Thicker Than Water

Get yourself drunk, get yourself laid, see if it improves your mood.’

I ignored the cheap jibes and kept banking up the music in front of him in a hot, futile rage, while Imelda sat cross-legged across from me, her head bowed, doing an interpretive dance of a refrigerator. Between the ice and the fire, the demon laughed and took his ease, whistling out of key with my lead-sap lullaby.

This wasn’t an exorcism, it was just a soporific: the same tune I’d been playing for Rafi ever since he’d caught his spiritually transmitted disease three years before. It wasn’t the tune I wanted to be playing - but then, that tune had been stolen from me.

I’d have to be content with cleaning out the Augean shithole over at the Salisbury. That at least I could do now. And Bic was stirring in his sleep towards normal wakefulness, his face calm, his chest rising ¾an and falling evenly. Everything had worked out fine, really - except that Asmodeus had found a way to stick a poker up my arse even when I was facing him full-on.

Gradually, step by step, we heaped up chains around him and sent him back down into the oubliette of Rafi’s soul. He went smiling, enjoying his joke, but he went. I took the whistle from my lips, flexed my stiff fingers, and listened to the silence that was descending on the room.

‘Where am I?’ Bic demanded groggily, sitting up. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘You’re with friends,’ I assured him, surprised by my own cracked voice. ‘Imelda, thanks for everything. I owe you, and I’ll find a way to pay you back.’

She didn’t move, but her head came up slowly and she stared at me.

‘You let yourselves out,’ she said stonily, not acknowledging the thanks. ‘I’m staying here until I’m sure.’

‘He’s asleep,’ Rafi said, sounding even more wrecked than I felt. ‘I’d feel him if he was still awake.’

‘He fooled us once,’ Imelda reminded him. ‘When he kept a little piece of himself inside your hand. There’s nothing to stop him doing the same thing again, so I’m not taking anything on trust here.’

She walked with us to the door. Trudie made to take Bic’s hand but I got there first and handed her the helmet instead. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Rules are rules.’

She took it, giving me a slightly hurt frown, and slid it over her head again without a word.

Imelda confronted me squarely. ‘When you’re done tonight,’ she said, ‘you come back and take your friend out of here. I’ve got nothing against Rafael, and Pamela is as sweet a child as ever I saw, but I got my own child to think about, too. Enough is enough, Castor. This is your notice to quit.’"

"‘Could you give me a week?’ I asked her. I just didn’t feel like I could deal with this right now, on top of everything else. ‘A week or a fortnight, to scout out another place? Seriously, Imelda, I don’t know if I can find anywhere at this kind of notice. And you know what will happen if—’

She cut me off coldly and bluntly, swiping her hand horizontally between us in a no pasaran gesture. ‘It’s your problem,’ she said. ‘It’s not mine. Not after tonight.’

I nodded, giving up the point. She went down to tell Cheadle we were through while I trussed Trudie up like a BDSM turkey again and Bic watched me with big, bemused eyes.

‘It’ll all make sense when we get you home,’ I promised him. And then, as he opened his mouth to ask a question, I silenced him with a cowardly ‘Your mum will explain.’

Cheadle appeared at my elbow. ‘All done?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘Right, let’s get off, then. I’ve got another job on.’

<Ã’

I almost asked him what it was, and whether he took everything as completely in his stride as he had this scary, weird circus; but I knew I wouldn’t get any kind of an answer I could actually use.

We led Trudie down the stairs between us, Imelda following with Bic. He got to sit up front this time, a blanket of Imelda’s draped over his shoulders, but Trudie was once again locked in the back of the van after Cheadle had checked the adequacy of her restraints.

‘Soon be done,’ he said, slamming the doors on her. This seemed to be addressed to Bic, who nodded silently. He’d barely spoken a dozen words since he’d woken up, but it wasn’t because he was groggy or disoriented. On the contrary, he seemed entirely alert and even thoughtful: but whatever was in his thoughts he didn’t seem to want to share.

When we got to Walworth Road and saw the orange glow colouring the night sky ahead of us, I realised that the night was far from over. It was many hours past sunset, and many months before Bonfire Night, so there was no good explanation for that redecoration of the heavens.

‘Someone’s having a fry-up,’ Cheadle remarked dryly.

Someone was. A few blocks further on we came to a gap between buildings where some old shops had been levelled, and we could see the Salisbury a scant mile away.