Satan Wants Me (11 page)

‘Screw that,’ she replied. ‘Now I’m always going to have the feeling that you are spying on me and writing me down in your reports.’

‘Sally, it’s not like that. Even I am not allowed to read my diary.’ (I am lying.) ‘I am saving it all up – bottling it, as it were, saving it up to read in old age. You can read it then too.’

Sally was satisfied with that. Thank God for that. I could not have her discover how its writing is being directed by Dr Felton, nor those frightful kissing lessons, nor what I think about some of her nuttinesses. As for us reading the diary together in old age, the hell with that – old age is another country, inhabited by foreigners speaking a language I can’t understand. Also, I do not know why, but I have not told her about all the money I am accumulating. We used to be completely open with one another, but now just the bare fact of having a secret inside me is changing me. It is like I am secretly pregnant.

For a moment, though, I was tempted to show her my notebook. There would have been an adrenalin kick in such a gesture of total honesty – letting her see these pages, to be psychologically as well as physically naked before her … it definitely has an erotic buzz.

But then, no, this diary belongs to the Lodge and it is to the Master and those who serve him that I owe the debt of total honesty.

But then, as I continue to think about this, I think that maybe, after all, I will show this notebook to Sally. I like to play with the thought of it. It even gives me an erection. Her reading my diary might destroy our relationship, but, then again, total honesty with one another, might bring us closer together. Love is a risk and I think that I want to take that risk.

Anyway, the diary business was forgotten as we played the usual game with the cucumber before turning the light out.

The day gets off to a bad start. Over breakfast of cornflakes lightly laced with soap bubbles, we agree to meet on Wednesday to see
Elvira Madigan
. It is still early when Sally leaves my bed and all tippy-toes heads towards the front door. I roll over in bed, but only moments later I hear a commotion on the stairs. Melchett has intercepted Sally on the staircase and is raging at her, calling her a tart. Still pulling on my jeans, I come out onto the landing in time to see Sally blow the landlord an ironical kiss as she flits out of the door. He turns on me,

‘OK, you, you piece of hippy vermin with your girly hair and your jigga-jigga music! It’s all up with you! I want you out, out, out! I’m giving you until the end of next week to be out of here.’

Strictly he does not have the right to do this, but, as I have no rent book, I am in no position to resist. There are unpleasant tales about what happened to some who clashed with landlords in this area.

This morning I have a supervision with Michael. Since the sit-in drags on, it is in his flat in Camden Town. Although he is not much older than I am, in academic terms he is a whole generation older than me – old enough to be suckered into buying the theoretical constructs of Talcott Parsons. He riffles frantically through his notes and keeps pushing his spectacles back on his nose. He is so nervous about my research. But what’s there to worry about? He keeps warning me not to get emotionally involved with the subjects of my thesis. Only after I have repeatedly reassured him about this does he relax a bit and start talking in that jerky way of his about alternative modelling systems and the four paradigms of Parsonian modelling of groups: values, norms, collectivities and roles.

Then he starts to fret that I may not be classifying my data effectively. He shows me what he calls his ‘data base’, all stored in racks of file-card trays, cards with holes through which long wires can be passed. It is, he explains, the new information technology. Everyone, not just the universities, but big businesses also will be using them.

‘In twenty years time or so every major institution will be using this sort of information retrieval system! Punched cards are the shape of the future!’

I try to tell him about my lodgings problem, but he is not interested. If a problem is not an intellectual problem, then it is not a problem.

I have lunch in Senate House and spend the afternoon working in its library. The place is built like a mausoleum and I have fantasies of myself as a library-wraith hiding forever in its stacks and subsisting on sandwiches and chocolate biscuits stolen from librarians. It could be the solution to my accommodation problem. Another fantasy: somewhere in this library is the book of power, the key to all knowledge.

By evening, I have had more than enough of sociology, so, before finally crashing, I start reading Dennis Wheatley’s
The Haunting of Toby Jugg
. It has an ominous epigraph:

‘Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject, and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel that it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real concrete nature.’

What a wonderful come-on …

I spent part of the morning on my accustomed spot on the wall of the playground, meditating on Talcott Parsons for the under-10s, but really I was too worried about where I was to live next to concentrate. So I spent the rest of the morning trudging around the Goldhawk Road area looking for to-let signs in newsagents’ windows. There were places, but I was feeling too idle to go and check them out. Since I was feeling flush, I went to Oxford Street and the HMV shop where I bought the Beatles’ single of ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’, plus LPs of Pink Floyd’s ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and the Stones’ ‘Between the Buttons’. I would have bought more, if it were not such a bad time for new music.

I buy music to match my mood and tell myself who I am each week. Thus my record collection, from Connie Francis onwards, is an archive of emotional development, a storehouse of past loves and depressions preserved, as if in jam jars. More emotional preserves are being added all the time. Twenty years from now, I shall play ‘Strawberry Fields’ and it will all come flooding back to me – Sally blowing that kiss at Melchett, me standing on a corner of Goldhawk Road on a sunny day, the Work of the Lodge still a dark mystery which I had yet to understand.

I arrived at the Lodge a bit late and I had the records with me as I entered Felton’s study. He insisted on examining my purchases. He turned the LPs over with distaste. But when he saw the photograph of the Stones he was transfixed. For fully ten minutes he sat rocking to and fro as he contemplated their image.

‘Natural barbarians … those faces … that simian vigour … and a touch of the reptilian too. Remarkable, really remarkable. No brains of course, just latent energy … ’

I pointed out that Jagger had been to the L.S.E., but this weighed nothing with Felton. As far as he was concerned, he was contemplating beautiful animals. He reluctantly passed the record back and turned his attention to my diary. I interrupted his reading to ask what my name meant. He sighed heavily,

‘A gentleman is a man who knows Latin.
Non Omnis Moriar
means “I shall not entirely die”.’

I am pleased with my new name, I think. He studied the diary. Then, after a few pages,

‘ “Sally and I are a number again!” he quoted derisively back to me. ‘Setting aside again the ghastly colloquialism of “a number” – by which presumably you mean that she is once more your mistress – the use of the exclamation mark in such a context is hideously vulgar. You are making a statement of fact, and facts need no such punctuational garnish. You may well be excited by being “a number” once more with your young floozie, but you should not expect to convey any of this feeling of yours merely by scattering exclamation marks over your prose like fairy dust. I thought that I had told you to get rid of her.’

‘Well, not in so many words.’

‘In just so many words I am now telling you to get rid of her. Your oath to the Master commits you to obey me also. When do you next see her? Wednesday … that is tomorrow is it not? I do not care whether you tell her before or after entering the cinema, but you will tell her. How you make the break and how you explain it is entirely up to you, but you are not to involve the Lodge in your explanation. Once you have sent her away, we shall take steps to find a replacement for her.’

‘What gives you the right to give me such orders?’

‘You did, Peter. You did. All I am doing is asking you to obey your own will.’

I said nothing and bowed my head.

‘Do cheer up,’ he said. ‘I have arranged a treat for you. I am taking you off to a country-house this weekend. You will enjoy yourself.’

‘But I promised my father that I would go home this weekend and look after my mother. She is very ill.’

‘Your oath takes precedence over your private concerns. For that matter, the healthy and the vigorous take precedence over the sick and the dying.’

‘You should not be forcing me to make such a choice.’

‘There is no choice. Tomorrow you will ring your father and tell him … let’s see … that you have a “work crisis” and consequently that you will be unable to go up to Cambridge this weekend.’

‘I cannot do that.’

Felton does not trouble to reply. He continues to leaf through my diary, looking ostentatiously bored as he does so. Sally’s second little gift to me gives him pause.

‘This crucifix she gave you, are you wearing it?’

I shook my head.

Felton smiled,

‘There is no need to be ashamed of such an emblem. Jesus ranks with Apollonius of Tyana as one of the greatest sorcerers of late antiquity.’

And he returned to correcting my punctuation. Only when he reached the part about Melchett and my expulsion from my digs did he become animated – weirdly so, like electrified jelly.

‘Fate has taken a hand,’ Felton cried. (I refrain from vulgarising his cry with an exclamation mark.) ‘Your accommodation crisis is solved. You can live here in the Lodge. A room will be found somewhere on the second floor. You can live there rent free in exchange for performing certain services around and about the place. It will fall out very well, for this will assist you in your speedy progress along the Path.’

‘I will have to think about it.’

‘You will find that obedience serves you better than thought. Get your things ready and packed. I will make arrangements for you to be moved out of your place on Friday.’

I had told Felton that I would think about it. This was not really true. I had already had an instantaneous think about it and I knew that Horapollo House was not where it was at. All this psycho-esoteric bullying was making me seriously uptight. I thought that I would attend this evening’s path-working – that would cost me nothing – and then split for good. I was not going to give up Sally and my family and friends and move in to this gloomy old pile where no sunlight ever entered. Ancient, muttered mysteries were doing nothing for my mind. The more money I took from Felton the more deeply implicated I would be in whatever creepy thing it was that he wanted me to do for him. There was nothing he could do for me. I was sure of that. Thinking all this was like taking a blast from a Vick’s Inhaler and my head was now much clearer.

The kissing business was as weird as ever and this time there were ominous hints in Felton’s instructions that the mouth is not the only thing that gets kissed if genuinely powerful dark forces are to be aroused.

This evening it was also Felton who was conducting the pathworking. It is the first time that he has done so since I joined the Lodge. This time it was a controlled imaginative sequence based on a narrative found in the
Westcar Papyrus
, a tale of the Nineteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom. As usual there is a brief preliminary period of relaxation, during which we lie with eyes closed and we focus on the various parts of our bodies, starting at the extremities, and relax them stage by stage.

Then Felton addresses us,

‘You are over Africa. The Africa you look down upon is as it was three thousand years ago. You descend to the great lake which is the source of the Nile. Along the river, not far from its source, you find a boat equipped with both sails and oars. As soon as you step on board, the boat begins to move. Helped by the current and the wind, it is scudding north and its progress is so astonishingly rapid that you barely have time to marvel as the boat sails on past Elephantine, Thebes, and the Singing Statues of Memon, then Dendera. Finally, your boat reaches its destination, the necropolis of Memphis. Stepping ashore you advance purposefully down the long, stone-flagged avenue, flanked by granite obelisks, heading towards the funerary temple which lies in the shadow of the Pyramid of Wenis and … ’

And Felton continues to narrate in a low monotone, I suppose, but I am no longer conscious of hearing him. I am too far away in old Memphis. I am Setem Khaimwese, a priest of Egypt, and I have come to the necropolis at nightfall in search of the
Book of Thoth
, possession of which will confer knowledge of the language of the winds, as well as allowing one to enchant the earth and one’s own sleep. This book, which can even be used after death, belongs to the wizard-prince, Neufer-Ka-Ptah, and he is dead.

I have been studying the tombs of the Great Ones, gathering the clues, and so prepared I have no difficulty in locating the entrance to the wizard’s tomb in a store chamber attached to the funerary temple. The descent is steep and I am very afraid of the Night of Nothing, but the prize is greater yet, for it promises the end of fear. Without my being aware of having passed through a door, I find myself in the funerary chamber of the wizard. I raise my taper over the body of Neufer-Ka-Ptah, who lies on a marble slab with his arms folded. His wife, Ahaura, lies on a slab beside him. Canopic jars, containing the couple’s visceral organs, have been placed below their feet. The
Book of Thoth
, recognisable by the image of the ibis-headed god painted upon it, lies on the floor between the slabs. I reach down to pick it up, but, as I do so, the wizard and his wife sit bolt upright.