Two: Sharon was smuggling drugs and had got caught. As the Buddha says, shit happens.
Three: Rachel participated in a dangerous sport and had run slap bang out of luck. Right.
Without ever mentioning the photographs to Mandy I discussed it all with her. "These things come along in threes," she said.
"Do they?"
"That's what they say."
"They? Who the fuck is 'they?'"
"No one knows who they are. We don't talk about they. And it's bad luck to use foul language when talking about they."
"Oh yeh."
All right, I thought. Just so long as they don't talk about things coming along in fives.
The days passed, and then the weeks, and Fraser failed to return to college from the Christmas break. While I was certainly not in a state of grief about this, I couldn't help wondering what had become of him. My thoughts did stretch to wondering whether he too had become another victim in the series of disasters. I could have made enquiries—maybe got a telephone number from the college authorities—but I didn't. Oddly, even though one of the cleaners confirmed that he hadn't been in his room in Friarsfield Lodge since the beginning of term, I did find myself on more than one occasion poised outside his door, listening.
I don't know what I was listening for. I had this irrational idea that Fraser was fooling everyone and that really he had come back to college but was hiding. I thought that if I stayed with my ear by the door for long enough he might make a sound that would give the game away. And there were sounds. Nothing that would confirm his presence or activity in the room, but odd punctuations in the silence behind the door.
Once I heard what I thought was the sound of a piece of paper—like a paper dart—hitting the floor. One day I heard a zip rasp, but for a split second only, and not long enough to represent a real zip. Another time there was a very brief flapping, like the sound of a carpet being rolled, but just two turns. I would press my ear to the door, hardly breathing, straining to hear more; but there never was more.
"What are you doing?"
I know I jumped. I actually had to put my hand on my heart. "Oh. I was just seeing if Charles was back yet. He hasn't returned from the holidays."
It was Dick Fellowes. He must have crept up on me. I had no idea how long he'd been watching me with my ear to Fraser's door. "It appears not. We'll have to make some enquiries about him."
When my beating heart recovered, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what Fellowes was actually doing there. He certainly had no habit of dropping in at the Lodge. He had no casual business there. His presence always related to some particular purpose. He gazed back at me, either expecting a reply or waiting for me to leave. "I'll go back to my room, then," I said stupidly
"Yes, you should."
I did go back to my room, with my cheeks flaming, but I left my own door ajar. I wanted to know what Fellowes was doing. I couldn't actually see him, and the damndest thing about it was that I think he just stood there for several minutes. I believe he was waiting to see if I would come out and check on him. Or maybe my presence had stopped him from doing something like going into Fraser's room, or whatever. I have the feeling we were trying to outwait each other. After maybe twenty minutes of this nonsense I couldn't stand it any longer, and I collected some coins together on the pretext of going to call Mandy from the payphone in the hallway.
But when I stepped out of my room and into the hall I saw that Fellowes had gone.
I called Mandy anyway, and went round to her place. We hadn't fucked in something like six hours and I wanted to be inside her again. With my tongue in her mouth and my dick in her pussy I could feel as if the world was right. Or if the world wasn't right then at least I could hide from it.
When I got to her place she'd just had a bath and was still wrapped in a towel. She squealed when I whipped it off her and threw her on the bed. I buried my tongue in her pussy and she was pulling me with both hands by my hair, deeper into her, when I suddenly lost my erection. I don't know why. It just collapsed.
"You okay?" she asked, pulling me to her.
"Yeh. I just . . . I dunno."
"I love you, William. Come here."
"This is real, isn't it? Me and you?"
"Of course it's real. Why do you have to ask? Let's get under the covers."
We got into bed and we lay holding each other. Outside the windows the twilight deepened, and then the amber streetlights outside her window came on. After a while there was a flurry under the lights.
"It's snowing," she said.
I barely heard her. I was busy thinking about what Dick Fellowes had said when I offered to go back to my room after he'd caught me eavesdropping at Fraser's door.
Yes, you should
, he'd said. Now why would he say that?
Fraser did return to college, rather late in the term, but I had as little as possible to do with him. For one thing he actually stank worse than he did before—worse than anyone I've ever known. I failed to imagine why such a clever person—there's no question that he had a fine brain—couldn't be bothered to wash his face and clean his teeth in the morning. I avoided him.
In fact, I even avoided staying in my own room as much as possible, shacking up at Mandy's place for as long as I could get away with. Whenever I returned to my room I would find notes from Fraser: scruffy bits of paper shoved under the door, requesting that I see him. Then I ignored his notes altogether. I found further notes from him in the college pigeon holes. I pretty much knew his movements and he was easy enough to dodge.
Over the weeks, the notes started to take on a more desperate character, scrawled and littered with javelin-like punctuation marks inveighing me to
get in touch!!!!!!
I ignored all of these notes and remained holed-up with Mandy, working hard on my final essays and fucking into oblivion.
We fucked until we were sore and then we fucked again. We barely went out, mainly because I didn't want to run into Fraser, but also because we spent a lot of the time stoned on weed. I was mad for the smell of her. Were it not for Fraser's example I would never have washed her off me. The smell of the weed and the smell of her pussy became commingled in my mind. I think I was stoned on both.
One time we were naked on the bed and she was rolling a joint for me. I stuck my finger inside her and I smeared her juices on the cigarette papers and on the mixture of tobacco and grass; and I smoked it. I smoked her. Mandy just shook her head at me.
Mandy folded her soft wings around me. She knew something was chasing me, though she never asked what. I started to let her make decisions for me. I stopped going out at all. She did my shopping and turned in my college essays. I thought she was my salvation. I just wanted to get through college, finish my degree, get a job and yes—ask her to marry me all over again. I knew I was in flight, but it didn't matter. I loved her and I wasn't faking it.
Then one evening she persuaded me out of my pit. She was getting cabin fever. Mandy wanted to go down to the Students' Union bar, breathe the air outside of her room. Reluctantly I agreed.
When we got down to the bar we plunged into the usual high-energy and low-IQ noise of student life. Mandy saw some of her friends grouped around a table and dispatched me to the bar to get drinks. I don't know why, but I felt nervous, on-edge. I'd hardly ventured out of Mandy's room for three weeks and I felt dislocated.
After I'd fought my way to getting served at the bar, I ordered drinks for Mandy and myself. I noticed that Lindi wasn't there pouring pints that night, so I asked about her. The girl serving me looked at me strangely. She dropped Mandy's empty mixer bottle in a big plastic tub and approached me from behind the bar.
"Lindi is in Good Hope," I thought she said.
I remember sniggering as I reached for a banknote to pay for the drinks. "Where the fuck is that?"
The student barmaid had a heavily freckled face and washed-out blue eyes. "She was on a bouncy castle and it blew up in the air."
"What?"
"It wasn't pegged down properly."
"What?"
"It was a kid's party. Well, after a kids' party."
"What?"
"She was just having a bounce at the end of the day and it blew up in the air. She fell on her head. Terrible."
The girl looked at me with her pale, washed-out blue eyes. Then someone else wanted serving. I stood there appalled, stupidly holding my pint in one hand and Mandy's vodka and coke in the other.
After a while Mandy appeared. "Are we getting a drink or what?" she said.
What I couldn't tell Mandy, of course, was that Lindi was the fourth on a list of five; Mandy was the fifth.
We sat with her friends, though as they chatted in high spirits, Mandy catching up on the gossip, I remained silent. They just thought I was morose, whereas I was stunned by the news about Lindi's freak accident. It's not that Mandy and the others were unsympathetic. It's just that they couldn't see the mathematical equation in all of this, or Mandy as a factor in that occult equation.
After the bar closed we went back to Mandy's place as usual. I rolled a joint when she went to the bathroom. The alcohol had made her frisky, and she got naked, dancing around me to try to snap me out of my mood. I was sitting on a hard chair where I'd constructed my joint at the table. Mandy put some music on and made a lap-dance around me, the smoke rising from my joint but my mood not lifting with it. Mandy took the joint from me, had a draw on it and reinserted the joint between the v of my fingers before blowing the smoke in my face.
She climbed on me, grinding her crotch into my thigh. The music came to a stop. Mandy climbed off my lap and looked hard at me, hands on her hips. Then without a word she switched off the tape player and climbed into bed.
I sat in my hard chair for maybe an hour. By the time I joined her in bed she was asleep. I switched off the light and inched my way between the sheets, not wanting to wake her. But I couldn't even lay down my head. I just stared at her, wondering what kind of suffering or curse I had called down on her. Yes, it had been Fraser's doing, not mine, but I'd created the frightening ritual out of scraps of arcane knowledge. I was seriously implicated in it, and in ways in which I couldn't begin to tell her. I wanted to defend her, to stand in the way of the evil shadow that had fallen over her, but how?
I remained poised above her lovely, frail sleeping body, watching over her, feeling ugly yet protective, a stone gargoyle leaning out from some buttress against the night, my face contorted in the dark.
I knew what I had to do.
We'd finished desert. Crème caramel, and the sweetness of it just made me want to give in, to kiss her. I wanted the sugar from Yasmin's lips. Her hand lay flat upon the table, and I still wanted to stroke it, to touch it, but without penalty. I looked round for the waiter.
"Don't order more wine," Yasmin said.
"No?"
"No. Do you know why I suggested this pub?"
"Tom Paine's bones are supposed to be buried in the cellar."
"That's it.
The Rights of Man.
Tom Paine is my hero. The landlord of this building at the time had Tom's bones brought back from his pauper's grave in New York. He was going to give him a heroic burial, but then he lost his money. The building was sold and Tom's bag of bones was left in the cellar. And walled up."
"And what has this got to do with me?"
"Nothing really. Except that you're walled up in the cellar. Like Tom."
I laughed, but I felt the furrowing of my own brow. "What? I think I
do
need another glass of wine." I waved to the waiter.
"I've added another basic right to Tom Paine's list."
"What would that be?"
The waiter, a handsome young man with a head of dark curls and raisin-coloured eyes, appeared, smiling at the table, hands clasped before him, leaning in to the table. She didn't even acknowledge him. "The right to be fucked within an inch of your life by a beautiful woman who has the hots for you."
I blinked. I couldn't help it: to avoid the intensity of her gaze I looked at the young waiter, as if for his comment on the situation. Perhaps he saw a kind of pleading in my expression, because he looked away from me and stared down at the table.
"If that's what
she
wants," she added. "And she does." Then she turned to the waiter and smiled. "We just want the bill. Thank you."
The waiter went away and I fumbled for my credit card. "Well, that'll give him something to tell them in the kitchen."
"I don't care what they think in the kitchen. Take me home."
But I couldn't take her home, even if I wanted to, because my daughter and her boyfriend were there.
"My place, then," she said, "but I warn you, it's not up to much."
I tried to think of a way of resisting, but she'd taken charge and wasn't even listening to my feeble protests. Outside the pub she confidently hailed a hackney cab and while its diesel engine ticked over she held the door open for me. She gave the driver an address just south of the river.
In the rear of the cab she leaned in to me, kicked down the seat in front of her and laid a heel on it, exposing from underneath her coat a leg clad in that elegant grey nylon. I was forced to admit to myself that I was a little bit scared of her. "Look, I don't know how much good I'm going to be to you."
It was true. I meant my remark both sexually and emotionally. I was completely out of practice. I felt targeted; I wondered if women had suddenly become much more predatory since I was last in the game. When I was younger I remember chasing girls; I don't much recall them ever chasing me.
She lifted a lazy finger to her lips and placed her other hand inside my coat. "Shhh! I'm taking you home to tell you something. After you've heard it you might not want me anyway."
The cab carried us across London. The amber streetlamps bathed her lovely features, and as they did so I was able to search her eyes without her seeing me. With the streetlights rising and setting over her at intervals, the cast of her eyes made her look like a jungle-cat. And after we'd gone a few miles I saw that thing I was looking for. She was half-squinting through the cab window as the city flashed by. It was the tiny match-flare, behind the iris, a brief instant of terrifying luminescence.