This is the Ritual Read online

  One night, when I was still with her, I went to watch her dance. I didn’t tell her I was coming. I sat down the back, almost in disguise, hidden behind my drink, in the shadows. Maybe she saw me, what do I know. Really – and this is probably clearer to me now than it was then – really I was looking for the Turk. I hardly even concentrated on her dancing, though I admit it was beautiful (what I saw of it), her pale young body bathed in the blue light, called forth to radiance from the grime and neglect and all that her father could never protect her from. She had many admirers that night, but I never caught a glimpse of the Turk. Maybe he’s backstage, I thought desperately, draining my drink and wiping my lips as she bowed, then stepped serenely from the podium, and out through the narrow doorway.

  I got home that night at three a.m., drunk and furious. Bitter, bitter. I masturbated savagely to web-porn and slept with the come not yet dried on my knuckles.

  The next day I saw her, I mean we met up, first for a cappuccino, then an autumn afternoon stroll through Hyde Park, where foreign students walk dogs by the dozen (I hear they make decent money). Every man we passed seemed not only to seek out her eye, but to grin a faint, smug grin, like they were all in on some joke and I was the only one left in the dark. I kept it in, I said nothing, I was fucking chivalrous.

  Another time we were back at her place in Canary Wharf – the nineteenth floor, London down there like a plane of stars, or neon smears, or just science fiction. And how many cameras are down there, and not one of them ever saved me from anything. We screwed and I tried to memorise the flawless orbs of her breasts, the way the light caught her body – it felt as if, for once in life, all the promise of pornography had been delivered, there was nothing left to be bitter about. But I kept thinking about the Turk, and then it’s like my dick felt smaller, somehow not wide enough to fill her up, to give her the friction that she wanted. It was an illusion, I suppose, but at the time it seemed real enough. I stayed the night and then I had to put in a shift at the Mexican restaurant, wearing that fucking sombrero. It was an alright shift, though, cause Celak was there and we had sly laughs about pretty customers, and got decent tips. After work we went for a few drinks. Celak wanted to go clubbing in Tiger Tiger, but at eleven I said I had to be somewhere (it makes you feel important, it’s never true, even when you think it is). I said see you man, and took a bus. This time I sat closer to the stage, more openly, and I drank more too, and I was kind of short with the waitress cause Jesus, I’m paying here, I’m the customer, what the fuck is this.

  She came on after a Latina woman with a nice enough body but too old, too old. This time I watched her appreciatively and I even forgot about the Turk, more or less. She used one of those long, white, glittery things – what’s it called, a boa? Is it called a boa? Or is that just a fucking snake.

  The blue light, the music. Oh you are wondrous, I thought, and the men there all agreed, and she caught a few of their eyes, and I’d say that smile was a little less than professional, wouldn’t you agree now, honey. When she headed backstage, I put my drink on the bar (empty) and tried to follow her in by another route. That didn’t really work out, but it could have been worse and I left, as they say, unmolested. That night the porno I put on depicted weird metal devices and blood (fake probably), and a sinister font. I was ashamed in the morning but it had suited my mood.

  For a couple of months we met up once or twice a week, we had sex, we saw a gig in Brixton. But always when I was with her the Turk invaded my thoughts – he molested me. Whenever we drank, things turned ugly. My mind twisted up, I hissed or snapped and said brutal or double-edged things, and basically upset her, but later I always apologised in a gush of sentiment and horniness (I could never walk away – an ass like that?). One morning we slept late and she woke up and said shit, I have to get going, hang around here if you want. So I did hang around, up on the nineteenth floor (thereabouts). I did what you’d expect: sniff her underwear, scrutinise the toilet bowl, pull myself off in her bed. I was going to somehow pretend I’d gone home, then hide under the bed and wait – I wanted to see if she’d bring him back. But in the end I thought the better of it, or really I couldn’t be fucked. I let myself out, slid the key under the door like she’d said, and took two buses home. I got drunk that night and wandered late along Seven Sisters where it’s busy, hoping for I don’t know what, some kind of new horizon, a human reaction, some friendship I suppose.

  When she broke up with me I sort of went off the radar for a while – I mean even to myself. I have trouble saying exactly what happened in those weeks, what I was up to. That wasn’t only down to finishing with her: it had a lot to do with mephedrone, which was still legal then. You could just walk into a head-shop and buy it. And I did, I walked right in there and bought it. It was so much better than coke – stronger buzz, more reliable, longer lasting, only a tenth the price. Coke is a status sign, you only get symbolically high, like Holy Communion.

  Everything accelerated with the drug. I was all over London like a streak of red light in one of those stop-motion panoramas in music videos (the singer always moves at normal speed while everything rushes around her, she’s supposed to be special; but everyone feels special, that’s the primary con). I was living amid extreme, daily agony, blunted only by drugs and drink. The worst part was that I felt we hadn’t had enough sex. That might sound crass or shallow, but I felt it as a real loss, it really hurt. You know you’ll carry it with you till the end, that remorse – you failed to live to the full, life was for the brave and you did not make your moves.

  She said I was too intense, that’s why she broke up with me, she said I came on too strong – those kinds of clichés. In other words: same stuff they always say. They can’t handle it, they say they want the high romance but really it’s just security and families. So yes I was angry. But the thing is, I wasn’t really that angry with her – or only in an indirect way. What really boiled my blood, what kept me awake at night, was not her, but . . . the Turk. Still. I’d wake up at 2:49, 4:06, 5:20, and I’d know – I can’t explain how, I was just dead certain that at that very instant, over the other side of the city, he was lashing it into her, I mean searing out her insides, making her come again and again and again and again. And all the time he had that superior smirk, and he didn’t take off his clothes (grey suit and jacket). And every thrust he gave her, every shuddering orgasm he brought her to – that was really him fucking me. That’s all there is to it. Absolute injustice. I had no power whatsoever. I remember clawing my hair and my scalp, hissing and writhing around and making all these animal noises, grunts and shrieks, and moaning weird obscenities, racist invective, all kinds of random taboo stuff. It was like demonic possession. I wanted to kill him. I thought about it so much, I mean obsessively, just smashing his mouth in with a hammer and stomping his head to a mush, hacking into his face with a cleaver, the usual.

  Celak was my only friend in those dark days. He didn’t drink much, and looked down on my drug-taking with Muslim smugness, or wherever he comes from. But he was mad for women, so he came out with me every night after work. I’d be fucked off my head on meow meow, with my eyes like saucers, talking too quick, too eager for any human contact or approval, and Celak would be there at my side going sure, man, sure, but really his eyes were scanning relentlessly for women, flitting from one to the next, like RoboCop, sorting out their bodies and arses, catching their glances. A machine he was like. I always dreaded him actually picking up a girl, cause then I’d be out there on my own, stranded at four a.m. with nothing to go back to, nothing to stave off the shocking grief of the comedown but a dismal box-room in a house full of strangers.

  I came through that period, somehow. I mean the worst of it. The pain was still there, every day it burned. When things got a little clearer I was surprised to find I still had my job at the Mexican restaurant, despite all the sick-days and lates and ‘alienating or inappropriate behaviour’, or however they put it in those fucking letters. But then I decided to go
back, just once, and see her dance. I hadn’t heard a word from her now in maybe two months. (I’d made a routine of calling her and letting it ring out, then calling her again, repeating that around twenty-five or thirty times per night.) On a Friday night I took a tube to Russell Square. I paid in and sat at a middle table, not too far from the stage.

  All night I sat there. I must have seen a dozen dances – a redhead, the Latina woman, two blondes, a Chink with mad tits. When the same girls came out for a second rotation I knew she wasn’t going to appear. I waited anyway, just in case. Her or the Turk, I had to see one of them. I knocked back a barrel’s worth of whiskeys and Coke – they cost a fortune but I had to deal with the rage, though to be honest the drink only exacerbated it. I saw how the men were transfixed by the dancers – a flesh trance, a lust rapture. I imagined very vividly how the Turk had watched her just like that, except it was different cause he’d have trembled in anticipation, knowing he could have her the moment she stepped off-stage. The images bombarded me, worse than ever. I let out a long moan and bit into my knuckle. I wanted to run outside, but where to? – the hell was inside me. I gasped at the waitress for more drink, I must’ve spent a week’s wages, no exaggeration. I heard myself moan like I was dying. The fucking Turk, I gasped, loud enough for some guy to turn and look. And the awful truth of it was that what made her knees weak, what made him better than me, was his fucking money, his power, his prestige. The fucking Turk.

  At some point I just wasn’t in control any more and that’s when I was shoving my way through the stage door, demanding that I be allowed to see her, getting slammed by a big black guy. She’s my boyfriend, I roared – precision was lost in the rage – she’s my boyfriend and you’re saying I can’t see her. I don’t remember the actual getting thrown out but I assume they were civilised enough – I mean no broken bones or anything. Who knows what happened with the rest of the night, but it ended with me being shaken awake by a homeless man with grimy dreadlocks who looked genuinely worried. Dawn had broken and I was down on one of those smelly grey pebble beaches on the Thames, right in the heart of the city, on the South Bank, where they have raves in the summer. It was a dull morning and my pockets had been thoroughly looted. One shoe was missing, along with the sock. I still had on my leather jacket.

  That night scared me. I had the realisation – right there on that slope of grey sand by the Thames – that there was no getting away from the Turk, I mean the Turk inside, the inner Turk. Things had to change or I was fucked. I could be a waster no longer, the humiliation was too severe. It took some time, a few years I mean, but eventually things started coming together. Then, for a dark and frightening period, there was the cocaine instead of mephedrone, and all that led to, the regressions and setbacks – but that’s another story, or I can’t be bothered to tell it.

  And so here I am, still working hard – too hard, I sometimes think, even my manager says I should take things a little more lightly – up in my office on the twenty-eighth floor, right bang in the City. It’s still a struggle, I take one day at a time. I don’t like to think about that other period of my life, but it comes back at night when I can’t sleep, or early in the morning, before my first double espresso.

  As for her . . . I only saw her once after that – my breakdown or epiphany or whatever you want to call it. I was still fairly frail at that time, shaky. I’d lost the restaurant job, had no money, had fallen out of contact with Celak – I was basically litter on the breeze, too weak for life. I was sitting on a bench in Hyde Park. It was a summer’s day, I forget why I was there, possibly no reason, just sitting and waiting. I looked up and saw her walking towards me along the pathway, it was too late to get up and scurry away. Beside her was a man – one of those bulging, all-in-black, fashion-beard guys with sunglasses, from Italy or the Middle East, wherever. I mean someone who was in love with himself, and you could tell right off that his phone cost twice your yearly salary. It was an awful moment. I shrank into the bench, hands in pockets, praying to God she wouldn’t stop and talk, just walk on and pretend she didn’t see me. But then she did walk on – and she’d seen me alright, I caught the moment of confusion and dismay on her face before she averted her eyes – and it was the most crushing, humiliating thing I’d ever experienced, like being informed I had a terminal sex disease or I was a leper. They walked away. I looked up when they were twenty yards on – she was under his wing, that rippling, designer-labelled hulk of muscle and self-worth. I stayed there on the bench, on my own. It occurred to me that there was no one, not a single person in this whole city, who I wanted to talk to at that moment, despite the suicidal loneliness. I stayed sitting there on the bench as the park slowly emptied out, and grey clouds drifted in across the sun, chasing away the warmth. Then the day was gone and all the people had left, just a few pigeons shuffling about. Finally the man with the green uniform and the rubbish-prong came and told me to go home, or move away, or get lost, I don’t really remember exactly.

  Final Email from P. Cranley

  What follows has only the most oblique and tenuous of claims to fictionality, being an email, transcribed from memory, sent to me by an Irish friend I met while travelling in India several years ago. Though the original is no longer in my inbox, having no doubt fallen victim to one of my periodic, over-vigorous purges, P. Cranley’s strange last email, which I received in late 2010 or early 2011 and read a great many times, remains fresh in my mind. Its fractured and torrential cadences still haunt me, as does the memory of Cranley himself – a generous, likeable man who exuded the unmistakable aura of being both doomed and psychotic. If I have not achieved here a verbatim transcription of the email, I have come close to it. Cranley never responded to any of my subsequent attempts to contact him. In all probability he is now dead.

  From: P. Cranley

  To: Robert Doyle (No Subject)

  4:32am

  i did what i said i got out of st patricks hospital i came to america. my ma keeps emailing DONT DO IT WE LOVE U and da as well WHATEVER HAPPENED TO U WEELL FIX IT but i have to meet the angel. i know u laugh but only transcendent presence can save u me or anyone. u must embrace it. have u done so

  let me tell u i

  i came here 2 san francisco i checked into v cheap & v grimy hotel on colombus street which is bad-energy area where u will find titty bars. d guidebook say ‘this area is OK by day but can be dangerous at night when it is often d site of drug deals and also cannibal hordes roam freely feasting on christians and yes d policemen have red SATAN eyes and truncheons of fire. with d truncheons they impale u anally in their HQ which is d COCK FORTRESS.’ but i stay in at night i pray i write i have to meet the angel at 3 am tomorrow thursday out at d panhandle. this is dark strip of grass and benches where homeless wander nocturnally with shopping trolleys stocked 4 d coming holocaust. i pray i write i reread d lives of saints. st teresa of avila her story is my own. tears of fire 2 cleanse us of sin. but at night now she comes 2 me and whispers DESPAIR CHIL’’, THE SKY IS A DESERTED QUARRY OR A FAMISHED MOUNTAIN THE LORD IS A CRIPPLE HE HATES US ALL. i cry i scream LIES but d other guests shout through d walls in spanish or gigolo & d manager pounds on door sayin QUIET OR U GET THE HELL OUT i know he is a denizen of d Foul Realm but i am protected in d ring of light holy light. embrace d lord in yr heart.

  everything has changed

  i need to explain all 2 u. starting. only with d force of god i could walk out of that so-called hospital ie ‘loony bin’ (prison of light. black cage of spirit . . . bureaucrats of d abyss) i came to san francisco like i said to meet d angel. of mercy of truth . . . o holy fire. & yesterday i went down to castro where d homosexuals congregate i roared BROTHERS I LOVE U AALL BUT FEAR THE FLAME . . . D LORD WILL SPEAK AND HIS VOICE IS FLAME & U WILL TREMBLE & REPENT. YES. TO LUV A MAN IS NOT A SIN BUT IT IS A TRANSGRESSION I TOO HAVE MY SINS BUT I ACCEPT D LORD INTO MY HEART. D RECKONING IS AT HAND & they were all laughing and i wasnt d only 1 naked there was 1 homosexual male in cowboy hat & nothing else he t
ried to dance with me while other homosexuals clapped & cheered. i felt ridiculed i pulled on ‘pants’ AKA trousers and ran away . . . angel will protect me i felt strong and elated & ran to haight. nearby a music festival ie. gathering of dark shamans/infiltration of d invader force. but it was ok until i see this hippy ie ‘human wreckage’ with a sign held up saying MELT ME. that i could not handle i ran to d end of haight every1 deformed every1 doomed the armpit of the earth i came to golden gate park at the end of haight/hate & sat & cried. overcome i was d universal sorrow. could not stop crying. like FATHER WE ARE SCREAMING COME TAKE US AWAY OUR EARTH IS FALLING THROUGH SPACE & SHAMANS MASSED IN LEGION FROM D FOUL REALM R POISED TO OVERRUN BUT I HAVE NO FEAR OF D COMING WAR IF U LUV ME DO U LUV ME d hippies gathered around & took pity but i can see these are d broken children/orphans of d american wilderness d broken west i see them all marching into d ocean or a JAW in d sky. they have no teeth & crackhead mothers tried to abort them & now they smoke chillum & pray to universal spirit or ganesh or vishnu or shiva but i was frighten they had been duped n under d sway of d dark shamans from d far side of d universe where hate is d only law & cruelty d only science (vast technologies shown 2 me by d angel . . . planet systems wholly of prison torture experiment/entire races engineered & raised captive only purpose as subjects of torture. they have elongated life & amplified nervous systems x1000000000 sole purpose is 2 feel agony) all of this is real

  then d hippies were laughing to themselves while i was sitting there crying & 1 of them says to me HEY MAN WHAT U NEED IS SOME SHROOMS they all laughed & i knew they were conspire but then i look up & 1 hippy girl she was smiling at me benign smile i knew she was different she was beautiful & then i knew ‘it is a sign!’ she was d angel or a human bodiment of d angel 2 guide me through d utter chaos. calm i put out my hand n d hippy reached out & put d mushrooms in it i ate them. d other hippies were laughing & watching like v curious & then d shroom guy took out more i ate them & then d other hippies weren’t laughing & 1 says SHIT MAN, THATS 2 MUCH HE IS GONNA TWEAK . . . YR A FUCKIN ASSHOLE & i felt fear. i start 2 panic but i thought ‘look 4 d angel’ so i looked up into crowd of hippies 4 d radiant girl but she was gone. & now i felt pure alone like had been duped & she was not d angel she was a trickster 4 d dark shaman. d other faces crowded around sneering & deformed. i screamed WHAT DID U GIVE ME WHAT HAVE I EATEN U CUNT i leapt i claw his face he screaming & blood flow i scream U DARK SHAMANS D LORD WALKS WITH ME I HAVE NO FEAR & put my finger in his eye. in d commotion i run so fast away from d park i kept running till they gone behind me. already i could feel d alien presence in my system this was d mushroom i knew it was Malign Presence i was crying 2 d angel ‘PLEASE BE WITH ME NOW THIS IS MY TRIAL’ i ran 2 a place called buena vista park a big mountain in d city. ran up d side of d mountain & all around me were screaming devils & d sky was a holocaust. i saw now that nature was a virus from d FOUL REALM and d virus has spread to everything. this was a revelation. nature not benign: d trees grass sky insects birds & animals r all manifestations of d FIEND & d FIENDs body is nature itself. i was in horror. nowhere 2 escape 2. i knew despair because i reached d top of d mountain & no one around & thick fog came rolling in across d bay i saw it swarm over d land & cover everything i saw d earth swallowed up in fog i screamed now i knew i had been fool all along. d great war 4 d earth is not to come IT ALREADY HAPPENED WE R LIVING IN D FOUL REALM . . . IT IS CALLED NATURE . . . WE LIVE IN D BODY OF SATAN i fell on d ground & cried i thought ‘i am abandoned for ever in d body of satan’ a dog came to me he lick my face i try to annihilate him i punch his face he shrieked & run he is 1 manifestation of d FIEND & i howled and screamed & then d vision overwhelmed . . . planet in space. planet/Gaia is Satan & conscious & we are his serfs god is defeated & crushed & great war will never come we r lost. r future is 2 be engineered ie. earth as infinite suffering realm ie. warfare/torture/screaming 4ever 2 feed d power of Satan