The Devil You Know

I let the sentence hang. Again, I’d reached the point where language couldn’t take me any further. What did happen to the loose spirits I packaged up and shipped out? Where was I sending them? Did they go on to greener pastures or just stop existing? I didn’t know. I’d never found an explanation that didn’t sound like bullshit.

“When you stop playing?” Alice pressed.

“Then the ghost stops being there. It goes away.”

“Where to?”

“Wherever music goes when it’s not being played.”

It wasn’t what she’d expected to hear, and it left her if anything even more unhappy than before. I should have known it would.

What could I tell her? My own definition of life extended from cradle to grave, and what came after that I saw as something else. If you could find your way to Heaven or Hell, all well and good. If you couldn’t, you had no damn business hanging around the local chip shop or in your wife’s sock drawer. In other words, if there was a natural order at all, then I was part of it—a moving finger that never wrote anything down but was really good for canceling things out.

“Try a priest,” I suggested again, all out of homespun wisdom. “Or just someone you love and trust. Try Jeffrey, maybe. Talk it through. Don’t run away from it. In my experience, there’s nowhere to run to.”

I suddenly realized at that point that Alice was staring at me in a sort of pained bewilderment.

“Jeffrey?” she said with an incredulous emphasis.

“What?”

“‘Try Jeffrey’? Is that what you said?”

I thought about it, and it was.

“I meant,” I tried again, “that you should talk to someone who—”

“I know what you meant, Castor. I want to know why the hell you meant it. You think Jeffrey and I are attached? Romantically attached? Did I do or say anything that would lead you to that conclusion?”

“You seem to have a good working relationship,” I temporized.

“Bullshit.” Alice was really angry now. “Nobody has a good working relationship with Jeffrey. The relationship that I have with him is that I do the work, and he hides behind my skirt.”

“Okay.” I spread my hands, offering surrender.

It was rejected. “Not okay. Not okay at all. Some whingeing creep told you I slept my way into this job, right? I knew the rumor was circulating, but I didn’t know it had reached light speed. For the record, I’m senior archivist because I do the job really efficiently. And Rich isn’t, because nobody except him thought he could handle it.”

“Okay,” I said again. I didn’t want to argue with her. It wasn’t like it was any of my business, after all.

She stood up, glaring down at me. “In my opinion, it’s you that needs to have that talk, not me,” she said. “And I don’t mean with a priest or a rabbi. I mean with yourself. God helps those who help themselves, Castor. I suggest you start by taking a good, hard look at what you do for a living.”

Alice grabbed her bag and left, not exactly storming out, but certainly leaving it clear that she didn’t want to be followed. And I sure as hell didn’t want to follow her right then. Even Good Samaritans will give up the habit if you smack them hard enough, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice in one evening—of doing the wrong thing because the right one wasn’t available.

But as I got up, I noticed that she’d left something behind her. The heavy key ring had fallen out of her pocket onto the wooden bench, and she hadn’t noticed it in the near dark of the church’s interior. I picked it up, hefted the impressive weight of it. Alice wore it like a totem. She’d be really upset when she missed it—not least because it had her ID card attached to it by a bobble-chain, and she wouldn’t be able to open any of the doors at the archive without it. Changing my mind, I sprinted after her.

No sign of anyone in the doorway or outside the church. By now, the drizzle had turned into steady rain. London in the wet smells like an incontinent dog, but in other ways, it’s not so endearing. I gave it up and just carried on walking down toward King’s Cross. I didn’t even know which direction she’d taken, and in any case, it wasn’t the end of the world. I’d just have to be there when the place opened the next morning to hand the keys back to her.

As I was about to go down into the Underground by the steps outside King’s Cross Station, I passed a phone booth that was miraculously both intact and unused. Well, we do live in an age of signs and wonders, after all. Remembering the card in my pocket, I stopped and fished it out. I had just enough coins on me to feed the meter and get a dial tone.

7405 818. I vaguely knew the code, and I had an idea that it was somewhere fairly central. Close to the West End, if not actually in it. I dialed, and the phone at the other end rang just once.

“Hello?” A man’s voice, low and smooth—slightly bored. Music was playing in the background somewhere—louche synthetic jazz. Someone laughed loudly in a way that suggested there were a lot of other people hanging around whatever place the phone was in.