Yearn (15 page)

“I know, I've been following it all day. Even Daddy's worried. You were a big hit with him last night, by the way. I thought you might have overdone it with the Oxford story, but we pulled it off, Edward! Isn't that amazing?” She sat down beside him, nuzzling up. Eddy pulled away despite himself.

“Are you okay, sweetie? I mean, everything is okay with us, isn't it?”

There was a slight pause. Eddy felt as if the room had started to recede from him, as if he was drunk or suffering from vertigo.

“Cynthia . . .”

Cynthia studied his face and now, suddenly too nervous to hear his answer, spoke over him.

“Daddy said you had real grit. He's even offered to put you up for the Carlton House. Of course I'll have to recruit a few of the Pony Club to substantiate your story. What was the name of the school you went to again? The real school?”

He sensed the question could possibly be a trap—Cynthia might tolerate a grammar school background but certainly not a secondary modern. Eddy fingered the signet ring they'd bought for him at Christopher Graffs (he'd paid) when they'd bought her engagement ring. He pulled away. “Sorry, I don't feel very well.”

He rushed to the bathroom and locked himself in. Inside he reached into his jacket for his BlackBerry and dialed Janey's number. The line rang and rang. Eventually an automated voice came on to tell him the number had been disconnected. How was that possible? She had only given him the number that morning. Dread began to jangle his shot nerves as his emotions narrowed down to one desire only—to see Janey.

Outside Cynthia had started to rattle the door handle.

“Eddy, are you okay? Eddy?” The concern in her voice made him feel instantly guilty. Panicked, he climbed out of the bathroom window and bolted down the back lane toward a cab.

He directed the cab to the brothel, telling the driver he'd give him an extra ten quid if he got there in under ten minutes. They were there in seven. After instructing him to wait outside, Eddy ran into the building. The receptionist, cool as ever, looked up from her desk.

“Janey, is she here?” His heart was now in his throat, throbbing uncomfortably.

“Who?”

“Janey—I mean Jezebel?”

The receptionist, registering his desperation, put out her large man-hand, long red fingernails catching the light, and touched his.

“I'm sorry, baby, but she resigned this afternoon, no forwarding address or number.”

“Nothing?”

“I would help you, a regular, if I could. But you know these girls, especially the temps. Fly-by-nights, gone by the morning. I don't even have a real name for you, never mind a surname.”

Eddy didn't even wait for her to finish her sentence. He rushed back out into the street and instructed the cab driver to take him to an address he'd suddenly remembered from all those years ago, an address he'd once carved into a box he'd made in woodcraft in a hopeless act of voodoo.

He stood in the street staring up at the block of brand-new luxury apartments, the For Sale signs attached to the gleaming glass windows. Gone were the old redbrick council flats in which Janey had once lived with her mother, the narrow Victorian entrance with its single arch over the doorway. He would never find her now. Overhead the sun slipped behind a dark cloud and it began to rain.

 • • • 

The key clicked in the door and Cynthia looked up from her magazine. Eddy stepped into the flat, his hair and jacket drenched from the downpour. She dared not get up, frightened that her gratitude at his return would drive him away again. Now she sensed that nothing was certain between them and yet she still wanted him, perhaps even more.

“Are you okay?” Not being able to help herself, she stood and took him into her arms.

“I think so,” he murmured. “Edgware Secondary Modern,” he suddenly said into her shoulder.

She pulled away and studied him. “Darling, why on earth wouldn't you tell me before? I don't care, honestly. I love you.”

To his own horror Eddy began to cry.

 

It was one of those impossibly hot days, one of those apocalyptic climate change can-fry-an-egg-on-a-car-bonnet days that had become so prevalent in Sydney lately. May, a twenty-two-year-old university student, was on her way back to the small two-bedroom apartment she rented with her boyfriend, Mitch, in a Victorian terrace house in the suburb of Glebe. A pale thin redhead, she had forgotten her sun hat and was hopping from one patch of shade to another as she navigated her way back to the flat. Earlier that day she had worked for four hours in the small vintage clothing store owned by her sister. The income from this part-time job helped with her studies and rent, and normally the anthropology student enjoyed the eccentric, laid-back atmosphere of the store, which was a stark contrast to the intensity of her own research work, but today was different. It felt to May like the whole world had suddenly tilted upside down and the intrinsic order of things—government, business and personal relations—had twisted up into something unrecognizable, something undefinably frightening. For a start the global markets had crashed badly overnight—it was in all of the newspapers and on CNN; the images of panicked stock exchanges with ashen-faced men gesticulating at TV monitors upon which numbers ran like terrified insects had upset May. She knew such financial panic was bound to filter down to universities and research grants, and she was about to graduate. But more important, May's own life had also contorted violently that morning, like a reflection in a curved funfair mirror.

May, a late riser, had woken to the sight of Mitch, her boyfriend and flatmate, naked except for an old fur rug draped across his shoulders, staring at a red pentacle he appeared to have scrawled on the bedroom wall. This was remarkable for several reasons—one was that Mitch was a conservative young man who liked to keep his clothes on in bed, or at least his underpants, an irritating habit May had battled the whole two years of their relationship, to her frustration. And second, despite the fur rug and the fact that it was at least ninety-five degrees, Mitch was still shivering.

May, stunned by this vision, had barely collected her wits when Mitch announced in an absurdly deep and serious voice that he was no longer Mitch Jackson, twenty-one, formerly of Pymble in the northern suburbs of Sydney, but Erasmus Jehovah, a warlock of the Mikulee tribe, and that she should address him as such. If it had been anybody else May might have dismissed this as an imaginative prank, but the two years with Mitch had taught her that the economics student, although top of his year and considered brilliant, was not the most imaginative of individuals, nor was he the most emotional.

In fact there had been moments when May wondered whether he wasn't borderline Asperger's, but what Mitch lacked in emotional intelligence he'd made up for in physical beauty, monogamy, and financial generosity, which made him a huge improvement on May's previous boyfriends. So naturally the sight of such a controlled individual so blatantly out of control was both deeply disturbing and, if May was honest with herself, incredibly amusing in a dark sort of way.

May stared at him, searching her mind for any tips on handling warlocks that she might have gleaned from her anthropological studies, but despite a number of lengthy footnotes on witch doctors and the practice of exorcism, not one useful fact emerged, which wasn't entirely surprising given her thesis was on the eighteenth-century tribes of Polynesia and not on the warlock myths of Scotland.

Regardless, and wary of the way Mitch alias Erasmus was now holding up a tennis racket as if it were some ancient wand, May decided the best policy might be to humor him and, assuming he was in the grip of a nervous breakdown and hadn't in fact been transformed into a warlock, bundle him off to the student counselor as soon as possible.

That was eight hours ago and Mitch still hadn't rung her on her mobile to confirm he'd made the appointment.

“Bugger it,” May swore to herself as she hurried down the street, mentally running through the past few months, searching for the trigger that might have tipped him into such a delusion. It was only at her front door that she remembered the DVD series of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
that she'd given Mitch for his twentieth birthday. Could that have been an influence? Then there was that night back in June when she'd come home from the library and found Mitch glued to the TV screen. The episode had been about Buffy's best friend, Willow, and her boyfriend, Oz, a werewolf who has to leave her to understand his inner beast. Mitch had been fascinated. Had this storyline released some appalling psychosis?

As May turned the key in the door she dismissed the possibility. It was obviously the result of stress, a meltdown of nerves just before his finals, and given the apocalyptic nature of the sudden economic crisis it wasn't very surprising that Mitch might harbor some hidden dread of failure that had now forced his subconscious to flip him into another identity altogether. In fact it seemed both poignant and pertinent to May that Mitch, a rationalist inclined toward a resigned fatalism, had chosen such a magical persona as a warlock. Perhaps he had unconsciously concluded that such a persona might equip him with the necessary sorcery to succeed in the financial world. May hoped that a session of counseling might have restored Mitch to his predictable but lovable self, but as she pushed the front door open, her optimism evaporated. Inside the lights were off and from the kitchen came the sound of banging.

The economics student was standing at the workbench illuminated by a dozen lit candles perched precariously on the corners of the kitchen counters. Looking like some demented medieval murderer, he was in the middle of pulverizing a large piece of bloody meat with a hammer. At least he was wearing clothes, May noticed with some relief, although his usual suit had been replaced by a raggedy old kilt and a bloodstained T-shirt.

“What the fuck?” she exclaimed, abandoning any possibility of handling his psychosis with sensitivity.

“Supper,” he growled at her, at which May, depressed by the sudden realization that she might have lost Mitch forever, sank into a chair.

“'Tis roo,” Mitch muttered darkly. He dangled the raw piece of kangaroo over his mouth and snapped at it, gobbling the dripping sinew greedily. May dry-retched, and then reminded herself that it was probably dangerous to display any signs of revulsion toward his behavior.

“Delicious,” Mitch concluded, blood now streaking his chin. May maneuvered herself closer to the door in case a fast escape might prove necessary.

“So how was the counselor?” She managed to sound calm.

“The high priestess spake truths that totally aligned with my mind-set. Amorous as she was of my paradigm, she hath summoned Mitch and thrown him from a great height and the economics scholar is no longer. Long live Erasmus.”

Which May understood to mean that the student counselor had empathized with Mitch's need to segue into this new and possibly more liberated persona, a notion May thought both ridiculous and dangerous, but given that she herself had visited the student counselor (an aging hippie with a penchant for the esoteric) once or twice, it was plausible.

“You mean, great Erasmus”—fuck, she hated the sound of her own groveling voice—“Mitch, the economics student, is no longer of this world?”

“World, street, lecture hall, and alas, fair maiden, of the matrimonial bed.”

This last item took May by surprise—she'd never considered Mitch a de facto, never mind a husband, despite having lived with him for the past two years. He was more a kind of pleasant passing phase, which she now reflected might have been somewhat of a misjudgment. But what exactly did he mean? That she was to sleep with Erasmus from now on, and if so, how would this affect their lovemaking?

She glanced over at the aspiring warlock. She'd been quite content with their lovemaking before; if a little predictable it was at least regular and enthusiastic. Mitch had been a good lover and if it was difficult to read his emotional responses it wasn't for lack of interest on his part. Now Mitch alias Erasmus suddenly grinned wolfishly at her, a fiber of raw meat still clinging to one tooth. Nope, there was nothing remotely sexy about this current manifestation of Mitch's personality. The meat fiber slipped off, dangling for a moment on his unshaven chin before falling to the kitchen floor. May made her mind up. Sharing a bed with Erasmus was not going to work; but could she rescue Mitch? He was, after all, her boyfriend.

“So there's no way I can summon the human individual Mitch back into this portal that standeth before me?” May asked, wincing at her own pseudo-Shakespeare speak sprinkled with a little postmodern techno-talk that appeared to be warlock dialect to Mitch.

“Not a hope in hell,” Mitch alias Erasmus answered cheerfully, then smashed the hammer into the bench top as if he were finishing off the human Mitch himself. May tried not to jump at the noise. Saddened and more than a little scared, she eyed the bloodied hammer cautiously, then backed a little closer to the door to contemplate her options, knowing that some strategy would have to be applied to remove the warlock from both kitchen and house. One woman's warlock is another woman's schizophrenic, she observed, then determined that self-preservation was probably the only course of action.

“Oh great Erasmus, I, a mere female human, am not worthy of being a repository for your great and mighty organ. . . .” she began, remembering that Mitch had always been slightly sensitive about the size of his penis. “You have greater and more powerful horizons to conquer; therefore I release you from the confines of this cottage. . . .” she concluded, trying to remember whether warlocks belonged to the village scenario as opposed to the castle scenario. At which Erasmus alias Mitch dropped suddenly to his knees and began to rub his head against her knee like a dog.

“You are right, prophetess. I am destined for greater things and distant lands. I will leave by the next full moon.” A statement that had May desperately scanning the calendar hanging over the fridge. To her great relief, the full moon appeared to be two days hence.

“But you'll have to pack first,” she quickly replied, then patted the warlock on the head.

The next afternoon, after May had made several clandestine phone calls to Mitch's mother, Erasmus stood in the front courtyard surrounded by cardboard boxes packed with his possessions. The economics student was still wearing the kilt and hadn't shaved or washed. He was standing stock-still, his arms outstretched and his face turned up toward the sun as if he were in a state of worship. May stood at some distance, praying that Mitch's mother, a feisty criminal lawyer who'd brought Mitch up single-handedly, would, for once, be on time. May tried not to stare at the aspirant sorcerer and she also tried to resist the temptation to throw her arms around him and say, “Stop, Mitch, it's May here, it's okay to be normal now.” Just then he made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a bark or a howl, and May reached for her mobile hidden in her skirt pocket, her fingers curling around it for comfort, trying to reassure herself that at least the police were only a phone call away.

She felt like crying. It was like Mitch had died; she might never see him again and she hadn't been able to say a proper good-bye. Meanwhile Mitch alias Erasmus started running from one end of the short street to the other, backward and forward past their gate. Christ, he looked completely demented, May thought to herself. Neither of them had slept all night. Instead he'd spent the night prowling naked around the tiny concreted backyard, occasionally stopping to genuflect toward the moon. It required all of May's charm and diplomatic skills, as well as the reassurance that he would be gone by the next night, to dissuade the neighbors from calling the police. Curiously, Mitch alias Erasmus did not seem emotionally affected by their approaching separation. If anything he appeared cheerful, relieved even, which made May suspect that perhaps Mitch had unconsciously wanted to leave her anyhow. Exhausted and near tears, she leaned against the front gate, determined not to get upset in case this triggered some unexpected reaction in her ex-lover.

Mitch's mother was due any minute and there was still no sign of Mitch reemerging from under the hairy mantle of Erasmus. If anything, the warlock persona appeared to have gained in strength: the five o'clock shadow on his chin had become a stubbly beard, his thick black unbrushed hair looked as if it was about to divide itself into dreadlocks, and he'd taken to muttering incantations, which had terrified the Vietnamese postman earlier that morning.

As May watched him, a great sadness anchored her to the pavement. Would he ever recover or would he end up like her older brother, medicated and only half-functional? She couldn't bear thinking about it. She glanced back at their apartment, where another, more pressing issue awaited her attention—the rent, which was due in four days. May knew she didn't have enough money in the bank to cover it, and she couldn't afford to be late with the payment. Accommodation was really scarce for students; she couldn't afford to lose the flat and yet she couldn't afford to keep it on alone.

Just then Mitch's mother's car swung into the quiet suburban street. Mitch alias Erasmus, recognizing the car, ran back to the gate and suddenly reached down behind some bushes. He pulled out a large cardboard box, from which came loud scratching noises. Smiling at her, he thrust the mysterious box into May's hands.

“His name is Shadow, he is a familiar, he will protect you. This is my last gift to you, oh faithful female of the human species.” May was too frightened to ask what was inside, just in case it was something odd like a rat or a possum.

She watched the Lexus drive off. Already she could see Mitch's mother arguing with her son inside the car. Surprisingly, now that he was gone she felt nothing but relief. Had she really loved Mitch, she wondered, or had he just been a financial convenience? As if to answer, a loud scratching suddenly sounded from the cardboard box. May rested it against the garden wall and opened the lid. Inside, a black cat peered out with uncannily intelligent eyes—there even appeared to be a glint of amusement in them. “Shadow,” she said to the creature. The cat did not reply.