by Paul Magrs
‘Where did you get it?’
‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘Fox Soames gave it to me. Donkey’s years ago. When I was a kid and staying at his house in the Ribble Valley. He knew how things stood. I never thought I’d need it, but he thought I’d want protection from the dark powers he could see clustered all around me. He knew they were in Karla. And he knew she would bring them to my door one day …’
Colin was staggered. ‘Jesus. You brought a lethal weapon out to dinner with you?’
‘Oh, I carry it around quite often. If I’m going somewhere rough, at any rate. I’m always on my guard.’
As they caught up with Raf and Vicki by the main road Colin was wondering if his gran hadn’t gone a little crazy. It was possible. He didn’t like the way she took all this dark arts business so seriously.
‘You’ll have to watch out for your Lance,’ Gran told him softly.
‘What?’ He was having some difficulty hearing her over the noise of the traffic. Lance and Karla were already across, slipping quickly past Yates’ wine lodge, down the street towards the Village. They were keeping their heads discreetly bent, tucked in close as they talked, evidently hoping no one would notice them. They were twinned in their furtive celebrity.
‘Lance is right, you know,’ Gran told him. ‘He is the reason she’s come back to Manchester. He was right to assume that. She’s been sent to get him.’
‘Sent?’
‘Looking at her, I’d say she’s still possessed. By someone or something. The devil himself, I bet.’
‘Gran,’ Colin shook his head. ‘You make this sound like something out of one of Raf’s rubbishy stories.’
The traffic slowed for them, and he helped her to cross.
‘He’s the one you should be wary of, Colin,’ his Gran told him. ‘That Raf. He doesn’t want you to be happy. He’s one of those mad, destructive people. They can seize hold of you and at first it’s lovely because they’re determined to be your friend. You can get swept along in that. You don’t know why you’ve been chosen and you’re glad. But then they soon go on the turn. They get fixated on you. Then their madness comes out. All their badness. And you can’t get away from them. They leach onto you and suck and suck and suck …’
Colin was feeling very uncomfortable. Raf and Vicki were only a few feet ahead of them, in a hissed conference of their own. He knew they were talking about what Raf had done with Colin, and Vicki didn’t sound very happy at all.
Colin’s gran patted his arm. ‘I’m telling you all of this to protect you, lovey. That’s always been my job. Since your poor parents died and you came to me. I won’t be here forever, you know.’
‘Don’t say that, Gran.’
‘Well, you know. That’s just how life is. Unless you’ve made a pact with Satan, of course. I have to tell you what I know about the dangerous people, the sad and crazy and obsessive people. I mean, I call it the devil, but that’s because I’m a silly, superstitious old woman who grew up in a different age to you. When I talk about evil, I might as well call it sadness, despair. Lonely obsession. People trying to fill their own emptiness by seizing on to other people. Trying to take over their lives. That’s what it is when the devil gets into you. Sometimes it looks like love. It’s the very opposite.’
Colin knew she was right. As they shuffled past the heaving, late night crowds round the canal, surging out of Clone Zone, queuing at McTucky’s, dodging the taxis on the bridge, he was thinking about how people latched onto other people. He watched Vicki’s green furry arm and how she’d hooked it around Raf’s slim waist. They were all moving together under the pink and orange lights of near-midnight and the tarmac was glistening underfoot. Colin watched drunk people, all dolled up on a weekday night, striding and jostling and catching up with each other. Teased and primped, tousled and shorn, some buffed up and some letting it all hang out. Everyone trying to look their best, agleam from the bars and sparkling with wit or despondency or elated on booze and pills and company. A frothing, pulsing crowd, all glancing round at each other and all of them thinking: Recognise me. See me. Look at me in my best clothes. This is me at my very best. Me at my prime. You’ve got to latch onto me now, before it’s too late. Catch my eye. Watch me. Wander into my orbit. Talk to me, someone. Some stranger. Come and talk to me now. Lift me out of my life and into your own.
‘Oh, look,’ Gran said mildly. ‘Your two friends are having a scrap, Colin.’
‘Hm?’
Up ahead, Vicki had turned feral. She was spitting and screaming at Raf, punching and pummelling at his chest. He was trying to push her away. She yelled something that none of them could make out. The passing, promenading crowd slowed a bit to watch her and the cars had to squeal their brakes as she turned and dashed over the road, and plunged into the small civic park beyond.
Raf turned to Colin and his gran as they hurried over.
‘Has she gone doolally?’ Sally asked.
‘Too right,’ said Raf. ‘She reckons I’ve broken her heart. You’ll have to help me. She’s going to chuck herself into the canal.’
He pointed at the slender, silver monument at the edge of the park. It was poised on the very brink of the canal.
‘There she is, look. The silly cow’s going to throw herself off the Beacon of Hope.’
TWELVE
Lance and Karla hadn’t even noticed that the others weren’t behind them. They were so keen on not being recognised, and slipping like shadows through the crowds. They needn’t have bothered. Everyone was focused on their own pleasure, their own ongoing dramas.
Lance led them to the door hidden in the alley where he usually did his therapeutic bottle-smashing. The glass crunched underfoot and the air was laced with wine and piss and, strangely, lemongrass and ginger, too. ‘Charming spot,’ Karla purred.
‘The back entrance,’ Lance said curtly, unlocking the door.
‘That figures.’
They were, he realised, behaving like secret lovers, the way they were stealing determinedly back to his rooftop pad. The very thought made him come over queasy and he remembered again what Karla had told him about the upcoming plotline on Menswear. That fucking Adrian had forced them into a romance. He would have to pretend to make love to this beast of a woman on the studio floor under bright lights, for the crowing delight of millions. And, the show being Menswear, they would have to go further than they would in any other show. She had managed to ensnare him. To humiliate him. He would have to be naked. She’d take hold of him, take possession of him at last.
He held the back door open for her. ‘Where are the others?’ he suddenly asked.
She shrugged, impeccable in her sharp, black, mannish suit. ‘They’ll catch up. I presume your Colin knows the way.’
‘You shouldn’t have said what you did about him,’ Lance told her. ‘He isn’t anything like what you think. There’s more to him than that.’
‘Is there?’
‘Yes. I’ve never felt like this about anyone.’
‘I wonder what your mother would have thought of him. Not much, I bet.’
‘Don’t you even talk about her, Karla. I’m warning you.’
She didn’t reply. She slipped up the heavily carpeted staircase and Lance pursued her, to the top floor and home again.
There wasn’t that many people about in the small, dark city park. Just a few pub-goers and dossers drinking on the damp grass. Colin took hold of his gran’s arm and she put on a surprising turn of speed as they hurried after Raf. He was yelling at Vicki’s determined silhouette as she clambered onto the concrete base and clung to the shiplike mast of the Beacon of Hope.
Across the other side of the canal, punters at tables outside of Via Fossa were starting to take notice of her. They turned round in their aluminium chairs under the newly-blossomed trees and gave a cheer at the sight of her in her green furry coat, preparing to leap into the unknown.
‘Vicki!’ Raf shrieked. ‘Don’t you fucking dare, lady! If you do this to me I’ll n
ever forgive you!’
‘I don’t care!’ she rasped. ‘You hate me! You only ever tolerated me! I’m nothing to you! Not really!’
‘Of course you’re not, you silly cunt!’ Raf yelled and then he amended it to: ‘I mean, of course you’re not nothing to me, Vicki. You’re not nothing! You are something! You are someone!’
She was peering down into the turgid sheen of the slow and mucky canal. ‘Thanks a fucking bunch! But you still don’t love me! You don’t!’
‘Oh, don’t give me that one!’ he cursed, exhausted with shouting. ‘Why does everything have to be about love?’
Vicki turned round to face them all and she looked suddenly savage and startling in the full glare of the monument’s lights. ‘Because that’s all there is, Raf. There’s only love. And I was a frigging mong for ever wanting it from you. You haven’t got any to give anyone.’
‘Just get down from there!’ Raf urged her. He knew he could never dash across and grab her in time. Not in these shoes. ‘Get down before you slip!’
Vicki snarled at them all. ‘Look at you lot! You’re all in love with each other! All running around after each other! What have I got, eh? What – Oh, fuck.’
She slipped then.
‘Arse over tit into the stinking canal,’ was how Raf put it, later, whenever the story came up, and he had to tell it, again and again, blow by ridiculous blow. He always relished the telling of it, though. How the three of them watched, hugging each other, horrified, on one side of the canal, and how on the other, a great wail of dismay and applause went up outside the Rembrandt and Via Fossa. Everyone dashed to see Vicki splash-land and vanish and bob up screaming and sink again and disappear from sight, sucked under the hellish recesses of the bridge.
It was a story Raf became expert in and he eventually grew to love recounting. How Vicki careened downstream, swallowing gallons of black water as she went, helter skelter the length of the Village, with a whole cheering crowd dogging her progress as she went, pointing out her sleek, black head when it popped up now and then.
And how, eventually, she twatted herself on the lock gates and was fished out by gruff and leather-clad bouncers. How she was dredged out and she was coated in poisonous weed and she was coughing her guts up. It was a story he got to tell at her wedding, when he gave her away and she went and married one of the bouncers responsible for saving her life. The bouncer was called Mandy and, in his own wedding reception speech, he touchingly explained that to him, Vicki was his very own Ophelia and as soon as he clapped eyes on her shivering, retching, greeny-black body he had known he was destined to spend the rest of his life with her. He was a dreadful-looking pig of a man who drank far too much, as Raf was fond of pointing out, but he made Vicki happy. Which was not only incredible, but exactly the kind of outcome her ludicrously melodramatic gesture had intended to net for her after all.
THIRTEEN
‘Some kind of fuss about nothing,’ Karla Sorenson said, peering over the balcony. ‘Someone jumped into the canal. They’re alive, I think. The ambulance has just turned up.’
Lance had poured them a gin and slimline each and he brought it out to her and they watched the confusing fuss below them with interest, shivering in Lance’s meditation garden.
‘Cheers then, my dear,’ she said solemnly, and they clinked their chunky tumblers. ‘Here’s to working together.’
He grimaced. ‘I don’t know where Colin and everyone else has got to.’ Lance wasn’t keen on being stuck alone with Karla.
‘Oh, he’ll be off having a row with his strange little Asian friend,’ she sighed. ‘Doesn’t that bother you? That he let him gobble him off in the lavvy?’
Lance shrugged. ‘Boys. Sometimes that’s just how it is.’
‘My, my,’ she said. ‘Quite the libertine.’
He didn’t rise to this. ‘If Colin wants to stick with me, he’ll let me know. I’ve told him where I stand. I’m here if he wants me. The thing with him is, he lets people wrap him around their little finger. He’s good-hearted. But that tends to bring trouble.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ Karla grunted, and fished in her pocket for her black Sobranies.
‘You? You aren’t good-hearted.’
‘I know,’ she said, sparking up. ‘That’s what I mean. I’m the one who causes trouble for all the good-hearted people.’ She leant over the railing again and the two of them stared at the tall, dusky, orange-bricked buildings and towers of the Village.
‘That’s true enough,’ he agreed.
‘I don’t want to cause trouble for you, Lance. Really I don’t.’
‘I think you already have, lovey.’
‘Sometimes …’ She hissed out her smoke and it dwindled away lazily. ‘Sometimes I could believe, really believe in this legendary curse that’s supposed to be on my head. The curse that’s fucked up every relationship and movie I’ve been in. The curse that’s killed people and made all my films shit. I really could believe I’m a kind of Jonah.’
‘I think we make our own luck.’
‘You’re talking ‘dialogue’ to me, Lance. You don’t believe in what you’re saying. You’ve bumbled along the same as everyone else we know, bumping into the furniture and prey to everything.’
He hated her predatory metaphors. He looked down into the drifting crowds as they started going home and felt like he lived above a shark pool.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Why do you think everything and everyone around me goes to hell? I make people fall for me and fall under my influence until they wreck their lives. I cause chaos. All I’ve wanted is an ordinary life, a smaller life. Like all of you lot there, tonight. Even you, Lance, famous as you are – you’ve managed to be ordinary and small. Why haven’t I got that?
He crunched on an ice cube and hurt his teeth. ‘Do you really want that?’
She frowned, suddenly looking her age. ‘I don’t know. I can’t imagine what it feels like. You know, I loved walking in the streets tonight and no one seeing us. No one calling out my name.’
‘Sharing my obscurity.’
‘No. They knew you were there. They respected your privacy. That’s nice.’
Lance was surprised by this more thoughtful, gentle Karla. ‘You tell me, then, Karla. Why do you think everything goes to hell around you? What is it about you?’
She smiled and threw back her head, laughing sadly. The length of her slender white throat was like a blade against the meagre light. ‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘That’s easy. I really did sell my soul to the devil. When I was about ten, in a forest outside Kendal. Big ritual, lots of booze and flames and chanting and then he appeared in a crack of lightning to take away my immortal soul in exchange for stardom.’
‘Oh, yes? And what did he look like?’
‘Between you and me? He looked just like Adrian the producer.’
‘I can believe it. Give me a drag on that ciggie.’ She passed him the last inch of fag. ‘So,’ he said, through a plume of indigo. ‘The devil really exists. Everything you’ve ever said about black magic is true?’
Karla nodded. ‘Oh yes. Every word. I’m still connected to a coven that sends me instructions to go about their evil work. It’s a bit like temping. Or having a very aggressive agent. I couldn’t get out of it if I tried. I mean, I’ve stopped going to the black masses so regularly, but I’m there for major festivals like Beltane. Keep my hand in at sacrificing goats and pledging my allegiance to Beelzebub. All that. A girl’s got to look after herself.’
‘I believe you,’ Lance said mildly. ‘You know … you make it sound ridiculous. But I think I really believe you.’
‘Good,’ she said, watching him stub out the golden filter of her cigarette. ‘That’s very important to me, you see, my dear, because …’
‘Because you’ve been sent to enlist me? To make me sign the same blood pact?’
‘Why, yes …’ She nodded, grinning at his cleverness. ‘Yes, you’ve …’
‘Just like you made the same of
fer to my mother. All those years ago.’
Karla’s mouth fell open as if she had been slapped. She stared at him and quickly regained her composure.
‘And she refused,’ he went on. ‘She wouldn’t have anything to do with you. Fox Soames had warned her off you. That’s what you fought about. You tried to take her over and she was strong enough to tell you where to get off.’
Karla’s expression was hardening, her lilac eyes going narrow.
Lance’s hands flashed out, grabbing both of her wrists. Their gin glasses smashed to the floor and she jumped, but didn’t resist him.
‘You killed her, didn’t you? You evil fucking bitch. You destroyed her. You put that tumour in her head. You sat by her bedside right till the end, willing it to grow …’ His words were lost in a roar of fury that erupted out of him and he pushed Karla right back against the terrace wall. He was shaking her hard so that she was winded and gasping. She howled and bit her own tongue so hard her mouth filled with blood and her wig slipped sideways, freed of its clips. She started to scream and Lance slammed one palm over her mouth.
‘One more sound and I’ll break your neck,’ he said.
She nodded, eyes wild.
He pressed himself against her, shoving her back and back until she was sitting on the ledge. And Karla knew, just from the air at her back, on her neck and the unwigged bit of her head that the drop behind her was sheer. Five storeys down to Canal Street, where revellers were starting to look up to the noise.
Her eyes were pleading at him. Close up.
‘She said no to you,’ Lance snarled. ‘And then you killed her. And then you wanted me. You still want me. To join you in your filthy world.’
Behind them, a voice called out inside the flat. ‘Lance … ?’
Colin and his gran had toiled up the back stairs. They were hunting through the flat for him and Karla.
Something shifted in Karla’s eyes. She realised that help might be at hand.