Conversations with Spirits

by E. O. Higgins

  We passed a lamp-lighter and his mate heaving their ladders up the street, and watched as the street-lamp they had been working on was instantly set upon by a gang of schoolboys, who shimmied up it with great skill to light the tips of Woodbines.

  At the end of the road, I looked up and saw, through the branches of tall trees, the crenellations of a large and imposing residence seated on a natural precipice above the town. When I pointed this out to Billy, I was informed that it was known as Fort House but had become affectionately renamed ‘Bleak House’ by many locals, keen to emphasise the town’s connection with Charles Dickens.

  Living up to the epithet, it seemed both dark and foreboding; its towers scraping the red-streaked Thanet sky.

  We continued on, turning down a sharp incline leading towards the seafront, where an ancient stone arch crossed our path. At some time it must have housed a gate and acted as a part of the town’s shoreline defences, but it had obviously long since fallen into disuse. Passing through it, we lurched flat-footedly down the hill until, without word, we both paused before a metal balustrade, and, in contemplation, stared out to the sea.

  The jetty was directly ahead. From its dark wooden base a number of rusted metal rings resulted, tethering a row of small fishing boats. The boats, buoyed by lapping waves, seemed to jostle for position, like piglets at the belly of a sow.

  At the mouth of the jetty there was a curious building constructed of white weatherboard. It seemed likely that it had once been used to house lifeboats, but was now—according the sign—the residence for the Harbour Master. Curiously, above a large barn door there was an alabaster statue of a horned man wearing a lion skin, resembling a ship’s figurehead. Although the figure might possibly have been appropriating some Grecian design, I felt it more likely that it held some Pagan significance…

  Across the bay, upon the otherwise open sands, was a large brick construction standing conspicuously in the centre of the beach. Viewed from the side, it looked much like a single brick wall, but it was clear that, in fact, this was the ‘box’ that Doyle’s society had financed for J.P. Beasant to ‘walk through’. In face of the facts, the author’s assertion that the man was not a conjuror but rather some manner of mystic savant that took no efforts to thrust himself into the limelight, seemed laughable.

  Suddenly my attention was diverted by the echo of hurried footsteps and I swung my head back to face the jetty. Two figures were passing briskly across it. Their faces, already shadowed by peaked caps, were further obscured by the raised collars of their heavy mariner’s jackets. Their progression was so rapid it demonstrated an obvious swiftness of purpose.

  Leaving the jetty, the two men crossed the road ahead of us, heading towards a squat stone-fronted cottage. As they opened the front door, a sudden cloud of heated air billowed out; and, with it, a momentary din of raised voices. Then, the door swung shut and silence resumed. Looking up at the building, I saw a wooden sign swinging gently on the corner post—displaying an aged picture of a clipper ship.

  “It’s a pub?”

  “Yes,” Billy responded, “The Tartar Frigate. It’s for the fishermen.”

  Without another word, we drifted across to it.

  Looking through the tavern’s narrow windows, it was possible to make out a number of figures sitting around tallow-lighted wooden tables inside. All unshaven and dressed uniformly in heavy coats, jerseys and greased sea-boots, they were half-hidden behind a dense cloud of smoke, and drinking from metal cups.

  Since almost the very beginning of the war, the major grievance amongst those working-people still at home had been the reduction of hours that inns and taverns could keep their doors open during the day. No longer was it commonplace for pubs to stay open for eighteen and a half hours. Instead, they were now peddling their increasingly watery wares for just a third of the time and charging three times the price for the privilege. However, whilst these laws were strictly enforced in the capital, clearly the inhabitants of Broadstairs seemed unaware, continuing to partake in their ‘liquid bread’ with something akin to careless abandon.

  The rusted ring door-handle squeaked in my hand. As I pulled back the heavy door, it finally shunted open and I gestured for Billy to go in.

  Standing in the doorway a moment later, a few of the tavern’s patrons blearily turned their heads, but interest in us was fleeting and, by the time I had closed the door again, it had evaporated completely.

  The Tartar Frigate was the sort of place people of my father’s generation would have drearily referred to as a ‘flash house’. Really, though, there was nothing remotely flash about it. The walls were heavily damp and the floorboards were bare and scored with dog-ends and traces of dried-up phlegm. There was a thick, cloying atmosphere—surpassing even the scent of tobacco fumes and stale sweat—clearly emanating from the privies. Entering the saloon bar, I looked about and saw that there was not a single table free.

  A chorus of mariners is not a quiet one, and, at night, when they supplant the sea salt in their veins with something more potent, they form a rowdy and unpleasant rabble. It was clear from the moment we entered that almost every other person in the room was heavily drunk.

  The only person contrary to this was a middle-sized, spectacled fellow holding up the bar on the right side. As Billy and I crossed the room, I felt his eyes upon me and—under the pretext of scanning the room for a place to sit down—glanced in his direction. In doing so, I was surprised that the fellow held up his drink to me in greeting. Not knowing him, I replied with a weak smile and quickly joined Billy at the bar.

  The barman finished serving the two sailors who had entered just before us. Then, turning to Billy, he paused momentarily, as though aware that there was something familiar about him that he could not quite place.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Two cherry brandies,” Billy murmured.

  “Cherry brandy?” repeated the barman loudly. “Ain’t got none of that.”

  I pushed my head over Billy’s shoulder: “Well, what do you have?”

  Blowing out his cheeks, the barman rubbed a hand across his neck and looked balefully back at me.

  “Ciders, ales…we don’t get a lot of trade from people looking for cherry brandy, sir. Might ’ave some rum still…”

  “Get them a mug of cider each,” said the man at the bar. “My compliments. Put them on my slate.”

  I turned and looked at the man, somewhat dismayed by this. Though he was well-dressed, his behaviour was unseemly.

  “That’s very good of you…” I replied cautiously.

  “Cider’s the only thing that’s drinkable here,” he said. “They grow good apples hereabouts.”

  The barman turned his back and grabbed an uncorked brown bottle from a back counter. Quickly filling up two metal cups, he placed them in front of myself and Billy and withdrew.

  “Are you down from London, sir?” asked the spectacled man.

  “Yes, I am,” I replied. “Are you?”

  “Used to be. But I live here now. Working the boats—we all do in here.”

  “You don’t look like a sailor.”

  At this moment, a vast, dissolute fellow with a wide, brick-coloured neck and strong scent of the piscine, ambled up to the bar and stood in between us.

  “’E ain’t no sailor!” said the new arrival, apparently in response to my statement, but without addressing these words to anyone in particular. “Local bloody wizard, ’e is!

  “Two mugs of Allsopp’s, Mr. Denison,” said the fisherman. “Instanter!”

  Hearing this, the barman hurried off to some back-room, returning promptly with two tankards clamped in his hands, a bubbly froth dribbling down their sides.

  Wrestling with the baggy pockets of his trousers, the fisherman pulled out a cluster of small denomination coins, dwarfed in the vastness of his hug
e palms.

  “When’re you doing your fing on the beach, Mr. Beasant?” asked the fisherman.

  My ears pricked up at the mention of the man’s name.

  “It’ll be on Saturday,” replied the spectacled man. “In the afternoon.”

  “You can count on me being there,” said the fisherman. “Mrs. Waller won’t be though. She don’t fink it’s proper.”

  I was momentarily stunned. It seemed, quite by chance—and at a moment when my mind was furthest from it—I was in the presence of the man I had travelled such a way to see.

  Taking hold of the two ale mugs, the fisherman murmured a parting comment of inscrutable wheeze to Beasant and lurched away from the bar. As he went, I pressed my own mug to my lips and took a moment to observe Beasant.

  He was an odd-looking creature. Two swift little eyes were hidden behind dark-framed eyeglasses and beneath a heavy brow that effectively bisected his face. He had a small, sulky mouth that pouted naturally in repose. Curiously, considering his age could not have been much more than middle-thirties, the hair on his head was pure white and swept straight back from his head. His dramatic colouring was further accentuated by his severe mode of dress. Better attired than the rest of the pub’s patrons, he was clothed entirely in black. A dark scarf was clasped about his neck and tucked inside an open three-quarter length black coat with velvet collars; the darkness of his clothing perhaps befitting a man who made a living from the dead.

  “I’m sorry,” said Beasant, noticing my eyes upon him. “What were you saying?”

  “I remarked that you don’t look like a sailor.”

  “No, I suppose I don’t. And you’re quite right, I’m not one. Three years ago I took a job as a ship’s engineer. I thought I’d give it a go—and the Defence of the Realm Act has kept me at it ever since. Still…” he said affectedly, “things could be much worse, I suppose.”

  Beasant nodded towards the window, presumably towards the trenches of France, and shifted about uneasily on his feet. He had a restless, uncollected demeanour that seemed to favour moving from one manful stance to another, seldom with anything motivating the change. Suddenly, without warning, Beasant swept across the counter and presented me his hand.

  “My name is Jean-Patric Beasant,” he said in a low voice, looking very intently at me.

  “Unthank,” I replied with a tight smile, accepting his hand. “Jules Unthank.”

  “Are you down for the weekend?”

  “Yes. Just here to do some business.”

  “Really? What do you do?”

  “Aeroplanes.”

  “Oh? You’re in the Air Corps?”

  “No, I’m a designer,” I told him. “You know those pointy bits at the front of seaplanes?”

  Beasant nodded faintly.

  “Well,” I said with a sniff. “I do them.”

  “I see,” Beasant said, turning to Billy with a smile. “You must be his silent partner?”

  “Billy Crouse,” mumbled Billy, nervously permitting a handshake.

  “Good to meet you both.”

  Moving back to his position at the bar, Beasant drained his mug and returned it to the counter. Instantly, the barman took it and headed to the back counter, filling it from the same bottle with which he had filled ours.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” Beasant said suddenly. “Duty calls.”

  Without further word, Beasant got up and strode past us to the toilets.

  “What an extraordinary piece of good fortune!” I said to Billy in a low voice, as Beasant turned through the open door to the privies and disappeared from view. “That’s the very man I have come to Kent to see—though he does not know it!”

  “How’s that?”

  “He is some manner of spiritualist medium. And I am a denouncer of such people.”

  “Why?” Billy responded. “Don’t you believe in ghosts and spirits ’en?”

  “No. I don’t,” I said, picking up my cider and knocking back a mouthful. “I’m afraid that when he comes back you’re going to hear me tell him some rather fanciful lies. If you could do your best to not seem surprised by them, I’d appreciate it.”

  Billy’s eyes narrowed, and he looked back at me with an air of uncertainty.

  “You see, I’m supposed to be going to a séance to-morrow,” I explained, “and they only really work in one of two ways. Either the medium knows something of their sitters already or they employ a number of clever linguistic ploys in order to deceive the sitters into thinking they know about them—and then let them do the work.”

  Billy nodded in a way that made clear that he had heard my words without fully comprehending them.

  “Let me give you an example,” I said, keeping a watchful eye on the lavatory door. “Here’s a good one which I’ve heard a lot of them use. They might tell a sitter that a spirit is aware that they’ve ‘spent a good deal of time thinking that they’re not happy with the direction their lives are going recently’ or something to that effect.”

  “Right?”

  “I mean, a statement such as that is so general it could basically apply to anyone, couldn’t it? No one is happy with everything in their lives—most people, scarcely anything at all. But it sounds personal and a sitter hearing it will more-often-than-not validate the information themselves—because the sort of people that turn up to séances are exactly the sort of people who want to believe they work.”

  A frown creased Billy’s brow and for a moment he looked confusedly back at me, saying nothing.

  “Let me think of something else,” I told him. “Right, here’s a better example: a lot of mediums will select a sitter and tell them there is an elderly man or woman that wishes to talk to them. To convince them, they’ll add that they passed over as a result of an illness in the chest or stomach. Now, the torso of a human being contains a lot of organs and therefore holds a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong—but, as long as the sitter doesn’t analyse the words they’re hearing, it sounds like they’re being told something specific.

  “The skill of any good medium is simply to manipulate a co-operating sitter into searching for meaning in his well-rehearsed and ambiguous statements.”

  At this moment, Beasant emerged from the toilet and strode back to his place at the bar.

  “It always worries me,” he said, with a theatrical sigh, “that no matter how long you stand at this bar, you never become accustomed to the pollution from those toilets!”

  “Mr. Beasant, tell me, your name sounds familiar to me. Yet, I cannot place it.”

  “There are bills up around the town about me at present—perhaps you have seen one of them?”

  “No,” I replied. “Are you a wanted man, sir?”

  “Not in the way you think…” Beasant laughed.

  “What’s on these bills then?”

  “I’m part of an event on the beach this weekend—I’m a psychic.”

  Raising my eyebrows, I left the remark to hang in the air for a moment, as though I was completely thrown by the statement.

  “I’m interested,” I told him, “how does one become a psychic?”

  “You don’t become a psychic…” he replied, picking up his cider and taking down a mouthful. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “How does it work then?”

  “It’s a gift, I suppose…” he said, looking mildly embarrassed by his statement.

  “A gift? From God?”

  “Not that I’m aware,” he replied cautiously. “I’d say if you were Mozart or something—maybe that’s what people think of as a gift from God. What I have is different. Perhaps gift isn’t the right word.”

  “But, tell me…” I said, looking earnestly at him. “When did you learn you were so endowed?”

  “What do you mean?”
r />   “With your abilities?”

  “When I was a boy.”

  “How did they manifest themselves?”

  “As manifestations, on the whole,” he responded with an oblique smile. “Sometimes voices…sometimes just noises.

  “My Grandmother was a strict Papist, and was forever calling in priests and holy men and what-have-you. Most of them thought the house was possessed.”

  His story had a thoughtless lucidity that told me instantly that it had been recounted many times before. He paused, taking down some of his drink in a lusty sort of way, before continuing.

  “But when we moved house the same thing happened there. My twin brother came to me one day. He had died in childbirth. But in my eleventh year, he made contact. He has been my spirit guide ever since…”

  “Your what?” asked Billy from over my shoulder.

  “Spirit guide,” Beasant repeated offhandedly. “He helps me interpret the messages I receive from the other side.”

  It had to be said, if Beasant had a skill, it was for making the utterly fantastic seem quite unremarkable. He spoke of the mystical in such an ordinary and uncomplicated (even mundane) manner, that it was difficult to think of him as anything more extraordinary than the engineer of a telephone exchange.

  “I’m confused,” I said thoughtlessly, “you say your twin brother died in childbirth? Presumably, therefore, he never learnt to speak? So how did he make contact?”

  The moment I had asked the question I regretted it. My intention was to befriend the man and create a convivial atmosphere between us, but—like so very often in my life—I found my mouth had worked more rapidly than my brain. Fortunately, Beasant seemed to regard the question as enquiry rather than rebuke and chose to mull it over.

  “That’s a good question,” Beasant said, blinking rapidly, “I suppose it’s like how a bi-lingual man doesn’t need to translate two languages in his head—he just hears them both and understands them the same. My brother doesn’t speak to me in words. It’s more like thoughts, but thoughts pushing into you, instead of being released in the proper way. Does that make sense?”