It was too early in the day for drinking but I badly wanted a drink. I headed for The Blue Posts knowing they’d be closed but hoping for sanctuary from the weirdness of the day. When I got there I found Grace Kowalski looking at the closed doors and shaking her head. ‘I know it’s too early,’ she said, ‘but I feel like drinking and I don’t want to do it alone.’
‘Bombers evidently can’t disturb the British licensing laws,’ I said.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Come up to my place and we’ll do early drinking not alone.’
The baseball bat in its velvet sheath was slung from her shoulder as before. ‘I see that Irv is with you,’ I said.
‘Always.’
‘I hope some day to hear Irv’s history.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘It’s a matter of how much disbelief you can suspend. Do you work out?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Suspending enough disbelief to believe Irv’s history would be roughly equivalent to pressing four hundred pounds.’
‘Maybe I could suspend a little each day and gradually work my way up to the full whack.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Grace. The shop was closed; we went up the stairs to the studio. The place smelled of soldering and unknown chemicals. On the workbench were coils of brass and silver wire, various small pliers and cutters, and boxes filled with bits of coloured glass. In the vice was an unfinished angel brooch, brilliantly bejewelled. On the workbench lay a goat done in yellow, orange and brown glass. It was a longhaired goat like the one in the William Holman Hunt painting.
‘Scapegoat?’ I said.
‘Right,’ said Grace.
‘Odd thing for someone to wear.’
‘I have odd customers.’
‘There’s a verse in Leviticus that tells how Aaron put all the iniquities and sins of the children of Israel on the head of the goat and drove it out into the wilderness.’
‘To Azazel,’ said Grace, ‘the demon of the desert.’
‘So who’s ordered this goat?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say. But there are a lot of deserts about, and where there’s a desert you’ll find Azazel. Drink is next on the programme: all I have is vodka.’
‘Didn’t you say that the ravages of time had forced you to switch to beer?’
‘I lied,’ she said. She went to the fridge and took a bottle of Stolichnaya from the freezer. She poured two glasses and we clinked. ‘Here’s looking at you,’ said Grace.
‘Here’s looking right back.’ The cold vodka went down my neck beautifully, and after the third glass it seemed the icy blast of pure reason. ‘Your bat’s named after one some,’ I said. ‘Someone.’
Grace nodded. ‘Irv Goodman. Fell in love too late.’
‘With you?’
‘With me. He was eighty-three.’
‘Ah.’
‘We were both in the nick and he got pneumonia and died a week after they let us go.’
‘I’m sorry. Why were you in the nick?’
‘DI Hunter didn’t believe what we told him and he was pissed off so he locked us up.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘You wouldn’t believe it either.’
‘Anything to do with vumpires, ampires?’
‘Maybe, but not the usual kind — there’s a batrachian elephant, element.’
‘What’s a batrachian elephant?’
‘Frogs and toads. Am I making myself queer?’
‘Transparently but can leave it for another time. Now think I’ll go home and have little lie-down.’
Getting home wasn’t easy — the Underground was shut down and taxis were not to be had. I walked for a long time and then stood by the curb looking hopeful and was finally picked up by a man on a red Yamaha who lived in Hammersmith and chivalrously dropped me at my door.
I got there just in time for a throw-up before the lie-down. Up came breakfast and vodka, the bombs in the Underground and bus, the dead and the injured, my morning sadness and everything else.
I slept until almost five, realised I didn’t know if Phil was all right, and rang him up. I got his answering machine and left a message for him to phone me. Then I made a coffee and waited for the phone to ring. After the third cup it rang. ‘Barbara,’ said Phil, ‘are you all right?’
‘I’m OK. I was nowhere near any explosions. What about you?’
‘I’m OK. It’s a surreal kind of day and I haven’t really taken it in yet. I’m at Euston, about to leave for Scotland.’
‘How come?’
‘I’m tutoring a writing course at Diamond Heart — it’s near Port Malkie on the Moray Firth. I didn’t know about it until this morning — the guy who was scheduled to do it is off sick so they called me.’
‘How long will you be gone?’
‘A week — it’s a residential thing. The course I’m taking over is “The Search for Page One”.’
‘I hope you find it. How is it with all those people living together up there?’
‘It’s about what you’d expect — people talk bollocks, get laid, and do a little writing that I have to read and help them with.’
‘Do the women tend to need a lot of help?’
‘Depends on the tutor. Ken Hackett who was meant to do the course is a good-looking guy with a high scoring average.’
‘What about you?’
‘This time I’ll confine my tutoring to talking bollocks. But no sex.’
‘You’re giving it up for Yom Kippur?’
‘I don’t want to weaken the connection.’
‘What connection is that?’
‘The one between you and me.’
Pause.
‘Barbara?’
‘I’m here. I was letting your words linger in my ear.’
‘Ah, that’s nice. I have to go now, I’ll phone you when I get there.’
‘Don’t phone — I’d like a week where we can walk around in each other’s minds and listen to each other without telephones.’
‘OK. If I say anything good, write it down. I’m off, see you in a week.’
‘See you.’
I was thinking about that connection between us, wondering if it was like the string between two tin-can telephones. I sat there with my finger in my navel for a while, then I went into the kitchen to make some coffee.
Hilary was sitting there with a cup of tea and her Bible. ‘How was your day?’ I said. She’s an estate agent with Vanston here in Fulham.
‘“And I looked,”’ she said, ‘“and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” We closed early but some of the staff probably aren’t home yet. There’s an Alpha meeting tonight and I expect I’ll be back later than usual.’
Her Bible remained on the kitchen table after she left, still open at Revelation 6. Hilary likes to do that, leave the open book where my eye might be caught by the Word of God. I’m impervious to it.
Back at work the next day I was wondering where the stars and planets stood with yesterday’s bombings. The Times had star maps every month and the constellations drawn in white lines and dots on the black circle of July’s night sky certainly seemed to be telling us something. Mercury and Venus were low in the northwest but there was nothing that interested me in the rest of the text.
At the studio I googled around and found The Visual Astrology Newsletter. ‘Nergal claims the empty sky…’ was the first thing it said. I liked the sound of that so I read on. ‘The sky has never stopped talking; rather we have stopped listening,’ said Bernadette Brady, the writer of the newsletter. Using ‘concepts discussed by the Chaldean priests of over 2,500 years ago’ she claimed clear predictions of the death of the pope and London’s successful Olympics bid.