Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘Told you. He’ll wake up right as rain.’

Pen nodded glumly – then visibly brightened as another thought struck her. ‘Dylan says he might be able to prescribe some stuff that will keep Asmodeus under for more of the time. He wants me to have a word with Webb about letting him in to give Rafi some tests.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Worth a try,’ I said. ‘I thought you said he was a rag-and-bone man.’

‘Bones and joints,’ she corrected, looking at me severely. ‘But he interned in endocrinology.’

Pen followed me as I walked through into her cramped, pie-slice-shaped bathroom and washed my bloody hands in the sink. I was trying to get away from another lecture about how wonderful Dylan was – Pen’s favourite theme for the past few weeks – but it wasn’t going to be that easy.

‘He’s really sweet,’ she said. ‘You’d think he’d want to stay well away from Rafi, considering – you know – what he means to me. But he just wants to make me happy.’

‘Ask him for a blank prescription pad before it wears off,’ I suggested. She punched me in the shoulder and I took it like a man.

I’d already learned the hard way that sarcastic comments about Doctor Feelgood met with terrible retribution. He was an odd guy for Pen to be dating, in some ways: she wasn’t drawn to material things, and affluence normally struck her as a sign of spiritual malaise rather than anything to aspire to. But Dylan’s wealth and success and smoked-silver Lexus were counterbalanced by the fact that he was an ovate – a sort of junior officer in some druidical training system, learning to be one of nature’s high priests. That was how she’d met him – at some solstice-related knees-up on a windswept hill in Pembrokeshire. Pen’s own flavour of paganism didn’t have ranks and hierarchies, but she liked it a lot that this well-to-do young doctor was groping towards spiritual truth rather than just worrying about his backswing. And he understood about Rafi, which most people flat-out don’t.

Yeah, the guy was clearly a saint. It was probably just as well I’d never met him: if opposites attract we’d probably have fallen head over heels in love with each other and left Pen out in the cold.

‘Are you feeling a sense of choking terror that you can’t pin down to anything in particular?’ I asked her.

It might have seemed like an odd question in some circumstances, but coming from me Pen knew it was like a doctor asking you if you’d been off your food. She searched her mind. It’s both capacious and somewhat idiosyncratically arranged, so it took a while. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Just the usual choking terrors, and I can pretty much account for those. Why, Fix?’

I dried my hands and went back out into the living room. Arthur was clashing his beak and shrugging his wings open and shut – his way of begging for more, but I was all out of goodies. I skirted around him, keeping my distance in case he decided to search me to make sure. Pen leaned in the doorway, arms folded, looking at me with some concern.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Something coming in on Channel Death. Or maybe nothing. You know how these things go.’

Just by reading her face I could see her decide to change the subject. ‘Grambas called,’ she said. ‘Some men tried to deliver something at the office yesterday, but you weren’t there. He’s got it in the lock-up behind the shop.’

I grimaced. A pilgrimage out to Harlesden first thing on a Monday morning wasn’t a thrilling prospect. On the other hand, that was meant to be my place of work, and since I owe Pen so much back rent that she could probably legally impound both my kidneys and sell them in Hong Kong, she feels fairly strongly that I should spend more time over there than I do.

But she sympathised with my raw mood, and as usual her sympathy took a concrete form. She cleared the table – by tipping all the newspapers, magazines, coasters and unopened mail off onto the floor – and went to get her tarot deck.

‘Pen,’ I said, regretting that I’d said anything, ‘you know I don’t hold with this stuff.’

‘It never hurts to get a second opinion,’ she said.

‘From who? Whose opinion are we getting? Pieces of laminated cardboard don’t know jack shit about what’s going down in the world, Pen. Nobody ever tells them anything.’

‘It’s not the cards, Fix. It’s you, and it’s me, and it’s the Weltgeist – the world-spirit.’

I winced and waved her quiet. The world-spirit. Right, because there’s a consciousness behind the universe and it loves all its children: we get daily evidence of that in terms of famine, plague and flood. I don’t buy the tarot for the same reason that I don’t buy religion: the hopes and fears of ordinary people stick up out of the miracles like bones out of a spavined horse. My universe doesn’t work like that, and the only spirits in it are the ones that are my stock-in-trade.

Pen gave me the cards to shuffle. I considered palming Death and top-decking him while she wasn’t looking, but she hates it when I do that so I played fair.

She dealt out a Triskele spread – three cards in a triangle, two more crossed in the centre. Ordinarily she’d have done a full ten-card spread, but she knows my limits so she was keeping it short and sweet.

She turned over the cover and the cross – the two cards in the middle. They were an inverted ace of wands and the Hanged Man. Pen blinked, clearly surprised and a little unsettled by the conjunction.

‘That’s really weird,’ she said.

‘Tall dark stranger?’ I hazarded.

‘Don’t be stupid, Fix. It’s just that those two cards, together like that . . . they mean exactly what you just said. Spiritual energy – negative spiritual energy – in a kind of suspension. Blocked. Frozen. Penned up.’

I made no comment, but she didn’t expect any. She turned over the root card at lower left: the page of swords, again inverted. ‘A message,’ Pen interpreted. ‘News. All the page cards mean something dawning, something being announced. I think . . . because it’s upside down . . . a problem that doesn’t get solved, or that gets solved in the wrong way. Fix, if someone asks for your help with something, go in carefully. One step at a time.’

The bud card at lower right was old Death himself, which as we all know doesn’t mean death at all. Pen started to make her speech about change and flux, and I made the ‘wrap it up’ gesture that TV floor managers use. ‘It’s another bad combination,’ she said stubbornly, refusing to be bullied. ‘The page of wands, and Death. Forget what I said about being careful: you’re going to trip up, and fall on your face. But it’s only the bud, it’s not the flower.’

The flower is the apex of the triangle. Pen turned it over, and we both looked at it. Justice. I never look at those scales without thinking of Hamlet. ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?’ I don’t want justice: I want to cop a plea.

Pen gave me a look, and I shook my head – but the querent doesn’t get to have the last word, even if it’s only a gesture.

‘Things will balance out,’ she said. ‘Actions will have the consequences they were always going to have. For better or worse.’

‘Which?’ I asked. ‘Better, or worse?’

‘We won’t know until it happens.’

‘Christ, I hate these little bastards.’

Pen gave up on spirituality and got the whisky out. On some things, at least, we still see eye to eye.

Harlesden is like Kilburn without the scenic beauty – it’s the stamping ground of Jamaican gangsters with itchy trigger fingers, predatory minicab drivers whose cars are their offices, and a great nation of feral cats. Oh, and zombies: for some reason, those who’ve risen in the body seem to congregate in large numbers on the deserted streets of the soon-to-be-demolished Stonehouse Estate. It’s a setting that shows them off to very good advantage.