“I thought my heart was broken.”
“No,” said the demon, without hate, “you didn’t.” It stared at him with expressionless eyes, and he was forced to look away.
“I thought, now she’ll never know I’ve been sleeping with her sister.”
The demon took apart his life, moment by moment, instant to awful instant. It lasted a hundred years, perhaps, or a thousand—they had all the time there ever was, in that gray room—and toward the end he realized that the demon had been right. The physical torture had been kinder.
And it ended.
And once it had ended, it began again. There was a self-knowledge there he had not had the first time, which somehow made everything worse.
Now, as he spoke, he hated himself. There were no lies, no evasions, no room for anything except the pain and the anger.
He spoke. He no longer wept. And when he finished, a thousand years later, he prayed that now the demon would go to the wall, and bring down the skinning knife, or the choke-pear, or the screws.
“Again,” said the demon.
He began to scream. He screamed for a long time.
“Again,” said the demon, when he was done, as if nothing had been said.
It was like peeling an onion. This time through his life he learned about consequences. He learned the results of things he had done; things he had been blind to as he did them; the ways he had hurt the world; the damage he had done to people he had never known, or met, or encountered. It was the hardest lesson yet.
“Again,” said the demon, a thousand years later.
He crouched on the floor, beside the brazier, rocking gently, his eyes closed, and he told the story of his life, re-experiencing it as he told it, from birth to death, changing nothing, leaving nothing out, facing everything. He opened his heart.
When he was done, he sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the voice to say, “Again,” but nothing was said. He opened his eyes.
Slowly, he stood up. He was alone.
At the far end of the room, there was a door, and as he watched, it opened.
A man stepped through the door. There was terror in the man’s face, and arrogance, and pride. The man, who wore expensive clothes, took several hesitant steps into the room, and then stopped.
When he saw the man, he understood.
“Time is fluid here,” he told the new arrival.
KEEPSAKES AND TREASURES
I am his Highness’ dog at Kew
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
ALEXANDER POPE,
On the Collar of a Dog Which I
Gave to His Royal Highness
You can call me a bastard if you like. It’s true, whichever way you want to cut it. My mum had me two years after being locked up “for her own protection”; this was back in 1952, when a couple of wild nights out with the local lads could be diagnosed as clinical nymphomania, and you could be put away “to protect yourself and society” on the say-so of any two doctors. One of whom was her father, my grandfather, the other was his partner in the north London medical practice they shared.
So I know who my grandfather was. But my father was just somebody who shagged my mother somewhere in the building or grounds of St. Andrews Asylum. That’s a nice word, isn’t it? Asylum. With all its implications of a place of safety: somewhere that shelters you from the bitter and dangerous old world outside. Nothing like the reality of that hole. I went to see it, before they knocked it down in the late seventies. It still reeked of piss and pine-scented disinfectant floor wash. Long, dark badly lit corridors with clusters of tiny, cell-like rooms off them. If you were looking for Hell and you found St. Andrews you’d not have been disappointed.
It says on her medical records that she’d spread her legs for anyone, but I doubt it. She was locked up back then. Anyone who wanted to stick his cock into her would have needed a key to her cell.
When I was eighteen I spent my last summer holiday before I went up to university hunting down the four men who were most likely to have been my father: two psychiatric nurses, the secure ward doctor, and the governor of the asylum.
My mum was only seventeen when she went inside. I’ve got a little black-and-white wallet photograph of her from just before she was put away. She’s leaning against the side of a Morgan sports car parked in a country lane. She’s smiling, sort of flirtily, at the photographer. She was a looker, my mum.
I didn’t know which one of the four was my dad, so I killed all of them. They had each fucked her, after all: I got them to admit to it, before I did them in. The best was the governor, a red-faced fleshy old lech with an honest-to-goodness handlebar mustache, like I haven’t seen for twenty years now. I garotted him with his Guards tie. Spit bubbles came from his mouth, and he went blue as an unboiled lobster.