Mean Spirit

‘It’s a gift. It is a gift. You can’t believe it yourself at first. Dead people out there, just queuing up to talk to you. So many of them that you have to appoint an agent over there to filter them.’

‘Agent?’

‘Spirit guide. I’ve had several. Even a Red Indian. A Native fucking American. I said, “Piss off, Mr Running Bear, whatever you call yourself, you want to completely ruin my credibility?” But he stuck around, the poor old sod. He was very friendly in his gruff way, I quite took to him. All the cliches — you get all the bloody cliches. Table-rapping — that works as well. I’m not saying scores of people didn’t fake it, but … it happens.’

‘Ectoplasm?’

‘Why not? Not in my experience, but there’s evidence for it. And it’s a word that sounds good, isn’t it? Sounds scientific. That was the big thing when all this started in the mid-nineteenth century. It had to be seen as another great scientific leap forward, like electricity and photography. All these huge developments were linked into spiritualism — it wasn’t religion, it was human scientific knowledge crossing the final frontier. Man was becoming so clever so fast that it was obvious we were going to solve the mystery of death, sooner rather than later.’

‘I did a piece on all that once,’ Grayle said, ‘but the evidence was that it was nearly all one big scam.’

‘No.’ Callard blinked balefully. ‘That’s not the scam. Or rather, much of it was, but it’s not the one I’m talking about. I haven’t produced ectoplasm, but I’ve had materialization. Visuals. Energy forms.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘You believe in ghosts, perhaps?’ Callard eyeing her thoughtfully.

‘I … think so.’

‘You’ve seen?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You do know, Grayle. No-one who’s seen has any real doubts.’

‘So why is it shit?’

Callard stretched her long neck. She was looking firmer now, less sick. OK, beautiful; no getting around that.

‘For a number of years, I’d go into trance and receive these clear, comprehensible messages from what I had every reason to believe were departed spirits. The fact that the messages were mainly banal in the extreme was neither here nor there. One day Einstein might come through and it would be different. Meanwhile, I relayed the trivial messages to my well-heeled clients — sort of people who would never consult Mrs Higgins in her council flat — and everyone was happy.’

Grayle on the edge of her chair by this time, never having heard a medium putting down the profession. Callard was something else.

‘And then Einstein did come through,’ Callard said.

‘Oh boy.’

‘Albert Einstein. The Albert Einstein. Saying just what you’d expect from him. How disappointed he was that modern physicists had failed to develop his ideas. How he was full of regrets at the way he’d treated his first wife, but they were blissfully reunited now. He also said that, from his present position, he was able to see where some of his theories fell down.’

‘How was that?’

‘You have scientific knowledge?’

‘Not to speak of.’

‘Me neither. I offered him automatic writing to explain, and the results looked like the authentic minute calculations of a mathematical genius. Lots of little brackets and bubbles and algebraic symbols. My agent, Nancy, got frightfully excited and had them photocopied and dispatched discreetly to a certain professor in Munich or somewhere. Who said, of course …’

‘That it was complete horseshit?’

Callard sighed.

‘Why does that always happen?’ Grayle wondered sadly. ‘The psychic artists produce Van Gogh plastic sunflowers, and the psychic composers … you’d think Mozart would reach sublime new heights, being dead and gone to heaven and all, instead of … some pale, music-school imitation. Why?’

‘I don’t know why. Or, rather, I think I do now. It’s because mediumship, as it’s usually practised, is a low- level art … mundane and mediocre. It attracts low-level, inconsequential dross. Psychically speaking, the pits. Spirit shit.’

‘But still from like … out there?’

‘Who knows whether out there is really in there? In the end, I can’t tell you where the messages come from — perhaps some area of the brain we don’t yet understand. I just don’t believe they come from where we think they do when we first start to receive them. One comes to realize that the challenge is to separate the truth from the random disinformation.’

Grayle had drunk some more whisky from the greasy glass, journalistically excited, spiritually disappointed.

‘But it’s all soooo plausible when you need it, Grayle. When you’ve lost someone.’

‘I guess.’

‘So.’ Persephone Callard leaning on an elbow, hunched up in a corner of the Victorian sofa in that state of drab sobriety that comes after long days of serious drinking. ‘Would you like to speak to your dead sister, tonight?’

Grayle’s mouth was suddenly parched in spite of the Scotch. She shook her head, alarmed.

The woman grinned at her discomfort, displaying white, perfect teeth in the candlelight.

‘What have you got to lose, Grayle? You might get some special insight. You might achieve peace of mind.’

Grayle shaking her head.

‘Perhaps there’s something you’d like to have told her before she died.’

Grayle staring into the crimson cinders.

‘… something you wish you’d shared.’

‘We didn’t have too much in common outside of parents,’ Grayle said tightly. She looked up. ‘And anyway … you don’t think it really would be my sister.’

‘Who am I to say? Only you would know that.’

Grayle said nothing, feeling trapped. God damn it, why couldn’t Marcus just have written, told Callard he’d come see her when he was over the flu.

‘You’re afraid, aren’t you, Holy Grayle?’

‘Maybe I just don’t want to learn something which may, if what you say is correct, have no basis in truth.’

‘Too close, eh?’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean, it’s OK when it’s somebody else. When it’s journalism.’

‘You are very astute,’ Grayle said hoarsely.

‘Family connections, where there’s been a difficult death, are usually the strongest. Things which need to be explained. I can feel she’s near you. Some of the time. Now. She wants to come, I think.’

‘No.’

‘You know, when I said there’d been manifestations … the strongest one, the one which everyone in the room saw, was a mother of twins who died in childbirth. Both sisters were there, grown up now. And we had the seance in the room — I didn’t know this at the time — where she’d actually died. She had the babies at home — she’d had two already — and she was … Anyway, this was a bungalow, and it was the living room now, not a bedroom any more. And there were photos of the mother all around the walls, and her favourite things scattered about … clothes, handbags. And all the family — the husband, the twins, another sister — all of them there. And the room was dense with her before we started …’

‘I don’t think I want to know about this,’ Grayle said.

Well, of course there were things she wanted to say to Ersula. Things she wanted to ask.