Down Among the Gods Read Online Free Page A

strikes a match. It flares and leaves a blind white spot in his vision, then gutters and creates dark shapes which sway and lean towards him as he crosses the room. The hairs on his back stiffen and tingle as the match burns out, and he quickly lights a second one and touches it to the two candles on the mantelpiece. As they kindle and the light expands, the room takes on a less forbidding quality. When he first moved here, in exodus from his last relationship, he bought a bolt of cheap grey fabric and hung it around the walls using a borrowed staple gun. It was a way to cover the crumbling plaster, and he had not thought of it as being any sort of a decorative achievement. It did, though, have some unusual and pleasing consequences. The cloth hangs over the recesses on either side of the fireplace, leaving perfect alcoves where the clutter of his life can lie concealed. And instead of bringing these curtain pieces right into the corners, he rounded them where they are attached to the ceiling, so that the room appears to be oval in shape. All the sharp edges are hidden.
    Patrick puts a match to the gas fire and as it heats up its red light begins to overpower the candles. He sits down for a moment or two to calm himself before starting into the night’s work which lies before him. For the first time in all the years he has lived here, it occurs to him that the round, warm space he has created is a womb. But it is a womb which has outlived its purpose. Now it is trying to expel him.

Chapter Three
    T HE HATRED BETWEEN HERA and Dionysus is long-standing and bitter. For when Hera’s first attempt to get rid of Dionysus failed, she did not give up. As soon as he emerged from Zeus’ thigh, she ordered the Titans to destroy him. They did their solid and pragmatic best. They tore Dionysus to pieces and boiled him in a cauldron, but his grandmother Rhea rescued him and delivered him back to Zeus, who entrusted him to Persephone, the queen of the underworld. She in turn brought him to King Athamas and his wife, Ino, who reared him in the women’s quarters, disguised as a girl. But Hera was not to be deceived. When she discovered what they had done, she rewarded Athamas and Ino with madness.
    Jessie would have liked to linger on after the class to see whether there was anything happening but instead she drives across town, in the opposite direction from her home. She has agreed to meet Lydia to discuss Frances Bailey’s novel with her, and little short of accident will stop her from keeping her promise. Jessie has, she believes, got her priorities in order. She knows London well. There isn’t much traffic around, but by habit she zips the little car through side streets and alleys, taking the shortest route. The drawing has done her good, stimulated an unused part of her brain and woken her up.
    Something else has woken her up, too. She frowns to herself in the car, remembering the man in the hat. Her visual memory isn’t good and she can’t recall his face, but it will be a long time before she forgets the feelings that his hungry gaze produced.
    But along with those feelings, and the reciprocal hunger, comes the all too familiar emergence of guilt. Jessie’s father was a Methodist minister, and her mother was his even more Methodist wife. They believed in the one, true god, and did their best to defy all the others that they dimly sensed lurking in the shadows. They did this in themselves by instilling rigid and indissoluble discipline. To rid their children of the symptoms of original sin, they used shame.
    Towards the end of his life, Jessie’s father began to get an inkling that he had somehow been conned. The one god idea is intriguing, but has consistently failed to get past humanity’s tendency to worship something outside itself, and to be consequently overtaken by that which it worships. The Church, despite the remarkable insight of its originators, soon became just another of the deities in the pantheon, and