by Jo Bannister
For a moment Brodie didn’t reply, her mind’s eye fully occupied with the picture of a solemn student teacher in thick glasses, huddled in a dark corner where the fun wouldn’t get him. ‘Hot stuff, is it?’ she asked then.
‘I thought so. There are those who can’t see it.’
‘Imagine,’ said Brodie evenly. ‘Well, what do you think about the party?’
‘Maybe Jack will want to take you.’
She shook her head. ‘If you’re not enjoying yourself, you’ll go and wash some glasses. If Jack isn’t he’ll start arresting people.’
Daniel could see how that might make a policeman an even poorer escort than a man who took panic attacks. ‘You think I should do this, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ she said honestly. ‘I think it’ll be all right. But if it isn’t, we’ll try something easier next time.’
‘All right. I’ll give it a shot.’
‘Good,’ said Brodie. ‘Now: have you anything decent to wear?’
Chapter Four
When rich men build homes they build them in private grounds where commoners can’t stare at them. But inns are not residences and The Diligence was built fronting onto what was at that time a main route from the south coast to London. But that was long ago, before motor-cars let alone motorways, and what was once a main arterial had slipped down the rankings in the last century. Now it served only Cheyne Warren, looping back to the Guildford road north of Menner Down, and was quiet enough for people to ride horses and bicycles past The Diligence’s mullioned windows.
Brodie had thought that might be a problem. All she knew of pop-stars was gleaned from television, but for people who made their money in the spotlight they seemed inordinately keen on privacy and she couldn’t see how a coaching inn fronting a public road could be made private. But Chandos was unconcerned, merely gave instructions for raising the garden wall, topping it with wrought iron and backing it with a bank of mature shrubs. It didn’t turn The Diligence into a fortress, but when the iron gates were locked it would take a determined paparazzo to get in.
Tonight the gates and all the doors were flung wide, light and music bursting out in all directions. Following the signs, Brodie parked in the stable-yard behind the house among cars worth more than her flat. She changed her shoes and picked up her bag; but halfway to the door she realised she’d forgotten something. She went back and yanked Daniel bodily out of the car.
‘This is a once in a lifetime experience,’ she hissed at him. ‘You will never get an opportunity like this again.’
His plain round face was unhappy. ‘Promise?’
Inside was bedlam. Entering The Diligence they hit a wall of sound – shouts, laughter, music and argument layered and tossed as if by a cement mixer, packing the available space so densely that all meaning was lost. Visually, the same chaos reigned. Far from the funereal atmosphere Brodie had expected, colour was everywhere, weaving and throbbing as two hundred birds of paradise flocked and wheeled, displaying to one another and mobbing the bar. It was impossible to pick out individuals, and the patterns they wove were no sooner formed than broken up. The effect was a sensory explosion. Anyone prone to seizures would have been worshipping the skirting-board by now.
It should have been an affront to a building as ancient as The Diligence. But actually this was what it was made for: not the monochromatic poor who pretty much stayed where they were born but the travelling classes who had money and displayed it every way they could – on their backs and in their entourages and in what they poured down their throats. The Diligence would have seen parties on this scale before. It would take more than a few demon rockers to shock these timbers.
Brodie stole a quick glance at Daniel. She didn’t want him to know she was anxious about him. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘Fine,’ he said. He sounded surprised.
‘There’s Eric.’ Brodie forged a way through the spectacle and fetched up beside the tall man in the grey silk suit. It wasn’t the only suit in the room but it might have been the only one that anyone outside the entertainment industry would have been seen dead in.
The man he was arguing with, on the other hand, would have attracted uneasy looks in The Rose, which was the closest thing Dimmock had to a speakeasy. He was ten years younger than Chandos but his skin was sallowed by hard living, his beard a mere neglect of shaving. The fingers with which he gesticulated in the manager’s face were stained by nicotine, the angry eyes sunk in dark pits like bruises. By his frame he should have been a sturdy man but his way of life had left his cheeks hollow and the tendons of his throat exposed. Where everyone else had dressed for the occasion – if not in the best of taste, at least with élan – he seemed to have settled for the first things he found in the right colour. Against the motley black his pallor glowed like a fever. He looked as if he had an imminent appointment with destiny, and not in a good way.
Brodie didn’t like to interrupt them, partly from politeness but mostly because she wanted to eavesdrop, but it was almost over. The younger man threw her a furious glance before yelling his parting shot. ‘It hasn’t even got a swimming pool!’ Then he was gone, a bundle of black rags swept away by the multi-coloured tide.
Realising she was there, Chandos turned to her with a restrained smile. ‘It’s nice when the host takes the trouble to greet all his guests.’
She indicated the departing man with a blood-red fingernail. ‘I take it that was …’
‘Yes, that was Jared. Spreading charm and good-fellowship wherever he goes. Among ourselves, you know, we call him Pollyanna.’
Brodie laughed aloud. ‘And I thought all that sexy glowering was part of the act.’
‘Oh no. That’s real.’
‘Well, let me introduce my friend Daniel,’ said Brodie. ‘He doesn’ t do a lot of sexy glowering but I’m fond of him anyway.’ Seeing the faintly puzzled expression on Chandos’s face she turned and found she was alone. She sighed. ‘A pound to a penny he’s in the kitchen, washing glasses.’ She was hoping that was all it was.
Now Chandos laughed. ‘Not what you’d call a party animal?’
Brodie considered. ‘Perhaps a party hamster.’
Chandos collected a bottle and glasses and found them somewhere to sit out of the carnival. Brodie said, ‘He didn’t ask for a swimming pool. I’d have found him one if he had.’
‘Don’t give it a thought,’ said Chandos. ‘This is Jared all over. You bust a gut for him and he wants to know why you still have two functioning kidneys. I didn’t know he wanted a swimming pool until today. He doesn’t swim. Demon rockers don’t – it’s something to do with crossing water.’
‘That’s vampires,’ murmured Brodie.
‘Anyway, there’s a couple of acres outside – if he wants a pool he can have one. It’s not that he wants a pool: it’s that he wants to complain. It would kill him to say he was pleased with something.’
Brodie eyed the tall man speculatively. ‘That must make it difficult working together.’
‘It does. Do you know what makes it easier? All the money.’ They chuckled together like friends. Brodie thought fleetingly of Daniel, that he might be in trouble, that rather than talking mathematics and washing glasses he might already have been overwhelmed by the fairground atmosphere and be standing out in the dark garden unable even to get himself home. Then she forgot him.
Daniel was fine. And then all at once he wasn’t.
When Brodie took off into the raucous crowd in pursuit of her client and the chaos swirled between them, he stood alone in the eye of the maelstrom and waited, breath abated, to see how he would fare. Seconds passed. He had to take another breath. Still he was just a man standing in a crowd, not a panic-flayed brain imprisoned in its own skull hammering to get out, every muscle knotted, every pore streaming, existence concentrated in a silent scream that started in the pit of his belly and swelled to encompass the universe.
He breathed again. Brodie was right. Three months ago he couldn’t have d
one this. He’d healed without knowing, and would never have known if she hadn’t pushed him to find out. He breathed again.
Someone put a drink that he didn’t recognise into his hand. He risked looking round. They were just people: dressed like parrots and making the same kind of noise but still just people enjoying a night out. There was nothing to be afraid of. He knew where the door was, could be out of here in six seconds if he had to be, but really there was nothing to flee, no reason to panic.
Then the music changed.
At one end of the mediaeval hall was a raised dais where its first owner had conducted his business. The more things change, the more they remain the same: the new owner was using it for the same purpose. Spotlights that a moment earlier had been focused on a DJ with a set-up like Mission Control at Houston suddenly switched to centre stage and picked up a figure which no one – to judge from the sharp intake of two hundred breaths and the chorus of delighted cheers – had noticed until just then. Intrigued, Daniel watched between the shoulders of people taller than him.
In the confluence of the spotlights Jared Fry was something different to the ragged ruffian Brodie had almost met ten minutes earlier. He hadn’t changed his clothes but now the black rags shimmered, and mostly it was the light but some of it was the kind of internal energy that fuels stars. His face, paper-white in the bath of brightness, shone like marsh-light. In their cavernous hollows his eyes burned like coals. And when he sang … when he sang …
The voice was as rough as concrete, raw as a wound, and it tore from his throat like a brute birth, marvellous and monstrous. It wasn’ t so much an energy that drove it, Daniel thought, as a desperate need to get it out there, to be rid of it. The man sang from the depths of his soul in every sense of the words, as if the music festered within him and without venting would spread its poison. Singing was an emetic.
Before Fry sang Daniel had hardly noticed the music except that it was loud. Now it was like a presence in the room, a great dark creature spreading membranous wings over all their heads, making the air throb with its heartbeat. Daniel was astonished. All he knew about music was that there was a lot of it he didn’t like. Until now he’d never suspected how much sheer power could be crammed into sound-waves. Enthralled and appalled in equal measure, he stood frozen, mineralised like Lot’s wife, while the demon rock bludgeoned his soul; and he never noticed the tight fluttering starting up in his chest.
And what Jared Fry sang was:
I am the timber, the tree that was growing,
the king of the mountain, the pride of the wood.
I am the iron, the ore that was taken
by deep-delving men who knew iron is good.
Men cut me and sawed me, and smelted and poured me,
and now a man’s paying in praying and blood.
Millennia pass, and the wood is still growing,
the ore is still glowing in furnace and fire,
and men are still bleeding, and begging and pleading,
and nobody’s leading them out of the pyre.
The promise is broken, the words were a token,
the smoke from the burning mounts higher and higher.
We crucify women whenever we take them.
We shake them and break them and leave them in blood.
We plough them and seed them whenever we need them.
They smile through the tears and say it was good;
and don’t feel betrayed at having been nailed
to the cross of our wanting, the dream of our rood.
There is no redemption, there is no salvation.
The future is only a come-again past.
The skies are still clouding, the darkness is crowding,
the death-knell is sounding, the dice are all cast.
The strongest are shaken, the truest are broken,
the kraken is waking. The void is vast.
In the dense pack of bodies below the dais people were driven to dance. It wasn’t dance music, but in any bacchanalia there’s always someone willing to try. Like an electric current, the pulsing beat galvanised bodies and limbs. Immediately in front of Daniel a girl threw her arms to the beamed ceiling and her wits to the wind, and pirouetted into him, spinning him into the surging crowd.
He didn’t just lose his balance. He lost all sense of direction so he no longer knew where the door was. He lost the sense of autonomy, that he was here from choice and was free to leave, that no one had an interest in staying him. From a grown man escorting a friend to a noisy but essentially benign social gathering, in an instant he was reduced to a frightened child in a situation he could neither understand nor control nor escape. The old panic rose behind him like the wicked wizard in a pantomime, throwing its cloak over his head, laughing at his helpless burgeoning terror.
Either those around him didn’t see he was in trouble or no one cared. They may have thought he was drunk. They may have thought he too was moved to dance by the insistent crash of the music and just wasn’t very good at it. He saw sweat-shiny faces leer at him and then move away. He saw the rainbow colours of their garb spiral around him. He tried to ask for help but couldn’t find the words.
He looked desperately for Brodie but couldn’t see her. Now he couldn’t breathe. The harder he tried, the less oxygen he got. He gasped in the sterile air, pulse thundering in his ears until it drowned out even the crowd, even the thumping music. He thought he was going to die. The rational core of him knew the danger was illusionary, that you can’t die of panic unless you happen to be half-way across Niagara on a high-wire, but those parts of his brain that were still operating honestly believed he was going to die.
Of all the people crammed into the mediaeval hall, only one was looking Daniel’s way. And he had other things on his mind, but by degrees the awareness of another human being in distress brought his focus back from wherever it was Jared Fry went in the throes of his music. He threw the microphone to the DJ and vaulted off the dais, forcing his way through the crowd; and they, thinking it was part of the act, cheered louded and stamped harder and wore the marks of his elbows with pride.
At the heart of Daniel’s not-so-private hell a new face loomed out of the mayhem, a voice out of the chaos. ‘You OK?’
Daniel shook his head. In fact his whole body shook. He was mortally afraid the man wouldn’t understand, would walk away and leave him alone.
But strong hands gripped his shoulders, steering him through the crowd, a harsh voice by his ear clearing a path. The riot of colours parted, the arch of a doorway appeared, and then he was out of the press of people and into an oasis of calm and, when the door closed behind them, quiet. A kitchen. There was a table with bottles on it and already a stack of used glasses beside the sink. Weak with relief, Daniel gave a faint, half-hysterical chuckle. This at least was a situation he was familiar with.
The man holding him hooked out a chair with his toe and dropped Daniel into it. He swilled out a glass and filled it from the tap. ‘Drink.’ Daniel’s teeth rattled on the rim. It took time to unclench them enough to do as he was told. When he did the panic began to subside.
He found an unshaven face peering into his own from a range of inches. ‘What happened?’
Daniel panted softly, recovering his breath. His face was wet with sweat and he was damp under his clothes. ‘Panic attack. I’m sorry. I thought I could do this.’
‘It’s happened before?’
‘Oh yeah,’ sighed Daniel. ‘Not so much recently.’
‘I thought it was a bad trip.’
‘In a way. Thanks for your help. I couldn’t have got out of there alone.’
The man shrugged. Dressed in black – worn jeans, torn shirt – he looked as if he’d come to sweep the chimneys and got caught up in the party by accident. ‘I thought I was going to end up talking to guys in pointy hats. I don’t mind people bringing their own stuff, but if they’re going to kill themselves I’d rather they did it somewhere else.’
Daniel was putting it toge
ther. ‘You’re Jared Fry.’
Fry’s expression was still. ‘You didn’t recognise me?’
‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ said Daniel, with that old-fashioned solemnity that made old ladies want to pat his head and had Jack Deacon reaching for his truncheon. ‘I’ve seen your picture but you were wearing mascara. And, um, chains.’
Fry barked a laugh. He wasn’t a big man but his voice was pitched a couple of tones lower than expected. ‘Professional attire.’
‘Ah. Like a bowler,’ said Daniel.
Fry didn’t know quite what to make of him; adding his name to the end of a long list. ‘What made you lose it?’
‘Somebody stumbled into me. But I think mainly it was the music.’
‘My music?’ He almost seemed pleased.
‘I suppose.’
Fry grinned. ‘It’s nice to know I still have an effect on people.’
‘It’s powerful stuff,’ said Daniel. ‘I had no idea.’
‘You’re not a fan then.’
‘No. Sorry. I thought I was too old for pop music.’
‘It’s not pop, it’s rock.’
‘Sorry.’
Fry was still trying to make sense of it. ‘If you don’t know me and you’re not a fan, what are you doing here?’
‘I came with a friend. Brodie Farrell – she found this house for you.’
A glower crossed his brow. ‘Oh yeah. She’s with Eric. Do you want me to get her?’
Daniel shook his head. ‘I’ll be fine here. Let her enjoy the party. I’ll wash some glasses.’
‘All right.’ Fry looked sourly at the kitchen table, groaning under the weight of bottles. There must have been hundreds of them, all the same. ‘Have you seen this?’
‘It’s cola,’ said Daniel, not understanding.
‘Yes it is,’ growled Fry. ‘And if I had a house full of twelve-year-olds and a clown called Mr Chuckles to entertain them, it would be exactly what I meant when I said to get in enough coke for everyone.’ Shaking his head, the black hair dancing lankly around his face, Fry left Daniel to his washing-up.