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 of the Goddess three years after I’d started secondary school. All I had to console me was my music: Corpus Delicti and All Living Fear, Ataraxia and Midnight Configuration, Faith and the Muse and Faith and Disease.
I should have fought back, but I didn’t. All I could do, then, was to swear that if Mischief ever took back what she had given, running needles into my eyes to start my bitter tears, then I would make her suffer in return—even though I knew that any curse I laid would hurt me too.
It didn’t seem appropriate to change the record, so I put ‘Funeral Nation’ on again while I showed Howard the two dolls I’d adapted and the two dolls I’d made. He tried to laugh, but ‘Subterrania’ was already pounding in his ears, and he couldn’t quite manage it.
‘Barbie wasn’t making it up,’ I told him, ‘and she wasn’t being stupid, although I’m sure you must have told her that she was. When she heard John screaming, he really was screaming—and when he left, he didn’t go to the hospital, because he was utterly and absolutely convinced, by that time, that he had to do exactly what I told him to do. He went to Barbie’s. He’s there now. By now, he must have been screaming and moaning at her for the best part of an hour, as well as vomiting all over her royal blue carpet and shitting his pants. He won’t die, of course, but he doesn’t know that—and neither does she.’
‘Sinister Sinister’ was booming from the speakers, and even Howard had the grace to be more than a little bit frightened.
‘What have you done, Rose?’ he asked me, in a tone that suggested that all thought of fucking my brains out had vanished from his fickle head.
‘Exactly what you said—I cooked something up, from one of Mummy’s old recipe books. Not exactly eye of newt and toe of frog but something not dissimilar. Natural selection has devised all manner of tasty trifles for the benefit of innocuous creatures that need a little something to discourage all the predators who might otherwise make a meal of them. Not fatal, of course—the whole point of such devices is that the predators need to learn from bitter experience. Rumor has it that mixing the brew with the alcohol increases the intensity of the spasms, but I’ve never actually experimented with it before.
Howard the Flasher looked down, horror-stricken, at the empty glass clutched in his hand. I let him stew for three or four seconds by saying: ‘I put it in John’s whisky—the vodka’s just for guests, and it’s as pure as the day it left Warrington.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, truthfully.
‘That’s good,’ I assured him. ‘Because this is where we move into unknown territory. By now, you see, Barbara must be just as confused as you are. She still doesn’t believe, of course, but it’s not what you believe that counts: it’s what you feel. Barbara’s heart was always a few degrees colder than John’s, but even she can’t be ice-cool right now. Not with John groaning like a sinner in hell in front of her, and with all the anxiety and shame and guilt and everything else that goes with the territory. No matter how civilized you and she may think