Thicker Than Water

Bourbon Bill Bryant, the former ghostbreaker who used to run the Oriflamme, the exorcists’ pub on Castlebar Hill, told me once that one of the biggest mistakes you can make in our profession is to go hunting bear with a pea-shooter. Pretty self-evident, you’d think: but that was the trap I’d fallen into. I was chasing this thing just because it was running away, forgetting that until I had a clear enough mental impression of it to feed into the music I was not only wielding a pea-shooter - I hadn’t even brought along any peas.

Suddenly, the darkness was no longer receding. It was standing still, and I was rushing towards it. It seemed to grow, not continuously but in a series of flickering freeze-frames, becoming denser and deeper and bigger by the moment. I was sailing into a storm, and there was nothing ahead but blackness.

I modulated the tune, letting it dip almost into silence, letting the wind drop. But the darkness was moving toward me now of its own volition, and it was so huge that I had no sense any more of where it began and ended. It was the world around me. It was the hungry void in which I floated, and although it already filled the sky it was still getting closer.

When it was right on top of me, my skin prickling with the ghost-sense of imminent contact, I forced myself to open my eyes. It felt like I was hefting two bowling balls, one on each eyelid. My sight was swimming, both eyes watering and stinging as though I’d jammed slivers of raw onion into my tear ducts. There was a ringing in my ears. But I was back in the real world, so abruptly that it felt like that moment just before sleep when you jolt back into wakefulness with a feeling like you’ve fallen out of thin air onto the bed.

Bic wasn’t moving any more. He was preternaturally still. Very distinctly, he said, ‘I got the sword.’

‘What sword is that, Bic?’ I asked, my voice scraping against the sides of my dry throat.

‘Wilkinson’s. Wilkinson’s Sword.’

‘Just those three words?’ Pen demande k?’

‘Yeah. Just those three words.’

‘But what did he mean?’

I shook my head, walking faster so that she had to trot a little to keep up. We could have grabbed a cab down to Peckham, but I was restless and walking felt like a good way to burn it off. A little unfair to Pen, though, whose legs, although in perfect proportion to the rest of her, are a good bit shorter than mine.

‘You don’t know either?’ Pen asked.

‘I know what the words mean,’ I muttered. ‘I’m just not sure who was saying them.’

‘Fix, am I going to have to drag this out of you one syllable at a time? Either tell me or—’

‘Wilkinson’s Sword,’ I said, ‘is a well-known and popular brand of razor blade, second only to Gillette in UK market share.’

Pen digested this in silence for a moment or two. ‘The boy who died,’ she mused.

‘Mark. He was a self-harmer. So is Kenny.’

‘The bully who beat you up when you were a kid? Are you sure?’

‘Reasonably sure, yeah. He’s kept his dead kid’s hurt-kit and there’s so much scar tissue on his wrists he’d have a hard time putting his hands in his pockets.’

‘Is there a connection?’

I shrugged irritably. Having to tell Jean Daniels that I’d blown the gig had left me in a sour mood. I’d promised to come back and try again, but for the time being all I’d managed to do was calm Bic down a little and leave him in a light, seemingly normal sleep. It was some considerable way short of a command performance. Whatever this thing was, it had stopped me cold. But then again, I’d gone in half-cocked, so I had nobody but myself to blame.

Which was about as much of a consolation as it ever is.

We were on the outskirts of Peckham by this time, and Pen’s excitement was becoming a palpable thing. Short legs and all, she was outstripping me now: but then, I was only going to have a chat with a demon - a process that always carries the risk of agonising death - while she was going to meet her lover. On balance, her jubilant horniness took some of the edge off my unease.

And there’s a darker side to Peckham, too, once you get in deep: a side I like a lot more, because I identify with the past and prefer even worm-eaten wood to wipe-clean plastic. If you set your back against the kitsch-Bauhaus folly that is Peckham library and walk half a mile south towards the common, you’ll eventually find yourself walking through streets that the property developers haven’t found their way to yet: streets where endless curved terraces of turn-of-the-century three-storey town houses, like the tiers of some city-sized amph kityreeitheatre, have been left to fall in on themselves at their leisure. There’s a hectic tubercular beauty to them.