But what mystifies him most is the time immediately after Johnny Law rolled up. Where did Beth and her companion flee to? There was no one around when the police found him. The male officer went off and searched about, flashing his torch here and there amongst the dunes. There were no other cars out there, no buildings to hide inside, and not a single soul had been sighted. They had vanished.
'They,' the male officer said, sarcastically, 'must have been long gone by the time we found you.'
'No,' Dante insisted. 'It was your interruption that saved me.' From death, he wanted to add.
But it was just him they found, alone on the sand, and they were sick to death of students wasting their time with their drunken foolery, and noise, and rucks in the streets with locals. They only enjoyed a brief respite over the summer months when most of the students left the town, but recently things had been as busy as they were in Raisin week. 'What was that?' he asked.
'What was Raisin week? A festival,' the policewoman said, and she rolled her eyes at the very mention of it. Then they took Eliot's address at the School of Divinity. Questions would be asked. But Dante was unsure about pressing charges, and was still foolishly wary of implicating Eliot, out of an unshakeable, stubborn, and infuriating sense of his greatness.
All he wanted, he said to the officers in conclusion, was to grab his mate, get out of town and drive home. This seemed to please the male officer, but they would still need his town address should further inquiries be made. When he provided the flat's address on the East Scores, the officers exchanged glances. 'What?' he asked.
'Do you know the man who used to live there?' the woman cop asked him.
'No,' he replied, and gave them the date of his arrival in town. The male officer looked at him with suspicion. 'So you have no connection with a man called Ben Carter?' he asked. Dante shook his head and wanted to know why this caused concern. They believed he was telling the truth — he could see it in their faces — but neither gave him an answer to his question.
The male officer said it was probably best that he was going back to England after all. 'Some strange things have been happening,' he added, more to himself and for his partner's benefit than for Dante's.
'You're telling me,' Dante said to prompt them. 'I turned up the day they found that arm.' At that both officers looked uncomfortable. 'Know whose it is yet?' he asked. 'No,' they said in unison, and the interview was over. Then the grumpy male cop took him to the hospital for repairs, staying silent all the way and not even looking him in the eye when Dante said goodbye outside the entrance to the Emergency Room.
Casualty wards in Birmingham were dreadful places in the early hours. On three occasions, he either took Punky to casualty for a stomach pump, or collected the drummer from casualty after a stomach pump. He saw fist fights, nurses assaulted by drunks, hysterical women, kids wheeled to and fro with blue faces. But in St Andrews, at the Memorial Hospital, it was a different world. He was the only patient, so the staff — a young doctor and a sweet nurse — saw him immediately, and were careful not to question him too closely about his wounds. It was obvious they assumed he'd been in a fight. With his tattoos and messy hair, they thought he was a brawler, the type that attracted and caused street violence. It would have been no good trying to explain otherwise. A dog and angry girlfriend story was too lame for a repeat telling. From casualty, he then took a cab to North Street and drove the War Wagon home from where it was parked outside the police station.
Regaining his feet in the bathroom of the flat, the stinging pains on his back cry out again, tender body parts harassed by the simple touch of his shirt. The bite on his neck is not as deep as he expected and doesn't trouble him greatly, even though the teeth marks immediately went septic. 'Dirtiest mouth on the planet,' the young doctor said, swabbing his throat. 'Did you know that even the dog bite is cleaner than the human?' One of his cheeks is bruised and he has a fat bottom lip from Beth's punches, but his face has slipped into a welcome numbness since he swallowed the painkillers he was given at the hospital. Even his ribs that Beth crushed offer nothing more than a tender sensation when he inhales, but his back continues to give him hell.
The doctor spent some time inspecting his back. 'You were bitten? What did the other fellow do, pick you up in his mouth and run with you? Nasty,' he added.
Curious and anxious about what he might see, Dante slowly removes his shirt. A trickle of sand falls to the tiled floor of the bathroom. He turns around and peers over his shoulder at the reflection of his back in the bathroom mirror. Then he peels the corner of dressing off the part of his skin that hurts the most, stretching from his waist to the small of his back.
'Jesus,' he says. Standing under the electric light, he moves from side to side to fully reveal the extent of the flesh wound. He keeps his eyes in a squint because he can't bear to see it clearly. His sallow torso now resembles something on a mortician's slab. It is as if he was thrown amongst a legion of small beasts during a feeding frenzy. Small incisions, encrusted with coagulating blood, are surrounded by others that are still raw and fresh. It covers his entire lower back. Spattered between the cuts and evil bruises is a series of painful blue indentations pressed into his flesh by fingertips. Bony fingertips. But it is the marks over his kidneys that make him dizzy with shock. He grips the sink, steadies himself and then looks back at his reflection. Teeth marks. It looks as if a large mouth has dislocated its lower jaw to clamp his skin between sharp incisors — wanting to break through and kill. Around the entries the teeth have made into his skin are what resemble long and inflamed bruises from where his skin has been stretched. It is like the doctor suggested: that he's been picked up in a mouth and carried.
Down on the sands, the last of his fever, his anxiety at meeting Beth, and her manic behaviour may have transformed the evening into something surreal and dreamy. But here are the physical scars, again, resulting from a few minutes in her company. The attack was savage, the assailant determined and merciless. There have been no illusions in St Andrews after all. It is for real.
Beth is insane. Not weird, kinky, beautiful, a mystery in furs and leather boots, like he wanted to believe, but insane. She hypnotised him or drugged him back at St Mary's. Same again on the West Sands where body parts wash ashore. Only down by the sea, where it is more remote and easier for her, for them, to work, she tortured his helpless body in some kind of blood sport — a perverse sadistic rite — a prelude to a snuff movie, where the tide and wind swallowed his cries.
Silent and awe-stricken by the weight of his thoughts, he stands mute, displaying his broken skin to the mirror until his legs weaken and he can look no more. But even when his cuts are covered again, the bandages only conceal his battered nudity; the flesh itself still harbours the sensations of thin fingers and dirty teeth.
Dropping his head, Dante fights to hold the tears back. When was the last time his mind was clear, when he was able to think and act rationally? He needs Tom, who will shake his perfect head and smile, before suggesting a fresh escape and a new plan. An involuntary shiver wracks his body, and Dante thinks of his bed. Will sleep remove her terrible scream from his mind? It still seems to echo around his skull, tainting his thoughts with its awful sense of excitement. And beneath the painful abrasions on his skin, the virus might still be groping about, looking for a chink through which to rise.
'Eliot,' Dante whispers, as he creeps across the quiet hallway to his room. The man he wants to immortalise with music has deceived him. How many years has he spent quoting from the book, feebly transferring its message to half-drunk musicians? How many times has he rescued it from second-hand bookshops and offered it as a gift to someone he thought would benefit from Eliot's wisdom? Eliot wants him dead, mauled by Beth and then offered to the thing in rags.