Mean Spirit (7 page)

And this is not merely mischief, because Kurt knows that Cindy’s act depends on that continued ambivalence …
is he or isn’t he?
– with so many levels to that question – and that the revelation of his padding will literally be the end of him … the end of his credibility, the end of his career even on Bournemouth Pier.

Why does Campbell want to do this to him? What has he ever done to the boy to inspire such cruelly reckless disdain?

And what is Cindy to do now?

Up in the gallery, Jo, the producer, will be in a panic, on her feet, probably unsure – because she’s quite young for this job – how to stop it.

Now some members of the audience have started a rhythmic slow handclap. This is definitely not in the running order. Cindy does a last, desperate twirl. Kurt is smiling. The
shit.

Cindy pauses. Pushes out his chest.

The spotlight encircles him. Cindy backs up and it follows him. He’s standing now in front of his chair.

The crowd whoops. Kurt no longer smiles, no longer has that certainty.

The moment has come. No avoiding it.

The pink suitcase still standing, half in spot, next to Cindy’s empty chair, emits a raucous squawk.

‘Get ’em off, you old tart!’
shrieks Kelvyn Kite.

When Kurt Campbell started the machine for the draw, a number of people, Cindy among them, noticed that his smile was tainted by a pure, black fury.

The winning numbers were six, fifteen, thirty-six, forty-two, forty-three and forty-six.

Kurt did not look at Cindy again, but Cindy could almost see the rage shooting out of him like thick, black arrows.

When the team gathered in the green room for a drink afterwards, Kurt had gone. Jo Shepherd dragged Cindy into a corner. She was white.

‘Christ…!’

‘I’m sorry, Jo.’

‘What the hell
happened
?’ There were great sweat stains under the arms of Jo’s blouse.

Cindy was calm, but no longer high, no longer living in the moment.

‘I think’, he said, ‘that young Kurt forgot his cue.’

‘He bloody didn’t. He wanted you …’ Jo was near to tears ‘… all fucked up in front of twenty million viewers. I knew it was the wrong thing, I bloody
knew
it.’

Cindy blinked. ‘I’m sorry, lovely?’

Jo shook her curls. ‘Never mind, you got out of it. You turned the tables. You’re a brilliant man, Cindy, we all thought you were completely under. How did you do that?’

‘Wasn’t me, lovely. Kelvyn, it was.’

Jo was smiling and shuddering at the same time.

‘I’ll tell you what, Cindy – public humiliation on the National Lottery … that guy is never going to forget this. I think you’ve probably made yourself an enemy for life.’

‘Yes.’ Cindy bent down and flipped open the case. ‘I suppose I have.’ He extracted Kelvyn Kite, all beak and feathers and big rolling eyes. ‘There’s unfortunate, isn’t it?’

VII

MOST OF THE NIGHT, GRAYLE HAD AVOIDED IT
.

Ersula. The matter of Spirit.

She’d taken down the numbers of two hotels in Stroud, but it was clear Persephone Callard was in no fit state to drive her there and she wouldn’t have a cab calling here for Grayle – there were already too many people who knew the house wasn’t empty.

No way out of this.

Past midnight: she lay on her back, in her sweater, under an eiderdown on the iron-framed, brass-headed bed, in the plain, square Victorian bedroom with its small iron fireplace and a view into the dark woods.

From the next room she heard Persephone Callard snort and then moan in her sleep.

They’d eaten microwaved Marks & Spencer’s Chinese food – Callard leaving most of hers – and then drank and talked for over four hours, with a lot of stuff coming out.

But none of it explaining what Callard was hiding from. Either she was playing with Grayle or whatever it was really could only be said to Marcus Bacton.

Fathers. They talked about fathers.

They’d discussed Dr Erlend Underhill, eminent Harvard Professor of American and European History, who had two daughters: Ersula
who, in her father’s image, was studious, serious, humourless and an archaeologist, and Grayle, of whose writings Lyndon McAffrey, Deputy City Editor of the
New York Courier,
had once said,
This may be journalism, but not as we know it.

They’d spoken of Stephen Callard, the knighted career diplomat, who had become besotted with a lovely black nurse in Kingston, Jamaica, brought her home to be his wife, have his child and die.

‘So what does your father think about what you do?’ Grayle had asked.

‘What I
did.
’ Persephone Callard’s eyes were hot but hard in the candlelight.

Grayle had accepted a second weak Scotch, but Callard’s tumbler remained on the mantelpiece, and Grayle kept thinking of what she’d said earlier:
When I’m pissed I don’t receive.

‘So how does he feel about it, your father?’

Callard shrugged. ‘I don’t know how he feels now. I haven’t seen him in two years. He’s over seventy, spends most of the time in Italy, studiously avoiding the kind of English newspaper that might contain items about me and … what I did.’

‘He’s embarrassed?’

‘He’s glad I’m rich and going my own way. I don’t think he’s really wanted to have anything to do with me since I turned twelve. I was the only woman who reminded him of my mother at her ripest and also the one woman he couldn’t fuck. Hardly remind him of her now, would I? Look at me!’

‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’

‘Maybe I want to die,’ Callard snapped. ‘Maybe I want to die and find out if there’s any truth at all in the kind of shit I’ve been feeding people for the past fifteen years.’

As always when she lay alone in strange beds, sleep receded like the tide on a long beach, leaving Grayle cold and tense and thinking,
Why am I here?
On every level of the question.

She knew – because he’d said so several times – that Marcus firmly expected her, at some stage, to leave her rented cottage in the village of St Mary’s, on the border of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, to take up a
real
career.

She kept telling herself she wasn’t going to do this, at least until
The Vision
was making enough money for Marcus to hire another writer and maybe a sub-editor too.

So perhaps she was destined to be there all her life.

There should, of course, be a man. There always used to be a man. And yet she’d been faintly horrified when her old boyfriend, Lucas, the Greenwich Village art-dealer, had written to her saying he’d be over on a buying trip in the spring and maybe they could like
get together.
Cool, refined, Ferrari-driving Lucas, who talked all night about the need for an inner life and would just hate ever to have time for one.

Lucas, Grayle decided, had his place in history and that era had been covered.

It was hard to find a man with an inner life. Maybe this was what drew her back to Marcus. Not in
that
way, of course, but Marcus, even though he raged and threw things, was certainly the father she kind of wished she’d had.

Grayle also thought sometimes about Bobby Maiden, the English cop. Who’d died in the hospital after a hit-and-run incident – and then been resuscitated and come out of it different. Events had tied them together. Losing loved ones to the same killer.

It was Bobby – mercifully, not Grayle – who had been there when Ersula’s decaying body came to light.

‘Why do you say it’s shit?’ Grayle had asked eventually, when the candle was burning low in the pewter dish. ‘Why do you think you were feeding people shit?’

And the woman had bowed her head, her tobacco hair falling forward.

‘It’s a gift. It
is
a gift. You can’t believe it yourself at first. Dead people out there, just queuing up to talk to you. So many of them that you have to appoint an agent over there to filter them.’

‘Agent?’

‘Spirit guide. I’ve had several. Even a Red Indian. A
Native
fucking
American.
I said, “Piss off, Mr Running Bear, whatever you call yourself, you want to completely ruin my credibility?” But he stuck around, the poor old sod. He was very friendly in his gruff way, I quite took to him. All the clichés – you get
all
the bloody clichés. Table-rapping – that works as well. I’m not saying scores of people didn’t fake it, but … it happens.’

‘Ectoplasm?’

‘Why not? Not in my experience, but there’s evidence for it. And it’s a word that sounds good, isn’t it? Sounds scientific. That was the big thing when all this started in the mid-nineteenth century. It had to be seen as another great scientific leap forward, like electricity and photography. All these huge developments were linked into spiritualism – it wasn’t religion, it was human scientific knowledge crossing the final frontier. Man was becoming so clever so fast that it was obvious we were going to solve the mystery of death, sooner rather than later.’

‘I did a piece on all that once,’ Grayle said, ‘but the evidence was that it was nearly all one big scam.’

‘No.’ Callard blinked balefully. ‘That’s not the scam. Or rather, much of it was, but it’s not the one I’m talking about. I haven’t produced ectoplasm, but I’ve had materialization. Visuals. Energy forms.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘You believe in ghosts, perhaps?’ Callard eyeing her thoughtfully.

‘I … think so.’

‘You’ve seen?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You do know, Grayle. No-one who’s seen has any real doubts.’

‘So why is it shit?’

Callard stretched her long neck. She was looking firmer now, less sick. OK, beautiful; no getting around that.

‘For a number of years, I’d go into trance and receive these clear, comprehensible messages from what I had every reason to believe were departed spirits. The fact that the messages were mainly banal in the extreme was neither here nor there. One day Einstein might come through and it would be different. Meanwhile, I relayed the trivial messages to my well-heeled clients – sort of people who would
never
consult Mrs Higgins in her council flat – and everyone was happy.’

Grayle on the edge of her chair by this time, never having heard a medium putting down the profession. Callard was something else.

‘And then Einstein
did
come through,’ Callard said.

‘Oh boy.’

‘Albert Einstein.
The
Albert Einstein. Saying just what you’d
expect from him. How disappointed he was that modern physicists had failed to develop his ideas. How he was full of regrets at the way he’d treated his first wife, but they were blissfully reunited now. He also said that, from his present position, he was able to see where some of his theories fell down.’

‘How was that?’

‘You have scientific knowledge?’

‘Not to speak of.’

‘Me neither. I offered him automatic writing to explain, and the results looked like the authentic minute calculations of a mathematical genius. Lots of little brackets and bubbles and algebraic symbols. My agent, Nancy, got frightfully excited and had them photocopied and dispatched discreetly to a certain professor in Munich or somewhere. Who said, of course …’

‘That it was complete horseshit?’

Callard sighed.

‘Why does that always happen?’ Grayle wondered sadly. ‘The psychic artists produce Van Gogh plastic sunflowers, and the psychic composers … you’d think Mozart would reach sublime new heights, being dead and gone to heaven and all, instead of … some pale, music-school imitation. Why?’

‘I don’t know why. Or, rather, I think I do now. It’s because mediumship, as it’s usually practised, is a low-level art … mundane and mediocre. It attracts low-level, inconsequential dross. Psychically speaking, the pits. Spirit shit.’

‘But still from like … out there?’

‘Who knows whether out there is really
in
there? In the end, I can’t tell you where the messages come from – perhaps some area of the brain we don’t yet understand. I just don’t believe they come from where we think they do when we first start to receive them. One comes to realize that the challenge is to separate the truth from the random disinformation.’

Grayle had drunk some more whisky from the greasy glass, journalistically excited, spiritually disappointed.

‘But it’s all soooo plausible when you need it, Grayle. When you’ve lost someone.’

‘I guess.’

‘So.’ Persephone Callard leaning on an elbow, hunched up in a
corner of the Victorian sofa in that state of drab sobriety that comes after long days of serious drinking. ‘Would you like to speak to your dead sister, tonight?’

Grayle’s mouth was suddenly parched in spite of the Scotch. She shook her head, alarmed.

The woman grinned at her discomfort, displaying white, perfect teeth in the candlelight.

‘What have you got to lose, Grayle? You might get some special insight. You might achieve peace of mind.’

Grayle shaking her head.

‘Perhaps there’s something you’d like to have told her before she died.’

Grayle staring into the crimson cinders.

‘… something you wish you’d shared.’

‘We didn’t have too much in common outside of parents,’ Grayle said tightly. She looked up. ‘And anyway … you don’t think it really would be my sister.’

‘Who am
I
to say? Only you would know that.’

Grayle said nothing, feeling trapped. God damn it, why couldn’t Marcus just have written, told Callard he’d come see her when he was over the flu.

‘You’re afraid, aren’t you, Holy Grayle?’

‘Maybe I just don’t want to learn something which may, if what you say is correct, have no basis in truth.’

‘Too close, eh?’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean, it’s OK when it’s somebody else. When it’s journalism.’

‘You are very astute,’ Grayle said hoarsely.

‘Family connections, where there’s been a difficult death, are usually the strongest. Things which need to be explained. I can feel she’s near you. Some of the time. Now. She wants to come, I think.’

‘No.’

‘You know, when I said there’d been manifestations … the strongest one, the one which everyone in the room saw, was a mother of twins who died in childbirth. Both sisters were there, grown up now. And we had the seance in the room – I didn’t know this at the time – where she’d actually died. She had the babies at home – she’d had two already – and she was … Anyway, this was
a bungalow, and it was the living room now, not a bedroom any more. And there were photos of the mother all around the walls, and her favourite things scattered about … clothes, handbags. And all the family – the husband, the twins, another sister – all of them there. And the room was dense with her before we started …’

‘I don’t think I want to know about this,’ Grayle said.

Well, of
course
there were things she wanted to say to Ersula. Things she wanted to ask.

Grayle stared at the ceiling. There were times when the dead, unhappy Ersula had appeared to her in dreams. Or what had seemed, with hindsight, to be dreams.

How very close we all were to madness.

And yes, she’d been afraid.

From the next room Persephone Callard, sorceress, con-woman, cried out crossly in her sleep. Maybe turning over, in her subconscious mind, all those things she wouldn’t tell Grayle but might just tell Marcus.

Dark stuff. Grayle wasn’t sure she wanted to know about it.

Like, what had really happened to make her conclude that the Spirit World was not to be trusted? It surely went beyond the Einstein incident; there were so many well-documented cases of earthly genius failing to survive death, great talent coming back half-assed.

‘So this just came over you, this fit of conscience about misleading people – it just hit you, and you couldn’t do it any more?’

‘Something like that.’

No way. It was more than some kind of crisis of faith. Something more personally traumatic.

Grayle went to sleep thinking about it and dreamed of a cavernous, candlelit ballroom, empty but full of noise … a clamour of voices, a hubbub of the unseen. Occasionally she would catch a phrase which seemed to make thrilling sense, then it was gone and unremembered. And then the mush of voices was pierced by the purity of a thin scream, and Grayle was awake in a much smaller room with no candles.

And no voices, only another scream.

What?