by Phil Rickman
Merrily sobbed and sank slowly to her knees.
Flaunting him.
Failure.
Too strong for them.
Too strong for her.
Stock swung from side to side like a swaddled pendulum. Don’t really know what the fuck you’re doing. Waste of time, Merrily. Heard you were a political appointment.
Merrily’s hands fumbled at the airline bag, closed on the flask of holy water.
‘Begone!’ she sobbed in pain and fear and ultimate despair. ‘Begone from this place, every evil haunting and phantasm. Be banished, every delusion and deceit of Satan. In the name of the living God, in the name of the Holy God, in the name of the God of all creation—’
How empty it sounded, how hollow. She was on her knees with the flask of holy water, and she couldn’t get the bloody top off.
She would have fallen forward then, into her own shadow, but there wasn’t one.
It must be noon.
He’d gone, of course he had. He was never there. Nothing dangled from the crosspiece. There was only Simon, with his face in his hands.
Merrily came to her feet.
‘Mine,’ Simon croaked.
‘What?’
‘My projection.’ His face was grey-sheened. ‘Projection of defeat.’
Merrily leaned against the pole, nothing to say. There was no fog, no Stock, and the air in the alley was the same air that lay heavy on the whole of the Frome Valley. She swallowed; it hurt.
When did it ever go right? When did it ever work? Through the overhead wires, the midday sun was splashing its brash, soulless light over the whole of the sky.
Go out losing. What better way? Nothing to look back on, no foundation for thoughts of what might have been.
Sodden with weariness, she put away the flask, picked up her airline bag.
Simon didn’t move. Merrily heard a crumbly rustling that her tired mind dispiritingly translated into brittle hop-cones fragmenting on mummified bines.
‘Almighty God,’ Simon said numbly, gazing beyond her. ‘Please don’t do this.’
47
Ghost Eyes
THE FIRST SOUND Merrily was aware of was the vibrating of the wires overhead.
It wasn’t much; if there’d been a breeze, it would have sounded natural. If these had been electric wires, it would have seemed normal. It was a thin sound, with an almost human frailty, a keening, that somehow didn’t belong to summer. The rustling overlaid it, as if all the wires were entwined with dried bines. This other sound belonged to winter. It sang of mourning, loss, lamentation.
The sounds came not from their alley, but the one adjacent to it and, as Merrily went to stand at its entrance, she noticed that it seemed oriented directly on the tower of the kiln, the poles bending at almost the same angle as the point of its cowl.
Merrily stood there with sweat drying on her face, edging past the fear stage to the part where she knew she was dreaming but it didn’t matter.
She waited. She would not move. She fought to regulate her breathing.
For here was the Lady of the Bines, approaching down the abandoned hop-corridor, drifting from frame to frame, and the sky was white and blinding, and the Lady moved like a shiver.
Simon St John came up behind Merrily.
‘What am I seeing, Simon?’
He didn’t reply. She could hear his rapid breathing.
‘Whose projection now?’ she said, surprised that she could speak at all. ‘Whose projection is this?’
She blinked several times, but it was still there: this slender white woman, pale and naked and garlanded with shrivelled hops.
Merrily put on her cross. Christ be with me, Christ within me…
The bine, thick with yellowed cones, was pulled up between the legs, over the glistening stomach and between the breasts. Wound around and around the neck, covering the lower face, petals gummed to the sweat on the cheeks.
Christ behind me, Christ before me…
The head was bent, as though she was watching her feet, wondering where they were taking her. She was not weaving, as Lol had described his apparition, but almost slithering through the parched grass and the weeds. And she couldn’t be real or else why was she affecting the wires?
When she was maybe ten yards away, the head came up.
Merrily went rigid.
The Lady swayed. Her eyes were fully open but hardened, like a painted doll’s, under a thickly smeared lacquer of abstraction. They were a corpse’s eyes, a ghost’s eyes. The end of the bine was stuffed into her mouth, brittle cones crushed between her teeth, and those petals pasted to her cheeks – grotesque, like one of the foliate faces you found on church walls.
She put out her arms, not to Merrily but to Simon, but he stepped away.
‘Stay back. For Christ’s sake, don’t touch her. Keep a space.’
The woman’s hands clawed at the air, as though there was something between them that she could seize. Her breath was irregular and came in convulsions, her body arching, parched petals dropping from her lips like flakes of dead skin.
‘Don’t go within a foot of her,’ Simon rasped.
‘It’s all right,’ Merrily said softly.
And she reached for the clawing hands, and waited for the cold electricity to come coursing up her arms all the way to her heart.
48
Love First
NOON: THE DEAD moment in time. All the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything still. Everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.
But these people clustered in the base of the bowl under the midday sun, they were not the dead.
The severely beautiful elderly woman, weeping, and the sharp-faced, white-haired man with an arm around her and the plump woman in a wheelchair and the leather-faced, crewcut man demanding an ambulance – surely somebody had a bloody mobile phone. And Lol, standing apart from the others, looking thoughtful.
And the pale, naked woman under the hop-frame, lying with the padded airline bag under her head. Not even she was dead.
Keep her here? Would that contain it? For how long? How long?
Merrily looked up at the sun.
Simon St John understood. ‘Get back. Please. Just a couple of yards, please.’ Simon was OK, he was in the clear – the woman was not dead, had not been dead when she walked under the wires. Simon was all right with this. Wasn’t he?
‘Yes,’ the woman agreed irritably, ‘Just keep back. I’m all right. I’ll be all right.’ She coughed, her head thrown back over the airline bag, a bubble of saliva and a half-masticated hop-petal in a corner of her slack mouth. ‘I’ll be with you in… just give me… give me a moment… give me a bloody minute.’
Merrily looked up at Simon. He nodded towards the woman. The hop-bine was still curled around her legs, yellowed petals crumbled into her pubic hair.
Simon said, ‘You know her?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Merrily knelt down, was immediately enclosed in a dense aura of sweat and hops. ‘Annie, listen to me – were you in the kiln? Were you in the kiln, just now?’
‘Cordon it off!’ The eyes were still blurred. ‘We… need the fire service. There’s probably—’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said.
‘Gases. An escape of gases.’
‘Or sulphur.’
‘I don’t… I got out of there, but I must have lost… Put somebody on the door. Don’t let anybody go back in there. It may be… I think I lost consciousness, just for a moment. You—’ She seemed to register Merrily for the first time. ‘What the hell are you—?’
‘I’m going back to the village,’ Charlie said. ‘We need an ambulance.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Annie Howe tried to sit up. ‘That’s—’
‘Who’s he?’ Simon demanded. The woman in the wheel-chair had made it from the path, breathing hard from her struggle across the baked ground. Simon was holding her hand.
/> ‘Her father,’ Merrily told him. ‘Charlie, she’s right. Forget the ambulance. But—’ She met his eyes, his copper’s eyes now, hard as nuts. ‘There’s something else we need to do, and we need to do it now. I’m not kidding, Charlie, we’ve got a problem here, you must be able to see that.’
‘And possibly a solution,’ Simon St John said.
‘Dad?’ Annie Howe struggling to sit up. ‘What the hell are you—?’
‘Stay where you are, girl,’ Charlie said softly. ‘Everything’s all right.’ He looked down at Merrily. ‘She been attacked?’
‘Not in the way you think, no. In the way I think – do you know what I’m saying?’
‘I don’t know, Merrily, her clothes…’
Lol was there. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious she took them off herself, Charlie. The things we saw strewn across…?’
‘I’ll fetch them,’ Sally Boswell said.
Merrily came to her feet. ‘Charlie, I swear to God. I swear to you that this is not some scam. She was in the kiln just now – on her own. The wrong place at the wrong time. Charlie, it all comes down to that place.’
‘I was simply’ – Annie shook her ash-blonde head in irritation – ‘taking a final look round before we handed the keys back to…’ She looked vague for a moment. ‘Before we handed over the keys to S–Stock’s solicitors. Is there some water? If I can just have some water…’
Merrily said, ‘Charlie, I don’t have time to explain. You have got to—Please trust me.’
‘Look,’ Annie Howe said, ‘where’s the fucking car?’ She finally sat up. ‘Get these people—’
‘Stay where you are, Anne.’ Charlie’s jaw was working from side to side. ‘You’re naked, girl.’
‘What are you—?’ Annie Howe rose up suddenly, and Charlie Howe stepped to one side so that Annie was in the full sun.
There was a moment of silence, and then she started to scream, her head tossed back, eyes squeezed shut against the blast of light. Her spine arched in a spasm, her white breasts thrust towards the sun, her mouth opening into a big, hungry smile, as if—
In the instant that the screaming turned to laughter, Merrily was down by Annie’s side, both hands on her burning forehead. The eyes opened once, a flaring of panic and outrage under the sweat-soaked white-blonde hair.
It wasn’t all sweat, though. The top must finally have come off the flask inside, because the airline bag, where Annie’s head had lain, was soaked now with holy water.
Rebekah, Merrily said calmly, somewhere deep inside herself. Listen to me.
For an instant, hugging the Lady of the Bines, in all her persons, absorbing their coarse, racking sobs, she found the core – or maybe the core found her. The coin spun in the air and stayed in the air, caught in a confluence of sunbeams, and kept on spinning, bright new copper.
She could do this.
St Paul said: Put love first.
That simple: bypassing fear and revulsion, the heaving aside of a great concrete slab of personal resentment, ignoring even the stunning irony.
Behind her, Simon St John stood quietly, made the sign of the cross in the air above them.
Love is patient. Love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited. Love keeps no score of wrongs. There is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance.
Merrily felt her hands becoming very warm, warmer than the skin beneath. She was in a void, an emptiness that was infinitely vast and yet also movingly intimate. She didn’t understand. She didn’t have to understand. At some point, the words came automatically, from the final verse of the old Celtic anthemic prayer.
Let them not run from the love that you offer
But hold them safe from the forces of evil
On each of their dyings shed your light…
– ONE –
Love Lightly?
‘TWO,’ PROF LEVIN said over the phone. ‘Let me get this right. You’re showing me two songs?’
Tomorrow, the legendary producer was returning home for a few days. Tom Storey’s slow disembowelling of the blues, he said, was making everyone close to clinically depressed; they needed a break. This was costly, sure, but if Storey had any real need to worry about expense he’d be recording at Knight’s Frome.
Lol sat on one of the packing cases in the kitchen. It was almost dark. The sky was lime green in the north, and there were great banks of cloud. A storm was coming on and it was very humid.
‘I suppose, if I was being honest,’ he admitted, because this was a night for complete honesty, ‘I’d have to say the last verse of the first one needs rewriting. And I might have to dump the second one altogether, on account of it… Maybe it wasn’t my place to write it, not really.’
There was a long silence.
Prof said, ‘So, basically, just half a song, correct?’
‘Hopefully. I’m really sorry, Prof.’ And he was. He should feel ashamed. He had a lot of work to do.
‘It’s that bloody Boswell guitar,’ Prof said. ‘I knew it would be cursed.’
‘Oh, no,’ Lol said quickly. ‘No curse. I don’t think so. Probably no curse after all.’
No need, surely, for the burning of the Boswell vardo to become any kind of issue – although Al had told Lol that maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, he would not be over-surprised to wake up in the Lower World with a whole lot of explaining to do. He insisted he was taking nothing for granted; he would be grateful for each fresh day with Sally and the ponies and Stanley the donkey. He was grateful, too, obviously, to the drukerimaskri – if he’d had to borrow a place in which to be found dead, he hadn’t particularly wanted to borrow it from Adam Lake.
So, Lol wondered, had he actually encountered Rebekah as he sat in the hop-yard under the midday sun? Had he, in fact, journeyed to the Lower World?
These were not questions that a gaujo had any right to ask, Al had said sternly. But, well, if the little priest had managed to retrieve the Romany soul of poor Rebekah, he would not deny having performed a little essential groundwork.
Al smiled: gypsies lied.
‘I’ve been thinking about you, Lol,’ he’d said finally, leaning on the fence around his paddock, watching Stanley browse the buttercups. ‘You and this thing about the Frome. This rootlessness, this having no home? As you may have gathered, we Romanies prefer to see this as a benefit – no estates, no cities, no cathedrals.’
‘But I’m a gaujo,’ Lol pointed out.
‘In which case,’ Al kept on smiling, ‘consider it the first stage in your personal development.’
Walking away, in the sunset, Lol had observed Sally coming down from the museum to meet Al. She wore a long, white dress, embroidered around the bosom, wide and flouncy at the hem, and at least forty years out of fashion.
Prof said, ‘The other thing – and I want the truth here, Laurence, no placatory bullshit – has that insane bastard been near the place?’
‘Who?’
‘Who? Stock, of course! The impossible creep who claims he’s being haunted out of his home. If you recall, around the time I was suggesting you should be thinking about producing at least four fresh songs, I also gave express instructions that Stock should not be admitted to the premises while I was gone, yes?’
Lol sighed. ‘You don’t read the papers much, do you, Prof… when you’re working?’
‘I don’t read the papers at all. I don’t read the mail. I don’t read menus, either, because when I’m working, with my stomach the way it is these days, I don’t even eat. No, I don’t read the sodding papers.’
‘Evidently not,’ Lol agreed.
He moved through the silent studio, where the Boswell guitar, in all her quiet beauty, sat on the stand, where the preliminary – and possibly final – tape of ‘The Cure of Souls’ still occupied the deck.
After a lot of noise, it was very quiet now.
A thousand questions still echoing; just a few answers.
Gomer Parry had brought Jane and Eirion across t
o Prof’s, and Eirion’s dad’s secretary had arrived in the BMW – she’d come up to Hereford by train with a spare set of keys to pick up the car from the police station where it had been accommodated overnight. And to collect Eirion. Jane had considered her options for a while before getting in the car with them. ‘Can’t let the poor dab face this alone.’
This was after the police had been and gone: Frannie Bliss, with DS Mumford. DCI Howe had left, it was presumed, with her father. ‘She’ll deny any of it happened,’ Merrily had said to Lol afterwards, as they waved the kids away to Pembrokshire. ‘Especially to herself. She’ll have had someone tell the press she was called away on another case, and she’ll never talk about it, not even to her dad. And she’ll hate me worse than ever. But that’s the price you pay.’
Lol said, ‘What would have happened to her, if you hadn’t—’
Merrily had just shrugged, and Lol had conjured, then dismissed, nebulous images of a hungry, promiscuous Annie Howe darkening into corruption.
Like her old man?
‘You think?’ Merrily had asked him.
‘I don’t really know. He went out of his way to tell you about Allan Henry and the corruption he wasn’t involved in. I just… don’t know.’
‘He told me you were going to blackmail him,’ Merrily said, ‘to keep Annie off my back.’
‘You see? He told you that. It doesn’t fit with him having something to hide, does it? I bet he does, though.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Merrily said. ‘No doubt at all. Would you have?’
‘Blackmailed him? I never even thought of it that way. I’ve never done anything like that before.’ He’d blushed. ‘Maybe.’
‘I don’t deserve it,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t deserve any of you… Sophie… Jane – don’t ever tell her I said that! I just… flounder about from one irrational scenario to another, making a balls of things, coming to false conclusions – appealing to God, apologizing to God… being terrified of coming one day to reject God. I mean, before all this began I was supposed to recruit a back-up team. I don’t know where to start. Simon—’