And along the way, after discovering to my bitter chagrin that you couldn’t play tin whistle in a rock band, I stumbled across one application for music that I’d never dreamed of.
My first exorcism, though, didn’t involve any instrument except my own voice. I was six years old – just. And when my dead sister Katie came back from the grave and visited me after midnight in the bedroom we used to share back when she was alive, I sent her packing by singing the stupid taunts that kids use to make each other cry in the playground. I did it because it worked, found out much later why it worked, or rather how, and like many people I’ve met since turned a strange knack into an even stranger career.
The more I did it, the easier it got. I found that I had a sort of additional sense, more like hearing than anything else. When I was close to a ghost for long enough, I got a feeling for it – a feeling which translated readily into sound and usually into a tune, into music. When I played the tune on my whistle, the ghost would get tangled up in the sound: and when I stopped playing, the ghost would fade away on the last note like breath on a mirror. None of them ever came back, after that. Bizarre and inexplicable as it was, what I did to them was permanent.
But what seems stranger, now, as I look back on that time in my life, is that I did it all without ever once asking where the ghosts went when I played to them. Where did I send them to? Where did I send Katie to? Eternal reward, the world-soul, or just oblivion? Answers on a postcard: except that the undiscovered country has no postal service.
It took a lot to shake me out of that complacent tree. I was an exorcist for well over ten years, and in that time I must have played a thousand tunes. The world changed around me as the dead started to return in greater and greater numbers. They made the first tentative steps towards creating their own infrastructure – zombies in particular have some very specialised needs – and predictably the living responded by dividing into antagonistic camps, the Breath of Life movement calling for a recognition of dead rights, while groups like the Catholic Anathemata preached the imminent apocalypse and started stockpiling weapons for it. Meanwhile people in the ghost-busting trade started to talk about encountering other kinds of creatures that had never been either human or, strictly speaking, alive: creatures that seemed to fit the mugshots of the demons described in medieval grimoires. I even met a few myself – encounters that I still relive in dreams, and probably always will.
Two things eventually had to happen before I started to realise that tooting my whistle first and asking questions later was a flawed strategy. The first was me fucking up someone else’s life beyond all possible unfucking, and the second was having my own life saved and handed back to me by a dead woman I was trying to exorcise. These days I don’t do straight ghostbusting any more: if you look at the sign over my office door, you’ll see that it says I provide SPIRITUAL SERVICES. No, I don’t know what that means either, and it doesn’t do a hell of a lot to bring in the passing trade. But that suits me okay, in a lot of ways: the closest thing I’ve got to a philosophy is that I’ll do anything for a quiet life except work for it.
So what kind of a spiritual service was my old acquaintance John Gittings in need of? As I sidestepped out of the way of a broken-off chair leg that left a dent in the wall at the height of my crotch, I ran through some of the options – from the humane to the extreme. None of them looked good right then except slamming the door shut behind me and making a run for it.
Geist! It was like finding out that your best friend is a cannibal after he’s just offered you a chicken sandwich.
Well, maybe not quite like that: John had never been a friend, exactly. Including one memorable skirmish with a werewolf at Whipsnade Zoo, in which he’d modified our sketchy battle plan on the fly and almost gotten me eaten alive, I’d seen him maybe five times in the last three years.
It was still a shock, though, and I was having a hard time getting my head around it. Like I said, most ghosts are passive and harmless: it’s only the most disturbed souls who go geist after death, their tortured personalities subliming through some terrible metamorphosis into an unliving storm of anger and frustration.
But John Gittings? In the words of Denis Healey, it was like being savaged by a dead sheep.
I turned to Carla, realising what she’d been going through; why she’d asked me to come home with her, and what she’d tried and failed to say as we were driving back here.
I put a hand on her arm and gave her a firm push towards the door, seeing in her eyes that she was about to start crying again, and afraid that this time she might not be able to stop.
‘Wait in the car,’ I said.
She stared up at me, frightened and hopeful in about equal amounts – and some of what she was scared of was the same as what she was hoping for. ‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded.
‘What you asked me to do. Give him some peace.’
‘You won’t-?’
‘Exorcise him? Send him away for ever? No, Carla. I won’t. I promise. Wait in the car. It shouldn’t take longer than twenty minutes.’
She took one last look past me into the room, where an invisible entity was trailing some extension of itself through the broken glass on the carpet, making it bristle and shift. Then she nodded and backed out through the door, staring all the time, as if turning her back would have felt like a betrayal. I closed the door gently behind her, then knelt down and unshipped my whistle.
I keep it in a pocket I’d sewn into my coat myself, high up on the left-hand side. A paletot is handy like that – it’s so voluminous that you can carry a drawerful of cutlery, a samovar and a sub-machine gun around with you and it won’t even spoil the line. I generally just keep the whistle, a silver dagger, an antique goblet I’ve never yet had occasion to use and a bottle of whatever booze I’m currently flirting with.
I blew a random sequence of notes to tune it in – except that even then, even on this first approach, it wasn’t quite random. There was an element of echolocation in it: of throwing out sounds to see how they’d come back to me again – to see which the ghost absorbed and which bounced off and rolled away into the ether. These are just metaphors, you understand: but everything I do is a kind of metaphor. You choose the tools that work, or maybe they choose you.
And sometimes it comes hard and slow, sometimes quick and easy. This ghost was so big, so angry that the sense of it filled the room: notes ran from my gut up into my chest and lungs, through the bore of the whistle past my flickering fingers and out into the air without me even needing to think about it. They built like a wave, and broke like a wave, and the thing that had been John Gittings met them in full flood.
For a handful of moments the force of that meeting threw me out: I faltered in the middle of a phrase, pieced it out awkward and staccato, then found the flow again and began the laborious crescendo for a second time.
This was the binding: the systolic beat, usually and inexorably followed by the diastole, which is the banishing. But not this time. By this point in my life I’d had plenty of experience of a different kind of tune, with a different, more insidious purpose. I let a new phrase sneak in now, on a minor key – something I’d designed for my best friend Rafi, after I’d lost the plot and let one of the most powerful demons in Hell weld itself to his spirit. What I was playing now was something few exorcists ever bother with, because for most of them it doesn’t really pay its way in the standard repertoire.
This was a lullaby.
Gradually I let the second phrase ride in over the first, run through it and colonise it. Then I played the tune out until there was nothing left of it except three descending notes, each held for as long as my breath lasted.
The silence afterwards was like a roomful of applause. Nothing moved in the pillaged room. The ghost was still there, but the oppressive weight of it had lifted and faded. The sense I was left with was a dull, distant echo, not the roaring dissonance I’d walked in on.