by Kim Newman
The crisis had been official since spring, and the harvest was set to be a disaster. The land was ailing. Around him, the grass was piss-yellow. Up in the orchard, the property was a post-holocaust wasteland. The apples had ripened early, but under shiny skins the fruit had been sour and hard. This morning, Hazel had had to get up at six to phone the Bleaches, on their lecture tour in Canada until September, and break the bad news. Their garden was suffering a slow, lingering death. Mike and Mirrie were understanding. The instructions were to do the best to limit the damage. Paul had only met the couple once, but liked them very much. Mike was external assessor for the polytechnic, and one of Hazel’s tutors recommended her as a working caretaker for the summer. The Bleaches were right not to shut up shop while they were away; agriculture might be down, but tourism was up. The shop was so busy some mornings that Paul had to fill in for Hazel with customers so she could get a few uninterrupted hours at the wheel.
The bell by the showroom steps jingled. He looked across the lawn. Hazel was sliding off the seat of her wheel, brushing off her apron. The visitors weren’t customers. They hadn’t gone into the shop. Hazel joined them on the steps. Paul realized immediately they were a pair of Jago’s peace-and-love zombies. In their Woodstock-era outfits and beatific living-dead expressions, they were unmistakable. He’d seen a few of the species around the village, but had never had to speak to any of them. Until now. He’d heard of Alder before this summer, of course. The Village Where God Lives. Thered been a piece on cults in the Independent, and an acid profile of Anthony Jago in The New Statesman. The Agapemone was well away from the village but could be seen from the moor, a prime sample of early Victorian megalomaniac architecture halfway up its own little hill.
‘Hi,’ said the broad-hipped woman, ‘my name’s Wendy, and he’s Derek. Welcome to Alder. Wed have been round before, but it’s been hectic.’
She had brought flowers, miraculously unshrivelled, and handed them into Hazel’s arms carefully, as if passing a baby. The Lord God evidently outranked the parish council when it came to water regulations. Paul had been yearning to violate the local authority’s sprinkler ban and give emergency aid to the lawn, but water laws were being enforced with the zeal eighteenth-century revenue men had employed sniffing out lace smugglers.
‘Hello, I’m Paul Forrestier.’ They’d come over to his desk. Hazel had provisionally put the flowers in a vase in the showroom, and was wiping clay-grey hands on her caked apron. ‘This is Hazel.’
‘Chapel,’ she added, smiling. Her name was Chapelet actually, but she didn’t like it. ‘Hi, thanks for the flowers.’
‘We’re from the Agapemone,’ said Wendy, ‘that means—’
‘Abode of Love,’ said Paul.
‘Right. I’m impressed. I heard you were a brain of some sort. Are you a Greek scholar?’
‘No,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘English Lit. I read an article…’
‘Oh.’ Wendy dropped a hint of defensiveness. ‘Well, never mind. Don’t be put off. Jesus Christ didn’t get a good press either. We’re not really like the Manson family, honest.’
Wendy’s cheeriness was suddenly unconvincing. The New Statesman had compared Jago with Sun Myung Moon, L. Ron Hubbard and, tactfully, Jim Jones, but Paul let it pass. He didn’t want to go into a discussion of the tenets of the Acid Gospel. He had Wendy and Derek pegged as old hippies, but Wendy’s conversational daintiness was almost conventional. She wore CND, Animal Rights and Legalize It patches on her embroidered waistcoat, and her grey-touched hair was frizzed and long. However, she’d have been as happy representing the Women’s Institute as a fringe cult which worshipped God in the flesh. Under multicoloured skirt and tie-dyed blouse, she was creeping chubbily into middle age.
‘Tony’s amazing,’ said the man, Derek. He was thin and worn, his Midlands-accented hesitance suggesting he did little of the talking. ‘He’s got the whole world sussed.’
‘Oh yes.’ Wendy took over again, digging leaflets out of her Rupert Bear shoulder bag. Hazel took one. ‘He’s helped us sort ourselves out. We used to be really screwed up.’
Paul cringed inwardly. He was afraid Wendy was going to ramble on about their Messiah.
‘He’s far out,’ said Derek, without apparent irony. If this went on much longer, Paul was going to have trouble keeping a straight face.
Hazel sat in one of the garden chairs and picked through the handout. Wendy and Derek sat on the ground, cross-legged. Derek plucked a few straw-coloured blades of grass, and started braiding them. ‘The earth is dying,’ he said. Or was that ‘The Earth is dying’?
‘Yeah,’ said Paul. ‘Time for the big red sunset and the giant crabs.’
‘The Time Machine, right?’
‘Yes.’ Paul was surprised. He would assume Derek was remembering the film, but Hollywood had left out the giant crabs.
Hazel was excited, brighter than he had seen her since spring. ‘Can we go?’ The tiny overlap of her front teeth, which she hated and he quite liked, showed, as it did whenever she forgot not to smile broadly. She handed him a leaflet. It was for the summer festival. He did not realize how big it was going to be. Hazel pointed out the names of several groups he had never heard of. One of the headline acts was Loud Shit, a skunk band Sally had taken him to last year. He didn’t think they’d get involved in anything remotely religious, and grinned at the idea of how well they would go down with the Tory-voting farmers of Alder. The nearest they came to a love song was a number called ‘Fuck Off and Die’. He’d broken up with Sally shortly afterwards, when she’d had one of her breasts tattooed.
‘We were going to ask you…’
‘(Because you make pots)’
‘…if you’d like a stall to sell stuff from. We’ve got all sorts of crafts people. Weavers, woodturners, jewellers. And some really good theatre groups. And things for kids. We’ve been scheming for months. It’ll be even better than last year.’
Hazel went ‘umm’. She was unhappy with her recent work.
‘I’ve only had one gloss firing, and there was a hiccough with the glaze. Too many things came out dingy brown. I haven’t got much sellable stuff. A few things from last term.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be lovely.’
‘Most people will be stoned anyway,’ said Derek, nearly giggling. ‘They’ll make up their own colours.’
A pause. Wendy’s lips thinned momentarily. Derek would get a reasonable talking-to later, Paul was sure. He felt sorry for the man, intuiting that he’d been dragged by his girlfriend into Jago’s sect and was liable to be stuck with it. Until the Reverend gave the Beatles’ Double White one spin too many and called for a bloodbath, or, depressed by an income-tax investigation, decided it was time to try out the Kool-Aid and cyanide cocktail on his congregation.
‘But I’m firing again tonight. I think I know where I went wrong. I’m not used to this big kiln. If it turns out okay, I’ll have some pretty things. I hope. I’ve also got a couple of boxes of Mike and Mirrie Bleach’s pots. They’re supposed to replace the work that sells from the shop, but nobody will mind if they go during the festival.’
‘That’s great.’ Wendy clacked her beads. ‘We’ll put you down for a table. Come over to the Agapemone when you can, and pick a site. We don’t lock up or anything. We try to be really open, and anyone can come to one of our meals or Tony’s services. There’s no real mystery. We’d like to have you. Both.’
‘Thanks, I’m a bit busy with my thesis, but—’
‘We’d love to drop over,’ said Hazel. ‘There’s blow all else to do out here.’
Hazel took Paul’s hand. Hers was dry, and he felt slip-clay powder between their palms.
‘You must come. He’ll like you. And you’ll like Him. Tony.’
Paul had known whom Wendy meant. The Reverend Anthony William Jago. In photographs, he had eyes like Robert Powell as Jesus and the three-weeks-dead expression Paul associated with William S. Burroughs.
Post addressed to ‘The Lord Go
d, Alder’ was apparently delivered to him.
‘We must be going,’ Wendy said. ‘So much to do, so little time to do it in.’
When Wendy and Derek had gone, Hazel got a different vase for the flowers and filled it with precious water. Then she went back to work, and Paul was left to his books.
2
Leaning on his cherry-wood stick, Danny Keough rested. Not wanting to strap himself into his old Volkswagen because of the heat, he had decided to go round the outlying farms on foot. Inside, the car smelled like burning tyres. Still, it might have been better than punishing his trick knee on this long hike. The old wound was playing up, and a permanent haze had settled on his brain. He had not been smitten by the sun like this since 1947, his stint in Palestine.
Maybe somebody would give him a lift to the Maskell farm. It was unlikely. On the levels, you could see cars coming from a long way away. There was nothing in sight except a blue van pulled up on the verge a hundred yards down the road. This was a B-route anyway, not wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other without one having to back up into a lay-by. It was only here to serve Maskell and a few smaller farmers. The tarmac was springy, the patches laid down in spring to fill in potholes were bitumen black and tacky. Across the ditches, rubbery fields were moistened only by rancid remains of long-dead grass. The ditches were mainly muddy depressions streaked with pale, cracked earth. Although these were the wetlands, there wasn’t much wet this year.
It would be a bad year. And Jago’s jamboree would only make it worse. Last Christmas, they had sent him an anonymous present. Inside the thin square parcel was a gramophone record. ‘Don’t Stop the Carnival’ by the Alan Price Set. He should have laughed. This was not a carnival, this was a zoo. The hippies were animals. Despoiling the countryside, breaching the peace, disturbing the livestock, interfering with people, raising a racket.
He was late with his petition because he’d been laid up by the heat, but he had hopes it would be longer than ever. He mightn’t stop them this year, but he was making a dent. Next year, or the year after, maybe. He didn’t care if he was grappling with the Lord God. Danny Keough had dealt with a campaign of terror before, and this time he would brave it out. His country had let him down in Palestine, running away from the Jew-boy killers. Things were different now. It was all up to him. There were no politicians to chicken out when things got hairy.
Four years ago, he’d been sweet-talked along with the rest of the village. But when he saw the first carload of teenage tearaways come up the road, he knew what it would be like. They didn’t call themselves hippies any more, but that was what they were all right. And hippies were no different from gypsies, savages, vermin. Nomadic trash with no hopes, messing up one place and going on to the next.
It was an invasion. An occupation. A week of unrelieved din, litter, harassment and degradation. Naked and painted kids using the street as a toilet. Drugged freaks running riot. And the noise. It wasn’t music, any more than a plane crash was music. Afterwards, Alder looked as if a Panzer division had rolled through, followed by an Apache war party.
The next year, and every year since, Danny had been making a din of his own, trying to put a stop to the festival. He began with letter writing. He remembered with pride the headline the Western Gazette printed over his first published letter, ‘“Hippies Should Be Stopped” Writes Decorated Veteran’. He sent copies to the district council, the county council, the Sedgemoor and District Preservation Society, his Member of Parliament and the bishop of Bath and Wells. He’d been in the Gazette again regularly, also the Bridgwater Mercury, the Western Daily Press and the Bristol Evening Post. HTV West came and interviewed him in his front garden, but they had cut up what he said and also had on some posh-voiced drop-out from the Agapemone to make him look an intolerant old fool. Even then, the television station had letters in support of him.
But the festival happened again. And it had been even worse. Every year, it got worse. Five weeks before the second festival, the last of his cats had been run over in the road. Danny was sure the car was from the Agapemone. It was part of some obscene rite which demanded sacrifice. Over the years, indignities had mounted up. His front garden had been trampled over, his stretch of white fence pissed on and spray-painted. The side of his house had been flyposted with so many advertisements for groups with disgusting names that it looked like a modern art collage when he tried to rip it down. He wasn’t the only victim. Mrs Graham, who lived alone, had been terrorized by young thugs who pitched a tent in her garden with not so much as a by-your-leave, and had passed away the next winter. Mr Starkey’s youngest, Tina, had been lured into the festival; she had come back half-naked, doped up to the eyeballs. The family had to send her away to an approved school, and Danny heard she had to get rid of a baby. There was also damage to crops, animals, roads and private property.
It had to be stopped.
This used to be beautiful countryside, but since Jago came to the Manor House it had turned, like milk left in the sun.
He started walking again, trying to keep the weight off his knee. There was pain in each step. Lately he was more aware of his old wounds, and thinking of how he had got them.
It must be the heat, taking him back. During the Gulf War, he had grudgingly raised a brandy in salute every time one of Saddam’s Scuds got through to the Jew-boys. Every time he read in the Telegraph about the PLO blowing up people in Israel, there was a little holiday in his heart. That was what an American writer had said about Palestine, ‘Every time a British soldier is killed, there’s a little holiday in my heart’. The Jews invented terrorism and he relished the thought of them choking in Tel Aviv on their own medicine. Some time soon, when he’d stopped the festival, Danny was going to get back on their case. He’d been prodding the army and government for years. He had a scrapbook. He knew how many Irgun killers held high office in the Israeli government. They hadn’t paid their debt to Britain, their debt to Danny Keough, yet. But there was time.
He’d walked as far as the blue van, and was in sight of the Maskell house. There was a group of people in the nearest field, standing among some skinny cows. One of the animals was down, and a man knelt by it. Maurice Maskell stood over them, eyes shaded by a tweed cap, hands on hips, listening. The farmer looked now as his father, Major Maskell, had done in the 1950s, weathered and authoritative. But he wasn’t the man the Major had been. He had never been to war, never faced the enemy.
Danny found a concrete bridge, not that he needed one to get across this ghost ditch, and walked into the field. He waved his stick, but no one turned to take notice. He joined the group.
The kneeling man was Donal Goddard, the local vet. Danny had taken his cats to him. Goddard was finishing a depressing diagnosis, which Maskell was doing his best to take on board.
‘It’s the heat,’ Goddard concluded, standing up, brushing dry dirt off his knees.
‘Umm,’ Maskell was thinking. The two other men in the group looked at the tall farmer. They were farm labourers, Reg Gilpin and Stan Budge. Everyone was worried.
No one said anything, so Danny piped up. ‘Maurice, if I might have a word?’
Maskell looked as if he didn’t recognize him for a few seconds, then snapped out of it. He grasped Danny’s hand and took hold of his shoulder, steering him slightly away from the others.
‘Danny, hello, good to see you. I’ve got something on right now. I’ll be with you in a moment. Go up to the house, and Sue-Clare will get you something cold. Okay?’
‘Righty-ho.’
Maskell gave him a slight push, sending him across the field, toward the house, keeping him out of the group. Danny heard the vet talking. ‘There’s not much more I can do here, Maurice. Keep on as you have been, and I’ll give you a ring tomorrow.’ Maskell mumbled a goodbye, and Goddard started toward his van. When Danny got to the gate that separated Maskell’s concrete yard from the fields, he looked back.
Maskell was talking to the men. Budge gestured angrily. Voic
es raised. The workman spat on the ground. It was obviously a rough day all round.
In the yard, Maskell’s wife was greasing a saddle. She dressed like the land girls Danny remembered from the war, tight trousers and a loose man’s shirt. Her eyes were covered by beetle-black glasses. She smiled to see him coming, and waved a cloth.
‘Good morning, Mr Keough.’
‘Is it?’
She ignored the comment. ‘Maurice sent you over, eh? I’ve got a jug of lemonade chilling in the fridge. Join us.’
‘I shan’t be stopping long.’
Sue-Clare Maskell had her top two buttons undone. In the sticky heat, her shirt outlined her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Danny found it hard to understand. These days, this was the way a respectable woman dressed.
‘I’ve more calls to make,’ he said, holding up his new folder. ‘The petition.’
‘Excuse me, will you. I’ll get the juice. Maurice is coming. Be right back.’
She went indoors, to her kitchen. Danny watched the seat of her riding trousers as she walked. She must be years younger than her husband. Their children, a weedy boy called Jeremy and a robust girl named Hannah, were barely old enough for school. Jeremy was the beginnings of a nuisance, wandering around in a dream, falling in ditches, having tantrums. Danny had heard that Sue-Clare Maskell had strange interests. Crystals and acupuncture, stargazing. She wasn’t from around here.
He remembered the girls in Jerusalem who crowded the barracks, bodies like ripe fruit. One of them had brought in the bomb. Perhaps one he’d been with? The heat had been driving everyone crazy. It was almost a relief to be in the fanned cool of the hospital. And he remembered the other woman from the other war. The German parachutist. No one talked about her. Danny might even be the last man alive who had been there the night the Nazis tried to bomb Alder.