The stranger stared at him blankly.
“There’s a little scrap of a wood just behind here,” said Rod with a shrug, “if that’s the one you mean. You can get to it through the back door there. There’s a gate at the bottom of the beer garden. Just follow the hedge.”
“And in the middle of the wood there’s a pool?”
Again I thought of a girl like Beatrice wading in a warm pool, with rushes and willowherb and forget-me-nots.
Harry frowned: “I don’t remember a pool down there.”
“There isn’t one,” said Rod.
But the stranger was already heading off.
“Wait a minute!” Harry called. “Can’t I get you a drink? You’re new in town aren’t you?”
He never missed a chance to make a contact.
“How about something to eat?” I asked, getting up to join them. I remembered how hungry he’d been several hours ago and I doubted he’d eaten since. “You must be famished.”
He looked at me. I don’t know if he remembered me or not, but he nodded anyway and I bought him a couple of pies while Harry got him a pint and introduced us all.
“Harry Higgins, mate. Convenor of the local Men’s Rights crowd for my sins. Anything you need, let me know. We blokes have got to stick together these days, eh?”
The stranger stared blankly.
“This is Peter, my treasurer,” Harry went on, “and Rod here is my deputy when he’s not too busy pulling the only decent pint in town.”
He glanced at me.
“Oh, and this is Jack,” he said, his voice perceptibly cooler. “He’s one of us too at heart, aren’t you Jack my old mate? It’s just that his mum’s on the other side and his dad…well, Timothy’s a lovely bloke of course but he’s sort of gone native, as they used to say in the old days. Fair comment, Jack?’
I grinned painfully.
“Oh, but he’s such a good man,” squeaked Rod in a cruel falsetto.
“So what do you call yourself, my friend?” asked Harry. “Whereabouts do you hail from?”
The visitor’s mouth was full of pie and he had his eye on the door at the back of the pub. He mumbled a name that no one heard and said he came from Birmingham.
“Birmingham, eh? Well I couldn’t quite place that accent of yours, but I’d never have had you down as a Brummie!”
“And how do the slits treat you up there these days?” asked Rod Stone.
“Slits?”
“Slits,” Rod repeated impatiently. “You know! Bumpies, pussycats…”
“…doublebums…” offered Peter Hemlock.
“…women!” exclaimed Rod.
Understanding dawned. “Oh… women… well…”
He glanced uncomfortably between their faces, wondering what sort of reply they wanted. “Well, you know…”
“We know, mate, we know,” said Harry sympathetically. “Still you’ve got a strong champion there in John Thompson.”
The stranger looked blank.
“You don’t know who John Thompson is?” asked Harry, very surprised. “You come from Brum and you don’t know about the chair of the Birmingham Men’s Committee? Good God man, they say he’s the most powerful man left in England!
“Oh yes… that John Thompson… he’s…”
“In a different mould entirely from our own dear Timothy Brown,” Harry said, winking at me to show no hard feelings.
“Oh but Timothy’s such a good man,” said Rod Stone again in a soft falsetto. And he didn’t bother to wink.
“He’s a pussy-licker,” said Peter Hemlock, avoiding my eye. He tipped back a glass of vodka. His eyes glazed over as the ethanol hit his bloodstream.
Rod Stone refilled his glass.
“Drink up,” Harry said to the stranger, “You look like you could use another. What on Earth were you hoping to find in that wood there anyway?”
“Jazamine. She said she’d…”
All three of them snorted with disapproval.
“A girl? What do you want a girl for?” Harry asked. “Listen mate, if it’s a little nooky you’re after, you be much better off with the likes of Lily here.”
Lily had come up behind us in an overpowering blast of sickly sweet scent.
“Hi there,” she purred.
“She’s got everything a woman has got,” said Harry with a wink at me. “I think we can all vouch for that, eh lads? But she’s got the brain of a man, and that means she knows what a man really wants.”
Lily fluttered her eyelashes at the stranger. Comprehension slowly dawned in his dazed blue eyes. Her female face was nothing more than a mask of paint and mascara. Through it looked out the solid heavy face of a man, burning with a bottomless rage.
So the stranger had come looking for Jazamine in the green wood – and he was offered this.
He reddened violently and turned away. The others laughed at him. He tried to shift the conversation onto other ground.
“What… what is TTX?” he blurted out. “I saw it written on a sign.”
The laughter died instantaneously. The four of them stared at him in shocked silence.
“You mean you don’t know?” asked Harry quietly, all friendliness gone.
The stranger could see he had made some kind of blunder and tried to recover.
“No – I mean yes… I mean I just forgot for a moment…”
“Well, if you really know what it is sweetie,” said Lily in a hard male voice, “why don’t you tell us?”
The stranger looked at me desperately. I tried to mouth the word ‘plague’.
“It’s an… illness,” he said.
“Yes,” said Harry grimly, “an illness. So now tell us what it does to a man.”
“It’s… like flu to start with and then…”
“It makes your balls go purple and swell up like footballs,” snapped Rod Stone from behind the bar, “and then they burst and you die.”
“Everyone knows that, my friend,” said Harry reprovingly, “everyone knows that.”
There was a moment of silence.
“You know what he is, don’t you?” said Rod. “He’s one of those shifters you hear about. He doesn’t belong here. He’s slipped in from another world.”
Harry whistled softly.
The stranger stood there like a prisoner in the dock.
Harry spoke very quietly “So you come from a place where TTX never happened, do you? The women never took over?”
“Maybe he’s got some of that stuff on him,” Rod said. “You know, that shifter drug they use, maybe he’s got some.”
“Well let’s see if he has,” said Peter Hemlock.
“You know what they say, don’t you?” said Lily. “If a shifter’s swallowed all his stuff, you can still get it out of him by drinking his blood!”
Her painted lips parted, revealing yellow fangs. The stranger gave a sort of low groan and started to back away.
“Not so fast,” Harry said, “we haven’t finished with you.”
He and Peter took hold of the stranger’s arms.
“Hey!” I yelled. “He hasn’t done you any harm. Leave him alone!”
“Or you’ll tell your mummy, eh?” snarled Peter.
But they loosed their grip all the same, for my mother had power. The stranger broke free and ran, out of the door at the back, off in the direction of the wood.
Harry and Peter settled back onto their bar-stools, both a little flushed and breathless. Lily gave a cold snort of contempt. None of them looked at me.
“Do you think he was really a shifter, or was he just off his head?” asked Rod, after a moment.
“Just some nutter more likely,” said Harry with a shrug. “I mean I’ve heard these rumours about shifters the same as you have, but I’ve never been able to see how a drug could make people cross to another world. Even if there are such things. I mean I know the slits have abolished science and we don’t know squat about anything anymore, but it just doesn’t sound plausible does it?”