It didn’t occur to Kit until much later to wonder what Mrs. Gaunt might make of the sight of her uncurtained window glowing brightly scarlet in the night sky, mere hours after their little talk about the white slave trade and the horrid way the world was going.
CHAPTER NINE
Long afterwards, while Kit still lay on her back, precariously balanced on the outer rim of the narrow bed, she looked up at the figures hovering over her on the slanting ceiling, and sideways at the bulkier form that loomed over Stephen’s sleeping body. The red light was off now but the street-light was on, and there was light enough to see the shadows in the walls. Without the emphasis lent by the colored light they were very vague indeed, but now that she knew they were there her mind had no difficulty at all improvising more detailed outlines.
She was only half asleep, but she was already beginning to dream.
She dreamed, while she still had lucidity enough to guide the illusion, that the Devil reached out a long furry arm, whose claw-like hand had talons instead of nails. The arm reached right out of the wall, over Stephen’s body, and laid the tips of its talons upon her forehead, very gently, then trailed them down her face towards her lips.
It was as if the talons were inviting a kiss—but Kit turned her face away. It wasn’t a refusal, as such—just a matter of being fashionably coy. The shadow knew that. She and the shadow had almost reached an understanding now. But she was only dreaming. She knew that she was dreaming, although she wasn’t sleeping deeply; she was conscious enough to be making the dream up as she went along. She wasn’t surrendering, even to the anarchy of an authentic dream.
This time, she was prepared to let Stephen sleep in her bed all night, if he wanted to, no matter how uncomfortable it got. She was even prepared to sleep on the settee to make sure that it didn’t get too uncomfortable. She waited until she was absolutely sure that he was sleeping deeply before she detached herself from his residual grip, so that she wouldn’t wake him up. She was in a self-sacrificial mood, and she figured that he had earned it.
She tiptoed to the bathroom and did her best to be quiet while she was in there. She pulled the door to so that the light wouldn’t wake him. She took her time, and paused before coming out to check herself in the mirror. She didn’t look too bad, all things considered. She turned off the light before opening the door again.
The room into which she stepped seemed to be as dark as she had every right to expect, all the more so because the street-light wasn’t directly visible from the bathroom doorway, but something strange had happened to her eyes. Because she was coming out of a brighter light to which her eyes had had plenty of time to adjust she should have been blinded for a moment or two, until her pupils had dilated again to let more light through to her retinas. Instead, she could see quite clearly. It was as if she had suddenly been blessed—or cursed—with the vision of a fox or some other nocturnal wanderer, far more comfortable by night than by day, or with a kind of vision that was even more remarkable, equipped for looking into the darkness that lay beyond mere darkness, which required second sight for its perception.
With the aid of this new sense, Kit could see the mural above the bed with perfect clarity. It was no longer a matter of guessing what the shapes must signify: she could see every line of the artist’s depiction, every field of color.
The image was indeed like something out of a comic book, or something from a fanciful album cover, and it did indeed depict a witches’ sabbat overflown by winged demons—or perhaps, given their diminutive size, demonettes. The dancers and the demonettes were mere silhouettes, but the Devil was carefully detailed: curling horns, bestial face, shaggy back, and an arse like a rutting ape’s, uniformly black but very highly polished.
The portrait was vivid enough to have the kind of eyes that would follow observers around a room, but the Devil’s eyes didn’t seem to be fixed on her. Instead, they seemed to be fixed on the settee where she’d been aiming to sleep in order to let Stephen rest undisturbed: the settee which was now occupied by a young woman with jet-black hair and bright red lipstick, clad from head to toe in a combination of soft black leather and gleaming black PVC.
Kit never doubted for an instant that this was Rose Selavy, in her working clothes. Not Violet Leverhulme, but Rose Selavy: a self-made woman, in the image of a whore; the ghost of a fantasy. Touched by the Devil, Kit had been freed to see what she hadn’t been able to see before. Until now, she’d only caught the merest glimpses of the world beyond the world; now she could see it with TV-quality definition.
“Nice work,” said Rose Selavy.
Kit could hear her voice clearly, but she knew that it wouldn’t have shown up on a tape-recorder, and that if Even Stephen could hear it at all it would only be a dream-voice, not the kind of sound that might wake him up. Kit was nervous about replying, because she wasn’t sure that she could speak in that kind of dream-voice without making the kind of sound that might wake a sleeper, but as soon as she made the effort she realized how easy it was.
“I didn’t paint it,” Kit said, silently. “And I certainly didn’t paint you.”
“It takes two to tango, love,” said Rose Selavy, who had retained a trace of Violet Leverhulme’s accent even though she had suppressed the rest of her existential legacy, “and two to make a folie à deux. I could never have made myself visible like this without the right kind of help. You’re an angel. This means a lot to me.”
“I bet you say that to all your visitors,” Kit countered.
“You aren’t paying,” the phantom whore pointed out.
Kit wished she could be sure of that. “What do you want from me?” she whispered, taken slightly by surprise by the fact that it was possible to whisper in a voice whose loudest scream would have been silent to any objective witness.
“What have you got?” was the mocking reply.
“A life,” Kit retorted, quick as a flash—but she bit her lip when she’d said it, because she didn’t want to tempt fate.
Rose Selavy smiled. “Don’t worry, ducks,” she said. “I don’t want your life. Been there, done that, got the tattoo. I like things just the way they are. There’s always a new twist, isn’t there? One more virginity to lose. The holier you are, the more ways you can get fucked.” She laughed at her pun, although it was as weak as one of Kit’s Dad’s.
“Folie à deux,” Kit said. “That means....”
“I know what it means,” Rose Selavy retorted, sharply, although Kit hadn’t actually been accusing her of anything. “I may be a whore but I’m not fucking stupid.”
Kit couldn’t help hearing herself in that interjection, misinterpretation and all.
“That means you need me,” Kit went on, stubbornly. “If I can stop seeing you, smelling you, hearing your music...you’re gone. Dead and buried.”
“Why would you want to?” Rose asked her, insouciantly. “What else have you got in your life that’s half as interesting as me?”
Kit must have cast an involuntary glance toward the bed, because Rose’s ghostly gaze immediately went the same way. “Oh, come on,” said Rose. “he’s not your type, and you’re only his because you’re holier than he is. But you and I could be relationship material.” As she voiced the last sentence, though, her own gaze was subject to an involuntary twitch that gave her away.
“I thought you already had a relationship,” Kit said. “With a goat’s arse.”
“We could make it a threesome,” Rose Selavy told her. “We could even make it a foursome, if the boy’s up for it—or do I mean up to it? He’s half way hooked already. He wants in. Have to catch him while he’s hot, though. I could help you with that. With your flesh and my experience we could go a long way. We could get a real life.”
“That’s not what I want,” Kit said, although she could have kicked herself the moment the thought was out in the open. She should surely have said that a real life was what she’d already got, and that she didn’t need any help in that department from a comic book
dominatrix—or, for that matter, from the Devil himself. She should surely have said that she was free, and more than capable of sustaining her freedom, of making something of herself that was more than Daddy’s girl or Mummy’s pet.
But all Rose Selavy said was: “Okay. I’m versatile. Let’s work out what you do want. I’m making sacrifices here too, you know. You’re not my ideal demon lover.”
Kit tried to steady herself. “This is just a dream,” she said. “It’s a hallucination. It’s not real. It’s just my imagination playing tricks. It’ll all seem stupid when I wake up.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Rose Selavy, wryly. “Not just about death—about life too. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but...there are advantages to being dead, you know. There’s no cold turkey on the other side, but you can still get high. How high can you get, Kit? Move towards the light, they say in the movies, but take the word of one who know—it ain’t that easy. Go to the Devil, they say, if you’re bad—but that ain’t as easy as it sounds. Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try—not. That’s all we are, at the end of the day—all any of us are. Just our imagination playing tricks. That’s existence—human existence, anyway. Different for bugs, I expect, but I never wanted to come back as a cockroach or a termite queen. Consciousness is just a dream. We think we’re in control, because the dream is so lucid, but we aren’t. You’d think that afterlife would be easier, without all that lumpen flesh, bone and cellulite to drag around, but it’s not. I mean, it’s nice of you to make this little home-from-home for me, but it’s not exactly progress, is it? Most haunting, from the ghostly point of view, is just prison without the dealers—I think you and I might do better than that, don’t you? I think we could be really special, if we put our minds to it. This is the twenty-first century, after all. What we’ve had so far was nice—don’t get me wrong—but I really do think we ought to work on our relationship to see what more we can get out of it. Believe me, love, the sky’s no limit. I’m open to all suggestions. I’ll try anything once.”
“Without me,” Kit whispered, speaking aloud now, albeit in a reverently hushed tone, “you’d be nothing but a shadow in the dark, a whisper in the silence, a wisp in the fog. All I have to do....”
“Too true, ducks,” the phantom admitted, cheerfully. “So it would be really nice if you could take your responsibilities a little more seriously. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. The lad’s just a punter, but he could be useful. Use him. If God hadn’t meant us to play dirty he’d never have given us so much equipment. It’s all imagination, love: day, night, awake, dreaming, stoned, unstoned, fucked anywhichway, the bestest bitter there ever was. Reality’s a myth, even when it’s a hit. Make up your mind, darling, or your mind will make you up. Ask yourself: what do you really want? And don’t blink.”
It was too late. Kit had blinked—and Rose Selavy was gone, vanished into thin air. Except that the air wasn’t thin at all. It was as thick as treacle and just as hard to breathe. It was full of odors: scent; smoke; fried onions; shit.
Kit breathed anyway.
The Devil was gone too, but he had never been more than a cartoon even at his most distinct. Kissing the black-arsed goat that was hiding in her primrose yellow wall would be no better and no worse than kissing a fan-club poster of some third-rate pop star, or some shoddy item of Buffy the Vampire Slayer merchandise.
“Barking mad,” Kit muttered, audibly. “Absolutely fucking barking mad. No two ways about it.”
Even Stephen shifted in his sleep, slyly extending the temporary empire of his personal space across the whole bed, but he didn’t wake up. In the morning, Kit resolved, she’d ask him to re-attach the curtain-rail. She could do it herself just as well, but it would make him feel that he had something to contribute to their relationship, if they were indeed relationship material. And it would give them a means of cutting out the intrusive glare of the street-light.
Having made that resolution, she tucked herself up on the settee and went back to sleep.
CHAPTER TEN
By the time Stephen condescended to sit up in bed and admit to being awake Kit was washed, dressed and ready to go to work. Stephen must have figured out that she’d slept on the settee, even though he’d supposedly slept right through her removal, because he took the trouble to apologize, but Kit didn’t have time for any elaborate process of forgiveness.
“We’re wasting the summer spending our nights in smoky pubs,” she told him, sternly, before she rushed off. “We need some fresh air. I’ll meet you on Caversham Bridge at half past six and we’ll take a walk along the riverbank. You can explain why you don’t believe in ghosts, if you like.”
“I never said...,” he began, but she shut him up with a gesture.
“Make sure the place is locked up tight when you go,” she said. “If you leave it another twenty minutes you won’t run into anyone else who’s on earlies, and the buggers on lates will all be fast asleep.”
If he’d left it an hour he could have got on her bus back to Green Road, but neither of them knew that, and by the time she pulled the number 17 in to the stop by the chippy on the way back from the SavaCentre he was long gone. It was perhaps as well, because she wouldn’t have wanted him hanging about trying to talk to her while she was collecting fares and painstakingly negotiating her way through the hundred-minute gridlock jam that was euphemistically known as “rush hour”.
Once rush hour was over and the working classes had been replaced by shoppers and pensioners taking advantage of their off-peak free passes the going became a little easier, and the driving a little more relaxed. Usually, it wasn’t until then that Kit settled into a rhythm and became absorbed into quotidian normality, but today the world seemed more solid than usual, and time more disciplined. Her existence seemed to have taken on a density and regularity that the impatience and general fractiousness of rush hour was impotent to disturb. The unillusoriness of the bus and the road, which she would normally have taken for granted, seemed unprecedentedly assertive—boastful, even—but not as reassuring as she could have hoped.
Kit knew that the world’s new-found determination to remain determinate should have been reassuring to a person who’s been up half the night chatting to a ghost, and she wasn’t at all sure what to read into the fact that it wasn’t having that effect on her. Indeed, as they day wore on she was taken by the notion that a kind of competition had now been joined, in which mundane reality and whatever lay beyond it were flexing their muscles, testing their strength and making ready to wrestle for possession of her soul—two falls or a knockout to define victory.
She relaxed into her work as far as she could, but she couldn’t put herself on autopilot the way she usually did; she was more conscious of being conscious than was entirely comfortable. She couldn’t help wondering whether she’d already sealed some kind of deal with unholy Rose, which involved the use of her own holes, but she figured that she was perfectly safe while she was at the wheel of a number 17 no matter how many dirty old men got on or what kind of imbecilic suggestions they might make.
She was looking forward to seeing Even Stephen again. She figured that he could help her get through this, even if he didn’t last the week as a substitute boyfriend. He could be her anchorage, her voice of sanity, her comic relief. He could counteract the subtle seductions of Rose Selavy with temptations of a coarser sort, perhaps all the more valuable for their awkwardness. If she could only concentrate her mind on his flesh and his common sense, Rose might not get another look in. Time was on her side—not to mention the solidity of the world, the relentless normality of driving a bus, and the fact that she was two hundred miles away from her mother.
But the doubts never went away. Maybe time favored the dead over the living. Maybe solidity was just one more illusion. Maybe there was nothing normal about a woman driving a bus. Maybe you could take the child out of the mother but couldn’t take the mother out of the child.
Worst of all, maybe Stephe
n was part of it now, and no relief at all. He was certainly feeding the fantasies as well raising a bulwark of sanity against them, but that was surely okay, because he had to be part of it if he were actually to help her to some sort of conclusion, because he couldn’t do that from outside. This was no tug-o’-war between him and Rose Selavy, with Kit caught in the middle like a red ribbon tied to the rope. It wasn’t that kind of contest at all. Stephen had to get into the fantasy in order to change it, because she had to engage with her demons in order to have any hope of defeating them, and he had the know-how to help her do that. He was only a student, but he’d sat his final exams, so he was a fully-fledged intellectual, exactly like the person she had always dreamed of being without ever having the nerve to try to make her dream come true.
Kit tried to imagine what Stephen’s Mum and Dad would be like. An accountant and a primary-school teacher, probably, living in a detached house in somewhere quintessentially nice like Tunbridge Wells or St Albans, with two garages to house their two cars, and hundreds of books all over the house. They probably hadn’t even touched his room, except to dust, in all the time he’d been away. The models he’d made would still be on the bedside table, the pictures that had turned him on to art history still on the walls. A cornfield by Van Gogh, something by Dali with soft clocks or torsos fitted with drawers, a discreet Goya nude....
Her confidence in Stephen increased a little more with every detail. Even if all he wanted was an easy lay, he was too polite to throw her over like so much dirt. He was reliable, and he knew what she was on about. That was why she had commissioned him to tell her why he didn’t believe in ghosts; she knew that feeding breadcrumbs to the swans on the Thames and talking about the best places to shop wasn’t going to take her mind off anything or provide any kind of counterweight to the insidious intrusions of second-hand Rose. She needed to talk about ghosts, but in the right way—the way that gave her a chance of standing up to the whore who was trying to upset her and use her and fuck with her head.
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story Page 8