Down Among the Gods (5 page)

Jessie reads the look as being slightly contemptuous. She believes herself in general to be a good judge of men, but she is having a great deal of difficulty reading this one, and he fascinates her. ‘You’ve obviously done it before,’ she goes on.

Patrick sighs. ‘Yes.’ They are almost at the pub, and his attention is already inside it. But Jessie is looking over at him, expecting him to say more. Her eyes are bright in the mist-filtered light from the street lamp on the corner. She is inquisitive. For a moment, despite himself, Patrick is drawn in. There is something showing there, in Jessie’s eyes, that he recognises. Something that he has lost.

It is the ability to listen to me.

A few of the other students are gathering at the bar but Patrick, with some casual engineering, keeps himself and Jessie a little separate. Again Jessie is flattered, seeing it as a gesture of exclusivity, but in that she is mistaken. Given the choice, Patrick would always make for the crowd. When he steers her away from them it is to ensure that he won’t get into the embarrassing predicament of having to buy a round.

‘What are you drinking?’ he says.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Jessie. ‘What are you having?’

Patrick pauses, as though for deliberation. ‘Guinness, I suppose.’ He is long enough out of Ireland now to find London Guinness palatable.

‘Sounds good,’ says Jessie. ‘Guinness, then.’

As Patrick turns towards the bar, Jessie remembers his cartoon and adds, ‘A pint.’

For an instant, Patrick suffers a mental seizure. He isn’t at all sure why he chose to team up with Jessie in the first place but he did it on the assumption that the most he would have to sacrifice would be a half-pint. Now, if she doesn’t reciprocate, he’s going to go thirsty. He looks at her carefully, trying to sum her up, and is surprised to find that she really is quite good-looking. Certainly not the feminist type, but probably not too traditional, either. The seizure passes and he turns back to the bar.

Jessie, meanwhile, in her increasingly mesmerised state, has taken Patrick’s long, searching look to be one of reappraisal and final approval. She knocks back her pint with admirable speed and orders two more. Dionysus, always on the lookout for converts, begins to forget Hera and take a bit more interest. Patrick is getting relaxed. A woman who drinks like that, he thinks, might be worth getting to know.

Patrick’s chances with Jessie are good, but Dionysus is on a non-runner. He has wooed her before, quite temptingly at times, but in the long run he can never win. She worked her way through most of the available drugs during her university days, but discovered in the end that she doesn’t have the constitution for them. A few jars once or twice a week is about all she can manage. Any more than that and she gets the spins, or throws up, or gets paralysed by migrainous hangovers and swears off the booze. And when she is off it she doesn’t miss it at all.

‘Do you suppose,’ she says, ‘that we’ll get a chance to draw a male model?’

‘A male model?’

‘Yes. Or will we have the same one all the way through?’

‘It’s a good question. I hadn’t thought about it really.’

‘Nor had I. But I have a friend who thinks about things like that. She thinks it’s an issue of some concern.’

Patrick has an image of an Amazonian ball-breaker. He has no time for Artemis at all. ‘Does she?’ he says.

‘Well, it is a bit one-sided when you think about it. I wouldn’t mind getting a shot at doing a man.’

Patrick hesitates. He senses that the kind of response his King’s Cross drinking companions would expect to a remark like that might not go down too well with Jessie. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I suppose it would make a change. Could be a bit awkward, though, couldn’t it?’

‘Why?’

‘Well ...’

Jessie can barely keep her eyes off Patrick’s face. It is causing him acute discomfort, not only because there is something slightly predatory in the way she looks at him, but because he is beginning to suspect that he wouldn’t put up too much resistance to being preyed upon. Jessie is nothing like the women that he normally finds himself drinking with.

Most of them are members of the bacchae. They are maenads, as besotted with Dionysus as Patrick is himself. And if they are licentious it is because they take pleasure in being licentious, not because they have any further design. Patrick has rarely felt threatened by them. This woman is different. This woman is coming dangerously close to drawing him in.

‘You wouldn’t do it, then?’ she says.

‘What, model?’

‘Yes.’

‘No way.’

‘Why not? There’s nothing to it.’

‘Not much, there isn’t.’

Jessie looks him up and down, approvingly. ‘I can’t imagine what you’d have to hide.’

‘Thanks very much,’ he says, but it passes her by.

‘I don’t understand why men are so shy about their bodies,’ she says.

‘Would you do it, then?’

‘Ah,’ says Jessie. ‘Touché.’

She gets up to go to the Ladies and Patrick thinks about what she has said. The rent boys would do it, no problem. They’d do almost anything for enough to buy a few snorts. But as he thinks about it, he isn’t sure that he would really like to know what evidence of brutality might lie beneath their denim jackets and tight jeans. The bright lights and loud music of their flat is in apparent contradiction to the subdued darkness of his own, but the demonic figure which continues to haunt his rooms is somehow associated with them as well.

And now, he realises with a sinking heart, he will have to go back there. He has work to do in the darkroom before tomorrow, and however much he dreads facing it, he dreads even more the prospect of losing his week’s wages. He empties his glass and leans back in his chair. The art teacher nods to him from a table nearby and he returns the greeting. He had forgotten that the others were there. The murmur of voices is comforting and he is strongly tempted to stay, but he has no more money. Jessie has still not come back, and he considers slipping away quietly. She is, without doubt, a danger to him. But before he can make his decision, he spots her making her way back towards their table. She is carrying two more pints.

W
HEN DIONYSUS REACHED MATURITY
, Hera found him again, and recognised him despite the effeminate appearance that his upbringing had given him. As she had punished his first foster parents, so she punished him also: by driving him mad. It didn’t have the desired effect, though. It merely made Dionysus doubly dangerous and sent him off on a wild and violent rampage across the world. That was the first of his campaigns.

Knowing nothing of the gods, or the terms on which they operate, Patrick has accepted everything that Dionysus has offered him. In the early days it was escape, ecstasy, euphoria. Later it was exaggerated self-confidence and the courage to break away from the despised establishments of family and education. More recently, Dionysus has offered Patrick little more than protection from the unacceptable reality of where his allegiance has brought him. But at every step, sacrifice has been exacted. First it was the irreconcilable breakdown in his relationship with his parents, followed by a progressive decline in confidence, failure to keep contact with friends, the loss of women that he might have loved, and the child that he has never seen.

Yet Patrick knows nothing of sacrifice. He sees these things as the unavoidable actions of a world that has never understood him, and from which he has come to expect nothing better. He doesn’t consider his life to be tragic. In sour moments he blames society, or the institution of the family, or the insufferable nature of women for the state of his existence. But in general he considers himself lucky to have escaped the suffocating mediocrity of middle-class life and the humiliation of being registered as a state statistic. His has been a life spent in hiding, in fear of exposing his underlying vulnerability, his unquestionable guilt, his inadmissible pact with Bacchus. And he has hidden with great success: from the Inland Revenue Department, from jilted lovers, from the mother of his child, and above all from himself. He has always, just, succeeded in keeping one step ahead.

‘I shouldn’t really drive,’ says Jessie as they leave the pub, ‘but I’m going to.’

‘Three pints,’ says Patrick. ‘That’s not much, is it?’

‘It is for me,’ says Jessie, ‘but to hell with it. Can I take you home?’

Patrick has learnt, over the years, to think quickly. He thinks quickly in order to defend himself because he believes that he is in need of defence.

He almost says, ‘No thanks, my car is just around the corner,’ but he catches himself in time. Patrick is not entirely honest, but he tells lies only under extreme pressure. What he does say surprises him slightly, because it is against at least one of the wills that is currently operating within him.

‘Which way are you going?’

‘Camden.’

‘I’ll come as far as Camden with you, then. I can make my own way from there.’

They will, in fact, have to pass through King’s Cross, or close to it, to get to Camden, but Patrick will not ask Jessie to drop him off. There are no respectable residential areas anywhere near it that he can claim. Camden is a gamble. From its nearest point he will have a short walk home. From its furthest, he will end up footsore.

Jessie drives competently, despite the drink. She drives fast, like all Londoners, and accurately.

‘So what part of town do you live in?’ she says.

Patrick stalls. ‘Actually, I’m not too happy where I am at the moment.’ He pauses, and before Jessie can ask him why, he says, ‘Good God!’

‘What?’

‘Did you see that? That guy on the motorbike?’

‘What about him?’

‘Sending up sparks from the foot-rest. Didn’t you see?’

‘No.’

‘Phew. He’s had a few I’d say. Either that or there’s someone on his tail. Did you ever have a motorbike?’

‘No,’ says Jessie, ‘I never did.’

‘Shame. You’ve missed out.’

When Jessie pulls up in Camden High Street a few minutes later they are still, somehow, talking about motor bikes, despite the fact that Jessie has no interest in them whatsoever. Patrick looks out and up.

‘You don’t live here, do you?’ he says.

‘No. I’m going to get a Chinese. Want one?’

Patrick passes Chinese restaurants almost every day in the course of his travel around the city. He passes Indian, Greek and Italian restaurants, all issuing the smells of wholesome meals. Yet he never gives any thought to what he is missing. Those places are beyond the range of his pocket, out of reach, out of mind. But With Jessie’s offer, Patrick suddenly wants a Chinese take-away more than anything he could possibly imagine.

Jessie picks up on his hesitation. ‘I’m buying,’ she says.

‘I’ll give it to you next week.’

‘What do you want?’

He shrugs. ‘Anything. What are you having?’

‘I’ll get a few different things. We can share.’

She slams the car door and disappears behind the half-painted window of the take-away. While they were in the pub the night air cleared, and a few dim stars are now penetrating the smoggy aura of the city. Further up the street a group of Bengali boys are leaning against a bus shelter and an elderly man, drunk and wavering, is negotiating the pavement towards them. As he draws level he stops and says something. Patrick watches. The sound of passing traffic can be heard through the closed windows of the car but the old man’s voice cannot. The boys stare frostily at him for a moment or two, then one of them moves forward and drops a glinting coin into his outstretched hand.

The scene fills Patrick with anxiety, but not because of the confined space of the car or the rough appearance of the boys. More dangerous to him by far is the sudden appearance, as if from nowhere, of kindness in the world. His psychic barriers, which have taken him a lifetime to erect, are beginning to crack. If he allows himself to believe that care and intimacy exist then he will have to admit that he wants them, needs them, is barely surviving without them. He will also have to admit that he has had them in the past and lost them. And if that happens he will be at the mercy of regret.

He buttresses the walls before the cracks can grow any wider. When Jessie returns to the car with yet another plastic carrier, she finds Patrick cold and distant and wonders if she has said something to offend him. Jessie searches her mind for a way of breaking into it, but there seems to be no point of contact. There is a dark silence between them as they drive the few blocks to her house.

‘This yours?’ he says, as he follows her in through the front door.

‘Yes.’

‘What, all of it?’

Jessie laughs. ‘Yes.’ She turns on the fire and puts the food in front of it to keep warm, then goes into the kitchen for the bottle of whiskey and two glasses. Patrick winks at her, and takes it upon himself to pour.

‘Want to have a poke around?’ says Jessie.

‘I’d love to, if you don’t mind.’

The house is a fairly basic three up and three down, with a small glass extension built on to the back as a conservatory or potting shed. Patrick wanders through the rooms on the ground floor with his glass in his hand. Jessie’s tastes show themselves more clearly in her house than they do in her dress or her choice of car. There is nothing of opulence in the surroundings but there is a certain elegance. The rooms are decorated in colours that are soft but rich, and everywhere there is fabric. All the floors have faded but welcoming rugs. Every chair has a cushion. The sofa and the armchairs are draped with Indian bedspreads or old velvet curtains in warm colours. Patrick sighs, envisaging himself stretched out on the floor in front of the fire, reading one of the books which line at least a wall of each room.

He wanders through the living room and on to the front of the house where Jessie has her office. An Indian batik covers most of one wall, and the others are hung with Japanese prints in simple frames. Closed up on the desk, beside a pile of papers, is something that looks to him like a small, portable sewing machine.

Jessie has come quietly in behind him. ‘Grub’s up,’ she says.