‘Fix, it’s me.’ Pen’s voice, sounding just a whisker away from hysterical. ‘I’m at the Stanger. You’ve got to get over here. It’s Rafi, Fix. It’s Rafi!’
‘What’s wrong with Rafi?’ I asked, my heart plummeting into my shoes.
‘Nothing!’ She said. ‘Nothing!’ And then tears choked out her words for a good couple of minutes.
9
Rafi cried for a good long time, and that was painful to watch – but his present calm was worse in a way. It had a flavour of shell-shock to it.
‘Two years! Two fucking years! No, that’s not – that’s not even funny.’ He shook his head, hitting that solid wall of incomprehension again – unable to make himself believe.
Pen was beside him on the faded sofa: beside him, and entwined with him, and clinging to him as if he was a life jacket and she was adrift in stormy seas. She was crying too, and repeating his name whenever she could get her breath in between the racking sobs. He looked at me over her head, a look of mute terror and appeal.
‘It feels like I just went to sleep, and then woke up,’ he muttered. ‘I was in that sod-awful flat down Seven Sisters Road. You were there, Fix. I was talking to you, and for some reason I was . . . I guess, lying down, or something. Anyway, you were above me looking down. Then I closed my eyes, and . . . I had really bad dreams. The kind where if it was a movie you’d wake up screaming, but you try that and you find out you can’t.’ A new thought occurred to him. ‘Ginny. Did Ginny see all this? Where is she? Is she outside?’
‘Was that the girl?’ I asked, and he nodded. I remembered the white-blonde, stick-thin apparition who’d worked beside me through the hours of that night, shovelling off-licence ice packs into the bath where Rafi lay sprawled, to stop the water that was keeping his temperature down from boiling away. Rafi was right, it had been a bit like a dream – and she’d been one of the things that faded with the daybreak. I’d never seen her again, and it turned out the flat was only in Rafi’s name so there was no way of contacting her. ‘I lost touch with her,’ I murmured – which had the merit of being accurate without hitting him in the face with how quickly his lady had bailed out on him.
He knew how to read between the lines, though; and two years of being Asmodeus’s finger puppet had left him a little deficient in the putting-a-brave-face-on-it department. I had to look away from the naked pain in his eyes.
I was fervently grateful that this scene wasn’t being played out in Rafi’s cell. Doctor Webb – despite the lingering unpleasantness of Saturday’s punch-up – had allowed us to use one of the interview suites, only insisting that a male nurse stay in attendance and that we should all be locked in until we signalled that the visit was over. The nurse – a humourless Welshman named Kenneth, about the size and heft of a bulldozer – stood in the corner of the room watching Coronation Street without sound on the wall-mounted TV: it was as close to privacy as the Stanger offered.
‘I was possessed,’ said Rafi, sounding as though he was once again trying the concept on for size and finding that it didn’t even go over his shoulders. ‘Asmodeus took me over. Lived inside my body.’
‘Rafi, love,’ said Pen, wiping her bleary eyes, ‘you shouldn’t keep going over this. You want to get well first. Then later on, when you’re . . .’
She tailed off into silence because Rafi was shaking his head with slow, stern emphasis. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I need to know where I’ve been. You can’t just sit up in bed, yawn and stretch and get on with your life. Not after two years.’
‘It won’t be that easy in any case,’ I said, feeling it my duty as bastard in residence to shoot his hopes down before they flew high enough to hurt themselves. ‘Getting on with your life, I mean. You’re not here on your own recognisance, Rafi. You were sectioned. Getting you out is going to take time. You’ll have to convince a whole lot of people you’re sane again.’
Pen glared at me as if it was my decision to make. ‘He was never mad, Fix,’ she said, her voice betraying her because all the crying had left it shaky and high. ‘You know that.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I do. But it doesn’t matter a good goddamn what I know, Pen. Rafi isn’t in here because anyone ever really thought he had a mental illness: he’s here because demonic possession isn’t legally definable – and because Asmodeus couldn’t be let out on the streets to amuse himself with the traditional demonic pastimes of torture, mutilation and murder. We did what we had to do. And unfortunately, once it’s done, it’s not quick or easy to undo.’
Pen stood up, her fists clenched, and faced me down. Just for that moment, it seemed, I was the enemy – the voice of all the unreason and all the hypocritical hedging that had put Rafi here in the first place and was happy now to leave him here until he rotted.
‘I think we’d like to be alone for a while,’ she said pointedly. I threw out my hands in a placating gesture and headed for the door.
‘Wait, Fix.’
When I turned, Rafi was looking at the ground – or maybe, had his stare fixed on the ground while he looked within himself for a script for what he was going to say next. That search seemed to absorb every ounce and inch of his attention.
‘What?’ I asked, a little brusquely. I was with Pen on this one: I wanted out. Wanted to leave them alone to match velocities again after two years in which Pen had had a life and Rafi had had a padded room. And I particularly – fervently – needed to be somewhere else when the conversation got as far as Dylan.
‘It’s not . . . undone,’ he said. There was a long, terrible silence. Then, just as I opened my mouth to ask for a translation, Rafi looked up and stared at me with an intensity that shoved the words back down my throat. ‘I mean, Asmodeus is still here. A piece of him. It’s not like he just up and left. It’s more like –’ his mouth moved for a moment in silence ‘– like he took his weight off me so that he could lean over sideways and do something else. But I can still feel him, and he can still feel me. We’re still joined.’
‘No,’ Pen protested, in a tone that was almost a moan. Neither Rafi nor I responded to that poor, orphaned little syllable.
‘Maybe that gives you a window,’ I offered uneasily. ‘Maybe someone could do a full demon-ectomy on you now. If he’s loosened his hold . . .’
‘Someone,’ said Rafi. ‘Not you?’
‘You don’t remember,’ I told him bleakly. ‘If you did, you wouldn’t ask me. I tried once, Rafi, and I fucked up – badly. That’s why his soul and yours are wrapped around each other in a lovers’ knot.’
‘That’s not the only reason. I invited him in to start with.’
In spite of myself I felt a quickening of queasy interest. I’d always wondered what the Hell Rafi had thought he was doing that night. ‘So it was Asmodeus you were fishing for?’ I asked. ‘It wasn’t an accident?’
Rafi laughed – a laugh with a crazed edge to it. ‘An accident? It was an accident that I let my guard down. But you can’t say it’s an accident if you light your cigarette with a blowtorch and you lose your eyebrows. Asmodeus was the one I was after, Fix. The books said he was one of the mightiest demons in Hell. And one of the oldest. I didn’t see any sense in working my way up from the bottom: I wanted the goods, and I wanted them fast. So I don’t blame you for what happened, Fix. I blame myself. And I’ll take any help I can get right now.’
I shook my head. ‘No. You need someone with a lighter touch. Or a steadier hand.’ Call it cowardice or scruple or whatever the hell you like, but I wanted that cup to pass away from me. I’d ruined Rafi once: I didn’t think I could live with myself if I did it again.
‘You got someone in mind?’
I thought of Juliet. ‘Maybe. I know someone who could come in and give us an opinion, anyway.’
Rafi smiled the most unconvincing smile I’ve ever seen. ‘Thanks, Fix. You’re a brick.’
‘One letter out,’ I riposted, more feebly still.