The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul

Chapter 21

For about a minute Dirk remained sitting motionless in his car a few yards away from his front door. He wondered what his next move should be. A small, cautious one, he rather thought. The last thing he wanted to have to contend with at the moment was a startled eagle.

He watched it intently. It stood there with a pert magnificence about its bearing, its talons gripped tightly round the edge of the stone step. From time to time it preened itself, and then peered sharply up the street and down the street, dragging one of its great talons across the stone in a deeply worrying manner. Dirk admired the creature greatly for its size and its plumage and its general sense of extreme air-worthiness, but, asking himself if he liked the way that the light from the street lamp glinted in its great glassy eye or on the huge hook of its beak, he had to admit that he did not.

The beak was a major piece of armoury.

It was a beak that would frighten any animal on earth, even one that was already dead and in a tin. Its talons looked as if they could rip up a small Volvo. And it was sitting waiting on Dirk's doorstep, looking up and down the street with a gaze that was at once meaningful and mean.

Dirk wondered if he should simply drive off and leave the country. Did he have his passport? No. It was at home. It was behind the door which was behind the eagle, in a drawer somewhere or, more likely, lost.

He could sell up. The ratio of estate agents to actual houses in the area was rapidly approaching parity. One of their lot could come and deal with the house. He'd had enough of it, with its fridges and its wildlife and its ineradicable position on the mailing lists of the American Express company.

Or he could, he supposed with a slight shiver, just go and see what it was the eagle wanted. There was a thought. Rats, probably, or a small whippet. All Dirk had, to his knowledge, was some Rice Krispies and an old muffin, and he didn't see those appealing to this magisterial creature of the air. He rather fancied that he could make out fresh blood congealing on the bird's talons, but he told himself firmly not to be so ridiculous.

He was just going to have to go and face up to the thing, explain that he was fresh out of rats and take the consequences.

Quietly, infinitely quietly, he pushed open the door of his car, and stole out of it, keeping his head down. He peered at it from over the bonnet of the car. It hadn't moved. That is to say, it hadn't left the district. It was still looking this way and that around itself with, possibly, a heightened sense of alertness. Dirk didn't know in what remote mountain eyrie the creature had learnt to listen out for the sound of Jaguar car door hinges revolving in their sockets, but the sound had clearly not escaped its attention.

Cautiously, Dirk bobbed along behind the line of cars that had prevented him from being able to park directly outside his own house. In a couple of seconds all that separated him from the extraordinary creature was a small, blue Renault.

What next?

He could simply stand up and, as it were, declare himself. He would be saying, in effect, “Here I am, do what you will.” Whatever then transpired, the Renault could probably bear the brunt.

There was always the possibility, of course, that the eagle would be pleased to see him, that all this swooping it had been directing at him had been just its way of being matey. Assuming, of course, that it was the same eagle. That was not such an enormous assumption. The number of golden eagles at large in North London at any one time was, Dirk guessed, fairly small.

Or maybe it was just nesting on his doorstep completely by chance, enjoying a quick breather prior to having another hurtle through the sky in pursuit of whatever it is that eagles hurtle through the sky after.

Whatever the explanation, now, Dirk realised, was the time that he had simply to take his chances. He steeled himself, took a deep breath and arose from behind the Renault, like a spirit rising from the deep.

The eagle was looking in another direction at the time, and it was a second or so before it looked back to the front and saw him, at which point it reacted with a loud screech and stepped back an inch or two, a reaction which Dirk felt a little put out by. It then blinked rapidly a few times and adopted a sort of perky expression of which Dirk did not have the faintest idea what to make.

He waited for a second or two, until he felt the situation had settled down again after all the foregoing excitement, and then stopped forward tentatively, round the front of the Renault. A number of quiet, interrogative cawing noises seemed to float uncertainly through the air, and then after a moment Dirk realised that he was making them himself and made himself stop. This was an eagle he was dealing with, not a budgie.

It was at this point that he made his mistake.

With his mind entirely taken up with eagles, the possible intentions of eagles, and the many ways in which eagles might be considercd to differ from small kittens, he did not concentrate enough on what he was doing as he stepped up out of the road and on to a pavement that was slick with the recent drizzle. As he brought his rear foot forward it caught on the bumper of the car he wobbled, slipped, and then did that thing which one should never do to a large eagle of uncertain temper, which was to fling himself headlong at it with his arms outstretched.

The eagle reacted instantly.

Without a second's hesitation it hopped neatly aside and allowed Dirk the space he needed to collapse heavily on to his own doorstep. It then peered down at him with a scorn that would have withered a lesser man, or at least a man that had been looking up at that moment.

Dirk groaned.

He had sustained a blow to the temple from the edge of the step, and it was a blow, he felt, that he could just as easily have done without this evening. He lay there gasping for a second or two, then at last rolled over heavily, clasping one hand to his forehead, the other to his nose, and looked up at the great bird in apprehension, reflecting bitterly on the conditions under which he was expected to work.

When it became clear to him that he appeared for the moment to have nothing to fear from the eagle, who was merely regarding him with a kind of quizzical, blinking doubt, he sat up, and then slowly dragged himself back to his feet and wiped and smacked some of the dirt off his coat. Then he hunted through his pockets for his keys and unlocked the front door, which seemed a little loose. He waited to see what the eagle would do next.

With a slight rustle of its wings it hopped over the lintel and into his hall. It looked around itself, and seemed to regard what it saw with a little distaste. Dirk didn't know what it was that eagles expected of people's hallways, but had to admit to himself that it wasn't only the eagle which reacted like that. The disorder was not that great, but there was a grimness to it which tended to cast a pall over visitors, and the eagle was clearly not immune to this effect.

Dirk picked up a large flat envelope lying on his doormat, looked inside it to check that it was what he had been expecting, then noticed that a picture was missing from the wall. It wasn't a particularly wonderful picture, merely a small Japanese print that he had found in Camden Passage and quite liked, but the point was that it was missing. The hook on the wall was empty. There was a chair missing as well, he realised.

The possible significance of this suddenly struck him, and he hurried through to the kitchen. Many of his assorted kitchen implements had clearly gone. The rack of largely unused Sabatier knives, the food processor and his radio cassette player had all vanished, but he did, however, have a new fridge. It had obviously been delivered by Nobby Paxton's felonious thugs and he would just have to make the usual little list.

Still, he had a new fridge and that was a considerable load off his mind. Already the whole atmosphere in the kitchen seemed easier. The tension had lifted. There was a new sense of lightness and springiness in the air which had even communicated itself to the pile of old pizza boxes which seemed now to recline at a jaunty rather than an oppressive angle.

Dirk cheerfully threw open the door to the new fridge and was delighted to find it completely and utterly empty. Its inner light shone on perfectly clean blue and white walls and on gleaming chrome shelves. He liked it so much that he instantly determined to keep it like that. He would put nothing in it at all. His food would just have to go off in plain view.

Good. He closed it again.

A screech and a flap behind him reminded him that he was entertaining a visiting eagle. He turned to find it glaring at him from on top of the kitchen table.

Now that he was getting a little more accustomed to it, and had not actually been viciously attacked as he had suspected he might be, it seemed a little less fearsome than it had at first. It was still a serious amount of eagle, but perhaps an eagle was a slightly more manageable proposition than he had originally supposed. He relaxed a little and took off his hat, pulled off his coat, and threw them on to a chair.

The eagle seemed at this juncture to sense that Dirk might be getting the wrong idea about it and flexed one of its claws at him. With sudden alarm Dirk saw that it did indeed have something that closely resembled congealed blood on the talons. He backed away from it hurriedly. The eagle then rose up to its full height on its talons and began to spread its great wings out, wider and wider, beating them very slowly and leaning forward so as to keep its balance. Dirk did the only thing he could think to do under the circumstances and bolted from the room, slamming the door behind him and jamming the hall table up against it.

A terrible cacophony of screeching and scratching and buffeting arose instantly from behind it. Dirk sat leaning back against the table, panting and trying to catch his breath, and then after a while began to get a worrying feeling about what the bird was up to now.

It seemed to him that the eagle was actually dive-bombing itself against the door. Every few seconds the pattern would repeat itself — first a great beating of wings, then a rush, then a terrible cracking thud. Dirk didn't think it would get through the door, but was alarmed that it might beat itself to death trying. The creature seemed to be quite frantic about something, but what, Dirk could not even begin to imagine. He tried to calm himself down and think clearly, to work out what he should do next.

He should phone Kate and make certain she was all right. Whoosh, thud! He should finally open up the envelope he had been carrying with him all day and examine its contents. Whoosh, thud! For that he would need a sharp knife. Whoosh, thud! Three rather awkward thoughts then struck him in fairly quick succession.

Whoosh, thud! First, the only sharp knives in the place, assuming Nobby's removal people had left him with any at all, were in the kitchen. Whoosh, thud! That didn't matter so much in itself, because he could probably find something in the house that would do. Whoosh, thud! The second thought was that the actual envelope itself was in the pocket of his coat which he had left lying over the back of a chair in the kitchen. Whoosh, thud! The third thought was very similar to the second and had to do with the location of the piece of paper with Kate's telephone number on it. Whoosh, thud! Oh God. Whoosh, thud! Dirk began to feel very, very tired at the way the day was working out. He was deeply worried by the sense of impending calamity, but was still by no means able to divine what lay at the root of it. Whoosh, thud! Well, he knew what he had to do now... Whoosh, thud! ...so there was no point in not getting on with it. He quietly pulled the table away from the door. Whoosh — He ducked and yanked the door open, passing smoothly under the eagle as it hurtled out into the hallway and hit the opposite wall. He slammed the door closed behind him from inside the kitchen, pulled his coat off the chair and jammed the chair back up under the handle. Whoosh, thud! The damage done to the door on this side was both considerable and impressive, and Dirk began seriously to worry about what this behaviour said about the bird's state of mind, or what the bird's state of mind might become if it maintained this behaviour for very much longer. Whoosh... scratch... The same thought seemed to have occurred to the bird at that moment, and after a brief flurry of screeching and of scratching at the door with its talons it lapsed into a grumpy and defeated silence, which after it had been going on for about a minute became almost as disturbing as the previous batterings.

Dirk wondered what it was up to.

He approached the door cautiously and very, very quietly moved the chair back a little so that he could see through the keyhole. He squatted down and peered through it. At first it seemed to him that he could see nothing through it, that it must be blocked by something. Then, a slight flicker and glint close up on the other side suddenly revealed the startling truth, which was that the eagle also had an eye up at the keyhole and was busy looking back at him. Dirk almost toppled backwards with the shock of the realisation, and backed away from the door with a sense of slight horror and revulsion.

This was extremely intelligent behaviour for an eagle wasn't it? Was it? How could he find out? He couldn't think of any ornithological experts to phone. All his reference books were piled up in other rooms of the house, and he didn't think he'd be able to keep on pulling off the same stunt with impunity, certainly not when he was dealing with an eagle which had managed to figure out what keyholes were for.

He retrealed to the kitchen sink and found some kitchen towel. He folded it into a wad, soaked it, and dabbed it first on his bleeding temple, which was swelling up nicely, and then on his nose which was still very tender, and had been a considerable size for most of the day now. Maybe the eagle was an eagle of delicate sensibilities and had reacted badly to the sight of Dirk's face in its current, much abused, state and had simply lost its mind. Dirk sighed and sat down.

Kate's telephone, which was the next thing he turned his attention to, was answered by a machine when he tried to ring it. Her voice told him, very sweetly, that he was welcome to leave a message after the beep, but warned that she hardly ever listened to them and that it was much better to talk to her directly, only he couldn't because she wasn't in, so he'd best try again.

Thank you very much, he thought, and put the phone down.

He realised that the truth of the matter was this: he had spent the day putting off opening the envelope because of what he was worried about finding in it. It wasn't that the idea was frightening, though indeed it was frightening that a man should sell his soul to a green-eyed man with a scythe, which is what circumstances were trying very hard to suggest had happened. It was just that it was extremely depressing that he should sell it to a green-eyed man with a scythe in exchange for a share in the royalties of a hit record.

That was what it looked like on the face of it. Wasn't it?

Dirk picked up the other envelope, the one which had been waiting for him on his doormat, delivered there by courier from a large London bookshop where Dirk had an account. He pulled out the contents, which were a copy of the sheet music of Hot Potato, written by Colin Paignton, Phil Mulville and Geoff Anstey.

The lyrics were, well, straightforward. They provided a basic repetitive bit of funk rhythm and a simple sense of menace and cheerful callousness which had caught the mood of last summer. They went:

Hot Potato,

Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.

Quick, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on.

You don't want to get caught, get caught, get caught.

Drop it on someone. Who ? Who ? Anybody.

You better not have it when the big one comes.

I said you better not have it when the big one comes.

It's a Hot Potato.

And so on. The repeated phrases got tossed back and forward between the two members of the band, the drum machine got heavier and heavier, and there had been a dance video.

Was that all it was going to be? Big deal. A nice house in Lupton Street with polyurethaned floors and a broken marriage?

Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall and, whap, your head comes off.

So what exactly was the deal? What was the Potato contract? Who was getting what and why?

Dirk rummaged through a drawer for the breadknife, sat down once more, took the envelope from his coat pocket and ripped through the congealed strata of Sellotape which held the end of it together.

Out fell a thick bundle of papers.