by Graham Joyce
"And there's this extraordinary woman: Antonia, who is like a lantern in the storm and who asks no questions and who makes no judgement, but slowly she helps you start to make a fist of yourself again. And then one day she's running around trying to straighten the place up because, she says, our angel is coming.
"And of course she means benefactor, but we all get into scrubbing down the doss-house so as not to scare this angel away. And when this angel comes, I do wonder what sort of man just hands out his cash to a lot of deadbeats, so I approach him. Of course I'm not a pretty sight: my lips are blistered with cold sores, my hair has been hacked back and I'm wearing shades because the light gives me migraines, and I say, You don't look like an angel."
Those last few words went right through me. "That was you?"
"And you said, 'Let's sit down.'"
"Yes," I said.
"I remember you sweeping some muck off a plastic chair—for me—and you sit down in your fancy coat and I sit down in my filthy jeans and you take out a packet of cigarettes and offer me one but you don't take one for yourself, and you say, 'Do you know what an angel looks like?' 'Sure,' I say. 'No you wouldn't,' you say. And you proceed to tell me your philosophy of demons.
"I think: he's cracked, completely cracked. But it's amusing. You're funny. And clever. Then you tell me I have one right alongside me, a demon. You are so convincing that I actually look round. You say it's listening with interest to our conversation, attending on the outcome, waiting to see if the exchange will make a difference to me. Suddenly that isn't funny. It creeps me out. I ask you how they work, these demons, and you tell me that mostly they just wait.
"Of course I ask you: Wait for what? And you say you don't know, but that it seems like they are waiting for some kind of opportunity. You say we should spend our lives keeping them out, except for the good ones, which we should let in; and you say that these are called angels but that they amount to the same thing. And if I remember right I say: I want some of what you've been smoking. But you ignore that remark as if I haven't even said it.
"I say, 'Here's a reality check for you: you can't change the world.' And as you stand up to leave, you say, 'Ah, but you can change one person's world.' And then you go off to say your goodbyes to Antonia, and the strangest feeling passes through me. Like a beam of light. Not literally, of course, but that's how it feels. And with it is the feeling that I want to go with you, right then. But I know of course that I can't.
"After you've gone, I ask Antonia about you. 'That's William Heaney,' she says. 'He keeps this place open.' 'Is he rich?' I say. 'No,' she says, 'not in terms of money.'
"Your words stay with me long after you've gone. I dwell on what you'd said about changing one person's world. I even have dreams about you. You see, William, that tiny interaction, that little sit-down chat, plants something inside me, and it's growing and has been growing ever since. There's a chain reaction going off inside me.
"After three days of thinking about it, I ask Antonia to help me clean up. Seriously. I tell her I want a job, any job. We talk about things. Languages have always come very easily to me—I'd picked up some French and German from touring with the band—so she thinks I could train for secretarial work. She fixes up the training and pays for it all with GoPoint funds. Your money? I dunno.
"Even while I'm training it's easy to find temporary work. Big corporations, they don't know or care who you are, where you've been. Someone always wants a pile of photocopying doing. Antonia pays for a suit of clothes for me and she arranges for better accommodation. I practice hard at my skills and I soon get better work. If you have the knack of anticipating what your boss needs you can become indispensable.
"In one year I transform myself from dosser to serious PA. I admit that some mornings I look in the mirror and I see the doss-girl standing just behind the smart PA, like a bad photocopy, like a ghost, but I do the work. I network. I let people know what I've got. I blag work sometimes, then I dig in to make up for anything I lack. I get international work. I get special assignments. I move so far away from the person I was at GoPoint that I change my name."
"What was your name then?" William asks.
"Anna."
"I knew! I knew it! I've no idea why I knew."
"I introduced myself and shook your hand. Maybe you remember it from when you met me? I like the idea that you remembered somewhere. It means a bit of me stayed with you. Anyway, the next six years take me to some interesting places. (I was a lap-dancer for a while, how do you like that?) But that life takes me a little too near what I've escaped from. It's all another story. The thing is, over those years, I often think of you. You had come into my life and turned it around. I never forget that. So I finally decide to find you again.
"It's ridiculously easy. You still look after GoPoint and you still work for that odd organisation. If you want to know why I chase you, it's because I need to repay you somehow. To give something of myself. Naturally I have no way of knowing whether or not you would want me, or anything from me. But when I find you I'm elated to see that you have so much need. I know I could be here for you at a time when you need it. Just like you were there for me. You still listening? You haven't gone to sleep?"
"Oh, I'm listening," I told her. "I'm listening."
"I'm telling you all this because you have to know that I didn't meet you by accident."
"But that day when I met you, you were with Ellis."
"No. We weren't ever lovers. I just used him to get close to you. But I wanted it to look like we'd met by accident. I followed you into a poetry reading. I waited to get my book of poems signed by him and heard you both arrange to meet. It was easy to get close to Ellis after that."
"You stalked me."
For the first time in her story she lifted her head from my chest and looked me in the eye. "Yes, William, I stalked you. I targeted you. I decided I would make a demon of myself and wait, wait for an opportunity to slip into your world. And here I am. A piece of karma in a pretty dress. But before you dismiss me, let me tell you that you can do what you want with me. If you want me to I'll leave you alone. It's not my plan to hang round your neck. I don't ask anything from you except what you want to give."
I was stunned. I didn't know whether to feel amazed, angry or perplexed.
"I think it's pretty funny that now you're the one who is broke. Aren't you going to say something?"
All I could think of saying was, "Why?"
"You were my angel. Now I'm yours."
Chapter 34
We both got up the next morning like an ordinary couple and made ready for work. In her bathroom I inspected the tip of my penis, sore from an entire night of fucking. And my balls ached. I was a bit shocked to be reminded of the honeycomb where uninhibited sex can take you. I did hope my blood pressure was up to it.
We left her small flat together like Mr. and Mrs. Workaday, taking the Tube together, her to her office, me to mine. Before parting company we arranged to meet up for lunch, in the Jugged Hare on Victoria Bridge Road, an elegant pub of marble and of dark wood, with fluted pilasters and a giant chandelier.
The walls of the pub were full of prints. We sat under one grand painting depicting old-timers slouched in that very ale-house a hundred years ago. The pub was in every sense a fine old historical London alehouse. Except that it wasn't; it was a fake old pub, like so many of them. It was a bank that had recently been converted to a pub. The old-timers loafing in the picture were fakers.
I ordered a bottle of Marqués de Griñón Reserva and poured Anna—yes Anna—a glass. As she lifted the glass to her lips I stopped her. I had something for her—a perfectly ordinary dull yellow-gold Yale key—and I placed it on the table with a delicate click.
"What's this?"
"I want you to come home after work. I think my house is more comfortable."
The key glittered faintly on the table, reflecting that dull yellow light from the overhead chandelier. She looked down at it. "Too soon," she to
ld me. "Slow down."
"Why not? You know you want to."
"Yes, I do, but I can't take it yet. Because I'm not sure if I've tricked you. Deceived you in some way. I'm not sure if I'm that homeless girl; or that smart girl who works in an office; or that hippie-chick; or that lap-dancer; or so many others, really."
"Oh," I said, clinking glasses and taking a sip of wine. "I was on to you right from the beginning."
"How?"
"Your demon told me."
"My demon?"
"Oh yes. He was there right from the beginning. Or rather, she was. At least, I think it's a she." I squinted at the chair next to her. "You can't always tell. She's sitting there now. At this very moment. Right next to you."
And she couldn't help herself. She couldn't help turning her head a fraction, just to check out the adjacent chair, just to see for herself.
"Just kidding," I said.
These really were Antonia's last days. She'd finally surrendered to her doctor's request and was taken into hospital. Anna—I had to get used to calling her Anna now—and I went in to see her. Anna wanted to tell her story, and I wanted Antonia to hear it, so I left them alone for a while. I wanted Antonia to die in no doubt that Some Good could be done in this world. I do believe in the possibility of Some Good. Truth was, Antonia didn't need telling that. She was beyond the argument. Perhaps I was still trying to persuade myself.
I don't know: I almost expected her bed to be surrounded by angels and golden light. It wasn't. It was an ordinary hospital bed in a shared ward that badly needed a lick of paint. A screen of curtains on wheels had been pulled around the bed. The odour of chrysanthemums streamed from a vase on the bedside table, skirmishing with the smell of hospital antiseptic.
Antonia was half-propped on a pile of pillows. I kissed her on the cheek. My nerves ached for her. My love for her was a decayed, unconsummated love; a withered-chrysanthemum love.
We'd brought our own flowers. Trumpet lilies. But there was no vase to put them in, and because I knew Anna had some things to tell Antonia I said I'd find one. I wandered the wards trying to locate a receptacle for them. Eventually I unearthed a wine carafe, of all things, and I filled it with water.
When I returned behind the screen, the two women were talking in low voices. I put the carafe on the side table. The lilies were really too big for the carafe. There was a second chair on the other side of the bed so I sat in it, and, without breaking her conversation with Anna, Antonia reached out to hold my hand.
"I'm sorry I didn't recognise you at first when you came to see me," she was telling Anna. "Then again, I'm not sorry. It shows what a long way you've come."
"How could you be expected to remember everyone? There must have been hundreds."
Antonia laughed, a tiny laugh; but it made her cough. "Over a thousand. I keep count. But not everyone is a success story, like you."
"You rescued me."
"No, you rescued yourself. Has William told you about his demons?"
"Oh yes."
"And do you see them, too?"
"No. At least not quite in the same way that he does."
"No? Well, I do. But I never admitted it to him. I didn't want to encourage him. William, do you see any here now?"
"No," I said. "They don't seem to like you, Antonia. I've told you that before."
"Anna," said Antonia, "I'm going to tell you what it is he sees."
"What does he see?" Anna said.
"Suffering," Antonia said. "He sees other people's suffering. And his own. He sees it as demons. Real demons."
"But I don't see yours, Antonia," I said.
"No. That's because I trick them. You know you once asked me what it is they seem to be waiting for. Always waiting. You know what it is they wait for? Permission to leave." She shook her head at me. "I love you, William, because for you life has never stopped taking your breath away. Because you are generous to all its creatures. You give them a home. But sometimes they don't want one. I'm dying, William—I had to say this to you."
"Antonia," I said. "Antonia."
"Shhh! Listen to this," she said. "Anna is going to take over the running of GoPoint."
"What?" I said. I looked at Anna, who nodded back at me. "When was this decided?"
"Just now. While you were looking for a vase," Anna said.
After leaving the hospital I desperately needed a drink. I couldn't face the braying, cigar-smoking demons of Chelsea so we headed up to the Embankment, to the more civilised caves of Gordon's Wine Bar, where they play no music and serve only wine.
In Gordon's low-cellar bar you need to stoop to get to a table. The light from the candles doesn't even penetrate to the dark corners and everyone in the place seems to be engaged in either a tryst or a conspiracy. Samuel Pepys lived in the building in the seventeenth century; Rudyard Kipling wrote The Light That Failed in the parlour above the bar. It's one of my favourite bars in all of London, but it didn't do much to lift my spirits.
"She's only got weeks," I said. "Maybe only days. You're full of surprises, you know that?"
"That's me," Anna said.
"The funding is a constant nightmare."
"You'll help us." She knew all about the antiquarian-books racket, because I'd told her.
"I'm having trouble funding myself just now. You'll be exhausted. It will drain all your energy."
"I'll have you to comfort me."
"It would be easier just to pass on the assets to one of the neighbouring agencies. St. Martin-in-the-Fields. They do good work."
"What's easiest is not always what I want."
"You'll be broke all of the time."
"Yeh. Could be."
I looked around the cellar bar, casting an eye over the gloomy corners and the huddled couples, as if a spy or an enemy might be in the bar, listening to us. But everyone had their own private conspiracy to worry about. I thought Anna's idea to keep GoPoint open was crazy, even though I would support her if I possibly could. All this made it more crucial than ever for me to get hold of Stinx, to find a new buyer to step in for Ellis. The truth was I didn't know where to begin.
I didn't have to ask her why she wanted to do it. Because while the world is filled with people who just need to let their demon go, there is another group who need to find themselves one.
Chapter 35
Just three days before Christmas, Antonia died.
When someone dies—someone whom you love—the world is a changed place. A distinctive light has gone out of the world. Nothing puts the world back as it was. I've said before that these lies are told as a kindness and a sedative, but they don't help. They are demonic, actually. They cheat our humanity. They take our attention away from the true value of the fleeting moment. It's a value only people like Antonia ever learn: the briefer the life, the more precious; the more certain we are that life is a sealed unit in time, the more we should celebrate its infinite space; the more dark and absurd, the harder we should strain our eyes to peer into the miracle of it.
I didn't cry when I heard about her death. There was no need to. She'd led an impeccable life. I would more likely cry for myself, for my stupidities, vanities and wasted time.
But even though I didn't shed a tear I did feel adrift. I desperately wanted to have people around me, and I suggested to Anna that we get a big silly dinner going for Christmas Day: invite everybody and half of hell. She was all for that.
I knew that Fay would want Sarah at home with her for Christmas dinner and that Lucien would want to blowtorch a live goose or whatever was fashionable. However, I had no objection to the kiddiewinks staying with me and Anna. Neither of us were great cooks but we could probably stick a feather in a dish of pâté and call it Norwegian Woodcock, à la Lucien.
Sarah was passionately against catering Chez Lucien. There was a third option of their spending Christmas with Mo's mother and father. In response to this suggestion, Mo said nothing, but looked like he'd rather scalp himself with a chainsaw.
&nbs
p; So it seemed to me that Sarah and Mo would be there, and Jaz didn't have any better invitations. "As a Sikh I'd be very glad to join in with your Middle Eastern shepherd-cult-of-death festival. By the way, I've got some news about Ellis. He told me he still wants the book. But he's refusing to deal with 'that loony.' I think he means you."
"Oh," I said. "Yes, I was a bit brusque with him."