The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  A woman and a girl. They were standing on the bank, in full sun, and Danny Thomas could see them clearly, and they weren’t exactly what he’d been expecting.

  ‘How’re you?’ he said mildly. Was he a bit disappointed because they were so ordinary-looking, both in light-coloured tops and jeans and trainers? Because they wasn’t wild-haired creatures with tattoos and chains and rings in their lips?

  ‘Oh hell.’ The woman scrambled down. ‘I suppose we’re trespassing.’

  Danny shrugged.

  ‘It was late,’ the woman said, ‘and we were exhausted. I’m sorry.’

  Danny said, ‘Where’d the other one go?’

  The woman blinked, shook out her dark brown hair. The girl came down and joined her, sticking close like Flag, the sheepdog, had with Jeremy. The girl looked about fourteen.

  ‘Minibus?’ Danny said. ‘Pentagram on the side?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, right.’ The woman had an English accent. ‘They’ve gone. They left early. What happened, we met them last night – a girl and two guys. We both pulled into this garage forecourt, only it was closed, and we were nearly out of fuel and it was getting dark and I’m like, Oh Christ, what are we going to do if they’re all closed? I mean, obviously I don’t know this area too well, and I couldn’t think of anywhere to stop for the night. Then this girl in the bus says, “Oh, we’ve been round here loads of times, we can show you a good campsite.” And that’s how we...’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, it was dark and I— We didn’t light a fire or anything. We wouldn’t do anything like that. Is this your farm? Can I pay you?’

  Danny became aware of Jeremy Berrows up on the bank.

  Danny said. ‘It’s his farm, it is.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He watched the woman approaching Jeremy. She was very thin and her bare arms were tanned. She was real sexy, in fact, in a more managed way, like a rock chick of the old school.

  ‘Hi, I’m, er... I’m Nat,’ she said. ‘Natalie. That’s Clancy.’

  The girl nodded and said nothing.

  Jeremy didn’t move at all, but he wasn’t still either. He was so much a part of this land that he seemed suspended in the air currents, and his sparse, fluffy hair was dusted by the sun. When the woman moved towards Jeremy, leaving the girl by the van, Danny would swear he saw a hell of a shiver go through the boy, as if there was a sudden stiff breeze, come out of nowhere, that no one else could feel.

  Danny felt an apprehension.

  For over a week, the blue van stayed in the bottom field.

  Then it wasn’t there any more.

  About a month after this, Gwilym Bufton, the feed dealer and gossipy bastard from Hundred House, told Danny Thomas that he’d seen a blue van parked up in Jeremy Berrows’s yard, hidden behind the old dairy. Like it was meant to be hidden.

  By September, people were starting to talk.

  In October, Danny saw Jeremy Berrows one lunchtime in the Eagle at New Radnor, sitting at a table in the shadows with the woman with dark brown hair. Jeremy nodded and said, ‘How’re you?’ in a nervous kind of voice, and Danny didn’t push it. The woman smiled at Danny, and it was a nice smile, no question, and she was a lovely-looking woman, no question about that either, but her eyes were watchful. Danny supposed he could understand that, the way people were talking.

  Next thing he heard about the van was that it had been sold – bit of irony here – to the naturalists working up at Stanner, to use as a mobile site HQ and for overnight accommodation. Serious burning of boats here, in Danny’s view. Then he hears the woman’s gone to work for the latest London fantasists to take over the ruinous Stanner Hall Hotel. Manager, no less.

  A few days later, Greta said, when they were watching telly, during the adverts, ‘Rhoda Morson – you know, Mary’s mother? Well, I was talking to her, in the paper shop, see, and her says, “Oh, he’s just doing it to make Mary jealous.” ’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Her. Well, Rhoda Morson was mad as hell, sure t’ be, when Mary blew it with Jeremy and lost the farm. Getting his own back now, that’s what she reckons. Rubbing it in.’

  ‘That’s what her reckons, is it?’ Danny said. Lost the farm. Bloody hell, it was all they ever thought about – bringing another bloody farm into the family. Where was love in the equation, or was that a sixties thing?

  Greta looked at him, thoughtful. ‘You could find out.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘How permanent it is.’

  ‘Why’d I wanner do that? En’t my affair.’

  ‘Ah, but is it?’ Greta said. ‘Is it just an affair? Or has that tart got her big feet firmly under the table? The girl’s going to school over at Moorfield now, ’cording to Lynne in the hairdresser’s. Now that’s got the ring of permanent about it, isn’t it?’

  Danny yawned and watched a car commercial he liked because it had a soundtrack of ‘Travellin’ in Style’ by Free. He’d never had an actual car, only second-hand trucks. He didn’t mention to Greta about the van being sold; if she hadn’t heard, he wasn’t going to give her more gossip to spread across the valley.

  ‘You knows Jeremy Berrows better than most,’ she said. ‘You could find out.’

  ‘I prob’ly could, Gret,’ Danny said. ‘If I gave a shit.’

  And the matter was never raised again, because that was the night of the terrible fire that wrecked Gomer Parry’s plant-hire depot down the valley, killing Gomer’s nephew, Fat Nev. Bit of a shock for everybody in Radnor Valley, that was, and Danny spent a lot of time helping poor old Gomer salvage what could be salvaged and restore what could be restored. Rebuilding the perimeter fence to keep out the scavengers and dealing with the particular area of the site that he realized Gomer couldn’t bear to go near.

  And out of the blackened ruins of Gomer’s business came the glimmering of a new future for Danny. It wasn’t, admittedly, the career in music he’d always dreamed of, but it would mean whole days out of the valley. New places, new people. And he was a good ole boy, Gomer Parry.

  For a while, Danny Thomas was so excited that, like the great David Crosby, he almost cut his hair.

  He never saw much of Jeremy Berrows again until the winter, when the trees were all rusty and the skulls of Stanner Rocks gleamed with damp like cold sweat, and the traditional stability of the border country was very much called into question.

  Traditional stability: that was a bloody joke.

  Part One

  It occurred to a man who was cycling home to Kington late at night – he’d been working at the munitions factory during the War. Near Hergest Court he saw this enormous hound which he’d never seen before and never saw again. The hound had huge eyes – that’s what impressed him most, the size of its eyes. The hound didn’t attack him, and he just kept cycling and I would imagine he cycled very fast. He had a feeling that there was something that just wasn’t real about it.

  Bob Jenkins, journalist, Kington

  1

  Without the Song

  NORMALLY, SHE WOULDN’T think of fogging the air around non-smoking parishioners, especially so soon after a service. Tonight was different. Tonight, Merrily needed not only this cigarette but what it was saying about her.

  The cigarette said, This woman is human. This woman is weak. Also, given the alleged findings on secondary smoking, this woman is selfish and inconsiderate. This is a serial sinner.

  Only it wasn’t getting through. Brenda Prosser’s eyes were glowing almost golden now. Twice she’d tried to sit down at the kitchen table and been pushed back to her feet by the electricity inside her. She had to hold on to the back of the chair to stop her hands trembling, and then the joy would make her mouth go slack and she’d shake her head, smiling helplessly.

  ‘Gone.’ Maybe the fourth time she’d said that – Brenda relishing the hard finality in the word: gone, gone, gone.

  ‘Just like it never was there, vicar,’ Big Jim Prosser said. His light grey suit was soaked and blackened across the shoulders. He stood wit
h his back to the old Aga in the vicarage kitchen, and the Aga rumbled sourly.

  And Merrily smoked and wondered how she should be responding. But the inner screen was blank. Just like Ann-Marie’s scan.

  ‘This is a miracle, sure t’be,’ Jim said.

  Oh Christ. Any word but that.

  ‘And, see, like I kept saying to Jim, hardly the first one, is it?’ Rain was still bubbled on Brenda’s forehead like the remains of a born-again baptism. ‘Not the first since you brought back the Evensong.’

  ‘Without the song.’ Merrily sat down, then abruptly stood up again and went to fill the kettle for tea. A dense curtain of rain swished across the dark window over the sink, as though it had been hosed.

  They could have waited for her in the church porch, Brenda and Jim. But when the congregation was filing out, umbrellas going up, there they’d been, standing among the wet tombs and the headstones, both of them bareheaded, as though they were unaware of the sometimes-sleety rain. Like they were in some parallel dimension where it wasn’t cold and it wasn’t raining at all.

  The truth was, Jim had said, as they followed Merrily to the vicarage, that they didn’t want to talk to anyone else, didn’t want to answer all the obvious questions about Ann-Marie. They thought it was only right that the vicar should be the first to know.

  This was the first time that either Jim or Brenda had been to the Sunday evening service. They’d been among those older parishioners who were huffily avoiding it because they’d heard it was all changed, had become a bit unconventional, a bit not for the likes of us.

  ‘I pray we’ll be forgiven for ever doubting what you were trying to do, Merrily,’ Brenda said now.

  So much for the experiment in Mystery.

  Evensong.

  As in most parishes, the Sunday evening service had been killed a while ago, by falling congregations.

  And then Merrily had suddenly brought it back. Sunday evening in the church. Everyone welcome. Just that. Nothing about a service.

  The truth was that, after what had happened with Jenny Box, she’d been feeling guilty. Deliverance work had been separating her too often from her own parish, from the day-to-day cure of souls. She’d been too busy to notice the anomalous buds in the local flower bed until they were bursting into black blossom.

  When she’d put this to the Bishop, he’d waved it away. Congregations were in free fall; it was a phase. Or it wasn’t a phase, but something truly sinister – the beginning of the end for organized Christianity. What about children? the Bishop asked; the new Archbishop of Canterbury was particularly worried about the absence of children in churches. Merrily had raised this issue with Jane, who seemed to have been a child like yesterday, and Jane had wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Who needs kids in church, anyway? Look at it this way – kids are not supposed to drink in pubs until they’re eighteen, so pubs are slightly mysterious... therefore cool. So like, obviously, the best way to invest in the future would be to ban the little sods from the church altogether. That way, they wouldn’t turn out like me.’

  ‘So the monthly Family Service, with kids doing readings, the quiz...’

  ‘Totally crap idea, I always said that. It just makes the Church look needy and pathetic. You have to cultivate the mystery. If you don’t bring back the mystery, you’re stuffed, Mum.’

  It was worrying: increasingly these days the kid was making a disturbing kind of sense.

  OK, then. When she brought back the service, she didn’t call it Evensong because there was no song. No hymns, no psalms. And no sermon, definitely no preaching. It was an experiment with Mystery.

  She didn’t even call it a service. She didn’t wear the kit – no cassock, not even a dog collar after the first time – and she sat on a car cushion on the chancel steps. The heating, for what it was worth, would be on full, and pews were pulled out and angled into a semi-circle haloed by a wooden standard lamp that she’d liberated from the vestry. It was a quiet time, a low-key prelude to the working week. The first time, only four people had turned up, which partly dictated the form. Five weeks later, it was a congregation of around twenty, and growing, although congregation was hardly the word.

  It would begin with tea and coffee and chat, turning into a discussion of people’s problems. Sometimes solutions were arrived at before the villagers went home. Small difficulties sorted: babysitters found, gardeners for old people. Sometimes it would quietly feed notions into the village, and issues would be resolved during the following week.

  The church as forum, the church as catalyst. The polish-scented air as balm. How it should be.

  And the Mystery.

  As early as the third week, more personal issues had started to emerge. The ones you wouldn’t hear discussed on the street, certainly not by the people involved: marital problems, anxieties over illness and fears over kids and what they might be getting into. There was a surprising focus to these discussions, and when prayer came into it – as it usually did, in the end – it would happen spontaneously, rising like a ground mist in the nave.

  Real prayer... and somehow this was a seal of confidentiality. None of the problems raised in the church and distilled into prayer had ever drifted back to Merrily as gossip.

  She was elated. It had been cooking. What she didn’t need at this stage was anything boiling over into myth-making.

  Jim and Brenda Prosser ran the Eight till Late in the centre of the village. Their daughter, Ann-Marie, who last summer had been painlessly divorced, had moved into the flat over the shop, helping out there at weekends before going off clubbing in Hereford, with her mates. Ann-Marie’s illness had been a rumour for some weeks. Pasted-on smiles at the checkout, whispers about tests. On a Sunday night two weeks ago, Alice Meek, who had the fish and chip shop in Old Barn Lane, had said, Brenda won’t talk about it, but it don’t look good. En’t there nothing we can do?

  ‘Alice,’ Brenda said now. ‘You know what Alice is like.’

  ‘Calls a spade a bloody ole shovel,’ Jim said.

  ‘We met Alice when we were coming back from Dr Kent’s house this afternoon, and she seemed to know.’

  ‘Only by your face, love,’ Jim said with affection.

  The kettle began to hiss, and Merrily put tea in the pot. Brenda sat down at last. She was in her early sixties, had lost weight recently – no surprise there – and her bleach-blonde hair was fading back to white. Periodically, a hand trembled. Brenda folded both of them in her lap and stared across the refectory table at Merrily, like she was seeing the vicar in a strange new light.

  ‘Alice told us about the special prayers you had for Ann-Marie.’

  ‘Well, not—’ Merrily looked down at the table top. Of course it was special; all prayer should be special.

  ‘Alice said she lost track of time. She said she felt as if everybody there was together. United, you know? And that was also some of the newcomers she didn’t know. All united and they were part of something that was... bigger. Said she’d never known anything like that before. Alice said.’

  Emotion had brought up the Welshness in Brenda’s voice. The Prossers had moved across from Brecon about fifteen years ago. Merrily felt flushed and uncertain. Happy, of course – happy for the Prossers and Ann-Marie. It was luminously wonderful, and she’d been conscious of reaching an unexpected level of conscious worship, but...

  ‘What did Dr Kent say exactly?’

  ‘He phoned for Ann-Marie just after lunch,’ Jim said. ‘He admitted he’d known since Friday, but he was afraid to say in case it was wrong. In case they’d somehow got the wrong medical records or whatever. He said he didn’t think it was possible the new tests had drawn a blank, couldn’t like get his head around it. So he was trying to get the consultant on the phone all of yesterday, and it wasn’t until this morning, see, when he managed to reach him at his home. Couldn’t believe it. Neither of them.’

  ‘He definitely confirmed that the scan was...’

  ‘Clear. Nothing there. And it
was hers, no question of that. No mistake here, Merrily.’

  ‘What did the consultant say about it?’

  Jim shrugged. ‘You know these fellers.’

  ‘Maybe they...’ Merrily bit her lip. Made a mistake the first time.

  ‘See, to be frank, Merrily, I’ve never been what you’d call a real churchgoer,’ Jim said. ‘I’m a local shopkeeper, struggling to stay in business. Sometimes I’ve come because it seemed to be expected.’

  Brenda sat up. ‘Jim!’

  ‘No, let me say this. I want to. It’s like being a social drinker. I was a... how would you put it?’

  ‘Social worshipper?’ Merrily smiled. ‘That’s perilously close to martyrdom, Jim.’

  ‘What I’m trying to say...’ He’d reddened at last. ‘Well, if this isn’t a bloody miracle, Merrily, I wouldn’t recognize one, that’s all.’

  Merrily tried to hold the smile. ‘Big word.’

  Brenda said quickly, ‘Alice said you also prayed for Percy Joyce’s arthritis and—’

  ‘Yes, but that—’

  ‘And now he’s come off the steroids. You’re healing people, Merrily.’

  The words echoed once, clearly in her head as the kettle began to scream and shake, and the kitchen lights seemed too bright.

  ‘I...’ Merrily ground her cigarette into the ashtray, twisting it from side to side. ‘Sometimes, God heals people.’

  Sometimes. It was a crucial word, because most times people were not healed.

  Big Jim said gently, ‘We understands that. But He do need asking the right way, don’t He? What I’m saying, Merrily... something happened during that service, to concentrate people’s minds on it. Something a bit powerful, sort of thing. It’s a new kind of service, and you’re a new kind of vicar. Not what we was used to. Alice is telling—’

  Everybody, probably.

  ‘Where’s Ann-Marie now?’

  Brenda smiled. ‘In the pub, I expect, with her friends. She’ll be coming to thank you, have no doubts about—’