Mean Spirit (3 page)

‘A nurse,’ Grayle said tightly, ‘as I understand it.’

‘Oh, that’s what they calls ’em now, is it? You’re a reporter, why’n’t you expose her for a cheat and a phoney?’

‘Well, I, uh … my job is … Are you sure this is the right road to Mysleton?’

‘It’s the picturesque route.’ Justin laughed, like his display of self-righteous, racist rage had blown down a barrier between them. He looked more relaxed. Not a good development, in Grayle’s view.

‘Um, Justin, in light of the time I already lost, I think I would prefer to take a chance on the shabby route … like through the factory estates and stuff?’

‘There aren’t any fac—’ He turned to her. ‘You’re bloody having me on, Grayle!’

And what he did next … she could not
believe
this … he reached over and rubbed her goddamned thigh, pushing up the hem of her skirt, like they were long-time lovers sharing an intimate joke.

‘
Jes
—’

By the time she unfroze enough to grab his hand, he’d already pulled it casually back. The truck speeded up, going insanely fast for a road this narrow and twisting.

‘This is my famous Cotswold Tour, Grayle. You want the commentary?’

‘Look—’

If anything came around the bend now they’d be dogmeat.

‘Relax, my sweet. Listen, if we don’t get that ole exhaust sorted, you’ll be looking for a hotel, right? I can probably help you there.’

‘But it’s gonna be …’ Grayle bounced off of the door as the truck took a tight bend on two wheels ‘… fixed, isn’t it?’

‘Friend of mine does accommodation.’

‘Huh?’

The bastard actually thought he was going to fix her up with a room in some sleazy flophouse? She had to get out of here. She
pushed herself up against the door, as more hedgerow reared up in the windshield.

Her mobile bleeped in the purse on the seat, between her and Justin.

‘Excuse me …’ Diving into the purse, scrabbling for the phone, fumbling for the green button. ‘Hello?’

‘… erhill?’ Marcus? His voice was breaking up badly. ‘Underhill, I’ve …’

‘It’s my …’

My boss, she was about to say. She bit that off and jammed the phone hard to her left ear so that Justin couldn’t hear the voice the other end. He’d slowed down and was watching her intently.

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Ms Callard! Yeah, I’m just on my way. I had a problem. My
car
broke down. No … really … nothing too serious, and I got lucky – I’ve been given a ride by a very … a very kind gentleman called … called Justin. Runs a small garage? In a village about three miles out of Stroud? Justin. Yeah. You know him? Gave me a ride in his … his … white … Toyota … truck.’

Justin slowed to a crawl, and she thought for a moment he was going to snatch the phone.

‘…
UCKING SCOTCH
!’ Marcus roared.

‘So I should see you in about … Oh, I should guess ten minutes? That would be terrific. Bye … bye, Ms Callard.’

Marcus had broken up into unintelligible crackle. Grayle pressed the
end
button. Trying hard to keep her breathing steady as she dropped the phone in her purse.

Justin’s eyes were back on the road.

‘Ten minutes, would that be about right, Justin?’

‘’Bout that,’ Justin said sullenly.

‘Good,’ Grayle said, breathless. ‘Terrific.’

Justin’s face looked dark with suppressed rage.

II

Witch doctor,
they’d said behind their hands, the night the dormitory window blew out.
JUJU WOMAN GO HOME,
Marcus Bacton had found the next day, daubed in lipstick on the girl’s locker. Even the other staff were wary. Eventually the head had brought in a psychologist.

Bastards.
Marcus had read the bloody tabloid cutting too many times. He balled it, tossed it into the opened stove, piling twigs on top to rekindle the fire, and then an oak log. Slammed the stove door, pulled off his glasses, snatched a handful of Kleenex to mop his sore, pouring eyes.

The race factor had figured strongly, if obliquely, in the psychologist’s report. The bottom line had been that the subject – ‘rather immature for her age, lonely and alienated from her peers’ – had attempted to create a mystique around herself by fabricating a fantasy history of her late mother’s West Indian family, involving ethnic magic and occult practices. Producing what the psychologist had called ‘evidence of her own assumed powers’. The fantasy enveloped her to the extent that ‘a certain self-deception was evident’.

Blinkered wanker.
Marcus recalled storming into the headmaster’s office. Bloody hell, was the head
mad?
Didn’t he understand the overwhelming significance of this? Didn’t he realize that this overpriced, underachieving internment camp was about to go down in parapsychological history?

Bacton,
the head had said aridly,
‘did it ever occur to you that what you choose to call parapsychological history is merely a tawdry chronicle of fraud, lies and mental illness?

Marcus wiped sweat from his glasses.

It had been one of those archaic boarding schools which, after
about four centuries, had been induced to admit girls. There were probably a whole bunch of black girls there now, but Persephone – Afro-Caribbean/Home Counties English – had been the first.

‘And took shit from kids of both sexes, I guess,’ Grayle Underhill had said, when he’d given her the history, working on her to meet Persephone on his behalf.

‘Especially when things started disappearing,’ he’d recalled.

Small things at first, like pens, then there was a watch – from classrooms and dormitories where Persephone had been, and then fingers had been pointed. Made no difference when some of the items had turned up again, sometimes in the same place, sometimes not. Kleptomania, they sneered.
Always go for glittery things and coloured beads, don’t they?

Underhill had looked sceptical. ‘So you’re saying this was … what’s the word?’

‘Teleportation. I was convinced of it. Many of the disappearing items were things no-one would ever want to steal. And they would vanish so swiftly and completely that unless she’d been a master of sleight-of-hand …’

He saw her grimace, heard the whispered
Beam me up, Scotty.

Yes, all right. Where Persephone was concerned, all Marcus’s own cynicism went out of the window.

‘By now, some of the girls had switched from patronizing her to basically shunning her. While from some of the boys she had what today would be described as plain sexual harassment.’

All of which had made her withdrawn. But she wasn’t inarticulate and maladjusted like the psychokinetic kids in all those overblown films. Persephone was highly intelligent and aware of the unearthly beauty of it all.

‘Confused, obviously. A little scared – who wouldn’t be? But there was also this tremulous excitement. She resented being treated like some sort of pariah, but equally she was glad not to be … normal.’

‘So what
was
this, Marcus? Just straight up poltergeist activity, or what?’

‘Energies channelled through her, I suppose. It happens. I wondered if, like many people with this kind of ability, she’d had some sort of electric shock as a young child. But if she had, she didn’t remember it.’

‘Or chose not to. I guess Ms Callard would hate to think all this was down to some unfortunate accident during infancy.’

‘But she never once ran away from it, Underhill. What she resented was the randomness of it – didn’t like to be out of control, like a psychic puppet. Hated being used. Wanted to know how to use it. And after a while she
did.
It was how she first came to my attention, actually. All those essays in a variety of handwriting styles.’

‘Oh,
right
… She was getting the spirits to do her …’

‘Her prep. Something like that. I never actually taught her in class, you understand. I was the A-level Eng. Lit. man, and she was only fourteen then. But one day her English mistress brought me a piece of apparent verse Persephone had handed in. I couldn’t make head or bloody tail of it at first, and then I realized … it was Chaucerian English. And more than that…’

Marcus staring into the stove, the embers reflected in his glasses. Reliving the sheer excitement of it.

‘It was Sir Topaz,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘There’s this spoof bit in
The Canterbury Tales.
Where Chaucer himself is invited by the Host at the inn to tell a tale. He begins to relate the story of Sir Topaz – doesn’t matter who
he
is. Point is that after a few minutes, the Host interrupts Chaucer and informs him, in no uncertain fashion, that his tale is bollocks.’

‘Which is a joke, right?’ Underhill said. ‘We all know Chaucer’s written all the rest of the stuff, so he must be pretty smart, therefore—’

‘Exactly. Persephone’s verse seemed to be
continuing
the tale of Sir Topaz, where Chaucer left off.’

‘Good stuff?’

‘The whole point’, Marcus said irritably, ‘is that the Host is critical of Chaucer’s literary skills. The notable line being, as I recall, “your dreary rhyming isn’t worth a turd”.’

‘So like if Seffi’s poetry was not of sufficient literary merit to be recognizable as vintage Chaucer coming through Callard, it could still be genuine, because this is Chaucer deliberately writing bad poetry. That’s smart.’

‘Too bloody smart for a fourteen-year-old girl who’d never been exposed to Chaucer.’

*       *       *

Soon after the night of the exploding window, Marcus had resigned, cleared off to the other side of the country and back into state education, in which he’d remained until the opportunity had arisen to purchase
The Vision,
or
The Phenomenologist,
as the magazine had been known then – memories of the Callard affair fuelling his resolve to take the gamble.

Because he knew the girl was
absolutely bloody genuine
! Adolescents, particularly at boarding school, relied on friends, peer support. No fourteen-year-old girl would choose to condemn herself to life as a social outcast.

And he’d seen the incomprehension in her eyes.

His head full of fever, Marcus glared out of the window at the farmyard and the castle ruins. Feeling like a bloody prisoner. Dripping a little single malt into his glass. Which left just under an inch in the bottom of the bottle. How the hell was he supposed to survive flu on
an inch of whisky
?

‘
BOTTLE OF SCOTCH
!’ he’d bawled at the static surrounding Underhill’s bastard mobile phone.
‘BRING BACK A BOTTLE OF FUCKING SCOTCH
!’

All right: if he was honest, the whisky had also been an excuse. He’d assumed Underhill had reached Persephone Callard by now. Had hoped she’d be able to pass the phone over to Persephone, so that he might explain why he was not there in person. And make sure that Persephone understood that, contrary to her appearance and general attitude, Underhill was, in fact, relatively trustworthy.

Another week – another three days, even – and he might have been fit enough to drive over there. Right now, he was too fucking ill to walk to the pub in St Mary’s for a bottle of Scotch. He couldn’t think straight and Persephone’s letter was burning up his brain.

The letter pleaded for Marcus to come and see her at the lodge at her father’s house. Not to write or phone – she was afraid her calls were being monitored.

‘Crazy,’ Underhill had said. ‘She’s blown it, you only need to read the papers. You don’t need this shit. Call her up when you’re on your feet, but play it cool. Don’t get involved.’

‘Oh Marcus, you were like a father to me.’
Underhill raising her eyes to the oak beams.
‘Like the father I never had on account of he was always across the sea in some God-forsaken consulate
…’

‘She’s never—’

‘Subtext, Marcus.’

‘Underhill, I was simply a teacher at her boarding school. A teacher who listened. She thought she was going mad, with all the things that were happening to her, and I was the only teacher who was prepared to consider the alternatives.’

‘Twenty years!’ Underhill yelled. ‘You haven’t seen her for
twenty years!
Like, did she come for your advice when they were touring her all over Europe and the States? When Diana was calling her up in the middle of the night, did she ask you how to handle it?’

‘She’s in trouble. I know this girl.’

‘Well,
precisely.
You knew a
girl.
This is a grown woman now and by all accounts she’s manipulative and paranoid in equal measure.’

‘You don’t know her.’

‘I know a lot of people like her.’

‘Believe me, you don’t.’

Underhill had looked stubborn.

‘She’s in trouble,’ Marcus insisted. ‘We can’t let this hang fire. I need you to go and talk to her.’

‘Like, she’s gonna talk to
me
? She’s in hiding from the media, she won’t take phone calls, and you think—?’

‘What else can we do?’ Marcus had started coughing, and the coughing had gone on for a long time and Underhill had sighed and given in.

Marcus pulled off his glasses, clutched the Kleenex to his streaming eyes. Never seemed to get colds or flu when Mrs Willis was alive and keeping house for him – first sniffle and the dear old soul had always been there with some mysterious, brown, stoppered bottle. Now he’d been forced back on the inhalers, expectorants and headache pills produced by fiendish pharmaceutical multinationals which, he was convinced, directed a meaningful element of their astronomical profits into the development of new and virulent strains of influenza.

Bastards.

He sagged back into his old chair, and the castle disappeared from the window, displaced by the last weak sun seeping into the Black Mountains. The study door edged open and Malcolm, the bull terrier, ambled in.

‘What are
you
grinning at?’ Marcus dragged the phone from the desk. A recorded message told him it was not at present possible to reach the mobile phone he was calling and he should try again later.

Waste of bastard time, mobile phones.