by Phil Rickman
‘Well, children, quite simple, it is. First, we are asked to state briefly how we would define ghosts.’
‘Bollocks?’ Ozzy says diffidently. ‘That brief enough, or would you like me to reduce it to a single syllable?’
‘I think that sets the pattern admirably, Austin. Eloise?’
She’s calmer now, but wary, inevitably, after the incident of the elder. She’s shed her shawl to reveal a crocheted black top, through which her black bra is visible. Her nails are black. Once a goth…
‘Spirits of the dead,’ she says unequivocally.
She’s chosen the seat at the bottom of the table, well away from Ozzy and Rhys Sebold, whose radio session with her was sent to Cindy a week ago. She hasn’t spoken to either of them directly. Biding her time, no doubt.
Cindy nods gravely, looks next at Roger Herridge – suit and tie, big hair.
‘Place memory,’ Herridge says. ‘Recording in stone. Imprint.’
‘So without personality?’
‘Only in the most obvious sense. If this was, say, the ghost of an angry person, you might get a sense of excitation… wrath, disturbance. Which might be hard to live with, even though essentially harmless in a physical sense.’
‘Invariably?’
Roger’s smile is rueful.
‘One should never say that.’
‘Thank you, boy. A good answer. Helen?’
‘God… I dunno.’
Helen Parrish looks more relaxed than any of them. And rather fetching in a sloppy jumper and black jeans, Cindy thinks. In fact, if he was normal…
‘Try.’
‘Well, you know… I do think there’s something. Levels of personal experience as yet uncharted by science, how about that? All those centuries of ghost stories, you can’t just dismiss it all out of hand.’
‘I think I just did, didn’t I?’ Ozzy Ahmed says.
‘Only because a put-down is usually funnier. You strike me as a man who must always go for what is funnier. In the interests of sustaining an income, surely.’
Ozzy blinks. Helen shrugs.
‘And, as they say, I know what I saw. And it doesn’t bother me greatly if you all think I’m deluded because I can’t prove otherwise. If this was something we could easily get a handle on, we’d all know by now.’
‘You can get a handle,’ Eloise insists. ‘If you want to. Perhaps you don’t, which is fine.’
‘We should perhaps…’ Cindy raises a finger, ‘…build up to the arguments. Mr Sebold?’
Rhys is wearing one of those crisp, striped shirts with a white collar. His body is gym-slim, his hair thick but short, razored at the sides. Good-looking boy and well aware of it. His mouth is wide, as befits his big voice, tossing Cindy a loose smile.
‘So where do you stand, Mr Lewis?
Of course. Rhys is an interviewer. He asks the questions. Cindy feigns embarrassment.
‘Me? Oh, heavens, all of the above. And more. Ghosts are various and complicated. But also, I suppose, relatively simple. They inhabit areas of our senses which have become moribund through disuse. They live in our derelict houses.’
‘You’re saying we make them up.’
‘Far from it. What I—’
‘Because we do make them up. For whatever purpose suits us at the time. That’s my answer. We invent them.’
Rhys stand up and walks away from the table, as if his work here is done. Cindy calls after him.
‘Or do they invent us?’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Haven’t the faintest idea. Now…’ Cindy peers around the table. ‘Who’s left?’
‘Just me, I’m afraid.’
‘Ashley. My apologies.’
She’s looking fresh and relaxed in a magnolia dress, swingy blond hair, no jewellery. A schoolteacher on holiday. She sips white wine.
‘As a psychologist, I could bore you all at length, but I shall restrict m’self to words like “projection” and “auto-suggestion”.’
‘As distinct from “hallucination” and “self-delusion”?’
‘That would be offensive.’
How nice we are being to one another, Cindy thinks. And how nice the room feels, quietly Elizabethan, not oppressive. He wonders: was the elder a device? And whose? If so, it could hardly have worked better: a sudden darkness followed by some companionable light relief – which no viewer will trust. He consults the creamy notepaper under the circular candle-holder which haloes them like the biblical light in a Rembrandt.
‘Next question. Again, quite simple. Apart from the money, why are we all here?’
Sitting beside Jo Shepherd in the live gallery, Grayle watches on another monitor as Jordan arrives in the chamber with his bier and its cargo of fresh logs. The thick door between the two adjacent rooms is shut. Jordan’s alone.
Well, not entirely. Let’s not forget the cameramen behind the false wall with its inset two-way mirrors. They are the ghosts in here.
To make this kind of traffic possible, boards have been cut to use as ramps to get the bier up and down the few steps. What this suggests to Grayle is that Defford knows full well that this is no ordinary wood cart and is hoping one of the residents knows enough about historical death-procedures to get spooked and spread it around.
Jordan unloads some wood that Grayle doesn’t recognize. Pale, flaking bark, silver birch? The camera’s behind him, so that his face is not seen. He looks timeless in a leather apron and a kind of old-fashioned watch cap – not the type of headgear Grayle’s seen him in before – so you don’t even get to check out his haircut.
A camera between the ceiling beams observes his hands piling the elder on the bier for removal, which itself must be an infringement of some folkloric no-no. The fire’s burning low, the main elder log already collapsed into pink and orange ash. Jordan uses one of the new blocks of wood to push it back. Then he nests the block in the hot ash, arranging a funnel of smaller ones either side.
‘In case you were wondering, Leo actually hadn’t planned that,’ Jo whispers to Grayle. ‘The elder incident. He loves how it happened, but he’s disturbed that it did.’
‘How much does he have planned?’
Jo comes on all wide-eyed.
‘Did I say he had anything arranged, Grayle? I don’t think I did. That would be against the whole ethos of the programme.’
‘Sure,’ Grayle says between her teeth.
Damn right it would.
‘Let’s not dress this up,’ Helen Parrish says under the kindly candlelight. ‘We’re all losers. We’re trying to recover something of our professional lives before we’re unfit to be seen on the box after four p.m.’
‘Except for him.’ Eloise nodding at Ozzy Ahmed. ‘He’s doing rather well, it pains me to say.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Cindy running with it. ‘Austin’s behaving terribly badly, he is, simply by turning up here and robbing a decent loser of an opportunity to get back on his feet. Thought-less, see. Selfish.’
Ozzy looks wry, says nothing. Fundamental rule: if you can’t think of anything funny to say, look wry and say nothing. But he’ll be looking for a way to establish that Cindy is not the house’s number one comedian. Eloise, who’s drunk a little wine, waves her empty glass.
‘I know why he’s doing it.’
The reflections of at least five candles glimmer from that glass. There’s a scraping noise from the inglenook.
‘His marriage is over,’ Eloise says, impish glee behind seaweed hair. ‘No mother-in-law to torment any more. He needs a whole new act. He needs us – all of us, except possibly his mate, Rhys. We’re new material. Soon as he gets to his room he’ll be making notes, scribble, scribble, scribble.’
‘Unfair,’ Ozzy says at last, more of his native Manchester coming through. ‘I actually like mixing with people like you. Used to enjoy visiting me mum-in-law, meeting the coven.’
‘He’s a hypocrite,’ Eloise says, succinctly.
Ozzy grins, waves a hand casually, as if
he’s swatting her.
‘Never said they were sane, but I enjoyed their company.’ Shaking his head, smiling nostalgically. ‘Muppets.’
Cindy notes that he hasn’t given them a better reason for his presence. Neither has he denied his friendship with Rhys Sebold or his intention to use this gathering of eccentrics in future comedy routines.
Aware of movement in the fireplace, he turns his head, but is disinclined to mention it. Ashley Palk also glances at the fire. Could be production people, whose presence they’re expected to ignore, just as nobody commented on the rumbling from next door a couple of minutes ago. This is television.
Helen Parrish says, ‘They going to tell us what happened here? A murder? How old’s the house, anyway?’
Eloise and Herridge answer simultaneously. She says late medieval, he says Elizabethan. He bows to her.
‘Let’s compromise on Tudor. But you could be right, could be older. Stone-colour suggests… hard to say, could be Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset. And if you want to know why I’m here, it’s very simple and nothing to do with money or being political driftwood. I want to see a ghost.’
Eloise turns to him, interested.
‘You never have?’
‘Absolutely fascinated by them since childhood. Written three books about them. Made a practice, whilst travelling the country, of sleeping in the most haunted room of every haunted inn I could find.’
‘And a haunted flower shop,’ Ozzy murmurs, ‘where you wake up and smell roses from the pillow on the left and gardenias from the pillow on the right. Spooky.’
Roger Herridge laughs, and it’s not forced either, Cindy notes.
‘I suppose this begs the question, Roger – why do you still believe?’
‘I haven’t seen God, either, Cindy, but I still go to church.’
‘That,’ Rhys Sebold says from over by the door, ‘is ridiculous.’
‘You may think so.’
‘Not that, Roger – well, that is ridiculous, but I meant what’s happening through there. Come and have a look.’
He’s opened the door. From the chamber on the other side comes an uneven, weighty rolling: wobbly wheels on stone flags.
Ozzy Ahmed gets up, followed by Roger Herridge. The women don’t move, being above all this. Cindy turns his chair to observe.
‘There’s a kind of yokel here,’ Rhys says, looking into the main chamber. ‘Quiet, now, we don’t want to scare him away. What you doing, mate?’
No reply. Rhys doesn’t give up; he’s an interviewer.
‘Chop this wood yourself?’
Ozzy opens the door wider, amusement squeaking in his throat.
‘What has he got on? It’s like a fucking troll uniform.’
‘Let’s not torment the poor chap,’ Roger Herridge says. ‘He’s obviously been told not to speak to us. He’s just bringing in more logs.’
‘No he’s not, he’s taking them out. What’s that about? Nice cart, though, cock.’
Roger bends into the room.
‘That’s interesting.’
‘What is?’ Rhys says.
‘It’s a bier. Funeral bier.’
‘What, you mean for carrying…?’
Rhys takes a step back. Cindy hears the cart rolling away down the passage.
‘Corpses,’ Roger says.
‘You’re kidding.’ Ozzy peering in. ‘This a joke or what? Is there also a secret panel in the wall and when some bugger opens it a fucking skeleton falls out? No, geddoff his back, Rhys, they probably don’t want him to speak to us, avoid paying him Equity rates.’
The women are quiet, Eloise’s eyes dark and smoky, watchful behind the candles’ aura.
Cindy ponders. Evidently, a man has been sent to replace the elder logs with something less offensive. But on a bier? He hears the rolling, grinding sound in his head, those wooden wheels. Were they, the Seven, meant to be aware of this going on, and in a fairly sinister way? If Defford hasn’t mentioned any of it to him, well, why should he? Defford is a seasoned professional. He’ll have constructed his sets with care. It’s in his interests to create a general air of uncertainty and apprehension. And, amongst the residents, a fermenting mistrust of one another – essential, that.
‘It’s OK,’ Roger Herridge says. ‘He’s gone.’
They come back into the dining room, Rhys Sebold closing the oak door, letting the wooden latch fall like a little guillotine. He looks annoyed. Cindy hears Eloise’s indrawn breath, gives her a warning look: say nothing.
Ozzy rubs his hands.
‘I really like the idea of the funeral buggy.’
Roger Herridge turns to him with understandable suspicion.
‘No, I do,’ Ozzy says. ‘You reckon when we get evicted, we all go out on that? Laid out? One by one?’
Strangely, nobody laughs. Ozzy doesn’t give up.
‘Roger with a little bunch of flowers on his chest?’
‘Let it go, mate,’ Rhys says.
43
The rusty fender
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Eloise is summoned to the chapel to talk to Grayle.
How they do this, a bell bongs and the voice of Matthew Barnes – he sounds like a monk – comes through the speaker in the tapestry. ‘Eloise to the chapel, please.’ It’s a recording. Barnes has done a summons for each of the residents, so he doesn’t have to be there the entire time. In fact, Grayle’s never seen him – or maybe she has and just doesn’t recognize him; he’s a radio face.
The green light comes on. Grayle pulls in a breath.
‘Good evening, Eloise.’
‘Is it?’
‘Not been a great one for you, huh?’
Eloise has pulled back her hair, applied a rubber band. Been into the bathroom, washed her face clean of make-up, though her eyes are still dark. She looks like a corrupted schoolgirl, still vulnerable in spite of everything she’s said yes to.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’m not mad, you know.’
‘We do know that.’
‘Old beliefs, they weren’t just invented. They came out of a time when people were sensitive to the moods and the vagaries of nature. When you had to fit in with the natural world, when people didn’t think they could trample over everything, and fracking and all this abuse.’
As suggested by Jo, Grayle gets Eloise to explain the folklore surrounding the elder tree, Judas Iscariot, all that stuff. It can be edited and fitted subtly around what happened at the inglenook.
‘We don’t yet know how that happened,’ Grayle tells her. ‘But we apologize for any offence. Eloise, what do you think of the other residents?’
‘They’re OK. I mean, they’re OK so far.’
‘Are there any of them you seem to connect with?’
‘Well, I knew Cindy before. He doesn’t change. He knows his stuff. Roger Herridge seems fairly well-meaning. Not as much of a conman as I’d expected. I’ve never met a politician who was honest. Maybe he’s realized what’s important. Helen Parrish… I don’t know. She seems OK, but I don’t really know where she’s coming from. I’m going to wait and hear what she has to say.’
‘Ashley?’
Eloise wrinkles her nose.
‘She’s just the token sceptic. Just comes out with psychological crap. I’ve heard it all before. Doesn’t impress me. Just hides a completely flat mind.’
‘Which leaves…’
‘Yeah, I know who it leaves. I’d forgotten about them. They’re just nonentities, those guys. You can tell why they’re mates, both just out for everything they can get. Atheism’s cool right now, OK, let’s have some of that.’
‘They’ve offended you in the past?’
‘I did Sebold’s radio show and Ahmed was on it, and they took the piss out of me, non-stop. I didn’t expect intelligent. Sad bastards on late-night trash radio. They’ll go through the next week determined to see nothing and sneer at any of us who do. Well, fuck them.’
‘Do you have any feelings about the house it
self, Eloise?’
‘It’s not a warm place in any sense. I don’t feel it welcomes us, or what you’re doing here. But then I’m not sure any house would. Which sounds a bit hypocritical after agreeing to take part. I can probably give you a better opinion after spending the night here.’
*
The night.
This isn’t like Big Brother, where they sleep in dormitories, all together. This isn’t about turning them back into kids. Each has a separate room, with an en suite bathroom and a bell to awaken them for breakfast. Cameras will watch over them as they sleep, but there are none in the bathrooms. This is not about voyeurism.
At least not in that sense.
Most of them go up before one a.m. to rooms with boarded windows, a wardrobe each, a mirror and a bedside table with a lamp. The single beds are plain, with headboards of antique pine; nobody gets a four-poster.
The residents emerge from their bathrooms mostly in robes or dressing gowns. On one monitor Eloise is switching out the lamp before sliding into bed. On another Ozzy Ahmed is not scribbling in a notebook.
When the lights go out, there’s no infrared to make people look like they’re in another dimension. At least Defford stuck to that.
He’s quit the live gallery now, leaving a couple of all-night producers and Jo and Grayle amongst the screens. Grayle watches the house tightening into the dark. Ashley Palk comes out of the bathroom into quite a large bedroom, the single bed looking isolated in one corner. She’s wearing a long, dark nightdress, low cut. As she crosses the room, Grayle realizes which room this is, looks away. Perhaps Ashley’s the best person to have it.
Only two people remain in the chamber, chairs pulled close to the ingle, the fire bronzing their faces. Late-night chat, like after the kids have gone to bed. Helen Parrish has a cigarette going.
‘I suppose I came out of normal journalism too soon, all those years ago. Once you’ve been a TV-face, you’re over for everything else.’
Cindy nodding, his beret on his lap.
‘Couple of years ago,’ Parrish says, ‘I applied for a subeditor’s job on an evening paper. Turned me down. The editor said he couldn’t believe I’d be satisfied with the subs desk.’