Will Kingdom: Mean Spirit

Quite often you get a rush of them coming at you like primary school kids when the doors are opened to the playground. Most mediums are happy to employ an outside filter, known as a spirit guide, but Seffi’s been through all that and finds it unsatisfactory: hand-holding, patronizing. She doesn’t need any of those old cliche props. Nor even a feed-line — although this is expected and everyone has a variation on the traditional Is there anybody there? Like, Do we have company? Or the cringe-making Are there spirit friends amongst us?

She lowers her eyelids, focuses on a point three feet in front of her, so that the opulent room becomes a soft blur and none of the guests exists as individuals.

Letting the music flow into her, slowing her breathing. Hands on knees, long neck extended, she yawns luxuriously and gathers herself into trance.

There’s quite a space around her, like the space left by spectators standing back from a road accident or a street fight. As though the earlier exchange has caused a shock on that side too. Only Kieran remaining for a moment, a more nebulous presence than before — confused, unsure how to proceed. There should be someone there for him; he needs only to become aware of this.

Look around, she says to him, gently. See who’s there.

Waiting now for him to react, for the confusion to evaporate. It’s at moments like this when you realize you almost always are stronger than they are.

And then Kieran is gone. On the edge of her vision, the candle flame becomes a tiny planet of light.

‘The lines’, she announces softly, ‘are open.’

Later -

when it’s cold … when the music, with a busying of woodwind, gains power and the voices come in, the first swelling cry of Debussy’s night nymphs … when women are pulling cardigans and evening shawls around their shoulders, expressions of vague distaste puckering several faces … when Coral’s chair is no longer empty … when exploratory hands are dry and fibrous on Seffi’s skin.

— how she wishes she could claw back those words.

The truth of it was, Grayle didn’t much like spiritualist mediums any more — was now prepared to admit never having encountered one who seemed wholly genuine. All this, I have a tall, grey-haired gentleman here, he says to tell Martha hello and he wants her to know he doesn’t get the migraines now.

Hey, screw the migraines, you wanted to scream … what’s it like over there? What does God look like?

Plus, they were usually creepy people. They had soft voices and wise little smiles. You looked at them and you thought of funeral flowers and the pink satin lining of grandma’s casket.

Of course, as an accredited New Age writer, Grayle was supposed to relish creepy, was supposed to embrace creepy.

Uh-huh. Shaking her head, driving nervously towards the next traffic island. Couldn’t handle that stuff the same any more, since Ersula. If this woman started giving her little personal messages from across the great divide, she was out of there.

Pink satin lining. No-one would ever know what kind of lining was in the special casket she had to obtain to take home what remained of Ersula. Closed for ever. Vacuum sealed.

Grayle shuddered at the wheel. She wished it was a brighter day, but this was mid-March — March still at its most unspringlike, blustering over Gloucester, a grey place every time she’d been here, which was maybe twice. Stay out of the city, that was the rule. Each time you meet with a junction, aim for the hills.

She swung hard right in front of a truck, which was not enormous by US standards but big enough to crush the Mini like a little red bug. The driver was leaning on the horn from way up there, glaring down at Grayle, who was gripping the wheel with both hands, cowering. OK, I blew it again, I switched lanes without a signal. But you’re a big rig in a tiny country. You should make allowances. Asshole.

In England even rural roads were now so crowded that driving had become small-scale and intricate, like macrame. OK, no comparison with New York, but in New York Grayle took cabs.

Places like Oxford were on the signs now. But what about Stroud? Was this OK for Stroud? There were hills ahead, at least. Not big hills, but in England the further east you went, the more they lowered the minimum height for hill status.

From behind, another horn was blasting her out. In her driver’s mirror she saw a guy in a dark blue van gesturing, moving his hand up and down like a conductor telling an orchestra to soften it up. OK, what did I do now?

It was three miles further on — Gloucester safely behind her, the blue van gone — when Grayle found out. This was when the clanking began, like she’d just gotten married and someone had attached a string of tin cans to the fender.

All too soon after this delightful image came to her the noise became more ominous, this awful grinding and then the car was sounding like a very ancient mowing machine.

Grayle pulled over, climbed out.

There was a dead metal python in the road with an extended lump in the middle, like it just dined on a dachsund. She realized what the van driver’s up-and-down hand movements had been about.

This was wonderful. This was just terrific.

She looked around. Suddenly the British countryside seemed an awful lot bigger.

The garage guy stood over the mangled exhaust system, doing all those garage-guy things — the head-shaking, the grimaces. Showing her how the pipe had apparently been attached to the underside of the car at one end by a length of fence wire. Fence wire?

Grayle said, ‘Couldn’t you just like patch it up and kind of … shove it back on?’

The garage guy found this richly amusing. Wasn’t that odd: the world over, garage guys having the same sense of humour?

It began to rain. Because her mobile was out of signal, she’d walked over a mile to a callbox, where she’d found the number of the local car repairer on a card taped to the backboard. Then walked all the way back to the Mini and waited another half-hour for this guy to arrive like some kind of knight in greasy armour.

‘Problem is …’ he kicked the pipe ‘… it’s not gonner be too easy finding one like this.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

She stared at him. Was this not the most famous British car there ever was? A classic car? This was what the second-hand dealer had told her when she bought it — quiet-voiced middle-aged guy in a dark suit, not slick, not pushy. Marcus had been furious when he heard how much she had paid, but the car had run fine, until now.

‘As you say — was. Not any more, my sweet.’ The garage guy took off his baseball cap, scratched his head, replaced the cap, all the time grinning through his moustache at the dumb American broad. ‘How long you been over here?’