” said Alice. “I’m very sorry. If you won’t give me my bag, I’m going to go anyway. But I’d rather have my bag, please.”
“No.”
“Okay,” said Alice. “Good-bye, Apollo. I really am very sorry, but I’m sure once you sleep on it you’ll realize that it’s for the best.”
Alice walked toward the door, but Apollo leaped up and grabbed her waist from behind.
“You can’t leave,” he said. “I forbid you!”
“Please let go,” said Alice.
Apollo just gripped tighter.
“You’re hurting me!” said Alice.
Instantly, Apollo’s hands flew off her as if she had given him an electric shock. He staggered back a pace, then lifted one hand and stared at it as if he had never seen it before.
“Oh dear,” said Alice. “Are you all right?”
“Sorry,” said Apollo, “I didn’t mean to harm you.”
He lowered his hand and looked at her with some kind of indecision.
“Good-bye,” said Alice again and took another step toward the door.
“You can’t leave,” said Apollo. “Please. I’m in love with you.”
“The thing is, I love . . . somebody else,” said Alice.
Apollo threw himself between her and the door.
“I’m not going to let you go,” he said.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t stop me,” said Alice.
Apollo refused to move, so she was forced to try to pry him away from the door, but her small body was no match for his muscular frame. She pulled with all her strength but nothing happened. Apollo grabbed at her shoulder, but again, his hand flew back as if it had been stung.
“Damn it!” shouted Apollo.
“Please let me past,” said Alice.
“Can I just ask you something first?” said Apollo.
“Of course,” said Alice.
“Does rape constitute harm?”
Alice’s blood turned to ice. She was paralyzed, instantly, with fear.
“Well, does it?”
“What?” Alice managed to croak.
She tried to figure out which way to run. The door was the only way out of the room; the window was too high to jump from.
“I’d like to rape you, but would that cause you harm?”
Apollo seemed genuinely interested in the answer.
“Yes,” Alice managed to reply.
She willed her limbs to move. She did not want to die here.
“Oh,” said Apollo. “Is that why they made it illegal?”
“Yes,” she said again.
“Oh, right,” said Apollo. “And you’re not going to consent to sex?”
“No,” said Alice, a little more strongly this time.
“Well, in that case, you’d better go then.”
“I can go?”
“Don’t forget your bag.”
When the phone rang, Neil was in his den, playing the kind of computer game that involves committing acts of obscene violence on undeserving aliens, and he was losing.
“What is it?” he barked.
“It’s me,” came the voice, wavering at the other end. “It’s Alice. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course I can,” said Neil. “I’m sorry too. You know I am. Please don’t be so upset.”
On-screen, an alien administered the last rites, but Neil didn’t notice.
“It isn’t that . . . ,” said Alice.
“What is it?” said Neil. “What’s happened?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Alice. “Can I come over? I’m too scared to go home by myself.”
“Too scared?” said Neil. “What’s going on?”
“Please don’t ask me,” said Alice. “It’s all my own fault anyway. Please can I come over, Neil? I don’t have anywhere else to go. I can’t stay by myself tonight. Please.”
“Of course you can. You don’t have to ask. You’re welcome whenever you like, you know that.”
“Thank you . . . You shouldn’t be so nice to me. Thank you.”
After he had calmed her down and hung up the phone, Neil changed the sheets on his bed and then made up the sofa for himself, struggling with mixed feelings that he wasn’t entirely proud of. Alice was upset, so he was upset. Alice was frightened, so he was frightened. And Alice had turned to him for help, and that was the best news he’d had in weeks.
17
APOLLO, MEANWHILE, 7
APOLLO, MEANWHILE, DECIDED that the only possible response to Alice’s cruel rejection of him was to get drunk. He started drinking at home, in his bedroom, huge slugs of Dionysus’s wine out of Alice’s glass, which still tasted of her mouth. But then Ares came along and asked him how it had all gone, and Apollo, who didn’t like looking weak, and particularly didn’t like looking weak in front of war-loving Ares, and even more so when Ares had helped set up the situation in the first place, gave a noncommittal answer and went downstairs.
This was even worse. When he went into the living room, Athena was practicing a presentation in front of an appreciative audience of empty chairs, and before he could sneak away she grabbed his arm and asked whether she could count on his prompt attendance at tomorrow’s assembly? “Your presence,” she stressed, “is critical.”
“Yeah,” said Apollo, detaching himself, and he went to the kitchen in the hope that nobody would be there.
Unfortunately Aphrodite was at the table, sniffing a bacon sandwich and talking filth into her phone. When she saw Apollo come in, she immediately put the hapless caller on hold and looked up at him with a disturbingly knowing expression.
“The cleaner left in quite a hurry,” she said, a sparkle in her far from innocent eye. “I do hope nothing was wrong?”
“Nothing at all,” said Apollo.
“I thought that Neil was terribly nice. Didn’t you?”
“I’m going out,” said Apollo.
Her laughter followed him down the hall and into the street.
Dionysus’s nightclub, Bacchanalia, was located in a basement down a poorly lit side street popular with prostitutes and junkies, somewhere between Euston and King’s Cross. It was a dingy, shabby hole, sweaty and cramped, painted an unwelcoming shade of purple and stinking of stale cigarettes and sour booze. That it was able to survive was testament to the combined pulling power of Dionysus’s wine—legendary for its potency among bohemian alcoholics—and the still more legendary floor shows that unfolded on the mirrored stage behind the tiny dance floor. In fact, together these proved such a draw that the club was sold out every night and, given the cheapness of the rent, should therefore have been wildly profitable, but so much cash went into bribing the police and, when that was unsuccessful, fighting court orders and reapplying for licenses that Dionysus barely made any money from it at all.
It was early when Apollo got there, not even fully dark yet, but the queue was already beginning to tail back along the street. Wrapped in a long coat, head down, hands plunged deep in his pockets, Apollo didn’t even bother to admire the clientele—women dressed like Warhol-era New York whores and sharp-suited, sharper-coiffured men in eyeliner, waiting in multisexual combinations of pairs and threesomes. Ignoring them all, he marched straight to the front of the queue, where two cold, bored maenads—followers of Dionysus since the dawn of time—stood, wearing little other than a few vine leaves and scraps of fur, holding clipboards and sorting through the crowd, turning away the insufficiently hip.
“Is he in?” he said.
“Who?” said one of the maenads.
“Don’t act the idiot,” said Apollo, “or I’ll button your lip. Permanently. You’re not mortal. I can still do that at least.”
The maenad, who had the kind of loathing for Apollo that could only come from having slept with him on a regular basis, clenched her teeth and looked at the ground.
“He’ll be behind the bar,” said the other maenad. “Go on in.”
She unhooked the tatty purple velvet rope that crossed the door, allowed Apollo to slip past, then swiftly hooked it up again, paying no attention to the cries of desperate wannabe punters, insisting they were with him.
Apollo went down the narrow stairs, past the small ticket booth that was staffed by a heavily tattooed hermaphrodite who sometimes performed when other acts called in sick, and into the club itself. On the stage were a trio of dwarf contortionists doing something that would upset Artemis deeply were she ever to witness it. In front of them, a group of girls, including two current faces of top-selling perfumes and an up-and-coming Hollywood actress, were dancing together in elaborately feigned lasciviousness. They were coolly being observed by the rest of the growing crowd, clustered at the bar or seated at rickety round tables on the edge of the dance floor. From these Apollo recognized the editor of a tabloid newspaper, a top-end hotelier, and four minor deities.
Apollo walked over to the bar, the filth of the floor sticking to the soles of his shoes. Dionysus hadn’t seen him come in. He was busy restocking the bar with bottles of his wine—the club sold nothing else.
“Hello, bro,” said Apollo.
Dionysus turned.
“Apollo. You look like shit,” he said.
Without waiting to be asked, Dionysus uncorked a bottle and poured out a tall glass.
“Quiet night,” commented Apollo.
“It’ll pick up,” said Dionysus. “What can I do for you?”
“I want to get shit-faced and fuck someone. Preferably several people,” said Apollo.
“The usual, then,” said Dionysus.
“I wish it was,” said Apollo.
Dionysus looked sharply at Apollo. If, as he suspected, he was going to have to endure Apollo banging on yet again about the appalling unfairness of his existence, he was going to need liquid assistance. After only a second’s thought, he decided to dispense with glasses entirely and started lining up bottles on the bar between him and his brother.
“It’s a girl,” said Apollo, once he had started his second bottle.
“A girl?” said Dionysus. He was surprised. It wasn’t like Apollo to get emotional over a mortal.
“The most beautiful, amazing, incredible girl in the world,” said Apollo.
“Right,” said Dionysus.
“The fucking bitch whore,” said Apollo.
“Right,” said Dionysus again.
Apollo swigged back a quarter of the bottle of Dionysus’s strongest wine in one swallow. He muttered something unintelligible into his chest. Dionysus gazed over his shoulder at the stage, where a lithe, shining, nude black man was currently inserting his big toe into his nose.
“Her name’s Alice,” said Apollo. “Isn’t that the most wonderful name you ever heard in your life? Alice. Are you listening to me?”
Dionysus snapped his eyes back to Apollo’s face.
“Of course I am,” he said. “Alice. Wonderful name. Yes.”
“I really thought she was the one, you know?” said Apollo. “The one. I was ready to settle down . . . me. For a few decades at least, till she died. I really thought she loved me. But now I realize that I was just her fool.”
“Mortal women can be like that,” agreed Dionysus. He hoped that this wasn’t going to go on for long.
“You’re supposed to tell me that I’m not a fool,” said Apollo.
“Oh. Sorry. You’re not a fool,” said Dionysus. But you are incredibly boring, he added silently.
“Bitches. All of them,” said Apollo, returning to his theme.
“I’ll drink to that,” said Dionysus.
He uncorked another bottle.
“Alice . . . ,” he mused. “You know, I think I know somebody called Alice.”
“You do,” said Apollo. “She cleans our house.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s it,” said Dionysus. “So where did you meet yours, then?”
“No,” said Apollo. “That’s it. That’s her.”
“That’s her? That’s your Alice? The cleaner?”
Dionysus was delighted. This was turning out to be interesting after all.
“You’re in love with the cleaner?”
“Don’t be such a snob,” snapped Apollo. “You’re half mortal, remember? You’re hardly in a position to be making social judgments.”
“Whatever you say,” said Dionysus. “So what happened? Don’t tell me she turned you down.”
Apollo finished the entire bottle before replying.
“She turned me down,” he said eventually.
Dionysus stifled a laugh.
“The cleaner turned you down?” he said.
“That’s what I said,” said Apollo.
“When did that happen?”
“This afternoon,” said Apollo. “Tonight should have been the most amazing night of my life. At last I’d met her: the one. The one who was going to make all the difference. The one who was going to mean everything to me. And I would have done anything for her, Dion. I would have moved the world. I swear it. But she just led me on . . . the bitch. She led me on and then she dropped me like a stone. No, not like a stone. Like a greased fish. That was how desperate she was to be rid of me.”
“The cleaner turned you down,” confirmed Dionysus.
“And I can’t even kill her,” complained Apollo.
“And that’s what you want to do, is it?” said Dionysus. “Kill her?”
It was a funny definition of love, in his opinion, but he knew better than to mention this.
“She shamed me.”
Dionysus contorted his face into agreement.
“And she’s got this thing . . .”
“Thing?” said Dionysus. “Like a deformity?”
“Sort of. His name’s Neil. Looks like the skeleton of a leaf.”
“A boyfriend, you mean?” said Dionysus.
“Not exactly, but close enough,” said Apollo. He sighed. “The evil, manipulative witch . . . I’ll never meet anyone else like her.”
He took a long, sorrowful drink from the latest bottle in front of him.
“So why can’t you kill her?” said Dionysus.
“I made,” said Apollo, “some stupid vow. On Styx.”
“Oh,” said Dionysus. “I can see how that would make things difficult.”
“Bloody Artemis interfering again,” said Apollo.
“She does that,” agreed Dionysus.
On the stage behind Apollo, they were bringing out the crabs. People would start fainting soon. Time to wrap up the conversation.
“Never mind, eh?” he said to Apollo in a brighter tone that suggested, he hoped, finality. “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“How’s that?” said Apollo.
“Maybe she’ll die anyway.”
As Dionysus picked up the empty bottles and walked away, Apollo wondered whether to take his comment as just an observation or as a piece of helpful advice.
18
APOLLO, MEANWHILE, 7
APOLLO, MEANWHILE, 18
APOLLO AWOKE ON the floor of the deserted club. That he had been asleep at all was, in itself, a bad sign. That his head felt like someone was standing on it wearing hobnailed boots was even worse. Pain was a new and deeply unwelcome arrival in his physical repertoire. Aside from the obvious discomfort, there was also a certain unpleasant irony to experiencing pain: he could use his power to get rid of it, but in doing so, he would weaken himself, thus becoming more susceptible to further pain in the future. Standing up groggily, peeling a flyer from his face and picking the cigarette butts off his rumpled, wine-stained clothes, he decided o
n a compromise and reduced the agony to merely an insistent, irritating throb, which suited his mood perfectly. Scrabbling around on the floor of the club, he found enough loose change to pay for a bus ride home—he knew from past experience that Dionysus would already have banked the cash from the till, so there was no point looking there.
At the bus stop, the gathered mortals—mothers with kids, pensioners with tartan shopping trolleys, and a clutch of commuters in suits who obviously believed themselves to be wholly superior to the others—all kept their distance from Apollo, huddling together at the far end of the stand and not trying to hide the disapproval and disgust on their faces. I could kill you all, thought Apollo, with a click of my fingers. I could turn you into nasturtiums, or worms, or yesterday’s papers. I could flay you alive, make your eyeballs boil in their sockets, rearrange your internal organs so that your guts were in your mouths and you were shitting out of your armpits. Or at least I could have. Once. Before Artemis had her little bit of fun.
When the bus finally came, the mortals clambered on one by one, but the driver, who had seemed passive and half asleep, managed to shut the doors before Apollo could get on board and sped the bus away. Rather than endure the same humiliation twice, Apollo put his sticky change in his pocket and started walking, telling himself that he didn’t want to sit in a rattling red tin can full of rotting mortals anyway.
London that morning was bleak and dirty, the color of soot. There were mortals everywhere, walking in the same direction, silent and featureless, like a greasy tide. Apollo walked against them, smacking into shoulders and briefcases as they refused to get out of his way. If they knew who he was, wondered Apollo, knew that he alone was responsible for the sun that shone above their heads, would they even care? He doubted it. One thing about mortals that had never changed was that they all believed themselves to be immortal. He quite liked that about them. It was so arrogant, so optimistic. Like himself, on a better day.
He had hoped to sneak back into the house and into his bed unseen, but as he dragged himself up the front stairs, he heard swift steps following him, and he turned to see, of all possible gods, Artemis, dressed in her tracksuit and carrying a handful of empty dog leashes.
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