The very air swam with sex and violence.
It smelled of sweat and stale beer.
Adam fell forward on the carpet and retched over some huge tattooed hulk’s shoes.
He looked up to apologise, only to see a fist descending at speed and from a great height. He shut his eyes, resigned to unconsciousness, but the fist was halted by a flailing, kicking dervish who proved, once Adam had groggily come to his senses, to be Julia Shields.
‘Get off him!’ she shrieked.
The pole-dance music stopped.
Somebody took Adam by the arm and dragged him away from the hulk, then handed him a paper tissue to wipe his mouth.
In the meantime, the hulk had stepped back from Julia and was being calmed down by a group of friends.
‘Come on, Adam,’ said Julia gruffly. ‘You need a lie down.’
Evie leapt off the stage and stood with a hand on her hip, staring fiercely at Julia.
‘What’s your game?’ she demanded. ‘What are you doing with him?’
‘I don’t have a game,’ said Julia haughtily. ‘You’re the one with the agenda. We all know what it is. Well, I don’t think he deserves it.’
‘Get your hands off him!’
‘Come on, Adam.’
Adam, unsteady on his feet and with black spots floating in and out of his field of vision, followed the most soothing voice. It happened to be Julia’s.
He wove through the mob in a dark-edged dream, his stomach in revolt, his brain furred up with equal measures of revulsion, despair and, behind it all, a confusion of lusts. For Evie, for Julia, for flesh, for sin, for forgetting – any or all of them boiled within him as his feet trod an unknown, careless path.
Greasy smells of frying onions and burnt candyfloss and engine oil mixed with the sea salt, swimming past him, with the noise and the press of heated bodies.
He came to his senses on a bed, sprawled out where Julia had pushed him. She had loosened his collar and taken off his boots.
He opened his eyes slowly, taking her in as she hovered above him with a tooth glass of water. Her fair hair shone like a halo.
She sat down on the side of the bed and stroked his brow. He couldn’t hold back any longer. He laid his head in her lap and burst into tears.
‘There, there,’ she said, and every caress of her fingers, mopping up his tears, was like the re-establishment of some long-lost bond.
‘What’s happening to me?’ he pleaded. ‘Why is it happening to me?’
‘Darling, I imagine this has been a long time coming. You’re tired. You’ve used up too much energy denying your nature and masking it with this old-time religion of yours.’
‘What do you mean, my nature? You don’t know me that well.’
‘I know you very well, Adam. You and all who came before you.’
‘What are you talking about?’ His lament came out as a strangulated bellow. ‘What is going on in this village? Julia, I have dreams – such dreams. Dreams of being a Puritan preacher who takes a witch for a wife. What does it mean?’
‘It means you’re the last in a long line, my love. And so is Evie Witts.’
‘What line?’
‘I shouldn’t say. The village secrets aren’t mine to
disclose.’