Dead Men's s Boots

Most of the time they come back as a visual echo of their former selves, without substance, mass or weight, and then we call them ghosts. Sometimes they burrow back into their own dead flesh and make it move: then we call them zombies. Occasionally they invade an animal body, subdue the host mind by force majeure and redecorate the flesh and bone so it looks more like what they used to remember seeing in the mirror. Then we call them werewolves or loup-garous, and if we’re smart we keep the fuck out of their way.

But here’s the wonderful thing: for all the revenants’ many forms, there were people like me who shouldered the live man’s burden and came out fighting with the skill and the will to knock them back again.

The exorcists. Probably we’d always been there too – a latent tendency in the human gene pool, as I’d said to Louise, waiting for its time to shine. Whatever it is that we do, it’s got sod-all to do with sanctity or holy writ: it’s just an innate ability, expressing itself through the other abilities that we pick up as we go through life. If you’re good with words, then you’ll bind the dead with some kind of incantation: if you’re an artist, you’ll use sketches and sigilhey„s. I met a gambler a while back – nice guy named Dennis Peace – who did it with card tricks.

And with me, it’s music.

I always had a good ear as a kid, but I never had the patience or the concentration to survive formal lessons. This was in Walton, Liverpool, you understand – and although the image of the godforsaken North that persists down here in the Smoke is a bit of a caricature, the mean streets I walked down would have been a damn sight meaner if I’d been walking down them with, say, a cello.

In the end I picked up the tin whistle because I found I could knock out a tune on it without really having to know what I was doing. Most of the little musical knowledge I’ve got I picked up along the way, either by jamming with better musicians or by not being ashamed to ask stupid questions whenever I was with someone who might be able to answer them.

I learned to read music by watching a TV programme aimed at six-year-olds, painstakingly practising exercises set for me by a smiling animated treble clef.

And along the way, after discovering to my bitter chagrin that you couldn’t play tin whistle in a rock band, I stumbled across one application for music that I’d never dreamed of.

My first exorcism, though, didn’t involve any instrument except my own voice.