I take off my helmet. Even though my head is shaved it's caked in sweat and grit. I have weird sensations running up and down my leg. A horrible feeling of lightness is in my foot, as if it's threatening to float up quite against all my intentions for it to stay bearing down on that metal plate. Then a Red Admiral comes by.
I mean a butterfly. One of those beautiful, rare ones you sometimes see in an English country garden. I didn't even know you got them in the desert and I think, well, there ain't much green round here for you, is there? I'm glad to see it. It takes my mind off the situation for a few seconds as it flutters by. Then it turns back towards me and it settles on my wrist.
Beautiful. I wonder if this is the last thing I'm going to see. I do believe it drinks the sweat from my wrist. It opens its wings and just stays there quite happy. There you are. Drinking sweat from a man with his foot on a mine. What's that all about?
That's not bad, I think. If that's the last thing I'm going to see, a Red Admiral. I can think of a lot of things lower down my list. Have you ever looked hard at one? They are strange. They look like they're looking back at you. Like they're holding this cloak open for you to see.
Rubbish, I know, but I start to think about keeping the Red Admiral alive.—You don't wanna stay there too long, old pretty. You're in the wrong place. You don't wanna stay there.
I flex my hand, gently, but it doesn't move; it's still drinking my sweat. When it beats its wings to fly away I watch it go. I track it for several yards, to the vanishing point where the yellow dust closes in around me. But it seems to stay, fluttering in the air, the tiniest red dot; and then the red dot changes and I realise the red dot I was looking at isn't the tip of a butterfly's wing at all; it's the red dot of an Arab's
shemagh
, the traditional headscarf, and the Arab wearing it is making his way towards me.
After my attack on Ellis in the Cittie of York, I began to brood. I read Seamus's manuscript over and over. Of course he never targeted it at me—no, I'm not completely paranoid—but it seemed to speak to me directly. He hadn't written it for me, but he had written it for people
like
me. And what I began to brood on was what I'd done, back in Derby, in my youth.
After everything that had happened I was ready to take my foot off the mine. But I needed a little help.
All those years ago, I'd walked out on the great love of my life, a grand gesture in which I'd made a fool of myself. It sat heavily with me. I tried to put it aside—and for long periods of time I would manage to do so—but it always came back. Another demon for me: I seemed to be collecting them. But I knew that if I didn't confront this particular demon head-on it would always be waiting for me at the gate.
I started to make my own investigations into what had become of Mandy. I'd always been in dread of some terrible confirmation of my earliest fears, suspecting that something bad had happened to her; that my pact, my deal, had been ineffective. But over the years—not least from Fraser—I had learned that no such bad fate had befallen her: at least no worse than that which befalls many people, in that she'd married, had two children and got divorced. Then it seemed she had made a second marriage, eventually settling in the Yorkshire city of Leeds.
And over the years I had put this information aside, even when the insidious whispering would return. But now the time had come to unearth more information about Mandy. I just couldn't leave it alone.
In the end it wasn't difficult at all to make contact. An Internet site—the kind that offers lists of people with whom you went to school or college—made it more than simple. I paid a small subscription to the Internet site and with trembling hands I typed out the message:
I need to talk with you
.
There was no return message, and for three days I wrung my hands, wondering what I might do next. Then it came.
I don't think I want to.
So that was it. Except of course, it wasn't. I saved that email on my computer and looked at it every few minutes. There are spaces between words: loopholes, gaps, cracks, interstices through which anything can flow. She didn't
think
she wanted to talk to me. That meant she didn't know for certain. And of course the very fact that she replied to me at all meant that some small part of her did want the connection. She might have not replied at all. So in the ebbing tide I clung to the back of the little fish
think
.
I managed not to rush a reply. Finally I wrote:
All I ask is an hour, half an hour, to explain. Then I'll stay out of your life forever.
She wrote back almost immediately. Seconds after I'd sent the message.
That's a bit dramatic! Explain what?
Maybe I'd been driving myself mad by dwelling on something that for Mandy had long been consigned to the lumber-room of the past. Now this was much more tricky. Maybe I was filed in a dark corner of her memory along with a few one-night stands and foolish but laughable indiscretions. Everyone has a box of old photographs they never look at.
I'm not so egocentric as to think that I still had a central place in her thoughts or affections, or even that she ever thought about me. She'd had children of her own and the socks and underpants of at least two husbands to launder over the years. There was no reason to believe that she ever thought of me at all. Consciously.
But the past for me is an ever-present ghost. Time does not fade things for me. The chemicals on those old photographs we never look at become unstable. They unfix and yellow and fade. But experience—for me—does not. I can meet someone I haven't seen for fifteen years and my apprehension of them is as if it were yesterday. If they were kind to me fifteen years ago, I want to repay that kindness immediately. If they slighted me fifteen years ago, I hold a grudge right now. If I had an argument with them fifteen years ago I want to resolve it today. If we conflicted fifteen years ago, I'm still vibrating from the altercation.
This is how the world is for me. Perhaps I'm wrong in thinking it thus for everyone else.
Time does not heal. Time does not restore. The passage of many days does not smooth away pain, anguish, hurt, betrayal, grief; any more than it takes away the sights and smells and sounds of happy memories. Who first set loose the demon of that great lie? Was the liar who first said that trying to be kind? Trying to offer a salve?
I know how much I hurt Mandy and I have suffered for it ever since. She may have consigned that hurt to a place of forgetting. But you can't kill it off. All you can do is shut it in a cellar, turn a key and pretend not to hear the sound of its raging.
That's a bit dramatic! Explain what?
So perhaps I was mad. And perhaps I wasn't even on her radar. Until now.
I have a guilty conscience. I would appreciate the chance to explain why I left college so suddenly and without telling you.
Another two days went by before I got a response. The delay didn't bother me in the slightest. After all, over twenty years had lapsed. What was the rush?
Oh that! Yes, it was rather sudden. I did wonder at the time! But don't worry, you're forgiven. We were just kids, after all. Xxx
No no no! I wasn't buying it. She was making out as if it counted for nothing in her world. She was faking it, like we all do. But I held a steady course. I manufactured a reason for being in Leeds the following day: a visit to some regional office of our organisation. I pressed for a meeting. A coffee. She resisted. I pressed again.
"Hello, stranger." It's what she always used to say. Sometimes she would say it if you'd seen her two days earlier.
I'd found my way to Whitelocks, a pub in an alley called Turk's Head Yard in the city centre for our midday appointment. She'd chosen the venue. Whitelocks? Turk's Head? Was she being funny? I had to do a paranoia check. But I recognised her instantly. She sat at a table near a window, slowly stirring her coffee with a teaspoon as I walked in. There were no other drinkers; it was perhaps too early. She looked up and she recognised me, too.
She was carrying extra weight, of course, and there was some kind of henna colour to her dark hair, maybe to disguise the grey. She had what some people call crow's feet but which I prefer to call laughter lines at the corners of her eyes. And she wore on her lips a half-smile utterly familiar to me. I remembered it from all those times when I might have done something she disapproved of. Whether it meant she was hostile or indulging me I didn't know back then, and I didn't know now.
I slumped into a chair and blinked at her.
"You mad bastard," she said. "What's this all about?"
"Hello, Mandy."
"God in heaven!"
"I need a drink."
"You always used to drink beer," she said when I came back from the bar. "You used to say wine was for poofs."
"Did I? Bless me for a fool."
She said the years had been kind to me and that I still had my good looks. I said the same for her, but in my case I meant it: I really did. "I've got an hour," she said. "Then I've got to be somewhere else."
I was disappointed to hear that, but not surprised. I said that I'd got a story to tell her, about why I'd suddenly left college. After a couple of false starts I finally pushed the boat out. I began by telling her about the occult book that I'd made but failed to finish—the one that Fraser adapted for his own schemes. But she interrupted me.
"Before you go on," she said, "can you explain why you suddenly felt the need to tell me all this?"
"There was nothing sudden about it. I've often felt I wanted to tell you. Over the years."
She put a hand on my wrist, very lightly. Her manicured fingernails were painted flamingo pink. I could smell her perfume. "William, we were just kids. This is like talking about something that happened at school, in the playground. Is it really that important?"
It was important enough to me. I'd taken a train a hundred and seventy miles to tell her about it. I'd also travelled over twenty years in order to be able to tell her. So she listened wide-eyed, but with her chin supported by her hand as I told her the lot. Rituals. Pentacles. Chaplains. Photographs. Demons. Girls dying. Girls not dying. Then I took a deep breath and explained that I'd made a pact with a demon to have her left alone. That I'd left in a hurry to protect her, to draw the demons with me. And that it was only years later that I'd learned—from Fraser—that I'd been misled about the fate of the girls in the photographs.
She blinked at me. "Bullshit," she said.
"No."
She laughed. "What have you been smoking? I always knew you were on another planet, but really." She turned her head away from me and ran a hand through her hair.
"I never tell anyone this," I said. "I never even told my ex-wife, who I lived with for twenty years. I never breathed a word of it."
"You're fucking serious, aren't you?"
"Those demons have never left me. They're here now. There is one sitting in that chair next to you."
She turned to look, quickly, but of course saw only an empty chair. She couldn't see what I could see. There was indeed a demon sitting in the chair. In fact there were five of them in that bar with us. They were utterly fascinated with where this discussion would lead. They were simply waiting, waiting patiently, for the outcome of this discussion."
She looked back at me. "This is nasty, William."
"I've learned to live with it. It's okay so long as I don't try to tell people. Not all the demons are bad."
"I don't mean that. I mean what you're doing to me. I mean, why are you telling me this stuff? Is it a game? Why have you come all this way? Just to upset me again?"
So there it was. I was right. The hurt hadn't gone away; it had just been hard-packed in ice. "Mandy, I promise you that hurting you again was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted you to know that I never rejected you. I was trying to save you."
"But why didn't you tell me any of this at the time?"
"What?"
"Why not tell me back then?"
"You don't believe me now; why would you have believed me then?"
"Oh no. That isn't the point at all. I'm asking you why you didn't even
attempt
to tell me."
"I was protecting you!"
"Nice try, William. But even if I were to buy this bloody story of yours, these pentacles and photos and what-have-you, I'd still say you were running away from me. The moment you decided to cut me out you were running away. You rejected me. So what? It's life. Happens all the time. We move on. I moved on. Why didn't you?"
"Wait, wait—"
"No, you wait, William. What did you expect by coming here today? Forgiveness? You have it. There you are. Understanding? I always understood you were a strange one. What did you want?"
I wasn't anticipating this. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this burst of assertiveness. This dismissal. "I think I'm in hell, Mandy. I think I put myself there."
"Well, find a way out!"
"I think I have. But I need permission. From you."
She threw her head back and flared her eyes at the ceiling. But I knew that was just to stop me looking at her. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about!"
"I need permission from you to fall in love with someone else."
Now she looked back at me. Her lips were compressed. She plucked at something in the corner of her eye. She said some words but seemed to address them to someone or something just over her shoulder. "I don't believe I've let you do this to me. I don't believe it. After all this time." Her eyes were filling up. "I really don't believe it."
I scrambled to my feet. "I'm sorry, Mandy. Sorry. Sorry."
I grabbed my coat and scarf and got out of there. I felt like a monster. I staggered out of the pub, blinking into the light of the alley. I leaned my back against the whitewashed wall of the pub for a single second before swinging off into the street.