Down Among the Gods (2 page)

The heavy brown envelope is still waiting to be opened. It is about as attractive to Jessie as a lump of cold dough. She doesn’t need to open it to know what is in it, but it will have to be faced some time.

The covering letter reads:

Dear Jessie,

Here it is. If anything it’s marginally worse than the last, but I have every confidence in your manipulative abilities. Let me know what’s required as soon as you’ve read it. Good luck,

Lydia

She puts aside the letter and turns to the first page of the manuscript. ‘Life Drawing’ by Frances Bailey. Jessie drops it back on to the table and it makes a sound like a hefty slap. She struggles with familiar frustration for a while, then absorbs the slap and pours herself another cup of tea. The work is bread and butter and it is necessary. But if she had time and space, she would show them all how to write. About this she has no doubt.

In the library, the hostile policeman has turned his attention towards the forensic team, who have made some new discovery and are doing something with tweezers and plastic bags. Patrick has taken all the photographs his editor will use, but he isn’t finished yet. He wants a few for his own collection. He takes one or two surreptitious shots of the forensic team at work, then begins kicking carefully through the cinders, amusing himself. He photographs plastic chairs in the children’s section, shrivelled into grotesque formations. He photographs a set of shelves, still standing, with an entire row of book spines, all perfectly preserved, all pitch black. He prods with his toe at a half-burnt coffee-table book on the floor and persuades the sodden and wrinkled pages to turn.
The Living Model: How to bring paper to life and life to paper.

The effects of the fire upon the book are fascinating. The nude figures, randomly mutilated, remind him of the damaged remains of Roman statues. He squats on his heels and examines the book more carefully. The closer he looks at the drawings, the more fascinated he becomes. He is remembering a time, long ago, when he was good at this.

Patrick has always been convinced that he could have been an artist. Throughout his life, whenever he has thought about it, he has been determined to return to drawing, and to painting, and to doing something with his growing file of unusual negatives. During rare moments of reflection, Patrick knows that the life he is leading is a deepening rut. What he needs is some kind of a boost, a kick-start to get him going and give him a new direction. He contemplates taking the book away with him, to give him inspiration, but when he looks up, he finds that the policeman is watching him again. He shrugs, a little more tetchily than he intends, and focuses the camera on the book.

Jessie picks up the paper and opens it at random. The Inner City Polytechnic is advertising evening classes for adults. It could be just what she needs to freshen her up, get her out into the world and meeting some new people. The first of the classes to meet her eye is Life Drawing.

Patrick uses up half a roll of film on the book, then stands up and begins to wander back towards the entrance to the library. Not far from the doors, beside the blistered desk, is a large pin-board covered, half covered now, with green baize. A diagonal line crosses the board. In the lower right-hand triangle there are charred papers and blackened pins. The higher left-hand triangle, however, is intact. The fire had reached exactly so far and no further. The pin-board is a standing testimony to the arrival of the fire brigade.

Patrick finds the right distance and photographs the board. Then he moves in, to get a close-up of a partially burned paper. As the focus clears, he finds that he is looking at the words ‘Life Drawing’. He lowers the camera and reads the heading. ‘Inner City Polytechnic. Evening classes for adults’. He takes out his notebook and pencil.

Jessie tears out the ad and pins it beside the phone.

That’s my bit done for the moment. It was easy enough. Coincidence, hunches, synchronicity, those things are all my department. Some people have called me a trickster because of this aptitude I have, but no one has to listen to me if they don’t want to. For those who desire it, however, I can produce the most extravagant series of coincidences which will keep them happy and mesmerised for as long as they like. So, if you’re bored with life and have a suspicion that you might, underneath it all, be the new Messiah, just whistle me up. I’ll produce all the evidence you need to convince you that it’s true.

And if, after all that, you are still having difficulty identifying me and my area of influence in human life, you might know me by my absence better than by my presence. Those are the times when the magic is missing from life, you’re down on your luck, without inspiration. Everyone has those days, weeks, years even, when nothing is worth looking at or thinking about. The world seems grey and meaningless. If you recognise what it is that’s missing at such times, then you might be close to knowing me.

Z
EUS, HAVING CHARMED HERA
with the old cuckoo trick, resumed his own shape and raped her. She was shamed into marrying him, and from their union Ares, Hephaestus and Hebe were born. Zeus, however, was not content with wedlock. As a result of his philanderings with various nymphs, Apollo, Artemis and Athene were born. And that wasn’t all. He fathered, they say, the Fates, the Seasons and the Muses. There’s a rumour that he fathered Persephone as well, who went on to marry his brother, Hades. And then there was me, of course. Hermes.

Hera was in a state of perpetual jealousy. She found ways of getting her own back, though, and despite their constant bickering, she and Zeus maintained some kind of balance up there on Olympus. But when Zeus extended his amorous attentions to a mere mortal, it was more than Hera could stand.

The unfortunate woman’s name was Semele, daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes. By the time Hera found out about the affair, Semele was already six months into her pregnancy by Zeus. Hera determined that her offspring would never see the light of day. Disguising herself as an elderly neighbour, Hera convinced Semele that she must discover the true nature of her mysterious lover. This she did, but what mortal can look upon the face of a god and survive? Confronted by thunder and lightning, the poor woman burst into flames and although I arrived on the scene almost immediately, there was nothing I could do for her. In sudden inspiration, however, I whipped the foetus from her womb and stitched it into Zeus’ thigh.

It was a gamble, but it paid off. The foetus reached full term and emerged, horned, crowned with serpents, the newborn god of wine. His name was Dionysus.

All the old stories. They never really happened of course. They’re just myths, that’s all.

Patrick stops in for a pint on his way to the class. It is early in the evening, and the pub in the alley beside Griffon Square is almost empty. At one end of the long, dark bar, the landlord is making distant responses to the chatter of a middle-aged woman who is slumped against the counter. He takes Patrick’s order and pulls him a pint, still muttering in a solicitous way in response to the woman’s complaints. It seems to Patrick that she is looking for an opportunity to weep, and he takes his glass over to a seat beside the window, carefully avoiding her sideways glances. It is his belief that women, all women, exist in one of two steady states: on or off, infatuation or recrimination. He will deal quite happily with the first, but has spent a large part of his existence finding ways of avoiding the second. It’s not that he doesn’t like women. He does. There is little that he enjoys more than spending an evening with a woman who loves to flirt as much as he does. But since his experience of relationships has been that the one state is invariably followed by the other, he never allows such an association to go any further. His past relationships seem to him like quagmires that he has successfully dragged himself out of. And if his life is a little marshy right now, it is at least his own. He doesn’t have anyone else’s problems and resentments to worry about. Patrick has promised himself, or someone that he assumes to be himself, that he will never again enter into an emotional involvement.

He finishes his pint and looks out of the window at the alley, wishing that he had chosen another pub. The woman’s presence fills him with unease and his need for a second pint is almost cancelled out by his reluctance to approach the bar again. He is not at all sure what he is doing there in the first place, and begins to fear that he may have taken leave of his senses. The money that he paid out at enrolment left him uncomfortably short for most of the week, and he wonders if it’s too late to change his mind and ask for a refund. He has a deep mistrust of coincidence and can’t understand how it is that it has succeeded in luring him there. For a few minutes he struggles with a suspicion that borders on paranoia. Then the drink begins to take effect. He returns for the second pint, keeping his back to the woman, who is continuing to build on her stockpile of anguish. Half-way down the glass, he lets out a massive sigh as the tension within him melts away. Now, for an hour or two, he will be ready for anything.

The room where the class is held is large and airy. Six fluorescent tubes obliterate the soft daylight which lies against the windows. Patrick screws up his eyes against the glare for a minute or two and decides to keep his hat on.

As he looks around, he realises that the other students are not the young enthusiasts he had imagined. On the whole, they are as clumsy and uncertain as he is and mostly of around the same age or older. He follows the stragglers as they pick up their drawing-boards and collect sheets from the thick slab of butcher paper that the college has provided. As he sets up his board, an elderly man with a worried expression takes the place beside him.

‘I thought it was going to be apples and bananas,’ he says, ‘or flowers, that sort of thing. Someone told me she’s the model.’ He tilts his head in a rather obvious way towards a girl who is chatting with the teacher. ‘She’s not going to take her clothes off, is she?’

For reply, Patrick winks. But when the model does come to stand before them, he finds that he, too, is slightly embarrassed. On the opposite side of the room, so is Jessie, and so is every one of the other students. The model, on the other hand, is not in the least ashamed. She is ashamed about a lot of things, but her body isn’t one of them.

Patrick glances at her a few times, then picks up his pencil and looks more closely. She is standing now in the centre of the group, her arms folded, her eyes averted. He runs his eyes over her body and makes gestures over the page with his pencil, but he is not yet ready to draw. He is playing with his feelings for a moment, trying to provoke some sense of desire. It occurs to him that he has noticed desire lately only by its absence, and he wonders if he ought to worry about it. At the age of forty-two he should be still going strong. A small anxiety stirs at the back of his mind, an association between alcohol and loss of sexual drive, but before it can become clear, something begins to happen. Patrick’s pencil meets the page and he is drawing. To his surprise, he moves almost immediately into a smooth synchronism of hand and eye that he recognises from years gone by. Accurately, but with a minimum of care, he sweeps the pencil across the page and the figure begins to emerge, almost as though it had always been there and awaiting liberation. He is away.

Across the room, Jessie has noticed the man in the black hat and registers with interest the hungry look on his face as he studies the model. She watches him now for a little longer as his expression changes and registers the intensity of his concentration. She begins to sketch pale lines on the forbidding whiteness of the paper in front of her and realises as she does so that she hasn’t the slightest idea what she’s doing.

Everyone is drawing now except for the elderly man, who seems to be having some sort of a problem with a pencil-sharpener. When the teacher, on her first round of the class, steps quietly up behind him, he jumps and holds up the offending object in a profession of innocence. It is full of broken lead.

Jessie’s attention alternates between her page, the model and Patrick. She likes the hat. It is somehow suggestive of loyalty and comfort. When he steps back to get a perspective on his work, he pushes it back from his forehead and clears his face of its shade. She has a feeling that she knows him from somewhere, and she searches his face until he becomes aware of her eyes upon him and glances up. Jessie smiles. Patrick wonders where he has seen her before and how it is that he hadn’t noticed that she was in the group before now. He raises his eyebrows to her and smiles back. Jessie looks down and continues with her drawing, just as the teacher reaches her elbow. It seems that as far as her drawing is concerned, there is nothing to smile about. The teacher sighs a little wearily and, on her own sheet of paper, shows Jessie some of the basics. Jessie listens attentively and nods, and returns to work with a little more enthusiasm. But occasionally her eyes slide from the model towards Patrick and she is pleased to notice that his attention is also divided. She draws his hat on the head of the figure taking shape on her page. It is considerably more recognisable than the model. When the class takes a short break, she holds it up for Patrick to see. He laughs, pulls the hat down over his brow and peers out at her from underneath it.

The elderly man is packing away his pencils as the model takes up another pose, on her knees this time, and facing Jessie. It would be difficult now for her to avoid looking at Patrick even if she wanted to. She works with half her attention and is surprised to find that after a while her drawing is beginning to look something like a human being. The teacher, however, is not of the same mind. Jessie screws up her face in exaggerated anguish and looks over to share it with Patrick. He is already watching. Their eyes meet.

Beware of love at first sight. It is far from being simple. The advantage of being the gods’ messenger is that I have, as it were, a foot in both camps. I can see what’s going on from all angles, which no one else can, not quite.