Deacon shrugged. "I'm guessing." He drew heavily on his cigarette in order to keep the tip alight. "How did he speak? Did he have an accent?"
"Not so's you'd notice. I asked him once if he was an actor because he sounded pretty classy when he was raving. But he said no."
"What did he do when he was raving?"
"Shouted anything that came into his head. Some of it rhymed, but I don't know if he was making it up himself or if he was quoting someone else. I remember some of it-and one bit more or less because he said it over and over again. It was bloody weird stuff, all about his mother groaning, his father weeping, and demons leaping out of clouds."
"Can you quote it?"
Terry looked at the others for inspiration. "Not really," he said when he didn't find any. "He always began with 'my mother groaned, my father wept' but I forget what came after."
Deacon cupped his cigarette in his hands and dredged deep into his memory. " 'My mother groaned, my father wept,' " he murmured, " 'Into the dangerous world I leapt;/ Helpless, naked, piping loud,/ Like a fiend hid in a cloud."
"Yeah," said the young man with surprised respect. "How the hell did you know that?"
"It's a poem entitled Infant Sorrow by a man called William Blake. I wrote a thesis on him years ago. He was an eighteenth century poet and artist who was considered off the wall by his contemporaries because he claimed to see visions." Deacon gave a faint smile. "William wrote some wonderful poetry, but lived and died in virtual poverty because no one recognized his genius until after he was dead. I suspect your friend knew William and his work rather well."
"Yeah," said Terry with quick intelligence. "William Blake. Billy Blake. What else did this guy write?"
" 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/ In the forests of the night,' " Deacon paused, inviting the lad to finish it.
" 'What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?' " said the youngster in triumph. "Yeah, Billy were always spouting that one. I told him it didn't rhyme properly, and he said you had to stress thy, which was where the rhyme was."
Deacon nodded. Had Billy Blake been a teacher? he wondered. "There's a line in the next verse that goes: 'What the hand dare seize the fire?' Was he thinking of that, do you suppose, when he tried to burn his own hand?"
"I dunno. It depends what it means."
"The tiger represents power, energy, and cruelty. The poem describes this beautiful but uncontrollable creature being forged in flames and then goes on to question why his creator was brave enough to manufacture anything so dangerous." Deacon could see he'd lost the others but there was keen interest still in Terry's face. "It's the creator's hand that dared 'seize the fire,' so perhaps Billy thought he'd started something that he couldn't control."
"Maybe." A faraway look came into the young man's eyes as he stared across the river. "Is the creator God?"
"A god. Blake doesn't specify which one."
"Billy reckoned there were loads of gods. Gods of war. Gods of love. Gods of rivers. Gods of every bloody thing. He used to swear at them all the time. 'It's your fault, you buggers,' he used to shout, 'so let me alone and let me die.' I said he should just stop believing that the gods were there, then he wouldn't have to hate them. Makes sense, doesn't it?" The pinched face turned back towards the brazier.
"What did he think was the gods' fault?'
"It's not what he thought," said Terry with careful emphasis, "it's what he knew." He reached out and gripped the air with his fingers. "He strangled someone because the gods wrote it into his fate. That's why he stuck his hand in the fire. He called it the 'offending instrument' and said 'such sacrifices were necessary if the gods' anger was to be directed somewhere else.' Poor bastard. He didn't know his arse from his elbow most of the time."
On Terry's instructions, Deacon gave the bottle of Bells whiskey into the care of the old man in the balaclava, before following Terry into the warehouse to see where Billy had slept. "It's a waste of time," the lad grumbled. "He's been dead six months. What are you expecting to find?"
"Anything."
"Listen, there've been a hundred derelicts in his space since he kicked it. You won't find nothing." But despite this he led Deacon into the gloom. "You nuts or what?" he said in amusement as Deacon lit a small pool of light at their feet with his flashlight. "That's not going to help you see a damn thing. Just wait, okay. Your eyes'll soon adjust. There's enough light comes through the door."
A grey lunar landscape slowly developed in front of Deacon, a wasteland of twisted metal, piled bricks, and abandoned warehouse wreckage. It was the aftermath of war where nothing recognizable existed anymore, and only the acrid smell of urine suggested human presence. "How long have you been here?" he asked Terry, as he began to pick out sleeping bodies among the rubble.
"Two years on and off."
"Why here? Why not a squat or a hostel?"
The young man shrugged. "I've done them. This ain't so bad." He led the way past a pile of bricks and gestured to a makeshift structure, made out of plastic and old blankets. He pulled one of the blankets aside and reached in to light a battery-operated hurricane lamp. "Take a look," he invited. "This is my pitch."
Deacon experienced a strange sort of envy. It was a cobbled-together tent in the middle of a urine-smelling bomb site, but it had personality in a way his flat did not. There were posters of seminude women pinned to the plastic walls, a mattress on the floor with a handmade patchwork quilt, ornaments on a metal filing cabinet, a wicker chair with a dressing gown on it, and a jam jar of plastic red roses on a small painted table. He went in and sat on the chair, carefully folding the dressing gown onto his lap. "This is good. You've done it up well."
"I like it. Got most of this stuff off the council tip. It's fucking amazing what people chuck out." Terry squeezed in beside him and lay on the bed. He looked younger in repose than he did in tense concentration against the wind. "It's freer than a hostel and not so cramped as a squat. People can get on your nerves in a squat."
"Don't you have any family?"
"Nah. Been in and out of homes since I was six. One bloke told me once that my mother went to prison which is why I ended up in care, but I've never tried to find her. She's a loser, so it's no good looking. I get by."
Deacon made a point of examining the young face in order to remember it afterwards. But there was nothing memorable about the lad. He was like a hundred shaven-headed boys of the same age, uniformly colorless, uniformly unattractive. He wondered why Terry hadn't mentioned a father, but guessed the father was anonymous and therefore irrelevant. He thought of all the women he himself had slept with over the years. Had one of them fallen pregnant by him and given birth to a Terry whom she subsequently abandoned?
"Still, it can't be much fun living rough like this."
"Yeah, well, I'm not the first to do it, and I sure as hell won't be the last. Like I said, I get by. Whatever man has done, man can do."
The expression seemed an unlikely one for a youngster like Terry to use. "Is that something Billy used to say?"
The lad gave an indifferent shrug. "Maybe. He were always fucking preaching at me." His voice took on a more refined tone. '"You cannot have rights without responsibility, Terry. Man's greatest sin is pride because he dethrones God at his peril. Be prepared-the day of judgment is closer than you think.' " He reverted to his own, rougher accent. "I'm telling you, it did your head in to listen to him. He were a right nutter most of the time, but he meant well and I reckon I learnt a thing or two off of him."
"Like what?"
Terry grinned. "Like, fools ask questions that wise men cannot answer."