He glowered at her as if she had committed some serious social solecism and took a pair of sunglasses out of the table drawer. She put down her bag on the brown sofa and seated herself beside it. The long procession of identical emperors seemed to come alive with the light. She made herself not look at them. 'Now, what do you think is wrong with you? How do you feel?'
His head bowed, he stood in front of her. 'I don't know.'
'All right. Why did you want me to come?'
He lifted his shoulders and the enwrapping blanket with them.
She persevered. 'Have you been breathless? Have you any pain?'
'No. Not either.'
Asked to take off the blanket and remove his pyjama jacket, he obeyed with maddening slowness. Her stethoscope held against his chest and then his back, she listened to his heart, his lungs. 'I don't think there's much wrong with you, Joel.'
'It's not my body, it's my mind.'
'That's for Miss Crane, not me,' she said. 'You are seeing Miss Crane?'
'I've been once. I told her about Mithras. I told her I wanted him to go away. It's strange, really, I liked him at first but I hate him now.' He seemed to read the doubt in her eyes, the fear. 'I tell myself he's not real, he's in my mind. I told him that. But when I'm alone with him I don't know. How can he only be in my mind when he talks to me in a language I can't understand? I can't have made that up.' She said faintly, 'Is he here now?'
'He's here but he's not speaking. He won't speak till you've gone.'
'And when he does will he speak – well, English or his own language?'
'It's hard to say.'
She must stop asking him about this imaginary creature. It wasn't her province, that was for the therapist. 'When is your next checkup at the hospital?'
'Friday,' he said.
It was a relief. She wanted him to be in other hands than her own. 'I don't think you should be alone here, Joel. Would your mother come and stay with you?'
'Pa wouldn't let her.'
'Is there no one else? No friend or relative you could ask to stay for a few days?' A few days wasn't enough but it was better than nothing. 'There must be someone.'
'No one who'd come unless I paid them. I mean, Pa paid them.'
She came to a quick decision. 'I will find someone for you.'
'I don't want a nurse!'
'Not a nurse, a carer. Someone just to be in the flat overnight.'
He put his head in his hands but he made no objection. 'You can go now,' he said, looking up. 'It gets better when I talk to you. I feel a bit better.'
When she was out in the street heavy rain was falling from a leaden sky and it was as dark as winter midnight, the street lamps dimmed by the yellowish fog the rain made. She drove back to Eugene's, thinking of the man she had left behind in that sepulchral place and wondering if, with her departure, the mind-created thing he called Mithras was muttering to him once more. She had meant to ask him how he passed his long lonely days in that dark place. She would do so next time they met, perhaps after his checkup on Friday. The reason she hadn't asked might have been because she knew the answer. Nothing. Nothing at all. No exercise, no reading, no watching television, listening to music, no talking to friends, nothing but sitting dozing in the dark.
Half the country was under flood water. Uncle Gib saw the pictures of Tewkesbury and Gloucester on his computer and in a newspaper he found on a wall in Raddington Road. 'We shall be all right up here,' he said. 'It's not called Notting Hill for nothing, is it? Haitch, I, double L, geddit?'
Dorian Lupescu didn't get it. He hadn't understood a word but he nodded in agreement. Uncle Gib had exited from the Internet and was replying to a few selected letters. One of them had come from a man in Marlow, a member of the Children of Zebulun's Cookham church, who was watching the Thames rise and who hadn't insured his house. The Agony Uncle had no intention of answering it, privately or in print. Questions of morality, usually sexual, were all he bothered with. He turned his attention to the letter from a woman in Kenton whose partner couldn't maintain an erection. Disgusting, thought Uncle Gib. He wouldn't sully the pages of
He had remembered the Brent Reservoir that they called the Welsh Harp. It was quite a long way away but water travelled fast. Look how it had travelled all over Gloucestershire from rivers on the border of Wales. He switched on the television for the one o'clock news just to check where that water had got to now. Fifteen flood alerts issued, the newscaster told him. Tewkesbury cut off, Oxford in danger, Bedford threatened. That Welsh Harp was a great lake and it was high up, a lot higher than here, he thought vaguely, geography not being his strong suit. He imagined it bursting its banks the way they said the Severn had and the Great Ouse. Water would pour down through Willesden and Kensal into North Kensington…
Uncle Gib looked up insurance companies in the Yellow Pages but the abundance of them confused him. Turning down the volume on the television, he picked up the phone and dialled Reuben Perkins's number. Maybelle answered, which was just as well as it was she who saw to what she called 'business matters' in their household. Within minutes she had given him the phone number of their insurance company.
The way they made him hold on before anyone was available to answer his call started to put Uncle Gib in a bad temper. Music played – if you could call that droning and throbbing music – interrupted every few seconds by a woman thanking him for his patience and inexplicably telling him his call was important to her. Uncle Gib had shouted loudly and threatened the speaker with dire punishments before he realised he was berating a recorded voice. After ten minutes of this, Lance came into the room, hovering on the threshold, looking apprehensive. 'Get out!' Uncle Gib yelled and threw the Yellow Pages at him.
But he got his answer at last and by the time the weather man had appeared on the screen and was forecasting more torrential rain, he had arranged for the insuring of his house. Against water damage, fire, tornados and other Acts of God, which Uncle Gib naturally thought less likely to be directed at his property than at that of the rest of the population. Forms would arrive, a cheque must be sent, but substantially the deed was done.
He could have the whole day in the old woman's house, the whole night if he wanted it. He could stay in the place. The thought of it made Lance feel quite dizzy. Before Uncle Gib got religion he'd told Lance how he and a pal had cleared someone's flat while they were away on holiday. Just turned up in the pal's van and walked in with a key Uncle Gib had got from somewhere and taken everything, two TVs, a new computer, a CD player, a microwave and most of the furniture. The pal was a good dad, devoted to his daughter, and he'd wanted the tables and chairs and whatever for her flat. She'd just got married. Lance decided that it wasn't likely the old woman had a computer but she'd got a state-of-the-art TV with flat screen and built-in DVD player. He'd need a van but now he and Gemma were having their affair he and her brother were best mates again.
'You can only ask him,' Gemma said when she and Lance were lying in his bed, having a post-coital glass of Soave. Uncle Gib was attending the baptism (total immersion in a disused storage tank) of two new members. 'When d'you reckon on doing it?'
'The old woman goes away on August eight and she's not back till the twenty-first but I don't want to leave it too long. How about the fourteenth? It's a Tuesday.'
'What's with Tuesdays, then?'
'It's a weekday,' said Lance incomprehensibly.
'I'll ask him, shall I? He may be doing his community service. It's cleaning graffiti off tube trains. But I'll ask him, see what he says.'
'You know what you are? You're an angel, you are.' This show of emotion soon led to renewed lovemaking and it was another hour before Gemma left, making her way down the Portobello Road just as Uncle Gib turned out of it
