Down Among the Gods (13 page)

As he crosses to the window he is struck by the strong smell of dampness in the room and wonders how it can have built up so strongly in less than two days. He pulls the grey cloth back from the window, hooks the torn edges into the bent nails that tore them. The bottom of the cloth is heavy with damp and flecked with pale mildew. Wherever he can see the cotton meeting the floor it is the same. How could he have lived here for so long without noticing? The place is a dungeon, a doss-hole.

Yet the face that he saw in the mirror this morning belongs here, surely?

A shiver runs down Patrick’s spine. He begins to gather his clothes from the floor and stuff them into Jessie’s plastic bags. Then he picks through the rest of the mess and gathers his toothbrush, his razor and blades and shaving brush. There are one or two books here that he has enjoyed and he wonders if Jessie might like to read them. But when he picks them up, he realises that they, too, are contaminated, thickened and crinkled by damp. They smell musty and old. He puts his nose into one of the bags of clothes. The smell is there as well. Everything. How long has it been there? How long has he been carrying it round with him like a leper’s bell? Did Jessie smell it, too? In the art class? In the pub? Did she smell the gutter and see the old tramp in the lines of his face and take pity on him? What does he know of her, after all? She has given him a bed and a good feed like a mongrel fetched in from the street. Women do that kind of thing. It makes them feel good. But they turn round and throw it all back at you in the end. Tear you to pieces.

The tremor is spreading slowly outwards. It is reaching his thighs and his shoulders. The room is taking on a presence of its own.

Patrick steps backwards, kicks a bottle and sends it skidding across the cracked lino. ‘My god,’ says Corrie. The tremor has reached his arms and his calves. He turns and walks quickly out of the flat.

At the top of the steps, he pauses and looks up and down the street. From the front room of the boys’ flat comes a shriek which sends a shock-wave through Patrick’s innards, but it is followed by young laughter, and then more of it. Patrick puts his hand into his pocket. There are two keys in there, two possibilities. The pubs are closed until six and he may well have to wander the streets until long after that before he can be sure of finding one of his drinking buddies in one of them. By then the streets will be dark, and as full of horrors as they were two nights ago. And Ray is lost, receding behind the spectre of a twenty pound note to join other faces from the past. Patrick takes the two keys out of his pocket. They appear to be identical. There is only one way to find out which is which. He leaves the bags at the top of the steps and goes down. The first key fits. The jamb side of the lock has been torn away from the wood by the thieves, but it doesn’t matter. Someone can fix that if they want to. He pulls the door shut against an unexpected, contrary wind, and leaves the key where it is.

Patrick cooks again. Afterwards, Jessie brings her work in and sits with it in front of the fire. Patrick stretches out on the couch against the opposite wall and leans on his elbow, reading a novel. The nervous shake has long since left his limbs, but it is oscillating deep down at a very high frequency and he is restless, unable to concentrate.

He sighs and turns over another page. Jessie glances across at him. She is wondering whether or not to take herself back to the office. Her concentration, too, is slightly impaired but she at least knows what is causing it. It is Patrick’s presence. Even with his face slackened in repose he is one of the best-looking men she has ever seen.

Can this possibly be the same Patrick who was pole-axed by the sight of himself in the mirror this morning? Beauty is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder. But who, you might ask, has put it there?

Jessie turns back to her work, pencilling in correct punctuation, suggesting alternative words, weeding out spelling mistakes. Frances Bailey has a few favourites which she uses over and over again.

Patrick’s eyes slide from the book and come to rest upon the soft, rusty downpour of Jessie’s loosened hair. He imagines the feel of it between his fingers and the nape of her neck concealed beneath. His breathing begins to thicken and he turns away and on to his back to avoid temptation, but he is comforted by the knowledge that it is not desire which has been lost in his life, merely the occasion for its arousal.

Jessie feels Patrick’s eyes upon her and hears his sigh as he turns over. Quietly, she collects her papers into a pile and goes back to her study, away from temptation. She has no intention of rushing things.

Hera has lost him before by coming on too strong, too soon.

T
HE ROMANS CHANGED ALL
our names, and tried to change our natures, too. They succeeded in changing their perception of us, perhaps, but not what we are.

Cupid is an example. I am another. They called me Mercury and, knowing me to be responsible for trade, set me up as guardian of their market-places. But I wasn’t to be so easily manipulated, and they could never understand why their markets were so often filled with travellers and tricksters, minstrels and thieves.

And they made the same mistakes with Dionysus, learning nothing from the old stories. They called him Bacchus, portrayed him as a benign and amiable character, and refused to take him seriously at all. That kind of attitude can be guaranteed to cause trouble. Dionysus took offence and set out once again to prove his authority. The Roman senate prohibited the celebration of the Bacchanalian rites. The rest is history.

Patrick spends most of the next day in the garden. Jessie is delighted to see the place getting straightened out and has given him permission to do whatever he likes.

Hera has no problem with Demeter, none whatsoever. Demeter’s nature is placid; she gets on with pretty much everyone apart from Technossus. She and Hera have always been willing to share. Their interests are hardly ever in conflict.

As Jessie stands outside her parents’ house and watches the auctioneer drive away, she remembers the moon as it appeared to her in her dream. It was ancient and austere; it seemed to make love to her somehow without touching her at all, and left her utterly drained, as though the orgasm it sucked from her was life itself, or the light that it cast across the sky when it left her. She thinks about Patrick and the growing feelings she has for him, and wonders if the dream has any relevance to their situation. For the light that she perceives in him seems to come from a distance. It is reserved, unreachable, guarded somehow, but whether it is guarded by something threatened or threatening, something fearful or fearsome, Jessie can’t decide. She walks out of the gate and snaps the padlock closed, her heart as bleak and cold as the empty house behind her. It is all over now, too late to change her mind about any of the things that are still in there. In less than two weeks time, they will all go under the hammer. She has made up her mind that she won’t be there when that happens. The whole business makes her feel sick.

Patrick finishes straightening out all the tiles. Afterwards he harvests the rest of the potatoes and puts them in the vegetable rack in the kitchen. They bring the smell of the earth in with them and he catches it from time to time as he drinks tea. A short break was all that he intended, but a strange lethargy descends upon him as he sits there. His spirit becomes heavy, and his body, too, and he somehow can’t see the sense in getting up again and returning to work. What, after all, is the point?

One drink from that whiskey bottle would give him the impetus. Just one. Why the hell not? ‘My god,’ says Corrie, but the little faggot can go and fuck himself. There were bottles in that basement from years back. Patrick just forgot about taking out the rubbish, that’s all. He doesn’t have a drink problem. It was just a way of passing the time while he was stuck in that dingy hole. Things are different here.

But what would Jessie say? She wouldn’t say anything, probably, but what would she think?

Patrick, although he doesn’t know it, has already come to associate Jessie with the powers of the mother goddess she serves. He associates her powers with all women. And he is not wrong. All the deities exist as potentialities in all mortals. If Patrick convinces himself that Hera is around, he will undoubtedly find her, wherever he goes. She will be constellated by his expectations, even in the most unlikely of people. There is always evidence available for whatever you might choose to believe.

Jessie would think nothing of Patrick helping himself to her drink. She would be pleased, in fact, at least for the moment. It would be a sign that he is making himself at home, which is what she wants him to do.

But he does not yet feel at home. He is trapped in a terrible conflict, and he needs help.

There is a knock at the door. Patrick wrenches himself from the chair and goes to answer it. On the step is a young boy, very blond, very neatly dressed. In his hand is a plastic bucket with a large sticker on the side.

‘We’re collecting for the disabled,’ he says.

Behind him, at the bottom of the steps, is a man in a wheelchair with a blanket tucked around his legs. Patrick still has, somewhere, the few bob he had in his pocket when he arrived. But there is something familiar about the man in the wheelchair.

It is Joe Mooney. And Joe Mooney has recognised him as well. He is reversing the wheelchair away from Jessie’s house as nonchalantly as he can. Patrick laughs. ‘I see you have another little problem,’ he calls.

Joe salutes and wheels himself along towards the next house. Patrick, still laughing, returns to the kitchen and goes straight out into the garden.

The sun comes out again from behind one of the mooching clouds. Patrick weeds the hummock of old compost, tracing the yellow nettle roots right down to their capillaries and breaking the deep, stubborn grip of the docks. The compost is crumbly and black. As he dredges through it, hunting out the last of the roots, the trowel strikes persistently on some kind of stone underneath. Patrick digs at the sides of the heap and discovers the regular edges of flagstones. The trowel is too small and there isn’t a spade, so Patrick borrows the little coal shovel from beside the fireplace in Jessie’s office. It’s not ideal but he works slowly and methodically, throwing the compost out on to the tangle of weeds that was once the lawn, feeling like an archaeologist as he reveals the flagstones, one by one. In the middle of the heap, the shovel strikes something else made of stone, this time lying above the level of the ground. He has just finished uncovering it when Jessie arrives home.

‘You heathen!’ he says, when she comes out to see what he’s doing.

‘Why am I a heathen?’

‘Throwing your sloppy old peelings and tea-leaves on top of this beautiful thing.’

‘What beautiful thing? What is it?’

‘It’s a sundial,’ says Patrick. ‘Look.’

He points to the end of the stout column of stone which lies on its side in a bed of compost. Jessie bends down as he shows her the green brass triangle set into the stone, and the inlaid circle of figures.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ says Jessie. ‘I didn’t know what it was. There were weeds growing all over it. I thought it was some kind of phallic symbol or something.’

Patrick looks at her out of the corner of his eye. ‘I see,’ he says. ‘You have something against phalluses, have you?’

Jessie laughs, just a little too loud.

She goes back into the house and cooks while he carries on with the excavation. He comes across the base of the sundial next, and clears it with great excitement. Then he washes them both and sits on the upturned bucket, wondering if there is any way of putting it back together again. It is made of sandstone and has snapped quite cleanly at the point where the column once met the base.

‘That corner of the garden must have been a suntrap,’ he says to Jessie when he comes back in. ‘You could put a table and chair out there.’

He is drying his hands on a tea towel to Jessie’s consternation, but she lets it pass and is rather proud of herself for doing so. ‘Trouble is,’ she says, ‘I never seem to get time to sit around and relax. Not in the daytime, anyway.’

‘You could bring your work out there. And I could wait on you with pots of tea and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. It would be good for you to get out into the fresh air.’

‘That’s all very well,’ says Jessie, ‘but there isn’t any fresh air in London.’

Patrick is a little wounded by her lack of enthusiasm. The excitement he has felt throughout the afternoon has been enhanced by the sense that he was sharing, that he was unearthing treasure which could belong to them both.

He cannot quite give himself over to the pleasure of the meal. His system is still making adjustments to the change of circumstances and he is a little edgy. Jessie senses his mood and accepts it, giving him the space he needs to settle and relax. The confrontation that he fears is avoided but as the two of them are clearing the table he misses his grip on the clay fruit bowl and it shatters across the kitchen floor. For a moment they both stand frozen, staring at an apple which rolls smoothly across the lino and comes to rest beneath the table. Then Jessie lets out her breath. She loved that bowl. It was made for her by a friend who has since died. There was an inscription on the bottom.

Patrick stands in a state of shock. The pieces lie where they landed, like a frozen frame of the action which put them there. Patrick is not so far away from such an explosive moment himself.

Jessie senses it. ‘Thank god for that,’ she says. ‘I’ve been wondering how to get rid of that old thing. I was beginning to think it was indestructible.’

She bends and begins to gather the pieces, concealing the base with the writing on. Patrick picks up the fruit and puts it on the table. He is getting into debt again.

Jessie decides to work in the study for the evening. She knows that Patrick is suffering some kind of distress but he is withdrawn and unapproachable and she doesn’t know how to help him. As he finishes the washing up and wrings out the dishcloth he is in a state of panic about the prospect of the evening ahead. The book he has been reading does not have the power to hold his attention. His mind keeps trying to re-route itself along the old, comfortable paths but continually comes up against the same, unbreachable barrier. He has no money.