Attention? That it? You want attention? Develop some personality, and that’ll give you attention, if that’s what you want.
Lightly, He hit His fist against His forehead. He forced the air against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. If He didn’t take care, the maggot would eat away His brains.
At night in bed, He’d started plugging orifices against the invasion of the worm-cotton in ears and nostrils, plasters across His arsehole and at the end of His prong-but He still had to breathe and that was where He failed in His prophylactic measures. The worm got in with the air He took into His lungs. From His lungs, it crawled into His bloodstream where it swam like a deadly virus to His skull and munched and whispered and munched.
Perfect adversaries, He thought. You and I and who would’ve thought it when all of this started? The maggot chose to feast upon the weak, but He…Ah, He’d chosen an opponent worthy of the struggle for supremacy.
And that’s what you think you’ve been doing, little bugger?
Maggots ate. That was simply what maggots did. They operated solely on instinct and their instinct was to eat until they metamorphosed into flies. Blowflies, bluebottles, horseflies, houseflies. It didn’t matter. He merely had to wait out the period of eating, and then the maggot would leave Him in peace.
Except there was always the chance that this particular maggot was an aberration, wasn’t there, a creature that would never sprout wings in which case, He did have to rid Himself of it.
But that was not why He had begun. And that was not why He was here just now, across the street from the hospital, a shadow waiting to be dispersed by light. He was here because there was a coronation that needed to happen, and it would happen soon. He would see to that.
He crossed the street. This was chancy, but He was ready and willing to take that chance. To show Himself was to make a mark of preeminence upon a time and a place, and that was what He wanted to do: to begin the process of carving history from the stone of now.
He walked inside. He did not seek His adversary, nor did He even try to locate the room in which He knew he would be found. He could walk directly to it if He’d wanted to, but that was not His purpose in coming here.
At this hour of night breaking into morning, there were few enough people in the hospital corridors and those who were present did not even see Him. From this He knew that He was invisible to people in the way that gods were invisible. Moving among ordinary men and knowing that He could smite them at any moment illustrated irrefutably to Him what He was and would always be.
He breathed. He smiled. It was soundless in His skull.
Supremacy is as supremacy does.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
LYNLEY REMAINED WITH HER THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT and long into the day that followed. He used the time largely to disengage her face-so pale upon the pillow-from what she was now, from the body to which she had been reduced. In this, he tried to tell himself that it was not Helen he was looking upon. Helen was gone. In that instant in which everything had been transformed for them both, she had fled. The Helen of her had soared from the framework of bone, muscle, blood, and tissue, leaving behind not the soul, which defined her, but the substance, which described her. And that substance alone was not and could never be Helen.
But he couldn’t make a go of that because when he tried, what came to him were images, for he had known her simply far too long. She’d been eighteen years old and not his in any way but rather the chosen mate of his friend. Meet Helen Clyde, St. James had told him. I’m going to marry her, Tommy.
D’you think I’ll do for a wife? she had asked. I haven’t a single wifely talent. And she’d smiled a smile that had engaged his heart, but rather in friendship than in love.
Love had come later, years and years later, and in between the friendship and the love what had bloomed was tragedy, change, and sorrow, altering all three of them unrecognisably. Madcap Helen no more, St. James no longer the fervent batsman in front of the wicket, and himself knowing he’d been the cause. For which sin there was no forgiveness. One did not alter lives and simply walk away from the damage.
He’d been told once that things are at any given moment just as they are supposed to be. There are no mistakes in God’s world, he’d been told. But he could not believe that. Then or now.
He saw her in Corfu, a towel spread beneath her on the beach and her head thrown back so that the sun could strike her face. Let’s move to a sunny climate, she’d said. Or at least let’s disappear into the tropics for a year.
Or thirty or forty?
Yes. Brilliant. We’ll Lord Lucan it. With less cause, of course. What do you think?
That you’d miss London. The shoe sales if nothing else.
Hmm, there is that, she said. I am a lifelong victim of my feet. The perfect target for male designers with ankle fetishes, I’m the first to admit it. But have they no shoes in the tropics, Tommy?
Not the sort you’re used to, I’m afraid.
The silly stuff of her that made him smile, the very maddening Helen of her.
Can’t cook, can’t sew, can’t clean, can’t decorate. Honestly, Tommy, why do you want me?
But why did one person ever want another? Because I smile with you, because I laugh at your banter, which you and I both know very well is designed just for that…to make me laugh. And the why of that is that you understand and have done from the first: who I am, what I am, what haunts me most and how to banish it. That’s why, Helen.
And there she was in Cornwall, standing before a portrait in the gallery, his mother at her side. They were looking upon a grandfather with too many greats in front of him to know exactly how far back he was in time. But that didn’t matter because her concern was centred on genetics and she was saying to his mother, D’you think there’s any chance that terrible nose could pop up again somewhere along the line?
It’s rather ghastly, isn’t it? his mother murmured.
At least it shades his chest from the sun. Tommy, why didn’t you point this picture out to me before you proposed? I’ve never seen it before.
We kept it hidden in the attic.
That was very wise.
The Helen of her. The Helen.
You cannot know someone for seventeen years and not have a swarm of memories, he thought. And it was the memories that he felt might kill him. Not that they existed but that there would be no more of them from this point forward and that there were others he’d already forgotten.
A door opened in the room, somewhere behind him. A soft hand took his, shaping his fingers round a hot cup. He caught the scent of soup. He looked up to see his mother’s tender face.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered. “Tell me what to do.”
“I can’t do that, Tommy.”
“If I let her…Mum, how can I let her…them? And if I do that, is it ego? Or is it ego if I don’t? What would she want? How can I know?”
She came close to him. He turned back to his wife. His mother curved her hand round his head so she cradled his cheek. “Dearest Tommy,” she murmured. “I would take this from you if I could.”
“I’m dying. With her. With them. And that’s what I want, actually.”
“Believe me. I know. No one can feel what you feel, but all of us can know what you feel. And, Tommy, you must feel it. You can’t run away. It won’t work like that. But I want you to try to feel our love as well. Promise you’ll do that.”