What else?
‘Bell…’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you really think Marion flies?’
‘If you’re going to throw your girlfriend’s dogma at me—’
‘No… No, it’s not, but… we’ve all heard endless accounts of what a ghost looks like, what a ghost sounds like, what a ghost does, but we don’t – and nor does anyone – know what a ghost feels.’
‘And what do you think they feel?’
‘I doubt they feel anything, they just exist. Transient, two-dimensional, in flickering shades of grey… Just existing, in little cold pockets of nothing.’
‘Beautiful.’
‘It’s not immortality.’
‘Existence without pain.’
‘But without any prospect of happiness.’
‘I sometimes think our highest aspiration is the avoidance of pain.’
‘That’s deeply sad,’ Lol said, ‘coming from an artist.’
And, saying that, he realized that being an artist was the explanation of most of it. It was not spiritual, not about transcendence… only a projection of a grand design, developed over many years from a single lurid image in a picture book. She’d found a place on which to impose her vision of a multidimensional heaven. An old-fashioned concept album in a beautiful gatefold sleeve.
Not madness, but it was a fine distinction.
Something else occurred to him then, something far more prosaic. If it was the dead baby’s birthday, it was also Jon Scole’s. No wonder the poor sod had got drunk.
‘Bell… how did Jonathan die?’
He was thinking of Merrily’s vague suspicion about the blood. How there had not been enough of it.
‘You’re a creator,’ he said. ‘You’re not a killer. You couldn’t kill. Could you?’
Because it was clear she didn’t see her own death as an act of self-destruction; it was a great display, a rush of ferocious light that would launch her spirit into an intimate form of eternity.
She’d gone still, with her head on one side, like a Halloween mannequin someone had wedged between the battlements as a joke.
Lol said, ‘Did he kill himself? Did he take an overdose or something? Did he prise open the mandolin case, on his birthday, and see where all your maternal love had been going?’
She tilted suddenly, and he thought she was going over, unlit, and he ran at the wall.
‘No!’ Throwing her hands out, then slapping them back down when the case began to slip, tugging it into her lap.
He stopped.
‘He… must have gone on drinking, taken his clothes off and gone to bed, and then… I don’t know… Maybe he got up to make a phone call…’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because there was a message on my machine this morning. It was full of bile. So drunk he could hardly speak. It was like, “You fucking old bitch… you gave away a baby and kept…” ’
Lol could hear voices in the streets and alleys below, guessed that Bell finally had an audience. Without one, there would be no point.
‘ “… Kept something…” ’ She began to play with the clasp on the mandolin case, flicking it up and down with her fingers. ‘ “… Something looks like a Kentucky fried chicken.” ’
‘He was dead when you found him, right? Come on, Bell, everybody’s going to know after the post-mortem.’
She let the clasp snap back. Her sigh was irritable.
‘Maybe he went on drinking and choked on his own vomit. I don’t know. I was just so angry at him. He’d killed Robbie and he’d got away with it… for what? Such a sordid, ignominious… such a little death… He wouldn’t… even he wouldn’t have wanted that. I… I went into his hovel of a kitchen and I found a knife in a drawer.’
Lol imagined the resulting scene like a concept-art tableau: Tracey Emin meeting Damien Hirst in their own perfect purgatory.
Bell said, ‘It’s how I imagined Arnold de Lisle dying. Naked. Cut to pieces. Jonathan, if he was nothing else, at least he looked like a warrior. Like Eric. All they ever had was their looks.’
‘Arnold de Lisle, huh?’ Lol was suddenly furious at her. ‘Except that with Arnold there’d have been masses of blood. When someone’s already dead, nothing pumping, you can cut through arteries and just get a dribble.’
‘I didn’t know. Or if I did, I didn’t think.’
‘So that was pretty sordid, too, really. And you know something else? With your luck, you could throw yourself off this roof and… and land on the porch or something and just wind up a paraplegic.’
‘We’ll see,’ Bell said. She straightened up with a kind of magisterial calm and flicked up the catch and opened the mandolin case, releasing a very strong smell of what could only be more lighter fuel.
‘The other difference with Arnold,’ Lol said in desperation, ‘was that at least he had some love first.’
Bell smiled sadly, with those lovely crooked teeth, a glint of moving light in her eyes as she came down, with the open coffin, to the candles.
Side by side, looking out of the window space towards the river and just a few lights, Merrily and Sam prayed together for Marion de la Bruyère, Merrily murmuring snatches from the Requiem Eucharist.
‘We’ve come to remember, before God, our sister Marion…’
Robbie Walsh had probably chosen well. Marion might well have resembled Sam physically even if, in a border fortress full of tense, wary men, she’d have grown up faster and probably harder.
You promised eternal life to those who believe:
Remember your servant Marion,
as we also remember her.
Bring all who rest in Christ
Into the fullness of your Kingdom
where sins have been forgiven
and death is no more…
And then busking it.
‘God, we pray for the release of Marion’s spirit from the deluded and the misguided and those who would use her to further their own… agendas. We pray that Marion may…’
It was very cold now, in the Hanging Tower. Sam crept close to Merrily; she was shaking. Her face was in shadow but the tiny ring glittered at the edge of an eyebrow.
‘… Fly,’ Merrily said.
Quite prepared to become aware of long, slow breathing in the tower, or even what Bernie Dunmore had described as more like an absence of smile. A smile so cold, so bleak, so devoid of hope… only this perpetual, bitter… terminality.
Unprepared for a long and hollow scream from somewhere else.
50
Dead Person Watching
COMING UP TO sunset, Lol’s living room was like the inside of a terracotta plant-pot. Even Jane didn’t like it any more.
‘Who gave you this number?’ Lol said into his mobile.
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘I’ll have to change it now.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Lord Shipston said. ‘I doubt you’ll be hearing from me again. I just wanted to say, do you really want to start all this?’
‘Well,’ Lol said, ‘the album’s already out.’
‘I don’t care about the album. If I’m ever asked, I think I shall accuse you of, shall we say, political satire. Anything beyond that, we’ll see each other in court. And I’ll win because I can afford the best.’
‘You’re threatening me again,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing changes.’
‘I’m just pointing out to you the problems of a long and costly libel action.’
‘It’s nothing to do with courts, Gavin,’ Lol said. ‘In the end, mud just sticks.’
It went on like that for a while. Lol considered the options but, with guys like this, compromise was not one of them.