Down Among the Gods
A Novel
Kate Thompson
For Phil and Brendan Godfrey
PART ONE
HERA
Chapter One
I
HAVE A STORY
for you. It’s a simple story, old as the gods yet as young as each new generation which tells and retells it. It is a tale of immortals, acted by mortals, and told by a borderline character plying between their two worlds. That’s me. The messenger of the gods. My name is Hermes.
It is the day after the fire which gutted Camden library. A monsoon-like cloud has recently opened above London and plunged the city into an abrupt gloom. The gutters are running like mountain streams, and the rain is falling faster than the street drains can carry it away. Passing cars and buses throw great arcs of water at each other, and at Jessie Parker, who is walking along the street towards her house. When she left home a few hours earlier, she decided not to bring the car. Now she is laden down with heavy bags, and rain is running down her face into her eyes, and down her arms into the shopping bags. Her long, red plait is drenched and hangs down her back like a heavy rope. Jessie has got it wrong again.
As she opens it, Jessie’s front door jams on a large brown envelope, two inches thick, which is lying inside on the mat. It is something which happens regularly, but the driving rain makes it particularly irritating today. Jessie reaches a wet hand round the door and tugs at the package. The paper tears as she wrenches it free and tosses it further into the hall, but it doesn’t bother her. She knows what’s in it and has no respect for it. As she slams the door behind her, one of two umbrellas which are leaning in the corner falls across the mat. Jessie stares at it as she puts down the shopping and takes off her sodden jacket. She often stares like that at the two umbrellas when she comes in out of the rain, but somehow she never sees them when she’s on her way out. The jacket drips on to the hall carpet. On the doormat, the rest of the mail is beginning to soak up the run-off from the plastic carrier bags. Jessie props up the umbrella beside the letter-cage which is also leaning in the corner. It has been there for two years, waiting to be screwed on to the door.
Jessie rescues the mail, brings it into the sitting-room and drops it on the table beside the shopping list that she forgot to take with her when she went out. She screws it up and throws it into the bin before she can be tempted to read it and find out how many things she has forgotten.
About half a mile away, Patrick Robinson is anticipating problems. He has allowed indecision to hinder him an instant too long on the road opposite the burnt-out library, and one of the two policemen standing at the door has noticed him. The camera beneath his overcoat gives him, he knows, an odd sort of pregnant bulge, and the old black hat that he always wears does not suggest respectability. The water that drips from its drooping brim is, he notices, a little muddy. As he crosses over the road, he pushes the hat back from his face, and casually undoes the buttons of his coat. He has already taken photographs of the building from the back, where the damage is most evident, and now he needs to get inside. But he doesn’t like the look of the policemen. His press card won’t stand up to close scrutiny.
Patrick scissors over the police barriers and all their warnings of danger. The two officers in their yellow mackintoshes stand still and watch him. The sight of the camera has done little to gain their respect. They have not failed to notice the hat.
‘Press,’ says Patrick to the nearest of them.
‘You’re a bit late, aren’t you?’
‘I work for the weeklies.’
The constable stares hard. Patrick flashes him a brilliant smile which masks a bitter contempt for all figures of authority.
‘Do they suspect arson?’
The officer shrugs. It is a mistake. Dislodged raindrops run down inside his collar and trickle coldly down his back. He sighs, deeply. ‘Go on,’ he says, ‘but don’t touch anything.’
Some other sort of distance away, high up on Mount Olympus, perhaps, or deep within the human psyche, the gods look on. We are all but forgotten now, reduced to quaint images on flaking frescoes, unlikely characters in story books for the very young, historical oddities in classic texts.
Not that we mind. It is just such ignorance which renders entire populations helpless. Worship is one thing but power is another. Unrecognised and unopposed, the gods are free to wreak havoc throughout the mortal world. We are alive and well, believe me, and we are having a ball.
The only opposition we have to worry about comes from each other.
Jessie drips across the living room and lights the gas fire. She cannot remember the last time she was so wet. Everything is wet, including the evening paper which she lays in front of the fire to dry out. It’s the early evening edition, but the
Mail
photographers have been quick about their business and the front page carries a photograph of the gutted library. Jessie has already heard that news. She has heard it from every shopkeeper and passing acquaintance in the High Street, and she prefers not to think about it. The library has always been a source of comfort to her, and these days she seems to need comfort more than ever before.
During the last three months, two things have happened to change her life for ever, both of them drastic and irreversible. First she turned forty. Then, just three weeks later and quite unexpectedly, her mother died of a heart attack. Jessie has been left with an overwhelming sense of having been cheated, abruptly orphaned and thrown into a premature middle age. And now that the library has gone, she can’t even consult the psychology shelves about what is happening to her.
She stands for a moment, staring at the photograph, then goes back out to the hall. Despite her absent-mindedness, Jessie is not untidy. She collects things; the house is cluttered with little milestones from her life, but it is always clean and, in its own way, orderly. She goes through now into the kitchen and unpacks the shopping. Throwing away the list hasn’t helped. As the carrier bags empty she becomes aware, one by one, of the things that she has forgotten.
The wind changes direction and hurls a battery of heavy raindrops against the kitchen window. It reminds Jessie that she is wet through and needs to change. She shakes the water from the plastic carriers and opens the bottom drawer beneath the draining board. It is already full of carrier bags, overstuffed and stiff. Jessie keeps them because she wants to be environment friendly and re-use them, but she never remembers to take them with her when she goes out. For a moment she stands and looks at the multi-coloured mess still expanding gently into the unaccustomed space, wondering if her forgetfulness is a sign of mental decay. There is always something else on her mind, and it worries her, because she feels that, at the age of forty, she ought to have given it up. It is something that she has never told anyone and never will. Whenever she is alone and not working or reading a book, Jessie’s mind runs for her a constant picture show. She is a fantasist. The scenarios change, and the characters and the details, but the central theme is always the same. Jessie creates, repeats, and recreates for herself, the perfect romance.
Patrick wanders through the remains of the library building, among sodden cinders and buckled shelving. It is not the magnitude of the damage which fascinates him, but the small details, the books that have somehow remained intact, the little patches of untouched paintwork, a beam which hangs above his head and ought to fall but doesn’t.
After some time of being lost in wonder, Patrick realises that he is being watched. Over in one corner, a group of forensic experts are huddled together beneath a pair of umbrellas in some kind of debate. Standing guard beside them is another mackintoshed policeman, and he is following Patrick’s every movement with his eyes. Patrick smiles and raises his camera in explanation. The officer’s hostile gaze doesn’t alter. Gritting his teeth against a rising anger, Patrick turns away and examines his camera. It is the single most valuable thing that he owns, and his only source of livelihood. Despite his care, a few drops of rain have made their way on to the front of the lens. He reaches into an inside pocket and takes out a soft cloth wrapped in a plastic bag. The policeman watches. There is something about Patrick that he doesn’t like, and Patrick is fully aware of the fact. He cleans the lens carefully and puts the cloth away. Then he begins to take photographs.
Jessie sits beside the gas fire with her feet up. A pot of tea stands on the table at her right hand. Rain still batters against the windows, but Jessie has changed out of her wet clothes now. She is warm and dry and satisfied. Life is not without its pleasures.
She leans back and sips her tea for a few minutes, relaxing into her most recent romantic fantasy. It is set in North Wales, where she has gone to get away from the pressures of the city and write, at last, that earth-shattering novel. This time round, he is a destitute musician, damaged by life, his tent blown down in the gale which skirls around her cottage. She is warm and cosy beside the fire when the knock comes at the door. He is not too tall, not too dark, not too handsome, and very, very wet.
Jessie didn’t always have the same type of fantasies. In her tomboy phase she was a heroic, warrior-woman type, striding into battle alongside the men and emerging triumphant. This was when, unknown to herself, she worshipped Artemis, the great huntress of Olympus, chaste and proud. Women in her favour are generally strong and competent, unabashed by the male disapproval they often encounter. Later, as Jessie moved into maturity, she became, in her fantasies, phenomenally beautiful, quite irresistible to men, and quite often willing to be rescued by them. This was during the rule of Aphrodite, the goddess of desire. More recently, however, were Jessie to know enough to take notice, she would see that her fantasies are driven by Hera, queen of Olympus, mother or stepmother to most of the gods. The men Jessie dreams of now are without exception needy and ill-used by the world. She restores them to their wholeness by endless kindness and patience, and by unconditional love.
It was this aspect of Hera that Zeus exploited when he failed to win her in marriage by any other means. He turned himself into a bedraggled cuckoo, which she took into her protection. She is mother, after all, and nurturer, ever willing to take the fallen and luckless to her breast.
Jessie finishes her tea, and turns to the letters which are lying beside the teapot on the table. The first one is a tax renewal form for her car. The second is a subscription reminder. The third is a letter from her sister in Uruguay. It is brief and businesslike, relating to their mother’s will and the sale of the family house. Jessie puts it down. When her father died, it was her mother who took care of all the technical details. Now it is Jessie’s turn to deal with them, and she finds them difficult to manage. In retreat, she glances down at the latest edition of
Time Out
which protrudes from beneath the evening paper, drying nicely now. At her ease, after dinner perhaps, she will turn to the Lonely Hearts column and read through it slowly and carefully. She will read it a little guiltily and furtively, as though she just happened upon it by chance. She has never answered an ad and she never will. It would be beneath her dignity. But she reads them all the same, and gets fuel for her fantasies, and is comforted by the knowledge that she is not the only one who is alone.