The Last Days of Jack Sparks Read online

  I might seem to shirk my journalistic duty by reading social media during an exorcism. But in the face of this amateur dramatics society play, social media provides a vital lifeline to the real world. Feeling a strong urge to connect, I fire a message into the ether:

  ‘Probably bad to laugh during the exorcism of a thirteen-year-old girl, right? Well, I just did. You should SEE this bullshit.’

  I consider attaching a photo of the exorcism in full swing, then ditch the idea. It might prompt Beard and Beardless to wrestle me to the floor while trying to confiscate my device. I could take them both on, no question, but just don’t need the bother.

  Di Stefano seems back on a roll, clutching a wooden rod with a perforated metal ball on the end. He emphasises certain bits of banter by using this device to fling droplets of something at Maria.

  ‘We drive you from us, whoever you may be . . .’

  Maria shrieks every time this stuff hits her. Oh yes, he’s bringing out the big guns now. Holy water! Another box ticked.

  ‘Unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders . . .’

  Maria shrieks again and bares her teeth. ‘Poor Maria,’ she growls. ‘In such pain, locked deep inside herself. She will die before we ever let her go.’

  ‘All wicked legions, assemblies and sects . . .’

  Maria twists in agony as this last triple whammy of water gets her right in the face. Interestingly, her skin reddens, as if scalded. Wonder how they did that. I should pay more attention.

  ‘Remember what a small boy once told you, about your nieces?’ Maria says. ‘He meant what he said. Believe it.’

  Di Stefano shoots a swift, meaningful glance my way, weirdly vindicated.

  It’s a great moment. Very clever. I do love a bit of continuity.

  Online, there are already over two hundred responses to my exorcism post. Most of these ask whether I’m really at an exorcism or where exactly it is taking place. Some say how scared they’d be to see an exorcism, while others laugh along with me. ‘Are they really still doing that stuff?’ says Domina22 from Cape Town. ‘It’s like science never happened.’

  Beard and Beardless hold Maria as firmly as they can, as the exorcism builds to a grand finale. Di Stefano dishes out his pious gems, louder and more forceful than ever. One thing’s for sure: if Maria Corvi isn’t giving the performance of her young life, she needs an MRI scanner right away. She froths at the mouth, her irises are nowhere to be seen and her neck appears to have stretched, which must be down to the angles again. Always working the angles, these guys.

  Finally she convulses, breaks free of the aides and falls to her knees. Then she regurgitates something red and unexpectedly solid, which hits the ground with an even less expected clang.

  Okay, they’ve upped their game. They’ve got me back. Yes, vomiting is yet another exorcism cliché, but I’m curious – why the clang? I crane my neck to see, but this brings no satisfaction, so I spring up, edge past Maddelena and head to the front. I am an audience member evading security and running to get a closer look during a Penn & Teller show.

  Beardless gestures for me to stay back, offering a clear challenge. Ignoring him, I strain to see what Maria’s thrown up. There’s blood, some kind of spongy matter . . . and pieces of metal that are hard to identify.

  ‘You will leave this poor girl,’ commands Di Stefano, ‘this child of Christ!’

  The teenager cackles, still on all fours. Strands of bloody drool connect her chin to the floor.

  ‘You will return to the foul depths whence you came. The power of Jesus Christ compels you!’

  The latter phrase may amuse me, but it rocks Maria. As if in response to this upping of the ante, she yells fiercely up at him: ‘Leave us be, Di Stefano! Or we will slaughter this bitch.’

  Her whole body spasms and her fingertips dig hard into the floorboards.

  I wince as one of her fingernails bends back, strains, snaps.

  Her head jerks back and a solid object explodes from her mouth in a torrent of red mist. This startling missile punches into Di Stefano’s left upper thigh and stays there, the end quivering. When he cries out and grabs at it, his own blood spritzes his hand.

  Mr Beard steps in between Maria and Di Stefano, as if intending to block further projectiles. Beardless rushes to support Di Stefano, who nevertheless topples backwards and crashes to the floor, banging his head.

  I’ve never seen anything with this kind of impact, even in the fiercely unpredictable world of gangs. It’s all so convincingly chaotic that my Truman Show theory falters.

  For now.

  Since we’re in the middle of nowhere, it takes half an hour for paramedics to arrive.

  During the wait, Beard and Beardless tend to Di Stefano as best they can. They lay him down along two pews pushed together to form an impromptu bed. He groans, rocks to and fro and mutters prayers in Italian. The aides rip and cut the robes around his wound to reveal a rusty six-inch nail jutting out of his pale, bony thigh. I examine it as closely as seems polite, but it certainly strikes me as real. No prosthetic special effects here.

  Interesting. So Di Stefano will go to any lengths to convince an infidel like me that Satan is real – even if it means taking a nail to the leg. Either that, or he and the Corvis actually aren’t in cahoots. If the latter is true, then Di Stefano was just doing his theatrical shtick with a disturbed teenager who swallows pieces of metal, and he has tumbled under the wheels of rough justice.

  I inspect the vomit on the floor. Oh, the glamour. There’s another nail there, like the one in Di Stefano’s leg, plus a piece of jagged, indistinct metal. When I go to touch the nail, Beardless barks something that will turn out to mean ‘Leave it alone!’ when I get the audio translated. Happily, Translator Tony is nowhere to be seen, so I feign ignorance while rolling the nail back and forth. It really is made of weighty metal.

  ‘Do not touch that!’ commands Beard. ‘This is now a police matter.’

  ‘No no no,’ says Di Stefano, through gritted teeth. ‘I will not press charges against a young girl who does not know what she is doing.’

  I suspect the old boy regrets having allowed a journalist to witness an exorcism. This one presumably hasn’t gone as smoothly as he’d hoped. How fortunate, then, that I signed the wrong name on the papers which would have granted Di Stefano copy approval. In case you don’t know, copy approval is when the interviewee gets to read the finished piece and object to certain bits and pieces, which are generally then pruned to suit them. This phenomenon happened to journalism a decade or two back, when some sackless editor caved in and agreed to give some big-shot celebrity that ridiculous power. It has been a blight on the profession ever since, along with other regular mandates such as PRs sitting in on interviews, and questions having to be approved in advance. And you wonder why I moved into books . . .

  Now that the show’s over, Maria has returned to her normal self. The whites of her eyes are white again and her neck appears the conventional length, although the redness on her face remains and that broken, bleeding fingernail looks painful. Sitting with her mother across the aisle, she looks frightened and bewildered, firing off questions in Italian. Maddelena fights back tears as she tries to answer those questions, while using a handkerchief to dab blood from around Maria’s mouth.

  Feeling the heat of Maddelena’s long, hard stare, I try to explain how I was laughing at the situation, rather than at her daughter. Without Tony present to do his job, the distinction doesn’t register. When I ask what her next move will be, she manages some English: ‘I don’t know. Maybe doctor.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I say. ‘It’s good to try all options.’

  I want to add, ‘Especially as, you know, your daughter’s just puked blood and metal,’ but surely that’s self-evident.

  ‘Signor,’ says Di Stefano from across the aisle. This sounds like a summoning, so I search for Tony. I find the work-shy bastard outside, standing on grass, gazing along the side of the church towards
the cliff edge, with cigarette smoke billowing from his nostrils. I’m telling you this part for a reason: Tony actually starts at the sight of me, confused and shaken, instinctively touching the small cross hanging around his neck. It reminds me how very powerful things like exorcisms can be to believers. He pulls himself together and follows me back in, tossing his cigarette aside.

  The Beard Brothers have staunched the priest’s bleeding as best they can, but he’s pallid. His aides whisper to him in Italian, presumably advising him to forget about the stupid journalist and conserve his strength. Yet the question on Di Stefano’s mind is too pressing to wait.

  ‘Why was the exorcism funny?’

  Those dead eyes burrow right into me.

  At this point, if I was a Louis Theroux or a Jon Ronson, I would nervously pop my spectacles back up onto the bridge of my nose and utter something evasive, most likely in the form of another question. (Eleanor: I know you and Murray don’t like me mentioning these guys in print, but I heard Ronson slagged me off on the radio last week. He didn’t mention me by name, but blatantly cast aspersions in my direction. And in the Fitzroy Tavern, one of Theroux’s flunkies couldn’t resist telling me all about Louis’ book sales and viewing figures and asking whether I’d landed myself a TV series yet. So as far as I’m concerned it’s open fucking season.) Instead, I tell Di Stefano I laughed because his exorcism struck me as a pantomime.

  Di Stefano absorbs these body blows with dignity, for a man stretched awkwardly across a pew in a torn dress, with a filthy piece of metal sticking out of him.

  ‘But I suppose that’s the way I see all religion,’ I add. ‘I’m an—’

  ‘Atheist,’ interrupts the priest. ‘Yes. I know about you. An atheist and a drug addict.’

  He groans and clutches his leg with one liver-spotted hand. I’m glad he’s in pain. Because I’m not a drug addict, whatever they told me every day in rehab. Much like religion, drug addiction is for the weak. Right here, right now, on this bright, chilly afternoon, I feel in control. I feel good. Great, even. Haven’t even thought about cocaine, my number one fix, in a long time.

  Beardless intently reads the small print on the packaging of some painkillers. He and Beard debate whether they can give Di Stefano more before the ambulance gets here.

  ‘At first,’ I tell Di Stefano, ‘I thought Maria was in on the deception.’ I glance at the nail and the wound. ‘But now, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well,’ says the priest, ‘then we have changed your mind in some way. But I assure you, there has been no deception here. The only deception is in your mind.’

  Sidestepping that odd, tit-for-tat playground comment, I say, ‘Seriously, mate, can’t you see she’s mentally ill?’

  Di Stefano’s selective deafness kicks in. ‘A word of warning,’ he says. His voice may be slighter now, having lost its boom, but nevertheless I wonder if he’s about to threaten me. ‘You can laugh at the Church, no problem. We are laughed at every day. But when you laugh at . . .’

  His eyes flit across the church.

  ‘At the Devil?’ I ask, raising my voice for Maria’s benefit as much as anyone else’s, hoping she and Maddelena will understand. ‘There’s no such thing as the Devil!’

  Di Stefano makes a kind of horse’s whinny. I think it’s supposed to mean I’m treading on thin ice with The Man Downstairs.

  Across the church, Maddelena stands alone. She must have been keenly eavesdropping on our conversation, because only now does she realise that Maria is no longer beside her. The woman’s hair flails as she scans the church.

  I frown my most irritating frown at Di Stefano. ‘Why would the Devil care? Isn’t his greatest trick supposed to be convincing the world he doesn’t exist?’

  ‘Maria?’ calls Maddelena. With one swipe of a curtain, she reveals an empty confession box.

  Di Stefano opens his mouth so Beardless can insert pills, then gulps them down with water. He tells me, slowly and deliberately, as if instructing a child, ‘That was a movie.’

  The priest has underestimated me in assuming I was paraphrasing cinematic dialogue as opposed to the Charles Baudelaire quote, but I’m impressed that he’s seen The Usual Suspects. It makes him seem more human when I imagine him lounging around in his underwear, throwing a DVD on the box. I resist the urge to ask which other cool nineties films he’s seen, like Reservoir Dogs, or Goodfellas (‘My exorcism is funny, huh? I amuse you, I make you laugh?’)

  Maddelena’s voice is smaller and without echo, suggesting that she’s outside. ‘Maria? Maria? Dove sei, la mia bambina?’

  I nod over at the stained-glass window that Maria looked at so pointedly during the exorcism. Its coloured glass panels collectively depict a glum Jesus Christ sitting on some rocks.

  ‘What is the meaning of that?’ I ask.

  ‘No more, no more,’ says Beard, making the universal gesture for ‘No more’ with his hands. ‘Move away.’

  Di Stefano glances irritably at the window.

  ‘It is Christ during his forty days in the wilderness,’ he says, sagging with relief at the approaching wail of an ambulance siren.

  * * *

  You’d think the paramedics’ arrival would end the madness here, but no. There will be one more burst, for my pleasure.

  Mother and daughter have been reunited. Maria, it transpires, only wanted some fresh air. Besides attending to Di Stefano’s obvious needs, the paramedics check the girl over and swab samples of that worryingly rust-infused blood from the church floor.

  Basically, everyone’s going to hospital except me and Translator Tony. I have to catch a flight back to London, which means Tony is no longer required. It’s a shame the fun has to end: I might derive perverse pleasure from spending time in a crowded ambulance with a Catholic priest, a nail-spitting teen and two lunkheads. Great material for another episode of Satan & I.

  While Di Stefano is being strapped on to a stretcher, I pull out my phone and walk around, fishing for reception.

  My post about laughing during an exorcism has caused a furore. I honestly hadn’t imagined that, in this day and age, chuckling in the Devil’s face would be so controversial. Of course, plenty of people support me, but at least as many spiritually minded folk object to my ‘arrogance’, ‘disrespect’ and ‘rudeness’. These are people with whom my good friend Richard Dawkins spars on a daily basis. The kind of people who believe the Earth is only six thousand years old. I feel like I’m getting a taste of Rich’s online life. I’ve sampled it before while posting about atheism, but never to this extent.

  ‘An exorcism can be a very dangerous thing, both for priest and exorcee!!! Shame on you!!!’ writes GodsAmy12 from Tucson, Arizona. Loving the word ‘exorcee’. Is that really a thing?

  ‘Your [sic] gonna be laughing on the other side of you’re [sic] face when you burn in hell!’ suggests the incongruously named TickleTumTina from Ipswich, Suffolk. Sorry for reposting your post, Tina! Hope you didn’t get too much grief from the rest of my 251,043 followers . . .

  ‘You are SO self-obsessed,’ offers TheRossotron in Tampa, Florida. ‘Not just laughing during an exorcism, but telling everyone. Why do we need to know? Is it impressive?’ I should point out that TheRossotron is following me. Presumably by choice.

  I learned a while back that it’s pointless to try and reason with individuals on the internet. Even if you do succeed in changing one person’s mind, ten more will spring up asking the same questions and making the same stupid points. When you have as many followers as I do, the whole thing becomes untenable. You may as well try to scoop up the sea, one cup at a time. I soon realised that addressing everyone collectively was the best use of my time and energy. As was following no more than fifteen people.

  It’s famously unwise to feed the trolls, but on this occasion the stream of abuse riles me. As I watch Di Stefano gruffly berate the paramedics who are trying to make him more comfortable, I see a stupid old man with way too much power over the ‘little people’. I see a man who,
just like most people who promote the supernatural, is trying to deceive others.

  I post a new missive: ‘Everyone, seriously. If the Devil, ghosts and ghouls existed, don’t you think they’d be all over YouTube by now? Where’s the EVIDENCE?’ Then I return to the ambulance to try and prise some final words from exorcist and, ahem, exorcee.

  It seems Father Primo Di Stefano, now in the back of the ambulance and impatient to be off, has nothing left to say. When asked to sum up how the exorcism went, he bats off an imaginary fly with one hand.

  ‘I did not expect it to be like this,’ is all a distressed Maddelena can manage, several times.

  Maria winces as a paramedic carefully bandages her forefinger. ‘I can’t remember anything that happened,’ she says, with more than a note of despair. ‘It is just like all the other things Mamma tells me I’ve done, at night. But this is the first time it’s happened during the day.’

  A shadow crosses Maddelena’s face – I think she just twigged that Di Stefano’s rite has only made her daughter worse.

  I’m concerned about Maria and can’t help myself. Screw journalistic impartiality: I implore – no, tell – Maddelena to take proper medical advice at the hospital. Hopefully, this time, my words sink in. I wish them well and head for my Alfa Romeo rental, keys jangling in hand.

  ‘Hey there,’ calls Maria, in English. ‘Hey, Jack Sparks.’

  Except her voice doesn’t come from the ambulance. It comes from the opposite direction. It comes from Translator Tony, who is approaching his own car. As if on cue, he spins around to face me, a dazed puppet, his centre of gravity awry.

  His mouth opens and continues to move as Maria’s voice comes out of him.

  ‘Enjoy your journey,’ he says. Or, rather, Maria says it. His mouth, but her voice. Tony looks as surprised as anyone else that a thirteen-year-old girl’s words just sprang out of him. Then his jaw drops again and Maria’s voice says: ‘I’ll be back in a few hours, okay?’ Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

  Back in the ambulance, Maria regains the power of speech and emits a childish giggle. She wears that same knowing smile she had during the exorcism, the one just after she looked at the window. The eyes are back jaundice-yellow.