How To Make Friends With Demons Part 1

How to Make Friends with Demons.

by Graham Joyce.

Chapter 1.

"Down there everyone lives folded within himself and torn apart by his regrets."

A description of h.e.l.l given by a possessed man to Father Gabriel Amorth, the Vatican's Chief Exorcist.

There are one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven known demons. Precisely. Okay, I know that Fraser in his study claimed to have identified a further four, but it's plain that he's confusing demons with psychological conditions. I mean, a pathological tendency to insult strangers in the street is more likely caused by a nervous disorder than the presence of a demon.

And chronic masturbation is what it is. I suspect that Fraser didn't even believe in his own case studies. I think he just "discovered" four new demons so that he could peddle his b.l.o.o.d.y awful book.

I should know: I did after all go to college with him. (One time he got me so mad I broke his nose, and I'm no fighter.) In any case, I prefer Goodridge's original study and his much stricter category of definitions. I like strict definitions. Right, I'm going to footnote it for you, but just this once: firstly because I hate the messy intellectuality of footnotes and secondly because, as you will know, it was Goodridge himself who brilliantly identified that the footnoting affliction is itself demonic1 and is the cause of much of the madness and disorder you find amongst university academics. What's more, it's a particularly nasty species, attracting to itself the company of several other fourth- or fifth-level infestations; and as anyone with any knowledge of this area will tell you, once you let one in, the gate is wedged open for the rest.

I'd been clean for twenty years or so before I picked up my latest demon. I don't even know how it happened. All I know is that it first attached to me in a pub in central London, and that it was embedded long before I could cut it out with the scalpel and ammonia of disciplined thinking. Disciplined thinking: listen to that. It's me I'm talking about.

I shouldn't have been thinking about demons, but that morning before it happened I found myself in one of those meetings which is really a kind of slow and agonising descent into death.

The meetings where your thoughts drift like whisps of cirrus over the Pennine hills on a lovely summer's day. Two hours of rapture led by a Home Office junior minister on the subject of Young People and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Half a dozen civil servants in designer suits with creases sharp as paper-cuts, their key projects and outcome capability frameworks exploded by the spectacular and eccentric interventions of representatives from the Scout a.s.sociation, the Girl Guides, the Woodcraft Folk, the Youth Clubs and some foggy ent.i.ty called the British Youth Council.

"A sense of decency," insisted the representative from the Scouts, prodding the table in front of him as if squashing an ant. "A sense of knowing what's right from what's wrong." His name always escaped me, because I was distracted by his peppery but neat moustache and the fabulous, burst-fruit condition of his puce face. He didn't actually work for the Scout Accociation any more. He'd been retired fifteen years, but they still trotted him along because he "liked to stay involved." Nothing wrong with what he was saying, either, it's just that it was all he said, and at every meeting. He prodded the table again. "Basic decency."

Collectively we are what is called a "think tank." I like that. It makes us feel strong. It's just that the tank, having rumbled onto the beach of reason, has tumbled into a sand-trap and is lodged face-down in the wet mud, its clapped-out engine smoking and its gears grinding noisily but without any sense or hope of traction. Oh G.o.d, I thought, this is going to run way past lunch.

I mean, it's important enough, this think-tank work. We all get to feel vital, central, when guided through the high security of the glittering steel Home Office buildings in Victoria and escorted to a meeting room of blonde wood tables, every place primed with plastic bottles of sparkling mineral water and Glacier Mints in tiny ceramic dishes. But it's the usual agenda: youth is going to h.e.l.l in a handcart, again, and oh dear what can we do to stop it?

"A greater sense of responsibility and recognition," professed the lady from the Youth Clubs. She was wearing a very smart lilac beret, even indoors. I've no idea why; it wasn't cold.

But the most astonishing thing was the sight of the junior minister taking notes and engraving his face with lines of earnest sincerity, as if the words "decency" and "responsibility"

had just been minted fresh. Never ever ever been said before. The b.u.g.g.e.r even wrote the words down on embossed government notepaper! Not that any of us were fooled for a second. Just as with emails from Nigeria and certain ebullient young women, you can be sure it's a trap. When all the contributions had been made and noted, the junior minister's second a.s.sistant laid out the latest government initiative for which our support was invited. Note that it was our support that was invited, not our comments.

It was a community service plan designed to engage disaffected and unemployed youth in semi-voluntary activity. It was linked, we were being told, to a greater recruitment drive for the Territorial Army.

Oh no, I remember thinking, where are we going tomorrow? Iran? Syria?

Its seems incredible to me that the government can recycle the same "initiatives" every seven years, even if they railed against those very ideas when in opposition. The junior minister's second a.s.sistant then took half an hour to roll it out, like a carpet in an Arab souk, smiling fanatically, trying to get you to take home something you neither want nor can fit in your luggage. He managed to weave the words "decency" and "responsibility" into his presentation three or four times, rewarding the old Scout and the slightly less old Youth Clubber with plenty of steely eye contact.

I personally have opposed this drivel more than once over the years, but I've learned my lesson. The eager young man from the Woodcraft Folk clearly hadn't.

"We don't want soft conscription. We want p'litical responsibility. Real decision-makin'.

This is jus' patronising."

The junior minister glanced at his watch and started talking about new paradigms in politics and not waiting around for people stuck in the fossilized formations of the past. This was my cue.

"Well, minister, I think there's a lot of radical thinking on offer here, plus some complex issues which need to be sifted. I recommend we all go away and reflect very deeply on both the opportunities and the risks involved in this paper."

The junior minister beamed at me. Even though I don't have the power to open or close these meetings, he knew enough about committees to hear the final whistle being blown, and he was thankful. Papers were shuffled and we were on our feet, leaving the old Scout to look around as if he might have nodded off and missed something.

The truth of it is I found out a long time ago that if I spoke up against these briefings my influence with funding bodies was b.u.g.g.e.red and the people who I represented lost thousands of pounds in grants.

I tried to get out fast, but the old Scout hung me up to talk about decency. The young man from the Woodcraft Folk swept back a forelock, eyeing me as if he couldn't work out whether I'd just rallied to his cause or knifed him in the back. The bereted lady from the Youth Clubs was meanwhile bent on tipping Glacier Mints into her handbag.

Nodding ferociously, I disentangled myself, rode the lift down to the ground floor and skimmed my security badge back to the receptionist. Then I was out and hurrying to the banks of the Thames, filling my lungs with the odours of its tidal mud. You can only sell your soul once and mine had gone so long ago that on that day I didn't even hear the whisper of its ancient lament.

By the time I got to Bloomsbury I was late, but I found a minute to buy a copy of the Big Issue from a h.o.a.ry street-vendor with a sleeping dog. Not because I'm a nice person but because it was November, pinching-cold out, and I have a phobia about homelessness. I folded the paper to fit into my coat pocket and stepped out of the crisp, chilly lunchtime air and into the street-corner Museum Tavern, a pub-rather unsurprisingly-located directly opposite the British Museum.

The place was bustling. I glanced around but didn't see the person I was looking for. There is a mirror in there reputed to have been vandalised by Karl Marx. It warms the c.o.c.kles of my heart to think of the father of Communism trashing the joint after a few pints of Victorian wallop. In the mirror I saw someone rising from a seat and advancing towards me.

"Billy! What you having? La Belle Dame Sans Merci?" It was the poet Ellis, rising from a tiny scratched and polished round table in the corner near the entrance. I drew up a seat and lowered myself into it. No one calls me Billy, but I didn't say anything.

Ellis fell back into his own seat with a bit of a thump. "Get the poor sod a gla.s.s of house red, will you?" he said to his lovely companion, a slender woman in her twenties with whom I'd already made a point of avoiding eye contact.

"The Pinot Noir would be the thing," I qualified, shooting an over-the-shoulder glance at the girl while unwinding my silk scarf.

Ellis waited until she was engaged with the barman before asking me, in an underbreath, "Well? Have you b.l.o.o.d.y well got it?"

"Sadly, no," I returned, with an inflection of my voice designed to irritate him.

"So when will you be getting it?"

"Ah! That's kind of you." My wine had arrived chop-chop. The young woman handed the gla.s.s to me so delicately and theatrically that I detected the training of a ballerina or a mime artist. Our eyes met briefly. She had dark lashes and green irises grained with nut-brown. I felt a squeeze of disgust when I thought of Ellis enjoying her, he being only five years my junior; and then that sentiment was trailed by the usual stab of envy that in turn generated a species of regret followed by a chill of boredom at the way in which every pretty face I met could yank my chain and engender this domino-sequence of emotions. In response I did what I always do: I poured wine on it all.

"Is that okay for you?" she asked me.

Interesting accent. Modulated old London working-cla.s.s, I'd call it, but buffed up a bit and been around the world. Not unlike me. "It's very okay. Thank you."

"I think it's b.l.o.o.d.y great," she said, taking a sip from her own gla.s.s of-I guessed-vodka and tonic. "This thing you do."

"Aw, shaddap," Ellis said to her.

"He's an old cynic," she said, nodding at Ellis before placing-with a delicate click-her gla.s.s on the scarred table. "But you change people's lives."

"For G.o.d's sake!" Ellis protested. "He's older than I am. And more bleeding cynical."

"He can't be," she said, looking at me, not Ellis. "He helps people out."

"Helps people out? I could tell you a thing or two about Doctor Helps People Out here."

She held out a tiny white hand across the table. "My name's Yasmin."

No it isn't, I wanted to say, because she didn't look or talk at all like a Yasmin. Demon of false naming, we know all about that one. But I held my tongue. "William Heaney."

"I know."

Well, there we had it. She knew my name before I'd revealed it; I didn't know hers even after she'd declared it to me. Another demon in there somewhere. Perhaps we held each other's gaze a splinter too long because Ellis said, "I think I'm going to vomit."

"How do you two people know each other?" I asked genially.

And as she told me, my demon, my real demon, who had been listening, crouched, always attentive, breathed its sweet and poison breath in my ear. "Take her away from the lout. Take her home with you. Lift her skirt."

She talked at length and I listened. Voices are sometimes like the grain in a strip of wood.

You can hear the character of someone's experience in their voice. Hers was warm, and vital, but damaged. I followed the lovely tracks of her elegant hands as she spoke. I wondered how he'd found her. Ellis has a routine; I've seen it executed at his poetry readings. Anna, I thought would be a better name for her, Anna.

"And I dunno, we just . . . clicked," she said.

Yes, I bet you did is what I thought. When she'd finished talking, Yasmin-or Anna as I was already calling her-sat back, a little self-conscious that she'd enjoyed the stage for five minutes. Ellis tugged at his ear lobe and said nothing. "Well," I said, raising my gla.s.s across the table, "here's to clicking."

We all touched our gla.s.ses together.

I explained that I was on my way to GoPoint when Anna announced that she used to work there several years ago. I was surprised. She didn't seem the type. "So you know Antonia?"

"Course. She's a saint."

"She is. I'll mention your name to her."

"So when might you have it?" Ellis growled, strong-arming his way back into the conversation.

I dealt him the poker face. "I'll let you know. Of course." Then I drained my gla.s.s and stood up, rewinding my silk scarf around my throat against the November cold.

"Are you going there now?" Anna said. "I have to walk that way back to work. I'll walk with you."

Ellis looked miffed.

"That would be lovely," I said, shucking on my coat, "but I have one or two errands to run first and I don't want to hold you up."

I don't know why but I got a sense that she was disappointed, though if that were true she disguised it. I could see she didn't really want to be with Ellis, and I felt a wee bit sorry for him.

What fools we make of ourselves over women. What naked prey. I promised Ellis to contact him when I had more news and I shook hands again with Anna/Yasmin/whoever. She said she hoped that we might meet again. As I turned I caught my slightly foxed reflection in the Karl Marx mirror. She was still looking at me; and he at her.

Then I was out of the Museum Tavern and striding across Bloomsbury towards Farringdon.

The window in the door to the GoPoint Centre had been kicked in since I was there last.

Someone had made a hasty repair with a sheet of chipboard, which had offered a nice target for a graffiti artist with a tag like a Chinese ideogram. Below the tagged board, a woman with a head of unkempt, swept-back long curls, raven-black but grey at the temples, was sitting on the steps looking blissed out. Her sweater was a stained rag with pin-hole burns dotted on the chest and her jeans were filthy. She wore swollen Dr. Martens boots, the kind once favoured by elegant British skinheads.

"Gorra f.a.g, 'ave you?"

"I don't smoke and neither should you."

"Got the price of a pint, then?"

I sat down on the step next to her. The concrete slab shot a piercing cold through my b.u.t.tocks. She looked up at the sky between the tower blocks and said, "I was in a printing house in h.e.l.l, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation."

Other people might have John Clare or William Burroughs or Thomas Aquinas quoted at them by this woman. For some reason it was only ever Billy Blake for me. "I'm really sorry, Antonia. It hasn't come through yet."

Without taking her eyes from the clouds overhead she reached out and put a hand on my knee. "No worries. I know if anyone can get it then it will be you, and even if you don't you will have tried your very best." Then she turned to face me with those cloudless blue eyes, and she smiled. "And you know how happy it makes me that you try for us? You know that, William? It's so important for me that you know that."

"How long before they come and close you down?" I asked.

"Don't fret, William. Lots of time."

"A month?"

"Slightly less."

GoPoint was a refuge for the homeless, the wayward, the desperate, the lost, the drowned-at-sea-but-don't-yet-know-it. It was an unregistered charity. It couldn't be registered with the Charity Commission because it kept no books. GoPoint stuffed to the gills maintained thirty-seven beds, and right now with November burrowing deeper and deeper into winter it would be working at capacity and beyond. The saintly Antonia Bowen, sitting on the steps quoting William Blake at me and looking exactly like one of the inmates, was the inst.i.tution's manager, inspiration, apologist, advocate, fundraiser and janitor.

A f.u.c.kin' saint, I swear it.

Her clients came through her doors with nothing and sometimes left with Antonia's clothing. She dressed herself in whatever rotten garb was left behind; paying herself and her intermittent staff with the casual donations that came her way. One or two staff members were paid from eccentric contracts with this or that social welfare scheme. She was a deep thorn in the side of the social services and the government agencies because she made outrageous guerrilla raids on their offices. Because all help had been refused, on one occasion she and five of her inmates carried the corpse of a woman who'd died on the premises down to the offices of the Department of Health and Social Security and left it in the reception with a Queen's Silver Jubilee tin tea-caddy for donations.

Now Antonia's landlord, with an eye to property development, had hiked up the rent.

GoPoint, well in arrears, was threatened with closure. I was working on something that might buy her a little time, but there had been a hitch and it was proving difficult.

"I'll come back next week, hopefully with better news," I told her.

"You're one of my heroes, William. I wish there were more like you."

"You don't know me, Antonia! I'm not worth bothering with."

"You're one of the kindest, warmest men I've ever met."

She linked her hands around my arm and when she looked at me with those cloudless eyes, I couldn't take it. She was one of the seraphim. I had to change the subject. "Hey, I met someone who worked here. Pretty thing. Said her name was Yasmin."

She blinked thoughtfully. "I don't think I'd be able to employ someone called Yasmin."

Ah, so we do have prejudices, I thought. A pin-p.r.i.c.k in your sainthood. That's a relief.

She was still thinking. "Hey . . . unless it was the girl who started the library. Have you seen our library lately? Come inside."

The "library" was a dozen shelves of second-hand mostly paperback books. I had no intention of visiting it. Firstly, GoPoint was infested with demons for obvious reasons. The clients had to vacate the place between midday and four o'clock so that they didn't merely rot on their pallet beds all day long. The idea was to give them purpose. It was while they were out of the building seeking purpose that the demons became most active in their prowling, relentless search for a new host. Secondly, demons do tend to cl.u.s.ter around the yellowing pages and cracked spines of second-hand books. I've no idea why.

Not that I discussed demons with Antonia. She, who every single day walked with purity of heart in a place teeming with demons, said that although she'd seen them, she didn't want to discuss them.

I simply made my excuses. I got up off the steps, dusting the seat of my trousers. "Antonia, your conjunctivitis has come back. You should get it seen to."

"It's nothing."