Down Among the Gods (23 page)

The band finishes the first number and starts straight into another. Now that Jessie has stopped trying to decipher the words, she becomes aware that the lads are quite good. The monotonous vocals blend in with the instruments smoothly and the rhythm is tight and hot. The girls who are dancing liven up. One or two of the bolder ones are beginning to drag in the boys, who cast off from the sides with apparent reluctance, handing their drinks to the ones who remain on shore.

But the boldest of the girls is ignoring with disdain the boys who are glancing surreptitiously in her direction. She has eyes for only one, and that is Patrick.

And why wouldn’t she? Healthy and tanned, inwardly lit by his renewed acquaintance with Bacchus, he is a sight for sore eyes. There are other good-looking men in the room, but this girl has known them for most of her life. Patrick has the advantage of novelty. Egged on by her pals she is approaching Dafydd’s table. She is not super-cool, not chewing gum or smoking a cigarette. She is not a siren. She is a maenad, a devotee of Dionysus.

‘Hi Dafydd.’

‘Hi, Bronwen.’

‘Hi, Mel. How are things?’

‘Pretty good.’

‘That’s good.’

Neither Dafydd nor Mel thinks of introducing Bronwen to the others. She is not particularly close to either of them, and certainly not coming to join them. Mel offers her a cigarette, which she declines. Her nerve begins to fail, but when she looks around she sees that her friends are watching.

‘Is he yours?’ she says to Jessie.

‘What?’

Patrick is gazing slightly foolishly up at Bronwen. She is very good looking, and she knows it. Her shoulder-length hair is layered and curls gently inwards around her forehead and cheeks. If she wasn’t good looking she wouldn’t be where she is now.

‘Is he yours?’

Jessie grasps her meaning. ‘Oh, yes,’ she says, and then, but a bit too late: ‘You could say that.’

‘Can I borrow him, just for a minute?’

Patrick is regaining consciousness and beginning to understand what’s going on.

‘Of course,’ says Jessie. ‘Help yourself.’

‘Just hold on a minute,’ says Patrick. ‘I can’t dance.’

‘Of course you can,’ says Jessie. She is delighted by the attention that Patrick has attracted. It reflects, very clearly, upon her.

‘Come on,’ says Bronwen.

Patrick is genuinely reticent, but he doesn’t want to give Bronwen offence. He turns to Jessie rather helplessly. ‘Must I?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Go on.’

He stands up awkwardly and follows Bronwen a couple of steps towards the floor. He is aware, suddenly, of his age among that flock of young things and is acutely self-conscious. He turns back to Jessie, but she shoves him gently away, like a bird pushing a fledgling out of the nest. Beside her, Mel expands quietly into the vacant space.

For a while, Patrick shuffles rather clumsily round after Bronwen, who has ignited into frenzied action. Then, slyly, the band changes key. Their drummer, who writes most of their riffs is, unknown to himself, one of Apollo’s favourites; a musical genius. And one night, a few weeks ago, a mysterious sequence came floating into his room and hovered for a while around the foot of his bed. He was careful. He didn’t jump up and make a grab at it, but waited quietly until it found a spot that it liked in one of his arrangements. Then he got up and played it, and now it is his for ever.

Not all the people in the room notice, but the sequence strikes one of those delicate nerves in Patrick’s soul and suddenly he is in tune with the band and moving, moving to amaze himself and Jessie, watching from the wings. He is not manic or suave or extravagant. He is not showing off. Jessie and the rest are forgotten. Patrick has become part of something larger than himself out there on the dance floor.

Mel moves still closer. ‘Do you dance at all?’ he says.

Jessie hears him and means to reply, but she is too mesmerised by what she is watching. Patrick is beautiful. His movements are rhythmically perfect, springy and graceful as a kid goat. He no longer needs to follow Bronwen. They are bound together by some inner understanding of why they are there and dancing. They are involved in a rebellion of the first order. Rebellion against inhibition.

Hats off to Dionysus! Where would humanity be without him? Who else has the power to cure, even temporarily, the mild form of autism which has reached epidemic proportions in the Western world?

He is at his best at times like this, joining forces with his brother Apollo, watching with a knowing eye the mortals who are flinging themselves around his new extension, utterly in thrall.

‘Why not, then?’ says Mel.

‘What?’ say Jessie.

He gestures with his head towards the dancers. ‘Why not?’

‘Oh, all right, then.’

She stands up and Mel manoeuvres himself out from behind the table. He places his hand lightly in the small of her back as they go, and she represses a shudder. As they start to dance, Patrick spots them and slides over, his face full of excitement. Deftly, he slips off the band which is holding Jessie’s hair, and then he’s gone again, into the crowd.

Jessie tries to keep sight of him, but Mel pulls her arm, demanding her attention. She relaxes and begins to dance.

But it won’t help. Dionysus may well have got a hold on Patrick, but something will have to be salvaged from this. He’s not having Jessie as well.

Within minutes of joining the dance, Jessie’s head, to her horror, begins to spin. She makes her way unsteadily back to the table, where Dafydd gets up solicitously and takes her arm. ‘Are you all right?’ he says, with genuine concern in his voice. He helps her to sit down and scans the crowd.

Patrick is still dancing, but he has lost by now the extraordinary fluidity which possessed him earlier. He would, none the less, have danced the whole evening if he had been given the chance. He is having a ball.

Jessie holds her head in her hands and tries hard not to move.

‘Got the spins, have you?’ says Mel. ‘Do you need to puke?’

Jessie doesn’t answer. As long as she stays perfectly still she is fine, but even talking is risky. Dafydd rest a brotherly hand on her shoulder.

When the band comes to the end of the number, Patrick looks round and sees Jessie sitting with her head in her hands. As he begins to make his way out of the crowd, Bronwen says ‘Thanks’, and looks around for the next bit of fun.

The dancers are temporarily demagnetised and drift slowly away from the centre of the floor, but as soon as the band starts up, the direction reverses.

Patrick draws the hair back from Jessie’s face like a curtain. ‘What’s up?’

‘I think she’s got the bends,’ says Mel. ‘Must be something to do with my dancing.’

Patrick leans down. ‘Are you dizzy, Jessie? Come on, love, yes or no?’

‘Yes,’ says Jessie, and finds that speaking isn’t so dangerous after all. ‘Sorry about this.’

‘That’s OK. Maybe we should go outside for a while? Get some fresh air?’

Unwisely, Jessie nods. Patrick gathers their jackets, and as he does so, Dafydd hands him a chaser that he had bought for himself. Patrick smiles his appreciation and throws it back in one go. Then he takes Jessie by the waist and steers her out through the bar.

The cool air of the street outside is refreshing, but not much help. Jessie sits on the wall of the tiny yard at the front of the building. Patrick stands beside her, a little restless. After a while, he says, ‘Any better?’

‘Not really. But you go on in if you want to. I’ll be fine if I just sit still for a while.’

‘Would you rather go home? The walk might do you good.’

‘Would you mind?’

‘Not really. Not at all.’

But he does. It is against a strong resistance that he puts his arm around her and supports her across the road and up the steep path on the other side.

For a while Jessie makes progress by keeping her eyes shut and allowing Patrick to guide her. She has the feeling that something is pulling her inwards and down in a billowing, bucketing whirlpool. They make it up the hill and along the tree-lined path which runs between a few outlying houses, but when they reach the more open countryside beyond, Jessie gives in.

‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I have to lie down.’

The ground is damp from the dew which is rising to meet the darkness, but it is solid. It doesn’t move. Jessie lies on her back and sighs as the dizziness stills and is gone.

Patrick stands beside her, looking back along the path the way they have come. The band is still audible, but barely, just a rhythmical drone in the distance. Patrick submits and lies down beside Jessie on the grass. Gently, he strokes a stray wisp of hair from her face. ‘Are you OK?’ he says.

By the time the dizziness finally leaves her for good, Jessie’s mind is surprisingly clear. It is she who leads the way along the narrow tracks in the darkness and warns Patrick of upcoming brambles or stones underfoot. When they get to the churning pool, she continues without changing pace, keeping close to the steep bank and well away from the fence. But Patrick drops back, stopped in his tracks by a sinister presence which teases and beckons from the dark water.

‘Jessie!’

She is waiting for him on the other side. ‘What’s up?’

‘I can’t seem to see very well. I’m not sure where the fence is.’

She comes back for him, takes his hand, and guides him safely past.

D
IONYSUS, ARRIVING IN THEBES
, brought the women away from their homes and out into the hills to join his revelry. The king, Pentheus, was incensed. He had Dionysus brought before him, and took him down into a murky cell beneath the palace. But Dionysus drove him mad, and when he tried to chain him down there in the darkness, he shackled a bull instead.

Repression never did, never will succeed, where Dionysus is concerned.

On the days that Patrick doesn’t go down to the village pub, he takes a glass or two of whiskey, or opens a bottle of wine to go with the evening meal. He sees no reason not to. Jessie replaces the bottles and the money in the drawer of the dresser. She, too, sees no reason not to.

But Patrick has disturbing dreams. In one of them he is being pulled backwards and away down the meadow by some creature that has caught him from behind. Jessie is sitting at the front of the house reading through a huge sheaf of papers, and he calls out to her to help him but she doesn’t hear. In another dream he is out on a boat crossing the sea, when the crew members suddenly start running away from him. He laughs and asks them what they’re doing, but they leap from the deck and turn into dolphins which disappear beneath the waves. When he returns to the tent where he is living with Jessie, the zip is stuck and he can’t get in.

I’m doing my best.

Patrick is, too. He tends to sleep more, and his forward momentum has stopped, but he keeps the things close round him in good order and is rarely idle. On an October day that is clear but cold, he stands in the yard and looks down towards the gulley below. There is little wind in the yard, but down there a strange eddy is swirling the rusted leaves of the trees high into the air and twisting them across the road towards the forestry. Patrick watches for a while, wondering how he might go about drawing what he sees, until a passing tractor breaks his concentration and brings him back to the present.

The fence around the garden was never finished, and the two rolls of wire peel back from the last posts they reached, so it looks as if something has blasted its way out. The hens, meanwhile, have fallen into a depression. Their little henhouse is too small even for institutionalised birds to live in, and they have started to stand in a miserable huddle and refuse to eat. Patrick goes to the feed shed and gathers some tools. As a temporary measure, he rigs up a wire across the middle of the yard. Jessie keeps her car in the parking space on the other side of the house, and Dafydd can turn the tractor or the Land Rover in the meadow.

But Patrick has forgotten Dai Evans. He has barely finished tying up the wire when the red post van comes crawling up the track, and he has to take it down again so that Dai can turn in the yard. The chickens scatter in all directions, and two of them head straight for the garden.

When Jessie comes to the door she sees Patrick in the garden waving a couple of letters after the two chickens, who are racing away down the meadow.

‘Anything for me?’

‘It’s all for you,’ says Patrick. ‘Help me get these biddies back in, will you?’

Together they round up the terrified birds and drive them back into the yard. Patrick puts the wire back until he can think of something better.

‘No sign of your log book yet?’ says Jessie.

‘No.’ Patrick has had one letter since they moved into the house, and that was from Gregory, who sent him photographs of the sundial.

‘I wonder what’s happened to it?’ says Jessie. ‘Maybe you should drop a line to Swansea and see if you can hurry them up.’

‘Why should I want to hurry them up?’

‘No reason, I suppose. I just thought you might like to get the bike on the road. Officially, I mean.’

For the bike is on the road. Patrick takes it every time he goes down to the pub and leaves it concealed in the trees outside the village. If he didn’t do that he would have to walk the four miles back along the road. He will never pass the churning pool by night again.

They have reached the door of the house. Jessie has one eye on the letters in her hand. There is one from Lydia. ‘It might have fallen down the back of a desk or something,’ she goes on.

‘What might?’

‘The log book.’

‘Ah. The log book again.’

‘There’d be no harm in finding out.’

‘Will you bloody well shut up about it?’

‘What?’ says Jessie. ‘What have I said?’

‘You sound like somebody’s mother, going on about things. It’s my bike, all right? It’s my problem.’

‘I only said ...’

‘You’re only nagging me! If you’re so worried about the bike, why don’t you get on it and take it back where you got it from?’

Jessie shakes her head in disbelief. ‘What’s wrong? I don’t know what’s got into you lately.’