Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

Oh, that! Yes, of course. Always. Forever. Yes. I found myself nodding as though in approval when in fact I was relieved to see that Selena had remained in the same familiar track and that nothing had really changed.

Then she said something that really did ruin my lunch. “I know you’re still troubled by awkward circumstances in your past, Louis.”

“What do you mean?”

“Seventeen years ago, at Walter and Siobhan’s wedding.”

“I was there,” I said. I’d been so drunk I remembered very little about it. “Of course I was there. I am Walter’s godfather.”

Selena leaned back and, gently caressing the phantom promise of her swollen belly, delivered her best and most unexpected shot. “I know you are ashamed of what you did.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I refused to rise to her dark insinuation, but it planted an uneasy seed. I had a vague memory of Selena and Floss, Ronnie too, running around at the wedding looking precociously pretty, slightly drunk. But I had been on the edge of blackout. In the recesses of my mind, a sliver of memory, there were drugs that I had supplied and plied, ketamine the worst, and there was lust, but probably for Sally, who was more my kind of woman.

“Don’t try to kid me, Louis. I saw you together, getting it together, Louis, when you thought no one could see you.”

My head was spinning, but I was alert enough to realize for the first time that Selena was trying to exercise some kind of control over me, even blackmail me over something I may or may not have done at Walter and Siobhan’s wedding. I sat there expecting accusations of perversity, for her to call me a disgusting old fart even for agreeing to take her to lunch. Then suddenly she surprised me.

“Louis,” she said with a sweet smile, “do you like me? Do you care about me? Do you love me at all, as a friend?”

“Of course I do, of course,” I said, relieved she had modified her tone. “We are friends, of course we are.”

“Then help me to win Walter. Please.”

“I have no intention of actually helping you to win my godson!” I tried to laugh her proposition away, but she faced me with a very determined expression.

“Of course you want Walter and Floss to remain together,” she almost sneered. “You and Floss have a very special bond, don’t you?”

I tried to calm her down. “But I would never stand in your way if they split up and you and Walter were to find love.”

I wasn’t sure I had placated her, but we managed to complete our lunch in a slightly more settled mood.

The thud of a baseball bat hitting a melon. An ax whizzes through the air and strikes a tree trunk. A machete chops at thick, leafy undergrowth. A spade buries its tip into the soil. A blade slashes at the throat of a pig, blood gushes noisily as the animal squeals. A rain begins, of billy clubs, falling onto shoulders, cushions, heads, smashing windows, onto bone, skull, cheekbone, forearm, back of hand. Footsteps fleeing, footsteps following. A chase. A clearing. A cleaning. A cleansing of woodland, jungle, wild animals, human body, and soul. And then the clunk , click , clank of huge switches being thrown, the buzz of brilliance and electrons. Blinded again, by brilliance, the future, by fear, by anxiety, and shame.

Walter told me later that the very next day Selena had summoned him to the same table in the same restaurant. Floss and Ronnie were away at the time on an organized hack, strangely enough in the same area of the Lake District over which Old Nik had wandered like a tramp for many years. What Selena shared with Walter was as disturbing to him as everything she’d told me.

“Ronnie has an entity.”

Walter had laughed and turned to fiddle with his shoulder bag, trying to find his credit card to pay for lunch.

“He’s possessed by a dark spirit that I can only see when he’s walking away from me. It lives around him like a shadow, literally. Ronnie is a good-hearted man in many ways, but he is a fraud.”

Walter said he could hardly believe what Selena was trying to tell him.

Selena crashed on: “Ronnie pretends to be gay, but in fact he’s a full-blooded heterosexual man with a long string of female conquests among the customers at the stables.”

Walter looked incredulous. Ronnie had recently started to wear items of women’s clothing; he especially liked high heels, and had even started to joke about transitioning.

But Selena had not yet delivered her final blow.

“Ronnie and Floss are lovers. Everyone knows.”

Walter’s deepest insecurities had been triggered at that moment.

“They are probably making love right now.”

Walter felt sick. Selena was reinforcing all his most paranoid fears.

“How do you know?” he snapped. “What have you seen? Or is this just gossip?”

“I don’t need evidence,” Selena said quickly, defending herself haughtily. “I won’t listen to tittle-tattle. I simply know.”

Walter had always been determined to keep Selena at arm’s length. He regarded her like a wayward little sister—and perhaps as a bit mad. He and Floss had enjoyed sex only rarely for quite a long time now—and he was only human. He was vulnerable, envious that Ronnie spent more time with Floss than he did.

Selena could see her chances slipping away, so she went further.

“You too,” she had told him confidently. “You also have an entity. I can see it now. This parasitical disembodied soul is expressing itself through you. It’s what is making you feel crazy. It’s coloring and distorting your creativity.”

Walter had not been convinced, but on one level had been longing for some explanation of what had been happening to him.

Selena saw her chance. As she leaned forward, her loose dress opened slightly and Walter said that he could hardly take his eyes from the new voluptuousness of her cleavage and the lustful light in her blue-green eyes.

“Believe me, Walter,” she said. And somehow, the combination of her persuasive psychic magic and the swelling of her pretty breasts gelled; Walter told me later he was seriously afraid he might weep.

Twenty minutes later, the bill settled, Selena took Walter by the hand and led him to her car and drove him to Sheen. Later, separately on different occasions, they both told me what happened next. When they arrived outside the house, she parked carefully in the driveway, sheltered by shrubbery, turned off the engine of her battered old VW, pulled up her dress as though gathering herself to get out of the car, and kissed him deeply, hungrily, passionately. At last she knew for sure she had begun to close the circle that had started its lustful arc back in the bar at Dingwalls fifteen years before. She was about to seduce her number one candidate. Walter flushed, his heart beating; he could probably taste Siobhan on Selena’s lips. I’m sure he was aroused by memories of lips and taste and familiar flesh. They got out of the car and walked into the house.

Later, Walter decided that maybe, after all, Selena had been correct about him being taken over by some kind of jinn. For as he reached his orgasm, swimming in the genuine loving adoration that rained down on him from Selena’s entire body and being, he suddenly felt nothing.

“Oh God,” he gasped. “I’m sorry.”

It was as though his orgasm had been hijacked, stolen, completely erased.

“My darling,” cooed Selena, holding Walter’s sweat-covered face in her hands. “What happened?”

In what should have been the afterglow of their illicit passion, the morphine-like swoon that Selena had felt, Walter clumsily blurted out the truth.

“Not what I expected,” he said. “I’m so sorry, but for a moment there I felt as if I’d left my body.”