Down Among the Gods (3 page)

There’s a lot going on here. There are, in fact, four different encounters involved. For a start we have two mortals, each in their own way lonely and needy. Given a chance they might come to like each other quite a lot. But that in itself wouldn’t be causing the extraordinary jolt which they are both experiencing. The strange sense of recognition that they share is very common among those who are attracted to each other, and sometimes it’s so strong that people get the sensation they have known each other for ever. It’s in fashion these days to attribute this to meetings in past lives, a hypothesis for which I am always willing to provide evidence for those who seek it. What I’m seeing right now, though, is a meeting, a fairly strong clash in fact, between two of the immortals. Jessie and Patrick have never met. It is impossible that they should recognise each other. But Hera and Dionysus have known each other for ever. Dionysus is giving Patrick strong messages to back off, and Jessie feels a similar desire to disengage and retreat. But there are still two more pairs of co-ordinates here. Jessie, like many over-regulated people, has long had a fondness for Dionysus, and tends to be attracted to him again and again. And Patrick, despite his resolutions, has not succeeded in breaking free of the childish longing to hand over responsibility for himself to someone who is willing to take it. Which is why, in the past, he has attracted Hera to himself, again and again and again.

Jessie looks away, hoping that she doesn’t appear as flustered as she feels. Patrick covers a momentary confusion by going over some lines with his pencil but it’s a while before he is able to concentrate again on his drawing. They have both been abruptly besieged by an inner conflict which neither of them is able to understand. For the rest of the class they are acutely aware of each other but each carefully avoids meeting the other’s eyes. When the model finally relaxes and gets dressed, Patrick’s attention is taken by the teacher who is full of enthusiasm and encouragement. Patrick is flattered. He is beginning to believe that his creative faculty might be intact.

Why shouldn’t it be? Every human being is potentially a genius. But anyone with creative aspirations needs to be aware that Dionysus is a brilliant mimic, and one of the best impressions he does is that of the muse. He will serve the imaginative individual up to a point, but the gods are not handmaidens to humanity. The time inevitably comes when they cease to serve and demand to be served instead.

The drawings on Patrick’s board are good, without doubt. But the creative impulses, the ideas and enthusiasms which are at present passing through his mind are mirages. They, like so many before them, will vanish before he can reach them.

The teacher issues a general invitation to the class to meet in the Red Lion for a drink. Patrick agrees readily and, without thinking, looks around to see if Jessie is coming. But she has already gone. The drawing that she did of the model wearing his hat is just visible among the crumpled papers she has thrown into the bin. The sight of it gives him a slight jolt and he turns back to the bustle of the class, packing away. Carefully, he rolls up his own drawings and tucks them under his arm.

As he walks down to the pub, the sky is as dark as a city sky can be, and a light fog blurs the edges of the buildings. The trees in Griffon Square are beginning to drop soft scatterings of autumn leaves on to the pavement. It is the kind of evening that Patrick loves, mysterious and calm, as though awaiting the arrival of drama. He remembers Jessie’s face clearly and that strange, ambivalent meeting of their eyes. It remains with him along with the general excitement of renewed possibilities as he scuffs through the fresh leaves.

But by the bottom of the first pint he has forgotten her.

It is late when he gets home from the Red Lion. He has no car and no money for a taxi so he has to walk. For a while he had a bicycle and he remembers that time as being pretty much perfect. But the bicycle was, inevitably, stolen and he hasn’t been able to get the money together for another one. He will, sooner or later. Just as he will, sooner or later, find the impetus to break free from King’s Cross.

The house where Patrick lives is on a main thoroughfare where three lanes of one-way traffic pass almost continuously.

There are stairs down to his basement flat and something rustles among the rubbish bags that he keeps forgetting to bring up to the street for the dustmen. He pauses on the steps. Two heavy lorries rumble past, and in the relative silence that follows Patrick is aware of a sense of anxiety as he goes on down and fits the key into the door. For some reason that he cannot understand, the flat has begun to feel menacing to him in recent months. He doesn’t believe in ghosts or evil spirits but it seems to him that the flat is inhabited by some sort of malign presence which constantly threatens his peace of mind. Reason, Patrick’s defence against anything unknown, is becoming increasingly powerless to protect him.

He passes quickly through the hall and into the larger of his two rooms, which is where he sleeps and occasionally cooks. The darkness is solid after the street lights, but not as empty as it ought to be. Patrick strikes a match. It flares and leaves a blind white spot in his vision, then gutters and creates dark shapes which sway and lean towards him as he crosses the room. The hairs on his back stiffen and tingle as the match burns out, and he quickly lights a second one and touches it to the two candles on the mantelpiece. As they kindle and the light expands, the room takes on a less forbidding quality. When he first moved here, in exodus from his last relationship, he bought a bolt of cheap grey fabric and hung it around the walls using a borrowed staple gun. It was a way to cover the crumbling plaster, and he had not thought of it as being any sort of a decorative achievement. It did, though, have some unusual and pleasing consequences. The cloth hangs over the recesses on either side of the fireplace, leaving perfect alcoves where the clutter of his life can lie concealed. And instead of bringing these curtain pieces right into the corners, he rounded them where they are attached to the ceiling, so that the room appears to be oval in shape. All the sharp edges are hidden.

Patrick puts a match to the gas fire and as it heats up its red light begins to overpower the candles. He sits down for a moment or two to calm himself before starting into the night’s work which lies before him. For the first time in all the years he has lived here, it occurs to him that the round, warm space he has created is a womb. But it is a womb which has outlived its purpose. Now it is trying to expel him.

T
HE HATRED BETWEEN HERA
and Dionysus is long-standing and bitter. For when Hera’s first attempt to get rid of Dionysus failed, she did not give up. As soon as he emerged from Zeus’ thigh, she ordered the Titans to destroy him. They did their solid and pragmatic best. They tore Dionysus to pieces and boiled him in a cauldron, but his grandmother Rhea rescued him and delivered him back to Zeus, who entrusted him to Persephone, the queen of the underworld. She in turn brought him to King Athamas and his wife, Ino, who reared him in the women’s quarters, disguised as a girl. But Hera was not to be deceived. When she discovered what they had done, she rewarded Athamas and Ino with madness.

Jessie would have liked to linger on after the class to see whether there was anything happening but instead she drives across town, in the opposite direction from her home. She has agreed to meet Lydia to discuss Frances Bailey’s novel with her, and little short of accident will stop her from keeping her promise. Jessie has, she believes, got her priorities in order. She knows London well. There isn’t much traffic around, but by habit she zips the little car through side streets and alleys, taking the shortest route. The drawing has done her good, stimulated an unused part of her brain and woken her up.

Something else has woken her up, too. She frowns to herself in the car, remembering the man in the hat. Her visual memory isn’t good and she can’t recall his face, but it will be a long time before she forgets the feelings that his hungry gaze produced.

But along with those feelings, and the reciprocal hunger, comes the all too familiar emergence of guilt. Jessie’s father was a Methodist minister, and her mother was his even more Methodist wife. They believed in the one, true god, and did their best to defy all the others that they dimly sensed lurking in the shadows. They did this in themselves by instilling rigid and indissoluble discipline. To rid their children of the symptoms of original sin, they used shame.

Towards the end of his life, Jessie’s father began to get an inkling that he had somehow been conned. The one god idea is intriguing, but has consistently failed to get past humanity’s tendency to worship something outside itself, and to be consequently overtaken by that which it worships. The Church, despite the remarkable insight of its originators, soon became just another of the deities in the pantheon, and although she occupied a seat on Olympus for quite some time, she has clearly not succeeded in her bid to overcome the rest of us.

But her father’s reversal came too late for Jessie to be affected by it. She accepted and obeyed her Methodist teachings, even when they ran against the passions that were steadily gaining strength within her nature. Her rebellion began relatively late in life, when she left home to go to university.

Did she change, then? Hardly.

Human beings do not change, though they do, from time to time, change their allegiance. This can happen at any time during their lives, but there are certain critical points when everyone is, in terms of the gods, up for grabs. The most important of these is adolescence.

With rare exceptions, children accept with little question the gods that are favoured by their parents. It is not until the teenage years that there is a monstrous reshuffle, which is agonising for them and those around them. Because now the gods close in and vie for power. The individual in the midst of it is prone to all kinds of unpredictable passions, enjoying inflations of character as one or another of the deities takes possession, then suffering desperate depressions as they are dropped again. The adolescent swings between the safe, parental gods and the inducements which the new ones are offering, while their parents find themselves lying awake at night wondering how it is that their placid and reliable child has been transformed overnight into a demon. In rare cases, this uncertainty remains with an individual, who spends his or her life in a state of unpredictability, pursuing now this interest, now that, forever on the point of finding their heart’s true path, forever failing to do so. Most people, however, come through the phase of adolescence and settle. They come to some sort of decision about their life.

At least, that’s how it appears from their standpoint.

Jessie’s decision to study literature was an acceptable one to her parents. What she did during her years of college would not have been, had they known about it. For as soon as she was free of their restrictive influence she entered her postponed adolescence and moved straight into the inner-city whirlwind of the seventies. Jessie was ready to join the party. Her red hair and unpretentious air of innocence ensured that she was never short of suitors. She fell in love easily, and out again, amazed by her own sense of abandonment, her readiness for anything. Those were heady times. She never knew where she was going to wake up, or with whom, or with what kind of hangover.

The gods were having a ball. Dionysus was there, his latest campaign just beginning to pick up strength, and Apollo, the god of music, during his rock and roll phase. And wherever you find those two together, there also you will inevitably find Aphrodite, goddess of desire, and her unruly son, Eros.

He’s popular on earth, Eros, particularly with the manufacturers of greetings cards. The Romans called him Cupid, and maybe that’s the name by which he’s better known. A cutesy little cherub with dimply buttocks and a dainty bow and arrow. Where would the world be without him?

But what people don’t remember is that he has another side to his nature. He never got a seat up here on Mount Olympus; too irresponsible, it was decided. So he stays down below, getting into all kinds of mischief in darkened rooms across the world. It’s not Aphrodite who is responsible for rape, child abuse, prostitutes and rent boys. She had little, if any, part to play in the sudden and terrifying emergence of AIDS.

Jessie pulled up short and returned, slightly shamefaced, to the fold. The Methodist title was rejected for ever, but the Methodist ethic remained.

‘You know what bothers me?’ she says to Lydia, as they settle before the fire in the untidy clutter of her flat.

‘No. What bothers you?’

‘What bothers me is that I get no acknowledgement for what I do for Frances.’

‘You get paid.’

‘I know I do. That’s not the point. Frances would be nowhere without me, and that’s a fact. She can’t write good English to save her life. I mean, there I am, basically ghostwriting her stuff and she’s never even thanked me, let alone given me any public recognition.’

Lydia moves her chair away from the fire at the same moment that Jessie draws hers closer. Lydia is one of those people who never seems to be cold. Jessie is somehow never quite warm.

‘Would you want it?’ says Lydia. ‘Really?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s the principle of the thing, I suppose.’

Lydia pours vodka from a new bottle into two glasses. ‘Frances probably has to ignore you, Jessie, for the sake of her dignity. If she admits to what you do then she also admits that she doesn’t do a great job herself. I have a suspicion that she believes all writers work like that. They just deliver the baby and give it to someone else to clean up. Quite a lot of them do, these days, you know?’

‘Well, it bothers me,’ says Jessie.

‘It didn’t used to. You used to love it.’

‘I suppose that’s true.’

In the silence that follows, Jessie is surprised to discover just how much it does bother her. Her literary faculties are jammed full, bunged up with things that she wouldn’t even read, given the choice. The work had seemed to be a perfect way of earning money while she waited for her own inspiration, but it hasn’t turned out that way. No inspiration has come to her since the year she was on her own between Alec and John.