Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“This is wild!” she laughed, the plum gash of her mouth halving the pallid remains of her face, once so fleshy and pinkish; at once she looked both like the most alive and the most enervated person and in Camden that was saying something. She looked synthetic, the skin too tight, as if it might split and waft the smell of plastic toys over me. But her eyes had lost their initial vagueness, fastening on individual blurs of color as it all streamed past us, like a hawk tracking its dinner. The whites were so clear they were almost blue.

We tooled up and down the main drag, trying on sunglasses and hats. She fingered jewelry and squeezed the arms of thick sweaters, which made me feel even hotter. I pointed out the egg-tipped folly of GM-TV and she scoffed when I told her it was a listed building. I showed her where I’d seen Adam Ant handing over some coins to a charity collector as we crossed the walkway over the Grand Union Canal into a tight knot of stalls and alcoves. The heat was building up here; candles were sagging on their displays and the drifts of antiques shone dully in a solid mass of bronzed light. Every time Louise brushed against me or held on to my arm, I sagged, as if she were transmitting weight through her touch. At such moments, she would perk up and become animated, trying on hats or mugging in smeared mirrors, laughing as my face grew greasy and pale.

The stream of people was endless. The pavements were so obstructed, pedestrians spilled into the road, slowing the traffic which began to trail back toward Mornington Crescent Tube. The crowds seemed to be swelling, like a single bloated body, inflated by sore tempers and the ceaseless, airless heat. I pulled Louise into a café, worried by a mild panic that had transmitted itself into an hallucination of us crushed beneath a stampede of bodies as they attempted to escape their stifling skins. I bought cappuccino, hoping I could relax sufficiently at the counter before she noticed my discomfort.

When I turned round, Louise was bathed in sunshine. Because of the angle of her chair and the way the sunlight was blocked by the weirdly squashed conglomeration of buildings, only she was favored by its color. It invaded the thick pile of her hair, seeming to imbue each filament, like one of those carbon fiber lamps. It moved across her face like thick fluid and, somehow, seemed of her too, picking out the configuration of her bones slouched inside their fleshy housing, curled into the chair. A comma of wet sunshine touched her lower lip and I found myself wishing I could kiss it away. I still wanted her, even after such a long time had passed. No time at all. Everyone around her seemed to diminish, shadows on the wane, growing sluggish like figures trapped in tar. And then she looked at me. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what kind of fire it was that filled her eyes, certain only that it wasn’t human but then the moment passed, and she smiled and everyone was a component of the greater animation around us once more. She just seemed like a willowy girl, lost in the scrum. Unremarkable.

“Get this down you,” I said, pushing across her coffee. “It’ll put hairs on your chest.”

“This place, Camden that is, reminds me of my last few years,” Louise said, furring her top lip with the froth of her cappuccino. I don’t know why, really. Something about the way everything feels sad and unreal but is all disguised by movement. I bet this place seems more like its true self when the shops close and everyone pisses off.”

“What have you been up to these last few years?” I asked that, when all I wanted to know was how she’d turned up in such a state on my doorstep. Now she looked in some semblance of control, I was finding it hard to believe that I’d seen her like that, in extremis.

“It felt like I was being followed. No, that’s not right, it felt like I was being hunted. I had to keep moving or I felt I’d be consumed by something so big I couldn’t even see it. Just an aspect of it, I saw, usually in sleep, moving furiously, like an engine part well-oiled, pistoning and thrashing around. It belonged to something that was vast and after me. Hungry for me.” She took another drink of coffee, then reached over and tapped a man in a vest and combat trousers on the shoulder. Asked him for a cigarette. After he’d lit it for her, she turned back to me and spoke around a mouthful of bluish smoke.

“I left Warrington just after we finished… after you finished with me. I got a job with a waste disposal firm in Keighley.”

“Keighley? Why Keighley, of all places? Middle of nowhere.”