Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

I rehydrated myself with a couple of litres of water, and zapped my nervous system with about the same amount of strong black coffee. I still felt like the walking dead, but I’m not prejudiced: some of my best friends belong to that fraternity. And at least my brain was starting to work again.

The first thing it did was play me back those few snippets of memory, like answerphone messages. The worrying one was Pen saying, ‘I’ll find him myself.’ I needed to have a word with her about that, but she wasn’t in her basement sitting room when I went down there to check.

The rats were, though, prowling restlessly round their rat-habitat. So were the ravens, Edgar and Arthur, one of them sitting on an actual perch, the other on Pen’s computer monitor. They clacked their beaks when I entered, and Arthur cawed intimidatingly.

I make a point of feeding the ravens whenever I see them, because it doesn’t make sense to piss off birds whose beaks are strong enough to open tin cans, but it’s occurred to me recently that I’m only making a Pavlovian connection in their minds between Castor and food which may one day come back to bite me in the arse, either figuratively or literally. I took some frozen liver from Pen’s fridge, thawed it out in the microwave and split it between the two of them. They fell on it like a pair of blood-crazed maniacs. It looked like they hadn’t been fed in a while. To be on the safe side, I fed the rats too. Then I went upstairs and fed myself, saved from the agonies of indecision by the fact that the kitchen was empty except for a tin of baked beans and a packet of Ryvita crackers. Well, okay, there was a half-finished bottle of Janneau Armagnac too, but I made myself look away. I didn’t want to go on another bender until I was sure Pen was okay.

So I fixed myself some weight-conscious beans on toast and ate them slowly with Radio 4 playing in the background. That told me what day of the week it was and who was prime minister; the fine detail I could fill in for myself later.

In the meantime, that bottle of brandy was still making indecent suggestions to me from the kitchen. I decided to get some distance from it before I found myself in a compromising situation.

I went back upstairs to my room with the vague but virtuous intention of clearing up some of the shit that had accumulated during my spectacular drunk. But the scale of the task daunted me. There was broken glass trodden into the carpet, a sour stink of stale, spilled booze in the air, and the lurking likelihood that picking up any one item of dirty laundry or overturned furniture would reveal greater horrors underneath. I gave up on the idea before I’d even started. I was able to assemble myself a less ridiculous outfit, though: a black shirt, dark grey cargo pants and a pair of low-heel boots that have proved over the years to be as durable as Permian granite.

After that I just waited for a while: in the back garden until the sun got too high, then in the basement with the ravens. Morning shaded into afternoon, with no sign of Pen. She couldn’t know that I’d wake up and feed the birds, so her absence was doubly hard to explain.

I was on the rack again by this time: sweating like a warthog, with a sick, hollow feeling in my stomach that only alcohol could fill. My head throbbed as though it was a blood-filled pimple that would burst at a touch. And the physical symptoms fed off my disquietude about Pen, and vice versa, until I couldn’t even sit still, but had to walk around the room like a prisoner in solitary taking the only exercise that was on offer.

How long did someone have to be off the scene before they counted as an official missing person? A lot longer than half a day, surely. But it might be worth calling Pen’s sister Antonia, and seeing if she’d showed round there. The only thing that made me hesitate was the fact that Tony hates my guts and would curse me out loudly down the phone. She shouts a lot. Really, a whole lot; and I felt right then as though the wrong harmonic would just shatter me.

But I steeled myself to do it in the end, and I was actually dialling when the key turned in the lock upstairs. I put the phone down and headed up to ground level. Edgar and Arthur glided over my head, keen to get their word in first. They didn’t need to worry: I was fighting another bout of the shakes, and they could have beaten me at an easy walk.

When I got to the top of the basement stairs, Pen was bespeaking the door: talking to it in guttural undertones while touching the wood at the four cardinal points. Pretty much everyone puts wards on their doors and windows these days, to prevent unwanted visits from the recently deceased. Mostly they buy them in ready-made, though: photocopied stay-nots and tied-up sprigs of flowering herbs from the Camden Market spiritualist stalls, crucifixes and vials of holy water from the local church, mezuzahs and salats and cunningly modified Mani scrolls and every other flavour of religious prophylactic all readily available now by weight or piecemeal. Pen, though, makes up her own. She’s a pagan, and a priestess in an indie church that doesn’t even have a name. She keeps that side of her life very much to herself though, and I’ve learned not to ask.

The ward laid, she turned to look at me. It was a searching look that lingered speculatively on the clean shirt and the freshly sliced, mostly stubble-free chin.

‘Hey,’ I said, crossing over to her. ‘I was starting to get worried.’

She submitted to a kiss on the cheek, but I heard her sniff the air as I leaned in, so I knew she was still trawling for information on my sobriety and soundness of mind.

‘I’m sober,’ I assured her.

‘Yeah,’ she agreed dryly. ‘I’m sure that will last.’

She walked past me into the living room, threw her handbag down on the sofa, then threw herself down after it. I hadn’t really registered it until now, but she was in disguise. Instead of her usual flamboyant colours, she was wearing a suit in a subdued mid-brown, and she’d tied her hair back in a tight bun. In short, she’d done her best to avoid a second glance. Not easy for Pen: she stands five foot nothing in her cotton socks, but has intensely green eyes like chunks of radioactive kryptonite, flame-red hair and a general air – which is pretty much accurate – of being a compact container for a lot of dangerous energy. I’d had a serious thing for her once, but it was a long time ago, back when she and I and Rafi were all at college together. It might even have gone somewhere if Rafi hadn’t been an item in that list, but the chemical bond that developed between the two of them reduced the two of us, by some mysterious alchemy, into just-good-friends, which is where we’ve been ever since.

All the same, I must have looked a little like a suspicious husband as I stood over her now, arms folded and face solemnly set. ‘Where have you been?’ I demanded. ‘The birds were starving.’

‘Looking for Rafi,’ she answered shortly.

‘Overnight?’

‘He’s got a demon inside him, Fix. I don’t think demons keep office hours.’

She closed her eyes to deter further questions, so I waited to see if she was going to volunteer any more information on her own.

‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that you might have left me some of that brandy?’ she asked after a while.

I went and got her the bottle and a glass. Just the one glass, although my palms prickled at the proximity of the booze. A single medium-to-large-sized shot would set me up so right.

But that way lay madness, and another lost weekend that might easily last until the middle of next week.

Pen poured herself a generous shot, then as an afterthought she offered me the bottle. I shook my head and she grunted in what sounded like surprise but could have been approval. She emptied the glass in three swigs: not the most respectful way to treat the fruit of Monsieur Janneau’s labour of love.