He flicked his head and looked away. I didn't want him to tell me. It was a rhetorical question. "Do we celebrate, William?"
"We certainly will. When it's done, we will."
"Never mind that," he said, reloading his folder with the samples. "It's as good as done. Get your coat."
"Isn't that a bit premature? I mean when exactly will the thing be ready?"
"Fullness o' time, William, fullness o' time."
"I've got our guy on the hook: we don't want him jumping off."
"Get your coat, I sez. Jaz is already on his way. Lamb and Flag."
Covent Garden, then. Stinx left his samples at my place to be collected later. We took a cab. I kept congratulating Stinx on his workmanship, thinking that lavish praise might encourage him to complete the job, but all he would say is, "Giz a break, William."
The Lamb and Flag is a bit of a surprise to find in Covent Garden. It has the appearance of an old coaching inn. The clientele is mixed and the pub is replete with demons loitering amongst the old fittings of knotted wood, but for some reason they tend to leave you alone. Jaz was already there at the bar, with champagne in an ice bucket and three glasses waiting.
"I would have preferred the non-fizzy stuff," I grumbled.
"Oh, stop being a grouch," said Jaz. "Tell him to celebrate, Stinx."
"Celebrate."
Jaz grabbed the bucket and I took the glasses and we found a table in the corner. We poured the fizz, clinked the glasses and pretended everything was a done deal. I was thoroughly aware that all this "celebration" nonsense was designed to put my worrying mind at rest. It didn't.
The way it worked was that Jaz and I fronted the money for all the materials for Stinx, and later we deducted that amount from his truly modest fee. Jaz, who seemed to operate at the interface of the Art and Fashion worlds, was very good at identifying buyers. Jaz and I similarly deducted any expenses and the considerable profit all went to our agreed benefactor, which in this case was GoPoint.
We fell silent. Then Stinx said, "How was New York then, Jaz?"
"Fabulous. Love it. Shot of caffeine, hit of helium, you can speak like a native."
I've been to New York. I once fell in love there, in Central Park. But it was a trick, and she turned out to be a demon. I spoke nothing of that and said instead, "Meet anyone?"
Jaz was always meeting people. Men and women seemed to line up and lay down for him. Sometimes he would tell us about his exploits, funny, daring, bizarre. But his brow creased this time and he swirled his drink around in his glass.
"Yeh. A former soldier."
"Not another Guardsman!" said Stinx. Jaz already had a boyfriend in the Coldstream Guards
"They don't have Guardsmen in America," I said.
"I know that," said Stinx.
"They do, but they're like reserves," said Jaz. "No, he was a high-ranking officer in the 101st Airborne. Lovely guy. But he's a mess, body and soul. Depleted uranium, it just trashes the DNA. But he saw something there. In combat."
Jaz looked up at the two of us, and for a moment I thought that whatever his officer-lover had seen in the Gulf, it had carried over to Jaz. We must have been staring pretty hard because he almost shouted, "Hey, drink up! We're celebrating!"
So we drank up, and turned the talk to more cheerful things. Or pretended to.
I'm not a great one for clubbing but, having drunk too much on an empty stomach I was persuaded on to some candle-lit cave with scarlet Parisian brothel velour upholstery. Jaz was a member. It was the sort of place where undistinguished celebrities hang out with foreign footballers. Jaz called over a couple of magnificent and statuesque girls with whom he'd been on photo shoots. They were good company. Stinx and I were in high spirits and we were making the girls cackle. I could see the footballers checking us out, wondering what it was that we had to offer. Red-rot and vellum, I wanted to tell them: you should try putting it up your nose instead of Bolivian marching powder.
Then we were joined by a member of the minor aristocracy. (That's how the girls described him, anyway.) He endured half an hour of toff-baiting, mainly by Stinx, before taking quite a shine to me, much to Jaz's amusement. I found a private moment to communicate my misgivings to Jaz. When I told him that Lucy had deserted our friend all over again he agreed we might have problems seeing the project through. We both agreed that there was nothing we could do but sit tight and hope that Stinx delivered.
I was drunk and wanted to leave. One of the girls came to my rescue—I think her name was Tara. She lived in my neighbourhood so we agreed to share a cab. She took my arm on the way out and our movements were tracked ravenously by the two Chelsea footballers. I was so drunk I mimed for them a back-heel flip and header. One jutted his chin at me, while his friend's hungry midfielder's eyes said: Cunt.
In the back of the cab Tara told me, with an excited squeak to her voice, that the aristocrat was fourteenth in line to the throne. I'd quite liked Tara until that moment. "Just here will do fine," I said to the cabbie.
Tara squeezed my thigh before I got out of the cab. "Do you want to do something?" she said.
I leaned over and gave her a peck on the cheek. "I've never paid for it in my life," I said, "and I'm not going to start now. Goodnight."
She shrugged and opened the cab door for me. It doesn't matter how much I've had to drink, you start paying for sexual comfort and you invite flocks of them into your life. Throngs of them. Swarms.
I was so drunk that when I got to my front door I could barely get my key in the lock. Once inside I drank a pint of water in one gulp, kicked off my shoes and collapsed into my chair, where I instantly fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming of my days back in Derby, at the teacher-training college.
I saw Charlie Fraser collecting his mail from the pigeon holes near the Students' Union. No one was around so I darted up behind him and whispered, "Watch out, he's on to you," and then kept on moving.
I found something in my own pigeon hole a few yards along the rack, and pretended to be absorbed in the minutes of the staff-student English Programme Committee. Even without looking up I could feel his brown, spaniel eyes boring into me.
"What are you talking about?"
I still didn't look up from my essential reading. "I'm just tipping you off, that's all."
"Who is on to me?"
I turned and smiled at him. "Okay. Please yourself." I walked away.
Sweat, you fucker
, I thought.
I thought it might be a day or two before he felt compelled to speak to me. In fact he broke cover sooner than that. Early that evening there was a short rap on my door.
He stood with his hands in the pockets of his black jeans. His capped black t-shirt revealed one of the Chinese ideograms sported on the bicep by just about every middle-class student at that time, and if he wore underarm deodorant it had let him down. I couldn't stop myself from wrinkling my nose.
"Yeh?" I asked, like he might have been selling insurance.
He didn't answer. I saw the toe of his boot tap once, but other than that he just stared at me.
"You want to tell me what it's all about?" I stared back at him for a while. Then I stepped back and let him come in. "Sit down," I said.
"No. I'd rather stand."
"Okay, don't fucking sit down. What's cracking off?"
He sniffed. "I've no idea what you're talking about."
"Really? Well, fuck off out of my room then, because you stink. And what about those fucking photos?"
He blinked. That was all I needed. He blinked. I'd been right all along and it was him. And I hadn't been able to stop thinking about the photographs since I'd discovered them pinned around the goat's head in the attic.
I'd needed somewhere to stow my antiquarian books for a while. I'd entered into a house-clearing partnership with a bad lot called Johnno, a guy who'd found his way onto List 99—the teacher-exclusion register—and been expelled from the college for supplying cannabis, more or less by the bale. Johnno had a house-clearance operation. Well, a van.
Johnno's technique was to go in to bereaved families or incompetent pensioners and offer them good money for some piece of tat. Having won their confidence, he'd then pick up anything valuable they had for a song. I got all and any books in return for furniture humping. It was unsavoury and I was already thinking of packing it in before somebody's aggrieved and psychotic son came after Johnno with a crow-bar. I became convinced that he would be after me, too, and I wanted to hide some books I'd collected.
The attic seemed the obvious place. I didn't want the college porter to know I was stashing stuff away in there so I went up to see if there was some way I could force the lock, or maybe take off the hinges of the door, I don't know. But when I got up there I saw a bit of debris on the floor and noticed that the wall enclosing one side of the landing by the door was no more than a flimsy plyboard panel painted over. What's more, the panel was floating loose at the skirting board. When I pressed my hand flat to the plyboard, all the panel pins popped out on one side. It wasn't difficult to squeeze through the flapping panel and into the attic.
That's how I discovered it all. The pentagram—pentacle—chalked on the floor; the curious symbols; the Latin and Hebrew slogans; the candles. And the goat's head impaled on the wall.
And the thing that made my stomach lurch.
Pinned on the wall around the head of the goat, and arranged strategically as if to mimic the shape of the star in the pentacle, were photographs of five girls. All the girls were students at the college, and all five were personally known to me. Their faces had been cut around and very crudely superimposed over the faces of nude models from glossy titty magazines.
They were all girls that I had been out with at one time or another during my college years, and one of them, Mandy Rogers, was my current girlfriend.
I felt suffocated. I wanted to get out of the room. The goat seemed to look at me, its beady eyes swimming, as if it were still alive. But my intimate connection with all five of those girls made it impossible for me to leave. I was panicking, wondering if and what it all had to do with me. I remember my skin flushing unpleasantly; it was as if something else had stepped into the room with me and brought with it a freezing breath on my neck.
I wanted to take down the photographs, but I was terrified of the goat. I stepped from one side of the pentacle to the other, and its eyes followed me. I was almost certain that if I reached out my fingers it would bite. Overwhelmed with repulsion and nausea I decided to get out. I opened the Yale lock on the door but before leaving I had a sudden, defensive thought: I popped the flapping panel back into place from the inside.
I let the Yale lock spring back into place behind me and hurried down to my room before anyone saw me. My first thought was to find Mandy and tell her that her picture had found its way onto the wall. But it seemed such a distasteful thing to show her. And secondly, I would have to explain my connection with one of the other girls, whom Mandy hated. I sat in my room gnawing my knuckles and wondering what kind of a freak would do all this, and what I should do about it.
At six o'clock all the inmates regularly abandoned the Lodge for dinner at the student refectory. Genuinely having no appetite, I made my excuses and waited for the last student to leave. When the place was empty, I retraced my steps back up to the attic and scrambled in, once again via the loose panel. This time I pressed the panel pins back into place immediately, hurriedly ripped down the photos of the girls and let myself out a second time.
Outside in the car park to the Lodge I burned the photos in a sand bucket. Then I washed my hands.
I barely slept that night. My thoughts twisted and turned, and my bedsheets with them. At first I managed to convince myself that I wasn't a target after all, and that the fact that I'd dated all five girls was pure coincidence. After all, I assured myself, it was a rampant egocentricity to assume that everything was connected to oneself. But then I tried to think of any other student in the college who had dated the same five girls, and of course I couldn't. At best I could think of only
one
guy who had been out with
two
of the set. I couldn't know for certain, since there are many kinds of liaisons, some as brief as a match-flare, but at college you get a pretty shrewd idea of who hooks up with whom.
Neither did the set of photographs represent a complete set of my "significant" playmates. Ruling out the one-night stands and the egregious follies, there were two more girls whom I would have described as major figures: young women who were important to me. So if someone was tracking my sexual and emotional history they hadn't made a comprehensive job of it.
All this ran through my fevered brain as I lay in bed. About two o'clock in the morning, I got up and made sure my door was locked. I checked the windows were securely bolted, too.
I tried to think what the five girls might have in common quite apart from me. It was hopeless: they were from different regions of the country and they studied a range of subjects. This one's father was a Harley Street doctor while this one's was a coal miner. This one didn't like sex much at all while another one had an alarming enthusiasm for being tied to the bed and vigorously spanked. I couldn't see any shared ground at all.
That's how the night was spent: It was a coincidence. It wasn't a coincidence. It was a coincidence. It wasn't.
I was fairly certain one of my fellow students in the Lodge was behind it all, though I didn't immediately suspect Fraser. Door security was pretty tight after one or two thefts, so whoever was using the attic had to have access to the Lodge, and would also have to have spent some considerable time there to discover the panel by the attic door.
There were twenty-two students in residence.
It was easy to eliminate a few cheerful friendly guys who didn't seem to want much from life besides beer, burgers and Saturday mornings spent swinging a leg at a leather football. Then there were the hard-line politicos on the ground floor, a little group of nervy Marxists who cloned themselves in dungarees and soup-kitchen haircuts: their only menu was dialectical materialism and a proposed ban on all forms of humour. It just wasn't their style to bugger about with a goat.