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- 1966 -
Chas' hand shook as he turned the key in the lock. He cursed, tried again and pushed the stupid thing until it clicked and yanked it out.
He weighed the key in his hand and then tossed it as hard as he could into the street. It clattered on someone's car and clinked as it hit the street.
He pushed his hands deep into his pockets and rubbed his fingers and thumbs together to warm them up. It was a cold March morning and there was still frost on the ground. He turned and walked down the street, away from Queenie's Castle and its aroma of decay and human waste and into the crisp pure air of the morning. He'd find a pub first, have some real fucking food with the money he'd found in the kitchen cupboard, then take a train somewhere, anywhere. Maybe thumb a lift to Ireland. Yeah, 'cause they love Londoners out there. Couldn't be worse than this, though.
Chas Chandler was thirteen years old. His father was dead, his mother was insane, and he had nothing left to lose.
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- 1969 -
The house, Chas found out later, belonged to some old queen John was friends with. John had, as Chas was to find out, pretty strange friends. The boy made friends with half the people he met, as if he was saving them for a rainy day. Chas could see why, because here they were with a place to sleep with heating and a proper bath, not to mention the fireplace. Sometimes nothing mattered quite so much as getting warm.
In the past three years Chas had outstayed his welcome with just about anyone who'd ever tolerated him, and as he was still working on his Knowledge and nobody wanted to hire someone who smelled like they lived in the street, he'd been well out of options. So when a bloke about his age who didn't have needles sticking out of his arms or pinch his arse made easy friends with him at the pub and offered a place to stay, Chas took him up on it. It didn't matter it wasn't his own place he was offering, or even that Chas knew he was too pissed to think straight, because fuck it, it was November and he was sick of shivering under blankets at tube stations.
He woke up warm in a nest of blankets by the cold fireplace with no recollection of how he got there, neck aching from sleeping at a weird angle and with a mouth like a dog's backside, but he was warm and there was a hot bath to be had and suddenly John Constantine might as well have been a friend.
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- 1977 -
John was on the back of Chas' cab, hanging over the passenger's seat and dropping ash over the morning paper. He was still wearing the clothes he'd had on at the gig earlier that night and smelt all over like booze and smoke.
'So what did you think?'
'Honestly?'
'No.'
'Brilliant, mate. You'll go far.'
John slumped back on the seat. 'It's not about the music, it's about the attitude.'
'The words of a success in the making.'
John didn't answer; he just went on smoking in silence.
The band was shit and John had no skills even beyond his lack of musical talent, but Chas wasn't worried. John had a way of making it in the world. A self-destructive, desperate kind of way, but it seemed to work for him. You'd do better to look out for yourself around a bloke like him. Chas didn't want any more trouble; he just wanted a life.
Even so, there he was, driving John fucking Constantine around like he was bloody royalty. John was good at making people do things for him, especially Chas. It was a kind of magic.
-
John had that same smell all about him when he jumped Chas in the backroom of some noisy pub where they'd just had a pint thrown at the stage. Chas didn't say a word. He got up only long enough to lock the door. They finished with obscenities on their tongues as the owner banged on the door almost in rhythm to their fucking, but with all that noise they never said a word about it, not before, during, or after.
Chas wasn't sorry, though. It had been coming ever since he'd seen John with another man. He'd reckoned they might as well get it out of the way.
He hoped it was out of the way now, anyway.
-
The first thing Chas noticed when he opened the door was the flash of a sputtering flame and a black shadow in the hallway. In the next second he recognized John, and in the one after that he took in the shaking of his hand and the bloody smear on the left side of his face. 'Bloody hell, John, what happened to you?'
'Got a light?' John said. 'I've been trying to get this piece of shit to light since the A&E.'
Chas opened the door and John stumbled through. He looked pale and there was an ugly pattern of yellow bruises already emerging on his face.
'Just fix me a drink and bring me a another lighter, will you, Chas? I'm don't feel like a chat right now.'
Chas knew John had been mixed up in some dangerous business – had even mucked in himself sometimes. Something to do with smuggling. He didn't ask questions – just showed up and punched whoever John told him to punch. That's how he'd got the down-payment for this apartment. But he'd heard that lately John had been running around with Harry Cooper, who even Chas knew better than to mess with.
Somehow Chas had just never thought it'd catch up with him. John should've been too smart to get his face kicked in.
Chas went to get a beer and a lighter, and a pack of tissues and antiseptic while he was at it. 'I'd just like to know if I should expect someone to come kicking in my door later looking for you,' he said while dabbing at the blood on John's face.
'Thanks, mate,' said John with a grin.
'What for?'
'Letting me stay until they do.'
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- 1978 -
The hospital was painted a sickly green and there was the stink of chlorine and piss in the air. Chas could swear the baby he held in his arms still smelled of Renee's blood, too. The child was scrunched up and tiny and Chas kept thinking, is this it? He held her tiny head and waited to love her, but nothing happened.
He handed her back to Renee, pale and exhausted in her hospital gown, and she curled her arms around her baby. Her red-rimmed eyes shone with possessive joy, and it was only then when the world shifted on its axis.
Chas was a dad, now.
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- 1980 -
Renee never took to John much. She had plenty of reasons not to, such as being a sensible woman with bloody good instincts who hears a story like theirs and comes to the obvious conclusions.
'He's just going to keep on getting you in trouble,' she told him. 'It's not just that he's been in prison, it's that he probably will be again. You don't owe him anything. Nobody owes anybody so much they have to get dragged down by them.'
It made sense to her, Chas knew that. You had to earn Renee's loyalty. She'd been screwed over often enough.
Chas wondered if he even could be screwed over enough when it came to John. It was a question of a man's nature, he supposed, and wondered if that made him a loser. Sometimes that suspicion brought the rage bubbling up in the acidic pit of his stomach and spewed it out like so much venom. John was one of those people who could take his anger and still think him a friend. John gave the impression of being able to take just about anything, and somehow that made all of Chas' objections and Renee's good sensible advice crumble like a house of cards. If John needed something, Chas provided it, even if it'd get him arrested. That was all there was to it.
It was a cloudy night somewhere in February, with Renee's warm body sleeping next to his and his own body exhausted from the day's work that Chas realized he'd probably even bed John again if John asked. Even knowing what it would do the Renee if she found out. Even knowing that.
He covered his face in the darkness and then curled himself around Renee, who shifted and muttered in the dark.
-
- 1991 -
'You could've fucking told me.'
John Constantine was sitting in the bathroom of Chas and Renee's flat, his back against the wall, face pale and splattered with red, much like he'd been that night he'd stumbled to Chas' room with the Russian mafia at his heels, only this time nobody was doing him in except John himself. Chas saw him reach into his coat pocket to pull out a pack of Silk Cuts and almost kicked it out of his hand.
'What the fucking hell, John?' he shouted as he snatched the pack away from him. 'You didn't just cough your lungs out in our fucking bathroom just so you could light up right after?'
'Doesn't matter now anyway,' John said and pushed off the floor. 'Spare me a drink, then?'
Chas caught him on the arm as he faltered. He could hear Renee in the next room already calling an ambulance.
-
John had made a great many friends in his life, but he'd lost so many of them that there was only a handful left to show up at the service. Cheryl was there with her family, as was the nun whose name Chas never could remember, and a shivering grass who turned out to be a former member of the Mucous Membrane. Some Irish bloke was supposed to come, but it turned out he'd died of drink not two weeks before John.
Sorry bloody lot they were, standing around each other, all of them strangers to each other. They didn't talk much either, save Cheryl and Thomas and their Gemma, who left soon after the coffin was wheeled into the furnace, probably because of the hungry way the grass was staring at Gemma.
Chas drove his family home and then went out to do his rounds. It was a wet day that stretched into a wet night. The punters seemed to swim by, some rowdy, some quiet. A middle-aged couple that snogged loudly for a whole half-hour's drive. A trio of talkative Venezuelan tourists. A pair of young girls holding hands in grim silence, one of them heavily pregnant.
At the end of the night, he parked his cab outside Sid the Greek's. He sat in the seat for a full ten minutes before starting the engine up again. It wasn't a day when he felt like talking to friends.
He clocked in and found a decent-looking pub he'd never been to before. He sat at the glass counter and ordered a pint. And then another one.
'You look like a lonely soul,' said a pretty black woman, decked out just enough to be either on the stage or in the game.
The barman caught his eye, and he nodded. 'I'll have a margarita,' she said. 'So, what's tonight like for you?'
'Holding a bit of a wake,' Chas said. 'Remembering a friend.'
She touched his hand. Soft hands, but strong. 'A good friend?'
'No,' said Chas, and proceeded to tell her about John Constantine.
As he spoke, the story changed.
He'd not run away from home at thirteen. He'd tried, but his mother had sent a demonic monkey to get him back. John had saved him from Queenie's Castle by drowning the monkey and murdering Queenie.
John had been a magician, see.
John himself had run away from home, not because he'd smashed a beer bottle over his dad's head, but because he'd done magic and it had gone wrong. He hadn't meant it, was the point. Not John.
The world wasn't the miserable shithole it was because people made it that way, it was all because of scum demons and evil beings and it was people like John who put themselves between us and them.
It was John Constantine who saved the world, even if it meant less than ten people came to his funeral. It had been his secret life, a life normal people didn't know anything about. Except Chas. He got to see the ugly secret side of the world, because of his friend John. His magnificent John.
He woke up two hours later slumped over a table in the corner of the pub, a little drool mixed with vomit leaking from the side of his mouth, his wallet gone. A waiter was shaking him by the shoulder. "Got a taxi waiting for you outside," he said. "Get yourself home, all right?"
Chas wiped his mouth and groped for his car keys. They were gone too. It was okay. He had an extra set.
Stumbling and dirty, Chas went home.