Vicious Circle

There’d been some spirited batting around of all these issues in the Commons and in the Lords, and the pundits were saying the bill might hit the rocks if it came to a free vote. But even if it did, it seemed like it was only a matter of time: sooner or later we had to grudgingly accept that our old definitions of life and death were no damn use anymore, and that people who refuse to take the hint when their heart’s stopped beating and their perishable parts are six feet under still have at least a minimal degree of protection under the law.

Which for a lot of guys in my profession was just flat-out bad news.

* * *

I guess the dead were always with us, but for a long while they were fairly discreet about it. Or perhaps there just weren’t so many of them who bothered to come back.

In my earliest memories, there’s no real distinction: some people had laps you could sit on, hands you could hold, while with others you sort of fell right on through. You learned by trial and error who was which—and then later you learned not to talk about it, because grown-ups couldn’t always see or hear the silent woman in the freezer aisle at Sainsbury’s, the forlorn kid standing out in the middle of the road with the traffic roaring through him, the wild-eyed, cursing vagrant wandering through the living room wall.

It wasn’t that much of a burden, really: more bewildering than traumatic. I found out that ghosts were meant to be scary when I heard other kids telling ghost stories, and as far as I can remember my reaction was just “Oh, so that’s what they’re called.”

The first ghost that ever really rattled me was my sister Katie, and that was because I knew her from when she was alive. I’d even been there when my dad had brought her broken body back to the house, sobbing uncontrollably, fighting off the hands that tried to help him lay her down. She was skipping rope in what was nominally a “play street,” off-limits to cars (8:00 AM TO SUNSET, EXCEPT FOR ACCESS). A delivery van, going way too fast in the narrow street, hit her a glancing blow and threw her about ten feet through the air. As far as anyone could tell, she died instantly. The van, meanwhile, kept right on going. My dad spent a lot of time after that going round the neighbors’ houses asking people if they’d seen what kind of van it was: he was hoping to identify the driver and get to him before the police did. Fortunately for both of them, he got a whole range of different answers—Mother’s Pride, Jacob’s Biscuits, Metal Box Company Limited—and eventually had to give up.

I was six years old. You don’t really grieve at that age, you just sit around trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I sort of got that Katie was dead, but I wasn’t all that clear yet on death itself: it was a transition, a change of state, but how permanent it was and where it left you afterward seemed to vary according to whom I asked.

One thing was for sure: Katie wasn’t up in heaven with God. The day we buried her, she walked into my bedroom at five past midnight and tried to climb into bed with me—which was where she normally slept, there being only one room and two beds to share between us three kids. I was perturbed by the broad, bloody gash in her forehead, her pulped shoulder, her gravel-sculpted side, and she was upset by my screaming. It went downhill from there.

My mum and dad were falling apart themselves at this stage, so they didn’t have much sympathy to spare. They took me to a doctor, who said nightmares were entirely normal after a trauma—especially a trauma like losing a sibling—and prescribed large doses of sweet bugger all. I was left to get on with it.

And that was how I found out that I was an exorcist.

After two weeks of Katie’s nightly visits, I started trying to make her go away, running through the whole gamut of gross and offensive behavior that six-year-old boys can come up with. Katie just kept on staring. But when I sang “Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put your sister on the top,” the subdued little ghost made a whimpering sound and started to flicker like a dying lightbulb.

Seeing that I’d made an impact at last, I pushed on through my small repertoire of songs. Katie tried to talk to me, but whatever she was saying I couldn’t hear it over my own raucous chanting. By the time my parents stormed in, their patience finally exhausted, she was gone.

She was gone, and I celebrated. My bed was my own again. I was stronger than death, and I knew that whatever death actually turned out to be, I had the stick that would always bring it to heel: music. I became fascinated by the mechanics of the whole thing; I discovered by trial and error that whistling was better than singing, and playing a flute or tin whistle was best of all. It works differently for each of us, but music is the trigger that does the job for me.