Mean Spirit

V

The room which had been, until her death, the bedsit occupied by Mrs Willis, Marcus’s housekeeper and resident healer, was now the editorial suite of The Vision. Marcus stumbled in with a glass and his dying bottle of Glenmorangie, brushing a hand down the light switches, gazing around in bleary despair.

The shelves which had held the herbal potions were dense with box files — Underhill having bought them as a job lot from a local farming accountant who was switching to computers.

The boxes contained — for the first time alphabetically sorted and categorized — the many years of handwritten case histories sent in by an ageing army of correspondents the length and breadth of Britain.

Loonies to a man, Marcus thought morosely. Although, in truth, most of them seemed to be women. Many of whom had, over the years, made vague proposals of marriage to the editor, whom they’d never even seen. And who were now expressing dismay at the large number of young women who appeared to be working with him.

Meryl Taylor-Whitney, Alice D. Thornborough and the rest.

All the pseudonyms of Grayle Underhill, who was changing everything.

For most of its life the flimsy pages of The Phenomenologist, as it was then known, had been grey with dense and smudgy type, its headlines not much larger. A typical one might read,

Report of Presumed Fairy Ring Received from Central Cornwall

‘And what the hell’s so wrong with that?’ Marcus had demanded of Underhill during their first, tempestuous editorial conference last year. ‘It’s straightforward, accurate and a direct statement of fact. The magazine has received, from an old biddy in Truro, a garbled letter relating to what is probably a mildly anomalous circle of mushrooms on her front lawn, but which she, in her precarious mental state, presumes to be a nocturnal meeting place for tiny men with bells in their little bloody hats.’

Underhill had let her unkempt, blonde head fall forward into her hands and had groaned. He’d stared at her, baffled and resentful.

‘Marcus,’ he’d heard from under the hair, ‘it just isn’t … it isn’t sexy, is it? And what are we doing with a magazine title that most people connect with a bunch of crazy German philosophers pre-World War Two?’

And so, just over six months ago, to surprisingly few complaints from the residual readership, The Phenomenologist had been relaunched as The Vision.

Marcus poured himself a quarter-inch of Scotch, held the whisky in his mouth as long as he could taste it. Sitting in the high-backed chair behind the bastard computer he refused to use, he leaned his head — thick grey hair lank with sweat — into its soulless foam-rubber padding.

Underhill had energy, enthusiasm and — though he was never going to admit this to her face — a certain dexterity with the written word. A touch flip, a trifle coarse — but what could one expect from a New York tabloid hack?

Hey, you know, this is fun, Marcus. We’re gonna make it happen, I can feel it. Like, if we start by bringing it out like bi-monthly … like six times a year? Then we go to monthly … Oh, sure you have the material … You just got to stop cramming it all together … have bigger type, photographs. And bigger headlines which are more, uh … evocative. Plus, you need to attract advertising. And also, of course, you have to start trying to sell it to people other than the correspondents themselves. Hold on to the subscribers, sure, but get it into the newsagents. You appreciate what I’m saying?

Well, of course he did. Known all this for years. If it had happened with Fortean Times, it could, presumably, happen to The Vision. As she told him, there was a market for ‘this sort of thing’.

But should it?

Look here, he’d told her. You know I can’t possibly pay you a decent wage.

She’d shrugged. Then she’d have to make it so that he could start to pay her. It’s gonna happen, Marcus. It was meant to happen.

Because Underhill, in her ingenuous American way, believed in destiny: coming to Britain, initially, in search of her sister, an archaeologist, who had gone missing; who, it later emerged, had been an early victim of an obscene ritual murderer residing perilously close to Castle Farm itself; Underhill accompanying the decayed remains of her sister home to the United States, where their father was a prominent academic … and then making an unexpected return within three months, arriving on Marcus’s doorstep with two large suitcases and a pale, shy, unsure smile.

Destiny.

And now The Vision was bi-monthly and designed on a computer, and each issue carried several stories investigated and written by Meryl Taylor-Whitney and Alice D. Thornborough. Underhill was volatile and frantic, and there were times when Marcus suspected she was no more balanced than the crazed biddies who wrote to him about their haunted coalsheds and their stigmata.

Yet the journal’s circulation had already increased by forty per cent and, even after the expense of the computer and sundry publishing software, there was a small but appreciable profit.

But was the magazine’s destiny compatible with Underhill’s? Was The Vision, any more than its editor, ever meant to be commercially successful?

The phone rang. Marcus fumbled it wearily to his ear.

‘Bacton.’

‘Marcus, it’s me.’

He stiffened. ‘Where are you? Have you seen her?’ His head burned, his eyes and nose filling up.

‘I’d have called earlier,’ Underhill said, ‘only the car broke down.’

‘Piece of bloody tin.’ Mopping his eyes with a handful of tissue. ‘Are you telling me you haven’t even got there?’

‘Oh, I got here all right.’ She sounded unhappy. ‘Looks like I’ll be spending the night here.’

‘With Persephone?’

‘Yeah. I feel so privileged I could weep.’

‘How-?’

‘She’s OK. Kind of. I don’t know too much yet, and I don’t think I want to. You wanna speak to her?’

‘What?’

‘You want me to bring her to the phone when she-?’

‘I … is she there now? Is she with you?’

‘She went to the john, so I took the opportunity to call you. She’ll be back in a couple minutes, if you-’

‘No,’ Marcus said, panicked. ‘I don’t want to speak to her like this. Tell her you couldn’t get through. Tell her the line cut out. Tell her-’

‘Marcus, you’re really in some kind of awe of this woman, aren’t you?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘Listen, I can see the dangers. I’m trying to resist is all. I’ll call you tomorrow when I leave. Uh, tape Cindy for me, would you?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake-’

‘You don’t have to watch it, just press the damn button. Eight p.m.’

Marcus snorted and got off the phone, fearful of Persephone returning.

What was the matter with him? Why was he glad that it was Underhill, rather than himself, who was spending the night under the same roof as Persephone? Was it just the flu or was he losing his bottle?

Marcus sat down behind the blank computer. He didn’t even know how to turn the thing on.

Malcolm, the bull terrier, waddled over and stood looking up at him, a possible glimmer of pity in his psychotic eyes. How long before it was just the two of them again? Underhill was thirty-one years old and not unattractive. And an American. Had she got a proper work permit or whatever was needed? How long could she be expected to stay in a remote elbow of the Welsh border, where the idea of an eligible batchelor was a man with two tractors?

And when she left — within the year, if he was any judge — how could Marcus possibly fake the racy prose of Alice and bloody Meryl? How could the magazine ever again revert to Question of Telepathy between Budgerigars Posed in Lanarkshire?

‘IT’S THE NATIONAL LOTTERY … LIVE!’

Marcus winced, reached for the remote control.

‘AND COULD THOSE BIG-MONEY BALLS BE IN SAFER HANDS … THAN THE BEJEWELLED FINGERS OF THE GLAMOROUS, THE SENSATIONAL …’

Marcus stabbed in panic at the sound button, which failed to respond.

‘… CINDY … MARS …’

Why was it now impossible to buy a bloody television set with a row of bloody knobs on the front?

‘… LEWIS?’

Marcus recoiled. The entity wore a tight black, angle-length dress glittering with a thousand sequins. Earrings dripping almost to its shoulders. Bangles the size of manacles hanging five to each skeletal wrist.

The studio audience — tickets presumably handed out free to anyone who could provide the correct answer to the question: Are you a greedy, moronic prick? — responded to this vision with whoops and whistles and crazed shrieks, and Marcus sank back in his chair, feeling — if that were possible — slightly more ill.

Half the nation, it seemed, now lived in a drugged dream, from Lottery night to Lottery night, convinced that they deserved to be millionaires.

‘How’re you, my lovelies?’ Mars-Lewis’s arms flung wide, bangles jangling. ‘All right, is it?’

Marcus growled. The numbers on the video recorder appeared to be turning satisfactorily. He could switch off the television, couldn’t he?

‘And before we go any further … no … stop that now, come on … just listen, lovelies, let me just tell you that tonight’s jackpot winners will share … are you ready now …? A grand total of … SEVEN AND A HALF MILLION POUNDS!’

The audience keeled over with what sounded to Marcus like narcotically enhanced rapture. He shook his head slowly. How the hell could bloody Lewis have let himself become associated with this nauseous exhibition of mob avarice?

Money, of course. Tonight’s fee was probably ten times what the man — Marcus was almost certain Lewis was a man — had earned in an entire summer season of bottom-of-the-bill cabaret on Bournemouth Pier. And about ten thousand times what Marcus had ever paid him for an article in The Vision.

‘Now, I must show you this, see …’ The creature looked furtive, producing a fold of paper. The syrupy Welsh Valleys accent became more pronounced as it acquired a confidential wheedle.

‘Came today, it did. Signed jointly by the Director General of the BBC and the Managing Director of Camelot, organizers of the Lottery. Just listen to this. Dear Ms Mars-Lewis … Ms! There’s progressive.’

The response to this, accompanied by the creature’s arched eyebrow, suggested that several hundred people had spontaneously soiled themselves.

‘Dear Ms Mars-Lewis. Moderately accepting though we are of your personal manner and general deportment …’ Lewis sniffed and smoothed his dress ‘… we are bound to express dismay at the attitude of your avian associate …’

Uncertain laughter, as the cretins pondered possible meanings of the word avian.

‘We feel the continued and unwarranted cynicism exhibited by the bird is not in the spirit or indeed the best interests of the National Lottery as we see it, and unless there is a radical change we intend to take a hard look at the terms of your contract.’

Lewis lowered the paper and looked glum.

‘Oh dear. Well, now, despite what you see, I’m not as young as I was … And I’m not a rich person.’

This was true enough; the creature apparently wintered in a rusting caravan in Tenby.

‘The DG now, he has a terrible long memory. And I have to think of my future, isn’t it? Which is why I’ve come to a decision. I’ve decided, I have, that from now on I shall have to work … alone.’ Lewis straightened up, nose mock-heroically in the air. ‘I shall be … a solo artiste.’

To which the audience produced a passable simulation of a tragic Greek chorus.

‘What else can I do?’ Lewis shrieked in torment. ‘What can I do?’

The camera backed up to reveal a large, pink suitcase splattered with airline stickers. A muffled squawk seemed to emanate from within.

‘You can start by getting me out of this bloody scented boudoir, you old tart!’ screeched Kelvyn Kite.

‘Definitely not. Your services are no longer required. You can sign on in the morning.’

‘You’ll regret this, Lewis!’

Marcus sat up. What? ‘Hmmph.’ He shook his head and poured the last centimetre of Scotch into his glass.

‘Je ne regrette rien!’ Mars-Lewis defiantly throwing out his arms. ‘My loyalties are to Camelot and to the BBC!’

The audience booed. Marcus sank the whisky and switched off the set.