Pandaemonium (34 page)

Jordan grunted again; Jacey patted my hand, in a gesture that might have been infuriatingly patronising another time but right now was just fine, thanks. I didn’t mind being patronised, when I was leaning half my weight on him.

“Good,” I said. “Right now, the other thing I need is beer. We’d better be going in the right direction, or you two are in such trouble...”

P
UBS COME IN
many guises. Some are foul. Actually more and more of them are foul, which is like a measure of how everything is getting worse, which is like a measure of how I’m getting older. I hate that. Soon I’ll have to have a lawn and everything.

Pubs on the margins, neither city nor country, caught between the suburbs and the industrial estates? Often the worst. All too often. TV screens on every wall, corporate muzak, microwaved food, no decent beer. Children. Everything I hate in a public house.

Maybe Jacey has an app on his phone to lead him away from all of that. Maybe he has native tracker skills. When we lived together, I was too young to know what was good, and too much in love to notice.

Which is a universal story, I guess, and no surprise that it ended badly. Now we were grown-ups, and trying to rebuild; it would do him no harm in the world, that he steered us to a pub like this.

From the outside, you’d never have known. It looked like a shoebox, broad and flat. My heart sank. It was probably no older than I was, and that’s never a recommendation. A good pub is like a good wine, it needs time to settle and then more time to mature. Also it needs angles, shadows. Dust.

Call me old-fashioned, and get off my lawn. That’s how I feel.

So we walked into this dull brick building, and it just goes to show. What you see isn’t always what you get.

It looked just as dull inside, more like a church hall than a pub: chipped formica tables and lino floor, strip lighting. I was half ready to turn around and walk straight out again, except that my bones ached with a still-foggy chill and I wanted to sit down.

The boys were being telepathic again. Jacey took charge of my unresisting self, propelling me towards a corner table, while Jordan headed for the bar.

“Unprepossessing, isn’t it? But you know how this goes, in all the best stories: you can’t judge a book by its cover, every frog is a prince, the best things come in plain wrappers. Besides, there will be beer, and there will be food. Hang on to that thought, and trust me.”

I glowered at him across the table and trusted him not at all, until Jordan came over with three pints balanced between his two hands. There’s a skill to that, when your hands are small; partly it’s practice, partly it’s confidence. He used to bite his lip and watch his footing. Now he didn’t even watch his hands. I bit my own lip instead, and missed my old young Jay in all his tentative potential. And couldn’t regret him – it had been my choice, after all, to do this, to move him on, to give him back, and I still thought that was right – but even so. I missed him on my own account, and wasn’t sure what I had now. Whether I even had a friend.

“Okay,” he said in his unrecognisable new voice, laying down the glasses and lining them up, “I didn’t know who’d want what, so there’s a mild and a bitter and an IPA.”

“They have
mild?
” I may have been gaping.

“Sweetheart. You’re in the north now. People still drink real drinks up here. Besides, this place is in the Good Beer Guide.” Jacey was smug; of course he had an app. Unless he just had a good instinct and a sharp eye for the decals on a pub door.

Either way. Jordan went to slide a glass towards me, but he was too slow; I already had my hand around it.

Tall straight glass, black, black liquor with a tawny head, oh, my.

Mild doesn’t mean weak. Mildly hopped is what it means, and young and sweet and malty. These days they tend to be quite light on the alcohol, but they don’t have to be.

This one wasn’t.

I sipped, and sighed, and sipped again. I guess the boys sorted themselves out, with drinks and chairs and so forth; I wasn’t paying attention.

When I looked up, when I spoke, it was for a cause. “I don’t suppose this place is in the Good Food Guide too, by any chance?”

“As a matter of fact,” said a voice behind me, “yes, we are.”

If I’d had my Aspect on, I’d have known she was there, never mind the distractions of my glass. But then, if I’d had my Aspect on, I wouldn’t have been enjoying the beer so much, I’d have been too aware of all the world around me. Swings and roundabouts.

And she was a nice lady bringing menus, because Jordan had thought to ask for them; and I don’t know if he’d asked for these too but she left us nibbles in pretty white bowls, to sustain us while we considered our options. There were crisps and roasted cashews and –

Holy cow.

Pork scratchings.
Home-made
pork scratchings. Strips of rind rubbed with sea-salt and aromatic herbs, roasted until the rind puffs out like popcorn into a crisp lacy honeycomb with a blanket of dense juicy fat beneath: like the crackling on a Sunday dinner only better, and you don’t have to bother with all that extra stuff on your plate, the meat and vegetables and so forth.

I didn’t grab the bowl and tug it to my side of the table, that would have been unmannerly. I didn’t even growl when the boys reached out automatic hands to help themselves. I don’t think I did. I must have made some kind of noise, or glowered, or something. Jacey gave me an amused glance, took a bare single scratching and nudged the rest in my direction; Jordan went back to the bar, to negotiate for more.

Usually, I’m actually quite good about sharing. Usually. That night, not so much. I did get better, once it was obvious that we weren’t going to run short. And that Jordan would be paying. I was entirely happy to dine out on his dollar. On his family’s dollar, that is, now he was a poor little rich kid again.

An hour later I was happy inside as well as out. There hadn’t been a whole lot of talking: just more beer and more crunchy salty goodness until eventually even I was craving solid food to follow; and then there was slow-roasted pork belly with mash and greens, and steak-and-kidney pudding, and proper fish and chips. And poaching from each other’s plates, and fencing each other off with cutlery, and more beer, and I suppose in the end we had to start being serious but I didn’t really want to. Hell, I’d even got the twitch of a smile out of Jordan, when we’d both been fighting over the last trace of his tartare sauce. Which was home-made too, and the best I’d ever tasted, which was why I stole his last chip to dunk in it.

“Told you this’d be a good pub,” Jacey said, leaning back to watch us with a self-satisfied leer.

“This is not a good pub,” I said, “this is a great pub. Some pubs are born great: the old coaching inns, f’rexample, or those taverns built into the mediaeval city walls. Some achieve greatness; you know the way a perfectly ordinary pub becomes the place that everyone goes, because it has the best jukebox in town or the best food for twenty miles or whatever. And some have greatness thrust upon them. Like this place. Which has everything against it, including an almost total lack of customers” – we were still the only people in, bar two old men on bar-stools – “and yet. Great beer, great food. No atmosphere, but hey. If it had everything, we’d never get in the –”

I stumbled then, because I made the mistake of looking at my audience in mid-oration.

“Well, what?” I snarled.

“Oh, nothing.” Jacey was positively smirking now, resoundingly pleased with himself. “It’s just nice to see you feeling better. Have another pint and carry on.”

You haven’t changed
, he was really saying.
Despite the name, and the Aspect, and the years and the experience. You were always like this, holding forth about something or other as soon as you got some beer inside you...

I scowled at him, and turned to Jordan in hopes of a more sensible response. Nostalgia was the last game I wanted to play just now. I couldn’t be Fay for one boy and Desi for the other, I couldn’t chop and change inside myself, uncertain from one moment to the next who I was or who I ought to be. Who I ought to be with.

Inside my pocket, my hand was suddenly fidgeting with the Zippo. One flick, and I could have a third alternative. Thom was the easy choice, utterly uncomplicated.

Oh, and utterly naked, that too. And utterly heedless of it, but even so. Better not...

Not that either of these boys was actually making me an offer, mind. Jacey was preoccupied with his own smarts and our shared memories; Jordan had apparently been listening to me all too carefully, hearing what I didn’t mean to say. I hate when that happens.

“Some are born great,” he quoted back at me. “Some achieve greatness. Some have greatness thrust upon them. It’s like a summary of the Overworld, isn’t it? With immortality to substitute for greatness.”

And there we were, back in the moment. Back in the story.
Damn you, Jordan.

“Damn you, Jordan,” Jacey said. “Lighten up, will you?”

“No,” I said. “No, he’s right. We need to talk about this. It. Him. Oz is still out there – hell, we all know exactly where he is – and vice versa, that too. He knows where we are. And he... thinks he has an interest.”

“In seeing us dead.” Jordan was being laconic, apparently, as well as direct. Maybe that was the beer. He wasn’t used to it, after all. Hadn’t been. Now, who knew?

“Yeah, that. So I guess we have two choices. We can run him to earth, or we can run away.”
Again
, but that didn’t need saying.

“No point in running,” Jacey said, “if he knows where we are. If he can just follow us. That’s not really running, is it? That’s leading him directly to us, whenever he cares to come. Like waving a flag and saying ‘Okay, we’re going over here now...’”

“What are you suggesting, that we should take the fight to Oz? Beard him in his den, just walk in and have it out with him, face to face?”
Do exactly what he wants
, I was saying actually,
give ourselves over to him in his place of power?

Put it like that, of course it wasn’t an option. That’s why I put it like that.

I had some experience of running; Jordan had a whole lot more. A hell of a lot. I looked to him for sober rational good sense, to set against Jacey’s folly.

“Yeah,” he said, his eyes smoking. “That. Oz Trumby? I’m not running from fucking Oz Trumby.”

For all his long denial, he still had all the arrogance of the born immortal, prince of Hell.
Some are born great
– it was a truth settled into his bones. Now at last he had the power to support that, and of course he wanted to use it.

I guess when the worm turns, it turns all the way. I thought about saying that, just to make him angry, make him storm out if I could – only then he’d get on the bike and storm all the way to Oz’s and die stupidly, uselessly, alone. And then his parents would have lost both their children, and it’d be my fault both times, and...

No. I didn’t say a thing, I just waited for Jacey to realise what idiots they both were, and calm everything down, and –

“Okay, good,” Jacey said. “You and me, we are the big battalions, right? If we go in together, we’re going in strength. Desi’s got her Aspect, sure, that’ll look after her – because you do know she’s not going to stay behind, right? – but we’ll take the rough stuff. No offence, sweetheart, but, well. I guess you achieved greatness, on this new scale of Jay’s, but...”

How did I ever come to be involved with two such extraordinary morons? Simultaneously? What did I do to deserve this? Give me Thom any day, over these two. One might be regarded as unfortunate, but two...

I took a breath, and hit them hard below the belt.

“Have you forgotten the Green Man?
Both
of you? There was only one of him. And you were there, Jacey, and so was Asher, and so was I.”
And so was Jordan, but he was still seventeen then, he didn’t count. He was the trophy we were fighting for.
“Immortal doesn’t mean what you think it means, if you think it means you can stomp lesser beings and not die. Ash died, remember? And Oz may not be immortal-born, but he’s strong like anything, and, and
established
” – it was the best way I could think of saying that: they knew what I meant – “and he’ll have half an army in there with him. You won’t stand a chance, if you just go bulling in there on your we’re-so-superior high horses. They’ll tear you apart.”

I said that last deliberately, so that they’d remember what had happened to Ash in all too much horrid detail, as I was. I don’t think the male imagination works right, so they wouldn’t be seeing their own selves torn apart that same way, as I was, but even so.

One of them shrugged; one of them scowled. Neither of them raised an argument. Both of them hated me, I guess, a little, for being right.

Jordan went back to the bar for more beer. It was easier to watch his back view than to meet Jacey’s eyes, so I did the easy thing. I’m like that.

Besides, he does look good from the back. From the front too, actually, but I’ve always liked my boys neat and slim and callipygian, I’ve always admired the curve of a young man’s back.

I don’t believe I sighed, I’m not that gauche. I haven’t sighed over a boy since I was an adolescent.