'You kept that from me?' Tom says, incredulous, after Dante nervously recounts the fuller version of his liaisons with Beth. 'I can't believe you never told me. I've been kicking around this flat day after day, jerking off, looking after you, going insane with boredom. You know, I started to think that this whole deal in Scotland was a mistake. We don't belong here. I only kept going because of you, keeping all of my doubts to myself, because this was Dante's trip of a lifetime. He was going to meet Eliot Coldwell.'
'Tom, I know it sounds bad –'
'Damn straight it does. For Christ's sake, Dante! All this time you've been fucking about with Eliot's wife. If anyone was going to commit adultery up here I thought it would've been me, but it was you and some tart into bondage. Look at the state of yourself. You don't have a fuckin' clue! How could you do it to the guy that wrote Banquet? You've read it a hundred times and turned it into lyrics. He's an old man with a young girl, and you fuck her.'
Something hot flinches inside Dante. 'Tom, forget sex. It's not like that.'
Tom refuses to look at Dante. 'Sure.'
'Tom, I'd never met anyone like her before. Beth was like that muse I was always telling you about. I thought she was the one. Instantly. She seemed so beautiful and so weird. And it was Beth who asked us up here. The letters, the research job, the flat – she claims that everything was her idea. She read Banquet for all the same reasons I did. We seemed so alike. How could I have resisted her? I didn't know what I was getting into. Eliot manipulated the whole thing. He wanted us to get together for a reason. You have to understand how I was pulled in.'
Tom looks at the ceiling. Shakes his head in disbelief.
'Try and understand, Tom. I couldn't tell you. I had to know where we were standing. If we could pull this thing off. I didn't want to worry you with all this in the first week. I mean we're here five minutes and I get fuckin' typhoid or something and . . .' Dante pauses, swallows. 'There's more, Tom. It gets worse.'
'How could it get any worse?'
'Hear me out . . . I don't trust Eliot, let alone Beth. I don't know how to say this, but I doubt if Eliot asked me up here to assist his research.'
'What?'
'It's crazy, I know. But being his assistant was just a ruse. Something is going down that Eliot started. I don't know what. Maybe some kind of cult. And I'm their fuckin' sacrifice. It's all starting to make sense to me and I'm frightened, Tom. I'm not kidding. I want to leave St Andrews. Today.'
'You're out of your mind. She's made you paranoid. You never could handle your emotions with a girl.'
'Please, please, just listen. What about these nightmares I've been having? I thought it was because of the virus, but it's not. They're connected to Beth. The dreams are like a prelude, an introduction to something. Same with the time I met her in the court. They're offering a glimpse of someone I'm supposed to meet.'
'You're the only fuckin' nightmare,' Tom cuts in.
'Tom! You're not hearing me. Beth told me something about a third party and she acts all weird whenever she speaks about him. And I don't think this other party is a person. I mean, it's not a man.'
'What the fuck are you on?'
'It sounds crazy, I know. But I saw it last night. Or a part of it.
The thing from my dreams that I can never remember properly when I wake up. Don't you see? It's all connected. At first I thought I was seeing things, being ill and susceptible and somehow dreaming the whole thing. But now I know it wasn't. It's real. That's why she asked me out to the sands last night. And in the court. They have something, Tom. Something up here with them. They were going to give me to it.'
Tom closes his eyes and dips his sleek head between his legs. 'I've heard some bullshit in my time, Dante, but I never thought it would come out of your mouth.' He looks up. 'We came up here to get away from the crazies, remember? I don't know what the fuck that woman has done to you, but she's made an arse of you. A real arse. Do you think you can sneak off behind my back and shag some crazy bitch and then fob me off with this shit?'
Knots of frustration tighten inside Dante until they produce a burning sensation in his chest. 'Is that all you care about, Tom? All you ever care about, the allocation of female affection? That's why you're pissed off, isn't it? Because for once I got the girl, without you getting in first. Without taking over and rewarding me with your castoffs, like I should be grateful. You don't care about everything falling through. Or the fact that we've been deceived, and that I'm ill, and in trouble. You just can't stand the thought of me meeting someone first. It offends your vanity. I've never been more serious in my life and you call me crazy. I nearly died, for fuck's sake.'
Tom's face colours. 'You selfish bastard. Why did you bring me here? Because without me you'd be isolated. You might think you're some kind of radical outsider, but you're not. You're a misfit and a fuckin' dreamer. You meet some arty bitch, some brainy beauty, who gets off on being the centre of attention, who craves it, with some weird-ass psycho sex shit going on, and you think, you convince yourself, she's the one. You betray Eliot and you ditch me. You've been single for so long, your desperation is calling the shots.'
Dante knocks his mug of tea over. 'Fuck you! How can you talk of betrayal? You knew how I felt about Imogen and you just had to have her. You took her when you could have had any girl in or out of the rock scene. And then she became everything that was good for you and you still chucked her. And now you try and judge my problem by the yardstick of your fuckin' bitterness. By your inability to ever accept even a smidgen of imperfection. Your own friends, best friends, can't trust you. You fucked Punky's girl and it killed the band.'
'She was no good, and you know it,' Tom blurts out. 'I did him a favour. If it wasn't me, it would have been the next guy that made a pass. She was going to dump him anyway because of his drinking.'
'Bullshit! You know how he felt about her. That's why he was drinking. The kid always had problems, but he loved that girl and he worshipped the fuckin' ground you walked on. You just couldn't resist flexing your power. Proving that you could have any girl going. Even a mate's. Everyone knows you're beautiful. Every girl wants you, but you always have to prove it. You're poison. That's why the band has two musicians left. You fucked it up. The straw that broke the camel's back. You're fond of gazing into mirrors, mate, but the one I'm holding up reveals a little more than your fuckin' bone structure.'
'Enough,' Tom says, clenching his fists. 'Say another word and I'll break your jaw.'
Dante turns his face away. A thick clot of something cold closes his throat down.
They do not speak or even see each other for the remainder of the day. Both guitars remain silent, as if neither man can bear to touch any symbol of their companionship. The melody and rhythms are gone.
Tom stays out of the flat all day, and only returns for a brief spell in the early indigo-tinted evening, before Dante hears him leave the flat a second time, taking the Land Rover with him. He will go on a bender, that is for sure. After wandering around the town all day in a sulk, he will drink himself stupid and end up breaking a window or blarting in the street.
After laughing, humourlessly, Dante speaks aloud in the empty flat, 'We are truly pathetic. A pair of teenage girls. We ought to be ashamed,' only stopping himself when he longs for an opportunity to share the notion with Tom.
Unable to concentrate on anything in his room, Dante shuffles about the flat. Whether messing with a snack or slouching on the couch, the cuts and bruises on his body refuse to let him concentrate on anything, or relax or forget. Every time he sees Eliot's collection of books, stacked into the small wooden bookcase in the lounge, he wants to boot them all over the floor. They seem to mock him: a symbol of adolescent delusion. All he wants is to leave. There is no way he can spend another night in the flat.
CHAPTER THIRTY
'Where are you, buddy?' Dante calls out, but the wind snatches his words from the air and throws them away like a handful of sand.
He wande
rs around the East Sands and harbour. There has been no sign of Tom for twenty-four hours. The beach here is not as spectacular as the West Sands, but the thought of going back there fills him with dread. He just needs to be outdoors, to clear his thoughts of conspiracy, and the fretting and paranoia. But even nature seems to have turned against him. Screwing up his eyes against the salt spray, he spits a tendril of hair from his mouth and replaces it with a cigarette. Out at sea, the water is a dull grey. It stretches between the rusty shallows to the thin dark line of the horizon. The clouds look like dirty snow and move sluggishly to erase any peek of brightness above them.
The late summer has given way to skies that remain dark after sunrise, and brood throughout the day as if impatient for the return of night. The change in the weather occurred suddenly. It is as if he was deceived on his arrival by the bright sun and blue skies and their false promises of eternal spring in this coastal suntrap. Now the weather shades the morning brightness and swallows the afternoon light, threatening a long and terrible winter.
And somewhere under these unfriendly skies, Tom also walks alone with his thoughts. But where? He took the Land Rover and only returned yesterday evening to take his share of the money. Something Dante only discovered before he left for the harbour this morning. To his lasting shame, and Tom's equally enduring indifference, neither of them possesses a bank account. Following the nonpayment of his student debts, and Tom's irregular employment history, at the age of twenty-six it has been deemed by banks and building societies that neither of them can be trusted with a cash card.
Hidden inside a guitar case, their stash of paper notes was to have been carefully meted out in Scotland until the second album was finished.
An early division of their means was never envisaged when they left Birmingham.
He's paid no attention to their troubled friendship since they arrived. But after everything that has happened so quickly and unexpectedly, how can he blame himself for the confrontation? In truth, it has been brewing and threatening to spill over for years. Tom's relationship with Imogen loosened the pin from the grenade destined to go off since they began living exclusively in each other's pockets, for the five years following Dante's graduation. Perhaps it isn't natural for two grown men to have grown inseparable. Has the band been an excuse to spurn an ordinary life? he wonders. Was it a sophisticated refuge for two misfits? Does it represent their failure at life? And even if they have talent, what does it mean if they are now destined to lose their friendship and song-writing partnership? If only Tom understood what he's seen in St Andrews, what he alone has experienced, then it would be different. They could escape together.
Three Tornado jets crack the sky and break his trance. They shriek beneath the clouds like black, spiky dragons and then drop down, beyond the town, into the narrow crevice of the Eden Estuary. Dante turns his collar up and walks back along the beach toward the pier. The wind pushes at his back, like the hand of an annoyed guardian, determined to hurry him along. Resisting it, and increasingly angered at something else he is at the whim of, he deliberately makes a slow drift toward the town until the weather responds by launching a new offensive against his bowed shoulders. Rain adds a serrated bite to every gust of the punishing wind. By the time he reaches the fishing vessels bobbing inside the oxbow harbour, he has little idea whether it is the sea spray or the rain that proves most effective at slapping his numb head and stinging his exposed earlobes.
Following his first and reluctant night alone in the flat, he packed their bags and then cleaned the flat of their nervous occupancy, a means of keeping himself busy and a reinforcement of his decision that he and Tom quit St Andrews without delay. But he waited alone in the flat, staying awake all night and dozing through the morning that followed, occasionally disturbed by the sound of an engine more powerful than a car rumbling down the East Scores, at which he had rushed, in vain, to the front door hoping to see his Land Rover idling at the curb. At times he would stop his agitated pacing about the lounge and his room, overcome by an urge to laugh madly at what has befallen him in Scotland. But he never dwelt on his stay for long before the unpleasant images blew into his mind, ragged and animate fragments from dreams and darkened beaches, flung forward from where they had been banished, before he stopped the train of thought, clutched his face, and, by an act of will, forced them back whence they had come.
In the past, when times were hard, playing the guitar was good therapy, and he was always able to withdraw for days and reach inside himself for a song. Or reading a book could be useful in counteracting his tendency to wallow in doubt or fear. But not now. Those distractions seem trivial. A struggle between life and death, between friendship and abandonment, occupies him completely. This is the biggest challenge of his life, and he can focus on nothing but the imagined return of his friend.
Buffeted and whipped by the wind, and slipping over twice to muddy his knees, he climbs around the bottom of the pier and makes slow progress up the grassy hill to the cathedral and the Scores. Never has he felt so insignificant – a plaything at the mercy of an old place that shuns the outsider. The sea spits at him, the wind shoves him, and the town now refuses to please his eye since it has swallowed Tom. Its graceful lines become the edges of cruel defences, the crumbling walls of the castle and cathedral a promise of ruin; windows are empty black sockets, the wide streets an arena for him to stumble and trip through as he is persecuted from the pavement. All the doors are shut to him.
Back in the town, scant drifts of people look past him as they hurry by. No one will meet his eye. Shop assistants look askance at his drawn and bruised face. They serve him quickly to encourage him off the premises and on his way.
His only consolation, and a blessing he counts hourly, is that there has been no further sign of Eliot or Beth. If he had seen either face again, now having grown in his mind to detestable proportions, he is sure he would have fled to the nearest railway station, guitar in hand, and leaped upon the first train bound for England.
And what more can he do but wait for Tom to return to the flat? The thought of going to the police and filling out a Missing Persons report makes him feel both afraid and foolish. And there is always a chance Tom has driven back to Birmingham. For years, Tom's impulsive behaviour has driven Dante to either quick-fire rage or silent exasperation. But his annoyance has always been a transitory thing, and their reconciliation was always inevitable on account of their fears of losing each other. They have no one else. There is no safety net in his estranged and disappointed parents, their collective of resentful lovers, or the casual rock-scene acquaintances picked up over the years. But who can Tom go to? He must have fled to someone. Of that Dante is certain; Tom can never exist on his own for long. And that only leaves Imogen.
In a phone box, on the westerly end of North Street, he finds himself overcome by a sudden anxiety. He raises the receiver and replaces it three times. If he is honest with himself, separating himself from Imogen was a major motivation in his desire to leave Birmingham. Just hearing her voice on the phone still causes him pain, and watching Tom and Imogen together was, at times, unbearable. He still blames Tom for conveniently shelving his guilt over breaking up the band by launching himself straight into a new distraction with Imogen. But if that was Tom's motivation, then it was his own too. Tom seduced her before he had a chance to assert his own designs. They both saw Imogen as an escape from the mess Sister Morphine had become. And Tom's effortless triumph fuelled most of his animosity. He hates himself for it – it makes him sick with guilt and a sense of chronic immaturity.
Mistakenly and sullenly, he'd presumed Tom was set for life with Imogen, which bore the consequence of them parting anyway – at least from the suffocating and increasingly quarrelsome bond that had developed between them. Ironically, he even began to fantasise about a new start in life without Tom or the dregs of the band, in the form of a new and solitary vocation somewhere near the sea – a new musical trajectory under Eliot's direction. And when E
liot's unexpected invitation arrived, it had to be an act of fate, creating a chance for him to escape his muddled and resentful life.
But everything is clearer now. His departure from Birmingham was partly founded on his desire to hurt Tom for securing Imogen as his own. Back home, as the War Wagon was serviced, his bags packed, and his goodbyes passed around the rock scene, his friend could only watch – unsmiling, never participating, saddened. And just as they were about to shake hands, it was then Tom changed his mind about their girl and decided to tag along. 'Things aren't working out with Imogen,' he said. And it was all he said. Suddenly, as Dante also secretly hoped, the relocation to Scotland did not have to be faced alone, and Tom no longer had Imogen. No matter how hard he chided himself, he was unable to prevent himself secretly rejoicing over Tom's decision. Revenge was his, but now it seems manipulation and self-pity ask a heavy price.
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