The Devil You Know

Six

RICH AND JON WERE ALREADY WAITING OUT ON the street, and they fell into step with us. Jon didn’t react to my being there, but I didn’t imagine he was thrilled at the prospect.

We went to a free house on Tonbridge Street that didn’t seem to know quite what its freedom was for, at least if the choice of beers was anything to go by. I opted for a pint of Spitfire, which shone out from among the otherwise lackluster options.

Cheryl got the drinks in while Rich, Jon, and I found a table. It wasn’t hard; the after-work crowd were just starting to trickle in, only sluggishly drawn to the plastic gilt and the sandwich menu, and completely indifferent to the two ranks of fruit machines giving their synchronized salutes off in the far corner.

“What do you think of the Bonnington?” Rich asked with a sardonic grin.

I think he was hoping for an extreme response—one that he could savor. I temporized. “Well, it’s an office,” I said. “The more you see of them, the more they come to look alike.”

“Have you ever worked in one?” Tiler asked pointedly.

“I’ve always done what I do now,” I said, glossing over the fact that for the past year and a half, I hadn’t been working anywhere. “So apart from the odd vacation job back when I was a student, no. But I’ve been called into a fair few.”

“Well, I’ve seen loads,” said Rich. “But I’ve never seen anything like this place.”

“It’s a bit of a swamp of fear and loathing,” I allowed. “What’s with Alice? Is she always like that?”

He raised his eyebrows. “No. She’s always been a bit of a bitch, but now she’s fallen out with Jeffrey, hasn’t she? She probably hasn’t had breakfast in bed all week.”

“So she and Peele are knocking boots?”

The quaint euphemism made Rich grin and Tiler purse his lips. “Yeah,” Rich said. “Exactly. But only because Jeffrey is the CA. If they made a new post of Executive Big Bastard over the Chief Administrator, Alice would roll up 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 white boy. He was calling me all the sluts and whores, and Danny was reaching out to me like he wanted to give me a big hug, so Paulus tried to hit him and smashed his hand through the window instead.”

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 is a punch line. I exorcised him.”

“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.”

“Sunday?” I asked.

“My mum’s getting married,” said Cheryl. “Again. At the Brompton Oratory. Fourth time around the track, this is. They don’t say ‘Till death us do part’ for my mum; they say ‘Who’s holding ticket number twenty-three?’ Anyway, I had a brain wave. I asked Jeffrey if we could have the reception in the reading room at the archive, and he said yeah, we could. So everyone’s invited.”

“So you don’t hold it against your mum that she threw you out on the street?” I asked, more surprised at that than at the ghost story—I already suspected it would take a lot to shake Cheryl.

She laughed. “We tear pieces off each other, and then we’re all right again. We’ve always been like that. I’ve got no time for all her bloody boyfriends and fiancés and husbands, though. They’re a right shower. This latest one’s worse than Paulus and Alex put together, if you ask me. But he won’t last. They never do.”

“What about your dad?” I inquired.

“Nothing about my dad,” Cheryl answered shortly. She made a face and shook her head.

“Here,” said Rich, trying to pull the agenda back onto safe ground. “Joke about ghosts, right. This big expert on paranormal phenomena is doing a lecture tour of the UK, and he gets to Aberystwyth on a Friday night. And he goes into the hall, and it’s packed. Shuffles his notes, clears his throat, and says, ‘Let’s just see where we stand. How many people here believe in ghosts?’ Every hand in the room goes up. ‘Excellent,’ says the professor. ‘That’s what I value. Truly open minds. Okay, how many of you have actually seen a ghost?’ Half the hands go down, half stay up. ‘Good enough,’ says the professor. ‘And out of you lot, how many have spoken to a ghost?’ Maybe twenty hands stay up, and the professor nods. ‘Yes, that takes some courage, doesn’t it? And how many of you have touched a ghost?’ All but three hands go down. ‘Finally,’ the professor says, ‘how many of you have made love with a ghost?’ Two hands go down, but one right at the back of the room stays up. It’s a little old guy in a grubby mac. ‘Sir, you amaze me,’ says the professor. ‘I’ve asked that question a thousand times, and nobody has ever answered yes to it. I’ve never met anybody before you who’s had sex with a ghost.’

“‘Ghost?’ says the old guy. ‘Oh, sorry, I thought you said goat . . .’”

Cheryl guffawed, and Jon said he’d heard it. Jokes about goats followed, and for a while, we all tried to think of one that was clean. It turns out there aren’t any.

Rich bought the next lot of drinks, and I took care of the one after that. Jon downed his third vodka breezer with indecent haste and claimed a prior engagement. Rich gave him a meaningful look, but he clearly wasn’t going to be shamed into standing his round. He wished us all good night and left without a backward glance.

“Tight bugger,” muttered Rich.

“Oh, leave him alone,” said Cheryl. “He can’t help it. You’ve seen what he buys himself for lunch. He just gets off on counting his pennies, that’s all.”

“What are his politics?” I asked, casually.

“His politics?” Cheryl repeated blankly. “I haven’t got the foggiest. I don’t think he’s got any, unless supporting Fulham counts. Why?”

“He looked really unhappy to see me. I wondered if he was a Breather.”

“Ohh.” She saw what I was getting at then, and her eyes widened as she considered the possibility. “I don’t know. Maybe. He’s never seemed to give much of a toss for his fellow man, to be honest, but they’re an odd bunch, aren’t they? My flatmate where I lived before was one of them, and she used to go along to the cemetery at Waltham Abbey at weekends and read aloud from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall—I suppose because she thought the ghosts might need the intellectual stimulation. It always seemed a bit cruel to me.”

The Breath of Life movement—or the Breathers, as most people refer to them—are a grassroots pressure group campaigning for changes in the law governing the risen dead. Ghosts and zombies, they say, are still people; they have rights that need to be recognized and defined in law. Some of them feel the same way about the more colorful groups among the undead, but there’s a certain amount of controversy there. What rights do the possessed have, for example, and who gets to enjoy them? Host body or invading spirit? And what about the were? It had all turned into a bit of a circus. The government—New Labour, but with a bit of the shine gone—had made some cautious statements about legally recognizing the dead, causing the Tories to point dramatically quivering fingers at the law of inheritance. How could it be expected to work if it turns out that you can take it with you after all? What about criminal trials? Could a dead man give evidence against his murderer or stand trial for murder himself? And if he were found guilty, how in hell are you supposed to punish him? And so on, and so on.

And my own profession, of course, had come in for a whole lot of attention. If the dead had rights, then presumably one of those rights was not to be blasted into the void by a cheerful tune from a tin whistle—or by a poem, a mechanical drawing, a series of complicated hand gestures, or whatever other form of cantrip the exorcist happened to favor as he slashed and burned his way through the natural order of things.

I let all this wash over me as far as I could, but the Breathers were getting to be something of a worry for me—as the other, earlier right-to-lifers had been for the staff at abortion clinics.

However, neither Rich nor Cheryl remembered Jon Tiler ever saying anything on the subject one way or the other, which made it more or less certain that he wasn’t part of the movement. You could never get them to shut up about it short of gagging them with moldering grave cloths.

The party passed its cusp and started to wind down. Cheryl went off to powder her nose, and Rich, who was a bit maudlin-drunk by this time, started in to tell me about some of his walking tours in Eastern Europe, but ran out of steam in the middle of a rambling anecdote about a club in Prague called Kaikobad, where they have transsexual strippers. His eyes seemed to defocus, which, when a guy is in his cups, either means he’s thinking deeply or he’s about to pass out. Either way, I figured it was about time to call it a night.

“Hey, mate,” Rich said, rousing suddenly. “I think you’ve made a new friend.”

“What, Cheryl?” I asked, a little thrown. He obviously couldn’t mean Jon Tiler.

Rich waved that suggestion away impatiently. “No, not Cheryl. Cheryl talks a good fuck, but she’s never been known to deliver. I meant the oversize geezer in the corner.”

He didn’t point, just rolled his eyes off to the right and then back. I followed his lead, not jerking my head around but picking up my drink and then letting my gaze traverse the bar slowly and casually.

It wasn’t hard to guess who he meant—a big, heavyset guy sitting near the door, jammed into a tight booth that made his already impressive bulk loom even larger. His oddly shapeless body was packed into an antique-looking gray herringbone suit, and whatever it said on the label, there had to be a whole lot of Xs in front of the L. His bald head glistened, and his pale, almost colorless eyes shied away as they caught my stare.

As he looked away, I experienced the sudden cessation of a feeling so tenuous, it had slipped under my guard. It was the sensation that Peele had described to me over the phone: the sensation—like a light, even pressure over the whole of my skin—of knowing that I was being looked at.

Okay. File that one for later, I guess. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew what he was well enough, and he probably knew what I was, too. That could even have been why he was watching me. Exorcists excite very real and very natural fears in certain quarters.

Cheryl came back from the loo right then, which was my cue to head on out. I made my excuses, gave the birthday girl a kiss on the cheek, and left.

I walked past Euston Station and back up Eversholt Street for reasons I can’t even remember. Maybe I just fancied a walk, although it was still cold and blustery, or maybe I was deliberately choosing a route that would take me by the archive.

I was on the other side of the road, though, so when I saw the woman standing out on the pavement next to the doorway of the Bonnington, her arms hanging at her sides and her head bowed, my first thought was that it was Alice calling it a day after a stupendous stint of unpaid overtime.

Then I registered the hood, and a moment after that, the way her body became more and more washed out and hard to distinguish from its surroundings the closer you got to the ground. And finally she raised her head to stare at me, which stopped me dead in my tracks, because the stare was being conducted without the benefit of eyes. The upper half of the woman’s face was a formless, rippling plane of undifferentiated red. Dark hair, decorously tousled, then cherry red lips and a neotenously rounded chin. Nothing, nothing but redness in between.

What she was wearing was harder to determine. She was dressed in white, the way everybody said, but white what? There was too little of her to form a judgment from. She raised an arm to point toward the building, and it was a bare arm, spectrally pale. It seemed as though she was fighting against the pull of gravity, her movements as strained and slow and full of terrible effort as the way your legs pump in dreams when you’re running away from the bogeyman.

I pulled myself together and stepped out into the road—almost into the path of a Routemaster bus; the blare of its horn floated behind it like the bellow of a wounded animal as I jerked back at the last moment, out of its path.

I thought she’d be gone now, her dramatic exit hidden by the bus in line with all the best movie clichés. But she was still there, and as I broke into a run, I tried to assemble the sense that went with the vision—the fix. I began to drop the mesh of my weird perceptions over her, dredging up notes in sequence, turning her into music. It was hard. Even though she was there in front of me, the trace was so faint, it almost wasn’t there at all. It was as though I was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. That wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and I didn’t understand it. But if she stayed where she was for just a few moments longer, it wouldn’t matter.

Then a door opened about twenty feet behind her, and bright white light stabbed through her. She turned away, and as she turned, she disappeared. I found myself staring at Jon Tiler, who was looking at me with a startled-rabbit expression on his face. He had a satchel in his hand, which he lifted up by way of explanation—or protection, because he looked like he was expecting to be spanked.

“I went back for my bag,” he said. “Was that . . . Shit, were you—”

I ran through a range of answers in my mind, most of them revolving around the word fuckwit. But none of them would achieve anything beyond the immediate emotional catharsis.

So “Lock the door behind you” was all I said over my shoulder as I walked away.