Vicious Circle

It was years before I really thought again about the shy, scrawny little girl who collected elastic bands for no fathomable reason, wrapping them around each other until they formed a huge, solid ball, and who let me share her lunch when I’d swapped my own crisps and sandwiches for Twilight Zone bubblegum cards: years before I even asked myself where she went when I made her go away.

I grew up. So did my big brother, Matthew. We’d never had a lot in common, and as we grew we took off in totally opposite directions. He went straight from school to a Catholic seminary in Upholland—the same one that Johnny Vegas trained in, but Matthew stuck to his guns when Vegas ditched the priesthood to become a stand-up comedian. On the other hand Matthew would have been hampered in that job by having a sense of humor so atrophied that he still thought The Goons Show was funny.

I went to Oxford to study English, but dropped out in my second year and by devious and twisted routes ended up going into exorcism. For six or seven years I made a living out of doing to other ghosts for money what I’d done to Katie out of pure, naked self-preservation.

There was a real call for exorcists by this time. Something was happening as the old millennium bumped and creaked and trundled its way downhill toward its terminus. The dead were waking in greater and greater numbers, to the point where suddenly they were impossible to ignore. Most were benign, or at least passive, but some had clearly gotten out of the wrong side of the grave—and a few were downright antisocial. The immaterial ones were bad enough, but some of the dead returned in the flesh, as zombies, while other ghosts—known as loup-garous or were—were able to possess animal hosts and sculpt them into a more or less human shape. And in some cases, where you got a big concentration of the dead in one place, other things would appear there, too: things that seemed to correspond to what mediaeval grimoires called demons. It seemed like it was chucking-out time in hell, and the whole rowdy bunch had all come surging out onto the streets at the same time. Kind of like eleven o’clock on the Dock Road back home in Liverpool, but with brimstone.

And equally suddenly, there were the exorcists. Or maybe we’d always been there, too; maybe it’s part of the genome or something, but it didn’t really come into its own until there was something out there worth exorcising. We’re a weird, unlikely lot: every one of us has got his own way of doing the job—which is to catch a ghost, tangle it up in something that it can’t get free from, and then dispel it.

For me, obviously, that “something” is music. I play some sequence of notes on my tin whistle, which for me perfectly describes—models might be a better word—the ghost as I perceive it. And somehow the music adheres to the ghost, or becomes part of it, so that when the tune stops the ghost stops, too. I’m not unique, I have to admit: I’ve met more than a few people who use drums in the same way, and some bat-shit guy I met once in Argentina taps out a rhythm on his own cheek. Other exorcists I’ve bumped into along the way have used pictures, words, dance, even the syncopation of their own breathing. The religious ones, of course, use prayer, but it all comes down to the same thing. Most of us are in no position to get all holier-than-thou about it.

So for a while, by the simple application of the laws of supply and demand, I was rolling in it: asking for top dollar and getting what I was asking for (in the positive rather than the ironic sense of that phrase). And if anyone ever posed the question, or if I allowed myself to wonder where the ghosts I dispelled actually went to, I had a flip answer in the breech ready to fire.

It’s only in the Western tradition, I’d say, sounding like someone who’d actually finished out his degree, that ghosts are seen as being the actual spirits of dead people. Other cultures have them down as being something else. The Navajo think of ghosts as something that congeals out of the worst parts of your nature while the rest of you goes into the next world cleansed and fighting fit. In the Far East, they’re often treated as a sort of emotional pollutant whose appearance depends on who’s looking at them, and so on.

Yeah, I know. Given that ghostbusting was my bread and butter, and given that I’d started with my own sister, it helped a hell of a lot if I could tell myself and anyone else who’d listen that ghosts were something different from the people they looked like. I was only talking my conscience to sleep, and while it was asleep I did some pretty bad things.

One of them was Rafi.

* * *

The Charles Stanger Care Home stands just off the North Circular at Muswell Hill, on the smooth bow-bend of Coppetts Road. From the outside, and from a distance, it looks like what it used to be—a row of Victorian workmen’s cottages, turn-of-the-century poverty reinvented as tasteful nostalgia.