Stave One
I was first visited by the spectre of the late Raymond Burr back in the autumn of 2012 whilst I was pruning near some plum trees, psyching myself up for the real thing. What alerted me to the fact that it was the late actor’s spectre and not the man himself, was not that he’d, by that stage, been dead for almost twenty years, but that he was hovering ten feet in the air, and despite appearing to be urinating into the ornamental fishpond, his phantom micturition left no discernable ripple in the water’s surface.
I have a generally cool head; I once remained completely silent during a hostage siege in a butcher’s, and took the phantom phallus metaphorically in my stride.
“Can I help you at all?” I asked, putting down my gardening shears to appear less threatening. He had the decency to pause mid-stream and turn his head to address me directly.
“I have been sent from beyond to warn you!” His rich bass voice leant itself very nicely to such a portentous proclamation.
“Aren’t you Raymond Burr?” I asked.
“I was in life, indeed,” he replied. His stream had started again, but he remained looking at me. I felt slightly degraded by this.
“I don’t understand why they sent you,” I said, “I didn’t know you personally in life. I enjoyed the Perry Mason theme tune. I have it in my iTunes. But that doesn’t really explain why you’ve been sent to me.”
“I’m disappointed too,” he demonstrated this by increasing the flow. I didn’t understand the biology of phantoms, but his urination had already lasted a good five minutes longer than any earthly one I’d heard of.
“Couldn’t they have sent Peter Falk?” I enquired. This seemed to upset him.
“Everybody wants Peter Falk,” he grumbled, “he’s booked up until 2067.”
“Does he do the ‘just one more thing’ thing?” I attempted an impression but feared I hadn’t done the great man justice.
“Of course he does, the man’s a performing seal – he’d do anything for a round of applause and a dead fish. No bloody dignity,” Raymond Burr harrumphed, “not like some of us.”
“You’re pissing into my fishpond.” I felt I had to point this out.
“Yes, but at least I’m not pandering to your fatuous whims. Bloody Falk.” Whether it was a trigger phrase or not, I don’t know, but with that, he stopped urinating, and tucked away his phantom member into his trousers. He zipped up and then gave a cursory wipe down of his hands against his suit jacket and turned to face me properly, still hovering in the air.
“Do you know ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens?” He asked.
“Yes, of course,” I replied. “That’s the one with Kermit the Frog in.”
“You’re a moron,” said Raymond Burr. “Anyway, Heaven liked the format and bought the rights to visitations.”
“They can do that?”
“They’re very well connected,” said Raymond Burr. “Every time Tiny Tim says ‘God bless us everyone’, they get a dollar.”
“Gosh,” I said, “how upsetting.”
“So I’m here to take you to the past, present and future to help you change your wicked ways.”
“I didn’t realise I was abnormally wicked.”
“Oh yes, quite ghastly from what I’ve read, and remember, I was a lawyer.”
“Pretend lawyer.”
“I was method. I lived the role.”
“Right.”
“For Ironside I took a hammer to my knee-caps.” He mimed the action. “Commitment.”
“That’s alarming,” I flinched.
“Right, you get three visits from me. First, we journey back to your childhood. Grip my hand and I’ll take you back.”
“But you’ve just been . . .” I nodded towards the pond and grimaced thinking about spectral urine.
“Oh don’t be ridiculous man,” he blustered, “it’s completely harmless.” And he grasped my hand.
There was a heady rush of sight and sound and a nauseating smell of ammonia, and I found myself floating several inches above dusty ground still holding the damp hand of Burr.
“Right, here we are, follow me.” He started drifting off and I trailed behind.
Stave Two
Nothing about the location rang any bells. I wasn’t suddenly gripped by the icy hands of Madame Memory, or slapped about the chops by Monsieur Nostalgia. It didn’t look like how I remembered my rural England upbringing.
“Did that sign say ‘Zaragoza’? Are we in Spain?” I asked.
“Of course!”
“I’m not Spanish.”
“Lots of familiar faces, I’m sure,” Burr seemed to ignore my words. “But remember, these are but shades . . . did you just snigger?”
“Butt shades.”
“It’s like trying to redeem a cockroach.” Disdain was replaced by contempt in Raymond Burr’s voice. “What I was trying to highlight is that we cannot interact with these visions.”
“I know,” I said, “I can’t speak Spanish.”
“And yet, in many ways, they’ll communicate to you far more in the moments that we spend with them, than a lifetime of talking could hope to achieve.” He nodded solemnly as if he’d uttered the profound.
“Unless there are subtitles, I very much doubt that.”
The streets we were drifting through were bustling with early morning eagerness – the keen were in their element, preparing for their afternoon smugness. Displays leaked out of shop fronts and invaded pavements; pedestrians danced in and out of traffic that stop-started along the street, fuming little tin cans of agitation. We floated on by this scene and turned into a quieter street inhabited by poplars and bollards. Amongst these was nestled what appeared to be a school, judging by the diminutive Spaniards dashing about the yard in matching outfits. Raymond Burr ushered me through the gates and thence, without seeming to travel through a wall, deposited us both inside a classroom neatly packed with young students.
Despite the numerous bodies in there, the room was cool and calm. It was gently lit by the low autumn Sun shining through the generous windows flanking three sides.
“Generous windows?” I queried. “That’s the kind of loose personification you’d get in a cheap romance novel.”
“What? What are you complaining about? I thought you were the narrator?”
I blanched guiltily.
“Why on Earth have you brought me here?”
“Shh!” Burr raised his ethereal finger to his chops. “The teacher is about to speak.”
A teak-fleshed man with a lacquered mane and corduroy vestments turned from the blackboard, chalk in hand, and smiled at the students.
“¡Buenos dias clas!” he said.
“Buenos dias, Señor Sanchez,” the children chorused back.
“Ah!” Raymond Burr exclaimed, and gripped my forearm. “Do you spy the small figure in the corner?” He pointed towards a diminutive little fellow sat by himself and wearing a shirt that he’d clearly inherited from an older brother, or Luciano Pavarotti. “The solitary child, bereft of friends and company?” My eyes dutifully followed.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you not recognise his sullen brow and aquiline nose?” Burr tried raising his eyebrows and nodding, the subtly of which would have outdone that time Cilla Black wore light-bulbs – but only just.
“No,” I said, honestly. “It’s not me. I’m not Spanish.”
“What?” Burr almost listened.
“It’s not me,” I repeated, “I’m not Spanish.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, man,” Burr dismissed it with a scoff, “of course you’re Spanish!”
“No I’m not,” I insisted, getting quite agitated, “I’m not Spanish. I’ve never been to Spain. I’m not sure I’ve even ever been near a Spaniard. I occasionally get a bit sleepy after a heavy lunch these days, but that’s about as close to being Hispanic as I get.”
“Why on Earth would I have brought you to Spain if you’re not Spanish?!” Burr riled. “Stop being awkward, and start being inwardly transformed by the tragic sight of your eight-year old self isolated and ostracised by his fellow miniature Spaniards!”
“But . . .” I began before he placed a finger over my lips and shushed, nodding at the scene.
“¿Pablo, cuànto es seis por siete?” The teacher aimed this question at the solitary child who Burr believed to be me.
“Cuarenta y dos señor,” the dutiful Pablo replied.
“Bien hecho, Pablo,” the teacher smiled and nodded. Burr deflated.
“How on Earth could you get it so wrong?” I asked, as we wandered the streets of Zaragoza away from the school.
“I blame Head Office, all those different files, their system is awful.” He looked disgruntled, his face taking on the expression of a belligerent ram.
“Have you done this visitation stuff before?” It was taking me a while to get used to it, but the people in the street seemed to naturally avoid us and move out of our way as part of their intuitive actions, and so we drifted between them like eels through greased fingers.
“A couple of times,” Burr admitted in a bluster. “There was a Bernard in Cincinnati, and I visited a Marjorie in Goole to persuade her to stop being a racist.”
“So you’ve only done this twice?” I said.
“Well yes,” he muttered, refusing to catch my eye, “every son-of-a-bitch wants bloody Falk.”
“I bet he wouldn’t have sent me to Spain,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“I bet he could work out a filing system,” I added. “You’re lost without Della.”
“Leave Della out of this!” He turned and spat at me.
“Touchy.”
“Right,” he said, “let’s get you back!” He clicked his fingers and I fell into my pond back home. He hovered above me in the light of dusk. “I’ll see you again shortly for a second dose of moral rectitude.”
“I learnt nothing in Spain!” I shouted up at him, spitting pondweed from my mouth.
“Didn’t you? Didn’t you?” He seemed to expand as he drifted backwards and upwards, before fading away to nothing.
I thought about it. Nope. I hadn’t learnt anything in Spain. A shiver ran through me as I remembered he’d been pissing in the pond.
Stave 3
The second time he appeared was initially awkward because I was in the middle of a pedicure that my cousin Bernice had arranged. I had to excuse myself by claiming that I was only really interested in my left foot being attractive. Having paid the lady, I had a heated debate with the spectral Burr in the boutique’s solitary latrine.
“I’m here for the benefit of your soul,” bellowed Burr. “I think the mild inconvenience to your feet is a small price to pay for spiritual cleansing.”
“It’s more the embarrassment caused by me squealing so loudly when you suddenly appeared in the mirror instead of my reflection, like some ghostly warning about eating too much pork fat, that was the problem. Why the Hell couldn’t you have popped up when I was by myself?” I said.
“Your foot looks lovely by the way,” said Burr.
“Thank you,” I snarled, “it’s just a clear polish.”
“Lovely,” he said, “but you might want to put your shoes back on for where we’re going.”
“Certainly,” I said, “I just had to let it dry.”
It was difficult getting my sock and shoes back on in such a small cubicle, which also contained a rotund thespian. There was a lot of ‘could I just . . .?’ and ‘would you just mind . . .?’ and ‘sorry, could you grab hold of . . .’s before I was successfully reshod.
“Where are we going by the way?” I asked, somewhere in the midst of the shoe contortion act process.
“Come now,” he said, “you know that’s not how it works.”
“Oh, it works, does it?” I said. “Our Spanish sojourn was all part of the celestial plan?”
“Sarcasm is unbecoming in one so inept. Now hold my hand, click your heals together three times and repeat ‘there’s no place like home’ again and again”
I did so and the cubicle vanished.
A moment later, with all the requisite whooshings of fabric and hairs to indicate temporal movement, we arrive in what appeared to be a simple suburban street somewhere in England.
As we began to drift along it, Burr came to a sudden halt and gripped my arm.
“You see the busy telegraph pole engineer, running from his van to the pole?” He pointed at an agitated man in a boiler suit. “I sprinkle joy from my metaphorical horn and . . .”
The engineer started to whistle the Perry Mason theme tune. “And look . . .” a passing Postal Worker joined in, and further along the street, a man removing boxes from his boot added his whistle to the chorus. “The shared joy of singing an old theme song together!” Burr declared triumphantly, raising his arms, his jowls wobbling in delight. He turned to me. “I bet you couldn’t sing the Columbo theme tune!” He said. “Stupid bloody Falk.”
“Is this about my redemption or your Falk envy issues?”
He appeared not to hear me again. “I could have played the grandfather in ‘Princess Bride’. Anyone can read a bloody book. I’d have given it gravitas,” he said.
“I think you’ve lost focus again.”
We’d come to a street in suburbia with a depressed looking hedge and a trampoline in the front garden. There was a collection of stone animal garden ornaments flanking the front door, and a sign on the letter-box warning of a terrier with a penchant for fingers.
“Where are we now?” I asked Burr.
“This is your employee’s house,” he said.
“I don’t have an employee. I’m a freelance carpet samples salesperson. I sell swatches.” I said this as he grasped my hand and drifted us through the front door and into a cramped hallway and from thence to a living room bedecked with the usual detritus of modern western human living. There was a middle-aged man in pyjamas staring out of a back window. “Who is this man?” I asked.
“His name is Terence Claypole, and that is his son, Sasquatch Claypole,” he pointed at a youth playing on his X-Box with oversized headphones on, “who has a gammy foot. I fear that if you don’t help Terence, this time next year, Sasquatch’s foot will be really quite awful.”
“Help him? I don’t know him. I mean, where on earth are we? I assume we’re at least not in Zaragoza this time.”
“Deep in the slums of darkest Shrewsbury.”
“Shrewsbury?”
“Yes, right in the seedy guts of this sprawling metropolis where you find the poorest of the poor, your unfortunate employee and his crippled child.” At this point the child Raymond Burr called Sasquatch took off his headphones, got up and walked out of the room.”
“You’re making all this up.” I said.
“How dare you question the authority of the spectral plains!” Burr flared up at me, nostrils steaming, eyebrows dashing towards his fringe.
“Okay then,” I said, refusing to back down, “where’s Shrewsbury?” He blinked a few times.
“I refuse to partake in such paltry parlour games!” He proclaimed. “It is sufficient that you are a Shrewsburian and that your shameful treatment of your employees affects good, decent Shrewsburians.”
I turned to face the flaring thespian properly, speaking clearly and steadily, partly to try desperately to make him take something in that I was saying, but mainly to just stop myself screaming in his face. “I have been to Shrewsbury. I like Shrewsbury. It’s a very pleasant town. I’d be happy to go back to Shrewsbury some day. But, and I can’t stress this enough, I don’t live in Shrewsbury or employ anybody in Shrewsbury. And the reason I don’t employ anybody in Shrewsbury is because I don’t employ anybody full-stop.”
“Full-stop?”
“Period, sorry, I forgot you were American briefly,” I said.
“I’ve always been American.”
“No, my forgetting was brief, not your Americanness.”
“Ah,” he paused. “Have you learnt nothing from this tragic Shrewsburian scene?”
“No, not really,” I said, “I mean, I hope the kid’s alright – but he seems utterly fine and mobile. It’s difficult to empathise with someone who’s clearly not suffering.”
“Let us pay a visit to a relative!” Declared Burr, tacking sharply to avoid the quagmire he’d sailed himself into.
“Yours? Mine? Or the cousin of the tragic non-limping boy here?” I asked.
“Shh! I’m trying to flourish dramatically,” protested Burr. “Home James and don’t spare the horses!” He gripped my hand again, and the whooshing occurred.
To be fair, it was my family this time. It was my parents’ house, the living room to be precise, in which we appeared behind the display cabinet containing the stuffed monkey. A significant number of my close and distant relatives seemed to be squatting behind an assortment of furniture, clutching glasses. For some reason the lights weren’t on, and so the scene was only lit by the sunlight creeping in around the curtains and reflecting off anything that would obligingly glitter.
I’d never witnessed a collective squat before. Humankind is capable of exquisitely graceful stances. A dozen awkwardly uncomfortable Englishers was no ‘Swan Lake’. Nowhere would the image be used to advertise the species. Maybe as a warning about haemorrhoids, but certainly not for promotional purposes.
Two feet in front of Burr and me were my cousins Eric and Tim crouching stiffly and whispering to each other.
“Where the Hell is he?” whispered Eric, balding and overcompensating with facial hair. “He’s been quite unreliable recently.”
“When I saw him earlier,” replied Tim, in his forties and misguidedly experimenting in leather, “he mentioned something about Raymond Burr.”
“Raymond Burr?” asked Eric; clearly the name didn’t ring a bell. Burr bristled next to me.
“Perry Mason,” Tim explained.
“Isn’t he dead?” Asked Eric.
“Well, he always was one for unusual friends.” He paused then grimaced. “I’m getting cramp from all this squatting.”
A thought struck me.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Am I getting a surprise party?”
“Clearly,” said Burr, “you are not as experienced as I am at dissecting the facts and interpreting the clues. Of course it’s a surprise party you cretin.”
“How nice,” I said. “I’m touched.” I had a little walk around the room. There was Uncle Tony – he’d once been trapped in a lift with Felicity Kendall and had dined out on the story ever since. Apparently she was quite anxious, and this anxiety had primarily expressed itself through the medium of flatulence. Beside him was his wife, my Auntie Cheryl, who was more blue rinse now than human. I moved amongst them all, excitedly pointing out my different family members and their idiosyncrasies to Burr. He didn’t seem impressed.
“I don’t quite understand what moral I’m being taught here,” I said. “Clearly my family love me – they are holding a surprise party for me.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Scoffed Burr. “It’s about reliability! These good people have gone about organising a fabulous surprise for you and you’ve let them down by not being there.”
“What?”
“You need to be dependable. You’re unreliable . . .”
“Hangabout,” I interrupted. “It’s a surprise party, as in, I don’t know anything about it. It’s not like I’ve stood a date up or missed a dental appointment – I literally know nothing about this. It’s their responsibility to get me there. If anyone is unreliable, it’s Hank for failing to get me there.” I paused. “Hangabout,” I added. “This is happening now? You’ve stopped me going to a party in order to take me to watch live a party I’m supposed to be at in order to tell me I’m unreliable?! You’re the sodding reason I’m not there, you pompous git! I don’t believe this! I’m missing my own surprise party because I’ve drawn the short straw and got the spectral equivalent of Chris Grayling.”
“Watch it, you poltroon! If I knew who that was, I’d probably be offended.”
“I bet Falk isn’t busily ruining surprise birthdays,” I said.
“I’ll punch you in the chops if you don’t shut up!”
“Actually, never mind Peter Falk, I’d have settled for Angela Lansbury.”
“She’s not dead,” Burr bristled.
“She’d still have more of a grip on navigating through temporal and spatial plains of reality than you.”
“Why you ungrateful arse!” He swung for me, missed, and his arm went straight through my Great Auntie Miriam, who failed to register the phantom fist, but who did sneeze into her Bacardi.
“Satisfied?” I said, as Burr rearranged himself, trying to regain his composure.
“I think we’d better leave it there for this visitation,” he said, “there’s nothing more I can teach you today.”
I was about to say that he’d failed to teach me anything, like a startled supply teacher, but he’d disappeared by then, and had deposited me back in the fishpond again.
Stave Four
“And now a startling vision of the future!” This time he’d appeared whilst I was having my breakfast at the table in the kitchen. I had a feeling that he was about to turn up when Today went all crackly and became something called Vicky and Jason’s Breakfast Mash-Up.
“Is it worth us bothering?” I put down my crumpet. “Am I going to see the gravestone of Carmen Miranda? Three people haggling over the bed-shirts of Hugo Chavez?”
“A guy makes two mistakes and he’s lambasted by the living equivalent of linoleum.”
“Two?!” I exclaimed. “Your maths is as poor as your control of supernatural visitations. I’d get better guidance if I was a rally driver and had Stevie Wonder as my navigator.”
“Nonsense,” Burr rebuffed my criticism, in the same way he’d rebuffed Charles from MASH as the prosecution lawyer on countless occasions.
“You had me down as Spanish, showed me a boy with a mild limp in Shrewsbury, and made me miss my own birthday party. If you were any more inept, you’d be offered a railway franchise,” I said.
“Nonsense,” he repeated. Perhaps his defence arguments weren’t quite as good as I remembered them to be.
“Far from enlightening my spirit and unburdening me from any supposed sins that had been weighing down my future potential shade, you’ve turned me into a bitter ball of anger who has taken to shouting at his fishpond for reminding me of your ineptitude!”
“Well, surely that’s . . .” he stumbled through a selection of words.
“You know I can’t watch Columbo anymore without crying, thinking about what could have been?” I got up from my breakfast stool and jabbed a fork at his ethereal form. “I resent that. I resent that you are so bad at this that I wish to be haunted competently by a dead man in a mac with a glass eye.”
“Right!” He bellowed. “Bloody Falk! I’m off! I’m not staying to listen to this slanderous claptrap!” He rose into the air, billowing in rage. “Next time I’m not coming. Expect the blond guy.” And with that he disappeared into the ether.
Stave Five The blond guy was actually quite good, and taught me that avarice was probably really bad, and that I shouldn’t have shot that man in Nando’s.
Treatises of Gloria 