How to Make Friends with Demons Read online

  "And when did this enquiry come, Stinx?"

  "Three days ago. Stranger."

  I didn't like it. "It's too close. What do you know about the customer?"

  "Not much," Jaz said. "He's another one of these public schoolboy types. Ex-military. Gay. That's all."

  "Does he have books?"

  "No idea."

  "You'll need to get inside his house, Jaz. Look at his bookshelves to see if he's for real."

  "How will he do that?" Stinx wanted to know.

  Jaz raised his glass. "Anyway, here's to the abolition of celibacy."

  Well, guess what: we ended up in that bloody club again. I can never remember the name of the place because we always drink too much and my store of brain cells for the hour preceding entry therein and much of the two hours thereafter is washed away like writing in the sand. I worry about this. I worry about how much of my life is not available to me. I want total recall. I want the full set of records. I don't want to think that some sinister organization has stolen half of the files on my life like they did with the enquiry into the death of Princess Diana. I'm not expecting to present these records at the Pearly Gates, you understand: it's just that if I don't have all the evidence how can I judge myself?

  Oh, bugger it, let's just call it the Red Club. I didn't mind. Jaz always insisted on covering the bill when we went there, and my funds had become seriously depleted after taking out the loan and making repayments at bank rates that would embarrass a vampire. I needed to have a word before Stinx got too smashed.

  "Has Lucy come back?" I asked him.

  He wiped his nose, and shook his head.

  "Stinx, listen. I need to know if there's any progress on Pride and Prejudice."

  His answer was to down his glass of fizzing champagne in one go and wave a large hand through the air. "It's coming. It's coming." He looked round the club for more interesting company.

  "Come on, mate. I want an answer."

  He patted my shoulder. "Relax, it's nearly there." Then he waddled off to find himself another drink.

  I didn't like this club any more than I had the last time I was there. Tara my neighbourhood good-time girl was on show, but the footballers were different. Tara cheerfully introduced me to one of them. He was a nice lad, but I thought he looked a bit too young to be out so late.

  "Do you make a living from it?" I asked him.

  "Of course he does," Tara giggled. "He plays football for England!"

  "Marvellous," I said. "This is what we want. More young men playing for England." I tipped back my glass and looked round for a way out of the conversation.

  Tara waved at some more people entering the club and the footballer touched my elbow. "I've done something a bit stupid."

  "What?"

  He stepped round to my other side. The music was quite loud. He had to stand on tiptoe to speak in my ear. "I've got journos on my back. Paps. All that."

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I put down my glass, left him standing and made my way downstairs to the Gents, where an elegant Nigerian was working for tips. I was splashing the enamel, as it were, when the footballer came in, seemingly having followed me. He slipped a banknote to the toilet attendant and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. The attendant cleared off quickly. I turned and washed my hands, and what with the toilet attendant out of commission, I had the indignity of reaching for my own paper towel.

  "I've got to get 'em off my back,' the footballer said. "Tara reckons you're well connected. There's a wedge in it for you."

  "I can't help you," I said.

  "I understand. I know all that. This is unofficial. Just between me and you. You're in government, right?"

  "Government? What on Earth did she tell you? Haven't you got people at Chelsea to help you? Whatever it is you've done?"

  "I don't play for Chelsea."

  "No. Look, whatever Tara has told you, she's mistaken."

  The young footballer grabbed my arm angrily. I looked at his hand on my arm and it was enough to make him back off. Then, to my astonishment, he turned to the washbasin and began to cry. He was just a boy. I'm not made of stone: I reached out a hand to try to console him but what I saw in the mirror made me leap back.

  There was a demon hanging from him. And the demon looked desperately sad. I knew exactly what that meant.

  My stomach lurched. I had to duck into one of the stalls and I retched, emptying the contents of my stomach, mostly red wine, into the ceramic bowl. The footballer hadn't even noticed. As I came out of the stall, the demon tried to make eye contact with me, but the sadness and the grief and the sudden stench of its presence made me race from the Gents. The attendant was lounging outside.

  "Go in and help him," I said.

  Back upstairs I got myself another glass of salvation and cadged a cigarette from Jaz.

  "You all right?" he said. "You look a bit pale."

  "Where's that bloody Tara?"

  "She's under the table with a faded rock star. What's she done?"

  "Oh, for God's sake!"

  "William, chill out! Come on, sit down. We need to have a chat." Jaz led me to a corner sofa upholstered in ghastly red velour. The Red Club always made me feel as if we were inside a giant throat, rubbing up against a set of tonsils. He called for a waiter.

  "Just water for me," I said. "I feel dizzy."

  "Look, you've got to write me some more poems. These idiots want me to go on tour now."

  "Tour? Where on tour?"

  "Bloody South Africa."

  "Christ, where will it all end?"

  This was not encouraging news. A couple of years ago, Jaz and I had arranged a kind of hoax. The Regional Arts Council had a reputation for doling out grants—cash grants—to ethnic writers. For a laugh we'd cobbled up an application where I scribbled some truly god-awful poems and Jaz submitted them. The Arts Council in question salivated and bit his hand off. He was a godsend: Asian, gay, he filled in their minority categories, so they immediately rewarded Jaz with a five-thousand-pound bursary, I think was the word they used for it. When we'd stopped laughing, we invested the money in our book-counterfeiting enterprise with Stinx.

  But the thing started to get a little out of hand. The broadsheet papers loved his face so much they couldn't stop featuring Jaz in their Arts pages. Well, he's a good-looking boy and what with my shit poetry they thought they were onto something. He was sought out to give public readings and tours and all the rest of it. I warned him to pretend to be a recluse or shy or whatever, but he insisted he could carry it off. And he could.

  In fact, he lapped up the attention. The readings and the performances always seemed to draw an audience of people who wanted to do more than admire his poetry. Next thing I knew he was reciting my doggerel at the South Bank and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Now the bloody British Council was sponsoring him on international tours! Worse than that, I hadn't got the heart to stop it all because Jaz was donating every single penny he made from this poetry hoax to GoPoint.

  "You've got to give me some new material," Jaz said. "I can't keep reading the same old stuff."

  "What do you want," I said dryly, "Asian-Gay or Gay-Asian?"

  "Something rather lighter, I feel. My recent stuff has been getting a bit . . . miserablist."

  I gave him an old-fashioned look. The problem with this game was that the bigger his reputation became on the poetry circuit, the more difficult it was to kill him off. Jaz knew everyone in poetry. He was the one who had introduced me to Ellis, after the near-laureate had written a splendid and scintillating review of Jaz's poetry in some literary rag. Ellis was even supposed to be providing me—sorry, Jaz—with a cover blurb when my/his/our anthology was published by Cold Chisel Press later in the year. Ellis said he was a fan and had invited Jaz to dinner one night; that was how Jaz had discovered his interest in antiquarian books, and that's how I'd originally met Ellis.

  Sitting in the Red Club and thinking about Ellis made me think of Yasmin, of cours
e. How I wanted to be with her. Just talking. I felt I could tell her everything. About the fake books and the forged poetry; about my paranoia that we would inevitably get caught for these scams; about the haunted footballer; about Fay and the children; about demons and how it all started.

  Jaz was talking but his voice was like a radio station struggling for bandwidth, drifting in and out. I looked around me at the swollen red walls. They seemed to be veined and twisted and pulsating slightly, like a giant larynx. I had a horrible insight of myself and all the other people in the club as individuated fragments in the gagging throat of a drunken demon.

  "You've gone ashen," Jaz said. "You're not going to throw up are you? Look out!"

  Chapter 17

  I don't know if she has spies, but somehow everything seems to get back to Fay eventually. I mean everything. The evening after my embarrassing but record-breaking projectile vomiting in the Red Club she called me.

  Ostensibly she wanted to talk about the children. Sarah had come home from Warwick University for the Christmas break with a boyfriend who, according to Fay, looked like Nosferatu but not so handsome. Was he on drugs, did I think? Claire meanwhile had had a brush with the police after shoplifting a Cadbury's Chocolate Flake.

  "A what?"

  "A Cadbury's Flake. Stop pretending you don't know what a Cadbury's Flake is."

  Robbie, meanwhile, was having a miserable time at the local comprehensive. Some girls had pulled him into the female toilets and dragged his trousers down.

  I was still thinking about why I was never lucky enough to have this horror befall me when Fay said, "I hear you've been drinking a lot."

  "What? Who told you that?"

  "You were also seen on the Embankment, strolling arm-in-arm with a young woman."

  "Seen? What do you mean seen? I don't remember trying to make myself invisible."

  "William, I hope you're not having a mid-life crisis."

  I thought about that for a few seconds. The usual indicators were not available: I wasn't married so couldn't have a mistress; and the thought of purchasing and owning a sports car is in my mind tantamount to walking the streets with one's penis exposed. Anyway what was this about "mid-life"? As far as I'm concerned, the crisis started when as an infant I was removed from the maternal breast and the situation will continue to remain critical until I am comforted by the black teat of death. There is no "mid" about it. Life is a crisis from the cradle to the grave.

  "If I am having a crisis," I told Fay, "I intend to do so quietly. Now, what are you calling about?"

  "Nothing," she bridled. "That is, I just wanted to see if you're okay."

  "I'm okay. Okay?"

  "I also wanted to tell you your maintenance payment didn't come through this month."

  "Oh, I changed my bank account. I'll sort it. Make a double payment next month or whatever."

  "Not like you to miss a payment. You're not going to leave us, are you?"

  "Leave you?" I reminded Fay that she was the one who was in the spiriting-away business, and for celebrity pastry chefs.

  "I mean, you're not going to shoot off into space so that we'd never see you again. Are you?"

  "No," I assured her, "I'm not going to shoot off into space."

  The one time that I nearly did shoot off into space was when I discovered Fraser had been basing his conjuring of demons on my book. In fact I freaked out, to use the parlance of the day. I remember staring down at the rotting book and my own manuscript pages as if it were a pit of snakes into which I was about to be tossed.

  "It won't bite you," Fraser said.

  I was paralysed. I couldn't speak. I wanted to destroy the book and strangle Fraser at the same time. But I also needed to disguise my reaction to the manuscript. There was no way that I was going to confess to him that I was the author of the fraudulent scribblings on the onion-leaves.

  I was also trying to calculate the insane implications of it all. Fraser had scared himself half out of his wits with whatever it was he'd managed to summon. Of course, he might simply have created that psychological condition for himself; but independently of that I had most certainly sensed some presence in the attic. So had the porter. So had the porter's dog. I tried to think back over what I'd done with the manuscript.

  The original book, the rotting publication, had fallen into my hands along with several other mildewed volumes buried deep in a cardboard box I'd collected from a doctor's widow during one of my house-clearance jaunts. Most of what was in the box was rubbish, but I had been intrigued by the occult content of the book. As I say, half of it was missing and the cover and all the frontispieces were gone. It had no resale value. It was impossible to tell who had published it, or when, or who had authored it.

  The main body of the text was offered in long-winded style, but involved lengthy preparation for magical rituals. There were diagrams and formulae in the book, but frustratingly no instructions for the performance of the actual rituals. I'd assumed these were in the missing section of the book.

  At the time there had been a heightened interest in occult publications. Bookshop shelves groaned with imbecilic titles like Finding Your Egyptian Spirit Guide or Casting Runes for Your Cat and the like. It occurred to me to use the book as a basis for a manuscript purporting to offer the secrets of magic rituals. I purchased the onion-skin paper and the India ink, and with a bit of research set about composing the rituals myself. My hair-brained plan had been to offer the manuscript to a publisher as a "sensational find."

  I spent hours on the elegant almost copperplate script and the painstaking draughtsman-like illustrations, only to abandon the project well before completion. It was all too much like hard work. I figured it would take me a year to get the manuscript anything like ready for a publisher. So I packed the book and my unfinished occult manuscript, along with all my other old books, in the attic at Friarsfield Lodge, to gather dust.

  And that's how Fraser had stumbled across it.

  "I'm going to take these papers away," I told Fraser that morning.

  "Not bloody likely. I need those."

  "What for?"

  "They might help me figure a way to . . . put it all back in the box."

  I could have simply asserted ownership. But then I would have felt more deeply implicated. And though I hesitate to say it, more deeply threatened by what Fraser had done. It's barely rational—but then none of this was rational—but I thought that if Fraser knew my part in all of this then the thing that was contaminating him might make a virus-like leap to me.

  "I just want to study them. I know a bit about this shit."

  "You do?" Fraser said, disbelieving.

  I mentioned a few things like the Key of Solomon and other fragments of magical jargon. Enough to impress him, anyway. He surrendered the papers to me. "I need to know exactly what you did."

  "I just followed it as it's laid out there. It's clear as a bell."

  A cracked, doom-laden bell, I wanted to add. "What about the pictures? The girls?"

  He shuffled. "They were the object of the ritual."

  "To do what?"

  He flared his eyes open at me.

  "You did this," I asked him, "just in the vague hope that you would get to fuck them?"

  He blinked. I wanted to mend his broken nose just to break it again.

  "Fraser, you're such a shit. Why all my girlfriends?"

  "Because it was easy to get personal effects when they were here. From the bathroom, I mean. Hairbrushes. Bath water."

  "Bathwater? You stole their bathwater?"

  "Stole? They didn't exactly want it! In one or two cases it was easy to nip in while the water was draining. I mean, if their hygiene had been better, if they'd rinsed the bath—"

  "Shut it or else. You're not one to talk about hygiene."

  "I'm just saying."

  "Well don't. What about the photos?"

  "It's easy, William. You just pretend to be snapping something behind them."

  "I take it
that it hasn't worked."

  "Not exactly."

  "Not exactly? What's that supposed to mean? Has it or fucking well hasn't it?"

  "Well, no, not yet."

  I thought about his creepy handshake when he was saying goodbye to Mandy that morning. "I'm going," I said. "I'll take these with me."

  "What will you do?" he shouted after me.