Mean Spirit

Prologue: The Lines are Open

Trust no-one, Seffi’s telling herself, as she does so often lately. Trust none of them. This has been a mistake, this is very wrong … even by my strangled standards.

Despite all the people, a party going on, she feels something hollow in the room. Sometimes, in her head, there’s the sensation of a bright white, penetrating light, turning to grey, turning to black.

And then, suddenly, Kieran’s here. A boy of eighteen or nineteen. Instantly she trusts Kieran, he’s so messed up and full of shame. He’s sending her a faintly fogged picture of himself: bare feet no more than three inches above the … hay?

No … rushes. Rush matting. On the floor of — light through slats, no glass … greenery … bars of sunlight — a kind of rough, rustic summerhouse. A gazebo.

Kieran’s hanging there. Seffi, sitting very still on her straight chair, in her claret-coloured velvet gown, hands enfolded on her lap, is aware of Kieran hanging.

How does she know his name? She just does. Reticence is rare unless you’re dealing with a personality for whom formality’s an obsession or a way of life — say a former army officer, or a butler.

‘OK, Kieran, hold on,’ Seffi murmurs, nodding. He’s pressing her, innocent as a big puppy. ‘Just … wait … We’ll get to it, yah?’

‘Miss Callard?’

Sir Richard Barber’s buffed face is tilted to hers. Behind him all those half-pissed, crass, glassy smiles. When the drawing-room lamps were first dimmed, it was like facing the rows of skulls in those catacombs under Rome or Paris or somewhere: nothing behind the smiles but dust — no grief, no sorrow, none of that hopeless yearning which one often perceives as a kind of sepia mist.

Also, no discernible respect. She’s … the entertainment. Half of them think I’m a phoney, she realizes, with a bright flaring of rage. And the other half want excitement, spectacle. They’re here to have fun.

One particular man seems to be laughing all the time now, in an irritating, rhythmic way, atonal and repetitive like a tape-loop. Seffi’s seething. She might as well be a hired pianist or a stand-up comic. That fucking Nancy.

‘Give me a minute,’ she tells Barber. ‘All right, Kieran, I do know you’re there. Who is this for? Who do you want to reach?’

A hush is spreading in the room now like steam. They didn’t know it had begun. Christ, she didn’t realize at first — usually, there’s a thickening of the atmosphere, a sense of the essences gathering around her like a cloud of summer midges. Kieran, in his fuddled desperation, that awful dismay at what he’s done, has fallen through. Like a small, thrashing fish through a net.

Glasses are accumulating now on side tables, cigarettes being crushed into ashtrays. Seffi finds herself under the gaze of one of the obvious unbelievers, a woman. She’s sitting in a wing chair about seven feet away; she has short hair dyed dark red, vulgar trophy earrings, a wide, carnivorous mouth.

And she’s saying sharply, ‘Did you say Kieran?’

Seffi doesn’t blink.

A big, broad-faced man in a white tuxedo turns at once from a conversation with a younger woman, hissing, ‘Don’t be stupid, it’s just a name.’

OK. So it’s the red-haired woman. She’s the one.

She isn’t going to like this.

‘If this means anything to you,’ Seffi says coolly, ‘Kieran tells me he killed himself.’

Dead silence in the room.

And then the poor bloody woman’s rising up as though electrically jolted, her big mouth falling open.

‘God!’

Seffi finds herself smiling slightly. Yes, obviously, it’s wrong to enjoy the shattering of disbelief in such circumstances, but she’s only human.

The man in the white tuxedo’s staring hard at her, several expressions chasing across his face. One of them: hunted? He converts it quickly into anger, softening this to exasperation. Speaks through tightened lips.

‘Don’t make a fool of yourself, Coral.’

In Seffi’s head, Kieran’s pulsing hard. OK, calm down, there’s a good boy. We’re getting there, yah?

Nobody’s talking now; she can hear the music playing softly out of hidden speakers: Debussy, Nocturnes. She brought the CD with her — more for them than for her; music’s no longer essential. All right, let him come. Talk to Seffi, Kieran.

‘Ah.’ She nods, very slightly. Just a boy who’s done something impossibly stupid. He was twenty years old — it was the day after his birthday. His mother persuaded his father to buy him the sports car, the black … Mazda? Finding out about … Kelly — is that the name? on his birthday compounded the sense of injury and blinding humiliation.

Finding out what, Kieran? Come on, what did she do? What did Kelly do to you?

Kieran is hanging from a thin, plastic-covered washing line. It’s bright red; from a few feet away it looks like a wound around his neck, as though he’s slashed his throat.

In a garden summerhouse, a gazebo-thing. Kieran’s body half-revolving then swinging back. His tongue out.

Revolting.

This is what Kieran’s thinking now. The manner of his dying disgusts him.

So what exactly did you find out, Kieran? What did you find out to make you do this?

‘Please …’ The red-haired woman’s half out of her chair; she’ll be on her knees soon, poor bitch. ‘For Christ’s sake, tell me …’

‘No! I don’t do this sort of thing. I’m not a bloody nightclub act.’

Ten days ago. An outraged Seffi snarling at Nancy.

Who simply put on her glasses, reread the letter — on notepaper as crisp and creamy as her own — and then nodded, all mild and motherly. Well, of course, Nancy knew exactly what Seffi was. Nancy, the agent-manager, wise and discreet, sculptor of one’s brilliant career.

‘And this guy, Barber … he’s not even an MP any more, is he?’

Nancy raised her eyes for a moment over the half-glasses. ‘On the other hand, he is Sir Richard now.’

‘Well, big fucking deal,’ said Seffi Callard, whose father had been Sir Stephen for most of her life. She walked around the room a couple of times, biting her lower lip, getting ready to despise herself.

‘How … how much was it again?’

Nancy silently pushed the letter across the desk towards Seffi, flattening it out. The long figure now ovalled in green ink.

‘Nancy, for one session?’

‘Rather vulgar, in one sense, but …’ Nancy shrugged ‘… he wants the best.’

‘I don’t even like to think what he wants for that much.’

‘Well, there’ll be a personal reason. There always is. Perhaps he’s lost someone. Perhaps he would be too embarrassed to approach you on an individual basis.’

‘You mean he’d hate anyone to know he was consulting someone like me, so he’s setting me up ostensibly to amuse his friends, like you’d hire a bloody soprano?’

‘Say a string quartet,’ Nancy said soothingly.

Seffi froze. Was Nancy in on this? Was it the start of a subtle reshaping of her career, taking in discreet cocktail parties and country-house weekends? Seffi knew too many who’d gone down that road — sincere enough at first and then, inevitably, it had become an act, a routine, and on those occasions when it failed to happen they’d fill the void with imaginary voices.

‘Up to you.’ Nancy picked up the letter between thumb and forefinger, swinging her arm, cranelike, to a position over the wastebin. ‘Do you want me to …?’

Seffi snatched the letter.

Barber, with his politician’s false deference, is gliding like a game-show host between Seffi and the red-haired woman addressed by the tuxedo’d man as Coral. But when Barber turns to Seffi, it’s with uncertainty. No mistaking that fractional hesitation; he isn’t quite sure what’s supposed to happen. This makes absolutely no sense, not with the money he’s spending.

‘Miss Callard, are you …? Have you …?’

‘Started? No. This is a … wild card.’ Seffi smiles thinly. ‘Sometimes they just can’t wait.’

She has everyone’s attention now. Some of them standing, some sitting in chairs pushed together, all in a bunch. Cocktails clinking, teeth and jewellery twinkling in the half-light. She notices Barber’s sweating. Pretty bloody obvious he doesn’t want to be doing any of this. He’s actually paid over twenty grand for something he doesn’t want to be happening.

So who does? Some woman? Barber’s long divorced; is there a new woman, out there among the teeth, whom he’s trying to impress?

And yet he was making no pretence of friendship nor even of knowing Seffi before tonight. All this Miss Callarding. Shaking hands in a distant sort of way when she arrived, the merest meeting of eyes. Curious, because she has actually met him before, during that tedious period of attending receptions on her father’s arm.

Something very wrong about this. But then she’s always known, hasn’t she, that there would be?

The woman whispers, ‘Is it Kieran Hole?’

‘Fucksake,’ the man rasping out, ‘get a grip.’ He looks powerful, this guy, big shoulders. Seffi feels Kieran’s hatred for him. She puts a steady hand on the red-haired woman’s bony wrist, stares candidly into her contact lenses.

‘Your son didn’t leave a note, did he?’

‘No.’ A whisper. Hand full of rings tightening around the stem of her glass.

‘He thought you’d know, you see.’

‘Know?’

‘What a load of old shit!’ The man’s local accent rolling through. People frowning at him, wanting him out of the way because this is getting interesting.

‘Shut up! Leave us alone!’ The woman turning her stiffening back on him, spilling her drink. ‘Go on,’ she pleads to Seffi. ‘Go on.’

And oh, there’s a belief now, all right. And hunger in the wetness and the slackness of the lips.

‘Hold on …’ Seffi lifts a finger. ‘He’s asking my advice, I think. At first he dearly wanted you to know, but now he’s not sure it would do any good. He’s angry and upset, and confused above all. We tend to imagine death confers wisdom, but that’s not how it goes.’

‘… cking shit.’ The man spinning away, fists clenched.

‘He can move on. That’s my feeling. He isn’t earthbound, just weighed down, like a hiker with an overstuffed rucksack, yah? He needs to shed some of it before he can go on. It’s a question of whether you’re prepared to take it on. Take the weight. It won’t be comfortable. Are you going to be OK with that? You have to be sure.’

The woman nodding, but looking bewildered, lowering her glass to the carpet.

‘All right,’ Seffi says. ‘Kelly. Was there a Kelly?’

‘I’m going.’ The man pushes through the faces and the drinks. ‘Get yourself a cab.’

Seffi shaking her head. ‘Sorry, Kirsty. It was Kirsty, yah? I’m sorry.’

The man stops at the door, reeling sharply, as though he’s been hit by a sledgehammer in the small of the back.

‘His girlfriend!’ The woman gripping Seffi’s hand. ‘Kieran and Kirsty. They were getting engaged. She was his girlfriend …’

‘So she’s done her research.’ He’s got the door half-open. ‘She’s had some of us checked out, hasn’t she? That’s how the black bitch does it, you stupid woman, can’t you-?’

‘Bloody get out!’ Coral screeches.

A man murmurs, ‘Easy, now, Les,’ two other guys on their feet, guys the size of bouncers, guiding the tuxedo’d man from the room.

‘There’d been a row, OK?’ Seffi says. ‘It was about nothing in particular. It was after … a party?’

‘Yes. His birthday party. We hired-’

‘They were both pretty drunk. He’d been mouthing off and she told him … Kieran says he must’ve blanked out what she told him. It didn’t really hit home until …’

Tangible suspense. The only lights are from the muslin-shaded porcelain lamp on the Chinese table to her left and the white tongue of the ball-candle which is supposed to dispel cigarette smoke.

‘… until he awoke the following morning. Terrible hangover. Sickness. The usual.’

‘Yes. Yes, he did! He looked awful! How could you have known that? No-one could’ve known that!’

‘And it’s swirling round and round him, what she said, right? What Kirsty said. Round and round in his head. All that day. He can’t go out. Can’t face anybody. Walking. A sunny day. Late afternoon, long shadows. Big garden. Red brick.’

‘We were, oh God, living in a farmhouse. Eighteenth century …’

‘A gazebo at the bottom of the garden. He’s walking round and round it.’

Coral’s lips are spreading into a silent wail.

‘Round and round the gazebo.’ Seffi’s breath coming hard and fast, like gas. ‘He doesn’t want to see anybody. All the time hearing what she said, what Kirsty said.’

Coral waits for it, her face lined and bloodless. Coral knows. Coral knows already what this is going to be.

‘About how his father’s a better fuck,’ Seffi says.

Eventually a woman takes Coral out of the room, supporting her as though she’s been found in the street, knocked down by a car, and there could be something broken.

The lights are on, the atmosphere in Sir Richard Barber’s drawing room raw with excitement, spattered with emotional shrapnel.

Seffi sitting in the aftermath, surrounded by nervous laughter, unwilling awe, shrivelling scepticism.

‘I’m sorry,’ she tells no-one in particular. ‘He wanted to come. Sometimes they just … do.’

Look, it needed to be done, she used to tell herself. All those comfy old mediums who sanitize everything, only pass on the innocuous stuff, the trite crap. Times change. Honesty is what is needed now.

Yet it horrifies her: twenty thousand pounds for exploding a bomb under a marriage?

Seffi Callard is suddenly personally afraid. All eyes on her. And these are … these are nightclub people. About twenty of them, all expensively dressed, but perhaps too expensively. More than a hint of the garish. Money, certainly, but not old money. And the sense that Barber doesn’t know any of them very well. A room full of comparative strangers. Extras in a movie.

Of which Sir Richard Barber is not the director.

‘Miss Callard … is there anything I can get you?’

‘Sir Richard,’ she says quietly, ‘I think it’s time I left, don’t you? Could someone call me a taxi? This was a mistake.’

His unhappy eyes agree with her; his mouth says, ‘No. Emphatically not.’

‘We’ll return your cheque in the morning.’

There, in the background, goes that tape-loop laugh again.

‘Miss Callard-’

‘Sir Richard, people think it’s going to be a game. It never is. I was never a cabaret act.’

‘We know it isn’t a game.’ She can sense a desperation in him, fear — but not of the supernatural, this is fear of the known. ‘We want you to stay. We want you to carry on.’

‘Who does?’

‘… I do. Miss Callard … please.’ Barber signalled to a young guy in a maritime white jacket, and the lights begin to go again, one by one. ‘I … we … need you to stay.’

Well, of course she should get out of there right now if she’s got any sense. But what if poor bloody Coral’s husband is outside? What if he’s out there waiting for the black bitch?

Quite often you get a rush of them coming at you like primary school kids when the doors are opened to the playground. Most mediums are happy to employ an outside filter, known as a spirit guide, but Seffi’s been through all that and finds it unsatisfactory: hand-holding, patronizing. She doesn’t need any of those old cliche props. Nor even a feed-line — although this is expected and everyone has a variation on the traditional Is there anybody there? Like, Do we have company? Or the cringe-making Are there spirit friends amongst us?

She lowers her eyelids, focuses on a point three feet in front of her, so that the opulent room becomes a soft blur and none of the guests exists as individuals.

Letting the music flow into her, slowing her breathing. Hands on knees, long neck extended, she yawns luxuriously and gathers herself into trance.

There’s quite a space around her, like the space left by spectators standing back from a road accident or a street fight. As though the earlier exchange has caused a shock on that side too. Only Kieran remaining for a moment, a more nebulous presence than before — confused, unsure how to proceed. There should be someone there for him; he needs only to become aware of this.

Look around, she says to him, gently. See who’s there.

Waiting now for him to react, for the confusion to evaporate. It’s at moments like this when you realize you almost always are stronger than they are.

And then Kieran is gone. On the edge of her vision, the candle flame becomes a tiny planet of light.

‘The lines’, she announces softly, ‘are open.’

Later -

when it’s cold … when the music, with a busying of woodwind, gains power and the voices come in, the first swelling cry of Debussy’s night nymphs … when women are pulling cardigans and evening shawls around their shoulders, expressions of vague distaste puckering several faces … when Coral’s chair is no longer empty … when exploratory hands are dry and fibrous on Seffi’s skin.

— how she wishes she could claw back those words.