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By the Light of All His Demons

In the late '70s Benny Baxter used to collect the rents in a house full of bedsits where I lived. Ex-RN he was, a former diver with a build like a wrestler's. Years later when I bumped into him again he’d put on quite a bit of poundage and was living in his car. (Benny claimed though that he never over-ate -- in fact he hardly ate at all. It was the demons and spirits, the succubi, that went up his back passage and blew him out.)

'Would you believe that a spirit can actually go methylated, invade the body and bring on a case of cirrhosis? Because that's what they've gone and done, me boy!'

He could give dazzling accounts of the illnesses that had been attacking him, month after month, without doing much harm. (As he was on a Navy pension he could spend all day with the medical books in the Public Reading Room.)

A little earlier, after numerous tests under different aliases in any town the Fiesta could take him to, he'd reluctantly accepted that he did not, in fact, have HIV. Guilt over several incidents that occurred between himself and a Chief Steward during his training as a sea cadet had lent strength to that fantasy. He'd had some London doctor put him on AZT for a while though, at any rate. Now he realised that he only had what in a weaker person would surely have turned into AIDS.

'If Rock Hudson had come to me I'da saved him. I'd have made him stay outside, under the open sky like I do. But still, how high would he have valued his survival if it meant living like a dog? ... You see, Terry, germs can't survive in the open air. That's why I can't go indoors and I have to live in the car. All right, you'll say how come I keep getting booked into these hospitals. Well, in hospital you've got a sterile environment, see....'

Though it was going way back I wanted to hear a bit more about this Chief Steward. It was well known, I told Benny, that the AIDS virus had a long incubation period, fifteen or twenty years. There was even a report that a body in a morgue was found to have the virus -- and the chap had been killed in the Blitz.

'You see, plus the fact, this Steward could have picked it up anywhere. From New Zealand to Honolulu -- he might even have enjoyed one of the green monkeys of the Gold Coast, for all we know.'

Benny considered this soberly, getting out of the car briefly to study the bonnet where a sparrow had shat.

'You could be right. But I don't think the guy was into penetration in any big way. I mean, I know he liked to watch me in the shower -- said I had a good skin, like. An officer's skin more than an Able Seaman's. Offered to get me one or two of the officers' towels sent down, so I took 'em.... But what I say is, he didn't like too much of the physical. Basically, just a bit of a cuddle. Not like some of the sods I know here in Ipswich, in the football realm and that. I could bring a few down if I wanted to!' he shouted, startling an old married couple walking by.

'But no, Reggie was an all right bloke. The first thing I knew he was waking me up by pulling me wire, then he'd hand me a mug of tea.'

'What, he played with your rocket while you were asleep? Why didn't you hammer the bloke?'

'Why should I?' said Benny, with his childlike grin. 'I was happy, he was happy. Just a boy sailor, that's me, left home, no affection. Glad of a little human warmth, you see.... I suppose really that's why that sort of thing was so rife on boats.'

As long as I'd known him, Benny had passed as a fairly ordinary heterosexual. He was now too, to the extent at any rate of living with Mavis, who had seen the cosmic and sometimes demonic light in his eyes and 'been not afraid'. She'd done clairvoyance and clairaudience herself, in fact, and had run an advert in the free Advertiser for eighteen months. Therefore she didn't perhaps find it too bad when 'in spirit' Benny saw a mass of rotting meat on her belly, or a grey-haired old woman over her shoulder who was later identified as Aunt Alice the pea picker.

Over the next few months I saw quite a bit of Benny and Mavis. There was the little matter of the eternity ring he got her. It turned black -- and as everybody knows, gold will not tarnish. The jeweller sent it off for assay and it was pure gold all right. No one was able to furnish an explanation.

It was from soon after taking up with Benny, Mavis confided, that her downfall began. She had trouble with her legs -- they blew up like rubber salamis. Benny forgot all about his own complaints and gave himself over to the study of Mavis's symptoms. The man of learning soon drew his conclusions: her problem was rooted in the psychic domain.

'Poor cow, if I'd known what I was starting I'd have let her be,' he said. 'You see, the girl was vulnerable. The heebie-jeebies got to her.'

'But she's had her dealings with the spiritual world for years,' I replied. 'She's a skilled clairvoyante, isn't she? I mean, she knows the ropes.'

'Ropes?' he snarled. 'Yeah, she knew some ropes, fair enough. What she didn't know was, she was getting into something that goes way back beyond the pyramids, me boy. It reaches back before Methuselah strutted the globe, I can vouch for that much. She's just been doing all this Tinkerbell stuff for years. Didn't know what it was to come up against the old Dragon.'

For Benny, it was all bound up with the position of Pluto in Mavis's planetary set-up. And Pluto was one slow-moving ball of wax. So he had to wonder whether she'd actually live through it.

He'd moved in with Mavis by now, leaving his car for the time being. Under her influence he'd been able to go indoors for short periods but still preferred to sit in the garden under an ingenious perspex arrangement he'd rigged up.

'They've found diabetes,' he said, welcoming me at the front door one morning soon after Mavis had gone into the Gynaecological Unit. 'She'll be out tomorrow.'

'Well, that's manageable,' I said, taking a chair at the kitchen table.

Benny nodded guardedly as he poured from the kettle to the tea pot. Whatever it was, he had no doubts that it was the work of devils, the little buggers. For some reason the diagnosis seemed to him totally trivial. He'd rather have heard about something more spectacular, say leprosy or gangrene. At least a rumbling appendix.

'Women always let you down -- it’s not worth the candle. I'll never forget me dad tellin' me. It's the Jezebel trap. They can't help it, half the time. He told me about when he was in the Forces during the war. There you'd be, see, on a divan with some tart and all these straps and stays and bodices and what have you, all the sort of caper a proper God-fearing bloke like me old man would never have needed even to know about in a decent world. Well, anyway, she lures him in, gives him the old palaver, spiral staircase job, and then what do you know, there's an air raid and a real danger to life, let alone being AWOL because he can't even get away because his underpants and flies are all snarled up with her millions of rubber and nylon dufers.'

Mavis had been talking to one of the other patients and came out of the hospital convicted of sin and anxious to start a godly life. Though she knew he was a noble fellow Benny Baxter was not in her destiny nor she in his. She told him, in layman's terms, to set about getting his stuff out of the bungalow.

Living in his car again, Benny confessed he'd been disappointed with Mavis and all her works.

Fed up of the lovey-dovey syndrome, henceforth he'd devote himself all the more to Spirit. Sleeping in the open, washing in the snow when necessary.

'I tell you one thing though, Terry: I wouldn't, if I had my time again, go anywhere near a church, nor would I go inside a fucking pub. The vicars deserve endorsements from Warner Brothers -- all they preach to is the Little People. And pubs, well, too many of the demonic go there. That's why they drink -- to blot out the Vision, see. The worst of it is they ought, the same as the holy rollers, to come out and admit that they're well and truly blinded by the light.'

Uttering this global panacea, shouting the odds to infinity as it were, Benny was off in a swirl of exhaust fumes. It was a rare sort of courage and determination he had: to keep on as he did, preaching like, fully aware that he didn't know how to make the world listen.

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