The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  I remember her telling me once that she liked anything that came between her and reality, and I said amen to that.

  I’d led a pretty sheltered life until I got into the music business. Married at twenty to a sweet girl who didn’t understand me, and who could blame her? I didn’t understand myself. Still don’t. I knew that inside me was something wild. Something I didn’t want to acknowledge because it frightened me. I knew that deep down I wasn’t functioning right. So I asked the first woman who I knew would say yes to marry me. And she did.

  I figured that if I took on that sort of responsibility I’d settle down.

  How wrong I was. When I got married I was working for an insurance company, in a job that with my qualifications I could do on my head. I did, and hated it.

  When I’d been at school I’d worked in a record shop as a Saturday boy, and loved it. One evening on the way home from work I saw an advertisement in the Evening Standard for a record shop manager. On impulse I answered the ad, got an interview, lied through my teeth, and got the job.

  I was good at it too.

  Then one day, a bloke who sold records off the back of a truck for a tiny company that happened to have one of the biggest bands in the world on the label was having a cup of tea in the shop, when his van got towed away by the law.

  This individual was always broke and didn’t have the price of the parking ticket and tow-away fee on him, and got a bit panicky about what they would say back at his office.

  I lent him the cash out of the till on the promise that if a job came up with the company I’d get first refusal.

  He paid back the cash next time he called, thanked me for saving his life, and a few weeks later, gave me a bell and told me that another of the salesmen had left and I had an interview for his job the next morning.

  I got it too, and quit the shop that Friday.

  I thought I was the business. A white Escort van full of hot product, a desk in a room overlooking Old Compton Street, and rock stars coming and going at all hours. Bliss.

  Of course I soon fell into bad habits with the bad company I was keeping. I’d only ever smoked a few joints before, and maybe had the occasional half of bitter. I told you I was innocent, and besides, my wife didn’t drink.

  But this place was Cocaine Central. Smack City. Marijuana Junction. Heaven, in other words. The first joint of the day was rolled with the coffee at ten, and the pubs opened at eleven. Of course not a lot of records were sold, but with this particular band pumping out the units worldwide, it hardly seemed to matter.

  After a few months, the guys who owned the label and the distribution company got a bit pissed off, and closed it down. All the other salesmen got fired, but I was kept on. General dogsbody for the record company was my game, and I loved that too.

  Then I met a woman. Like no other woman I’d met before, or have since. She was pure poison wrapped in satin and lace, with shoes by Zapata, who wafted a trail of patchouli oil behind her that drove men mad.

  Me included.

  She was in the process of getting divorced from the bass player in an American band who were gradually winding down from being huge. She’d lived in California for a couple of years, then came back to London when her marriage broke down, got a job with the company, a flat off the King’s Road, and started hunting for prey.

  She went through the guys in the office like a tornado, until eventually she got to me.

  I fell like the proverbial ton of bricks, and she screwed, blued and tattooed me until I could hardly walk.

  I knew I was being a mug, but I couldn’t leave her alone, and she knew it.

  So did my wife.

  In the end, after one of the shortest marriages in either of our families, we separated, and she divorced me.

  Adultery.

  As soon as the divorce proceedings began, the woman I was crazy about dumped me for a nineteen-year-old boy studying at Oxford.

  For the first time in my life I was left for a younger man, and it hurt.

  * * * *

  I left the firm shortly afterwards, and drifted round the fringes of the music business for a couple of years, until I got the job where I met Louise.

  I had a load of girlfriends in the meantime, but no one permanent, and put my other bad habits on the back burner through lack of funds.

  Then Louise turned up the heat.

  See, I didn’t like the taste of booze much, though I’d had my share. Bitter reminded me of cold coffee, and Scotch made me puke.

  Louise had the answer. She introduced me to Strawberry Hock, White Russians, Margaritas, and Harvey Wallbangers, and I was a dead gone kid.

  And I found I had quite a capacity for liquor. Hard liquor, and this improbable redhead who kept flashing her knickers at me.

  We got it together for the first time in the back of the Capri in an underground car park somewhere off the Euston Road. God knows why we picked that particular location. Romantic it wasn’t. Horny, it most definitely was.

  I won’t go into details. Just believe me.

  After that we were an item. Christ knows why. She could have had her pick of hundreds of blokes, but she chose me.

  Of course we weren’t faithful to each other. That would never have done. But she moved into my flat, and we set up housekeeping together. She was a hell of a cook too. Real domestic when she wanted to be, and she got a cat.

  * * * *

  We lived together for about eight years before things went seriously up the creek. During that time I asked her to marry me, and she refused, and just before we split up for the first time, she asked me to marry her, and I refused.

  Then I met someone else and fucked off. I left Louise the flat where she continued to live with her cat. Percy was his name. A Burmese cross, and destined to live longer than his mistress. Not much, but a bit.

  But somehow we couldn’t seem to manage without each other, Louise and me. Can’t live with, can’t live without. Know that one?

  I think that in the first year we were apart, we talked more than in the last year we were together. And my new girlfriend wasn’t happy about it.

  Too damn bad, I thought. By then I was on the road, tour-managing bands all round the world. Louise got me work in the management office where she was doing PR, after the record company we’d both worked for went belly-up, and naturally that threw us together even more.

  So, in the end, I left the woman I’d left Louise for, and moved back in. It was great too, for a while. I was on tour most of the time, screwing the world, getting fucked up with drugs and booze every night, and thoroughly enjoying myself.

  Then I met someone else. I needed to right then. I was a mess. Semi-alcoholic. Semi-addicted to uppers and downers, and as a lot of my friends told me, on a one-way roller-coaster ride to Hell.

  Mind you, it felt all right to me. But I’m always the last to know.

  So when Ms Straight came along, determined to save me from myself, I clung on to her like the last survivor of a shipwreck clinging on to a lifebelt.

  By then I was beginning to realize that if I didn’t get cleaned up I was in serious trouble. I was taking more than the fatal dose of Valium every day, and getting through a bottle of spirits or more between noon and bedtime.

  Ms Straight worked in publishing, had a nice, and I mean nice, bijou house in Clapham, and needed a project. Moi.

  So I packed my bags and left Louise again. She cried and so did I.

  I lasted a couple of years with Ms Straight, cleaned up my act and got a job in publishing too. I made a few good contacts through her, had a fair degree in English, loved reading, and somehow knew what looked right on the page. It wasn’t the biggest or most prestigious publishing house in London, but it suited me. I still had the job until. . . Well, like I said before, we’ll come to that.

  Of course I kept in touch with Louise. I knew by then that I had an addictive personality, and I was addicted to her. We’d been together for years, and had become, to our mutual surprise, good friends
. No more sex. That had gone out of the window long before. No. Friends. Friends with mutual interests, private jokes, and memories that no one else shared.

  Of course Ms Straight hated it. She thought that when I was with Louise I was off the straight and narrow. And she was right. But not as badly as before. Never as bad as that, ever again.

  Then we split up too, and I was left with my clothes, some books, some records, and a Ford Sierra. Not a lot to show for a life, but we all have different goals.

  Louise took me back, of course. She’d got a new place to live by then. She was on her own, apart from Percy, and I moved into the spare room.

  * * * *

  It was that summer that Louise had the accident that in time was going to kill her. And if I’d been around it would probably never have happened.

  She was doing freelance PR by then. Still in the music business, but video and travel too.

  One of her clients was a travel agent who, by way of a bonus, offered her a week in Spain for two. It was at short notice, and I couldn’t go. I was working a deadline on a book edit, with a particularly obnoxious and pernickity author, and there was no way I could get time off.

  None of her other friends could make it either. It was literally go the next morning or not at all. So she went. On her own.

  Hey, this was the eighties. What could happen?

  Shit happened. Like it often does.

  She had a great time. Fell in with the hotel owner and his family, and got real friendly.

  Then on the last morning of her stay, with her bags packed, and whilst she was waiting for the coach to pick her up for the trip to the airport, she went for one last stroll along the beach she’d come to love.

  And Nemesis, in the shape of a big, black dog came loping along the beach towards her.

  At first she thought he was just being playful, and as an animal lover, she joined in. Maybe he was, but he got too excited and bit her. Twice. Once on the face and once on the foot.

  Louise was terrified and ran into the water to escape. The dog didn’t follow her. He ran up and down on the seashore for a minute, then split. Louise came out of the water, went back to the hotel, dried herself off, changed, put plasters on her bites and came home.

  No anti-tetanus. No antibiotics. Nothing.

  She was okay for a couple of weeks, then started to go strange. Now you’ve got to remember that Louise was always strange. Eccentric. And the older she got, the more eccentric she became. I didn’t mind. I’m eccentric myself, and I was used to her.

  Then one night, after a particularly early start, I came home to find her lying nude on her bed. She hadn’t touched the breakfast dishes, and Percy was screaming to be fed.

  I moaned like hell as I fed him, and she came into the kitchen, still naked, and collapsed.

  I wasn’t very sympathetic. After a hard day at the office, all I was ready for was to crash out in front of the TV with an Indian take-away.

  ‘Are you pissed?’ I said unkindly after I’d picked her up and put her in a chair.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then? Why aren’t you dressed?’

  She suddenly looked scared. ‘Don’t know. I’m fine.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘I am.’

  And suddenly, with the sure and certain knowledge obtained from all the years I’d known her, I realized that something was seriously wrong.

  ‘Louise,’ I said. ‘What day is it?’

  It was a Thursday. A day of infamy.

  ‘Monday,’ she said.

  ‘And you haven’t been on the booze, or anything else?’

  ‘No. I told you.’

  ‘Lou,’ I said. ‘Get some clothes on. I’m going to take you to the hospital.’

  ‘No,’ she screamed, and ran and locked herself in her bedroom. This wasn’t the Louise I knew, so when she refused to answer my knocks, I called her doctor. I apologized, told him what had happened, and that she wouldn’t unlock her door.

  He wasn’t a bad bloke, and came straight round. Louise had always been fond of him, and after a few minutes’ conversation through the locked door, she opened it. By then she’d pulled on a dress, and put on some lipstick. But most of it was on her chin, and the dress was on back to front. When I saw that, I knew that something bad, something well beyond my ken, was happening.

  And I was right.

  * * * *

  The doctor called an ambulance, then left. That was all he could do.

  I went to the hospital with Louise. The paramedic asked her for her name, address and date of birth. She didn’t have a clue. She was getting worse. I gave him the information, and stayed at the hospital all night. No one could or would tell me what was wrong. Eventually I cornered a consultant in one of the corridors, and he told me. Meningitis. Another day and she would have been dead.

  She was off her head for more than a week. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know her family. She didn’t know her friends. Then, just as the fever broke, complications set in.

  The meningitis had weakened a valve in her heart, and she needed immediate surgery. They operated right away, and put in a new valve.

  I went to visit the same night and I could hear her screaming as I got out of the lift. I didn’t know how I knew that it was her, but I did. I’d never heard a sound like it before or since. Primeval. Animal. My blood temperature fell like a stone.

  I was sure she was going to die that night. But she was made of sterner stuff. I’d always known that Louise was tough, but I had no conception exactly how tough that was.

  She pulled through, and left hospital a month later. I was down as next-of-kin and the consultant called me into his office the day she was discharged.

  ‘Does she smoke?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Not any more. Does she drink?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Keep it moderate.’

  There was about as much chance of that as flying down to Rio without a plane, but I didn’t say so.

  Louise had to keep going back to the hospital as an outpatient. Three times a week to have her blood checked, and she had so many needle holes in her arms that she looked like a junkie.

  They hurt her a lot there. It wasn’t their fault, but each time she came back I could see the pain in her eyes like a shadow on the sun.

  Then the doctors decided she needed a heart transplant. And all because the Spanish authorities pumped untreated sewage into the sea, and that damned dog had chewed on her.

  So the waiting began for a suitable donor. A wait that was going to take three long years, and every day her condition deteriorated.

  And looking back, the worst thing is that when you’re with someone who is seriously ill, terminally ill in fact, you get used to it. Get to take it for granted, and in the end you treat it as normal.

  At least until the worst happens.

  And the worst happened just after Easter in 1991. Louise was bad. And then the call came that a suitable donor heart had turned up. It belonged to a twenty-one-year-old man who had died in a car crash.

  Of course I wasn’t there when she got bleeped. I was working, and got the message later. After the operation had been done in fact. I was in London looking after the apartment and Percy, and flat out against a deadline again.

  The operation took place on a Tuesday evening, and when I called the hospital that night, they told me everything was fine. I phoned again on Wednesday, and the prognosis was excellent. She phoned me herself on Thursday morning and sounded great. I know I should have visited her, but I was busy. You see, she was in Bedfordshire, and I wasn’t.

  If everyone hadn’t been telling me how successful the op had been, I’d have gone up. But they kept saying that she was doing well, so I didn’t arrange to visit until Sunday morning.

  By then I’d sold my car, and another friend of Lou’s was driving up, and had offered me a lift.

  Listen. I’ve thought about it a million times since. I should have gone before,
but I never thought that anything really bad was going to happen.

  She was Louise, see. And Louise always survived.

  Wrong.

  I was boiling an egg for breakfast and waiting for the guy to arrive that Sunday morning when the call from the hospital came.

  She was starting to reject they said, and I should prepare for the worst. I turned off the gas under the saucepan as soon as I put down the receiver, and the egg was still there when I left the place finally, weeks later. It was kind of like a reminder of what I’d done. Or hadn’t done, as the case may be.