‘Let’s see if it is.’ Amy reached for the pipe and thumbed the lighter into the socket. As soon as it protruded she brought it and the bowl together and sucked the brass stem with all her breath.
As the sharp hot spicy smoke overwhelmed the taste of metal, the world reinvented itself around her. Though the light didn’t alter, the streets below her were no longer simply illuminated, they were luminous. An additional star came into existence over the eastern moors, and winked at her to let her know it was the ghost of its long-dead self. She wouldn’t exhale until she’d counted ten slowly, she vowed. While she counted, her awareness of Rob intensified as her senses extended themselves towards him: his long eyelashes like filaments of the night, glinting with each blink; the smell of denim and beneath it the clean cool scent of his flesh; the note of each of his indrawn breaths, very slightly higher than the sound of their expulsion; his pale blue pupils dilating with their eagerness to renew the sight of her… ‘Christmas does linger though, doesn’t it? I don’t mind having the odd sprout in the midst of my festivities, but I feel as though I’ve been nibbling a parson’s nose for weeks,’ Charlie Churchill said, and Amy had to exhale, because she felt she would otherwise have burst. She had just begun to giggle when the whole of Nazarill lit up.
For a moment she believed the light was searching for her. It wasn’t just the effects of the pipe that made it appear so much brighter than usual. The crouching hulk the colour of a skull glared across the town at her, reminding her that she had to return to it, and she saw it squatting like a spider above its web of streets into which she would have to descend. Perhaps she took only a few seconds to grasp that the glare seemed brighter because the tree was no longer in the way of any of it, but that didn’t explain why the security lights had switched themselves on; nobody had been visible in the grounds, and nobody was now. She felt as if the glare was trying to probe the depths of her mind. ‘You can’t touch me,’ she whispered.
‘Who can’t?’
‘Not you, Rob. Not anyone. Shush, I’m listening,’ Amy said, and caught up with Charlie Churchill’s patter. ‘If me and Oscar hung around like Christmas we’d be arrested. He insisted on playing the waiter, you know. Kept topping up my Pouilly Fuisse, he did. What’s that? Voices in my head. Oh, my producer’s telling me it’s time we let you tuner-inners use my channel. Anybody listening who wants to try my frequency, don’t be shy. Call me if you’ve a Christmas anecdote to share. Oscar thinks it’s time I put my legs up.’
As he gave the number to phone, the light of Nazarill seemed to enter a hidden corner of her mind. ‘A Christmas ghost story,’ she said aloud.
‘Are you talking to me this time?’ said Rob.
‘You and anyone who’ll listen.’ She released her seat belt, which slithered across her breasts and clanked against its slot. ‘I’m going on the air,’ she said, and assumed a cold cap of night as she ducked out of the car.
‘Transmissive.’
Given his enthusiasm for her proposal, she might have expected him not to take so long over ensuring the Micra was locked, unless it was the relentlessness of the elevated glare of Nazarill that made him seem slow. She walked over the chunks of garden path scrawled on by snails and waited for him to open the door, whose breasts someone had flattened before turning their rectangular frame on end. When he let himself into the red-eyed dark she followed while he switched off the alarm and on the lights. An undimmed Nazarill appeared to lurch into the doorway until she shut it out and turned along the hall, which smelled as rosy as its wallpaper looked. At the foot of the fifteen thickened russet angles of the stairs and their fifteen opposites a telephone table stood on baby giraffe legs, its drawer poking out a tongue of supermarket tokens. Amy hoisted the receiver while Charlie Churchill’s voice continued to repeat the digits on a loop inside her head. When Rob raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth each of the several times he lifted a cylinder of fingers and thumb to it, she managed not to laugh. ‘Whatever you’re having,’ she told him, and dialled the number. She was preparing to wait or even to be mocked by the engaged tone when a woman’s voice said ‘Charlie Churchill.’
‘He was asking for people with stories.’
‘If it’s clean you’re on.’
‘It’s a ghost story.’
‘That’s seasonal. Is it true? Did it happen to you?’
Amy saw Rob light up a picture of a kitchen at the end of the hall and step into it. The question, or her answer which until this instant she hadn’t been sure of, seemed to focus her mind like a telescope directed at the past, stripping away all her peripheral impressions. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘We’ll put you on after this record. What’s your name?’
Amy thought of offering an alias, but the only one she could find in her head was Hepzibah, which would sound like a joke. ‘Amy,’ she admitted.
‘I’m putting you through to the studio now. Don’t speak until you’re spoken to,’ the woman told her, and at once a man’s voice began to croon at Amy from two directions, from the kitchen and close to her ear. ‘May all your Christmases be white,’ it finished still more lingeringly. ‘As they sing at National Front Christmas parties,’ Charlie Churchill said, and rebuked himself with a stage cough. ‘I’m only pretending I’m not touched. Brings a lump to my pipe every time I hear it, that song. Reminds me of when I was in short trousers, my own, I mean, but I promised Oscar I wouldn’t mention last night. Here’s someone to tell us a funny instead. Amy, are you there at the end of my wire?’
‘It isn’t funny,’ she protested, and heard herself attempt to say so in the kitchen before her dislocated voice turned into a metallic screech.
‘Oh, that went straight through my orifices. Have you got a radio on?’
‘Someone has.’
‘Tell them to twiddle their knob or take it somewhere else and shut their portal.’
Before she could tell Rob to do something of the kind, the kitchen had become a slab of pine. ‘He has,’ she said.
‘That’s more like it. Like ointment in my apertures, that is. So what were you saying, it won’t be a joke?’
‘Dead serious.’
‘Ghosts would have to be, wouldn’t they? Now, now, Churchill. Stiffen the visage. Tell us all about it, Amy. Where are you from?’
‘Partington.’
‘Fair little community. I’ve stuck my bum on a stool or two in the Scales & Bible. I didn’t catch a glimpse of any ghoulies there, though. No goblin available while I was in town. You’re going to tell me what I missed, Amy, are you?’
‘When you let me.’
‘I’ll have Oscar come and gag me. The stage is yours. Tell us where we have to go in Partington if we want a scare.’
‘Nazarill.’
‘That’s the big manor kind of place, isn’t it, oop on t’ill.’
‘It’s where I live.’
‘Lucky girl. I’d call that living. So what are you saying, something’s popping up there that shouldn’t be?’
‘I think so.’
‘Great blessed blunderbusses, I can feel my vessels shrinking. Have you seen it?’
Amy felt as if each of his questions brought the memory creeping closer. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘My membranes are quivering. What did you see?’
She drew a breath which tasted like another toke. The brevity of her answers wasn’t all the fault of his loquaciousness; she could hear her own locked-up muffled voice beyond the kitchen door, echoing or anticipating her. ‘It was through a window,’ she and her voice said.
‘At least it was outside, eh? I thought you had it coming up behind me for a second there.’
‘No, it was inside. I was looking in.’ She still was; her inner vision was adjusting to the dimness of a corner of her mind. Her words were causing her to see more than she wanted to see, and she might have tried to outshout her locked-up voice if she hadn’t had to broadcast what she’d seen. ‘It was in a room downstairs, in the dark.’
‘Doe
s someone live there? Did you tell—’
‘Nobody does now.’ All at once it was clear to her that the room she was remembering had occupied part of the area where Dominic Metcalf had lived. ‘Maybe nobody should,’ she blurted.
‘Isn’t that a bit—’
‘I haven’t told you what I saw yet. You tell me if you’d like to live there.’ She heard both her voices falter, and struggled to control at least one of them. ‘It was dead, but it was laughing, only it didn’t make a sound. It looked as if it’d been locked away for a long time and forgotten about. It didn’t have much of its skin left but it was reaching for me. Maybe it wanted to tell me something. And it hadn’t any eyes left, but I think there were insects—’
‘Were there. Creepy. Insects. Yeekh. Any more of that and my pudding won’t stay down. I reckon after all that we need our cockles warming, so here’s—’
‘I haven’t finished. That isn’t all that’s happened. Someone’s cat was hanged in front of Nazarill, and I think—’
‘I think we’ll have a record.’ Immediately a brass band tethered by a disco beat struck up ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’, and then Churchill’s voice, abandoning its camp modulations, pressed itself against her ear. ‘And I’ll tell you what else I think if you’ll pardon my frankness. I think your parents ought to take you to see someone if you’re having such unhealthy ideas. Ghosts are one thing, nothing wrong with ghosts at Christmas, but the stuff you were saying goes too far. Cruelty to animals, as well. Have a thought for other people’s feelings.’
‘Don’t blame me. I didn’t make any of it up.’ At this point Amy realised why she sounded wrong to herself: she was no longer audible beyond the door. She felt as if she’d been robbed of too much of her voice, especially since the dialling tone had flattened her last few words against her ear. She dropped the receiver in its cradle and gazed towards the kitchen. The door stayed shut, unmoved by the thumping carol, and she wondered if listening to her could have disturbed Rob. Being shut out made her feel shut into herself, which frightened her. ‘Rob?’ she called.
The mechanical drumming might have been growing louder, the door appeared to shift, but she couldn’t be sure what she was hearing or seeing until the kitchen opened its light to her. Rob paced into the hall, pausing to pick up from a shelf one of two glasses of Coke. She saw the air fizzing above them, and thought he resembled a solemn-faced wizard bearing potions. ‘What did you think?’ he said.
“That maybe he should remember what it’s like when people don’t want to know you.’
‘Not about him, about the cat being hanged. Wait, I’ll turn this off.’
‘Not yet. I want to hear if he says anything about me.’
Rob handed her a glass as the record blew a final blast and drummed itself into silence. ‘Nothing like a brass band, is there? I love to watch their trombones going up and down,’ Charlie Churchill said. ‘Now here’s a lady to tell us about her plum-duff that kept popping out of its container. I’ll tell you, Flora, I’ve had problems like that myself…’
‘Switch him off,’ Amy said, and pressed the icy glass against her cheek. ‘I feel as if I don’t exist.’
‘Well, you do. You must do. You think, and you’re going to tell me what you thought about the cat.’
Amy gulped a mouthful of her drink, which seemed to rise like a gentle firework through her skull as its cold wake plunged into her stomach. ‘I don’t think anybody hanged it. I think the place made a sacrifice to itself.’
‘Might make sense.’
‘Think so?’
‘Why not, if things got worse after that.’
At first she wasn’t sure if he was serious, and then she didn’t know if she wanted him to be quite so amenable; she might have liked to be dissuaded after all. But he was fetching a sheet of paper which a green magnetic pig had held against the refrigerator door. ‘Here’s a message for us.’
AT YOUR AUNT’S, the small brisk felt-tipped capitals said. BACK BY MIDNIGHT. ENOUGH VEG LASAG FOR TWO IN FREEZER. ‘Do you want some?’ said Rob.
‘If you are,’ Amy said, and was suddenly hungry as well as weighed down by her cold hands and feet. She sat on a slice of the pine of the kitchen while Rob microwaved the lasagna and ladled half of it onto her plate before sitting on the opposite bench. ‘Good,’ she said once she’d fed herself a forkful, and was digging up another when he said ‘So don’t you want to talk about it any more?’
‘That place.’
‘Never mind, I’ll put the CD with Clouds Like Dreams on.’
‘No, I do. He didn’t let me say. What I said I saw, that was when I was little. I’d forgotten all about it. I must have thought I didn’t really see it, but now I know I did.’
‘You mean the cat made you remember. The sacrifice.’
She hadn’t meant that, and she found the notion disturbing for no reason she could articulate to herself. She could only shrug and fork lasagna into her mouth. ‘So what are you going to do?’ Rob said.
‘I’ve done it.’ Once she’d swallowed she tried to sound more convincing. ‘I told people.’
‘You’re going to stay there, I mean.’
‘Nowhere else I can go, is there?’
Rob lowered his head and turned lasagna over with his fork. ‘Maybe if I asked them…’
‘Don’t yet. I can’t help it, I’m worried about my dad. I don’t want to leave him there by himself.’
‘He isn’t, is he?’
‘He hasn’t got my mum. That must be part of his problem.’
‘You mean you miss her.’
‘Of course I do, but that isn’t going to bring her back.’
‘But if what you saw isn’t alive…’
‘That’s different. I don’t think that’s ever been away.’
‘Since when?’
‘That’s one of the things I have to find out. Maybe someone who heard me will know. I wish they hadn’t cut me off. There was more stuff I wanted to tell people about.’
‘You can tell me.’
‘You’re just you,’ Amy said, and patted his free hand to reassure him that in some ways he was enough. Since he didn’t look persuaded, she told him everything she could remember: how the old man had insisted somebody hadn’t come out of Nazarill for the photograph; how something had let him into Dominic Metcalf’s apartment, and what he’d seen there; how she was sure that was where she’d seen it too. Rob gave each new revelation a blink so lingering she could almost see his eyelashes catching on the air. When she shrugged to indicate she’d finished he said ‘I don’t think I’d want to live there.’
‘It’s only on the ground floor, and nobody’s living down there now.’
He seemed more heartened by this than Amy discovered she was, but she could see no point in admitting that aloud. They finished their meal, and were at the sink, admiring the rainbow bubbles while they washed up, when he glanced at the flat square clock. ‘Back in a, have to record It’s a Wonderful Life for my mother.’
Amy recovered the plates and utensils from under the froth and having rinsed them, abandoned them on the draining-board. She followed Rob into the living-room, where six increasingly older and less fat-faced photographs of him adorned the chunky ridge of his father’s homemade mantelpiece, in time to see the title of the film. ‘Leave it on. I used to like it when I was little,’ she said.
At first she couldn’t see why she had. She sat on the couch and moved over for Rob, which reminded her of cuddling up to her mother the last time she’d watched the film. Now she seemed to be watching people so dead they couldn’t even make themselves be in colour, and the setting of a town where everyone knew everyone else no longer appealed to her. Though he was gawky and drawling, the hero married his girlfriend, apparently because she considered these qualities to be endearing, and Amy remembered how they fared: their luck turned so bad that he tried to throw himself off a bridge and had to have an angel show him the town needed him. That must have been the part she liked, his being a
ble to see the future and transform it, but the significance for her of the scene had changed; she felt as though the darkness of the film was closing around her. She was living in the future her mother had been unable to take back, and she snuggled against Rob in search of comfort.
When he slipped an arm around her shoulders she settled closer to him and looked up at him. Her eyes were telling him how to continue, and less eventually and clumsily than the gangling character might have, he did: he found her open mouth with his and gently squeezed her breasts before slipping his hand under her sweater. When she disengaged herself so as to pull the sweater and her black bead necklace over her head he ran his hand up her back and, since she leaned forward, unhooked her bra. She peeled his sweater off and wrapped her arms around him.
The whole of her seemed focused where their bodies met—in the mating dance of their tongues, the same tastes in their mouths, the silky touch of his chest hairs on her nipples, the lump of him between her legs as she straddled his lap—yet all this felt distant, already remembered. Without warning she was afraid to imagine the future in which it would be a memory; worse, she felt as though she’d forgotten she already had. She thrust her tongue on his and pressed as much of herself against him as she could, but she could still sense the future lying in wait for her. As soon as the film announced its resolution with a flourish of an orchestra, and Rob groped for the video control, she lifted herself off him and picked up her bra from the carpet. ‘Better be going.’
‘Oh,’ Rob said, and flattening the disappointment out of his voice ‘Okay.’
‘I’m feeling a bit… Too much…’ That was vague enough to sound true, but insufficient as an excuse. She drew sloppy circles with her fingertips close to her forehead. ‘Maybe I should go to bed.’
‘There’s one here.’ He must have decided that presumed too much, because he added hastily ‘Shall I drive you?’
‘You don’t want to do that. I’m all right to walk.’
‘Walk you, then.’
‘Another time, Rob, would you mind crucially? I want to think.’
‘I didn’t know I stopped you.’
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 15