A Ghost in the Machine (24 page)

This level of wilful battling against the tide of truth was hard to handle. At a loss as to what to say, Doris decided to have one last attempt at getting through to what she wistfully thought of as the old Benny.

“Would you consider, love, him being so high up and all, that this inspector might actually have got it right?”

“Now I don't know where to turn,” replied Benny.

“It's a problem,” agreed Doris, jumping with one bound into the opposite camp and feeling, what the hell, if you can't beat 'em…“Let's have a think, shall we?”

They stirred their tea and thought. After a little while Doris suggested, eyes cast down and cautiously, for she knew her friend's opinion on such matters, a second visit to the Church of the Near at Hand. She was thinking how wonderful it would be if Dennis came through. If he described what actually happened on the day he died and so laid to rest Benny's terrible obsession.

Benny was silent for a moment, then lifted her head and smiled at Doris. Her expression showed an awesome awareness as if she had just received news of great significance. She reached out and seized both of Doris's hands.

“Yes – you've got it! Oh, Doris, why didn't I think of that?”

Doris felt uneasy at this sudden burst of confidence. Benny seemed to think all she had to do was go along and a hot line to Dennis was a certainty. It seemed wise to point out this might not be so. The poor soul had had more than enough to cope with already. Doris tried to put it gently.

“Spirits don't always turn up just when you want, Ben.”

“No, no,” cried Benny. “You mustn't worry about that. In fact, Doris, you mustn't worry about anything. I'm on the right lines now, thanks to you. From now on, everything is going to be just fine.”

There was a depressing little queue outside the Church of the Near at Hand. The building itself was hardly less depressing. About the size of a village hall, it was made of overlapping clapboard shingles once coloured a rather sickly clover. Now little of the paint remained. Just a few loosely attached shavings curled up in the August sun. The corrugated iron roof, heavily stained, was scabbed with moss. Its rusty extremities had crumbled away leaving a rather pretty scalloped edge, like a lace doily. One of the rear windows was cracked.

Sentinel along each side of the church and dwarfing it even further were six yew trees. These were immensely tall and so dark as to be almost black. Even on a bright, summer's day the church seemed threatened by their long, pointed shadows. They made it appear both isolated and sinister, like a house in a fairy story, suddenly and mysteriously present in a woodland clearing.

A board had been hammered into the grass just behind the scruffy railings. On it, a white square of card in a plastic cover read: “The Spirit Is Willing: Matthew 26, 41.” This reassurance was garlanded by tiny moth-like creatures with human faces and patterned wings drawn with a felt-tipped pen. They were smiling in a dreamy sort of way and holding hands. Beneath their twinkling feet another notice. “Key with Mrs. Alma Gobbett, Paradise Bungalow, 17 Midgely Road.”

The queue was plainly, even poorly, dressed. It was mainly female and some of the women had bags of shopping. A pinched-looking girl wore a sling holding a tiny baby. She was smoking, blowing the smoke carefully away from the baby's face, not seeming to notice when it drifted back. Two stout elderly reeking men were supporting each other back to back, like a pair of bibulous bookends.

Near the opposite pavement a new primrose-yellow Beetle was parked close to the kerb. Inside, Cully Barnaby and her husband Nicolas, watched as the little line began to shuffle forward.

“They're opening the doors.” Cully took the keys from the ignition. Nicolas stretched over to the back seat and picked up his jacket. “You're not coming.”

“Try and stop me,” cried Nicolas.

“Nico, you promised to wait outside.”

“Would I promise such a thing? With Mother begging me on her death bed—”

“Your mother's fine. I saw her in Sainsbury's on Wednesday.”

“So you say. Anyway, the principle's the same. ‘See if you can contact your Aunty Ethel,' she cried. ‘Ask her where that Victorian tantalus—'”

“That's exactly the sort of attitude…” As she spoke Cully sprang out of the car and targeted the locks. A fraction of a second too late.

Nicolas beamed at her over the gleaming roof. “What do you mean ‘attitude'?”

“Snorting derision. Look what happened last time.”

The last time was a week previously. They had both gone to a spiritualist meeting in Causton. The medium, poised delicately on four-inch rhinestone heels, had begun fervently to roll her thumb and index finger together. Conjuring the gradual formation of a crumb of invisible dough she enquired if someone had recently lost a baker. Nicolas stood up and asked earnestly if the crumb could possibly be clay as he had recently lost a sculptor.

Cully struck out firmly across the road. Nicolas kept alongside, mocking her with principal-boy strides. He produced an exercise book, slapped his thigh with it, then waved it under his wife's nose.

“Look—look! See what a help I shall be.”

“What's that for?”

“To take notes—discreet notes,” he added quickly as she turned to glare at him. “You can't be expected to remember everything.”

Nico offered one of his best audition smiles—sincere but with a hint of irony to show he was intelligent. Cool but not overly detached. Humorous while appreciating that something really serious was happening right here, right now. A hundred per cent engaged yet a free man, able to walk calmly away should the situation not work out while still remaining overwhelmingly aware of the powerful inner radiance of his talent.

“Don't do that, Nico. I've just had lunch.”

“Sorry.”

To Cully's surprise in the short space of time that they had been arguing the queue had grown much longer. Cars were being parked and quite a lot of people were making their way towards the church. By the time she and Nicolas entered, the rows of narrow, unvarnished hard-backed chairs were almost full.

This was the fourth meeting they had attended in as many weeks and the interior of all the churches proved to be remarkably similar. The Church of the Near at Hand was different only in that it was crowded with shadows. The few patches of sunlight admitted through the dense yew trees shimmered on cream walls. A dais, shabbily carpeted, was backed by dusty black velvet drapes. These had been drawn back to reveal a poorly designed and crudely coloured stained-glass window. A man with golden curls and doll-like crimson cheeks and lips stood in a rackety rowing boat. He wore a long white robe and a long white wing sprouted clumsily from his nearest shoulder. About his head was a rainbow made in several sections and clumsily conjoined.

A card table on the platform held a carafe of water with a glass turned upside down on the neck. A sunburst of vivid plastic flowers balanced on a mock marble column. A portable gas heater at the back of the stage was unlit and some rather old-fashioned sound equipment played “You'll Never Walk Alone.”

Nicolas came to rest beside Cully, who gave him such a savage nudge he almost fell off the seat. Muttering, he got up and settled himself further down the hall. Looking round, he thought what a washed-out, colourless lot they were. And curiously similar. Not in feature perhaps, but in the vacant stolidity of their expressions. No frisson of suppressed excitement at the thought of soon getting in touch with the dear departed. No expectant glow lightened their tired, parched skins. What a bunch of losers. Nicolas risked glancing over his shoulder at his gorgeous wife in her vivid patchwork jacket, saffron silk shirt and dark green velvet trousers. She looked like an orchid on a dung heap.

The woman next to Nicolas pulled some knitting from an Iceland carrier bag. He entertained himself by wondering what had happened to the angel's second wing. Was its absence laziness on the artist's part? Or an unwillingness to wrestle with the problems of scale and perspective? Maybe the money had just run out.

In the front row an elderly man who had been welcoming people at the church door now stood up from his seat, clambered the few steps to the dais and turned to address the gathering. He smiled broadly, his false teeth glittering, raising his voice above the swelling strings.

“Friends, welcome. Welcome to another afternoon of love, light and laughter. I hope everyone will be able to stay on afterwards for tea. There will be a collection as usual, which this Sunday is in aid of the Animal Healing Centre. Our cosmic inspirer today is Ava…” He paused, nodding in response to the smiles, murmurs of satisfaction and even some handclapping. “Ava Garret – known and I'm sure I can say loved – by you all.”

Nicholas positioned himself directly behind the person in front so as to be invisible from the platform. His crafty scribblings had never yet been remarked upon and he'd prefer things to stay that way. But if comments did arise he had his story ready. They were simply questions from his mum on the off chance that today might be the lucky day that her late sister decided to come through.

He had expected the woman beside him to abandon her knitting at this stage but she clicked on regardless. It was like sitting next to a lively deathwatch beetle. An immense tan-coloured sausage depended from her four steel needles and he could see a teddy bear's head with one vast ear poking out of the bag. Nicolas tried to picture the bear's eventual dimensions and did not envy the toddler squaring up to it on Christmas morning.

A youth with long greasy hair and rings through every visible orifice attended to the sound equipment. He wore a leather jacket with flying witches painted on, and army combat trousers. As the music faded Cully leaned forwards slightly, emptied her mind of all but the present moment and concentrated on the stage. The previous sessions had been remarkably similar and, should this follow the same pattern, Cully had already decided it would be the last.

The signs were not encouraging. The setting had been exactly as she expected. As for the performance, Cully was afraid that by now she could write the script. The medium would be fat and dressed in flowing garments stiff with tacky but bombastic decoration. She would be wearing quite a lot of flashy jewellery, even more highly coloured make-up and her coiffure would never, ever move. Her patter would mix sickly endearments with sentimental messages from the dear departed and deeply unfunny humour. Psychomancy as showbiz.

So when Ava Garret stepped on to the stage Cully had quite a shock. The first idea that came into her head was Aubrey Beardsley, for the woman closely resembled one of his illustrations. Then a quick and less charitable thought – Morticia Addams. Tall, sinuous and robed simply in black, she leaned on the plastic column and threw back her dark flowing hair. She began to drift back and forth across the stage, stretching out her hands in a most peculiar way. The left, palm out in front of her face as if warding off a rush of seekers after truth. The right, vaguely groping upwards as if to seize any shy, celestial beings before they changed their minds and dissolved once more into etheric vapour. At every turn she kicked the long train of her dress neatly behind her before setting off again. Cully, acting in her cradle, acting before she could even lisp the word, recognised a trick of the trade when she saw one.

“Someone is coming through now…” Estuary English overlaid by Received Pronunciation in a nice reversal of the current mode. “I'm getting a Graham—no, tell a lie—Grace. Does Grace connect with anyone here?”

“Very much so.” A woman on the end of the row opposite Nicolas stood up. She had bright ginger hair cowled in net veiling scattered with red and black beads. They looked like tiny insects.

Nicolas wrote down: “Could do with a good spray.”

“Grace wants you to have your legs looked at, my darling. Because you've only got one pair and I believe there's been trouble in that department already, am I right?”

Nicolas stretched his neck and looked across at the woman's legs. They were thin and straight, fragile sticks with tiny, bony bulges, like little basins, sticking out at knee level.

“My GP says it's cramp, Ava.”

“Earth doctors.” She laughed, shaking her head at the naïve conclusions of these simple inadequates. The audience joined in. Someone at the back started clapping. “Grace suggests a pendulum.”

“Oh! Thank you—”

“Plus a fenugreek massage.”

“Could you ask her—”

“I'm sorry but someone else is calling now, a gallant gentleman holding a red rose. I'm getting the letter T…Yes? A lady towards the back…”

“My son…” A shabbily dressed figure got up. “Trevor—he…was on his motorbike…”

“Now, my love, this is going to sound a little bit hard but Trevor has seen you on your tod having a weep over his picture and it makes him very sad. And we don't want that, do we?”

The woman, unable to speak, covered her mouth with a scarf and shook her head.

“Because he liked a bit of jollity – didn't he, young Trev? A little glass of something…I'm getting quite a lot of bubbles here…”

Trevor's mother struggled with unintelligible sounds. Eventually a strangled resemblance to the word “snorkelling” emerged.

As she subsided the next communication arrived. This was Tom with apologies to Mavis for passing to spirit before he'd had time to finish liming her outhouse.

After Tom messages came thick and fast. Nicolas wondered if everyone was supposed to receive one before they went in for tea, the way all children at a party expect a present. He was longing to look around at Cully but knew, if she caught him, he'd never hear the end of it.

“I'm being wafted shades of green now – overalls and masks. Bright lights and a definite scent of ether. A dear one recently lost in the theatre, perhaps?”

Nicolas wrote down, “Gielgud?”

“And here's someone – a bit of a Charlie, he tells me. And an Albert. Do these names connect at all?”

What a question, thought Cully, yawning. The miracle would be if two of the most common names of the last century did not connect with such an elderly audience. Where were the Crispins and Algernons, that's what she wanted to know. Why didn't Rollo and Georgiana, Araminta and Pauncefoot “come through”?

And why were there no really helpful or exciting messages? Like a recipe for low-calorie chocolate fudge. Or a new sonnet from William S. Something that would give pith and moment to the whole tedious procedure.

“I hear a baby chuckling now in the world of spirit…”

“My grandson, little Darren.” A man in the front row burst into floods of tears.

“You wouldn't know him, my darling. He's getting to be a lovely boy, because they do grow up, you know, in the higher realms.”

The man, amazed, started to dry his eyes.

“And he has his very own guardian angel – Brother Thundercloud – so rest assured no harm can ever come to him.”

“Thank you, thank you. Oh! Darren, we think of you all the time. Nana sends her love…”

It was at this stage that Nicolas stopped sneering to himself at the audience's credulity and started to feel angry on their behalf. Angry at the easy promises and consoling images tossed to rows of hungry faces like crumbs from the table to starving birds. The words “bread” and “stones” came to mind.

Then, as the medium tilted back her head, the light fell fully on to the right side of her face and Nicholas noticed for the first time a pinkish, plastic shell tucked neatly inside her ear. Deaf – oh, brilliant. Able to talk to the deceased a trillion, zillion light years away but unable to hack it with the living at spitting distance. After this observation all his light good humour returned.