The Medium is the Message

      The ghost would have to be exorcised. Hugh had no doubt about it. Oriole had some doubts about the ghost. Ghosts did not exist. But some residual sense of the authority of the male over the female remained bedded in him: his it was to dictate the nature of the universe. She was older than he was by seven years and the family breadwinner, but never mind. He wanted to call the priest in now, now, now and so did his brother Clive, and they weren’t listening to her. Hugh even picked up the telephone to call his father the Diocesan Bishop, who could recommend a good exorcist if anyone could—the Church of England acknowledged the occasional need for exorcists, though they didn’t focus on the matter if they could help it—and Oriole had to pull the phone line out of its socket to stop him making the call. And then the fifth cup whistled past her ear: just rose from its saucer and hurled itself against the wall and broke. That stopped them. Silence fell. The cup, being eighteenth-century Meissen and of the most fragile porcelain, exploded rather than broke, and every tiny splinter had its own peculiar little crackle, so the ensuing silence seemed particularly dense. And again the temperature had fallen, which you only noticed after the event, when you began to feel warm again.

      ‘Okay,’ said Oriole. ‘You win,’ and she re-plugged the phone again and Hugh and Clive called their father. Oriole, rather than hear the conversation went to ask Sarla the help to bring dustpan and brush. Sarla was sitting at the kitchen table calmly enough, reading Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These days she had a clear complexion, a sweet smile, glossy hair, and though she still had no work visa seemed untroubled enough, and one way and another not capable of instigating poltergeist activity. According to the Internet this latter was usually associated with neurotic adolescent girls. Just as pre-pubertal boys could do Uri Geller tricks, make heavy cutlery bend and twist simply by rubbing it, teenage girls could apparently create a sufficient energy field to hurl small domestic objects around the house in a mildly malevolent way. But Sarla was into her late twenties and twice the girl she’d been when she’d joined the household two years back as a sallow, skinny, grieving refugee from Muslim Bosnia with very little English.

      But even if poltergeist activity was a ‘proved’ fact, it didn’t mean that the energy required to overcome the normal inertia of stationary objects was paranormal: just that the laws which governed the phenomenon were not yet properly understood.

      In Oriole’s perception the natural universe obeyed definite physical laws. You dropped things, they broke. You heated water, it boiled. People died, they stayed dead. She’d once sat next to the Astronomer Royal at a formal dinner organised by her employers, Dree Pharmaceuticals, to present the new annual Dree prize for Mathematics—and he’d told her all about the Big Bang and how it was pointless to ask what happened before, as people tended to do, because time itself only started at that moment. He’d then added that the Big Bang was only another Creation Myth, which rather spoiled things, and formal speeches had begun before she could question him further.

      Nevertheless—until the matter of the suicidal cups: she still tried to joke about them—she’d had no doubt but that once put in motion the universe worked like clockwork, wound up and set going—by Big Bang or Prime Mover, who cared—cogs turning, gravity tugging, evolution soldiering on, obeying its own internal rules, and no exceptions. And now she found herself agreeing to an exorcism. Hugh and Clive had pressured her into it. She, who resented so little, found herself resenting this. If it was anyone’s ghost, anyone’s poltergeist, anyone’s paranormal phenomenon, it was hers. Her ear the teacups whistled past, gold rims glittering as they flew. Her cups, or at any rate her deceased grandmother’s, brought out of Germany in 1937. Her dresser: her whole house come to that: she might put Hugh’s name on the title deeds but it was hers by moral right.

      She told Sarla another two cups had broken and the pieces needed to be put in an envelope for the menders. Sarla said she’d do it when she’d finished the scene in which Titania falls in love with the ass. She was looking up all unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Sarla was developing a fine Shakespearean vocabulary. Since Oriole was paying an immigration lawyer some thousands of pounds to help Sarla qualify for citizenship it was good to see her thus dedicated to the culture of her putative new country. Nevertheless Oriole would have liked a more instant response, a springing to the feet at the behest of her employer. ‘Don’t worry,’ Oriole said, a little more briskly than usual, ‘I’ll do it.’

      When the first bill relating to Sarla’s visa came through Hugh remarked it would be cheaper to pay someone to marry her and get her citizenship that way, and Oriole had found that somehow shocking. What shocked Hugh tended not to shock her, and vice versa. They laughed about it. Hugh was a master craftsman. He made long-necked Elizabethan lutes out of sycamore and cedar for a small specialist market. Oriole was now International Sales Director for the famous Dree pill, the new wonder morning-afterthe-night-before contraceptive. She was beginning to be away from home more often than she was in it, as Hugh had sadly observed, flying round the world: so far her work had taken her mostly to Europe, but now China was opening up as a market. Neither of them looked forward to it.

      Oriole took the dustpan and brush and went back into the dining room. Clive had taken the phone back from Hugh and had resumed his version of events. Clive, at thirty-four, was Oriole’s age, seven years older that Hugh. But the boys, as their mother still called them, could have been twins, and were often mistaken for such. Both were tall, well-built, blond, thatch-haired, square-jawed, highly educated, softly spoken and gentle-eyed. Oriole was little and bustling, dark and petite. Clive made virginals in the Flemish style inset with ebony, an even smaller and more specialist market than that for lutes. Oriole was famous for having a cloth ear: she couldn’t tell a lute from a virginal from a viola da gamba when she first met Hugh. He was the one who could tell the true notes, the pure sound, who understood the music of the celestial spheres. She only knew from pharmaceuticals. But their bodies fitted together, spoon like: there was just the right differential in height.

      ‘They’re Oriole’s cups,’ Clive was saying. ’Oriole’s grandmother married out, and her mother too, and Oriole herself is living out, as it were, so she’s only a quarter Jewish anyway, and I shouldn’t think that would affect an exorcism, would it? The ghost wouldn’t have to be Christian to take notice? It could be a pagan, an ancient Roman, anyone.’

      ‘Is your brother suggesting,’ asked Oriole of Hugh, as she carefully swept the larger pieces into the dustpan, all thinly fluted crimson and gold and blue and sharp edges, ‘that the phenomenon goes with the cups? Because it needn’t. It could come from this house, which is old enough. It could be Sarla’s neurosis, bubbling away. It could just have drifted in from outside. That’s why I don’t want some priest in here, nailing it into the here and now, making it real, stopping it