Spotted Lily (2 page)

—2—

I was just thinking I had enough mental meat to chew on for the moment when the Devil asked, 'Why did you Pledge?'

'Don't you know our motivations?'

The Devil was still sitting on my bed on the floor. He picked up a corner of my bedspread and leaned over to smell the sheets. I don't know why, but this embarrassed me. The laundromat was four blocks away, and since I didn't have anyone I was sleeping with at the moment, I hadn't bothered stuffing them into my backpack for a rather long time. He sniffed deeply. 'I am not the Omniscient, you know,' he said, smoothing the bedspread back into place.

I didn't ask about the Omniscient. This was already almost too much for one day.

He crossed his legs and rocked back. He had already looked pretty amazingly hung in those tight jeans—the major reason that Andrew had voted for him in the house meeting—but now he looked oddly enough, double hung.

I couldn't help asking, 'Do you have a tail?'

'Of course.' He adjusted his crotch and then scratched it, looking for all the world, just very very male-modellish. 'But I asked you,' he said. 'Why did you call?'

Now he had me confused. 'I didn't call. What call?'

'When you wrote to your Julie "I just want fame. Only that, and I wouldn't mind it in a week, and at this point I don't give a shit what I write."'

I could feel a flush climbing my face. 'You have read my emails?'

'We only read mail when it relates to us.'

'But I never mentioned you at all.'

'But you did,' he said, reminding me for a moment of Miss Waldenmere in first form.

'But please, I don't mean to be rude, but I did not.'

The left side of the Devil's lip rose as if caught by a fishhook. 'Angela, my dear—'

I hoped my anger was not showing, but Jeesus, I yearned to pound him into fishpaste.

'Angela,' he sighed, in a maddening display of put-upon tolerance. 'Your undertext
reeked
of the appeal for me to save you.'

The books piled all over the floor did not help me one bit. I glanced at the top one on the nearest pile:
The Bestseller
. It leered at me.

'And when I arrived this morning, what did you do?' he needled, in a maddening tone of reason.

I thought back. Sunday morning. The day of the interviews for the new housemate. There had been a number of calls already, and we knew that the kitchen would be full. So tedious, but if I didn't attend, I wouldn't have a vote, and then I could get a housemate-from-hell on the other side of the wall. So I had groaned and crawled out of bed. I had then thought of the other duty of my day: to produce something. Anything. And that made me look forward to the house meeting, in preference.

I remembered what I did next. Check my email, in which there was a letter from Julie telling me about how she has this new idea for a screen play and how she is going to begin writing it. And then I remembered my reply to Julie. And then I remembered smelling a smell that made me check the extension cord, and then I remembered finding it just fine, but still there was that smell, and then I saw this person in the corner.

'I remember,' I said to him.

I remembered more.

'What the fuck are you doing in my room!' I hissed at the person, not wanting to yell in case he was a sleep-deprived spunky-looking-overnighter of Simone's who had just strayed to the wrong room from the loo downstairs. Simone always liked exhibitionists, and this one looked just her type. Very sexy, but in a narcissistic way. A great head of hair, but I do remember thinking that if he really wanted the horns to show, he should shave himself bald, though maybe he thought that was common. I was just thinking of telling him to get out and back to Simone's bed, when he spoke.

'Are you interested in developing your true potential?' I remember him—the Devil—asking, and then I remember to my shame, that I answered 'yes', though upon reflection, this is the worst come-on line I have ever heard.

~

I was mind meandering when the Devil dragged me back to the here-and-now. 'When I explained to you who I was, you didn't fidget or scream, or run out of the room, or jump out of the window, did you?'

I thought back. 'I guess not.'

'Have you thought about why?'

I was thinking, when he interrupted. 'I'll tell you why,' he said, cracking his knuckles one by one. 'You—and I mean all of you—never truly think of the future. Only of what you want now ... and you think the future can, I think your phrase is, "go to the Devil", but again, you don't mean it.'

'Don't mean it?'

'You don't think it will come. Not when it is what you don't want. At least when it relates to yourself.'

I thought about my credit card.

'Then you've answered your own query,' I observed, as he hadn't repeated his question about my motivation for wanting him, or not being frightened about doing a deal with him when it came right down to the deal itself.

He bent and eased the laces on his thick black boots. 'You were very creative,' he said 'about getting me into the house.'

'What? The Australian War Memorial communications officer  who is on stress leave, with your lifestyle-discrimination case pending in the Federal Court?'

'Yes, that. I could never have thought of that.'

Perhaps he was flattering me. Perhaps not. 'You need to know cultural stuff, to be able to have the right cover.'

'So true,' he crooned, and I wasn't sure why. 'And the name.'

'Your name?'

'Yes.'

I was unaccountably pleased. 'You like it?'

'Quite.'

'Brett Hartshorn does kind of roll off the tongue,' I admit that I bragged. 'And with respect, your ideas...' and then I ran out of words—'sucked' seemed suddenly, ineloquent.

But there was one question that had to be answered before we could really establish a working relationship. 'Why are you here for the week?'

He opened his bootlaces even more, and sighed. 'Quite frankly,' he said, 'a holiday.'

This was something I had never read about. 'The Devil ... you ... take holidays?'

'I need to keep in touch.'

'Don't you know what's going on all the time?'

'Do you?'

'Of course not.'

'The deuce you say!' he grinned, and his chin bristled with five-o'clock shadow. 'Well, I don't either. You must stop thinking of me as omniscient.' A thought seemed to strike him. 'Think of me as a construct. Does that help?'

He even pronounced it as CON-struct. For one wonderful and awful moment, I thought: are all the philosophy professors dead? But anyway, this was getting too deep for me. He was incontrovertibly the Devil, and he was sitting on my bed, the only soft sitting place in my room, and I was cross-legged on the floor a metre away. I had more questions.  But first: 'Uh, I don't know how to put this, but what do I call you?'

Now he was confused. 'Can't you guess?'

I hadn't a clue. So many names came to mind. Mister Devil (sounding like a drink), Beelzebub, the Evil One, the Tempter, the Prince of Darkness, His Satanic Majesty, plain old Satan.

But none of them seemed right. Besides, they were all hard on my tongue. For comfort, I would have preferred what he would have been called where I grew up, if he'd rolled into town: Beez, Evo, Maj, or even Horny. And then there were the other names that were just part of Bunwup's Saturday night crowd: Ugly (handsomest bloke in town), Boozer (the parson who came to the pub and drank orange squash), and of course, the ever common Blue, for redheads.

The Devil interrupted this train of going-nowhere thought. 'I was always partial to "The Angel of the Bottomless Pit", he said. 'Until you called me Brett.'

He smiled that wide smile of his.

'So, Brett,' I continued, rather inordinately pleased. 'Why do you come up here—or is it down?'

'It's more like over, he said, stretching himself full length on the bed. 'I like to get a feel for things during Pledge Week, and then we always have our pledgers chaperoned by someone, as it were, throughout the week.'

'Why?'

He plumped my pillow and shoved it under his head. 'Trust. And getting the job done.'

This was confusing all over again. I remembered all the instances I'd read about the time being up and the person being dragged off to hell, or shoved in the Devil's collecting box and stuffed in his pocket. 'I thought a deal is a deal with you.'

'It is,' he said, 'but we've got competition. You must know of our competition? And besides, you...' And here he bowed and waved his hand in a gallant swashbuckle of a flourish. 'I don't mean to impute—but you in a more generic sense—don't always play straight. We prefer not to let you go once you've signed.'

That made sense. Once, in response to a radio station's pledge drive that had some story that made me cry, I rang the station and pledged. This reminded me.

'And besides,' he said. 'About that award-winning best-seller that you're going to write, that's going to win you fame...'

'Yes?' Suddenly I felt all over again that thrill of signing the contract, only hours ago.

'Who's going to write it?'

I panicked as the whole vision fractured. 'Me?'

His raised his eyebrows so high, his horns moved. 'Not a word, my silly worrier,' he said, and I know I should never use the word
soothingly
, but he did say it that way.

I was trying to figure out how he was going to coerce anyone really good to write it when he pointed to his chest. And then he smiled not only soothingly, but rather egotistically. I didn't care. After five years of everyone asking
When is it coming out?
I was off the hook. I could just go to work and come home, and in a short time, only a hell's week, the book would be done and I would be ...

The room swam with the smell of success, mixed with Celestial Sky.

I felt alive of an aliveness that I had never felt. In one week (I hadn't asked about the details of what this meant exactly, or read the contract that closely, as it had seemed rude at the time), anyway, it was hard to put all these thoughts in coherent order (which had always been one of my problems)—there would be me, the finally-famous writer of some book (unnamed as of yet). My whole body thrilled (I could
feel
somewhere—probably my intestines—effervesce with joy). The book—my book that had eluded me for bloody
years
—this book that I'd talked about writing for
years
but never specified, would finally be written, holdable, read by others, translated, quoted, and plagiarized—and would be ghost-written by the Devil himself, 'Brett Hartshorn', the best words of fiction I ever thought up.

—3—

I woke in a panic—the contract.

It was on some sort of parchment—signed in my blood. When I had asked for a copy for myself, he told me there were no duplication services in hell, nor carbon paper, and that if I were unhappy, I could tell him then and there and he would rip it up and return 'from whence I came' immediately. He held the document with his hands poised to rip it from end to end.

'Yea or nay' he demanded.

I assumed there was no cooling-off period.

His hands moved in opposite directions, stretching the parchment.

'Yea!'

~

But now, I remembered—how long would I have to enjoy my success? I hadn't looked.

The big luminous hand on my watch pointed to 2, and somewhere near my desk, paper rustled and then fell silent as a Sydney cockroach the size of a Medjoul date flew from it, to land on my pillow with a thud.

Launching myself out of bed, I threw the pillow at a wall, pulled on pants and shirt and socks, and left my room. I tapped on his door just loud enough for him to hear if he were awake.

'Yes,' he answered immediately.

'It's Angela here. Could I please come in?'

'By all means.'

I entered, and this was the first time I had been in the room since Callum, the previous housemate, had lived here. Outside of a table and chair and a mattress without sheets, there was nothing else besides the Devil himself and—by the head end of his mattress, a black bag that looked like what doctors must have once carried, and a small round-topped trunk that was either black or very old, either metal or wood or some kind of skin, and if it had handles, I surely couldn't see them, but various winglike projections stuck out all over it.

He was lying on the bed with his hands behind his head.

'Oh!'

'Do I offend you?' he asked.

I thought about this. 'Nah. I wasn't prepared, is all.'

He spread his knees and smiled. 'I don't carry jahmies.'

'Not many people wear them nowadays,' I said, pulling over the chair.

He rolled over on his side and began playing with his tail. Was this a technique? If so, I was having none of it.

'Can I please look at the contract?' I said ever so coolly.

'Do you like my tail?' he asked, finding my eyes and I admit, holding them in his gaze.

'Very, but is it possible for me to just look at the contract?'

'I'm glad. No, actually. It is against the rules.'

Oh, so this is how it was to be. I needed to clutch something, so wrapped my arms around my waist and tore my eyes away from his.

Trying to gaze out the window, I asked, 'Don't you make the rules?'

'I am merely the administrator,' he said smoothly, running his tail back and forth over his lips.

The hair on the end moved and shone like a shampoo ad's. It was silky and black and long and as beautiful as our cattle's tails back at Wooronga Station. I used to love combing Boofhead's before a show. But never before had my whole life been at stake.

'I have to know,' I said—quite firmly—'just how long I have.'

He sighed. 'You never think it's long enough.'

'But how long? I don't remember seeing.'

'It didn't say.'

'What?!'

He sat up. 'Be reasonable, and look at it from our point of view, Angela.'

My molars squeaked from clenching. 'Alright,' I said, opening my mouth and taking a yogic breath. 'Please go on.'

'Thank you,' he said. 'When you are unhappy, you don't care how long you have to live. You often want to end it then and there. But when you are happy, you want to cheat death.'

'So?'

'So the contract you signed said that your book will be a success. That you will achieve fame. Isn't that what you asked for?'

That was exactly what I had asked for.

'And with that, isn't time timeless?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'You will, if I remember the words of one of your poets, "not go gently". You will, in fact, want to weasel out of our deal when you think your time is drawing nigh. So we don't put the time down any more, as it is an insoluble dispute in which we find no benefit in taking part.'

The window had no curtain, and the streetlight at the corner lit the room with a greenish glow. The Devil's eyes glowed a contrasting red. I was sitting in an operating room in which my future was on the table—stripped, vulnerable, and waiting for the scalpel.

'I tell you what,' the Devil said. 'I will do something for you that I just don't do. Do you want to reconsider? I will let you out of the contract if you say no now.'

He smiled, showing his molars. 'No hard feelings.'

The patient breathed, innocent of the sharp knives poised. I thought of the state of this patient just a day ago. I thought of the prognosis—thought
honestly
of the prognosis before the Devil dropped into my room.

There really wasn't much to think about.

'Thank you, Brett,' I remember saying. 'No thank you. I don't need to reconsider.' And I think I might have added, 'Operate.'

Anyway, I got up and shuffled off to bed. I don't know what the Devil did for the rest of the night, but I slept until ten.