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“Janey—I mean Jezebel?”
The receptionist, registering his desperation, put out her large man-hand, long red fingernails catching the light, and touched his.
“I’m sorry, baby, but she resigned this afternoon, no forwarding address or number.”
“Nothing?”
“I would help you, a regular, if I could. But you know these girls, especially the temps. Fly-by-nights, gone by the morning. I don’t even have a real name for you, never mind a surname.”
Eddy didn’t even wait for her to finish her sentence. He rushed back out into the street and instructed the cab driver to take him to an address he’d suddenly remembered from all those years ago, an address he’d once carved into a box he’d made in woodcraft in a hopeless act of voodoo.
He stood in the street staring up at the block of brand-new luxury apartments, the For Sale signs attached to the gleaming glass windows. Gone were the old redbrick council flats in which Janey had once lived with her mother, the narrow Victorian entrance with its single arch over the doorway. He would never find her now. Overhead the sun slipped behind a dark cloud and it began to rain.
• • •
The key clicked in the door and Cynthia looked up from her magazine. Eddy stepped into the flat, his hair and jacket drenched from the downpour. She dared not get up, frightened that her gratitude at his return would drive him away again. Now she sensed that nothing was certain between them and yet she still wanted him, perhaps even more.
“Are you okay?” Not being able to help herself, she stood and took him into her arms.
“I think so,” he murmured. “Edgware Secondary Modern,” he suddenly said into her shoulder.
She pulled away and studied him. “Darling, why on earth wouldn’t you tell me before? I don’t care, honestly. I love you.”
To his own horror Eddy began to cry.
FUR
It was one of those impossibly hot days, one of those apocalyptic climate change can-fry-an-egg-on-a-car-bonnet days that had become so prevalent in Sydney lately. May, a twenty-two-year-old university student, was on her way back to the small two-bedroom apartment she rented with her boyfriend, Mitch, in a Victorian terrace house in the suburb of Glebe. A pale thin redhead, she had forgotten her sun hat and was hopping from one patch of shade to another as she navigated her way back to the flat. Earlier that day she had worked for four hours in the small vintage clothing store owned by her sister. The income from this part-time job helped with her studies and rent, and normally the anthropology student enjoyed the eccentric, laid-back atmosphere of the store, which was a stark contrast to the intensity of her own research work, but today was different. It felt to May like the whole world had suddenly tilted upside down and the intrinsic order of things—government, business and personal relations—had twisted up into something unrecognizable, something undefinably frightening. For a start the global markets had crashed badly overnight—it was in all of the newspapers and on CNN; the images of panicked stock exchanges with ashen-faced men gesticulating at TV monitors upon which numbers ran like terrified insects had upset May. She knew such financial panic was bound to filter down to universities and research grants, and she was about to graduate. But more important, May’s own life had also contorted violently that morning, like a reflection in a curved funfair mirror.
May, a late riser, had woken to the sight of Mitch, her boyfriend and flatmate, naked except for an old fur rug draped across his shoulders, staring at a red pentacle he appeared to have scrawled on the bedroom wall. This was remarkable for several reasons—one was that Mitch was a conservative young man who liked to keep his clothes on in bed, or at least his underpants, an irritating habit May had battled the whole two years of their relationship, to her frustration. And second, despite the fur rug and the fact that it was at least ninety-five degrees, Mitch was still shivering.
May, stunned by this vision, had barely collected her wits when Mitch announced in an absurdly deep and serious voice that he was no longer Mitch Jackson, twenty-one, formerly of Pymble in the northern suburbs of Sydney, but Erasmus Jehovah, a warlock of the Mikulee tribe, and that she should address him as such. If it had been anybody else May might have dismissed this as an imaginative prank, but the two years with Mitch had taught her that the economics student, although top of his year and considered brilliant, was not the most imaginative of individuals, nor was he the most emotional.
In fact there had been moments when May wondered whether he wasn’t borderline Asperger’s, but what Mitch lacked in emotional intelligence he’d made up for in physical beauty, monogamy, and financial generosity, which made him a huge improvement on May’s previous boyfriends. So naturally the sight of such a controlled individual so blatantly out of control was both deeply disturbing and, if May was honest with herself, incredibly amusing in a dark sort of way.
May stared at him, searching her mind for any tips on handling warlocks that she might have gleaned from her anthropological studies, but despite a number of lengthy footnotes on witch doctors and the practice of exorcism, not one useful fact emerged, which wasn’t entirely surprising given her thesis was on the eighteenth-century tribes of Polynesia and not on the warlock myths of Scotland.
Regardless, and wary of the way Mitch alias Erasmus was now holding up a tennis racket as if it were some ancient wand, May decided the best policy might be to humor him and, assuming he was in the grip of a nervous breakdown and hadn’t in fact been transformed into a warlock, bundle him off to the student counselor as soon as possible.
That was eight hours ago and Mitch still hadn’t rung her on her mobile to confirm he’d made the appointment.
“Bugger it,” May swore to herself as she hurried down the street, mentally running through the past few months, searching for the trigger that might have tipped him into such a delusion. It was only at her front door that she remembered the DVD series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that she’d given Mitch for his twentieth birthday. Could that have been an influence? Then there was that night back in June when she’d come home from the library and found Mitch glued to the TV screen. The episode had been about Buffy’s best friend, Willow, and her boyfriend, Oz, a werewolf who has to leave her to understand his inner beast. Mitch had been fascinated. Had this storyline released some appalling psychosis?
As May turned the key in the door she dismissed the possibility. It was obviously the result of stress, a meltdown of nerves just before his finals, and given the apocalyptic nature of the sudden economic crisis it wasn’t very surprising that Mitch might harbor some hidden dread of failure that had now forced his subconscious to flip him into another identity altogether. In fact it seemed both poignant and pertinent to May that Mitch, a rationalist inclined toward a resigned fatalism, had chosen such a magical persona as a warlock. Perhaps he had unconsciously concluded that such a persona might equip him with the necessary sorcery to succeed in the financial world. May hoped that a session of counseling might have restored Mitch to his predictable but lovable self, but as she pushed the front door open, her optimism evaporated. Inside the lights were off and from the kitchen came the sound of banging.
The economics student was standing at the workbench illuminated by a dozen lit candles perched precariously on the corners of the kitchen counters. Looking like some demented medieval murderer, he was in the middle of pulverizing a large piece of bloody meat with a hammer. At least he was wearing clothes, May noticed with some relief, although his usual suit had been replaced by a raggedy old kilt and a bloodstained T-shirt.
“What the fuck?” she exclaimed, abandoning any possibility of handling his psychosis with sensitivity.
“Supper,” he growled at her, at which May, depressed by the sudden realization that she might have lost Mitch forever, sank into a chair.
“’Tis roo,” Mitch muttered darkly. He dangled the raw piece of kangaroo over his mouth and snapped at it, gobbling the dripping sinew greedily. May dry-retched, and then reminded herself that it was probably dangerous to display any signs of revulsion toward his behavior.
“Delicious,” Mitch concluded, blood now streaking his chin. May maneuvered herself closer to the door in case a fast escape might prove necessary.
“So how was the counselor?” S
he managed to sound calm.
