Satan Wants Me (40 page)

However, the man who stood beside her in the doorway looking drenched and miserable, was not the Beatles’ manager, but Mr Cosmic.

‘Epstein did not say anything,’ Sally continued. ‘He just looked at me rather strangely.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ I replied. ‘With no eyebrows and no eyelashes, you do look rather strange. Hello, Cosmic. What brings you here?’

‘Hi man,’ was all he said.

Then Maud walked in from the bedroom.

‘I am David Hargreaves, but they call me Mr Cosmic,’ he said.

‘Oh yes, I have heard all about you,’ Maud replied and she extended her hand in that slightly absurd, ladylike manner of hers and he stooped to kiss it.

‘What are you doing here?’ I persisted.

‘What do you think? I’m looking after you.’

Before I could press him more on this, Sally danced between us and -

‘Taraa!’ she shouted as she ripped the turban from her head. Sally had had her skull tattooed with a coiling snake and, in the middle of the snake’s coils, one could read in rainbow lettering the words, ‘I AM SALLY, THE SLAVE OF MAUD AND PETER’.

‘Wow! That’s cool,’ said Cosmic.

‘That is why I was away so long,’ she said. ‘I had to go all the way to Aldershot to get it done,’ and she looked to Maud for approval.

But all Maud said was,

‘Now that you are here, perhaps we can eat.’

Cosmic went back out into the rain to retrieve his sleeping-bag and the provisions which he had stashed in the woods. Sally explained that she had stumbled across Cosmic looking fed-up and trying to shelter under a tree at the end of our road and, when she suggested that he came back with her to the cottage, he had just shrugged his shoulders and agreed. But Sally was more preoccupied with her sighting of Brian Epstein. I do not believe that she has seen Brian Epstein. Two days after running into Brian Jones, that would be too much of a coincidence. Just possibly she might have seen someone who looked like Epstein. But is she going to keep on running into famous Brians every time that she goes into Farnham? Not that I can think of any more Brians who have become famous. The truth is, of course, that Sally has completely flipped. Presumably it is all the drugs she has been taking recently. Thank God Maud is here, for I would not like to be alone in the cottage with this mad girl, whom I now feel I do not know at all.

Sally unpacked the shopping. One of the things she had bought was a frilly apron. Before starting the cooking, she took off all her clothes and put on the apron. Maud and I ate at the table in the kitchen with Sally waiting on us. It was a weird buzz, to see a plate of pork chops displayed beneath Sally’s pointy breasts. Then Sally and Cosmic ate on the mattress in the lying-room. Cosmic produced a bottle of vodka from his rucksack and, after rooting around in the kitchen, he found a jar of Bovril. So then we all drank a mixture of vodka and Bovril – Polish Bison is what it’s called apparently – and Maud, who had a lot of it, was pawing me drunkenly. It flashed through my mind that what started out in this cottage as a kind of rustic idyll, is turning out to be something like a small-scale, green-belt version of the Playboy Club. It seems to be only me who does not know what the hell is going on.

Cosmic seems in a bad way. He sweats and scratches himself a lot. He was talking in a low monotone, almost as if he was talking to himself. His drone was in praise of alcohol and about how each culture has its own drug. In the Middle East it is hash. In China it is opium. In Central America it is peyote. But the great drug of Christian and European culture is alcohol.

‘One should not underrate alcohol just because straights take it. It is the best, most predictable drug that it is possible to score. With hash you can never tell in advance the quality of what you have scored. The heroin currently sold is often contaminated. It is easy to have a bad trip on acid – everyone does sooner or later. But the alcohol high is fast and rock solid-predictable. Looking back over the history of the last two millennia, I think it is plain to see that it is alcohol which has fuelled the triumph of the West … ’

Sally had crashed out. Maud and I staggered off to bed, leaving Cosmic drunkenly talking to himself.

Still raining. Maud was doing her press-ups and stretching exercises beyond the foot of the bed. I watched with pleasure for a while, before deciding that I really needed to talk to Cosmic and get some sense out of him. I staggered out into the kitchen, but I was too late. He had finished breakfast and he was preparing to shoot up. I had seen Cosmic skin-pop heroin from time to time when I visited him in London. But now it seemed that he had switched to mainlining. A saucepan was nestling between his legs and a tourniquet fashioned from a rubber strap of some kind was already tight on his upper arm. He gave me a funny kind of rictus smile as he plunged the needle in. First time lucky. He flushed the syringe full of blood before sending it back into the vein and gasped as the stuff began to hit. He slumped backwards with his eyes closed, but then he abruptly jerked forwards and vomited into the saucepan. Cosmic always throws up when he is on heroin. He claims to actually enjoy the experience. Be that as it may, it is definitely off-putting to be having breakfast in the same room in which Cosmic is shooting up.

It was also irritating, of course, to have listened to all that stuff about the wonders of alcohol coming out of the mouth of someone who is really hooked, it now seems, on heroin. Tanked-up the way he was, he was going to be no sort of company for the next few hours. It might have been a good scene if we had shared a trip together, but then, even if he had not been so zonked, I remembered that Cosmic does not do LSD. He is very puritanical about the subject and believes it fucks up the mind in the long term. According to him, a trip does not necessarily stop when it seems to stop and hallucinations can surge up years or even decades later. Cosmic’s body is a temple, albeit a somewhat bizarrely furnished temple.

Sally said that she had shopping to do. I said that I would go with her. If she was going to run into any more famous Brians, I wanted to be there too. However, Maud, who had gone back to bed called from the bedroom, asking me to stay with her. She said that we would both be safer if I stayed close to the cottage. I went in to see her. Maud was sitting up in bed reading old copies of
Vogue
. She patted the space beside her. So I joined her in bed and set to work stroking her breasts and thighs. But after a while, she shifted restlessly under my hands.

‘Just be patient, darling. Tomorrow is the big day.’

So I got out of bed and went and fetched what turned out to be the last of my acid-impregnated sugar cubes.

‘I am going to take a trip.’

‘Must you, darling?’

‘Yeah. I’m bored out of my skull.’

So now I am sitting cross-legged in the lotus position by the open door looking out on the spears of rain. My diary rests on my knees and I am waiting for the hallucinations to kick in. Every trip is completely different. So, whatever is going to happen this time, I know that I will not be trapped in the pages of my diary, nor will I re-encounter Proust and his conversational sharks. What I am hoping is to get into grooving on nature and discovering a more Thoreauesque mode of existence. I want to observe lesser-crested nuthatches, spotted grebes, hedge corncrakes and God knows what else and write lovingly detailed evocations of convolvuli, oak leaves and stuff like that. Rather than waste page after page of this notebook on the bizarre antics of Sally and Cosmic, I ought to dedicate myself to simply recording the shapes assumed by the dirty brown clouds as they roll endlessly by.

The rest of this is written in retrospect, as at that point the hallucinations did indeed start to kick in and they came so thick and fast that I had to drop my biro and just let it all wash over me. What happened was that I looked up at the dirty brown clouds and fancied that I could see shapes in their billowing coils. Behold, I beheld the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding high in the Surrey skies! First there was skinny John with his pitchfork, the very figure of famine. Chubby-faced Paul rode beside John and threatened the world with his balances. Behind them rode George brandishing a sword and Ringo with a bow and a quiver of deadly arrows. They went forth conquering and to conquer. I thought that they might make a landing in our garden and that I should throw myself on their mercy. So I went and lay on the grass and got pretty wet in the process, but they galloped on by. And I kept looking … and beheld a pale horse; and his name was Death and Hell followed with him. And power was given to them over the fourth part of the world … Why, I cried out, are the dead grateful?

Having received no answer and having then turned back to the cottage, I found myself confronted at the door by a handsome young man who wore a black leather jacket and a black eye-patch. He raised a hand in salutation.

‘Johnny Kidd,’ he said.

‘Johnny Kidd of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates?’

‘The same.’

‘Wow! What are you doing here?’

‘I died in a car crash. That was in October last year, but it feels like eternity,’ he replied.

‘No, I mean what are you doing here?’

‘I am your appointed psychopomp,’ he declared. Then, seeing the expression on my face, he added, ‘Look it up in a dictionary sometime.’

Of course, I thought, I should not have to look it up in a dictionary. It must be in my mind, filed away somewhere. The whole trip comes from within my head. It is important to keep a grip on that. He gestured that I should follow him inside and I accompanied him into the kitchen. I was without fear. This, even though the total overload phase of the trip was commencing. I was well protected, as Johnny Kidd walked before me as my guide and an honour-guard of toad-headed pikemen marched with me. Now I was blessed or cursed with double vision, for I could see that I was in the kitchen, but I could also see that I stood in one of the pits of Hell. The place was a tip. Last night’s washing-up had not been done, never mind the breakfast things. Rotting rubbish overflowed the bin beside the sink. Cosmic’s vomit was congealing in the saucepan. That was to start with, but then all the garbage and the kitchen implements fornicated together and produced new and Hellish hybrids.

The lower half of the egg-timer sprouted a woman’s arse. Eyeballs rose up bubbling out of a half-opened tin. Tiny mites danced round a thing that was half an eggshell and half a coffee-grinder. A chunk of raw liver on the sideboard kept on emitting sulphurous farts. A kitchen knife, which used ears for wheels, rumbled across the floor seeking another damned soul to stab at. The screaming damned were in free fall and hot ash and gouts of lava fell with them in an unending stream. Why do all medieval painters show Hell as pretty much the same? Why are there so many pictures which show tormented throngs of naked men and women, monstrous hybrids, blood-red skies and demon foremen with pitchforks? It is simple. They paint Hell that way because that is the way Hell looks.

The population of Hell increases hour by hour and the place is one vast building site – scaffolding, ladders, temporary tent cities and half-finished ramparts in all directions. Evil-looking creatures scurry about with buckets of tar and hods of bricks, but despite all their business, nothing ever quite gets finished. The first person we met in Hell was sitting in a tub of excrement. Johnny Kidd introduced me to Robert Johnson, the legendary founder of Blues music. Did playing the Blues merit such punishment? Seeing that I showed compassion for the man’s suffering, Johnny explained that there could be no help for Johnson, since he had sold his soul to the Voodoo god, Legba. Then, in the circle of suicides, I saw Julian come crawling out from a culvert. Julian, when he saw me, shrieked and covered his eyes. Straightaway he dropped onto all fours and ran off as fast as he could. Julian was naked and a little monster rode upon his back and sought to open up his arse with a tin-opener. The unclothed bodies of the tormented are so spongily soft and vulnerable. They are skewered, fried, flayed, sawed and gnawed.

Suddenly I had a nasty, queasy thought,

‘Is my Mum here?’

But Johnny smiled reassuringly,

‘In the final stages of her illness, your mother started going to services at the Baptist Church and in the last year of her life she had herself baptised, so, though her repentance came late, through the mercy of the One Whose Name We Do Not Speak Here, she is in Another, Better Place.’

Johnny went on to point out to me the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens and the Marquis de Sade, but when I asked about Aleister Crowley and if I could meet him, my guide looked at me strangely and shook his head. He walked on a bit and beckoned that I should follow. So, thinking that I was about to meet Crowley, I scrambled down behind him, all the way down to the lowest pit. At the centre of this pit was a little hill covered with skulls and on the hill a cross and on the cross a naked person was crucified. I looked up and saw that it was not Aleister Crowley, but Maud.

Actually, if I took a grip on myself and concentrated, I could see that Maud was sitting beside me in the kitchen. She was holding my hand and worrying because she was under the impression that I was having a bad trip. It was only if I let my vision slide, that the Hellspawn came frothing out of jars and packets and the vegetables decomposed into souls in torment and I stood once more on a parody of the Hill of Golgotha.

‘What are you doing on the cross?’ I wanted to know.

‘I am practising.’

Her exercise struck me as both bizarre and blasphemous and a very strange thought flashed through my mind.

‘You are the Devil, aren’t you?’

‘I can be anything you want me to be, darling, but I think you prefer me as a beautiful woman,’ she replied.

Somewhere in the background, Russ Conway was playing ‘The Moonlight Sonata’.

I turned to Johnny Kidd, who stood beside me sombre and with head bowed in thought.

‘Am I lost to the mercy and love of God?’ I demanded.

‘God could not love you as I do,’ Maud called down from her chosen place of torment.