proscenium longy eye’s tree.
leave it, Collingswood heard, evenin evenin all evenin all, hes a nonce sarge, fell dan the stairs. as high was proscenium.
“Alright,” she said. “PC Smith, PC Brown, and PC Jones. You three are heroes. You all made the ultimate sacrifice for the force. Line of duty.” The dirty smoke ghosts shivered, in and out of sight, proudly waited. “Now’s your chance,” she said, “to do it again. Work for those pensions you never got, right?” She lifted a big file.
“In here’s all the info we’ve got on the case so far. What we need is a certain bad boy name of Wati. Flits about a bit, does Wati. We need him brought to heel.”
wati wati? some voice said out of smoke. sands like a nonce sands like a paki oozes wati cunt?
“Half a mo,” Collingswood said. slag a slag she heard, arl nick that cunt. She dropped the folder into the fire. done me prad.
The ghost-things made ah noises, as if they were lowering themselves into a bath. They churned up a froth of aether that made Collingswood’s skin itch.
Ghosts, she thought. As if.
IT WAS A CON TRICK, WHOSE GULLED VICTIMS WERE THE TRICK itself. A persuasion. These things she had made, constituted of vague but intensely proud memories of canteen banter, villains brought down, uppity little cunts slapped into place, smoky offices and dirty, seedy, honourable deaths, had not existed until a few moments before.
Ghosts were complicated. The residue of a human soul, any human soul at all, was far too complex, contradictory, and willful, not to say traumatised by death, to do anything anyone wanted. In the rare and random cases when death was not the end, there was no saying what aspects, what disavowed facets of persona, might fight it out with others in posthumous identity.
It isn’t a paradox of haunting—it only appears to be to the alive—that ghosts are often nothing at all like the living whose trace they are: that the child visited by the gentle and much-loved uncle succumbed to cancer maybe horrified by his shade’s cruel and vindictive needling; that the revenant spirit of some terrorising bastard does nothing but smile and try with clumsy ectoplasmic intervention to feed the cat his fleshly leg had kicked days before. Even had she been able to invoke the spirit of the most tenacious, revered, uncompromising Flying Squad officer of the last thirty years, Collingswood might well have found the spirit a wistful aesthete or a simpering five-year-old. So the experience and verve of genuine dead generations were closed to her.
There was another option. Toss up a few crude police-functions that thought they were ghosts.
Doubtless there was some soul-stuff from genuinely deceased officers in the mix. A base, an undercoat of police reasoning. The trick, Collingswood had learnt, was to keep it general. Abstract as possible. She could clot together snips of supernatural agency out of will, technique, a few remnants of memory and, above all, images, the more obvious the better. Hence the cheap police procedurals she burnt. Hence the televisions and the tapes, copies of The Sweeney and The Professionals, spiced with a little Dixon for sanctimony, swirled up into a golden-age nonsense dream that trained her spectral functions in what to do and how to be.
This was no arena for nuance. Collingswood wasn’t concerned with fine points of post-Lawrence policing, sensitivity training, community outreach. This was about the city’s daydream. A fetishised seventies full of proper men. There went a DVD of Life on Mars onto the pyre.
What Collingswood did was motivate into being tenacious gung-ho clichés that believed themselves. She heard herself slipping into the absurd register the functions themselves used, the kitsch pronouncements and exaggerated, stretched-out London accents.
“There you go, squire,” she said. “That’s yer lot. Wati. Last known address: any fucking statue. Job: making our lives difficult.”
They did not have to be, could not really be, clever, the faux ghosts; but they had a nasty sort of cunning, and the accrued nous of years’ worth of screenwriters’ fancy. little bastard she heard them say. look at this shit, a billowing of ashes of case notes. bring this little toerag in, overtime, nonce, slag, guv, sarge, proceedin long the eye street. They clucked the words. They muttered in conspiracy, compared nonexistent notes. Collingswood heard them say names from the case—wati billy dane adler archie teuthex bleedin nora—as they learnt them from the burning files.
The presence or presences—they shifted between unity and plurality—slipped out of sensibility, out of the