The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul Read online

  Dirk squatted down in between the boy and the screen.

  “Listen to me,” he began.

  The boy craned his neck round to look past Dirk at the screen. He had to redistribute his limbs in the chair in order to be able to do this and continue to fork Pot Noodle into himself.

  “Listen,” insisted Dirk again.

  Dirk felt he was beginning to be in serious danger of losing the upper hand in the situation. It wasn't merely that the boy's attention was on the television, it was that nothing else seemed to have any meaning or independent existence for him at all. Dirk was merely a featureless object in the way of the television. The boy seemed to bear him no malice, he merely wished to see past him.

  “Look, can we turn this off for a moment?” Dirk said, and he tried not to make it sound testy.

  The boy did not respond. Maybe there was a slight stiffening of the shoulders, maybe it was a shrug. Dirk turned around and was at a loss to find which button to push to turn the television off. The whoIe control pane seemed to be dedicated to the single purpose of keeping itself turned on — there was no single button marked “on” or “off”. Eventually Dirk simply disconnected the set from the power socket on the wall and turned back to the boy, who broke his nose.

  Dirk felt his septum crunching from the terrific impact of the boy's forehead as they both toppled heavily backwards against the set, but the noise of the bone breaking, and the noise of his own cry of pain as it broke was completely obliterated by the howling screams of rage that erupted from the boy's throat. Dirk flailed helplessly to try and protect himself from the fury of the onslaught, but the boy was on top with his elbow in Dirk's eye, his knees pounding first on Dirk's ribcage, then his jaw and then on Dirk's already traumatised nose, as he scrambled over him to reconnect the power to the television. He then settled back comfortably into the armchair and watched with a moody and unsettled eye as the picture reassembled itself.

  “You could at least have waited for the news,” he said in a dull voice.

  Dirk gaped at him. He sat huddled on the floor, coddling his bleeding nose in his hands, and gaped at the monstrously disinterested creature.

  “Whhfff...fffmmm...nnggh!” he protested, and then gave up for the time being, while he probed his nose for the damage.

  There was definitely a wobbly bit that clicked nastily between his fingers, and the whole thing seemed suddenly to be a horribly unfamiliar shape. He fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and held it up to his face. Blood spread easily through it. He staggered to his feet, brushed aside non-existent offers of help, stomped out of the room and into the tiny bathroom. There, he yanked the hosepipe angrily off the tap, found a towel, soaked it in cold water and held it to his face for a minute or two until the flow of blood gradually slowed to a trickle and stopped. He stared at himself in the mirror. His nose was quite definitely leaning at a slightly rakish angle. He tried bravely to shift it, but not bravely enough. It hurt abominably, so he contented himself with dabbing at it a little more with the wet towel and swearing quietly.

  Then he stood there for a second or two longer, leaning against the basin, breathing heavily, and practising saying “All right!” fiercely into the mirror. It came out as “Aww-bwigh!” and lacked any real authority. When he felt sufficiently braced, or at least as braced as he was likely to feel in the immediate future, he turned and stalked grimly back into the den of the beast.

  The beast was sitting quietly absorbing news of some of the exciting and stimulating game shows that the evening held in store for the determined viewer, and did not look up as Dirk re-entered.

  Dirk walked briskly over to the window and drew the curtains sharply back, half hoping that the beast might shrivel up shrieking if exposed to daylight, but other than wrinkling up its nose, it did not react. A dark shadow flapped briefly across the window, but the angle was such that Dirk could not see what caused it.

  He turned and faced the boy-beast. The midday news bulletin was starting on television, and the boy seemed somehow a little more open, a little more receptive to the world outside the flickering coloured rectangle. He glanced up at Dirk with a sour, tired look.

  “Whaddayawananyway?” he said.

  “I ted you whad I wad,” said Dirk, fiercely but hopelessly, “I wad...hag od a bobed...I gnow thad faith!”

  Dirk's attention had switched suddenly to the television screen, where a rather more up-to-date photograph of the missing airline check-in girl was being shown.

  “Whadayadoingere?” said the boy.

  “Jjchhhhh!” said Dirk, and perched himself down on the arm of the chair, peering intently at the face on the screen. It had been taken about a year ago, before the girl had learnt about corporate lipgloss. She had frizzy hair and a frumpy, put-upon look.

  “Whoareyou? Wassgoinon?” insisted the boy.

  “Loog, chuddub,” snapped Dirk, “I'b tryid to wodge dthith!”

  The newscaster said that the police professed themselves to be mystified by the fact that there was no trace of Janice Smith at the scene of the incident. They explained that there was a limit to the number of times they could search the same buildings, and appealed for anyone who might have a clue as to her whereabouts to come forward.

  “Thadth by segradry! Thadth Mith Pearth!” exclaimed Dirk in astonishment.

  The boy was not interested in Dirk's ex-secretary, and gave up trying to attract Dirk's attention. He wriggled out of the sleeping-bag and sloped off to the bathroom.

  Dirk sat staring at the television, bewildered that he hadn't realised before who the missing girl was. Still, there was no reason why he should have done, he realised. Marriage had changed her name, and this was the first time they had shown a photograph that actually identified her. So far he had taken no real interest in the strange incident at the airport, but now it demanded his attention.

  The explosion was now officially designated an “Act of God”.

  But, thought Dirk, what god? And why?

  What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15.37 flight to Oslo?

  After the miserable lassitude of the last few weeks, he suddenly had a great deal that required his immediate attention. He frowned in deep thought for a few moments, and hardly noticed when the beast-boy snuck back in and snuggled back into his sleeping-bag just in time for the advertisements to start. The first one showed how a perfectly ordinary stock cube could form the natural focus of a normal, happy family life.

  Dirk leapt to his feet, but even as he was about to start questioning the boy again his heart sank as he looked at him. The beast was far away, sunk back in his dark, flickering lair, and Dirk did not feel inclined to disturb him again at the moment.

  He contented himself with barking at the unresponding child that he would be back, and bustled heavily down the stairs, his big leather coat flapping madly behind him.

  In the hallway he encountered the loathed Gilks once more.

  “What happened to you?” said the policeman sharply, catching sight of Dirk's bruised and bulging nose.

  “Ondly whad you dold me,” said Dirk, innocently. “I bead bythelf ub.”

  Gilks demanded to know what he had been doing, and Dirk generously explained that there was a witness upstairs with some interesting information to impart. He suggested that Gilks go and have a word with him, but that it would be best if he turned off the television first.

  Gilks nodded curtly. He started to go up the stairs, but Dirk stopped him.

  “Doedth eddydthig dthrike you adth dthraydge aboud dthidth houdth?” he said.

  “What did you say?” said Gilks in irritation.

  “Subbthig dthraydge,” said Dirk.

  “Something what?”

  “Dthraydge!” insisted Dirk.

  “Strange?”

  “Dthadth right, dthraydge.”

  Gilks shrugged. “Like what?” he said.

  “Id dtheemdth to be cobbleedly dthouledth.”

  “Completely what?”

  “Dthouledth!” he tried again. “Thoul-leth! I dthigg dthadth dverry idderedthigg!”

  With that he doffed his hat politely, and swept on out of the house and up the street, where an eagle swooped out of the sky at him and came within a whisker of causing him to fall under a 73 bus on its way south. For the next twenty minutes, hideous yells and screams emanated from the top floor of the house in Lupton Road, and caused much tension among the neighbours. The ambulance took away the upper and lower remains of Mr Anstey and also a policeman with a bleeding face. For a short while after this, there was quietness.

  Then another police car drew up outside the house. A lot of “Bob's here” type of remarks floated from the house, as an extremely large and burly policeman heaved himself out of the car and bustled up the steps. A few minutes and a great deal of screaming and yelling later he re-emerged also clutching his face, and drove off in deep dudgeon, squealing his tyres in a violent and unnecessary manner.

  Twenty minutes later a van arrived from which emerged another policeman carrying a tiny pocket television set. He entered the house, and re-emerged a short while later leading a docile thirteen-year-old boy, who was content with his new toy.

  Once all policemen had departed, save for the single squad car which remained parked outside to keep watch on the house, a large, hairy, green-eyed figure emerged from its hiding place behind one of the molecules in the large basement room.

  It propped its scythe against one of the hi-fi speakers, dipped a long, gnarled finger in the almost congealed pool of blood that had collected on the deck of the turntable, smeared the finger across the bottom of a sheet of thick, yellowing paper, and then disappeared off into a dark and hidden otherworld whistling a strange and vicious tune and returning only briefly to collect its scythe.

  Chapter 7

  A little earlier in the morning, at a comfortable distance from all these events, set at a comfortable distance from a wellproportioned window through which cool mid-morning light was streaming, lay an elderly one-eyed man in a white bed. A newspaper sat like a half-collapsed tent on the floor, where it had been hurled two minutes before, at shortly after ten o'clock by the clock on the bedside table.

  The room was not large, but was furnished in excessively bland good taste, as if it were a room in an expensive private hospital or clinic, which is exactly what it was — the Woodshead Hospital, set in its own small but well-kempt grounds on the outskirts of a small but well-kempt village in the Cotswolds.

  The man was awake but not glad to be.

  His skin was very delicately old, like finely stretched, translucent parchment, delicately freckled. His exquisitely frail hands lay slightly curled on the pure white linen sheets and quivered very faintly.

  His name was variously given as Mr Odwin, or Wodin, or Odin. He was — is — a god, and furthermore he was that least good of all gods to be alongside, a cross god. His one eye glinted.

  He was cross because of what he had been reading in the newspapers, which was that another god had been cutting loose and making a nuisance of himself. It didn't say that in the papers, of course. It didn't say, “God cuts loose, makes nuisance of himself in airport,” it merely described the resulting devastation and was at a loss to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.

  The story had been deeply unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways, on account of its perplexing inconclusiveness, its goingnowhereness and the irritating (from the newspapers' point of view) lack of any good solid carriage. There was of course a mystery attached to the lack of carnage, but a newspaper preferred a good whack of carnage to a mere mystery any day of the week.

  Odin, however, had no such difficulty in knowing what was going on. The accounts had “Thor” written all over them in letters much too big for anyone other than another god to see. He had thrown this morning's paper aside in irritation, and was now trying to concentrate on his relaxation exercises in order to avoid getting too disturbed about all this. These involved breathing in in a certain way and breathing out in a certain other way and were good for his blood pressure and so on. It was not as if he was about to die or anything — ha! — but there was no doubt that at his time of life — ha! — he preferred to take things easy and look after himself.

  Best of all he liked to sleep.

  Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to sleep for longish periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping overnight was not taking the business seriously. He enjoyed a good night's sleep and wouldn't miss one for the world, but he didn't regard it as anything even half approaching enough. He liked to be asleep by half past eleven in the morning if possible, and if that could come directly after a nice leisurely lie-in then so much the better. A little light breakfast and a quick trip to the bathroom while fresh linen was applied to his bed is really all the astivity he liked to undertake, and he took care that it didn't jangle the sleepiness out of him and thus disturb his afternoon of napping. Sometimes he was able to spend an entire week asleep, and this he regarded as a good snooze. He had also slept through the whole of 1986 and hadn't missed it.

  But he knew to his deep disgruntlement that he would shortly have to arise and undertake a sacred and irritating trust. Sacred, because it was godlike, or at least involved gods, and irritating because of the particular god that it involved.

  Sneakily, he twitched the curtains at a distance, using nothing but his divine will. He sighed heavily. He needed to think and, what was more, it was time for his morning visit to the bathroom.

  He rang for the orderly.

  The orderly arrived promptly in his well-pressed loose green tunic, good-morninged cheerfully, and bustled around locating bedroom slippers and dressing-gown. He helped Odin out of bed, which was a little like rolling a stuffed crow out of a box, and escorted him slowly to the bathroom. Odin walked stiffly, like a head hung between two heavy stilts draped in striped Viyella and white towelling. The orderly knew Odin as Mr Odwin, and didn't realise that he was a god, which was something that Odin tended to keep quiet about, and wished that Thor would too.

  Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it. It was inappropriate. He seemed unwilling, or unable, or maybe just too stupid to understand or accept... Odin stopped himself. He sensed that he was beginning mentally to rant. He would have to consider calmly what next to do about Thor, and he was on his way to the right place for a good think.

  As soon as Odin had completed his stately hobble to the bathroom door, two nurses hurried in and stripped and remade the bed with immense precision, patting down the fresh linen, pulling it taut, turning it and tucking it. One of the nurses, clearly the senior, was plump and matronly, the other younger, darker and more generally bird-like. The newspaper was whisked off the floor and neatly refolded, the floor was briskly Hoovered, the curtains hooked back, the flowers and the untouched fruit replaced with fresh flowers and fresh fruit that would, like every piece of fruit before them, remain untouched.

  When after a little while the old god's morning ablutions had been completed and the bathroom door reopened, the room had been transformed. The actual differences were tiny, of course, but the effect was of a subtle but magical transformation into something cool and fresh. Odin nodded in quiet satisfaction to see it. He made a little show of inspecting the bed, like a monarch inspecting a line of soldiers.

  “Is it well tucked?” he asked in his old and whispery voice.

  “It is very well tucked, Mr Odwin,” said the senior nurse with an obsequious beam.

  “Is it neatly turned?” It clearly was. This was merely a ritual.

  “Turned very neatly indeed, Mr Odwin,” said the nurse, “I supervised the turning down of the sheets myself.”

  “I'm glad of that, Sister Bailey, very glad,” said Odin. “You have a fine eye for a trimly turned fold. It alarms me to know what I shall do without you.”

  “Well, I'm not about to go anywhere, Mr Odwin,” said Sister Bailey, oozing happy reassurance.

  “But you won't last for ever, Sister Bailey,” said Odin. It was a remark that puzzled Sister Bailey on the times she had heard it, because of its apparent extreme callousness.

  “Sure, and none of us lasts for ever, Mr Odwin,” she said gently as she and the other nurse between them managed the difficult task of lifting Odin back into bed while keeping his dignity intact.

  “You're Irish aren't you, Sister Bailey?” he asked, once he was properly settled.

  “I am indeed so, Mr Odwin.”

  “Knew an Irishman once. Finn something. Told me a lot of stuff I didn't need to know. Never told me about the linen. Still, I know now.”

  He nodded curtly at this memory and lowered his head stiffly back on to the firmly plumped up pillows and ran the back of his finely freckled hand over the folded-back linen sheet. Quite simply he was in love with linen. Clean, lightly starched, white Irish linen, pressed, folded, tucked — the words themselves were almost a litany of desire for him. In centuries nothing had obsessed him or moved him so much as linen now did. He could not for the life of him understand how he could ever have cared for anything else.

  Linen.

  And sleep. Sleep and linen. Sleep in linen. Sleep.

  Sister Bailey regarded him with a sort of proprietary fondness. She did not know that he was a god as such, in fact she thought he was probably an old film producer or Nazi war criminal. Certainly he had an accent she couldn't quite place and his careless civility, his natural selfishness and his obsession with personal hygiene spoke of a past that was rich with horrors.

  If she could have been transported to where she might see her secretive patient enthroned, warrior father of the warrior Gods of Asgard, she would not have been surprised. That is not quite true, in fact. She would have been startled quite out of her wits. But she would at least have recognised that it was consistent with the qualities she perceived in him, once she had recovered from the shock of discovering that virtually everything the human race had ever chosen to believe in was true. Or that it continued to be true long after the human race particularly needed it to be true any more.