Phil Rickman: The Smile of a Ghost

‘That mean you’re thinking of making one?’

‘Be awfully time-consuming, but perhaps worthwhile. I’d certainly be quite interested in examining apparitions as subjective – or reflective – phenomena.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A study of perceived apparitions to discover what they’re telling us about the perceiver.’

‘The ghost as a psychological projection of someone’s inner condition?’

‘Inner guilt, inner torment.’ Saltash joined a tailback of cars from Leominster’s town-centre lights. ‘Sense of loss. Repressed sexual desire. Is the perceived ghost, for instance, shadowy and quiescent? Is it urgent, or aggressive?’

‘So I can take it you don’t accept the possibility of ghosts as an objective reality.’

‘Merrily, the very word “ghost” ’ – Saltash’s smile broke out – ‘is surely an antithesis of the word “real”.’

‘So, even as a Christian—’

‘I don’t think the Bible has a lot to say on the subject. Or am I wrong?’

‘Well, it… occurs, here and there.’

‘But probably without a hard and fast definition of the term ghost. You see, I don’t know how far you personally go with this. I’m not going to ask you about your personal “psychic experience” – highly subjective, therefore rarely helpful, and not a can of worms I’d want to open at this stage of our relationship.’

This stage?

Merrily had the feeling of being worked, becoming the subject of some kind of private thesis. And guessing that whatever she said next would seep, at some strategic point, back to Siân Callaghan-Clarke.

There was that mellow, new-car smell inside the BMW, a discreet No Smoking sign on the dash. She wished she was alone, in her rattling Volvo.

‘Look, I… I don’t have a particular problem with psychological projection. Probably does account for a lot of ghost stories. But it doesn’t fully explain the traditional haunted house, does it? Where something is seen again and again, by more than one person. How would you deal with that?’

‘Where do you want to start?’ The lights turned green; Saltash turned left. ‘Preconditioning? Folie à deux on a grand scale? If I were a physicist, I might even be drawn to seek a more scientific explanation of the trace-memory theory. But that’s not my backyard. The mind’s where I live. Edging, a touch warily for the moment, however, around Jung’s collective unconscious.’

‘So I’d be safe in assuming that the whole idea of the unquiet dead… would be well over your belief threshold.’

‘Merrily…’ Nigel Saltash wore his smile like a gold medallion. ‘Do you think we know each other well enough yet to even raise that question without the risk of permanent damage to an otherwise promising relationship?’

Promising? Promising how?

They were leaving Herefordshire now, and the personality of the countryside was changing. She saw the plains and ridges and escarpments of Shropshire: a bonier landscape, a lighter green, a bigger sky.

She saw, far in the east, the sawn-off slope of the Clee Hills. And then, momentarily, in the middle distance, fading out of the morning mist to the north-west, the tower of the church that was sometimes called the Cathedral of the Marches.

St Laurence’s, Ludlow. The ancient town clustered below it, an island in amber. A small town with an antique lustre and a bigger history than the whole of Herefordshire.

No town that ancient is unhaunted , Merrily thought, irrationally.

At first, Lol had thought, He’s too young .

Too young to know the background. Too young to understand how difficult it had been to get anywhere in the 1980s with music that was soft and breathy and woven into a mesh of acoustic guitars, when everything else was shiny and synthesized and nobody had heard of Nick Drake, and the Beatles were archaeology.

Jack Fine sat on the shorter stepladder, his microphone between his knees, wired to a mini-disc recorder in his jacket pocket. He had floppy hair and sulky lips and looked like he could be about nineteen. But then so did a lot of blokes that Lol learned later were in their mid-twenties. A sign of age, but he tried not to worry about this any more. And it became clear that Jack Fine did know the background. Maybe too much of it.

‘So, as I understand it, Lol, this goes back to when this other guy in the band – Karl Windling? – was hot for this groupie, and he roped you in to keep her mate occupied. And they were both under-age, and you got stitched up?’

‘I was eighteen,’ Lol said patiently. ‘I was very naive.’

‘But you were the one who finished up getting arrested and taking the rap—’

‘For something that never even happened.’

Oh God, how many times was he going to have to tell this wretched story? Even Karl Windling was history – dead in a road accident two years ago.

‘Leaving you with a police record,’ Jack said.

Lol nodding wearily. ‘And then my parents… they were tied into this fundamentalist religious sect, and they disowned me. And everything went downhill from there. Got the wrong kind of help, cracked up, wound up in a psychiatric hospital, and… Listen… Jack… I’m not trying to cover anything up or tell you your job or anything, but would it be possible to maybe not go into all this again?’

‘Lol…’ Jack leaned over his mike, his fair hair falling over his forehead and covering up one eye. ‘Look, man, OK, I can gloss over it. I can deal with it in, like, a couple of paragraphs? It’s just that you seem to be putting this experience into a few of the songs on the album?’

Lol sighed. No way round this.

‘The song “Heavy Medication Day”,’ Jack said. ‘The one that goes, “Someone’s got to pay, now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way.” What’s that about?’

‘It was just a particular doctor who was – how can I put this? – liberal with the medication. Anything for a quiet life. And probably so people wouldn’t know what he got up to on the side.’

‘Go on.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Lol shook his head. ‘He knows and I know, and all the rest is… just a song.’

‘There’s real anger in that song, though, isn’t there? Which is unusual for you – it’s usually more sort of resigned. It’s as if this guy did something really bad to you.’

‘Not to me personally.’

‘So, what—?’

‘Can we leave this one, Jack?’

‘Seems to me this whole album is about your journey, through the system… back into the light, kind of thing,’ Jack said. ‘Like an exorcism.’

‘Not exactly the word I’d use.’

Jack grinned, like maybe he knew about Merrily. He couldn’t know.

‘So how did you wind up out here in the sticks?’

‘Well, I… came here originally with a woman. She eventually went off with someone else. And then, um…’ Lol leaned back on his sofa and paused for a few seconds while he worked out what it was best to leave out – like him leaving the village and then coming back, because of Merrily. ‘… Then I met Prof Levin, just as he was setting up his studio on the other side of the county. And I’ve been working there, helping Prof out, doing a bit of session stuff. And then Prof kind of persuaded me to do the album. So I owe it all to him, really.’

Lol got out a copy of the CD and put it on the boombox, and they sat there, amid the paint cans and the dust sheets, discussing the songs and people who’d played on the tracks.

‘Including Simon St John on bass and cello,’ Jack said. ‘That’s a real name from the past. And he’s a vicar now, right?’

‘He’s been a vicar for years.’

‘Cool.’

‘Yeah, he’s cool.’

‘But you’re nothing to do with the Church…’