by Phil Rickman
‘… he on about? ’
‘ His fanny-meter’s gone off.’
‘ Ask the barman for a Kleenex.’
‘ Not kidding, George. I’m in love.’
‘ You’re rat-arsed.’
‘ I think… I think I feel a wager coming on…’
None of them spoke for a few seconds. Apple logs shifted on the hearth. Danny looked at Lol. Red mud was still flaked in his heavy-metal hair. He’d been here in the village all day, working with Gomer on extra flood defences down by the river.
A wager. Lol could imagine florid men, squires and their sons, in three-cornered hats, with lavish waistcoats and long bendy pipes, under these same beams on Jacobean nights when the Black Swan was young.
‘ How much? ’
‘ Hundred? Two? ’
‘ You’re not scaring me, George. I’ll go three.’
‘ Bloody confident tonight, Cornel.’
‘ He’s bladdered. He won’t -’
‘ All right. Listen. I’ll persuade her into the paddock for nothing, and then… why don’t we say three-fifty if I get her upstairs? However -’
‘ Yeah, but that doesn’t prove -’
‘ However… any tricks, any remarks from you bastards that might put her off, and you pay up anyway. Deal? ’
‘ That’s -’
‘ Deal? ’
‘ Don’t fall for it George.’ Mild Scots accent. ‘ He’ll probably offer to split it with her if she plays along.’
‘ He won’t, Alec, because we’ll be listening to every word.’
At some stage, probably when money came into it, the banter had shed its forced humour. At the other end of the bar, Jane was handing Barry a ten-pound note, leaning forward, exposing a widening band of pink skin just below the small of her back.
As the daylight faded, their cars would arrive on the square like Viking longships floating into a natural harbour, the top-of-the-range Beemer, the Porsche Boxter, the Mercedes 4-by-4.
Barry the manager, like half the village, was in two minds about them. They had – nobody could argue about this – seen the Swan through a bleak winter of recession, and yet…
Like they own the place. That old cliche. You heard it a lot around Ledwardine but it was only half right, Lol thought. You didn’t need to own a playground.
Only one man in Ledwardine actually seemed interested in owning the village. Lol had never actually met Ward Savitch, but you couldn’t fail to be aware of his presence, usually on Sunday mornings. Used to be church bells, now it was shotgun echoes.
The new hunter-gatherers. Paying guests of Savitch, who’d bought the old Kibble place, known as The Court, a farmhouse with fifty acres. Savitch was everywhere now, grabbing marginal land – woods and rough country, like he was reclaiming his heritage. In fact, he was building himself one. Came out of London just ahead of the big recession, with all his millions in a handcart. Now the fifty acres had more than doubled, holiday chalets had gone up. Shooting and paintballing weekends, for those who could afford them. Some were corporate jollies, designed to freshen up tired executives – Savitch clearly exploiting his old contacts.
Not many posh cars outside tonight, though. A couple of these guys were staying here at the Swan – overspill – and the others had come down from The Court on foot, intent on serious drinking. Some of them still in their designer camouflage trousers bought from one of the few retail chains in the county that were no longer on nodding terms with the Official Receiver.
‘Day’s shooting supervised by Kenny Mostyn and the kids from Hardkit and they think they’re fighting fit,’ Barry had said one night when it was quiet. ‘Well… fit enough to take on a five-course champagne dinner and a few gallons of Stella.’
Barry knew about fighting and fitness. Retired from the SAS at forty, still went running in the Black Mountains most weekends. He was on the portly side these days, but only portly like a bouncer.
‘But – what can I say? – it keeps the lights on. Most of these guys, it’s just about getting pissed and bringing me pheasants they’ve shot. Who loses?’
‘Apart from the pheasants?’ Lol had said.
Glad that Jane hadn’t been there.
But not as much as he wished she wasn’t here now.
Keeping an eye on Jane… this was getting increasingly delicate.
She’d been Lol’s friend before he even knew her mother, back when she was just an insecure kid, in a new place, and he was a part-time recluse in a cottage down Blackberry Lane. But Jane was eighteen now, approaching her last term at school, finding herself some space. Wasn’t as though Lol was her dad or even a dad figure. Not exactly a dad-figure kind of person.
Jane had said she was just popping to the loo, would get the drinks on her way back. But Lol had noticed she hadn’t actually gone to the loo. Directly to the bar. Purposeful.
He pushed his chair back so he could see her talking to the lanky young guy with the deep chin and the big lips. Because of all the voices raised against the rattle and hiss of the weather, you couldn’t hear what was being said as the guy bent down to her, like he was offering her a lollipop.
‘Stay calm, boy,’ Danny said. ‘This is the Swan on a Friday night. She can just walk away.’
But she hadn’t. She seemed to be listening, solemnly, then smiling right up into the big-jawed face. Wearing that close-fitting white top, half-unzipped, over very tight jeans. The small band of pale flesh and the navel.
‘… hand it to Cornel,’ one of the older bankers-or-whatever murmured to another. ‘ Eyes in her knickers already.’
Lol looked helplessly at Danny. You could see the three lagers Jane had bought sitting on the bar top behind her left elbow, giving her a good excuse to prove she was not here on her own.
Jane could walk away from this any time she wanted.
But no, she went on talking to this Cornel.
Very much a woman, and smiling up at him.
‘Oh God,’ Lol said. ‘What do I do about this?’
3
Wet Cassock
The Grey Monk was still there, in the ladies’ lavatory, his face fogged and his arms spread wide.
A deja vu moment and it made Merrily feel unsteady. The wind was whining in the rafters, buzzing in the ill-fitting glass of the leaded window, whipping into the thorn trees around the chapel. All the different rhythms of the wind.
Had this ever been a friendly place? Its stone looked like prison stone. It stood mournful as an old war memorial in a shallow hollow on the yellowed slopes where the SAS used to train. Nearer to God? All it felt nearer to was death.
She glared at the grey monk by the side of the door, where he lived in the plaster. Where you’d see him in the mirror as you tidied your hair. According to Huw, he’d been a Nonconformist preacher who’d roamed the hills sick with lust for someone’s wife down in Sennybridge. He’d been found dead where the women’s toilet now stood, head cracked open on the flags.
The point being that he was said to have left his imprint there, later known, because of its general shape, as the Grey Monk – Huw explaining how most so-called ghostly monks were not monks at all, just a vagueness in the electromagnetic soup suggestive of robe and cowl.
Merrily saw herself in the mirror standing next to the monk. She was thirty-nine years old. Were the crow’s feet becoming webbed or did she just need more early nights? She nodded to the monk and walked out to where Huw was waiting for her at the top of the passage, standing on his own under a small, naked bulb, spidery filaments glowing feebly through the dead flies and the dust.
The course students had all gone into the chapel. Merrily shut the doors on them. The only chance she’d get.
‘OK. I was absolutely determined not to ask, but…’
‘It’ll be obvious, lass,’ Huw said. ‘Also, good for you. A chance to step back and see how far you’ve come. Rationalize it.’
‘It can’t be rationalized. It isn’t rational. You taught me that.’
&
nbsp; Huw put on his regretful half-smile. His dog collar was the colour of old bone. Huw’s collars always looked like they’d been bought at a car-boot sale, maybe a hearse-boot sale. Merrily remembered the first time she’d heard his voice, expecting – Huw Owen? – some distant Welsh academic with a bardic lilt, but getting David Hockney, Jarvis Cocker. He’d been born in humble circumstances just down the valley here, then taken away as a baby to grow up in Yorkshire.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘It’s partly on account of you being the first woman ever to get sent here for deliverance training.’
Which he’d hardly been happy about at the time. Walking her over the unwelcoming hills, telling her what a turn-on women priests were for the pervs and the creeps. As for a woman exorcist…
‘Two on this course,’ Huw said.
You could tell by his tone that he hadn’t been impressed. The hanging bulb glowed the colour of wet straw. The wind was leaning on the new front door at the top of the passage, and Merrily had an urge to walk through it, out onto the hill. Try and keep a cigarette alight up there. Or just keep on walking into the rattling night, back to the car, foot down, out of here, with the wind behind her.
‘So what do you want me to tell them?’
‘Just answer their questions, best you can. Feel free to downplay everything. We don’t want to put the shits up them.’
Then, suddenly, impulsively, Huw sprang up on tiptoe and headed the bulb, setting it swinging like a censer. In its fibrous light, his smile looked slightly insane.
‘Although we do,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’
The women on the course were a brisk, posh girl and a squat, quiet matron in her fifties who Huw said had been governor of a women’s prison. If it wasn’t for the hungry female clergy, a third of the churches in England and Wales would probably be nightclubs and carpet warehouses. They had the confidence of being needed, these women.
‘So why are you all here?’ Huw said. ‘Eh?’
Over twenty clergy in the body of the chapel, mostly young middle-aged. The higher number on the course reflecting not so much an increased interest in exorcism, Merrily was thinking, so much as the trend for deliverance panels within each diocese. Health and Safety. Back-up. Decisions made by committee.
There was a kind of formality about them. No jeans, no sweatshirts, more dog collars than Crufts. But somehow it felt artificial, like fancy dress. The only obvious maverick here was Huw himself, so blatantly old hippie you expected flecks of spliff down his jacket.
‘I’m serious. Why were you picked for this – the one job the Church still gets all coy about? And Dawkins on the prowl, knife out.’
Somebody risked a laugh. Huw gazed out. Now they were out of fashion again, he wore a ponytail, grey and white, bound up with a red rubber band. He was sitting next to Merrily, behind a carafe of water, at a mahogany table below where the lectern used to be.
‘You…’ Levelling a forefinger. ‘Why’ve you come? Stand up a minute, lad.’
The guy into the second row was about forty, had narrow glasses and a voice that was just as soft and reasonable as you’d expect.
‘Peter Barber. Luton. Urban parish, obviously, high percentage of foreign nationals. The demand was there. I was invited by my bishop to consider the extent to which we should address it.’
‘And how much of it do you accept as valid, Peter? When a Somali woman says she thinks the Devil might be arsing about with her daughter, what’s your instinct?’
‘Huw, we discussed this. I have a respect for everyone’s belief system.’
‘Course you do, lad.’
Huw glanced at Merrily, his lips moving slightly. They might have formed the words Fucking hell. The wind went on bulging the glass and swelling the joints of the chapel.
‘How many of you are here because you’ve had what could be called a psychic or paranormal experience?’
Silence.
‘Nobody?’
Someone coughed, smothered it. Merrily felt Huw wanting to smash all the lights. Then the woman who’d been a prison governor stood up. She wore a black suit over her clerical shirt. Her lapel badge said Shona. Her accent was lowland Scottish.
‘I’ve been close to situations which were difficult to accommodate. We had a disturbed girl with a pentagram tattooed on the side of her neck, who we found was organizing Ouija-board sessions. Something not exactly unknown in women’s prisons and not invariably stamped upon.’
‘Because at least it keeps them quiet,’ Huw said.
‘Not in this case. We had disturbances bordering on hysteria, which spread with alarming speed. Girls claiming there were entities in their cells. The equilibrium of the whole establishment seemed to have been tipped. The prison psychologist was confident of being able to deal with it but eventually our chaplain asked me if he could bring in a colleague. From the deliverance ministry.’
‘When was this?’
‘Five or six years ago. I’d been reluctant at first, expecting him to… I don’t know, subject the girls to some crude casting-out thing. But he just talked to them, and it gradually became quieter. No magic solution, and it took a number of visits by this man, but it was resolved.’
‘Never an exact science, lass.’
‘I was impressed. Wanting to know how it had been achieved. When I took early retirement a couple of years later and sought ordination, that incident kept coming back to me. So here I am. A volunteer.’
Huw nodded and didn’t look at Merrily. If the first guy had seemed unlikely to go the distance, it would be hard to fault this woman on either background or motivation. Merrily watched Huw bend and lift the carafe with both hands and tip a little water into his glass.
‘So in other words,’ he said, ‘you’re a set of dull buggers.’
Outside somewhere, a branch snapped. Huw took an unhurried drink.
‘Men and women of common sense and discretion. Selected for their stability. Safe pairs of hands. Individuals who won’t embarrass the essentially secular element inside the modern Church. No mystics, no evangelicals, no charismatics.’
Merrily stared at Huw. That was a bad thing? He shrugged lightly.
‘Well, aye, we don’t want crackpots. We don’t want exorcisms prescribed like antibiotics, to cure shoplifting and alcohol abuse. Ideally, we don’t want them, in the fullest sense, at all. But let’s not dress this up…’
Merrily watched his fingers flexing on the mahogany tabletop then taking his weight as he leaned forward.
‘This is no job for a digital priest. At some stage, if you decide to go ahead with this particular ministry, you’ll be pulled into areas you never wanted to go. You’ll be affected short-term and long-term, mentally and emotionally and spiritually. Every one of you’s guaranteed to encounter summat that’ll ruin your sleep. I don’t want any bugger leaving here thinking that’s not going to happen.’
She was aware of him glancing into the bottom left-hand corner of the chapel, where the shadows were deepest and you couldn’t make out the faces.
‘Which is why I asked this friend of mine to come over. Through the rain and the gales.’ Turning to look at Merrily, who couldn’t kill the blush and frowned. ‘This is Mrs Watkins, deliverance consultant for the Diocese of Hereford. Successor to one of the most experienced exorcists in the country. Quite a responsibility. So… we have to ask, how did a young lass get a job like that? Safe pair of hands? I don’t think so, though she is now. No, she were hand-picked by the Bishop of Hereford at the time, because…’
Huw. Glaring up at him, not moving her lips. For God’s sake…
‘Because he fancied her,’ Huw said. ‘It were a glamour thing.’
Merrily had come in jeans and a cowl-neck black sweater with her smallest pectoral cross. Nowt formal, Huw had said on the phone. She sighed.
‘Runner-up in the Church Times Wet-Cassock competition. Never going to live that down.’
‘ Runner-up.’ Huw sniffed. ‘That were a travesty.’
Onl
y half of them laughed. You could almost see the disdain like a faint cloud in the air around the posh girl who was probably planning a paper on how the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were part of the same complex metaphor.
‘With Merrily, you can’t see the damage, but it’s there.’
Huw wasn’t smiling now. She noticed that his face was thinner, the lines like cracks in tree bark.
‘Tell them about Mr Joy, Merrily. Tell the boys and girls what Mr Joy did to you.’
And then he turned away so he wouldn’t see her eyes saying no.
4
Talk About Paris
Cornel – was that his first name or what? Cornel. You had to try and laugh. He didn’t even need to open that wide, loose, red mouth to be screaming, Look at me, I’m from Off. That too-perfect combination of plaid workshirt and Timberland-type boots… and the Rolex. Or whatever it was. Some flash old-fashioned status watch, anyway, and he’d be thinking all the country girlies would be like, Take me, Cornel… take me away in the Boxter and show me the penthouse.
Well, not quite all of them.
‘I’ve never been up there myself,’ Jane said. ‘The Court… it’s like real mysterious to us.’
The localish accent rolling out nicely, not too pronounced. If this wasn’t so serious it could almost be fun.
‘Mysterious,’ Cornel said.
Did he actually say myshterioush? Was he really that pissed?
Probably. Jane looked up at him, hands on her hips.
‘So go on…’
‘What?’
‘Like what happens?’
‘What do you think happens?’ Cornel said.
‘I don’t like to think.’
Cornel grinned down at her. There was that sour, too-much-wine smell on his breath. More unpleasant, somehow, than beer or whisky. Kind of decadent and louche.
‘You’re really tall,’ Jane said stupidly. ‘You know that?’
‘I was breast-fed. For months and months.’ He looked up from her chest. ‘So my mother tells me.’
‘You got a gun, Cornel? Of your own?’