How to Make Friends with Demons Read online

  "Slightly less."

  GoPoint was a refuge for the homeless, the wayward, the desperate, the lost, the drowned-at-sea-but-don't-yet-know-it. It was an unregistered charity. It couldn't be registered with the Charity Commission because it kept no books. GoPoint stuffed to the gills maintained thirty-seven beds, and right now with November burrowing deeper and deeper into winter it would be working at capacity and beyond. The saintly Antonia Bowen, sitting on the steps quoting William Blake at me and looking exactly like one of the inmates, was the institution's manager, inspiration, apologist, advocate, fundraiser and janitor.

  A fuckin' saint, I swear it.

  Her clients came through her doors with nothing and sometimes left with Antonia's clothing. She dressed herself in whatever rotten garb was left behind; paying herself and her intermittent staff with the casual donations that came her way. One or two staff members were paid from eccentric contracts with this or that social welfare scheme. She was a deep thorn in the side of the social services and the government agencies because she made outrageous guerrilla raids on their offices. Because all help had been refused, on one occasion she and five of her inmates carried the corpse of a woman who'd died on the premises down to the offices of the Department of Health and Social Security and left it in the reception with a Queen's Silver Jubilee tin tea-caddy for donations.

  Now Antonia's landlord, with an eye to property development, had hiked up the rent. GoPoint, well in arrears, was threatened with closure. I was working on something that might buy her a little time, but there had been a hitch and it was proving difficult.

  "I'll come back next week, hopefully with better news," I told her.

  "You're one of my heroes, William. I wish there were more like you."

  "You don't know me, Antonia! I'm not worth bothering with."

  "You're one of the kindest, warmest men I've ever met."

  She linked her hands around my arm and when she looked at me with those cloudless eyes, I couldn't take it. She was one of the seraphim. I had to change the subject. "Hey, I met someone who worked here. Pretty thing. Said her name was Yasmin."

  She blinked thoughtfully. "I don't think I'd be able to employ someone called Yasmin."

  Ah, so we do have prejudices, I thought. A pin-prick in your sainthood. That's a relief.

  She was still thinking. "Hey . . . unless it was the girl who started the library. Have you seen our library lately? Come inside."

  The "library" was a dozen shelves of second-hand mostly paperback books. I had no intention of visiting it. Firstly, GoPoint was infested with demons for obvious reasons. The clients had to vacate the place between midday and four o'clock so that they didn't merely rot on their pallet beds all day long. The idea was to give them purpose. It was while they were out of the building seeking purpose that the demons became most active in their prowling, relentless search for a new host. Secondly, demons do tend to cluster around the yellowing pages and cracked spines of second-hand books. I've no idea why.

  Not that I discussed demons with Antonia. She, who every single day walked with purity of heart in a place teeming with demons, said that although she'd seen them, she didn't want to discuss them.

  I simply made my excuses. I got up off the steps, dusting the seat of my trousers. "Antonia, your conjunctivitis has come back. You should get it seen to."

  "It's nothing."

  I was about to argue with her when a young woman with a shocking set of teeth and wearing a dirty padded jacket—it looked like the insulation you might put round a hot-water cylinder—lumbered up to us. "Is it four o'clock?" she said in that Mancunian vibrato you get when loss of drugs wobbles the sternum. "Is it? Is it?" Her eyes were popping. Two huge dilated pupils had the words intravenous hellhound written on them in spiralling calligraphy.

  "No," Antonia said to her. "It's about two thirty."

  The Mancunian turned her beggar's gaze on me. I felt a tiny bit scared, and sad for her at the same time. "Are you sure it's not four o'clock?"

  I looked at my watch for her. "Not even close to four."

  She spun her body away from us, but clearly without any idea of what to do with herself. She hung her head, stuffing her hands deeper into her water-cylinder lagging.

  "I'll be on my way," I said. "I only dropped by to keep you updated."

  "And I appreciate that, William. I really do." A blissed-out smile told me that she meant it. With Antonia it was never just rhetoric.

  As I stepped around the lost Mancunian girl in the padded jacket I heard her ask Antonia, "Eh! Eh! So when will it be fuckin' four o'clock? Eh?"

  Chapter 2

  When I got home that evening the telephone was ringing. I didn't hurry. Sometimes I didn't bother answering at all, since it was usually only someone who wanted to talk about something or other. I hung up my keys, slipped off my coat and chose a Moulin-à-vent 1999 Beaujolais from the rack. I finally answered the phone, squeezing the receiver under my chin while I pulled the cork from the bottle and poured myself a very large glass of the rubicund relief & rescue.

  It was Fay. "How are you?"

  "I'm good, Fay. You?"

  To have Fay enquire about my health and temper at all was new. Even if it was only a formality, it was progress. Normally she simply launched in. Anyway, once she'd got the hideous semblance of caring out of the way, she flew like an arrow to the clout. "The children have talked about it. Claire will see you, but Robbie doesn't want to have anything to do with you."

  I took another sip of the rain from heaven. It splashed on my tongue like a soft shower in the arid desert; it swooped over my palate like an angel robed in red. I think the Grand Masters must have been looking at the wine in the glass when they clothed their models on the religious canvas. Come here my love: let me array your nakedness with the juice of the grape.

  "Well, that's something."

  "He might come round," Fay said. "I'm trying to stay out of it, but I won't let him not see you." I heard a sucking noise. Fay always seemed to be eating something when she was on the phone. Ice cream, maybe. Or honey or chocolate sauce, from her fingers.

  "I appreciate that, Fay." There was an uncomfortable pause, so I said, "How's the celebrity? Is he feeding you all well?" I knew if I turned the conversation to Lucien it would curtail the call.

  "Busy with his new programme. There's some issue with the contract."

  "There always is." Oh yes. Be advised of this: contracts demon is a spirit of martial force.

  Fay had left me, three years ago—for a celebrity chef. He's on the telly. He's very good with pastry. Spinning it out with sugar and all that. I really can't be bothered with pastry myself. Anyway, he left his wife and his two kids for my wife and my three kids. I would have offered a straight swop but my God you should see his brute of an ex-wife. My eldest child, daughter Sarah, is studying at Warwick University; she has always been on "my side," so, two out of three ain't bad.

  Fay came to the point of her call. "So Robbie wants to know if this applies to his tennis and his fencing as well as his school."

  "How can he ask me that if he won't talk to me?" Really! The little shit!

  I thought I heard her shift the phone from one hand to the other to suck the freed-up fingers. "Obviously he's asked me to ask."

  "Obviously he has to ask me himself. And obviously you'll explain why that is necessary."

  "That's your answer?"

  "Obviously."

  Fay sighed. She's good at sighs. She can invest the entire weight of disappointment over years of marriage into a single sigh. "All right. I'll let him know."

  "Thanks for your call, Fay."

  I replaced the receiver and topped up my glass. Yes, there is still pain. There is still hurt. I lash the suppurating sores with red wine.

  I know what you're thinking. For the record, and since I don't expect you to be an expert in the identification or taxonomy of these things: alcohol is not a demon. It's merely one of a series of volatile hydroxyl compounds that are
made from hydrocarbons by distillation. It's a scientific process involving the transformation of sugars. The fact that it is highly addictive or that it can drive men or women to extreme and destructive forms of behaviour does not make it a demon. When people say "his demon was alcohol" they don't know what they are talking about.

  I myself am mildly addicted to the fermentation of the grape and it has on occasion caused me to behave recklessly. But there is no imp in the bottle. Grant you, a demon may take up residence and—spotting a weakness in its host—encourage a destructive habit. But that is a hell-horse of a different colour.

  The reason why my fifteen-year-old son will no longer speak to me? Because I chose not to pay the fabulous fees required to propel him through the towering gates of the privileged Glastonhall any longer. I did not like what he was becoming behind the mullioned windows of that expensive institution. I took no pleasure in the mark of "excellence" stamped on his brow. More than that I didn't like the way he treated the waiter when I took him to lunch at Spiga in Dean Street.

  I don't know if Robbie has developed his contempt for what used to be called the working classes from the shadowed cloisters and manicured lawns of Glastonhall, or whether it has been served to him, piping-hot, by Lucien the celebrity chef. But it soured my wine. I felt a deep stab of shame and, of course, of guilt that I hadn't been there to guide the habits of his early manhood. It doesn't take much for us to treat every other person in this world first with respect and then with kindness, if possible. All other virtues are only targets, whereas these two are imperatives. In the days that I'd been set apart from the upbringing of my son he'd turned into a posh, sneering little viper, unnecessarily abusing the waiter in Spiga. Of course, I crossly told Robbie about what George Orwell said regarding people who bring you your food. But I made sure the waiter heard the boy get that dressing-down before he fixed up our salad.

  I also decided that a dose of a thousand days at the local comprehensive might help Robbie's true education before he followed Sarah on to university. Claire had to suffer the same fate. Though she was already doing A levels, and didn't mind in the least being switched from snooty St. Anne's. In fact she kept telling me her new school was "cool." Robbie's school was not cool. In fact, I think he found it a little hot down there in the trenches, studying Information Technology with the sons and daughters of plumbers, car salesmen and desk-jockeys like myself. Oh, and of non-celebrity chefs, it occurred to me. So now we weren't on speaking terms.

  Lucien the pastry chef might have baled him out. Why not? He was more of a father to him these days in the sense that Robbie chose to live with him and Fay instead of me. But then my network of spies had told me that Lucien, for all his celebrity endorsements, voice-overs and book deals, had money problems of his own; something I would leave Fay to discover rather than inform her and risk her hating me still further.

  A footnote on snobbery: Robbie's, Lucien's or anyone else's. No, not a demon either. Just a deeply unpleasant human trait magnified and cemented by a vigorous British class system; vicious, sadistic and thriving very well in the twenty-first century. If Robbie wanted to continue to knock tennis balls over the net with his conceited privately educated cronies he would have to find the humility to fucking well ask me for the cash.

  There was some post to open. I tore one of the envelopes and my heart quickened to see that there was a development on dear old Jane Austen and one or two other things. By the time I'd finished perusing the letter and opened the rest of the post I was draining the last of the Beaujolais into my glass. Which, even for me, was some kind of a record.

  Chapter 3

  Ideal in rare books and manuscripts. Not as a profession, but as a hobby. Second-hand and antiquarian books, as it states on my card. But not for profit, which it does not state.

  Oh no, not for profit. Not any more. Originally, when I started the game back at college in the early 1980s, profit was exactly the motivation. Those were the days when Madam Thatcher set her nose to the wind and her commandments were clear: thou shalt trample the faces of the poor and rub thy hands with glee. How we rubbed. Rubbed and rubbed.

  But all that rubbing produces smoke, and out from the smoke poured the djinn. That old story of the lamp is a mere externalization, for the simpler mind. The rubbing of hands is quite enough to do the trick. The avidity. The avarice. Out pour the demons, exulting in profit.

  Luckily for me, I became ill, and recognized the dangers. Others of my ilk from that era were not so fortunate. They went on to make vast profits or to pursue fame.

  It started for me when a slip-cased copy of The Shanachie, an Irish miscellany of short stories—featuring no less than Yeats, Shaw, Synge and Lord Dunsany—fell into my hands. I was a student at teacher-training college in Derby and while trying to sleep with a girl called Nicola I was roped into helping with a stupid jumble sale designed to raise money for the homeless. Despatched to a large house on the London Road, I collected some boxes of dusty books from a spindly old woman who stank of cat urine and who jawed incomprehensibly at me as I humped book-laden cardboard boxes to the student societies' minibus.

  I remember feeling tricked. I had hoped to spend that Saturday morning with Nicola, and in doing so gain some advantage over her many other pursuers, and here I was, my sinuses wheezing with house-mite dust, fending off invitations to sip Darjeeling with a stinking cat-lady.

  What else was in those boxes? I don't know but I've lain awake at night wondering. I recall rummaging through a fairly vile assortment of mildewed volumes for which the entire box might yield no more than a few pence at the jumble sale; and since I was already a fan of W. B. Yeats the copy of The Shanachie, neatly slip-cased, took my fancy.

  It stayed on the shelf in my student bed-sit on the Uttoxeter New Road for some months, until a bookish, stoned, pot-dealing brother of a fellow student crashed on the floor in my room one night. At breakfast time he ran a nicotine-stained finger along my bookshelves and pulled The Shanachie from its resting place. He said he thought it might be "worth a few bob" and offered to trade me a quarter ounce of very fine Thai grass. It seemed like a good deal, but for some reason I declined, and after he'd gone I decided to check it out for myself.

  I got two hundred quid for it—a handsome figure for a student in those days. Today it would fetch possibly ten times that amount. But the point is that it set me on a trail. If one of these things could turn up so casually, I decided, then there must be more out there. And I was of course correct.

  Fast forward to some thirty years later and the letter that had just arrived indicated that there might be hope yet for the Jane Austen project to arrive in time to offer a reprieve for Anthonia's GoPoint. I no longer profit personally from my forays into the antiquarian book-dealing world. Without fail I turn over the margins—often huge—to some useful cause. I'm good like that. In this case, GoPoint would get the loot. Obviously I would like to enjoy the fruits of my labours for myself. But if I did, then I wouldn't be able to cheat the demon.

  In the book-hawking game—just as in the worlds of art-dealing, arms-trading and drug-trafficking—securing the object of sale is only half of the business. Of equal or greater importance is the identification, cultivation and gulling of the buyer. The mark, if you will. In this case, the inveterate collector. The obsessive, the driven, the covetous customer who cannot breathe easily until he or she has secured yet another grain of sand for the hourglass of all eternity.

  For this type of client is not a victim of an ordinary psychological condition. This is not like alcoholism, or snobbery, or other social afflictions. This is easy prey. For this one, for the mark in question, is settled under the wings of that most red-toothed of demons.

  "Did you get it?" Otto asked me as I stepped into his gaily attractive toyshop in Ealing, even before the pretty bell over the shop door had stopped tinkling. He even stepped back from a transaction with a paying customer. Note the absence of a how-are-you, good-to-see-you, how-is-your-belly-for-spots and all o
f the rest of it from the normally genial Otto. Just this unpleasant leaping to the point to betray the presence of the leathery inner creature.

  Otto Dickinson picked up his demon somewhere in southern Iraq near the Kuwait border during Operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf War of 1991. Strictly speaking his demon should be described as a djinn, and it took up residence while paratrooper Otto, having removed his helmet, was resting under the shade of a tree with three other members of his battalion. Otto was exhausted. In the heat of the afternoon he closed his eyes and slept for perhaps only a second. Or maybe he didn't sleep at all but drifted in the measureless space between waking and sleeping, whereupon the Arabic demon, seizing the opportunity, slipped down from the tree as softly as a speck of wind-borne sand falling through the air to land upon a single hair, and then found ingress through the cavity of Otto's sunburned ear.

  Otto, recovering from his split-second of sleep, woke to hear his comrade paratrooper Wayne Bridges reading aloud from a scrap of paper: