A Ghost in the Machine Page 23

  “Thank you, thank you. Oh! Darren, we think of you all the time. Nana sends her love…”

  It was at this stage that Nicolas stopped sneering to himself at the audience’s credulity and started to feel angry on their behalf. Angry at the easy promises and consoling images tossed to rows of hungry faces like crumbs from the table to starving birds. The words “bread” and “stones” came to mind.

  Then, as the medium tilted back her head, the light fell fully on to the right side of her face and Nicholas noticed for the first time a pinkish, plastic shell tucked neatly inside her ear. Deaf – oh, brilliant. Able to talk to the deceased a trillion, zillion light years away but unable to hack it with the living at spitting distance. After this observation all his light good humour returned.

  There was a silence from the platform. The pause lengthened. Nicolas’s neighbour nudged him and whispered kindly, “Nothing for you today then, dear?”

  “No.” Nicolas glanced down at the tan sausage, which had grown alarmingly. It now looked more like a chair leg. “I’m here on my mum’s behalf. Hoping for contact from my Aunty Ethel.”

  “Her sister?”

  “They got very close towards the end.”

  “Aah – peaceful was it?”

  “Lovely.”

  Nicolas was beginning to feel worried at the ease with which he was slipping into this by now familiar scenario. I’ll be believing it myself next, he thought, and vowed, if Cully’s research went on, to invent a more colourful departed relative to talk about. A mad axe murdering uncle perhaps, now chuckling in the world of spirit as he laid about him with a sawn off, double-barrelled harp.

  The meeting was getting somewhat restless when Ava Garret, now positioned dead centre, front of stage, lifted both of her hands and held them, palms facing out towards the audience. A strange expression had transformed her face. It was marked now with a deep frown of concentration. Apprehension too. It seemed that easy access to the higher spheres had suddenly deserted her. However, all was not lost.

  “I’m getting…a D…and an E…The name’s becoming clearer…It’s definitely Dennis.”

  Two women in the front row turned to each other. One built, as far as Nicolas could make out, along the lines of his formidable father-in-law, appeared very excited. The second woman raised her arm, high and straight in the air like a child at school.

  “There is a message for you, my dear. It is…a distressing one…”

  A feeling of unease pervaded the hall. Messages were never distressing. The congregation started to shift around, rustle bags. Began to crave refreshment.

  “I’m aware of some strange shapes…” She opened her arms wide, then leaned back slightly. Her eyes widened as if seeing a frightful vision. “Huge constructions like nothing I have ever seen…They throw great shadows…white walls are all around with windows high in the air. A man, small with red hair, clad in green, approaches them. But he is not alone…Someone else is hiding in the shadows…someone who means him dreadful harm. I see them handling one of the machines…causing damage…Now it is no longer safe. The merest touch could bring it crashing down…”

  A concerted gasp swept the church. Even the lady with the chair leg stopped knitting.

  “As the man draws nearer the watcher in the shadows creeps forward too…coming as close as they dare to gloat…to watch a terrible plan succeed. The mist around this figure is clearing now…I can almost see an outline…even perhaps a face…”

  A baby cried – the tiny baby held in a sling against his mother’s breast. He was wet and he was hungry. His cries became yells and screams.

  The tense atmosphere ruptured beyond repair. People started to relax, a few laughed, marvelling aloud at the amount of noise coming from such a minute scrap. Someone held him while the mother got her things together. For a moment the medium hesitated. Then she caught the eye of the man in the grey suit, made a negative movement with her head then swept slowly from the stage, gazing ahead as if tugged by some magnetic force.

  As the service finished the youth who had switched on the hi-fi at the beginning worked the rows with a velvet drawstring collecting bag. Nicolas dropped in a jingle of drachmas he had brought back from Corfu. The music began again and the congregation filed out to Dean Martin’s liquid gargling: “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”

  Cully and Nico had been the last to move. She pretended to search for something in her bag as the others streamed by. But the Master of Ceremonies was walking up the centre aisle, sweeping and shooing with both hands, as fussy as an old woman rounding up hens. He bared his teeth in a fearsome grimace of synthetic friendliness.

  “Get that smile,” muttered Nico, allowing himself to be eased into the general stream. “Like a mouthful of Chiclets.”

  About ten minutes later everyone was in a large room off the hall, enjoying their tea. Cully was taking dainty bites out of a fragile cucumber sandwich. Nico gnawed on a huge chunk of bread pudding. Smiling, nibbling and gnawing, responding politely when spoken to, they waited for an opportunity to slip backstage.

  The MC had accepted a plate of food composed by the lady with the teddy bear knitting. There were a lot more teddies on a large table under an Oxfam poster, amended to read: “Teddies For Tragedy.” They were hand-knitted too and all wearing different clothes. There was a teddy surgeon, a policeman and a gardening teddy with a little hoe. They were all for sale at different prices.

  “I rather like the idea of teddies for tragedy,” said Nico, helping himself to a cream horn. “Why shouldn’t they have a rotten time like the rest of us? Want one of these?”

  “I think I’d rather have one of those.” Cully nudged her husband round to face another smaller table behind them.

  “Aaarrgghhh!” cried Nicolas, sotto voce.

  He was looking at the most extraordinary display of candelabra. They seemed to be made of string, knotted and tangled then glued into twisty Gothic shapes. From time to time the glue had dripped a little, hardening into tiny orange beads.

  “Look,” whispered Cully. She pointed out a card which read: “Geo. Footscray. Candelabra & Pot Holders. Chandeliers to order.” “We could have a chandelier.”

  “But they’re only to order.” Nicolas too spoke with quiet reverence. “You said we wouldn’t be coming back.”

  “Damn.”

  “How’s he doing – Mr. Sparkle?”

  They both stared across at the MC. He was in earnest, not to say excited, conversation with the woman who had responded so positively to the advent of the final visitant. Cully gulped down the remains of her cucumber sandwich. No one noticed them slip away.

  “I don’t know why we’re bothering,” said Nico, following Cully down the deserted aisle. “She won’t be any different from the other two.”

  “She’s already different.”

  “How?”

  “That last connection was pretty strange. And what’s with the ‘we’?”

  “I’m here to help.”

  “So wait in the car.”

  Cully climbed on to the platform, her hand stretching out to the velvet drapes.

  Nico, a step behind, whispered, “Shall I take notes?”

  The two people already behind the curtains had very little room to move. Ava Garret was sitting on a fold-up chair by a small table, staring into a mirror on a stand. Her hands were raised, the fingers loosening gauze that secured a wig. The only other piece of furniture was a moth-eaten old chaise longue. A child was drying glasses by a small stone sink. She saw the intruders first. Flinging her tea towel down over the table she gave a sharp cry.

  “What do you want?” Ava Garret jumped to her feet. “No one’s allowed back here.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Garret. I didn’t realise—”

  “If it’s healing, George will be in the Salamander Suite at five.”

  “I was hoping to talk to you.”

  “Then you’ll have to take your chance in the vestibule with the others. And I’m quite exhausted so I
shan’t stay long.”

  Pompous cow, decided Nicolas. Who did these people think they were? Take your chance indeed. She’d be giving them her autograph next.

  “Do you see people privately?”

  “No.”

  “Not even on special—”

  “Not never,” said the child.

  Cully responded with an apologetic smile. She studied the little girl without seeming to, taking mental notes as she always did, storing stuff away. The most utterly colourless creature she had ever seen. Totally washed out. Long straight hair, blonde as far as one could tell – it looked pretty filthy. Skin, fine as paper. An almost perfectly heart-shaped face, which was not nearly as appealing as it sounded in fairy stories. The chin came to a very sharp point indeed. You could have eased the lid off a jam jar with it.

  “It was all just so…amazing.” Cully gave Ava Garret a deeply admiring smile. “I’m longing…that is, if you could possibly explain how—”

  “I’m just a channel through which departed souls contact the living.” She rattled it off, plainly bored.

  “Do they come to you one at a time?”

  “They throng, dear, and that’s the truth. Once one’s through they’re all at it.”

  “I see. Any special ord—”

  “Mother’s family on the left. Father’s on the right.”

  “And do you see them clearly?”

  “Not always. There’s a lot of murk around the openings to the dromeda stratosphere.”

  “What’s she asking all these questions for?” said the girl to Nicolas. “What d’you want?”

  “That final…connection was rather—”

  “I don’t encourage common curiosity. Now I have to change. Go away.”

  “But it isn’t common curiosity.” Nicolas spoke hastily, having noticed a certain stubborn persistence tightening Cully’s lovely profile. “My wife is an actor. She’s playing a medium, you see—”

  “You’re in the business?” Ava Garret stared at them, an expression of longing softening her hard, heavily painted face. A wistful smile completed the transformation. She looked at Nicolas. “The theatre?”

  “Yes.” Eagerly Cully seized this stroke of luck and ran with it. “I’m rehearsing Blithe Spirit at the moment. For the Almeida.”

  “Aahh…” sighed Ava, “the Almeida. I used to dance there as a little girl. I was in all their shows.”

  Cully and Nicolas remained silent, carefully avoiding each other’s gaze. The Almeida, one of London’s most exciting theatrical companies, was presently performing at an old bus depot at King’s Cross. Before then it was in the shell of the Gainsborough film studios. Soon they would be back at their real home in Islington. A movable feast.

  “I sensed there was something.” Cully smiled warmly, linking herself and Ava in starry complicity. “You can always tell.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t quite…?”

  “Cully. Cully Barnaby. And this is my husband, Nicolas.”

  “I’m an actor too,” cried Nicolas, thinking to build on the goodwill so suddenly and surprisingly present.

  “I don’t know if you know the play,” said Cully, “but Madame Arcati—”

  “Aaah, poor Margaret Rutherford. She used to come to me with all her troubles.”

  “I do like to research my character. And you are plainly outstanding in your field.”

  “Say no more.” Ava waved at the chaise longue. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.”

  Nicolas and Cully sat down on what felt like thistle stuffing. Cully did not care. She had got what she wanted. Nico wondered if it would be safe to take notes, risked asking and was given permission.

  Then Ava leaned forward with a gesture of confiding grace. The wise sibyl about to reveal the secrets of the universe. The storyteller with a million legends up her sleeve. Once upon a time, in the little market town of Causton…

  Ava Bunton had always wanted to be somebody. As a child she thought of being a dancer or a singer and danced and sang at home while constantly pleading for lessons. Eventually, driven half mad by this theatrical posturing, her father boxed her ears and threatened to tie her ankles together. And, when she cried, started unravelling the Sellotape. That soon shut her up.

  But the dreams continued. She did errands and delivered papers to buy tap and ballet shoes and pay her subscription to Causton Amateur Society’s Junior Club. Every Saturday morning she improvised becoming a tree or a kettle or a hedgehog. She exercised her voice, did pliés at the barre and acted her little socks off. She was in all the pantomimes to which no one in the family came, not even when she played the cat in Dick Whittington.

  In her last term at school she ran away to London, got a room through a flatshare agency and started office temping to keep herself and pay for more tuition and glamour photographs. She grabbed The Stage the second it was on the newsstand, went to any open auditions, tried to get an agent. Ava was never defeated. A fatal mixture of rock-hard confidence and a blinding lack of intelligence protected her from the unhappy understanding that she was completely untalented. Not even good enough to be called mediocre.

  Eventually she got a job dancing on a second-rate cruise liner and spent the next seven years more or less afloat, occasionally winging it in nightclubs in Turkey and Beirut. It was in Lebanon that she met Lionel Wainwright Garret, a once-handsome ex-public schoolboy, now living seedily on what little he could earn giving English lessons. Impressed by his accent and thrilled with the idea of going up in the world, Ava moved in with Garret, parting with nearly all her savings in the process. For a short while he took some sort of interest in her – enough to make her pregnant at any rate – before reverting to his previous passion for young boys. Ava returned to England, sadder though no wiser, for she was the sort of person who blamed her troubles on everyone but herself. But then, something wonderful happened.

  Ava was not looking forward to having a baby. She was in her late thirties and, had she not returned from the Far East too late for a National Health Service abortion, would certainly never have had the child. And that would have been a real mistake because, not too long after the baby was born, Ava became aware of a strange new presence, an intelligence at work which she had not experienced before. She put this down to some mysterious genetic intermingling between herself and Lionel Garret. What else could it be?

  However, the assurance which had seen her through so many years of rejection and sordid show business wrangles unaccountably absented itself when the question of how to make the best use of this new opportunity arose. It was so strange, for a start, so outside all her previous experience. In fact, it was quite a long time before she worked out how best to handle things. Bringing up the little girl took a great deal of her time, and struggling to make ends meet took a hefty chunk out of what was left. But eventually a way, an opening, presented itself almost out of the blue. And what an appropriate phrase that was, Ava had thought, even back then.

  At the time she had joined a friendship club for the divorced and separated, passing herself off as a widow. Refusing to admit to loneliness, she referred to this move only as extending her circle of friends. But her devoted self-interest made friendship impossible and she was on the point of abandoning these meetings, where everyone talked endlessly about themselves, when she met George Footscray.

  George, a middle-aged man living with his mother and into one or two deeply unadventurous hobbies, showed the keenest interest when she told him about the messages from other realms that were now transmitting almost daily. He said excitedly they should be shared with the world and described her as a born medium. Another Doris Stokes. Ava had never heard of Doris Stokes and was somewhat uneasy with the word “share,” but her longing to be someone burned as strongly as ever. If anything, years of disappointment had fanned the flame to an even fiercer strength.

  George explained that she would not necessarily have to be a platform medium. There were those who did only private sittings or group seances. But Av
a loved the idea of rows and rows of faces looking longingly up at her, hanging on her every word. And in respectful silence too, not laughing and drinking or making obscene gestures and rude jokes as they had in nightclubs and aboard ship.

  She was not so keen on George’s suggestion that a certain amount of training was important. That, for example, she must learn how to prepare before working from the platform. How to handle a congregation. What to do when a spirit manifested only to be met with indifference or blank incomprehension. Never mind how to cover when no one came through at all. Ava assured George that would never happen as her connection was absolutely genuine. And anyway, she’d practically been born on a stage. Improvise was her middle name. It was not until she realised that without a certain degree of training she would not be allowed to tread the boards at all that she grudgingly gave way.

  George took her to several church meetings to illustrate the way of things and one or two established mediums kindly attempted to take her under their wings. Ava listened. She gritted her teeth at what she saw as patronising condescension but she listened. Her confidence disturbed them. She seemed to have no nerves at all.

  From the very beginning, like an old-style travelling magician, Ava was always supported by an assistant, her daughter, Karen. She would carry Ava’s long black velvet cloak, set up her mirror and cosmetic tray, check that everything on the platform was in its correct place, brew her special herbal tea. She had also, in the early days, presented Ava with a bouquet “from a grateful client” at the conclusion of each meeting; flowers which Ava herself had purchased earlier. However, this was abandoned after complaints from other psychics that a precedent was being set. A precedent that not everyone could afford.

  From the first all went well. The voices never let her down and Ava revelled in the attention; in the silent waves of intense longing that poured over what she still thought of as the footlights the moment she began to speak; the gratitude of the gathering afterwards, thanking her, shaking her hand, telling her she was marvellous. That she had changed their lives; brought sunshine out of sorrow. All very nice.