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 A.M. 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 neighbours’ 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 afterwards seemed to vary according to who 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 behaviour 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 light bulb.
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 heeclass="underline" music. I became fascinated by the mechanics of the whole thing: 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.
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 humour so atrophied that he still thought the Goons were 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 towards 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 got out on 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 medieval 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 added 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.