Thicker Than Water

‘Rafi?’ I echoed, just to be sure. ‘Not Asmodeus?’

‘Rafael Ditko,’ Imelda confirmed. ‘In his own right mind and native disposition.’

‘You’re a wonder, Imelda.’

‘Yes, I am. That doesn’t mean I’m any happier about this, incidentally.’

‘I know. This wipes out any debts between us.’

An edge came into her voice. ‘No, Castor, it doesn’t. It leaves the balance on my side. And when I call in that favour, you will damn well know about it.’

‘Okay.’ I was prepared to bend over backwards a long way to placate the Ice-Maker: not many people could have done what she’d done, and I’m not counting myself in that number.

A couple of weeks passed. Pen went down to Peckham every two or three days to visit Rafi, and every visit after the first was what you might call a conjugal one. Without going into indelicate detail, the visits required Imelda and me to pull out all the stops to make sure that Rafi’s infernal other half didn’t surface and try to make it into a threesome. That didn’t bear thinking about.

In fact, there were a lot of aspects of the situation that didn’t bear thinking about, as Imelda was only too happy to remind me. But you can get used to anything, over time. There’s no atrocity so atrocious that it can’t become a routine.

We felt like we were on top of things. We’d plucked Rafi from the jaws of Jenna-Jane: we’d given him some kind of a doll’s-house miniature version of a life. We were shit-hot, all things considered: so good, so sharp, so fly that we knew, even while we were congratulating ourselves, that we couldn’t afford to lower our guard by a fraction of an inch.

But how much use is that when the roof falls in?

2

The sound of hammering dragged me up from uneasy dreams. Then the dreams and the noise got muddily entwined, so that for a few confused seconds I was knocking nails into a cross where one of the Bee Gees - Robin, I think - was hanging in place of Christ.

Then I was awake, and I realised that the noise hadn’t stopped. I got myself upright and threw the covers back, my head throbbing as though my brain had been set to ‘vibrate’ and was taking a lot of incoming calls all at the same time. Why was that?

Oh yeah.