How to Make Friends with Demons Page 4

  I wasn't sure for a moment if he was taking the piss. Then I decided he couldn't be. We chatted a little bit, offering guarded information, and concluded that we'd been dumped by our respective spouses—spice?—within moments of each other.

  He reached a leathery hand across the bar. "Ian. Though everyone calls me Stinx on account that I reek of some sort of chemical or other. I'm a painter."

  To my discredit I assumed he meant the sort of painter who slaps a coat of magnolia on your hall-stairs-and-landing. I didn't realize my mistake until much later. We weren't about to spill our emotional guts, so in turn he asked me what I did.

  "I'm director of a youth organization. Well, kind of a youth organisation."

  "What's that, then?"

  "I head up the National Organisation for Youth Advocacy. NOYA."

  "What's that, then?"

  "It's an umbrella outfit. I represent a number of organizations to government and official bodies, that sort of thing."

  "How's that work, then?"

  "We lobby for change, make representations, sit on funding committees. You know?"

  "No, I don't get it."

  I suddenly felt depressed about my job as well as my marriage. "No, no one ever does. I dread meeting anyone new because I feel worn out just trying to explain my job."

  Stinx waved a nicotine-yellowed finger at the barmaid, a freckled redhead with button-eyes. "Haven't I told you before not to leave a man with an empty glass?"

  "It's my first night on the job," she said, pouring me a fresh globe of wine. She was Australian, as are all bar staff now in London. Compulsory. "So that's kinda gotcha."

  "You're too fast for me," he said. "Have one for yourself."

  While we skirted around our respective matrimonial disasters I noticed another man sitting at the bar fiddling with the text on his mobile phone, though I had the impression he was eavesdropping on our conversation. He was Asian and extraordinarily handsome; the kind of groomed figure you see in moody men's magazines with full-page adverts and quarter-page articles. He tapped away at his text with growing impatience.

  Meanwhile Stinx shuffled one stool along to sit next to me. "What's the wisdom, then?" he said seriously. "What is it?"

  "About women? You must be joking if you think I know the answer to that."

  "Date blokes instead," the Asian man said without looking up from his text.

  We both turned our heads towards him at the same time. "Well, I suppose that's one answer," Stinx said gruffly.

  "Except I've just been dumped." He held up his phone. "By text, would you believe it? The arrogance of it."

  Stinx reached over and grabbed the phone from him, reading the message. "My life!" He wagged his pollen-gold finger at the Aussie barmaid again. "Give this one another drink, too. We seem to be forming a club."

  "Great. Can I join?" said the barmaid.

  "No, you bloody cannot. But you can have another drink."

  So the Candlelight Club was formed. It's a curious thing, but when Diamond Jaz joined the conversation we had a warm sense of our own ridiculousness. Camaraderie flushed through us like a good wine as we paraded our wounds. I'd seen it before on the hospital ward when I had my appendix removed. Men in hospital drop their competitiveness and become tender, solicitous, motherly, wanting each other to recover. And so were we. I surprised myself by talking at length about Fay and how much she had meant to me. Stinx waxed poetic about Lucy and actually cried at one point in the evening, though we were saturated with booze by that time, so it was allowed. And Diamond Jaz, the baby of the group who did indeed turn out to be a photographic model, explained that he was bisexual and could therefore speak with authority on the difference between being dumped by a man you loved and a woman you loved: he said there wasn't any.

  It was like falling off the world, and falling for days, until you hit a shelf. There you lay for a while until, struggling to your feet in the dark, you found steps hewn in the stone. Though your heart felt too heavy to climb the steps, climb them you did, knowing they were without number.

  I remember saying all this—or slurring something like it—while the Aussie barmaid tried to get us to drink up so that she could go home. Everyone else had already gone, and she'd locked the door while she cleaned up around us. Anyway, after I'd finished I looked up to see Stinx and Jaz regarding me with glittering, storm-holed eyes. I'd either impressed or bored them into silence.

  Stinx, slobbering slightly, dug an eagle's claw into my shoulder and one into Jaz's shoulder and gripped both hard. "It's all right, boys," he snarled, mashing his words. "Because we're falling togiver."

  And fall together we had. Over the last two years or more, meeting up once a fortnight pretty much without fail. There's fidelity for you. We were what those eighties feminists kitted out in humorous dungarees used to term a support group, except we never used to call it that. It was a drinking club, an eating club, and some evenings it was a laugh-until-the snot-comes-down-your-nose club. Say what you like, we were a spiritual salve for each other.

  When Lucy came back to Stinx, Diamond Jaz and I waited with trepidation and then with relief as we attended their "re-marriage" ceremony and knees-up. Meanwhile Stinx and I watched, with the kind of horrified fascination that you might have for someone juggling two or three buzzing chainsaws, as Jaz passed through one relationship after another. And they attended, like a pair of anxious parents, to my utter failure to recover from Fay; even setting up from time to time—God help me and the poor women involved—dates of a romantic nature.

  But here he was, reduced or returned to the state in which I'd found him that first evening in The Pineapple. His resort to drugs—I don't even know what crystal meth is, but it doesn't sound like something anyone with a moderate interest in mental stability would want to grapple with—was desperate, because Stinx had a historical affiliation with pharmaceuticals. It was a serious threat to our forgery project. Though I was more concerned with Stinx's state of mind than the project, except of course where it might cause problems for Antonia and GoPoint.

  "She left you? Lucy left you? When?"

  "Night afore last. No, the one before that. I've sorta lost one night."

  "You could have called me."

  "I tried. No answer. Tried to call Diamond, too, but he's in fucking New York modelling cashmere scarves with Ground Zero as a backdrop, I ask you."

  "Get your coat." I said. "Come and stay at my place."

  "No, mate, I've got this job to finish."

  "It can wait."

  "No, it can't. I've already put you behind. I can't let you down William. I can't. Nor can I let down those boys and girls."

  "Is it going to work out? The two copies, I mean. Six vols in total, isn't it?"

  "It's not like it's twice the work. I'll have to finesse a few differences between the two. Spine and edges. Joints and stuff. But I'll 'ave it for you. Work through the night. And the next night."

  Stinx made it sound easy but I knew he proceeded sheet by sheet. He was a master forger. Originally an accomplished bookbinder, Stinx had been called to make restorative work on some old books that had suffered water damage after a cellar flood. He'd quickly grasped that between restoration and reproduction there are several grey areas. This work was child's play compared with some of the things he'd done in his colourful life.

  "Want me to stay over? Do the coffee? Marmite on toast?"

  "You sling your hook, mate. You got work in the morning."

  He was already turning away from me, digging his hand under the back of his collar, surveying his workshop. I decided to leave him to it. But before I left I saw something skitter under a workshop bench. I thought I saw tiny black eyes watching me. I decided to say nothing to Stinx.

  The door to his workshop faced one of those steel industrial cage elevators still working from the days when the building was a warehouse. He followed me out and opened the cage for me.

  "Call me," I said, "if crystal meth comes knocking."


  He pointed a gnarled, golden finger at me as the cage began to descend. "Be lucky, William."

  Chapter 5

  I'm not sure what it was that I saw under the table in Stinx's workshop. People are extremely ignorant about demons and their nature. It is possible to walk into almost any bookshop and find some kind of encyclopaedia or A-to-Z of demons. How disappointing these publications are, for they generally turn out to be nothing more than lists of the names of gods of various cultures. Beelzebub, for example, the god of the Philistine city of Ekron; or Asmodeus, the Persian god of wrath. These are only demonic in as much as the Judeo-Christian religions took them to be rivals.

  These are not demons. These do not number in the one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven, as brilliantly catalogued by Goodridge. And anyway, if it's long lists of gods you want, you need go no further than the Hindu religion to stop you in your tracks. Diamond Jaz, who was at one time in his youth training for the Sikh priesthood, informed me that they are countless; and the last figure I was quoted was "in excess of three hundred and thirty million." Right. And of course, the person trying to count them is in the grip of that particular demon Goodridge characterized as the "demon of counting the ever-changing number."

  I was thinking about this as I neared King's Cross. The light was already fading and a man in a long, filthy coat croaked at me from a doorway. I was thinking about the person working for some government agency whose job it was to count the homeless. I'd probably walked five or six yards past the shop doorway when I stopped and retraced my steps.

  I looked hard at the wreck of a man in the doorway. His long hair was plastered to his face. Tear tracks—I'm sure that's what they were—ran down his grimy face and into his beard. He seemed to be all in.

  He blinked at me. "Ain't it terrible, I'm trying to get a cup of tea."

  "Seamus, isn't it?" I said. "We met at Otto's place the other day. You were with Otto in the Gulf."

  He looked away, to the side. "Don't keep going on about it."

  I wasn't sure he was talking to me. "How are you, Seamus? You look a bit rough, if you don't mind me saying."

  "Cup of tea would be the thing."

  I could have easily given him a couple of quid and carried on walking. But we all know what a cup of tea means, so instead I asked him if he knew about GoPoint. He said he'd heard of it. I found a business card and scribbled the GoPoint address on the reverse, plus a brief note for Antonia, and pushed it into his hand. Seamus looked disappointed. Then on second thoughts I hailed a black cab and steered Seamus into it.

  "Thanks," said the driver. "I wanted him in my cab."

  "Shaddup. Here's a twenty. Make sure he finds the door to the place, will you?"

  Then I took the Tube to the offices of NOYA in Victoria.

  It was about eleven when I rolled up to work. It makes no difference what time I go in. For one thing I'm often there until seven in the evening or travelling for the organisation, and for another I'm the boss. In any case, Val, my long-term secretary, holds the fort from nine to five. Val's a lovely girl. Old school. Immaculate filing cabinets and keeps a delicate tissue tucked inside her sleeve.

  Very formal secretarial standards, too. Always opens the post for me and removes the envelopes unless marked "Personal and Confidential," which they never are. Except this morning, there it is on my desk with the other, opened mail: a white envelope.

  "What's this?"

  "You'll have to open it to find out, won't you?" Val often speaks to me as if I'm twelve years old. "Looks like an invitation to me."

  Invitations come often enough—usually to some stiff formal reception or briefing hosted by a government agency and preceded by a pernicious glass of chardonnay or some filthy sherry. Inside the envelope was a stiff white card. A small publishing house called Winding Path was inviting me to the launch of a book by one Charles Fraser.

  "Bloody Hell!" I said aloud. "There's a name I haven't heard in a while."

  The publicist had added a little note, telling me that Charles Fraser had acknowledged my contribution to the book and that they hoped to see me there. What contribution? I thought.

  Val laid a file on my desk and looked over my shoulder at the invite. "How exciting for you," she said, as if I'd been chosen to play for the junior school football team. "Is the author someone you know?"

  It was at teacher-training college in Derby in the early 1980s, just after my interest in antiquarian books had hatched. I'd moved back into halls of residence for my final year and the college chaplain was interviewing all inmates of Friarsfield Lodge in turn. The Lodge, a shambling Edwardian white-walled mansion converted into single studies, accommodated twenty-two male students. Sometimes the place was a zoo, but mostly it was a dull, tranquil residence with bathrooms full of drying rugby shirts and drying rooms cluttered with football boots or potholing gear. It was approaching Christmas. Fraser I knew from my English class, but I hadn't spent much time with him. We were being interviewed in our own rooms, and I saw from the posted schedule that I was to follow Fraser.

  We'd had plenty of notice to get rid of any pornography or pot-smoking paraphernalia before the chaplain's gentle knock on the door. He came in rubbing his hands, like a surgeon about to perform a routine appendectomy. He declined my offer of tea and sat himself in a chair by the gently hissing gas fire. I sat on my bed.

  The college was originally established by the Church of England. Even though the government had stripped the church of its controlling powers, the church still took its ministry seriously, providing a chaplaincy and offering the usual ceremonies at the beginning and end of term. Dick Fellowes, a wiry and effusive character with sparkling eyes, was normally informal, but that day he was got up in his dog collar. For the record, he also sported a blonde goatee at a time when no-one else did, not even for a joke.

  He was nobody's fool. He sat on the Students' Union committee, but because the students wanted him there. "So, have you seen it?"

  "Yes."

  "You've been up to see it?"

  "Yes."

  "Since this all broke out, or before?"

  "I was with the porter when he opened it up."

  "Oh yes. So you'd never seen it before the fuss?"

  "You can't get in, normally. It's supposed to be locked."

  All the time he was asking me these questions he was looking not at me but around my room. For clues. He keenly surveyed the posters on my wall. His eyes fell on an African carved-wood mask a girlfriend had given me because her mother found it spooky and didn't want it in the house. When he got out of his chair it was with the litheness of a jungle cat. He went over to my bookcase and started rubbing his hands again. He crouched down with his back to me. I know he checked out the spine of every single paperback on my shelf. There were certain things I'd removed along with the porn and the pot; now I wondered if there were dust marks that would tip him off to the fact that, like the British Library, I had a secret or withheld collection. After he'd done with my books he started leafing through all my tapes.

  He turned and flashed me a huge smile over his shoulder. "I know I'm here to talk about that thing upstairs, but I find people's music collections fascinating, don't you?"

  Sure.

  He waved one my tapes at me. "I adore this! Does things for your head!"

  "They've got another album just out," I said helpfully.

  He stood up, evidently satisfied with my taste in Indie rock. He turned and twinkled his eyes at me. "Then I shall have to put it on my Christmas list. Shall we go up and take a look at the thing?"

  He followed me out. I made sure the latch was down to lock the door and he expressed surprise. He wanted to know if I always locked my door. I pointed out that there had been one or two petty thefts recently. He said he wondered what the world was coming to when students couldn't trust each other any more.

  Dick Fellowes led the way up the first two flights of stairs. I noticed that he wore very tight black trousers and black patent-leather shoes.
There was something mincing and effeminate about the way he trailed his hand along the banister and swung round the post at the top of the stairs. I knew that he'd once nursed a student all night through a bad acid trip. Apparently he'd been good enough to sit with the ninny and reassure him until the effects had completely worn off. A rumour did the rounds that Fellowes had buggered the student before persuading him it was all part of his hallucinations. I fell on the minority side of believing this to be a malicious story.

  I think that was when I first learned the glorious cost-free feeling of righteousness that comes with defending other people's reputations.