‘Just interested.’ Now it was my turn to raise a glass to him.
‘What do you want, my life story?’ Bitter now, I’d definitely touched a nerve and there was no hint of flirtation in his voice any more. I was oddly glad that this wasn’t going to degenerate into a quick sofa-fumble because, despite myself, I was intrigued by this mercurial man. ‘It’s not important, none of it is.’ He flicked my list. ‘Now, do you want suggestions on some of this stuff?’
‘You know how I can come by these things?’
‘Got a few ideas. Lateral thinking, see. I do crosswords too.’ Kai leaned forward over the table, arms propping his weight. ‘See this one? Nail from a demon? Come with me.’
He headed towards the door and I couldn’t help but follow. It was that or stay alone in a room that looked like it had been decorated in shades of O positive.
We tiptoed up the stairs, on the off chance that the overloaded Cerys might have fallen asleep. When we reached the landing, he turned right and led me along a dark passageway, panelled in heavy wood. ‘This is the older part of the house.’
‘What, you mean Bronze Age?’
Kai laughed. ‘Despite appearances, the place was built in the seventies. Or, should I say, rebuilt. Apparently, there was something even more gothic on the site originally, but that fell into disrepair.’
‘Fell into Hell, more like,’ I muttered. Some of the panelling was so deeply carved that it was a wonder it was still in one piece. It looked like wooden lace.
‘Here.’ He opened a door. I walked in behind him, then stopped dead.
‘It’s your bedroom.’
‘Yeah, so? Oh, come on, if I was going to seduce you, I’d hardly be discussing architectural niceties would I?’
‘I don’t know. What does your seduction technique normally consist of?’
It was too dark to see his face, but his voice was as unnaturally smooth as a starlet’s forehead as he said, ‘Pretty much the same as yours, I’d say, Holly.’ He turned on a lamp. ‘This is what I wanted to show you, over here.’ His voice was back to its normal tone now, I was glad to hear.
The room was almost as big as the kitchen. A double bed carved out of dark oak took up a large proportion of floor space, an equally ugly carved wardrobe squatted in one corner, and most of one wall was full-length windows, outside which I could see a wrought-iron balcony. Kai was pointing at the wardrobe. ‘The furniture came with the place. I’ve spent every night I’ve slept in here staring at it. Look.’ He ran a finger over the wardrobe door.
‘It’s absolutely horrible.’
‘Yep. But look, here …’ He bent closer and I bent in too, until our heads were almost touching and I could smell his smoky, heavy aftershave. ‘See? Demons.’
‘Gothic furniture? That was one serious obsession.’ We had lowered our voices as our bodies had got closer, and now we were almost whispering.
‘And what’s holding the panel to the wardrobe?’ He turned his head and his hair brushed my cheek but his voice was pure practicality and I didn’t even feel the tiniest flare of any kind of attraction now.
‘It’s … it’s nailed on.’ I started to laugh, straightening away, from the demons, from him. ‘The nail from a demon! You’re bloody brilliant.’
‘Oh yes.’ The grin was wicked. ‘All we have to do is pull one out, and you’re good to go.’ There was a drawer at the base of the wardrobe. He dragged it open with a shriek of tortured oak and drew out a pair of long-nose pliers. ‘Right.’
‘You have pliers in your bedroom.’
Again the wicked grin. ‘And that isn’t even my secret drawer. Oh, come on, we’ve just moved in, there’s stuff all over the place. Now, you hold the door and I’ll – there, that’s got one.’ He grabbed my hand, unfolded it, and closed it again around the stubby little tack. ‘I’m enjoying this. What’s next?’
‘Frog’s head. Oh, but that’s not so hard, there’s loads of dead frogs out on the track. I’ll pick one up on the way home.’
We left his bedroom and crept back downstairs, where we shared another triumphant glass of wine each, and Kai looked at the list again. ‘Rich man’s hidden treasure? Wow, don’t envy you that one.’
I looked at him. There was a prickle in the air between us, like a static charge. It wasn’t lust, that particular firework was well extinguished, even though I had the feeling that the blue touchpaper was quietly burning in another universe, but something else. Something with a depth to it that made me almost feel shy. ‘Kai, would you say you were well off?’
He stopped, half way through refilling his glass. ‘I’m not rolling in it like some people. But then I’m not grubbing down the back of the sofa for fifty pence either. This place is bought and paid for, my bank balance is in the black so … yeah, guess I’m okay. Comfortable, anyway. Why?’
‘Have you got a picture of Cerys anywhere? Doesn’t have to be recent or anything.’
‘Yep, there’s one in my wallet … no, Holly, you’re not thinking …’
‘Come on, admit it, she’s the most precious thing you’ve got, isn’t she?’ Triumphant, I swigged my wine. ‘Your treasure. And fairly well hidden, since she doesn’t even call you Dad. Rich man’s hidden treasure. QED. I thank you.’ And I sat down, rather more heavily than I’d intended. Damn, but that wine he kept giving me was good stuff; I was amazed I could still think, let alone tangentially.
Now Kai’s eyes were positively glowing. ‘That, may I say, is bloody cool thinking. I knew I was right about you.’ He reached into a drawer and pulled out a sheaf of photos, spread them on the table between us and started riffling through. I couldn’t help but notice … oh, all right, I could, but I didn’t try, in fact I stared blatantly … there were quite a few of Kai himself, with a very pretty dark-haired woman. Who looked fantastic in a bikini. He picked out one of Cerys, pre-pregnancy, sitting on a gate looking cute, and handed it to me. ‘Is there anything else?’
I looked at the list. ‘Only a couple. Eye from an owl. That’s disgusting.’
‘No, no, I can do this one. Wait here.’ He shoved what was left of the wine, and his glass, into my hand and dashed out of the door, returning a minute later with a tatty cardboard box.
‘Please tell me you didn’t go out and murder an owl.’
‘Take a look.’ While he held the box I cautiously tore off the tape which sealed it. Inside was the scruffiest, most moth-eaten stuffed owl I’d ever seen. ‘It was here when I moved in, but it gave Cerys the creeps so I shoved it in the garage.’ A moment’s probing and he dropped something into my hand. ‘There.’
‘It’s glass.’
‘It’s an owl’s eye by someone’s interpretation. Shit, this is great. Anything else?’
‘Last one. The words of a king.’
There was a moment, a perfect moment, when we stood there in the hallway, thinking the same thing. Then he dropped the box, I pushed the wine and glasses onto the staircase and we both ran for the living room, jostling each other as we raced to be first through the door and over to the bookcase.
‘Yes!’ Kai won and snatched a dog-eared copy of The Tommyknockers from the shelf. I was halfway to The Shining, but let go when he ripped three pages out of his book and waved them in the air. ‘That’s it! What do we win?’
‘Our wishes, I think.’
‘Jesus.’ He calmed down instantly. ‘So, you all make a wish, do the spell and then what?’
‘It comes true, according to Vivienne.’
He whistled softly and went back to finish pouring the wine into both glasses. ‘Right. So a bunch of possibly psychologically-uneven women get loose in the wood and try to perform magic … Wow, I am going to look for something to work on in the Orkneys while that’s going on. Sounds as though it has the possibility to become the oestrogen-fuelled bitch fight to end all bitch fights. Whereabouts did you say you were, again?’
‘The bare hilltop on the other side of the dale. Creepy place, Isobel said she could feel someone watching when
we were there last time.’
‘I bet she did.’ He emptied his glass. ‘Look, Holly. This place, Barndale – even if most of you wouldn’t know Wicca from a wardrobe, it’s still not a good place to be wandering around.’
I whistled the theme tune to the X-Files. ‘Yeah. There’s armed gamekeepers and loony journalists for a start.’
‘No, seriously.’ A hand curved onto my shoulder. ‘Just be careful.’
There was a sudden darkness to the mood, his image switch was complete. ‘Okay, I will.’
‘Right.’ He flashed his wrist in front of his eyes. ‘God, look, it’s nearly one. Sorry, but I’m going to have to kick you out. Got an early start tomorrow.’
‘Oh, yes, course. Well, me too.’
‘I’ll call you a taxi. Give me your keys and I’ll drop your car off for you tomorrow morning on my way to the station.’
Damn, I’d forgotten about my car. Or had I? Had I secretly been hoping that being over the limit would get me invited to stay the night in that balconied room with the toad-like furniture and this amber-eyed man? Had his previous flirtatiousness really just been a knee-jerk reaction to a female presence then? It had felt like more … I glanced up at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Taxi?’
‘I think so, yes.’ The hand on my shoulder turned me firmly towards the door. ‘They can normally be with us in five minutes. You wait there and I’ll ring.’
That was possibly the subtlest turning down of my charms I’d ever encountered.
Chapter Eight
It would have been so easy. She was giving off all the right signals, the cute little head-toss, bit of lower-lip action between the teeth, all carefully choreographed, of course, and I had to admit that she does it well. Almost unstudied, a kind of knowing innocence about her, like she doesn’t know how she’s doing it but she’s going to keep doing it until I go for it. But. And, oh yeah, there’s a big but here, something else kicked in. We were playing the whole ‘eye contact’ game and it was going so, so well, point to her, point to me, it only needed one of us to take advantage and … And then she looked right into me. Can’t describe it. It wasn’t like she changed, conversation kept right along the lines it had been but … yeah, there’s that word again. But. She asked me about my past. About what made me go into this mental whoring that I like to call ‘journalism’ as if that gives it any respectability, about what I am. A simple little question, nothing that anyone else couldn’t have asked anywhere along the line. Any of them. Any of those thoughtless, careless women who wanted me enough to let their eyes skim the surface without their brains even trying to get underneath. For all their smart ways, their great jobs, their intellectualism, not one of them ever asked me why I did it. They were all content to let the image rule. Like they didn’t want to know anything else, like they wanted me to be the man they thought I was, with nothing going on to break that image. Like they didn’t want me to be real, somehow. No shitty background, no identity crises, nothing nasty to ruin the view of me that they had, as some kind of black knight, in his designer jacket and jeans, riding in over the horizon to sweep them from their lives of boring mediocrity.
It hit me hard. Oh, I covered myself, the good old bait-and-switch. Distracted her attention and got it all back to where I could deal with it, put myself back in the driving seat and never let her know that she’d done something that no one has ever attempted before – got through my armour like a tungsten carbide round. And there I was, like one of those poor bastards on the war fields, too shocked to feel pain, with all my protection rendered useless.
And she never even knew what she’d done.
Chapter Nine
Vivienne had pushed all the furniture up against the walls of her living room and we stood awkwardly in the bare centre, like early arrivals at a school disco. A ginger tomcat stropped against my legs and Isobel had hardly taken her face out of her handkerchief since she’d arrived. Megan looked perky, bouncing from foot to foot, a supermarket bag swinging from her wrist, containing what looked like a human head. Eve had brought a stick, on which she leaned heavily.
‘Sciatica playing up this week,’ she explained. ‘It’s the weather, must be changing.’
‘Well, we’re not going anywhere yet.’ Vivienne motioned us to one side and we huddled in the kitchen doorway as she rolled back the dusty carpet to reveal bare floorboards on which someone had chalked an amateurish circle. ‘First we must prepare our ingredients.’
She made us put our bags in the centre of the circle and then fussed around drawing symbols beside them.
‘So, how was dinner with Kai last night?’ Megan asked. ‘I rang you around elevenish but you weren’t back.’
‘It was good, yes.’ I didn’t know what else to say. Kai and I had parted company chastely enough, with a shaken hand and a kissed cheek, and even now I could feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder, turning me away from him. There had been a strange weakness in the gesture, as though he knew he had to do it, but hadn’t really wanted to. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part. Or not. I still didn’t even know what it was he had going on, but I wouldn’t have turned down a quick bounce on that limber-looking body.
‘Please.’ Vivienne’s voice was stern. ‘We must keep our minds on the matter in hand. Now. What did you all bring?’
I confessed to the contents of my bag. There was a moment of hushed admiration. ‘What, you got everything?’ Isobel stared at me. ‘The thing about the demon as well?’
‘Yep.’
‘I got an owl’s eye from roadkill,’ Eve confessed. ‘Cut a picture of a frog’s head and the nail from a demon out of some old Reader’s Digests, and I printed out Edward the Eighth’s abdication speech from Wikipedia. Couldn’t think what to do about the hidden treasure thing.’
It turned out that Megan and Vivienne had also googled Edward the Eighth. Isobel had cut some pages from a Bible and was rotating with paranoia in case this affected the spell. ‘I mean, some people believe Jesus was King of the Jews, don’t they? But it won’t be, sort of, counterproductive, will it? We’re not evil, after all, are we?’ Vivienne had found an article on Tutankhamun’s tomb, and seemed a little bit put out that any of us had an alternative approach to the rich man and his hidden treasure.
‘I got pictures of owls as well,’ Megan pointed to her bag, ‘And I found a dead frog in the pond in the park, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut off the head, so it’s all in there. No treasure though, or demon’s nails.’
Vivienne rolled her eyes. ‘So only Holly found all the ingredients?’ I tried to look unassuming. ‘Hmm. The spell will work best for her,’ Vivienne sounded disappointed that it had been me. I think she would rather have Isobel or Megan strike gold; these two appeared to be her most devoted disciples. ‘As a matter of interest, Holly, where did you collect your things?’
‘Most of it came from a friend of mine who lives on the other side of the woods,’ I said, trying not to sound smug or as though I was implying that the others had no friends. ‘In the Old Lodge.’
She hissed in a breath and the ginger cat shot from between my legs into the kitchen. Isobel lowered the handkerchief. ‘The warlock’s place?’
‘Well, he wears a lot of black, but he’s a journalist, really.’
But Vivienne had started to smile. At least, I think that’s what she was doing – her mouth went an alarming shape and previously unnoticed wrinkles began to manifest alongside her eyes. ‘Oh, Holly.’ She sounded almost orgasmic. ‘Now I know the spell will work for sure.’
‘What did you do?’ Megan whispered to me.
‘I don’t know,’ I whispered back. ‘But whatever it was, it must have been good.’ Vivienne was now groaning ecstatically, cradling my small bag to her chest.
‘Just think, these are the real thing! Oh, girls, we are going to have such results tonight!’
‘Looks like she’s getting results already. If her knickers start smoking, get ready to run.’ Only Eve smiled at that.
&
nbsp; A bit more chanting, a few more esoteric shapes drawn in coloured chalk – which non-esoterically came from a primary-coloured bucket with kindergarten pictures on – and we were ready to hit the hill. Vivienne was carrying a Primus stove and a large saucepan; I had high hopes of mulled wine when we got there. The rest of us carried our bags and Megan also carried Vivienne’s hessian tote bag containing her offerings. Apart from King Tut, Vivienne had, apparently, a real owl’s eye (I didn’t dare ask if it had been parted from its owner pre- or post-mortem). Her ‘demon’s nail’ turned out to be one of her ex’s toenail clippings – yeah, she looked like the kind of woman who’d hang on to that sort of stuff. She hadn’t struck lucky in the frog department though; maybe she’d been too busy trying to kiss them, and had driven them all away …
So, carrying the results of the world’s oddest treasure hunt, we plodded up the sticky track to the open-topped hill. I carried Eve’s bag, to give her a bit of a start; she struggled quite badly with the incline, even with the stick. ‘You all right?’ I walked alongside her, giving Vivienne a chance to go on with the Suck-Up Twins. ‘It’s a bit of an odd choice for a hobby this, isn’t it?’
Eve smiled at me, as we paused for a moment for her to get her breath back. ‘It beats watching reality TV,’ she puffed. ‘Or getting cats.’ She inclined her head towards the toiling shape of Vivienne, today draped in wafty, floating tie-dye and looking like a woman who’s fallen into a vat of handkerchiefs.
‘Do you think she’s mad?’
Eve considered. ‘I think she’s very sad. But, mad? Well, as long as no one is getting hurt. And, although it’s not exactly a reading group, we’ve all met new people and we’re getting out and doing new things, so does it matter?’
‘I guess not.’ I could even manage to muster warm thoughts about Isobel now. She was shy and allergic to everything and I really wanted to introduce her to a skin care regime, but she was cutely naïve and fun to be with in the same way as a puppy. I didn’t know if I’d ever come around to Vivienne, but the woman had organising abilities coming out of every orifice. It struck me that she was wasted on this little ‘Women’s Group’ as we’d agreed to call it. She should have been on Dragons’ Den, giving them nightmares instead of us.
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