December (43 page)

      
'That a pub?' Dave cast a worried glance at Prof.

      
'How far's the Crown?' Prof asked.

      
'Couple of miles.'

      
'OK,' said Prof. 'We'll do that. You didn't say I'd got Dave
with me?' '
      
'Who's Dave?'
      
'Good,' Prof said.

In the pub, waiting for
Russell Hornby, Prof drinking draught Guinness and a single whisky, Dave looked
deeply into his orange juice.
      
'That's a good question,' he said.

      
The pub was quiet. Prof had settled back with his drinks in window
seat and asked, 'What's it like, Dave, being you?'
      
'In fact,' Dave said, 'it's the
first time anybody's ever asked me that. With the band, we knew instinctively
where the others were at.'

      
'I don't mean the band. I mean you.'
      
It wasn't an old pub. The beams on
the ceiling were painted shiny black or varnished. The chairs were
vinyl-covered. There were gaming machines and a pool table. Dave had said that
Tom Storey would probably be OK in here. Clearly not so sure about Prof, who'd
thought, sod it, this encounter demands alcohol.

      
'You serious, Prof? You seriously want to know what it's
like?'

      
'I'
m too old to piss around
with questions I don't expect an answer to.'

      
'What's it like being me?' Dave drank some orange juice. 'I
should say it's a nightmare. But it's not a nightmare all the time. Or maybe it's
no more of a nightmare than anybody's life, I wouldn't know. Until I was about
twelve I thought everyone was like this.'
      
'Like what?'

      
'I had this quite promising thing going until very recently.'
Dave unwrapped a packet of Silk Cut, looking gloomy. 'I started smoking again
when I got in last night. Packed in for a whole week once. You don't mind
secondary smoking, Prof?'

      
'More satisfying than secondary drinking.' Prof drained his
whisky. 'What thing was this you had going?'

      
'Teacher. Actively left-wing, committed atheist. Good really.
She did a lot of living for the moment. We lived together for six months, for
the moments.'

      
'I like it,' Prof said.

      
'It's funny, you get into a situation like that, it absorbs so
much that this other ... aspect of you ... can go remission for weeks at a time.
Like a good holiday. You're thinking, shit, life really is simple, why've I
been messing a in the shallows all these years, not getting close to anyone?'

      
Prof watched Dave light up a cigarette, glancing from side to
side, like a schoolboy behind the bike-sheds. Ludicrously, Dave still looked
too young to be smoking.

      
'And then. Prof, she had to go and introduce me to her sister.'

      
'What, you fancied the sister?'

      
Dave laughed and choked on his own smoke. Nothing so easy as
that, then. Prof waited.

      
'It was in a pub,' Dave said, 'pretty much like this one, near
Southport. We had a table, like this one, except the place was more crowded. The
sister comes in through the top door, spots us, waves and starts walking
towards us. I couldn't tell you now what she looked like, how old she was,
whether she was slim or curvaceous or what. All I could see was this black and
red haze around her head. Shimmering. With, like, a light of its own. Only it's
a dark light. And something inside her is feeding it, feeding the light.'

      
Prof felt chilled, as if a shadow had fallen across their
table. He said tentatively, 'That's what they call an aura, right?'

      
'Who gives a shit what they call it, one like this is bad
news. I've been seeing them on and off since I was a kid. Used to see pretty
ones when I was young, light blues. One of my earliest memories, me ma on her
birthday, with blue light corning off her.'

      
Why did you have to ask, Prof thought. Why'd you have to bloody
well ask?

      
Dave was talking about his formative years. Nineteen
sixty-seven, the Summer of Love. He'd been too young to know much about love, but,
wow, all those psychedelic colours, the op-art mandalas ... and the music.
Wonderful, inspiring music. Years later before he understood most of it had
been down to LSD and stuff. He'd thought it was a great psychic explosion,
everybody realizing their true potential. Suddenly Dave Reilly was no longer a
freak.

      
'It was more than drugs, David,' Prof said sadly. 'There was
something in the air that ain't there any more.'

      
Maybe, Dave conceded. This had been when he first thought he
could perhaps use his ...
sensitivity
... to find new colours, to go in search of the lost chord, all that stuff. By
the time he was twenty-one he'd been in about four bands, each one weirder than
the last. But, of course, punk rock had arrived then, and all that acid stuff
was way out of line. Not that Dave was using anything - who needed it when your
whole life was like an intermittent acid-trip? And he was still under the
illusion he could make something of it ten years later, when he answered Epidemic's
box-numbered small-ad in the
Melody
Maker.
      
'Ad? That was how it started? He
placed an ad?'
      
Dave nodded. 'Straightforward as
that. And when I finally got in to see him. Max Goff said' - Dave put on an Australian
accent - '"How do I know you're the real McCoy, how do I know you're not
shitting me?'"

      
Dave stubbed out his Silk Cut.

      
'So I looked at him, this big fat bastard smoking a cheroot, and
his ... light... was in two halves, one blue, one orangey-red, like the wires
inside a plug. I'd never seen this before, I don't think it's in the rule-book.
It was about ten a.m., he hadn't been up long, he was looking very pleased with
himself.
      
I looked at him, I didn't even think
about it, I just said, "The girl sleeps on that side and the boy's on that
side, right?" And then got up to leave before he could throw me out.'

      
Dave finished off his orange juice. 'Ten minutes later he was
having a contract drawn up.'

      
'A small-ad in the
MM
,'
Prof said. 'Blatant as that. Stone me.'

      
'Wanted: musicians of proven psychic ability. Box number. He
had over fifty replies. The way it turned out, I was the only eventual member
of the band who was one of those who actually answered the advert. He got the
others by reputation, word of mouth. Starting with Tom, who was going through a
fairly excitable phase, all kinds of tales circulating. Goff got him out of
some sort of trouble, Tom being the original destroyer of hotel rooms. Threw a
lot of people downstairs.'

      
'Those were the days,' Prof said absently. He was wondering,
horrified,
Can this bastard see my aura?
Prof
didn't like to think what colour his aura might be. He wished he was somewhere
else.

      
Dave looked up with a sheepish grin. 'You're all right. Prof, it
doesn't seem to work with mates, people I know well. At least ... least, it
never has. Up to now.'

      
Dave bit down on his lower lip. Some problem here.

      
'Never occurred to me,' Prof said gruffly. 'What happened about
that girl? In the pub.'

      
Dave sighed. 'It's just a fleeting thing. You see somebody,
usually for the first time, and it's like when you've been lying in the sun and
you open your eyes. A black smudge. Then you rub your eyes and it's gone. Jan's
sister. Yeh. I said to Jan that night, how long has Sara been ill? Jan says,
what are you on about, she's not
ill.
I say, maybe she should go and have a check-up. Ooooh
God.
She was a card-carrying atheist. Beat me into a corner with
psychology and logic.'

      
Prof said, 'I don't think I'm gonna ask you what happened to
the sister.'

      
'Thanks,' Dave said.

      
'How often does this happen, David? How often do you see it?'

      
Dave sighed. 'I thought you'd have got the picture. When I was
younger, I used to see auras in all the damn colours of the rainbow - OK, including
the dark ones. On occasion. That is, sometimes I'd see them faintly discoloured,
kind of going off, and I could say to whoever it was, are you feeling OK? And
it - you know - it would sometimes be good advice, it would help them. They'd
go to the doc or some natural healer or maybe just take a holiday or get a few
early nights in. You do this - somebody tells you you don't look well, it makes
you think about the way you're living. And the next time I'd see them their
colour would be lighter. I still don't
like
all this, it was a bit of a bloody cross to bear, but the times you helped
somebody made it bearable.'

      
Prof nodded at the window. A Rolls-Royce Corniche was pulling
in, at once dominating the pub forecourt. 'Sorry,' Prof said. 'Go on.'

      
'But after the Abbey, it all changed,' Dave said. 'After
Lennon, after Deborah, increasingly I stopped seeing variations. I just saw the
darkest ones.'

      
'Oh my Christ,' said Prof.

      
'The ones where it's too late.'

      
Prof stared at him in horror. Is this real?
Can I believe any of this? Is this guy sick?

      
'The Abbey changed everything. It wasn't obvious at first, it's
happened over years, but that's when it began. I drove away from the Abbey, booked
into a hotel for the night, near Cheltenham, came down to breakfast the
following morning and there were four people in the room with, like, black
bonnets

      
'Shut up,' Prof said. 'For Christ's sake shut up.'

      
'There's a major hospital, you see, at
Cheltenham, where ...'

      
'David, this is the worst thing I've ever heard.'

      
Prof thought.
He looks
so innocent, he looks so normal, so affable, he's hardly got a line on his
face.

      
'Now you know what an Angel of Death looks like,' Dave said,
and smiled a truly sickly smile.

IV

End of Story

The door of chalet eleven
was opened by a cleaner, a young woman with a plastic sack.
      
'I'm sorry, sir, I really am going
as fast as I can ... Oh.'

      
Meryl said, 'I'm looking for a gentleman.'

      
'I'm so sorry.' The cleaner looked flustered. 'I thought you
was him back again. I said to him, I have to get this place cleaned by eleven.
He says he don't want it cleaned, go away. Go away, he says.'

      
'Oh dear,' Meryl said.

      
Found him.

      
'And he's on his own, too, I know that, not as if .. . Anyway,
he said he'd let me have ten minutes, but he's been back twice already. I'm not
used to this, most people are gone by nine.'

      
Meryl smiled. 'He's been under a lot of pressure lately. You carry
on, I'll see if I can head him off.'

      
The cleaner gratefully vanished back inside. Meryl heard a vacuum
start up.
      
Now. Where?

On the other side of the
Little Chef was a filling-station bordering the main road, open fields beyond
it. A line of leafless poplars marked the perimeter. To Meryl as a child, the
poplars would have looked like a fleet of witches' brooms lined up for a night
mission. The older she got, the more she wished poplars
were
symbolic of supernatural transport. It was important to Meryl
to be able to look out at the world and think,
There's more here than I can see.

      
'You come here to hassle me, lady, you can
piss off now,' Tom Storey said.

As soon as Russell Hornby had
come through the door, Dave had taken himself off to the bar, to do what he'd
said he wouldn't do again, which was to buy Prof Levin an alcoholic drink. He
guessed Prof would appear sober for a long time before there was a problem. But
when it happened, it would be a real problem.

      
When Russell strolled over to Prof's table and sat down, Dave
felt Time's primitive gear-lever crunch jarringly into reverse.