I didn't want to believe what I'd heard, but I knew it was true because the role fitted him so perfectly. I just wanted him out of my flat. I would never have managed it if he hadn't been so drunk. By the time I had slammed the front door and double-locked it I was shaking with anger and fright. This, I told myself, was my reward for trusting too fast.
I avoided him. There was no question of moving out, or of coming to terms with what he had told me. I would not be bullied, and anyway I couldn't afford to leave. He put a note through my door begging to talk to me. I tore it up and posted it back through his letterbox. The next time I passed him on the stairs, I warned him to leave me alone or I would tell the police I was being pestered.
Two nights later, the real trouble began.
I was trying to paint, staring at a great blank sheet of Daler Board. Nothing was coming out right. I told myself that the idea of Midas affecting my artistic ability was simply some form of psychosomatic suggestion. Just then, the walls of my flat started shaking with the sound of Greek music. Midas held a party that carried on until dawn. People were still arriving at four in the morning. I donned earplugs and went to bed, but didn't sleep a wink.
'You missed a great night,' Ari said the next day when I passed him on the stairs, 'a great night! How we danced and laughed! Midas is a wonderful host.'
'I thought you said he was very quiet.'
'Yes, but a party, that's different! Such singing! It's a pity you couldn't come.'
There were seven binbags filled with wine bottles by the front door.
Hey, I figured, live and let live. Maybe this was his way of coping with rejection. But it was just the first of the parties. From being the quietest guy in town, Midas suddenly became the neighbour from hell. Crashing and banging, deafening me at all hours with music, howls of laughter and even what sounded like screams of pain. People came and left at three, four, five in the morning. Sometimes I went on to the landing and saw them climbing the stairs, dangerous types, criminal lowlife, drug dealers, crazies, whores. Each week it got worse. Several times I got up the courage to hammer on his door, but he would never answer. I angrily complained to Ari and Maria, who were dumbfounded.
'But you must be able to hear the noise, even two floors away,' I insisted.
'No,' they said, shaking their heads, 'we haven't heard a thing. As far as we know, Midas only had one party.'
'But the rubbish he throws out on to the landing, the people, the mess…'
'You see any mess around here?' asked Ari defensively. 'I think maybe you're overreacting. We never have any trouble from Midas.'
I was not imagining it. The woman in the apartment below mine was spending summer at her daughter's house in Cornwall. That just left me.
The noise and the mess continued. I asked the residents in the buildings on either side of mine if they had suffered disturbances, without luck. I visited a harassed young man at a council advice centre and was told that nearly fifty per cent of all flat owners move because of problems with neighbours. He outlined the alternatives, patience or the police, and counselled the former. I was reluctant to involve the law, as I had done during the stormy end of my marriage, and finally persuaded the community officer to call on Midas. The report he sent me after his visit made me wonder if we knew the same man; it was virtually a love letter. My neighbour, my ex-lover, had certainly turned on some full-strength charm. As the community officer was almost certainly gay, I found myself wondering if he had done more than that.
I felt like selling my story to the Enquirer: I DATED A PAGAN GIGOLO. Surely he was just an ordinary man with a smart line in seduction. Could Midas have found a way of preventing others from hearing his noise? If he really could cast spells, perhaps he wasn't just directing them at me. Legally my hands were tied. No previous problems had ever been recorded at this address. If anything, I was the nuisance. Perhaps I was going crazy. I could imagine the community officer's official report: Ms Merrigan complains that her neighbour is bewitching her.
My patience was pushed to the limit. My relationship with Midas became a war of nerves. Thunderous music that no-one else ever seemed to hear played all night. Bags of stinking rubbish split and spilled against my front door. Creepy characters sat at the top of my stairs drinking, picking their teeth and flirting; a smacked-out kid who played with a knife, a laughing fat whore with gold teeth, a sickly bald man who constantly hawked and spat – Midas's acolytes. Ari and Maria swore they saw nobody pass them, but how else did these sleazeballs get on to the staircase, by flying in through the skylight? The first few times I saw someone sitting there I raced down to the ground-floor apartment and dragged Ari upstairs, only to discover the landing deserted. It was like living in a carnival funhouse. I could feel my ordered life cracking apart as quickly as the plants in my flat were drying and dying.
One hot evening I heard a noise outside my door and opened it to find Midas drunk and nearly naked, smeared with paint and slumped on the landing smiling at me.
'I'll call the police if you come any closer,' I warned, trying not to panic.
'And I'll send them away with love in their hearts,' he replied, smoothing his stomach, allowing his hand to brush his genitals. 'Don't you know the story of the wind and the sun, and their wager to remove a traveller's coat? The wind tries to blow the coat off but the traveller pulls it more tightly around himself. The sun just smiles and warms his victim until he sheds his clothes…'
He was tumescent now. I yelped and darted back into my apartment, slamming the door with a bang. There was no point in ringing anyone for help. I knew Midas would be sober, clothed and full of charm by the time they arrived.
That night my dreams betrayed me, conjuring him into my bedroom, pacing before my bed, whispering happy obscenities. Wherever his bare feet touched the carpet, grapevines sprang up in verdant knots. Wherever his strong hands touched me, silvery green tendrils traced lines of moisture on my skin. I reached between his broad brown thighs and buried my face there, at the source of his heat, to fill my head with searing comets. In the morning I awoke feeling spent and sluttish. Later I passed Midas on the stairs, smartly attired, going out. 'Sleep well?' he asked with a knowing smile.
I was going mad. I sought Gloria's advice over lunch, and after trying to persuade me to go to the police she produced a more workable idea. 'Find out about him,' she said. 'Make him your quarry. The more you discover of a man like that, the less strength he has over you.'
I knew Midas often received mail from a woman. Her unwanted letters, handwritten in purple ballpoint, accumulated in the hall. When I returned home, I made a note of her return address.
Her name was Danielle Passmore. She lived in Notting Hill, on the top floor of one of those grey Victorian houses large enough to garrison a regiment. The front garden was filled with dead rhododendrons, the ground floor boarded with corrugated iron, so that at first sight it looked as if nobody lived there.
I rang the bell and stepped back, squinting up at the filthy windows, wondering what I would say. She took so long to come to the door, I was about to leave. Danielle was small and shy, thirtyish, fair and very pale, probably once attractive. It was hard to tell now, because her face was disfigured. A livid crimson scar traced a series of crescent-shaped indentations from forehead to chin, as if someone had tried to cleave her skull in two. She was missing her right eye. Skin had dried dark and tight across the socket. I tried not to look too hard.
'I hope you don't mind me just turning up like this,' I said, but before I could continue she interrupted; 'It's about him, isn't it? You've come about him. I knew someone would eventually.'