Warning: Strong language, non graphic sex scenes and liberal use of British idiom

Bringing in the New Year     

I resisted the urge to put a hand to the slap mark on my cheek. Getting caught with two separate girlfriends at the same party wasn’t the best move I could’ve made. Must be the tequila, because I’m not normally so sloppy. Nothing else could have induced getting under the mistletoe with Viv while Jo was just walking in the door, despite saying she was staying home tonight. Now I was paying for it.

     The titters subsided, as did Jo and Viv, who became instant friends and made their way to the bar, no doubt to discuss my shortcomings in lurid detail to anyone who’d listen.

     Bad Day Richter Scale Score: 7.3, with the possibility of aftershocks.

     I had a strange urge not to be here any more, but not before I’d finished my drink. Scuttling out of embarrassing situations just isn’t me. All brass neck, as my uncle is so fond of saying. Anyway, there were enough drunkards here to fill a brewery, and for me to hide among. Funny how everyone feels freer to get royally leathered at New Years without religion around to knacker up the proceedings as it does at ‘insert winter holiday of your choice’. Not that religions, of any description, have had much of a following in the last couple of decades, not with the way the world’s all gone to shit. Blasting your brains to death with alcohol, loud music and whatever drug was in at the moment was what counted as high culture these days. Nothing else to look forward to, except maybe dying quickly in an earthquake rather than slowly being poisoned by the air you’re breathing.  Even finding a house with a solid roof was an achievement round here.

     Over by the sorry-looking plastic Christmas tree with 90% of its needles missing, someone was watching. I’d noticed her earlier – who wouldn’t? She looked me up and down without a flicker of interest and I regarded her carefully in return. Normally I would have liked what I saw. Just slim enough while still going in and out in the best places. A pretty enough face, with an added edge of something in the way she looked at people. A flat look, as though sizing everyone up, deciding whether they were worth talking to, and if you weren’t, tough luck.

I don’t go for looks as a rule. Don’t get me wrong, I like a pretty face as much as anyone. But it’s the way they walk that always gets to me, the way they carry themselves. This girl walked as though she owned the place, with an unconscious grace that made me tingle. The leather helped, I can’t deny it. I’ve always been a sucker for a woman in leather. The sword was maybe a touch I could have done without. A fancy dress party, so she’d come as what? A pirate? Maybe. But that sword looked real and she looked like she knew how to use it. 

So, she ticked all my boxes. Over eighteen, still breathing, female. And the big box – a challenge. No one went anywhere near her, and it seemed that was just how she liked it. Even my mate Geoff, the man who’ll shag anything, was more content talking to the train-spotter in the corner about the engines they used on the 15:37 from Kings Cross. Which, with her in the room, was frankly astounding. I wondered briefly whether he’d been possessed by the soul of a demon who wore beige cardigans.

I looked her over again. An ice-queen from hell, untouchable, just how I like them. There’s normally such a volcano underneath. The only difference here was she looked like she meant it; the ice went all the way through.

Unfortunately she ticked the ‘not on your life’ box too. Maybe it was the sword, or maybe it was her eyes. Those calm, dead eyes told me she could slice me limb from limb and not worry about it, but there was something else, deeper, darker, and even now I couldn’t tell you what it was. Whatever, it was scaring the crap out of me. And I liked it.

So when she walked up to me it was a toss up between run or try my luck. I’ve always liked to think I’m Luck’s favourite son, and running makes me get all sweaty, so I stayed where I was. She didn’t say anything to start with, just cocked her head and looked at me as though she was deciding whether I’d look best cleaved straight up and down or from side to side.

‘Nice sword, is it real?’ Yeah, I’m so smooth, babies compare me to their bums.

Against all expectation she laughed, a deep throaty sound that made my shoulders itch. ‘Gods damn it Finlay, you always were such a tit.’

     ‘Happy New Year to you too. Er, how did you know my name?’

     ‘You mean you don’t know? Shame on you.’ She knocked back the rest of her drink in one swallow. ‘I heard those girls talking about you. Really, is that all true? Even the ketchup?’

     I’ll never live down the ketchup moment. ‘Probably. And how could you hear them?’ The girls were through an archway into the kitchen, and I could hardly hear this woman over the rastabillyskank blasting from the speakers.

     She shrugged, and what it did to her cleavage brought me out in goosebumps. ‘Same way I really knew your name. Or why you can see me and they can’t, I expect. You coming?’

     ‘What? Er, where?’ Frankly I was too busy staring at the way the leather was moving over her to properly answer. It was very snug. And sort of slippery…

     The back of her hand connected with the side of my head. Quite bloody hard as it happens. ‘Ow!’

     ‘Really, you’d think you’d have got over this by now. How old are you this time?’

     ‘This time? What do you –.’ She gave me the glare. You know, the ‘I am woman and I’ll make you pay for this if you don’t get it right, dipshit’ glare. ‘Um, twenty one?’

     She shook her head ruefully, but she was smiling all the same. ‘At your time of life it’s pathetic. Come on.’

     She turned away and made her way through the crowd, not even looking to see if I followed. It was easier than it should have been – where she wanted to go, all of a sudden no one was there. They just…wanted to be somewhere else.

     I juggled the pros and cons as quick as I could. Cons – she was fucking weird. And she had a sword, and after that incident with the husband and the hunting knife, blades kinda freak me out. Pros – she was seriously bloody hot, and she wanted me to follow her, somewhere more private by the looks of it. Plus, there was the leather, and the way she moved through the throng might prove handy when it was time to get the drinks in.

     Tough choice. The leather and the quick drinks won.

     I followed her, having a harder time of working my way through the sweating bodies covered in tinsel. She waited for me in the hall. Two guys fell through the front door, armed with silly string. I caught a blast right in the ear, but it floated around her as though she had her own protective bubble.

     ‘What was your name?’ I had to shout over the noise, and the two guys gave a look as though I was something weird that had just fallen out of their nose.

     ‘Who you talking to, dickhead?’ One of them laid a drunken hand on my shoulder. His breath about floored me just with the alcoholic fumes. The basic BO stench was almost hidden behind them. ‘You seeing things? Need more booze, that’ll fix you up.’

     It was only then that I saw that people weren’t avoiding her. They didn’t know she was there. No looks at her, and with this many drunk guys there should be at least one leer. Especially with a cleavage like that. Not even a sideways ‘I bet her boyfriend’s built like a tank, but hot damn’ look. Not even, and this is where credulity kind of snapped, not even a ‘I’m drunk as ten skunks and therefore god’s gift to women and / or  it’s New Year’s, I might get a sympathy shag, it’s gotta be worth a go’ look. Nothing.

     They couldn’t see her.

     I came over a bit strange for a second, as though my brain wasn’t attached to the rest of me. The drunk waved a bottle of something green and sticky-looking in my face. I took a swig and almost gagged. Crème de bloody Menthe. At least my breath would smell all right.

     ‘Fix you right up,’ the drunk said and bumbled off in a cloud of his own fumes.

     But she was still there and people still moved around her without seeing her. She was grinning at me.

     ‘Your name?’ I asked again.

     She smiled again, a threat and a promise all mixed up in a twitch of her lips. ‘Guess.’

     ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ was on the tip of my tongue, but I restrained myself. There was that sword to consider. ‘Mavis?’ It slipped out before I could stop it. I’ve always suffered with Foot In Mouth disease.

     He hand flicked out, caught me round the back of the head and retreated before I could see it move. Damn, that hurt. Like being hit with a bunch of rivets. Okay, snark was getting me nowhere.

     I looked at her again, really looked this time. I had a bit of trouble seeing past the leather, and the thoughts of what she’d look like out of it, but when I did there was a certain something that reminded me of someone. The shape of the cheekbones, the wide grin. The way one eyebrow arched, questioning everything, the stillness that pervaded the air around her.

     ‘Not got it yet have you sweetie?’

     The patronising tone irked me. ‘Well it could be Desdebloodymona for all I can tell.’

     She cocked her head again and stepped in close. All that leather, only inches from me. Quite distracting. ‘If you like. Or maybe I can show you?’

     I was inside her little bubble; someone else let off some silly string and I barely noticed as it spattered to a stop above us. Next to her I was …inviolable. Apart from the world. And this was probably my monstrous ego, but it seemed as though she relaxed once she was that close to me. As though my presence comforted her in some way. Like I said – my ego, it gets out of hand if I don’t rein it in.

     I cleared my throat, and wondered what the fuck I thought I was doing. ‘Um, this showing, it would entail what exactly?’

     ‘Dendroglyhps.’

     ‘That’s nice. Anything I might understand?’ Or indeed anything involving taking our clothes off? Or moving in a decidedly up and down fashion? Or both?

     She was only a little shorter than me and just had to tilt her head to look me in the eye. ‘Depends, how stupid are you feeling?’

     ‘When it comes to dendroglyphs, all kinds of stupid.’

     She laughed at that and I breathed a sigh of relief. There are times, and they don’t come often, when truth is your best policy. Because when people expect you to be lying, you can get away with the bare-arsed truth without offence.

     ‘No change there then,’ she said and headed for the door under the stairs. A cellar – well, private at least, if unusual. This house was a little different when I came to think of it. It wasn’t falling down for a start and that was a rarity in modern day Peckham. But I was getting the feeling our intentions weren’t quite the same. Unless dendroglyphs is a naughty word somewhere.

     She slid through the doorway like a ghost, and I did my best to follow in kind. Tripping over the step didn’t help, but I blame whatever was in that green stuff.

     It was dark on the stairway and she didn’t put on the light. As far as I could tell there was no light. I fumbled my way down the stairs and almost landed in a heap when they ended unexpectedly. Hot damn, but that Crème de Menthe was pokey. Glowy things hovered in front of me. Vaguely human in shape, but twisted into parodies of people and with a sheen of silver that made my eyes feel kind of bendy. Pink elephants on a whole ‘nother scale.

     ‘Mavis….’ I’ll admit it, I was feeling a little, well, I could have done with someone holding my hand. 

     A faint ringing sound came from ahead. Kind of like someone pulling a sword from a scabbard, if all those old Pirates movies I was forced to watch as a child were anything to go by.

     But whatever it was, it was a bad sound. It resonated in my bones, and that’s more bad than a bad thing in a bad place. Wearing a bad t-shirt. Possibly even with ‘bad’ tattooed on its forehead.

     Mavis’s  – I was getting used to calling her that in my head – voice was soft in the dark

     ‘There is,’ she said. ‘a tiger.’

     ‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ was my first reaction.

     ‘It’s. A. Fucking. Tiger.’ She sounded serious. But ….

     ‘Look, tigers are extinct –.’

     ‘Fine. It’s large, it’s cat-like and it has stripes. And pointy teeth. Quite large ones.’

     ‘A stuffed one?’

     ‘Stuffed tigers do not lick their lips when debating whether to eat you.’

     ‘You’re talking to me like I know what to do.’

     She muttered up ahead. ‘Fine, fine, if that’s the way you want to play it.’ She handed me the sword. I took it gingerly, trying to make sure I kept myself away from the pointy bit.

     Her eyes narrowed in the dim light from the door above us and I tried to look enthusiastic. It didn’t work well because she tapped her foot. ‘You’re supposed to do something with it.’

     ‘Like what?’

     She stared at me then transferred her glare at the sword, as though it had done something wrong by being seen in my hand. ‘It’s supposed to…Never mind. Want a job doing, do it yourself.’ She yanked the sword out of my hand and moved off into the fuggy darkness.

     There was a growl, a big one, and the scrape of what could have been claws on concrete. Then a squelchy sound that did my innards no good whatsoever, and then she came out of the gloom in front of me. I could only see part of her face in the thin slice of light. What I saw wasn’t encouraging.

     ‘You killed the tiger,’ I said, and I could hear the flat tone of shock in my voice. A tiger! Tigers are majestic and beautiful and… well, and very extinct.  We’d found one and she’d killed it. Less and less of my idea of a romantic interlude.

     ‘Yes I killed the tiger. It was that or be eaten. Besides it wasn’t really a tiger. It just looked like one.’ She waved a dismissive hand. ‘One of us had to do it. And you’re being far too useless.’ It was only then I aw the gash along her arm. I would have offered to do something, bandage it or whatever. Only from the way she stood, like she owned the world, I didn’t quite have the courage.

     ‘Good gods man, did they remove your balls at birth or something?’

     ‘I’m not sure I –.’

     ‘For fuck’s sake. He we are, trying to save the world from a fate worse than zombies, and you’re not sure. Look, it’s very simple. We are married. You, obviously, are the stupidest husband who ever lived. We have to get through there, if you want there to be a New Year to be alive in. The thing through the door is what can help us, help you. The tiger dying is the key. The sword was supposed to make you remember, but it didn’t, so I killed the tiger instead. Got it?’

     ‘Married? Like we’ve, you know….I’d remember that, believe me.’ The rest of what she said faded into the background. I was married to those boobs? I couldn’t think of anything else for a while, at least until she cuffed me again. ‘Sorry. Um, so we need to open the door. What would you like me to do about it?’

     ‘Use the bloody key!’

     ‘The what?’

     She snorted derisively. ‘Okay, fine, Words of one syllable. I need you and your special skills. And if you can’t remember them we’re screwed.’

     ‘I have special skills?’ Well I make a damn good pizza, and I can sometimes keep up to five women on the go at once. I didn’t think these skills were what she meant.

     ‘Men,’ she said with a roll of her eyes. ‘Can’t live with them, and if you kill them it only means they get born again even stupider. Yes, skills, as in things that might be useful at this juncture.’ She looked at the blankness that must have been evident on my face.

     I’d got no idea what she was talking about. Something moved behind the wall. Something big and slithery. Something nasty. ‘This thing behind the door?’ I asked. ‘Does it hate pizza?’

     She looked at me like I had the brains of a turnip. ‘The bone. Remember?’

     Bone? This woman must be on drugs. Not that that would deter me but…well. Not quite all there. Bunny boiler alert.

     ‘I could make you remember,’ she said, and her voice was full of both want and hate. ‘Now would be good. I need your skills. I need you.’

     ‘Well I – .’

     She kissed me, and it was like being dead and being alive. The cold of the moon’s surface and the burning of the sun’s. The touch of her lips on mine made sparks fly in my head and the scent of moss under trees surround us. Sunlight hit my eyelids and stained them red.

     Sunlight, in a cellar?

     I pulled back, rather reluctantly it has to be said, and opened my eyes. It was…she was…it wasn’t a cellar any more. Or at least some of it wasn’t. Sunlight was straining through leaves, tinting every thing a pale green-gold, dappling the floor in shifting patterns. But at the same time there was quite clearly a ceiling. Trees surrounded us, gnarled old things covered in moss. Only there was a door in one of them, and not one of those elaborate things you see in fantasy films. A cheap plywood door, a bit mouldy on one corner. The handle only hung on by one screw. The concrete under my feet radiated cold along my toes, but the floor was earth and moss and leaves. Stripes faded away from the thing on the floor, er, ground, no, floor. It was a dead tiger and at the same time it was a heap of wobbling grey goo.

     I turned back to Mavis. Either she’d shrunk or I’d got taller, because she only came to my shoulder. Her hair was no longer the pale gold of corn, but night black. Her eyes had lost their piercing, icy quality. And their blueness. Soft, warm brown now, and laughing at me warily. She’d somehow acquired a very deep tan in a matter of seconds.

     I opened and closed my mouth a few times, but nothing came out. Then…I wasn’t twenty one any more. I wasn’t Finlay, born in Peckham with a multiple choice in fathers. I was someone else, someone who was struggling to make themselves known. As old as time, older. And her, she wasn’t Mavis, or Desdemona or Rumplestiltskin. She was – she was – ‘Rohe.’

     ‘I knew you’d get it in the end.’ She looked me up and down with a nod of approval. ‘Still as ugly as a bulldog licking piss off a nettle, though.’

     ‘Now wait a minute –.’

     ‘Still no sense of humour about it, too.’

     I watched her lips form the words, and only then realised we weren’t speaking English any more. ‘I’m probably going to regret asking this but – what did you just do?’

     She laughed under her breath. ‘Me? I didn’t do anything. That was you. Take the sword.’

     She held it out and I took it, even more gingerly than last time. Who knew what it would turn into? Knowing my luck a sodding cobra, and it’d bite me. My hand closed round cool metal…which was also bone.

     The door creaked open behind me, but I didn’t move. I was spellbound by the way she was looking at me. Hesitant, as though she thought I’d be angry, as though that would matter. Hopeful with it, and waiting for something, for what?

     I leant forward and kissed her again. I didn’t care what was at my back, or what weird shit was going to happen because of it. She smiled under my mouth and sighed. Finally, it appeared I was doing something right. I shut my eyes and concentrated on her, on kissing her as slowly and thoroughly as possible. The slick leather under my hand turned to something softer. Like suede, but thinner, pliable, and a dress now that scrunched up along her thigh when I ran my hand there. My own clothes seemed to have melted away – my chest tingled where her dress rubbed on it, and all that covered my modesty was a cloth of the same material. A bird started singing somewhere off to my left and the tang of the sea mingled with the scents of a forest, an old and tatty forest full of secrets.

     I pulled her in closer and time stopped as she wrapped her arms around me and her body softened into mine. It might have been an eternity later, it might have been seconds, when she pulled away and looked up at me with a face that shone like the sun.

     She took my hand and led me towards the trees and a mossy bed there. Carvings writhed over the trees – men, animals, fish. Primal and full of energy, almost as though they would walk off the bark and morph into real people in front of us.  Somehow I knew they were why she was here, they were for her. Remembering her, calling her. Calling us both.

     ‘What are we –.’

     ‘Don’t think about it,’ she whispered and her voice was silk across my skin. ‘Don’t think as Finlay. Don’t think, do. Do what he would do. What he has to.’

     Who – she cut off any rational thought by kissing me again and then we were on the moss, her lips hot, scented velvet on mine. The door creaked again behind us, opened with a rush and something flowed over me, around me, into me. It shivered along my bones and leaked into my brain and blood. I was him, whoever he was. And this was what I was here for. She was what I was here for, her, this bed of moss.

     Her hands skimmed my back and trailed a line of goosebumps behind it. One hand rose up, along my shoulder, up my neck and into my hair. Her fingers pulled me along, onto her, into her. The forest was alive around me but a muted kind of life, as though it had stretched on too long.

     Sweat trickled down my back as we loved, soaked the moss beneath us with its moisture, shrivelled it till it crackled to dust. She cried out, a funereal knell of a cry that struck me dead and urged me on at the same time. Brown, dead leaves swirled around us, birds fell from the sky and the trees, the glyphs, wept blood. The sea stopped its hiss and pound.

     Everything stopped, except us. There was no anything else. All was dead.

     And then she moved under me and I couldn’t stop the cry that ripped from my throat. My voice echoed across hills, thundered across the seas, ran into everything, everywhere. Leaves burst forth on the trees, sap rose, the moss grew green and fat. Dead birds breathed again, flew and sang. The sea began its endless whisper along a hidden shore. I was the world, and it lived.

     My sweat dripped down over my face, onto her lips where she licked it up with a flick of her tongue, her eyes half-closed and sated looking.        

     ‘What the fuck did we just do?’ I asked when I could speak again.

     Rohe laughed and the forest faded away from us. First the trees and the glyphs went. Then the moss, and I was lying with scraped knees on a concrete floor. The sound of the sea faded to nothing, and finally, the last trill of birdsong seeped away into the walls.

     I used the wall to haul myself to my feet, rather shakily, and pulled the clothes that had reappeared back into some sort of order.

     Up above, the drunken strains of Auld Lang Syne filtered through the floorboards. Someone shoved open the door at the top of the stairs. ‘What are you doing down there, you dirty bastards?’ Whoever it was cackled to themselves and stumbled away singing ‘And nnnneeeeeever brought tooooo miiiiind!’

     In the new light, she was different again. Not the blonde, not the sultry woman who’d lain on the moss with me. Her hair was chestnut now, swinging between her shoulders in a glossy wave. The leather was less severe but still damn sexy. She turned towards me, on a height with me again.

     ‘It’s been too long. You killed me and I destroyed you. And yet the world needed us – and the love was still there. A long time I’ve looked for you, looked for your soul as it moved between bodies. A long time, and all the while the world kept stretching in that slim band of time it had, thinner and thinner till it was almost ready to snap. Didn’t you ever wonder why things got only worse, that every year brought just a little more death and decay into everyone’s lives?’

     Something turned in my mind. Something that was still, even though the rest had faded, a part of me. I wasn’t Finlay any more. I was –.

     ‘We make the years turn, you and I. We make the old year die and the new one live. Without us the world can’t move forward, it can only re-exist on old time.’

     I was Maui.

     I was life and she was death.

     She moved to the bottom of the stairs and took the first step up.

     ‘Rohe I –.’

     She stopped but didn’t turn. Something about the set of her shoulders made me think that she was waiting for me to say the right words. The words that would end the eternity of loneliness we’d been through. Let us be together and turn the years ahead.

     I’d killed her and she’d destroyed me, long ago. I knew it now, and yet the why of it didn’t matter. It only mattered that she was here, with me.

     I stepped forward and turned her with a touch on her arm. She was wary, her eyes guarded. Expecting me to kill her again. I reached up and kissed her, lightly at first. Then I let my new self pour through me, through us. Electricity crackled on our lips and she kissed me back. An age or more of the world we stood there, until she knew I loved her, and I knew she loved me. Stars wheeled overhead, continents rose and fell and collided.

     When at last we stopped, we were still in a damp basement in Peckham of all places.

     ‘At least you’re a tad better looking this time.’ She laughed at my growl and ran up the stairs ahead of me. I followed her into the New Year, and all the new years ahead.

 Note: I've played fast and loose with some mythology here. 

In a tradition of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, Rohe is the wife of the demi-god Māui. Beautiful Rohe was a sister of the sun, and her face shone. A quarrel arose after Rohe remarked that Māui's face was ugly. Māui then decided that they should change faces. Afterwards Māui used magic to kill Rohe, but her spirit returned and destroyed Māui. Thus were black magic and death introduced into the world. After her death, Rohe ruled as the goddess of the pō (spirit world), where she gathered in the spirits of the dead.