by Phil Rickman
Shelley glanced at Martin, who shrugged.
'Martin's had a call from his housekeeper. She's apparently located Tom and has whisked him off somewhere. For a spot of ... shall we call it counselling?
Weasel said, 'That ... wossername? Morticia?'
Martin smiled. Shelley said, with half an eye on Vanessa, 'It's actually not that funny, Weasel. We don't know where they've gone. Also... Morticia is apparently fascinated by Tom in a ... a non-physical sense, if you know what I mean. If she was only after his body, everything would be so much simpler.'
Vanessa was expressionless. Shelley was pretty sure she wouldn't have understood any of this.
'He'll be back tomorrow,' she told the child. 'By the time you get home from school he'll be back. With a present, he tells me. Go on. Go and watch telly. I'll bring you some supper through on a tray. With Vienetta to follow, how about that?'
It cut no ice with Vanessa tonight. But she went through to the drawing-room. 'She's such a good kid,' Shelley said sadly
'Super kid,' Martin said.
'Yeah,' said Weasel dourly. 'Triffic. And she's in a real fucking state with all this shit.'
His face was thin and drawn, his hair a greasy pigtail in a rubber band.
'I don't believe this, Shel. Tom's gone off with this loony slag, and you're sitting around like the fucking Government debating the bleeding issue.'
Shelley bridled. 'You got any better ideas, Weasel?'
'Yeah. Gimme a day off, lemme take the van. And I'll find him.' He stared defiantly at Shelley and then at Martin Broadbank. 'I done it before, ain't I? I come out of stir and I gone on the road and I found him.'
What could she say? It was true. Weasel's devotion to Tom was legendary. But ...
'Yeah, I know,' Weasel said. 'It took me a few weeks. But I got here, di'n' I, in the end? And I'm smarter now. And I got better reason.'
He looked towards the door, where Vanessa had gone.
Shelley said wearily, 'Sure. Take the van.'
Simon stumbled back alone along the valley bottom with no light but the sliver of moon. He followed the single-track road, the sound of the thin river to his left and owls all around.
He'd refused a lift from Sile Copesake, could hardly bring himself to speak to the bastard.
It was cold, the tarmac shining with a breath of night frost, bare trees making stiff silhouettes along the hedge between the road and the river.
A set-up.
A record-company scam to lure Tom Storey out of hiding, bring him safe into the bosom of his old band. The target could only be Tom; where was the kudos - apart from the element of humour - in signing a neurotic clergyman, a half-crazed club comic and a now-obscure Scottish folk singer?
Poor bloody Storey. Simon had had a couple of Christmas cards from Shelley, trying to sound lively but the gloom seeping through.
We have the tapes, Sile had said.
God forbid!
Fascinating stuff. We could release it. Throw in a couple of spare cuts from the first album to make up the set. But I don't think you guys would be happy, somehow.
Sile Copesake, this sixty-year-old man in his element, wiry, athletic. Delightedly flicking switches, spinning tape, until some brittle acoustic guitar chords started to sidle edgily out of the speakers, underpinned by a hard, spiky bass.
And then the plaintive, razored, nasal voice of John Lennon ...
Don't know what you got here
But it sure ain't a song
Sounds like Patience Strong
On a bad day ...
Only it wasn't John Lennon; it was Dave Reilly, and Simon himself on bass, and he hadn't thought about it in years.
You can't put that out!
Never entered my head to, Simon. I'm very sorry, I didn't intend to play you that one, I was going to give you Aelwyn. Remember him?
Don't bother.
Sile had cut the sound.
Simon, listen, this is a good studio with a unique location. It was my baby. I brought Goff here in seventy-nine, he fell in love; didn't need persuading to buy the place. He'd got this new band that was going to put the Abbey on the map just like Mike Oldfield did with the Manor. Only better, because ...
Because the band were destined to become part of the Abbey's bloody cement?
Sile had smiled.
If that was Goff's idea, it didn't exactly work, did it? After what happened, nobody wanted to work here. It was an unlucky studio. Unlucky for Epidemic and unlucky for the Abbey. Wasn't even making it as a tourist attraction. The curse of Aelwyn Breadwinner.
Sile had switched off the studio, leaving a couple of concealed
lights on.
Goff was a New Age man. All ley-lines and healing powers. He didn't believe in negatives. This was holy ground, and if s ours now. TMM's. My baby again. I went out on a limb, persuaded the Board to refurbish it. Just like it was. State of the art, 1980. Same gear, most of it.
The vans that Eddie Edwards had seen. The vans which went to the Abbey and did not come back for hours.
It must have been done in a hell of a hurry.
So we're saying, come back. Finish what you began. Face the curse. What have you got to lose?
Sile Copesake's dry, Yorkshire rasp. So arrogant. How dare he?
You came back, already, Simon. You were drawn to this place. I was amazed when they told me. And delighted, of course. Gets you, this area, doesn't it? You have to come back.
Who told you?
People I know in the area, from way back. You've been carrying some bad luck and you came back to come to terms with something. I'm not going to ask you what that is, I'm just asking you to come back and play, for one week, maximum. Fit it in with your parish duties or take a holiday, it's up to you, but there's money in it, for what that matters.
When?
Soon as you like. The, er, eighth of December is next Thursday.
Piss off.
And Simon, clutching his head in his hands, blinded by images of crunched cars blazing in the night, dirty brown candles, a wheelchair crashing in pieces to the frozen earth, had raised his foot and slammed it flat against the plate glass door of one of the new shiny, new recording booths, watching it shatter around his ankle, the sound exquisitely trapped in the taut studio ambience.
Piss off.
When he walked into Ystrad Ddu he was thinking, why did you do that? This is why you came back; to face the demons, to cleanse yourself, to maybe cleanse the Abbey. To find out why.
But was this the way? He'd thought it was a summons from God, flashed down from the Skirrid, and it had turned out to be commercial enterprise, a sleazy record company's bid to turn over another million.
He thought of his latest despicable dream: hurling aside the stricken woman in her wheelchair to crawl towards the black-robed monk's cock. The rejection of the spiritual to quench the body's base cravings.
Celibacy. Crap. A delusion.
Because you could never cage the mind.
He was sweating when he passed the chest-high, mud-splashed, moon-fingered Ystrad Ddu sign, primitively grateful to be back in Ystrad, where the cottage lights were coloured by curtains and the smells of woodsmoke and coalsmoke drifted out to claim him.
Welcome back, vicar.
The village never felt more hospitable than at night when it seemed to draw itself under the sheltering rock, and a beery haze formed around the Dragon Inn. This was the real heart of it, not the plain, towerless church. Everyone had been friendly enough the few times Simon had gone into the Dragon, as if they were saying: when you're here, you're part of us. But you take the road along the valley bottom at your own risk, Vicar.
Once again, he stood aghast at the thought that he, a feeble deviant with a public school gloss, was supposed to be this community's official spiritual adviser, God's sales-rep in Ystrad Ddu.
It was never quite funny.
Feeling too damned emotional to cry, Simon stumbled over the boundary inside which a narrow country l
ane became an even narrower village street, stone walls replacing the spiky, leafless hedgerows.
Under the first of Ystrad's three blueish streetlamps, metal gleamed. His path was blocked by something as uncompromising as a small tank.
'Fancy one of these, Vicar?' Isabel Pugh sat in her chair at the road's edge, holding something out towards him, like a carrot for a donkey.
It was stubby and brown and she held it very still.
It reminded him at once of the monk's cock, and he almost retched.
'Go on. Take it.'
He shrank away, but the wheelchair rolled inexorably towards him and her hand came up, and the smell reached him, butcher's shop ripe.
'Uuuurgh!'
Shrinking as the malformed, earwax-brown candle hit his cheek and slid down his front, leaving, he was convinced, a slimy trail like a black slug. In his head, the scraping of the wheelchair over the edge of the tower, the canteen-of-cutlery clash of metal on frozen earth and toppled stones.
'Please,' Simon whispered. The candle dropped, as if reluctant to leave him, to the glistening road and began to roll away, making a hard, wobbling sound.
'Please?' Isabel Pugh's face looked cold and angry under the streetlamp. 'You've got a bloody nerve, you have. Want to talk and then' you want nothing to do with me, and these evil things sprouting on our altar.'
Simon threw his head back, wolflike, and screamed aloud at the shrivelled moon. 'Oh God!'
'You can come into the house,' Isabel Pugh snapped. 'Or not. As you please.'
With a whine of the motor, she turned her chair abruptly around and rattled over the cobbles to the cottage door.
XI
Flying
The stove doors were open, revealing orange coals and a single skeletal log in a nest of white-hot ash. The bottle of Southern Comfort was among the papers on the trestle table, down to its last quarter.
She nodded at the bottle. 'Finish it with me?'
'Your mother?'
'Whist drive,' Isabel said dismissively. 'Be away a couple of hours. Sit down. Vicar, warm yourself. Always wet and starved, you are, when you come here.'
'Vicar? What happened to Simon?'
'What indeed?' said Isabel, surveying him through narrowed eyes, her chained glasses magnifying a cluster of freckles on her nose. She'd pulled off her cyclist's cape to reveal a blue silk top, provocatively tied with a drawcord across her breasts.
It was as warm as ever in the living-room, but there were blueing goose-pimples on her arms. She was clearly very frightened and determined not to show it.
Making two of them.
'Eddie Edwards, he thinks he's gone bananas.' Words coming out in a breathless hurry. 'We had a senior policeman in the church. Funny bloke. He's still around. You go back home now, he'll nab you sure as ...'
'Police?"
'Detective Superintendent somebody-or-other Jones. Waiting for you, he is. Crafty-looking devil. About the candles, Simon. He's here about the candles.'
To cover his reaction, Simon went swiftly into the kitchen, got himself a tumbler, brought it back, sat across the table from Isabel.
The candles? Police?
His wrist was still unsteady as he tilted the Southern Comfort bottle, spilling some.
'Human grease,' Isabel said suddenly, almost shrilly, and he swallowed half his drink and didn't even notice the sweetness of it. 'Can ... Candles made from human fat.'
Stiffly upright in her wheelchair.
'But you knew that, didn't you?'
Fumbling her glasses straight, leaning forward and peering intently into his eyes.
Which were frozen in shock, the words human fat sitting on his senses. He couldn't speak.
'No,' she said. 'I don't think you knew that after all. Human fat. There's intriguing, isn't it?'
Simon blinked helplessly, feeling again the warm, slick, misshapen things, the grease on his fingers afterwards. Feeling an overwhelming desire for the hollow, solitary emptiness of prayer.
Isabel lowered her glasses, said more calmly, 'Eddie sent one away to a mate of his at Swansea University, who threatened to shop him to the police if he didn't report it. He tried to find you, to warn you, but you weren't there, weren't in. If you're going to be sick, Simon, the toilet's on the left through the kitchen. All us cripples have them to hand.'
It occurred to Simon to go to the lavatory and slip quietly away. To go where? Back to the new vicarage to sleep under blankets in the armchair with the Good Book across his knees?
Isabel smiled, with difficulty. 'You've got nowhere to run, Mister priest. You go home, you'd better have a good story because he didn't believe Eddie's, that copper. Or you could go to Eddie's house if you want to watch the poor old bugger crawling up the walls screaming, "No, no, it couldn't have happened," and "Oh, Lord, I'm going out of my mind.'"
'I don't understand.'
'Oh, poor dab, he doesn't understand.' There was a quiver in the last word and she bit down on it. 'Well, let me try and explain it to you, best I can. When I arrived at the church tonight, there were these two ugly little brown candles in the holders on the altar ...'
Simon shook his head, not wanting to believe this - that he didn't even have to be there any more for the candles to ...
'... that Eddie swears blind were not there when he came in with this policeman about twenty minutes before. And one was, you know, smoking. As if it had quite recently been .. . blown ... out-'
'No,' he said uselessly.
'And I ...' She stopped, leaned back, coughed and swallowed. ' ... I have never seen a grown man in such a state of terror, squealing that we had to get them out of the way before the copper saw them. But too scared to go near the things, he was, so I had to ... take them.'
Simon said, croaked, 'Where's the other?"
'Tossed one over the hedge,' she said rapidly. 'And the other, of course, at you.'
There were glaring tears of fear and disgust in her eyes. Her hands gripped the padded chair arms. 'I can't talk any more. Make like a bloody priest, Simon, for Christ's sake, comfort me.'
She dragged three Kleenex from a box on the table, mopped her eyes. Hesitantly, he went and knelt by her chair, picked up her left hand. It was soft and warm with sweat, but there were still goose-pimples among the fine down on her bare arms. Her body began to shake and she snatched her hand away from him and wailed.
'Is that it...?' Cheeks streaked with mascara. 'Simon, my legs might be written off, I might not be able to feel my fanny, except in my fevered imagination, but I'm not a bloody porcelain doll, I'm not fragile. And I don't care if you are a fucking queer; just hold me, can't you?'
But he was afraid to touch her, knowing this wasn't only the candles, that cheap, cosmic conjuring trick. He brought an arm awkwardly around the back of the chair, meaning to squeeze her shoulder, but she lifted her left arm and trapped his hand under it and against a breast.
'Simon.'
'Don't do this,' he said. 'I'm the fucking vicar.'
With her right hand, she clasped his fingers tightly over her breast.
'Simon, will you do something for me? Take me back to the Abbey.'
Where he knelt, the open stove was pumping heat into his back. It felt like the doors of hell had opened.
'You're joking.' His mouth was dry.
'I have these dreams. Recurring dreams. Listen, you must know this isn't bullshit. It took away my feelings, that place, that Abbey. It took away ...'
She gulped at her drink, held on to the glass and, weighing her words, said, 'It took away a young, passionate girl, and threw out a crabby spinster. No, listen!'
'I don't want to.' He'd closed his eyes tight, as if that could seal off the sound of her voice. 'I don't want to know this.'
'I was flying, Simon, that night. Higher than I ever thought you could fly. I can feel it now, I can feel it in places where there isn't any feeling.'
Her breast swelling against his hand. Making him embarrassed, ashamed, confused. Excited. A littl
e. Flesh was flesh.
'All night, when I was lying there under the rubble, I wasn't, see. I was flying. Not all the time, some of the time I was asleep, but other times I was awake and flying. Hallucination, they said. But I know I was flying, and the part of me that can fly, see ... it's still there. I have recurring dreams. I go back there. Go back. For the healing.'
In his head, the scraping of the chair on the stone, the flurry of air, the clash of metal and stone, metal and stone, metal and ...
'No, please ...' Simon dragged his hand away from her breast, came violently to his feet, harsh tears like acid in his eyes. 'I won't take you there.'
Isabel was rocking in her wheelchair.
'Why not? WHY NOT, YOU BASTARD?'
And threw the chair into electric motion, crashing her useless legs into the trestles of the table, reversing, sending the chair whining across the carpet at Simon.
'WHY NOT, YOU CREEPY LITTLE QUEER?'
The wheelchair's footplate bit into his ankles and he was thrown across her, his arms around her neck, his face on hers, a mingling of desperate tears.
'All I knew was,' Tom said, 'if that session wasn't busted up, and fast, somebody was gonna die.'
After barely an hour's sleep he'd started talking, lying there on his back. I could be asleep, Meryl thought, and he'd still have to talk.
'You can't say how you know these fings, but I fink it was gonna be Moira. Would've been Dave, but Dave pissed off first, got the shakes, so Moira was in the frame. All down to this Aelwyn geezer. When he died, Dave was gonna die. How? Maybe he'd beat his head on the stone wall, who can say. Maybe one of us ... don't bear finking about, none of it.'
And he was only thinking about it now, Meryl thought, because he was here, in this temporary place. He wouldn't let it pollute his home, threaten Shelley or Vanessa.
'Somebody had to be in the frame. Some bastard had to go. We'd done it all wrong, we'd screwed it, we was letting it dictate the terms.'
'It?' Meryl said softly. 'What was "it"?'
Tom's big hand roamed her midriff, fingertips like pumice-stone.