Which she couldn’t do. No going back then. No going back now.
She never forgets the day Marcus told her, in his gruff, unsympathetic way, that she was on the edge of clinical depression.
Funny how you never see that one coming. Never even see it when it’s fully in residence, this sinister squatter who advises you to buy more crystals until your cottage looks like some seaside fake-grotto and you don’t notice.
But Marcus did, and he was right: redemption resided in the dirty world, the soiled pool of missing kids, street-stabbings, soap stars’ marriages.
Almost transcendent, in its way, her two and half years at the Three Counties News Service. In that time, she’s become near normal. Dating, amongst other short-term mistakes, an industrial chemist and a Ukrainian jeweller. Both good-looking, personable guys, if mostly humourless. Where was Fred Potter when he was single?
But she forgets – he’s too young. She turned thirty-seven last month – how the hell did
that
happen?
Fred inspects his glass of mineral water, sees it hasn’t turned to beer, puts it down without drinking.
‘For what it’s worth, I really don’t think you’re looking at mediums and infrared. Might actually be closer to a serious documentary about Trinity Ansell and her dreams of the Tudor idyll. Working-class supermodel, to glittery celeb, to gracious country lady, to… I don’t know what…’
‘Presence’ is the term that Elsie, the kid at HGTV, kept tossing at her. Find out about ‘the presence’. As if Elsie had been told not to use the G-word at this stage of the game.
Grayle looks at the long-skirted sepia ladies in the photos on the walls. Images of the dead.
Start off by talking to them about life with Trinity
, Elsie told her,
and then take it from there
. She so hates it when some stupid kid tells you what questions you need to ask.
‘There’ll be sceptics,’ Fred says.
‘Where?’
‘On the programme. It isn’t… you know…’
‘Just fruitcakes.’ She swivels back to Fred. ‘But Defford still wants that house to be supposedly haunted by the ghost of Trinity Ansell, right? I was as good as told to try and stand that up.’
Fred shrugs.
‘In which case, how’s he squared it with the grieving widower to use the actual place?’
‘Ask him. He wants to meet you next week. At the house.’
‘Knap Hall?’
‘His PA will text you the details.’
‘Fred, you’re a…’ Her voice is giving out. She clears her throat, takes a drink. ‘A good guy. It’s just I always figured I’d maybe go back into, like, active metaphysics when I was old enough for an afterlife to have some personal significance.’
Which is not strictly true.
‘Makes sense.’ Fred nods, deadpan. ‘Certainly explains all the Zimmer frames in church porches.’
She doesn’t smile. Didn’t really mean it that way. Is really not sure which way she meant it. Maybe just trying to articulate a swelling sense of trepidation, because, even if she wanted to return to the funny stuff, this is unlikely to be a good way back.
And something touched her, and it was cold.
7
Feral
GRAYLE TAKES A
headache home with her. Hasn’t had one in years. She swallows two paracetamol, turns out the lights and lies down on the sofa, where she has a dream about a dead person.
It’s a dream she’s had before. She’s in the Three Counties office, working late, and becomes aware of someone watching her.
As usual, it’s Ersula, her sister. The clever one.
Ersula is standing in the doorway, like a ghost should, dark-robed. Except the robe is her academic gown, with all the trimmings. Ersula has a bunch of degrees in archaeology, anthropology and comparative religion, but she is dead. Knowing this, Grayle pretends to be unaware of her presence, until there’s an irregular development.
The door opens and a man walks in, a leather file under an arm, pair of reading glasses in one hand.
Their father.
Dr Erlend Underhill is an academic with even more degrees than Ersula. He still winces when she calls him dad.
He joins his cleverer daughter and the two of them stand looking down at Grayle. Looking down
on
her, on account of Grayle has no qualifications worth a damn.
Dr Underhill puts on his glasses, bends to her laptop screen and she thinks,
No, please, don’t look at this…
Still trying to figure out an intro for a story about a horse with a talent for picking National Lottery winning numbers. A story aimed at national tabloids, which, if they deign to use
it, will all rewrite it anyway. Still, she has to prove she can do the UK popular-journalism thing – like how the golden hooves of Barney the shire horse are helping his owner to rein in a small fortune, that kind of stuff. Only she can’t get it right. It’s semi-literate shit and her father’s face tells her he’s seen it. She’s slamming down the laptop’s lid, throwing her arms around it like a kid, but Dr Underhill’s laughter is already sour with derision.
I once had two daughters
, he says,
and now I don’t have any
.
Grayle starts to sob with rage and regret and looks up to see Ersula fading back into the doorway. Grayle’s body lurches and her eyes fly open.
When she stands up, the headache has gone, but its causes remain. Did she truly think that, after a few years at Three Counties, she was going to be headhunted by one of the big, serious papers? Sending authoritative reports from some foreign war-front that people would find on the Internet and email to her father?
Barney the shire horse. Nobody took that story in the end.
In her claustrophobic kitchen, Grayle makes coffee, brings her mug back into the living room, carrying it over to the window, which overlooks a half-lit courtyard. The one-bedroom apartment is midway up a period-looking block within easy walking distance of the Three Counties News Service. The rent is just a little more than she can afford without working six, sometimes seven, days a week.
Never minded that at all. She’s grown to love this work. It’s so… real?
Stepping back, she sees her reflection dimly in the window. The brutally shorn hair. Getting it cut short seemed to be what you did when you turned thirty-seven. Crossing the abyss between mid-thirties and late thirties, young and middle-aged. Pushing stiffened fingers through it, she finds her open palms are in contact with what feel like tears. She only ever dreams about Ersula when she knows she’s done something stupid. A
dream featuring both Ersula and her father… she doesn’t like to think what that might signify.
Never going to forget her father’s disdain when he first saw the column head
Holy Grayle
, even though it didn’t matter so much to him then because Ersula was still alive. Not much more than Christmas cards are exchanged nowadays – he never remembered her birthday anyway. It’s like the savagery of the favourite daughter’s passing has simply carried the lesser daughter away in its bitter slipstream.
Grayle watches a man in a wool hat and a long-haired woman crossing the courtyard, sees the teeth-glint of easy laughter when they pass a lamp on a pillar at the entrance.
To break the loneliness of last Christmas, she slept with the Ukrainian jeweller but felt no sorrow when he slipped away pre-dawn on Boxing Day, leaving a note saying he’d call her. Which he didn’t. Sometimes she thinks about Bobby Maiden, a cop she’d wanted to know better but who went off with a blind woman. How can you feel jealous of a blind woman?
You don’t. You just go back to work.
Grayle turns away from the window and the wool hat and the long hair. Sits down, drags over the phone and, before she can change her mind, calls up the man who maybe should have been her father.
Andy Anderson picks up. The former
Sister
Anderson, the kind the NHS doesn’t employ any more in case they’re infringing the young nurses’ human rights.
‘Funny, we were only talking about you just now,’ Andy says.
Grayle says, ‘You’re still talking?’
Andy laughs. She sounds happy, which is weird as she’s living full-time with Marcus now in a bungalow in the genteel village of Broadway, which Marcus hates.
‘How is he today, Andy?’
‘Disnae change. Laying intae his book most days, already makes the Bible look like a wee pamphlet. Bottom line, he’s no’
gonnae die yet, unless he meets Richard Dawkins in a lift and they both go out wi’ hands around each other’s throats. I’ll fetch him.’
Grayle hangs on, picturing Marcus at his scratched and beaten desk. Dumpy old guy in glasses, an English bull terrier called Malcolm, with psychotic eyes, lying across his slippered feet as he labours on the book with the working title
In Defence of Mystery
. Bound to be an angry book, a fist in the face of the sceptical society. Like you’d expect anything else from a man fighting off the scourge called Elderly with all the rage of a dysfunctional teenager.
‘
Underhill!
’
‘Jesus!’
‘Close enough, I suppose, give or take a few problems with the meek and the mild.’
‘Marcus, look, I’m sorry if this is a bad time.’
There’s a pause.
‘Is it?’ Marcus says. ‘A bad time?’
‘Well… I got fired.’
‘I see.’
She told him it was probably coming the last time they spoke, three, four weeks ago, but just saying the words aloud has caused a physical reaction She covers the mouthpiece to sniff. Marcus grunts.
‘Sorry to hear that, Underhill. Rather thought they might lose some other bastard instead.’
‘Last in, first out.’
‘Just stay off the… what was that stuff?’
‘Prozac. I tried it
once
, Marcus.’
This was when the subscription magazine called
The Vision
was failing and she was blaming herself.
‘Only, I can get you magic mushrooms now,’ he says. ‘Psilocybin. Proved to be better, safer and no bastard drug companies involved. Brew them up in a teapot.’
Grayle frowns.
‘Isn’t that, uh, class A illegal? And aren’t we discussing this on an open phone line?’
It’s living in Broadway that’s done this. Andy finally quit the NHS for reflexology and allied therapies. She’s good. Got offered a job at a high-end alternative clinic, in Broadway. Persuading Marcus, weakened by the heart attack, to quit his crumbling dwelling in the Black Mountains, out near Wales. Even Grayle could see he couldn’t afford another year of repairs.
Now they’re renting the ‘bastard bungalow’ behind one of the art galleries on what is arguably the Cotswolds’ most tasteful shopping street.
Not Marcus’s kind of place, and it’s turning him feral again.
8
Shock of the cold
BACK IN THE
States, there are alternative therapists as good as, maybe even better than Andy Anderson. There are folklorists and students of the anomalous even more knowledgeable than Marcus Bacton. And they certainly take themselves more seriously.
But there’s still an underlying current here that you don’t find back home. A fusion with the land itself and a remote, unchronicled history maintained through very ancient traditions. A quality of holistic strangeness which transcends eccentricity.
And it’s in danger. Does it take an outsider to see how badly it was damaged, by all the people who bought into it, in a half-assed way? All the people with crystals in the alcoves and a tarot-pack in the drawer and a subscription to
The Vision
. The people who, when the recession bit, began to defect to what Marcus calls the limitless insanity of the Internet.
But his reaction to the approach from Hunter-Gatherer Television is surprising.
‘What’s your problem? Grab every penny on the bastard table.’
‘You don’t even know what it is.’
‘Underhill, they’re
all the same
. Find an allegedly haunted house, poke around at night in infrared with all their useless gizmos, follow a few…
orbs
. And, if all that fails, fetch out the bastard ouija board. Always find a convincing explanation by the end of the programme. Apply paint-stripper to the Mystery. Then go off and bugger up somewhere else.’
Grayle smiles, aware that one premise of
In Defence of Mystery
is that we should stop wasting time and money applying what we think of as scientific thought processes to what we like to call the paranormal. The unconfined spirit, Marcus says, is never going to respond to the earthbound brain.
Be aware… observe… absorb
, Marcus says,
and allow transformation to take place in its own way
.
‘I…’
‘What?’
‘Thought you’d be disappointed in me,’ Grayle says. ‘It’s just I—’
‘Need the money. We all need the money. We all compromise ourselves to survive in the bastard material world.’
‘It’s more than that. I need to work.’
She doesn’t need to explain. He was there when she had the near-breakdown that she failed to recognize at the time. There’s two or three silent seconds, then he says,
‘Actually, they contacted me some weeks ago.’
‘Who?’
‘Hunter-Gatherer. Appealing name, but that’s where it ends. Patronizing bastards said they were looking for what they described as “opinionated enthusiasts”. Lot of psycho-babble about a multi-disciplinary approach to unscrambling the paranormal. Believers and sceptics in lengthy, exhaustive and, ah, heated discussions over a period of a week. Live, apparently. Teenager who rang, to her credit, had clearly never heard of me.’
‘Whoa… hold it there, Marcus, let me get this right – you’re telling me you’re involved in this project?’
Marcus coughs.
‘
Would
have done it. Gather the money’s not inconsiderable. Possibly more than I’ve made in the past decade.’
‘So…’
‘Anderson said no. Thinks I’d be in cardiac bastard arrest before the first night was out.’
‘Well… I mean, she knows her stuff, Marcus.’