Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘After fifteen years with the military? No problem at all for me. Funny chap, though, old Huw. Been through the mill, you can tell that. Wears the scar tissue like a badge.’ Charlie dug his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘I think Huw’s here to show us where we stand as of now.’

  ‘Which is?’

  He nodded at the closed door. ‘Out in the cold – lunatic fringe. Half the clergy quite openly don’t believe in God as we know Him any more, and here we all are, spooking each other with talk of breathers and hitchhikers and insomniacs.’

  Not for the first time since her arrival, Merrily shivered. ‘What exactly is a hitchhiker, Charlie?’

  ‘What’s it sound like to you?’

  ‘Something that wants a free ride?’

  ‘All the way to hell, presumably,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Mustn’t overdramatize,’ Merrily reminded him as the door opened and Huw stood there, unkempt, his dog-collar yellowing at the rim.

  ‘Putting the telly on now,’ Huw said hesitantly. ‘If that’s all right?’

  Merrily said cheerfully, ‘I didn’t notice anything at all in the lavatory, Huw.’

  Huw nodded.

  There was a clear dent in the woman’s forehead. Also a halfknitted V-shaped scab over her left eye, the bruised one.

  Merrily had seen several women in this condition before, although not recently. And not under these circumstances, obviously. Mostly in the hostel in Liverpool, when she was a curate.

  ‘This was what done it.’ The woman was holding out a green pottery ashtray. An old-fashioned pub ashtray like a dog bowl. ‘See? Chipped all down the side. Not from when it hit me, like. When it fell on the floor afterwards.’

  ‘I see.’ The man’s voice was calm and gentle and unsurprised. Not Huw – too deep, too posh. ‘So it came flying—’

  ‘I should’ve saved the other pieces, shouldn’t I? I didn’t think.’

  ‘That’s quite all right, Mrs… bleep… We’re not the police. Now, the ashtray was where?’

  ‘On the sideboard. Always kept on the sideboard.’

  You could see the sideboard behind her. Looked like early sixties. Teak, with big gilt knobs on the drawers. On the oncewhite wall above it was a half-scrubbed stain. As though she’d started to wipe it off and then thought: What’s the bloody point?

  ‘So you actually saw it rising up?’

  ‘Yeah, I… It come… It just come through the air, straight at me. Like whizzing, you know?’

  This was a very unhappy woman. Early thirties and losing it all fast. Eyes downcast, except once when she’d glanced up in desperation – You’ve got to believe me! – and Merrily could see a corona of blood around the pupil of the damaged eye.

  ‘Couldn’t you get out of the way? Couldn’t you duck?’

  ‘No, I never…’ The woman backing off, as though the thing was flying straight at her again. ‘Like, it was too quick. I couldn’t move. I mean, you don’t expect… you can’t believe what’s happening, can you?’

  ‘Did you experience anything else?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was there any kind of change in the atmosphere of this room? The temperature, was it warmer… or colder?’

  ‘It’s always cold in here. Can’t afford the gas, can I?’ Her eyes filling up.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Tell me, where was your husband when this was happening?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your husband, did he see anything?’

  ‘Nah, he… he wasn’t here, was he?’ Plucking at the sleeve of her purple blouse.

  Merrily wrote down husband on her pad.

  ‘He was out,’ the woman said.

  ‘Has he had any experiences himself? In this house?’

  ‘He ain’t seen nothing. Nothing come flying at him. I reckon he’s heard, like, banging noises and stuff, though.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘You better ask him.’

  ‘Have you discussed it much between yourselves?’

  Minimal shake of the head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I dunno, do I?’ A flicker of exasperation, then her body went slack again. ‘What you supposed to say about it? It’s the kids, innit? I don’t want nothing to happen to the ki—’

  The woman’s face froze, one eye closed.

  ‘All right.’ Huw walked back to his desk pocketing the remote control, turning to face the students. ‘We’ll hold it there. Any thoughts?’

  Merrily found she’d underlined husband twice.

  They looked at one another, nobody wanting to speak first. Someone yawned: Nick Cowan, the former social worker from Coventry.

  Huw said, ‘Nick, not impressed?’

  Nick Cowan slid down in his canvas-backed chair. ‘Council house, is this, Huw? I don’t think you told us.’

  ‘Would that make a difference?’

  ‘It’s an old trick, that’s all. It’s a cliché. They want rehousing.’

  ‘So she’s faking it, is she?’

  ‘Well, obviously I can’t… I mean you asked for initial impressions, and that’s mine, based on twenty-five years’ experience and about a thousand reports from local authorities after that rubbishy film came out… Amityville whatever. It’s an old scam, but they keep on trying it because they know you can’t prove it one way or the other. And if you don’t rehouse them they’ll go to the press, and then the house’ll get a reputation, and so…’

  Nick felt for his dog-collar, as if to make sure it was still there. He was the only one of the group who wore his to these sessions every day. He seemed grateful for the dog-collar: it represented some kind of immunity. Perhaps he thought he no longer had to justify his opinions, submit reports, get his decisions rubberstamped and ratified by the elected representatives; just the one big boss now.

  ‘All right, then.’ Huw went to sit on his desk, next to the TV, and leaned forward, hands clasped. ‘Merrily?’

  He was bound to ask her, the only female in the group. On the TV screen the woman with one closed eye looked blurred and stupid.

  ‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘she isn’t faking that injury, is she?’

  ‘How do you think she got the injury, Merrily?’

  ‘Do we get to see the husband?’

  ‘You think he beat her up?’

  ‘I’d like to know what he has to say.’

  Huw said nothing, looked down at his clasped hands.

  ‘And see what kind of guy he is.’

  Huw still didn’t look at her. There was quiet in the stone room.

  There’d been a lot of that. Quite often the course had the feeling of a retreat: prayer and contemplation. Merrily was starting to see the point: it was about being receptive. While you had to be pragmatic, these weren’t decisions which in the end you could make alone.

  Beyond the diamond panes, the horn of the moon rose over a foothill of Pen-y-fan.

  ‘OK.’

  Huw stepped down. His face was deeply, tightly lined, as though the lines had been burned in with hot wire, but his body was still supple and he moved with a wary grace, like an urban tomcat.

  ‘We’ll take another break.’ He switched off the TV, ejected the tape. ‘I’d like you to work out between you how you yourselves would proceed with this case. Who you’d involve. How much you’d keep confidential. Whether you’d move quickly, or give the situation a chance to resolve itself. Main question, is she lying? Is she deluded? Merrily, you look like you could do with another ciggy. Come for a walk.’

  2

  Fluctuation

  THE MOUNTAINS HUNCHED around the chapel, in its hollow, like some dark sisterhood over a cauldron. You had to go to the end of the drive before you could make out the meagre lights of the village.

  It was awesomely lonely up here, but it was home to Huw, who sniffed appreciatively at Merrily’s smoke, relaxing into his accent.

  ‘I were born a bastard in a little bwddyn t’other side of that brow. Gone n
ow, but you can find the foundations in the grass if you have a bit of a kick around.’

  ‘I wondered about that: a Yorkshireman called Huw Owen. You’re actually Welsh, then?’

  ‘Me mam were waitressing up in Sheffield by the time I turned two, so I’ve no memories of it. She never wanted to come back; just me, forty-odd years on. Back to the land of my father, whoever the bugger was. Got five big, rugged parishes to run now, two of them strong Welsh-speaking. I’m learning, slowly – getting there.’

  ‘Can’t be easy.’

  Huw waved a dismissive arm. ‘Listen, it’s a holiday, luv. Learning Welsh concentrates the mind. Cold, though, in’t it?’

  ‘Certainly colder than Hereford.’ Merrily pulled her cheap waxed coat together. ‘For all it’s only forty-odd miles away.’

  ‘Settled in there now, are you?’

  ‘More or less.’

  They followed a stony track in the last of the light. Walkers were advised to stick to the paths, even in the daytime, or they might get lost and wind up dying of hypothermia – or gunshot wounds. The regular soldiers from Brecon and the shadowy SAS from Hereford did most of their training up here in the Beacons.

  No camouflaged soldiers around this evening, though. No helicopters, no flares. Even the buzzards had gone to roost. But to Merrily the silence was swollen. After they’d tramped a couple of hundred yards she said, ‘Can we get this over with?’

  Huw laughed.

  ‘I’m not daft, Huw.’

  ‘No, you’re not that.’

  He stopped. From the top of the rise, they could see the white eyes of headlights on the main road crossing the Beacons.

  ‘All right.’ Huw sat down on the bottom tier of what appeared to be a half-demolished cairn. ‘I’ll be frank. Have to say I were a bit surprised when I heard he’d offered the job to a young lass.’

  Merrily stayed on her feet. ‘Not that young.’

  ‘You look frighteningly young to me. You must look like a little child after Canon T.H.B. Dobbs.’ Huw pronounced the name in deliberate block capitals.

  ‘Mr Dobbs,’ Merrily said, ‘yes. You know him, then?’

  ‘Not well. Nobody knows the old bugger well.’

  ‘I’ve never actually met him – with him being in and out of hospital for over a year.’

  ‘There’s a treat to look forward to,’ Huw said.

  ‘I’ve heard he’s a… traditionalist.’

  ‘Oh aye, he’s that, all right. No bad thing, mind.’

  ‘I can understand that.’ Merrily finally sat down next to him.

  ‘Aye,’ Huw said. ‘But does your new bishop?’

  It was coming, the point of their expedition. The pale moon was limp above a black flank of Pen-y-fan.

  ‘Bit of a new broom, Michael Henry Hunter,’ Huw said, as a rabbit crossed the track, ‘so I’m told. Bit of a trendy. Bit flash.’

  ‘So he appoints a female diocesan exorcist,’ Merrily said, ‘because that’s a cool, new-broom thing to do.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘Only, he hasn’t appointed me. Not yet. Canon Dobbs is still officially in harness. I haven’t been appointed to anything.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Huw tossed a pebble into the darkness.

  ‘So are you going to tell him?’

  ‘Tell him?’

  ‘That he shouldn’t.’

  ‘Not my job to tell a bishop what he can and can’t do.’

  ‘I suppose you want me to tell him: that I can’t take it on.’

  ‘Aye.’ Huw gazed down at the road. ‘I’d be happy with that.’

  Shit, Merrily thought.

  She’d met the Bishop just once before he’d become the Bishop. It was, fatefully, at a conference at her old college in Birmingham, to review the progress of women priests in the Midlands. He was young, not much older than Merrily, and she’d assumed he was chatting her up.

  This was after her unplanned, controversial speech to the assembly, on the subject of women and ghosts.

  ‘Shot my mouth off,’ she told Huw, sitting now on the other side of the smashed cairn. ‘I’d had a… all right, a psychic experience. One lasting several weeks. Not the kind I could avoid, because it was right there in the vicarage. Possibly a former incumbent, possibly just… a volatile. Plenty of sensations, sounds, possibly hallucinatory – I only ever actually saw it once. Anyway, it was just screwing me up. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and Jane saying: “Didn’t they teach you anything at theological college, Mum?” And I’m thinking, yeah, the kid’s right. Here we are, licensed priests, and the one thing they haven’t taught us is how to handle the supernatural. I didn’t know about Mr Dobbs then. I didn’t even know that every diocese needed to have one, or what exactly they did. I just wanted to know how many other women felt like me – or if I was being naive.’

  ‘Touched a nerve?’

  ‘Probably. It certainly didn’t lead to a discussion, and nobody asked me anything about it afterwards. Except for Michael Hunter. He came over later in the restaurant, bought me lunch. I thought, he was just… Anyway, that was how it happened. Obviously, I’d no idea then that he was going to be my new bishop.’

  ‘But he remembered you. Once he’d got his feet under the table and realized, as a radical sort of lad, that he could already have a bit of a problem on his hands: namely Canon T.H.B. Dobbs, his reactionary old diocesan exorcist. Not “Deliverance minister”. Decidedly not.’

  ‘I’m afraid “Deliverance consultant” is the Bishop’s term.’

  ‘Aye.’ She felt his smile. ‘You know why Dobbs doesn’t like the word Deliverance? Because the first two syllables are an anagram of devil. That’s what they say. Must’ve been relieved, Mick Hunter, when the old bugger got his little cardiac prod towards retirement.’

  ‘But he hasn’t gone yet, and I’m only here because the Bishop wants me to get some idea of how—’

  ‘No, luv.’ Huw looked up sharply. ‘This isn’t a course for people who just want to learn the basics of metaphysical trench warfare, as Hunter well knows. He wants you, badly.’

  It’s a sensitive job. It’s very political. It throws up a few hot potatoes like the satanic child-abuse panic – God, what was all that about, really? Well, I don’t want any of this bell-book-andcandle, incense-burning, medieval rubbish. I want somebody bright and smart and on their toes. But also sympathetic and flexible and non-dogmatic and upfront. Does that describe you, Merrily?

  Mick Hunter in his study overlooking the River Wye. Thirtynine years old and lean and fit, pulsing with energy and ambition. The heavy brown hair shading unruly blue eyes.

  ‘So,’ Huw Owen said now, mock-pathetic, slumped under the rising moon. ‘Would you come over all feminist on me if I begged you not to do it?’

  Merrily said nothing. She’d been expecting this, but that didn’t mean she knew how to handle it. Quite a shock being offered the job, obviously. She’d still known very little about Deliverance ministry. But did the Bishop himself know much more? Huw appeared to think not.

  ‘I do like women, you know,’ he said ruefully. ‘I’ve been very fond of women in me time.’

  ‘You want to protect us, right?’

  ‘I want to protect everybody. I’ll be sixty next time but one, and I’m starting to feel a sense of responsibility. I don’t want stuff letting in. A lot of bad energy’s crowding the portals. I want to keep all the doors locked and the chains up.’

  ‘Suddenly the big, strong, male chain’s acquired all these weak links?’

  ‘I’ve always been a supporter of women priests.’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘Just that it should’ve all been done years ago, that’s the trouble. Give the women time to build up a weight of tradition, some ballast, before the Millennial surge.’

  ‘And how long does it take to build up a weight of tradition? How long, in your estimation, before we’ll be ready to take on the weepers and the volatiles and the hitchhikers?’

  ‘Couple
of centuries.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘Look…’ Silver-rimmed night clouds were moving behind Huw. ‘You’re not a fundamentalist, not a charismatic or a happy-clappy. You’ve no visible axe to grind and I can see why he was drawn to you. You’re in many ways almost exactly the kind of person we need in the trenches.’

  ‘And I would keep a very low profile.’

  ‘With Mick Hunter wearing the pointy hat?’ Huw hacked off a laugh. ‘He’ll have you right on the front page of the Hereford Times brandishing a big cross. All right – joke. But you’ll inevitably draw attention. You’re very pretty, am I allowed to say that? And they’ll be right on to you, if they aren’t already. Little rat-eyes in the dark.’

  Merrily instantly thought about Dermot Child, the organist in the monk’s robe. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I think you do, Merrily.’

  ‘Satanists?’

  ‘Among other species of pond life.’

  ‘Isn’t all that a bit simplistic?’

  ‘Let’s pretend you never said that.’

  A string of headlights floated down the valley a long way away. She thought of Jane back home in Ledwardine and felt isolated, cut off. How many of the other priests on the course would agree with Huw? All of them, probably. A night-breeze razored down from crags she could no longer see.

  ‘Listen,’ Huw said, ‘the ordination of women is indisputably the most titillating development in the Church since the Reformation. They’ll follow you home, they’ll breathe into your phone at night, break into your vestry and tamper with your gear. Crouch in the back pews and masturbate through your sermons.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that’s the tip of the iceberg.’

  ‘Rather than just a phase?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Huw said, ‘you know what I heard a woman say the other week? “We can handle it,” she said. “It’s no more hassle than nurses get, and women teachers.” A priest, this was, totally failing to take account of the… the overwhelming glamour the priesthood itself confers. It’s now a fact that ordained women are the prime target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills that ever sacrificed a chicken. And there are a lot of those buggers about.’

  ‘I’ve read the figures.’