Burial (22 page)

Nathan said, 'What's wrong?'

Bob lit a cigarette. His hand was shaking.

'I want you to sit down and listen to something.'

Nathan hitched his trousers and sat.

Bob walked to the reel-to-reel. He manually rewound it several inches, saying: 'Now, this is going to be loud. Okay? I'll explain why in a minute.'

'What is it?'

'Just listen.'

Bob pressed Play.

He'd hooked the reel-to-reel through to a pair of floor-mounted loudspeakers. From them emanated a painful blast of white noise, like the static on an untuned television turned up to maximum volume. Nathan looked at him in baffled discomfort.

Bob pressed Stop.

The silence was sudden and total.

Nathan shifted in his seat. 'What am I supposed to be listening to?'

'You might have to listen a few times. It does that.'

'Listen a few times to what?'

Again, Bob was manually rewinding the machine, saying: 'Try to listen through the background noise.'

Bob pressed Play again.

The same abrasive static.

Then, mumbled and indistinct, something like a voice. It was murmured, and very quick. When it was gone, Nathan doubted that he'd even heard it.

Bob stopped the tape.

'You heard it.'

'Heard what?'

Bob played the tape again.

On a third listen, there was something behind the white noise, like someone murmuring through a hotel wall.

'Okay,' said Nathan, in the ringing silence that followed. 'What is it? Someone speaking?'

'I don't know about someone speaking. But it's a voice.'

Nathan's palms were wet.

'Whose voice?'

'Elise's.'

Nathan laughed. His mouth was numb.

'And what do you think she's saying?'

Bob swallowed.

'I believe she's saying "I'm alive".'

There was a long silence between them.

Nathan said, 'You're mad.'

It's called EVP,' said Bob. 'Electronic voice phenomena. I've been researching it for years. You run a tape in an empty room. You make sure it's isolated from stray radio broadcasts, yada yada yada, you ask it a question. You go away. You come back, you've got voices on the tape.'

'Whose voice?'

'The dead.'

'Who else?' said Nathan, and began to giggle. He said, 'Jesus Christ, Bob.'

Bob waited until the laughter had passed.

'Play it again,' said Nathan.

Bob played it again.

This time, Nathan heard a clear pattern beneath the shifting, oceanic hiss.

It was the sound of a human voice. It was a woman.

She was saying, 'I'm alive.'

Or perhaps it was 'line five'.

Nathan shouted over the noise, 'It's off the radio or something. It's one of your neighbours. It's somebody walking past the house.'

Bob pressed Stop.

'I have eliminated those possibilities.'

'How?'

'Trust me. I know what I'm doing. I've been doing this for twenty years now.'

'And what? This is the first voice you've heard?'

Bob reached under the table and drew out an old blue suitcase, worn white at the corners. He opened it. It was filled with reel-to-reel tapes.

'There are voices on each one of these, sometimes dozens of them.

I've also got several hours archived on the hard drives of these computers.

They talk all kinds of shit - just like the Ouija board. That's what makes it so fascinating. They sound confused, disconnected.

Maybe not even conscious. So no, Nathan, this is not my first voice.

But it is the first voice I ever recognized.'

Nathan felt something rise inside him. He said, 'You can't have recognized it. You only knew her for one night, and that was years ago. Ten years! And you'd been drinking. And taking cocaine.'

'Listen again.'

Nathan didn't want to hear it. But he didn't want to admit that. So he sat through it, once more.

I'm alive

'There's more,' said Bob. 'Wait.'

He fast-forwarded the same tape. Nathan had learned how to filter the static by now, or perhaps to impose order on it. This time, quite distinctly, but as if at a great distance, he heard a woman's voice shouting: Bob! I'm here!

Nathan stood up.

'Fucking turn it off.'

Bob hit the Stop button.

'There's more.'

'I'm not joking. Fucking turn it off 'Don't you want to hear what she says?'

'She's not saying anything. It's, I don't know what it is. But one thing I know it's not, it's not Elise. All right. Jesus. Get a fucking grip.'

Quietly, Bob said, 'I think you should calm down.'

Nathan's legs were shaking. 'If you put your finger back on that fucking button, I swear to God I'll break it. I fucking promise you, Bob. Don't touch that thing again.'

Bob sighed. He slumped in the office chair.

'Usually there's more than one voice. Sometimes there's three or four. Sometimes half a dozen. Sometimes, there's twenty of them.

Twenty distinct voices. They're temperamental and sarcastic.

Sometimes they manifest at different speeds. Sometimes they talk gibberish. But on this tape, this entire tape, there is only one voice.'

'Shut up,' said Nathan.

'What are we going to do?'

'I'm not joking. Shut the fuck up.'

Bob pressed Play. Nathan heard it plainly. A young woman, clear and crisp behind the hiss, like someone shouting from the edge of the sea.

Bob! I'm here!

Nathan waited until he had some control over his voice and said, 'Bob, if you don't get a grip on yourself, this is all going to fall apart.

All right?'

'Don't kid yourself

'Kid myself what?'

'That it's not her.'

'Fuck you.'

Nathan was running before he reached the bedsit door. He sprinted up the stairs and ran on to the street. And he was panting and wheezing and had a stitch in his side when finally, a long way away, a taxi finally stopped to pick him up, and take him back to work.

He sat through the meeting without making a contribution. When the meeting was over, Justin automatically invited Nathan to an afternoon meeting in the Cricketer's Arms.

Nathan said yes.

They sat in the pub. It was almost empty. A scrawny, prematurely wizened barman with baby-soft hair served them drinks at the table, Justin being a precious slow-time regular. Nathan ordered a double whisky with his lager. When the drinks arrived, he downed the whisky and ordered a second.

Justin laid a hand on his shoulder.

'What's wrong?'

Nathan sipped lager. 'What's the worst thing you've ever done?'

Justin pretended to think. 'I was best man once, for an old school friend. I shagged the bride the night before the wedding.'

'That's pretty bad,' said Nathan, not believing him.

'And I shagged her on the morning of it. She was wearing her bridal underwear, and her dress was all laid out on the bed. The full wedding cake. One of the white ones.'

'Did you get caught?'

'No. You don't want to worry about that. I had the bride's mother the same day, just after the speeches. I didn't really fancy her. It was for the thrill, you know?'

Nathan took a long draught of his beer.

'So, it's possible to do something you regret, and get away with it.' 'If you do it with enough style, nobody will ever know.'

Nathan stared at him with sadness where the incredulity should be. He happened to know that Justin had been impotent for many years. He knew because Justin's wife had used his impotence as a pretext to attempt the seduction of several members of staff-and once, Nathan himself. Two or three of them had obliged her in the back of company Mondeos or in wine-bar toilets. Nathan hadn't.

Justin never got away with anything. He just thought he did. And yet, here he was. Still here, long after he should be gone.

'So,' said Nathan. 'What's your secret?'

'Never sleep with anybody who has less to lose than you do.'

Nathan pondered the wisdom of this, then drained his pint and raised his hand to order another.

Justin said, 'So who is she?'

'Who's who?'

'Your guilty secret.'

'Nobody.'

'You can tell me. You know how good I am at keeping secrets.'

Nathan knew exactly that.

'It's nothing like that.'

'It's always something like that. You wouldn't be human otherwise.'

They

stayed in the pub for hours. Justin seemed to think of it as a special occasion and, after the fourth pint, he ordered a bottle of champagne.

He spent a long time talking about office politics. And he kept asking who she was. Nathan maintained that she was nobody.

When Nathan got home, he was drunk. Holly was watching television in bed. She watched from the corner of her eye as he fell over, trying to get out of his trousers. When he leaned over the bed to kiss her, she turned her face away. She got up to visit the bathroom, and when she came back she was wearing a nightdress.

He woke, as he always did when he'd been drinking, in the early hours of the morning, badly needing to piss. But he lay curled on his side, the duvet clutched over his head, trying to sleep.

In the morning, he said, 'I'm sorry.'

She said 'Fine, whatever,' and stomped downstairs. Halfway down, she paused, saying: 'You could've called.'

'I know. I'm sorry.'

'I don't care what you do. I just want to know that you're okay. I just want to hear your voice.'

Nathan sat on the bed. Yesterday's clothes, reeking of smoke and beer, lay in a pile beside it. He wanted to burn them.

30

In Nathan's pigeonhole that morning was a tatty buff envelope.

Because PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL had been scrawled across it in red ink, Angela hadn't opened it for him - she'd placed it on top of his other post, internal and external.

Sometimes, people were offended by one of Hermes' cartoonish and lewd greetings cards. The complaints often came in envelopes like this.

He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter inside.

DearN

Naturally I understand your reaction.

Here are some transcripts of further conversations. At all times, only a single voice (1) appears on the tape. I should reiterate how unusual that is.

Tape 1, Monday, 12 am

Duration: 17 minutes

Bob, I'm here

you bastard (Jew bastard?)

cold here

Tape 1, Monday, 3.40 pm

Duration: 9 minutes

didn't get there

Bob!

Tape 1, Tuesday, 7 pm

ft Duration: 3 minutes

my eyes

my teeth

Tape 1, Tuesday 11.30 pm

Duration: 1 minute

oh god

horrible

: The office door opened. Nathan jumped.

It was Justin. He leaned, cross-armed, in the doorway -- working ,, at being rakish and hungover. 'Christ. You look awful.'

Nathan crushed Bob's letter in his fist. 'Cheers.'

'Can't take the pace?' He walked in, closing the door behind him.

His perfumy bulk took up much of Nathan's little office and the smell -- stale booze and tiny breath mints and too much Issey Miyake - was intimate and revolting, like busy airport toilets. Nathan breathed through his mouth.

Justin said: 'Just like old times.'

'Yep.'

'Before she tied you down.'

'She didn't tie me down.'

'Anyway. We should do it again.'

'Yeah.'

Justin said, 'Cool,' and left the office without bothering to close the door. Nathan leaned over to close it, then called Bob from his desk phone.

'Bob. It's me --'

'Did you get it?'

'Yes, I got it. What the fuck did you think you were doing?'

'Did you read it?'

'No,' said Nathan, and glanced through the office window. The new graduate trainee stood, infinitely bored, at the photocopier.

Every few seconds, he was scanned by a bar of light.

Then Nathan said, 'Listen, Bob. We've been through a lot of stress, all right? I mean, really a great deal of stress. And stress does funny things. It's dangerous. What you need, you need to get away for a while. Get away for a few days. Book yourself a holiday.'

'Don't patronize me. You're the one who's denying the evidence.'

'Evidence

of what? A voice you think you can hear on a blank iŤ3V

tape? Jesus Christ, have you got the slightest idea how mad that sounds? I mean, even the faintest inkling?'

In the silence that followed, Nathan could hear Bob, breathing through his nostrils, until he said: 'I know about this stuff Nathan wanted to light a cigarette. Instead, he pressed on his temples with his thumb and second finger and spoke very carefully.

'Okay. We're not going to agree about this. We're just not. So answer me one question. What bearing does this have on the rest of-- the project?'

'Are you referring to the recovered materials?'

'Yes, I am referring to the recovered materials.'

'Well, obviously it changes everything. We can't just destroy them.'

Nathan stood up so abruptly the telephone lifted from the desk and hung there, spinning on its cord.

'And why not?'

'Because we need to give her a proper burial.'

'And how do you propose to do that?'

'I don't know.'

'Bob, this is totally unacceptable, this is completely unacceptable.'

'It's completely non-negotiable.'

'There's no way I'm doing this.'

'There must be a way. Even if it means we go to prison.'

I'm afraid I don't see how that would improve the situation.'

She's haunting us. Do you know what that means?'

What are you talking about?'

She's lonely. And she's angry. She's really, really angry.'

Incredibly, Bob began to snivel.

Nathan took this in. And said: 'We'll talk about this later. Don't do anything hasty. Please. Promise me that.'

Fine.'

'Hasty about what?' said Angela, who was standing in the doorway, about to offer him a cup of tea.

Nathan screamed.

31

He and Bob met in the park. They sat on a bench, watching children play. The wind flapped at the tail of Nathan's coat. He was smoking a cigarette.