We Are All Made of Stars (6 page)

I put a frozen pizza in the oven and crack open a beer, take my research notes from work and put them on the kitchen table. I switch on the radio to LBC and turn it down low, because I just like the sound of the voices in the background – not what the people say, because most of what the people say makes me want to dig a bunker in the middle of a remote forest, hoard tinned food and wait for the apocalypse.

Tonight I am researching the Victorian spiritualist movement, and the wave of table tipping and séances that swept across the nation, the Empire and the world, for a special exhibition at work entitled ‘Afterlife: How science tried to solve the mysteries of death'. It's a working title; something more catchy will come – that's what I keep promising my bosses. It's all got to be immediately catchy, these days; it's got to be a
Daily Mail
headline, even history. Which is fine, because that's what I'm good at: making the subject I am passionate about seem interesting to people who normally are mostly passionate about TV talent shows. It also comes in handy when meeting girls.

When I was a kid, and I mainly pretended to be Spider-Man or Eighties Flash Gordon, I never would have foreseen anything as prosaic as a career as a historian, specialising in nineteenth-century social culture, in my future. It was one of those things that I felt like I alone had discovered. A subject that I caught the corner of, and kept pulling at, peeling back layer upon layer until it transformed from an interest into a specialism and finally, I, in my little two-bedroom London terraced house, was listed almost everywhere as a world expert.

The Victorians loved to congregate around tables and talk to ghosts.

It's not lost on me, as I sit at the table that's been in this kitchen since I was a baby – this very table where my mum used to feed me mashed-up carrot and my dad would sit after work, and roll his shoulders, and wince if he got up too quickly – that I am surrounded by ghosts, if only metaphorical ones. This is the table where Mum would let me draw on the tablecloth, where Dad would explain to me the finer points of making a fly, for the purposes of fishing. This was the table where I first asked out a girl, and was spectacularly turned down. And it was here where Mum left her wedding rings.

This is a table surrounded by ghosts, covered in the fingerprints of the two people I have loved most. The people that exited, stage left and stage right, before their time, before my time, all gone now, leaving me here alone with a table full of long-dead people's exploited hopes. And a slightly resentful cat.

‘Knock once for yes, twice for no,' I say out loud to Jake, who has climbed onto the table to sit on my papers. It's a peculiar habit he has developed of liking to sit on whatever I am trying to read. As far as I can tell, it's designed purely to be annoying. There is nothing – no reply but the soft chatter on the radio, and the distant sound of trains somewhere. No secret smoke or mirrors. No other realm, full to the brim of the dead who have something very pressing to say to a Celia, Cecil or possibly Cedric.

‘Is there anybody out there?' I say to Jake, who blinks in slow motion, and then, hopping down off the table, taking a ream of my research with him, disappears through the cat flap, as if he's going to check.

It's not until I go into the living room a couple of hours later, my head full of stories of long-ago mediums that once held court every night at every fashionable address in London, that I see there is a message blinking on the answerphone, and the sight stops me in my tracks.

The device is a relic, seriously outmoded technology, at least fifteen years old, perhaps even older. So old it has one tiny analogue tape that has been rewound and recorded over a thousand times – but not recently: no one calls my landline any more. I keep it really because it was Dad's. It even still has his greeting message recorded on it. Not that I've played it for a very long time. I just like to know it's there, that I can still hear the sound of his voice whenever I want. Fishing my mobile phone out of my pocket, I look at it. Nothing. No missed calls or texts. The landline wasn't a last resort, a final attempt to try and reach me. Perhaps it was a random cold caller.

I don't know why I feel so nervous as I press it, and wait for it to go through its various machinations, whirring and clicking. Finally the long beep that precedes the recorded message sounds, and I wait, but it's just – silence. No, not silence. I rewind it and play it again, kneeling on the carpet so that my ear is level with the speaker. This time I hear crackling, a distant sound of cars, perhaps the sound of an intake of breath. Someone is – was – there on the other end of the line. But there are no words.

I am gripped by a need to know who it was who called. Yes, probably some scam selling me something, I tell myself as I dial 1471. A cold call from New Delhi, or something about a car crash that I may be eligible for compensation for, but I have to know. The phone rings and rings on the other end of the line, and I let it, unable to break this tenuous link between me and someone who wanted to talk to me. It seems like a lifetime until it is picked up.

‘Er, yeah?' A male voice, young and unmistakably London, on the other end.

‘Oh, yeah, I had a call, from this number?' I say, trying to sound nonchalant, concealing the strange, sickening irrational urgency that seems to have gripped hold of my gut. ‘I had a missed call from this number, today?'

‘It's a phone box, mate,' the voice says. He sounds young.

‘Would you mind telling me where it is?' I ask him. ‘If you wouldn't mind?'

‘End of Shapland Road, opposite the burger place,' he says and hangs up. I listen to the dial tone for a few moments more and put the phone down. I turn around and start to find that Jake has returned and is watching me, curiously, from the banister on which he is somehow poised, apparently able to defy the pull of gravity.

‘Who would call me from the phone box at the end of this street?' I ask him.

He hasn't got a clue, either.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I'm going in,' Ben says, rubbing his hands together like a Bond villain.

‘You bloody are not.' I drag him back, but he shakes me off and heads out into the hallway, clutching my guitar by the neck, knowing that eventually, like a Shaggy to his Scooby, I will inevitably follow. Today is the day when a selection of volunteers come to serenade the inmates, I mean patients. Last week we had this guy who played acoustic guitar and wore very tight jeans, which meant that when he was sitting on the stool he'd borrowed from the coffee bar, you could see exactly the outline of his penis. No such luck this week, though. This week we have the man with the accordion, who is singing ‘Here Comes the Sun'. Singing might not be exactly the term – it's like Terry Wogan has been resurrected from the grave and he's gone a bit folksy. Oh, wait, I don't think Terry Wogan is dead. Well, you get what I mean. I thought about hiding in my room, waiting for the utter horror of having to watch someone else be dreadful to blow over.

But of course Ben is going in; he never can resist the urge to grab the limelight. He sucks up adoration like a bone-dry sponge, so it's lucky that almost everyone who meets him likes him at once. Sometimes I wonder if it's a talent he developed while trying and failing for his entire childhood to get his mother to notice him.

Ben strides into the patients' lounge, and I loiter in the doorway, waiting to see what he does before I actually commit to entering, not just because of the awful mind-bending embarrassment of witnessing his utter lack of embarrassment in action, but also because I need that moment to wait for my heart rate to slow, as the short walk seems to have made my body think it's running a marathon. The pain that holds me at all times intensifies for a while, and I concentrate on breathing, waiting until it becomes its usual background grind again, one that with enough concentration I can fade almost out of existence.

The room is full of families and children, sitting on sofas, curled up on beanbags, toys spread across the floor, flooded with a kind of warmth that doesn't come from the underfloor heating. My own small family of Mum and Dad aren't here tonight. They left as Ben arrived, handing over the baton of keeping an eye on me in one seamless, almost invisible, move – Mum turning pink as Ben shamelessly flirted with her. Suddenly, I miss them, with a pang that isn't like me at all. I look at the families brought together this evening, courtesy of Death and the accordion, and you feel it: all the hours of care and teetering anxiety, but mostly a sort of optimism. That life can't be too bad, if it can be exactly like this, even just for a few rare perfect moments at a time.

Ben isn't exactly the world's best singer, but what he lacks in tuning he makes up for in charm. Accordion Man looks more than a little put out as Ben joins in with his performance, but seeing the welcoming smiles of the faces of his captive audience, he grins and nods, and bobs up and down on his knees. I stand in the doorway and watch a little girl climb off her mother's lap and dance in circles at Ben's feet. And I see how it makes her mother, who's wrapped in a bright purple dressing gown, smile, which in turn makes the girl's father smile, and his expression of intense worry lifts a little for a while. That might be Ben's greatest gift: the knack he has for making almost every person he encounters stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about him instead. He really should be doing something else apart from persuading unsuspecting people to upgrade to phone contracts they don't need. He should be shining somewhere; he should always be the star. I think – I don't really like to admit it, because it's pretty shitty – but I think there's a little part of me that wants him to stay small and disappointed, because if he suddenly knew, if he suddenly saw what a talent he has for living, then of course he'd leave me far behind in my tiny four-walled world.

Silently I sing along with Ben, and Accordion Man. I feel each note vibrating internally, knocking against my bruised and battered insides like a pinball in a machine of flesh and blood, and I know that even as weakened as I am, I could still sing better than both of them. But I don't. I just watch and smile as Ben, one of the ballsiest buskers ever to be unleashed on unsuspecting Saturday-morning shoppers, flirts with the women, winks at the men and plays the fool with the kids, making the room come alive with smiles.

‘How about this one? Know this one?' he says as the song ends, to laughter and clapping. He starts to play ‘One Love' by U2, and, out of his depth, Accordion Man shrugs and takes a seat. But even he's not that offended by Ben, because that's his gift – the whole world loves him in an instant, and he loves them right back. There's never a moment with Ben, not even a second, when he isn't certain that everything is good.

‘Why don't you go and sit down; join in?' Stella comes in and stands behind me. ‘Your friend is joining in. He's … very flamboyant.'

I turn to look at her. Her dark eyes in a slim narrow face give her a particularly intense edge – like she feels everything a little more keenly than other people, even than me. I wonder what secrets there are that keep showing shadows in the hollows of her cheeks and eye sockets.

‘Ben doesn't join in,' I tell her. ‘The world joins in with Ben.'

‘Well, don't be the only one left out, then,' she says, watching Ben throw back his head and holler. ‘It's really sweet that he comes every night to see you.'

‘He's weirdly chivalrous about that sort of thing; he promised, you see,' I explain. ‘He never breaks a promise. I told him he didn't have to, that I am perfectly happy reading and watching movies, but he thinks I can't go twenty-four hours without seeing him.'

Stella smiles, tentatively. ‘When I first started seeing my husband, I remember he couldn't stop showing off to impress me. He'd do anything to make me laugh, or scream or hit him. He loved it, loved the attention; and I've got to say, your Ben reminds me a little bit of that time, right now. Look at him! He so alive, isn't he?'

We both look at him, head thrown back as he sings, throat exposed, eyes closed, feeding off the energy in the room.

‘He's not
my
Ben,' I say uncomfortably. ‘And, anyway, Ben just likes to be in the spotlight. He's just your average attention-grabbing monkey.'

‘Or maybe he likes to be in your spotlight, have you ever thought about that?' Stella asks me, with a mischievous edge I haven't seen before.

I snort. ‘Ben and I are not in any way romantically involved. He fairly often witnesses me cough up mucus, and I've wiped vomit off his chin after a big night out.'

Those dark eyes regard me for a moment longer, keeping secrets, holding back thoughts.

‘See Issy over there in the corner?' she says, nodding at a girl huddled in an armchair that somehow swamps her. ‘She's fourteen years old. You are the nearest thing to someone her own age in here. She's got the room opposite you, and she is obsessed with you. Every time I go in there, she tries to find out more about you. She thinks you look so pretty and interesting. Would you go and say hello? You'd make her day.'