Night After Night

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Horribly cinematic,’ Helen Parrish says.

  She tells it so well, sitting on a cushion at the edge of the hearth. Probably pieces of her old TV news scripts coming through.

  ‘I didn’t cover the funeral, of course – wasn’t grand enough. Wasn’t enough of a name.’

  Rhys Sebold palms his stubble. He hasn’t shaved since he came into the house.

  ‘You a bit pissed off about that, Helen?’

  ‘No. Of course not. You get used to it. I knew they’d offer me one of the menial jobs, doorstepping the fans who’d travelled hundreds of miles with their tributes and their sandwiches. “What did Diana mean to you?” Couldn’t face that. Threw a sickie – two days of migraine. First time I’d ever done that. The documentary was years later and that was my idea. Didn’t think anyone would go for it, but…’

  She pauses for a sip of wine, her glass blood-red in the firelight. Ghost-story time, the first one and so nicely done, Grayle’s thinking. The nest of shivering candles on the drinks table, all those in the overhead hoop extinguished. Jordan did this while the residents were eating next door, arranging chairs around the fire. Helen was called into the chapel to be told she was first.

  It’s only seven o’clock but feels like the other side of midnight.

  Cindy says, ‘Did you have much to do with her? Diana?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Helen’s smile is tilted. ‘We all did. I mean the regulars. I don’t know whether she really did like the media or whether she just chose to like them because she thought Charles and The Family preferred to view them through bullet-proof smoked glass. Whether she only courted us to piss them off I still don’t know. But, yes, there were days when she was your mate.’

  Grayle thinks of Trinity, what Lisa the scullery maid said. She notices Eloise turning away, looking bored by Helen’s cascading memories.

  ‘You’d show up and she’d give you that cute look over the shoulder, as if she’s about to roll her eyes, here we go again. She liked the photographers best – the long-serving royal snappers. Tabloid guys especially. She knew what they wanted and she always made sure they got it. And when she wanted to be photographed in a particular way, with a particular person, to piss off Charles, she’d give them the nod and they’d be there for her.’

  ‘All true then,’ Ozzy says.

  ‘Mostly. We had a few short discussions, she and I. She was opening a new school for kids with learning difficulties down in South Wales and she said to me, “Don’t you get fed up with this, Helen, day in day out?”’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to say, Don’t you get fed up? I told her I enjoyed basking in the reflected glamour, and she said “liar”, and gave me a little punch on the arm. You rather glowed when she did something like that. I mean, nobody royal ever touched you in those days, for heaven’s sake, not even some duchess on the fringe of the action. I’m a hard-bitten hack, and I’ve still got that jacket in my wardrobe. Stupid, isn’t it?’

  ‘Little circles, Helen, where Diana’s knuckles connected?’

  Ozzy’s mood has lightened.

  ‘Don’t knock it, my boy,’ Roger Herridge says, ‘If she’d touched your arm you’d still be having sexual fantasies about it.’

  Ozzy opens his mouth like he’s about to say something involving flowers then shuts it again and shakes his head with a little puff of breath.

  ‘So you were shooting at Althorp,’ Cindy prompts. ‘The seat of the Spencers.’

  In the live gallery, Grayle hears Leo Defford mumbling something about wishing Cindy wouldn’t add pertinent details for the viewers.

  They’ve allowed two hours for this. Should be ample.

  It will go out in the second programme, Sunday. By then the story will have been released to the press for Monday’s papers. Doesn’t matter what Parrish says, Defford told the team at tonight’s briefing, she’s talking about it for the first time.

  ‘Could be looking at a couple of front page leads – Star, Sun… Mail even?’

  ‘Mail will blurb it on the front,’ Grayle forecast, ‘but the story will be inside. It’s no splash, except maybe for the Star, but it has legs. I guess even the Guardian will use it someplace, having started the whole thing off with that diary piece which may or may not have gotten Helen fired.’

  Surprising herself at how well she’s picked up on the psychology of the British popular press.

  Now, sitting behind Defford and Jo in the live gallery, she listens and knows this is on the level. Whichever of them sneers, Helen will ride it. The way only the truth can. Or the perceived truth.

  Helen says. ‘Althorp, yes. Where she’d been buried about five years earlier. There’s a lake and an island with this little white classical-looking temple on it. A real shrine.’

  Grayle thinking of Katherine Parr at Sudeley.

  ‘This day I was doorstepping people. It’s probably Britain’s most recently established place of pilgrimage. I saw a woman in a wheelchair. Knew what I was after. Wanted her to say she believed Diana could heal her, you know?’

  Eloise turning round, showing interest at last.

  In the gallery, Defford leaning across to Grayle.

  ‘Good-good?’

  Grayle nods. Helen being a professional, earning her money, displaying her human side. Giving value. Also, it will make people like her. On TV she seems to have come over as kind of stiff and proper. That’s the consensus, anyway. Maybe it’s what’s expected of royal correspondents.

  Ashley Palk says, ‘So this was what? Scene-setting? I’m guessing you were more than just presenter?’

  ‘I was directing, too. Indy production for the BBC. Yes, you’re right. Near the top of the programme we needed some short vox pops to demonstrate the kind of following that Diana still had, even so long after her death. We talked to the woman in the wheelchair for about five minutes. She obviously knew what we were looking for, but all she said was, “You do get a sense that she’s here, don’t you? I think she’d want to be here for us. She wouldn’t like to think we’d all come for nothing.” And I remember wishing I had been here for the funeral, instead of pretending to be sick because I didn’t want to be a minion.’

  Helen looks around the room, briskly shakes her hair.

  ‘I don’t get headaches, you see. Don’t drink much these days, but even when I did I didn’t get hangovers. Yet I had one that day – maybe too much sun, but it felt like I was being paid back for inventing a migraine. We weren’t getting any great vox pops, so I walked away through the crowds to try and think of something. A question to set them off. The atmosphere was quite heavy by then, sultry. The surface of the lake like brass.’

  ‘And like a halo over the island?’ Ozzy Ahmed says wistfully.

  Bringing Eloise half out of her chair, hissing.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, you moron.’

  ‘Yes,’ Herridge says. ‘Let’s hear this.’

  Helen shrugs.

  ‘I’m quite happy to stop. Been quite a tiring day. Surprising how exhausting it is watching people trying to revive their crumbling careers.’

  Delivered with such genuine weariness that nobody says a word.

  ‘Helen,’ Cindy says softly. ‘Please go on.’

  Helen leans back against the stonework, tilting her head so she’s looking above all theirs, addressing the dim beams.

  ‘I’m not going to do the build-up. There was a woman. Standing with her back to me, facing the lake. She was wearing an ankle-length fitted dress. Cream-coloured with a narrow brown diagonal stripe. She didn’t turn around, but I heard her voice, very clearly. She just said, “Hello, Helen, how’re you these days?”’

  Helen leaves a silence, knows the cameras need to record reactions. They won’t want to spoil this, Grayle thinks, so they’ll probably go for placid Cindy rather than sardonic Ozzy.

  ‘Oh, it was her voice. No question. That light, faintly colloquial tone she used sometimes, talking to the press when she was in a good mood. “H
ello, Helen…” not “Oh, hi, Helen,” no drawly stuff. Nobody else there. It was tremendously still. Like a cocoon of silence. So every word was distinct.’

  Ashley Palk says gently, ‘Was the voice in your head? Were there other people nearby who might’ve…?’

  ‘There were other people. Just a few, not a crowd. If you’re asking did they react as if they’d seen something, I don’t remember anything like that. But I know it wasn’t like the way a producer’s voice sounds in your earpiece. I don’t remember it as being in my head. I just… it’s like I was in another world, another place. Or rather we were. Her and me. It was her place, her world – she wasn’t in mine.’

  ‘Like… a spirit place?’

  ‘No. A kind of… middle place. That was also Althorp. Another Althorp.’

  ‘Did it feel good?’

  This is Eloise abandoning her chair, dragging the cushion down to the stone flags.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Helen says. ‘Didn’t think about it that way. It wasn’t a religious experience, if that’s what you’re asking, except in the way the lake and the sky seemed to have become one place. She turned around. I thought there was mist… Her eyes were looking towards me, but… through me, somehow. And I realized it was a veil. You know the veil she wore with her wedding dress, covering her face so she looked… shy. Demure. Something like that. And she was still talking, very quickly, as though she needed to get something over to me. Something she needed to say, but her voice was getting fainter, and I saw that she was fading back until she was just a… a paleness. I don’t recall what she said. I can hear her saying it, in that confiding, between-you-and-me voice, but I don’t know what it was, except for these four words, over and over: “nobody can see it, nobody can see it.” And then gone.’

  Helen shrugs. Nobody speaks.

  ‘I mean me,’ Helen says. ‘I was gone.’

  Next thing she knows she’s lying on a brocaded sofa. They tell her she fainted and the St John Ambulance guys carried her back to the house. Hot day. Too many people. Hallucination. Mirage. Her cameraman has some shots of her passing out. Never been shown on TV, those pictures. But a couple of visitors caught it on their videocams, and they’ve been on YouTube. Grayle’s not seen them, never thought to look. Unbelievably remiss of her.

  ‘Slipping to my knees,’ Helen’s saying. ‘Not gracefully, not how you imagine someone fainting. And then sideways on the grass at the edge of the lake, frock up around my waist. Undignified.’

  Grayle jumps, something touching her left knee. It’s Jo’s hand reaching behind her seat with a scrap of paper, one of those Post-it notes. Grayle takes it, reads: Check mobile when poss. She crumples it.

  Ashley’s saying, ‘You’ve been very honest, Helen, very fluent, obviously. You’ve explained what you think happened. You’ve disclosed that you had a headache, that it wasn’t going well, that you weren’t getting the interviews you wanted.’

  ‘Oh, we were getting them, we just weren’t getting any surprises. Nothing that would make people sit up and take notice. No wow factor. No miracle and wonder.’

  ‘That must’ve been alarming.’

  ‘Just disappointing.’

  ‘Would you say you were… close to a minor panic attack?’

  Helen looks wry.

  ‘I don’t get panic attacks, Ashley. I’m a professional. I get faintly irritated attacks.’

  Ashley laughs, approaching from another angle.

  ‘Diana was very much in your head that day.’

  ‘She was in everybody’s head. It was her shrine.’

  And so it goes on. Helen never departs from what she sees as the plain facts. She makes no attempt to attach any greater significance to them. Asked if she thinks she’s psychic, she says she has no idea what that means.

  Seeing Ashley Palk about to say something, she gives her a direct look, pre-empting it.

  ‘Well of course it could have been in my mind. It obviously was in my mind because nobody else saw her. But does that negate it as an extra-normal experience? What do you want me to say?’

  Grayle watches Cindy sitting next to Helen on the hearth, no cushion. Can’t be comfortable.

  ‘It could indeed be in your mind,’ he says. ‘But what put it there? What made it so vivid? So separate. Should we perhaps consider the effects of the atmosphere of the place itself, a place subjected to such floods of emotion… all with one focus.’

  Palk sighs at this.

  ‘And the idea that something of her remains there,’ Cindy says. ‘As well as her final resting place, it’s her ancestral home. An old family. Ancestors are important.’

  ‘Only,’ Palk says patiently, ‘to a professed shaman.’

  Doing her smile. Cindy takes no notice.

  ‘And what happens when all these powerful elements connect, like wiring? Have you ever fainted before, Helen? Anywhere? The stench of bodies in some war zone?’

  Helen looks annoyed.

  ‘If I’d ever fainted in a war zone, Cindy, it would have been the last war-zone I was ever sent to. Men were allowed to pass out in those days without damage to their careers, women never. No, that was the first and only time I’ve ever fainted.’

  ‘You were losing confidence in the programme,’ Ashley says. ‘If it gets off to a bad start—’

  Helen raises both hands, as if in benediction.

  ‘All right, you’ve explained everything for me, Ashley. I’m not going mad. It was a hot day and I was getting stressed-out. It happens. And I probably only saw Diana after I passed out, although I remember it as being before. How’s that? Is that OK with you?’

  Ashley Palk makes no reply. Looks, for once, lost for words. Grayle’s hearing Ozzy Ahmed earlier today. Let’s call it a dream. Let’s give them a get-out. Does Helen know she’s reacting to a challenge in almost the same quiescent way? Does Ozzy recognize…?

  She looks for him but he isn’t there. Looks around the semicircle of chairs, the firelit faces and his isn’t one of them, and there’s an empty chair. Roger Herridge is agreeing with Cindy; he knows Althorp well, talks about the almost magical serenity of that setting, as Grayle leans forward to tap Jo on the shoulder.

  Defford catches the movement and turns at the same time, Grayle waving a hand at the screens.

  ‘Any chance we can get a wide shot? Sorry, but I can’t see Ozzy.’

  ‘Can’t…’ Jo glancing rapidly from screen to screen. ‘Can’t be far away…’

  ‘We’re supposed to be watching him, for Chrissakes.’

  A few seats away, one of the directors gets the point of this, looks at Defford, who nods, and then the guy’s pushing switches, wrapping cans around his head, talking low-voiced into a mic. Within seconds there are wide shots, two of them, one from above, but the light’s not good in this one, especially with several candles gone out, pushed off the table as if by someone hurrying past, lying on the flags like old bones, one rolling under a chair as they watch.

  The other picture’s from the false wall, and it’s brighter but all blurs at first, vague shapes trying to coalesce. On other screens, movement, lights, the screech of chair legs, shouts. You can see all that on other monitors, but Grayle doesn’t take her eyes off the rubbery blurs as the camera tries to make sense of them.

  ‘…uck’s the matter with him?’

  Rhys, big voice distorting.

  ‘Leave him.’ Roger Herridge. ‘You don’t know what…’

  Then the voices are dusted away by a close whisper.

  ‘Bleeding.’

  Not a wide shot any more. No more than the width of a face.

  Ozzy’s face so close to the false wall it’s like he’s trying to deliver an open-mouth kiss to the camera lens.

  He backs off, eyes wide and glassy.

  ‘She was bleeding.’

  ‘Tears,’ Grayle breaths. ‘Jesus, God, look, there are tears in his eyes.’

  Defford’s on his feet, his face looks paler than his hair, and he’s impossibly excited.

&n
bsp; ‘Put out a call for Max.’

  ‘She was bleeding!’

  Ozzy swaying, then down on his knees, sobbing.

  48

  Dirty lantern

  THE ATMOSPHERE IN the live gallery ought to be electric and, in a way – not a good way – it is. It’s like they got all the wiring wrong and nobody noticed until now.

  Mutiny? Is that the word? Whatever, he’s ignored it. Ignored the bell. Ignored the Matthew Barnes recording, repeated twice: ‘Mr Ahmed to the chapel, please.’ If it wasn’t just a recording and he wasn’t just a hired voice, Barnes would be screaming obscenities through the wall by now.

  Glancing from face to face in the gallery, Grayle notices how close trepidation is to anticipation, excitement to dread.

  Leo Defford and Jo Shepherd are watching a monitor screen featuring Ozzy Ahmed curled like some kind of crustacean on his bed, face hidden by a pillow and the arm wrapped around it.

  ‘What are we supposed to do about this?’ Jo says, a little shrill. ‘What can we do? Dock his pay? Would he care?’

  ‘End of the day,’ Grayle says, ‘we need him more than he needs us.’

  ‘Never a good starting position,’ Defford admits. ‘Someone told me, play safe, stick to losers. The slippery slope, looking down. I laughed.’

  He digs the fingertips of both hands into hair that might, after all, be prematurely white. Less than two hours from the first transmission. That, at least, is safe: a full recorded programme put together, with the emergency extra hour added. No way can they go live after midnight, not now. Events already have overtaken them.

  Leo Defford – oh God, how dangerous is this? – is one step behind.

  ‘Looking on the bright side,’ Jo says, ‘one way or the other, it will be magnificent telly. Eventually.’

  ‘Not,’ Defford says heavily, ‘if the guy turns out to be a basket case, emotionally flaky or drunk… This programme is not about the pity of somebody coming apart.’

  He makes an executive decision.

  ‘Get Parrish in.’