Between

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “I had a grandmother called Rita,” said Sophie, putting down her fork. “But I never met her. As it happens, she ran away with a gigolo or something and left my mum as a baby, so it couldn’t have been her who came through.”

  “It was probably Rita Hayworth,” said Wayne, pulling a face.

  “And you said she was wearing a red coat,” said Julian, laughing suddenly. “I mean, what has that got to do with it? Don’t tell me that people still wear coats in Heaven, because I just don’t believe it.”

  “Admittedly we have hardly achieved what we set out to do,” said Romano. “But this is no judgement, since our aims were highly questionable. Perhaps the satisfactory conclusion we hoped for is impossible. We cannot always expect our prayers to be answered.”

  “I suppose you lot are really wondering if I’m just an idiot,” said Wayne. “Or a fraud. I mean, I know I’m not exactly paying my way while I’m here, but being a back-packer doesn’t mean I’m a liar.”

  “I do not for one minute think you were making it up,” said Romano, once again pouring wine. “Had this evening been a trick, I am quite sure you would have tried to be more convincing. A dishonest man would have given us what we wanted, and included a long and loving message from Georgia.”

  “Well, I suppose you’re a bit sceptical for all that,” Wayne said, “and I wouldn’t blame you.” He shook his head, as if clearing the static from both worlds. “But I hear these voices, honestly I do. I get a weird feeling like fingers up the back of my neck, and then I hear things. But sometimes it gets so jumbled. I’ll try harder next time.”

  “Maybe you should try less hard,” suggested Sophie. “Then you’d get fewer people.”

  “Of course, it wasn’t very focused this evening,” admitted Julian, almost defensive, “but Wayne’s hardly a professional after all.”

  “I think,” said Romano, as everyone looked at everyone else, “that I will retire early tonight. Please help yourselves to the wine, and do whatever you please, although I would ask you not to hold another séance in my absence.”

  ”Oh, we wouldn’t, not without you,” said Sophie. “I think I’ll go to bed soon myself.”

  “I fancy a walk under the olives,” said Julian.

  “I might come with you for half an hour or so,” said Wayne. “It’ll put me in the right mood. Besides, I love this land in the dark. All those scuttling things and owls hunting and there’s still plenty of moonlight.”

  The moon was sliced narrow and pearled but its halo was insistent when Romano awoke after midnight. The blankets had fallen from his bed and left him more consciously alone, the shutters part open to the evening’s warmth, now susceptible to the night’s chill. Perfumes of honeysuckle and lemon blossom crowded past the moon’s crescent, the olives delicate grey and polished pewter in the fairy light. It had rained a little, stringing diamond facets along the vines, caught briefly by the witching hour. A silver world in a silver light. Something moved along the old stone wall, a cat chasing mice, disappearing again beneath the shadows.

  Romano padded bare foot down to the kitchen. Passing Julian’s room he heard soft voices, no distinct words, friends discussing tomorrow’s plans. From Sophie’s room there was the snuffle of childlike snoring, then quiet. He filled the coffee pot and set it to boil, poured himself a Sambuca while he waited, and wandered out into the silent privacy of the garden. The grass was still wet, spangled with glitter, bathing his feet, the good rich earth of Tuscan generations, the inheritance of his family. Red earth, fertile earth. It had stopped with him.

  His brother, the worthy inheritor, carried that destiny forwards with a solid, dependable ethic of work, children, grandchildren, hope and confidence. He himself had carried nothing but the weight of vague disappointment and lost love. He was not sure if it mattered, but it was a sense of failure he felt now, so strongly, since Georgia’s death. And he had called to her, but she had not come.

  Sophie woke shivering, the touch of a bad dream still damp at the back of her neck. She pulled her blankets up to her ears and blinked away the memories. The black nothingness hole of the dream had whispered of death, rejection, and abandonment. She had discovered herself alone, palely insufficient and inescapably flawed. The moonlight intruded, its knife stripe from the swinging shutters directed across her eyes. She crawled from the warmth and scurried to the window to shut it out. She sneezed. She had to open the casement to reach the shutters, then discovered the air was milder than she had supposed. She paused, staring for a moment at the tall, slim figure standing beneath the thick stretched branches of the great fig tree on the terrace. She watched him for a moment as he bent to stroke a cat, lifted it, its dark fur against his face, then set it down. It bounded away and he turned back to the house. It seemed as though he shrugged, as if accepting something he had not wished to know, then drank from the glass he carried and pushed open the door, entering the long passage below. Sophie sighed, watching still. For a moment, just a fleeting moment amongst so many shadows, it seemed as though another shadow lived and moved, no cat but a figure passing between worlds, reaching out and then caught back. Disappearing into the starlight.

  The sky throbbed with starlight as the moonglow sank, a million pulsing stars in their milky spilling swirls. In a universe so vast, surely there would be room for the dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Wilmot arranged his skirts and crossed his ankles. There was a quick glimpse of fishnet stockings, black leather garter and a gold anklet.

  Primo leaned back again and the harpy, having removed herself to the less tremulous security of the head board, now leaned down and nibbled at Primo’s ears.

  “That was bloody disconcerting,” said Primo.

  “I’m glad you think so,” smiled Wilmot. “I try to please.”

  “I didn’t say I was pleased,” said Primo.

  “Yes you did,” said Wilmot. “I can read your mind and besides, you enjoy being disconcerted as long as it’s unthreatening. Most people do, unless they live in a mental suburbia.”

  “I don’t think I ever met anyone who lived in suburbia,” said Primo. “Certainly wasn’t the country I came from. You don’t strike me as the sort of person who knew much about suburbia yourself.”

  “Oh, I had my placid moments,” said Wilmot. “The last life was fairly plastic from time to time. The two before that were more interesting.”

  Primo sat forwards, momentarily dislodging the eagle from her grooming. “You remember them all? God, I can barely even remember the last.” He leaned back again and frowned. “Not that I want to.”

  “Which is the problem of course,” said Wilmot. “But I’m not here to discuss my past lives nor the whole philosophy of reincarnation, and logical thought is such a plodding, self-absorbed absurdity. I don’t mind explaining a few things, but it’s inspiration you need, not lectures. And certainly not logic.”

  “Inspire me to what?” demanded Primo with deep suspicion. “You might pop up in an entertaining way every now and again which I admit relieves the boredom, and anyway, I don’t mind some of the lectures. I was thinking about karma before and you came and obligingly ironed out some of the wriggles. That’s okay. But don’t fucking think you can bring your shit-arse fucking prissy poetry stuff down here. I’m not playing anyone else’s games. You want to be my fucking guide, then you do it on my patch, and I ask the fucking questions and you answer if you want. Apart from that, you can take your silly disguises and piss off.” Primo leaned further back, absorbed into the high swinging shadows of the bed curtains. The harpy’s crest reared up. She sensed discord and hissed. “And if you don’t like my fucking language,” said Primo, shoulders hunched sullen and defensive, “you can go find some other bastard to guide into your stupid fucking holy land.” His chin sank into the collar of his tunic and the wrinkles of his neck.

  Wilmot grinned widely. “Strangely enough,” he said, “I never was much perturbed by the vocabulary of the bedroom or the gutter. But I tended to be
a little more inventive with it myself. My conversation invariably stretched to more than the repetitively vulgar. Now. About inspiration.”

  “As long as you don’t start getting fucking religious,” muttered Primo.

  “Religion,” said Wilmot, regarding his very pink finger nails, “is what happens when humanity finally notices the power of the spirit, and then tries to usurp it by excluding pretty much everyone else. While naturally the only way you can start to acknowledge the power of the spirit, is by including everyone else. Even the idiots.”

  “That hardly sounds very saintly,” said Primo.

  “Oh dear, I doubt if anyone ever accused me of aspiring to sainthood,” smiled Wilmot. “Now then. Where were we?” He hitched at something beneath the dress, then sighed deeply which increased the cleavage alarmingly. “Garters, you know,” he added, still fumbling. “They tend to slip down and wriggle around. Most disconcerting, especially when they pull at your knickers.”

  “How can I listen to serious shit when you’re swishing your petticoats?” demanded Primo.

  “You don’t like the dress? I thought it rather pretty myself.” Wilmot stroked his silks back into order. “The joys of transvestism. I always wanted to experience everything.” He smiled prettily with a widening of buoyant red lipstick and inserted a pearlised finger nail into his neckline, twitching it down with obvious satisfaction. “If I’d known such possibilities were the province of the dead, I’d have arranged my own demise earlier,” he said. His voice, unaltered with his gender, remained somewhat incongruent.

  “Suicide? Isn’t that another of your deadly sins?”

  Wilmot pouted witheringly. “Please, how boring. Even you fourth plane rabble can’t believe that nonsense. You think someone who’s so utterly miserable they face the eternal fear of the damned and blink themselves out of the only life they know, arrives over here only to be punished yet again? What a mean spirited ideology. No. But in any case, I didn’t actively promote my death through suicide, at least, not recently. I was accused of shortening my life a couple of times by attempting to enjoy it too much, which always upsets the earthly authorities, and I did once manage to fuck myself to death, which turned out to be no fun at all as it happens. But suicide always seemed too boringly messy. However, I prevaricate. I’m not here to talk about myself. At this rate they’ll have me back in angel school before I get my girdle off.”

  In bed again but not in slumber, Romano stretched, muscles drawing in the warmth from the shape where his body had lain before, the outline still impressed. The coffee had comforted him, the Sambuca more, but he felt somehow old, and somehow worn, an unravelling jumper thrown to the back of the cupboard.

  His parcel of youthful protégés, the reminder both of his usefulness and of his age, slept in untroubled conscience. He stared up at the high flaking ceiling and its first drift of dust webs trailing from plaster rose to cornice. Windows now unshuttered, the light was a pale tracery in mournful echoes.

  He had been black haired once, hard muscled and strong. Now silvered temples were the first steps to doddering decrepitude, straggling grey amongst the black silk, eyes bloodshot, flesh sagging. Georgia had smiled about character lines, Romano had seen only contemptible degeneration. Now none of it mattered.

  Did she miss him, he wondered, even fleetingly, as he missed her. Did the dead miss the living, as the living missed the dead? Was there space, in a spirit’s free soaring heart, for the love left behind?

  Across the room the moonlight pooled, then sprang. Splitting suddenly into a twin shaft, it illuminated the carved wooden cross Georgia had once given him, which now hung above his bed. Romano looked up and smiled. Seemingly apt but too easy, Romano dismissed the temptation to feel her close or to imagine a message in the moonlight. He turned, kicking off the tangle of sheet that now trapped his legs. At the same instant he felt the passing of a cool hand across his forehead, a whisper of encouragement and a reminder of something he could no longer grasp. He smiled and reached out but there was nothing there. Or something. But if it was something, it was a something he did not dare believe.

  Wilmot and Primo stood under the trees. Wilmot had reverted to being an old man, as wizened as before, in white swathed tunic with a purple edging. Still skirts, but a dress more Roman senate than courtesan. “Do you want me to come with you and hold your hand?” said Wilmot.

  Primo grinned. “Hardly. Pigseed would die laughing. Well, he’s already dead of course. Can you die twice?”

  Wilmot said, “Not until you’re born again. But since you’re sadly ashamed to be seen with me, I’ll let you get on with it alone. I’ll see you later.”

  Primo set off directly from the forest clearing by his own front door. He rose higher, flying on the warm thermals, then looked down, seeing Wilmot standing there a moment before disappearing into a rainbow spangle. Primo cleared the tree tops and increased his speed. The harpy joined him at once, with a smoother, swifter alignment of wing to wind, her crest flattened back against her head and her eyes as bright gold as the sun above.

  From a great height he saw his mountain hut and Daisy sitting alone outside, staring out to the white gushing sweep of waterfall. She was chopping carrots. She did not sense his nearness or look up, which was convenient since he wasn’t ready to speak to her again yet. He travelled on into the narrow pass of the mountains. The peaks were snow covered and for a moment before the fogs enclosed all sight and sound, the sunlight hit the pure white and sang in a note of astounding beauty. Primo understood, looking down in delight, why he had adored living there. He had moved on and was glad to have moved on, but the astounding brilliance of life in the mountains was still something he thought he would like to do again. He wondered if the boundaries between the next planes, the fourth and fifth, were also marked by mountains, precipices and high jagged passes, partially lost in mist and the damp haze of the fogs. If so, and if this was a Summerland pattern, then he would arrive there one day perhaps, moving to the first level of the fifth, if Wilmot, old devil that he was, could help him rise.

  If he lived again on the cliffs, Primo thought he would miss the forest. But in the forest, he missed the sharp solitude of the mountains. Indeed, it was the split of his personality, and the secrets of his past, that Wilmot had now sent him to resolve.

  “To get me ready for moving up to the next plane?” Primo had asked. “Or just to complicate what was a simple and contented life before you turned up to spoil it?”

  “Spoiling other people’s lives is what I’m good at,” Wilmot had smiled back. “While you’re flying back to sort things out, you can plot your revenge and work out how to spoil mine. In the meantime, concentrate on yourself.”

  Primo had grinned. “Vindictive old bastard.”

  Wilmot had cackled in a carefully ancient manner. “Vindictive bastard I’ll happily accept, but less of the old. Actually, I keep dying young, it’s a habit I must learn to break. So I thought I’d try old over here. Trouble is, I’ve tried manifesting a toothless gape but the teeth keep growing back. You’ve no idea how difficult sustaining a decent disguise can be.”

  “I can’t say I sympathise,” Primo had said, just before leaving the forest house and setting off in direct regression for the third plane.

  Once through the shudder of the fogs, the scrubby meadows of the third stretched like a pebble-dashed moorland below. Ahead, across the sullen river waters and through the conifer woods, a road, dark as tarmac, marked a highway downwards. Wide enough for solid traffic, the road was straight and purposeful and could lead its followers directly down to the banks of the second, or instead, to the edges of the fourth. It was a division of the third and led, according to personal growth, either up or down. Primo followed down. When the road forked with a sideslip into a hollow and barren valley away from the small township beyond, Primo took the fork. Pigseed’s gang were sitting around the campfire. The gang had swelled.

  Primo slowed, circling downwards. As duty, convention, manners and pu
re common sense advised, Primo called for permission to land.

  Pigseed stood and kicked logs and ashes back into the circle of fire. He looked up and scowled. “Who the fuck asked you back? You left us, remember?”

  “Get on with it,” said Primo, hovering. “Can I come in, or not?”

  “Bugger off,” said Warl, peering up at him.

  “Come in,” said Pigseed, “but leave the fucking parrot behind. I can’t stand that bird.”

  Primo nodded to the harpy, who shrieked and spat, then wheeling, flew off to the branches of a small tree nearby. “Only since she ripped your eyes out a couple of times,” smiled Primo. “But we’re not here for trouble. It’s questions I’m here for.”

  “I’ve got no questions for you,” said Pigseed, squatting back down beside the warmth of the flames, poking at them with a stick.

  Primo landed beside him and stood, looking down. “My questions, shit-face, not yours. I want to know things. You answer properly, and keep to the truth, and I’ll make a deal with you.”

  “What’ll you give me?” said Pigseed, looking up with a sudden sharp glance.

  “We can work something out,” said Primo, “once I’ve seen how much help you can give me. It’ll be a fair deal, you know me. I’ve always been fucking fair.”

  “It’s weapons I want,” said Pigseed.

  Primo shook his head. “I won’t give you that. I’m not making stuff you can wound some other poor bugger with. Besides, I doubt if I could make them anymore.”

  “No weapons, no shit-arse deal,” said Pigseed, losing interest and returning with a sullen frown to the fire.

  Primo sighed. Everything down here was always such a long and boring struggle. Nothing could ever be achieved quickly. “I see you’ve got new members,” he said.