Burial

29

'Hello,' said Bob.

'Hold on,' said Nathan, cupping the mouthpiece. He leaned over and, with the tips of his fingers, closed the office door.

'How are you? How's the research coming?'

'Not good.'

'You or the research?'

'Both. We've hit a snag.'

'What snag?'

'I can't talk. Can you get over here?'

'As soon as I can.'

He put the phone in its cradle and consulted his diary. He had a meeting at 2.30. He told Angela he was stepping out for an early lunch -- it was 11.30 -- and he grabbed his coat and made straight for the door. Outside, the taxis weren't biting. He stood for a long time on the corner, hailing cabs that were already occupied. His tie flapped at his shoulder like a flag.

Eventually, a taxi stopped for him. But they hit every red light on the way. It took forty-five minutes.

Bob came to the door scrub-bearded and hollow eyed. Over his jeans and T-shirt, he wore a tatty, dirty pink chenille bathrobe; it looked like a woman's. He smelled bad, like milk left too long on a July windowsill.

Nathan

followed him downstairs. The bedsitting room was yet more shambolic. Improvised ashtrays had been placed on the tables, the bookshelves, the kitchenette, the windowsill, the arms of all three sofas, alongside the computers, the reel-to-reel tape machine. All of them were overflowing.

Nathan said, 'What's wrong?'

Bob lit a cigarette. His hand was shaking.

'I want you to sit down and listen to something.'

Nathan hitched his trousers and sat.

Bob walked to the reel-to-reel. He manually rewound it several inches, saying: 'Now, this is going to be loud. Okay? I'll explain why in a minute.'

'What is it?'

'Just listen.'

Bob pressed Play.

He'd hooked the reel-to-reel through to a pair of floor-mounted loudspeakers. From them emanated a painful blast of white noise, like the static on an untuned television turned up to maximum volume. Nathan looked at him in baffled discomfort.

Bob pressed Stop.

The silence was sudden and total.

Nathan shifted in his seat. 'What am I supposed to be listening to?'

'You might have to listen a few times. It does that.'

'Listen a few times to what?'

Again, Bob was manually rewinding the machine, saying: 'Try to listen through the background noise.'

Bob pressed Play again.

The same abrasive static.

Then, mumbled and indistinct, something like a voice. It was murmured, and very quick. When it was gone, Nathan doubted that he'd even heard it.

Bob stopped the tape.

'You heard it.'

'Heard what?'

Bob played the tape again.

On a third listen, there was something behind the white noise, like someone murmuring through a hotel wall.

'Okay,' said Nathan, in the ringing silence that followed. 'What is it? Someone speaking?'

'I don't know about someone speaking. But it's a voice.'

Nathan's palms were wet.

'Whose voice?'

'Elise's.'

Nathan laughed. His mouth was numb.

'And what do you think she's saying?'

Bob swallowed.

'I believe she's saying "I'm alive".'

There was a long silence between them.

Nathan said, 'You're mad.'

It's called EVP,' said Bob. 'Electronic voice phenomena. I've been researching it for years. You run a tape in an empty room. You make sure it's isolated from stray radio broadcasts, yada yada yada, you ask it a question. You go away. You come back, you've got voices on the tape.'

'Whose voice?'

'The dead.'

'Who else?' said Nathan, and began to giggle. He said, 'Jesus Christ, Bob.'

Bob waited until the laughter had passed.

'Play it again,' said Nathan.

Bob played it again.

This time, Nathan heard a clear pattern beneath the shifting, oceanic hiss.

It was the sound of a human voice. It was a woman.

She was saying, 'I'm alive.'

Or perhaps it was 'line five'.

Nathan shouted over the noise, 'It's off the radio or something. It's one of your neighbours. It's somebody walking past the house.'

Bob pressed Stop.

'I have eliminated those possibilities.'

'How?'

'Trust me. I know what I'm doing. I've been doing this for twenty years now.'

'And what? This is the first voice you've heard?'

Bob reached under the table and drew out an old blue suitcase, worn white at the corners. He opened it. It was filled with reel-to-reel tapes.

'There are voices on each one of these, sometimes dozens of them.

I've also got several hours archived on the hard drives of these computers.

They talk all kinds of shit - just like the Ouija board. That's what makes it so fascinating. They sound confused, disconnected.

Maybe not even conscious. So no, Nathan, this is not my first voice.

But it is the first voice I ever recognized.'

Nathan felt something rise inside him. He said, 'You can't have recognized it. You only knew her for one night, and that was years ago. Ten years! And you'd been drinking. And taking cocaine.'

'Listen again.'

Nathan didn't want to hear it. But he didn't want to admit that. So he sat through it, once more.

I'm alive

'There's more,' said Bob. 'Wait.'

He fast-forwarded the same tape. Nathan had learned how to filter the static by now, or perhaps to impose order on it. This time, quite distinctly, but as if at a great distance, he heard a woman's voice shouting: Bob! I'm here!

Nathan stood up.

'Fucking turn it off.'

Bob hit the Stop button.

'There's more.'

'I'm not joking. Fucking turn it off 'Don't you want to hear what she says?'

'She's not saying anything. It's, I don't know what it is. But one thing I know it's not, it's not Elise. All right. Jesus. Get a fucking grip.'

Quietly, Bob said, 'I think you should calm down.'

Nathan's legs were shaking. 'If you put your finger back on that fucking button, I swear to God I'll break it. I fucking promise you, Bob. Don't touch that thing again.'

Bob sighed. He slumped in the office chair.

'Usually there's more than one voice. Sometimes there's three or four. Sometimes half a dozen. Sometimes, there's twenty of them.

Twenty distinct voices. They're temperamental and sarcastic.

Sometimes they manifest at different speeds. Sometimes they talk gibberish. But on this tape, this entire tape, there is only one voice.'

'Shut up,' said Nathan.

'What are we going to do?'

'I'm not joking. Shut the fuck up.'

Bob pressed Play. Nathan heard it plainly. A young woman, clear and crisp behind the hiss, like someone shouting from the edge of the sea.

Bob! I'm here!

Nathan waited until he had some control over his voice and said, 'Bob, if you don't get a grip on yourself, this is all going to fall apart.

All right?'

'Don't kid yourself

'Kid myself what?'

'That it's not her.'

'Fuck you.'

Nathan was running before he reached the bedsit door. He sprinted up the stairs and ran on to the street. And he was panting and wheezing and had a stitch in his side when finally, a long way away, a taxi finally stopped to pick him up, and take him back to work.

He sat through the meeting without making a contribution. When the meeting was over, Justin automatically invited Nathan to an afternoon meeting in the Cricketer's Arms.

Nathan said yes.

They sat in the pub. It was almost empty. A scrawny, prematurely wizened barman with baby-soft hair served them drinks at the table, Justin being a precious slow-time regular. Nathan ordered a double whisky with his lager. When the drinks arrived, he downed the whisky and ordered a second.

Justin laid a hand on his shoulder.

'What's wrong?'

Nathan sipped lager. 'What's the worst thing you've ever done?'

Justin pretended to think. 'I was best man once, for an old school friend. I shagged the bride the night before the wedding.'

'That's pretty bad,' said Nathan, not believing him.

'And I shagged her on the morning of it. She was wearing her bridal underwear, and her dress was all laid out on the bed. The full wedding cake. One of the white ones.'

'Did you get caught?'

'No. You don't want to worry about that. I had the bride's mother the same day, just after the speeches. I didn't really fancy her. It was for the thrill, you know?'

Nathan took a long draught of his beer.

'So, it's possible to do something you regret, and get away with it.' 'If you do it with enough style, nobody will ever know.'

Nathan stared at him with sadness where the incredulity should be. He happened to know that Justin had been impotent for many years. He knew because Justin's wife had used his impotence as a pretext to attempt the seduction of several members of staff-and once, Nathan himself. Two or three of them had obliged her in the back of company Mondeos or in wine-bar toilets. Nathan hadn't.

Justin never got away with anything. He just thought he did. And yet, here he was. Still here, long after he should be gone.

'So,' said Nathan. 'What's your secret?'

'Never sleep with anybody who has less to lose than you do.'

Nathan pondered the wisdom of this, then drained his pint and raised his hand to order another.

Justin said, 'So who is she?'

'Who's who?'

'Your guilty secret.'

'Nobody.'

'You can tell me. You know how good I am at keeping secrets.'

Nathan knew exactly that.

'It's nothing like that.'

'It's always something like that. You wouldn't be human otherwise.'

They

stayed in the pub for hours. Justin seemed to think of it as a special occasion and, after the fourth pint, he ordered a bottle of champagne.

He spent a long time talking about office politics. And he kept asking who she was. Nathan maintained that she was nobody.

When Nathan got home, he was drunk. Holly was watching television in bed. She watched from the corner of her eye as he fell over, trying to get out of his trousers. When he leaned over the bed to kiss her, she turned her face away. She got up to visit the bathroom, and when she came back she was wearing a nightdress.

He woke, as he always did when he'd been drinking, in the early hours of the morning, badly needing to piss. But he lay curled on his side, the duvet clutched over his head, trying to sleep.

In the morning, he said, 'I'm sorry.'

She said 'Fine, whatever,' and stomped downstairs. Halfway down, she paused, saying: 'You could've called.'

'I know. I'm sorry.'

'I don't care what you do. I just want to know that you're okay. I just want to hear your voice.'

Nathan sat on the bed. Yesterday's clothes, reeking of smoke and beer, lay in a pile beside it. He wanted to burn them.