by Phil Rickman
‘Fortunately,’ Sophie said, ‘Huw Owen was present and able to take over and conduct the service, so that was all right.’
Merrily stared at her. What are you doing?
‘Owen?’ The Bishop’s face stiffened with outrage. ‘Who the hell invited Owen?’
‘I did,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m sorry, I should have told you, shouldn’t I?’
‘Yes, you should. The man’s from outside the diocese. He’s Church in Wales.’
‘It’s my fault,’ Sophie said quickly. ‘Merrily told me she’d asked the Reverend Owen to come in as…’
‘Hand-holder,’ Merrily said. ‘It was my first serious exorcism. As it was to be in a church, I didn’t want to make a mistake.’
‘Well, I should have been told,’ the Bishop said almost peevishly. ‘I realize he was your course tutor, Merrily, but I’ve appointed you, not him. In fact, if I’d known more about Owen at the time, we might not have sent you on that particular course.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Let’s just say’ – the Bishop’s eyes were hard – ‘that his roots are planted in the same general area as Dobbs’s.’
‘Oh, Michael…’ Any further discussion of the dangers of medievalism was forestalled by Sophie informing the Bishop about the missing Cantilupe knight, apparently smuggled out of the Cathedral.
‘And that’s all they took?’ The Bishop slowly shook his head, half-smiling now. ‘Admittedly, we don’t want opportunist tomb-robbers cruising the Cathedral, but it’s hardly cause for a major panic. Surely our guys can construct a temporary substitute if they need to put the shrine together in a hurry. Reconstituted stone or something. Who, after all, is going to know?’
‘Reconstituted stone?’ Sophie said faintly.
‘Poor old boy’s bones are already widely scattered,’ the Bishop said reasonably. ‘It’s not as if those knights have anything to guard any more, is it? Sophie, Val and I shall be leaving earlier for London than planned.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie spun towards her office, ‘I thought the reception was tomorrow.’
‘Well, there’s going to be a dinner now, tonight – with Tony and Cherie. And other people, of course.’ He laughed. ‘One can hardly reschedule these things according to one’s personal convenience. We’ll need to get off before lunch. So… Merrily,’ turning his attention on her like a loaded shotgun, ‘I want you to think about something.’
He stepped back and surveyed her – critically, she thought – in her black jumper and woollen skirt, flaking fake-Barbour over the back of the chair.
Whatever it is now, she thought, not today.
‘Ironic that the question of Dobbs and Owen should arise. Traditionalism – I want all this to be raised at the next General Synod, and I want you, Merrily, to give some thought to producing a paper on what, for want of a better term, I’m officially calling New Deliverance.’
She stared at him. ‘Me?’
‘Very definitely you. I think I may be looking at the very face of New Deliverance.’
‘Bishop, I don’t know what you mean about “New”. Surely the whole point of—’
‘You know very well what I mean, Merrily. Think back to our discussion in the Green Dragon. Anyway, I don’t have time to expand on it now. We’ll talk again before Christmas, yes?’
She couldn’t reply.
‘Excellent,’ the Bishop said crisply. As he left, Merrily’s phone rang.
‘Merrily. Frannie Bliss. Remember? How are you?’
‘I’m… OK.’
‘You don’t sound all that OK to me. You should’ve said something – us keeping you talking outside in the cold all that time. Not that it was much warmer inside. Sorry you had to go off like that, but you probably did the best thing. He’s a card, that Huw, isn’t he? Turned out well for us, anyway.’
‘It did?’
‘I’m not gonna bore you with the run-up to this, but we finally had a chat with two very nice elderly ladies: sisters, churchgoers, and active members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. They put us on to a lad called Craig Proctor, lives out near Monkland. Now young Craig, for reasons you really don’t want to know about, especially if you’re not feeling well, is an expert at trapping wild birds. These old ladies’ve been after him for months, but he’s clever is Craig – or he thought he was. Anyway, after a long and meaningful exchange at Leominster nick this morning, Craig has told us he was approached by a chap he didn’t know, and given a hundred and fifty pounds to procure one live carrion crow.’
‘Christ.’
The fog outside was like a carpet against the window.
‘Yeh,’ Frannie said. ‘Now, what’s that say to you, Merrily?’
‘It says you’re not just looking for a bunch of kids who’ve seen some nasty films.’
‘The real thing, eh?’
‘Yes, though I don’t know what I mean when I say that. Did you get a description out of him?’
‘Young guy – motorbike, moustache, hard-looking. That’s not much help. Craig’s never seen him before, he claims.’
‘You arrest him?’
‘No. He knew we’d no evidence and he wasn’t gonna confess.’
‘You made a deal.’
‘We don’t make deals, as you well know, Merrily. Just have a little think about why somebody would blow a hundred and fifty on setting up some grubby little sacrifice in a church nobody uses.’
‘And taking a considerable risk too,’ Merrily said. ‘Stretford itself might be a bit lonely, but the church is hardly lonely within Stretford.’
‘That too.’
‘Have you asked Huw?’
‘Well, yeh, I did call Huw, to be honest, but he wasn’t there.’
‘He’s a busy man,’ Merrily said quietly.
Sophie had gestured to her something about popping out for a while. Merrily considered waiting for her to return, needing to find out how she’d learned about last night’s disaster, and why she’d been so quick to cover up in front of the Bishop.
But, by lunchtime, Sophie had not come back, so Merrily switched on the computer and typed out the letter.
It had already been composed in her head on the way here. It was formal and uncomplicated. That was always best; no need for details – not that she felt able to put that stuff on paper.
Dear Bishop,
After long consideration and a great deal of prayer and agonizing, I have decided to ask you to accept my resignation from the role of Diocesan Deliverance Consultant.
I do not doubt that this is – or will become – a valid job for a woman. However, events have proved to me that I am not yet sufficiently wise or experienced enough to take it on. Therefore I honestly think I should make a discreet exit before I become a liability to the Church.
I would like to thank you for your kindness and – albeit misplaced – confidence in me. I am sorry for wasting so much of your very valuable time.
Yours sincerely,
Merrily Watkins
It hung there on the screen and she sat in front of it, reading it over and over again until she saw it only as words with no coherent meaning.
She could print it out and post it, or send it through the internal mail. Either way, he would not see it before he and Val left for London. Or maybe e-mail it immediately to the Bishop’s Palace? That would be the quickest and the best, and leave no room for hesitation.
She read it through again; there was nothing more to say. She looked up the Palace’s e-mail address and prepared to send. It would be courteous, perhaps, to show it first to Sophie. Perhaps she’d wait until Sophie returned, perhaps she wouldn’t. What she would not do was ring Huw Owen about it.
As often, the only certainty was a cigarette. Her packet was empty, so she felt in her bag for another, and came up with a creamy-white envelope, the one pushed through the letterbox while she was shivering on the landing. She’d stuffed it into her bag, while arguing with Jane that she was perfectly fit to go to work – no, sh
e did not have flu. It’s mental, flower. I’m coming apart and torturing myself with sick, sexual, demonic fantasies. God’s way of showing me I’m not equipped to take on other people’s terrors. But she hadn’t said any of that either.
She opened the letter, postmarked Hereford and addressed to The Reverend Mrs Watkins. It came straight to the point.
Dear Reverend Watkins,
You should know that your Daughter has been seen brazenly endangering her Soul, and yours, by mixing with the Spiritually Unclean.
Ask her what she was doing last Saturday afternoon at the so-called PSYCHIC FAIR at Leominster. It is well known that such events attract members of Occult Groups in search of converts. Ask her how long she has been consorting with a Clairvoyant who uses the Devil’s Picturebook.
Many people have always been disgusted that your Daughter does not attend Church as the Daughter of a Minister of God ought to. Now we know why.
If it is true that you have been appointed Exorcist then perhaps you should start by cleansing the Filthy Soul of Your Own Daughter.
It was unsigned. Quite expensively done, judged by the standards set by these creeps. Usually the paper was cheap and crumpled, and whereas most of them were pushed into a letterbox, either here or at the church, this one had come by post.
Surprising how many anonymous letters you got. Or perhaps male ministers didn’t get so many – quite a few of these letters muttered that you should stop pretending to be a priest and go out and get yourself a husband like ordinary, decent women did. One or two of them also offered to give her what ordinary, decent women were getting, but she evidently wasn’t. She picked these ones up by one corner and washed her hands afterwards.
Some of them she felt she ought to file, or give to the police in case other women were receiving similar messages and the sender ever got nicked. Some she really didn’t want to take to the police, in case anyone at the station suspected there was no smoke without fire.
But most of them got burned in the grate or the nearest ashtray.
Merrily flicked the Zippo. It would be true, of course. Jane had laid it on the line that altogether fateful afternoon in the coffee lounge at the Green Dragon. The Church has always been on this kind of paternalistic power-trip, doesn’t want people to search for the truth. Like it used to be science and Darwinism and stuff they were worried about. Now it’s the New Age because that’s like real practical spirituality.
Psychic fairs were where people went in search of ‘Real Practical Spirituality’. Merrily didn’t doubt that what the letter said was essentially true. It would explain a lot of things, not least the allure of Rowenna.
She knew the Devil’s Picturebook was the tarot – a doorway.
Et tu, flower. She felt choked by acrid fog. Her head ached.
No option now.
She sent the Bishop his e-mail, walked out of the office and down the stone stairs.
PART THREE
PROJECTION
30
Self-pity
SHE FELT COLD, and dangerously light inside, as though a dead weight had rolled away, but releasing nothing. She stepped through a tide of pensioners, a coach party heading towards the Cathedral. The sky was overcast. Nobody seemed to be smiling any more. One of the old men looked a bit like Dobbs.
She should tell Dobbs that it was OK now. That he could go ahead and recover. She’d do that, yes. She’d go to the hospital at visiting time and tell him. Jesus Christ was the first exorcist; the pattern is unbroken. This would draw a final line under everything.
Unless Huw was there, the bastard, with his holy water and his candles.
Jesus!
The city swirled around her in the fog, undefined. She mustn’t look back at the Cathedral. It was no part of her life now. She should go back to her own parish and deal with the church break-in. Head Ted Clowes off at the pass. At Ledwardine – her home.
Or not?
Sweat sprang out on her forehead. She felt insubstantial, worthless. She had no home, no lover, no spiritual adviser, no…
Daughter?
Failed her. Too bound up in your own conceits. Sending her into the arms of New Age occult freaks, a reaction to living with a…
Pious bitch?
Her dead husband Sean had been the first to call her that. After a day quite like this, a headachy day, the desperate day when she’d found out just how bent he was, and screamed at him for his duplicity and his greed, and he’d screamed back: I was doing it for you, you pious bitch.
She hated that word. Don’t ever be pious. Smoke, curse, never be afraid to say Jesus Christ! in fury or astonishment – at least it keeps the name in circulation. Strive to be a good person, a good priest, never a pious priest.
Once, up in Liverpool, she’d conducted a youth service wearing a binliner instead of a cassock. It was half a generation too late; some of the kids were appalled, others sneered. Not so easy not being pious.
Merrily found herself back on the green, watching the Cathedral placidly swallowing the coach party. The fog was lifting, but the sky behind it was darkening. She had no idea which way to go next.
Suppose she’d backed away from the lamplit path and supported Sean, had said, Let’s fight this together? Would he have made the effort for her, found some fresh, uncorrupted friends, a new but much older secretary? Would he, in the end, have survived? Might she have saved his life by not following the Path of the Pious Bitch into the arms of God?
She stood at the barrier preventing cars turning into Church Street. She was panting, thoughts racing again. Wasn’t it true that having women in the priesthood was creating a new divide between the sexes – because men could love both God and their wives, but no truly heterosexual woman could love both God and a man with sufficient intensity to make both relationships potent? Was it all a sham? Was it true that all she was searching for in God were those qualities lacking in ordinary men? Or, at least, in Sean.
Oh Christ. Merrily flattened herself against a brick wall facing the side of the Cathedral. The headache had gone; she wished it was back, she wanted pain. Fumbling at her dogcollar, she took it off and put it in her bag. A cold breeze seemed to leap immediately to her throat, like a stab of admonishment.
She zipped up her coat, holding its collar together, turned her back on the Cathedral and walked quickly into Church Street.
Lol saw Merrily from his window, through the drifting fog: gliding almost drunkenly along the street, peering unseeingly into shop windows newly edged with Christmas glitter.
He ran downstairs, past the bike, past Nico’s sepulchral drone and the very interested gaze of Big Viv.
‘Merrily?’ Close up, she seemed limp, drained.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’ And he was shocked because she looked as vague as Moon had often been, but that was just him, wasn’t it – his paranoia?
But paranoia hadn’t created the shadows and creases, the dark hair all mussed, dark eyes moist, make-up escaping.
He looked around. Not the flat now – it had been too awkward there the other night, as if foreshadowed by the death of Moon.
She let him steer her into the corner café where he and Jane had eaten chocolate fudge cake.
There was no one else in the back room. A brown pot of tea between them. On the wall above them was a framed Cézanne poster – baked furrowed earth under a heat haze.
The letter lay folded on the table, held down by the sugar bowl, revealing only the words ‘known that such events attract members of Occult Groups in search of converts’.
‘But surely,’ he said, ‘they mainly just attract ordinary people who read their daily horoscopes. It doesn’t mean she’s sacrificing babies.’
But he thought of seeing Jane and the other girl coming out of Pod’s last night, long after it was closed. And Jane pretending, for the first time ever, not to have seen him.
‘If this was London,’ she said, ‘I could get away with it. Or if Jane was grown-up and living somewhere else. If she’d even
been up-front about it, I could have—’
‘Merrily, it means nothing. I can’t believe you’ve just quit because of this. It’s the Bishop, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘He made another move on you, right?’
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘He’s been… fine. And anyway I might have taken that the wrong way: late at night, very tired. No, I’m just… paranoid.’ She held up her half-smoked cigarette as though using it as a measure of something. ‘Also I have filthy habits and a deep reservoir of self-pity.’
He nodded at the cigarette. ‘What are the others, then?’
Merrily tipped it into the ashtray. He saw she was blushing. She had no filthy habits.
‘Just… tell me to pull myself together, OK?’
‘I like you being untogether. It makes me feel responsible and kind of protective – sort of like a real bloke.’
She smiled.
‘So what are you going to do now?’
‘Go back to my flock and try to be a good little shepherd. The Deliverance ministry was a wrong move. I thought it was something you could pick up as you went along. I didn’t realize… I’m a fraud, Lol. I don’t know what I’m doing, let too many people down. I even let you down. I said I’d go and see your friend, Moon…’ She looked vague. ‘Was that yesterday?’
‘Mmm.’
‘I mean, I could still see her. I’m still a minister, of sorts.’
‘She’s not there now,’ he said too quietly.
‘Lol?’ She looked directly at him for the first time since sitting down at the table.
‘She died.’
Her face froze up behind the smoke.
‘No!’ He put up his hands. ‘She was dead long before you could’ve got there. There was nothing you could have done.’
And he told her about it: about the Iron Age sword… about the old newspaper report… why Denny had concealed the truth – why Denny said he’d concealed the truth… why Dick thought they should let it lie.
She kept shaking her head, lips parted. He was relieved at the way outrage had lifted her again.