Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

Robbie?

Robbie was not, somehow, quite part of this. And Robbie had fallen from the Keep. He still, in some way, stood for an innocence.

It left Marion.

Marion who had made a mistake and accepted the consequences. Marion who so many people – Robbie and Bell and Jemmie Pegler – had moulded to match their own requirements.

Poor Marion.

‘Erm… Thank you. I’d like everybody to leave now.’

Sandy Gee’s eyes flashed urgently in the light of the hurricane lamp.

‘I’d like to work with Sam.’

Sandy’s stare told her that she’d better know what she was doing.

She didn’t.

When they’d all left, Steve leaving behind, at her request, his hurricane lamp, she said, ‘OK if I come up there with you, Sam?’

Lol stood up. He could see, lit up like a distant doll’s house, the complex chessboard façade of the Feathers, the main street a chain of lights, the whole town like a jeweller’s counter.

He’d have to deal with his own fear, make a rush at her. It was unlikely he’d get close enough even to reach for her before she let the inflammable dress brush the candlelight. But what else could he do?

What else?

‘Bell…’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you really think Marion flies?’

‘If you’re going to throw your girlfriend’s dogma at me—’

‘No… No, it’s not, but… we’ve all heard endless accounts of what a ghost looks like, what a ghost sounds like, what a ghost does, but we don’t – and nor does anyone – know what a ghost feels.’

‘And what do you think they feel?’

‘I doubt they feel anything, they just exist. Transient, two-dimensional, in flickering shades of grey… Just existing, in little cold pockets of nothing.’

‘Beautiful.’

‘It’s not immortality.’

‘Existence without pain.’

‘But without any prospect of happiness.’

‘I sometimes think our highest aspiration is the avoidance of pain.’

‘That’s deeply sad,’ Lol said, ‘coming from an artist.’

And, saying that, he realized that being an artist was the explanation of most of it. It was not spiritual, not about transcendence… only a projection of a grand design, developed over many years from a single lurid image in a picture book. She’d found a place on which to impose her vision of a multidimensional heaven. An old-fashioned concept album in a beautiful gatefold sleeve.

Not madness, but it was a fine distinction.

Something else occurred to him then, something far more prosaic. If it was the dead baby’s birthday, it was also Jon Scole’s. No wonder the poor sod had got drunk.

‘Bell… how did Jonathan die?’

He was thinking of Merrily’s vague suspicion about the blood. How there had not been enough of it.

‘You’re a creator,’ he said. ‘You’re not a killer. You couldn’t kill. Could you?’

Because it was clear she didn’t see her own death as an act of self-destruction; it was a great display, a rush of ferocious light that would launch her spirit into an intimate form of eternity.

She’d gone still, with her head on one side, like a Halloween mannequin someone had wedged between the battlements as a joke.

Lol said, ‘Did he kill himself? Did he take an overdose or something? Did he prise open the mandolin case, on his birthday, and see where all your maternal love had been going?’

She tilted suddenly, and he thought she was going over, unlit, and he ran at the wall.

‘No!’ Throwing her hands out, then slapping them back down when the case began to slip, tugging it into her lap.

He stopped.

‘He… must have gone on drinking, taken his clothes off and gone to bed, and then… I don’t know… Maybe he got up to make a phone call…’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because there was a message on my machine this morning. It was full of bile. So drunk he could hardly speak. It was like, “You fucking old bitch… you gave away a baby and kept…” ’

Lol could hear voices in the streets and alleys below, guessed that Bell finally had an audience. Without one, there would be no point.

‘ “… Kept something…” ’ She began to play with the clasp on the mandolin case, flicking it up and down with her fingers. ‘ “… Something looks like a Kentucky fried chicken.” ’

‘He was dead when you found him, right? Come on, Bell, everybody’s going to know after the post-mortem.’

She let the clasp snap back. Her sigh was irritable.

‘Maybe he went on drinking and choked on his own vomit. I don’t know. I was just so angry at him. He’d killed Robbie and he’d got away with it… for what? Such a sordid, ignominious… such a little death… He wouldn’t… even he wouldn’t have wanted that. I… I went into his hovel of a kitchen and I found a knife in a drawer.’

Lol imagined the resulting scene like a concept-art tableau: Tracey Emin meeting Damien Hirst in their own perfect purgatory.

Bell said, ‘It’s how I imagined Arnold de Lisle dying. Naked. Cut to pieces. Jonathan, if he was nothing else, at least he looked like a warrior. Like Eric. All they ever had was their looks.’

‘Arnold de Lisle, huh?’ Lol was suddenly furious at her. ‘Except that with Arnold there’d have been masses of blood. When someone’s already dead, nothing pumping, you can cut through arteries and just get a dribble.’

‘I didn’t know. Or if I did, I didn’t think.’

‘So that was pretty sordid, too, really. And you know something else? With your luck, you could throw yourself off this roof and… and land on the porch or something and just wind up a paraplegic.’

‘We’ll see,’ Bell said. She straightened up with a kind of magisterial calm and flicked up the catch and opened the mandolin case, releasing a very strong smell of what could only be more lighter fuel.

‘The other difference with Arnold,’ Lol said in desperation, ‘was that at least he had some love first.’

Bell smiled sadly, with those lovely crooked teeth, a glint of moving light in her eyes as she came down, with the open coffin, to the candles.

Side by side, looking out of the window space towards the river and just a few lights, Merrily and Sam prayed together for Marion de la Bruyère, Merrily murmuring snatches from the Requiem Eucharist.

‘We’ve come to remember, before God, our sister Marion…’

Robbie Walsh had probably chosen well. Marion might well have resembled Sam physically even if, in a border fortress full of tense, wary men, she’d have grown up faster and probably harder.

You promised eternal life to those who believe:

Remember your servant Marion,

as we also remember her.

Bring all who rest in Christ

Into the fullness of your Kingdom

where sins have been forgiven

and death is no more…

And then busking it.

‘God, we pray for the release of Marion’s spirit from the deluded and the misguided and those who would use her to further their own… agendas. We pray that Marion may…’

It was very cold now, in the Hanging Tower. Sam crept close to Merrily; she was shaking. Her face was in shadow but the tiny ring glittered at the edge of an eyebrow.

‘… Fly,’ Merrily said.

Quite prepared to become aware of long, slow breathing in the tower, or even what Bernie Dunmore had described as more like an absence of smile. A smile so cold, so bleak, so devoid of hope… only this perpetual, bitter… terminality.

Unprepared for a long and hollow scream from somewhere else.

COMING UP TO sunset, Lol’s living room was like the inside of a terracotta plant-pot. Even Jane didn’t like it any more.