You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  It was nine o’ clock by then, a Tuesday night in high summer. Something was different about the air: it was filling with humidity. I could see clouds up over the moor outside the town. I cooked. I watched a TV programme about a footballer accepting a challenge to be an interior decorator. After that the news came on, the usual stuff, children without anything to eat enlisted as soldiers in some fucking African war; kids at home suffering all kinds of abuse. It was dark by then. Outside it had just begun to rain, big slow drops then smaller and faster. I fell asleep in front of the TV and woke up at two o’ clock in the morning to find it still on. I went over to satellite to get the adult channels, but after five minutes I couldn’t be bothered. I couldn’t imagine having sex any more. The water was more interesting, sluicing down the windows, rushing down the gutters in front. I got up and switched the light on. The house had been a rental when I bought it, a one-up one-down furnished in the 70s with fitted carpets in swirling patterns of purple and green. The bathroom suite and kitchen cupboards were purple too. Nothing got done because I couldn’t get the energy up after work. There was grease and dust on top of the cupboards that had been there twenty years.

  Looking round, I wished I’d done more. Then I thought if I just went to bed maybe I’d go to sleep again. But I lay awake listening to the rain and thinking about the sword in Ed Brinklow’s dream. I thought about Brinklow himself, and the sense of him I had as feral, full of caution and daring as he went about getting their heads off. I thought about him taking the dentist’s bet, bracing himself against the vibration in his jaw, trying to bring on anaesthesia by staring up and away from the dentist’s blank intent face into the spray flying up like fireworks through the tight beam of the overhead lamp.

  Why did I like his smile so much? He didn’t smile often but when he did it was hard not to respond. All I could think was that it reminded me of my father’s smile. It had the same quality of being too young for his age.

  ‘I’m too old for mine,’ I thought.

  I was awake most of the night.

  It was still wet the next day, Wednesday, which made it hard to wake up. The light was poor. The air had that grey liquid look it gets in West Yorkshire, where the chemists are still filling prescriptions for seasonal affective disorder in July. Brinklow arrived ten minutes late. I was already outside the house waiting for him.

  ‘You’re keen,’ he said.

  ‘Good time at the dentist’s?’

  That got a grin off him.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘But I had a right epic wi’ the van this morning. Smoke coming from under the dash, all sorts. I can see something sparking back there but I just can’t get at it with my fingers.’

  By the time we got to the job the sun had come out a bit. A light breeze was helping to dry things out, moving the leaves of the birch and oak above Church Bank Lane. Church Brook, swollen by the night’s run-off, rushed along in its narrow defile. The porous old gritstone they’d built the church from had sucked up the rain; it looked blackened and fucked, like a ruin in the valley. Brinklow wouldn’t have the radio on, he didn’t feel like it. That made us slow. We had trouble getting the GEX ACCESS sign down. CPTs and other tools, locked into the vestry at night, had to be checked into their plastic bins and stacked in the back of the van. Brinklow did this on his own, then wandered about the site looking for things he thought he might have missed. He seemed sad the job was finished. ‘People should look after places like this,’ he said. If he had his way, he’d always do this kind of work, restoration work. Looking out at the graveyard I wasn’t so sure. Eventually we were finished.

  ‘How’s that dream of yours?’ I said.

  ‘Eh? Oh, that.’ He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Like clockwork these days,’ he said. ‘Night after night, getting their heads off.’

  ‘I want to be in it,’ I said.

  He grinned.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘I want to be in the dream. I want to share it.’

  ‘Come on Mike,’ he said. ‘What’s the joke?’

  ‘I mean it, Ed.’

  He began to look embarrassed.

  I said: ‘There’s no joke here.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Come on Mike,’ he repeated. ‘It’s a dream.’

  I kept looking into his eyes, but he shook his head and walked off. ‘You’re fucking mad,’ he said.

  Two hours later I watched him go round the graveyard. I was on the tower by then, hidden down behind the parapet. Brinklow was calling, ‘Mike? Mike?’ The humidity in the air made his voice sound unpredictable, close by one minute, far away the next. ‘This is fucking stupid,’ he said. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m giving you another five minutes, then I’m going.’ He waited slightly less than that. ‘Fuck off then, you stupid fucker,’ he shouted. I watched him drive the van away, then I went back down into the church. I pulled one of the Sunday school drawings off the pinboard and wrote on the back of it:

  ‘Places like this reek of death.’

  I signed that as if it was the visitor’s book and put it on one of the tables next to the careful fan of leaflets. As an afterthought I added, ‘Anyone can see that.’ Then I went out between the graves with the bucket of gobbo I’d mixed that morning and started smearing it over them at random with a pointing trowel.

  Elf Land: The Lost Palaces

  Eldranol the Elf Lord is wheeled to bed every night on a reinforced composite and titanium gurney. Two or three attendants lift the thick laps of flesh and lovingly clean out the sores down in the creamy, lardy folds where his genitals still nestle. He has lost some of his right foot to diabetes. The Queen left him a hundred years ago, with her dwarf, for the North. But none of this will ever spoil his dream of finishing an ultra-marathon. At night in a secondary world of his secondary world the Elf Lord runs, barefoot and effortless, across the Great Erg Desert (see map), wearing only the traditional leather kirtle, while his favorite daughter keeps watch over his sleeping body with its faint, calming smells of ketones and antifungal cream. She’s a feisty urban vampire princess but her heart is so in the right place. She can’t help but wonder how things will go with them when the Horde arrives at the Gate next Wednesday. Tomorrow, in a final attempt to reach out to his people, the Elf Lord will feature kingdomwide in the Don’t Do This To Yourself segment of Supersize vs Superskinny; while for the Princess it’s a Kickass Battle Looks last chance on QVC.

  Psychoarcheology

  I keep getting flashbacks to provincial streets. You’re driving. We’re touring the big civil engineering projects, looking for dead Royals. We found a minor Plantagenet earlier today, crouched in bad cement beneath a Midlands motorway pier for all the world as if he’d been garotted on the lavatory. Yesterday it was a previously unknown illegitimate Stuart, two meters under the floor of an HS2 station with her two children, some scraps of religious writing and an older man (he’s related, maybe a brother or cousin, molecular biology will sort it out). She’s no longer the fairest of them all.

  Now that science tells us they’re a good place to look, we’re finding kings and queens under every parking structure in the UK, just lining up to present their DNA for inspection. They choked on items of food, bled out on a moor during some predictable turf war, suffered a beheading they might have avoided if they’d learned how to work a room and not piss off the archbishop. There’s no more sense to the way we find them than in a feature length re-run of Waking the Dead or Silent Witness: their circumstances seem no less incoherent, post-historical; their post-death narratives no less fatuous. Their hands are clenched and presented in the boxer position, as if to hang on to the good things they grabbed in life.

  ‘We’re coming up on the airport now,’ you say. ‘The data indicates Hapsburgs. Lots of them.’

  I say: ‘I think we should get takeaway first.’

  DNA, the last word in personal identification. Along with every one of these corpses there’s a buried irony. It’s to do with
privilege transmitted in the blood. DNA, after all, was the reason for their hugger-mugger in the first place – the plot in the provinces, the rat in the arras, the neck bent before the axe, the smothering of little princes, the slaughter of serfs in an open field somewhere near Bosworth, the unrelenting sexual intercourse – the dogged monotony of the Royal way of life. Now here they are, their hack-marks intact, identified – betrayed, some might say – by the very chemistry that drove them through their crap lives. DNA is the meat of it.

  So we eat in the car on the South Perimeter Road, staring through the chain link fence, and you say:

  ‘What will the heritage industry do when it runs out of kings?’

  The airport is like a vast construction site. In one corner, heavy duty ground-penetrating radar is still grinding to and fro; if there’s a pea left under this mattress, the radar will find it. Elsewhere the field-walking and heritage solutions teams have been and gone; trench trials are over; ‘strip, map and record’ is under way. Ranks of powerful backhoes, on standby for a month, manouevre in and out of the shadows. The Dreamliners are mothballed, the runways are up. The overburden is off. They’re ripping down to the first archeological horizon. The schedule’s tight: time is money in more ways than one. Generator exhaust drifts through the cones of light from a thousand portable halide lamps, under which celebrity academics gang-bang the ‘past’ in front of the cameras in hi-viz wear and sterile paper suits. There’s a palpable sense of excitement. Can they hear us, the queens and kings, through the impacted earth? Do they know we’re on our way down?

  For them the truth will soon be out. They come to light pre-butchered, grinning shyly, stripped to the bones and teeth for on-site strontium isotope analysis. There’s no option but honesty for them in this respect; after the imbroglio of history, chemistry must seem simple, even refreshing. But things are more complex for us, especially when we work for the Heritage Police. There’s always a rights issue. Where does the latest Tudor belong? Does he belong where he was found? Or whence he came? Who gets the brown sign? One wrong decision and York won’t talk to Leicester, the knives are out again after hundreds of years of peace. Contracts torn up, the industry at war with itself, we all know where that can lead: diminished footfall in the visitor centres. No one wants to see that. In the end, of course, presentation is nine tenths of the law: dig for the evidence, develop the interactive exhibit, crowdsource the story the public wants to hear.

  ‘It’s the contemporary equivalent of the religious relics industry,’ you say, winding down the window and chucking the remains of your burger into the shadows of the layby, ‘only this time the relics are real.’

  ‘Very postmodern,’ I say.

  It’s as if our obsession with dead Royals has in itself made them available in such numbers. Why have we suddenly started digging them up like this? Out of nervousness? Out of the need for a psychic anchor? Out of economic desperation, so that, having run out of each other’s washing to take in, we now take in one another’s ancestors? Why not let them lie? It’s certainly not possible to learn from them. All they mean to us is what we want them to mean. To claim we can learn from them because they had, at base, the same emotions as us, the same satisfactions, the same fears, the same ‘needs’, is in itself a projection. They aren’t the past in any material sense: brought to light, they’re what they are now, not what they were then. At best they’re a geological resource, not perhaps as valuable as coal, but more easily available and each containing enough energy to power a couple of careers, a biography, an MA course, a BBC4 series.

  ‘All this is so hackneyed and played out.’

  I’ve heard you say as much before, so I shrug and start the engine. ‘Let’s get this over with,’ I say.

  It can’t be long before the DNA of Richard III’s horse is detected in processed food in the Republic of Ireland. That’ll open up new fields of research.

  Royal Estate

  The palace turned out to be a stuffy, disappointing warren that just reeked of dogs. The Queen showed us around lots of small low-ceilinged rooms with fitted carpets, not what we were looking for at all. No real Elfland values or internal architecture left, except for that rather gorgeous river-frontage. She kept saying that she and her husband had been going to make this or that improvement, but everything was interrupted when, ‘They came back’. At one point she said, ‘We were going to sell up, go to the Deep West, but they came back. They came back, you see, and what can you do?’ She never said who or what they were. There was an old labrador sleeping outside the back door. They also had a really quite smelly chihuaha, always gazing up at you, and when you petted it, ‘Oh she’ll go to anyone, that one. When you’re shopping she’ll go straight in your bag.’ Meanwhile, honestly, Eldranol just vegetated there in the front room, watching cable TV on satellite and in the end we decided no matter how close it was to the Evening Harbours it just wasn’t for us.

  Yummie

  In his late fifties Short experienced some kind of cardiac problem, a brief but painful event which landed him in an Accident and Emergency unit in East London. From A&E he was processed to Acute Assessment, where they took his blood pressure at two-hourly intervals but otherwise didn’t seem to know what to do with him. Everyone was very kind.

  His second night on the ward, he stood in the corridor where it was cooler and looked out over a strip of grass. An iron staircase was off to one side. He could see bollards; what he imagined was a car park; behind that a few trees quite dense and dark against the sky. He rested his forehead against the cold glass of the fire door. Propane tanks, portabuilding offices, everything lighted grey and blue. He had a short clear glimpse of himself opening the door and walking out. It wouldn’t have required a decision; to some degree, in fact, he felt it had already happened. That glimpse had lobed itself off immediately, becoming its own world. He could see himself moving away between the trees, tentatively at first but with increasing confidence.

  Late the next evening, a bed came free in Coronary Care, a wheelchair ride away across the architectural and procedural grain of the hospital, from clean and new to grimy and old, past stacks of mysterious materials, parks of apparently abandoned medical electronics and radiology machines, and into a narrow slot deep in the original building. 3am, he found himself awake again. Someone further along the slot was moaning. Someone else had a cough, long and retching, full of sad self-disgust.

  ‘Make no mistake about this,’ the consultant advised him next morning: ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’

  Short, who had never believed anything else, waited to hear more; but that seemed to be it. The procedure he now underwent was an experience very much like an amusement ride. He was placed carefully on a narrow table. The nurse gave him an injection of diazepam she described as ‘the equivalent of three good gin-and-tonics’, while someone else demonstrated the bank of cameras that would image his heart. The table stretched away in front of him, elongated, bluish. The cameras then groaned and slid about, pressing down into his space. Soon, off to one side, someone was putting in a lot of effort to push something like an old-fashioned drain-rod up the femoral artery and deep into his body. It was a struggle. He had the distant sense of being smashed and pummelled about. He couldn’t feel anything, but sometimes their voices made him nervous. ‘He’ll have a bit of a bruise,’ someone warned; someone else said they would put some pressure on that. Every so often they asked him if he felt ok. ‘I don’t know what I feel,’ Short answered. In fact he felt violated but excited. He felt as if he was whizzing along some blue-lit track, he could come off the rails at any time but thanks to the diazepam he wouldn’t mind.

  ‘I’m quite enjoying it,’ he said.

  They laughed at that, but when he heard himself say he thought there might be a sensation in his heart – not a pain precisely, but some sort of feeling he couldn’t quite describe – there was a silence then the thud of some more powerful drug hitting his system like a car running over a cattle grid.

 
Back on the ward, he felt embarrassingly optimistic, though a list of possible changes to his life (scribbled under the heading ‘Opportunities’ in the blank space next to the Guardian crossword puzzle) proved vague; turning out when he consulted it later to be couched in the self-improvement languages of the 1980s. How, for instance, could Short be ‘kinder’ to himself? What might that actually mean? Deep in the night, Coronary Care became a site of hallucination, like the woods in a fairytale: he was woken by a child’s cough, sometimes seeming to issue from a ward directly beneath this one, sometimes from the wall of monitors and tubes behind his bed. It was a careful, precise little sound, urgent yet determined to attract no attention. Towards dawn a tall languid-looking man of his father’s generation stood in the corridor by the fire door, calling, ‘Yummie? Yummie?’ in tones pitched between puzzlement and command. His head was almost entirely round, his expression in some way surprised. He looked Short up and down, made eye contact and said, ‘Let’s not be mistaken! You will have a hell of a bruise!’

  An empty trolley clattered past unseen behind them.

  ‘Are you even here,’ Short whispered. ‘Because Yummie is not a name.’

  ‘Those chickens,’ the man said, ‘waiting outside for you now? They are your chickens. You deny them, but I see they follow you with great persistence.’

  Though no chickens were visible, he was right: if Acute Assessment had been like the lobby of a cheap but comfortable hotel – air too hot, coffee bearable, quiet conversations at reception – Coronary Care was where events played out the way Short had been taught to fear. It wasn’t the bottom of things by any means, but it was the beginning of the bottom of things. Those chickens, having come home to roost, would eye him now and until the end, heads on one side, mad little combs flopping.