Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘When Professor Mulbridge finds out that you stole her prize specimen from under her nose,’ she observed, ‘it will make her very angry. She’ll want to get back at you. She’ll think of ways to do it that you won’t see coming.’

I acknowledged this with a vague shrug. ‘She’s been angry at me ever since I turned down her job offer,’ I said. ‘Let her come. I’ll be ready for her.’

Juliet looked as though she was reserving her own opinions on that one, but she let the point go. ‘Bind Asmodeus well,’ she said, getting out of the van. ‘If he gets loose — really loose, with no anchor in your friend’s flesh to hold him back — you can’t imagine the harm he could do.’

But on that point she was wrong. My imagination is just fine, and I know what will happen if Rafi’s passenger ever finds a way to step off the bus.

‘I’ll be careful,’ I promised.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, with no hint of sarcasm in her face or voice. ‘I know you take no unnecessary risks, Castor. Not by your own definition.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Shall I tell you now how flawed your definitions are?’

‘Give Sue a kiss from me,’ I said. ‘Platonic. On the cheek. Nothing threatening.’

‘She has my kisses.’

‘Then I guess she’s doing okay.’

Juliet smiled with real and sudden warmth. ‘Oh yes,’ she agreed. With a final wave she stalked off into the darkness, and was gone more suddenly than the darkness itself could fully explain.

There was a Judas window in the back of the cab that let me look into the rear of the van. I slid it open and peeped through, although there was really nothing to see. Nothing to hear, either: the silence was absolute.

‘You okay, Rafi?’ I ventured, after a few moments.

No answer. Well, better nobody home than Asmodeus taking Rafi’s calls. And better that he sleep all the way to where we were going, because it would make unloading him at the other end a lot less complicated.

I wound up the window and drove away. I still had to get to Lambeth and back tonight, and I wasn’t looking forward to the drive. Or to what was waiting at the other end of it.

But I did what I had to do, which — when it comes right down to it — is the epitaph to most of my days. I handed off to Imelda’s people down in Elephant and Castle. There were two of them: handsome black men of few words who were ten years my junior and could have folded me backwards until I broke if the notion had come into their heads. I gave the van’s keys to the taller of the two, who wore a beanie and bands in rasta colours and had a braided beard that impugned the manhood of any man he met. He waved the keys at me like a schoolteacher waving a pointer.

‘Imelda wanted me to say this to you,’ he rumbled. ‘And she wanted me to say it slow, one word at a time.’ He tapped the keys against my chest five times, once for each word. ‘Don’t — make — me — regret — this.’

Being on his turf and his time, I took the insult with as much good grace as I could muster. ‘You ever get any snarl-ups south of the river?’ I asked.

He gave me a suspicious scowl. ‘What?’

‘The beads,’ I clarified, pointing to his beard. ‘Do they get in the way when you muff-dive?’

His eyes widened and his mouth set in a tight line. ‘Man, you’re asking for some real–’

I nodded, making the wrap-it-up gesture used by studio floor managers. ‘Tell Imelda I’m grateful,’ I said. ‘And tell her I’ll sort this out soon. She’s got my word on that.’

South Circular. Kew Bridge. North Circular. In Pen’s car now, which at least didn’t handle like a barge, but I was at the end of my rope, physically. Tiredness kills. Ask anyone. The only thing that kept me awake was surfing the news channels to find out if I was a wanted man.

Pen was waiting in the kitchen with all the lights on. She wanted a debriefing, which was extensive and occasionally hysterical, shading eventually into alcoholic.

When I rolled into bed at last, drunk with fatigue and spent adrenalin and a great deal of actual alcohol, I fell into sleep like a man stepping off the edge of a cliff. On the way down, I thought with a slightly numbed wonder about all the shit that was going to hit all the many and various fans when the morning came.

And decided to sleep until noon.

But we got through the next day without the sky falling, and then the day after that. There was nothing about Rafi in the papers or on the TV news: there weren’t even any good rumours flying on the conspiracy websites, and nobody came to the door to ask me where I’d been on the night of the third. Gradually, Pen and I relaxed from our bunker mentality.

I called Imelda, who said that she’d got Rafi settled in pretty well at her place. ‘Rafi?’ I echoed, just to be sure. ‘Not Asmodeus?’

‘Rafael Ditko,’ Imelda confirmed. ‘In his own right mind and native disposition.’

‘You’re a wonder, Imelda.’

‘Yes, I am. That doesn’t mean I’m any happier about this, incidentally.’

‘I know. This wipes out any debts between us.’

An edge came into her voice. ‘No, Castor, it doesn’t. It leaves the balance on my side. And when I call in that favour, you will damn well know about it.’

‘Okay.’ I was prepared to bend over backwards a long way to placate the Ice-Maker: not many people could have done what she’d done, and I’m not counting myself in that number.

A couple of weeks passed. Pen went down to Peckham every two or three days to visit Rafi, and every visit after the first was what you might call a conjugal one. Without going into indelicate detail, the visits required Imelda and me to pull out all the stops to make sure that Rafi’s infernal other half didn’t surface and try to make it into a threesome. That didn’t bear thinking about.

In fact, there were a lot of aspects of the situation that didn’t bear thinking about, as Imelda was only too happy to remind me. But you can get used to anything, over time. There’s no atrocity so atrocious that it can’t become a routine.

We felt like we were on top of things. We’d plucked Rafi from the jaws of Jenna-Jane: we’d given him some kind of a doll’s-house miniature version of a life. We were shit-hot, all things considered: so good, so sharp, so fly that we knew, even while we were congratulating ourselves, that we couldn’t afford to lower our guard by a fraction of an inch. We were good with that. We were holding the door to Hell fast shut, our shoulders braced and our muscles locked.

But how much use is that when the roof falls in?

The sound of hammering dragged me up from uneasy dreams. Then the dreams and the noise got muddily entwined, so that for a few confused seconds I was knocking nails into a cross where one of the Bee Gees — Robin, I think — was hanging in place of Christ. I tried to apologise, but he was laying down the lead vocal riff from ‘Staying Alive’ and with the headphones on I don’t think he even heard me.

Then I was awake, and I realised that the noise hadn’t stopped. I got myself upright and threw the covers back, my head throbbing as though my brain had been set to ‘vibrate’ and was taking a lot of incoming calls all at the same time. Why was that?

Oh yeah. Because last night we’d been down in Peckham at the Ice-Maker’s, for the third time this week, and when we got back Pen had been too wired to sleep. So we’d talked until the early hours, about old times and counter-factual worlds, until the alcohol drowned the adrenalin and we finally staggered off to our beds.

Half a bottle of Courvoisier XO on an empty stomach, and less than two hours’ sleep: the perfect way to start the day, if you want it to feel as long as two days and be filled end-to-end with pain.