The Ghost Who Fed Them Bones (27 page)

“I think that there is a good chance.”

“Would you mind if I final y left you forever, Paul?”

“I would certainly miss you, Alice. I miss you now because you are not real y here.”

“You can always come to visit my grave and pray for my soul.”

“I wil .”

“You promise?”

“As often as I can.”

“Thank you. I’l put in a good word for you in heaven. I don’t mind sharing you, Paul, but I don’t want to be forgotten by you entirely.”

“You shan’t be, Alice. Nobody is going to forget you now after you have brought al those lost bodies to light.”

“I don’t want you to remember me for that. I want you to remember me for me.”

“I was joking.”

“It is hard to tel when the English are joking. You always seem to be but you seldom are. Shal I take you on a tour of my favourite places?”

“Certainly.”

“Let’s go then.”

So we spend several hours touring the countryside and visiting parts of Béziers, Montpel ier and Narbonne. Alice tel s me the story of her short life, of the friends she used to play with, where she smoked her first cigarette, the walks she used to go on with her parents and with her friends, of the rivalries and the jealousies, of the clumsy way her father treated her mother, of her uncles and her aunts and her cousins, and in the whole story there was not one remarkable thing – nothing that couldn’t have happened to anyone. She never had time to create space for herself beyond the standard pattern, and it made me wonder whether my friends would describe my life in the same way – I went to school, I played endlessly with Michael as good friends as wel as brothers, I grew up, I went to university in Leuven, then I died, except that I haven’t died yet, except that I shal die soon, I know it. I have seen it. I have seen how it happens. We wil al die, and many of us wil never have lived. The thought makes me realise the urgency of the situation, how I must at least live for something. Two years, three years, what time do I have left to me, do we al have left to us, to the moment when al the ghosts get cleared out of this place, a planetary spring clean at least – maybe the end of everything forever?

I wonder if I wil real y miss Alice. We haven’t real y had a relationship either. We have had a friendship. We have had a glimpse of promising impossibilities. We have pledged ourselves to each other, but there is nothing you could hang a coat on. A living human being and a ghost are simply incapable of fusing entirely. Even Fiona and I stil have more chance, and that is not intended by either of us.

What is a life? I am sorry if I am turning philosophical here but the moment and the atmosphere here demand it. Alice is begging these questions. What sort of life could anyone live when they can truly say that they have had a life? From the outside, in ignorance, it is easy. You just real off a list of zany adventures, tragedies, eccentricities, cataclysms, achievements. But from the inside does it feel like that, or is it just a life?

Who do I know who has had a life? I cannot think of anyone. So perhaps I just have to tough it out until I die, doing whatever it occurs to me to do and I am capable of doing. That’s it.

The end.

* * *

The Earl instantly agreed to re-bury Alice on his estate. In fact, he was immediately enthusiastic about the idea because there is an escarpment that faces out towards the Mediterranean and he would rather like to be buried there himself although he knows that in practice he wil end up in the family vault in the Cotswolds alongside three hundred years of ancestors.

“I have a trepidation that I wil arrive at the gates of the mausoleum and my entire family wil line up to tear me off a strip for al my misdeeds and mistakes. Father always said I was lazy, so I’l get that. Mother thought I was careless and irresponsible, so that wil be her dig. I never met my grandparents so they are unknown quantities, but being late Victorian I am sure that they wil be duly censorious of my neglect of the cause of science and my indifference to my religion. They wil al have been watching me like hawks my entire life and taking notes. I can only hope that St. Peter marches in and imposes a judicial moratorium pending the publication of his own report. It real y does give me the wil ies to think of myself entombed in a vault of cold, damp Cotswold stone in the midst of so many dead bodies. Worse than the Marquis’ hiding place down here in the cel ar – and for eternity. So, in short, I would much prefer to be buried on a nice warm gentle slope, facing out towards the sea in my own happy isolation. I have informed the Countess of my wishes but she only says ‘Don’t be sil y, Dear. You must do your duty. We al must.’ So that’s it, I suppose. Stil , if young Alice can enjoy my spot instead, that wil be some consolation. Where is she now, by the way?”

“I’m not quite sure.”

“And how do we get at her?”

“I don’t know that either. The issue was irrelevant until you agreed to accommodate her.”

“Wel , yes, she can definitely have board and lodgings here. We wil have to find a way to get her past the gate, but that shouldn’t be too difficult, and I’l ask M. Toucas to prepare the grave. I’l think up some excuse. Obviously I shal not cal it a grave. A hide. I’l think I’l pretend I am building a hide to watch the nocturnal animals from. He’l buy that story. He knows that I love watching wildlife in the quiet of the early morning. Never stops referring to it in fact. Thinks I am completely barmy. There you are, al settled from my end. I am sure that the Countess wil not object. In fact she wil be quite pleased.

She wil take it that I have final y given up on being interred here myself. It would be quite indecent for me to choose to be buried alongside the grave of an attractive young French girl rather than in the welcoming bosom of my family. Personal y I think I would prefer the welcoming bosom of an attractive young French girl, but don’t mention that to the Countess, now.”

So the adventure was on. I tracked down Alice and discovered that her body was buried on the elevated plains opposite the Pic St. Loup, next door to Valflaunès, give or take five kilometres. According to her, she was to be found about two-to-three metres below the surface of a tractor track which skirted a vineyard. The farmer is a friend of her father’s and her father knew that he was away for a few days, so he borrowed his tractor and dug a deep hole in the middle of the track, laid out Alice careful y and tenderly at the bottom of the pit, and then covered it al up again.

That worried me. Firstly, how exactly were we going to be able to gain access to such a public place without anyone seeing us, unless we should be so lucky that the farmer is away again? Secondly, even if uninterrupted access was possible, how was I going to dig up to three metres down? The earth around here is impossible. I have seen enormous rocks that the farmers have dug up making mountainous ridges along the edges of their fields. The stones are massive and there are tens of them to the square metre. Besides, the soil itself is like concrete, and I didn’t think that the Earl would be up for much digging. I considered asking Mike to help us, but if I mentioned it to Mike there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t pass the information onto Chloe and that would be disastrous. Despite al that, I nearly asked Mike anyway, but rare moments of integrity prevented me from opening my mouth. I owed that much to Alice.

Alice was convinced that she knew exactly where she was lying and could guide us there without the need for lights which were, of course, out of the question, but the sheer noise alone was going to be a problem. I would be there with my pickaxe (wel M. Toucas’ pickaxe) for hours pummel ing the soil. How can you do that surreptitiously? I then had another fear. Assuming that I did manage to dig three metres down using a pickaxe and spade, what if I drove either the pickaxe or the spade right through Alice’s skeleton? It wouldn’t hurt her, but it made me feel squeamish, especial y as I realised that I would probably have to pick Alice’s body out of its grave by hand. What if parts of it were stil intact? What if the earth had partial y preserved it and there were strands of skin and flesh and sinews, hair, nails, even eyes. She would not be as beautiful as I saw her as a ghost. She might smel foul too. What had original y sounded a fitting gesture was rapidly degenerating into a horror story nightmare. I didn’t dare share my thoughts with Alice so I pretended to remain enthusiastic.

The Earl picked us up in his car on the next Saturday night. He chose the Saturday because there was a chance that the farmer would be gone over the weekend, or that he would be attending the vil age fête in Quissac late into the night. I thought he was being optimistic. It was going to take five or six hours I reckoned to dig Alice out.

The Earl had stuffed the boot with excavation tools and with night vision equipment he happened to use to watch the nocturnal animals, so at least we would be able to see what we were doing, one of us anyway.

Alice guided us to between Biranques and Rouet and turned us up a track which immediately fed through scrubland, but which opened up to reveal a smal field of vines. I was looking around for curious and defensive farmers but the other two ignored al that. If we were going to do it we were going to do it, no apologies, no explanations.

“You can always buy yourself out of almost any scrape, Paul, especial y around here. Consciences are cheap, life is hard.”

I simply hadn’t acquired a sufficiently aristocratic outlook yet to believe that the entire earth belonged to me and that there was a simple solution to everything.

Luckily, in this case, there real y was. By some extraordinary coincidence, the farmer had been digging a ditch or something only a hundred metres away using his tractor, so the bucket was already attached at the front and the keys were in the ignition. Nobody steals much around here, I suppose, and thieving tourists don’t usual y have much use for a tractor.

Faced with a gadget rather than a pickaxe and a spade, the Earl immediately volunteered like a fired-up schoolboy to work the tractor.

“I do this sort of thing on the estate in the Cotswolds. I find it so peaceful and relaxing and the workers find it ingratiatingly hilarious, so we al have a good time,” he explained. “Al right, Alice, where exactly are you?”

Alice ‘walked’ to a specific position along the track and pointed down. “I am here,” she said. “Exactly here. My head’s there and my feet are there.”

“We’l have you out of there in no time,” promised the Earl. “Warn me when I get close to you. I don’t want to mash you to bits.” So the Earl had been having the same thoughts.

“I wil .”

As with previous digs, Alice remained relatively insouciant as the Earl removed the topsoil, if you can cal it that, and then rapidly attacked the layers below. I began to wonder whether this would prove to be yet another body entirely unassociated with Alice, the work of a second serial kil er operating in the area. However, as the Earl got closer to her body, she began to wince and to fret as if he were a dentist dril ing near a nerve.

“I think you should use a spade now,” she suggested.

“I’l go a little deeper,” replied the Earl but I’l go more slowly. You tel me how close I am.”

“You are less than a metre away from my body,” Alice advised him nervously.

“Can’t be. We are stil far too shal ow. Your father would not have buried you this close to the surface .”

Alice was giving the impression that if the Earl did not listen to her she might throw herself in front of the tractor.

“Stand back please, Alice. We don’t want any accidents. No, I mean that I don’t want an accident. You are interfering with my concentration.”

“I want you to take more care.”

“And I don’t want to waste my time or give Paul here too much to do. Digging this type of terrain is the sort of job they used to give to chain gangs to break their spirits.”

“Stop! You are almost touching me.” Alice was hopping from one foot to the other with a tension which was bordering on frenzy.

The Earl eyed her careful y, calculating the margin by which she was overacting. After two more sweeps he stopped and climbed down from the tractor. “Al right, Paul, you start digging and I wil get the blankets.

I walked down into the hole. “Where should I dig Alice?”

“Another pace. There. Dig there, but be careful. Try to scrape the soil away. I am sure that you are very close.”

And she was right. Scraping had no impact so I had to dig, cutting the blade hard into the soil, almost immediately disclosing some remnants of a blanket.

“What on earth are you doing?” came a stern voice above me. It was obviously the owner or the manager of the land.

“What are you doing with my tractor? Why are you digging up my land?” He was so astonished and agitated that he wasn’t even threatening to cal the police. He was threatening us with a hunting rifle instead. “Come out of that hole, please. This instant.” The barrel was pointing directly at my head.

“I feel that I need to explain,” the Earl began, heading the farmer off so that he would not blow me to bits if his finger itched.

The farmer resisted being distracted but he also recognised the calmly authoritative air of the Earl. “I would like to tel you a story … ” Astonishingly, the farmer bought the idea and they both walked away from us down the track. I stood there wondering what kind of story the Earl could possibly come up with.

“Quick,” Alice urged me. “Carry on digging. The Earl is buying you time.”

I scraped around the blanket to reveal more blanket and then the entire blanket. Alice came to stand by my side. “That is me,” she said. She lent down. “Please open the blanket.” I did so, averting my eyes to avoid seeing what was inside.

Alice gave a little scream. “That’s enough,” she said sharply. “You can cover me up again. I don’t want you to see me in that state.”

I only caught the briefest of glimpses but I got the impression that some of the body was stil intact although there was no real smel .