‘What you asked me to do. Give him some peace.’
‘You won’t-?’
‘Exorcise him? Send him away for ever? No, Carla. I won’t. I promise. Wait in the car. It shouldn’t take longer than twenty minutes.’
She took one last look past me into the room, where an invisible entity was trailing some extension of itself through the broken glass on the carpet, making it bristle and shift. Then she nodded and backed out through the door, staring all the time, as if turning her back would have felt like a betrayal. I closed the door gently behind her, then knelt down and unshipped my whistle.
I keep it in a pocket I’d sewn into my coat myself, high up on the left-hand side. A paletot is handy like that – it’s so voluminous that you can carry a drawerful of cutlery, a samovar and a sub-machine gun around with you and it won’t even spoil the line. I generally just keep the whistle, a silver dagger, an antique goblet I’ve never yet had occasion to use and a bottle of whatever booze I’m currently flirting with.
I blew a random sequence of notes to tune it in – except that even then, even on this first approach, it wasn’t quite random. There was an element of echolocation in it: of throwing out sounds to see how they’d come back to me again – to see which the ghost absorbed and which bounced off and rolled away into the ether. These are just metaphors, you understand: but everything I do is a kind of metaphor. You choose the tools that work, or maybe they choose you.
And sometimes it comes hard and slow, sometimes quick and easy. This ghost was so big, so angry that the sense of it filled the room: notes ran from my gut up into my chest and lungs, through the bore of the whistle past my flickering fingers and out into the air without me even needing to think about it. They built like a wave, and broke like a wave, and the thing that had been John Gittings met them in full flood.
For a handful of moments the force of that meeting threw me out: I faltered in the middle of a phrase, pieced it out awkward and staccato, then found the flow again and began the laborious crescendo for a second time.
This was the binding: the systolic beat, usually and inexorably followed by the diastole, which is the banishing. But not this time. By this point in my life I’d had plenty of experience of a different kind of tune, with a different, more insidious purpose. I let a new phrase sneak in now, on a minor key – something I’d designed for my best friend Rafi, after I’d lost the plot and let one of the most powerful demons in Hell weld itself to his spirit. What I was playing now was something few exorcists ever bother with, because for most of them it doesn’t really pay its way in the standard repertoire.
This was a lullaby.
Gradually I let the second phrase ride in over the first, run through it and colonise it. Then I played the tune out until there was nothing left of it except three descending notes, each held for as long as my breath lasted.
The silence afterwards was like a roomful of applause. Nothing moved in the pillaged room. The ghost was still there, but the oppressive weight of it had lifted and faded. The sense I was left with was a dull, distant echo, not the roaring dissonance I’d walked in on.
I went out and down the stairs, back to the road. Carla was leaning against the car, smoking a cigarette. The dog-end of another lay stubbed out between her feet. She stared at me – a wordless question.
‘He’s fine,’ I said, for want of any halfway-adequate way of putting it. ‘I sent him to sleep, the same way I do Asmodeus when he’s getting too frisky. Carla, how long has this been happening?’
She shook her head, looked away. ‘Since the day John died, Fix. Six days ago. It was almost immediate. It started maybe two or three minutes after I heard the shot.’
I exhaled heavily. ‘Jesus!’
‘It was how I knew he was dead. He’d locked himself in the bathroom, and I couldn’t get in. I was hammering on the door, shouting his name. And then something- I can’t describe it. Something went down the stairs, behind me. I could hear each footstep. The boards creaking, all the way down, as though – whatever it was, it was a massive weight. And I knew. I thought “That’s John. That’s my husband, going away from me. He’s dead.” Only he didn’t go away. He stayed. He stayed and—’
Seeing the trembling start in her shoulders, I looked at the ground. ‘You should have called-’ I began. Called who? Me? That was a hypocritical bridge too far, while I was standing there longing to be out of this. ‘One of us,’ I went on.
‘I didn’t know what to say.’ Carla’s voice was thick and choked. ‘Fix, what am I going to do? I can’t live like this.’
‘You don’t have to. Have you got somewhere else to stay?’
She took a step back from me as though I’d pushed her, and her eyes as she looked up at me registered shock and hurt.
‘Leave him alone? How can I do that to him?’
I threw out my arms, groping for words. ‘Carla, you said yourself that John wasn’t himself before he died. That you were scared he was losing his mind. I think that’s why this is happening. It’s best if you think of John as the man you used to know, and that thing in there as—’
‘No. No, Fix.’ She raised her arms defensively, as if I’d just made an indecent proposal. ‘It’s still him. Even if he doesn’t know that himself, that’s all that’s left of him. I’m not going to just lock the doors and run and hide. I’m staying here with him, whatever happens.’
I stared into Carla’s eyes. She meant it: in spades and with no room for argument.
‘Okay,’ I said at last, cursing myself for not having the balls to just shake hands and walk away. You’ve got to have the courage of your lack of commitment: otherwise you just keep getting dragged into the shit that other people leave in their wake. But the ghost of a one-night stand that had never happened was clouding my judgement. ‘Coffee-maker still work?’
It took a while to get the room to rights. I did the heavy lifting and Carla went around behind me, putting the few intact ornaments back where they belonged, sweeping up the broken glass, throwing out what couldn’t be mended or lived with. After we’d finished, the room still looked like a hurricane had been through, but it looked like it had stayed for tea and genteel conversation. You could tell that an effort had been made, anyway: it was the best we could do with the raw materials.
The kitchen was completely unscathed, though, which was a huge relief. I eyed the knife rack and wondered what it would have been like to meet the contents of
‘Does he mainly stay in the living room?’ I asked Carla as she heaped coffee into the Cona machine. She was scraping the bottom of the packet. When she’d finished I took the empty packet from her and dumped it in the bin. Along the way I accidentally kicked over a red plastic bowl on the floor: dry pet food spilled out onto the tiles.
‘Living room. Stairwell. Bathroom,’ she said, tightly. It was obvious that there was a whole catalogue of horrors behind that terse list. ‘I’m safe in the bedroom, and the hall outside the bedroom, and here.’ She switched the machine on, turned to face me, her face strained and earnest. ‘I said that wrong. Safe. He’s never hurt me. He throws things around the room, but nothing’s ever hit me. He’s still my John, Fix. He’s scared, and because he’s scared he’s angry – but he’d never dream of harming me.’
I mulled that over and found nothing to say to it. The stuff I’d dodged on the doormat had certainly come a bit too close to comfort. But then, John knew what I was, and what I could do to him: he had good reason to want me to keep my distance. And if Carla had been living with this for six days and not taken so much as a scratch, it was hard to argue with her conclusions. Geists had been known to topple wardrobes on people’s heads and push them out of windows: clearly what was left of John Gittings was pulling its punches – at least as far as his widow was concerned.
I scooped the pet food back into the bowl and used it to change the subject. ‘I thought you hated animals,’ I said.
‘Stray cat,’ Carla muttered, distracted. She tapped the Cona machine with a fingernail as it started to make slupslup-slup noises. ‘It came in through the window one day, and John fed it some tuna. Then it wouldn’t stop coming. I asked him not to encourage it but he wouldn’t listen. Haven’t seen it in a few days, though. Maybe it’s true that they know when someone doesn’t like them.’
Over coffee, she came back to the question of options.
‘I’m going to have to let them do it, aren’t I?’ she asked me glumly, staring at the cream swirling on the surface of her drink. ‘Dig him up again, and burn him?’
I thought about that. ‘If the will’s as specific as you say it is . . . Your only chance would be to prove that
