Dead Men's s Boots

And sometimes it comes hard and slow, sometimes quick and easy. This ghost was so big, so angry that the sense of it filled the room: notes ran from my gut up into my chest and lungs, through the bore of the whistle past my flickering fingers and out into the air without me even needing to think about it. They built like a wave, and broke like a wave, and the thing that had been John Gittings met them in full flood.

For a handful of moments the force of that meeting threw me out: I faltered in the middle of a phrase, pieced it out awkward and staccato, then found the flow again and began the laborious crescendo for a second time.

This was the binding: the systolic beat, usually and inexorably followed by the diastole, which is the banishing. But not this time. By this point in my life I’d had plenty of experience of a different kind of tune, with a different, more insidious purpose. I let a new phrase sneak in now, on a minor key – something I’d designed for my best friend Rafi, after I’d lost the plot and let one of the most powerful demons in Hell weld itself to his spirit. What I was playing now was something few exorcists ever bother with, because for most of them it doesn’t really pay its way in the standard repertoire.

This was a lullaby.

Gradually I let the second phrase ride in over the first, run through it and colonise it. Then I played the tune out until there was nothing left of it except three descending notes, each held for as long as my breath lasted.

The silence afterwards was like a roomful of applause. Nothing moved in the pillaged room. The ghost was still there, but the oppressive weight of it had lifted and faded. The sense I was left with was a dull, distant echo, not the roaring dissonance I’d walked in on.

I went out and down the stairs, back to the road. Carla was leaning against the car, smoking a cigarette. The dog-end of another lay stubbed out between her feet. She stared at me – a wordless question.

‘He’s fine,’ I said, for want of any halfway-adequate way of putting it. ‘I sent him to sleep, the same way I do Asmodeus when he’s getting too frisky. Carla, how long has this been happening?’

She shook her head, looked away. ‘Since the day John died, Fix. Six days ago. It was almost immediate. It started maybe two or three minutes after I heard the shot.’

I exhaled heavily. ‘Jesus!’

‘It was how I knew he was dead. He’d locked himself in the bathroom, and I couldn’t get in. I was hammering on the door, shouting his name. And then something- I can’t describe it. Something went down the stairs, behind me. I could hear each footstep. The boards creaking, all the way down, as though – whatever it was, it was a massive weight. And I knew. I thought “That’s John. That’s my husband, going away from me. He’s dead.” Only he didn’t go away. He stayed. He stayed and—’

Seeing the trembling start in her sht wart in oulders, I looked at the ground. ‘You should have called-’ I began. Called who? Me? That was a hypocritical bridge too far, while I was standing there longing to be out of this. ‘One of us,’ I went on.

‘I didn’t know what to say.’ Carla’s voice was thick and choked. ‘Fix, what am I going to do? I can’t live like this.’

‘You don’t have to. Have you got somewhere else to stay?’

She took a step back from me as though I’d pushed her, and her eyes as she looked up at me registered shock and hurt.

‘Leave him alone? How can I do that to him?’

I threw out my arms, groping for words. ‘Carla, you said yourself that John wasn’t himself before he died. That you were scared he was losing his mind. I think that’s why this is happening. It’s best if you think of John as the man you used to know, and that thing in there as—’

‘No. No, Fix.’ She raised her arms defensively, as if I’d just made an indecent proposal. ‘It’s still him. Even if he doesn’t know that himself, that’s all that’s left of him. I’m not going to just lock the doors and run and hide. I’m staying here with him, whatever happens.’

I stared into Carla’s eyes. She meant it: in spades and with no room for argument.

‘Okay,’ I said at last, cursing myself for not having the balls to just shake hands and walk away. You’ve got to have the courage of your lack of commitment: otherwise you just keep getting dragged into the shit that other people leave in their wake. But the ghost of a one-night stand that had never happened was clouding my judgement. ‘Coffee-maker still work?’

It took a while to get the room to rights. I did the heavy lifting and Carla went around behind me, putting the few intact ornaments back where they belonged, sweeping up the broken glass, throwing out what couldn’t be mended or lived with. After we’d finished, the room still looked like a hurricane had been through, but it looked like it had stayed for tea and genteel conversation. You could tell that an effort had been made, anyway: it was the best we could do with the raw materials.