Satan Wants Me (10 page)

The whole business lasted almost two hours. Granville paid, or rather he put it on the Lodge’s account. I hurried on to Liverpool Station and waited for the next train to Cambridge. I have now, once again, embarked for a destination which I never wish to arrive at. I would rather just sit here in the railway carriage, scribbling and forever travelling without arriving.

Having finished bringing my diary up to date, I carried on my reading of
Eros and Civilization
by Frankfurt philosopher, Herbert Marcuse. But my reading was interrupted by a tiresome old man who sat next to me. He tapped me on the shoulder,

‘Young man, young man, you don’t want to be reading that young man. It is about sex, isn’t it? Excuse me, but you don’t find sex in books. It’s a girl you want. They’re the best teachers and a book is a poor substitute for a girl.’

I could not think of anything to say to him. I could have told him that I had a girlfriend, but he never would have believed me. It was obvious that, for this old codger, my interest in neo-Hegelian philosophy was a pathetic sublimation of the sex-drive. So I just sat there red-faced, while he carried on,

‘I used to read books,’ the old man announced in a loud voice for the whole carriage to hear. ‘But then I met my Nancy and I stopped. I had no need you see … ’

Only slowly and by degrees did he fall into silence.

Getting out of the train at Cambridge, it occurred to me to wonder if I might not now be beyond the range of the psychic forces of the Lodge. Certainly I sensed nothing as I walked towards my parents’ house. Dad let me in. Mum was in the living room watching television. Her hair …

I do not want to write about this. I do not have to. It is none of my diary’s business – nor the Lodge’s. Enough. I am writing this in my old room. Although I have spent quite a lot of time here on and off since going to university, the room still looks as though it was suddenly abandoned in 1964 – the dinosaur posters on the wall, the cycling magazines, the Buddy Holly and Connie Francis records. Although the old records are still here, my record player travelled with me to London. This is a house without music. (It feels like a machine for dying in.) Mum and Dad have ‘no time’ for music. That is how they put it. Instead, they watch television with the volume turned down low. And recently, since Mum has become too tired to hold a book for any length of time, Dad reads to her. Currently it is
Of Human Bondage
by Somerset Maugham. I understand without anything actually being said that, while I am here, I should attend these sessions and, as I listen to Dad’s low-voiced mumbling rendition of Philip Carey’s ill-fated passion for the waitress, Mildred, it seems to me that these readings have taken on the nature of a prayer meeting.

But now, as I write, the house is quiet. It is a new house and everything here is white and silent. By contrast, the Black Book Lodge is all creaking staircases, dark corners and heavy drapes. Just inside the door of the Lodge a sculpted black-amoor holds a silver tray for the reception of visiting cards and a stuffed tiger glazedly looks down on the doorway from the top of the great staircase.

According to
The Function of the Orgasm
by Wilhelm Reich, cancer is the product of passion repressed. That is what Mr Cosmic told me anyway – I have not read the book. Cosmic says that Reich was murdered by the FBI (just as they dealt with Buddy Holly). The FBI wanted to suppress Reich’s orgone box. According to Cosmic, cancer is a judgement on a life that has failed. It is a sort of punishment for not living in accordance with the natural harmony. Cosmic is always smiling when he talks about things like natural harmony and part of me always thinks that what he is saying is absolutely ludicrous. Suppose that Mum had spent the last few years going round the houses and passionately offering herself to every man who fancied her, would she now be in harmony with the world? Would she be plump and apple-cheeked? Would she be constantly inventing excuses (‘I’m just off to borrow a cup of sugar’, ‘I’m just taking the dog for a walk’, ‘I’m popping round to the shops now’) in order to conceal her life-enhancing fucks with the neighbours. On the other hand, there is part of me which believes Cosmic. Certainly cancer is very mysterious. I have the superstitious feeling that one can contract cancer just by thinking about it – or writing about it. Enough.

Over breakfast they quiz me. They worry about me. They worry about my long hair – or rather what the neighbours will say about it. They worry about Sally. They are sure that she is unsuitable and a bad influence and that I spend too much time with her. Inconsistently, they also worry that I may be lonely. Am I taking drugs? Am I eating enough? What about my studies? From Dad’s perspective, that of a research chemist, sociology is not a real science. I try to soothe them and bore them into silence. If they ever found out that I was in an organisation like the Black Book Lodge it would freak them out totally.

This business about Sally being a bad influence is a bit unfortunate. Last year she came up to Cambridge to stay a couple of nights (separate bedrooms of course). At first things went OK. Although Sally had her period, there is a glow about her at such times and she claims that my big problem is that I, like most men, have menstruation-envy. Anyway on the Saturday my parents announced that they were going to be out for most of the day, so Sally and I decided to trip. Sally had been getting me to read some of her Arthurian stuff, so the trip we shared was confusedly centred round the Grail Mysteries. Sally was the Moon Priestess of the Grail Castle which was located in the midst of the Wasteland, desolate under an enigmatic curse. I was the questing knight who, having penetrated the Castle, saw a procession of dancing youths and maidens (bearing a remarkable resemblance to Pan’s People) and this dance troupe whirled and jived around a lance which dripped blood and behind the bloody lance came the chalice of the Grail which was overflowing with blood. In order for the Wasteland to be renewed, the question had to be asked, ‘The cup that bleeds, what is it for?’ To attain Gnosis I had to become the ‘red man’ of the alchemists. Stuff like that. All well and good. Except that Sally and I were not then as used to LSD as we are now and we had slightly underestimated the length of time our trips would take. By the time my parents returned we were coming down all right, but we still were not one hundred percent straight. This meant that I had not removed all the blood from my face. Also I was talking very slowly and carefully, as I was checking myself all the time in case I let something psychedelically mad out. Ever since then Sally was marked down as a bad influence. Things were not helped by my parent’s mistaking a joss-stick for hashish.

Grail Mysteries Day in Cambridge just does not bear thinking about – any more than does the bloody day Cosmic came round to my pad with a bottle of whisky and a hand-drill. I do not like whisky, but Cosmic made me drink more than half the bottle before he explained what he had in mind. He had just met a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gandalf’s Garden and this monk had explained to him, how one could enjoy a perpetual mystic high if only one had the resolution to let oneself be trepanned. Cosmic wanted me to drill a hole in the side of his head. If it all turned out to be as wonderful as the monk said it was, then he would do the same for me. Cosmic removed my glass of whisky and put the drill in my hand. The thing had a spike which I was to thrust resolutely into the side of his skull. The spike would hold the drill steady in the bone while a circle of saw-teeth went round and round until they had cut a neat little ring in the skull. This ring of bone I should be able to prise out with a penknife. Then oxygen would rush into Cosmic’s brain and give him a perpetual high. Fine. So I had another whisky while Cosmic stretched himself out on the floor. I offered to hoover, so that the place might be a bit closer to operating-theatre standards of cleanliness, but Cosmic was in a hurry to be high. I plunged the spike down onto his skull. First time round I could not bring myself to stab down hard enough. So I had another go and this time the spike went in a tiny bit and I started to turn the hand-drill. Blood was spurting out all over the place and Cosmic was whimpering a bit when I fainted and the whole thing had to be abandoned. Not a memory to dwell on.

Having written the above, I put my biro down and, closing my eyes, I concentrated on counting backwards from 1,000, in case any other gruesome memories were queuing up to be recalled.

Enough of these unpleasant digressions. I escaped my parents as soon as I could and, on the pretext of looking for some sociology textbooks, I walked into town. Just as I was about to enter Heffers Bookshop, I belatedly noticed the tune which had been playing in my head. It was ‘Strange Brew’ by the Cream – ‘Strange brew killing what’s inside of you’. I shook my head to clear it of this sinister music. On the way back to the house, I collected a shopping list’s worth of food and, as I paid for the food, I noticed that the tune was still with me, like a familiar dogging my steps. As I envisage it, such fragmentary silent tunes and lyrics inhabit the ether, like larvae from the world of the dead. They want to communicate, but they are not all there and they are not quite sure what it is that they want to communicate.

In the afternoon Dad went off to a football match. He never used to be so keen. He must have been desperate to get out of the house. I am left alone with Mum. She obviously wanted to resume her interrogation about my unsuitable life in London. But this deathly interrogation was interrupted by the phone ringing.

Sally and I are a number once more! She was ringing to make things up. The telephone was in the living room where Mum was sitting, so all Sally’s tenderness and passionate remorse had to be met by calculatedly downbeat, monosyllabic responses from me. Fortunately she swiftly twigged. We have agreed to meet on Monday. Sally says that she is, after all, prepared to share me with the Lodge.

‘I suppose it’s part of you and I love all of you.’

Then I am alone with my mother. The sickness and the treatment, working together, have turned her into a witch with straggling locks and cadaverous cheeks. Every time she opens her mouth to speak there is an exhalation of foul air. Surely I am too young to have a dying parent? I paced about the room filled with a mad anger at Mum’s weakness. Soon after I first met him, Felton showed me a passage in a book by the seventeenth-century divine, Joseph Glanvill:
‘And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death, utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.’

At length – God it was long – Dad returned from the football, like a prisoner who has just finished a brief outing on parole. At dinner we talked politics – the LSE sit-in, the Greek colonels’ coup, the Vietnam War. We are not really interested in these things, but we have nothing else to talk about. Mum and Dad have no interest in rock music, occultism or sociology. Indeed, they actively dislike these things. There is only one topic which obsesses the three of us and we do not talk about that.

Sunday is like Saturday only more so. It is like as if it is the same day with only the name changed. There was a thick morning fog. It seemed to be prowling round the house looking for a way in. I tried to read Marcuse and all his stuff about civilization’s repressive, monogamic supremacy, but I kept thinking about Sally. Perhaps the old man on the train was right after all. Sally rang again today. This time it was to ask if I thought animals had souls. It was her question of the week.

Some of the time passes helping Dad to prepare the dishes that he will serve up later in the week. While I was chopping up vegetables, he asked me if it would be possible for me to transfer my research to Cambridge? I promised to think about it. At last it is time to leave. I kiss Mum tentatively. Why so tentatively? Is cancer indeed infectious? Dad drove me to the station. He was querulous. Did I really have to leave this evening? I really did. I have a supervision on Monday. I promised to return next weekend.

On the train now, writing this, I am gleeful, set free, like a man who has escaped from a plague-stricken city. Suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if I really can be their son?

Sally met me at Liverpool Street. I stepped off the train into a cloud of soap bubbles. The bubble-blowing kit was a present for me to remind me of the transience of
maya
. She danced ahead of me down the platform, leaving me to follow her train of iridescence. Outside the station, she took my arm and started to question me about my mother. Although she was all sympathy, that sympathy was muddied by various loopy ideas about how the universe works. If I have got it right, Sally believes that my mother has allowed herself to fall under the influence of Cancer, the astrological sign. This sign of the Zodiac is negative and governs the stomach in an adverse way. Cancer and the moon preside over the grave. In order to heal herself, my mother should align herself with a positive fire sign like Leo, wear warm-coloured clothing, eat lots of curries and sunbathe. It is that simple.

Back at my place, she has my jeans off in seconds and is down on me, performing a hum job, so that my penis thrills to the mantric hum of Aum, Aum, Aum. Later, while strains of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat are coming from the record player, she produced another little present. It is a crucifix which I am to wear under my shirt, in order to protect me from the baleful influence of the Black Book Lodge. Once again she asked me to give the Lodge up and once again I replied that I had only signed up with them in the spirit of sociological enquiry.

‘So you are writing it all down?’ she wanted to know.

‘Yeah, I’m a writing a diary.’

‘Am I in it?’

I nodded.

‘Can I read it?’

I shook my head.

‘Why not? What’s to hide? We ought to be open with one another you know.’

‘It would cramp my style showing it to anyone. I don’t want to have the feeling while I’m writing it that there is a reader over my shoulder.’