by Phil Rickman
‘It was mainly me,’ said Barry Ambrose, the worried vicar from Wiltshire. ‘I half-believed her, but I think I’d have wanted to go back and talk to her again.’
‘Yes.’ Huw closed the door of the room. ‘That was what they did. It was a rector in Northampton. He felt bad about them recording the first interview on tape for the likes of us, and just giving her a token prayer, so he went back to talk to her in private.’
Merrily felt a tension in the room.
‘Sorry, Huw.’ Charlie held up his hands, something ribboning and rustling there, and glistening in the lamplight. ‘Don’t know what happened here.’
Holding up the video cassette. About four yards of tape had become unravelled.
‘Screen went blank. Ejected the tape, and the damn thing was on fire. Had to rip it out and stamp on it. Extraordinary thing. Wasn’t your only copy, was it?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Huw accepted the remains of the video. ‘Coming to the end of its shelf-life anyway, that particular case-history.’
‘Need a new player, too, I’d guess.’
Merrily leaned in and saw that the lips of the machine were scorched and warped. She’d never known this happen to a VCR before.
‘That’s the fourth one in two years,’ Huw said. ‘It’s a right difficult place, this.’
‘Jesus.’ Merrily’s legs felt weak; she clutched at a chair. ‘You’re not saying…?’
‘No, luv. I don’t say anything, me.’
Silence in the stone room. One of those moments when spiderwebs of cracks appeared in the walls of reality, and Merrily thought: Do I really want to be doing this? Should anyone be doing it?
Huw looked over the lamplit assembly of bemused vicars and rectors and priests-in-charge. God’s elite commando unit, Merrily thought, and wanted to give in to hysterical laughter, except one or two of them might then think she was possessed.
‘So, lads,’ Huw said, ‘which of you would like to practise his cleansing routine?’
Charlie Headland’s mouth tightened. Merrily guessed he was wondering if Huw had rigged this. And she even wondered that, too. Tests – little tests. Lies. Disinformation.
‘And should we bless and cleanse the entire premises? Or perhaps each other?’
Merrily thought, horrified: It’s getting completely out of hand. How quickly we all rush to the edge.
‘This is insane,’ Nick Cowan, the ex-social worker, said. ‘It’s nonsense. There was obviously some sort of electrical fluctuation. A power surge, that’s all.’
Huw beamed at him. ‘Good thought, Nicholas. You do get problems like that in the mountains. That’s a very good thought. There you are…’ He spread his hands. ‘Lesson for us all. Always consider the rational nuts-and-bolts explanation before you get carried away. Why don’t you go and check the fuse-box, Charles? In the cupboard over the front door. There’s a torch in there.’
When Charlie had gone, Merrily sat down. She felt tired and heavy. To break the uncomfortable silence, she said, ‘Was that a genuine case – the woman on the video?’
‘Ah,’ said Huw. In the wavery light, he looked much younger. Merrily could imagine him in some rock band in the sixties.
‘You said they went back to talk to her again.’
‘Well.’ He began to wrap the unravelled videotape in a coil around his hands until it was binding them together. ‘Our man in Northampton knocks on the door and gets no answer, but he can hear a radio playing loudly inside the house, and the door’s unlocked, so he goes in and calls out, like you do. And the radio just goes on playing, and our man’s beginning to get a funny feeling.’
‘Oh, dear God, no,’ said Clive Wells. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘Afraid so, Clive.’ Huw held out his hands, pressed together as though in prayer but bound tight, somehow blasphemously, with black videotape. ‘There she is on the settee with a bottle of whisky, nearly empty, and a bottle of pills, very empty, and Radio Two playing comforting sixties hits.’
Merrily closed her eyes. Huw wouldn’t be lying about this. He wouldn’t be that cruel.
‘And we still don’t know if she was genuine or not,’ Huw said sadly. ‘The bottom line is that our man in Northampton should not have left before administering a proper blessing to leave her in a state of calm, feeling protected. Psychological benefits, if nothing else. The worst that could’ve happened then was he’d have looked a pillock if it came out she’d made the story up. But, then, looking like a pillock’s part of the clergyperson’s job, in’t it, Merrily? Get used to it, don’t we?’
Merrily was still staring into the scorched and grinning maw of the VCR when the lights came on again.
‘First law of Deliverance,’ Huw said. ‘Always carry plenty of fuse wire.’
PART TWO
VIRUS
3
Storm trooper
THEY WENT TO look at Hereford Cathedral – because it was raining, and because Jane had decided she liked churches.
As distinct, of course, from the Church, which was still the last refuge of tossers, no-hopers and sad gits who liked dressing up.
Jane wandered around in her vintage Radiohead sweatshirt, arms hanging loose, hands opened out. Despite the presence of all these vacuous, dog-collared losers, you could still sometimes pick up an essence of real spirituality in these old sacred buildings, the kid reckoned. This was because of where they’d been built, on ancient sacred sites. Plus the resonance of gothic architecture.
Merrily followed her discreetly, hands in pockets, head down, and didn’t argue; a row was looming, but this was not the place and not the time. And anyway she had her own thoughts, her own decision to make. She wondered about consulting St Thomas, and was pleased to see Jane heading for the North Transept, where the old guy lay. Kind of.
They passed the central altar, with its suspended corona like a giant gold and silver cake-ruff. On Saturdays, even in October, there were usually parties of tourists around the Cathedral and its precincts, checking out the usual exhibits: the Mappa Mundi, the Chained Library, the John Piper tapestries, the medieval shrine of…
‘Oh.’
In the North Transept, Merrily came up against a barrier of new wooden partitioning, with chains and padlocks. It was screening off the end wall and the foot of the huge stained-glass window full of Christs and angels and reds and blues.
Jane said, ‘So, like, what’s wrong, Reverend Mum?’ She put an eye to the crack in the padlocked partition door. ‘Looks like a building site. They turning it into public lavatories or something?’
‘I forgot. They’re dismantling the shrine.’
‘What for?’ Jane looked interested.
‘Renovation. Big job. Expensive. Twenty grand plus. Got to look after your saint.’
‘Saint?’ Jane said. ‘Do me a favour. Guy was just a heavy-duty politician.’
‘Well, he was, but—’
‘Thomas Cantilupe, 1218 to 1282,’ Jane recited. ‘Former Chancellor of England. Came from a family of wealthy Norman barons. He really didn’t have to try very hard, did he?’
Well, yes, he did, Merrily wanted to say. When he became Bishop of Hereford, he tried to put all that behind him. Wore a hair shirt. And, as a lover of rich food, once had a great pie made with his favourite lampreys from the Severn, took a single succulent bite, and gave the rest away.
‘Must have had something going for him, flower. About three hundred miracles were credited to this shrine.’
‘Look.’ Jane pushed her dark brown hair behind her ears. ‘It’s the power of place. If you’d erected a burger-bar here, people would still have been cured. It’s all about the confluence of energies. Nothing to do with the fancy tomb of some overprivileged, corrupt…’
She stopped. A willowy young guy in a Cathedral sweatshirt was strolling over.
‘It’s Mrs Watkins, right?’
‘Hello,’ Merrily said uncertainly. Was she supposed to recognize him? She was discovering that what you needed more than anything in
this job was a massive database memory.
‘Er, you don’t know me, Mrs Watkins. I saw you with the archdeacon once. Neil Cooper – I’m kind of helping with the project. It’s just… I’ve got a key if you want to have a look.’
While Merrily hesitated, Jane looked Neil Cooper over, from his blond hair to his dusty, tight jeans.
‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Cool. Let’s do it.’
Under the window, a fourteenth-century bishop slept on, his marble mitre like a nightcap. But the tomb of his saintly predecessor, Thomas Cantilupe, was in pieces – stone sections laid out, Merrily thought, like a display of postmodern garden ornaments.
There were over thirty pieces, Neil told them, all carefully numbered by the stonemasons. Neil was an archaeology student who came in most weekends. It was, he said, a unique opportunity to examine a famous and fascinating medieval tomb.
Jane stood amongst the rubble and the workbenches, peering around and lifting dustcloths.
‘So, like, where are the bones?’
An elderly woman glanced in through the door, then backed quickly away as if dust from the freshly exposed tomb might carry some ancient disease.
Jane was prepared to risk it. She knelt and stroked one of the oblong side-slabs, closing her eyes as though emanations were coming through to her, the faint echo of Gregorian chant. Jane liked to feel she was in touch with other spheres of existence. Nothing religious, you understand.
‘Sorry,’ said Neil. ‘There aren’t any.’
‘No bones?’
Hands still moving sensuously over the stone, Jane opened her eyes and gazed up at Neil. He looked about twenty. An older man; Jane thought older men were cool, and only older men. It was beginning to perturb Merrily that the kid hadn’t found any kind of steady boyfriend her own age, since they’d arrived in Herefordshire.
Neil glanced at Jane only briefly. ‘What happened, Mrs Watkins, is some of the bones were probably taken away for safekeeping at the time of the Reformation. And some were apparently carried around the city during the plague in the hope they might bring some relief, and I expect a few of those didn’t come back. So he’s widely scattered, although part of the skull’s supposed to be back in Hereford, with the monks over at Belmont Abbey.’
Jane stood up. ‘So it was like completely empty when you opened it, yeah?’
‘Lot of dust,’ said Neil.
The side-slab was divided into six sections; on each a knight in armour had been carved, their swords and shields and helmets and even chain-mail fingers crisply discernible, but all the faces gone – flattened, pulped. It didn’t look as if time was entirely responsible.
‘So, in fact,’ Jane said, ‘this great historic, holy artefact is like an empty shell.’
‘It’s a shrine,’ Merrily said.
‘Of course, that’s one of the continuing problems with the Anglican Church.’ Jane smiled slyly, before sliding out the punchline. ‘So much of it’s just a hollow shell.’
Merrily was careful not to react. ‘We’re delaying you,’ she said to Neil Cooper. ‘It was good of you to let us in.’
‘No problem, Mrs Watkins. Drop in any time.’ He smiled at Merrily, ignoring Jane.
Jane scowled.
‘I expect you’ll be around quite often,’ Neil said. ‘I gather they’re giving you an office in the cloisters.’
‘Nothing’s fixed yet,’ Merrily said, too sharply. ‘And, anyway, I’d only be here one-and-a-half days a week. I have a parish to run as well.’ God, she thought, does everybody know about this? So much for low-profile, so much for discretion.
‘Look in anytime,’ Neil repeated. ‘Always nice to see you.’
‘The trouble with older men,’ said Jane, as they left the Cathedral, ‘is that the cretins seem to fancy even older women.’
As they walked into Broad Street, the rain dying off but the sky threatening more, Merrily noticed that Jane seemed taller. A little taller than Merrily in fact, which was not saying much but was momentarily alarming. As though this significant spurt had occurred during the few days they’d been apart: Merrily experiencing weirdness in Wales, Jane staying with trusty villagers Gomer and Minnie, but returning to the vicarage twice a day to feed Ethel the cat.
Merrily felt disoriented. So much had altered in the ten days since she’d last been to the Cathedral. Ten days which – because the past week had been such a strange period – seemed so much longer, even part of a different time-frame.
She felt a quiver of insecurity, glanced back at the ancient edifice of myriad browns and pinks. It seemed to have shrunk. From most parts of the city centre, the spires of All Saints and St Peter’s were more dominant. The Cathedral had long since lost its own spire, and sat almost modestly in a secluded corner between the River Wye and the Castle Green and a nest of quiet streets with no shops in them.
‘Tea?’ Merrily said desperately.
‘Whatever.’
The late-afternoon sky was a smoky kind of orange. Merrily peered around for cafés, snackbars. She felt like a stranger, needing to ground herself.
‘The Green Dragon? They must do afternoon tea.’
Jane shrugged. They crossed towards Hereford’s biggest hotel, nineteenth-century and the longest façade on Broad Street.
‘So you’ve learned about Thomas Cantilupe at school?’
‘Only in passing. He didn’t figure much nationally. Nothing that happened in Hereford seems to have made much of a difference to anything in the big world.’
Useless arguing with Jane in this mood. The kid had consented to come shopping, a big sacrifice on a Saturday; it was now Merrily’s task to tease out of her what was wrong, and Jane wasn’t going to assist. Tiresome, timehonoured ritual.
They found a window table in the Green Dragon, looking back out on to Broad Street, the Saturday crowds thinning now as the day closed down. Sometimes November could bring a last golden surge, but this one had seemed colourless and tensed for winter. Merrily was aware of a drab sense of transience and futility – nothing profound. Maybe just wishing she was Jane’s age again.
‘Cakes,’ she said brightly.
‘Just tea, thanks. Black.’
Merrily ordered two teas and a scone. ‘Worried about our weight, are we, flower?’
‘No.’
‘What are we worried about then?’
‘Did we say we were worried?’
The bored, half-closed eyes, the sardonic tuck at the corner of the mouth. It was pure Sean – as when Merrily was trying to quiz him about some dubious client. You don’t see your daughter for a week, and in the interim she’s readmitted her father’s soiled spirit.
Merrily tried again. ‘I, er… I missed you, flower.’
‘Really?’ Jane tilted her soft, pale face into a supportive hand, elbow on the table. ‘I’d have thought you had far too much to think about, poncing about in your robes and practising your Out, Demons, Out routine with the soul police.’
‘Ah.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what this is about – the soul police? You think I’m…’
What? An anachronism? A joke? Though Jane was basically spiritual, she just didn’t believe the Church of England was. Bad enough to have your own mother walking around in a dogcollar, never mind the holy water and the black bag now. Was that it?
That was probably too simple. Nothing about Jane was ever really simple.
A man striding up the street towards All Saints glanced through the window, blinked, paused, strode on. Oh God, not him, not now. Merrily turned away from the window, stared across the table at Jane.
The kid pushed back her tumbling hair. ‘OK, look…’
Yes? Merrily leaned forward. A crack, an opening? Yes…
Jane said, ‘I’m uncomfortable about what you’re doing, Merrily.’
‘I see.’
Jesus. Merrily? A major development. Now we are sixteen, time to dump this Mum nonsense. We are two grown women, equals.
This needed
some thinking about.
‘I don’t think you do see,’ Jane said.
‘So tell me.’
‘They’re dragging you in, aren’t they?’
‘Who?’
‘The Church. It’s all political.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘All those fat, smug C-of-E gits, they’re worried about losing their power and their influence, so they’re appointing cool bishops: smooth, glossy people like Michael Hunter… Mick Hunter, for God’s sake.’
‘Bishops are still appointed by Downing Street.’
‘Yeah, well, exactly. Old mate of Tony Blair’s. I can just see them swapping chords for ancient Led Zeppelin riffs. Like, Mick’s superficially cool and different, but he’s really Establishment underneath.’
‘Phew,’ said Merrily theatrically. ‘Thank God, my daughter has finally become a revolutionary. I thought it was never going to happen.’
Jane glared at her.
‘You really don’t understand, do you?’
‘Sure. You think I’m a glossy, superficial bimbo who’s—’
‘More like a trainee storm-trooper, actually.’
‘What?’
‘Look…’ Jane’s eyes flashed. ‘It seemed really interesting at first when you said you were going to do this Deliverance training. I’m thinking, yeah, this is what it’s all about: the Church actually investigating the supernatural nitty-gritty instead of just spouting all this Bible crap. And this course and everything, it all seemed really mysterious. So, like… Wednesday night, I go back to the vicarage to feed Ethel. I think maybe I should check the answering machine, see if there’s anything urgent. So I go into your office and I find… hang on…’
From a pocket of her jeans, Jane dragged a compacted square of printed paper which she opened out on the tabletop.
‘And suddenly I saw what it was all really about.’
Merrily pulled towards her a Deliverance Study Group pamphlet heralding a forthcoming seminar entitled:
NEW AGE… OLD ENEMY.
She’d forgotten about it. It had come in a package from the DSG the morning she left for the Brecon Beacons.