Thicker Than Water

‘I’d be really grateful for a second opinion,’ I said. ‘Whatever it was that I was sensing down there on the Salisbury, it wasn’t your bog-standard haunting.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because it didn’t feel right. It’s too big, and it doesn’t have a proper focus. It’s like someone tore a whole bunch of ghosts into confetti and sprinkled them over the entire estate.’ I threw out my hands in an inadequate gesture, fingers spread. ‘The feeling is everywhere, Juliet. I’ve never come across anything quite like it.’

‘Couldn’t it just be a lot of different ghosts? You said yourself this place is a slum. And it’s old enough now for a lot of people to have died there.’

Reflexively, I touched my left hand to my chest - to where my tin whistle nestled close to my heart. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It couldn’t be that. I’d hear it differently. You know how my thing works. To me, a bunch of ghosts in the same space would be kind of like half a dozen bands jamming in the same room. This was just one impression. One thing, but spread out over a wide area. It’s like - you know how they say ants and bees don’t have individual minds? That they’re part of a hive mind, a collective self?’

‘Go on.’

‘That’s all. It was all around me, and it was all the same thing. Big. Broken up. Not localised. Equally strong over the whole area of the estate, which is like a quarter of a mile from end to end. Did you ever come across anything like that?’

Juliet considered this, furrows of concentration appearing on her brow. While she thought, I put some time into just admiring her face: it never felt like time wasted.

‘Possibly,’ she said at last. ‘But not for a long time.’

‘Will you go take a look?’

She didn’t answer for a moment. She was looking at me as if she was trying to read something in my face. Or maybe she was just exasperated by my inadequate verbal photofit.

‘If I’m passing,’ she allowed, ‘I’ll take a look.’

‘Thanks, Juliet.’

‘If I’m passing, Castor. You wait patiently and you don’t hassle me. I’ll call you as and when.’

‘Thanks,’ I said again.

That would have to do, for now. I thanked her for the advice about jugulars and hit the road.

6

I hadn’t thought about Anita in years, and now suddenly I couldn’t get her out of my head. Every time my mind went into idle, as it did while I was Tube-hopping south and west across London, old memories of her kept popping up out of nowhere - no doubt shaken and stirred from the cerebral substrate by the pants-wetting trauma of seeing my name written in Kenny Seddon’s blood.

Had I fancied her? Jesus, who was I trying to kid? Of course I had. More than once, in fact. The first time had been when I was four and was dragged against my will to Northcote Road Primary School to see my brother Matt playing Joseph in the nativity play. Anita was his Mary, and I liked the way she smiled. She delivered her lines nicely, too. I committed two of them to memory, and used to repeat them to myself every once in a while for the sheer pleasure of the sounds: “Come, Joseph. I am close to my time and we must reach Bethlehem before our baby is born” and “I thank you for your gifts and for your great kindness.”

But that was just a childhood infatuation. The year after she stabbed Kenny - the year she turned sixteen - Anita was the most beautiful thing that had ever walked on two legs. And she’d saved my life! So naturally I was besotted with her to the point of insomnia, and used her as the raw material for a thousand fantasies ranging from the sloppily romantic to the baldly pornographic.

It didn’t help, though. She’d completed her metamorphosis by that time: she was all grown up and I was a kid. The yawning chasm of two years was way too wide to vault across - at least in that direc Fshetion: if I’d been older than her it would have been a different story. She dated one of the boys who loaded the vans at Hannah’s pie bakery in Arthur Street: a guy named Alan, who was eighteen and had all the advantages of a job, a car and a total absence of acne. I hated him and wished harm on him, even though he’d once given me a quid to put a bet on for him at Coral’s.

But that passed. It always does. You learn to scale your desire to things within your scope, when you’re fourteen. Or at least you learn to distinguish between desires you can hope to satisfy and ones that are just between yourself, your conscience, and the box of tissues on your bedside table.

By the time I finally lost my virginity - to Carole Aubrey in the car park of the Red Pepper Club on Rice Lane - I wasn’t even fantasising about Anita on a regular basis. The top slots were filled with movie actresses and female vocalists, interspersed with a few comic-book characters who really belonged to an earlier stage of my adolescence.

But I still saw Anita around, because Walton was a small place. Too small for her, I thought. I always expected her to leave, because it seemed to me at that time that leaving was the prerequisite for having any kind of a life.