Mean Spirit

XXX

‘What’s happening?’ she was screaming. ‘What’s going on? Cindy, why are they doing this to us?’

Near hysteria. The poor child.

Within a mile of Castle Farm, he was, when the phone, against all rural odds, had managed this tiny gasping bleep, a faint whimper. Cindy pulling over into the hedge — if it had turned out to be his friends from the Mirror, he would have had to hang up without a word.

‘Doing it to us, Jo?’

‘I’ve just had a call from the BBC Press Office. You wouldn’t believe the questions they’ve had fired at them.’

‘I rather think I would,’ Cindy said sadly.

‘The Press Office’ve drawn up a statement saying it’s complete nonsense. But they want to clear it with you before it goes out. Yes?’

‘And to what does this statement react?’

‘The Mail, the Express, the Mirror, the Telegraph, the-’

‘Yes, yes, but what are they saying?’

‘In the statement? Well, obviously, the BBC is rejecting any suggestion of you being involved with witchcraft.’

‘Well, good. That’s … er … that is quite true. In essence, but what I meant-’

‘Or the occult in any respect.’

‘And, indeed,’ Cindy said carefully, ‘depending upon the interpretation of the word “occult”, this also could be considered broadly accurate.’

‘Cindy …?’ A sudden remote quality to young Jo’s voice. He imagined her in the lovely Notting Hill flat she shared with her boyfriend, a writer of TV screenplays. Another lazy, idyllic little Sunday over the arts pages. Until this silliness. ‘Cindy, I don’t like the way you said that.’

‘Too Welsh?’

‘Cindy, for Christ’s sake! You’re only half denying involvement in the occult. This is not funny.’

‘No. No indeed.’ He was watching a buzzard alight upon a telegraph pole. ‘Not funny at all.’

Refusing to dwell on how important the programme had become in his life. Not only financially — he had no pension, no savings to speak of — but the way the buzz of live television twice a week had heightened his everyday consciousness, his being in the present moment, to an unexpected degree. He’d been flying, as never before.

‘Cindy, listen to me, you know there’ve always been people who want you out.’

‘Jo-’

‘Nobody wants the show to be dangerous, that’s the issue. Or anything other than genial, superficial crap, and all the winners buying their BMWs and flying off to the West Indies for a couple of months, and all living happily ever after. They never liked the idea of you satirizing the myth and they were all attuned for the first indication that what we were doing wasn’t working any more. Right?’

‘Jo, it… it’s little more than a hobby.’

‘What do you mean?’

There was, inevitably, a devastated silence.

Cindy sighed deeply and told it as it was.

‘Many years ago, while working in North Wales, I stayed with a family, the Fychans. Two of whom, father and son, were … well, dyn hysbys is the Welsh term, meaning “wise man”. In other parts of the Celtic world they’ve tended to be women; in Wales, for some reason, more often men. Anyway, the family had followed this particular path through many generations — making little of it, I have to say; it was entirely normal to them. But I was a young man and fascinated. And although I did not have the Welsh language, they were kind enough to say I had a peculiar aptitude for … this art.’

‘I’m not sure I understand,’ Jo said, evidently with some residual hope that it would all have been herbal cures and the odd love potion.

‘Shamanism is the technical term I tend to prefer. The Welsh descriptions, when translated, tend to invoke images of, er, wizardry.’

‘It’s not just like Mystic Meg then, is it?’ Jo said aridly. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. Why have you never told me all this?’

‘I never hid it, lovely, but I always detected that you were a trifle impatient with those people usually termed New Agers and, indeed, Kurt Campbell and his research into the paranormal.’

‘What about the bird? One of the papers said … oh, God, this-’

‘The truth of that’, Cindy said patiently, ‘is that a shaman often adopts what is sometimes called a totem beast — well, the beast, it is, usually, which adopts the shaman. In his … let’s call it his reverie … he will perhaps find himself accosted by a particular species of creature — it might be an owl or a fox or a hare — with which he will develop a relationship. In my case, it was the red kite which, at the time, was confined to an area of the Cambrian Mountains. Kelvyn was a humorous diversion. A shamanic in-joke, if you like.’

‘Cindy, I…’ He could hear the air being expelled in a thin stream between Jo’s little teeth. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. Cross-dressing is fine … being gay is fairly cool … having a rubber fetish is just about acceptable. But a ventriloquist having an unnatural relationship with his doll …’

‘Communications between shaman and totem creature occasionally are founded upon hostility rather than sympathy.’

‘This is a dream, isn’t it?’ Jo said. ‘This has got to be a bloody dream.’

‘It sounds to me’, Cindy said soberly, ‘as if the feeding of this background information to the press has been quite cleverly orchestrated.’

‘By whom?’

‘Not sure. Look, we both knew it was never going to last for ever, Jo.’

Jo gave a kind of yelp. ‘What are you saying? Listen … Listen, listen, listen! Just you stay out of the way. All right? Wherever you are, stay there! Don’t talk to anybody. I’m going to tell the Press Office I couldn’t get hold of you. Meanwhile, I don’t care how you do this — lie, cheat … deny, deny, deny … but you have to think of a way out of this. You’re smart, Cindy, you can talk your way out of anything. Look at the Campbell incident.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Cindy said. ‘The Campbell incident.’

He’s obviously just extremely vindictive, Jo had said.

‘Just think about how you’re going to get us out of this, Cindy.’

The line went dead.

In a big roadside pub, its bar like a deserted factory floor, they took a distant table, ordered coffees. Maiden laid on the table the brown paper bag from the bookshop in Gloucester. They’d stopped in Gloucester because Seffi needed a chemist’s. On his way back from the bookshop Maiden had seen her standing against a concrete wall, talking into her mobile.

He tipped out the book. On its cover was a smiling face. A cheery face under a slab of pavement-grey hair. One tooth off-centre, giving the smile that dangerous edge, that Jack-the-lad, lock-up-your-daughters, cross-me-at-your-peril kind of gleam.

The force of the smile gathered in all your attention so that you didn’t really notice the eyes, not at first. You didn’t notice how cold and fixed they were, like the eyes of a big fish packed in ice; all you saw was the cheery smile and the cheery title.

Maiden turned the book round, pushed it in front of Seffi.

BANG TO WRONGSA BAD BOY’S BOOK

‘Good God.’

‘You recognize him? From the party?’

‘Yes. Yes and no. All I remember from the party is hearing the laugh. Not the face. I’m not aware of seeing him at the party, so he must’ve been keeping well away from me. Maybe another room, I don’t know. But, yes, it was nagging at me last night, where I’d heard that laugh apart from the party.’

‘And?’

‘This was Barber’s driver,’ Seffi said. ‘He picked me up at the hotel.’

‘The chauffeur? The chauffeur was Seward himself?’

‘Peaked cap, the whole bit. Very friendly, very jovial, big smile. This smile. And, yes, the laugh, for heaven’s sake … that was what I was half remembering. The chauffeur had the laugh.’

‘What did you talk about with the chauffeur?’

‘He told me how seriously interested his employer was in the spirit world. Suspicious in retrospect because Barber obviously couldn’t care less.’

‘Is it possible Seward knew that something … extraordinary … was likely to happen to you that night, at that party? Did you get that feeling when he was driving you there?’

‘I wasn’t particularly …’ Her phone went off in her bag, like a small police warbler. ‘Yah.’ Brusquely.

The female voice in the phone was animated, insistent.

Seffi said, ‘Nancy, look, I’m going to have to call you back … No. No, I don’t. Yes, I will. But when I’m ready … I’ll call you back.’

She tossed the phone back into her bag, biting her lip then forcing a smile.

‘My agent. In a state of some anxiety. Wondering if she’s ever going to make any money out of me again.’

‘She know about the … trouble you’ve been having? The nature of it?’

‘She seems to know too much,’ Seffi said, ‘but that’s not your problem.’

Before they left the pub, she went to the lavatory. She was gone more than fifteen minutes and didn’t explain. Maiden guessed she’d been on the phone in there. Very evidently, now, there was something she didn’t want him to know about. He was feeling uneasy as they took the road towards Ross-on-Wye and the border.

After a while, she said, ‘I won’t stay. At the farm. I’ll just pick up my stuff. Perhaps you could explain to Marcus.’

‘Oh.’ He watched her biting her upper lip as she drove, hugging the wheel.

‘It was a mistake, anyway, Bobby. I’ve brought him nothing but hassle.’

‘Marcus likes hassle.’

‘When he’s well. But he’s not well. I’d never have written to him if I’d known that. I just wanted someone to tell it all to, who wouldn’t be judgemental.’

The Jeep rolled into a sandstone village with a Norman church. He saw how she’d tightened up, pulled back into herself. Like last night was something which had happened in a different time-frame.

Which bothered him. He’d felt so close to her. She was right: what had passed between them was as intimate as sex. Not casual sex, either.

‘What’s changed, Seffi?’

‘Nothing’s changed.’

‘You sure? You go to Marcus for advice after twenty years, because he’s the only person you feel you can trust. And then you just walk out. You know, it’s going to make him feel like a useless old bugger.’

She slowed as the road narrowed. She cleared her throat. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere, OK? Tomorrow, probably.’

‘You could stay tonight, then?’

‘No.’

‘Only there are things we need to discuss. All of us. Like the fact that there’s someone out there who wants you.’

A truck loaded with gravel came grinding and clanking past, making even the Jeep shiver.

‘That’s no-one’s problem but mine,’ Seffi said.