How to Make Friends with Demons (33 page)

She didn't agree with much of what I had to say that night. She claimed that love is Nature's way of showing you the very best of yourself; and that your best is different from everyone else's best. That it's Nature's way of scraping back the surface of a dirty world, so that everything can be seen again, cleansed, shining, luminous.

Oh, that Yasmin! I told her that her way of thinking was dangerous. And she said, "Yes, love is dangerous. It is supposed to be dangerous. It should be like rage. It should consume us, until the next time, and consume us again."

And I said that's dramatic, and she said yes, love is dramatic.

And then she said, "I love you. I always have. Right from that day you walked into GoPoint and I said,
You don't look like an angel,
and you said,
Let's sit down
."

And my dessert froze in my mouth, and I went, "
What?
" and some of it sprayed across the table.

It was like one of those moments when the band stops playing and you hear yourself shouting too loud, and everyone in the restaurant looks round at you. Except there was no band.

"What?" I repeated. "What did you say?"

"If this is an evening of confessions," she said, "it's my turn. Remember how I told you I used to work at GoPoint? With Antonia?"

"Yes."

"Well, it was only partially true. I did work there in a sense: Antonia asked me to organize a library out of all the books that were donated. So that was one of my jobs. I was actually an inmate. Rather than someone who worked there. What Antonia always generously refers to as someone
in recovery
. Do you still want to come back to my place?"

"Yes, if you'll pay the bill," I said. "Another thing I have to tell you is that I am completely broke."

We took a cab. Naturally I asked her to elaborate on what she'd said in the restaurant, but she refused to say any more until we were back at her place. She asked why I had no money. I explained that I'd given the whole lot—and some I didn't have—to Antonia at GoPoint. It made her scream. She found this funny. I didn't know why.

There was a cold, shared hall with paint peeling everywhere, and some long-dead post and junk mail littering the space inside the door. A flight of echoing, dusty stairs took us up to her room, which was neat and tidy enough but it was like a room someone is just about to move into or out of. There was a large bed with a white duvet and fluffy pillows almost fresh from the factory packaging. A hanging rail with a few dresses. An ancient central-heating radiator under the window kept the place warm.

The first thing she did was to pull down the blind and switch on the bedside light.

I said, "Do you have any wine?"

"Wine, no. Coffee we have." Still in her coat she went out to the kitchen to make the coffee. I took the opportunity to cast about the room looking for all the detritus of living that would yield up some more information about her, but there was precious little. Finally—and since there was nowhere else to sit—I perched on the edge of the bed, and waited.

When she came back, she handed me both mugs of coffee to hold so that she could take off her coat. When she'd done that she kicked off her shoes, kneeled on the bed and took back her coffee, never seeming to take her eyes from me. We drank the coffee in silence. I watched her lips on the rim of the mug every time she took a sip.

"Good coffee," I said after I'd finished mine. She found that funny, too. Again, I don't know why. I was proving to be pretty hilarious all round. "Do you know what this place reminds me of? It reminds me of a student room. You know, minimal."

"It's been a good while since you've done something like this," she suggested. "Hasn't it?"

"A bloody long while. I'm quietly freaking out here."

"It all makes sense to me now. You think you did something very bad when you were young; and now you think you're cursed and not entitled to anything good. You think you're not entitled to love anyone. You also think you have to do good deeds to atone. Hence everything you do for GoPoint."

"Well, that's overstating it all a little."

"Is it?"

I'm sure I sighed heavily and ran my fingers through my hair. "I'm sorry. I've forgotten all the dance moves."

"Dance moves?"

"What to say. What to do with my hands. Starting with what to do with my coffee cup."

She drained her own coffee cup and threw it over her shoulder and across the floor. It bumped on the bare board, but didn't break. She took mine from my hand and did the same with that one. It bumped into the corner of the room, also without breaking. It was a pleasing sound. It was a sound that said maybe we'd gone past the point of no return. It was a sound that said just surrender to the demon.

She shimmied closer to me, her nylons swishing on the white cotton duvet cover as she drew near. Close enough for me to tell the difference between her perfume and her natural body scent. Then she kissed me, and the kiss drew all the tension out of me and at that moment it was like something else came into the room, riding on smoke. Some dark enfolding power, black like sleep, red like embers, white with snowy wings. She held my face between her hands and gently pressed her tongue into my mouth. I felt myself going under; I wanted to swoon away, like a girl.

Perhaps because of that I put my hand on her breast. She moved it away. "No. Not until I've said what I have to tell you. I'm going to take off my dress but I just want you to hold me. Is that okay?"

I didn't know what was going on, but I said yes, it was okay. I watched her unbutton the cheongsam dress and take it off. I was hypnotised. She was like the snake-charmer. A slight shimmy or movement to the side had me almost swaying.

She made me lie back on the bed and took off my shoes before stretching out next to me, her head on my chest. "Listen to me," she said. "I'm going to tell you some stuff about me and you may not like me so much when I'm finished."

I lay there holding her, partly relieved that I wasn't expected to fling myself on her and rut like a porn star, partly disappointed that I couldn't.

"As I told you, I was actually an inmate at GoPoint. I was adrift. I was coming off a lot of drink and drugs at that time. Perilously close to a life of whoring. It's a greyer area than you think, especially if you can move in wealthy circles and your options for work are limited. A man buys you a bracelet, an expensive Blackberry device, a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes. But he doesn't want to see you at the weekends."

"Ah! There's a name for a demon of that grey area."

"Benefactor. You realise what you've become and you hate yourself. You do it, but you can't get rid of your own conscience hovering at your shoulder, watching you, watching you."

Oh yes, I thought. Seen that.

"So you do more drugs, all so you don't even have to see that thing watching you. And you step out all sexy in your designer shoes. But you pull back from the good-time-girl thing, just at the brink. Where are you going to go? You live with a boyfriend; boyfriend gives way to a friend; friend gives way to an acquaintance; acquaintance gives way to a squat. Down the spiral. More drugs. William, I'm giving you the shorthand, right?

"I played in a band, been there, done that—I can sing, you know? I'll sing for you one day. More drink. And you gig, and you live rough and fast. You split from that scene and the drink is a need by now, not a choice, and that thing, that ape, that shape at your shoulder is following you everywhere; and then comes a night when you realise you have no resources, and no friends who will take you in, and I mean no one. And someone gives you a card with the words GoPoint on it and they say,
here,
it's pretty desperate but it will keep you warm for a few nights.

"And there's this extraordinary woman: Antonia, who is like a lantern in the storm and who asks no questions and who makes no judgement, but slowly she helps you start to make a fist of yourself again. And then one day she's running around trying to straighten the place up because, she says, our
angel
is coming.

"And of course she means
benefactor,
but we all get into scrubbing down the doss-house so as not to scare this angel away. And when this angel comes, I do wonder what sort of man just hands out his cash to a lot of deadbeats, so I approach him. Of course I'm not a pretty sight: my lips are blistered with cold sores, my hair has been hacked back and I'm wearing shades because the light gives me migraines, and I say,
You don't look like an angel
."

Those last few words went right through me. "That was
you?"

"And you said, 'Let's sit down.'"

"Yes," I said.

"I remember you sweeping some muck off a plastic chair—for me—and you sit down in your fancy coat and I sit down in my filthy jeans and you take out a packet of cigarettes and offer me one but you don't take one for yourself, and you say, 'Do you know what an angel looks like?' 'Sure,' I say. 'No you wouldn't,' you say. And you proceed to tell me your philosophy of demons.

"I think: he's cracked, completely cracked. But it's amusing. You're funny. And clever. Then you tell me I have one right alongside me, a demon. You are so convincing that I actually look round. You say it's listening with interest to our conversation, attending on the outcome, waiting to see if the exchange will make a difference to me. Suddenly that isn't funny. It creeps me out. I ask you how they work, these demons, and you tell me that mostly they just wait.

"Of course I ask you: Wait for what? And you say you don't know, but that it seems like they are waiting for some kind of opportunity. You say we should spend our lives keeping them out, except for the good ones, which we should let in; and you say that these are called angels but that they amount to the same thing. And if I remember right I say: I want some of what you've been smoking. But you ignore that remark as if I haven't even said it.

"I say, 'Here's a reality check for you: you can't change the world.' And as you stand up to leave, you say, 'Ah, but you can change one person's world.' And then you go off to say your goodbyes to Antonia, and the strangest feeling passes through me. Like a beam of light. Not literally, of course, but that's how it feels. And with it is the feeling that I want to go with you, right then. But I know of course that I can't.

"After you've gone, I ask Antonia about you. 'That's William Heaney,' she says. 'He keeps this place open.' 'Is he rich?' I say. 'No,' she says, 'not in terms of money.'

"Your words stay with me long after you've gone. I dwell on what you'd said about changing one person's world. I even have dreams about you. You see, William, that tiny interaction, that little sit-down chat, plants something inside me, and it's growing and has been growing ever since. There's a chain reaction going off inside me.

"After three days of thinking about it, I ask Antonia to help me clean up. Seriously. I tell her I want a job, any job. We talk about things. Languages have always come very easily to me—I'd picked up some French and German from touring with the band—so she thinks I could train for secretarial work. She fixes up the training and pays for it all with GoPoint funds. Your money? I dunno.

"Even while I'm training it's easy to find temporary work. Big corporations, they don't know or care who you are, where you've been. Someone always wants a pile of photocopying doing. Antonia pays for a suit of clothes for me and she arranges for better accommodation. I practice hard at my skills and I soon get better work. If you have the knack of anticipating what your boss needs you can become indispensable.

"In one year I transform myself from dosser to serious PA. I admit that some mornings I look in the mirror and I see the doss-girl standing just behind the smart PA, like a bad photocopy, like a ghost, but I do the work. I network. I let people know what I've got. I blag work sometimes, then I dig in to make up for anything I lack. I get international work. I get special assignments. I move so far away from the person I was at GoPoint that I change my name."

"What was your name then?" William asks.

"Anna."

"I knew! I knew it! I've no idea why I knew."

"I introduced myself and shook your hand. Maybe you remember it from when you met me? I like the idea that you remembered somewhere. It means a bit of me stayed with you. Anyway, the next six years take me to some interesting places. (I was a lap-dancer for a while, how do you like that?) But that life takes me a little too near what I've escaped from. It's all another story. The thing is, over those years, I often think of you. You had come into my life and turned it around. I never forget that. So I finally decide to find you again.

"It's ridiculously easy. You still look after GoPoint and you still work for that odd organisation. If you want to know why I chase you, it's because I need to repay you somehow. To give something of myself. Naturally I have no way of knowing whether or not you would want me, or anything from me. But when I find you I'm elated to see that you have so much need. I know I could be here for you at a time when you need it. Just like you were there for me. You still listening? You haven't gone to sleep?"

"Oh, I'm listening," I told her. "I'm listening."

"I'm telling you all this because you have to know that I didn't meet you by accident."

"But that day when I met you, you were with Ellis."

"No. We weren't ever lovers. I just used him to get close to you. But I wanted it to look like we'd met by accident. I followed you into a poetry reading. I waited to get my book of poems signed by him and heard you both arrange to meet. It was easy to get close to Ellis after that."

"You stalked me."

For the first time in her story she lifted her head from my chest and looked me in the eye. "Yes, William, I stalked you. I targeted you. I decided I would make a demon of myself and wait, wait for an opportunity to slip into your world. And here I am. A piece of karma in a pretty dress. But before you dismiss me, let me tell you that you can do what you want with me. If you want me to I'll leave you alone. It's not my plan to hang round your neck. I don't ask anything from you except what you want to give."