her mattress and move on down the corridor. Whoever’s in the boss’s chair, there are some women who’ll always be under the desk bobbing for apples in his crotch.”
This was said with a certain amount of bitterness. Alice was younger than Rich, I realized. But he was her junior in the pecking order. No telling what sort of hatchets were buried there, or how shallowly.
“What did Peele and Alice fall out about?” I asked, trying to stay with the subject without responding directly to what he’d said. I thought he might be wrong about Alice. I didn’t like her, but she didn’t seem like the sort of person who’d give a pole dance in exchange for a pole position.
“I don’t think this is something we should be talking about,” Tiler said a little prissily. “It’s just gossip, anyway. No one even knows if they—”
“About you,” Rich interrupted, as if he was surprised that it needed saying. “You and the ghost. Jeffrey was all in favor of getting someone in to deal with it back when it first turned up. But Alice dug her heels in—said we were all just hallucinating, and there was nothing there. God, she was smug back in October, when the sightings stopped. But then they started up again, and I got this.” He touched his bandaged face. “And Jeffrey said right, we’ll have to deal with it now. But Alice still said no. And in the end, he went ahead and got you in without even asking her.”
“That must have been upsetting for her,” I allowed.
Rich nodded vigorously, looking as if he was enjoying the memory. “Yeah, you could say that. I mean, basically, she rules the roost while Peele hides in his office. And if he gets this Bilbao job he’s going for, she’s tipped for the big chair. So for him to disagree with her . . . well, it made her look stupid in front of the rest of us. Especially since he did it just by calling you up out of the blue, rather than by telling her to her face that she was wrong. He can only stand up to her behind her back, you see.”
I remembered that Peele had mentioned Bilbao to me—something about a trip that he was about to take out there. I asked Rich what that was all about.
“He’s been greasing up to the Guggenheim,” said Rich with absolute scorn. “If he’s an art historian, I’m the archbishop of Canterbury. But he loans himself out to them for lectures, and he’s really cosy with the trustees there now. So they’ve called him over for a little chat tomorrow, which he’s hoping is really a recruitment interview. And so is Alice, because then she walks into Peele’s job.”
“I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” said Jon.
“I do,” Rich replied, bleakly deadpan. “It’s always looked like a racing certainty from where I’m—”
Cheryl came back with the drinks then, and Rich stopped fairly abruptly to help her unload the glasses from the tray she was carrying.
“So you reckon you’ve got her in your sights?” he asked me as he settled down with his bottle of Beck’s.
“Alice?”
“The ghost.”
Cheryl handed me my pint with practiced hands that didn’t spill a drop.
“Not yet, no. I’m working on it. It shouldn’t take too long.”
“Can’t be quick enough for Rich,” said Cheryl. “He hates my Sylvie.”
Rich shook his head emphatically. “No, fair’s fair. I don’t hate her. I just want her to sod off to her eternal reward. Preferably with her engines belching hellfire.”
Cheryl laughed and prodded him with her elbow as she sat down next to him.
“Bastard,” she said.
We toasted her in beer and vodka, and she responded with a mock-solemn bow. “Thank you, thank you,” she said. “And next year in Jerusalem. Or at least somewhere that’s not here.”
Chink, chink, drink. Cheryl wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and belched unapologetically. For some reason, I found that endearing.
“So is this your first ghost?” I asked, shifting the topic from the loaded issue of how far I was along with the job—and, to be fair, the seemingly even more loaded issue of Alice’s right of succession. Tiler and Rich nodded, but Cheryl, taking another swig of her drink, made a negative wave of the hand.
“No,” she said when she’d downed her mouthful. “Not mine. I’ve had two already. And one was a bloke I went out with.”
“You went out with a—” Tiler echoed, bewildered.
“When he was still alive, I mean. I was haunted by the ghost of my ex-boyfriend. Is that sick or what? Danny Payton, his name was. He was lovely. His hair was all goldy-blond, and he worked out, so he had muscles on him.” She gestured vividly.
“But he was bisexual, which he didn’t ever tell me, and he was two-timing me with a bloke. And this bloke had another bloke, who beat Danny up and threw him in the Thames. Except he didn’t, because he missed. I mean, he threw Danny off Waterloo Bridge, but it was right up close to the edge, and Danny landed on the bank, in about two inches of water. Broke his neck.” Cheryl was getting into her story, and she clearly enjoyed our silent attention.
“Anyway, I went to the funeral, and I had a good cry. But mostly I was thinking you dirty bugger, you should’ve kept it in your trousers when you weren’t with me. What goes around, comes around.”
“Cheryl, that’s sick,” Tiler protested, wincing. “You can’t go to a funeral and be thinking stuff like that!”
“Why not?” Cheryl asked, appealing to the rest of us with her arms outspread. “You can’t make your thoughts wear black, Jon. It’s just the way I am, okay? I was missing him, yeah, and I was sorry he was dead. But he was dead because he’d been shagging another bloke, so I couldn’t help feeling a bit pissed off about it. That’s part of what funerals are for, in my opinion. You get it out of your system. You get closure, yeah?
“Except it turned out that Danny didn’t.” She paused dramatically, rolling her eyes at us. “I got back home, and he was only there in my bloody bedroom, wasn’t he? Not a stitch on him! I screamed the place down, and my mum and my stepdad came running in, and then they hit the roof. Mum was wetting herself because it was a ghost, and Paulus, my stepdad—husband number two, Felix, yeah?—was all crazy-eyed because it was the ghost of a
Cheryl laughed at the memory, and I laughed along with her. It was a dark enough scene, but she made it funny because her voice orchestrated it like a Whitehall farce. Tiler was looking like a hanging judge, though, and even Rich was shaking his head in pained awe.
“You always do that,” he said. “You tell these awful stories, and then you laugh. And there’s never a punch line.”
“There
“You what?” Rich exclaimed, and Cheryl cast a sly look at me. “There’s not a closed shop or something, is there?” she asked. “You know, like for actors, or train drivers?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “There is. The union’s going to have your arse.”
“Well, it’s my best feature.” She smirked. “See, I didn’t mind him being there, at first. You’ve got no right saying you don’t like something—”
“—if you haven’t tried it,” Rich finished. “But Jesus wept, Cheryl. A ghost!”
“The ghost of someone I really liked. It was nice still having him around. I used to chat with him about stuff. He never said anything back, but I knew he was listening. He was like a mate you can share secrets with.
“But you know, time goes on, sort of thing. I couldn’t really take another bloke up to my room if the ghost of the last one was still sitting there. And he was so sad—like Sylvie’s sad. In the end, I thought it was probably best if we ended it.
“So what I did, right, was I gave him the standard dump speech. Like as if he was still alive. I sat down on the bed next to him, and I said I wanted us to still be friends and everything, but I didn’t love him in that way, and I wasn’t going out with him anymore. You know how it goes. At least I’m assuming you do. And all the while I was talking to him, he was getting fainter and fainter. Until . . . when I’d more or less finished . . . he just went out like a light.” Cheryl pondered on that for a moment, her expression sliding down the register from sunny to somber. “And then I really cried.”
The silence from the rest of us was a testament to Cheryl’s skills as a storyteller. It was broken by Jon Tiler. “You really know how to throw a party, don’t you?” he said gloomily.
“Yeah,” said Cheryl, pointedly. “I do. And if you get snarky on me, Jon, you won’t be coming on Sunday.”
