Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (18 page)

There he learned that his mother had followed his advice and found herself a boyfriend.

T
HE MAN’S NAME
was Alastor Wylie and he held a position high up in the civil service, although Guy’s mother was unclear exactly what. They had met via a mutual friend, someone in the FCO who had worked with Maurice Lucas a long time back and still kept in touch with his widow. The mutual friend had introduced them at a cocktail party last month. Since then they had been to the opera twice and also attended a preview of the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum.

She told Guy all this with a sly, shy air. “I felt you ought to know. As luck would have it, he’s popping round for sherry tonight, then taking me to Claridge’s. You two should meet.”

Guy’s first impressions of Alastor Wylie were not entirely unfavourable. He was silver-haired and handsome, with an effortless suavity about him. He spoke in a languid purr, and his tailored suit, with its wide lapels and shoe-swamping flares, hung comfortably off his trim-but-ever-so-slightly-going-to-seed frame. He smiled a little too hard and a little too often, but all in all Guy was inclined to like him. He seemed genuinely smitten with Guy’s mother and treated her with courtesy and respect. Guy wondered if they had slept together yet, then did his best not to think about it. None of his business. His mother was a grown woman, still reasonably young, still good-looking. What she did with her body was up to her.

“So, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, eh?” Wylie said over a glass of Harveys Bristol Cream. “A balanced portfolio of disciplines and, I might add, the degree choice of the ambitious. What do you plan on doing with it, Guy?”

“No idea. It’s still early days. I’ve got two and a half years left to decide in.”

“Considering following in your father’s footsteps? Something in politics or the
corps diplomatique
?”

“I’ve not really thought about it.”

“You should,” said Wylie. “I can see you in Whitehall, striding the corridors of power. You have that air about you. An intelligent young man, well-spoken, reasonably well-groomed – at least, nothing that a shave and haircut couldn’t fix. Someone like you could go places, Guy.”

“Um, thanks. Really, I just don’t know. I want to enjoy life. I’m not sure about settling down into a job as soon as I graduate. Maybe I should get out there and see the world first.”

Wylie nodded sympathetically. “Very laudable, but it’s vital in politics to get a foothold while you’re still young. I know the prevailing trend among your age group these days is to fool around and have fun. We’ve bred a generation of dilettantes. But for those who wish to get ahead in life, the sooner they knuckle down to it, the better.”

“Well, I’ll certainly bear that in mind,” Guy said.

“You do that, my boy. I’m just an old bore, giving my advice. Pay me no heed. I happen to see something in you, though, something I like. I could help you. I know people. I could give you a leg-up.”

“That’s kind of you, Alastor,” said Guy’s mother. “Isn’t it, Guy? Very kind of him.”

“And now, my dear Beatrice...” Wylie consulted his watch, a handsome gold-and-steel Rolex Oyster Perpetual. “Our table’s booked for eight, and my driver is waiting.”

As Wylie draped Guy’s mother’s mink stole around her shoulders, he said to Guy, “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, young man. Don’t forget what I’ve said. I could be a useful ally, if you so choose. A friend in high places. Better the devil you know and all that, eh?”

W
YLIE’S PARTING WORDS
would not have lodged so firmly in Guy’s brain if he hadn’t already been obsessing over Molly, the Ouija board, and her apparent possession by some otherworldly being.
Better the devil you know
.

He realised that by running away from his problems, he was only making them worse. He needed to confront them instead, head-on.

He returned to Oxford the next morning and went straight from the railway station to Molly’s digs. She wasn’t home, and neither of her housemates, Sophie and Tamsin, knew where she was.

“How is she?” Guy asked.

“No idea. Haven’t seen her in a couple of days, actually,” said Sophie.

“But that row you had with her really screwed her up,” Tamsin added.

“We did not have a row,” Guy protested.

“Well, whatever it was. She’s been frantic ever since. She’s not as confident as she acts, you know. She comes across all brash and self-assured, but she’s delicate underneath.”

“As you’d realise,” Sophie chipped in, “if you weren’t an insensitive bastard like all men are.”

“Thanks, ladies,” Guy said, taking his leave. “I appreciate the lecture. Now go back to licking Germaine Greer’s fanny and fuck off.”

“Chauvinist pig,” Tamsin called after him as he set off down the street.

“Tosser,” added Sophie.

Guy V-signed them over his shoulder.

H
E ARRIVED AT
college to find a familiar bicycle leaning against the wall beside the entrance to his staircase: Molly’s. Its frame was festooned with stickers – the Stars and Stripes, the CND logo, Road Runner, a yellow Smiley. One of the college porters had taped a photocopied memo to the handlebars, asking the bike’s owner to move it as soon as possible, otherwise it would confiscated and sold. The memo had yesterday’s date scrawled across the top.

Guy skipped up the two flights of spiral stone steps to his rooms. He was anxious but hopeful, anticipating a happy reconciliation with Molly. Why else would she have come here if not to bury the hatchet? They could put this whole stupid business behind them and move on. What had happened in her bedroom that night had happened, it was in the past, they were both adults, time to behave like it. In truth, he missed her. She brought a welcome element of anarchy to his life. She was bewitchingly lovely. She was, no question, a damn good lay. What they would do was, they would make up, make love, then perhaps head down to the Isis for a nice riverside walk. It was a bright, brisk day, the first of its kind this year, more like spring than winter. If they got as far as the Trout Inn at Godstow, a lunchtime pint might be in order.

He opened the oak door.

The smell hit him straight away, and he didn’t know what it was, but he knew that it wasn’t good. It was sweet and sewery, a bloated smell. It touched something deep and dark in his brain, something that made him instinctively want to turn and flee.

He forced himself to stay put. His study was empty, no one there but him. He called out Molly’s name, tongue tripping over the word. No answer.

The bedroom door stood ajar.

He pushed it all the way open, stomach knotted with dread.

Somehow he knew what he was going to find.

He didn’t want to see it.

He had to see it.

So much blood.

The bedcovers were sodden red. The body on the bedcovers was sodden red too. An arm hung down from the mattress, hand almost touching the floor. It had been slashed open longitudinally, from the wrist halfway to the elbow, on the underside. A razor blade lay below the fingertips on the carpet, an inch from their reach. The gash in the arm reminded him – oh, God – of a vagina. A ragged wet pussy, gaping, revealing a fleshy purple-pink interior.

She stared accusingly at him across the room. Her eyes were open but dulled, the irises pale, almost opaque. Her lips were slightly parted, as though she had something to tell him.

Guy sank to his knees.

He retched. Vomited.

Molly.

A
POLICEMAN FOUND
the suicide note. Guy, once he had managed to stumble outside and raise the alarm, hadn’t dared go back in. The constable who arrived first on the scene handed the envelope to him, saying, “I think this is for you.” It had Guy’s name on the front. It bore traces of Molly’s scent – lilies and clean laundry. Specks of her blood, also.

The note inside read:

Guy,

I know you won’t believe me, but I had nothing to do with the thing you thought I did. I’ve been going half crazy thinking about it and worrying about it. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to have said to you. I guess I must have blacked out or something. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there when I said it. You have to believe me on that.

You’ve been avoiding me. I get it. But I’ve never needed you more than I have these past few days. I’ve never needed anyone as badly. But you don’t care. Fine.

So I’ll show you. I’ll show you what you mean to me and what I should mean to you.

Here’s the girl you turned your back on, Guy.

Guess you won’t ever forget me now, huh?

love,

Molly xxx

P.S. Hope you don’t mind me borrowing one of your razor blades!

D
AYS BLURRED.
W
EEKS
passed.

There was a nice large manor house with sweeping, well-kept lawns. Guy lived there. Doctors and nurses looked after him. They gave him pills and injections. They made him talk about himself. They were always pleasant and gentle, trying to get him to open up, to coax him out of his shell. But it was a nice shell. A solid shell. Cottony soft inside, like a cocoon. He wasn’t sure he ever wanted to leave.

Sometimes at night he had dreams. Dreams about Molly. She came to him in his sleep. Her arms dripped blood. She held them out to him, beseechingly, and the blood poured from them in crimson cataracts.

Usually she was not alone. There was someone behind her. Someone dark. Guy could never make out this person’s face – it was all shadows – but he had a sense of a looming, powerful presence. A strong vigorous force. The figure clung to Molly, as if claiming her for itself, but its focus was always on Guy. It meant him well. It had plans for him. Such plans. Great plans.

He did not confide in the doctors about his dreams. They were too personal. He did not understand them himself; the doctors would never understand. But he knew they were significant.

One day the doctors told him he was better. He had improved immeasurably. They were no longer concerned about him. He assumed they were right. He undoubtedly felt more a part of the world, less shut-in and lost. They told him he was well enough to go home.

A car came to collect him, a Bentley, with a chauffeur up front and his mother and Alastor Wylie in the back.

Wylie had paid for Guy’s treatment, apparently. The sanatorium he had been staying in was highly exclusive and terrifically expensive.

“But, for Beatrice’s son,” Wylie said, “for you, my boy, money’s no object. I think you’ll be worth it. Look on it as an investment in your future.” And he patted Guy’s hand, and Guy gazed out of the window of the Bentley as the car cruised down the long sinuous driveway to the main gate, and it was summer, and he never went back to university.

1974

C
OLOURS SCREAMED ACROSS
the sky. The stars would not stay put, cavorting and frolicking. Shimmering, iridescent surf brushed the shore. A handful of sand poured through Guy’s fingers, every grain a diamond. He heard the patterns in the song of cicadas, the repeated phrases, the overlapping trills, and almost knew what the insects were saying.

Later, in his beach hut, he listened to a pirated cassette of
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
which he had picked up for peanuts at the Chatuchak Market in Bangkok, and he understood it. He understood it in a way not even its creators understood it. He saw through its layers of meaning, its storyline, its complex musical mechanics, right down to the heart of it, its true message. Any other record, he would have done the same. That night it happened to be a Genesis concept album, but it could equally have been
Diamond Dogs
or
Pretzel Logic
. He was wise. He was brilliant.

Come the dawn, he had a splitting headache and felt at best only ordinary. He trudged along the beach to Mr Khun’s café shack, where he ordered fresh orange juice and scrambled eggs done Thai-style, seasoned with chilli and coriander. The sand was littered with casualties from the night before, sleeping off hangovers or skinning up a little wake-and-bake. Mr Khun brought over his breakfast, smiling a broad, sunny smile. Guy ate and drank at a plastic table in the swaying shade of the palms while red-clawed crabs scuttled past his feet, making for the water.

Everyone had advised him against visiting this region of the world, from his mother to the travel agent through whom he’d booked the flight. Thailand was too close to Vietnam, where chaos reigned. If he must go abroad, why not Australia? Africa? India? Wouldn’t any of those be adventure enough?