Patrick

Fitz-

gerald,

an Gerald

Fitz-

patrick,

ha ha, fucking fruit merchants.

*

A week later we meet up at the shop, after hours, and Wee Robin locks the door and gets one of her joss sticks going and we dim the lights and everybody sits round the table in a circle

if any cunt can jimmy the gates of heaven, it’s that wee bastard Tommy, Barney says to us. Shoosh, Wee Robin says to him, we’re trying to get the atmosphere going here. We put our hands on the table so as our fingers are touching. Miracle Baby closes his eyes but I keep mine open. I’m watching everything in the room and I’m looking for signs. But nothing happens. You can hear the traffic outside. People coming and going in the street. I look at Miracle Baby and at first I’m like, for fuck sake, no way, he’s got the ectoplasm coming out his neb, but then as I realise it’s probably just snot, he opens his eyes, and he says to us: he’s here. Tommy’s here, he says.

Everybody looks around them. Not here, Miracle Baby says: here. And he points to the table in front of us where we’ve got one of they Weegie boards set up. He’s trying to communicate, Miracle Baby says. You can break the circle now, he says. I thought you were never supposed to break the circle but I do as I’m told cause we’re in the spirit world here, after all.

Okay, Miracle Baby says, everybody put a finger on the speller. Then let him talk. We put our fingers on this heart-shaped wooden speller. And the blasted thing starts moving. And it’s not as if anybody is pushing it. It’s more like it’s hovering, like it’s floating back and forth, across the letters, though unfortunately it’s just talking rubbish and nonsense words and making no sense whatsoever. Ah, we’re bollocksed, Barney says, this is pathetic, so it is. Wait, Beavis commands him. He’s sitting there with his curly hair and his wee round glasses on and he’s starting to take charge. You don’t understand the spirit world, he says to us. You have no experience of travel in alternate dimensions, he says. Youse need to give it time. The recently deceased are unused to walking in the ways of the spirit. That’s what he says to us. Imagine your own first primitive attempts at speech, he says to us. Let the words form, in time.

We settle back down. Everybody is silent. Watching the speller move this way and that. Everybody is silenced. As it stops. And it starts again.

>:- w-h-i-t-a-b-o-o-t-y-e -:<

Barney laughs. That’s fucking Tommy alright, he says, and he still can’t spell to save his fucking life.

Tell him we’re grand, I says. Answer him. Sure, we’re grand, Miracle Baby says to him. How are you?

>:- g-r-a-n-t-i-d -:<