Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Meaning?’

‘Well… you know. There’s obviously a lot of places she finds a bit of a turn-on. That’s why she came here. Like I say, this is just a very haunted town, and it feels like it, know what I mean?’

‘It feels nice.’

‘It feels haunted , Mary. Everywhere you go. Look at all the stories… you got an old woman in a dressing gown in the churchyard, and heavy footsteps. You got Catherine of Aragon – allegedly – at the Castle Lodge. Summat shivery at The Reader’s House. You got haunted shops, a hairdresser’s with a poltergeist. And… look over there…’

A view had opened on the left, the kind of view that seemed like it was planned. Anywhere else, there’d have been a viewing point with a telescope that you could feed 10p coins into.

It was the castle, as she’d never seen it before. It was away on the other side of the town but, from here, it appeared to be nestling in lush greenery, the scene uninterrupted by modern buildings or, in fact, any buildings – as if you were viewing it along a wooded valley. As if you were back then, when there was only the castle.

‘Jon, it’s like this place – this cemetery – is linked with everywhere. You turn a corner and…’

‘Magic,’ Jon Scole said. ‘Everything in this town is connected up. Like electric wires. Like a circuit. If you know how, you can plug yourself in.’

‘Bell told you that?’

‘Just once. And then she shut up, like she were giving too much away. Links through time – all the sacred places interlinked, and there are special spots where all the… like the eras of time come together. When she walks here, it’s like… you know?’

‘Like she doesn’t walk alone? Or at least she feels…’

‘Feels, yeah. Doesn’t see nowt, but… I tell you, if I could get that woman into the ghost-walks, as a regular, I’d bloody clean up. As it is, I’m just taking it all in, I feel like I’m tapping into her consciousness.’

Merrily remembered Lol suggesting that inside Belladonna’s consciousness was not a safe place to be.

‘… Learned a lot about Bell,’ Jon was saying. ‘I mean, the music, that’s only half of it. This is a heavy lady, Mary.’ He paused, nodding his head. ‘’Course, she’s also halfway out of her fuckin’ tree.’

They went and stood under the dark, feathery awning of the yew, and she felt stupid with her glasses on, turning everything the colour of ripening plums.

‘Presumably,’ she said, ‘you’ve heard about the other things she’s supposed to have done. I mean, apart from walk.’

‘Naked!’ He laughed. ‘With a feller. Just over there, it was, apparently, where the ivy’s all thick on the ground. You’ve got to hand it to her, at her age. They must’ve been scratched to buggery.’

‘The Mayor was not amused.’

‘Well, what d’you expect? I mean, George Lackland… his generation… he’s not exactly a left-wing espouser of liberal values, is he? I mean, she was in rock music. They don’t operate according to George’s rules. They don’t live on the same planet.’

‘George lives on Planet Ludlow,’ Merrily said. ‘Isn’t that where Bell wants to be, too?’

‘She wants to be part of it, that’s true. But like, if she gets off on doing it in places where’ – making quote marks in the air with crooked fingers – ‘The Veil is Thin… I can connect with that. Sex produces a lot of psychic energy. And if there’s this vortex of energy there already, you probably get a top buzz. ’Least, you do if you’re Bell. You know what I mean?’

‘In a way.’

It was still a graveyard, though. Death-fixated erotomania was how Nigel Saltash might describe it. The yew tree was draped around them, exposing its insides. Ancient yews always looked like they’d been dead and come through it.

‘She’s built a career around an obsession,’ Jon Scole said. ‘If you’ve heard the music you’ll know that. She’s made a shitload of money, but she’s had a couple of brushes with the big D along the way, so she knows what a tightrope life is, even if you’re loaded. And she’s not getting any younger. So she’s not playing any more, and she doesn’t care what people think. She wants to know what she’s got coming.’

‘We all want to know,’ Merrily said. ‘Even the clergy.’

‘Yeah, but you got distractions. You got other things to do. This woman… she’s done the lot. Every way you can gratify yourself in this life, she’s done it. What’s left? Think about it.’

‘You sound as if you understand her.’

‘I try. I mean, she’s here… I’m here… there’s potential.’

‘But you said she was out of her tree?’

‘Halfway out of her tree.’

‘How would I get to meet her?’

‘You don’t meet her. She meets you… if she wants to. You can hang round here all night, and it’s like waiting for some rare creature – you might get lucky, you probably won’t. When she first came to live in Ludlow, reporters’d show up, full of themselves, and they’d all go back with nowt. Unless she wanted to talk. Which mostly she didn’t. Talked to the Journal ’cos that were the local paper. Wouldn’t even talk to the Star , ’cos it circulates outside.’

‘And that’s why local people protect her?’

‘That’s one of the reasons. She’s eccentric, Mary. This town likes eccentrics.’

‘George doesn’t. And a few others.’

‘No. Well…’

‘So if I wanted to meet her?’

‘You’d have to be someone she was interested in.’

‘Like Robbie Walsh?’

‘Let’s get back into the light, eh?’ Jon Scole said.

They stood inside the chapel gateway, near the information board, their backs to the surrounding wall and Corve Street. A young man came out of the print-shop with two carrier bags, smiled at Merrily.

‘Don’t believe a word this feller tells you. Most frightening thing you’ll ever see in Ludlow is him at closing time.’

‘Right…’ Jon Scole levelled a finger. ‘That order for four hundred Ghostours leaflets? Consider it bloody cancelled!’

He dropped his grin as the guy walked away. Turned to Merrily and shook his head.

‘What happened to Robbie, that were the worst thing of all. Great kid. Great to have around, you know? All that knowledge, he was like a wassername, prodigy. You’d see him wandering around, world of his own, and you’d go, All right, Robbie? You OK, mate? Be like he was coming down off something. Blink, blink – where am I?’

‘He used to go on the ghost-walk?’

‘Towards the end, he were practically a fixture. At first, he’d just tag along – well, I couldn’t charge him, could I? ’Sides, people liked him. He used to do half my job – knew everything about every building we came to. I didn’t, hadn’t been here long enough. Loved telling people about the past. In his element.’

‘He was interested in ghosts?’

‘Not so much the ghosts as the ’ist’ry. I did the ghosts, he did the ’ist’ry. We were quite a team, all through Easter. See… he could give you a picture. He was like a kid that’d just walked out of the Middle Ages. When he died, I were just fuckin’ gutted, Mary.’

Jon recalled the funeral – only right the service should be at St Laurence’s; even though he wasn’t local, he’d made himself local. Jon had waited to talk to old Mrs Mumford afterwards, telling her how much they’d all thought of Robbie.

‘Including Mrs Pepper?’

‘What do you think?’

‘So how did they meet?’

‘On the ghost-walk. Some nights, when it’s a bit quiet, she’ll just show up. Tag along. Tourists leave her alone; she’s a bit forbidding in that cloak. Anyway, one night – this’d be around last Christmas, when I was just getting the shop together – Robbie was there, and I were a bit knackered so I let him do most of it. He knew all the stories, better than me. And he just… little bugger brought it alive, standing there under a lantern on a stick. Especially the medieval stuff. He’d tell you what they were wearing, what the streets were like… the smells, even. Not in an academic way – he were still a young lad, no big words. But it was like the rest of us were in the here and now, and he was walking the same street, but he was in the twelfth century. You had to see it.’