How to Make Friends with Demons (26 page)

The truth is I wanted someone to stop me. But, shaking from exertions, when I looked them in the eye the men at the bar turned away and continued with their conversations. One of the bar staff was interrupted in the act of ringing a sale into the till. He looked horrified at what was going on, but when he saw me glowering at him he merely wiped a finger under his nose and continued with the transaction.

I thought it pretty appalling that no-one would intervene in a public place to stop a man from being choked to death. Indicative of our modern and uncaring society.

I let Ellis go.

"You're a fucking lunatic!" he rasped at me, fingering the bruises on his throat. "What's got into you? You fucking loony!"

I sat back and said nothing. I straightened my hair. I was surprised by how out of breath I was.

Ellis got to his feet and grabbed his coat. "Loony!" he bellowed at me again. "Fucking loony!" Then he marched towards the door without looking back.

"That's for being a shite poet," I bellowed after him.

After a few moments I went to the bar and ordered myself a glass of 1997 Château Pichon-Baron, 2nd-growth Pauillac.

"Large or small glass, sir?" said the barman who three minutes earlier had watched me strangle someone.

"Large, I think. Leave the bottle there, would you?"

"Certainly sir. Coming right up."

I didn't return to work after my attack on Ellis. I drank heavily at the Cittie of York all afternoon. I felt I was in a dangerous place and that I needed to sedate myself with wine. My sudden violence with Ellis hadn't satisfied anything. It had just started off a process.

I'd lost my purpose, my
raison d'être
in the manufacture of fake antiquarian books, and I'd lost our best customer, too, all in an afternoon. Worse, I'd just throttled the only means by which I intended to pay off my serious debts.

The barman kept a wary eye on me but my behaviour was impeccable until I got stuck in the Gents. I don't know how it happened. I remember standing against the porcelain urinal, pissing away. I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes because I woke with my cheek sticking to the wall tiles. There was some graffiti. I was sure it hadn't been there when I'd started pissing. It read:

Five, six, seven.

Just that.

"Ha!" I went.

I tried to find my way out of the Gents but I couldn't locate the door. On my knees I went round the room, pressing the walls, looking for egress. I did a complete circuit of the room, but still no door. Slumped against the wall, I called Yasmin on my cellphone
.
I was supposed to meet her after work, but I asked her to come and get me.

Someone came in, pissed and went out again, so I felt reassured that there was a door.

After a while the barman came down. "I got worried about you," he said nervously. "Shall I help you up?"

"I wish you would."

So the barman hauled me to my feet. Mercifully he discovered the door and we went out, me unsteadily, him with his hand guiding but barely touching me. He wanted to call me a cab.

"No, I've got someone coming for me," I said.

"Honestly?"

"Young woman. Coming for me. I know what you're thinking."

"I'm not thinking anything," said the barman.

I found a seat. The bar's custom had thinned out during the afternoon, but the after-work legal crowd was starting to fill it up again. They gave me a wide berth. I don't know why but I started to think about Seamus, and his document.

Eventually Yasmin arrived.

She stood over me, bemused. "You're sozzled."

My God, she was beautiful. I wanted to have her, there, in the pub. The barman came over and they exchanged a few words out of my earshot. He looked at me and then he looked back at her. He stuck a finger in his ear and shook it, as if to de-wax. I knew what he was thinking.

Yasmin got me into a taxi. I had no idea where we were going. I kept trying to figure out the route, but couldn't. I had a dreadful thought. What if my name were Seamus? And she was taking me to GoPoint? A kind of panic rose up in me.

"Where are we going?" I said.

"I'm taking you home. To your house, I mean."

That seemed acceptable.

There was a ridiculous fuss when I did arrive. Sarah and Mo were still in their pyjamas—again—but came to the door to see what was up. It was totally unnecessary that Yasmin had her arm around me as if she had to support me up the path. I couldn't have been that drunk because I was fully sensitive to the exchange of looks between Sarah and Yasmin. They did that thing women do: rapid calculation, processing a thousand small details into a hundred different boxes, all marked, stamped, appraised, indexed, judged and scorned. All in a heartbeat. Anyway, there were no formal introductions. Behind Sarah I remember Mo's grinning jackanapes face.

Yasmin said, "He needs his bed."

Sarah turned on her heels. "This way."

"I'll help him upstairs," said Mo.

"I don' need the shelp of a jackaschnapes," I said cheerily.

They got me to my room and laid me on my bed. Sarah took off my shoes, but Yasmin said, "I'll deal with it."

"He's my father," Sarah said. "I'll do it."

"Come on, Sarah," Mo said.

"What?" she said sharply.

"Leave them!" Mo said.

Sarah looked cross about something. I smacked my lips at her, and she left with Mo. Yasmin quietly closed the door. "Do you want me to stay?" she asked.

"Of course I do."

She took off her coat and flung it on a chair. After pulling off my shoes she unbuttoned my shirt and lifted my left shoulder and then my right to pull it from under me. Then she undid my belt. I tried to undo hers in return. It was all rather undignified.

"No," she said. "This isn't the time."

That sobered me up, a little. Quite right: sex was the last thing I wanted at that juncture. I sat upright, blinking at my reflection in the mirror. I didn't know what I was doing in the bedroom. I certainly didn't want to go to sleep. I stood up and gently pushed Yasmin aside.

"Where are you going?"

I went to my office and took from its hiding place Seamus's exercise book. I needed to know it was there, that no one had stolen it. Seamus had entrusted it to me. In my confused and drunk condition I even believed for a moment that he had written it for me.

This is the last will and testament of me, I, Seamus Todd, ordinary soldier of the Queen and very little else is my guess. Not that there is anything to laugh about in the way of
will
and that leaves only the
testament
. But which is honest, true, factual and everything I have seen with my own eyes. If I haven't seen it with my own eyes, or if I maybe just thought it or heard it said second-hand by another soldier or anyone else, then I have left it out. There's more than enough cheap talk and I don't want to add to it.

I done my twenty-two. Born in 1955, I joined the army at eighteen. Then the last couple of years haven't been so good, but I'm not complaining, that being my own fault, and the few thousand pound give me by the army when I was discharged I have not used wisely. This is my own slip-up, no one else to blame, and I don't like a moaner. Never have.

I don't have much to say about my time before the army but most of it weren't good. I never knew my father and my mother, bless her, was a bit simple. I can say that, she being my own mum, though if another soldier were to say the same I would easily break his back. Even before I enlisted I heard things said about her and I always paid back the badmouth. All I know regarding my father was that he was a soldier. I don't know what regiment. The thing that steered me to the army was when one badmouth did say my father was not a soldier but an entire barracks. I paid back the badmouth for that, too, but I was touched by the Law for it. It was my probation officer at the time brought up the question of the military and I went sharpish to the recruitment office in Halford Street and the army saved me and squared me with my PO.

Though she died from a fall after drinking in 1988, I still won't have things said about my mother. I was given compassionate leave from serving in Belfast to come back for her funeral. I had a sister somewhere but she never even turned up. There was some talk of a half-brother, but if there is one, I never met him. The army was my family, and after the cremation of dear old Mum I went straight back and signed on for another seven.

I started off as a private in the Staffordshire Regiment and I worked my way up to colour sergeant. Three tours of duty in Northern Ireland and then joined the landing assault as a battle casualty replacement in the Falklands. I was already well seasoned when the Gulf War came along in '91. Most of my squaddies were little pink-nosed boys of eighteen or twenty-one. I was their big angry Daddy, and I looked after every one of them. They all said I was hard but fair. What else do you want? I stand by that. I looked after my boys. They knew it. I told them "loyalty and a sense of humour" is what I want, "but you can fuck the sense of humour" and it always got a laugh. I don't know why. Well, you're not laughing when you're under fire.

I had the tip of one finger shot off in South Armagh bandit country on patrol, while another soldier was telling me a joke about three nuns out picking mushrooms. Wedding finger, left hand. Lucky for me the IRA sniper was a shitty shot. Also broke my leg in the Falklands, but this was in a game of football after we'd taken the islands back from the Argies. Slipped on sheep shit. That's the only injuries to report out of all my combat experience.

When the Gulf War kicked off it was just another posting, except that now I was looking after all my little lads, and it was my job to tell them how normal everything was. You know: war is normal.

And it is normal. That's why it's a paid job. You don't ask: Why are we in the Gulf? Why are we in Ireland? Why are we in some sheep-shit South Atlantic island that no one's ever heard of? You don't argue with the Queen. You form up. Move out. Press on.

And in January of '91 I came to be in the desert as a member of the coalition forces lined up against Saddam Hussein's Iraqi cohorts to drive them out of Kuwait. According to Saddam it was going to be "the mother of all wars" and him saying that put the wind up everyone. But that's not how it turned out.

We knew we were going long before Christmas. They haven't told you but you hear the drum. I can't explain. You're on active duty and there's a drum beat, an echo, maybe it's your own heart beating very quiet, and it thuds on until something happens or until you're stood down. Hear the beat, get the order. Form up. Move out. Press on.

With the heavy armour already at sea we were to be airlifted after Christmas so I was able to tell my boys: go shag your girlfriend and kiss your wife and get ready to go. It's what I always said and it always got a laugh. But the family men, those of them with little sprats in the homestead, there was always a quick switch off behind the light in their eyes. Yeh, better get the lad that new bike this year. Yeh, better get that little gal a big teddy bear.

But I didn't have that to think about, and no family to make Christmas with. Preferred my own company. Nuke a leg of turkey, pull in a crate of brown ale, feet up, watch the telly. I did get invites, I did. One or two of the lads would have had me come and sit down to Christmas dinner with them and theirs. Poor old fucker's got nowhere to go type of thing. Nah, didn't want it. Only makes the evening darker when you have to get up and leave.

So Christmas Day I'm feet up and supping beer from the bottle in my mess watching the Queen's Speech. Outside is definitely not a White Christmas. It's lashing it down with rain. I'm listening to her talking about looking back to the past and wondering if she's going to mention us lot off to the Gulf, and I don't know if she does or she doesn't because I fall asleep in my chair.

I'm woken by this tiny tapping. At first I think it's someone beating on the window with a coin or something, but I can't see anything. My empty bottle has fallen to the floor and the Queen has long finished. Some comedy programme is gagging away on the telly and I hear the tapping again but its coming from the door. Well, the upper half of my door is frosted glass so if anyone's jogged over to wish me a happy Christmas I would see their shape through the glass and get ready to thump them. But there's that sound again: a tinny little rapid tap tap tap.

I knuckle my eyes, get to my feet and open the door. But there's no one there. Or at least no person there. Because I look down and I see what's making the noise. It's a crow. He's been tapping on the door with his beak, see.

I don't know why but it makes my skin flush to see this crow there, black as you like. His feathers are a mess. He's dishevelled by the rain. Then he lifts up his head and looks me right in the eye.

—What the fuck are you doing there? I say to him, out loud.—What's goin' on, then?

And he shits on my doorstep and hops over my foot, and inside.

It's a big crow. A very big crow. I'm standing there with the door held open, not knowing what to do. I want to leave the door open for it, but it's perishing outside and all the warmth from my gas fire is escaping. So I shut the door.

—That's sorted you, ain't it? Now what you gonna do?

Crow hops a bit further in. I'm scratching me head. Don't want a live bird in there for the rest of the day. The crow makes some clicking noises at me. Then it hops over to the telly.

Now my telly is already a beat-up thing and the on-off switch is hanging out of the front panel by its wiring. Well maybe the crow thinks one of these exposed wires is a worm, because it goes for it, grabs a thin cable in its beak and it pulls; and then there's an almighty bang and smoke and sparks from the telly.

And I'm in my chair.

That's right, I'm back in my chair. The telly has blown up. There's no crow. Nowhere. Been dreaming, haven't I? Dreaming.

Only one thing.
Only one thing, my son
. The door, though not open, is ajar. And there's that little worm of birdshit, just past the threshold. And you know what? That's two things.