by Phil Rickman
‘Cleansing. The expulsion of evil. You probably know that the business I was in – when I was modelling – all that’s pretty damn repellent to me these days. And though I’m well out of it all now, it’s like when you give up some bad habit – smoking – you can’t bear to be near smokers any more. You can smell them a mile off, and it’s unbearably obnoxious, all the worse because it’s tinged with this… foul desire.’
‘Right.’ Merrily was instinctively feeling the outside of her coat pocket, the familiar bulge made by her mobile phone… and the packet of Silk Cut and the Zippo.
‘So coming out here was like going into detox for me. But why would I come here, you’re asking, to this particular village, to be cleansed?’
‘No, I wouldn’t ask that. I try not to be nosy.’
‘All right, then, why are you here?’
‘Oh, I ask that all the time.’
Mrs Box laughed lightly. ‘Vicar, tell me, have you ever had what you might call a visionary experience?’ Merrily stared at her; Jenny Box raised both hands. ‘I know, I know, it depends on how you’d define visionary. Oh, the clergy, you’re so cautious these days, even the women.’
‘Especially the women. We still feel we’re on probation.’
Jenny Box regarded her solemnly. ‘But you’re the future. You must know that. Look, I’d like to discuss this and… some other things with you sometime… if you have an hour or so to spare – I mean, not now. I can see you’re anxious to be off.’
‘Well, it’s just that my daughter—’
‘No husband, though,’ Mrs Box threw in quickly.
‘He died. Some years ago.’
‘A young widow, remarried to the Church.’
It was what people often said, and it was irritating. It began to rain again.
‘Which is a wonderful thing,’ Jenny Box said. ‘You were… saved.’ She smiled. ‘It’s hard to avoid the old clichés, isn’t it?’
Merrily heard a voice calling from somewhere down Church Street.
‘I’m learning all about that because I’m writing a book,’ Mrs Box said. ‘About some things that happened to me.’
‘Oh?’ No big surprise. Jenny Box: the heartache I left behind. Serialized in one of the Sunday papers, a women’s magazine. If it was sensational enough, if there were ‘revelations’.
‘Mum!’
Merrily turned, saw the kid running up the street. ‘I’m sorry… that’s Jane… my daughter.’
Jenny Box took a step back, and Merrily had a sudden powerful sense of something around this woman making small, anxious flurries in the air: disorientation, loneliness.
‘I’d… like to hear about your book sometime.’
‘It isn’t finished yet. It isn’t over, you see. What the book’s about… those things aren’t over. Those things have hardly begun.’ Jenny Box shook her head and began to move away. Then she stopped beside one of the pillars of the market hall, turning her face to Merrily. ‘You said we could all receive…’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that…’ She looked at Jane stumbling to a stop, shook her head with finality. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Watkins.’
Pulling her scarf over her head, Jenny Box walked quickly away across the cobbles into the shadows behind the hanging lamps.
And here was Jane, the kid’s face shining with rain and sweat.
‘Oh God, Mum, I’ve run all the way down to the sodding hall. Tried to call you on the mobile.’
‘It was switched off. Didn’t want it going off in the middle of the meeting. What’s the problem, flower?’
Jane said, ‘Gomer.’
Merrily felt her stomach tighten. ‘What’s happened?’ She’d been half expecting Gomer at the meeting: the only parishioner you could always count on for support against the village establishment.
‘It’s awf—’ The kid was still struggling for breath. ‘Awful.’
‘What?’ Remembering the night last January when Minnie had had her heart attack, the hospital vigil with Gomer, the final silence of the side ward.
‘He came banging on the door. Didn’t know where else to go. He’d been in the pub and he’d had a few pints and he didn’t think he was safe to drive, so he was hoping you—’
‘Where?’ The rain was coming down harder. Jane had no coat, she must’ve gone rushing out in panic. ‘Drive where?’
‘He’d just got back from the Swan, OK, and… when he gets in the phone’s ringing and ringing. The police’d been trying to get him for, like, ages. He was hoping you could take him, but now he’s gone for his van, and he’s probably way over the limit.’
‘Police?’
‘It’s his yard in the Radnor Valley. His big shed. Mum, it’s on fire. The shed with the diggers and the bulldozer? It’s just all on fire. Gomer Parry Plant Hire… burning up.’
‘Oh God.’
‘He’s gone like really manic. You know how he gets. Even if he was sober, he wouldn’t be safe.’
‘When was this?’
‘Just a few minutes ago. He went tearing back for his van.’
‘OK, he’ll have to pass this way.’ The village was silent – no vehicle sounds. Merrily pulled out her mobile and switched it on. ‘Go back home, flower. I’ll call you.’
‘I’ll come too.’
‘No, you won’t. I’ll call you. Just go home and get dry. OK? I’ll call.’ Merrily pocketed the phone, put both hands on the kid’s shoulders and pointed her at the vicarage. ‘Go.’
She watched Jane walking across the empty street and into the vicarage drive, where the kid stopped and looked back.
‘And bar… Jane, bar the door, OK?’
Merrily stepped into the road and waited.
4
A Good Name
‘SORRY,’ SHE MUTTERED. Thorny branches in the hedge were scoring the side of the van. ‘Sorry.’
The problem was that although she could reach the pedals – just about – the driver’s seat was sunken with wear and the heavy old van was hard to control on bends and steep hills when you couldn’t fully see over the bonnet. Especially at night, in the intermittent rain, on these greasy country roads leading down to the Welsh border.
‘Should’ve gone back for your own car, vicar,’ Gomer murmured round his ciggy. ‘I’d’ve waited.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t.’
He said nothing. Hadn’t he nearly run her down, before he’d spotted the dog collar in the headlights and braked so hard he’d stalled the engine?
Gomer Parry stalling an engine – unheard of. He’d been as close then as she’d ever seen him to coming apart. The night Minnie died, his anguish had flared publicly, just once, in a twilit street near Hereford County Hospital, before he’d subsided into bleak acceptance.
Tonight, however, there was no sign of him coming down from whatever emotional ledge he was clinging to, and the ciggy was glowing red and dangerous between his lips. He wore his cap and his old tweed jacket and, underneath that, a green sweatshirt with GOMER PARRY PLANT HIRE on it in white.
This had been his nephew and business partner Nev’s idea. Gomer had had two extra ones printed – a serious honour – for Jane and for Merrily, whose churchyard hedges he cut, whose ditches he cleared and not a penny charged for any of it. He even came to church, maybe every other Sunday. But plant hire was Gomer Parry’s religion.
‘They don’t know how it started?’
Had she asked him this before? There were only so many things you could say en route to the ruins of a man’s whole identity.
‘If they knowed, they wasn’t sayin’. You know what cops is like. Plus, nobody seen it at all till the whole shed was well alight. Four fire engines called out. That big.’
Poor Gomer, hunched gnomelike on the edge of the passenger seat, his wire-rimmed bottle glasses opaque in the dimness of the van. Merrily guessed that what Gomer and Nev did probably didn’t even qualify as plant hire in the strictest sense. Mostly, they dug field drains and soakaways for septic t
anks. They had two tractors, a lorry, a bulldozer and a couple of diggers, Gwynneth and Muriel, stored in a former aircraft shed, twenty minutes away, near a long-disused airstrip just across the Welsh border. Where the fire was happening.
‘What about insurance, Gomer?’
‘Oh, we’re insured, sure t’be. But that en’t the point, is it, vicar?’
‘No. I guess not.’ A couple of years ago, Gomer had been pressed by Minnie into semi-retirement and he’d let Nev more or less take over the business. But after Minnie’s death, he’d gone grimly back, full-time. Plant hire: now it was all he had left.
‘En’t the point at all,’ Gomer said sadly. They were held up by temporary traffic lights at roadworks on the edge of Kington town centre.
‘Does Nev know?’
‘Ah, he’ll still be out on the bloody piss – apologies, vicar. Nobody knowed which pub the bugger was in.’
Unlike his nephew, Gomer didn’t drink much at all these days. But earlier tonight, it seemed, he’d arranged to see a certain bloke in the Black Swan, about some job or other, and this particular bloke was a big boozer, and Gomer had felt obliged to keep up with him. Mabbe four pints, vicar, he’d confessed, surrendering the wheel. Tonight of all bloody nights.
When Jane had run up to Merrily on the square and said, It’s Gomer, her first thought had been that he’d had a stroke or a heart attack like Minnie, who would have loved to mind the souvenir shop in the church – nobody better, except possibly Miss Lucy Devenish who’d kept Ledwardine Lore. Both of them dead now. All the things that might have been. Everything changing before you were ready, like pages of a favourite book ripped out to reveal a different story and new characters you were supposed to relate to instantly, the old ones suddenly gone for ever.
The traffic lights changed at last, and Merrily drove through the damp and empty small town and out of England.
Most of the leaves around here must have come down in last week’s high winds. Between the stripped trees, you could see blue lights turning in the Radnor Valley below, beating at the mist, as though the night itself was strobing. No visible flames, only these gaseous blue lights and the off-white, misshapen moon bobbing in the mist over the border hills.
‘Take a left by yere, vicar.’ At the sight of the emergency beacons, Gomer’s voice had gone flat. ‘And keep slow.’
Merrily turned into a minor road, a fenced field on one side – stoical sheep-eyes in the headlights – and what looked like a quarry on the other. She drove on, in low gear, for about two hundred yards before the headlamps found a high wire fence and two metal wire-meshed gates, both hanging open. A police car, engine running, blue beacon revolving, was blocking the entrance. When Merrily wound down her window, there was the throb of other motors, a haze of headlights and a smell that filled up the van like poison gas: acrid, hostile.
A policeman walked over. ‘Gomer.’ And then he saw it was a woman behind the wheel. ‘Oh.’
Gomer was shouldering open the passenger door. ‘Couldn’t bring that torch from under the dash, could you, vicar? Your side.’
The policeman said, ‘You’ve brought the vicar?’
‘Little vicar brought me, Robbie.’
The policeman sniffed the air around Gomer and nodded, getting the message. Gomer would know most of the coppers around here, and their dads and grandads, too.
Merrily found the torch and climbed out of the van. Her legs felt weak. She’d never been to Gomer’s depot before. Looking around for the famous former aircraft shed, she saw only the harsh headlights of fire appliances and some other vehicles, and puddles swirling with beacon blue. A couple of firefighters were moving slowly around with hoses, amid eddies of smoke. They seemed to be spraying the earth, as if they were trying to stimulate growth, and she realized, shocked, that this was because much of the building must have fallen in around its contents. No flames were left anywhere; the firemen were just damping down, to make sure it didn’t reignite.
She saw the husk of a tractor or maybe a bulldozer, its windows all gone. Gomer spat his cigarette into a pool of rainbowed water and walked away from the policeman towards a pyramid of twisted galvanized roof-panels, about ten feet high and wreathed in stinking smoke. Merrily started to follow him, then gagged on a mouthful of the searing air – no autumn-bonfire scents here; this was chemical, astringent. She doubled up, coughing. Gomer looked back; she waved him on, pulling out some tissues to mop her flooded eyes.
When she was over it, she could see him talking to two coppers and a senior-looking fireman inside a steamy mesh of headlamp beams. There were other people around, another blue light. She straightened up, began to move towards them, and another fireman bawled at her.
‘Stay back!’
‘OK…’ Putting up her hands, backing off. The three-quarter moon gleamed off the flank of a digger lying tragically askew, like a great shire horse with a broken neck.
Gwynneth, or Muriel. Merrily felt close to tears. She saw the policemen leading Gomer back towards the van, the senior fireman following them, snapping questions.
‘… Oil tanks? Diesel?’
‘Tank was inside,’ Gomer said. ‘Locked up.’
‘Just the one?’
‘Ar. Locked up. Good locks.’
‘Who else had keys, Gomer?’ An older policeman: grey moustache and sergeant’s stripes.
‘Nobody else had bloody keys, Cliff! Me and Nev, just me and Nev. You saying some bastard let ’isself in? ’Cause you’d need a bloody oxyacetylene torch to break in yere, take it from me.’
‘Far’s I can gather, Gomer, there was no sign of a break-in when the fire brigade got here. No doors hanging open, nothing like that, nothing obvious. However—’
‘When was this, Cliff?’
‘Two hours ago, round about. It was well away by then.’
‘’Cause if you boys reckons this was done deliberate’ – Gomer turned to the older policeman, a forefinger waving – ‘then I can give you a name, straight off.’
‘Gomer, listen, we en’t saying nothing like that at this stage.’
‘A bloody good name, Cliff.’
Merrily blinked, confused. How could he possibly give them a name? Was there something she didn’t know about, something Gomer hadn’t told her? It went quieter suddenly, and she realized the hoses had been turned off.
‘Gomer, listen to me,’ Cliff said quietly, ‘before you start throwing accusations around… you seen Nev tonight?’
‘Eh?’
‘Nev.’
‘I never sees Nev at night.’ Gomer calmed himself down, bringing out his cigarette tin. ‘All right to smoke, is it?’
‘Rather you didn’t,’ the fireman said.
The younger copper, Robbie, put a hand over Gomer’s tin. ‘Because we can’t find him, see.’
‘He lives at Presteigne. Lot of pubs in Presteigne. You go round the bloody pubs, you’ll find him, all right.’
‘We know all that,’ Robbie said. ‘We know Nev’s been drinking heavy lately. Including tonight.’
‘Depends what you means by heavy,’ Gomer said guardedly.
‘The thing…’ The sergeant, Cliff, hesitated. ‘The thing is, Gomer… Nev got hisself thrown out of the Royal Oak earlier on. Been on the beer, gets into a barney with Clem Morris’s boy, Jordan, on account of Jordan thinks Nev’s after his girlfriend. Something and nothing, as usual, but it all gets overheated, and we get sent along to calm things down. And we strongly suggested to Nev that he oughter go home directly and sleep it off.’
‘Stupid fat bastard,’ Gomer said.
‘Only, we know Nev didn’t go home, see, or he didn’t stay home, because when we goes to his flat over the paper shop, after the fire was reported, Nev en’t there.’
‘What you saying?’ Gomer snapped a glance over his shoulder towards the pyramid of smoking debris, his fists clenching. Merrily saw that, behind the collapsed shed, a small building was still standing, probably because it was made of concrete blocks. In the
distance, below the moon, she could see a conifered hillside, the view of which the aircraft shed must once have concealed.
‘What we want to ask you, Gomer,’ Cliff said, gently enough to make Merrily very worried, ‘is where might Nev’ve gone? A mate’s… a girlfriend’s?’
‘What you saying?’ Gomer turned slowly, the blue light flaring in his glasses. ‘What you bloody saying, Cliff Morgan?’
Some more people were gathering around, firemen with their helmets off, like a sign of respect. Gomer suddenly spun away and pushed through them, disappearing into a hollow of darkness beyond the milky confluence of vehicle lights.
***
Merrily found him standing outside the concrete building. The air smelled of oil and charred wood. She felt slightly sick. From behind, she heard Cliff saying wearily, ‘Don’t let the little bugger go in, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Lend me the torch, vicar.’
But it was only holding tight to the heavy, rubberized flashlight that kept Merrily’s hands from shaking. Drawing a long breath, she shone the light inside the building to where the water was still an inch deep, from the damping-down. And then the beam was all over the place as she pushed her sleeve into her face because of what the breath had brought in with it.
She started to cough again. Amid the diesel vapour and the wet wood-ash was an odour you could taste. The torch beam found its own way down scorched plasterboard walls, over a dented grey metal desk, a wooden chair that now looked like it was made of hollow columns of ash. The remains of a wooden partition hung in grotesquely ornate strands, like the rood screen in some abandoned church.
Biting down on her lip, Merrily shone the light back onto Gomer, standing there with his cap gone and his white hair springing up, an unlit roll-up between his teeth. As she watched, he seemed to sag, as if what she saw was just his clothes, and the living essence of Gomer was deflating inside them. She let the beam follow his gaze to what had been a mattress, reduced now to lumps of scorched fabric and exposed springs.
And Oh God. Oh, sweet Jesus. Like a prayer opening up.