Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“The coming of daylight seemed to take longer than it ought to in the mornings. I’d see weather forecasts predicting rain or shine but there was a constant haze, like the sun trying to force its way through mist. It never changed. I’d visit my parents and they appeared to talk through me, looking at my face but somehow misdirecting their focus as if they were talking to someone standing behind me. And then this awful sense of something coming, gravitating toward me…”

I noticed that I was holding her hand but I couldn’t recall reaching for her. Her casual referral to her pregnancy had shamed me. I couldn’t say anything.

“And you wrote to me. It was salvation. There was no longer a sense of me being consigned to limbo. Does this sound silly to you? Because there are others. I saw one or two, drifting like me, pale and withdrawn like flames that can’t quite catch upon what they’re supposed to be burning. People who were dismissed from somebody’s life. People who had an umbilicus disconnected. God knows what would have happened to me if you hadn’t written. I think I’d have faded away. Winked out. There’s still something missing. Something I need in order to give me a sense of being replete but I’m buggered if I know what it is.”

It was a lot to take in. I wasn’t convinced by a great deal of what she’d imparted but I had a handle on her dislocation. I’d been gearing up to ask her how long she planned on staying but it didn’t really matter if she stayed a few more days, if it meant she’d get back to full speed.

“A party,” I said, lightly, trying to dispel the intensity that had drawn in around us. “There’s a party tonight. Why don’t you come? It will do you good to kick out and relax.”

She appeared briefly reticent but agreed, her eyes hankering after some morsel of encouragement as we held each other’s gaze for longer than necessary. It was a look I’d once suffixed with a kiss or a touch of my finger against her neck. Don’t get back into that, I thought, pushing away from the table. I couldn’t understand why she’d want to get involved with me again if there was even the shred of threat she might return to the dire illusions of her mind.

The party was at a friend’s place in Hammersmith; we were to meet by the bridge at one of the pubs which snuggled up to the Thames. Benjie was there to greet us, a tall affable lad who didn’t care if he was thinning on top as long as there was a beer in front of him. One of those people who needs only the most rudimentary of introductions before getting on well with anyone, Benjie soon had Louise feeling comfortable and interesting; she soon relaxed into the evening. A fine evening it was, the sun losing itself to the strata of color banding the horizon. Great jets would lower into it as they nosed toward Heathrow. We stood and watched them halve the sky till it grew dark and cold.

For my part, I felt better now that Louise was being shared around a dozen or so other people. I could allow my anxieties to shrink within alcohol’s massage and see Louise as someone more than a chipped and faded signpost to my past.

Benjie lived in a first floor flat on a wide avenue behind King Street. When we arrived, stopping off en route to buy beer from a twenty-four-hour inconvenience store that didn’t sell Beck’s or Toohey’s, there were already around thirty people stuffed into the kitchen and living room. Overspill meant that the landing and stairs were occupied too, by flaky looking individuals wadded into sheepskin coats with excessively furred collars. They probably looked furtive because they’d crashed the gig; not that it mattered: Benjie was hospitable to all. I followed him into his room where a hill of coats and plastic bags swamped his bed. A couple were leaned across them, kissing each other with such fervor that it seemed his mouth must engulf the entirety of her lower jaw. His left hand violently kneaded the pliant spread of her right breast. She could have been dead. I sensed Louise stiffen beside me and squeezed her hand, understanding her revulsion. The union was void of any tenderness. Perhaps Benjie noticed it too, because there was a needle in his voice when he asked them to move over. They simply stopped kissing and staggered from the room, lobotomized expressions all round. The woman was wearing six-inch rubber platforms and a black cat suit. An exterior white leather corset battled to keep her chest in situ. She hadn’t even bothered to take off her heart-shaped satchel with its blunt rubber spines.

“Kids, eh?” said Benjie, plonking his sweater on the pile. I followed suit but Louise refused to take her coat off. “Actually,” Benjie continued, gesturing after the zombies, “that was Simon. Top bloke. Known him since school. Spacecat. Does a bit too much of the wacky baccy to keep him compus mentus but you can’t hold that against him.”