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By Root 806 0

his armchair. He stared at his cassette machine, on the floor, over by the wall. The plug was still pulled from the socket and lay where he had left it after his tearful failure weeks earlier to listen to Eden. There’d been no batteries in the machine when he had bought it from the market stall so he knew bloody well there were none in it now. It didn’t even play with the pretence of a lit red power light to signal genuine electronic life. Denny’s roused ghost sang and her band went through their antic thrumming of the tune, and Seaton thought about the old couple who manned the weekend junk and bric-a-brac stall in Lower Marsh and had sold him the player. They were ordinary people, he had no doubt. Ordinary people plying an innocent trade for pin money.

He got up and pressed the ‘reverse’ button that would play the other side of the tape he knew the machine didn’t really house. And after a pause, he heard laughter and the sibilant hiss of his own name, repeated, recited, delivered like the punchline of some dark and secret joke. Then that stopped and there was only the spooling of phantom tape. And then there was a snatch of conversation he recognised from what dialogue he had shared in Zanzibar with Malcolm Covey. More laughter followed, viperish, and that noise again, familiar like the tearing of cloth. The bump of furniture. The drag of thin chair legs across a polished hardwood floor. He pressed the ‘stop’ button, and there was abrupt silence. He pressed ‘open’ and the cassette tray opened, empty. He stood and turned to get a glass of water from the kitchen tap and behind him heard the cassette tray snap shut again. The ghost of Sandy Denny wavered back into voice and sang ‘Tam Lin’. She was unaccompanied now. And she sounded bedraggled and somehow abject.

‘It’s a good trick,’ Seaton said, out loud. ‘If a touch domestic.’

The singing stopped. There was a moment’s silence. Then Seaton felt the shudder through the darkness of the cathedral bell as it pealed, once, booming between buildings in the rain and then reverberating into rest. He looked at his watch. It was fourteen minutes past one in the morning. It was no time at all for the cathedral bell to toll.

He nodded in acknowledgement and appreciation. The bell had been somewhat more than domestic. And instinct told him it was circumspect, just now, to pander to their vanity. He didn’t think he could be hurt from this distance. Not physically hurt. But he was very shaken. If the intention had been to disconcert him, then that had been achieved with great effect.

Seaton drank a glass of water drawn from the tap in his kitchen sink and went and lay back in his bed. For a time he feared that the song would groan back into its gruesome pastiche of life on his little cassette player. He thought that the bell in the cathedral might suddenly start to toll its iron angelus, defying calendar and hour through the depths of the night. But he was a long way away from the Fischer house. And there were three students of philosophy and their foolish tutor far more deserving of attention now than he. So he lay in bed and waited for sleep to come. But he lay for a long time and it came only reluctantly. Through his bedroom window, he was aware in their reflection on his roof of lights going on in the secular part of the cathedral building over on the other side of St George’s Road. The dean or the deacon, possibly, roused from their quarters. Possibly the warden. They’d discover no bell-ringer. Unless they were really very unlucky indeed.

He’d been no more than twelve or thirteen years old at home in the family’s two-storey tenement on the northside of Dublin. It had been at the most desolate period of his mother’s divorce from the father he was never to see again. She was getting through it only on heavy dosages of Valium. She drowsed a lot at times she shouldn’t have. She left food simmering on the stove. She left the fire untended in their open grate or a bath still running for one of her boys upstairs. On this particular night, she’d fallen into a deep sleep on the sofa.