Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  The Newton Abbot oracle informed Erin that the spirit of Lucas was both happy and sad, but more happy than sad, because the period of sadness would soon come to an end. He sent messages of love and hope, messages expressed in words that bore no resemblance to the way that Lucas had spoken when alive; this spirit seemed to be taking its script from some New Age bestseller. This was bad enough. Then the spirit invited Erin to tell him how she was faring. ‘Why would he do that?’ Erin wondered. Lucas would not need to be told what her life was like without him. We are observable to the spirits, for as long as they look at us.

  When the woman had finished with the uplifting nonsense, she invited questions on behalf of the spirit. It was ridiculous, Erin told me. The woman was carrying on like some sort of operator on an old-style telephone exchange, facilitating a conversation across the immensity of space. ‘But that’s not how it works,’ Erin insisted. ‘You don’t have a chat with the dead.’ Lucas could connect with the spirits, but he wasn’t running a helpline.

  As though what I was requesting was simply the clarification of one small aspect of an otherwise coherent dogma, I confessed, after consideration, that this was something I had never quite comprehended: as I understood it, nearly all other mediums undertook to relay questions from the survivors, but with Lucas the interaction with the dead was always an unequal relationship. The dead might make contact and speak to us, through a qualified intermediary, but we, according to Lucas, could not speak to them. This appeared to be a distinctive aspect of what we might term Lucas’s practice. For Erin it was a guarantee of his integrity.

  She explained: it was a mistake to use the word ‘speak’ when referring to the dead. The information that arrived through Lucas was not often speech in the everyday sense of the word. Yes, words were sometimes heard, but they were heard in the way that words are sometimes heard in dreams. When people relate what dream-people have said to them in the night, they always misrepresent what was heard: they makes sentences out of utterances that in most cases are not sentences at all – they are fragments, and fragments that are not truly ‘heard’, but instead arise from within. The ‘messages’ that Lucas received were not really messages. They were information of a rarified type, like radio waves, which Lucas could ‘interpret’, just as an astronomer can make sense of the noise that a radio telescope picks up. The metaphor was one to which Lucas had once resorted. Likewise, the dead observe us, but there can be no dialogue, or no dialogue of a talking kind. They pick up our ‘radiation’, said Erin, but they cannot hear us. ‘What would they hear with?’ she reasonably enquired.

  Upstairs, however, in Lucas’s filing cabinets, there were recordings and transcripts of many hours of speech, dictated by the dead, I pointed out.

  Again, I had used an inaccurate verb. The words preserved in the archive were not so much dictation as translation. Once more I was invited to think of the analogy of dreams. We all know that dreams, when put into words, lose nearly all of their reality. The experience of dreaming is rich; it is real. Yet a dream, when described, becomes merely a summary, a description of something that eludes description.

  To which I said ‘OK’, in such a way as to imply that the elucidation had been helpful, but there might be further questions. We were taking, I hoped, the first steps towards Erin’s liberation.

  •

  In the garden, admiring the letters carved by Callum, Erin said to me that Lucas had once told her that Callum was the one man he had ever wholly envied – until, of course, he had learned that his understanding of Callum had been incomplete. He had wished that Erin could have seen Callum at work. His touch was infallible, and as delicate as a surgeon’s, Lucas would say. The letters would appear in the stone as if they had always been there and Callum had simply been removing the material that had covered them. Lucas would hear the three quick taps as a statement of three quick words: This is right. This is right. This is right. Callum, he would say, had been born into the wrong age: he should have been a mason at a great cathedral, where everyone would have addressed him as Master.

  She asked me what I remembered of Callum.

  My memory of him was now almost completely abstract, I told her. His name is associated with a tall white-haired man, seen in the garden; one sunny afternoon, cradling an injured dog he had found in the street, he had stood at our front door, talking to my father. ‘That’s about it,’ I admitted.

  We observed some silence, contemplating the work of Callum, and Erin told me something I had not known: Callum had signed all of his stonework in places where the signature could not be seen – under the foot of a headstone, or, as in this case, on the reverse of an inscription that was to be set into a wall or the ground.

  And when Erin and Lucas had been in Venice, Lucas had remembered a story that Callum had told him, about a sculptor who had been commissioned to make the effigy for an important man’s tomb. Because the tomb was to be placed high on a wall near the altar, not all of the effigy would be visible to the people in the church, so the sculptor had economised by carving only the side of the figure that could be seen from below. Callum was outraged.

  ‘Quite rightly,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because one shouldn’t try to short-change the Almighty. He can see what you’ve been up to.’

  ‘You don’t believe any of that,’ said Erin. ‘Don’t pretend you do.’

  ‘I’m not pretending,’ I protested. ‘I’m sympathising.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Erin, ‘God would understand. The tomb wasn’t meant for him, was it?’

  Recalling Callum’s indignation, Lucas had wanted to find the offending tomb, but he had been unable to recollect the name of the church in question. A few candidates were found, but from floor level, none of those tombs looked unfinished. The guidebook had been of no use.

  ‘And no guidance was available from Callum?’ I wanted to ask; the joke would not have been appreciated. I was a man enamoured of a lovely nun, awaiting the day when sense begins to dawn. But of course there had been no guidance; the spirit of Callum had long been out of range.

  Later, at home, I imagined a day in Venice, with Erin, when I would take her into the church that Lucas had failed to find, and point out the shoddy tomb.

  And I remembered the evening, after they had come back from that holiday, when Lucas had moaned about the tawdriness of Venice.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Erin, to me.

  ‘Historyworld,’ said Lucas. ‘Too many bloody tourists.’

  ‘As if we’re not tourists.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going back in a hurry,’ said Lucas.

  ‘I am,’ said Erin. One night she’d stayed out until three o’clock, just walking the alleyways. ‘It was magical,’ she told me. Lucas had gone to bed; he couldn’t face another bridge.

  At the Rialto market Lucas had encountered a woman who, taking him for a person who seemed to know the place well, had asked him what she should make sure of seeing while she was there. ‘How long have you got?’ he asked; she would be leaving Venice the next morning. And then there were all the idiots taking pictures of everything instead of looking. ‘Taking pictures of paintings, for crying out loud.’

  ‘I’d like to be there for the Carnival,’ said Erin.

  ‘God in heaven,’ muttered Lucas. It seemed possible that this was not purely a performance for my entertainment. ‘All the masks are made in China,’ said Lucas. ‘Or Albania.’

  ‘Still, I’d like to go,’ said Erin.

  And Lucas went on, about the terrible restaurants and the pushy gondoliers and the fancy-dress orchestras that play the Four Seasons every bloody evening and the inexcusable price of a coffee on the Piazza, et cetera, et cetera.

  ‘It was wonderful,’ Erin stated. The discord became discomfiting; I left, but encouraged.

  The next day, before opening the curtains, I heard Erin laughing; they were arm
in arm in the garden, and might have been talking about the previous evening’s amusement.

  •

  It is significant that Erin told me, barely three months after Lucas’s death, of a dream that had troubled her several times in the preceding weeks.

  In this dream she is talking to Lucas late at night, in their kitchen. There is a portentous air to the encounter. It has no prelude: Lucas is facing her, in a room that seems to be lit by something outside the room, as if the house stands on open land and the moon is low in the sky and impossibly close. But she does not see the window; she sees only Lucas. The conversation is reasonable – or rather, it is conducted in a manner that seems reasonable. On waking, she could remember nothing of what was said; within the dream the words do not function as words function in waking life; their meaning does not persist. Syllables succeed syllables in the way that music proceeds; onward motion is constant. An act of conversation is being performed. It seems to be some sort of ritual – this is what Erin always thinks in the dream. Though she is participating, she is not perfectly sure of the nature of the action in which she is taking part. At one point, in a brief episode in which anger is represented, there is a sense of an audience’s presence, as if there were no wall behind them. She does not, though, turn round to see if they are being watched; an implicit constraint makes it impossible to turn away from Lucas. He raises both hands slightly, in a gesture that signifies that he is conceding something. He takes a step forward. It appears that they are about to embrace; the conclusion has been reached. Then Lucas falls back. There is no contact, but he goes down as if struck with violence. He makes no sound as he falls, and the fall is histrionic – his arms fly out and he throws his head back, as if falling onto a mattress. Lying on the floor, he closes his eyes and smiles. ‘Look,’ he sometimes says, calmly. Always he opens his eyes and looks at Erin, and his smile broadens. ‘It’s good,’ he says, or ‘It’s OK.’ Now, in the space of a second, fear floods into the dream; she sees that Lucas cannot move. ‘The face of a friend,’ he murmurs. He brings down his eyelids.

  This is what Erin told me. She held my arm in a crushing grip.

  •

  Mrs Musmari, a medium in Rottingdean, in her capacity as Lucas’s spokeswoman, instructed Erin to be happy. ‘All is as it should be,’ she reported. Words were uttered that could have been spoken by Lucas. And yet, though Erin was with her for most of an afternoon, in all that time Mrs Musmari gave no proof of knowing anything about Lucas that could not have been learned in an hour online. She relayed only words that anyone, knowing Erin’s circumstances, would have assumed that this young woman would want to hear. Erin consulted people in Rochester and Oxford. She went as far as Chester and Ely. The woman in Chester asked her in what way Lucas might help her, as though her business were some kind of supernatural customer support. Her intentions were good, though, as were the intentions of almost all of them, Erin thought, but none were credible; none surprised her.

  Or rather, only one surprised her: a male medium, middle-aged, formerly a member of some obscure religious order, purportedly, with something of a drink problem, she came to suspect, and a double-barrelled Germanic surname that might even have been genuine; there was the hint of an accent with certain vowels. Having conveyed the good news from the other side, he made a pass at her. Lucas had, after all, urged her to ‘live her life to the full’ and ‘not surrender to mourning’.

  These people offered nothing but fake sunshine, Erin complained. She was disappointed by them, but I saw something other than disappointment when she told me what they had asked her to believe. The anguish that I glimpsed was not to be explained by the bad faith of these imposters: it was the anguish of guilt. Lucas, were he to appear, would in some way address the origin of that guilt; that was how she would be able to tell if the presence of Lucas had really been detected. This was obvious to me, as was the cause of that guilt. It was not the kiss; that had been the sin of a moment, or no sin at all.

  In Ely the spirit of Lucas had transformed the medium’s voice from its customary fluting tone (she was a wispy lady, in her seventies) to a catarrhal rasp, a performance suggestive more of exorcism than of benign communication from the realm of the departed. Erin had broken the spell and irked the woman by laughing, and she almost laughed in telling me what had happened. Encouraged, I said: ‘You don’t need these people.’ I told her that we would always remember Lucas. ‘That’s enough,’ I proposed. But I had misjudged.

  ‘Don’t give me that look,’ she said, as if I had stopped all pretence and dismissed these frauds for what they were.

  ‘What look?’ I protested.

  ‘You know exactly what I mean,’ she said, with a stabbing gaze, in which there was also the despair of the confounded.

  The door was open, she knew, but she was not yet ready to step through.

  •

  Erin had been listening to Lucas’s voice. On the table, in the living room, there was a small cassette player. Erin had few photos of Lucas; many of herself, taken by Lucas, but few of him. In the archive, however, there were scores of recordings of Lucas at work, and one of these recordings had been made on the day she first met him, the day he came to help the family. This is the only tape to which she felt entitled to listen; to have played any of the others would have been like reading through a doctor’s notes.

  It was typical of Lucas that he should have continued to use cassettes long after everyone else had moved on to more modern technology, she said, approvingly. We looked around the room: the cumbrous furniture, the shabby rugs, the lamps. Only the television signified the present decade.

  ‘Lucas wasn’t what I had been expecting,’ said Erin. We were returning to the story of their first meeting; I encouraged her to talk about it, and she did, at length, willingly; it seemed to help.

  It had not seemed possible, she told me again, that the person she saw walking up to the front door could be the renowned clairvoyant: the dark suit and tie and white shirt, the heavy-looking briefcase – it all made him look like a lawyer. He talked like a lawyer, too – ‘very precise with his words’. The voice and manner, though, were ‘soothing’.

  After he had taken all the information that the photos could provide, he was ready to begin the séance – though ‘séance’ was a term that Lucas had never used, Erin wanted me to know; he preferred the plain ‘consultation’ or ‘meeting’. He went to the table, where he opened the briefcase and carefully laid out its contents: the recorder, a notepad, pens. Each thing was placed as though it had a predetermined and exact place on the tabletop. He asked for a glass of water; he took a sip, and set the glass to the side of the notepad.

  The family was invited to come up to the table; the parents flanked him, the daughters opposite. Erin had assumed that they would be required to hold hands, but this was not Lucas’s method, on this occasion; it was rarely Lucas’s method. Silence and concentration were required, not a physical connection. The silence might be lengthy, he warned them, and it was not guaranteed that anything would come out of it. Communication was not always achieved. Having made a quick note, as though dating the minutes of a meeting, Lucas asked the family to think of Tom, of ‘nothing but Tom’. He switched on the tape recorder, then closed his eyes and put his hands, linked lightly, on the table.

  For several minutes the only sound was the whirr of the turning tape. Then, at last, Lucas began to talk. He talked to Erin’s mother, and the conversation was very strange, Erin told me. For one thing, Lucas did not open his eyes. His voice was altered too – softer than before, and ‘blurred’. Everything he said made sense, ‘in a way’, but he was like a man talking in his sleep. He asked some questions about Tom, and these questions were interspersed with sentences or phrases that were like ‘dreamy reminiscences’. Some of these reminiscences seemed to be the speaker’s recollections of Tom, as though they had been friends many years ago; others sounded as if they were words that Tom himself mi
ght have spoken.

  Her ingenuousness, when telling me this, was that of the Erin who was meeting Lucas for the first time.

  The strange exchange between Lucas and Erin’s mother lasted for a quarter of an hour, maybe. It ended with Lucas opening his eyes. Groggily, he looked from face to face; he seemed not to know immediately who these people were. He scanned the faces again. Nobody knew what to do, but it seemed that the session must now be coming to an end. On the third pass across the faces, the movement of Lucas’s head abruptly halted, like a mechanism that had jammed. He was looking at Erin, and as he looked at her the quality of his gaze underwent a change that frightened her, she admitted. Fixing his gaze on Erin’s eyes, he frowned, as though he were seeing something that he could scarcely believe he was seeing. ‘He looked into me. He made me shrink inside myself,’ she told me.

  (Another aspect of Erin’s character; the absence of vanity. It is no surprise that Lucas, aged fifty-two, should have fixed his attention on the lovely Erin, twenty. Yet she conducted herself as if she had never seen her own image. We can assume that for Lucas too the innocence, or apparent innocence, was appealing.)

  Then there was another alteration in the quality of Lucas’s gaze; a ‘huge kindness’ arose; it ‘overwhelmed’ her. More than that – the object of Lucas’s scrutiny seemed to change. He wasn’t peering into Erin’s soul – his gaze was searching for something else, something that was within her but was not herself. ‘It’s really hard to explain,’ she said. It was as if Lucas were looking down into a cave, through a hole that had just opened in the ground, and he had seen Erin inside the cave; but then, as the darkness in the cave had lightened, he had noticed that there were images painted on the walls, and it was these images that he was now trying to read. Once she had overruled her timidity, she submitted to this ‘reading’. She ‘cancelled’ herself; she made her eyes into windows, so that Lucas could see clearly what he needed to see. This is what Erin told me. This image of the cave is hers.