Ordinarily, Kit hated the fact that all the decent Sunday papers now came in so many sections, but she had to admit that it had its advantages when there were two people competing for the bits. Stephen had an unfortunate habit—presumably carried forward from his paradisal parental home—of reading bits out to her, which not only cast a shadow over her anticipation of reading those bits for herself but got in the way of whatever bits she happened to be reading at the time, but it wasn’t the sort of annoyance that was likely to turn into a relationship-breaker so she decided to tolerate it.
By the time they’d finished the papers and done the previous night’s washing up there was less than an hour left before Kit’s shift started, but Stephen made a graceful exit without being prompted, in time for Kit to have a little time to get herself together.
In many ways, Sunday was the best day of all for driving buses in Reading, especially if you could do it on a warm and sunny late spring afternoon. Unfortunately, the day was neither warm nor sunny, being one of those relentlessly cool and dull days which seemed to afflict the Thames valley whenever the Atlantic winds decided to dawdle through the west country, leaving their cloudy fronts more-or-less becalmed. It could have been worse—it might have been raining—but the locals had already built up substantial anticipation of summer beneficence, and far too many of the passengers waiting for longer-than-the weekday-average times at the stops were in a mood to take the slight chill personally.
Nobody actually accused her of being responsible, and the old hands knew enough to be grateful that a bus had actually arrived at all, but the easeful quality of travelling three-quarters empty was more than a little compromised by the overly accurate match between the sullenness of the sky and the sullenness of the passengers.
Kit was almost glad when the evening wore on and the average age of the people she was carrying began to fall from the fifties towards the thirties. It never got much lower than that on a Sunday, in spite of the fact that the kids were all out of school. Anyone with any sense of urgency whatsoever knew better than to catch a bus on a Sunday, and Kit didn’t know anyone younger than she was who had given up entirely on a sense of urgency.
She wondered, self-indulgently, whether Rose Selavy might have been a happier whore if she’d been able to entertain the dead as well as—or instead of—the living. The dead would surely have fitted far better with her fantasies of having embraced witchcraft as well as bitchcraft and Satan as well as smack, but there would have been the difficulty of payment to be overcome. The dead didn’t carry cash and their credit cards would mostly have been cancelled, but it was possible that the dead had—or were in a position to discover—knowledge of a commercially valuable nature. Didn’t tradition insist that ghosts often knew the location of buried treasure? Their restricted mobility would obviously be a disadvantage, but wasn’t that compensated by their disregard for walls?
It was all a flight of fancy, she knew. Michael had made no bones about being an exception, and he had been around for a long time. Mostly, she figured, the dead had little alternative but to be celibate. Anyway, if Rose Selavy had been able to pick and choose supernatural clients, she’d probably have gone for demons every time—not the little batty kind that hovered over her bed like hummingbirds but the big ones.
Demons, Kit imagined, must have all the proper equipment, maybe with additional embellishments, but she vaguely remembered hearing rumours about their “members” being a trifle cold. Or was that just the Devil himself? Rose would presumably know, because, if you thought about it carefully, you couldn’t really believe that kissing the goat was a matter of planting your lips on that absurd arse of polished jet. “Kiss” had to be more-or-less a euphemism for something a bit more interesting, even if it didn’t necessarily involve a vagina.
Rose must have got it together with Satan, even if she had had to do it in her dreams because reality—or what passed for reality where she now dwelt—wasn’t sufficiently versatile or generous to render up the genuine article. Satan was more than just an idea; he was an Archetype of Evil. There had to be plenty of whores in the world who’d stop way short of offering themselves to that kind of self-sacrifice, but Rose Selavy wasn’t one of them. She was no shrinking Violet, no half-hearted apologist, no pleader of necessity. She was the kind of sinner who wanted to go all the way, from commoner to aristocrat to queen, and then...?
Well, that was the big question. but Kit didn’t see a single ghost waiting for her as darkness descended, arriving early as a curious kind of fog. Kit wasn’t unduly surprised by the fog, even though it wasn’t a phenomenon she’d met in Reading before. Up in Yorkshire the cloud cover was often so low that the Pennines were shrouded, and you sometimes had to go through it even on the Chesterfield run, but the Thames Valley was the kind of depression into which cloud very rarely sank. The town probably had fearful smogs back in the bad old days, but today’s air pollution was of a more refined and less particulate kind, which usually rose above the city and rested delicately upon its atmosphere like a ruddy halo.
On the other hand, Kit had never really understood why clouds mostly stayed where they were, up in the sky, instead of slowly sinking down under their own vaporous weight to lie upon the land like a vast duvet. Given that so much of the Met Office was located in the neighborhood, at least for the time being, she figured that she ought to take the opportunity one day to consult an expert about the mystery.
She hadn’t made any formal arrangement with Stephen, and half-expected that he would probably leave it till tomorrow before calling her, but when she got back to the hostel at half past eleven he was hanging around outside, waiting for her.
“You shouldn’t loiter here,” she told him, nodding in the direction of Mrs. Gaunt’s subterranean window as they went up the steps together. “The local neighborhood watch will begin to suspect that the house has turned back into a knocking shop.
“I couldn’t go in,” he pointed out. “Even if I could get someone to buzz me in, I don’t have a key to your room.”
“No,” she said, drily, “You don’t. I suppose if you had, my tea would be waiting on the table and you’d have warmed up my slippers for me.”
“Something like that,” he agreed. “Am I becoming a nuisance?”
“Not to me,” she assured him, as she opened the attic door and ushered him in. “You’ll have to ask Rose for her verdict.”
“I thought Rose wasn’t around any more,” he said, surprising her—although she suspected that the statement might have been more truthful if he’d said “hoped” instead of “thought”.
“What makes you think that?”
“No music. No mysterious shadows in the wall. No exotic perfume.”
“You couldn’t hear the music,” she reminded him. “Not while you were awake at any rate. Don’t worry about that, though—whatever comes of it, I expect you’ll be able to sleepwalk through it.”
“I don’t walk in my sleep,” he said, bluntly.
“That’s what you think,” she told him. “I bet you think you don’t talk and fuck in your sleep either.”
“Talk I can’t be certain about,” he said. “As for anything more energetic...I think I’d wake up.”
“Maybe,” she said, as she put the kettle on. “Do you want a sandwich?”
“No thanks—I ate earlier.”
She made herself a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. The crispy bacon was an extravagance, at more than two quid for an ungenerous packet, but most sandwich-meat was a rip-off and you couldn’t get pork luncheon meat any longer, presumably because they’d stopped making spam.
“Lousy weather, for June,” Even Stephen observed, while watching her eat. His attention was oddly studious, given that she wasn’t a historic work of art. “Better if it rained and got it over with.” She could tell that his heart wasn’t really in the conversation, probably because he was too sober. She was in much the same boat herself, but she was too tired anyway. It had been six days since her last day
off, and she was beginning to feel the strain. Monday, alas, was not the ideal day to have off, because the world at large considered it back-to-work day and acted accordingly—but she was glad that she had this one coming, especially if she was about to be called in for an extra-special shift of indeterminable duration.
Even though he’d taken the trouble to come round, and had dared to take it for granted that he’d be welcome, Kit was slightly surprised that Stephen was ready for action again, but he was young and she estimated that the novelty of being a bus driver’s toy boy would take a while to wear off. But this time wasn’t like any of the previous occasions, because as soon as Kit began to get into the swing of things, she knew that she wasn’t alone in herself.
The very first thing that Kit had been afraid of, when she’d accepted in the Rifleman that she really was being haunted, definitely enough to be able to say so, was that the presence behind the music and the odors might be avid to possess—or, more accurately, to dispossess—her. She had been afraid that her ghost might want her body, not in the way that Not-Steve or Not-the-Archangel Michael did, but in the way that the kinds of demons for whom exorcisms were designed were supposed to want human bodies. She had been afraid that she might become her haunter, ceasing to be herself as she did so—and in spite of the evidence provided by such movies as The Exorcist, she had been afraid that once she ceased to be herself she would never be able to recover herself, remaining impotent to repossess herself when the demon was done with her. She had not been entirely reassured when Rose Selavy had told her that it didn’t work like that, not so much because she thought the dead might be a race of habitual liars, or that Rose as an individual might have assumed too many of the traits of her beloved Father of Lies, but because there hadn’t been any conspicuous rush on the whore’s part to tell her how “it” did work, and in exactly what respects “it” wasn’t “like that.”
Now, she acquired a little more insight into that particular realm of not-quite-impossibility.
Rose had borrowed her flesh and her sensations before, even while she’d seemed to be an external presence, a succubus. What she was about now wasn’t all that different, or all that surprising, given that she wasn’t the kind of entity who had to open a door in order to get into a room. Rose didn’t just move into Kit like a hand moving into a glove; her spectral mind didn’t seize control of the synapses in Kit’s brain. It was merely that questions of shape and position became rather fluid, so that Rose and Kit flowed into one another, mingling without fusing, overlapping without confusing, softening one another’s sensations without defusing, counterpointing one another’s movements without refusing, dissolving a little into the surrounding atmosphere without diffusing, and generally blending their hopes and yearnings with far more rhyme than reason.
Rose was with Kit, more intimately than anyone had ever been with her before, but she did not become Kit, or possess Kit, let alone threaten to dispossess her. It was more frolic than seizure, more fun than sin, and also more fucking than sucking, in a strictly statistical sense.
There was no talk, of course—none at all—and Kit couldn’t begin to read Rose’s mind or eavesdrop on her thoughts or catch the least whiff of her memories. But Kit was the one who was contributing the flesh and the feeling, so she felt at least the human part of what Rose felt, and read at least the human part of what Rose intended.
Through her, Rose was making contact with Stephen. Through her, Rose was completing the link that Stephen’s waking mind still refused: the link that would give her a certain dominion over his dreams, at least for tonight and for as long as tonight might extend beyond the normal limits of time. Through her, Rose was drawing Stephen into the net, because she and Michael had decided that they wanted an art historian as well as needing a bus driver. Rose and Michael had decided that they had something to gain from a folie à deux, and this was the only way available to them to infect Even Stephen’s flesh and feeling with the same madness that Kit’s own flesh and feeling had soaked up like an arid sponge.
Not, of course, that there was any coercion involved. Stephen was still a free agent. He still had a choice. No one was possessing him. No one was doing anything to him, in fact, but making love. Maybe that was yet another capability that Rose had to borrow from Kit, but if so, it was one that Kit could provide when she was ready—and she really did feel ready, for the first time...maybe, in fact, for the first time ever.
They were consenting adults, after all. All of them. Stephen might not have suspected that Rose was there, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t consenting. He was consenting, and then some. Whether or not he too might be prepared to describe what he was doing as making love, he was committed. He wasn’t trapped, but he was committed, and he was probably enjoying himself more than he’d ever enjoyed himself in his life before, although that probably wasn’t saying very much.
When Rose had done what she had come to do and the ghostly sound of the Electric Hellfire Club had faded into silence, Kit got up and dressed herself. Her black slacks were draped over the chair next to the bed but she ignored them and got her uniform trousers from the hanger behind the door instead. She took the jacket too. She wondered whether she ought to wake Stephen up, but decided that it would be a bad idea. Whatever he had to do he had to do on his own. She waited patiently for him to stir, watching him dream.
She didn’t have to wait too long.
“Where are you going?” he asked, sitting up. There was an unmistakable tone of challenge in the question, as if he now felt entitled to be told where she was going whenever she went. The trouble with men, she thought, is that they get dependent and proprietorial at the same time, and way too quickly. You’d think it would take at least a month, but a week is more than enough for the impressionable ones.
“I’ll be back,” she promised, ineptly mimicking Arnold Schwarzenegger. “You can go back to sleep, if you want to.” She was being scrupulous, but she knew that he wasn’t about to lie down again. He was on his feet already, hunting for his underpants.
“It’s not necessary,” she said, although he had to know that. He didn’t know much else, but he knew that. If he hadn’t been the clingy type, he probably wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to try to solve her puzzle, and once he’d taken as much trouble as he had it would have taken more than mere unbelief to keep him tucked up in the bed. Rose had known that. Rose had known how to make it all come together. Anyway, wasn’t learning to see things as others saw them what higher education was supposed to be all about?
Kit waited for Stephen to get dressed, and then she led him down the stairs and out of the house. The night air was cold but very humid. The cloud that had descended from the sky at dusk still hadn’t turned to rain or dew, or whatever ground-level clouds usually turned to if they weren’t evaporated by the sun’s glare. The fog was silvery in spite of the yellow tint of the street-lights, but it was definitely fog rather than mist. Breathing it was like inhaling ghostly soup.
Kit didn’t speak to Stephen as she led him through the deserted streets, and he didn’t ask any questions until they reached the night-garage. Even then he didn’t ask her what she was doing. All he said was: “Funny time to be starting work. I didn’t know the council ran any all-night buses.”
“We live in a twenty-four/seven society,” she reminded him. “The rewards of unnatural light. If the company doesn’t run any all-nighters, it’s a false economy.” But the company didn’t run any all-night buses, and the night-garage doors weren’t supposed to be open. There was supposed to be a security guard on duty, with a dopy Alsatian bitch that had failed her guide-dog training, but the depot was as deserted as the streets had been. Kit and Stephen had already eased into the interstices of the twenty-four/seven society, and they were balanced on the very edge of the world of everyday experience.
Kit had left her wristwatch on the microwave, beside the toaster, but she was more-or-less sure that it had stopped before she had even taken it off, and not because th
e battery had broken down. She didn’t bother going to the blacked-out office to check out a ticket machine. The key she had wouldn’t have opened the door, although it let her into a 52-seater single-decker. She switched on the internal lights. Stephen followed her into the vehicle and perched on the luggage rack that was situated just inside the door so that he could look at her.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Just following the route,” she told him.
“What number?” he asked.
“Zero,” she told him.
“There isn’t a route zero,” he pointed out. “Not in Reading. Nor anywhere else, so far as I know.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “It’s all mapped out. All we have to do is find the map.”
“Maps can be treacherous,” he reminded her.
“Only the ones without bus routes,” she assured him, as she put the vehicle into gear.
As soon as they were out of the garage it became obvious that they’d left the twenty-four/seven society behind. The street lights hadn’t gone out, but they’d grown exceedingly dim. They weren’t yellow any longer, but they weren’t pink either. It was difficult to put a name to their color, and Kit figured that it wasn’t worth the trouble to try. The fog had all-but-eclipsed them.
Rose Selavy was waiting at the first scheduled stop, as might have been expected—and she wasn’t alone.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Rose wore a knee-length black leather coat and a red scarf. The tops of her black boots was invisible, but they had six-inch heels that weren’t the kind of thing people usually wore outdoors. They were preternaturally clean, as if she’d walked through the fog to the bus stop on a floor of polished obsidian.
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story Page 15
