How To Make Friends With Demons Part 4

I made an online enquiry about a loan.

All these concerns, not to mention the arrival of a book-launch invitation triggering memories of gravely misspent youth, made it difficult for me to concentrate on my work. Then, just as I was patently not about to commence the writing of my report, an email popped into my inbox. It was from an address I didn't recognize, with the header "Good To Meet You." I almost deleted it. It was the kind of header you expect from a Nigerian phisher who-quite reasonably-wants to share several million dollars with you in return for the use of your bank account for two minutes.

But I opened it, and found it to be from Yasmin. It took me a blink or two to remember who she was-so indelibly inscribed as Anna was she in my own head. She'd enjoyed meeting me that lunchtime in the Museum Tavern. She would have liked to have chatted for longer. She was sorry not to be able to spend a few more minutes together as she made her way back to work that afternoon. If I wanted to meet up one lunchtime on another occasion, she thought that might be fun.

My cheeks flamed.

Perhaps it was the thought of fun that made my face burn. What was all this gibberish about fun? Fun wasn't really something I went in for. Fun and I had parted company on the high road of life at about the time my hair started to thin and my knee joints lost all compression, quick handshake, no fuss, farewell.

Fun.

I'm not sure if I breathed the world out loud. I'm sure I did no such thing, and neither did I make any movement, but from across the room of that high-ceilinged old office with its moulded plaster tongue-and-dart cornices, Val looked up at me from her own work. How can that be?

"All right?" she asked, smiling pleasantly.

"Fine, Val, fine."

She put her nose back in her work. I pretended to re-engage with mine. Something was seriously wrong with that email. I read it again. It made no sense at all. Why would a hip, appealing and exciting young woman want to offer herself to a mothballed old stiff like me? I was no less suspicious than I would have been of the Nigerian phishing scam.

I deleted the email, put aside all thoughts of Yasmin, forgot about Stinx's nose and dismissed Charles Fraser's book-launch party. Instead I directed the full onslaught of my pa.s.sions into the YOPA report to all INGYOS.

Chapter 7.

It was dark by the time I got home that evening and I was surprised to find that I had left a light on. The tall standard lamp in my living room was burning softly. This bothered me. I don't leave lamps on. I wondered if Fay had been there. Or one of the children. For some reason I made sure Fay had a key to my house and now I hate the fact that I gave her a key. Some people do not know when a relationship has ended, and I'm one of them.

Nothing was otherwise disturbed and there was no indication that anyone had been there. I thought that I must have left the lamp switched on when I left that morning. I'd had a lot on my mind what with the upset with Stinx and his lack of progress on the book, and the threat to Antonia's project. I slipped off my coat, drew the curtains and went straight for a beaker of the rubicund relief & rescue.

I put on some music. I often feel as though a man my age sipping his wine alone in a dimly lit room should play Bach cello concertos, but it tends to be The Stranglers or The Jam. The Buzzc.o.c.ks. I'm not actually going to get up and pogo round the room but it does stop me feeling quite so alone.

The telephone went. It was my son, Robbie.

"Hold on," I told him. "I'll turn this down."

"Lucien says-"

I interrupted him. "How are you?"

"I'm fine. Lucien says-"

"No, after you say, I'm fine, you say, How are you, Dad? It's a fussy little ritual, I know, but it's an important one."

There was a pause. "Lucien says-"

"Okay, so you don't want to observe the ritual. What does Lucien say?"

"He says he'll pay for my tennis and my fencing if you'll pay for Glastonhall."

"So if I go the starter, the main course and the dessert, he'll stretch to the after-dinner mint?"

"What?"

"Here's a little life-lesson, Robbie. When asking people for money, observe the pleasantries, respect the rituals and always, always clench the b.u.t.tocks."

"What?"

I hung up on him. Sometimes it's great being a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Then I turned up the Buzzc.o.c.ks.

Loud.

Five minutes later the phone went again. This time it was Fay, wanting to know what happened.

"He's raging," she said. "He's slammed his bedroom door so hard one of the hinges has come off."

"Find a screwdriver. Take off the other hinges. Tell him he can only have his door back when he's learned how to use it properly."

"Be serious. He wants to talk about Glastonhall."

"What's that? Can barely hear with this dammed music so loud."

"Then turn it down!"

"I can't, I've got people here. You know what these young folk are like."

"What young folk?"

"Sorry, can't hear. Tell him to call me when he's stopped sulking. Bye!"

I poured myself another gla.s.s of red-robed oblivion and switched on my home PC in an angry mood. Do I hate my boy? Of course not. I just want to comb the fireball nits out of his hair and get him to remember that I spent the most important years of his life gently training him not to be a s.h.i.t.

Anger makes you drink faster. Sometimes when you're furious the drink doesn't touch the sides. Or even the shadow of the sides. If you're really incensed, drinking is just like driving a petrol tanker one hundred miles per hour into a fiery pit.

I had email. I deleted the spam with rapid keystrokes and stopped at one called "Second Attempt." It was from her again. Anna. Yasmin. Whatever.

She apologised if she was repeating her last message. Her email account had been playing up, she said, and some of her emails had strayed. She asked about GoPoint and Antonia. She made no mention of Ellis. She was, she said, "available for coffee or a gla.s.s of wine" at any time.

Available for coffee or wine?

Here we go again, I thought. Whatever for? What on Earth could she want? I doubted she was after antiquarian books. Perhaps she was looking for a job or a reference or contacts or something. It was all a bit baffling. Then I wondered if Ellis had put her up to it. The pesky poet didn't trust me an inch over the bidding for Pride and Prejudice and he was right not to: his over-developed proboscis was just sniffing out the wrong rat. I guessed that was it. Maybe he thought she could sound me out over a jeroboam of wine, lead me into an indiscretion or two.

The very idea! I think my heart has become a wineskin over the years. Authentic, tanned goat-hide, triple-st.i.tched, proofed with pitch, fashioned for an airtight nozzle. Nothing gets in or out. No matter how much I have to drink I don't spill, unless I want to. I hit the delete b.u.t.ton: get ye hence, saucy maid.

But then the screen prompt asked me: Are you sure you want to delete. And I thought: Am I sure? I got up and lowered the volume on the sound system. And I composed a reply: light, jocular but maintaining a suitable distance. And just as I hit send I heard a knocking on the door.

It was Stinx. "b.l.o.o.d.y Nora! I've been 'ammering away on this door for fifteen minutes. I went for a walk round the block, came back and banged again. I could hear the music but I couldn't b.l.o.o.d.y raise you!"

He had a huge artist's portfolio under his arm. He marched into the kitchen, unzipped it and began to lay out his work on the table.

"Is it finished?" I asked hopefully.

He beamed me a smile triumphant and radiant. "Almost."

He'd come to report progress, not completion. My heart sank. Well, not quite sank, but took on water, gurgled, listed to one side, tried to recover steam. I hid my disappointment and poured him a gla.s.s of vino while he shucked off his coat and laid out the samples.

"You should see the vellum I'm making for it, too," he said proudly. "Best yet."

I'd rather he'd got on with the forgery than its wrappings, however magnificent the latter.

"Excellent."

"Well, it's something I can do while I'm waiting for fixing and processes and all that."

I hadn't a clue what he was referring to. I picked up one of the paper samples he'd laid out on the table. It was mottled and fluffed and it seemed to smell exactly right. There were also the boards in green half morocco and with gilt spines, ready to be roughed up. I had no objection to what was actually there, which all looked very good. Masterful even, but it was nowhere near complete.

What's more, we needed two copies. Clearly there was a long way to go. I laid down the samples. "Congratulations, Stinx, you've done it again."

His way of accepting my compliment was to blink at me.

"How do you get the wonderful smell?"

He flicked his head and looked away. I didn't want him to tell me. It was a rhetorical question. "Do we celebrate, William?"

"We certainly will. When it's done, we will."

"Never mind that," he said, reloading his folder with the samples. "It's as good as done. Get your coat."

"Isn't that a bit premature? I mean when exactly will the thing be ready?"

"Fullness o' time, William, fullness o' time."

"I've got our guy on the hook: we don't want him jumping off."

"Get your coat, I sez. Jaz is already on his way. Lamb and Flag."

Covent Garden, then. Stinx left his samples at my place to be collected later. We took a cab.

I kept congratulating Stinx on his workmanship, thinking that lavish praise might encourage him to complete the job, but all he would say is, "Giz a break, William."

The Lamb and Flag is a bit of a surprise to find in Covent Garden. It has the appearance of an old coaching inn. The clientele is mixed and the pub is replete with demons loitering amongst the old fittings of knotted wood, but for some reason they tend to leave you alone. Jaz was already there at the bar, with champagne in an ice bucket and three gla.s.ses waiting.

"I would have preferred the non-fizzy stuff," I grumbled.

"Oh, stop being a grouch," said Jaz. "Tell him to celebrate, Stinx."

"Celebrate."

Jaz grabbed the bucket and I took the gla.s.ses and we found a table in the corner. We poured the fizz, clinked the gla.s.ses and pretended everything was a done deal. I was thoroughly aware that all this "celebration" nonsense was designed to put my worrying mind at rest. It didn't.

The way it worked was that Jaz and I fronted the money for all the materials for Stinx, and later we deducted that amount from his truly modest fee. Jaz, who seemed to operate at the interface of the Art and Fashion worlds, was very good at identifying buyers. Jaz and I similarly deducted any expenses and the considerable profit all went to our agreed benefactor, which in this case was GoPoint.

We fell silent. Then Stinx said, "How was New York then, Jaz?"

"Fabulous. Love it. Shot of caffeine, hit of helium, you can speak like a native."

I've been to New York. I once fell in love there, in Central Park. But it was a trick, and she turned out to be a demon. I spoke nothing of that and said instead, "Meet anyone?"

Jaz was always meeting people. Men and women seemed to line up and lay down for him.

Sometimes he would tell us about his exploits, funny, daring, bizarre. But his brow creased this time and he swirled his drink around in his gla.s.s.

"Yeh. A former soldier."

"Not another Guardsman!" said Stinx. Jaz already had a boyfriend in the Coldstream Guards "They don't have Guardsmen in America," I said.

"I know that," said Stinx.

"They do, but they're like reserves," said Jaz. "No, he was a high-ranking officer in the 101st Airborne. Lovely guy. But he's a mess, body and soul. Depleted uranium, it just trashes the DNA. But he saw something there. In combat."

Jaz looked up at the two of us, and for a moment I thought that whatever his officer-lover had seen in the Gulf, it had carried over to Jaz. We must have been staring pretty hard because he almost shouted, "Hey, drink up! We're celebrating!"

So we drank up, and turned the talk to more cheerful things. Or pretended to.

I'm not a great one for clubbing but, having drunk too much on an empty stomach I was persuaded on to some candle-lit cave with scarlet Parisian brothel velour upholstery. Jaz was a member. It was the sort of place where undistinguished celebrities hang out with foreign footballers. Jaz called over a couple of magnificent and statuesque girls with whom he'd been on photo shoots. They were good company. Stinx and I were in high spirits and we were making the girls cackle. I could see the footballers checking us out, wondering what it was that we had to offer. Red-rot and vellum, I wanted to tell them: you should try putting it up your nose instead of Bolivian marching powder.

Then we were joined by a member of the minor aristocracy. (That's how the girls described him, anyway.) He endured half an hour of toff-baiting, mainly by Stinx, before taking quite a shine to me, much to Jaz's amus.e.m.e.nt. I found a private moment to communicate my misgivings to Jaz. When I told him that Lucy had deserted our friend all over again he agreed we might have problems seeing the project through. We both agreed that there was nothing we could do but sit tight and hope that Stinx delivered.

I was drunk and wanted to leave. One of the girls came to my rescue-I think her name was Tara. She lived in my neighbourhood so we agreed to share a cab. She took my arm on the way out and our movements were tracked ravenously by the two Chelsea footballers. I was so drunk I mimed for them a back-heel flip and header. One jutted his chin at me, while his friend's hungry midfielder's eyes said: c.u.n.t.

In the back of the cab Tara told me, with an excited squeak to her voice, that the aristocrat was fourteenth in line to the throne. I'd quite liked Tara until that moment. "Just here will do fine," I said to the cabbie.

Tara squeezed my thigh before I got out of the cab. "Do you want to do something?" she said.

I leaned over and gave her a peck on the cheek. "I've never paid for it in my life," I said, "and I'm not going to start now. Goodnight."

She shrugged and opened the cab door for me. It doesn't matter how much I've had to drink, you start paying for s.e.xual comfort and you invite flocks of them into your life. Throngs of them.

Swarms.

I was so drunk that when I got to my front door I could barely get my key in the lock. Once inside I drank a pint of water in one gulp, kicked off my shoes and collapsed into my chair, where I instantly fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming of my days back in Derby, at the teacher-training college.