Caroline Graham - A Ghost in the Machine

The signs were not encouraging. The setting had been exactly as she expected. As for the performance, Cully was afraid that by now she could write the script. The medium would be fat and dressed in flowing garments stiff with tacky but bombastic decoration. She would be wearing quite a lot of flashy jewellery, even more highly coloured make-up and her coiffure would never, ever move. Her patter would mix sickly endearments with sentimental messages from the dear departed and deeply unfunny humour. Psychomancy as showbiz.

So when Ava Garret stepped on to the stage Cully had quite a shock. The first idea that came into her head was Aubrey Beardsley, for the woman closely resembled one of his illustrations. Then a quick and less charitable thought – Morticia Addams. Tall, sinuous and robed simply in black, she leaned on the plastic column and threw back her dark flowing hair. She began to drift back and forth across the stage, stretching out her hands in a most peculiar way. The left, palm out in front of her face as if warding off a rush of seekers after truth. The right, vaguely groping upwards as if to seize any shy, celestial beings before they changed their minds and dissolved once more into etheric vapour. At every turn she kicked the long train of her dress neatly behind her before setting off again. Cully, acting in her cradle, acting before she could even lisp the word, recognised a trick of the trade when she saw one.

“Someone is coming through now…” Estuary English overlaid by Received Pronunciation in a nice reversal of the current mode. “I’m getting a Graham—no, tell a lie—Grace. Does Grace connect with anyone here?”

“Very much so.” A woman on the end of the row opposite Nicolas stood up. She had bright ginger hair cowled in net veiling scattered with red and black beads. They looked like tiny insects.

Nicolas wrote down: “Could do with a good spray.”

“Grace wants you to have your legs looked at, my darling. Because you’ve only got one pair and I believe there’s been trouble in that department already, am I right?”

Nicolas stretched his neck and looked across at the woman’s legs. They were thin and straight, fragile sticks with tiny, bony bulges, like little basins, sticking out at knee level.

“My GP says it’s cramp, Ava.”

“Earth doctors.” She laughed, shaking her head at the naïve conclusions of these simple inadequates. The audience joined in. Someone at the back started clapping. “Grace suggests a pendulum.”

“Oh! Thank you—”

“Plus a fenugreek massage.”

“Could you ask her—”

“I’m sorry but someone else is calling now, a gallant gentleman holding a red rose. I’m getting the letter T…Yes? A lady towards the back…”

“My son…” A shabbily dressed figure got up. “Trevor—he…was on his motorbike…”

“Now, my love, this is going to sound a little bit hard but Trevor has seen you on your tod having a weep over his picture and it makes him very sad. And we don’t want that, do we?”

The woman, unable to speak, covered her mouth with a scarf and shook her head.

“Because he liked a bit of jollity – didn’t he, young Trev? A little glass of something…I’m getting quite a lot of bubbles here…”

Trevor’s mother struggled with unintelligible sounds. Eventually a strangled resemblance to the word “snorkelling” emerged.

As she subsided the next communication arrived. This was Tom with apologies to Mavis for passing to spirit before he’d had time to finish liming her outhouse.

After Tom messages came thick and fast. Nicolas wondered if everyone was supposed to receive one before they went in for tea, the way all children at a party expect a present. He was longing to look around at Cully but knew, if she caught him, he’d never hear the end of it.

“I’m being wafted shades of green now – overalls and masks. Bright lights and a definite scent of ether. A dear one recently lost in the theatre, perhaps?”

Nicolas wrote down, “Gielgud?”

“And here’s someone – a bit of a Charlie, he tells me. And an Albert. Do these names connect at all?”

What a question, thought Cully, yawning. The miracle would be if two of the most common names of the last century did not connect with such an elderly audience. Where were the Crispins and Algernons, that’s what she wanted to know. Why didn’t Rollo and Georgiana, Araminta and Pauncefoot “come through”?

And why were there no really helpful or exciting messages? Like a recipe for low-calorie chocolate fudge. Or a new sonnet from William S. Something that would give pith and moment to the whole tedious procedure.

“I hear a baby chuckling now in the world of spirit…”

“My grandson, little Darren.” A man in the front row burst into floods of tears.

“You wouldn’t know him, my darling. He’s getting to be a lovely boy, because they do grow up, you know, in the higher realms.”

The man, amazed, started to dry his eyes.

“And he has his very own guardian angel – Brother Thundercloud – so rest assured no harm can ever come to him.”

“Thank you, thank you. Oh! Darren, we think of you all the time. Nana sends her love…”

It was at this stage that Nicolas stopped sneering to himself at the audience’s credulity and started to feel angry on their behalf. Angry at the easy promises and consoling images tossed to rows of hungry faces like crumbs from the table to starving birds. The words “bread” and “stones” came to mind.

Then, as the medium tilted back her head, the light fell fully on to the right side of her face and Nicholas noticed for the first time a pinkish, plastic shell tucked neatly inside her ear. Deaf – oh, brilliant. Able to talk to the deceased a trillion, zillion light years away but unable to hack it with the living at spitting distance. After this observation all his light good humour returned.

There was a silence from the platform. The pause lengthened. Nicolas’s neighbour nudged him and whispered kindly, “Nothing for you today then, dear?”

“No.” Nicolas glanced down at the tan sausage, which had grown alarmingly. It now looked more like a chair leg. “I’m here on my mum’s behalf. Hoping for contact from my Aunty Ethel.”

“Her sister?”

“They got very close towards the end.”

“Aah – peaceful was it?”

“Lovely.”

Nicolas was beginning to feel worried at the ease with which he was slipping into this by now familiar scenario. I’ll be believing it myself next, he thought, and vowed, if Cully’s research went on, to invent a more colourful departed relative to talk about. A mad axe murdering uncle perhaps, now chuckling in the world of spirit as he laid about him with a sawn off, double-barrelled harp.

The meeting was getting somewhat restless when Ava Garret, now positioned dead centre, front of stage, lifted both of her hands and held them, palms facing out towards the audience. A strange expression had transformed her face. It was marked now with a deep frown of concentration. Apprehension too. It seemed that easy access to the higher spheres had suddenly deserted her. However, all was not lost.

“I’m getting…a D…and an E…The name’s becoming clearer…It’s definitely Dennis.”

Two women in the front row turned to each other. One built, as far as Nicolas could make out, along the lines of his formidable father-in-law, appeared very excited. The second woman raised her arm, high and straight in the air like a child at school.

“There is a message for you, my dear. It is…a distressing one…”

A feeling of unease pervaded the hall. Messages were never distressing. The congregation started to shift around, rustle bags. Began to crave refreshment.