Interviewing the Dead

by David Field

  ‘That is easy to prescribe as a theory,’ Matthew muttered, ‘but less easy to appreciate when seeking to convince a street corner full of drunks that temperance is a virtue.’

  ‘Quite. Anyway, off you go to your Bible class — you’ll be pleased to learn that I finally granted your request for a smaller room, which should at least preserve your throat for the weekly challenge down at the Docks.’

  That weekly challenge came round soon enough and two days later Matthew was back to his old familiar preaching ground, on Wapping High Street, alongside the entrance to the basin that led into the West Dock. He called in at the grocery shop whose proprietor was always happy to loan him an empty banana crate, on which Matthew would perch self-consciously as he preached the Gospel to passers-by on their way to the Saturday street market just down the road.

  A few doors down was the ‘Ratcliffe Arms’, a slightly better class of public house located in the lowest part of the East End. Matthew would often experience hecklers rolling out of the establishment, having consumed more than was good for them as they squandered the last of the week’s pay they’d received the previous day, leaving their womenfolk to search among the tradesmen’s barrows further down the street for cheap food that would keep the family fed for the week ahead.

  Preaching on a Wapping street corner every Saturday was one of the most challenging tasks undertaken by Matthew, but he always fortified himself with the thought that he was pioneering bravely in the purest tradition of his great hero John Wesley, who with his brother Charles had undertaken similar work in the days when the word of God was even less welcome than in more recent times. The early Wesleyan preachers had regularly been pelted with rotten fruit and occasionally physically attacked, by the very souls they were endeavouring to save, whereas for Matthew it was usually nothing worse than obscene heckling, embarrassing and demeaning though that was.

  Today seemed to be progressing normally, as Matthew did his best to advise those passing his upturned banana box that God was always with them and would always answer their prayers. There was, he insisted, a far better world beyond this one — a golden Paradise to which the good would always be granted admission, regardless of their current position in society.

  ‘There are no rich men in Heaven,’ he told them in a loud voice, ‘and there are no pockets in a shroud. For the Lord Jesus told us, while on this earth, that the Kingdom of Heaven is open to all, regardless of rank or wealth. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”. Those were our Lord Jesus’s own words, so take comfort, my friends. “Blessed are the Poor” was another thing he taught us.’

  ‘I bet he weren’t all that poor, all the same,’ a woman called out as she clutched three children to her skirts, to be followed by a roughly dressed working man who yelled, ‘Who were yer precious fuckin’ Jesus workin’ for, anyroad? If he were really poor, like yer sez, then ’e musta bin a coal-backer like me.’

  ‘He worked for God,’ Matthew replied, confident in his answer. ‘He relied on others to provide him with the necessities of life as he wandered the Holy Land spreading the wonderful news about God’s love for all men.’

  ‘Nellie Reilly loves all men, an’ all,’ came another voice from the rapidly gathering crowd. ‘For sixpence a go, anyroad.’

  ‘But the love of God transcends all physical considerations,’ Matthew persisted above the ensuing laughter. ‘It is a love that comes from pure spiritual grace.’

  ‘That isn’t all that’s coming at us from Spirit,’ called out a tall man who’d been lounging against a tenement wall, apparently in an effort to remain upright. ‘What’s your precious God doing about all those evil creatures coming up out of the ground? Tell us that, then — there’s been eight deaths already.’

  There were shouts of approval for this question and Matthew was suddenly on shaky ground. The man sounded half educated and was probably in possession of more facts about plague pit manifestations than Matthew was. The people of the East End were terrified and terrified people look for saviours. If Matthew couldn’t convince them that these recent events were not the Devil’s work, then he would lose all credibility as a preacher for God. And yet he could hardly hope to convince them, at this stage, that the real culprit was a cactus flower.

  ‘The manifestations of evil come only to those who stray from the paths of righteousness,’ Matthew argued. ‘All those who encountered the alleged creatures from Hell had been consuming the Devil’s brew.’

  ‘So are you saying that everyone who has a quiet drink at the end of a hard day’s labour is going to Hell?’ the same man asked. ‘And what the fuck do you know about it anyway?’

  ‘Of course I’m not saying that,’ Matthew backtracked in an effort to restore the discussion to a more general level. ‘I’m merely pointing out that one of the evils that flows from the consumption of liquor is a dangerous loss of reason.’

  The man heaved himself off the wall and lurched menacingly through the crowd, pushing men, women and children roughly aside as he bore down on Matthew. ‘You calling me mad, you ignorant Bible pusher?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Matthew attempted to reason with him, ‘but everyone here can see that you’ve had a few and are perhaps in no condition to be arguing with me about the beautiful story that the Bible brings us regarding the work of Jesus.’

  ‘You calling me a bleeding drunk now as well, are you?’ the man demanded, spittle froth flowing from his mouth as he reached the foot of Matthew’s banana box and looked up.

  Matthew swallowed hard, realising that he’d come too far to back down and must now show the man up for the drunken loudmouth that he was. ‘Well, you’re clearly not sober,’ was all he managed before the man gave an angry roar and grabbed Matthew by the legs, pulling him down into the roadway with a sickening thump.

  Most of the crowd roared their appreciation, while others called on the man to leave Matthew be, but there was no stopping him as he clawed for Matthew’s eyes. Matthew managed to avert his head, but only partially and long hard fingernails ripped down his cheeks before he was able to push the man off him and rise to his feet.

  It looked for all the world like the start of an illegal prize fight, as the two men squared up to each other. Matthew’s assailant was much taller than him, but his survival instincts told him that the idiot would be slowed in his movements by the effects of the liquor he’d clearly consumed fairly recently and he wisely waited until the man unwisely lunged at him with a raised fist. Matthew parried the intended blow with a sideways sweep of his left arm, then struck back with a straight punch to the man’s head with his right fist.

  The man looked dazed for a moment, then wobbled uncertainly on shaky legs before falling backwards into the roadway with a sickening thud. The crowd cheered and jeered as Mathew stood triumphantly over his vanquished foe, then felt a restraining hand on his arm. It was a uniformed police constable and he ordered Matthew sternly to remain where he was, while his colleague reached down and felt the man’s neck just below his jaw, then looked back up.

  ‘He’s a goner, Bill,’ the man holding Matthew was told, and the grip tightened on his arm.

  12

  An hour later Matthew was staring out at the world through the bars of a police cell somewhere below ground in Leman Street Police Station, charged with murder. In vain he’d tried to insist that he’d only been defending himself and had been told to ‘shut up and come quietly, unless yer want a billy club across yer head,’ and he’d resigned himself to his immediate fate. Now he sat with his back to the wall, legs spread out in front of him, wondering whether or not to attempt to eat the bowl of swill that had been handed to him through the bars, or drink the pale grey liquid in the tin mug that they’d assured him was water.

  His eyes on the dirt floor of his cell, he suddenly became aware of a bright light in his peripheral vision and looked out through the bars into the corridor that served the cell. His blood froze as his brain
began to rationalise what his eyes were taking in.

  Standing in a pool of bright light were two young women. The first was Nerys Jenkins, and she was smiling kindly at Matthew as she slowly raised her left hand, to reveal a wedding ring. Then she lifted her right hand in order to remove a pendant that was hanging round her neck. Matthew recognised it as the one he had bought her that wonderful Christmas, as a token of his undying love.

  Nerys turned to look at the other woman, who Matthew recognised with a jolt was Adelaide Carlyle. Then Nerys reached out and hung the pendant around Adelaide’s neck and blew Matthew what he took to have been a farewell kiss as the light was suddenly extinguished and both women disappeared instantly, leaving only the bare and peeling plaster of the far wall for him to contemplate as he tried to take in what he had just seen.

  He poured the suspicious grey liquid from the tin mug onto the dusty cell floor and began battering it against the cell bars and yelling out loudly for attention. Eventually a slovenly looking turnkey appeared in the corridor and was halfway through chiding Matthew for making such a noise when Matthew managed to yell his message across even louder. ‘Get Inspector Jennings down here right now — I want to confess to murder!’

  It was, by Matthew’s calculation, at least half an hour later before Jennings appeared on the other side of the bars. ‘D’you really want to confess, or what? I’ve spent the past two hours chasing down witnesses in your defence.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Matthew yelled urgently. ‘Get Dr Carlyle down here without delay and tell him that I’ve been having more visions of my own!’

  ‘You’ve certainly been through the wars,’ Carlyle conceded as he surveyed Matthew’s scars with an experienced eye. ‘Is it true that you’ve been charged with murder?’

  ‘Yes, but I was acting in my own defence,’ Matthew replied with a grimace as Carlyle began to investigate his facial scars gently with his hand. ‘I got the scars from the lunatic who attacked me. I gave him just one punch and he fell backwards. I assume that he banged his head on the ground.’

  ‘Any half decent doctor can fix up these scratches,’ Carlyle told him with no apparent sympathy, ‘but I’m not here for that reason. Jennings tells me that you’ve been having visions.’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ Matthew confirmed. ‘But they were of two living people, not dead ones. How can that be?’

  Carlyle sighed. ‘And I was just beginning to congratulate myself that you’d learned something from all this. What did I tell you about those visions people got of horrible creatures ascending from the depths of the Underground?’

  ‘That they were imaginary.’

  ‘And what does that word mean?’ Carlyle persisted, like a frustrated schoolmaster with a poor scholar.

  ‘It means “from the imagination”, obviously,’ Matthew replied, clearly annoyed at being treated in this way.

  Carlyle nodded and pursued the point. ‘Put another way, people see what they expect to see.’

  ‘How about what they want to see?’ Matthew asked tentatively.

  Carlyle missed the inference as he nodded. ‘Clearly, that too. But what fascinates — and rather puzzles — me is why you had those visions without consuming any poisoned beer, if we assume that to be the medium of introduction into the system. There are several passageways into the blood stream, such as — dear God, let me look at those scratches again!’

  Matthew stood stoically silent while Carlyle ferreted around in the medical bag that went with him everywhere — according to hospital folklore, even to bed with him — and came back out with a large eyeglass on the end of an ornate handle of some sort and a pair of tweezers. ‘I’m afraid this may be a touch painful, my boy, but it’s important.’

  Matthew let out a yelp of pain as Carlyle slid the tweezers into the deepest of the open cuts on his face, then closed them and extracted something that he examined minutely under the eyeglass. ‘Voila!’ he announced triumphantly as he held it up to the naked gas flame on the wall. ‘Regard — pink vegetation!’

  ‘You mean —?’ was as far as Matthew got before Carlyle supplied the answer.

  ‘You saw a vision because you’d been impregnated with Peyote, as readily as if you’d drunk some of the laced beer. Poisons — and for that matter medicines — can enter the human body through open cuts and this must have been the method of introduction in your case. You say that this man who attacked you scratched your face?’

  ‘Forgive me, but “scratched” is something of an understatement, Doctor. It felt as if he’d attacked me with garden rakes and it still hurts like — well, it hurts, that’s all.’

  ‘I can give you something for that when I get you to the hospital,’ Carlyle assured him.

  Matthew gave a hollow laugh. ‘Aren’t you forgetting that I’m down here, not through choice, but because I’m charged with murder?’

  ‘Where’s his body?’

  ‘How should I know? I’ve been unavoidably detained down here ever since it happened. The last I saw of him was when one of the bobbies confirmed that he was dead and he was lying flat on his back in Wapping High Street.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Carlyle insisted, as he banged on the cells bars as instructed by the turnkey who’d opened the cell for him originally. The slovenly oaf reappeared with all the speed of a tortoise about to give birth and Carlyle instructed him to send for Inspector Jennings. The man disappeared at the same slothful speed and Carlyle turned back to Matthew. ‘So what phantoms did you see that you wanted to see?’

  ‘A former lady friend. The one I mentioned to you over supper that night — the one who broke my heart. But so far as I know she’s still alive.’

  ‘Logic suggests that her precise anatomical status is irrelevant,’ Carlyle replied pompously. ‘It was who you wanted to see, you say? Was it therefore a pleasant encounter?’

  ‘Yes — and yet no,’ Matthew replied, confused and embarrassed. ‘Let’s say that it was reassuring — she was giving me a sign that she’s happily married.’

  ‘Which is clearly what you wanted to learn, I assume, since it came from your own subconscious.’

  ‘So my subconscious was dictating the vision?’ Matthew asked.

  Carlyle tutted. ‘Of course — have you absorbed nothing from what I’ve taught you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Matthew mumbled like an errant schoolboy.

  Carlyle hadn’t finished with his questions. ‘You said that your visions were of more than one person on this occasion. Who was the second?’

  ‘I’d rather not say, in the circumstances, since it’s quite embarrassing.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘No, not you, exactly. Well — to be frank — it was your daughter.’

  ‘Adelaide? What was she doing? Nothing compromising, I hope.’

  ‘Indeed not. She was just there when this other young woman — my former lady friend — handed her something.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘A pendant that I’d given this girl — “Nerys”, her name is — as a token of my affection.’

  ‘So in your vision,’ Carlyle concluded, ‘this former love of yours appeared to be happily married and therefore out of your romantic reckoning and she handed what might be described as a ‘love baton’ over to Adelaide. Correct?’

  ‘Yes, but what can it mean, if anything?’ Matthew asked.

  He was rewarded with a broad smile from Carlyle. ‘Let me give you a brief lecture on the history of one aspect of my profession, Matthew. There is a branch of it known as “neurology” and it concerns itself with disorders of the nervous system — “insanity” perhaps being one of them, although that is not yet decided. One form of treatment that has been the subject of considerable experimentation is known as “Mesmerism”, after its greatest exponent, Franz Mesmer. Today it is known as “hypnotism” and hopefully you recall our discussing it on one occasion.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Matthew replied, anxious to redeem something of Carlyle’s good opinion of him, ‘the control of a person�
��s mind by another person.’

  ‘Indeed. But what Mesmer discovered is that it is possible for a man — or a woman, for that matter — to control their own minds without being aware that they have done so.’

  ‘Why should that not be, since we all have conscious control of our actions, do we not?’

  ‘Do we?’ Carlyle replied. ‘What Mesmer discovered is that when a person is sent into what we might describe, for want of a better expression, as a “trance state’, there is another force lurking behind the conscious mind. You have heard me refer to it, more than once, as the “subconscious”, have you not?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Matthew confirmed. ‘So when we do things, or think things, that we believe are the result of our conscious will, we are in fact being misled by this subconscious force?’

  ‘That is putting it too strongly,’ Carlyle argued with a shake of the head. ‘What Mesmer discovered is that the subconscious acts as a receptacle for our deepest desires and that these are relayed to the conscious mind by some mysterious process. Sometimes, in the strong-willed, this creates conflict and can be the source of either anti-social behaviour, or depressive or disordered moods in the conscious individual.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ Mathew interrupted him tentatively, ‘but this sounds much like what you were telling me some days ago regarding your daughter and her “secret” desire to be a wife and mother, while publicly decrying such a status as demeaning to women.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Carlyle enthused, then his face broke into a knowing smile. ‘But I can now conclude that you are little different.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Consider your “vision” as some sort of reflection of your subconscious desire. What you saw was what you wanted to see, yes? We have agreed that, have we not? What you saw was the termination of one romantic attachment and the start of another, with no rancour from the first love. Your conscious “conscience”, if that doesn’t sound like complete balderdash, required that you satisfy yourself that you would be behaving honourably to this first lady to win your heart if you transferred your affections to the second of them. Hence the symbolic vision of — “Nerys”, was that her name? — handing your pendant love token to Adelaide. Nerys was more than content to hand over the token — to yield the baton, if you prefer. The really interesting question will be whether or not Adelaide is prepared to take it.’