one of my mates, but I would have thought that John, of all people, was way out of bounds. You’re supposed to be her best friend, for Christ’s sake! And what on Earth could he be thinking of? It’s one in the eye for us both—but we do have to be adult about these things, don’t we?’
There was a tiny hint of self-congratulation in his voice, born of the tacit assertion that he wasn’t the kind of guy who would go around fucking his best friend’s wife. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never once heard Howard the Flasher say ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ It was difficult to understand, at that particular moment, why I’d ever been besotted with him.
Then he smiled, and I remembered.
‘I know you better than Barbara does,’ he said, mistakenly. ‘I know you’re tougher than you look, and smarter than any of us. You wanted to throw a scare into her, didn’t you? It was something you and John cooked up together, wasn’t it?’
I smiled too. ‘I wanted to throw a scare into her all right,’ I said. ‘And you’re absolutely right—it was something I cooked up, with John in mind. Are you sure you don’t want that drink?’
‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew you couldn’t really be sitting upstairs sticking pins and needles into voodoo dolls. I knew it had to be a joke—like all that awful music you like so much.’
He laughed. That was Howard all over; whenever he was in doubt, he laughed. The first time he’d found out about his wife’s little adventures he’d probably had to choke back a tear or two, but in the end, he would have decided to laugh about it. He would have pursed his lips, gritted his teeth, and matched her adventure for adventure, so that they could both laugh at life’s little ironies, and congratulate one another on how civilized they were.
I had to put a stop to that train of thought, or I’d have merited far too many thorns to fit into any mere crown. I’d already opened the door to the sitting room and I was standing there like some midget butler, trying to usher him through. ‘Drink?’ I said, again. Men are like dogs; if you reduce communication to one-word sentences and repeat them often enough they usually get the message eventually.
‘Well, OK,’ he said. ‘Just one—I’m driving. Bloody Mary, if that’s OK.’ His BMW was bigger than John’s Peugeot, but he had two more points on his license. He’d never have sunk two doubles in the Rat & Parrot or the Newt & Cucumber and then got back behind the wheel.
When he sat down on the settee, though, the Flasher looked around yet again, furtively. ‘Where is John?’ he asked.
‘Oh, he’s already gone,’ I said. ‘Barbie knew that, of course. If I had to guess, I’d say that she probably only sent you round here in the hope that I’d beg you to fuck my brains out, so that I’d lose the moral high ground in this business between John and her. I think she’d prefer me to get even in the ordinary way, rather than stick her effigy into a candle flame and watch it burn. Well, she would, wouldn’t she?’
I handed him the Bloody Mary; I knew that Howard never drank whisky, so I’d already poured the stuff in the doctored bottle down the sink. He looked at me in complete confusion, although I thought I’d detected a faint hopeful gleam in his eye when I mentioned the possibility of his fucking my brains out. Flashers are always teed up to respond to sweet nothings of that kind.
‘I always loved that dry sense of humor,’ he said. ‘It drives Barb crazy, though. I really am sorry, you know—about her and John. I can take it, but I know how cut up you must be. If I’d known...I really am sorry. She is too, you know. She just didn’t think....’
‘If you were John,’ I informed him, ‘I’d owe you half a dozen needles by now—and I only have the thicker ones left. But you’re not John, are you? You were never that cold-hearted.’
He laughed again, in a curiously dutiful fashion, even though he didn’t have a clue what the remark about the needles signified.
‘Come upstairs,’ I said to him, opening the door again. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’
The gleam came back into his eye, flashing at me as he turned his head. He honestly thought I meant the bed. He honestly thought that if I really believed that Barbara had sent him around to give me a chance to even the score, I might have given her the satisfaction of taking the bait. He didn’t know me at all, and never had.
I suppose I would have wondered again what I could ever have seen in him, if he hadn’t already been flashing his smile
I’d hung around with girls prettier than myself long before I met Barbara Schiff, of course. At school, I’d gone with better-looking acquaintances to discos—even to gigs when the rare opportunity presented itself to see one of my favourite bands outside the hallowed environs of the Pagan Federation Conference. I knew well enough how such things worked: how predatory boys hunted in pairs, eyeing up their paired targets with assumed expertise, mouthing the usual clichés like the oldest rituals in the grimoire: Don’t fancy yours much. You take the little one; I’ll handle the Wonderbra. You take the thin one—she won’t need as much oiling. In my teens, though, that sort of thing had all been safely confined to the odd evening out, after which—no matter what might develop or how far things might go—everybody went home.
With Howard and John and Barbara it was different; we already were home. We lived on the same corridor, shared the same kitchen. John and I even attended the same lectures—but Howard was a historian and Barbara, thinking herself more fashionable by far than the rest of us, was doing Media Studies.
Left to ourselves, Coldheart John and I would probably have kept our distance from one another, or collided once and moved apart, never pausing overlong thereafter as our paths criss-crossed—but we weren’t left to ourselves. We were part of something larger and more complicated. We were entangled, by Flasher’s flair and animal magnetism, by Mischief’s leadership and Machiavellian scheming.
When Mischief decided that she must have Flasher she also decided that Rag Doll, whose initial attraction had been to him, must be fobbed off with Coldheart, whose initial attraction had been to her, thus neutralizing both potential inconveniences. It was probably unnecessary, and could easily have proved pointless, but that was the way she saw it. Once the precedent had been set, she returned time and time again to that same formularistic curse: ‘When you marry Coldheart’.
Never once did Barbie say, ‘When I marry Flasher’, but she never needed to. All she needed to do was to repeat her own spell over and over, until the people around her began to take it for granted. I never did, of course, but I was a witch and had been trained to know witchcraft when I saw it, even when it was being used by someone who would have laughed her socks off at the thought of the Pagan Federation’s Annual Conference. John and Howard had no idea, any more than Dad or Keith would have done. They accepted the assumption without ever realizing that they were being bound by a spell. By slow degrees, as our first year progressed, we stopped being a quartet and became two pairs.
Maybe, if I’d cast a counter spell soon enough, I could have turned the thing around—but I didn’t have Barbie’s advantages. I’d had a lifetime of knowing what to look for, but I’d never been able to take any of it seriously. She’d had a lifetime of blissful ignorance, and was able to take what she was doing very seriously indeed because she thought of it as common sense instead of magic, as everyday lust instead of demonic possession, as playing with words instead of laying curses.
If I’d been able to tell my mother, she would probably have helped me out. If Mrs. Cole hadn’t ‘passed over’, I could have consulted her, but she had gone to sleep in the bosom
