Spanky

by Christopher Fowler

  I caught a bus home, ditched my regulation suit with the stitched Thanet badge, put on jeans and returned to the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, just in time for the start of the main feature. They were showing a big-budget American thriller. In it, two undercover policemen screamed and hit each other until they became friends, a large building exploded and a girl with no knickers on had her head stuffed into a sack of cocaine.

  I left before the end.

  I was halfway through a bag of chips when I caught sight of a familiar figure walking past the window of the burger bar. Twice in a lifetime? This was too much of a coincidence to pass up. The daemon was staring straight ahead, and didn’t glance in my direction. He was wearing an electric blue Gaultier jacket and a black roll-neck sweater, and looked late for an appointment. Although he was moving along the pavement like just another well-dressed urbanite, something set him so far apart from the crowd that I instinctively knew he was not human. Then I realized. It was as if no one else could see him.

  Without thinking twice I left my place at the counter and pushed out of the bar. I just managed to catch up with him before he turned the corner.

  ‘Oh, hello.’

  Spanky appeared to have no idea who I was. He squinted distantly, then looked me up and down.

  ‘We met last night, remember? You got Elvis by mistake.’ What if it wasn’t the same person? I’d look a real dickhead.

  ‘Oh yes, Martyn, isn’t it? Look, I’m afraid I’m in rather a hurry.’ He glanced at the road ahead, checking the traffic lights. It suddenly seemed very important for me to successfully detain him.

  ‘I just wanted to say—’ I began, not knowing what I wanted to say at all, ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. Last night. I mean, naturally I was sceptical. You would have been, too, if the situation was reversed.’

  ‘There’s really nothing to apologize for.’ Spanky smiled vaguely, shifting aside to allow a young woman through.

  ‘I believe you’re who you say you are. I really do.’

  ‘Well, I’m pleased for you. I’ve moved on to someone else now, so everything worked out fine.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I watched as the young daemon turned to go. Neon sparks were trapped in the fine raindrops that frosted the shoulders of his jacket, and fell in streaks from his brilliantined hair. He looked as if the night and the city belonged only to him. ‘Spanky?’

  It was the first time I’d used his name. He paused, about to step off the kerb into the light-scarred road.

  ‘You’re supposed to have horns. Is that true?’

  He searched the ground, looked up and smiled knowingly. ‘They’re not horns exactly. Residual spines.’

  ‘You’re for real, though.’

  ‘Yes, I’m for real.’

  Further along the kerb, a news vendor began unloading bundles of magazines from the side of a truck. The strip lights of the sign at Spanky’s back began to flicker out, throwing us both into shadow.

  ‘Listen, Martyn. I’m late already, so if you haven’t anything else to ask me, I really have to be going . . .’

  ‘Wait.’ I realized that even if he turned out to be a phoney, even if he made me look a complete fool, nothing could be worse than the current on-hold status of my life, a never-ending string of wet Wednesdays that stretched off into the darkness of the years ahead.

  The shadowed figure squared off before me, his head cocked to one side, challenging. Suddenly I felt enervated and desperate, as though I was about to miss the last relief train out of a besieged town. If he was teasing me about this, trying to get me to beg him before he walked away . . .

  I took a step forward and cleared my throat. ‘You said you could change my life. Put it in order. There are others worse off than me.’

  ‘Indeed there are. Let them find their own spiritual guidance. I made my proposal to you, no one else. But the question is academic now. You refused my offer.’

  ‘What if I told you I’d made a mistake?’

  The figure slowly shook its head. ‘That would be awkward. I’m already working with someone else. I told you, I only make the offer once. But I’m not the only one. There are three others like me, creators of futures, absolvers of pasts. They walk the highways of the world, crystallizing dreams and fulfilling secret desires. One day you might run into one of them—’

  ‘Please, Spanky. I can’t wait around for a second chance to come along. I’d spend the whole of my life on the lookout.’

  Now that the offer had been rescinded, I wanted it back. I’d been cautious—who wouldn’t be? But anything was better than never knowing the truth.

  ‘Are you asking me to help you, Martyn?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Silence fell between us. The road ahead was devoid of cars. The streets were empty. For a moment it seemed that the city had ceased to function. Even the stars had halted their rotation above the darkened office blocks. My blood ceased pulsing through my veins. Then the lights changed, cars appeared, the news vendor tossed another bale of papers onto the pavement with a thud.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise anything. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to work, Martyn.’

  My heart began to beat again.

  He raised a hand as I walked toward him. Recovering myself, I dug into my pocket for the number of the furniture store. Zack always forgot to write down my messages at the flat. Spanky looked at me as if I was behaving like an idiot. ‘I know where you live, Martyn.’

  He turned and stepped into the road, and was gone with the passing of another truck. I stood and stared after him. I had never asked anyone for anything since Joey died, and the shock of submitting disturbed me. It felt unmanly somehow. Cowardly. The world was full of people who thought their lives were fine until a mirror was held up to them. Was this how others reacted?

  Finally I stopped watching the road ahead and returned to the apartment to pace my bedroom, hypertense with anticipation.

  I barely slept that night.

  Or the next.

  Chapter 5

  Memory

  I have to explain something about Joey, and the effect his death had on our family.

  First, there’s a memory.

  Gordon, my father, had always been a great proponent of the Day Out. Every other Sunday we would venture forward from the warmth of our little terraced house to march along storm-swept seafronts or dawdle through the roped-off rooms of country houses.

  One such Sunday, when I was seven years old and Joey was nearly eleven, we headed off in the direction of Oxford to join the guided tours around Blenheim Palace. A discrepancy in my mother’s map-reading technique resulted in a heated argument, so that by the time we drove through the gates my father wasn’t speaking to her. This was a common occurrence, and we three kids were familiar with the drill. For the next hour or so our parents would use us as conversational conduits through which they could address their grievances, taking turns to insult and slight each other.

  ‘Look how you’ve upset the children,’ my mother would say, staring accusingly at her husband. ‘Joey’s disgusted by your behaviour.’

  ‘They’re not upset, Joyce,’ Father would reply. ‘He’s embarrassed by you.’

  We weren’t upset or embarrassed so much as bored by the whole routine. Joey once told me that he felt like a medium when they did this, having his unvoiced thoughts interpreted as evidence of poor parenting.

  On this particular occasion, the row escalated so quickly that my father stormed out in the middle of the tour, and we all had to follow him. Outside, more heated words were exchanged while I looked away, squinting up at the clouds above the water gardens. There was a crack of flesh and I turned around. My mother was holding her face, shocked into silence. Then she burst into tears, and my little sister Laura started grizzling in sympathy.

  Joey had lately turned into a gangly daddy long-legs of a boy, so that he was now a full head and shoulders above me. He was quick-tempered, and I fully expected him t
o launch himself at my father.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he led Joyce to the circular rose garden beyond the palace and sat her on a bench overlooking the lake. As I watched, he took out his penknife and cut off a rose, a Royal William, deep crimson and heavy-scented. He spoke to her quietly, threading it through a buttonhole in her cardigan as he did so. I never found out what he said to her, but she stopped sniffling and walked back to the car without us.

  By the time we returned she had completely forgiven my father, who was sitting on the grass with his arm around her waist. Joey had the power to heal them, and they both knew it. They were awed by him, and loved him more than they loved Laura or me. Who could blame them? His death was just about the cruellest trick anyone could have played. Losing him was like breaking the rudder off a ship.

  When he was two years old, my brother caught pneumonia and nearly choked to death. The doctors put him in an oxygen tent and pumped him full of drugs that left a weakness in his lungs. Because he had nearly been lost, he became the family favourite. Laura and I weren’t neglected, but Joey had a golden aura around him. When he spoke, others listened. It was commonly understood that he’d been spared for a purpose. At some unspecified point in the future, he would make us all proud. I grew up worshipping my brother because he was tougher and smarter than anyone I knew. Oddly enough I was the fragile one, the one who caught the colds and had to wear a sweater in the middle of June. Although Joey was almost four years older, we were rarely out of each other’s sight. He was my protector.

  When the government decided to build another oversized motorway through South London, a compulsory purchase order was issued for our house, and we were forced to move. I had been happy there, and dreaded leaving my friends. Money was tight, so my father selected a small house on an estate in the suburbs, where property prices were lower. The day the removal van arrived I ran away, and my folks had to send Joey to bring me back. Eventually he managed to calm me down with promises of how much fun we’d have in the new place.

  The chances of staying out of trouble in Twelvetrees were slim. The estate, built as an idyllic commuter-belt arcadia, had no identity, no class and no amenities. Kids sat smoking low-grade dope in doorways, watching the rain fall, waiting for something to happen. We were often at a loose end. Much of this time our parents were barely visible; Father was obscured by claims and invoices, Mother was lost in the steam of the cooking. Laura, being younger, was usually off playing with girlfriends. So, Joey and I hung out. And he was full of good advice.

  If the other kids see you cry, they’ll start picking on you. Don’t try to climb over the fence, you’ll fall through it. Being good at one thing is better than being an all-rounder. Tell the drug kids to leave you alone or they’ll have to deal with me.

  He told me about the things he could see from the height of his extra years.

  You know those big thirties stations at the ends of the underground lines, giant spaceships of concrete and curves? Joey thought they were wild. They made him want to be an architect. That’s what he was studying when he died. He chose his path and I copied him each step of the way.

  One day he said: You don’t want to be an architect as well. Pick something that’s right for you. Our family hasn’t amounted to much. If you put your mind to it, you’ll be better than any of us.

  When my brother began his apprenticeship in the city we saw a lot less of him, but he usually managed to come home at some point over the weekend, and would always end up taking one of us aside to settle an argument. Even at this late stage, he was the glue that held us together.

  I didn’t even know he was sick. He looked a little thinner in the face, and came home tired all the time. I heard him coughing behind closed doors. Then he had a tense, muted argument with my father, and they stopped talking. After that, Joey’s attitude toward me changed. His patience evaporated easily, and he stopped offering advice. One day he shouted angrily that I would have to learn to make my own decisions. The tablets he took belonged to my mother; she often had trouble sleeping. Late one night, he drank a bottle of Evian and ate the entire prescription of Nitrazepam. He went back to bed and never woke up. I took him tea in the morning, and couldn’t wake him. His head was pushed down beneath the sheet, and when I pulled the cover back from his face I saw that his eyes were wide open.

  It took me a while to realize what had happened. He’d known that his lungs were collapsing, and had delayed going into hospital. He hadn’t wanted me to find out until the last possible minute.

  With Joey’s death a knot unravelled and we went into freefall, changing as we lost sight of each other.

  Laura took to her room. Dad simply stopped speaking. But Joyce went off the deep end. Even though she knew he had been in great pain and suffering from depression, my mother was mortified by the idea that her favourite child had committed suicide. A weird silence settled over us. Soon even friends stayed away from the house.

  At the funeral none of us cried except Laura. My parents were in a state of shock. I had expected to be miserable, but was surprised to find myself filled with anger. A few weeks after his funeral, I went back to the cemetery and defaced the headstone, kicking mud at the inscription until it was obliterated.

  I knew Joey had tried to protect me from the discovery of an abyss. But he should have told me he was sick. We weren’t supposed to have secrets. At least I could have prepared myself.

  I want you to understand why my life was a mess, why I couldn’t change things alone. I didn’t know how to do it without him, and I didn’t trust anyone else.

  That is, until Spanky came along.

  Chapter 6

  Eligibility

  By Friday evening the whole damned business bothered me more than ever. I sat at my workstation verifying order forms for kitchen accessories, but my mind had never been further from the job. All I could think of was the incredible opportunity I had missed. I thought about the planes of life that might exist if I were not too blind to see them. Why should our daily existence be the sum total of all physicality? Why couldn’t there be other forms beyond our comprehension?

  Because this is life, not an episode of Star Trek, came the answer.

  When I’d exhausted that line of thought, I consoled myself with the idea that Spanky was a lunatic, a fake, and that I’d probably had a lucky escape. And when I could pursue this idea no further, my belief in him began to grow again. I even tried to draw a picture of the daemon, but couldn’t capture the strange mixture of mystery and innocence that existed in his face. Still, saint or charlatan, Spanky had made me do something I hadn’t done for a long time: think seriously about my future, a world of possibilities to which I had pointlessly blinded myself.

  Some men rootlessly roam the planet. Others settle fast and build. I fitted neither category, too insecure for the one, too restless for the other. And all the time there was the sense that life’s real pleasures were passing me by. It would help if I could identify what I was looking for, but how would I know until I experienced it?

  At a quarter to six on a wet Friday evening, fifteen minutes before the store was due to close, I sharpened a pencil, tore off a fresh sheet of paper and began to evaluate my life.

  After breaking the lead three times I gave up and set the pencil down. The smell of dry-cleaning fluid permeated the entire store and made my throat raw. I looked out into the showroom.

  A tall black guy who had been standing beside a standard lamp for half an hour, trying to decide whether to buy it, was unscrewing the thing section by section and peering down each length of tubing, as if he’d lost something in there. Max was stumping over to the main doors to turn down the CLOSED sign, and Lottie was outside trying to pull the heavy steel trellis across the store entrance. Darryl was furtively talking on the phone to the married woman he dated, one hand cupped around the mouthpiece to prevent anyone from catching the conversation. I think he overestimated our interest in the affair. Dokie was leaning against the rear wall staring off into
space with one finger buried inside his nose, weighing his genitals with his free hand. Lottie shrieked as she shut her hand in the trellis. Dokie glanced over at her, then returned his attention to dislodging his nasal blockage.

  Martyn Ross, this is your life.

  The start of a weekend, and once again I had no plans. It was truly pathetic. There had to be something I could do. Right now there were people out there bungee-jumping, hang-gliding, deep-sea fishing, climbing to the peaks of the Nepalese mountains, drinking that yak milk tea in cafés where the air was so thin they had to use asthma inhalers to keep from passing out.

  I thought perhaps I should go to the library and read up on daemonology. Maybe I could discover where the other three Spanci-whatever-they-were hung out. I decided to go first thing in the morning.

  Meanwhile, there was the matter of tonight.

  Nobody even noticed my departure except Lottie, who anxiously wished me a nice weekend. I left the store and walked along the Strand into the West End, through the courtyard at the rear of the Wyndham’s Theatre, looking in the windows of the antiquarian bookshops. I wasn’t headed anywhere in particular, and was half-looking for a book which could tell me more about my strange experience when I saw Sarah Brannigan alight from a taxi at the far end of the alley.

  I quickly caught her up. I didn’t need the help of some supposed supernatural entity to ask a beautiful woman out. I would see what she was doing tomorrow night. I called out to her and she looked up in surprise, but I knew at once that she didn’t recognize me. She was wearing a long black gown, the kind of outfit you wore to the opera. Her fiery red hair was tied back with a silver clasp. Her bare shoulders were as smooth as vinyl.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she began, slowly shaking her head, ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘Martyn Ross,’ I reminded her. ‘I’m at Thanet Furniture. We order stock from you. I wondered—’

  And as I began to speak, the thought of what the gown meant slowly began to filter through. Even as I asked her for a date, I realized that she was with a very large man right now, and that he was on the other side of the taxi paying the driver. But it was too late, I couldn’t stop myself and the words came out just as the man appeared in full evening dress and looked at me with an eyebrow raised in puzzlement, ready to ask her if she was being bothered by a stranger.