by Phil Rickman
‘And the more outlets you send it to, the more money you collect.’
‘Sure, news is a business. But it’s in our interest, at the end of the day, to make sure the story’s sound – or at least, you know, stands up – or else various outlets are gonna stop coming back to us. If you get a reputation for being a bent agency, it’s not good, long-term.’
‘But, bottom line, this probably is a scam.’
Fred hesitated. ‘I don’t know. He’s a bombastic kind of bloke – comes over like big mates soon as he meets you – but underneath… I reckon there was something worrying him. He was really shaky. I mean, when people are quivering and telling you how terrified they are, it could be an act. But when somebody’s got this veneer of cockiness, and something else – call it fear – shows through, that’s harder to fake, isn’t it? Or it could mean he’s got a drink problem or something, I really wouldn’t like to say. You’re not gonna drop me in it, are you? I mean, I’d love to work for the Independent or something, but you’ve got to take what you can get.’
‘Life’s such a bitch, Fred. What did you ring for, anyway?’
‘A follow-up, I suppose, a new line on the story. I mean, you said you were going to look into it…’
‘I didn’t really, though, did I? What I said—’
‘Give me a break, Merrily. I think you’ll find a few papers’ll pick up on this again tomorrow.’
‘Meaning you’ll try and persuade them to.’
‘It’s…’ Fred Potter whistled thinly. ‘It’s a business, like I said.’
‘All right – off the record?’
He sighed. ‘Yeah, OK.’
‘I’m in a difficult position,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s hard for me to move on anything unless the local minister requests assistance. In this case, it strikes me that the local guy, St John, knows exactly what Mr Stock’s up to. So I don’t think we’re going to want to get involved.’
‘But if you do take it any further…’
‘I’ll let you know, promise.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
‘Yeah, but I’m a minister of the Church, Fred.’
‘Hmm,’ Fred Potter said.
Merrily washed up her solitary dinner plate, went back into the scullery and called the Shelbones yet again.
The phone rang and rang, and she just knew the bungalow wasn’t empty. She imagined all three Shelbones standing in the narrow hall, silently watching the base unit quivering. These Shelbones were wearing starched Puritan dress, like the Pilgrim Fathers, and the phone was a dangerous conduit to a bad, modern world that they believed could only do them harm.
She put back the receiver, picked up her cigarettes and lighter and took them into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on. She stood at the west window, waiting for the water to boil, looking out on the twilit garden and the scrum of shadows in the apple orchard where, in 1670, the Rev. Wil Williams, of this parish, was said to have hanged himself to escape a charge of witchcraft. It was claimed Wil had frolicked here with sylphs and fauns. Except it probably hadn’t been so simple.
Merrily recalled Amy Shelbone’s thin body surrendering to that eerie shiver.
Who’s Justine, Amy?
She slid a cigarette between her lips and flicked at the lighter. Nothing happened. Several more flicks raised nothing more than sparks. Merrily took her shoulder bag to the kitchen table and felt inside for matches. Something rolled heavily across the table and fell to the floor.
The room was sinking into the dregs of the day. She put on lights and finally found a book of matches with the logo of the Black Swan Hotel. Its timber-pillared porch stood across the cobbled village square from the vicarage under a welcoming lantern, and she briefly thought how pleasant it would be to wander across there in the dusk and sit in the new beer garden at the back with a glass of white wine.
She sat down at the kitchen table, lit her cigarette and saw, through the smoke, an image of Jane at the front gate yesterday morning. Merrily bit her lip, leaned back out of the smoke, and finally bent and picked up the misshapen penny dated 1797. It must have rolled from her bag, though she didn’t remember putting it in there.
It just kept turning up. Like a bad penny.
If you don’t like the cold, come out of the mortuary, Huw Owen had said mercilessly.
Merrily sat for a while, with Ethel the black cat winding around her ankles, and smoked another cigarette before she left the vicarage.
It was that luminous period, well beyond sunset, when the northern sky had kindled its own cool light show above the timbered eaves of Ledwardine and the wooded hills beyond. The village lights were subdued between mullions, behind diamond panes.
Wearing her light cotton alb, ankle-length, tied loosely at the waist with white cord, Merrily crossed the cobbles and slipped quietly through the lychgate.
The church looked monolithic, rising out of a black tangle of gravestones and apple trees into a sky streaked with salmon and green. In a summer concession to trickle-tourism, the oak door was still unlocked, but she assumed she’d be alone in here; since evensong had been discontinued, Sunday night was the quietest time.
She didn’t put on the church lights, finding her way up the central aisle by the muddy lustre left by dulled stained glass on shiny pew-ends and sandstone pillars. It was cool in the nave, but not cold.
In the chancel, behind the screen of oaken apples, she took out her book of matches and lit two candles on the altar, creating woolly, white-gold globes which brought the sandstone softly to life.
She placed the old penny on the altar, blessing it again.
‘As I use it in faith, forgive my sins…’
It was, she realized now, not a game of chance but a simple act of faith. Of trust. Most priests, in times of crisis, would open the Bible at random, trusting that meaningful lines would leap out, telling them which way to jump.
How different was that to one of Jane’s New Age gurus cutting the Tarot pack?
The difference was Christian faith. There was a huge difference. Wasn’t there?
The candles had hollowed out for her a sanctum of light, with the nave falling away into greyness, along with the organ pipes and the Bull Chapel with its seventeenth-century tomb. The atmosphere was calm and absorbent, the church’s recharging time just beginning. As Jane would point out smugly, this was a site of worship long-predating Christianity. You’re employing some ancient energy there, Mum.
Pre-dating Jesus Christ perhaps, she’d reply swiftly – but not pre-dating God.
Gods. Jane grinning like an elf. And goddesses.
Merrily let the kid’s image fade, like the Cheshire cat, into the flickering air, with its compatible scents of polish and hot beeswax. She knelt before the altar, her covered knees at the edge of the carpet, just within the globes of light.
OK.
She closed her eyes and whispered the Lord’s Prayer and then knelt in silence for several minutes, feeling the soft light around her like an aura. She remembered, as always, those deep and silent moments in the little Celtic chapel where her spiritual journey had begun: the moments of the blue and the gold and the lamplit path.
Her breathing slowed. She felt warm with anticipation and dismissed the sensation immediately.
Then she summoned Amy Shelbone.
More minutes passed before she was able to visualize the child: Amy wearing her school uniform, clean and crisp, tie straight, hair brushed, complexion almost translucently white and clear. Amy kneeling at the altar, as she’d been on the Sunday she was sick.
I don’t know anything about her, Merrily confessed to God. I don’t know what her problem is. I don’t know if she’s in need of spiritual help or psychological help or just love. I don’t know. I want to help her, but I don’t want to interfere if that’s going to harm her.
Her lips unmoving. The words forming in her heart.
Her heart chakra, Jane would insist: the body’s main emotional conduit.
Withou
t irritation, she sent Jane away again and put Amy at the periphery of her consciousness, at the entrance to her candlelit sanctuary. She knelt for some more minutes, losing all sense of herself, opening her heart to…
She’d long ago given up trying to visualize God. There was no He or She. This was a Presence higher than gender, race or religion, transcending identity. All she would ever hope to do was follow the lamplit path into a place within and yet beyond her own heart and stay there and wait, patient and passive and without forced piety.
When – if – the time came, she would ask if Amy might join them in the sanctuary.
Amy and…
Justine?
Three questions hovered, three possibilities: Is the problem psychological, or demonic, or connected with the unquiet spirit of a dead person?
Merrily let the questions rise like vapour, and prayed calmly for an answer. More minutes passed; she was only dimly aware of where she was and yet there was a fluid feeling of focus and, at the same time, a separation… a sublime sense of the diminution of herself… the aching purity and beauty of submission to something ineffably higher.
At one stage – although, somehow, she didn’t remember any of this until it was over – she’d felt an intrusion, a discomfort. And for a long moment there was no candlelight and the chancel was as dark – darker – than the rest of the church and bitterly cold and heavy with hurt, incomprehension, bitterness and finally an all-encompassing sorrow.
She didn’t move, the moment was gone and so, it seemed, was Amy Shelbone. And Merrily’s cheeks were wet with tears, and she was aware of a fourth question:
What shall I do?
Please, what shall I do?
She tossed the heavy old coin and it fell with an emphatic thump to the carpet in the chancel. She had to bring one of the candlesticks from the altar to see which side up it was. But it didn’t matter, she knew anyway. This was only proof, only confirmation.
She held the candle close to the coin. The candle was so much shorter now, the candlestick bubbled with hot wax.
Tails.
Nothing demonic.
She tossed again.
Tails.
No possession by an unquiet spirit.
She nodded, held the coin tightly in her right hand, snuffed out the candles, bowed her head to the altar and walked down the aisle and out of the church.
* * *
In the porch, it was chilly. The goosebumps came up on her arms.
In the churchyard, it was raining finely out of a grey sky that was light though moonless. Clouds rose like steam above the orchard beyond the graves. It had been a warm, summer evening when she went in, and now—
Now a figure appeared from around the side of the porch, carrying an axe.
11
One Girl in Particular
THE DEW ON the tombstone was soaking through the cotton alb to her thighs. She had her arms wrapped around herself, one hand still clutching her coin, and she was shivering.
Disoriented, she looked up, following the steeple to the starless sky, puzzled because it was so bright up there, yet she couldn’t see a moon.
‘Oughter get home, vicar,’ Gomer Parry said. ‘Don’t bugger about n’more.’
He was leaning on his spade. It was an ordinary garden spade, not an axe, but could be nearly as deadly, she imagined, in the hands of the wiry little warrior in the flat cap and the bomber jacket. So glad it was Gomer, Merrily tried to smile, but her lips took a while to respond. She felt insubstantial, weightless as a butterfly, and just as transient. She gripped the rounded rim of the tombstone, needing gravity.
‘Wanner get some hot tea down you, girl.’ Gomer’s fingers were rolling a ciggy on the T-handle of the spade.
Now in semi-retirement from his long-time business of digging field drains and cesspits, Gomer saw to the graveyard, where his Minnie lay, and kept the church orchard pruned and tidy. Also, without making much of a thing out of it, he reckoned it was part of his function to look out for the vicar. This vicar, anyway. Been through some situations together, she and Gomer. But still she couldn’t tell him why she’d been in the church tonight or what had happened in there.
The colour of the sky alarmed her. It was streaked with orange cream, laying a strange glare on Gomer’s bottle glasses. Merrily pushed her fingers through her hair. It felt matted with dried sweat.
‘Time… time is it, Gomer?’
‘Time?’ He looked up at the sky behind the steeple. ‘All but five now, sure t’be.’
‘Five in the morning?’
Her knees felt numb. Strips of… of sun were alight between layers of cloud like Venetian blinds over the hills.
Gomer struck a match on a headstone. ‘That Mrs Griffiths, it was, phoned me. Her don’t sleep much n’more since her ol’ man snuffed it. Reckoned there was some bugger in the church, ennit? Bit of a glow up the east window, see. Vicar? What’s wrong?’
‘It can’t be.’ Merrily was shaking her head, frenziedly. Her face felt stiff. ‘It can’t be. I’ve only been—Gomer, I…’ She clutched his arm. ‘I went in there… maybe an hour ago. An hour and a half at the most. It was about ten o’clock… ten-thirty.’
And then the earth turned.
The molten copper of the dawn sent terrifying pulses into Merrily’s head.
Gomer patted her hand.
‘Young Jane… Her’s gone away, then?’
‘Huh?’
‘First time you been alone yere, I reckon, vicar.’
‘It was ten-thirty,’ she said faintly. ‘I swear to God, ten-thirty at the latest.’
She remembered then how far the candles had burned down. It couldn’t be.
Six hours? Those few minutes had become… hours?
Her hands were trembling. The penny dropped out of one and fell onto the tombstone where she’d been sitting.
She recalled a blurred Britannia on the coin. Tails.
Gomer lit his ciggy. ‘Needs a bit of a holiday yourself, you ask me, vicar. Pack a case, bugger off somewhere nobody knows you, or what you do. Don’t say no prayers for nobody for a week, I wouldn’t.’
She bent to pick up the coin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for dragging you out, Gomer. I really… Maybe I fell asleep or something.’
‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer Parry stood there nodding sagely, patient as a donkey.
She met his eyes. Both of them knew she didn’t believe she’d been asleep in the church, not for one minute of those six hours.
She invited Gomer back to the vicarage, but he wouldn’t come with her. ‘Strikes me you don’t need no chat, vicar,’ he said perceptively. ‘’Sides which, me and Nev got a pond to dig out, over at Almeley. Get an early start. Makes us look efficient, ennit?’
She walked back to the vicarage lucidly aware of every step, the warming of the air, the shapes of the cobbles on the square, the tension of the ancient black timbers holding Ledwardine together.
Back in the kitchen, she looked around the painted walls, as if walking into the room for the first time. Yes, she’d been away for a while, a night had passed. She put the kettle on and some food out for Ethel. The little black cat didn’t start to eat for quite a while, just sat on the kitchen flags and stared at her, olive-eyed, while she drank her tea.
‘I look different or something, puss?’
Ethel didn’t blink. Merrily went upstairs and had a shower hot enough to hurt. She was aching, but she wasn’t tired. She still felt light and unsteady, slightly drunk. But also strengthened, aware of a core of something flat and firm and quiet in her abdomen. Afterwards, she stood at the landing window, wrapped in a bath towel like someone out of a Badedas ad, and watched the morning sun shining like a new penny.
Lifted up or cracking up? State of grace or a state of crisis?
If she’d been seriously stressed-out last night, she could have understood what had happened: the collapse into the arms of God, the acceleration of time, the flooding of the senses.
Like being abd
ucted by aliens.
She started to laugh and went to get dressed.
It wasn’t about stress. It was about the decision to toss a coin.
She put on the grey T-shirt and the dog collar and an off-white skirt. It was Monday, usually a quiet day in the parish. Meetings with the Bishop in Hereford were on Tuesdays.
With the decision to toss the coin she’d broken through something – probably her own resistance. She went quickly down the stairs and into the kitchen, its walls cross-hatched now with summer-morning light. The kitchen clock said nearly eight. Time still seemed to be moving faster than usual. She needed to ground herself. She needed another tombstone to sit on.
She went on into the scullery and sat behind the desk of scuffed and scratched mahogany. She didn’t plan to wait too long before she phoned the Shelbones. She’d ring just once, and if there was no answer she’d drive over there.
Knowing that this time she would get some straight answers.
She’d make the call at 8.45. She went back into the kitchen to make some breakfast, then decided she wasn’t hungry and cleaned the sink instead, scrubbing feverishly. She had energy to spare. Don’t question it. Don’t question anything about this.
Just after 8.35, as she was drying her hands, the phone summoned her back into the scullery.
‘Merrily,’ Sophie said quietly. ‘Can you come in, please – as early as possible.’
Not a question.
‘Problem?’
‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m afraid there is.’
Merrily lit her first cigarette of the new day.
It was the usual battle getting into Hereford, with the hundreds of drivers who just wanted to get through Hereford… and the inevitable roadworks. Not half a mile from the Belmont roundabout, southern gateway to the city, lorries were feeding pre-cast concrete into what used to be Green Belt and would, when completed, apparently be known as the Barnchurch Trading Estate.
