How to Make Friends with Demons (2 page)

"He can't be," she said, looking at me, not Ellis. "He helps people out."

"Helps people out? I could tell you a thing or two about
Doctor Helps People Out
here."

She held out a tiny white hand across the table. "My name's Yasmin."

No it isn't, I wanted to say, because she didn't look or talk at all like a Yasmin. Demon of false naming, we know all about that one. But I held my tongue. "William Heaney."

"I know."

Well, there we had it. She knew my name before I'd revealed it; I didn't know hers even after she'd declared it to me. Another demon in there somewhere. Perhaps we held each other's gaze a splinter too long because Ellis said, "I think I'm going to vomit."

"How do you two people know each other?" I asked genially.

And as she told me, my demon, my real demon, who had been listening, crouched, always attentive, breathed its sweet and poison breath in my ear. "
Take her away from the lout. Take her home with you. Lift her skirt
."

She talked at length and I listened. Voices are sometimes like the grain in a strip of wood. You can hear the character of someone's experience in their voice. Hers was warm, and vital, but damaged. I followed the lovely tracks of her elegant hands as she spoke. I wondered how he'd found her. Ellis has a routine; I've seen it executed at his poetry readings. Anna, I thought would be a better name for her, Anna.

"And I dunno, we just . . . clicked," she said.

Yes, I bet you did
is what I thought. When she'd finished talking, Yasmin—or Anna as I was already calling her—sat back, a little self-conscious that she'd enjoyed the stage for five minutes. Ellis tugged at his ear lobe and said nothing. "Well," I said, raising my glass across the table, "here's to clicking."

We all touched our glasses together.

I explained that I was on my way to GoPoint when Anna announced that she used to work there several years ago. I was surprised. She didn't seem the type. "So you know Antonia?"

"Course. She's a saint."

"She is. I'll mention your name to her."

"So when might you have it?" Ellis growled, strong-arming his way back into the conversation.

I dealt him the poker face. "I'll let you know. Of course." Then I drained my glass and stood up, rewinding my silk scarf around my throat against the November cold.

"Are you going there now?" Anna said. "I have to walk that way back to work. I'll walk with you."

Ellis looked miffed.

"That would be lovely," I said, shucking on my coat, "but I have one or two errands to run first and I don't want to hold you up."

I don't know why but I got a sense that she was disappointed, though if that were true she disguised it. I could see she didn't really want to be with Ellis, and I felt a wee bit sorry for him. What fools we make of ourselves over women. What naked prey. I promised Ellis to contact him when I had more news and I shook hands again with Anna/Yasmin/whoever. She said she hoped that we might meet again. As I turned I caught my slightly foxed reflection in the Karl Marx mirror. She was still looking at me; and he at her.

Then I was out of the Museum Tavern and striding across Bloomsbury towards Farringdon.

The window in the door to the GoPoint Centre had been kicked in since I was there last. Someone had made a hasty repair with a sheet of chipboard, which had offered a nice target for a graffiti artist with a tag like a Chinese ideogram. Below the tagged board, a woman with a head of unkempt, swept-back long curls, raven-black but grey at the temples, was sitting on the steps looking blissed out. Her sweater was a stained rag with pin-hole burns dotted on the chest and her jeans were filthy. She wore swollen Dr. Martens boots, the kind once favoured by elegant British skinheads.

"Gorra fag, 'ave you?"

"I don't smoke and neither should you."

"Got the price of a pint, then?"

I sat down on the step next to her. The concrete slab shot a piercing cold through my buttocks. She looked up at the sky between the tower blocks and said, "I was in a printing house in hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation."

Other people might have John Clare or William Burroughs or Thomas Aquinas quoted at them by this woman. For some reason it was only ever Billy Blake for me. "I'm really sorry, Antonia. It hasn't come through yet."

Without taking her eyes from the clouds overhead she reached out and put a hand on my knee. "No worries. I know if anyone can get it then it will be you, and even if you don't you will have tried your very best." Then she turned to face me with those cloudless blue eyes, and she smiled. "And you know how happy it makes me that you try for us? You know that, William? It's
so
important for me that you
know
that."

"How long before they come and close you down?" I asked.

"Don't fret, William. Lots of time."

"A month?"

"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 pinprick 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?"

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.