Satan Wants Me (28 page)

I arrived at Maud’s flat soon after seven. Maud was dressed for dancing – at least she thought she was. She had struggled into a tight, shiny, dark-blue, long, sheath-dress with a design of curvy, smoking dragons on it. It was the kind of thing that a Chinese concubine might wear – if, that is, the concubine was not planning on dancing that night. I was briefly introduced to her flatmate, a hollow-eyed and nervy law student. I seemed to frighten her, but, then, everything seemed to frighten her. It is no fun being a law student. They all have to work too hard.

They share a sitting-room, kitchen and bathroom. Maud’s bedroom is pretty austere and nothing special. On the walls there is a blown-up photograph of Honor Blackman posing in black leather and a poster for the film of
Barbarella
. There is a full-length mirror on the door of the wardrobe. Maud has an amazing array of cosmetics on her dressing table. Her karate kit is strewn carelessly over a chair. Beside her bed she has a plastic clown’s head. The head is full of earth and has grass growing instead of hair. Once a week or so Maud gives the grass a trim with her nail scissors. Also beside the bed there is a great pile of women’s magazines and an Alistair Maclean novel in paperback. Having fetched a shiny, black, PVC coat out of the wardrobe, Maud said that she was ready to set out for Horapollo House. As I followed her downstairs, I noted with dismay how the shininess of the coat just emphasised the broadness of her bum.

We took a bus over to Swiss Cottage. I was wondering what Maud would make of Horapollo House. If Sally who was pretty wild and heavily into esoteric things did not care for the Lodge, I cannot see Maud, who is much straighter, responding more favourably. Maud for her part seemed somewhat apprehensive. I think that she hoped to make a favourable impression on my fellow residents, but she could not work out what sort of people they were going to be. Wide-eyed and timorous, she entered Horapollo House. She was like a pantry-maid who had been invited to enter the big house by the front door. Yet Mrs Grieves, who happened to be sweeping in the hallway stepped back respectfully, as if Maud was rather a visiting princess.

I showed Maud the dining room, the library and a couple of lecture rooms. Crossing the hallway, I noticed Laura looking down on us from the first floor landing. Her face was inscrutable. When I next looked for her she was gone. I avoided showing Maud the Ritual Chamber as I did not want to have to explain about the pentacles all over the floor and the sacrificial altar at the centre. Apart from anything else, it is such an effort explaining anything to Maud. She wrinkled her nose at the frescoes on the first floor, but the sum total of all she had to say about Horapollo House was that it was ‘a bit gloomy’. It would be easy to keep any sort of secret from Maud. She is just so amazingly incurious.

My room was subjected to the most cursory of inspections. She picked up one of my Dylan records and remarked that she found him ‘kind of droney’. Then she sat down heavily on one of the beds and patted the space beside her for me to join her. She ran a hand through my curls, before burying her head in my chest. I could feel her trembling ever so slightly. I thought of all that nonsense that Laura tried to get me to practise saying: ‘We really have to be alone … for me to tell you how much I love you. I would be too shy to do it in a crowd of people … This is our night and nothing is more important than our love,’ and stuff like that. But, that was all pointless now. On the one hand Maud, so soft and trusting, would obviously be a pushover, but on the other hand, I am on a leash until the astral conjunctions are favourable. Unable to think of anything to say, I pulled her head up and kissed her vaguely, thinking as I did so that my kisses were only a foretaste of the much fiercer embraces of the ritual Consecration of the Virgin. I am a kind of sex-demon of the Dark Annunciation.

She ran a hand down my chest.

‘You are so thin. I think that you worry too much,’ she said.

I shifted restlessly, for I was impatient and anxious to be moving on to Middle Earth. I was about to say this when she placed a finger on my lips.

‘I think that we should be straight with one another,’ she said. ‘As you know, I am prepared to go all the way – except the last bit. However, I don’t want you horny all evening.’ She smiled nervously as she fumbled for my zip and, having got a hand inside my trousers, she began a frantic, arrhythmic rubbing to which I was unable to respond. She stared at me in a panicky sort of way. Then she opened her mouth wide before lowering her face between my legs. It was like watching a sea-monster diving – a monster hungry to devour what lay beneath it. To see Maud like this, her face twisted and deformed by sexual hunger, was even a bit scary and at that moment I could no more have achieved an erection than I could have levitated.

‘Maud, this isn’t necessary.’

‘I think it is.’ Her voice was muffled. ‘Anyway, I want to.’

In order to spare her further embarrassment, I tried to concentrate on memories of Sally and her hum jobs, but, since I was distracted and terrified of being permanently unmanned by Maud in her frenzy, Sally’s ghost was powerless to work any magic for us.

I raised Maud’s tear-stained face from my groin.

‘I want to please you,’ she said.

‘I know you do, but we have to get to know one another better. These things take time and I want it to be special between us,’ I said (momentarily enjoying my new-found role as vestal virgin).

She nodded humbly,

‘You’re so beautiful, Peter, but I know that I don’t understand you at all. You have to keep telling me what you are thinking all the time, because I am no good at guessing.’

Only after another half hour or so of inanely reassuring conversation was I able to persuade her to set out with me to Middle Earth. That stuff in my room was all just so ghastly. Nothing ever quite works with Maud. She always gets everything a bit off-key. It’s not just the timing of jokes she gets wrong. It’s social situations too. Like at first she will not have the confidence, then she will suddenly get her courage up and charge in – at just the wrong moment. Thinking about Maud’s incuriosity about Horapollo House, maybe it is that she is nervous of revealing her stupidity by asking the wrong questions.

Anyway, we reached Middle Earth with me desperate to lose myself in sound, light, movement and clouds of dope, but Maud was reluctant to follow me down onto the floor. She sniffed the air suspiciously. She seemed a bit shocked by the noise and the mass of heaving dancers. The Nuclear Hedgehog (all dressed in scarlet guardsmen’s uniforms) were playing. I do not think that they are as good as the Incredible String Band. Despite Maud’s reluctance, I drew her into the dancing throng. She was shouting something, but she had to keep shouting before I managed to guess that what she was mouthing was that she could not dance. It was ridiculous, for she kept asking me where to put her arms and legs and where she should move to next, as if we were dancing the mazurka or something. I just told her to follow my movements and copy them and then I tried to forget that I was with her. Yet this was difficult, partly because Maud following my movements was like a soldier mastering a difficult drill and partly because she kept looking at me so adoringly. Also, she, panicking, embarrassed and longing for the music to stop, was so tall that she stood out amongst the other dancers. It did indeed look as though she was ashamed of her body and wished that she was in another one. The Nuclear Hedgehog moved on to a slower, smoochier number and Maud closed in upon me. Her body rubbed against mine and her arms curled round me, so that I was like a doomed Indian villager caught in the coils of a fat python.

I could not bear to be so smothered and broke away and headed towards some cane chairs in the next room. But it was not so easy to escape from Maud’s coils and, instead of sitting on the chair next to me, she planted herself upon my lap and those deathly-white arms curled round my head as she began to stroke my hair. I was seriously down – down like a man lying on the floor who wishes that the floor would give way so that he could lie on the floor below. This place had been fun with Sally, but only with Sally. How long before the astral conjunctions would set me free from my current role as Maud’s cavalier? Seeing my despondency, Maud playfully tweaked at the corners of my mouth.

‘Give us a smile, Peter. Anyone would think that you’d just been at a funeral.’

As soon as the words were out, she realised what she had said and clapped her hands over her mouth – too late.

‘Oh God, Peter,’ she said at last. ‘I am so sorry. I forgot that it is less than a week since your mother’s funeral. Oh God, I am so very sorry. Look in the circs, should we be here at all? This has just been an unqualified disaster.’

I shrugged.

I hoped that the evening was over, but it was not quite. We had a very long wait at the bus-stop and, while we were waiting, Maud started to interrogate me about my previous girlfriends. She particularly wanted to know about Sally and why Sally and I had split up. She seemed to be doing a PhD thesis into the topic of why all my previous girlfriends had turned out unsatisfactory. I kept stonewalling on the precise reason why I had broken up with Sally. I could hardly tell Maud that it was because Sally had decided that I was evil, could I? After suffering this interrogation for some time, I told her that the subject was now closed and I stood apart from her.

Silent and sulking, she leant against the bus-stop. Then she called over to me,

‘OK, I apologise. It’s just that I don’t want to go the way of Sally, that’s all … But what do you like about me best?’

Before I could think of what to say, someone spoke, as if he was answering for me,

‘You are all gorgeous, darling. You look like God Almighty has sculpted your curves so as to give us men perfect delight. You’ve got great hair. And that’s a fab dress you have on. A girl like you is not safe out so late on her own.’

The speaker moved out of the shadows. He was a straight, with a short haircut and wearing a jacket and tie. He had been sweating and maybe he had been to a dance too, though he was definitely not a Middle Earth type.

‘She is not alone,’ I said.

He turned on me with simulated surprise.

‘Oh I see, it’s girls’ night out together,’ he said. ‘Hello darling. But shouldn’t you have stayed in tonight and washed your hair? You look a fright and that’s a terrible thatch of curls you got there.’

The next instant he was bent over, wheezing. He should not have said what he said while standing so close to Maud. She had delivered one of those controlled karate punches into his belly. While he was still doubled up, Maud hit him a second time, this time catching him on the side of his head. He went down on the pavement. It looked more as if he had decided to lie down than that he actually fell. Perhaps he thought that he would be safer on the ground.

‘It’s a bloody good perm,’ said my dragon-lady standing over him and, still not satisfied, she kicked him in the head, though not very hard, as the tightness of her dress would not allow her to get a good kick in. But she kept kicking and I had to pull her away from the twitching and retching man. I made her trot beside me and we followed a zigzag route through the streets of Covent Garden until I was sure we were in no danger of being pursued by the police or anyone else. Despite my anxiety, Maud beside me was smiling and relaxed in a way that she had not been on the dance floor. Once we reached another bus-stop, she got a handkerchief out and, bending awkwardly wiped smears of blood from one of her shoes.

After a while, she took my hand and squeezed it.

‘You should have let me finish the job, Peter. It’s good fun fighting. Fighting is nice. What I like is the adrenalin, the speed of movement and the putting out of strength and I like winning. At the classes I go to, the teacher is always telling us that karate is an art form, like Japanese flower-arranging or something, and that the greatest karate masters are the most gentle and all sorts of rubbish like that, but for me that is not the point. I like hurting – plus of course taking the risk of being hurt. It’s nice. That was why, before we met, I was hoping that you would be a soldier or stunt-driver or something like that. But you, being a student, wouldn’t understand how I feel about fighting and you probably think I’m being stupid, don’t you?’

‘I can relate to what you are saying about adrenalin,’ I replied, deftly avoiding her question. ‘Adrenalin is the sweetest drink there is and it’s like it’s always on tap within the body, always available on demand, and it’s really good, because, whereas beer makes me sleepy, adrenalin makes me fly.’

I went on talking about adrenalin and the other neurotransmitters in the body, like serotonin and the various endorphins. Inside my head – inside all our heads – there is a sea of chemicals. And it is we of the 1960s who are the blessed generation, for, thanks to the new pharmotechnology, thanks to LSD, methedrine, and other drugs, for the first time in human history, we have the means to navigate upon this strange sea. We can become as gods. Is this not the most wonderful thing to have happened ever?

I was gabbling a bit. I was so flabbergasted by what had just happened at the bus-stop. I kept seeing the blood on Maud’s dancing-shoe. But it was not just Maud’s attack on the man. (Maybe the Lodge will have a use for her delight in blood and action?) After all, I knew that she was good at karate. No, what really amazed me was that that man, whoever he was, drunk or not, seriously fancied Maud.

Myself I fancy – no Felton will not let me use ‘fancy’ – I worship from a distance at the altar of the slender, leggy woman. Her icon is everywhere displayed, as she is made manifest in the guise of Jean Shrimpton, Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling and Twiggy. Whereas looking at Maud is like looking at the photographs in a biography devoted to some worthy or another who flourished around the year 1900 and one is told in the text that the POET Y or the GENERAL X married one of the most notable beauties of the age, but then, when one looks at the relevant photograph, what one sees is a bulky bundle looking a bit like an upended sofa, with a jaw like a bullmoose and a nose like a meat-cleaver, and you wonder if all the men were mad in 1900, or what. Maud could have married POET Y, for she is florid in a way that is definitely no longer fashionable. She might have been a courtesan in the Second Empire or a fleshy mistress of Edward VIII or something. She was born out of her time. She could even have been a Victorian lady explorer, slapping the native bearers about a bit or kicking an unfortunate Kurdish brigand in the head. But this is 1967 and, dancing at Middle Earth, Maud just looked like a female yob – a yobbess, I suppose. I was glad when the bus came along. I felt a bit shaky waiting alone with her and holding her hand. Who knows when or why she will next turn violent?