Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  ‘I’m just passing it on, Francis. Mrs Watkins may not be as accessible to you as she has been in the past.’

  ‘She’s me mate,’ Bliss said.

  ‘Just be bloody careful, that’s all. The chief doesn’t like to offend the institutional hierarchy.’

  Bliss shook his head in disgust. But, yeh. Maybe it wouldn’t be helpful to damage Annie’s promotional aspirations. For as long as they were both here.

  ‘You ever feel all the old doors are closing on you?’

  Annie didn’t reply. He let it go and opened the email from Billy Grace, the reply to his query of last night.

  No obvious mystery here, Francis.

  Battle wounds. I’d say a bloody big sword, one of those two-handed jobbies. Vertical blow splitting the skull down the middle.

  Take out the clay it would probably just fall apart.

  Working cold-case now, are we?

  Ha ha.

  Bliss showed it to Annie; she didn’t look impressed.

  ‘What was the point of that?’

  ‘Dunno, Annie.’ Bliss shrugging uneasily. ‘It was the middle of the night. You get daft ideas. Like if you boiled all the flesh off Greenaway’s head, right now he’d look not unlike our friend.’

  He detected something less positive than disbelief on Annie’s face.

  ‘You emailed Grace on impulse while I was asleep? With the non-availability of Mrs Watkins, does this mean you’re trying to think like her?’

  ‘I’m a maverick.’

  ‘Because it doesn’t really make any kind of sense, does it?’

  ‘All right, no,’ Bliss said. ‘It doesn’t. It’s not rational.’

  36

  More

  THE FLAT SQUARE package had come in the post yesterday. Well, Lol knew what it would be and had resisted opening it, thinking it might be nice if he did it when Merrily was here. An introduction to a possible future.

  Never mind. He risked his bass-string thumbnail slitting the tape.

  Inside, a slim, brown-paper parcel, just over twelve inches square – wouldn’t be the same in millimetres. At its centre, a Knights Frome Studios card carrying a short message from Prof Levin.

  LAURENCE, I WILL ADMIT THAT WHEN I TOOK DELIVERY OF THESE, I WAS CLOSE TO TEARS. IF I’D THOUGHT EARLIER, I WOULD HAVE HAD THOSE IMMORTAL LINES OF YOURS EMBLAZONED ON THE BACK.

  ‘MOURN THE BARREN YEARS, ALL THE TIME WE’VE LOST.’

  Lol slid out the album with the matt sleeve: firelight from an inglenook, a spindly rocking chair, a guitar – the Takamine, not the Boswell, which had been indisposed at the time. But at last you could make out the titles of the paperbacks on the rug: Thomas Traherne, Selected Poetry and Prose and Select Meditations. Impossible to read on the CD cover.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Jane said.

  ‘Yup.’ Lol nodding. ‘And if Prof wants to claim the barren years for all the years without vinyl, who am I to object?’

  ‘The first Hazey Jane II album, was that vinyl?’

  ‘Came out in that transitional time, so it was actually vinyl, cassette and one of those new, exciting digital compact discs. Never liked the cover, mind. This is so much more seductive.’

  Jane held the LP well away from the stove, probably thinking it was in danger of melting if it got warm. Although actually it might be. It looked fragile and precious; the days of scratches and chewing gum were long gone.

  ‘So, like… will it sound all crackly and intimate when we put it on?’

  Ah. Well. Actually, I don’t know. Mainly due to not having a turntable any more. Perhaps I’ll drive into town tomorrow, see how much they cost these days.’

  ‘I see.’ Jane sat down primly on the sofa, pulling off what Lol recognized as her mum’s red beret. ‘So, to get this right, you phoned, asking me to come over to show me some vinyl we can’t play.’

  ‘Well, not necessarily tonight. I was thinking maybe tomorrow. I was actually planning to go to the meditation..’

  Where sometimes he’d just sit in a back pew, eyes half open, watching Merrily looking soft and shadowy, the rest of the congregation faded out. Act of worship.

  ‘And, uh… just also wanting to remind you that I was… here.’

  ‘Lol, you said—’

  ‘… in case you needed to discuss anything. Someone to listen. You know?’

  ‘You said there were “a couple of things”…’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘I thought that meant ASAP, and with Mum out of the way for an hour or so…’

  ‘And you agreed, I think, that maybe there were things you needed to discuss.’

  Lol sat down in the armchair opposite Jane on the sofa, with the LP across his knees. Maybe tonight was not a good time for this. Better if they’d both gone to the meditation.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I happened to be talking to Eirion. On the phone. Eirion, your… can we still use that word boyfriend?’

  He watched Jane’s head bend in almost a spasm, tangled hair falling forward over her eyes.

  He was remembering what Eirion had said about the archaeologists in Pembrokeshire. How Jane had been worried that she’d get sneered at, belittled for her interest in folklore and the crazy twentieth-century hippy theories about the arrangement of prehistoric sites and mysterious energies

  All of this dating back to when the TV archaeology programme, Trench One, had come to record in Herefordshire and Jane had been humiliated.

  Lol thought – they’d all thought – that she’d recovered from that. She was a kid. Kids bounced back. But she hadn’t been a kid, she’d been on the cusp of probably the biggest change she’d ever go through, maybe the last time she’d have total freedom to choose what happened next.

  This had never even occurred to him before, but suppose she’d only made the decision to go for a university course in archaeology just to prove she’d got over it, that she was undamaged. That would be so Jane.

  ‘Eirion said you were worried about not fitting in. At first.’

  ‘True. I suppose.’

  ‘But after he’d left you called him and said you’d found some people with the same interests.’

  ‘That’s… an exaggeration. In fact there was just one.’

  Her voice sounded dry, almost a croak, but she’d refused anything to drink. She was wearing an old Gomer Parry Plant Hire hoodie, coming apart at the neck.

  ‘Most of the others were even more cynical than I’d figured. And then the worst happened. One of them said he’d seen the rushes for the Trench One edition that never got screened. Where Bill Blore takes me apart as somebody who ought to be applying to… to…’

  ‘The University of Middle Earth.’

  ‘They never let it go after that. Little snide remarks. Well, it’s not like I can’t take a joke, but when it doesn’t stop…’

  ‘When it doesn’t stop it’s become bullying.’

  ‘So you keep laughing, knowing that it’s a relatively small world, archaeology, and there could be guys here I might wind up working for or attending their lectures, and I’ll always be Mystic Jane from the University of Middle fucking Earth. I just… I wanted out, Lol. Actually cried myself to sleep one night. It was going to follow me around, you know?’

  ‘You can’t be alone, Jane, in thinking there’s more…’

  ‘Yes you can. There are professionals and there are loonies. It’s like Mum – there are like hundreds of clergy who think she’s bonkers. And that’s the bloody Church, which is supposed to believe in the One God and all his… all his sodding angels.’ Jane had clearly given up pretending she wasn’t crying. ‘I’m a mess, Lol.’

  ‘We’re all a mess. People who don’t think they’re a mess are just stupid. Go on.’

  Jane smiled through it.

  ‘One day, these guys arrive.’

  Guys with dowsing rods. Not kids, middle-aged guys who said they were members of the British Society of Dowsers on a field trip. They were on their way to Carn Ingli, the famous mystical summit in t
he Preseli Hills. Lol thinking, Oh God…

  ‘They’ve spotted the dig,’ Jane said, ‘and they’d pulled in to have a look. Normally, I mean, dowsers, I’d be dying to talk to them.’

  ‘Well, it works,’ Lol said carefully. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Lol, the guys I’m with, they’ve got geofizz, they’ve got ground radar. Does that suggest they’re ready to believe they could do their surveys so much cheaper with a couple of bent coat-hangers?’

  ‘See your point.’

  ‘They’re quietly taking the piss. Leaning on the vehicles, making smart remarks. I was making tea, and…’

  ‘You offered them some, right?’

  ‘How insane was that? The looks I was getting, I was close to asking if they could quietly give me a lift back to Milford. But then… Sam comes over and starts talking to them. And like, Sam’s pretty smart. Sam is, you know, Dr Burnage? And wrote a couple of books, published by some American university like Yale… serious stuff, you know? And I realize Sam’s not being sarcastic, not rubbishing it at all. Thinks it’s entirely reasonable to think Neolithic people used to dowse for water sources when they were looking for places to settle. And the fact that blind springs tend to be found under standing stones… there is a mystery here.’

  Jane’s face was reddening, only partly because of the stove. She’d said, You can’t tell Mum any of this… not any of it. And he’d sworn that he wouldn’t. And especially Eirion… No, no, not a word. And he wouldn’t, although he suspected this was going to be difficult.

  ‘So I, like, tentatively join in with the discussion and one of the dowsers lends me his rods and, yeah, I’m getting reactions. You can feel it in your arms. But I’m still being fairly reticent, saying, gosh that’s quite interesting, isn’t it? Not revealing how much I actually know about earth energies and stuff.’

  Which was quite a lot. Lol knew that Jane had been reading about all this for two or three years. Jane had a wooden box containing two pendulums and a pair of Joey Korn swivelling rods.

  ‘And then Sam stands back, with a little smile and paraphrases Hamlet. Shakespeare. More things, Horatio, more things.

  ‘… in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Talking your language.’

  ‘Sam nailed it. Ancient people, we don’t just need to find out what things they made, how they lived. We need to see through their eyes, sense what they sensed… aware that their senses would have been much sharper than ours… accepting that they might well have been aware of things we no longer perceive.’

  ‘That really is your language.’

  ‘God, yes. I could’ve kissed Sam. Never been more grateful to anybody in my life. Rescued me from rock bottom. I suppose I kind of worshipped Sam, like when you have a crush on your teacher.’

  She was looking at the floor again, hands on her knees.

  ‘Went to the pub that night, just the two of us, and it was really great. I felt like I was… you know, in the vanguard of something. We talked till we got thrown out. About Hereford and Alfred Watkins and the Straight Track Club. Sam said Watkins was a really significant archaeologist whose contribution had been ignored because it came from instinct rather than scientific methodology. I told Eirion on the phone. He said that was great. Somebody I was in tune with.’

  Lol didn’t know how to respond. It was clear where this was going, and he felt sad about it, for both of them. He’d known Jane for just a little longer than he’d known her mother, but he wasn’t sure that unloading this on him was going to help her.

  ‘It all turned around.’ She looked up, bleakly dry-eyed. ‘I didn’t want it to end. I was learning – or thought I was – that it didn’t matter how you came to it, or how you found the commitment. And because I was a mate of Sam’s, other guys started to take an interest in helping me, and they’d take me off to the pub and places, and nobody mentioned Bill Blore again.’

  Lol could hear Eirion.

  We’d both heard that these archaeological digs were, like, shagfests, but there was none of that that I could see. The guys were quite protective towards Jane.

  ‘I thought I’d grown up,’ Jane said. ‘I thought I’d changed. I was looking back at the waste of space I was at fifteen. Looking back from the adult world. God, how we fool ourselves.’

  Lol took off his glasses, couldn’t find a tissue and rubbed the lenses with the hem of his sweatshirt.

  ‘If you want to leave them off,’ Jane said, ‘I’ll cut to the chase. On the last night, everybody went to the pub and, like, no way was I going to get pissed, so I stuck to cider. Cider and me, I thought we had an arrangement.’

  ‘Not all ciders are the same.’

  ‘Quite. I knew that better than anybody. So obviously I don’t remember getting back to the B and B. Except when I woke up next morning and realized it wasn’t my B and B.’

  ‘Sam’s?’

  He thought she nodded, but maybe not.

  ‘You heard from Sam since you left?’

  ‘We haven’t spoken since.’

  ‘So it’s over?’

  ‘Lol, it never really started, except…’

  She looked back at the floor. Lol sat there with his glasses in his lap, feeling the onus on him to make her feel better.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You know… I mean, these things happen.’

  ‘There was a text,’ Jane said. ‘Asking if I’d got Sam’s email. Perhaps there was something important in it. I don’t know. I’d deleted it as soon as I saw the name.’ She paused. ‘Dr Samantha Burnage.’

  Lol said, ‘Oh.’

  Jane looked almost relieved.

  ‘It’s not just about telling you. I’ve told Lucy now.’

  She looked up. All around the room. As if she might find her there: Lucy Devenish, soul of the village, mentor to Jane, mentor to Lol, living on in the stone and the timber and the applewood smoke.

  37

  Coffin wood

  THERE WEREN’T SUPPOSED to be discussions afterwards, at least not in the church. The deal was that they just left quietly, carrying something away with them. Something positive, you hoped.

  But whatever you suggested, there’d always be two or three people who wanted to talk. Tonight, in the porch, Gus Staines, in a long grey woolly, handed her a small Ledwardine Livres carrier bag. For Jane. As promised. No hurry to have it back.

  ‘She is all right, isn’t she?’

  ‘Jane? She’s a bit undecided, I think. About what she wants to do with her life. We’ve all been there, I suppose. Why do you ask?’

  ‘They grow up very quickly, don’t they,’ Gus said. ‘We forget.’

  ‘I suppose it just doesn’t seem very quick to us at the time. Seems to take forever. Sometimes I wonder if we ever do. Grow up.’

  Hell, was that even true? One of the worst aspects of being a priest was people expecting you to have a higher level of wisdom.

  Merrily hurried out of the lychgate, over the cobbles and back to the vicarage without meeting anybody else. It would’ve been nice to see Lol hanging around at the top of Church Street, although, even before the call to Sophie, the idea of inviting him over for a meal had lost its momentum. What kind of an item were they, really?

  The vicarage was silent, only the smallest lamp on in the kitchen and a note on the table.

  Mum, had something to eat.

  Gone for a bath and then bed.

  With the book.

  Tell you about it over breakfast.

  That’s if we don’t meet before dawn again.

  love, J

  When did they stop being children? Should she go up to Jane, or would that be an old-hen thing to do?

  She wasn’t tired. If she sat down she wouldn’t relax. If she went to bed early she wouldn’t sleep. Talking to Jane, sharing a meal would have passed the time. Now there was no excuse.

  How was she supposed to sleep anyway, with this hanging over her?

  She went through to the scullery and sat down behind the computer
, a sleeping monster with one small, baleful white eye. She stared at the blank screen then awoke it.

  Ledwardine Broadband wasn’t the fastest. Downloading the audio file took over half an hour. She went back to the kitchen and gave Ethel more food, thought about getting herself something to eat and couldn’t face it. Made herself a pot of tea.

  It was around ten before she switched off all the lights except the scullery Anglepoise, opened the document in iTunes, plugged in the headphones.

  ‘Sophie’s an admirable woman in many ways,’ Craig Innes said into her ears. ‘But Merrily Watkins would appear to be her one blind spot.’

  She’d never really listened to his voice before. It was quite high-pitched. A good, fluty preacher’s voice. You thought of sheeny new pine. Coffin wood.

  ‘—not including those who’ve eventually wound up in psychiatric care,’ Craig Innes was saying.

  The quality was startlingly crisp. Innes must have been sitting at Sophie’s desk, quite close to the iPhone.

  ‘Hasn’t happened to many women. To my knowledge.’ Siân’s voice more distant, probably from the desk in the window. Her desk. Her former desk. ‘Craig, there haven’t yet been many female deliverance ministers.’

  ‘I don’t have figures. It’s not widely discussed.’

  Siân talked about her own, limited experience in deliverance, her conclusion – unexpected – that there was actually quite a significant demand for it, even in what was increasingly perceived as a secular age. After this came a slow, muted hiss, like tssk, tssk, that could only be Craig Innes expressing impatience.

  ‘I’m increasingly inclined to think that it’s simply a demand we’ve created. Or have – unwisely – allowed to create itself.’

  ‘Craig, it’s a traditional ministry. Admittedly not always monitored, but—’

  ‘But if the only way we can fill pews is by becoming… ghost-busters… what does that say about the Church in the Third Millennium?’

  His voice faded over, you could hear his footsteps. He was pacing, angry.

  ‘… if she says no to rural dean…’

  ‘Do you think she’s even had enough experience to be a rural dean?’ Isn’t that likely to cause some resentment amongst the… the lifers?’