Thicker Than Water

It was in trying to dissuade Katie from coming into my bedroom at night with her blood-caked face and talking to me in the dark that I performed my first - entirely accidental - exorcism. I did it by chanting rude playground songs at her until she shut up and went away. Sounds. Patterned sounds, expressing in pitch and rhythm something that I couldn’t define or perceive in any other way.

Later I discovered that music worked even better.

Later still I picked up a tin whistle, and it shaped itself to my hand as though it belonged there.

Christian Barnard must have felt like that when he picked up his first scalpel. Or Osama Bin Laden when he flicked off the safety catch of his first AK-47.

This particular tune didn’t have much in the way of either form or progression. It just ambled backwards and forwards through the same sequence of chords, all in the lower half of the whistle’s register and sounding somewhat sullen and melancholy. But as the notes skirled around me the world darkened: or rather, my perceptions shifted a little along the spectrum that has life and death as its two poles.

"

"I was expecting to see the road get more crowded at this point. If anyone had died in the little red car, or under its wheels, then they ought to have come sharply into focus now. In fact, I ought to have been seeing them already, because the newly dead stand out like halogen bulbs in my eyes most of the time. But my death-sense isn’t infallible. The whistle is.

This time, though, and apart from the added depths and subtracted highlights, the scene before me didn’t seem to have changed at all.

Okay, there was a smudged-out but broadly humanoid figure standing in the air a henin the little way out from the edge of the flyover: a suicide, maybe, or someone who’d walked the parapet on a drunken bet and then fallen off. But the elisions and imperfections in that shape - the fact that I couldn’t even tell for sure whether it had been a man or a woman, or how old it had been when it shed its flesh and blood and bone and sinew to stand naked in the world - showed that it hadn’t arrived there in the recent past. It had died years if not decades ago and that was probably why I hadn’t seen it at first. Over time, ghosts fade like the colours on a cheap tee-shirt. And that ghost was the only one that was haunting this section of the overpass.

Turning my attention back to the parked car, I shifted my fingers on the stops of the whistle and slowly ascended the scale.