by Phil Rickman
At first, Helen Parrish looks oddly appropriate in the chapel, priestly in her grey cowl-neck sweater. They’ve altered the lighting so that you can see the pews behind her Gothic chair, receding into shadow. But, if Defford’s looking for stability from Helen, her hollow-eyed half-smile is not encouraging.
‘I don’t know that I can help you much with Ahmed. Didn’t really see how it happened.’
‘We’ll get to that,’ Grayle says. ‘Helen, after you finished your story you seemed drained.’
‘Mmm.’
‘But relieved?’
‘That I’d finally unloaded it, yes. When you’ve been carrying something around for so many years…’
‘When Ashley suggested the whole Diana incident was likely to be more about your own emotional state than, say, the location, you didn’t seem inclined to argue.’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘Why was that?’
Helen thinks about it over a long, tired breath.
‘Didn’t seem worth it. I suppose I didn’t care what she thought. Or anybody. Just glad to have told the story, in a very public way. I could argue all night and it wouldn’t alter Ashley’s world view. What’s the point? She is what she is.’
‘When you say—’
‘Doesn’t matter how anybody else explains it, who believes it and who doesn’t. It’s all just opinions. Scepticism, atheism – they’re just opinions, they’re not based on any kind of empirical knowledge. Anyway… it’s out there now for the crows to pick at. Joined all the other ghost stories out there.’
Helen looks sad but somehow not unhappy. She’s on a different level. Grayle’s fascinated. This is the programme doing what it needs to do.
‘Helen, earlier, when you were getting started, Ozzy made a smart remark, and—’
‘Smart remarks. There you go again.’
‘You still feel that?’
‘About Ahmed? Hmm. Not sure. Bit of an eye-opener, wasn’t it?’
‘What did you see?’
‘Saw there was someone missing from the circle, and then I saw him at the bottom of the room, and he seemed agitated. I thought his shoulders were shaking. Looked like he’d just got up without a word and started walking towards something. Not looking where he was going, knocking some of the candles off the table. And of course they went out, reducing visibility even more. And then I saw that he was genuinely crying. Thought it was laughter at first, but he doesn’t laugh much, does he? Not his style.’
‘You think he saw something. In the room.’
‘Perhaps he did. I don’t know. Or maybe something he saw or even something one of us said brought back some aspect of his own history that he’d buried.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know anything about his past. Something must’ve broken up his marriage, and I’d be surprised if it was just his mother-in-law jokes. Makes you…’
Helen goes quiet.
‘Go on.’
‘It does rather make you wonder if there isn’t something in this house – or what we’re doing here – that opens up doors into your subconscious mind. When I was describing what happened at Althorp, I really felt I was there. All the colours were alive – green and blue and white and so vibrant I wondered if all of you could somehow…’
Helen’s shaking her head, hands raised.
‘I think I should shut up.’
‘No, keep going, Helen, please.’
Through the windows of the booth Grayle sees rapt faces in the reality gallery watching her from both sides. If this programme has half the impact on the viewers…
‘Were you at any stage wondering if maybe you’d brought Diana herself into—?’
Stop. Don’t put words into…
‘When Ahmed was mumbling to himself,’ Helen says, ‘he was talking about a woman.’
‘Bleeding.’
‘Yes. Bleeding. I was thinking about Diana in the crash in the tunnel in Paris, but then I would, wouldn’t I? Had he entered my… field of vision? I don’t know how these things…’
‘None of us do.’
‘Oh God,’ Helen says, appalled, recovering her old self, ‘please edit this, or I’ll never work again.’
‘… but we have to channel our thinking according to the logic of the situation,’ Defford’s saying, back in gear now as Grayle slips into the live gallery. ‘If anybody saw anything, the chances are it wasn’t anything to do with Diana. If we’re looking for something that answers to the logic of this house, that’s not it. Jo, let’s open up a storyline here. Get somebody moving on it.’
Grayle slumps into her chair staring at him. It’s like she can see his aura, and it’s brightening again, a lurid yellow.
‘You’re thinking Trinity, aren’t you, Leo?’
‘I’m thinking that’s definitely got to be something worth following.’
‘Blood,’ Grayle says. ‘Abortion? That didn’t even happen here? And wasn’t it pre-empted, anyway, by a heart attack?’
He doesn’t reply. Grayle thinks of contagion. Something happens and Helen Parrish thinks of Diana and Defford thinks of Trinity Ansell and Ashley Palk thinks of the power of suggestion.
‘I think I need the bathroom,’ Grayle says.
In the nearest portaloo, she switches on her phone. First chance she’s had to check out Jo’s message.
Get rid of this when you’ve read it. My job’s on the line here. Ten minutes into transmission go round the back of the house. Gate into walled garden will be open. So will the chapel. Go in.
Ten minutes in. When Defford’s watching the first programme go out. When nobody will see someone walking round to the walled garden and the chapel. When nobody will miss her. What’s this about?
Outside, the wind’s on the rise, sending clouds scurrying across a fugitive moon. Grayle walks away from the porta-village to where she can see the house, only one corner of it lit and that dimly, like a dirty lantern.
It’s not about ghosts right now, it’s about people and how they react to their confinement and one another. Maybe that’s all it will ever be about: seven people trapped inside the glass of a dirty lantern.
When she gets back into the stable and the live gallery, Defford and Jo and a couple of the directors are on their feet, watching the pictures. Jo glances over her shoulder.
‘He’s on the move, Grayle.’
‘Ahmed?’
‘He could be coming down.’
49
Hurt
OZZY’S IN THE doorway, standing like some introverted only child at his first party. JESUS SAVES on his chest in white, with a fish symbol.
For long moments, nobody speaks to him.
Most of them have been talking about him behind his back, for the benefit of several million viewers, but now they’re embarrassed. Because what he did was embarrassing.
It’s like the tension has frozen the screens. It’s artificial, Grayle thinks. It’s just reality TV, for Chrissakes.
Even Rhys Sebold says nothing – Rhys who’s been defending Ozzy against the ridiculous claims that he might actually have been affected by this house. Rhys is in a black shirt open to a chained symbol that’s unlikely to be religious. He looks down at his feet in patent leather then over at Ashley Palk for backup.
In the end it’s Cindy who walks over to Ozzy.
‘How are you, boy? Feeling better?’
The room’s brighter now, all the fat candles back on the table, lit, and a match applied to the eight stubby candles projecting from the overhead hoop. Roger Herridge did this, without asking anyone.
It’s just over one hour to transmission when Ozzy clears his throat.
‘I wouldn’t mind telling my ghost story. If that’s all right.’
It isn’t all right in the gallery.
‘Shit.’
Defford’s chair is pushed back. According to the schedule, Ozzy isn’t due to say his piece until tomorrow after the Helen Parrish story has broken, thus swelling the viewing figures. And now a call’s come
in for Defford from Channel 4. He’s going to be out of the loop until after the first programme’s gone out, the other side of midnight. He’s going to miss the end of this, which means that he’s two steps behind. He bends to Jo.
‘Just… don’t get this wrong.’
Like she can alter anything. Like any of them can. Grayle’s glad when he’s gone. It eases the pressure on them to try to adapt everything to what Defford calls the logic of the situation.
It’s back to dirty lantern logic, now, which is no logic at all.
Ozzy says his school, up in Yorkshire, used to be a grammar school, then the poshest kind of state comprehensive. It was in an old building, late eighteenth century originally, some Victorian additions with flat-roofed 1960s projections.
It had a haunted room.
‘Science lab,’ Ozzy says. ‘Biology.’
He’s agreed to sit down, but not too near the fire. He’s broken up the arrangement of chairs set up for the storytelling session and sits in the centre of the chamber, on a hard chair. His back’s to the screen with its camera holes, so it’s all down to the false wall mirrors and the eyes between the ceiling beams.
‘I think it was only said to be haunted because it had this… skull. His name was Reg. Reg the skull. He was in this glass-fronted cupboard high up on one wall, and it was said that sometimes Reg would disappear from his cupboard and he’d be found somewhere else. Which I think actually did happen once, but that was some lads on their last day at school, having a laugh.’
Ozzy expels a little amused puff of air. In the gallery, Grayle takes Defford’s vacated seat next to Jo. This is weird, it’s like nothing happened earlier, like Ozzy’s mind just blanked it out. What if he does have some condition?
‘Used to be a lot of made-up stories about Reg – how he was the first school caretaker who fell off the roof, brains all over the quad, which explained the patched-up bits in his skull. So attached to the school he’d bequeathed his body to the biology department. Bollocks, obviously, but that’s what the first-formers got told. And how Reg’s ghost would be seen in the corridors with his rattly toolkit. There was also a complete set of human leg bones in a long drawer at the other end of the room, and another story was that other bits of Reg were hidden all over the school, and when his skull disappeared it was because he was trying to reassemble himself.’
One of the cameramen finds a close-up of Ozzy’s face, sweat-free and relaxed.
‘So the school was raising money for a minibus for educational trips, and me mate came up with this idea about how four of us would be sponsored to spend the night in sleeping bags in the lab… with Reg. Well, the teachers couldn’t refuse, but equally they couldn’t leave us alone on education authority premises all night. So one particular teacher agrees to come and check on us. He’s dead now or I wouldn’t be telling you this. I’m going to call him Cyril.’
Ozzy describes how they made a space in the centre of the room for the sleeping bags, and brought sandwiches and cans of Coke. One of the lads had this torch with coloured filters, and he kept shining it up on Reg so there’d be this evil-looking red skull grinning down at them.
‘Or green – that was the worst. You’d go to the lav and come back and there’d be this slimy light down the side of the door. Oh – should’ve said – it was a full moon – we had to do it on the night of the full moon, so it wasn’t much better when the torch was off. Old Reg grinning up on his shelf in a moonbeam, the black holes of his eyes. I didn’t like it. Well, I was a timid kid, I’m not scared to admit that. Makes me annoyed now to think of it. Wimpy little Arab.’
Grayle wonders how recently Ozzy’s kin were practising Muslims. To her knowledge, he hasn’t made any jokes about his family.
‘So during the night I put off going to the lav as long as I could, but we’d drunk a lot of Coke, and in the early hours I was in agony. All the others were asleep and I couldn’t hold out any longer. Got up, tried not to look at Reg. Go shuffling off down the corridor. On my way back, I encounter Cyril doing his rounds. Asks me if I’m all right. Says I’m looking a bit scared and I’m going, no I’m all right, sir, thank you, though I really didn’t want to go back in the biology lab. So when Cyril asked me if I’d like a mug of hot chocolate in the staff room…’
‘Oh dear.’
This is Herridge, ex-Eton or someplace like that. Ozzy gives him a look.
‘Yeah right. And we go down to the staffroom, and we sit down on the big plush sofa with our mugs of chocolate, and then the fucker’s all over me.’ Ozzy looking up, full into camera, brown eyes full of pain. ‘All over me.’
Squeezes his eyes closed.
‘Dynamite, or what?’ Jo whispers.
The monitor on Jo’s left has Ozzy’s audience, the camera finding Ashley Palk as she lifts a hand for attention.
‘Ozzy, I’m not being prurient, but when you say— I mean, what did this man actually do to you? You can say. In fact you should.’
Ozzy hesitates then shrugs.
‘Made me toss him off, Ashley.’
‘And you went along with that?’
‘Listen, I was scared shitless. I mean, already. Ghostly old Reg, you know? I was twelve! Twelve-year-olds were different back then, we didn’t even take drugs. Cyril… he wasn’t the gym teacher, but he played rugby with the sixth form, bought them pints down the pub. Big bloke, everybody’s mate, you know the sort. And in the staffroom we were far enough away from the science labs for nobody to hear me scream.’
‘You didn’t report him, afterwards?’
‘Easy to say that now, but you didn’t back then, did you? Popular teacher, Cyril. Everybody liked him. It was like bloody Jimmy Savile groping his way round the country, and lots of people knew and not a word cos he was such a lovely bloke, so-called.’
Ozzy stands up into silence.
‘And that’s why I don’t like ghost stories.’
In the gallery, Jo breathes in slowly.
‘Media are going to be down on this like a strike force.’
The quality of light in the chamber has altered, or so it seems to Grayle. It’s brighter, yet bleaker.
Rhys Sebold breaks the silence, going over to shake Ozzy’s hand.
‘Well done. I think your experience illustrates an important point about the way predatory paedophiles use a child’s fear of the supernatural.’
‘It was the other hand, actually, Rhys,’ Ozzy says.
Getting some nervous laughter, but Rhys has a point to make.
‘They use ghost stories, the way cults use religion.’
‘Let’s not go overboard,’ Roger Herridge says. ‘Your rather weak attempt to equate the supernatural with sexual predation says, I think, rather more about you. This man evidently was just an opportunist.’
‘Given me a few nightmares, though, Roger, over the years,’ Ozzy says. ‘Reg and Cyril have become like an item. In my subconscious, if you like. And now Cyril’s dead, just as dead as Reg… OK, I don’t believe in the supernatural. But it still scares me. That make sense?’ He sits up. ‘No not scares, it disgusts me. Makes me go cold. Like a phobia.’
‘It’s a trigger,’ Rhys says. ‘One’s become a trigger for the other. Perverted sex, perverted beliefs.’
‘In which case…’ Behind him, Eloise is looking entirely unsympathetic. ‘I mean, what the hell are you doing here? Because it’s trigger after trigger, here, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe that’s why he’s here,’ Rhys says. ‘To exorcize it. I’m using that word in its most rational sense.’
Looks at Ozzy who finds a wry smile.
‘If you think this guy knows me better than I know myself, you’re probably right.’
‘OK.’ Helen Parrish raises herself up. ‘So you feel better now, Ozzy? Now that it’s out in the open?’
‘Not sure about anything, Helen. All I think I’m saying is that you don’t have to believe in something to be scared of it. Buggered if I’m going into therapy, mind.’
‘Yes,
sure, I get all that. But it doesn’t tell us anything about the woman, does it?’
‘Woman?’
‘Here? In here? Over there? The woman you thought you saw? Who you thought was bleeding? Help me out here, Ozzy, I’ve lost the plot.’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’
Grayle and Jo look at one another. A flurry of movement in the monitor, Eloise on her feet.
‘Oh, you so bloody do, Ahmed! You’re in total denial. I’d be very surprised if all you’d had over the years were dreams.’
‘Oh, Elly, you’re such a—’
‘No!’ She’s standing directly in front of him. ‘You can’t just blank it out. You can’t go on fooling yourself for ever. We’re all psychic to an extent, and if you just go on hanging out with negative people like Sebold, you’ll wind up an alcoholic or getting sectioned, trust me.’
‘Yeah, go on,’ Rhys says to Eloise, ‘go for him while his defences are down. There’s no such thing as psychic. There’s only fraud.’
‘Oh, you are such a fucking idiot, Sebold.’ She spins at him. ‘Big mouth, opinionated, politicized… but going nowhere. Occasionally useful for winding people up on tabloid radio, but blind to what’s right in front of you. And he… he can go on denying it until they take him away.’
This is personal, Grayle a little scared at how fast the situation’s escalating. They haven’t been together two full days yet. Even on the celebrity Big Brothers she’s seen, it usually takes over a week to reach this level of antipathy.
She watches Rhys Sebold trying to control his rage, small tightenings in his narrow face. Eloise’s little fists bunched, a line of perspiration above her upper lip, like she’s been made-up for some hothouse drama. Is that a moment of love–hate electric sexuality, a pulse of blue light between her and Rhys? As if everyone else in the room has felt the charge, they’re all separating, a wide shot showing the diaspora. An experienced director called Lee is supervising, giving rapid instructions. A muted excitement in the gallery.
‘Hang on.’ Jo’s pointing. ‘Listen to this.’
One camera’s never left Ozzy. Now Helen Parrish has pulled her chair close to his, is talking quietly to him. Ozzy’s staring at the false wall, its mirrors reflecting candlelight as a blaze.