Six of the Best

by Michael White

  “The haunted litter bin is a good one.” he said as we went through my notes, “But it would be pretty hard for anyone to play the part of a bin, I think. The other ones are okay, though. Especially the last one.”

  So we proceeded. Our biggest challenge of course was deciding which one of us would do what. As I had written the stories Jack thought it would be best if I was the guide.

  “That way if you forget any of the stories you can just make them up.” he said. I could see his point, and that was that decided. Jack came to think that he would have no objection to getting dressed up as one of the ghosts, but I wasn’t sure.

  “I think we need someone who has some experience in acting or something like that.” I wasn’t convinced. “We could try and see if there any amateur dramatics groups with someone who wants to do a foreigner. They would have to be reliable though. We don’t want to be a ghost down with thirty odd punters in tow. It wouldn’t look good, would that!”

  “There’s always Mad Mary” said Jack, pointing to the corner of the snug where a bedraggled middle aged woman sat nursing a drink. “She used to tread the boards, didn’t she?”

  “The only boards she’s trodden are the floorboards of the local!” I laughed. “Though I do seem to remember her going on about acting or something at some point or another. That’s if you believe her, that is.” Mary could often be seen sitting in the corner of the pub where she would usually regale some stranger with her long gone golden days. The facts about her life seemed to be pretty flexible, too.

  “Over my dead body!” I finally concluded. “She’s a bloody nutter is that one. I’m not having her involved at all.” Jack was forced to agree, and so we left it there.

  “We’ll put a notice up in the library. That will do for starters.”

  “What about a marshal?” I asked. Jack tapped the side of his nose.

  “My cousin Arthur would probably be glad of a few bob. He’s a young bloke too, so he would be okay with all the walking.”

  “He’s got a gammy leg!” I said, laughing.

  “That’s what he tells the social.” said Jack, and he winked. Arthur it was then. We spent a bit of time polishing up the stories I had so far and started to write them out. Of course what I hadn’t realised at that point was that I would have to remember them! I could hardly read them from a piece of paper on the day, could I? We began to get them into some sort of order where they were at least ready to use. We wrote an advert asking for any local amateur dramatics people to email Jack, and off he went to the library to get it put up on the wall.

  Next we got ourselves off to town and had a wander around a few likely routes. We walked them out at a gentle pace and began to note down where we wanted to place the acts for each of the six ghosts. Now by necessity this had to be a relatively secluded but also accessible place, and they were buggers to find but somehow we managed it. The conclusion to the tour would be in a wide courtyard that was accessed by a narrow alleyway. Perfect for the finale, this was a really good find! Very dark too. Some of the other places were quite good too. Nice and open but generally somewhere one of our actors could hide and then jump out and surprise people when we were doing the relevant talk-through.

  So on it went. God knows what people thought we were up to, pacing the streets and then stopping every now and again to read from a notebook. Increasingly I began to improvise. I had written the ghost stories after all, so I could embellish them anyway I wanted. There was however, one problem we found very early on, which involved getting the actors in place as the tour progressed. Quite simply it was a logistical nightmare. We came to the decision that Jack would use his old white van to ferry the actors from place to place, but that it would then be all of them that did the finale. Once we had this sorted everything else seemed to fall into place.

  So after a while there we were. We had a route, we had a set of stories and we now knew it all fitted in to more or less two hours. Jack’s cousin Arthur was on standby as the marshal. All we needed were two actors. Jack had received a couple of emails from the advert in the library and so we asked the two of them, one man, one woman, round to Jack’s house one night with an hour’s gap in-between. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t an interview as such but we had to tell them what we were up to, explain the pay involved (we had settled on a percentage of the ticket sales to cover our arses in case we didn’t actually sell any), but more importantly to see if we could get across to them what we wanted as well as sussing out whether they were any good.

  The first one that turned up, a woman, was a complete bloody disaster. When trying to explain to her about the first ghost (a woman jilted at the altar who hangs herself in a bus stop) she kept holding her hand to her head in what was obviously meant to be a dramatic gesture but to my mind just looked stupid. She also kept asking what her “motivation” was. I tried to get across to her what we were up to but ended up telling her that her motivation was ten per cent of the ticket sales, and that she wasn’t going in for the bloody Oscar's or what have you. We politely told her we’d be in touch. Yeah right.

  The next one wasn’t too bad. He was a tall middle aged guy called Edward. If you passed him on the street you would be able to tell he was involved in amateur dramatics just by the way he dressed. He had the look of a man who was about to burst out into a long, heart-wrenching speech at any moment. We didn’t think the chip shop ghost was too much beyond him.

  More importantly, however, he was happy with the ten per cent. So he was hired, and we said we would be in touch once we were ready to go. I gave him a copy of his lines for the three ghosts he would be playing as well as the script for the finale and he said he would be off to the charity shops to see if he could find any clothes for his roles. He said it would help him get into what he referred to as, “the zone”, which was fine by us, because apart from anything else it meant we didn’t have to put our hands in our mostly empty pockets to pay for his costumes.

  A week later we were starting to get a bit worried. Three of the other ghosts were women, and we had no-one for the roles. The emails from the card in the library had stopped altogether.

  “It’s going to be Mad Mary, isn’t it? “ Jack asked one dinner hour as we were nursing our usual halves. We both turned to the corner where the nutcase in question sat humming some kind of tune to herself whilst hugging what very possibly could have been a glass of advocaat.

  “For crying out loud!” I muttered under my breath. “God help us.” Grabbing our drinks we made our way to the corner. I thought I’d let Jack do the talking. Unfortunately Mary got her nose in first.

  “I knew you two would be coming today.” she nodded, and tapped the side of her nose. “Hiawatha told me.” and she placed her glass on the table before her. I was busy looking around to see who she was talking about, but Jack was a bit quicker off the mark than me.

  “That’ll be your spirit guide then?” he said, and she smiled.

  “One of them.” she nodded.

  “Merlin the wizard busy today then?” I muttered and Jack kicked me under the table.

  “An unbeliever, then?” asked Mary, looking down her nose at me. I just grinned and noticed Jack shuffling on his stool beside the two of us. “No matter. Tell me gentlemen” she said, waving her hands around like some kind of silent movie actress, “Why do you think I sit her every afternoon?”

  Around about a hundred answers shot into my head straight away, but none of them would have convinced Mary that our “Witch of the park railings” part was suitable for her. Jack stepped in instead, though I could see that he was now struggling to keep a straight face too.

  “Dunno, Mary.” was all he managed and she looked at us both as if she knew that the pair of us were not able to decide what secret knowledge she held that we did not.

  “Ley lines.” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing ever. “They cross below this table. It is a particularly good place for one who has the sight such as I to sit.”

  “Ley lines.” I
said. “Under the table.” She simply nodded back at me.

  “Indeed.” she said. “Right here.” she pointed to the floor.

  “I’m going to the bar.” I said, and like a bastard left poor Jack to it.

  When I got back he seemed to be doing alright and eventually we got Mary interested enough to say that she would sleep overnight on our proposal, though she did concede that she was already very interested. I just think she had decided that she was going to make us bloody wait.

  As we walked home my head was spinning. “She’s as mad a box full of frogs, she is!” I said, and Jack was forced to agree. “She does know that she’s only meant to be playing a part and not actually summoning any spirits, doesn’t she?” I finished and Jack raised an eyebrow.

  “I bloody hope so, Pete. I bloody hope so.”

  The next lunchtime Edward dropped in to the pub in one of his costumes, announcing to us that he now had the “feel of the part” as he put it. He definitely looked the part. God knows which charity shops he had been to, but they seemed to be ones specialising in Edwardian gentlemen’s outfits! He flounced to and fro a few times loudly saying his lines, much to the amusement of some of the other regulars. I couldn’t help but notice there was a bit of a slur to his voice and once or twice when he was swirling his cloak about he seemed a little bit unsteady on his feet. “Is he pissed?” I asked Jack, but he didn’t seem to know. Eventually Edward announced his departure grandly, informing us that he would await our call.

  “I hope he isn’t getting the bus home dressed like that!” Jack said.

  “I hope he’s not driving!” I added. A little later Mary arrived and told us she would do it. So we were ready. We set a date for a Friday a week ahead and I spent the days before having mild panic attacks whilst simultaneously resisting the urge to call it all off. On the Monday night we had a proper dress rehearsal and it seemed to go pretty well despite getting a few funny looks from people as we went down the street. Friday arrived. I woke up in the very early hours in a cold sweat and took stock. All we had was a bunch of half arsed self-penned stories, a clapped out white van, a mad woman who thought ley lines ran under her seat in the pub, a slightly eccentric bloke in Edwardian dress who may just possibly be a piss head, and a marshal who may or may not have a limp.

  Great.

  I very nearly picked the phone up there and then and despite the early hour rang Jack to call it all off. I didn’t, though to this day I’m not sure why.

  A few hours later we were down the Albert Dock trying to sell tickets for the walk that night. I was wearing my costume, a particularly snappy gentleman’s outfit complete with top hat that Edward had found in one of his charity shops for me. As I said before, God knows where he goes for them but it really was very convincing. Poor Jack however was dressed as Spring Heel Jack, the notorious Liverpool ghoul or ghost, who was the big character for our finale, and he was doing his best to scare any passers-by. The only slight disadvantage to this was the bloody big mattress springs we had attached to Jack’s boots. Spring heel Jack, see. Get it? Anyway, the springs were giving him loads of jip but it was the bloody cobblestones that were causing the problem. The poor sod just couldn’t get across them! He would have trouble scaring anyone if I was having to lead him by the hand all the time. Eventually he had to take the boots off and he stowed them in his van which was sitting in the car park nearby, being mugged by the parking meter.

  Shifting the tickets was harder than we thought. We hung around outside the tourist centre for a bit until they shooed us off. By dinner hour we had only sold six between us, and we were starting to get despondent. Nevertheless we had our sarnies on a bench over by the dock and then started again. We sold another four in the first hour and two in the hour after. Once we hit the area around the Beatles Story Museum however, we found the Japanese and American tourists and we sold the lot! In fact we sold more than we had intended. We were up to forty people when we had to actually turn people away. Needless to say we returned home with a bit of a spring in our steps. Doubly so for Jack, once he got his boots back on. I figured out we’d probably be alright just as long as I didn’t let him drive in them!

  Quickly the evening approached. I felt like throwing up a few times but eventually we made our way to the town centre and our assembly point, and slowly our customers began to arrive, turning in the tickets we had sold them at lunchtime. Jack hovered about the place as we waited for everyone to turn up. He had already told me that Edward and Mary were in place at their first stops, and shortly after up strolled Arthur in his marshal's jacket. By the time everyone had arrived it was just getting dark, which is exactly how we had planned it. Jack was almost by now hopping from foot to foot as he saw all of our plans, and his initial idea, come to fruition. I just felt sick.

  I examined the forty or so people who seemed to be waiting for me to start. Quite a few Japanese, some Americans (you could spot them by the bloody big cameras. Silently I had a little prayer that none of them got mugged while they were on the walk), and various other people. As I looked at them a tallish haughty looking woman accompanied by a short fat bloke caught my eye and approached. “Are you in charge here?” she asked in a typical school headmistress kind of voice. “Great!”, I thought. “Complaints already and we haven’t even started yet!”

  “I am.” I smiled as she produced a small card out of her bag which she gave to me. Before I could read it she carried on.

  “Susan Harper.” she rattled off in an official kind of way. “I am doing a piece for the Liverpool Echo on tourism in the town and wondered if my colleague and I might accompany you on your walk this evening? I’m sure any publicity would be quite useful to you?” She said this as a kind of question in which the answer was never in doubt. Jack was beside me and out the corner of my eye I could almost see the colour draining out of him. Arthur also had a particularly pained expression, and had the look about him of a boy who wants to put a hand up in class to ask a question but doesn’t dare. She was right though. Any publicity would be brilliant. As long as we didn’t bugger it up, that was!

  “Of course, Ms Harper” I heard myself saying. “You will be more than welcome. Any questions feel free to ask.” she nodded and then moved off into the crowd with her colleague, who I now noticed was carrying a camera that big that even some of the Americans were looking at it in envy. No pressure then! “Let Edward and Mary know” I hissed to Jack, who nodded. “Tell them to go for it!”

  As a call to battle it wasn’t up to much, I know. But it was all that I had. To be honest, I was bricking it. Still. We couldn’t turn back now. Banging my long, ornate umbrella (another one of Edward’s strange little “finds”) on the ground for attention I welcomed everyone to the walk, told them how long it would last and gave a few basic rules. (Basically don’t get pissed or lost. Though not necessarily in that order.) Then we were off!

  Our first ghost was only ten minutes away and so off we proceeded, me waving my umbrella over my head for them to follow, and the rear brought up by a now furiously limping Arthur. As we approached the ornate steps of the particular building we had decided to use I could see Edward lurking in the shadows on the other side of the road. I began to relate the tale of what I had decided to call “The reluctant banker” which was some nonsense I had concocted about a banker who gets run over by a carriage on his way to the bank. I know. Dickens it ain’t, but there you have it. We had found that a few of the stories needed jiggling a little bit, as well as who was doing what. We had all agreed that this was our best one to start the night with.

  As planned, Edward suddenly came marching across the road in character and took over the tale, acting out the part of the ghost. It was a bit hammy, but once the punters realised what was going on they seemed to get into the spirit of it. The Japanese giggled and nodded furiously, though I have no idea whether they actually understood a word of it or not. The cameras of the Americans started flashing furiously, making poor old Edward blink madly.

  Eve
ntually he finished his bit and we were off again to our next rendezvous. So far, so good! As we moved off I saw Edward heading back towards Jack’s little white van. The engine was already running. Good. Next stop was the witch of the park railings, and Mary. Christ, I hoped she was going to behave herself, or at least make an attempt to be lucid! On our way at the back of the long snaking line of people following me I could see Arthur limping away madly. If anything his limp seemed to be getting worse. It was that bad he looked as if he had got a puncture or something. Anyway, we arrived, and with my back to the dark railing i began my tale. The plan was for Mary to appear behind me of course, which she suddenly did, raving like a loon. Unsurprisingly, (well to me, at least) she seemed to be quite good at it. The punters all gasped and there was the flash photography again. I moved out the way as she took centre stage and went to have a word with Arthur. As I moved through the crush I noticed the journalist making notes in a small jotter. There was a deep frown upon her face. Her photographer merely looked bored.

  Arthur was standing at the rear of the crowd with the look of a man who is trying desperately to fade into his surroundings. “What’s with the limp?” I asked him and he winced involuntarily. “I thought that was just for the social?” Arthur winced and nodded at the newspaper reporter while Mary carried on with her increasingly over the top tirade about being persecuted as a witch.

  “I’ll be done for if the social see me in a photograph.” said Arthur, shaking his head.

  “Arthur.” I sighed. “In the very unlikely event that they do take a picture with you in it then it’s not going to be obvious that you have a limp now, is it? It’s not quite the kind of thing that you can capture in a photograph is it?” Arthur frowned.