by Graham Joyce
I wasn't anticipating this. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this burst of assertiveness. This dismissal. "I think I'm in hell, Mandy. I think I put myself there."
"Well, find a way out!"
"I think I have. But I need permission. From you."
She threw her head back and flared her eyes at the ceiling. But I knew that was just to stop me looking at her. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about!"
"I need permission from you to fall in love with someone else."
Now she looked back at me. Her lips were compressed. She plucked at something in the corner of her eye. She said some words but seemed to address them to someone or something just over her shoulder. "I don't believe I've let you do this to me. I don't believe it. After all this time." Her eyes were filling up. "I really don't believe it."
I scrambled to my feet. "I'm sorry, Mandy. Sorry. Sorry."
I grabbed my coat and scarf and got out of there. I felt like a monster. I staggered out of the pub, blinking into the light of the alley. I leaned my back against the whitewashed wall of the pub for a single second before swinging off into the street.
A moment later I heard her calling my name. She caught up with me and linked her arm in mine. "Come on, we don't have to be like this with each other. You can at least walk up the street with me."
She was heading up to the Merrion Shopping Centre, where she'd arranged to meet her daughter. I was in a kind of daze, but I agreed to go with her. We talked a little more: catch-up stuff, summarising twenty-odd years of life without each other. It was a very slow walk.
We had to stand outside the entrance to the shopping centre for about ten minutes before her daughter appeared. During that time Mandy told me that Fraser had claimed to have been in touch with me for a year after I'd suddenly left college. I couldn't think why he would have said such a thing, and I told her so. "Were you and Fraser ever an item?" I asked her.
She pointed up the street. "Ah! Here's my daughter."
A girl of about nineteen was approaching. It was Mandy, when I first met her at college. For God's sake, even the fashions had come round again. She wore her long dark hair exactly the same way. I think I might have gasped.
"This is Natasha," she said.
We shook hands. Mandy introduced me as someone she went to college with. I couldn't help myself. "You're lovely," I said to her. "Your mum must be so proud of you!"
She blushed and mother and daughter exchanged a look containing infinite space. What I wanted to say to her was: Can you believe it, Natasha? There are people in this world who actually think there are no demons, and no ghosts?
But instead I declared my patent cheerful goodbyes and made my way to the station to take the train back to London.
Chapter 31
After my visit to Leeds I immediately went to see Fraser. I wanted to tell him that I forgave him. For ruining my life. For killing my relationship with Mandy. For lying all over the place. For stinking. For making me break his nose. For fucking Mandy after I was out of the way, which of course meant that he'd got what he wanted all along with his dirty rituals. I do wonder, however, if a demon told me I should, knowing perfectly well that Fraser wouldn't be able to take it. The trouble with forgiveness is that some people don't want to be forgiven.
He had a flat in Pimlico. I knew his address because he'd scribbled it on the back of that dead betting slip at his book-launch party. It was on the eleventh floor. I went up in the lift and rang a bell. A peephole-lens was countersunk in the door, and I put my hand over it. I didn't want him to pretend to be out or any of that nonsense.
My other hand was in my pocket, fingering Seamus Todd's exercise book. His Last Will and Testament. I had bought a brand new Arab headscarf in which to wrap it, so that it could be presented in exactly the way Seamus had given it to me. I was going to have to find a way of bequeathing it to Fraser. I thought it would be helpful to him, in the way it had been helpful to me. But I knew that it wasn't going to be easy to get him to accept it.
Fraser answered my ring and with a gruff greeting motioned me to follow him down a narrow hall and into a living room. A glass door from the living room opened out onto a balcony, but it was closed. I sat myself down on a sofa without invitation.
Fraser sniffed suspiciously. "Have you come alone?" he said.
"I won't keep you long," I said, inspecting the room.
He'd made some progress from the odoriferous cave he'd originally maintained in the hall of residence. His contemporary pad was a scholarly sort of place, lined with groaning bookcases and crowded with overspilling stacks of yellowing magazines. I think he must have been a tea fanatic, because an entire bookcase was dedicated to the most obscure brands. Specially imported, no doubt. On his desk was a large black ledger-style notebook in which he'd been writing longhand. Perhaps it was his latest project.
I did wonder what he would write without me to make it all up for him. Perhaps he would publish Seamus's document. Whether he would or not, I felt very strongly that Fraser should read it. If I could find a way to slip it to him.
But Fraser was no fool. He would know perfectly well that anything I handed to him was likely contain a lot more than some words on a page. He protected himself too closely to allow casual contact with anything that might be living and breathing inside the exercise book. That's what all the amulets were about. I had to get him to willingly accept the thing. Or even to take it, in the same way that Seamus had managed with me.
I got up and went to the balcony window. "Lovely view!" I said.
And it was. I tried the door handle; the door swung open and I stepped out onto the balcony. The London evening was on fire. Pink and yellow clouds twisted and folded like angelic wings all on a darkening sky. I could see clear across the city: spires, towers, chimney pots, masts, thrusting modernist blocks, all in dramatic silhouette against a light that was almost polar-blue. Underneath it all was the hum that is the engine of London.
It also occurred to me that the city was like a vast unconscious mind. You could never know it. The act of cataloguing its chambers of history or its ever-changing geography or its migrations and its waterways and its rumours and its myths would drive you completely insane. All you could do was approach some of the dreams generated by this giant unconscious engine. Know it as Stinx might know it, through its art galleries and its drug dens; or as Jaz might know it, through its bathhouses and its fashion shoots; or as Antonia might know it, through its homeless thousands and its rough shelters; or as I might know it, through its bureaucracies or its pubs. Sometimes our dreams flow together, and touch, and cluster; and when that happens we console ourselves that we have found an island in the torrent of dreaming. A small land mass of consciousness. A mirage.
I looked out at the nightscape of old London and I felt liberated; I felt free. I don't know why, but it was all thanks to what was written in Seamus Todd's Last Will and Testament. The report of his experience had made it possible. For the first time in almost thirty years I was about to take my foot off the mine, and I knew there would be no bang. I felt absurdly light-headed. I felt as if I could float from Fraser's balcony and sail off across that polar-blue light above London.
I didn't do that. Instead I stepped back into the room. With Fraser eyeing me nervously I crossed over to his work-desk, where his ledger-notebook was spread out on the table. Fraser shuffled, fingering his collar.
"You published my stuff," I said. "Without my permission." I was of course referring to that farrago I'd written all those years ago that formed the basis of his recent book. "What is it called? How to Make Friends with Demons?"
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "You didn't seem to have any interest in it. You said before that you made it all up."
"It didn't seem to make any difference that I made it up, did it? Anyway, the point is that I'm not all that comfortable with it being out there as it were."
He sniffed at that. "You know perfectly well if
you're not attuned or disposed to it already, it won't work. So where's the harm?"
"That may be so, Fraser. It doesn't matter. Even though you didn't ask me for my permission to reproduce my work I'm giving you my blessing. I'm moving on. I want to make way for something new to happen in my life."
I turned my back on him and quickly picked up his dark ledger, pretending to scan his notes. My other hand was still in my pocket, my fingers closed around Seamus's exercise book.
"What are you doing? That's private work."
"Come on, Fraser. You know I have an interest in these things."
He reached out to take the ledger from me, but I turned away from him, shielding it with the bulk of my body. As I did so I pulled Seamus's exercise book from my body and slipped it inside the ledger.
"Just put it down, will you."
I snapped the ledger shut. "Keep your shirt on!" I said genially. "Here. No harm done." I handed it back to him.
He snatched the ledger from me and made to return it to the table. But a frown crossed his face as he realised something was now compressed inside it. He opened the ledger and the scarf-wrapped exercise book fell to the floor. Immediately he saw what was done. You see, you have to accept a demon into your life. "What are you up to, you bastard?"
"You'll find it contains the demon of liberation. Make friends with it."
"What?"
"Just read it," I said. "Read it and weep."
He picked the exercise book up from the floor. "Take it away," he said. "Get it out of here."
"I've come to say you're forgiven, for everything."
"It's not staying here. You're taking it with you. And I don't want your forgiveness, thank you very much."
"I don't think you have much choice. That's the way forgiveness works."
"And you can take these two with you as well!"
A demon, probably the one who had found its way into Fraser's flat inside the pages of Seamus's exercise book, now stood behind me. A second demon, mine, but which I would leave behind, stood at the first demon's shoulder. They watched us closely.
Mostly they seemed interested in Fraser, though they appeared to be utterly fascinated by our exchange of words. I'd learned enough about demons by now to know they don't understand everything that is said; that their ability to understand is linked with their capacity to find a ride inside one of us; that once they get inside, then they can enjoy a psychic feed; and that once they have fed they leave a deposit behind them (analogous to shitting—you must understand I'm speaking by analogy here). This is why you don't want them. Even the demons of true love, with their eyes of blinding light and their arched golden backs and their tongues of flame—you don't want what they leave behind them.
But my own personal demon had already turned away from me, and had become more interested in Fraser. For me it was already fading. It knew, perhaps, that its time with me had ended. From what Fraser said, however, I knew he could see both demons with perfect clarity. Plus it was no good Fraser barking at me: he knew perfectly well that I had no control over the demons' presence in either of our lives.
As I crossed the room to leave, Fraser shouted, "Take them away with you, dammit!"
I shook my head. "I've no idea what you're talking about."
"Liar!" he shouted. "You liar! Take them with you! And take this filthy book! You don't just dump them here!"
"Goodbye, Fraser."
I let myself out. He stalked after me, haranguing me, following me to the lift where I already had my finger on the call button. I was telling the truth. The demon that I had when I'd gone in hadn't walked out with me. There was nothing there over which I had any power. Or which had any power over me.
The lift doors closed on Fraser's angry face. Even as they did so he was screaming at me. "Liar! You can see them just as well as I can! Take them with you!" I heard him thump on the other side of the doors before the lift began to descend. "Get them out of here! Get them out!"
Chapter 32
I instantly sight my rifle on the Arab. He doesn't miss a stride, but he does raise the palms of his hands towards me, to show me he's unarmed. He certainly isn't dressed like a regular soldier. He wears a long flowing black dishdasha thing and he's barefoot. But I guess the Iraqis have auxiliary soldiers or a militia; whatever he is, I'm ready to drill him if he even looks at me wrong.
His red and white shemagh shrouds his face. He wears it over his head and high over his nose and mouth against the dust. All I can see are his eyes. Still showing me a clean pair of hands, he draws up about five or six yards away, not looking the least worried by my machine gun trained on him.
I say I can see his eyes: that is, he has one eye, of the most piercing blue I've ever seen. The other eye is stitched closed. The stitches are clumsy, angry black threads. His robe is dusty and his shemagh is smirched and dirty. He peers hard at me with that one blue eye. Then he looks around him.
The Arab seems confused. He puts a hand to his forehead, as if trying to remember something.
—On the floor! I bark this command, gesturing at the sand with my machine gun.—Get down.
He laughs. Just a little snigger, before peering hard at me again.
—Down! Now!
He shakes his head quizzically. Then he lowers himself to the sand. He takes a squatting position, clasping his hands in front of him. But I want him down on his arse and I bellow at him some more.—Down! Get down!
—If you wish, he says, as if this is a game.
—Speak English? You speak English?
He looks confused. Then he nods a yes, before looking round quickly to all points of the compass, as if expecting re-inforcements or something.
—What's your unit?
—Unit?
—What's your company?
He shakes his head, making out he doesn't understand.
—Are you a soldier of Iraq?
He shakes his head, no.
—I'm holding you prisoner. You understand? Prisoner.
He is actually taken aback by my remark. I mean, he does that thing of jerking his head back in surprise at my words. He takes the shemagh scarf from his mouth and he smiles at me.
—Prisoner, I say again.
Again he looks puzzled. There is an expression on his face that makes me think of men I have seen who were concussed. I wonder if he's been wandering in this state. He certainly doesn't seem to know where he is, or what is at stake here. I think he might be retarded.
Finally he gestures at the mine beneath my boot.—You are in some difficulty.
His English is very good, though he speaks with a thick accent, like he has sand in his throat.
—You let me worry about that.
The Arab makes to stand up again.
—GET DOWN!
He sinks back down to the sand and spreads his arms wide.—I was trying to think how I might help you.
—Like I say, I'll worry about that. I've got people coming.
He laughs. Quite loud.—Who? Who is coming?
I flick on my radio and make the call. Still nothing but static. I give him a cold stare.—Where are you from?
Again he looks around him, all points of the compass. Though there is still nothing to see beyond the twenty-yard radius to the dust curtain.—I don't know.
—You don't know. Dark when you left, was it?
—Pardon?
—Never mind. Joke.
—Ah! Joking is good . . . in your predicament.
—Where did you learn to speak English?
He rubs his chin.—I can't remember.
—Funny fucker, incha?
—Inshallah.
I'm only asking questions to establish the upper hand, to show him that I'm in control. Given the situation, I don't feel in control and he seems to know that, too.—Name. What's your name?
He looks at the sky.—You couldn't pronounce it.
—Try me.
—It's many. And many don't like to repeat it.
He tur
ns his one eye on me when he says this, and I don't know why but my skin flushes. I mean my skin ripples like the sand does when the wind moves it.
—Funny fucker, I say again.
We spend the next half an hour staring at each other in silence. My wristwatch tells me I've been there with my foot on the mine for seven hours. Soon it will be nightfall. The Arab makes no movement. But something about him has me scared. And I'm the one with the gun.
He breaks the silence.—Perhaps you should tell another joke.
—What?
—To improve your situation. Perhaps one of your jokes.