Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

'Excuse the mess,' he said. 'I've never been too clever at housework.'

Sophie was beginning to wonder if she'd made a big mistake. Perhaps fear had acted as an aphrodisiac, because whatever spell he had cast over her the night before had lost its potency. Now she was finding him slightly irritating. He was like an overgrown undergraduate, eager to impress but devoid of the means by which to do it.

Sophie had to remind him about the spaghetti, which was already way past the al dente stage — any more boiling, and they would need to slurp it up with soup spoons. But Robert was aware he was approaching a critical stage in the food preparation; in a lighthearted manner, pretending to be an Italian dictator, he ordered her out of the kitchen.

It was turning into trial by taste bud.

'I'm not the world's most brilliant cook,' Robert admitted.

'It's delicious,' said Sophie, trying to swallow the pasta straight down, without letting the sauce come into contact with the inside of her mouth.

'Perhaps you'll cook for me sometime,' he said.

'I'd love to.' Sophie had managed to swallow about half her wine, sifting it through her teeth and trying not to let her mouth pucker, but before she could stop him, he'd picked up the bottle and refilled her glass to the brim.

'No, really,' she protested. 'I mustn't.'

'Yes, you must,' he said. 'You're going to be glad of that alcohol when you hear what I've got to tell you.'

She remembered the reason she was there. 'Fire ahead.'

He took her invitation literally and lit another cigarette, even though she hadn't finished eating. His fingernails were filthy and in need of a trim. 'Let's begin with what you know already,' he said. 'The house, as if you hadn't already guessed, is haunted.'

This was what Sophie had been expecting to hear, but all the same she giggled nervously. 'You're joking.'

'You wouldn't say that if we were sitting here in the dark. Everything seems normal now, doesn't it? But that's precisely why I asked you round during the day. If I'd said last night what I'm going to say now, you'd have wigged out.'

Sophie concentrated hard on not smiling. He was right. The daylight made a difference. 'So the girl on the railings was a ghost,' she said.

'In a manner of speaking.' Sophie blinked, and consequently almost missed seeing a number of expressions flit across Robert's face in rapid succession, so rapid that it was impossible to isolate any single one of them. The moment left her feeling slightly uneasy, as though a vital piece of information had been dangled in front of her nose before being snatched away and concealed.

'This is where it begins to get hairy,' said Robert.

'You mean it wasn't hairy before?'

'Thing is,' he said, 'she's not the only one. Remember that pop group we were talking about?'

'The Drunken Boats?'

Robert got up and walked slowly to the window. 'Typical public-school hippies. High on dope or acid, most of the time. Jumping on every bandwagon that was going and then jumping off again, thinking they could fly. They managed to cobble that one album together, God knows how, and then self-destructed quite spectacularly. One of them — I think it was the singer — took an overdose. The lead guitarist covered himself in petrol and put a match to it. The drummer was decapitated in a car crash. All within days of one another. All in this house.'

'There was a car crash here?' asked Sophie, trying to picture it.

'Of course not.' He sounded impatient. 'I meant it all happened at once. But at least one of them died here, I'm certain. Which would explain why their spirits are unquiet.'

'And they're not likely to get any quieter so long as they insist on playing that awful music,' said Sophie.

'They were real no-hopers,' said Robert. 'I heard part of their album once, in Rough Trade. Customers trampled each other in the rush to get out of the shop.'

'And the girl was part of the group?'

Instead of replying, Robert gazed off into the middle-distance.

'Ann-Marie,' prompted Sophie.

Robert started to run his hand through his hair; it was a habit, she realized, which indicated he was giving serious consideration to something.

'Let's just say she was a superannuated groupie,' he said at last. 'Perhaps she was the one who introduced Jeremy Idlewild to the needle. That would make sense, wouldn't it? In fact,' his voice gathered conviction, 'I think it was Jeremy who oh-deed.'

'You seem to know a lot about them.'

'I did some research,' said Robert. 'It was my way of coping with the noise. Can you think of anything worse than ghosts who play deafening rock music? Makes you long for the good old days when they just moaned and rattled chains.'

'What kind of research?' asked Sophie. 'How do you research a haunted house?'

'You look through back editions of the local paper,' said Robert. 'Or you frequent the pubs: Baldinger's, the Saddleback Arms, the Landrace Inn. Some of the oldsters can remember the juicy stuff — the axe murders and suicides and sex scandals. They have memories like attics, the ones whose brains haven't been scrambled with drugs and booze.'

'But what happened to Ann-Marie?'

Robert was now staring at a point in space somewhere beyond her left shoulder. She wondered if he were avoiding her gaze on purpose, or just having to concentrate in order to dredge up half-forgotten snippets.

'They had one acid party too many. She fell out of the window, and they were all so stoned no one noticed. She was found in the morning by a neighbour.'

Here Robert turned his big brown eyes on her and looked soulful. 'Poor Ann-Marie.'

'How awful.'

He became brisk. 'That's one version, anyway. There are others. Some people say it was murder, others that it was suicide. Ann-Marie threw herself out of the window to get away from whatever was going on inside the room. These guys, they were into some weird stuff.'

'You mean drugs?'

'I mean Devil worship. Amateurs, the lot of them, but they really dug black magic, idolized people like Aleister Crowley. There were rumours about a hidden message on their album. Play it backwards, and you had a hotline to Satan.'

'And was there a message?'

Robert burst out laughing. 'Those boys didn't have a clue. They wouldn't have known Satan if he had come up and bitten them on the bum.'

'You can't possibly have ghosts,' I said to Sophie.

'Why not?'

I wanted to say, 'Because you're not creative enough.' But that would have been excessively cruel, so instead I told her she was too sensible.

'No, I'm not,' said Sophie. 'I like ghosts. They remind us there's a spiritual side to life, that death is not the end. We're all too hung up on material things.'

Look who's talking , I thought. Sophie was the original Material Girl. Her idea of a spiritual experience was walking through Harrods and being squirted by six different perfume saleswomen at once.

'They don't frighten you any more?'

'Not in the least,' said Sophie. 'They're noisy, but harmless.'

'How do you know they're harmless? That might be exactly what they want you to think. And then, just when you think it's safe to go back into the living-room…'

'These ghosts aren't capable of being devious,' Sophie said. 'They're stoned all the time, like your friends Dirk and Lemmy.'

'Pity you can't ask them to play something classical.'

'Don't be silly,' said Sophie. 'They're ghosts, not DJs.'

'You're so sure there's more than one of them?'

'Robert said it was the whole group. Plus poor old Ann-Marie.'

I counted them out loud on my fingers. One — the singer who oh-deed. Two — the drummer who lost his head in a car crash. Three — the guitarist who set fire to himself.