Satan Wants Me (15 page)

‘You wait and see – this island will have become nothing more than the fifty-first state of the United States of America. I now think that we would have done better to have fought with Germany against America and the commies. I tell you this beatnik thing, which has reached us from America, offers a much bigger threat to the British way of life than does communism. At least the communists are men who know how to work for a living, whereas beatniks – ’

Granville smoothly interrupted,

‘Julian, please, you will not find any beatniks in either Britain or America today. Perhaps it is hippies that you are thinking of?’

Julian looked momentarily baffled. It had not occurred to him that there could be any fine grades of distinction between the various kinds of youth-scum. While he stood there, perplexed and speechless, the dinner-gong sounded. As Julian led the way towards the house, Granville fell back to walk with me. He told me that I was not to get into an argument with Julian or upset him in any way. Julian is ‘temperamentally frail’.

Well, ‘frail’ is one way of putting it.

We sat down at the table. Julian took one look at the soup and said, ‘I wish I were dead.’

Then he abruptly turned to Felton,

‘But, then again, I sometimes think that I am dead already. You would tell me the truth wouldn’t you?’

A horrible kind of creepy coldness crept over me, for this was just the same as one of those strange thoughts I had been playing about with only yesterday.

Julian rose to his feet and with his arms in supplication, he chanted over the soup,

‘What I doubly detest, I will not eat; what I detest is shit, and I will not eat it; excrement, I will not consume it. It shall not fall from my belly, it shall not come near my fingers, and I will not touch it with my toes. “What will you live on,” say the gods and spirits to me, “in this place to which you have been brought?” I will live on seven loaves which have been brought to me; four loaves are with Horus and three loaves which are with Thoth. What I detest, I will not eat; what I detest is shit and I will not eat it; what my ka detests is shit, and it shall not enter my body, I will not approach it with my hands, I will not tread on it with my sandals. I will not flow for you into a bowl, I will not empty out for you into a basin. I will not take anything from upon the banks of your ponds, I will not depart upside down for you.’

Then he sat down again.

‘There is plenty of life in you yet, Julian,’ said Felton.

We three continued to spoon away at our soup in a sort of embarrassed, surreptitious fashion. Julian tried to get the butler to remove his bowl, but Felton countermanded this and forced him to consume every single spoonful. Julian made the most horrible faces. Although Felton had told Julian that he was still alive, the tone in which this was said had not been reassuring. Julian looked terrified. Perhaps he was right? If so, I had never had dinner with a dead man before. And, if Julian was dead, then quite likely I was dead too. Perhaps this dinner in a country house with its ordinary-seeming menu and napery was a kindly illusion which might soon fade. Then Julian and I would see things as they really were and we would find ourselves in the Antechamber of the Final Judgement. It really was shit being dished out to us in the soup-bowls. Anubis-Granville would hold us by our arms and Felton-Thoth would point to the scales. Together they would watch and see our hearts weighed against the feather of Maat. And just beyond the next threshold the Eater of the Dead would be waiting to mangle and chomp on our bodies.

However, unlike Julian, I did not really believe any of this. It was just a drunken fantasy. I was woozily back on my favourite fantasy trip of being dead and what I was playing around with in my head was a very peculiar sort of crime novel in which the detective-narrator discovers that it is he who is the victim of the crime he is investigating and that he is already dead. I just like to play with such nutty ideas – just as I think from time to time about sliding down the razor-studded banister. I was in no real danger of joining Julian in a
folie à deux
. Spells from
The Book of the Dead
and from other ancient Egyptian papyri play a large part in the pathworkings of the Lodge and quite a few of our meditation fantasies involve encounters with the gods of the Afterlife, but they are strictly fantasies. Anubis and Osiris have no objective reality. They are exteriorisations of the internal workings of the sorcerer’s psyche.

All of which is not to say that fantasy-exteriorisations are not frightening. They are. If I allow myself to think of how I bedded down with the carrion body of Tbubi, a queasiness steals over me and I hear again that scream which was also a stench. I find myself paddling a flesh which gives way under the pressure of my hands. Tbubi’s rupturing skin goes livid and her panting for sex has given way to cadaveric spasms. (I imagine that she is what Sally will actually become at the very end of her life and that is the real horror of the thing.) The fact that Tbubi is
only
a creature of my mind makes things worse, not better. Worse yet, Felton knows exactly how to force such things out of me. Knowing myself to be afraid of Felton’s powers, I was not surprised that Julian was similarly afraid. But what astonished me was that Julian seemed to be even more afraid of me than he was of Felton. This was to manifest itself in a bizarre burst of aggression towards the end of the meal.

After the soup, things quietened down a bit and Julian did not seem to need to ritually curse the courses which followed. He was, however, drinking heavily – which, since I was matching him drink for drink, I was well aware of. For a long time the talk at table was about such things as the opera season at Glyndebourne. (I was right out of it and contentedly fantasising about myself as a dead detective.) But then Granville was stupid enough to mention that
The Times
’s music critic, William Mann, had compared ‘Sgt. Pepper’ to the symphonies of Beethoven. Then Felton made some sneer about it being impossible to take popular music seriously, particularly stuff produced by a group who could not even spell their own name properly and suddenly, Julian remembered his earlier difficulty in understanding what beatniks and hippies were.

‘Hippies! Hippy! What a silly name! Do they waggle their hips like girls? Yes, perhaps I did mean hippy, though I should be most grateful if you could explain to me the difference between a hippy and a beatnik, and explain to me also what is the good of either, and, while you are at it, explain why you have to go around with girly long hair.’

I came to with a jolt, suddenly aware that Julian was addressing these last remarks not at Granville, but at me. Granville put his hand on my arm. I suppose that he was signalling that I should not reply to this, but Julian pressed on,

‘I take it that the excessive length of your locks is intended as some kind of badge of commitment to the work-shy hippy ideal, whatever that may be?’

I was so very drunk and (as the newly-invented dead detective) in such a benign mood, that I was not immediately aware that Julian was trying to insult me. I actually thought of him as some kind of amateur sociologist who was intending a serious enquiry.

‘As far as I know “hippy” refers to some kind of drop-out who opposes establishment values. I am doing a doctorate in sociology and planning to have an academic career. I live in a fair degree of comfort in Horapollo House and I’m not politically active. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to label me a hippy.’

I was vaguely aware of a bell pealing somewhere in the house.

‘I am pleased to hear it,’ Julian said (though he did not look pleased at all). ‘A hippy is, I think, a kind of white nigger. He has embraced nigger values, their tom-tom and banjo music, and their loose morals. The popular songs, which have emerged from that sort of environment are about copulation – nothing but. Hippies are Britain’s unwanted white-nigger changelings. They are the ungrateful, unwashed, drugged and sponging children of an affluent age – ’

Julian’s drunkenly dyspeptic ravings were interrupted by the reappearance of Mr Dunn, the butler.

‘A message for Mr Keswick,’ he said.

‘Yeah, yeah. Just let me finish this first,’ I replied, for I had now worked out that I was indeed being insulted. ‘It should not take too long to establish the realities of the matter. As for “work-shy hippies”, forgive me, Julian, but you don’t strike me as being a horny-handed son of toil yourself. How much work have you done in your life?’ Without pausing to let him answer, I rushed on. ‘What I should have said to you just now is that, although I am not a hippy, I am ashamed of not being one. The hippy way of life embodies a wholly admirable set of ideals: peace, love, liberty, tolerance, and a readiness not to judge by conformist standards. As for “work-shy”, the sort of work you are thinking about is used by society to drill people into conformity. I think hippies are right to use drugs in their quest for self-discovery, as well as in a more generalised investigation of the ultimate structures of the universe. The best hippies are engaged in an all-consuming quest for enlightenment and ultimate truth.’

I sat back with arms folded. Mr Dunn, the butler, said that there was a phone message for me. Felton tried to stop Julian replying, so that I could leave the room and answer the phone, but, having got a rise out of me, Julian was gleeful,

‘Now at last we are hearing what you really think! And it is such thin, wet stuff! The British hippy preaches peace from behind the protection of the bayonets of the British army. The liberty he espouses is assured, not by his poetic musings, but by the hard work of policemen and courts. His love is funded by the administrators of the dole. Decent, ordinary people instinctively recoil from a hippy. It is not just a matter of the dirt, the drugs, or the half-witted inarticulacy, which are all endemic among people of that ilk. It is that hippies and popular musicians have turned sexual perversion into an ideal of life. There is a sick softness, an effeminacy about these young men with their long hair and their flowery shirts and beads. They are actually advertising their desire to become girls. It is all so shameful! Well, why don’t they go to Morocco and have the operation? Why don’t you?’

‘Do not answer that, Non Omnis Moriar,’ Felton commanded. ‘Go and answer the phone.’

‘OK, I’m going, but I’ll be back.’

I staggered behind Mr Dunn, the butler, trying with no success to imitate his stately roll. He led me to the antique sedan-chair in the hallway, which doubled as a phone kiosk. I picked up the receiver and said ‘Hi!’ to whoever it might be at the other end of the line.

‘It is your mother, Peter,’ Dad said. ‘She really is very ill. You must come – tonight if possible. If not, you should start out tomorrow.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, Dad. It could be difficult. This is a very important conference, I am at.’

‘Forget the conference. Come. I – we need you now. Peter, for Christ’s sake!’

‘OK, OK, but I doubt if it will be until tomorrow. We are a bit remote here.’

‘Very well …. but Peter, I think that she may be dying.’

After quite a bit of random opening of doors, I managed to find my way back to the dining room. They were deep in some argument.

‘I cannot understand why you chose him,’ Julian was saying.

‘We didn’t choose him,’ said Granville.

‘Try to look behind appearances,’ said Felton.

They fell silent and looked to me.

‘To pick up where we left off, Julian, there is an answer to what you just said.’ As I said this, I stood dramatically framed in the doorway and I was trying to remember what that answer was. ‘Oh yeah, you were saying about why don’t I have a sex-change operation? Well, I am on a student grant, Julian. I cannot afford the trip to Morocco, still less the operation. But please, please give me the money and I will go and have it done. But please don’t think of me as an ungrateful sponger, putting the make on you for that sex-change operation that all we hippies desire. Having had the operation, I’ll come back here and pay off my debt to you by working as a maidservant. It is an offer you can hardly refuse, not when servants are so hard to find these days – and particularly not when you will be able to show your bayonet for me to clean with my tongue and you may exercise
droit de seigneur
over my body and, after screwing me senseless, you can take me dancing on the village green to the sound of brass bands. Come on Julian, let’s make it happen -’

I paused to see if he had a reply to this, but he just said, ‘I wish I were dead.’ (That was the second time that evening. Maybe, if he says it three times, the Good Fairy will make his wish come true.)

‘What was the phone message, Non Omnis Moriar?’ Felton was impatient, but I thought that he might at least have offered me another drink. I helped myself from the decanter, while I remembered what the message was. It was a bit of a shock. I had thought it was going to be wine, but I think it was actually port.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ I said eventually, ‘but I have just had a message about my mother. She is really very ill and I need to get home as soon as possible.’

I had been expecting some sympathy, however perfunctory, but Felton shrugged.

‘I have to go,’ I persisted. ‘Whatever it is that you want from me, and I’m damned if I know what that is, it cannot be spiritless obedience. I’m going now.’

I helped myself to a final glass, a stirrup-cup.

‘The door is over there,’ said Felton.

I rushed out of the dining room, along the hall and managed to make it to the sweep of gravel in front of the steps before I threw up. There are things called epiphanic moments. Points of glory in an individual’s life which have a mysterious but unmistakably heightened significance. One can even sense, however dimly, the flow of the Tides of Destiny during such unbidden manifestations. This was one of those epiphanic moments. I stood in the peacock-infested grounds, looking up at the stars and then down at my vomit and then up at the stars again. My vomit, little bits of quail and vegetable, was all pinkish from the amount of wine and port I had drunk and it was really beautiful, just like the stars. And I felt cleansed. I was still high from the alcohol, but it was a purer sort of high. If one can go with the roll, vomiting is like sneezing -quite a good experience.