by Graham Joyce
The six-minute experience tipped Maggie into a deep trough of depression.
Ash did his best to take her mind off it.
"Why the Winter Solstice?" Maggie asked as they drove. She stared bleakly through the passenger window into the pitch dark outside. Spots of rain dotted the windscreen.
"Because now the days will get lighter. It represents progression toward the light. A' good time to consecrate these things."
"Can't you do it for me?"
"You make your own dedications."
"Who shall I dedicate them to?"
"Don't ask me things for which you already have the answer."
It was approaching midnight. They got out of the car and began walking across the shadowy heath. Low cloud obscured the moon. The wind screeched around the stunted bushes and buffeted the rocks. It flapped the hems of their coats.
"It's fucking freezing," said Maggie, stumbling along the path.
"You chose this place."
"I suppose I owe her one here. Doesn't your wife mind you running around the heath at this time of night?"
Ash treated the question as rhetorical. They reached the standing stones and it started to rain. Maggie laid out her equipment: altar cloth, knife, mortar and pestle, and the hazel wand she had cut and stripped from the hedgerow a few days earlier. Ash stood looking at his watch. He wouldn't let her start until midnight. "If we're going to do this at all, let's do it properly. I'm just glad there's no one here to see us."
At midnight Ash lit the paraffin-soaked brand he'd brought with him. It looked dramatic. It sent shadows running for cover behind the standing stones. Spots of rain hissed on the flame.
"What shall I say?" cried Maggie, her wet hair plastered to her head.
"Make it up," said Ash. "It really doesn't matter."
"Have I really got to say it aloud?"
"Oh, yes."
Maggie squatted. She reran the events of the day, and for the first time allowed her depressive feelings to roll over and through her, like a storm cloud passing over acres of fertile fields. Tears pricked her eyes, but somewhere in that moment she found words. Words of power. The rain battened on her tears as she offered up each piece of equipment in turn, each to the four points of the compass. She dedicated them and asked that they be imbued with power in return. Ash stood in the circle, patiently but self-consciously holding the flaming brand aloft until she'd completed the cycle.
She was drenched. The cold and the rain took hold of her. They penetrated her clothes and eased their way into her. They possessed her bones. It was like being entered by a spirit, but it was elemental cold and rain. She had a momentary sensation of damp heat at her lips, breasts, and vagina. She shivered. It was a deep, earth-charged spasm.
"Finished?"
She nodded. Ash put out the flame. Maggie collected up her equipment, wrapping them in the soaked altar cloth, then came over to stand beside Ash.
They stood in the silence, the rain still falling. Then it fell harder, very hard, bouncing high off the stones.
"Well," said Ash.
"What do we do now?"
"We go home, of course."
During the drive back, Maggie sat in silence.
"What is it?"
"Oh, I don't know. I'm disappointed," she said. "I expected something to happen. To feel something more. To see something. Anything. But she just wasn't there tonight."
"Oh no, she was there all right."
"Well, I didn't feel her."
"No. She takes her gifts very modestly. But she was there all the time. You'll see."
"How will I see?"
"Oh, I dunno. She'll give you something back in return."
Two days later, Alex agreed to let her have the children for an extra afternoon. He was taking them to his parents' house in Harrogate, where they would spend Christmas. She wanted to give them their presents before he spirited them away. She took them to a burger bar—which previously she'd always strictly refused to do—and bought them everything they asked for.
The time came for Alex to collect them. He piled the kids in the car and turned to her before leaving, pulling a gift from his coat pocket. Whatever it was, it was beautifully wrapped in expensive red-and-green paper and trimmed with gold thread and a golden bow. It had a label: To Maggie, love from Alex xxx.
"Can I open it now?" said Maggie. She was battling not to let him see how upset she was about the children.
"I wish you would."
She tore open the wrapping paper. It was Bella's diary.
"I thought you'd burned it!"
"How could I—me, an archaeologist—burn something like that?"
"Thank you for giving it back to me. Happy Christmas."
"Happy Christmas, Maggie."
She cried after he drove away.
TWENTY-FIVE
Christmas Day was bleak. Maggie woke with a hangover and a palate like a carpet soaked in sticky liqueurs. She'd been out with Kate to a pub on Christmas Eve. A drunk with Jesus Christ hair and the smell of vomit in his beard had spent the night trying to kiss her. She'd turned down two offers of bed and one of salvation when the Church Army had arrived with collecting tins just before midnight.
Now all she had was the vengeance of the morning after in her dismal bed-sit. Kate had gone home to her parents' house. Even the thrash music (which hadn't started up again since she'd left her calling card) would have been almost welcome. The house was as quiet and as chilly as a tomb.
Beginning to wish she'd taken up the offer to spend Christmas Day with Kate's family, she switched on her gas fire and went to wash in the bathroom. The fungus in the corner exuded malintent. When she returned to her room, the gas had died. She emptied her purse onto the table, finding not a single coin for the meter. She flicked on her portable TV set. Every channel seemed to be showing cartoons. She got back into bed.
And there she stayed until midday when there came a hammering on the front door. Maggie got out of bed and, tying the sash of her dressing gown, padded downstairs and along the cold corridor.
"Ash!" He was standing holding a gift-wrapped present. She hugged him, almost bowling him from the step in her enthusiasm. "Oh, Ash!"
"Didn't like to think of you here alone. Thought you might need cheering up."
She took him inside and made him wait in the kitchen while she dressed.
"Cold in here," he observed when he was allowed in the room.
"This is the worst Christmas Day of my life. You've no idea what it's like to be on your own for Christmas Day."
Ash looked at her strangely. "Put your coat on," he said. "Time you met the wife."
"I couldn't intrude, Ash. It's not fair."
"Do as you're told. You're not staying here all day."
So she let him bully her into spending Christmas Day at his place. She carried her still-wrapped gift to the car and climbed in beside him. It was a half-hour drive along roads that were almost empty.
Ash lived in a large, slightly gloomy detached house with rampant ivy trailing the facing wall. The lounge had a coal fire burning behind a brass fireguard. Ash moved the fireguard aside and she took advantage of the warmth. Maggie made a quick assessment as Ash poured them both a glass of sherry. It was a most conventional room, disappointingly so with its Dralon suite and velvet curtains and its brass ornaments grouped around the fire. She'd expected something more ... bohemian, more eccentric.
"Cheers," said Ash, tipping back his sherry.
"Isn't your wife going to join us?"
"The wife. Right. Time for you to meet the wife. Come through to the study."
Ash tugged her by the wrist and led her down the hall to a room at the rear of the house. He opened the door and propelled her into the room ahead of him. "Maggie, meet the wife."
Maggie looked back at him, perplexed. There was no one. But every eccentric or bohemian detail she'd expected to be exhibited in Ash's house had been crammed into this room. It was indeed a study. There was a great leather-inl
ay desk the size of a sports field standing against the far wall. A winking word processor suggested he'd spent some of his Christmas morning at work. The walls were decked with large maps, studded with pins and coloured ribbon connecting geographical positions. Otherwise framed prints covered all available wall space.
The room was heavy with the pungent smell of incense. And on shelves or on freestanding display tables was an extensive collection of figurines, statuary, carvings, and fragments of bas-relief. The room was a museum, but with the aura of a shrine.
"They're all—"
"That's right," said Ash. "The goddess, in all her different incarnations. I collect them. Actually I study them. It's my hobby when I'm not in the shop."
"And the maps?"
"I'm tracing her movements, across history. See? She started out here, in the Middle-East, and her influence spread to Africa, to Asia and to Europe. Then with the migration of the peoples.... only her name gets changed, she doesn't change."
"It's incredible!" She lifted a figurine from a table.
"That's the Ephesian Artemis. And it's original, in case you were wondering. From somewhere in Asia Minor about 1000 B.C. You went straight to it. Clever lady; I'm impressed. Most of the things you see here are reproductions. Some I had specially made."
Maggie weighed it in her hand. The lifelike representation had a dozen mammary glands. "It must be worth a fortune!"
"Yep."
"But why do you ..."
"Refer to it all as 'the wife'? Because it's here. It's a good excuse, if ever I want to get away from someone. And because I spend so much time with her.... Come on. Let's go back to the other room."
Maggie carefully replaced the figurine on the table. He closed the door softly on the goddess and poured them both another glass of sherry.
"So you're not married after all. You don't have a wife."
"I did have. She died in a motoring accident three years ago." Ash looked into the fire. This was the sadness Maggie had sensed in him from the beginning. "Actually there's another reason why I call all that 'the wife.' Janie—my real wife—started all that research. She was an academic, writing a book. I'm trying to finish it for her. I don't have her brilliance. It's taking a long time."
He was trying to make light of it, and he wasn't doing it very well. She could see he'd never let it out to anyone; intuition told her he'd choked it all back. "Do you know," he was saying, "people say time will help you get over it. Well, they're wrong. When you lose someone, the world becomes a changed place. And it's changed forever."
She wanted to hold him, but it wasn't possible.
"I'm being morbid!" he said brightly, suddenly.
"No, you're not."
"Yes, I am. Drink up! Open your present! There's a turkey cooking. Can you smell it?"
Oh, yes. Maggie could smell the bird cooking.
They pulled crackers and wore paper hats and drained two bottles of claret and had a jolly dinner. It was self-conscious jollity, but it was genuine. They were relaxed in each other's company, and they were both desperately relieved not to have to spend the day alone.
After dinner they sat through part of a lugubrious television church service, before Ash switched it off and put some music on instead.
"Don't you believe in the miracle of the Virgin birth?" Maggie asked, ironic
"No more than I believe Santa Clause comes down that chimney with a roast chestnut up his arse."
"You don't like the Christian Church, do you? I could see while you were watching TV."
"No, I don't. I despise it. Look, Christ was possibly the greatest teacher ever. A healer, in more ways than one. But if he was here today he'd have nothing to do with the Christian Church." She'd got him on his subject. "Take the Virgin Mary," he continued, "our most recent incarnation of the goddess. But what did they do, these old patriarchs? They took her sexuality away. The virgin mother. And that's how they took her power away. Who do you think is that second woman you always see standing at the crucifixion?"
"What? You mean Mary Magdalene?"
"That's right. The prostitute, so called. The demoniac cured by Christ. She's the same person, the same Mary. But they split off the two halves of the goddess. The Magdalene is the sexy half. The virgin's dark sister, if you like."
Dark sister. The phrase rang bells. "Why did you say that? Dark sister?"
"Isn't that what she is? A shadow, always in the background, but always present. Come to think of it, Jesus was probably married to Mary Magdalene."
"Where do you get these outrageous notions?"
Ash smiled and nodded toward the study. "From the wife. But what really makes my blood boil about the Christian Church is the slaughter. All of those women in medieval times, literally millions across Europe, who were tortured and slaughtered and burned. Wise women. Healers. Simple herbalists, some of them, like me. Some of them just lonely old antisocial women. All put to the torch. Actually, they used to hang witches in this country, not burn them. But no one in the Christian Church, even to this day, seems prepared to show the slightest remorse for this holocaust. And they're still trying to do it! Do you know they had a campaign against my shop, because of some of the books I sell?"
"I'd heard about that, yes."
Ash waved a hand through the air, as if he wanted to swat a barmy world.
In the evening they played a round of Scrabble and drank more claret and a few glasses of brandy. Then just to prove how committed to Christmas he was, in a deep down sort of way, Ash produced a packet of dates, and they were in such good spirits they ate them all.
It seemed perfectly natural they should snuggle on the couch to watch a late film on the television.
"Would you like to stay here?" Ash asked her sleepily. She nodded. "You can have my bed," he said. "I'll make a bed up on the couch."
"That's not necessary. I want you to sleep with me."
He kissed her lightly, but then looked at her hard. "I'll stay on the couch."
"Why?"
Ash vented a deep sigh. "Let me tell you something. One of the greatest, most remarkable pleasures for a man in this world is the secret pleasure of an erection. After my wife died, the goddess took that pleasure away from me. I'm waiting for her to give it back."
Maggie felt a surge of love for Ash. It effervesced in her, like something foaming at the lip of the vessel. She felt the need to hold him, to cradle him, to impart love.
"It's all right," she said. "I want you to sleep with me anyway. Just to be with you. Just to hold you."
Maggie knew Ash had some crying to do, and she wanted to help him do it.
TWENTY-SIX
Boxing Day blues.
Ash left to fulfil a promise to visit his dead wife's parents. He went around midday, and though he suggested Maggie should avail herself of the house, she found herself wandering back to her bed-sit. The place was still empty apart from her; then in the afternoon the thrash music started up again from the ground floor.
Maggie telephoned Alex. Alex's mother answered stiffly before putting him on. He was amenable.
"What have they said? Have they taken your side?"
"What do you expect?" said Alex. "Let's not get into it, eh?"
"Have the kids been behaving?"
"Amy is queening it over everything and they're spoiling her to death; Sam has been a little swine since the moment he got here. He's crying for you all the time and he's smashing anything that's put in front of him. Mum and Dad bought him an indestructible toy truck and he threw it on the fire."
"Let me speak to them."
Maggie asked Amy to share her toys with Sam, and she asked Sam to be a good boy.
"How's your Christmas?" Alex said when he came back on the line.
"Quiet."
Maggie broke a long pause by asking, "When are you leaving there?"
"Couple more days. Will you be home when we get back?"
"No ... Maybe. I'm thinking about it."
"Yes. Think about it." Alex pu
t the phone down.
Maggie was thinking about it. She wanted her home back. She wanted her children back. About Alex she wasn't so sure. There was one particular question about Alex to which she wished she had an answer. She'd confronted him with her suspicions, but it wasn't enough. She wanted to know.
Maggie returned to her room and fed coins into her gas meter. She wanted the place to be warm for what she was about to do. First she set up her table with the altar cloth and the implements she'd consecrated on Wigstone heath. She unboxed her Christmas gift from Ash, three ornate brass incense burners, which she set out in a triangle around the room, and set cones of incense smouldering.
Then she proceeded to mix her flying ointment.
She operated partly on information from the diary, partly on the basis of warnings and tips delivered by Old Liz. Getting information out of Liz was never easy, in that it came either in fragments or sudden outpourings. Checking or recapitulating anything was out of the question. It was like trying to catch rainfall: you collected only what went straight into the vessel.
It scared her deeply. Yet she wanted to do it, had to do it. She needed more than ever to prove to herself she was not some feeble spirit to be fisted around the house. The recollection of Alex's stinging blows came to her. It gave her the strength to proceed.
Using a base of almond oil she mixed her quantities with the precision and care only fear could marshal. Her hands trembled; her throat was dry even as she used her mortar and pestle to grind the ingredients. She invoked the name of a protective spirit given to her by Ash.