Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  I don’t know, Merrily thought wildly. I don’t know…

  ‘It’s hard…’ She took a breath to calm herself. Mick Hunter’s enthusiasm picked you up and carried you along and then put you down suddenly, and you didn’t know where you were. ‘It’s hard to express an opinion about something you’ve really had no experience of. I don’t think anyone can possibly—’

  ‘Merrily…’ He put his hand over hers on the white tablecloth. ‘One of my faults is expecting too much of people too soon, I realize that. But I know from my predecessor that you’ve proved yourself to be a resourceful, resilient person. The appalling Ledwardine business – I know you don’t like your part in all that to be talked about…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve shown you have nerve and wisdom and you can think on your feet. OK, I’m aware that we’re breaking new ground here, but it’s the direction I believe every diocese will be going in within five years.’ He paused. ‘I’ve had a word with Gareth, by the way.’

  ‘The Archdeacon?’

  ‘Under the reorganization, you were due to be awarded two extra parishes before the end of the year. I pointed out to Gareth that, under the circumstances, that would be far too much of a burden.’

  ‘You mean it’s either the Deliverance role or two more parishes to run?’

  ‘The two parishes would be a lot easier, Merrily – a quieter life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If it’s a quiet life you want?’

  What she wanted was a cigarette, but she knew the Bishop hated them. What she wanted was for Huw Owen to have been proved wrong, but everything Huw had forecast had been dead right. She would wind up with her picture in the Hereford Times, although probably without the crucifix.

  ‘I’m going to have to play this slowly and diplomatically,’ Mick Hunter said. ‘Dobbs won’t go until he’s too shaky to hold a cup of holy water, and as long as he’s here he has the support of the Dean’s cabal. Well, all right, he can still be an exorcist if he wants. That doesn’t prevent me appointing a consultant to, say, prepare a detailed report on the demand for Deliverance services.’

  Merrily said, ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘Merely politics. I’m afraid I’m quite good at politics.’

  She sighed. ‘You’ve given me a lot to think about, Bishop.’

  ‘Mick.’

  ‘Could I have some time?’

  ‘To pray for guidance?’

  ‘Yes,’ Merrily said, ‘I suppose that’s what I’ll do.’

  ‘Call my office if you’d like another meeting.’ Mick stood up, zipped his purple tracksuit top.

  ‘Er… if you can’t get an office in the cloisters, that means I’d be working from home then?’

  At least she wouldn’t have to see the rather scary Dobbs.

  ‘Oh no.’ Mick grinned. ‘The Dean doesn’t screw me so easily. I told you I’m quite good at this. I’m going to put you in the Palace.’

  In the car going home, Merrily put on Tori Amos’s From the Choirgirl Hotel because it was doomy and gothic and would keep Jane quiet. The kid would want to know what the Bishop had been so keen to talk about, but first Merrily needed to work it out for herself.

  It certainly wasn’t what Jane had imagined, a clandestine return to witch-hunting, sneaky rearguard action by a defensive Church. There was no sign of New Age, Old Enemy paranoia in Mick Hunter. He was simply enfolding the Deliverance ministry into his campaign to project the diocese further into the new millennium as a vibrant, caring, essential institution. Was that so wrong? But what did he see as the enemy?

  … paranoia, psychiatric problems, loneliness, isolation, stress, post-millennial angst…

  Clearly, the Bishop’s liberalism did not extend to the supernatural. Merrily suspected he didn’t believe in ghosts, and that for him the borderline between demonic possession and schizophrenia would not exist – which was worrying. To what extent was healthy scepticism compatible with Christian faith? And what did he mean: Put you in the Palace?

  ‘… little record shop in Church Street?’

  ‘Huh? Sorry, flower.’

  Jane reached out and turned down the stereo. Merrily glanced across at her. Jane turning down music – this had never happened before.

  ‘I said, who do you think I ran into in that poky little record shop in Church Street?’

  It was almost dark, and they were leaving the city via the King’s Acre roundabout, with a fourteenth-century cross on its island.

  ‘Close. Lol Robinson.’ Jane said. ‘You do remember… ?’

  ‘Oh,’ Merrily said casually. There was a time when she could have become too fond of Lol Robinson. ‘Right. How is he?’

  Jane told her how Lol had just started renting this brilliant flat over the shop, with a view over the cobbles and two pubs about twenty yards away.

  ‘Belongs to the guy who owns the shop. His sister used to live there but she’s moved out. Her name’s Katherine Moon, but she’s just known as Moon, and I think she and Lol… Anyway, he looks exactly the same. Hasn’t grown, same little round glasses, still wearing that black sweat-shirt with the alien face on the front – possibly symbolic of the way he feels he relates to society and feels that certain people relate to him.’

  ‘So, apart from the sartorial sameness, did he seem OK?’

  ‘No, he was like waving his arms around and drooling at the mouth. Of course he seemed OK. We went for a coffee in the All Saints café. I’ve never been in there before. It’s quite cool.’

  ‘It’s in a church.’

  ‘Yeah, I noticed. Nice to see one fulfilling a useful service. Anyway, I got out of Lol what he’s doing now. He didn’t want to tell me, but I can be fairly persistent.’

  ‘You nailed his guitar hand to the prayerbook shelf?’

  ‘Look, do you want to know what he’s doing or not?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You ready for this? He’s training to be a shrink.’

  ‘What? But he was—’

  ‘Well, not a shrink exactly. He hates psychiatrists because they just give you drugs to keep you quiet. More a kind of psychotherapist. He was consulting one in Hereford, and the guy realized that, after years in and out of mental hospitals, Lol knew more -ologies and -isms than he himself did, so now he’s employing him a couple of days a week for sort of on-the-job training, and Lol’s doing these night classes. Isn’t that so cool?’

  ‘It…’ Merrily thought about this. ‘I suppose it is, really. Lol would be pretty good. He doesn’t judge people. Yeah, that’s cool.’

  ‘Also, he’s playing again. He’s made some tapes, although he won’t let anybody hear them.’

  ‘Even you?’

  ‘I’m working on it. I may go back there – I like that shop. Lots of stuff by indy folk bands. And I’m really glad I saw him. I didn’t want to lose touch just because he moved out of Ledwardine.’

  Merrily said cautiously, ‘Lol needed time to get himself together.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jane said airily, ‘I think he needed more than that, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t start.’

  ‘Like maybe somebody who wasn’t terrified of getting into a relationship because of what the parish might think.’

  ‘Stop there,’ Merrily said lightly, ‘all right?’

  ‘Fine.’ Jane prodded the music up to disco level and turned to look out of the side window at the last of the grim amber sinking on to the shelf of the Black Mountains. A desultory rain filmed the windscreen.

  ‘Still,’ Merrily thought she heard the kid mumble, ‘it’s probably considered socially OK to fuck a bishop.’

  That night, praying under her bedroom window in the vicarage, Merrily realized the Deliverance issue wasn’t really a problem she needed to hang on God at this stage. Her usual advice to parishioners facing a decision was to gather all the information they could get from available sources on both sides of the argument, and only then apply for a solution.

  Fair enough. She w
ould seek independent advice within the Church.

  She went to sit on the edge of the bed, looking out at the lights of Ledwardine speckling the trees. They made her think of what Huw Owen had said about the targeting of women priests.

  Little rat-eyes in the dark.

  She hadn’t even raised that point with Mick Hunter. He would have taken it seriously, but not in the way it was meant by Huw.

  Merrily shivered lightly and slid into bed, cuddling the hot water bottle, aware of Ethel the black cat curling on the duvet against her ankles, remembering the night Ethel had first appeared at the vicarage in the arms of Lol Robinson after she’d received a kicking from a drunk. She hoped Lol Robinson would be happy with his girlfriend. Lol and Merrily – that would never have worked.

  Later, on the edge of sleep, she heard Huw Owen’s flat, nasal voice as if it were actually in the room.

  Little rat-eyes in the dark.

  And jerked awake.

  OK. She’d absorbed Huw’s warning, listened to the Bishop’s plans.

  It was clear that what she had to do now, not least for the sake of her conscience, was go back to Hereford and talk to Canon Dobbs.

  The Last Exorcist.

  Merrily lay down again and slept.

  6

  Sweat and Mothballs

  ‘OH YES,’ MOON said, ‘he was outside the window, peering in – his face right up to the glass. His eyes were full of this awful, blank confusion. I don’t think he knew who I was. That was the worst thing: he didn’t know me.’

  ‘He was in the… garden?’ How do I handle this? Lol thought. She’s getting worse.

  ‘I ran out,’ Moon said. ‘Then I saw him again at the bottom of the steps leading up to the camp. And then he wasn’t there any more.’

  She was sitting on a cardboard box full of books. There were about two dozen boxes dumped all over the living area. Lol hadn’t been into the kitchen or the bathroom but, except for the futon in the open loft, it looked exactly the way it had been the last time he was here. She’d refused offers of help from Denny and Lol, and from Dick Lyden’s wife Ruth. You had to arrange your possessions yourself, she’d insisted, otherwise you’d never know where anything was.

  But nothing at all seemed to have been put away, nothing even unpacked. It was as though she’d gone straight to bed when he left her on Saturday and had just got up again, four days later.

  Sleeping Beauty situation, fairytale again.

  The point about Moon was that she was utterly singleminded. Most of the time she had no small talk, and no interest in other people, although she could be very generous when some problem was put under her nose – like buying the busker’s balalaika.

  But now she’d found her father, and nothing else mattered.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and he was wearing a flat cap which I recognized.’

  Moon was wearing an ankle-length, white satin nightdress which had collected a lot of dust, a thick silver torc around her neck. She’d had on nothing over the nightdress when she’d opened the door to Lol. She didn’t seem cold. It was wildly erotic. Lol wondered how doctors coped with this.

  ‘It was this grey checked one with all the lining hanging out. Mummy always kept it – I mean for years, anyway. She talked about all the times she used to try and get him to throw it away. Denny threw it away in the end, I suppose. Now my father has it back.’

  Delusional, Lol thought. Because she doesn’t seem scared. It has to be wishful thinking. But what did it mean, that she’d wished up a father who didn’t seem to recognize her?

  The long nightdress rustled like leaves as Moon stood up, glided to the window.

  ‘When I was little, I used to wonder if that was the cap he’d worn when he shot himself, so that was why it was all torn. Of course, the gun would have made much more of a mess than that, but you don’t know these things when you’re little, do you?’

  It occurred to him that this was the first time she’d spoken about her father.

  Her father had killed himself when she was about two years old. Denny said she had no memories of him, but there was probably some resentment because his folly was the reason they’d had to sell up and leave the hill.

  This fucking insane investment. Some mate of the old man’s had developed this sweet sparkling cider he reckoned was going to snatch at least half the Babycham market. Dad threw everything at it – sold off about fifty acres, left the farm non-viable.

  They’d lost the farm. Which was said to have been in the family since at least the Middle Ages. Or much longer, if you listened to Moon.

  Denny had said, The day we left, the old man took his shotgun for a last, short walk. It’s a thing farmers do when they feel they’ve let their ancestors down.

  ‘How, um…?’ Lol’s mouth was dry. He sat down on another box of books. ‘How do you feel about your dad now?’

  Moon turned to Lol, her eyes shining. ‘I have to reach out to him. The ancestors have enabled me to do that, OK?’

  The crow. By bathing my hands in its blood, I’m acquiring its powers.

  ‘They sent him back. He doesn’t know why, but he will. He has to know who I am – that’s the first stage. I have to let him know I’m all right about him.’

  ‘You’re not… just a bit scared?’

  ‘He’s my father. And I’m his only hope of finding peace. He knows he’s got a lot of making up to do. To Mummy as well, but that’s out of our hands now.’

  She went silent, the fervour in her eyes slipping away.

  ‘Your mum… do you feel she’s at peace?’ Lol didn’t know why he’d asked that, except to get her talking again.

  ‘I don’t know. She was never the same afterwards. I mean, all my life she had problems with her nerves. It was lucky Denny was practically grown-up by then, and so he took charge. It was Denny who was always pushing me to do well at school, determined I should go to university because he hadn’t. Taking the father’s role, you know? He owes Denny too, I suppose.’

  ‘How can he make it up to you?’ Lol said softly. ‘How can your father help?’

  She blinked at him, as if that was obvious. ‘With my book, of course – my book about the Dinedor People. He can help me with the book. He can make them talk to me. They sent him to me, so I must be able to reach them through him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The ancestors.’

  The barn was quite small: just four rooms. It had been converted initially as extra holiday accommodation by the present owners of the farmhouse, some people called Purefoy, who apparently ran a bed-and-breakfast business. But this had not been a very good summer for weather or tourism, and they’d presumably realized they could make more money with a longterm let. Not much ground, of course. No room for a garage, quite difficult access, but a beautiful rural situation.

  Moon had come up here on the mountain-bike Denny had bought her in the aftermath of the shoplifting case. It was a hot day and she was pushing the bike up towards the camp when she suddenly, as she put it, felt her ancestors calling out to her.

  It was the most incredible experience. Like the one Alfred Watkins must have had, when he first saw those lines in the landscape. Except I was aware of just one line, leading from me to the hill and back through the centuries. The hill was vibrating under me. I was shaking. I realized this was what I’d been training for, during all those years of digging people up. But that was only bones. I want to unearth real people. I want to communicate with them. I knew I had to discover the story of the hill and the Dinedor People. It was just an amazing moment. I felt as light as a butterfly.

  Moon had been up here until the dusk came. She’d found herself almost frantically knocking on the doors of farmhouses and cottages all around the hill to find out who was living here and who had lived here for the most generations. Discovering, as she’d suspected she might, that the oldest Dinedor family was her own. Moon maintained that her family had come out of the original settlement on Dinedor Hill, all those years before the time
of Christ.

  But none lived here any more. Her father had snapped the line.

  Close to sunset, Moon had arrived at Dyn Farm, at the old, mellowed farmhouse near to the camp, to find the Purefoys – Londoners, early-retired – in the garden.

  Usually, as you know, I’m so shy, unless I’ve taken something. But I was glowing. They didn’t seem very friendly at first, a bit reserved like a lot of new people, but when I told them who I was, they became quite excited and invited me in. Of course, they were asking me all sorts of questions about the house that I couldn’t really answer. I was just a toddler when we left.

  Then they showed me the barn. And I felt that my whole life had been leading up to that moment.

  Moon came over and stood in front of Lol, close enough for him to see her nipples through the nightdress. Oh God! He kept looking at her face.

  ‘I wanted to tell him – my father – that it was OK, it was me, I was back. I was here. I wanted to tell him it was all right, that I’d help him to find peace.’

  ‘You tried to talk to him?’

  ‘No, not last night. I couldn’t get close enough to him. This was the first night… last Saturday. Yeah, I had a sleep and then I went for a walk in the woods, where he shot himself. I went there when it was dark.’

  ‘You saw him then?’ This is eerie. This is not good.

  ‘I didn’t see him then. That was when I started to call out for him.’

  ‘Literally?’

  ‘Maybe. I remember standing in the woods and screaming, “Daddy!” It was funny… It was like I was a small child again.’

  Lol said tentatively, ‘You, um… you think that was safe, on your own?’

  ‘Oh, nothing will ever happen to me on the hill. I intend to walk and walk, day and night, until I know every tree and bush of those woods, every fold of every field. I’ve got to make up for all those years away, you know? I have to absolutely immerse myself in the hill – until it goes everywhere with me. Until it fills my dreams.’

  ‘So when you… when you saw him, that was a kind of dream, was it?’