Melanie was doing the big clean up — just in case. Although her ground floor at Crouch End didn't look like the tip she had implied in an e-mail to Steve, she had put two loads through the washing machine and tumble dryer, ironed, then given the place a once over — hoovered and dusted. The flat was decent enough — it was the decor that needed tuning up, just in case. Take the 8 x 10 glossy of Jack Nash, for example; it was long overdue for the bottom of a drawer — he and Melanie with big distorted noses, laughing, snapped on Tri-X at arm's length through an eighteen-millimetre lens in Jack's right hand. Profuse Assyrian ringlets, levantine profile, cynical grin, with his left arm round her shoulders. At Melanie's convent school a dotty old nun had warned her about incubi, seductive male spirits, without saying what words or images they used.

Two years — call it a marriage if you like, sharing him with Leica rangefinders, Canon reflexes and Billingham bags; comings and goings, borrowings, maxed credit cards and debt consolidation; living hand to mouth with a devotee of Eugene Smith, who was working toward becoming an associate member of Magnum. They had met in Joburg in 1996, just when her experience of the New South Africa was wearing thin. Then it was back to London with the affair hot as hell — but by '98 it was cold. Relief came one morning when she realised that the Billingham bags were gone. She didn't even know where Jack had got to.

The wedding photo could remain — in a corner. Melanie had told Steve about Peter Austin, the older English journalist she had married in 1987, the year before they fled apartheid. In London she had started working on women's magazines while Peter returned to his old drinking haunts and slowly became a nightmare. Not that he ever laid a hand on her; his abuse was strictly psychological. He hectored, bullied, manipulated, controlled and humiliated her for seven years, which was how long it took Mel to see the light. She matched him for height and weight, and when the cowed, eager-to-please wife put her powerful and shapely shoulder behind the squash racquet she swung into his face, the ongoing mind-fuck ceased immediately. The divorce followed in short order in 1995, and Melanie kept the place at Crouch End. Peter, according to rumour, was writing PR releases in Dubai.

At twenty-nine, new divorcιe Mel went back to South Africa on her mother's suggestion; Madiba was in charge and you could suck optimism into your lungs — even from the polluted air of the Reef. But she couldn't settle; it didn't seem right, and then there was Jack, catching her unaware in black and white with the silent shutter of his forty-year-old Leica.

Her parents' wedding group remained on the mantelpiece in front of the mirror — Cathy and Dirk Malan, posing at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, after their 1960 wedding. Afrikaner Dirk, a doctor, and her English-speaking mother; both of them Catholic, which was an improbable combination in South Africa. The mantelpiece also bore old scars: Little brother Dirkie, twenty years old, a sacrifice to apartheid in 1985, who had come back from national service and the Angolan war in a coffin, all for a spurious cause. That was the year she had graduated. Dirk, old and fat in the last snap taken before his death in 1999, and one of Cathy at the funeral with a wan smile, a constant worry to her faraway daughter. Mel, who was not addicted to London living by any means, had recently been toying with the idea of returning to South Africa. Cathy regularly invited her to come home to Harrismith, and on bad Brankworthy days the idea of a small Free State town in the sunlight was tempting.

She found more old photos in a large envelope — ancient, innocent, soft-focus smiles from the University of the Witwatersrand and European backpacking days. The handful of forgettable affairs and one-night stands since Jack's departure had left no photographic evidence — nothing to sweep under the carpet there. Her spell with Brankworthy's company, since mid-1999, had yielded a crop of photos which she shovelled into a shoebox, reflecting that her days with that organisation were most likely numbered.

So — just in case — what will Steve think of the place? Not that I give a stuff, she thought; my books will pass muster. She had just finished an Alison Fell, and as she put it back on the shelf Mel noticed a novel by Fulmerford — which she tipped down the back of the bookcase, just in case Steve thought her taste outmoded.

Just in case, just in case — if I do, it will probably last all of five and a half weeks. Why am I bothering? Because he makes me laugh? I'm not Mills and Boonish in the slightest I'm a hard-headed woman, supposedly immune to incubi. But who the fuck am I fooling with all this 'will I — won't I' shit? This is a fetching boy — he has a way with him, a sexy mouth, cold grey-blue eyes and thick wrists. He has suffered a lot more than me, and he brought none of it upon himself. Is that why am I taking the trouble? Shaving my legs, selecting the right underwear to go with a little black dress and a killer pair of heels — even trimming my tuft, for pity's sake.

Eager Steve was early at Camden, and paced about. It had been close and overcast all day, with a few spots early in the afternoon, but at six it began to rain in earnest. Scanning the newspaper he had bought to hold over his head in the coming dash to the nearby boutique, he saw that it was the first day of the football season. She was late. I'm tensing up, he thought; tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. Surface Tension. He reached for his mobile, then thought better of it. A tap on the shoulder — he turned, and there she stood in her raincoat, grinning, with a folded brolly. Good enough to eat. She was taller, somehow; he felt her hair brush his cheek, and got a whiff of Shalimar as she kissed him. His crotch tightened; then they were off round the corner, laughing, sharing the umbrella as she clung to his arm, teetering on her heels.

The boutique was jam-packed with perfectly ordinary-looking chattering wine-drinking people in a joss-stick haze, and Steve felt naughty Mel give his elbow a squeeze as he sustained an introductory gush from Valerie Paxton, resplendent in a blue sari and smoothly-coiffed snow-white hair. Someone turned down the electronic New Age soundtrack and tapped a gong; the chattering subsided for a speech by Valerie. She introduced the petite, self-effacing authoress, who proved to have impeccable patrician vowels. As Anna Barclay explained how she had first seen the light — click! — about the obvious relationship between ley lines and crystals, and had begun her research, Steve surveyed the boutique's stock-in-trade.

Sundries: wind chimes and dream catchers, gemstones and crystals, coloured oils in fancy little bottles.

Personal adornment: gold plated ankhs, Ethiopian crosses and snugly sixty-nined ying & yang teardrops.

Statuary: the Buddha, the Virgin, Jesus, Friar Tuck. Ancient wrinkled Chinese sages with gay, glittering eyes. Merlin, King Arthur, angels. Faerie and Hobbit families.

Ms Barclay's fluting Benenden voice went on: how the earth was one vast crystal which held all others within its lattice; how enormous force fields were channelled by crystals, force fields that stretched between crystal nodes and affected the human psyche profoundly. Steve's attention drifted back to the stock-in-trade.

Practical items: dark Kilnerite goggles and Kirlian photo apparatus, ouija planchettes, mandalas, the Teen Witch Kit.

Egyptology: small pyramidal Tiffany glass razor blade sharpeners and Tutankhamen masks in blue and gold, plus figurines of celeb couples — Osiris and Isis, Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Titles by Hancock and Bauval.

Literature: The works of Cornelius Agrippa, Alice A. Bailey, Eliphas Levi, Mme Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Nostradamus, Mother Malsanto, Von Daniken, Brunton, Lyall Watson, Pauwels and Bergier, Edgar Cayce, Charles Fort, Aleister Crowley, Sandor LaVey and Gerald Gardner. The Aquarian Gospel, The Book of the Dead, volumes on Lemuria, Atlantis and Mu, Ararat and Arkology.

As Steve looked up from a shelf of Tarot packs and software for casting the I Ching, his gaze met the eyes of a tall, grey-bearded old man wearing a houndstooth Harris tweed jacket. Steve glanced away, back to the shelves and the how-to manuals: tai chi, feng shui; astral travel, dowsing, detecting auras, iris diagnosis photography, bringing up a Wiccan child. Cheiromancy, spiritual healing, psychic surgery and the Golden Dawn. He tipped his head sideways to read the book spines on the shelf nearest to him: Rendlesham, Roswell, Majestic 12, Area 51, Whitley Streiber, alien abductions. The bookends were little grey bulge-headed figurines with big black almond eyes.

As Anna Barclay explained how ley lines were nothing less than a manifestation of the force fields that link crystalline nodes, Steve was contemplating the posters on the walls: crayon portraits of spiritualistic dignitaries, from Krishnamurti to Crazy Horse. Gong-banging bonzes from Ladakh and assorted Hindu deities, from Kali Durga with her necklace of severed heads to Ganesha with his tusks and trunk. All this, and a lucky Cornish piskey too...

Applause. Anna Barclay started signing copies. Dennis Brankworthy walked in late, as if he owned the place, smug in bespoke pinstripe suiting. Fiftyish, he had bushy ginger hair, a smarmy rictus, a gold Rolex and plebeian vowels. Brankworthy addressed himself to Steve like the Sheriff of Nottingham interrogating Robin in the dungeon: "Known our little Melanie long, have we?"

Steve smiled and shook his head. Little Melanie came back with a glass of plonk for her boss; her eyes were an inch above his.

"Casinos, eh? Know anyone at London Clubs?"

Steve nodded. "Yes, they're having some difficulty in Las Vegas at the moment. The Aladdin?…"

But rude Brankworthy had turned his back. "Ah, Valerie! What a stunning sari! You can carry it off, my dear."

"He hates it when I wear heels," said Mel. "I shall suffer at work on Monday."

"I'm beginning to see what you mean about him."

"He was bonking one of his assistants; she left under his unofficial "fuck and fire" policy, and now she calls him the GRHSOAE."

"The what?"

"The Great Red Hairy Source of All Evil!"

Melanie began to circulate, pulling Steve along with her. A group surrounding Anna Barclay was debating possible further implications of her crystals-ley line connection. "Do they really act as a magnet for UFO activity?" asked an innocent, and the conversation turned to flying saucers.

"I believe that Billy Meier is a complete charlatan," said another. "But that doesn't mean that Pleiadians and Nordics don't exist. Now, what Peter Kolosimo says?…"

A short, intense man was talking about a published theory that the Nordic aliens were not from another planet, but were earthling time travellers from the future.

"D'you mean Nola Mottersham?" asked an earnest young woman who resembled Monica Lewinsky. "She's become a non-believer, you know. Debunks everything, these days, she has no sense of wonder."

"Yes, it was a book she brought out in the Nineties. Evidently the UFO people from the future came to see the Titanic hit the iceberg, and there were so many of them crowded onto the deck at the front, that the ship started to sink. Of course, the time travellers all got away safely..."

Steve was dreaming of salamandrine fires, when Mel gave his elbow another squeeze. Shalimar again, as she whispered in his ear: "Don't look now, but I’m going to introduce you to the man next to the Lord Krishna poster. He is extremely good value and his name is Elemer Urban — he's a Hungarian. He makes me laugh almost as much as you do. He's always with this bunch of crackpots — but not of them. I think he comes purely for the fun."

Steve turned after a decent interval and saw the man who had watched him inspect the merchandise. Soon Melanie had made the introductions, saying that Steve had encountered a peculiar luminous phenomenon called Balaam during his young days in Africa. So he was immediately obliged to answer the old man's questions about what he had witnessed.

"I see," said Elemer, with an accent Steve had never heard before. "You were confronted by pale fire?"

Steve grinned and took the bait. "Oh yes, Elemer — like Hazel Shade in the Haunted Barn."

"Ah! A devotee of old McNab! Steve, you're a man after my own heart. And what do you believe — that it was a message from the aunt about the atalanta?"

Steve was having the time of his life. "Well, that's what Boyd says, but I think he goes too far after that."

"You're up to date, aren't you? Some accuse poor Boyd of hagiography."

"I know, but I'll defend him on that charge — I respect his work immensely. Are you Shadean or Kinbotean?

"Neither — I believe that Volodya wrote the whole thing. And you? "

"Ditto!" Steve gave a delighted laugh.

Melanie, who had been listening to the exchange with a hanging jaw, broke in. "Gobbledegook! What are you two talking about? Where did you both learn to speak the same foreign language? I don't understand a single word! And who is old McNab?"

Elemer smiled. "Darling Melanie, we were simply engaging in an exercise in reciprocal oneupmanship, which proves, by ending in a draw, that your Steve is a most interesting and interested young man. Old McNab is Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, the proud, punctilious, unputdownable author of a book called Pale Fire.

"Don't know it. But I read Lolita years ago, and loved it."

"Well, you'll certainly enjoy Pale Fire." Steve told the story of the first time he had read the novel, one summer night when he was rocking Tony, only weeks old, in a wicker cradle at the bedside, giving his exhausted wife a chance to catch up on sleep. "It had been on the bookshelf for years, and I picked it out to read as I rocked, sitting on the edge of the bed. It must have been eleven when I started, turning pages with my left thumb, and rocking with my right hand. The book took hold of me; time vanished. I couldn't laugh in case I woke Sophie or the baby, so I had to control myself. I reached the last page, dazed and absolutely amazed to realise that birds were twittering in the garden, the sun was about to come up, and I was still rocking automatically."

"It must be one hell of a book. Is it a novel?"

"It has four parts," said Elemer. "An introduction, a 999-line poem, notes on the poem and an index."

"Sounds sort of dry to me."

"Far from it! The poem is by a character called John Shade, about the issues in his life; the other three parts are by an editor who has hijacked the poem — a pompous, obsessive character called Kinbote who believes that it is all about the issues inside his own demented head, and a fascinating fantasy-land called Zembla. It's extremely funny, and full of concealed riddles that draw you into a maze of multiple readings — Pale Fire has created a veritable literary industry. The Boyd we referred to is Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd, who has written a most intriguing book about Pale Fire."

Steve took over. "Mel, an argument raged for years, about who was the actual author, Shade or Kinbote. The two factions were called Shadeans and Kinboteans. Evidently Elemer and I feel the same way about that."

"Okay, okay — who was the V-somebody who did write it?

"Volodya! Nabokov's pet name in his family circle."

"Say no more, you two! I refuse to discuss old McNab from a position of complete ignorance. Steve — d'you have a copy I could borrow?"

He nodded, then Elemer made the couple an offer they couldn't refuse. "May I tempt you two young people away to a pub I know, where you might help me drink a decent bottle of claret? You may have noticed that my wine has been sipped but once, and I see that both of you seem to be nursing your own glasses. Wisely, because I speculate that the cultivar is Malbec, and that this unworthy little wine, which stings like a Rhodesian red, has come all the way from Buenos Aires in a bulk tanker. So what do you say — shall we skedaddle?"

Elemer raised his second glass to them. "I should warn you that this stuff brings out the best in me — and the worst. My greatest fault is loquacity, the eighth deadly sin, and when drinking claret I do tend to go on."

They were at a table where the music was quieter, as far away from the AWP coin-op machines as they could get. Elemer's choice of red was a hit — complex and tannic.

"God bless sweaty saddle," said Steve, taking another sip.

"Steve — I wanted to tell you more about the pale fire you encountered, but I couldn't very well do it at Valerie's shop. True UFO enthusiasts would have been disappointed to hear that there may be a rational scientific explanation for the phenomenon. I prefer to call it earth lights, or Anomalous Light Phenomena — ALP for short — and there is evidence that it is caused by geology."

"My old man put it down to ball lightning. He had a theory about banded ironstone."

"I think he may have been close. I also believe that the lights come from the ground. Did you know that when a rock sample is crushed with sufficient pressure, it emits light? A fellow called Paul Devereux has been working on the mystery for years, and he’s no crackpot. He thinks that the sea of stresses in the earth's crust generates these unidentified flying globes of light."

"I'll google him," said Mel.

"While you do, look up Michael Persinger as well. He's a Canadian researcher who goes even further than Devereux. He has the idea that the electric fields associated with anomalous light phenomena can affect the brain — the temporal lobes. The result is that one feels a presence, and the brain interprets the visuals in a way that seems most logical, depending on upbringing and culture. They say that when a pressman fails to understand the situation, he falls back on clichι; but so do we all. The children at Fatima in Portugal, for example — they saw something that they interpreted as a vision of the Virgin Mary. Numerous Americans have interpreted certain experiences as being abducted by aliens. Persinger also correlated UFO sightings with events that stress the earth’s crust, such as earthquakes and floods. His statistics make sense."

"Elemer, you referred to a Rhodesian red," said Steve. "That wine was utterly vile; they used to tint an acidic heartburn white wine red with potassium permanganate and market it into black Africa as claret. Were you ever out there?"

"Oh, I've knocked about in my time. The Mwanesi Range is part of the Bulawayan system, isn't it? Pre-Cambrian rocks. But what I favour as the cause of your friend Balaam is faulting, rather than banded ironstone. Stress building up across a fault, and the energy being released as an ALP — an Anomalous Light Phenomenon. Are those hills faulted?"

Elemer and Melanie looked at Steve. "I can't remember. I saw a geological map once, but it's been twenty-odd years."

"Talking of geology," said Melanie," I've been studying your ring, Elemer. What stone is that?"

The old man slipped it off his finger and handed it to her; she tilted it so that Steve could see — a gold ring with a light grey polished stone set in it, a quarter of an inch in diameter. Traced in the grey was a black saltire cross, like a capital X.

"That's an X-crystal. I picked it up on my travels." Mel handed it back, and was about to ask where he had obtained the crystal, when Elemer busied himself with topping up the glasses, looked round the crowded pub, and changed the subject abruptly. "I want you two to look at the people in here, all chatting away and socialising, in the earlier stages of intoxication — the human race unwinding. And I want you to think hard and tell me which part of human anatomy most clearly betrays its primate origins."

"Don't mind him, Steve — he's a wicked, wicked old man when he starts. I can feel one of his satirical rants building up. Okay, Elemer, we're looking. Is it the stance, the feet, the knees, the elbows, the drag-on-the-fag, the slouch?"

"Melanie, my darling — you are adorable, but you're miles out. Steve — I ask you to give this matter of anatomy your concentrated consideration. In which part of him is Man, the least-threatened creature on the planet, most anatomically reminiscent of a greatly endangered species? Where does he most betray his chimpanzoid affinities, eh?"

Melanie chuckled.

"Is it his cool, noble, classical, philosophical, ivory temples?" said Elemer sotto voce, scanning the patrons. "Is it his magisterial nose, suitable for governing a province, if not an entire empire? Is it the resolute jutting jawbone, ideally adapted for outlasting sieges and winning naval battles? No, none of those features betray man's humble origins! Steve and Melanie — I ask you to consider those curiously-curlicued cups of cartilage we call the external pinnae — the lugs! One glance is enough to confirm that Man shares most of his genome with the chimp!"

Steve began to smile as he cast his eyes round the room. He had never looked at ears in quite that way before. But now every drinker in the pub suddenly seemed to have a pair of wizened, vivid pink sound-scoops grafted on to the sides of his or her head. Melanie was covering her own ears with her hands, seized by a fit of the giggles, as Steve turned his eyes back on Elemer.

"Look all you want, Steve. I don't mind. I've come to terms with the fact that gravity has taken its toll on my dangling, wrinkled old lobes. Bit of mileage on my external pinnae, and no mistake. And Melanie, by all means uncover your dainty chimpanzette anatomy; since you're perfectly aware, especially with those pearl earrings — of how winsome they are, you coy little hypocrite, you!"

"Elemer — tell me, do you rehearse these tirades of yours in advance?"

"Sometimes I have a vague thought, my darling — but it's the claret that crystallises it."

Mel leaned over and kissed Elemer on the cheek. "You sneakily changed the subject, you bad, bad old man! Now come clean and tell us the correct geological name for that crystal. You made it sound like something from Fox Mulder's college fraternity."

"Melanie, my sweet — you have the better of me." He wrote a word on a beer coaster — chiastolite — and pronounced it: "Kee-AS-tow-lite."

At Crouch End, she put on a Dee Dee Bridgewater CD and poured the two doubles left in her Christmas 2000 bottle of Lagavulin. They settled on the sofa, and managed to undress each other — a piecemeal process — in the course of the next twenty minutes. Everything went perfectly; the negotiation of a condom-protected versus non-penetrative encounter was swiftly settled with tact, delicacy and good humour.

For a while, Steve felt delirious; it seemed that all of this delight and excitement couldn't possibly be happening to him. In the bedroom, as their coupling crossed the boundary between urgent and frantic, he stopped talking and forgot his own name. For Melanie, at first it felt as if they were old lovers with all the awkward edges polished off; he was surprising, she thought. Then she began to surprise herself. Soon both of them were much too busy to be surprised by anything.

After he had come twice and she three times, Steve was lying on his left side behind her, tracing Melanie's outline from shoulder to hip with his right index finger, telling her that she had the haunches of a goddess.

She rolled over. "Mm?… I like having a poet talk dirty to me — you get a much better class of filth. Tell me more, you talkative boy. Oh shit — my pearls! They're everywhere. Oh, why didn't I have them restrung? Help me look for them!"

"How many are there? "I forget — try and gather up as many as you can." The hilarity lasted some minutes as they combed the chaos of the bed and floor, hunting down the scattered moonlets.

"Mel – hold still."

"You're not starting again, are you?"

"Ah-ahn." He turned her hand palm-upward and dropped the pearl into it from his lips. " I was only winkling out the last pearl. I didn't expect to find it in such a tight little oyster."

"Give me a kiss, pearl diver."

After he had made her a cup of tea, Steve lay on his left side, his right knee drawn up, drifting off to sleep with soft Melanie tucked against his back, her right thigh resting on his left. His final thought was that he must be the happiest man in Crouch End, if not the entire Universe.

Boy gets girl. But will he keep her? And could the charming Elemer have a concealed agenda? The plot of THE X-CRYSTALS begins to thicken nicely in the following episode.

THE X-CRYSTALS © Tom Rymour is protected by Creative Commons and may be copied and distributed free of charge for personal non-commercial use. For commercial rights enquiries e-mail: orders@discobolus.co.za

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