The Devil You Know

up a gear or two when I heard a ghost story.

Grit in a paper cut, ground all the way down, where you couldn’t get it out again.

I backed the car into Pen’s overgrown driveway, crushing a few tough strands of bramble that had had the guts to put their heads back up since I’d left that afternoon. I got out and retrieved Rhona the rat’s cage from the backseat. She gave me a fairly unfriendly look; in her books, I was one of those guys who lead you on, take what they need, and then leave you hanging. All things considered, it was a fair cop.

The key fob played the first bar of “Für Elise” as I locked the car up. I hoped that Beethoven’s ghost was out there somewhere, making the night hideous for the managing director of Ford.

There was no sign of a light. I live at the top of the great, three-story pile, and Pen lives at the bottom of it, but it’s built into the side of a hill, so from this side, her rooms are underground. On the other side, they look out onto a garden that is ten feet below the level of the road. But I didn’t need to see a light; I knew she was in there, waiting for me.

The Peter’s Birthday Party Massacre seemed a long time ago now, and its sting had faded. But for Pen, it was still the big story of the day, and she’d be wanting to know how well I’d gone down. She’d also be wanting to count the pennies.

Well, I’d gone down like the Titanic, and the pennies were still in James Dodson’s wallet. Now I had to face the music—which was likely to be a lot more like “O Fortuna” than “Ye Banks and Braes.”

I let myself in and locked the door behind me. I bolted it, too, and I lifted up my hand to put a ward on it, which is still automatic with me even after living in Pen’s house for three years. But I remembered in time and turned away with a vague sense of coitus interruptus. She’s a priestess now; she does her own blessings.

But just as I put my foot on the top of the basement stairs, I saw that I was wrong about where Pen was. There was a light on in the kitchen, not visible from the street, and there were noises of purposeful, even slightly violent activity.

I walked on through. Pen was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to me, the bare bulb swinging gently over her head in the draft from the cracked window, and she didn’t look up. She was too absorbed in her work. She had her toolbox open on the table in front of her and the remains of a sprawled, broken necklace. I came a step or two closer and saw what she was doing. She was filing the beads from the necklace, laboriously and carefully. A saucer on her left-hand side was full of beads that she’d presumably already finished to her own satisfaction. There was also a bottle of Glen Discount and a glass.

“You can share,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I broke the other glass when I tried to scrub the turps smell off it.”

I was right behind her now. I picked up the glass, took a long sip of the whisky, and set it down again. While I was doing this, I looked more carefully at the necklace and saw that it was her rosary.

“Pen,” I said, because there was no way I couldn’t ask, “what are you doing?”

“I’m filing the beads down,” she answered, matter-of-factly.

“Because . . .”

“They were too big.” She looked up at me now, twisting her head around and squinting against the light. “You changed,” she said, sounding disappointed. “I hope you brought the suit back with you.”

“It’s in the car,” I said, putting Rhona’s cage down on the table. “Thanks for the loan.”

She pursed her lips and made kissing noises at Rhona, who sat up and scratched at the bars.

“Would you put her back in the harem?” Pen asked.

I was glad to. The alternative was to come clean about the party then and there, and every minute I could put that conversation off was one more minute of happiness. But the beads were still weighing on my mind, probably because I’d only just seen Rafi, and this looked so much like something that one of the inmates at the Stanger would do to while away the hours between ECT sessions.

“Too big for what?” I asked.

Pen didn’t answer. “Take Rhona downstairs,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you. I found something of yours, by the way—it’s on the mantelpiece next to the clock.”

As I walked down the stairs into Pen’s basement citadel, I heard something that made a sudden wave of unease crest inside me. It was “Enola Gay” by OMD. Pen often left her old vinyl playing on the turntable when she went out of the room, and the turntable was of the kind that goes back to the start of the record when it finishes. But if she was playing eighties stuff, that wasn’t a good sign.

The door to her sitting room was open. Edgar and Arthur watched me mournfully from their favorite perches—the top of the bookcase and a pallid bust of John Lennon, respectively—as I transferred Rhona from the carry cage to the big rat penthouse where she lived with her entourage of big, hunky guy rats who’d be happy to give her what I’d so signally failed to deliver.

I looked over at the mantelpiece. There was something leaning against Pen’s ludicrous antique carriage clock: a curled-up piece of glossy card, off-white on the side that was facing me. A photo. I crossed the room, picked it up, and turned it over.

I knew roughly what it was going to be—the music and Pen’s mood had filled in some of the blanks ahead of time. But it still hit me like a punch in the chest.

The back quad at St. Peter’s, Oxford—the one with the fountain that tends to run with things other than water. Night: a scene caught in the baleful eye of someone’s inadequate flashgun, so there was no background to speak of. Just Felix Castor, age nineteen, all chestnut curls and strained grin, trying hard to look like he wasn’t eight months out of a state comprehensive school. I was already affecting a long coat, but back then it was a poncy black Burberry—I hadn’t yet joined the pre-Revolution Russian army. And since the coat was made for someone a lot broader across the shoulders, I looked like five foot ten inches of sweet Fanny Adams.

To my left, Pen. Christ, she was beautiful. The photo didn’t exist that could do justice to the colors of her, the quickness and the life of her. In a feathered snood, a red sequined boob tube, and a slit black skirt (marking this as the morning after a party), and with her gaze cast so demurely to the ground, she looked like a hooker who’s just tossed it all in to become a nun but hasn’t told anyone yet. Her hand was raised to the heavens, index finger extended.

To my right, Rafi. He was wearing the black Nehru jacket and pants that were his trademark, and he was smiling the smile of a man who’s got a great secret in him. Herman Melville says that’s an easy trick, but then, he also thought Moby Dick was a whale.

Both Rafi and I were crouching down, each of us with one leg extended behind us, the other flexed at the knee. I remembered that night with a vividness that had never faded, and I knew the reason for the strange pose. We were on our marks, and Pen was about to say go.

“I found it in the garage,” Pen’s voice said from behind me. “After you moved all your magic stuff. It was lying on the floor.”

I turned to face her, feeling like I’d been caught out in something. An emotion, maybe—something unworthy and unspoken that made me ashamed. Pen had the saucer of beads in one hand, the maimed rosary in the other. She looked a little wistful.

“What’s the score?” I asked her, groping for something to say that wouldn’t relate to the photo. I indicated the saucer with a nod of the head.

“The score?” She chewed this over, setting the beads down on the arm of the sofa before sitting down heavily herself right next to them. She seemed to find the words a bit perplexing, unless that was just the whisky. The silence lengthened.

“The match was called,” she said at last, not quite managing the flippant tone she was aiming for. “Rain stopped play. Bloody hell, I wish I was rich. I wish you played the guitar, like Stoker.”

It was a standing joke that had started to lean over and fall down by this time. Mack Stoker—Mack the Axe, Mack Five—matriculated in the same year as us, and he dropped out of university, too, only he did it to become lead guitar with Stasis Leak, the thrash-metal band, and was so successful that he’d already been in rehab three times.

I managed a tired smile, which Pen didn’t return. She stared at me solemnly, then looked down at the saucer of beads, then back at me. “I worry about you, Fix,” she said. “I really do. I don’t want you to get hurt. I went to see Rafi last week, and he told me you were going to get yourself into trouble. In over your head.” After a moment’s silence, she went on, her voice a lot lower. “I wonder sometimes . . . if things could have turned out