“There’s a Michael,” Stephen said—but Kit didn’t spare the gravestone a second glance once she’d noted that the man in question had lived to the ripe old age of sixty-seven.
“He died young,” she said.
“How young?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Younger than me. Probably younger than you.”
“And yet he’s supposed to be some kind of big shot in the ghost world. How come?”
“He’s been dead a lot longer than he’s been alive.”
“There’s no tradition of this place being haunted. If there was a local ghost tour the organizers wouldn’t bother to include it—unless they were desperate enough to make something up.”
“You don’t have to be desperate to make things up,” Kit told him. “This was just a convenient place to meet. Like Rose, he probably has somewhere that was once his own to hang out in. But he’s been around, to the extent that ghosts can get around. He knows others. He takes an interest. Maybe that’s all it requires, in his world, to make you a community leader. This is more like it.”
She had to kneel down and part the branches of a bush in order to read the whole inscription on the broken stone, but it was still legible, even after a hundred and fifty years. The dates on the stone were 1834-51. The name wasn’t Michael, though; it was John. John Joseph Kingsley, beloved son of Matthew and Charlotte.
“You’re making the rules up as you go along,” Stephen told her. There was still a note of impatience in his voice, perhaps a warning that if she didn’t pull herself together he might not bother to get back to her afterwards the next time he had something on.
“Am I?” she countered. “No one’s stopping you from making a contribution. What do you think the dead are about? Why do you think they’re haunting us.”
“I already told you,” he reminded her. “Because they didn’t exist, our distant ancestors had to invent them. And because history moved on, our nearer ancestors had to reinvent them. As do we—provided that we includes the Psychical Research Society and the guys at Fortean Times and your friendly neighborhood spiritualist.”
“But not you? Me, but not you? We’re not we—just two strangers who met on a bus to nowhere.”
“Okay,” he conceded, with only the slightest hint of a weary sigh. “We can all do our bit. We can all see, if only we’re prepared to look. Forty per cent of adult Americans believe that there are angels active on the Earth, working petty miracles day by day. That’s maybe fifteen per cent more than the number who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens, and maybe five per cent less than the number who are clinically obese. Why quibble? If the people who’ve died on the operating table and come back in response to electric shocks can be believed, the white light is there, ready and waiting—but some of the dead turn away. Maybe it’s because they’re in denial about being dead. Maybe it’s because they still have moral debts to pay off before the celestial loan sharks will let them go. Maybe it’s because they’re photophobic. Maybe it’s because they just can’t find their way. What do you think, Kitten?”
“It’s Kit, Steve,” she said, frostily. The only person who’d ever called her Kitten was Dad, and never, so far as she could remember, when he was sober. “I think the white light’s just dazzle, hiding a reality that mortal eyes have trouble understanding. I think Rose Selavy isn’t just queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine.” Except, she didn’t add, that Rose Selavy wasn’t really queer at all, in spite of a few superficial symptoms, any more than Kit was.
“Very convenient,” Stephen observed.
“Actually,” Kit said, “it’s not. If the white light is just a catchall for our failure to get a grip on the idea of the afterlife, it’s extremely inconvenient. We’d be better off by far if we had the imagination to see through it. You, of all people....”
“Being passing familiar with the mysterious works of Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch and Fernand Khnopff—not to mention Andy Warhol, L. S. Lowry, M. C. Escher and Richard Dadd—should be able to comprehend all that the mind can see and all that the eye can interpret. Yes, you’re right...I, of all people, shouldn’t be content to be dazzled by light. I should be prepared to try to imagine what the world of souls actually looks like, if it looks like anything at all. And if ghosts really can be seen, if only by courtesy of illusion and delusion, then there’s a sense in which their world must be seeable too. Gloomy Underworld or Elysian Fields, Paradise or Inferno, it must have a visual dimension. Which, of course, we need to reinvent to fit the needs, desires and whims of the twenty-first century psyche. It won’t be the same, though, with all the nostalgia stripped out. It’ll be like the Jack-in-the-Box, refurbished for refurbishment’s sake. It’s not a gallery I’m particularly keen to visit, even if I don’t have to pay the outward fare and can get a free ride back.”
“It’s not compulsory,” she observed. “Not until you die, at any rate.”
“I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” he pointed out.
“Not if I’m driving. I got rear-ended once, back in Sheffield, but I’ve never hit anything in front.”
“You don’t really get the chance in this town,” he said. “The traffic moves way too slowly.”
“When I get back on the long-distance,” she told him, “I’ll be able to use the motorway.”
He let her have the last word in that particular exchange. “Well,” he said, pointing at John Joseph Kingsley’s grave. “Is it him you’re looking for, or isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” Kit admitted. “I think you might be right about this being a waste of time. I don’t think Michael was anyone famous while he was alive, or anyone who was loved by the kind of people who had memorials carved in stone. I think that’s part of the problem. Do you still want to show me the campus? It’ll be light for a good hour yet.”
“Fine,” he said, letting his relief show. “It’ll take us at least twenty minutes to walk up there, though. Mind you, the rabbits come out in force at dusk and dawn. Which is nice, if you like rabbits.”
“You think I’m out of my mind, don’t you?” she said, as he helped her over the cemetery wall.
“I thought you had an incredibly original chat-up line,” he told her. “Worked like a charm. I hadn’t quite realized how far the line would run—but if I had, I’d have followed it anyway. I’d be happy to take it further, if I had some notion of where it’s eventually going to wind up. What worries me is that it might go on forever.”
“It might,” she admitted.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d just about worked that out. Still....”
“See how it goes,” she put in for him.
“See how it goes,” he agreed.
“After all,” she pointed out, “you’ve probably never been pulled before, even if you’ve exercised a fair amount of traction on your own behalf. Might as well enjoy it while you can. You’ll always have the tale to tell. I met this bird once who was absolutely barking mad. She was a bus driver....”
It was his turn to finish for her. “But she wasn’t fucking stupid.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
By the time they’d walked around the campus lake it was getting dark again. Stephen offered to show Kit his room in the Hall of Residence, but Kit declined the offer. She didn’t want to be shown off to the neighbors, and she needed to be in her own place—or Rose’s place—if she were to make further headway in figuring out what was what in the world beyond. They walked back down to the Wokingham Road and caught a 17, but they got off a stop early so that they could pick up KFC for a change.
“Don’t you think it’s sad that people of our generation have almost given up cooking in favor of takeaways and microwavable ready meals?” Stephen asked, when they made a second stop to pick up some cans.
“No,” was Kit’s answer to that. She had to admit to herself that there was something slightly sad about a town centre jam-packed with young people who crawled out of work into the pubs and wouldn’t stagger
out again until closing time because they regarded their rooms or flats merely as places to sleep, but it was part and parcel of the march of civilization and there was no point in being nostalgic for the time when everybody spent their lives moving back and forth between one workplace and another because they didn’t make enough money to save themselves from housework. The people she felt sorry for weren’t the young people working for accountants and computer companies who never had to wash up because they never cooked and didn’t own washing machines because they put everything into the laundry and the dry-cleaners once a week and didn’t need vacuum cleaners because they got someone in to do a once-around one morning a week, but the people who had saddled themselves with prison bars in the shape of children and who therefore had to go home and stay there day in and day out to tend to all the manifold needs of their miniature slave-drivers, until the strain became too much and they turned to drink in order to make their clinical depression slightly less unbearable. She herself, of course, didn’t have quite as many luxuries as the power-dressing yuppies who worked for the big companies, but she could still use the launderette and was perfectly content to hope that if she didn’t bother the dust in her room it wouldn’t bother her.
“You really ought to get a video,” Stephen said, as he tried to find something interesting on broadcast TV. “The secret is probably to get one that’s already been stolen at least once and looks conspicuously second-hand, so that any self-respecting thief would turn up his nose at it.”
“For someone who disapproves of the decline of home cooking you seem pretty keen on entertainment technology,” she observed. “The whole point of television is that it’s something people can watch together, and the whole point of all the programs being total crap is to encourage the watchers to talk to one another while they’re doing it. It’s the only thing that holds modern marriages together. If TV ever became absorbing, all conversation would cease.”
“Would that be such a tragedy?” he asked. “Isn’t it possible that as the quantity of conversation declined the quality might improve?”
“No,” she said, surprised that a smartarse like him hadn’t worked that out. “Anyway, it’s not quality that matters. The point of conversation is to make and maintain connections, to allow people to agree on all the things they agree on, so that they can feel better about thinking the things they think, and to allow them to argue about things that don’t matter at all, so that they can tell themselves that the things that do matter aren’t the kinds of things that need to be justified against criticism.”
“Is that what we’re doing?” he wanted to know.
“No,” she said. “We’re eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and washing it down with John Smith’s—or, in your case, gnat’s piss.”
“Well,” he said, as if he were making some kind of concession, “I suppose it’s better than being haunted.”
“It’s not a matter of either/or,” she said. “Once you start being haunted, it’s not that easy to stop. I suppose it’s not much different seen from the other side. Once you start haunting someone...I guess there’s a kind of co-dependence involved.”
“I hate that kind of self-help-speak,” Stephen said. “What the hell is co-dependence but a fancy way of saying that when two people find themselves in a relationship of some kind they both affect one another? Big deal.”
“It means more than that,” Kit assured him, thinking about Mum and Dad, or Dad and her, or even her and Mum. “It means that some things are more difficult to get out of than they are to get into, even when all that anybody wants is out. It means that the most obvious route out of helplessness leads from the frying pan to the fire.”
He, of course, thought that she was talking about Rose Selavy, or about him, or maybe both. “You didn’t need the ghost this time last week,” he told her, firmly, “and you certainly don’t need a ghost who’s so needy that she’s clinging to you like a leech. Far better to stick to real people, whether they’re fans of the Electric Hellfire Club or not. Far better, too, to stick like a post-it note rather than superglue, if you can manage that kind of detachment.” He seemed quite pleased with the last remark, although he might have been less pleased if he’d looked behind the superficial wit to the actual meaning of what he’d said.
“She’s not a leech,” Kit said, soberly. “Maybe haunting is mostly a matter of attention-seeking, like faking suicide, but sometimes a cry for help really is a cry for help, even—maybe especially—if it comes from someone who could never bring herself to cry for help.”
“We’re talking about a whore addicted to heroin and Satanist lifestyle fantasies.”
“Are we? If we are, it’s not just her, is it? If you think about it, kissing the goat is the ultimate cry for help. You can have my soul, Satan, if you’ll just give me what I want...or maybe if you can just find me something to want that doesn’t go sour the moment I have it.”
“She’s the evil genius,” Stephen countered. “The queen of sin.”
“She’s trapped,” Kit riposted. “She’s a prisoner, more firmly anchored down than a mother with a thankless child or a husband with a chronically miserable wife. She had the junk and the job to oppress her while she was alive and now...she’s still lost, with even less equipment for finding her way home than she had when she still had a body.”
“She doesn’t seem to be entirely devoid of friends,” Stephen pointed out, ambiguously.
“Michael’s in the same boat,” Kit observed. “He’s no more capable of rowing it ashore than she is.”
“So they want to catch a bus,” Stephen concluded. “But you won’t be much use, will you, if you don’t know what route it’s supposed to take, or which terminus it’s supposed to end up at? Not Hull or Halifax, that’s for sure.”
“Nor Hell,” Kit added, quietly. She had to be sure of that, at least. Wherever the ghosts needed to go, it wasn’t Hell. Maybe it was the white light, or the Elysian Fields, or Valhalla, or a quaint little cottage with pretty roses growing on a trellis round the door, or something equally corny, but it wasn’t Hell.
“You do understand that I can’t come with you, don’t you?” Stephen said, after a pause. He had finished his meal and had promptly put all the packaging back in the carrier bag, like the tidy-minded ever-so-good-boy that he was. “I can play along with the fantasy to a certain extent, but I can’t get aboard a bus with you so that you can drive the lost ghosts of Reading to their final resting-place. I can be with you while the haunting’s here, and maybe while it spills over a little into the occasional local graveyard, but I’m not going to get on a bus with it and be taken for a ride. My soul might be flexible, but it’s not for sale—not to that extent.”
“I don’t think you really know what you might be capable of, if the need arises,” Kit told him. “Nobody does. Nobody really knows how far they’d go, if they were pushed or pulled hard enough. Nobody can know, until the evil day arrives. Don’t write yourself off, Stephen. The music’s been haunting you longer than it’s been haunting me, even though you didn’t know that you were being haunted. You’ve seen Rose, even if you’ve forgotten having seen her because your mind wouldn’t accept that it was anything but a dream. Maybe that’s the way you’ll have to do everything, but that’s okay. If you can’t be it, dream it. In your dreams, you can do anything—and the only price you’ll pay is that your memory won’t get the full benefit because it won’t take it all aboard. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to issue any warnings, or any denials. You don’t have to ask for any help at all, in any way at all. You can be a post-it note, if that’s what you need, or even if that’s only what you want. No sweat. No superglue.”
She left the ghost of “no sex” hanging in the emptiness, unspoken and unintended but not entirely unheard. It was unintended—sex was definitely on, and not just for the moment...although nobody in the world, or out of it, could expect that arrangement to last forever, or even very long.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Saturday timetable wasn’t as full as the weekday timetable, because it was assumed that fewer people had to get to and from work and that the vast majority of the shoppers who crammed into the pedestrian precinct and the Oracle would use their cars so as to have the benefit of the boot. It never seemed that way to Kit, though. For her, Saturday was always the most difficult day of the week, because whatever advantage was obtained by the early morning and late afternoon depletion of commuters paled into insignificance by comparison with the dramatic increase in the number of fractious children and ill-tempered parents. Sometimes, she wondered whether the abnormally high rate of Saturday absenteeism might have more to do with paedophobia than whatever the Greek for excessive love of football would have been if the Greeks had ever had a reason to invent it. Either way, she rarely got Saturdays off and was often under pressure to do an extra half-shift.
Today, mercifully, there was no question of an extra half-shift because Kit had already worked one during the week. On the other hand, she had to spend the day toiling in and out from the vast housing estates in Whitley and Tilehurst, which were both as bad as one another even though they supposedly catered to different economic classes. In Reading, the estates were distributed like geological strata, or tree-rings, those of a similar antiquity having broadly similar facilities whether they catered to the not-very-well-off or the almost-but-not-quite-well-off. The outermost and therefore most recent estates like Lower Earley had far fewer bus users not because they were inhabited by the authentically-well-off but because they had been designed like cul-de-sac-strewn mazes in order to pack the maximum number of pocket-sized houses into the minimum amount of space and it simply wasn’t possible to plan a bus route through them that enabled the vehicle to get through in a reasonable time and didn’t require too many people to follow frustratingly intricate routes to the stops.
Kit dropped of her double-decker at the garage at ten past six, but she didn’t get paid for the overtime because it had been timetabled to come in at five fifty-five and she was supposed to be able to cash up in the remaining five minutes of the shift. Even coming in a quarter of an hour late, though—especially coming in a quarter of an hour late—she had to get in line to hand over the ticket-machine and the takings and get signed off. By that time it was too late to do any sensible shopping, and because she’d done her extra half-shift on a late-night-shopping day she hadn’t had a chance to take advantage of that useful once-a-week facility. The bigger supermarkets were open till seven, though, and the buses hadn’t quite thinned out to the point at which the deadline was impossible to beat.
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