Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story

by Brian Stableford

  When she came off shift she was exhausted by thought, but she was still looking forward to an evening by the river. She wanted to be on time, but Mrs. Gaunt stopped her before she could go up the steps of number 21, with her key in her hand.

  “I asked around,” the old lady said, with a strangely predatory gleam in her eye. “There was a Rose. English, too—from your part of the world, though, not here. All black leather and fishnets. Nasty piece of work. Gone to the Devil in more ways than one.”

  Kit couldn’t resist saying: “I know. Her real name was Violet. From Lancashire, though, not Yorkshire. Lancashire’s the red rose county, Yorkshire’s the white.”

  “You didn’t know yesterday,” Mrs. Gaunt said, peevishly. “That young man of yours find out, did he?”

  “Yes, he did,” Kit said, decisively. “Hacked into the police computer. Thanks anyway, though. I’m very grateful. You helped put my mind at rest. I’d ask you up for a cup of tea, but I’ve got a date.”

  “Couldn’t manage the stairs,” Mrs. Gaunt said, assuming a martyred air. “I’ll keep on asking, if you want to know where she is now.”

  “Dead,” Kit said, reflexively. “Overdose.”

  “Good riddance,” was Mrs. Gaunt’s verdict. “You don’t know the half of it. Whips, chains...I’ll keep asking. Come see me Sunday, if you like.” All the while, her eyes were studying Kit carefully, as if casting around for symptoms or stigmata of evil—but she didn’t say anything about the red light that had shone from Kit’s attic the night before.

  “Thanks all the same,” Kit said, “But I’m not sure I can make it. Sorry.” She let the last word serve all her apologetic purposes, leaping up the steps and jabbing her key into the lock before the magical syllables had died away.

  It hadn’t been a long delay, but it took longer than she had hoped or expected to get herself into shape for the date—which, now that she had used the word in front of a witness, could hardly be reckoned anything but a real date.

  Fortunately, their relationship—if that was what it was—had progressed by now to the point where he would have hung around for at least half an hour on the assumption that she was bound to show up, and he would only have had to wait half that long if he had been on time himself. Although he assured her that he’d only been there five minutes, she guessed that he’d been early. That was the kind of boy he was.

  Because he was a student—and a conscientious one, it seemed, although his degree result was still hanging in the balance—he had actually taken the trouble to do a little research. He could hardly wait to give her the results, but Kit had to interrupt him to ask why there was a black swan in among all the white ones clustered by the jetty, when black swans were supposed to be native to Australia.

  He told her that there was some kind of wildlife park upriver, the other side of Pangbourne, and that the black swans kept there sometimes drifted down with the stream to mingle with their native cousins in places where tourists were likely to feed them. Kit didn’t know whether the black swan was a more appropriate symbol of Rose Selavy, a ghost among the living, or herself, a Yorkshirewoman among southerners, but she was sure that it was significant of something, if only the world’s relentless march towards globalization.

  “It’s not difficult to understand why belief in ghosts is universal in preliterate societies,” Stephen told her, when she gave him leave to settle into lecturing mode as they set off from the bridge to see how far the towpath would take them along the river’s course. “They don’t have the same attitude to dreams that we do. When they meet up with dead people in their dreams they take it as proof that the dead still exist in some other world. The legacy of the dead is all around them: everything they know has been told to them by their elders, who had it from their elders. All the wisdom in the world comes to them from the dead. What could be more natural for the living, in circumstances like that, than making every effort to maintain routine communication with the dead? And if their ghosts turn out to be disapproving, always lamenting the decline in moral standards...well, that’s exactly what our dead grandparents would say, if they were still able, isn’t it?”

  Not to mention our living mothers and all the Mrs. Gaunts of the world, Kit thought. Fathers too, if they weren’t so drunk that they didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  “Everything changes, of course, once societies have writing,” Stephen went on. “Wisdom becomes divorced from person-to-person communication, objectified in script. Writing gave us religion, and religion gave a whole new role to ghosts. Religion tries to balance the lack of moral order in the world we experience by assuring us that all accounts will be settled later, when the good go to Heaven and the bad go to Hell. Life-after-death compensates for the unfairness of life, and the spirits of the dead became agents as well as victims of that process of settlement. Christian ghosts cry out for vengeance, and do purgatorial penance—although they also serve as comforters, to soothe the grief and regret that inevitably follow the loss of loved ones.”

  Comforter, Kit knew, was an American euphemism for a baby’s dummy: a rubber tit. Rose Selavy certainly wasn’t that sort of comforter. Anyway, if and when Kit found out that her own mother had finally died, grief and regret would have to get in the queue behind blessed relief and you seem to have mistaken me for someone who still gives a flying fuck.

  “Science, of course, attacks ghosts of all kinds, banishing them all to the realm of illusion,” Even Stephen continued, relentlessly. “Under the pressure of Enlightenment, ghosts have no alternative but to fade away, becoming tenuous and enigmatic where they were once right in your face—but that fade-out was the prologue to a new horror of death and existential angst. Angst....”

  “I’m a bus-driver, not a moron,” Kit reminded him. “I know what angst is. We’ve got angst in Yorkshire. In fact, we’ve got so much it that we think it’s everybody else who doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Mind you, it’s improved a bit since we got the cricket championship back a couple of years ago. So, to cut a long story short, you don’t believe in ghosts because they’re basically a stupid idea?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I think they’re a necessary idea. If they didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them—so we did.”

  “But they’re not necessary any more, according to you.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. It’s a different kind of necessity now, but it’s still there. You’ve heard the one about the vanishing hitch-hiker, I suppose?”

  “Sure. He hangs around near that bad bend on the A64 between Leeds and Selby. Except when he’s on the motorway junction leading off to Hebden Bridge—or maybe that’s his evil twin.”

  “He can be found at a thousand other black spots too, all over the world. Ghosts like him persist to maintain a defiant challenge to the orthodoxy of skepticism. They’ll be around as long as skepticism is seen as something corrosive, something that leaches the magic out of life. They’re a last line of defense against the tyranny of explanation, against which everybody rebels at least a little bit, because even the cleverest among us can’t cope with all the kinds of explanation we need to make sense of things, and most of us can’t even do difficult sums.”

  “I’m not sure Rose ever bothered with kerb-crawlers. She worked from home, remember.”

  “Vanishing hitch-hikers aren’t the only modern ghosts, by any means. We still have haunted houses, and poltergeists too...poltergeists are very modern. Associated with troubled adolescents—external manifestations of their inner turmoil, fuelled by hormones and mental confusion.”

  “Stick to the haunted houses. Spirits that get left behind. Ghosts with unfinished business. If they don’t want to tell us off any more, what do they want?”

  “Good question. Maybe they just get stuck, because they’re unable or unwilling to pass on to where they actually belong. That would be very modern too, wouldn’t it? We’ve mostly lost the sense of actually having somewhere to belong, although we haven’t yet stopped wanting it. How many p
eople think they’re stuck in life, having somehow become stranded in the wrong place, reading from the wrong script? How many people die thinking they never got what they were entitled to, that they missed out on the opportunities they should have seized, that they could have done so much better if only they’d had better luck, or shown better judgment? How many people, imagining their future dead selves, can picture themselves singing My Way with conviction, no matter how much they’d like to?”

  Kit remembered that her Dad had once sung My Way at the karaoke down the working men’s club. She couldn’t remember any lack of conviction, but he’d been completely off his face, so he’d probably forgotten what his life was actually like. At the end of the day, HGVs were just like buses—you had to take them exactly where they were supposed to go. My Way wasn’t an option.

  “That’s the problem with getting past the infantile notion that everything that happens is fixed, ordained by God or contained in some inescapable destiny,” Stephen went on. “As soon as we realize that we’re free, we have to start taking responsibility for all our own mistakes, and it becomes so easy to fill ourselves up with a sense of our own failure that it’s almost impossible to believe that we won’t live on after our deaths as bundles of pure regret, avid to make amends for having made so little of life while we had it in our power to do so.”

  “Cheerful soul, aren’t you?” Kit said.

  “Actually, yes,” he countered. “Personally, it’s so far so good, although I’m keeping my fingers crossed about the marking. But as you keep pointing out, I don’t actually believe in ghosts myself, because I don’t feel the need. Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve seen more than I’ve told you, and felt more too. A lot of people I know, in my place, would feel bound to believe it, because the only alternative they could see would be admitting that they were absolutely barking mad. But I don’t know. I know she’s there—really there—but I’m not quite sure where there might be. It might be mostly or entirely in my head, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing actually going on, does it? Like you said, ghosts exist because we’d have to invent them if they didn’t. Maybe I needed to invent Rose and maybe she’d be around anyway, whatever I need or don’t need—but either way, I need to work out what the fuck to do next, don’t I? Do you suppose it would do any good to get a priest to exorcise her?”

  “Do you?” he countered. He wasn’t just being smart; he had a point to make.

  “No,” Kit admitted. “I don’t think Rose is the kind of ghost to be intimidated by Holy Writ. In fact, when she uses the word holy she brings her own meaning to it.

  Mercifully, he didn’t ask her how she knew that. “In that case,” Stephen told her, with crushing logic, “we’ll probably need something else to scare her off...or buy her off.”

  “We?” Kit queried, not because she didn’t agree but because she thought it needed further emphasis and clarification.

  “She’s my ghost too, now. Isn’t she?”

  “How come? You haven’t seen her, heard her, smelled her or felt her. Yet.”

  “I’ve seen the shadows behind the primrose emulsion. And I’ve seen, heard, smelled and felt you. Without coming over all proprietorial, I’d like to think that I’m involved. Even if I’m not part of the solution, I’m part of the problem now. I’ve done my bit to help you get your head around it—knowingly, not like Mrs. Gaunt. Isn’t she my ghost too?”

  “Violet Leverhulme might be your ghost,” Kit conceded. “But not Rose—not until you’ve seen her. Maybe not until you’ve felt her. Are you ready for that kind of threesome?”

  “I don’t know—but I seem to be in one regardless, don’t I? You didn’t tell me to meet you in the Rifleman because you thought I had a nice face, did you? It was because you heard your ghost on my discman. And you only agreed to meet me in the Fox and Goose because I had more information. Would you have let me stay the night if it hadn’t been for the light-bulb? And would you be here now if you hadn’t wanted to hear everything I could figure out to say about reasons for believing or not believing in ghosts? I don’t think so. You don’t really fancy me at all. You only love me for my fertile brain.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Kit said, defensively—although she had to admit that he’d got a point. Again. She’d shown far better judgment than she’d imagined when she’d picked him up—except, of course, that she hadn’t shown any judgment at all, really. All she’d done was recognize the song that was playing on his discman: The Evil Genius, sung by the Queen of Sin to the accompaniment of the Electric Hellfire Club.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re certainly different, I’ll give you that. Pretty weird, in fact—for a bus driver.”

  “Given that lads like you would be up any lass that offered like a rat up a drainpipe, even if she had a face like a robber’s dog” she pointed out, “I don’t have any more reason for thinking that you really fancy me than vice versa.”

  “Which rather proves my point,” he was quick to say. “If we didn’t have Rose to cement our relationship....”

  Kit knew that it didn’t prove his point at all, but she didn’t really care one way or the other. “If we don’t get rid of her,” she said, soberly “we’ll never find out.” That wasn’t the real reason she wanted to be rid of Rose, of course, but she figured that if it would do for him, it might be a step in the right direction.

  “In that case,” he said, lightly, “We’d better get on with trying to figure out what it is she wants, so we can help her on her way, hadn’t we?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  By the time the towpath had become terminally boring it had taken them out into the country, so they cut back towards civilization. They had to find some way of getting over—or under—the railway line, but once they’d done that it was easy enough get back to the Oxford Road and takeaway land. They didn’t go into any pubs or pick up any cans, because they both figured that they were ready to look at one another sober as well as naked, but they did buy some Polyfilla and a batch of plastic rawl-plugs from the DIY shop.

  They’d been walking long enough to miss the street-light’s pink phase yet again, and the first thing Kit did when she got in was to switch the bulb in the ceiling socket so that she wouldn’t have to stain everything crimson when she flicked the switch. Stephen packed the Polyfilla in the holes above the window and stuffed in the new rawl-plugs while she was putting the kettle on and doling out fried rice on to plates, and then he peeled the old plugs away from the screws in the curtain-rail.

  They had to wait for the filler to set before attempting to put the curtains up again. Stephen offered to put some music on the CD player, but Kit thought a dose of normality might help so she turned the TV on instead and started surfing in search of something that wasn’t sport, CC-TV footage of real life crimes and misdemeanors or zombie-infested horror. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find anything suitable, or even inoffensively unsuitable, so she had to switch it off again.

  “You should get a video,” Stephen advised her. “That way, you could record the shows you actually want to watch, and play them back when you had the time to do it.”

  “Videos get nicked,” she told him. “Portable TVs are okay because everybody wants widescreen nowadays, and my sound system is so pathetic that no self-respecting fence would look twice it, but videos will always be marketable, at least until people can record their own DVDs.”

  “Is that why you don’t have a mobile phone? Fear of theft?”

  “Don’t need one. The buses have radios in the cab for use in case of emergency.”

  “What about emergencies when you’re not driving?”

  “Never had one, except for the occasional nutter on the stairs and being haunted. I can shout for help on the stairs and have half a dozen burly lads stumbling out of their rooms. As for Rose—who’m I going to call? Ghostbusters?”

  “Don’t you find it a bit restrictive, only possessing things that no one could be bothered to s
teal?” he asked, mockingly. “Mind you, it does help to explain your music collection—and there was me thinking you just had bad taste.”

  “I’m living in a bus drivers’ hostel,” she pointed out. “You probably have better security up at the uni. And you’re the one whose music collection consists of the Electric Hellfire Club and CDs with tracks called Play Dead, Ave Dementia and Intercourse with the Vampire. At least I’ve got Ironic.”

  It was their first quarrel, but it didn’t last. To teach her a lesson, Stephen actually played her Ave Dementia and Play Dead, and she had to admit that they had a certain style. Kit could easily imagine Rose Selavy having a ball to Play Dead. In fact, now that she’d actually seen her, it was all too easy for Kit to imagine Rose Selavy up to all sorts of tricks. Every day, in every way, Rose Selavy seemed to be increasing her grip on Kit’s capacity for seeing, hearing and feeling. Something had to give—but who, and what?

  The re-erection of the curtains was a success, if not a triumph. Kit was suitably appreciative of the gift of near-darkness; she had begun to develop quite an antipathy to the hoarse yellow glare of the lozenge-shaped street-lamp.

  In the circumstances, the sex could hardly be as relaxed as third-time-around sex usually was, but because it was the first wholly premeditated sex they’d had it was a little less improvised and maybe just a little more leisurely. Stephen presumably threw himself into it more wholeheartedly than Kit did, because his mind wasn’t focused on the possibilities inherent in the aftermath of the event. He hadn’t seen anything yet, and still didn’t expect to, no matter what he might say about Rose being theirs rather than just Kit’s.

  His purpose in doing all that he had so far done had been to draw her back towards sanity, not to tip himself over the edge, and Kit had no definite reason to expect that either eventuality would actually come to pass. She had no idea what to expect of her next encounter with the ghost, although she certainly expected that there would be one. For that reason, she couldn’t go to sleep, no matter how hard she tried; she lay there in the darkness with eyes open, staring into the infinity that slanted over her bed, full of invisible winged demons who were not about to be deterred by any scarecrow called Stephen.