She managed to get round SavaCentre just before chucking-out time, although she did have to endure the strange artificial twilight that descended by degrees as the staff began switching out lights in the departments that had been cleared, while the last few customers were patiently waiting to be checked out through the last few operative tills. Getting back to the hostel wasn’t so easy, because the meager and lackadaisical evening timetable had arrived, but she told herself sternly that it was just a matter of patience.
In fact, Kit thought, as she waited at the stop with three plastic bags full of groceries tucked between her legs, there was a great deal of life that was essentially just a matter of patience. In theory, that ought to be good practice for being dead, but it was possible that the theory was a trifle miscalculated. On the other hand, maybe life provided far too much practice for being dead, and patience was exactly that of which the ghosts who lingered had had far too much. Perhaps the only thing they needed in order to move on was a healthy dose of impatience—in which case, a bus route like one of Reading’s was probably exactly what they needed to get them into the right mental gear for eternity.
There had probably been a time, she continued, when the inhabitants of Reading had had a measure of faith in the timetable, but everyone save for the most lunatic optimist must have lost that faith by now. It wasn’t the company’s fault, of course. It wasn’t the company’s fault that employment in the town was so close to full that the low wages they offered were no longer competitive. It wasn’t the company’s fault that the entire nation was developing a culture of absenteeism, in which a job’s quota of permissible sick leave was interpreted by the workers as a kind of extra holiday entitlement. It wasn’t the company’s fault that the creeping advancement of pedestrianization and the fashionability of such traffic-controlling mechanisms as one-way systems and mini-roundabouts had turned timetabling into a genre of popular fiction. It wasn’t the company’s fault that the inexplicable popularity of the monstrous Oracle created massive tailbacks of traffic queuing for the multistorey car-park. The company was doing its absolute best, but it wasn’t omnipotent any more than it was omniscient or omnibenevolent. The simple fact was that it had to operate in circumstances that no longer facilitated determinism, and thus, in consequence, no longer licensed faith. Faith was no use any more, even as a psychological device. In the old days, the people of Reading had been able to endure waiting at bus stops patiently because they had good grounds to trust that the bus would eventually come. That wasn’t so any more, and no one understood that better than Kit.
Had things really been so much better in Sheffield? Yes they had—but only because Sheffield was still enmired in the past that Reading was in the process of escaping. Despite the ubiquity of Greenwich Mean Time—or, at present, British Summer Time—it was slightly absurd that the clocks and calendars in Sheffield insisted on keeping pace with those in Reading, given that while Reading had definitely moved into the twenty-first century, Sheffield had definitely not.
What did that imply, Kit wondered, for the density of ghosts in the two towns? Would there be more ghosts stuck in Sheffield than in Reading or vice versa? Tradition suggested that the older a place was, the more ghosts were likely to be credited with haunting it—or, at least, with having haunted it in the past. But tradition was mostly concerned with old ghosts: ghosts which belonged to a more ancient phantom culture, which inevitably reflected obsolete understandings of the relationships between the living and the dead. At least one of the two ghosts with whom Kit had had dealings was a relatively new ghost, a spectral product of the twentieth century fin-de-siècle if not of the twenty-first dawn. Perhaps Rose Selavy wasn’t the kind of ghost that one could reasonably expect to glimpse in Sheffield.
Kit was too keenly aware of the problems of generalizing from an inadequate sample, though. Having seen no ghosts at all during all her years at home, she had absolutely no evidence whatsoever from which to make judgments about the phantom population of Sheffield, and the fact that the two ghosts she’d encountered in Reading had so little in common with one another made it impossible to estimate how much either one of them might have in common with the other ghosts she would have to take aboard if she actually agreed to go through with the scheme that Michael was hatching.
Except, of course, she thought—just as the bus finally put in its belated appearance—that she already had agreed, in principle, to go through with Michael’s plan. If she backed out now, she’d be letting him down, and letting herself down too.
Because she’d got fresh food in, Kit had agreed to cook for Stephen. She’d offered to do Sunday dinner—by which, of course, she meant a mid-day meal, as she had to because she was due to do a two-to-eleven shift—but he hadn’t come from a family that had a Sunday roast tradition, so he’d said that he’d rather make an occasion out of Saturday night, for which he would gladly provide the wine. That offer had presumably been made on the grounds that the price of a bottle of plonk, even in over-taxed Britain, was far less than the potential cost of actually taking her out, even if it was only to the multiplex. Not that Kit minded. Although she had come from a family which notionally had a strong Sunday roast tradition, it was one where Sunday, in consequence of that fact, had become somewhat akin to a weekly Christmas, in the sense that everyone brought hopeful expectations to it that were certain to be disappointed.
If Mum—and Dad, when he wasn’t away on the lorries—had only been able to be content with such moderate and certain expectations as getting plastered, all would have been well, but there was something in the quality of their drunkenness that could not entirely shake off the distant memory of the contrary rewards of sobriety, and persisted in the futile supposition that there might be more to be derived from the week’s one “real” meal: a pleasure more refined—in both the culinary and social senses—than calculated spiritual annihilation. To Kit, therefore, Sunday dinner seemed to carry a curse, and therefore an unwarranted risk, while Saturday dinner—served, by force of necessity, in the evening—had potential as well as potential for disaster.
And so it proved. The food was okay, and the wine was probably better than Kit’s uneducated taste-buds allowed it to seem.
“If you’re into wine,” she told him, “it’s really worth thinking about one of our cross-channel trips. If you reckon the saving at two quid a bottle, you can cover the price of the ticket on two six-bottle cases. Anything else you can carry is profit, and you only have to carry it from the bus-stop on Wilderness Road to your hall, which can’t be much more than a couple of hundred yards. A big lad like you ought to be able to carry four cases, if you can distribute the load sensibly. If you could get a friend to met you at the bus stop—especially if it’s a friend with a car—your only limit would be your share of the space in the bus’s hold.”
“Or,” Stephen pointed out, “I could just find out from a friend of a friend where the local bootlegger has his lock-up. That way, I only save a quid a bottle instead of two, but I don’t have to sit on a bus for ten hours going back and forth between Reading and France.”
“The trouble with the younger generation,” Kit said, trying as best she could to age the sound of her voice, “is that they’re not willing to graft.” It wasn’t the kind of thing that her mother would ever have said, and the voice wasn’t anything like her mother’s anyway, but the effort of trying to sound older than she was proved to be more discomfiting than she had imagined, so she cut the joke short. Fortunately, Stephen had spotted a play on words that would take it in another direction entirely.
“The trouble with the younger generation,” he said, “is that they’re far too willing to graft. They develop their lives by grafting on new interests, new relationships and new activities any-old-how, without any real regard for issues of compatibility and organic integrity. We all think yuck when people on TV talk about genetic engineering and they show pictures of that mouse with the ear grafted on to its back, but it’s just an empty reflex. Actually, we
’ve absorbed the principle into our world-view so completely that it forms the bedrock of modern analogical thought.”
Kit hadn’t a clue what he meant by “modern analogical thought” but she couldn’t ask because, although she was a bus driver, she wasn’t fucking stupid. She was, however, well used to steering around such difficulties in the course of everyday conversation. Steering around things was probably her most obvious and most extensively-practiced talent—which was perhaps as well, given that she was a bus driver, and her mother’s daughter.
“I blame nicotine patches myself,” she said. “Time was you had to use willpower to give up smoking.”
“You still do,” Stephen pointed out. “It says so on the ads.”
“It says on the packets that smoking kills you,” Kit pointed out. “It’s all a matter of degree. People buy the patches because they think it reduces the amount of willpower they need.” She daren’t say so, in case it made Stephen back off again, but she wondered whether that might be part of the problem with ghosts that got stuck. Maybe they simply hadn’t the willpower to go on, and needed a patch—or, if not a patch, some other kind of fix. A bus—a bus driven by someone with a ready-made talent for steering around things.
“I tried it once,” Stephen said. “Smoking, that is. Didn’t like it and gave it up on the spot. It’s useful not to be tempted, in a way, but inhibiting too. I don’t smoke pot because I don’t smoke, not because it’s pot. I tried beer too. Once.”
“And now you’re stuck with wine and cider,” Kit said, figuring that she could see the argument through to its moral. “You shouldn’t let yourself be so easily put off. Sure, it’s a policy with one or two advantages—but it has disadvantages too. What else have you given up because you couldn’t be bothered to acquire the taste?”
“Cabbage,” he said. “Brussels sprouts. Chicken tikka masala. Darts. Trying to use two-pin plugs overseas without an adaptor by sticking paper clips into sockets to form a bridge.”
“Okay. You’re sticking to the bright side. Suppose you hadn’t liked sex the fist time you tried it? I sure as hell didn’t. Or swimming. My first encounter with chlorinated water was no picnic. Or driving. The first time Dad put the steering-wheel of a two-tonner in my seven-year-old hands I was terrified. Some first things you have to get past.”
“Not necessarily,” he countered. “I can’t swim and I don’t drive, although I concede the point with respect to driving, which I shall certainly have to learn to do when I have enough money to pay for the lessons. As for sex, I thought the modern opinion was that it only comes in three varieties—good, very good and absolutely fucking fantastic.”
“I don’t think so,” Kit told him, although she was still being careful enough not to call on Rose Selavy as a hypothetical witness for the defense, “but perhaps I’m not modern enough to qualify as an appropriate opinion-holder. I do come from Sheffield, after all. And I started young, way back in the twentieth century.”
“Seven is a little young to be put in charge of a two-ton truck,” Stephen said—quite cleverly, considering that anything he’d said or asked about when and how she’d come by her first and potentially off-putting experience of sex would have sounded tacky and tempted fate, even though the truth was far duller than he probably imagined and certainly hadn’t involved her Dad, who had presumably sought solace for Mum’s unfitness for those kinds of wifely duties among temptresses who followed Rose Selavy’s profession without too many unnecessary embellishments.
“It would have been okay,” Kit assured him, “if my legs had been long enough to reach the pedals. As it was, Dad and I had to work in collaboration. It worked, after a fashion, but it was always a makeshift. Come to think of it, sex wasn’t all that different, to begin with. Maybe it’ll continue getting better for a while yet, although my legs stopped growing some time back, long before I’d reached the height I was ambitious to attain. I could have been a model, you know, if I’d only been ten inches taller and ten times as beautiful. Not that I would have been, given that I’d still have had my vocation—but it would have been nice to have had the option.”
“I could have done with a few more inches myself,” Stephen admitted, “but you just have to make the most of what you’ve got. That’s life.”
It’s probably much the same when you’re dead, Kit thought. Except that you’ve got even less. Maybe the lingering dead were scheduled for reincarnation, but decided against it because they didn’t much like incarnation the first time around. Maybe they’re like Even Stephen, who doesn’t smoke pot because it’s smoking, not because it’s pot. Maybe they’re still waiting, with way too much patience, for their legs to grow just a little bit longer before they get back in the driving-seat of life, or maybe they just want to the bus to arrive. Maybe the ones Michael wants to help are the ones who are reluctant even to do that, because it’s easier to make deals with the local bootlegger.
She suddenly realized, with a measurable surge of self-satisfaction, what Stephen must have meant by “modern analogical thought.” The afterglow of that achievement hadn’t entirely dissipated when they moved on, and she was still able to remember it when the street-light came on, causing the shadows to stir in the wall beside the bed while it still glowed pink. She was a trifle rosy herself, but it was mostly subjective.
Afterwards, when the ghost-sight came up on her yet again, as she now fully expected, she found that it was Michael she was talking to, not Rose.
“I thought I had to come to you because it was too difficult for you to come to me,” she said.
“You did,” he confirmed. “But you’re a better seer than I dared to hope. I’ve been around long enough to have a certain freedom of movement, always provided that I have a invitation.”
“So you were able to deliver the message yourself, instead of Rose having to deliver it. Okay—when do you need me, and will a single-decker be enough?”
“Probably tomorrow, probably yes. I didn’t come because everything is fixed.”
“Ah,” said Kit. “I see.” But she couldn’t help remembering the old joke Dad used to come out with whenever anybody said “I see.” I see, said the blind man, when he couldn’t see at all.
“The grave’s a fine and private place,” Michael quoted, “and it’s not entirely true that its inhabitants are beyond the art of embrace—but as you know, it requires the loan of flesh and feeling. The privileged dead still have a certain limited intercourse with the living, but even a whore as accomplished as Rose can’t do much for her peers.”
Kit lost herself momentarily in bizarre analogical wordplay based on the phonetic similarity between seers and peers, but brought herself up short when she realized that this might not be an ideal moment for steering around things. “I’m not about to set up in business,” she said. “I’m a bus driver, not a fucking whore. I don’t want hungry ghosts forming a queue round my bed just because Rose managed to attract my interest. It’s no wonder there aren’t more of the living willing to be haunted, if this is what it leads to.”
“Oddly enough,” Michael said, meekly, “Rose favors the opposite conclusion. She can’t figure out why the living aren’t moving heaven and earth to be haunted, if that’s what it can lead to.”
“How old were you when you died?” Kit wanted to know.
“Old enough to be trapped,” was the unhelpful reply—but he must have sensed her impatience, because he was quick to add: “Thirteen. Younger children often linger, but not for very long. I suppose I’m an exception.”
“But you’ve continued to age, even after death? Ghosts can do that?”
“It depends what you mean by aging. The dead can certainly change their appearance, more easily and more radically than the living. You’ll find that out, I’m afraid, so it’s perhaps as well to warn you. There are wraiths, but there are also ghosts that the living don’t normally see...or won’t. You can. You wouldn’t ever have found out about it, if Rose hadn’t got through to you, but you can.”
“And I’m a bus driver too. Lucky you. And you’re here tonight because you reckon that you’re in with a sporting chance of losing your virginity before you move on to your ultimate reward. If only I’d been ten inches taller with a nicer face, I might have restored your faith in Heaven.”
“Faith isn’t much use, I’m afraid,” Michael told her, with a hint of mournfulness in his voice. “Not any more. Not to us”
“Well,” Kit said, “I suppose, since it might be your last night on earth, that I ought to make an exception to my try-not-to-come-across-like-a-slapper rule. Given the compromises I’ve already made for Rose, it’s not that much of a concession. Will Rose be with us in spirit, do you think? That would be an extra notch on the stick of experience, I guess.”
“No,” said the ghost who had needed an invitation, “she won’t. She wanted to, but I wanted you all to myself.”
Kit knew how naive that was, given that she was already sharing the single bed with a lumpy student of art history, but she appreciated the thought. Nor was it just the thought she was able to appreciate, although she couldn’t honestly have said, afterwards, that it had been very good, let alone absolutely fucking fantastic.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Given her uncanny exertions of the previous night, it wasn’t at all surprising that Kit slept late, especially as she hadn’t really got much sleep at all until Stephen had belatedly bestirred himself and moved to the settee. He slept late too, for some of the same reasons, although he consented to walk to the newsagents and get a Sunday paper while Kit was making coffee and toast.
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story Page 14