Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

Turning to face Merrily at the end of the passage. Even in the gloom, Merrily could see that Bell’s eyes were alight.

‘But, you see, Mary, I was never very good at love.’

Merrily stopped in the passage. Beginning to see everything now, the whole purpose of this woman’s cycle of ritual: the candles burnt in ancient, sacred places, the menstrual blood in the church… the shroud, her magical apparel on a ghost-walk from the yew outside this house, over the spiritual summit of the town, to the yew in the overgrown cemetery of St Leonard’s that was humming and rustling with energy.

‘Death is eternal life without pain,’ Merrily whispered. ‘We make our own eternity.’

There was a momentary silence, except for the small sounds of a sleeping fire in the space behind Belladonna, where there were glimmerings of red and orange.

‘You know ,’ Bell said, in a kind of awe.

They’d walked from The Linney, down some steps under the castle wall, like descending from the high town into the country.

Once, a sensor had found them and set off an imitation Victorian gas-lamp in the tiered, tree-snuggled garden of a modern bungalow, and Bell Pepper had stopped and turned around, with the musical-instrument case held by her side. Her shroud had a high, ruffled neck and came close to the ground where her feet were in sandals. She seemed, for a moment, to be flickering in time, and that was when Merrily had had the first inkling.

Soon, the buildings were separating out, town houses giving way to farmhouses, brick to stone, walls to high hedges, viridian-grey under the egg-shaped moon. The pavement narrowing, so Bell was walking some way ahead of Merrily, the pale shroud like a waving handkerchief.

There were stone gateposts at The Weir House drive and high, iron gates. But a smaller gate to the side had been unlocked, and Bell had led Merrily into a pathway which took them not to the house but to a yew tree which the path encircled. The yew was the width of one of Gomer Parry’s diggers, very softly floodlit from below, green and gold. Like so many in churchyards, it was the remains of a long slow implosion, the great tree serving up its own entrails in a blackened tangle of pipes, like a ruined church organ.

Bell had walked inside.

Not uncommon to find them alive and hollow; there was one at Much Marcle with a seat inside. Merrily had hung back, didn’t want to go inside the tree with Belladonna. Emerging a few moments later, Bell had stepped back and bowed to the tree and walked away, with no explanation.

But she hadn’t been carrying the instrument case any more, only a long key.

‘That was quite a shock.’ Bell laughed nervously, a glass of red wine at her lips. ‘I thought for a moment— But I suppose Jonathan told you, didn’t he? He was here when we rehearsed it. That particular line – we make our own eternity – is on the album, the thing I’m doing with Le Fanu. Which we haven’t yet recorded. Jonathan was dropping so many hints I let him in once to listen – special treat. Little bastard, I expect he was making notes.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Merrily said. ‘Jonathan didn’t tell me.’

The laugh was snapped off, and then Bell, face glowing in the firelight, said, with uncertainty, ‘There is no other way you could—’

‘Yes, I’m afraid there is.’

There was what looked like half a small tree on the fire in the great stone hearth. There must have been some draught system under the hearth because Bell had awoken the fire, and they were sitting in its sporadic light in these hopelessly uncomfortable oak chairs, no more than carved wooden boxes with vertical backrests and the fronts blocked in like commodes. Velvet cushions helped a bit, not much. Bell leaned out of hers.

‘But of course Jonathan maintains you’re the best natural psychic he’s ever encountered. I was inclined not to believe him. Jonathan is… how shall I…?’

‘Prone to hyperbole.’ Carving on the chair’s upright spine bit into Merrily’s back. She sat up, sinking her hands into the pockets of her fleece. ‘Mrs Pepper, I read it on the Internet.’

‘I don’t know anything about the Internet!’ Bell’s voice rose erratically. ‘Computers suck your energy. You couldn’t have!’

‘The quote was on a website. Well, more of a chat-room.’

‘I don’t even know what a fucking chat-room is.’

‘It’s like a forum. Where people can send messages to each other? In this case, people interested in suicide.’

‘What?’

‘Where would-be suicides gather to talk it over online. It was quoted in a reply to someone who was planning to take her own life. I couldn’t tell you where they got it from, but the Internet moves almost as fast as you can think. Passing thoughts suddenly get shared with thousands of people.’

Merrily looked around into the darkness. They might as well have been sitting outside in front of a brazier. This would be a very atmospheric rehearsal room, but as living space, despite the heavy tapestries on the walls and the sheepskins on the floor, it was too big, too cold, too rudimentary. Too starkly, uncompromisingly medieval.

Bell Pepper was watching her intently over her wine glass. ‘Why were you looking at this suicide website?’

‘I was trying to help my friend, Robbie’s uncle. I wanted to understand Robbie and why he died.’

‘You think he committed suicide?’

‘His uncle thinks it’s possible. What do you think?’

Bell’s face went blank. ‘I don’t know.’

‘He seems to have been victimized – bullied – on the estate where he lived. There’s evidence that he didn’t want to go back. That he took his life to… stay here…’

‘No, that’s not true.’

‘So we looked at his computer and he—’

‘No! Listen… I didn’t put that stuff there. Yeah, yeah, there’s a computer here that Le Fanu use – for the music, they download sounds, sample stuff, I don’t know how it works, I don’t have to, I’m not an Internet freak like fucking Bowie… and I didn’t put those words out, or any of that song… I didn’t.’

‘I never said you did,’ Merrily said. ‘And, for what it’s worth, there’s no evidence that Robbie went near those sites. But, since I’ve just quoted that line back to you, somebody must have, mustn’t they? Did one of the band do it – Le Fanu? Your songs appear to be widely available on the suicide network, did you know that?’

‘It’s nothing to do with me. Anybody could… Everybody knows what I did.’

‘Sorry, I’m getting confused, what are we—?’

‘It’s in the books. The unauthorized biographies.’

‘I’ve never read them,’ Merrily said. ‘I just know the music. I just… wore the clothes.’

‘When I was fifteen,’ Bell said, a tired incantation, ‘I tried to kill myself. I took an overdose. I spent quality time on a stomach pump. I was fifteen and I was overweight, bad skin, repressed and horribly shy, and I had a heart defect and I was not allowed to do games and my parents drove me everywhere – even if I went out at night with friends they drove me there and collected me – and I also had a disgusting brace on my twisted teeth, so I tried to kill myself. It’s in the books.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know about that.’

Bell craned her neck forward. ‘Darling, it’s part of the legend. The next part is when I was seventeen and someone said I could sing and someone else pointed out that if you took the middle out of my dreary name, Isabella Donachie, you had the magic word Belladonna – poisonous, the most resonant name for a singer in those days – and that seemed like some glorious epiphany, and I snatched the brace off my teeth and slept with about a hundred men in six months.’