The Man From the Diogenes Club

by Kim Newman

  Finally, Finn got the speech down. As Lionel indicated, the actor had to repeat what had supposedly been said to him by the non-person on the line, with interjected expressions of astonishment.

  ‘It’s the famous Phantom Phoner,’ said Barbara.

  Richard knew the show had a habit of cutting into the middle of telephone conversations, without identifying the unseen party, to get over plot developments while avoiding potentially costly scenes (‘Morrie’s Boom-Boom Room Hot Spot has burned down to t’ ground? In a mysterious fire t’ police say might well be arson? Eeh, I’m right astonished!’) or repeat the last week’s bombshell for viewers who might have missed an episode (‘Brenda’s up t’ duff? By that coloured bloke who plays t’ drums? Well, I’ll be blowed!’). At the end of the call, Finn had to hang the phone up out of frame. Since there was no cradle for the receiver, a stagehand stood by with a weird little gadget that made the click sound (and was surely more expensive and harder to come by than an actual phone).

  Gerard Loss insisted Finn hasten over pauses where, logically, the Phantom Phoner should be speaking. Finn had an actory spat about believability, but was reminded which show this was and agreed just to read the board. His last line, crammed close to the bottom of the card, was a cipher scrawl, ‘t’ll be H to P w/M h a’t t – BH!’ Richard was worried that he knew instantly what that was about. Every Phantom Phoner scene in the episodes he had watched concluded with Ben Barstow looking straight into the camera, shaking his head and musing, ‘There’ll be hell to pay when Mavis hears about this! Bloody hell!’

  Loss called for quiet. Finn took a deep breath, and began.

  Three sentences in, the big studio door slid noisily open, admitting blinding light and a cloud of Lalique.

  Outside the stage building was a red box which lit up the word ‘Recording’. June O’Dell must have waited for it to go on before commanding her entourage to open the door and make way for the Queen of Northshire.

  Finn grimly carried on with the ‘take’. Loss chewed his moustache. Jeanne Treece hit herself over the head with the idiot board.

  Marcus Squiers hopped to and danced attendance on his ex-wife. He had to negotiate a way past two tall young men who flanked the star. They had mullet haircuts, sideburns like flat-ironed hedgehogs, and had overdone their daily splash of Früt aftershave. Their knitted rainbow tank-tops showed off muscular arms.

  In person, June O’Dell was tiny – though enormous hair took her height a little over five feet. She had hard, sharp, glittering eyes and her skin was shinily tight across the cheekbones and under her chin. Richard had heard her described as ‘a cross between Miss Piggy and Charles Manson’, but she was more frail than he expected. The Tank-Top Twins might well be there to rush in and prop her up if a stiff wind blew.

  Ignored by everyone, including a dead camera, Dudley Finn finished his scene. Without the board, he was word-perfect.

  ‘There’ll be hell to pay when Mavis hears about this,’ he said, flatly. ‘Bloody hell.’

  Jeanne Treece whipped the crew into shifting the cameras to the lounge set and getting it lit properly.

  ‘Madame Moo is prepared to work today,’ said Lionel. ‘Lesser morts have to strike while the icon is hot.’

  ‘What about the Phantom Phoner?’ asked Barbara.

  Lionel shrugged. ‘Scene’s scrubberood. Not that many people wrote in. Delia Delyght is in TV limbo now. Make up your own ending, luv.’

  ‘Delia escapes from Broadmoor and comes back chained to an axe-murderer? Then they chop up as many Barstows as they can get to?’

  ‘Pitch it to Mucus, luv. In a year or two, he’ll do it. Folk are always coming back to Northshire to get their own back. I shouldn’t be surprised if British Rail do a Revenge Special Awayday fare to Bleeds.’

  One of the Twins handed Squiers a thin script, heavily scrawled on in what looked like pink neon. June pointed a long fingernail at a particular passage and tapped the paper.

  ‘I see the star writes her own lines?’ observed Richard.

  ‘Never touches ’em. The pack know how to write Mavis the way Junie likes her. No, she always scribbles over everyone else’s sides. Loves to give the supporting artistes a hard time. She’d force them to run their lines backwards and on their heads if she could. Eventually she will. Knows all the tricks, that one. How to cut the heart out of someone else’s scene. How to take it all away with a single nasty look. What to wear to blind the other actors. Of course, Mavis on the show is an evil domineering cow, so Junie’s approach might be method acting.’

  Squiers looked over June’s suggested changes, agreeing with every one out of his mouth, appalled fury spitting out of his eyes.

  Loss had to chivvy Finn onto the lounge set, while jamming June’s line-changes into him. The actor didn’t complain. Squiers, who literally took off his producer’s hat when talking with June, diplomatically made a few suggestions.

  The lights came up on Mavis Barstow’s Lounge, the most-used Barstows set. Its two walls had shaggy purple paper that matched the carpet. At least once an episode, the camera would overshoot while panning to follow the action and afford glimpses of studio blackness and the odd crew member where the other walls ought to be. Inflatable plastic chairs leaked slowly around a glass-and-chrome coffee table loaded with mocked-up fictional glossy magazines. A drinks trolley held rattling bottles of cold tea and dyed water. On The Northern Barstows, no actual products were shown (that was saved for the commercial breaks); everyone drank ‘Funzino’, ‘Bopsi-Coolah’ and ‘Griddles Ale’. Mavis’s mother’s old mangle stood in a corner like an industrial art piece, to remind her where she came from: she would often tell relatives at length about the way her mam flattened her hands in a washing accident that threw the whole family into the poorhouse when she were a lass.

  An idealised portrait of the very late Da Barstow, in dayglo on velvet, cap on his head and miner’s pick over his shoulder, had pride of place above a shaped fibreglass marble mantelpiece where his ashes supposedly sat in a silver urn to which many of Mavis’s most vehement or nostalgic speeches were addressed. The cremains had once been ‘kidnapped’ by Cousin Dodgy Morrie and held to ransom. Since their return, Mavis often got close to the polished urn to talk to the departed, usually after one too many Funzinos, and the camera had to focus on her distorted, wobbly reflection as she reminisced about how much happier everyone was when they were dirt poor. Jeanne Treece stalked the set, putting odd little folded cards like place-markers in ash-trays, on the magazines, hanging out of Finn’s blazer pocket, around the mantel and under light fittings.

  When the floor manager had finished distributing the cards, she gave Dudley Finn a once-over as if checking for dandruff and nodded to Squiers, who signalled to Loss, who made a gun-gesture at the Twins, who lifted June O’Dell up by her arms as if she were part of their circus acrobatic act. The actress was propped on two eight-inch blocks with wheels. One Twin steadied her while the other knelt and fixed clamps from the blocks to her calves.

  ‘The Mavis Glide,’ exclaimed Barbara. ‘That’s how she does it. Platform roller-skates.’

  While her undercarriage was checked and fiddled with, a make-up girl made last-minute adjustments to June’s white mask. Then, her pit crew stood back. Suddenly, with a girlish giggle, she set off at a wheeled stride and did a figure eight around the set, skirts billowing. Applause was mandatory, but Richard conceded that it was a good act. She lifted one heavy skate off the floor and rolled on elegantly, leg out like a ballerina, then twirled and came to a dead stop.

  She was next to Dudley Finn. Thanks to the platforms, June O’Dell was now taller than him.

  ‘If a word of the risers leaks out, you’ll be killed,’ Lionel told them. ‘No question about it.’

  The recording light went on again, and June and Finn – Mavis and Ben – went through a scene which had evolved from yesterday’s script meeting. June floated about the set as she spoke, picking up phrases or single-word cues from the tiny cards
Jeanne Treece had distributed, skating through speeches with the aid of these prompts. The scene built up to the revelation that Mavis knew all along that Priscilla was the Bogus Brenda returned. Richard accepted the sad inevitability that he was now a follower of The Northern Barstows like everybody else in the country. He knew who all these people were and how they related to each other, and suffered a nagging itchy need to know what they would get up to next. This must be what it was like to be a newly body-snatched vegetable duplicate and click in sync with the collective consciousness of the pod people.

  ‘She’s an old ghost, Ben,’ said June, in a line Richard hadn’t heard yesterday. ‘There’ve bin too many bloody old ghosts round hereabouts lately. Spectre horses, headless spooks, all manner o’ witchcraft and bogeyness. I’m beginning to think this family’s bloody haunted. An’ somethin’ should be done about it or my name’s not Mavis Barstow.’

  Ben weakly put in a line about what was to be done.

  ‘Get me a bloody ghost-hunter,’ said Mavis. ‘Someone to put a stop to t’ haunting. Or else someone t’ haunting will put a stop to.’

  June’s face froze. Richard had assumed the effect was a camera trick, but she really did just stop still and stare at the lens for long seconds.

  Loss called ‘cut’ and June was applauded again.

  ‘What was that about?’ Barbara asked Richard. ‘The ghost-hunter bit?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it came out of nowhere,’ he replied. ‘I’m rather afraid we’ve been noticed.’

  June, who had perspired through her pancake, was wheeled off the set by the Tank-Top Twins and repaired by the makeup girl, who applied what looked like number-two gloss from a bucket with a brush. Then, June was trundled towards Richard and Barbara, with Squiers hopping along in her wake. From her artificial height, June O’Dell looked Richard in the eye.

  ‘So, you’ve come about the mystery?’

  Her natural voice would have suited her to play Lady Bracknell if she could ever be persuaded to admit she was old enough. It was nasal, aristocratic, reedy with that Anglo-Irish affectation known as ‘West Brit’. Richard wondered if she had ever met Lady Damaris Gideon. If so, Lady Dee would probably have come second in a peering-down-the-nose-with-disdain contest. Richard had previously reckoned the MP a likely British champion in the event.

  ‘The haunting?’ he prompted. ‘Very topical.’

  June tittered, a tiny hand over her mouth. She fluttered long, feathery eyelashes.

  ‘Must remain abreast of current events. It’s part of the format. Keeps us all on our toes. Or, in my case, wheels.’

  ‘Am I to have a writer tagging along as I work? Taking notes on my ghost-hunting activities?’

  ‘Not one of our writers, I trust. You wouldn’t want any of those oiks about. I don’t understand why we have to have them. Some of us are quite capable of making it up as we go along.’

  ‘June has the utmost respect for our writing staff,’ put in Squiers. ‘She is being amusing. The poltergeist plot has been thoroughly worked out by trained professionals.’

  June flicked a glance at her ex-husband and he withered. Then, she noticed Barbara.

  ‘Professor Corri, how nice to see you again. Peachy.’

  Barbara had not mentioned that she’d met June O’Dell. She nodded in acknowledgement of peachiness, but did not attempt a curtsey.

  ‘This curse has become infinitely tiresome and makes our blessed calling far more difficult than it need be. We have a duty to our viewers. They depend on us to take them out of their drab, wretched lives for two brief half-hours a week. Half-hours of entertainment, of education, of magic. It’s a terrible responsibility. Many say that the Northern Barstows are more real to them than their wives, husbands and children. And for some who live alone, the elderly and the loveless, we are the only family they have. It’s for them that we do this, undertake the endless struggle of the business we call show. I trust you will bring your investigation to a swift and happy conclusion. Rid us of all ghosts, ghoulies and ghastliness. You are, I understand, supported by tax-payers’ money.’

  ‘To an extent.’

  ‘Excellent. You are accountable, then. You will come to me tomorrow at tea-time, and give a report of your progress.’

  Richard kissed June’s hand. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Alone,’ she said, eyes swivelling to Barbara.

  He felt again the crackle he had experienced yesterday. This was a very powerful woman, perhaps a conduit for a higher, greedier power. He tried to let June’s hand go, but she pinched his fingers for a moment, hanging on, then released him when she decided to.

  ‘Now, I must rest. It’s fearfully exhausting, you know. Being Mavis.’

  June pushed off and skated away, independent of the Twins, making Squiers cringe. She did a circuit of the studio, whooshing through the shadowed areas away from the brightly lit lounge.

  Richard watched her brush past Emma’s cold, damp spot.

  There was a sound in his head like a bubble being popped and June sped back, puffed out a little like a cat with a mouthful of feathers. She zoomed across the set towards the door, which the Twins got open in time, and whizzed out onto the car park.

  Richard walked towards Emma’s spot.

  ‘What happened?’ Barbara asked.

  Richard opened himself up, trying to find yesterday’s presence. Emma was gone, completely. Her psychic substance had been consumed.

  ‘That woman’s a sponge,’ he told Barbara. ‘She just ate a ghost.’

  X.

  The Daily Comet, Britain’s best-selling tabloid, led with the headline ‘TERROR STALKS BARSTOWS’ – bumping England’s failure to qualify for the World Cup and another oil crisis to the inside pages. The popular press had been filling their middles with trivial showbiz stories since the days of Marie Lloyd sitting among the cabbages and peas and Lillie Langtry snaring the Prince of Wales, but now ephemera like this made page one. Richard sensed another trend in the making, another step downstairs. From now on, Coronation Street would get more newspaper coverage than coronations, Harold Steptoe would be more newsworthy than Harold Wilson, and the doings of Barstow and company would be followed more intently than those of Barclay’s Bank. Eventually, there would only be television. More and more of it, expanding to fill the unused spaces in the general consciousness.

  The Barstows weren’t taping this afternoon, so before-cameras talent had time off. Squiers and the writing pack were conjuring up the next script. June was in her caravan with a nervous ghost writer, one of a string employed on her much-delayed autobiography; it seems she ate them up, just as she consumed real ghosts. Finn, suitably equipped with a dolly bird as ‘arm ornament’, was opening a supermarket in Bradford; ‘Victoria Plant’ had turned down an offer of £15 to play the lucky girl, diminishing her chances of getting ahead in the business. Lionel was working on a futile press release to deny all these silly curse rumours.

  Richard and Barbara met Vanessa in the Grand Old Duke of North.

  Vanessa was perched on a bar-stool not designed with modern female fashions in mind. Unless she fixed her tangerine-and-lemon minidress firmly over her hips, it rode up and turned into a vest. She looked down, with an unjustly critical eye, at her officially lovely legs.

  Richard sipped Earl Grey from one of the silver Thermos cups in today’s Fortnum’s hamper, and took a psychic temperature reading. Vanessa and Barbara had hit it off at once, which was a positive. Otherwise, the Grand Old Duke was a chilly place.

  The pub, another Barstows standing set, was in the studio’s smallest stage. Here, many a ‘pint of Griddles’ had been called for and swallowed by a Barstow who needed a drink before spitting out the latest news, usually some bombshell lobbed just before the adverts to keep viewers transfixed as they were mind-controlled to hire-purchase fridge-freezers, terrorised by the catastrophe of hard-to-shift understains, warned of things their best friends wouldn’t tell them and urged to buy the world a Coke. Here, Ben Barstow had enjoyed (
or perhaps not) a liaison with Blodwyn, the Welsh barmaid who broke up his third marriage and then died in a plane crash two episodes before his fourth wedding. Here, for weeks and weeks, Da’s kidnapped urn had been hidden in plain sight, in the display case along with clog-dancing, whippet-racing and brass band trophies. There had been a nationwide contest to ‘spot the ashes’, with viewers writing in to suggest where they might be and newspapers running stories about urns seen in surprising real-life locales from the Jewel House in the Tower of London to an Olde Junke Shoppe in Margate. Some even sent in ashes of their own, in home-made or shop-bought urns: most were just from the grates of open fires, but some contained authentic human bone fragments. It was no wonder the show wound up cursed.

  ‘I think the culprit is the Phantom Phoner,’ said Vanessa, breaking into his prophetic gloom.

  ‘You think there’s a culprit?’ asked Barbara.

  Vanessa deferred to Richard.

  ‘Sometimes, a curse – by which I mean an infestation of malign extranormal phenomena – is like weather or a bad cold. No one’s fault, but hard to do anything about except wait for it to blow over. This happens in more cases than you hear of. Sometimes, it really is a ghost or a spirit – a discarnate, spiteful entity, making mischief or bearing a grudge, acting on its own accord or directed by a houngan who has summoned or tapped into a power and is using it for his or her own ends.’