Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

I looked over at the mantelpiece. There was something leaning against Pen’s ludicrous antique carriage clock: a curled-up piece of glossy card, off-white on the side that was facing me. A photo. I crossed the room, picked it up, and turned it over.

I knew roughly what it was going to be—the music and Pen’s mood had filled in some of the blanks ahead of time. But it still hit me like a punch in the chest.

The back quad at St. Peter’s, Oxford—the one with the fountain that tends to run with things other than water. Night: a scene caught in the baleful eye of someone’s inadequate flashgun, so there was no background to speak of. Just Felix Castor, age nineteen, all chestnut curls and strained grin, trying hard to look like he wasn’t eight months out of a state comprehensive school. I was already affecting a long coat, but back then it was a poncy black Burberry—I hadn’t yet joined the pre-Revolution Russian army. And since the coat was made for someone a lot broader across the shoulders, I looked like five foot ten inches of sweet Fanny Adams.

To my left, Pen. Christ, she was beautiful. The photo didn’t exist that could do justice to the colors of her, the quickness and the life of her. In a feathered snood, a red sequined boob tube, and a slit black skirt (marking this as the morning after a party), and with her gaze cast so demurely to the ground, she looked like a hooker who’s just tossed it all in to become a nun but hasn’t told anyone yet. Her hand was raised to the heavens, index finger extended.

To my right, Rafi. He was wearing the black Nehru jacket and pants that were his trademark, and he was smiling the smile of a man who’s got a great secret in him. Herman Melville says that’s an easy trick, but then, he also thought Moby Dick was a whale.

Both Rafi and I were crouching down, each of us with one leg extended behind us, the other flexed at the knee. I remembered that night with a vividness that had never faded, and I knew the reason for the strange pose. We were on our marks, and Pen was about to say go.

“I found it in the garage,” Pen’s voice said from behind me. “After you moved all your magic stuff. It was lying on the floor.”

I turned to face her, feeling like I’d been caught out in something. An emotion, maybe—something unworthy and unspoken that made me ashamed. Pen had the saucer of beads in one hand, the maimed rosary in the other. She looked a little wistful.

“What’s the score?” I asked her, groping for something to say that wouldn’t relate to the photo. I indicated the saucer with a nod of the head.

“The score?” She chewed this over, setting the beads down on the arm of the sofa before sitting down heavily herself right next to them. She seemed to find the words a bit perplexing, unless that was just the whisky. The silence lengthened.

“The match was called,” she said at last, not quite managing the flippant tone she was aiming for. “Rain stopped play. Bloody hell, I wish I was rich. I wish you played the guitar, like Stoker.”

It was a standing joke that had started to lean over and fall down by this time. Mack Stoker—Mack the Axe, Mack Five—matriculated in the same year as us, and he dropped out of university, too, only he did it to become lead guitar with Stasis Leak, the thrash-metal band, and was so successful that he’d already been in rehab three times.

I managed a tired smile, which Pen didn’t return. She stared at me solemnly, then looked down at the saucer of beads, then back at me. “I worry about you, Fix,” she said. “I really do. I don’t want you to get hurt. I went to see Rafi last week, and he told me you were going to get yourself into trouble. In over your head.” After a moment’s silence, she went on, her voice a lot lower. “I wonder sometimes . . . if things could have turned out differently. For him. For all of us.”

“There’s no room for a tin whistle in a hardcore band,” I parried ineptly. But she was talking about the photo now, and her words took me back, unwillingly, to the memory I’d been avoiding.

It wasn’t just a party, it was a May Ball. Overprivileged kids playing at being decadent adults, but with none of the poise and probably not enough of the cynicism. Pen had Rafi on one arm, me on the other, all three of us aroused way past our safety limits by alcohol and close dancing and teenage hormones. Rafi, with his characteristic chutzpah, suggested a three-way. Pen smacked him down. She was a good Catholic girl, and she didn’t put it about. But she countersuggested. We could race across the quad and back to her. The first one to touch her . . .

“How did the party go?” Pen asked, bursting the bubble.

I stared down at her like a rabbit caught in headlights.

“Fine,” I lied. “It went fine. But the guy—Mr. Serious Crimes Squad—paid me by check. I’ll give you the money tomorrow.”

“Brilliant!” said Pen. “And I’ll show you what the beads are for. Also tomorrow. Fair exchange, Fix.”

“The motto of all good landlords in this world and the next,” I agreed.

“Thank God one of us is earning, anyway,” Pen muttered, grimacing around another swig of whisky. “If I don’t get some money in the bank, I’m going to lose this place.”

She said it lightly, but for Pen that was like saying “I’m going to lose an arm.” I knew damn well how much she loved the house. No, more than that—how much she needed it, because she was the third Bruckner woman to live there, and three was a magic number. The devotional stuff she did, the rituals and incantations—her bizarre post-Catholic version of wicca—they depended on 14 Lydgate Road. She couldn’t do them anywhere else.

“I thought the mortgage was paid,” I said, trying to match her off-the-cuff tone.

“The first one is,” she admitted. “There’ve been other loans since. The house is the collateral for all of them.”

Pen only likes to talk about her get-rich-quick schemes on the upswing. The fact that they always leave her poorer than she was when she started is a truth that she finds unpalatable.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“I need a couple of grand before the end of the month,” she sighed. “When the money starts to come in from the party bookings, I’ll be fine. But right now, every little bit helps.”

I know when I’m beaten. I kissed her goodnight, went upstairs to my own room, and threw myself down, exhausted, on the bed. Something in my trouser pocket dug into my thigh, so I arched my back, rummaged for it, drew it out into the light. It was a blank playing card.

After the final no, there comes a yes. And you’ll be getting to that before the night is out.

“You bastard,” I muttered.

I flicked the card away into the corner of the room. Turned out the light and went to sleep still dressed. The number of the Bonnington Archive was in the book, and I still had the envelope with Peele’s home number on it; but there was no point in calling anyone before the morning.

THERE’S A SPRAWL OF STREETS BETWEEN REGENT’S Park and King’s Cross that used to be a town. Somers Town, it was called, and still is called on most maps of the area, although that’s not a name that many of the residents tend to use very much.

It’s one of those places that got badly fucked over by the Industrial Revolution, and it never really recovered. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was still mostly fields and orchards, and rich men built their estates there. A hundred years later, it was a pestilential slum and a thieves’ rookery—one of the places that got Charles Dickens salivating and sharpening his nib. St. Pancras Station sits in the middle of it like a great, overblown wedding cake, but it was Somers Town as a whole that got sliced up, by roads and railways and freight yards and warehouses and the cold, commercial logic of a new age. It’s not a slum anymore, but that’s mainly because it isn’t a place anymore. It’s more like the stump of an amputated limb—every street you walk down is sliced off clean by a railway cutting or an underpass, or a blank wall that usually turns out to be part of the gray, moldering hide of Euston Station.