Banquet for the Damned

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Harry looks across a sea of expectant faces. Seated in a semicircle around the dais, in the expansive wood-panelled Parliamentary Hall, five hundred new postgrads are waiting. About to begin Masters degrees and PhDs, they look up at him from below the oil portraits of the old deans with dour faces, each worthy's name etched in bronze at the bottom of his frame. Tired wisdom above the eager, serious faces beneath.

Harry smiles, sending his stare and welcome out and into the smells of antiquity, and the sounds of fidgeters, coughers, and bench scrapers. His head, mercifully, is clearer now. Two aspirin and a pint of orange juice have erased the damage inflicted by Dante's whisky, Arthur's story, and a night of interrupted sleep. He looks down at his notes and straightens the card on the top of a neat pile. In his mind, he straightens his thoughts too; he blinks quickly, inhales, clears his throat and thinks of the first line of his speech. The whole thing timed at twenty minutes. Honed after ten years as Proctor of the university. He says, more or less, the same thing every year to the assembled scholars.

Final fidgets and hushed conversations subside. His lips part and so do the large wooden doors at the rear of the hall. They click open. Heads turn and Harry squints over the rims of his reading glasses in anticipation of watching sheepish late arrivals shuffle through. But no one enters the hall. Instead, a gust of cold air, wet with rain, hisses through the aperture and lifts introductory papers off the empty seats.

'Looks like a restless spirit has come to hear your speech,' someone says, from the chairs behind him on the stage, where the staff sit. Harry turns, curious. It is George Dickell, Head of Careers, draped in his black academic gown. George laughs. Harry smiles, but with difficulty.

Someone from the back row stands up and closes the door, the sound of their heels echoing to the ceiling, so far above. 'I'll start again,' Harry says, a quaver in his voice. Did the staff notice? 'Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to begin this morning by welcoming you to St Andrews University, for the beginning of the Martinmas term. I hope my short introduction isn't as grim as the weather.' A ripple of titters passes through the rows of chairs, but soon falls mute. 'Assembled behind me is a hand-picked regiment of crack troops —' Harry turns to nod at his colleagues '— the Chaplain, Head of Library Services, our Student Union President, and Careers Officer.' But no Hebdomidar. Where is Arthur? No call, no notice of absence. Did he go out to the cottage last night like a damned fool, with that damned fool Dante? 'They'll take a little of your time to introduce the various services of their offices. At St Andrews, I believe we offer the very best in support services to the postgraduate body…' He pauses. There appears to be a small commotion in one of the back rows. Someone at the corner of his vision stands up. They are tall, very tall. He takes another glance down at his notes to find the thread, to stop the stutter. But the far-off figure, which blends into the long curtains, fails to sit down. Harry clears his throat and peers out. A long arm stretches upward, as if to wave at him. From the back, now, where the rows are empty, and the grey light is lost in the gathers and folds of the dark curtains, a thin arm beckons.

Harry swallows and says something about academic excellence.

Wrong paragraph. There is a joke before that. He missed it. Will they not sit down?

'Yes?' he says, aloud, looking to the back of the hall. Everyone below turns also to look at the interrupter.

Harry squints. Moving his head to the side, he tries to find a ray of weak light in which to see the upright figure. A fetid odour rolls over the podium. He looks away, one hand raised instinctively to his nose to block out the stench. A shuffling begins in the rows of chairs beneath him. Behind him, a flash of white catches his eye. It is the chaplain's arm, rising to smother an offended nose. 'This town is very old,' Harry says aloud. 'I think it's time we replaced the sewers.'

There is an uncomfortable silence below, and then some laughter — confused, nervous — followed by whispers. Alarm at the stench rises through him and tightens his throat. Humiliation sweats across his brow. His eyes dart back and forth to pick out the chaplain at his side, on the left of the stage. The man's usually florid face is ashen. He is perspiring too. The familiar jolly smile is gone. The priest fishes a handkerchief from a tight pocket in his three-piece suit and applies it to his face. 'Are you…' Harry begins, looking at the man.

More chatter rises from below the stage. One or two words are said aloud from the audience too, but are soon lost among the dry shuffles of feet and the creak of benches.

The Student Union President places a hand on the chaplain's arm and whispers something to the sweating man. The chaplain retches. A loud burping sound issues from his round body. His teeth clamp shut and his cheeks fill out as if he is about to play jazz trumpet. A fine milky spray squirts through his teeth and lands on his black trousers. The Union President gasps. Below the dais, chairs scrape backward, and several female voices express concern aloud. The smell in the hall worsens, and now Harry coughs to expel the taste from his mouth and nose.

The chaplain is helped to his feet and guided toward the fire exit at the left of the stage. Students in the back rows leave their seats, their heads bent forward on to their chests so their noses can escape the worst of the stench. Others from the front join the evacuation from Parliamentary Hall, desperate for clean air. 'I have no idea what this could be,' Harry calls from the dais. 'Sewers,' he adds, and thrusts his forearm across his nose, the scent of the chaplain's vomit fresh like vinaigrette about his face.

The chaplain burps again, loudly, and expels the load in his mouth down his vestments, onto his shoes and across the outstretched arm of the President. It makes a splashing sound that won't stop. There seems to be so much of it.

Speechless, Harry turns back to the audience, now thinning so quickly. Should a recess be offered? A medic called for the chaplain? An appeal for calm and an apology? His thinking derails; he is confused, and the stench is truly awful now, impossible to withstand. Amongst the now fleeing, gagging students, who leap from their seats and stumble to the main doors, creating a tumultuous clatter and scraping, Harry sees the tall, standing figure at the back of the hall again. It moves.

'Jesus,' he says, and falls back from the dais. It grins and the arms, too long, sweep out to catch a young woman with short black hair. She is pulled to it and smothered in a grotesque embrace. The smell of corruption intensifies. She screams, her silky bob suddenly animate around the howl of her mouth. Her stocky legs are pulled from the ground. 'No!' Harry calls. He rushes forward and clears the dais of his notes.

On his knees now, he looks up, but sees nothing. His vision has dissolved into a myriad of tiny hexagons, as if he is peering through the eyes of a fly. An excited voice whispers in his head. 'Dies Irae,' it says.

'No!' Harry cries out, and shakes his head.

'Sit tibi terra levis,' it says. Harry knows the line. The meaning returns from his days teaching Classics: 'May the earth rest lightly on you.' Dropping his head, he covers his eyes with his hands. His grey hair flaps across his forehead.

'Harry,' someone says, from nearby.

'No!' Harry shouts.

'Harry! For God's sake. Harry, what is it?' Another voice.

His vision clears. The smell vanishes. His eyes refocus and the tiny pixels disappear from his eyesight. George Dickell is bent over, staring at him, his face shocked white.

'Did you see it?' Harry asks.

'See what?' Dickell asks.

'That,' Harry says, not daring to look up, but pointing at the rear of the hall. 'The smell,' he whimpers.

'Let's get you some help,' the chaplain says, on his other side, his voice kind, his cheeks red, his black suit clean and pressed. But how can this be? Harry looks away from them and back to the hall. It is full of seated, silent students. The doors to the hall are closed. No one stands tall at the back near the curtains.

'You were ill,' he says, in a weak, humiliated voice to the chaplain. 'I saw you being ill.'

'Come on, let's get him out of here,' the chaplain says to George.

Harry is helped to his feet. The Student Union President is talking now from behind the dais, his voice thick with embarrassment as he apologises and tries to make light of the Proctor's disgrace.

'I couldn't have imagined it,' Harry says. Embarrassment melts the ice of terror from his face and back.

'You're not well, Harry. Get some air, for God's sake,' George says.

'He's all right, he's all right. It's OK. Harry, my man, you've had a funny turn,' says the chaplain.

Harry breaks from their soft, guiding hands and runs from the stage.

Beside his watch on the bedside cabinet, he places the coins from his trouser pockets. They slide against the metal bracelet of the watch. Harry sighs. Carefully, despite the thick-headedness of sleep and sedation, he restacks every coin on the coaster, where his mugs of morning tea are usually left by Barbara, his wife. Fifty-pence pieces at the bottom of the stack, followed by the chunky one-pound coins, topped by the twenties, the fives, and then the one-penny coins. No two-pence pieces: lucky. Over his vest, he buttons his pyjama top, and then slinks beneath the duvet. He shivers until the sheets around his feet warm.

Gradually the sense of ridiculousness at having to go to bed in the afternoon subsides. He closes his eyes, and everything swims in the reddish-black sea behind his lids. Voices and scenes from the morning drift through his mind: 'Your blood pressure's a little high, but it's nothing to get worried about,' the doctor had said, his patient face unmoving.

No good. The doctor was no help. Where were the answers to explain what he saw? And the stench; the appalling smell in Parliament Hall. What of that? 'Why did I see things?' he'd asked.

'Stress?' the doctor offered, with his back to Harry, who had remained, slumped, on the surgery bed once the checkup was over.

'I'm telling you,' Harry had said, far too quickly from where he lay, too preoccupied to jump from the squeaky mattress to dress in the customary haste, after revealing his nakedness to a stranger with hands that smelled of soap. 'It was as if the world changed. All around me, you know. My vision was… altered. It went into a hundred little shapes. And I saw the chaplain, quite clearly, get up from his seat and become ill. Stress doesn't do that.'

'No,' the doctor had said. 'It's not likely. No medication, you say?'

Harry remembered looking at the ceiling of the surgery, and raising both hands in exasperation. 'No.'

'And you're absolutely sure you didn't eat anything disagreeable? Flu symptoms? Any of these unpleasant smells before?'

'No,' Harry had said, emphatically. 'Maybe I'm not sleeping too well, but with…' He paused. 'With the start of the new year, everyone is up to their eyeballs. But to imagine something like that. A complete scene, a whole moment, and to then find myself standing like an idiot before the entire postgraduate body.' His face had flushed scarlet and he had closed his eyes for the worst of the feeling to pass. 'Doesn't make any sense at all.'

'No, it doesn't,' the doctor had agreed, nodding. 'I'll send your blood tests off and I'd like you to go to the Memorial Hospital for a scan. Just to be sure. If you have a repeat experience, call the surgery immediately.'

'Maybe I need a priest,' Harry had said, softly, while he buttoned his shirt.

Then he'd driven home, with the prescribed pills in a paper bag, rustling in his overcoat pocket. A speckle of rain had blurred the world, in between the swipes of the wiper blades on his windscreen. But he never saw much past the bonnet of his car, with only the vaguest presence of mind to keep the car on the road while making another fruitless phone call to Arthur on his mobile.

'Not in this morning, Harry,' Marcia had said. 'Have you tried Parliament Hall? He's supposed to be there.'

'I've just come from there. Why would I look there if I've just come from there?' Run from there, he wanted to shout.

Her end of the phone stayed silent.

'Sorry,' he'd said, clutching at the bits of himself that still made sense. 'Sorry, Marcia.'

'Is everything all right —' she began, but he cut her off and dropped the phone, only to pick it back up and place it in symmetry with the side of the passenger seat.

Was the episode with the postgrads nothing more than a reaction to the night before? Maybe it made him peculiarly sensitive; Arthur's story has played on his imagination and made him hallucinate. That is all, perhaps, and it is over now. A funny turn. Not surprising. But the face. The face that looked back from the dark at him.

He turns over in bed and presses his head, hard, into the pillow. Don't allow it. Don't allow yourself to dwell on it. 'No,' he'd even said, aloud in the car when he thought of the face. With a free hand, he'd had to straighten the rack of cassettes before the gear stick, and then adjust the folded windscreen cloth on the dashboard, to force it out of his mind and away. Taking the pills to sleep it off is the only option, the only thing that can offer peace.

He'll phone Arthur again in the evening, when he wakes up. Find out where he's been. What more can he do?

Lying in bed, he begins to fall asleep in stages, only to jolt back out of them again, moments later, as he tries to remember the actual journey back from the doctor's. Where did all the familiar turns go, and the traffic islands he drove around, and the landmarks? 'Not like me at all, at all, at all,' he whispers. The sedatives are strong. His mind softens into the pillows. Never needed them before. Never needed tablets. But the face, from the back of the hall — the grinning of it. Oh, Jesus. Don't take it to sleep with you, he tells himself, over and over again. Let the tablets kill it.

He wasted no time gulping them back in the kitchen, after plucking a glass from the draining board beside the sink. Three of the red and white capsules, instead of two after a meal, are inside him now, swallowed with ease where ordinarily he struggles to swallow any medication, and always has done since childhood.

Did he call the office? Yes, on his way up the stairs to bed. He left a message with his secretary too. He remembers wincing all the time he spoke, at the thought of the explanations he will have to make about his performance in Parliamentary Hall. They will think him mad. And Barbara? Still at work at the tourist board, but he's left her a note, pinned under the magnetic strawberry on the fridge door. That is all he can do. Yes, he's done everything he possibly can now.

In the large bed, with sleep so near and his thoughts dimming, he feels better. What little natural light remains outside, he's already closed the thick curtains against. Sleep will heal him. The doctor says so. Harry curls his legs and arms into the foetal position and wraps the duvet tighter around his body. He sleeps.

Barbara reads Harry's note left under the little rubber strawberry on the fridge door. She smiles. He often leaves his excuses there. She remembers all of the late nights he had three years before. Business dinners and negotiations with the people who built New Hall, and there were funding bodies for the new Chemistry research investments to meet too. Lunches, conventions, papers, admissions, vivas and hotel functions, dozens of them, a few she attended, most not. Harry wrote about them all, neatly and briefly on yellow notes, night after night, and left them for her on the fridge door. And all the time he'd been seeing Janice.

Pouring herself a large sherry, she knows she should eat something too, because her stomach is playing up. It isn't painful this time; the ulcer is long gone, disappearing as if by miracle when she made a very special acquaintance. Tonight, she won't need to sit in a chair and sip warm milk and eat the chalky tablets that taste of marzipan. This is a different kind of disturbance making the little splashing and gurgling sounds inside her tummy. Something she experiences more now, now things are changing in her life, in the town, and in the world out there. Hasn't felt this kind of excitement since her teens. She realises that now. Part of her has reawoken, quite suddenly. Changed: like the weather, and the sound on the streets and between the old buildings, and in all the places now in ruin. Something you can taste and smell, that tingles in every joint and digit, that rushes through your veins like flood water — it is all coming back to those who need it most. And those that don't understand, or can't, or refuse to, like Harry, like the people so long ago in Beth's time, well, there is no place for them.

Fresh blood and old magic, Beth says. This is what is needed. So give. Everyone must give.

It is her turn tonight and she's waited long enough for it to arrive. Time her sons had a new father — someone stronger and more attentive. Her own boys are young men now and if she isn't careful they'll turn out like Harry. No, they are to be great men and not tired devious nit-picking fools, obsessed with inter-departmental intrigue, with habits and obsessions that fill the mind up with stale flour.

We were close today, Beth said.

They nearly had him this morning. Harry will never realise how close he came to not making it home. To not seeing his own bed again. Now their lord is stronger, he can brave the daylight, go out beneath the sun if he chooses, and the hunt can be watched by something other than moonlight on distant sands. But Harry was lucky, if only temporarily, to get home and safe to bed.

Barbara finishes her sherry and places it on the coffee table and not on top of a coaster. She sees the wet ring the base of the glass creates on the tabletop, and laughs to herself. It will go sticky. Pity Harry won't be around to see it when he wakes up.

She checks her watch and stops laughing. There is work to do. Preparations to make. And they still have to be careful. The bigger something becomes, the more people hear about it. Eliot realised that back in the beginning, he who worked so hard to speak to someone who was standing right behind him the whole time. To think, they were here all this time. Never went away. All they needed was a fool.

Walking confidently into the wide lounge, she spots a newspaper from the day before, and thinks of chips wrapped in newsprint, and how the paper soaks up all the grease. Carefully, she separates it, page from page, and tucks the sheets of paper under her arm. As she turns to march back into the kitchen, she pauses, distracted by something on the shelf above the fireplace. Between the photos of her boys in their school uniforms is a photograph, framed in pewter. She and Harry in Tenerife. Barbara and Harry, 1992. She smiles, feeling slightly faint with another rush of excitement up from the stomach, and turns the frame around so their browned and smiling faces look at the wall.

Back in the kitchen, Barbara opens the utility cupboard between the owl calendar and the microwave. Rummaging around amongst indoor brooms, dust pans, and green Wellington boots, she finds what she is looking for. Her hands return to the kitchen light holding the tight roll of black plastic bin bags. On the marble chopping board, using the scissors with white plastic handles that she uses to cut through bacon rind, Barbara slices the bags along each seam at the sides, so they become large rectangular sheets; plastic and waterproof.

Closing her eyes, she tries to imagine the size of the bedroom. Eight or nine bags she will need. No, maybe ten. Twelve to be safe. With the carpet so new, and considering how excited he becomes when near the given and the chosen. Not to mention how hard it was to remove the stain from her cream pullover after cutting her finger on the vegetable knife; it is better to lay too much than not enough. She'd better retrieve the old sheets they used for decorating as well, the ones they placed under the ladder and over the floor while they painted the ceiling. Newspaper and linen at the bottom as an underlay, with the plastic sheets on top. Should do the trick if she arranges them all around the bed. The walls can be wiped afterward and most of the liquid will be gone anyway, by the time Harry is dragged down the stairs and taken into the garden.

Now that reminds her of something. She re-enters the lounge and, despite the cold and drizzly rain falling on the garden, she unlocks the patio doors and then lodges them aside. Best precaution to take, considering Marcia has called in the glaziers twice in as many weeks, to repair her sliding doors.

Back in the kitchen while she works — preparing buckets of bleach enriched water, readying floor cloths, opening a new packet of scouring pads — Barbara listens to the cassette player by the bread bin.

Instead of Radio Four — about the only thing Harry can tolerate on even a low volume — she listens to her old Shangri-Las tape. The one with the missing case. It is unlikely the sound of the music will disturb Harry after taking the sleeping pills. She's seen the bottle and, at one time, before she regained her deep and natural sleep, she used the same brand to get through all of those evenings alone, when Harry was out late and her stomach refused to give her a moment's peace.

Humming through the opening bars, she then begins to sing, 'Here comes my guy, walking down the street.' Nearly time to go up the stairs to lay those sheets out. And then, the phone call. So easy, Marcia said. 'And when I see him in the street, my heart takes a leap and skips a beat. Tell him that I love him, tell him that I care, tell him I'll always be there.'

Barbara drops her sponge and rests her back against the kitchen cabinets. It is too much excitement to bear. Will she see him, when he comes into the house? Best to hide, Beth said. 'Sometimes our lord's passions cannot be trusted. They go astray.'

It's the silence before he stirs, deep and cold as a flat lake, that Barbara loves most. How the air settles, as if every busy particle has stopped in awe or in fear. As if even the earth stops spinning when the god comes. She's seen the face of her friend after she gave to him. How fine Marcia looked after acquiring not one, but two for him. To give for honour, for the momentum of what has begun and will rise further until no one, no one at all, can stop it. To offer something for his reward. Our lord.

Harry sleeps but he will wake, she thinks. She smiles. At the sound of his step, he will open his eyes and see a god coming to him. Just for him.