But then the Anathemata had stuck their oar in, everything had gone to Hell in a hand basket, and Imelda had died.
I honestly didn’t give a tinker’s fuck about Gwillam’s three exorcists. Like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, they’d made love to their employment, and they’d only got what they’d been asking for. But Imelda . . .
Christ Jesus and all his angels. Imelda.
‘
Don’t make me regret this
,’ she’d said when she finally gave in to my undignified begging and let me land Rafi on her. And then when I suggested waking Asmodeus to let him feed on one of his homeys, she was horrified and enraged. She’d only agreed because she loved her own kid so much, and she couldn’t stand by and watch someone else’s kid dragged down to Hell when she had it in her power to do something about it.
I drew up the plan of attack. I led the charge. She was the Light Brigade and I was Lord fucking Cardigan.
So yeah. I took it hard. And yeah, I suppose I took the coward’s road.
I stayed with Imelda’s daughter, Lisa, until the ambulance arrived. She hadn’t said a word the whole time; just sat with her mother’s head in her lap, rocking her back and forth as though she was asleep. The only time she showed any animation at all was when the paramedics tried to separate her from the blood-boltered corpse. Even then, she didn’t fight them or cry or swear at them; she just held on tightly to Imelda’s chest, forcing them to pry her fingers loose one by one. And after that she stopped moving altogether.
I watched the ambulance go.
Then I found an off-licence, bought a bottle of whatever whisky came readiest to hand, took it to one of the wooden benches at Elephant and Castle and drank it dry.
My memories of the days and weeks that followed are a little patchy, but I know that that bottle was only the first of many. I would have taken other drugs, probably, if any had been kicking around, but booze has always been my sledgehammer of choice when I want to throw a tarp over the day and pass out fast.
Only now it wasn’t just a day I wanted to blot out. I wanted to forget I’d ever been born. I wanted to erase Felix Castor and rewind. Someone else might do a better job of taking up the space he used to occupy.
So I did my best to turn my brain into half-congealed soup, but in spite of my best efforts, a few scraps of sense input from that time manage to stand out fairly distinctly.
I remember being carried home one night by my good friend Juliet - who, being a succubus, didn’t even break a sweat - and propped up against the door like a sack of coal. She would have taken me all the way to my bed, I’m sure, except that my landlady, Pen, doesn’t allow her in the house: Pen has a ‘no succubi’ rule that’s fairly strict.
I remember Pen standing in the doorway of my room, cursing me out. ‘You selfish, self-pitying bastard!’ she was saying. ‘He’s out there. He’s out there on the streets right now, and all you’re doing about it is lying here in your own vomit! Well fuck you, Fix! I’ll find him myself, if you won’t help.’
I remember crawling on my hands and knees on the floor of my room, groping under my bed for a bottle that had fallen and rolled. When I found it, most of the contents had spilled out. Heartbroken from the loss, I cried. Then drank what was left in a single gulp, and coughed and hacked and wheezed for five minutes because the neck of the bottle had attracted enough dust and fluff to choke a horse.
I remember being called to the hospital to talk about Lisa’s condition. I’d given myself as next of kin because I didn’t know any other name to put down. So I had to go, wishing all the while that I’d given the paramedics a false name and address. She was still completely unresponsive, and the doctors wanted to know if she had any history of catatonia or neural disorders. They also wanted me to sign a shit-load of papers. I started in blithely enough, until my eyes came briefly into focus and I realised what some of the consent forms were for. Anti-psychotics. Electroshock. Surgical interventions. I fled, pursued by shouted assurances that most of the permissions were ‘just in case’.
I remember sitting in a car park late at night, my back up against the rear tyre of a truck, playing my whistle. I was trying to reproduce a note I’d never heard before. Something totally new: an
ostinato
that had sneaked its way into the world without my noticing, and that only my legless, almost mindless state was allowing me to hear right then. As I moved my fingers to half-block the stops and hit painfully elided semitones, ribbons of nearly invisible nothingness like the ghosts of tapeworms drifted past me and through me, seeking the music as though it was a form of sustenance.
I remember lying with my cheek pressed against cold stone, thinking with something like relief that it might all be over at last. This might be a mortuary slab that I was sprawled out on. But it wasn’t. It was just another stinking, sticky pavement strewn with broken glass, just another station of the booze-hound’s cross.
Alcohol is a curious thing: an arcane and complex thing that opens up its mysteries to you in successive layers. At the very heart of its cruelty, there’s a dark and terrible compassion, which is this: after it’s poisoned you, you can take it as medicine. You can get into a cycle where you’re drinking to carry your body through the pains and wrenches of withdrawal, and in the short term it actually works.
I rode that horse for a while. Then I fell off it and it trampled me. Then it pissed on me as I lay in the gutter.
Coming back was slow, and at first almost accidental. I woke up in my lightless room, stewed in my own sweat and feeling like someone had magically transformed my tongue into a size-10 army boot. I was on fire with the ague of chemical need, alternately too hot and too cold inside my skin, on which salamanders were crawling with hooked claws, and snakes with rasping scales.
I couldn’t find the light switch, couldn’t even remember the layout of my own room. I staggered to the bathroom in the dark, filled the bath with cold water and fell into it, fully clothed. Well, the clothes smelled like they needed a wash in any case, so it counted as economy of effort.
By the time the sun came up, I’d ridden out the worst of the shakes. I stood up on wobbly legs, stripped the sodden clothes from my body and washed properly. Shaving was harder, because my hands were still about as steady as the plastic mule in the game of Buckaroo, but I persevered.
I staggered downstairs about an hour later, wearing a pair of clean underpants that I’d providentially found down the back of a radiator and one of Pen’s 200 or so T-shirts with Celtic knot designs on them. On the table in the hall there was a stack of mail for me, including a brown envelope in legal quarto size which had come recorded delivery and had bad news written all over it. I ignored it for now. First things first.
I rehydrated myself with a couple of litres of water, and zapped my nervous system with about the same amount of strong black coffee. I still felt like the walking dead, but I’m not prejudiced: some of my best friends belong to that fraternity. And at least my brain was starting to work again.
The first thing it did was play me back those few snippets of memory, like answerphone messages. The worrying one was Pen saying, ‘I’ll find him myself.’ I needed to have a word with her about that, but she wasn’t in her basement sitting room when I went down there to check.
The rats were, though, prowling restlessly round their rat-habitat. So were the ravens, Edgar and Arthur, one of them sitting on an actual perch, the other on Pen’s computer monitor. They clacked their beaks when I entered, and Arthur cawed intimidatingly.
I make a point of feeding the ravens whenever I see them, because it doesn’t make sense to piss off birds whose beaks are strong enough to open tin cans, but it’s occurred to me recently that I’m only making a Pavlovian connection in their minds between Castor and food which may one day come back to bite me in the arse, either figuratively or literally. I took some frozen liver from Pen’s fridge, thawed it out in the microwave and split it between the two of them. They fell on it like a pair of blood-crazed maniacs. It looked like they hadn’t been fed in a while. To be on the safe side, I fed the rats too. Then I went upstairs and fed myself, saved from the agonies of indecision by the fact that the kitchen was empty except for a tin of baked beans and a packet of Ryvita crackers. Well, okay, there was a half-finished bottle of Janneau Armagnac too, but I made myself look away. I didn’t want to go on another bender until I was sure Pen was okay.
So I fixed myself some weight-conscious beans on toast and ate them slowly with Radio 4 playing in the background. That told me what day of the week it was and who was prime minister; the fine detail I could fill in for myself later.
In the meantime, that bottle of brandy was still making indecent suggestions to me from the kitchen. I decided to get some distance from it before I found myself in a compromising situation.
I went back upstairs to my room with the vague but virtuous intention of clearing up some of the shit that had accumulated during my spectacular drunk. But the scale of the task daunted me. There was broken glass trodden into the carpet, a sour stink of stale, spilled booze in the air, and the lurking likelihood that picking up any one item of dirty laundry or overturned furniture would reveal greater horrors underneath. I gave up on the idea before I’d even started. I was able to assemble myself a less ridiculous outfit, though: a black shirt, dark grey cargo pants and a pair of low-heel boots that have proved over the years to be as durable as Permian granite.
After that I just waited for a while: in the back garden until the sun got too high, then in the basement with the ravens. Morning shaded into afternoon, with no sign of Pen. She couldn’t know that I’d wake up and feed the birds, so her absence was doubly hard to explain.
I was on the rack again by this time: sweating like a warthog, with a sick, hollow feeling in my stomach that only alcohol could fill. My head throbbed as though it was a blood-filled pimple that would burst at a touch. And the physical symptoms fed off my disquietude about Pen, and vice versa, until I couldn’t even sit still, but had to walk around the room like a prisoner in solitary taking the only exercise that was on offer.
How long did someone have to be off the scene before they counted as an official missing person? A lot longer than half a day, surely. But it might be worth calling Pen’s sister Antonia, and seeing if she’d showed round there. The only thing that made me hesitate was the fact that Tony hates my guts and would curse me out loudly down the phone. She shouts a lot. Really, a whole lot; and I felt right then as though the wrong harmonic would just shatter me.
But I steeled myself to do it in the end, and I was actually dialling when the key turned in the lock upstairs. I put the phone down and headed up to ground level. Edgar and Arthur glided over my head, keen to get their word in first. They didn’t need to worry: I was fighting another bout of the shakes, and they could have beaten me at an easy walk.
When I got to the top of the basement stairs, Pen was bespeaking the door: talking to it in guttural undertones while touching the wood at the four cardinal points. Pretty much everyone puts wards on their doors and windows these days, to prevent unwanted visits from the recently deceased. Mostly they buy them in ready-made, though: photocopied stay-nots and tied-up sprigs of flowering herbs from the Camden Market spiritualist stalls, crucifixes and vials of holy water from the local church, mezuzahs and salats and cunningly modified Mani scrolls and every other flavour of religious prophylactic all readily available now by weight or piecemeal. Pen, though, makes up her own. She’s a pagan, and a priestess in an indie church that doesn’t even have a name. She keeps that side of her life very much to herself though, and I’ve learned not to ask.
The ward laid, she turned to look at me. It was a searching look that lingered speculatively on the clean shirt and the freshly sliced, mostly stubble-free chin.
‘Hey,’ I said, crossing over to her. ‘I was starting to get worried.’
She submitted to a kiss on the cheek, but I heard her sniff the air as I leaned in, so I knew she was still trawling for information on my sobriety and soundness of mind.
‘I’m sober,’ I assured her.
‘Yeah,’ she agreed dryly. ‘I’m sure that will last.’
She walked past me into the living room, threw her handbag down on the sofa, then threw herself down after it. I hadn’t really registered it until now, but she was in disguise. Instead of her usual flamboyant colours, she was wearing a suit in a subdued mid-brown, and she’d tied her hair back in a tight bun. In short, she’d done her best to avoid a second glance. Not easy for Pen: she stands five foot nothing in her cotton socks, but has intensely green eyes like chunks of radioactive kryptonite, flame-red hair and a general air - which is pretty much accurate - of being a compact container for a lot of dangerous energy. I’d had a serious thing for her once, but it was a long time ago, back when she and I and Rafi were all at college together. It might even have gone somewhere if Rafi hadn’t been an item in that list, but the chemical bond that developed between the two of them reduced the two of us, by some mysterious alchemy, into just-good-friends, which is where we’ve been ever since.
All the same, I must have looked a little like a suspicious husband as I stood over her now, arms folded and face solemnly set. ‘Where have you been?’ I demanded. ‘The birds were starving.’
‘Looking for Rafi,’ she answered shortly.
‘Overnight?’
‘He’s got a demon inside him, Fix. I don’t think demons keep office hours.’
She closed her eyes to deter further questions, so I waited to see if she was going to volunteer any more information on her own.
‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that you might have left me some of that brandy?’ she asked after a while.
I went and got her the bottle and a glass. Just the one glass, although my palms prickled at the proximity of the booze. A single medium-to-large-sized shot would set me up so right.