Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“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.’