Earthly Delights (24 page)

And so it was. So far.

I did not know why Daniel was staying with me, but it did allow me to leave the cleaning to Jason. He looked very nice in his overall and white shoes, very much the baker. Probably more than I was, at least from the tracksuit. I went to see if the Prof was home and interested in some good news. He was, both.

‘Send to slay the fatted calf, for this my son was lost and is come home again,’ he quoted. ‘How nice, how very, very nice.’

‘It was touch and go for a while there,’ I told him.

‘Well, naturally, it would be. Happy endings require preparation. They don’t just spontaneously arise, like mushrooms. Good of you to come to tell me, Corinna.’

He was dressed in a very nice suit. He looked dapper.

‘Going out?’ I asked.

‘Lunch at the University Club,’ he said. ‘Likely to be sadly boring but the food is always good. Nice to be able to walk without that wretched stick too.’

‘Where is it?’ I looked around. ‘I meant to have a look at that Anubis head handle.’

‘Oh, sorry. Mr Pemberthy borrowed it this morning. He’s twisted his ankle or something, poor man. May I escort you to the elevator, Madame Boulangère?’

‘Delighted,’ I said, accepting his arm.

When I got back Jason was well into the scrubbing and Daniel was sitting with Horatio, Heckle and Jekyll on the stairs. They looked very comfortable together. I ducked across to the Cafe Delicious and bought lasagne for three. Then I thought about it and doubled the order. I still had a recovering drug addict to feed. And he was also a teenage boy. Put that together and you have an appetite which could dine at Olympic gold-medal level. You have a boy who could eat whole cities into subjection.

The scrubbing lasted another hour. The lasagne lasted six minutes. Jason wiped his mouth, ate a casual baguette, polished off the last of the Coca Cola he had bought to refresh his labours and sighed. He was, I believe, actually sated at last. For, oh, I don’t know, minutes, before he would be hungry again. I gave him the bag of food and he changed clothes and left with a ‘bye’. That was another innovation. Usually he just vanished.

‘He’s improving,’ said Daniel from the other side of the clean floor.

‘I wish I knew where he slept,’ I said.

‘Flagstaff,’ said Daniel. ‘He’s there every night. He gets fresh rations from each circuit and even Sister Mary has limited him to three sandwiches and two cups of soup each time. Though she did say that God loves a willing eater. Which he is. Can you lend me your couch for a few hours? I’m going to need some sleep. Also a shower? I had to carry an OD to where the ambulance could get to him. I’m feeling grubby and I’ve got to go out on the van again tonight. Then we might have some dinner?’

‘My ablutions are your ablutions. My couch is your couch,’ I said formally. ‘But I’ll be using the desk in the parlour, so why not have my bed? You will have Horatio as company but he’s very civilised. If you don’t want him, shut the door. I’ll just do a few chores here and I’ll be right up.’

He kissed me gently. He seemed very sleepy and I let him go. My mystery man. Perhaps he really was a vampire. Then I pottered around a little, washing Jason’s clothes and sticking them in the dryer for the morrow. I was still not relying on Jason. It was nice to have him but Daniel had warned me that at any moment Jason might revert to Jase and vanish. I could still do the whole baking on my own. I was just wondering
where I was going to find another shop assistant after Friday when I was aware that someone was standing in Calico Alley. Leaning on my doorpost. A big man in a Blues Brothers suit. Last seen beating my assistant baker and knocking out one of his teeth.

‘Yes?’ I asked in my best middle-class voice. ‘Can I help you?’

‘That boy,’ he said in a gravelly tone probably borrowed from the Godfather. Or maybe the Sopranos. I don’t watch Mafia films much. Unless there’s really nothing else on.

Or Animal Planet has reset to crocodiles. Or sharks. Or crocodiles and sharks. Both of which were closely related to the man in the doorway.

‘Which boy?’ I elevated an eyebrow.

‘Jase,’ he snarled. I decided not to be too clever.

‘He’s my assistant,’ I said. ‘Jason.’

‘He been working for you long?’

‘A couple of weeks,’ I said. At the time it really seemed like that, though in fact it was only a week.

‘He always here early in the morning?’ he asked. I did not like this at all. The man was big, strong and unpleasant. I edged my hand towards the mobile phone into which I have programmed the police emergency number. I switched the phone on. It beeped. His eyes flicked to it.

‘I start at four,’ I told him. ‘When the ovens come on.’

‘And he’s here?’ he demanded, with menaces.

‘Yes. What are you asking all these questions for? I’ve told you, he wants to be a baker and he has to start at four. Who are you, anyway?’

He made a very fast movement. It could have been the death of Heckle, but alley cat reflexes never fade. As a hard heel came down, viciously, towards Heckle’s exposed white
belly, he did a lightning wriggle which would have broken an eel’s back and wasn’t there when the heel cracked into the flour sack. I yelped and pressed the speed dialler on the phone.

‘I’ve just called the cops,’ I said. ‘Do stay and wait until they come.’

‘You want to be careful with them vermin,’ he said, and grinned at me. A sadist. Great. Just when it had seemed like such a nice day. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I also felt that if I could reach the breadknife I would have cut this man’s throat. In a church. But I knew about bullies. Some will be placated if you do just as they wish. Some can be confounded if you do something unexpected, like not reacting to the attempted murder of your cat. I decided to try this. I wanted him out of my bakery, out of my life, as soon as possible. The only way to win this cat-and-mouse game, as the Cat said in Red Dwarf, was not to be the mouse.

‘What do you want with Jason?’ I demanded. I wasn’t confident of the way this interview was going but I could get Daniel to warn Jason to stay away if his hunters had grown this bold.

‘If you ain’t lying,’ he said, ‘we don’t want nothing to do with the little cunt. You can have him. You better not be lying,’ he told me.

‘You can check,’ I pointed out. ‘Everyone knows what time I start work. Now, if there’s nothing else …?’

‘Nah,’ he said. He stepped back from the doorway and I shut the door in his face. I locked both locks and heard the steel wards snick home. I threw the bolt. I cancelled the emergency call. Then I burst into tears. I found Heckle and hugged him while he growled and told me what he would have done to the bastard if he hadn’t been twenty times his size and had such hard hoofs. I spread kitty treats recklessly to
apologise for belonging to approximately the same species as that creature.

Then I went up to my own apartment. I found Daniel neatly asleep in my bed. I slid in behind him, embraced him as though he was a large, breathing teddy bear, and fell instantly and heavily asleep.

We woke at six, when the light moves across the window and falls on the pillow. Daniel turned over, exclaimed, ‘What?’, felt over my face and grunted, ‘Oh.’ Having thus explained to his own satisfaction where he was and who was lying next to him, he opened his eyes and said, ‘Hello, Corinna.’

‘Hello, Daniel.’ I snuggled closer to him, then forced myself away. ‘Let’s go and get some dinner.’

‘We could just stay here,’ he said dreamily. ‘Very nice bed. Nice cat. Nice company.’

‘No, I’m getting up, I need to talk to you.’

‘Talk here,’ he offered, but released me when I sat up. I had gone to bed in my clothes and I felt frowsty. I shed them and went into the bathroom and had a short, scalding shower and put on clean clothes, which always makes me feel better. When I returned Daniel was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. I don’t know how he makes it so fast. Some sort of magic, perhaps. Meroe would know.

‘So, what’s wrong?’ he asked.

I told him about the Blues Brother and his attempt to kill Heckle. My voice shook.

‘I wonder what our Jase has been doing?’ said Daniel into his cup. ‘As I said, he really should be too minor a player to attract heavy duty attention from the John Smiths. Tell me exactly what he said. Tell me slowly and don’t leave anything out.’

I complied. It was not a pleasant retelling. Daniel tugged at where his beard would have been if he’d had a beard.

‘You did well, ketschele. Got out of an interview with Big John unbruised. Not many can say that. You must have reminded him of his parole officer. Well, whatever it is they are investigating, it must have happened after four in the morning and you have given Jason an alibi. Inadvertent and, as you say, false, but it might distract them. I don’t see any major harm in Jason but the mind boggles at what he might have done, or been on the edges of.’

‘Do you know anything about Jason? Such as why he left home?’

Daniel delivered a report like a police officer, in a monotone. ‘He was the third child in a big multi-father family and they all picked on him. Dysfunctional families quite often have a scapegoat. The pyschs used to think that it had something to do with relationship by blood—the cuckoo in the nest theory—but it doesn’t. They can elect any one kid and make his life hell. Jason managed okay until the latest stepfather decided that he really couldn’t stand having Jason around and threw him out.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’

‘How can his mother allow it?’ I protested. What a romantic thing for me to say. My own mother had left me ploughing barefoot through icy mud because she didn’t believe in shoes. They cut off a child’s natural contact with the earth, she thought. I had the chilblains for months. And the pneumonia for weeks. If Grandma Chapman hadn’t rescued me I would have died, because Father didn’t believe in antibiotics. Mothers, forsooth. Families, forsooth! Daniel took my hand.

‘Imagine this. You are born into a dysfunctional family
yourself, where no one cares about you. Even worse, you are alternately hugged and slapped, neither for any good reason. You know that no one loves you. You are starving for affection. You lie down for the first boy who asks and you get pregnant. Then the boy leaves and you only have the baby and you know that the baby will love you alone, except that’s not what babies do, and you are miserable and trapped and even lonelier. Then another boy comes along and the same thing happens again. After three or four children you don’t have your looks anymore and you have to accept older and possibly violent men, and they still leave you, partly because you now have a brood of underfed, insecure children with no manners.’

‘That’s awful,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Daniel. ‘Jason’s mother might have really wanted to love him but she had to choose between Jason, who was difficult and aggressive and actually believed it when they told him he was stupid, and the latest boyfriend who, this time, might stay with her.’

‘How old is Jason?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Shit,’ I said.

‘Quite.’ I drank coffee. Daniel drank coffee. Horatio sat on the windowsill and tried to outstare the setting sun. He does this sometimes. I’ve never kept count but the score is probably about fifty-fifty sun/cat.

‘Where shall we get some dinner?’ I asked.

‘How about asking Meroe and the Prof and sending out for some gourmet takeaway?’ he suggested. ‘And Trudi and maybe Cherie and Andy. Assuming that they’ve actually bonded again.’

‘Too early for that,’ I predicted. ‘She is still so angry with him.’

‘You’d be amazed,’ said Daniel, smiling at me affectionately. ‘She’ll have shed a lot of it by now. She’s been carrying it for so long. It’ll be such a relief to put it down. But you were right about her, Corinna. What a strong-hearted girl! Out at fourteen and an abuse survivor and she finds a job, finds a place to live, finds a passion.’

‘What passion?’ I asked.

‘The Goths,’ he said. ‘Just the right philosophy—world weary, sophisticated, a little edgy. Very detached from the world of abusive uncles and nice middle-class fathers and betrayals.’

‘You like them,’ I said.

‘They’re like the Society for Creative Anachronism,’ he said. ‘Or the war-game people. Or the science fiction fans. They have created an elaborate fantasy to comfort them for the shortcomings of the modern world. They put a huge amount of effort into it. For example, learning languages and courtesy, making perfect period costumes, memorising every move that Napoleon made at Austerlitz. Even sitting through seven hundred episodes of “Star Trek”. This means that, unlike most people, they have a mission. They have things to think about apart from the mundane.’

‘So there aren’t any bad Trekkies?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘Ones that die young and fester instead of live long and prosper?’

See previous comments about the dangers of sarcasm. He just answered me as if it was a serious argument.

‘Oh yes, of course there are bad Goths and nasty SCA people and evil dungeon masters. But they are in a society that really wants to maintain its fantasy. So they get thrown out if they make too much trouble for the others. I don’t think it matters what fantasy it is. As long as it is a courteous, creative,
intelligent fantasy, then it rejects someone who, for example, wants to discover how fourteenth century soldiers handled rape in armour or wants to re-enact the fall of Calais with real blood. The fantasy people self-select for intelligence and good manners. There are way worse people to learn your social interaction from. As I get older I begin to believe that good manners are much more important than most social skills,’ said Daniel.

‘This must not be taken to apply to Nerds Inc,’ I commented.

‘They don’t get out much,’ he agreed.

‘And bikie gangs,’ I added.

‘You’d be surprised,’ said Daniel ambiguously. ‘Now, what about some dinner?’

I started telephoning and found all in favour of gourmet pizzas from the Pizzeria De Luxe, which were always superb. Also they deliver. Cherie answered Andy’s phone and said she’d be glad to come but they couldn’t stay because she and her father were going to pick up her stuff from the room she shared with four girls in a hostel in Carlton. She asked if she could bring Pumpkin and I said yes, a little bemused. Most seventeen year olds didn’t bring their teddy bear to dinner.