Finally, I opened the door, turned off the bathroom light, and stepped back into the living-room.
Jefferson Airplane was on the tape deck. I'd been playing it so often that I recognized it instantly.
The white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen's lost her head
How true, I thought. Sophie could be the red queen; she had certainly lost her head. But who was the white knight?
Graham was standing over by the window with his back to me.
'What are you up to?' I asked, trying to sound jovial, as though he might just overlook my having left him to his own devices for the past ten or twenty or thirty minutes, however long it had been. I had half a mind to sneak up behind him and give him a great big hug. It would have been one way of breaking the ice. If I felt him cringe, I'd still be able to back down with my dignity intact.
But something stopped me. Graham's shoulders were hunched as though he were reading something, hut I couldn't see how or what because he had turned off the lamp and the room was lit only by the light from the street outside.
His shoulders were shaking.
I took a step forward and said 'Graham?', and he turned, and I saw that he wasn't shaking, nor was he reading anything, and it wasn't Graham at all. I'm not sure how I could tell, but perhaps it had something to do with the way his outline rippled, like a person glimpsed through the dimpled window of the Landrace Inn. He was more shadow than solid person, a shape made up of shifting black smoke.
I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound emerged.
I was beginning to think that maybe I should have kept my glasses on after all.
The shadow crept forward until I found myself looking into a half-formed face.
Definitely not Graham.
The shadow spoke, just as the room began to tilt at an impossible angle, and I lost my footing and slid towards the dark lake that waited for me under the house.
From somewhere above, I heard the words, 'What took you so long?'
PART THREE: AUTUMN
Chapter 1
I missed Dirk and Lemmy like mad. All those evenings in their company no longer seemed like pointless loitering in the waiting-room of life. I couldn't imagine how I'd ever regarded them as no better than second-rate stop-gaps for the kind of social calendar I'd always thought I wanted. Instead, as the weeks passed, I found myself looking back on the times we'd spent together as a long-lost golden age. Dirk and Lemmy hadn't been…
'Hang on a minute,' said Daisy.
'…substitutes. They'd been the real thing. Once or twice I'd glimpsed them from afar, shambling along Portobello Road or…'
'Hell-o,' said Daisy, cupping her hands into a megaphone. 'Earth calling Clare.'
Clare stopped talking and folded her arms. 'What now?'
'Excuse me," said Daisy. 'Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we just come face to face with the dead guy?'
'Maybe,' said Clare. She smiled to herself. 'Maybe not.'
I tried to stay out of it, but the provocation was too great. 'That's cheating,' I said. 'You can't just leave it there.'
Once again, Clare seemed to be directing most of her rancour towards me. 'Who says I've left it anywhere?' she demanded testily. 'Look, do you want me to go on with this, or don't you?'
'That's just it,' said Daisy. 'You're not going on with it.'
Clare leaped to her feet, 'Fine. Party's over. Let's go, Miles, we're out of here.'
'No,' wailed Luke.
'Sit down,' pleaded Daisy, tugging at Clare's skirt. Clare glared down at her contemptuously, as though she couldn't believe one of us had actually sunk to the skirt-tugging level.
'Please sit down,' Daisy begged.
I could tell that Clare was savouring the sensation of being in demand. Then she said, simply, 'No more interruptions then,' and sat down again. She was looking grim, like a girl on a mission.
'No more interruptions,' repeated Daisy. 'And that's a promise.'
Dirk and Lemmy had been the real thing. Once or twice I glimpsed them from afar, shambling along Portobello Road or moseying around the north end of Ladbroke Grove. Once I spotted Dirk staggering along Golborne Road with an enormous Art Deco cocktail cabinet strapped to his back. But neither he nor Lemmy ever gave any sign of having noticed me, and I didn't have the nerve to approach them. Instead I kept my head down. I had to face it: the Boar's Head had been my own personal Garden of Gethsemane. I had publicly disowned two of my closest friends. It would serve me right if they decided to cut me dead in their turn.
But how I needed them now. They might not have listened as I poured out my heart, it's true. Or they might have babbled some of their hippy garbage, but once you dug past the layers of fish-heads and mouldy old cabbage leaves, there was sometimes, wrapped in old newspaper at the centre of all that crap, a gleaming nugget of perspicacity.
I needed someone to confide in. I needed to be convinced that I wasn't going mad, that it was pure coincidence that an unnervingly large number of rational individuals honestly believed they'd seen me in the company of someone who, for want of a better way of putting it, wasn't there.
Walter Cheeseman had acted as a sort of deterrent, but as soon as he departed, my shadow had returned to hover at my shoulder, whisper into my ear — even buy me drinks, or so I was told. You have no idea how frustrating this was. I kept thinking of that line from The Wasteland — 'But who is that on the other side of you?'
Well, who was it? More to the point, what was it?
And who could I talk to? And who would understand?
It was ironic, I thought, that since I'd moved to the hub of the social universe, my circle of friends had not gone supernova, as I'd confidently anticipated, but had dwindled into something of a black hole. I hadn't seen Larry and Berenice since their dinner party. Rufus and Nadia and the others had fallen by the wayside, and I didn't feel up to phoning them now, out of the blue, to dump this all over them. I could still hear the sympathetic noises people had made about Sophie. I didn't want them making those same noises about me.
Walter Cheeseman, with his interest in local history, might have lent an ear without sniggering, but he had deserted me as pitilessly as any lover. As for Graham, just because we were now having regular sex didn't mean I was ready to empty all my innermost secrets into his ear. It would have sent the wrong sort of message entirely. He might have started thinking our relationship was meaningful.
'But what did he look like?' I asked Carolyn, after she had once again started talking about the person everyone referred to as simply 'my friend'.
'What I meant was,' I said, 'Did you think he was good-looking?' By now I knew better than to say, 'What friend?'
Carolyn wrinkled her brow, but delicately, so as to lessen the risk of permanent frown lines. 'Kind of,' she said. 'Rather fond of black, though, isn't he? You should coax him out of that post-apocalyptic get-up and into something a bit more cheerful. I remember when Grenville went through his all-black phase. Everyone started calling him The Undertaker, and it really pissed him off.'
I wasn't one hundred per cent happy about the idea of any undertaker — phantom or otherwise — loitering at my elbow, but how could I possibly feel menaced in the middle of a packed bar or crowded street? How could I be afraid of something I couldn't see or hear or fed? It wasn't as though the flat was haunted — that might really have worried me. It wasn't even as though I was hearing things going bump in the night any more; even the typing noises had turned out to have a logical explanation.