Mean Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  Maiden prowled the room, picking up more glass. He wondered if maybe they hadn’t all made the window explode – all sitting there nursing their private fears and longings.

  Under the computer table, which he and Grayle had pulled back into the centre of the room, he found a writing pad. He froze.

  * * *

  Cindy searched for his phone for a while before remembering that he’d hurled it, in his agony, over the castle wall.

  At nine, from the payphone in the hallway of the Tup, he rang Jo’s direct line at the BBC. No answer. No point in calling her at home; she’d be on her way to the office. Cindy returned to the bar and his table, bare now. Except for the Sun.

  No excuse any more. He looked at page five. Saw a picture of himself wearing a cunning smile and a pointed hat.

  Underneath the picture, the caption read:

  Cindy the sorcerer: ‘communes with spirits’.

  The smile on the face was real, but the hat was a clever and convincing computer graphic. Perhaps a legitimate liberty, under the circumstances.

  The feature story had it all. Twisted and sensationalized, of course, but, in essence, true. The Sun had even sent someone to confront one of the Fychans, young Sion, at his farm in Snowdonia. Not that this had proved entirely helpful. Sion had invited the reporter in for tea and generously answered all his questions. In Welsh, of course. Only in Welsh. Cindy allowed himself his first and probably final smile of the day.

  The sources of the information which did not require translation were given as ‘close friends’ and anonymous people said to have ‘worked with’ Cindy.

  Only one person was actually named in the piece.

  TV hypnotist Kurt Campbell, who recently discovered the hard way that Cindy was no easy subject, said last night, ‘I didn’t know any of this, but to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me.

  ‘You can tell that behind all that camp stuff the guy has iron will-power.

  ‘Sure I could believe he’s studied magical techniques. It could explain a lot.’

  ‘Thank you, boy,’ Cindy murmured grimly. He returned to the payphone in the hallway, redialled Jo’s number.

  This time the phone was answered almost immediately. The voice was male and young and cool and assured.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jo Shepherd isn’t coming in today.’

  ‘Unwell, is she?’

  Jo was always at work on Monday, planning Wednesday night’s show.

  ‘Far as I know, she’s absolutely fine. Who’s this?’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Cindy said. ‘Call her at home, I will.’

  ‘Ah.’ Pause. ‘That’s Mr Mars-Lewis, isn’t it?’

  Cindy considered hanging up.

  ‘Glad you called. My name’s John Harvey. I’ll be taking over as producer for the next few weeks.’

  Cindy’s grip on the phone grew tight. ‘I may be wrong, but I don’t recall Jo mentioning that.’

  ‘Oh, Jo didn’t know until this morning.’

  And could not reach Cindy because his phone was lying in some soaking nettlebed at Castle Farm.

  ‘Swift decision from On High,’ John Harvey said. Smoothly. Triumphantly. ‘They wanted someone more experienced to take over for a while. I don’t think I need to explain the reasons, do I?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Cindy said, then regretted it; these people never thought they needed to explain, they just dictated memos.

  John Harvey, sounding all of twenty-six, said, ‘Look, Cindy, I’m going to have to call you back, I’m due—’

  ‘In a meeting?’ The hand gripping the telephone now shaking.

  ‘You’ve been in the business a long time, matey. I think you know how these things work.’

  ‘Not really, boy. Perhaps you can enlighten me when we meet at rehearsal tomorrow.’

  John Harvey laughed nervously. Cindy remained silent.

  He was going to make the boy say it: that his presence at tomorrow’s rehearsal would be very far from essential.

  Grayle had come in with a whole pile of papers, all this crazy stuff about Cindy, portrayed as some kind of jinx figure bringing down darkness and retribution on innocent people for the crime of winning the National Lottery.

  What the hell?

  Insanity all around her. Hadn’t gotten any sleep until must’ve been four a.m. Lying there, hearing Callard whispering, He’s touching my face. And then the window disintegrating, the exclamations, the scraping of chairs, the stumbling, the feet skidding on glass.

  And now here was Bobby Maiden staring in disbelief at the office pad they used for telephone notes.

  A drawing on it, another relic of a wild and crazy night.

  She hadn’t seen Bobby like that since Emma, his girlfriend, was savagely killed, when he was groping for the light of understanding under the deadening pressure of a lingering head injury.

  ‘OK … let’s … let’s be calm.’ Easing the pad out of his fingers. ‘Let’s look at it by daylight. Let’s consider the rational options before we get carried away.’

  She bore the pad quickly to the back door and out into the farmyard, Bobby following in silence.

  The main options were that he was lying, that he’d done this as a scam to give Callard some credibility. Or that Cindy had done it after they left him alone in there last night. She didn’t know too much about Cindy’s level of artistic ability, but the design work on his shamanic drum had some style.

  It was good that Marcus had not reappeared. Better not to complicate this by introducing the Big Mystery option.

  The wind was blowing, the sky was heavy but there was no rain. Grayle leaned the pad against the stump of an old gatepost. She didn’t like to hold it. She was glad to get it out the house. Well, Jesus, a face like that …

  The drawing was rough, done with the kind of broad, scrubbing strokes that Lucas, her old art-dealer friend, might appreciate. She could almost hear Lucas now: Yeah, yeah, bold, confident … what it lacks in finesse it makes up for in raw energy. The pencil shading had been smudged, like Bobby had licked a finger and rubbed at it.

  Damn it, this face had life.

  Bobby and she stood together examining the picture, like they were figuring whether to buy it.

  ‘You never said you saw him,’ Grayle said.

  ‘I didn’t … see him. Grayle, I don’t remember doing this.’ Rubbing hard at his eyes. ‘What the fuck …?’

  ‘Calm down. Jesus, were you like this when you found Justin’s body? Believe me, this is … this is just… I’ve seen this stuff before, Bobby. It’s just an anomaly.’

  ‘It was me who did this?’

  ‘Sure it was. I was vaguely aware of you drawing. I didn’t even think much about it at the time. I must’ve thought, yeah that’s what he does when he’s all strung up. He draws.’

  She remembered something else then, something that had gotten wiped from her memory in all the chaos of Marcus trying to break into the dairy.

  ‘What were you doing in there with Cindy? Afterwards.’

  ‘Well, he was just … it was a cleansing thing. Didn’t he do it to you?’

  ‘No. A cleansing thing?’

  ‘A banishing. He made me stand against a wall and he drew shapes in the air in front of me.’

  ‘Pentagrams?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was a bit shaken. Lost track of time. And then,’ Bobby thought back, ‘he told me to stay there and he went off and came back with Malcolm.’

  ‘Right. He was checking if you were clean. If the dog had growled and backed away or taken a piece out of your ass, there’d still be a problem. He was scared you’d become possessed.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘By …’ Grayle jerked a thumb at the drawing. ‘Look, like I said, I’ve seen this … well, I’ve seen so-called spirit drawings and … I guess none of them were like this. They were all kind of two-dimensional. Or do I mean one-dimensional? Whatever, they didn’t have this level of … of … expression. I mean like the expression on that face. That i
s … that is some … expression.’

  The wind peeled back the page of the flimsy pad – the page made even flimsier by the pencil-scraping and thumb-smudging. Grayle moved to stop it getting torn off, blown away.

  ‘Leave it,’ Bobby said.

  ‘It might be important. Don’t you … think?’

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything, does it? There’s nothing to show exactly when I drew it, is there? Nothing to show it was me who drew it at all.’

  Grayle looked at him. Bobby was way off-balance. Bobby was scared.

  ‘Grayle … I attacked her, didn’t I?’

  ‘Naw … hey … What happened, she starts saying it’s … it … is touching her face. You try and grab her … or maybe you’re trying to grab him. It was confusing.’

  ‘That’s why she ran away, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. She ran away because there were things she didn’t want to explain.’ Grayle looked back at the picture; she hated it. If it was her who drew that she’d be setting light to it then burning incense. She said tentatively, ‘I guess if we kept it … and we showed it around … like, I don’t know where we’d show it around … but maybe there’s somebody somewhere who could like attach a name to this person. Like if there was someone who looked like this.’

  Bobby said, ‘Oh, there was.’

  ‘Bobby?’

  He bent down and helped the wind take the drawing of the guy with the thin, mean face and the slicked-back hair, the Roman kind of nose and the watery-looking eyes and the scar that cut horizontally across from eye to ear, like half of a pair of glasses.

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Bobby said. ‘I know who this is.’

  The paper got scrolled up into a funnel, and the irritable wind hurried it across the yard towards the castle walls.

  XXXVI

  THE PLUMP WOMAN IN THE EIGHT-TILL-LATE STORE IN ST MARY’S stared hard at Cindy. She was thinking, Was it? Could it be? Surely not?

  Cindy was in his blazer and slacks. Perhaps he should also be wearing dark glasses and a false beard. Come to buy another paper. A Times or a Telegraph or a Guardian. Wanting to know how the broadsheets had treated the story of the Sherwins’ fatal fire. Trying to tell himself tabloid hysteria was not necessarily the end of the world.

  Even though the new producer, John Harvey, had said it had been decided that Wednesday’s show should be compered by Carl Adams, the stand-up who occasionally stood in for Cindy. A breathing space, Harvey had claimed. They’d be in touch soon. And after all, Cindy’s contract had another three months to run, did it not?

  Oh, three whole months! And the very fact that Harvey knew how long the contract had to run … what did that tell you?

  Cindy had tried to contact Jo at her home, but there was no answer. She must be somewhere inside the warren of the BBC. Trying to call him, no doubt. But he was unreachable now, a man with no mobile – unthinkable in London, might as well be dead.

  There was just one Telegraph left. The shop woman, unsmiling, eyed Cindy as he bent to lift the paper from the rack.

  From the front page of the Sun, at the top of the rack, his own face leered at him, all lipstick and long black lashes. Next to it, the pop-eyed profile of Kelvyn Kite. The photograph had been printed hard and contrasty, making Cindy look demented and the bird positively demonic.

  Cindy scratched his ear, put on a querulous cockney voice. ‘Looks like that geezer’s gorn too far this time, dunnit, love?’

  The woman looked relieved. Not him at all, then. Just an early holidaymaker on a Saga tour, or someone here to visit his grandchildren.

  ‘Well, I must say, I never liked him myself,’ she said. ‘People like that, they’ve always got a chip on their shoulder, haven’t they?’

  ‘Size of half a brick,’ Cindy agreed. ‘Bleedin’ perverts.’

  He paid for his paper. In the doorway, he turned back.

  ‘Oughter get treatment for it, I reckon. Compulsory. They says this whatchacallit, electric shock, sometimes works. Attach a couple of wires to their privates, that’d teach ’em to wear ladies’ frocks. Few hundred volts up the goolies, madam. Yes, indeed. Good mornin’.’

  Shattered, he was, however. Everywhere he’d been, in the past months, people had smiled, made jokes, tossed Kelvyn’s catch-phrases at him. It’ll all end in tears, they’d chorus as he sat in some café with a cup of tea and a Bakewell tart.

  Cindy Mars-Lewis: lovable, irreverent, saucy in his backless cocktail dress. An institution. Who could even remember the Lottery Show without him?

  He crossed the street back to the pub, feeling hunted, glancing at cottage windows for furtively twitching curtains, turning his head the other way when a car came past.

  If this was the attitude in St Mary’s, what would it be like in more populous places? In London, he’d have to start taking taxis door to door to avoid the vengeful public, and thus endure the cabbies’ crunching wit.

  And back home, back home on his lovely piece of the Pembrokeshire coast, it would be a return to: What have I told you about going near that creepy old man?

  Tears sprang into Cindy’s eyes.

  Grayle said, ‘This is so crazy. The British press has no sense of responsibility.’

  Papers all over the table in the editorial room.

  ‘Underhill,’ Marcus produced this infuriatingly knowing smile, ‘it’s practically a British tradition. Back to Tutankhamun, Macbeth. The British love a curse.’

  ‘Three times. Inside a week, Underhill.’

  ‘For Chrissakes, it happened just a coupla times. That’s a curse?’

  ‘Aw, this is bullshit. What do the others say?’

  She pulled the Independent off the pile. There was a page one story about the fire, noting it was the third tragedy to befall a jackpot winner in a few days, but no mention of Kelvyn Kite.

  Walking into the shop this morning, thinking about last night, wondering if Callard had returned, she’d come face to face with Cindy and the kite, in triplicate across the daily paper rack. His face was big on the front of the Sun, the Mirror and the Star but just a single-column shot on page one of the Daily Mail, where the big picture was the burned-out house with one surviving BMW in the drive. The Mail still had the line about the brother claiming Cindy had punctured the family’s joy, it just wasn’t making such a big deal about it. But then the Mail didn’t have the stuff the Sun had about Cindy’s mystical pursuits.

  ‘Where’s Maiden?’ Marcus asked.

  ‘I think he went to look up something in a book,’ Grayle said cautiously.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Maiden behaved particularly strangely last night, I thought.’

  ‘We all did, Marcus.’

  She hadn’t told him about the drawing of the face. Kind of hoping Bobby Maiden would come back wearing a bashful smile because the guy he’d been thinking of looked nothing like this, had a completely different kind of scar. Delayed shock, Bobby. We all jump to crazy conclusions in stressful times.

  ‘You see, the point is’, Marcus said smugly, ‘Lewis the Lottery Man was a tabloid creation. Tinsel thin. Essentially inconsequential. And those who the tabloids create, they reserve the right to destroy. Of course they know all this curse stuff is complete balls – that’s why they’re not actually saying it.’

  ‘I know what they’re not actually saying, Marcus. I used to be a tabloid journalist.’

  ‘American tabloids are rather tame in comparison with ours.’

  ‘Jesus, most American porn is tame compared with your tabloids. What nobody seems to realize is this is a career they’re wrecking. Guy struggles along for years, bit-part acting, summer season, finally gets his break when he’s looking at a cold and lonely old age—’

  ‘That’s show business,’ Marcus said heartlessly. ‘All the same, one can’t help wondering who gave them the crucial background information. Obviously no use asking who particularly has it in for Lewis, when the entire entertainment indu
stry’s riddled through with jealousy and back-stabbing. The answer is: every bastard who isn’t making as much money.’

  ‘Including you.’ Grayle dragged the phone over. ‘I’m gonna call the pub. Get him to come over here right now. Time like this, a guy needs friends. Even friends like you.’

  Marcus snorted.

  ‘’Sides, we need to talk about last night.’

  ‘Nothing to talk about. Lewis blew it. It was beyond him. He hadn’t the faintest idea what he was doing. And when Persephone realized it, she just got out. A little too late, unfortunately.’

  ‘Marcus, that is just so simplistic.’

  Marcus hit the table with the heel of his hand. ‘Well, I’m feeling fucking simplistic.’ He came to his feet, walked to the wall, began to pick at a piece of crumbling plaster near the door. ‘I just hope she’s all right.’

  ‘Jesus, Marcus …’ Grayle stood up, too. ‘What’s it gonna take? What is it gonna take to actually make you feel sore at Callard? The woman stays in your house, eats your food, borrows your friends, turns me into a murder suspect, then drives off without a damn word, leaving a pile of glass, and it’s still like poor Persephone. Jesus Chr—. Oh. Hi, Bobby.’

  He wasn’t wearing a bashful smile. Or any particular expression at all. He carried a paperback. He put it on the table. There was a vaguely familiar face on the front of the book, guy with a raffish smile but cold eyes. Not, Grayle was supremely glad to note, the guy in the drawing that the wind blew away.

  She glanced up at Bobby.

  ‘Page one hundred and ninety,’ he said.

  Grayle picked up the book. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Flicked over the pages. Around the middle of the book was a stack of photo-pages all together. Pictures of newspaper headlines, reproductions of news pictures – guy in handcuffs being led to a police van, bunch of guys in bow ties getting showered with champagne around a dinner table.

  ‘Over the page,’ Bobby said.

  Grayle turned the page to find a police mugshot.

  Underneath, the caption said,

  Believe it or not, this is the only photo I could get of Clarence. He always hated having his picture taken.