"No problem," I said. "After this one we just freeze all activity for a while. Close down. Give them nothing further to go on. We start up again in a year."
"Why not just close down now?"
I could hardly tell him that I'd loaned myself to GoPoint and needed the money to pay off my debts. "No. We'll complete this one. If Stinx comes through."
Jaz looked at me hard. "You seem to think he might not."
"It's more complicated than usual. Remember the original we took to model our copy on? Stinx spoiled one volume of it in a studio accident and I'm under pressure to return it. So he has to come up with two copies. And pronto."
"He hasn't let us down before, has he?"
"No. But where the fuck is he? That's all I'm saying."
We speculated a bit about who might be asking the questions but drew a blank. We had another round of drinks. Jaz told me a few fun things about his poetry tours. He was being commissioned by Lambeth Council to supply a short poem which was to be set in stone around the base of a sculpture outside a new community centre. The project was funded by Lottery money. The penniless buy their tickets of impossible hope and the government rake-off is partly returned to them in the form of bad artwork and fake poetry. How the poor get roughed up. Twice.
Cold Chisel Press were also avid for a new collection and Jaz was very keen for me to write it fast. We agreed as usual to hand over the spoils, which admittedly were not likely to be very much, to GoPoint.
Apropos of nothing, Jaz said, "Write me a sex poem."
"Bugger off, Jaz."
"Please. Write about this woman you're in love with."
"Ha," I said. "I'm not in love, you ponce."
"Go on. Write me a really deliciously sleazy sex poem. I'd say you
are
in love, actually."
"Ha!" I said again. "Ha!"
Jaz was right, of course. My worst fears had been confirmed. I was in thrall to Yasmin, right up to my neck. My head, ears, nose and throat, however, were still trying to resist. My rational, clonking, battery-dead misfiring-calculator-like brain was trying to summon up numbers other than those shown on the screen. Because I did not wish to acquiesce. Did not wish to go under. Because I lived in mortal dread of transitory love, winged and fiery, principal amongst all the frightening demons.
You think I'm speaking in metaphor. I'm not. Of all the demons most difficult to describe, the demon of transitory love is the easiest to identify or to witness. You are humbled in its presence. You are awed, mortified, trounced, pissed on. Still your mortal heartbeat quickens, your skin flushes, your eyes fix and re-fix and deliquesce. You lose all faculty of good judgement. You mismanage all sensible emotion. You become an ape, led by the demon on an unbreakable golden chain. And then when the subject of your fascination is just not ready for it any more and departs, you are left only with the company of yourself.
How do you know when it has gone? You just know. There is a radiance lost; a glamour fades; a soft focus resolves itself into sharper lines. A certain pressure in the air recedes. The demon that carried you in its wings to the glorious heights has dropped you like a stone.
And then all hell breaks loose.
A long time ago I resolved never, ever to give this demon such power over me again.
When I left Mandy at the college, I quit the course without a word to anyone. I didn't tell Mandy; I didn't let my mother know—in fact, to this day she still thinks I completed my degree and I see no reason to disillusion her; and I didn't bother to inform the college.
I just packed up my bags and I left. It made me physically sick to do it, but that's what I did. I threw up in a rubbish bin behind the bus station on the morning I left Mandy forever. I came to London because it's a city of refugees. Pretty much everyone who comes to London to live is fleeing from one demon or another. Some of them even know it.
My actions regarding Mandy might have been cowardly, but they were not selfish. I was trying to save her. I knew that her fate would be the same as those four other girls unless I made the trade, the deal, the exchange. I was still passionately in love with her but I wouldn't allow myself to be the instrument of her destruction.
Yet I hadn't managed to completely cheat the demon. It's one thing knowing when the demon will flap its wings and go; it's quite another thing to leave before the demon has done with you. That particular demon followed me to London and wrecked my life for three years before it was through with me. I hurt over Mandy. I cried. I tried to destroy my life with drink and drugs and reckless behaviour. But for three years, when I woke in the morning the first thing on my mind was Mandy; and she was the last thought in my head when I went to sleep at night, no matter whom I was with nor how much I poisoned my system.
For a thousand nights, I shredded myself. My demon flogged and flamed me. Old London Town is a fine place to burn. There is so much company, also on fire.
When the demon was done with me I promised myself never to let it approach me again. I devised a kind of mental yoga to keep it away. A system of disciplined thinking and alertness. And it worked! The side effect of this yoga was to roll back the surface of the world, and to make plain to me the astonishing array of demonic activity exacting a pull, like the moon and the tides, on every single human life in the capital and beyond.
There are thousands of them, and in multiple forms, living at our shoulders. Hosts of them, malign and benign, swarming or singleton, some fascinated by us, others disinterested. All utterly unseen except by the initiated.
The truth about demons is shocking to those who cannot see them. For those of us whose eyes are opened once, we can never go back. And the fact of it, their constant presence in the ether, would become almost banal were it not for the constant discipline required to keep them from attaching.
I have medicated my life with vigilance.
When I met Fay I liked her a great deal, and I knew that I wouldn't fall in love with her. Not in the kicking and screaming, biting and scratching, weeping and wailing manner. I saw that she would be a fine companion and a good mother should we be blessed with children. But also that neither of us would be open to the demon.
They are so clever. They enter our lives at a tangent, as it were, staying only for as long as it suits them, for as long as they can feed on our emotions. Maybe for a few seconds, maybe for years. Those who know about these things talk about spectacular interventions for good or ill. I met a man once who told me that a demon was the inspiration of Christ, entering him when he was a young man and abandoning him on the cross. These stories should not be repeated.
But since the day I saw one of their number enter Dick Fellowes in the gloomy attic room of Friarsfield Lodge to make my contract, the world was a changed place for me. There are so few cognoscenti. So few with whom this fact of life can be discussed. I knew Fraser, of course. And over the years I had occasionally sought out one or two authorities in the field. Those who were not charlatans were spectacularly eccentric or even unhinged. Then there were the accidental encounters with people who knew. Seamus the old soldier who was no older than I am: he was a good example. But he didn't know what he was seeing and they fed on him mercilessly. I could have helped him. I should have helped him.
And now there was Yasmin, who hosted demons, but who didn't know it. They flew in and out of her, like dark birds in and out of a tree.
I neither expected nor wanted ever to see Fraser again. I always regarded him as the chief architect of my suffering over Mandy. I know I wrote the fraudulent book that summoned the demon, but it was he who conducted the first ritual and it was he who had placed the photographs of Mandy and the four other girls around the goat's head.
Young people are obsessed with remaining cool, and it is always good advice anyway not to scare away the object of one's love with excessive displays of ardour. I had loved Mandy passionately but had never really told her. The nearest I had come to any serious declaration was that drunken night in the mist-draped dales of Yorkshire. But I blew it. And ultimately I made the sacrifice that protected her. Isn't this what love, genuine love, is supposed to be about?
Well, I did see Fraser again, but not for over fifteen years. I was in a café in Ealing—one of those earnest brown-rice-and-holistic-happiness joints where demons never bother to go—when on a cork-board between notices for flat-shares and Anarchist meetings my eyes fell upon his name. He was involved in one of a series of workshops organized by something called Karmic Insight. His workshop was titled
How To See Spirits.
I almost fell over.
It had to be him. It was too much of a coincidence. I looked at the other workshops. His was sandwiched between a workshop on Holistic Drumming (Intermediate) and another one about something alarming called Ear Candling. The workshops were being conducted at a nearby Adult Education Centre on Saturday afternoons. I glanced round the café. Everyone was intent on their tofu so I was able to snatch the notice from the board and stuff it in my pocket.
I was in a state for the days leading up to the Saturday afternoon of the workshop. I was going to see him; I wasn't. Was; wasn't. It's not that I was afraid of Fraser, but I was scared of what he represented. By now I was married to Fay with three small children. I had my job with the youth organization and I lived quietly. But there he was, in my neck of the woods, muddying pools, poisoning wells.
The Saturday came round. I dithered. I finally made up my mind to go along.
I deliberately arrived late to his workshop. He had a class of about eighteen or so, arranged in three rows on plastic chairs. He was writing some words on a large flip-chart with a day-glo marker pen, so he had his back turned when I slipped into the room and took a spare seat at the rear of the group. I hoped to go unnoticed.
And indeed I did, for several minutes, because Fraser was utterly absorbed in what he was saying. His lecturing style was to prowl and stroke his chin as if deep in thought, making little or no eye contact with his class. He wore a black silk shirt and black trousers belted at the waist and secured with a piratical silver buckle. He was carrying a lot more weight than when I'd last seen him. The fingers of his large, pale hands were beringed with silver and gaudy stones, and he fiddled with these rings whenever his hand dropped from his jutting jaw. He had another silver ring through his left eyebrow. I noticed a very slight stammer. He was a bag of nerves.
I didn't think he could possibly recognize me. For one thing I myself now sported a trim beard and neat moustache, which although it rightly engenders universal hilarity today was fashionable at the time. What's more, my head was covered with a beanie and for good measure I was wearing dark glasses.
And yet with all of this amounting to a disguise, he clocked me. He was in the middle of describing some esoteric process of mental preparation when he looked up at me and stopped dead. He stared hard at me. One or two of the members of his class coughed or shifted in their seats, so long was the hiatus as he stared at me unblinking.
He was obviously a professional at this teaching game, because he recovered his stride, managing to pick up where he left off. For the next hour he talked complete balderdash to his group, recognising full well that I was sitting there knowing it was balderdash; and yet he betrayed no shortage of commitment to his teaching.
I don't know why it was called a workshop. It was actually just a lecture, with fifteen minutes of Q&A at the end. A lady with a chopstick through her hair asked him if he thought the Spiritualist Church might help; an intense young man with bad skin asked a question about the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and then proceeded to answer his own question, sort of.
Two or three people, including the lady with the chopstick, lingered to quiz Fraser after it was all over. I hung back, waiting for them to clear. When they'd gone he collected up his papers, ignoring me. I waited patiently by the door with my arms folded.
Eventually he approached me. I thought for some reason that he was just going to breeze through the door but he didn't. He planted himself squarely opposite me. "A surprise," he said.
I nodded. "Do you do a lot of this?"
He sniffed. "Brings in a crust."
"I didn't think you'd recognize me."
"I wouldn't have," he said with a nod to the side, "but I saw your demon first."
"Oh? How many do I have these days?"
He looked around the room. "Just the one as far as I can see."
"Okay. Just testing."
"You were always testing me, William. Always."
"A drink," I suggested, "for old time's sake?"
He had to pick up his coat and hat from the cloakroom. The coat was a long black leather trench coat. The hat was a black fedora with a white band. I thought he looked a complete tit, and as we crossed the road to head for the pub, I said so. "What's with the Halloween get-up?"
He stopped in the middle of the road. "Do you have to be so fucking insulting?"
"Come on Fraser, let's get off the road. You'll get run over and then where will you be?"
No sooner had we stepped inside the Red Lion opposite the Ealing Studios than Fraser said, "Trust you to choose this place."
Fact is I didn't choose it. It was the nearest available watering hole, and I told him so. "Sometimes these things have a way of choosing us, don't you think?" He gave me what is often described as an old-fashioned look.
It's true though. The place is crawling. I mean
crawling
. All those photos of dead comedians don't help either. Where do you think all that comedy comes from? It's certainly not from happy folk, is it?
"We could go to the Drayton," he said. "Ho Chi Minh worked in the kitchens there."
I told him I didn't give a flying fuck about Ho Chi Minh. I ordered myself a glass of red wine and he had a pint of Fuller's. Someone at the back of the pub made a piss-taking remark about his hat so he took it off. He got halfway down his pint before he spluttered, "Why the fuck did you never respond to my messages? Messages message messages! You never answered."