Satan Wants Me

by Robert Irwin

  ‘Sally asked me to do it,’ said Maud calmly. ‘She told me that she did not want your eyes to linger on her more than was necessary.’

  And Sally looked at me submissively as she offered me the joint again. My hands were shaking as I took it from her. Shaven bald and with no eyebrows or eyelashes, Sally looked half-human, half-reptile. I inhaled deeply, but when I tried to pass the joint back, Sally indicated that she did not want any more and that it was all mine – as was the second joint, which was already rolled and waiting for me. She left my side and went to sit beside Maud. She was helping Maud draw up some terribly complicated horoscope. They paid me no attention as they worked away at their calculations.

  So I smoked alone, and, as I smoked, I felt myself growing increasingly paranoid. The world was slipping away from my grasp and I could no longer understand anything that was happening. After a while, I asked Maud if she still had the crucifix which I had given her just before Sally and I fled London.

  Maud looked up from the astrological chart which she was drawing up under Sally’s advice.

  ‘Darling, it is the only thing you have ever given me,’ she said in wounded tones. ‘Of course I still have it. It’s in my jewel-box.’

  So I went inside and rooted around until I found the jewel-box and the crucifix in it, together with a lock of my hair. (Maud has an amazing amount of jewellery.) Then I settled down again on the grass with the crucifix and the second joint and began to meditate on the mercy of Jesus Christ. The tiny silvered figure of the crucified Christ was attached to a cross of black wood which was pendant to a rosary. After a while, once the second joint was finished, I started to rotate the beads of the rosary through my hands while intoning a low-voiced mantra, ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’ But why, I kept thinking, should Jesus have mercy upon me? Particularly when I was not even very convinced that Jesus had ever existed? Even if Jesus did exist, what guarantee did I have that he was stronger and more powerful than the Devil? The Christians say that the mercy of Jesus will always prevail and that God is omnipotent, but they would say that wouldn’t they?

  And how miserable was I? It was true that things seemed a bit perilous at the moment. On the other hand, going to bed with two women last night had been pretty good and the joint I had just finished smoking made me feel absurdly, if only briefly cheerful. Was it blasphemously disrespectful to pray to God while high on dope? Then I thought that, even if Christ does not exist and there is in fact no infinite mercy on offer, I have still lost nothing by praying to the void. It could even be therapeutic to do so. But then it occurred to me that, if Christ did exist and He was reading my thoughts as I prayed, He would not be pleased by such a calculating way of praying. So I might forfeit salvation by entertaining such foolish thoughts. So I applied myself once more to humble myself before the tiny figure on the cross. I was trying to dedicate myself to a virtuous life. I thought that when I got out of bed tomorrow I should begin my new life as a Christian. The alternative was a spiralling descent to damnation and torment. But is it ever possible to pray to God? Suppose what I think of as Jesus is really evil? No man can know for sure whether he worships God or the Devil. But that last thought surely came from the Devil …

  The twilight came on as I struggled to concentrate on my Redeemer. The girls had finished casting the horoscope and gone inside. I do not know whether or not it was to mock me and my pious meditation, but ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ was being played again and again at top volume. Then Maud came out into the garden once more. She was naked.

  ‘Give that back to me, Peter. It is mine now,’ she said and she took the crucifix from my hand and hung it round her neck before turning back to the cottage. ‘Come to bed, my love,’ she called over her shoulder and, as I contemplated her shimmering white buttocks, the Jesus mantra died on my lips.

  In bed Maud allowed herself to be caressed by Sally and by me. Again I tried to enter Maud, but this time she forestalled me with the words,

  ‘Not yet, darling. You only need a little patience and I promise you that the day after the day after tomorrow at half past four in the afternoon I shall be wholly yours at last. I swear to you that I long for it more than you do.’

  ‘The day after the day after tomorrow at half past four in the afternoon,’ I muttered doubtfully.

  ‘What do you think we have been working on this evening?’ asked Sally. ‘We have consulted the ephemerides and the day after the day after tomorrow in the afternoon is astrologically the best possible time for Maud to yield her virginity to you.’

  It crossed my mind that this astrological rubbish might be some trick to delay sex, but the hungry desire on Maud’s face was unmistakable. She longed for it and for me. In the meantime, she actually urged Sally on me again, but now that Sally had lost her hair, I no longer found her at all attractive and so I turned my back upon her and Maud. As I composed myself to sleep, I commended my spirit to Jesus and Israfil, but without much hope in either – nor, for that matter, did I have much hope that I would sleep. Although I was mad with desire for Maud, I was beginning to realise that I was also terrified of her – and even afraid of what she might do next with those hairdresser’s scissors of hers. I was afraid too that, if I slept, I might not waken again and afraid that, if I died in my present unshriven state, I should be damned for all eternity. Then, as I continued to lie frozen in wakefulness, I thought that I could hear whistling which sounded as though it was coming from the woods. The tune seemed familiar, but it was only hours later, as I was at last beginning to doze off that I identified it as ‘Yesterday All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away’.

  Friday, August 11th

  I dreamt of Pan running wild and whistling in the woods. I slept in late and I awoke to find myself alone in bed. Outside in the garden Maud was doing her karate exercises. Only this time she was using Sally for target practice. She attacked Sally with reverse punches, slapping blocks and roundhouse kicks. However, she was careful to pull her punches, so that, at the end of it all, Sally was only lightly bruised. Sally, for her part, made only perfunctory attempts to defend herself.

  I watched for a while and then went inside and fixed myself breakfast. I noticed that a second gnome had joined the first on the kitchen table. Soon after I had started on my cornflakes, it began to rain and Maud rushed in and gave me a big, wet, sweaty hug and, as she did so, I realised that it was entirely by my own free will that I was damned, for I prefer Maud’s body to the mercy of Jesus Christ. This was a pretty freaky thought to be having while eating cornflakes.

  As for the second gnome, Sally had found it on the doorstep and once again our milk had been nicked. Setting aside any possible chthonic or Satanic connotations, what this meant was that we were running out of milk. Also the letter to Dennis Wheatley needed posting, as did some mail-order form which Maud had filled in. So it was agreed that Sally should go into town again. Sally tied one of Maud’s silk scarves into a sort of turban to disguise her baldness and borrowed an umbrella, for what had begun as drizzle had turned torrential.

  I have, provisionally at least, abandoned my PhD and the morning passed slowly. I have nothing to do, except write in this diary of mine. Thinking about Wednesday’s blast on amyl nitrite, it is not just the ultimate nature of reality that is too subtle to be put down in a notebook. Everything is too subtle to be put into a notebook. The looks that pass between Sally and Maud … my vague sense of where Maud is taking me … the precise smell of late summer … None of these things can be captured on paper. Reality is not a sequence of events, not a series of verbs acted out by Maud, Sally and me. Reality is a continuum of evanescent sensations for which I can find no words at all. How things are just the way they are – the spontaneity of falling rain, the suchness of ordinary objects, the passing away of everything and the faint hint of something that lies behind all these transient sensations – I can point to these things with my mind, but there is no way that they can be trapped on paper. In my diary I can write about everyt
hing except reality.

  As for the story I can tell – the one I am writing in my diary – it strikes me that maybe it could form the basis for a really good novel. Maybe a literary artist like Dennis Wheatley can use our story in one of his books. Of course he would have to tart it up and have us speak more eloquently. If I am going to be the hero, I will need more than an apprentice’s knowledge of occultism. I ought to be handy with my fists, an expert on fine wines and a driver of fast sports-cars. Also, the story as it is at the moment lacks a properly impressive Wheatley-style villain. We ought to be on the run from a half-Jewish mulatto with yellowing teeth and a withered hand who goes under the name of the Comte de Sabarthes and who smokes Havana cigars in an ivory cigar-holder.

  It is lunch-time, Sally has not reappeared and I am getting worried. Strange things are happening.

  Hours passed. The sun went down over the yard-arm and there was still no Sally. It was dark when she reappeared. She was not alone.

  ‘I saw Brian Epstein in town!’ she announced.

  However, the man who stood beside her in the doorway looking drenched and miserable, was not the Beatles’ manager, but Mr Cosmic.

  ‘Epstein did not say anything,’ Sally continued. ‘He just looked at me rather strangely.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ I replied. ‘With no eyebrows and no eyelashes, you do look rather strange. Hello, Cosmic. What brings you here?’

  ‘Hi man,’ was all he said.

  Then Maud walked in from the bedroom.

  ‘I am David Hargreaves, but they call me Mr Cosmic,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes, I have heard all about you,’ Maud replied and she extended her hand in that slightly absurd, ladylike manner of hers and he stooped to kiss it.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I persisted.

  ‘What do you think? I’m looking after you.’

  Before I could press him more on this, Sally danced between us and -

  ‘Taraa!’ she shouted as she ripped the turban from her head. Sally had had her skull tattooed with a coiling snake and, in the middle of the snake’s coils, one could read in rainbow lettering the words, ‘I AM SALLY, THE SLAVE OF MAUD AND PETER’.

  ‘Wow! That’s cool,’ said Cosmic.

  ‘That is why I was away so long,’ she said. ‘I had to go all the way to Aldershot to get it done,’ and she looked to Maud for approval.

  But all Maud said was,

  ‘Now that you are here, perhaps we can eat.’

  Cosmic went back out into the rain to retrieve his sleeping-bag and the provisions which he had stashed in the woods. Sally explained that she had stumbled across Cosmic looking fed-up and trying to shelter under a tree at the end of our road and, when she suggested that he came back with her to the cottage, he had just shrugged his shoulders and agreed. But Sally was more preoccupied with her sighting of Brian Epstein. I do not believe that she has seen Brian Epstein. Two days after running into Brian Jones, that would be too much of a coincidence. Just possibly she might have seen someone who looked like Epstein. But is she going to keep on running into famous Brians every time that she goes into Farnham? Not that I can think of any more Brians who have become famous. The truth is, of course, that Sally has completely flipped. Presumably it is all the drugs she has been taking recently. Thank God Maud is here, for I would not like to be alone in the cottage with this mad girl, whom I now feel I do not know at all.

  Sally unpacked the shopping. One of the things she had bought was a frilly apron. Before starting the cooking, she took off all her clothes and put on the apron. Maud and I ate at the table in the kitchen with Sally waiting on us. It was a weird buzz, to see a plate of pork chops displayed beneath Sally’s pointy breasts. Then Sally and Cosmic ate on the mattress in the lying-room. Cosmic produced a bottle of vodka from his rucksack and, after rooting around in the kitchen, he found a jar of Bovril. So then we all drank a mixture of vodka and Bovril – Polish Bison is what it’s called apparently – and Maud, who had a lot of it, was pawing me drunkenly. It flashed through my mind that what started out in this cottage as a kind of rustic idyll, is turning out to be something like a small-scale, green-belt version of the Playboy Club. It seems to be only me who does not know what the hell is going on.

  Cosmic seems in a bad way. He sweats and scratches himself a lot. He was talking in a low monotone, almost as if he was talking to himself. His drone was in praise of alcohol and about how each culture has its own drug. In the Middle East it is hash. In China it is opium. In Central America it is peyote. But the great drug of Christian and European culture is alcohol.

  ‘One should not underrate alcohol just because straights take it. It is the best, most predictable drug that it is possible to score. With hash you can never tell in advance the quality of what you have scored. The heroin currently sold is often contaminated. It is easy to have a bad trip on acid – everyone does sooner or later. But the alcohol high is fast and rock solid-predictable. Looking back over the history of the last two millennia, I think it is plain to see that it is alcohol which has fuelled the triumph of the West … ’

  Sally had crashed out. Maud and I staggered off to bed, leaving Cosmic drunkenly talking to himself.

  Saturday, August 12th

  Still raining. Maud was doing her press-ups and stretching exercises beyond the foot of the bed. I watched with pleasure for a while, before deciding that I really needed to talk to Cosmic and get some sense out of him. I staggered out into the kitchen, but I was too late. He had finished breakfast and he was preparing to shoot up. I had seen Cosmic skin-pop heroin from time to time when I visited him in London. But now it seemed that he had switched to mainlining. A saucepan was nestling between his legs and a tourniquet fashioned from a rubber strap of some kind was already tight on his upper arm. He gave me a funny kind of rictus smile as he plunged the needle in. First time lucky. He flushed the syringe full of blood before sending it back into the vein and gasped as the stuff began to hit. He slumped backwards with his eyes closed, but then he abruptly jerked forwards and vomited into the saucepan. Cosmic always throws up when he is on heroin. He claims to actually enjoy the experience. Be that as it may, it is definitely off-putting to be having breakfast in the same room in which Cosmic is shooting up.

  It was also irritating, of course, to have listened to all that stuff about the wonders of alcohol coming out of the mouth of someone who is really hooked, it now seems, on heroin. Tanked-up the way he was, he was going to be no sort of company for the next few hours. It might have been a good scene if we had shared a trip together, but then, even if he had not been so zonked, I remembered that Cosmic does not do LSD. He is very puritanical about the subject and believes it fucks up the mind in the long term. According to him, a trip does not necessarily stop when it seems to stop and hallucinations can surge up years or even decades later. Cosmic’s body is a temple, albeit a somewhat bizarrely furnished temple.

  Sally said that she had shopping to do. I said that I would go with her. If she was going to run into any more famous Brians, I wanted to be there too. However, Maud, who had gone back to bed called from the bedroom, asking me to stay with her. She said that we would both be safer if I stayed close to the cottage. I went in to see her. Maud was sitting up in bed reading old copies of Vogue. She patted the space beside her. So I joined her in bed and set to work stroking her breasts and thighs. But after a while, she shifted restlessly under my hands.

  ‘Just be patient, darling. Tomorrow is the big day.’

  So I got out of bed and went and fetched what turned out to be the last of my acid-impregnated sugar cubes.

  ‘I am going to take a trip.’

  ‘Must you, darling?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m bored out of my skull.’

  So now I am sitting cross-legged in the lotus position by the open door looking out on the spears of rain. My diary rests on my knees and I am waiting for the hallucinations to kick in. Every trip is completely different. So, whatever is going to happen this time, I know th
at I will not be trapped in the pages of my diary, nor will I re-encounter Proust and his conversational sharks. What I am hoping is to get into grooving on nature and discovering a more Thoreauesque mode of existence. I want to observe lesser-crested nuthatches, spotted grebes, hedge corncrakes and God knows what else and write lovingly detailed evocations of convolvuli, oak leaves and stuff like that. Rather than waste page after page of this notebook on the bizarre antics of Sally and Cosmic, I ought to dedicate myself to simply recording the shapes assumed by the dirty brown clouds as they roll endlessly by.

  The rest of this is written in retrospect, as at that point the hallucinations did indeed start to kick in and they came so thick and fast that I had to drop my biro and just let it all wash over me. What happened was that I looked up at the dirty brown clouds and fancied that I could see shapes in their billowing coils. Behold, I beheld the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding high in the Surrey skies! First there was skinny John with his pitchfork, the very figure of famine. Chubby-faced Paul rode beside John and threatened the world with his balances. Behind them rode George brandishing a sword and Ringo with a bow and a quiver of deadly arrows. They went forth conquering and to conquer. I thought that they might make a landing in our garden and that I should throw myself on their mercy. So I went and lay on the grass and got pretty wet in the process, but they galloped on by. And I kept looking … and beheld a pale horse; and his name was Death and Hell followed with him. And power was given to them over the fourth part of the world … Why, I cried out, are the dead grateful?

  Having received no answer and having then turned back to the cottage, I found myself confronted at the door by a handsome young man who wore a black leather jacket and a black eye-patch. He raised a hand in salutation.

  ‘Johnny Kidd,’ he said.

  ‘Johnny Kidd of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates?’