Down Among the Gods (10 page)

Patrick stands motionless, too stunned to think.

‘Is it bad?’ says Paul.

Patrick nods. ‘The ridiculous thing is that the stuff is practically worthless, you know? To anyone else, that is. They won’t get anything for it second hand. But I’m ...’

‘You’re what?’ says Paul. ‘Washed up? Finished? No, you’re not. No one’s ever finished till they’re dead.’

Patrick notices that the safelight is still there, still intact. He switches it on and it works. Paul closes the Zippo. ‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ he says. ‘Might even find you a snort if you’re lucky.’

The tea is tempting, and so is the snort. But Patrick is afraid. He’s afraid of everything just now, including Paul’s kindness and his tendency to stand too close. The truth is that Paul has no interest in Patrick other than a comradely sympathy. He has no interest in men at all, except for the ones who pay. Given the choice, he might as well prove to be straight as gay but he doesn’t know. He got into the game before he was old enough to find out, and his sexuality has been firmly harnessed to it ever since. It is the stock of his trade, the product he sells, that’s all.

‘I think I’ll maybe try and tidy up a bit,’ says Patrick. ‘Thanks all the same.’

But as soon as Paul and Corrie are gone, Patrick knows that he can’t stay. The demon is still there, despite the red light, leering at him from the damp air, mocking his destitution. It is driving him on again.

W
HEN APOLLO AND I
had finished with our various deals, he brought me to Mount Olympus to meet my father. When Zeus heard all that had happened, he warned me that I must respect the rights of property and refrain from telling lies. I charmed him, though, despite himself.

‘You seem to be a very ingenious, little god,’ he said.

‘Then make me your herald, father,’ I said, ‘and I will never tell lies, though I can’t promise always to tell the whole truth.’

Zeus agreed, and gave me a herald’s staff with white ribbons and a pair of golden sandals with wings, which enabled me to move at great speed between the worlds.

His brother, Hades, also appointed me his herald, to summon the dying and to escort their souls to meet him, in the underworld.

Jessie has come to the end of the poem and is well pleased. She opens the top drawer of her desk and slides the two pages into the folder along with the other poems. Tomorrow she will look at it again before she makes her final revisions and types it.

Despite the fervent energy which produced it, it is not a good poem. It is a maudlin and overstuffed account of the nostalgic memories which came to her while she was sorting through her parents’ possessions. In years to come the poem will embarrass her, but just now she is satisfied and pleasantly tired. It comes as a shock, therefore, when she realises that she has still to do the work on the Bailey book. She swears and enters into a debate with herself in the kitchen as she waits for the kettle to boil. It’s not imperative that she finish the work tonight, but she has promised herself that she will. So she puts away the cocoa and reaches for the coffee instead.

It’s going to be a long night.

Patrick is walking blindly, aimlessly, through the rain-drenched streets of King’s Cross. In the end, he left the flat hurriedly. Beneath the boys’ continuing party the door is still wide open.

There was nothing, not a single thing that he wanted to bring with him. Not a snapshot, not a book with a fond inscription, not even a pebble from some well-remembered beach to put substance into his empty pocket. Let them have it all, the bastards, whatever is left.

There are friends in the area, people he drinks with and has even gone home with on occasion, to share a bottle or a couple of joints. But for the last few years he has not been inclined to drop in on people for coffee or to share his meals or theirs. The area has a high turnover. Squatters come and go. As he walks towards the station, Patrick can think of several welcoming faces. There are people he could stay with, who might even lend him money and help him get back on his feet again. But he knows them only from the pubs, and the pubs are all closed. He doesn’t know where any of them live.

Dionysus is furious. What is happening here has nothing to do with him and he doesn’t like it at all. He is on the alert, suspicious, and very, very dangerous.

Patrick is walking because there is nothing left for him to do. If he has a destination in mind it is a vague one and lies somewhere beneath the silence of deep, dark water.

I must guide his footsteps carefully now and make no mistakes. And not purely for the sake of the errand I am on. Hera wants him safely delivered, it’s true. But so do I.

There are those who are aware, from time to time, of the barely perceptible presence of my guidance. Patrick isn’t one of them. He hears, but he doesn’t listen. He has no awareness of the fact that he is crossing busy roads without looking and walking through dangerous streets without harm.

What he sees are the small, everyday wounds of the inner city, blown by his fearful mind into unspeakable horrors. With visions like these, who needs hallucinations? The bag lady, bending forward, toppling into a vacant doorway. Two prostitutes, eyeing him with contempt as he passes. A small patch of fresh blood on the pavement, widening in the rain. An ageing drunk, unshaven and ragged, sleeping it off beneath the fading pornography outside the derelict cinema.

‘My god,’ says Corrie, ‘look at all the bottles.’

Patrick gets out of it, cuts across the King’s Cross Road in front of the station and takes the dark street which leads up past the old gasworks and towards Camden Town. He walks quickly, away from the increasing pressure behind him.

‘You’re a bit of a dipso, aren’t you?’

He walks so fast that the wet flagstones blur beneath his feet but he counts them anyway. It saves him from having to count the friends and lovers he has lost, the noses he has broken, the years in King’s Cross, the bottles.

Old Hera has really nobbled this one. Poor sod. There is strong pressure on me to throw the wretched soul under a passing car and put him out of his misery, but on this occasion I resist it. Even though Patrick mightn’t agree himself, Paul was right. He isn’t finished yet.

But it takes longer than you’d expect for him to get from King’s Cross to Jessie’s house. There are a few trouble spots that I have to be sure he avoids. Like the massive drugs raid that is going on in a block of flats which lies directly across his route. If Patrick walked into a street full of cops in his present condition, he would certainly panic and draw attention to himself. And there’s the juggernaut that took an ill-advised short-cut and mangled a car and its occupants. Patrick has photographed that kind of thing in the past but if he came across it now it would put a premature end to whatever sanity remains to him. And then there’s another, even more dangerous obstacle. To get him across this one will take a bit of time. I put him into a holding pattern while I get that organised. It’s no problem. He has no awareness that he passes the same shops and doorways three times.

‘How’s it going?’

‘What?’ says Patrick, given the go-ahead now, back on course.

‘Nice evening.’

‘I suppose it is.’

The man beside him is a stranger as far as Patrick is concerned, but he says, ‘Didn’t I meet you a week or two ago in the Goat?’

‘It’s possible.’

Anything is possible.

‘Joe Mooney,’ the man continues, ‘and you are ... ?’

‘Tired,’ says Patrick, ‘and on my way to bed.’

‘Good for you,’ says Joe. ‘Smoke?’

Patrick hesitates, but accepts. Joe hands him his lighter. It is a seventy-five-quid job but the effect is lost on Patrick, who lights his cigarette without looking at it.

‘One of those days, eh?’ Joe goes on.

‘Yes, I suppose you could say that.’

‘Me too. Do you ever look at the horses?’

‘Which horses would they be?’

‘The horses,’ says Joe. ‘You know, the horses.’

‘No,’ says Patrick. He has never had the slightest interest in horses of any kind. His father never kept them, and his only association with them is plump ladies riding through Hyde Park.

‘That’s how I make my living,’ says Joe.

Patrick looks at him sideways. However he makes his living, he seems to be doing well enough.

‘I have contacts in the game, you see,’ he says. ‘You can’t beat the system without that. Ever hear of a horse called Coldstream?’

‘No,’ says Patrick. He is beginning to get irritated with this man. He doesn’t remember what he was thinking about before he came along but whatever it was is trying to reclaim his attention.

‘He’s the best ’chaser alive today,’ says Joe. ‘Jenny Pitman trains him. Did you ever hear of Lunar Music?’

Patrick sighs. ‘No,’ he says.

‘He’s the second-best ’chaser alive,’ says Joe, ‘and he’s set to run against Coldstream the day after tomorrow at Hereford.’

‘Is that right?’

‘That’s what everyone is thinking, anyway. But I have it from my cousin who works in Jenny Pitman’s yard that Coldstream has a bit of heat in a hind leg. There’s no way she’ll run him.’

Dionysus is tugging hard at Patrick’s mind. He has something to tell him. Patrick has a feeling that there’s something he wants to remember and he wishes this stupid little man would go away and take his horses with him. He says nothing.

But Joe continues. ‘So, the story is that he’ll more than likely be pulled out of the race before tomorrow’s declaration. But no one knows that yet. So there’s still pretty good odds on Lunar Music, you see?’

Patrick is looking at Joe now with suspicion but Joe reads the expression as one of interest. ‘So the trick is,’ he says, ‘to get in to the bookie’s before they get the news that the horse is being withdrawn. But I’ve got a little problem.’

‘What is your little problem?’ says Patrick.

‘My bank is across the other side of town. I’ll never get there in time. So I have to find a way to get some cash together at short notice.’

Patrick stops and Joe stops too. He realises that he has picked the wrong man this time. It’s a rare mistake. He can normally tell them a mile off. But the look of raw violence in this fellow’s eyes is something he has never encountered before.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘It’s all right. I just thought you might have liked a bit of the action. I’ll get a loan off my dad, that’s all. There’s no need to get upset about it.’

He backs off to a safe distance, then turns and walks back the way they have come. Patrick watches for a few moments, then goes on. It would take a better man than Joe Mooney to make a fool out of him.

So he thinks. It was tricky, but it worked. Patrick has been guided so perfectly over the canal that he doesn’t even know he has crossed it. The rest should be plain sailing.

Jessie is so tired that the words are beginning to slide around the page in front of her. Full stops and commas are barely distinguishable from each other. She has a suspicion that she may not be doing a great job, but an innate stubbornness will not allow her to give in.

Patrick has no idea where he’s going or why. His mind is racing in panic-stricken circles, trying to make sense of itself. He is soaked to the skin, but not cold at all. In fact, the only thing he can take any comfort in is being soaked to the skin. He hasn’t been as uncompromisingly wet as this since he was a child.

In Ireland. He stops and looks around him, struck with the dazzling certainty that if he ceased to believe in all this brick and concrete it would dissolve. The hard edges would soften, and give way to the meadows and drumlins that have to be there underneath. But instead he sees, in an unlikely, office-bright light being cast from a downstairs window, his hat in the back of a car.

Patrick is overwhelmed by relief. It makes sense of everything. No wonder he was walking. What else would he be doing but looking for his hat? It is the one thing in the world that he loves.

There is only one problem. The door of the car is locked.

Jessie catches a movement out of the corner of her eye and looks out to see a shadowy figure trying to break into her car. She goes into the hall, switches on the outside light and opens the front door.

The man doesn’t seem to have noticed. He is trying to open the back door now.

‘Oy!’ says Jessie.

Patrick swings round, startled, and throws up a hand to shield his eyes from the bright light that shines out from behind her.

‘Patrick!’

He cannot remember her name.

But I can.

Jessie.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

He gestures to the car. ‘My hat.’

‘But why didn’t you knock?’

Now he has a new certainty about why he is here. There is nowhere else in the world that he could possibly be. Like a chastised child, full of contrition, he walks up the short flight of steps. He is cold, now, and hungry, and very, very wet.

‘Sorry,’ he says.

As Jessie closes the door behind them, a twist in the wind blows rain into her face.

It is, perhaps, the disgust of Dionysus as he watches Patrick disappear into the house of the enemy. But he can afford to give Patrick some rein, as much rein as he likes, in fact. He has plenty of other fish to fry while he waits to see what will happen.

Patrick sinks into an armchair, soaking Jessie’s velvet jacket which is lying across it. Now that she has her wanderer blown in from the storm, she’s not sure that she wants him.

He leans back in the chair and gazes at the ceiling. He is psychologically limp, defeated, exhausted. He doesn’t even want a drink. All he knows is that for the moment at least, he is safe.

Jessie watches him. Even like that, soaking wet and gaping at the ceiling, he is well worth looking at. The feeling spurs her into action. She lights the fire, puts on the kettle, then goes upstairs to get towels and something for him to change into. She moves quickly, but not too quickly. She hasn’t lost sight of her dignity.

Dignity is one of the qualities that are part of mortal inheritance. Honesty and integrity are among the others. There aren’t very many, though. Most of the properties that mortals take pride in do not belong to themselves at all. They belong to the gods.