“So Apollo—he’s a god too?”
“God of the sun. In practice that means he has absolutely nothing to do. Sun goes up, sun comes down. Child’s play. Why?”
“I . . . He . . . I . . .”
“Did you shag him?” said Hermes. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Everybody shags him. Even I’ve shagged him. That was during a very boring decade. Oops, nearly missed my turn.”
Hermes pulled the motorbike around sharply to the right, cutting a corner through a flock-wallpapered living room where an elderly couple were placidly watching TV.
“I suppose I could go all the way there through houses if I wanted to,” he mused, “but I’ve grown quite attached to roads.”
“No,” said Alice. “No, I didn’t shag him. But we did kiss.”
“Kiss?” said Hermes. “That’s nothing. Apollo gets around a lot. Kissing him is like shaking hands with a normal person. So why did you stop at a kiss? Come on, you can tell me. It’s not like you’ve got anybody else to talk to.”
At this thought Alice could feel herself wanting to cry again, but just like before, the tears wouldn’t come.
As if he could read her mind, Hermes said, “You’ll find you don’t have tears anymore. Tears are a mortal thing. There’s lots of other things you’ll be missing too, after a while, all your basic bodily range. You’ve lost everything corporeal: no eating, no drinking, no sleeping, no sex. No kissing, not even gods. It’s definitely the downside of being dead. On the other hand, you’ll never get hurt or ill or tired or hungry again. I’d focus on that, if I were you. So anyway, what happened?”
“Sorry?”
“After the kiss?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Alice.
“Why, did he rape you or something? I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. He’s always raping people.”
“No!” said Alice.
“So what’s the matter then?” said Hermes. “This is your last chance, you know, to discuss it with anyone who knows Apollo. And you’re never going to see me again.”
“He tried to rape me,” Alice admitted.
“Only tried?” said Hermes. “He must have really liked you. Or maybe he didn’t like you enough.”
He considered this for a moment or two as the motorcycle plowed through a crowd of oblivious schoolchildren on a zebra crossing.
“And then Zeus killed you. Interesting.”
“Zeus killed me? Who’s Zeus?”
“Our father. Chief god. He lives in the roof. Lightning is a classic Zeus maneuver.”
“I never met him,” said Alice.
“Well, he certainly met you,” said Hermes. “Okay, here we are.”
“What?”
Hermes pulled up to the curb and stopped. A bus pulled up on top of them and began disgorging passengers.
“We’re here now.”
“Already?”
“That’s what I said.”
“But this isn’t the underworld,” said Alice. “This is Upper Street.”
“Yes, it is,” confirmed Hermes. “Do you like what I did with that? Upper Street. You see?”
“Upper Street is the underworld?”
“No, of course it isn’t,” said Hermes. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have called it Upper Street. I don’t take you all the way into the underworld, I only take you to the portal. Which is here.”
“I don’t under—” Alice broke off.
“Over there,” said Hermes, pointing.
“Angel Tube station?”
“Where else? Yes, just go inside, follow the escalators down to the very bottom. Go through the back wall, and you’ll find another platform on the far side where all the other dead will be waiting for the train. You’ll know who they are because they’ll be able to see you. And some of them have really unpleasant injuries that make them very easy to spot. There’ll be a special train, get on that, and it’ll take you all the way there.”
“But,” said Alice, “but I’m not ready.”
“Nobody ever is.”
“I had so much I was going to ask you,” said Alice.
“Well, you should have died a bit further away from Islington then,” said Hermes. “Look, I’d love to help, but I can’t hang around. You mortals just keep dying. I’m sure you can get one of the others to explain it all to you.”
“Please, can you just do something for me?” Alice pleaded. “Neil—the man I told you about—Aphrodite knows who he is. So does Ares. And, well, Apollo, but . . .”
“I can’t believe you didn’t figure out the god thing for yourself,” said Hermes. “Weren’t the names a dead giveaway? No pun intended.”
“Find him,” said Alice. “Tell him . . . tell him I love him. Please. And that I’m sorry. And—”
Hermes shook his head.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “Alice, I understand that you’re scared and upset and you didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. You’re not the first, believe me. But I can’t treat you any differently from all the mortals I see every day—thousands of them, every single day, Alice. They’ve all got a message for their loved ones. And a lot of them have died in much worse circumstances than you—wars, plagues, famines, earthquakes, volcanoes, fires, floods, execution, torture, abduction, murder, stabbings, shootings, bombings, ODs . . . I can’t help you, Alice. I can’t help any of you.”
Alice looked at the ground. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yes, well, I’m sorry too,” said Hermes after a moment. “Sometimes this job really gets to me. If it makes you feel any better, you were really quite dignified, the way you asked. You should hear the begging that I get sometimes, it’s embarrassing. Really, Alice, for a mortal, you’re not that bad.”
“Thank you,” said Alice.
“Good luck with the next part of your journey,” said Hermes. “Don’t worry. You’ll be okay.”
Alice got off the bike.
“Good-bye, Hermes,” she said.
“Take care,” said Hermes, and he rode away down the street.
Alice looked around her. Upper Street: such a familiar place. She shopped there, ate there, went to the cinema there. Or at least she used to. The rain was stopping now; half the passersby had umbrellas up, the others down. They hurried in and out of the Tube station—the portal, thought Alice—read the menus of the restaurants, admired the clothes behind plate-glass windows as they walked around her, sometimes through her, not knowing that the dead were with them, that they were gathering here as if at the departure gate in an enormous airport, headed for . . . where?
“Alice!” said a voice behind her.
She turned. It was Hermes, pulling over again on his motorbike.
“Did you change your mind?” said Alice. “Will you speak to Neil?”
“No,” said Hermes. “Sorry. I was just dropping Jean-François off.”
He indicated an elderly man on the back of the bike.
“Vas-y, c’est la-bas,” he said to the man. “Suis cette jeune femme, elle connaît la bonne route.”
The old man got off the bike and looked at her with shining eyes, full of expectation.
“The old ones are always the happiest,” said Hermes. “They know it’s coming, and they’ve been scared of it for years. Then when it does come it’s a pleasant surprise for them that they’re still here, plus they lose all of their aches and pains. Sweet, really. Also, you and I were chatting so much that I forgot to give you your ticket.”
“My ticket?”
Hermes handed over what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary Tube ticket.
“Now, this is very important: don’t give it to the Tube driver until you get to the other side,” said Hermes. “He’ll ask you to, but don’t give him the ticket. Otherwise he’ll just drop you off midway, and you’ll end up haunting the Tube tunnels for all eternity. Most haunted place in the world, the Tube. Sometimes you can even see the ghosts, though nobody ever notices them. You have to look pretty close. They’re the ones who aren’t breathing.�
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“Thank you for letting me know,” said Alice.
“It was nice meeting you again,” said Hermes. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Bye! Au revoir!”
And he waved to them both as he drove away.
Alice turned to her new dead companion. “Hello,” she said. “Bonjour. It’s this way. Par ici.”
She beckoned him to follow and walked away, toward the gaping mouth of Angel Tube station.
23
APOLLO WAS FUCKING Aphrodite in the bathroom. Again. She was leaning against the wall, one foot up on the toilet cistern, and judging by the look on her face she was thinking about paint samples. Again. This ought to have been a triumphant moment, his victory fuck, when he proved that he had overcome that insignificant little mortal, that he had erased her from this unimportant mortal planet and now he was erasing her from his deeply important body and mind. But he didn’t feel particularly triumphant.
How many times? thought Apollo. How many times had he fucked Aphrodite in this precise position in this precise bathroom? How many times would he? The term déjà vu was completely meaningless in his life. He had already done everything over and over and over again, and he would carry on doing the same things over and over and over again, for as long as—well, for as long as the earth revolved around the sun. None of it had any meaning anymore. Had it ever had any meaning? He trawled through the endless repetitions of his memory, searching for some youthful spark of enthusiasm, some sense of newness. Surely it had been there once. But the only example he could find was how he had felt about Alice.
“What are you looking like that for?” said Aphrodite. “You’re not going to come, are you?”
“Far from it,” said Apollo.
“Good,” said Aphrodite. “I’m not done yet. Right, I’m turning round.”
His whole life, Apollo thought as Aphrodite shifted position, was some kind of recurring dream. Or maybe a nightmare. But no; it wasn’t exciting enough to be a nightmare. Or interesting enough to be a dream. Maybe it was just a persistent hallucination.
How long ago had he killed Alice, anyway? Or had been an innocent party to the killing of Alice, he hastily reminded himself, feeling a twinge from the watchful eye of Styx. Was it last week, or a month ago? How much time had passed? What year was it? How long had they lived there? Did it even matter if it was all the same?
Well, whether it was a week or a decade, he missed her. He hated to admit it, but it was true. He still had her photo on his phone so he could look at her whenever he liked, but it wasn’t the same. Because it wasn’t just looking at her that he missed—though that was part of it. He gazed over at the bathtub, remembered her thrusting motions as she scrubbed the soap scum off it while he stood in the doorway, pretending to be waiting to use the loo. She would get sweaty under her armpits, sometimes even across her back. The ends of her hair would curl above her sticky pink neck. She was so different from all of the perfect beings who had surrounded him for centuries—who still surrounded him. Her flaws entranced him.
But it wasn’t only her flaws. He missed her virtues too. He missed her humility. He missed her kindness. He missed her vulnerability—just thinking about her tears made him shiver. (“Stop shaking,” said Aphrodite, “you’re putting me off.”) He missed the way she’d listen to him—nobody in his family listened to him anymore. He missed having someone around the place who didn’t, deep down, hate him. He missed her cleaning, that was true too—the house was filthy since she’d been gone. He missed her deference to authority, the way she hated breaking those ridiculous rules. He missed her unassertiveness—it was so exotic, and erotic. And yet in the end she had defied him at the exact moment he’d wanted her to acquiesce.
It was her own fault that she’d died, he could hardly be held responsible for that. But he regretted it all the same. If only she hadn’t been so stubborn. If only she’d done what he’d said. Why had they ever decided to give mortals minds of their own?
“I’m thinking of redecorating my bedroom,” said Aphrodite.
He had forgotten she was there.
“Didn’t you just redecorate it?” he said.
“No,” said Aphrodite. “At least I don’t think so. Maybe I did.”
They both fucked on, lost in their own confusion.
Returning home from another doomed encounter with the estate agent, Artemis approached the house slowly, wearing her disappointment in the slump of her shoulders. Some rubbish—a couple of sheets of tabloid newspaper, an empty crisp packet, a dripping beer can—had drifted off the street and clustered at the foot of the front steps. She should point it out to Alice, thought Artemis, get it cleaned up. She climbed up to where the brass door knocker hung, its shine marred by fingerprints. She wondered who had been knocking at the door, and what had happened to them. The family had become even more paranoid about security of late, ever since Zeus’s escape attempt. In Hera’s absence, it had been Apollo, sulking in his bedroom, who had been first to react when the storm started, had been first to the roof and had coaxed Zeus back into his room and into bed. It was an uncharacteristic show of heroism from Apollo. Artemis was surprised he hadn’t taken the opportunity to push Zeus from the roof—she couldn’t even swear that she wouldn’t have. Perhaps her chat with him about the needs of the family earlier that day had had some effect? Artemis shook her head. Her pep talks hadn’t got through to him for the last several thousand years, so she couldn’t see why they would start to work now.
Artemis shut the front door behind her. She flicked the switch of the hall light, but the bulb had gone. The house felt stuffy, what air there was suffused with must and damp. She wasn’t in the mood to go out again so she made her way to the back door to get into the garden. Passing through the kitchen, it struck Artemis as unusual that there would be so much wasted food still sitting on the sideboards and the table, and judging by the smell of it, some of it was beginning to go off. On the back doorstep, a parade of ants were marching to and from the garden, carrying minute crumbs to their faraway palaces. Hadn’t they dealt with the ant problem? And where the hell was Alice?
“Hey, Artemis,” came a voice from behind her. “Where have you been?”
She turned. It was Hermes, at the bottom of the stairs in his winged boots, swinging his winged helmet by one hand, obviously on his way to start gathering the souls of the dead.
“It’s none of your business,” Artemis began, welcoming the argument as an opportunity for her to vent some of her frustration at the lack of viable flats in her price range. But then she stopped. She didn’t have the energy for it. “Hermes,” she said instead. “Why is the house so filthy? Have you seen Alice anywhere?”
“Yes, I saw her,” said Hermes, coming to the threshold of the kitchen and leaning against the doorway. “A couple of weeks ago. I took her down to the underworld.”
“What?” said Artemis. “Why did you do that?”
“Well, because she’s dead,” said Hermes.
“Dead?” said Artemis. “She can’t be dead! Damn it! I’ve been so preoccupied. I should have known something like this would happen if I didn’t supervise her properly. But she seemed so trustworthy! Stupid mortal. What did she go and die for?”
“It’s not her fault,” said Hermes. “Zeus killed her. Lightning bolt. On the day he got out.”
“Zeus!” said Artemis. “How did he find out about her? I told her not to go up to the top floor.”
“She didn’t,” said Hermes. “If you want my opinion, it’s got something to do with Apollo.”
“What?”
“Well, she was on that program he did,” said Hermes.
“She what?”
“—and Aphrodite got me to bring her in—”
“Aphrodite?” said Artemis. “What’s she got to do with anything?”
“—and Apollo was acting all weird around her the whole time she was here, and then they kissed, and then he tried to rape her—”
“Hermes, how do you know all this?
”
“It’s my business to know. And think about it: Apollo was the first up on the roof when Zeus got out. The day Alice died. Don’t you think that’s just a little suspicious?”
“There’s no way Apollo could have killed her,” said Artemis.
“Well, he didn’t, did he?” said Hermes. “He obviously got Zeus to do it. He’ll have tricked him into it one way or another, though I don’t see why he didn’t just do it himself . . . What’s the matter, Artemis? You look like someone just tried to pinch your bum.”
“It was a loophole,” said Artemis.
“A what?”
Artemis looked around her. There was too much chance of being overheard.
“I think we’d better continue this conversation outside,” she said.
“Artemis, I’m busy, I’ve got things to do—”
“Outside,” insisted Artemis in a voice that few, even gods, could argue with.
She took Hermes’s arm in a grip that could break a stag’s neck and dragged him out into the garden, shutting the door behind them.
Once they were safely in the garden and out of earshot of the other gods, Artemis explained to him about the oath.
“And then not only does he go and kill a mortal,” said Artemis, “he kills the cleaner!”
“The sneaky bastard,” said Hermes, a note of admiration creeping into his voice.
“Does anybody else know Alice is dead?” said Artemis.
“Not as far as I know,” said Hermes. “At least, I haven’t talked about it to anybody. Though the others must be starting to notice what a state the house is in. You really should hire another cleaner.”
“Not yet,” said Artemis. “If anyone asks . . . just tell them that she’s on holiday.”
“What’s the point?” said Hermes. “It’s not like she’s coming back.”
“Just do it,” said Artemis.
“Artemis, I don’t see why you’re getting so worked up about this. She’s just a cleaner. They’re two a penny. Get another one.”
“That isn’t the point,” said Artemis. “The point is, Apollo swore on Styx. On Styx! And he broke the vow! And that cleaner was mine—he had no right to touch her! It may have been a loophole, but it was against the spirit of the oath.”
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