December

by Phil Rickman

  And the Weasel, a changed man, is off on his toes, empty-handed, never to offend from that day to this, instead to embark on a search for Tom Storey that has - as Dave Reilly puts it - the epic quality of Lassie's journey home.

  It was Dave pointed him in the right direction. Dave gives him the name of Tom's business - Love-Storey, get it? Two weeks later, he's - you ready for this? - E. L. Beasley, Transport Manager, Wholesale Division.

  With certain additional duties, which become apparent when Tom and Shelley and the kid, Vanessa, move into the new house.

  The Weasel sometimes wondered about Dave Reilly, who knew where Tom lived yet never came round to visit, He wondered about Simon St John and Moira Cairns. (It was no surprise they never heard from Lee Gibson; Lee was on a monster earner in the States now, no cause to look back.)

  But most of all, Weasel wondered what really happened that night in December 1980 when he was in the hospital and Tom drove a Land Rover all the way to hell.

  The kitchen door opened. No lights were on inside.

  'You really know how to choose your bleeding moments Weasel,' Tom said, from the shadows. 'Come up.'

  As long as the Weasel had known him, way back before his old man was killed, Tom had been a big time record collector. Blues mostly, in those days; John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters and, the pride of his collection, some old Robert Johnson at 78 r.p.m.

  Johnson - who died half a century ago at, what was it, twenty-seven? - was just about the best, Weasel always figured. It used to be said he'd sold his soul to the devil on account of all the devil-bits in his songs and the fact that he was just so good, so young and that he died so mysteriously - murdered, wasn't it?

  And where was Robert Johnson now? Not in Tom Storey's record collection any more, this was for sure. Neither was Muddy Waters. Although, as Weasel could see even from here, - John Lee was certainly still on the shelf.

  The music-room was at the top of the house. The way it was arranged now, you came in through the door at one end and all the records were stacked at the other, a good twenty feet away. Between you and them were a beat-up pub table, a sprawly old easy chair, two fifty-watt practice amps arranged like a barrier, and the clutter of all Tom's guitars, about fifteen of them.

  So, what with the beams and trusses and that, getting across to the records was like some kind of commando training-exercise.

  Weasel took the Stones' Goat's Head Soup from under his arm.

  Not a bad album,' Tom said gruffly. 'Coulda been worse, considering.'

  Weasel moved towards the shelves to put the album back.

  'Leave it,' Tom growled. 'Leave it on the table'

  Yeah,' Weasel said. 'Right. I, er... I fought I could maybe have a lend of one of the earlier ones.'

  Slung 'em out,' Tom said straight off. 'They was knackered.'

  The room was stifling. Tom had this pot -bellied stove on a flagstone plinth on the boarded floor, with an iron flue going up through the roof. There were a couple of buckets of coal. Most mornings, Weasel awoke in his 'van to the sound of Hilda, the cleaner, filling the buckets and clattering off with them to the house and up all the bleeding stairs, poor cow.

  'So,' Tom said. 'What's the beef, Weasel? Ain't we paying you enough or summink?'

  Tom's eyes burned with challenge. He was still a scary sight sometimes, despite Shelley keeping his tough white hair trimmed and his moustache blunt.

  'Yeah, well.' The Weasel shuffled about near the doorway, pushing some of his long grey hair behind his cars. 'Fing is … you and Shelley, you done all right by me, ain'tcher? Pulled me out the shit.'

  Tom sat down on one of his amps. 'So put a word in for me for the New Year's Honours. Count for a lot, that, coming from you, Weasel.'

  Good guy, Tom, generosity itself, if you could take the verbal abuse.

  'What I mean ...' Weasel pushed on, as best he could. You know I'll watch out for yer - you and Shelley and the Princess. You know that.'

  'What we pay you for,' Tom said, all heart.

  'So, like, if there was someone after you. Or Shelley. Or the kid. Then you'd tell me, wouldn'tcher?'

  'Maybe.' Tom's eyes had gone dull. 'If it was summink you could fix. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't. Some fings, you talk about it, it don't help. Makes it worse.'

  Weasel nodded at the pot-bellied stove. 'That safe, is it? Up here in the roof space, all this wood, joists and all?'

  Tom shrugged.

  'Only I figured maybe an electric heater'd save a lot of, you know ...'

  'Useless,' Tom said. 'Wouldn't ...'

  'Wouldn't burn vinyl,' Weasel said, easing back into the doorway. 'Am I right?'

  Tom was at the door before him. Tom had moved faster than you'd reckon he could, given his size and his gut, and he'd cut off Weasel's escape route with one crunch of a Doc Marten on the door panel. The door shuddered and the latch went clack and Tom turned, his back and shoulders flat to the door.

  And Weasel feeling like he was locked in with a monster.

  They'd been up there too long in silence. Shelley was worried. The times Weasel came round, Tom would put albums on or maybe play a little. Weasel fumbling along on bass. What they didn't do was talk.

  Tom, it was fair to say, was not what you'd call a great conversationalist.

  Shelley finished her coffee. Decaffeinated was something Tom accepted now. Accepted that caffeine was a drug, just like tobacco, alcohol and cocaine and the other stuff. None of which Tom had gone near since their marriage, although her attempts to turn him into a vegetarian had been abandoned some years ago when Tom had pointed out - and he was right - that a no-meat diet lightened his senses, made him more receptive.

  No way. Just what he didn't need.

  Shelley washed her coffee mug. Vanessa was in the TV-room watching a video. She watched the same ones three and four times, Eddie Murphy usually.

  Shelley sighed over the sink. What a long, debilitating journey marriage to Tom Storey was. A woman taking on Tom loaded herself up with an incredible amount of sheer craziness, was obliged to acquaint herself with a body of knowledge uncatered for in the smaller branches of W. H. Smith.

  No question of bringing the books home. ('Whassis shit?' - Tom hurling Colin Wilson and Brian Inglis into the Jetmaster in a kind of furious terror.)

  In the end, what she'd done had been to install little carousels of New Age-type paperbacks in the shops on the basis that many vegetarians were into this kind of thing as well.

  And she'd read them all herself, in the shops, of course, never again bringing any home. And ordered others, more specialised. Indeed, for someone with no psychic ability at all (would Tom have gone near her if she'd had any?), she was becoming quite an authority on aspects of the Unexplained.

  Or, in this house, the Unmentionable.

  'Explain,' Tom said.

  His voice had gone hard and dry. He looked ready to pick up the Weasel and snap him in half.

  The Weasel stood in the middle of the room, sweating. There was a glass panel in the front of the iron stove and he could see deep red coals. The stove shimmered in its own heat.

  Weasel looked away, half afraid the face of Robert Johnson, the bluesman, would materialize smiling in the coals and the white-hot ash.

  'Goat's Head Soup; Weasel said. 'Heavy stuff, innit? Goats' heads, the devil, right?'

  'Devil, bollocks,' Tom said. 'It's a try-on. Creepy picture. Means nuffink.'

  'You said you ain't got Beggar's Banquet.

  'Maybe that is a nasty one,' Tom said reflectively. 'Sympathy for the Devil. That festival in the States where the poor bleeder got murdered in the crowd when they were doing Sympathy. Maybe a bad vibe running frew it.'

  'You ain't got no Stones albums before that, though, either, right?' The Weasel standing his ground. 'No Doors. No Hendrix. No Bolan. No Elvis. And no Beatles. Wassat telling me, eh?'

  There was a long silence. It was nearly dark and the windows were narrow and high in the walls, so you could only see t
he sky, no village lights, and the only light in the long room was coming out of the stove.

  'All dead,' Weasel said. 'All dead 'uns. You got rid of all the old Stones albums wiv Brian Jones on 'em, 'cause he's dead, drowned, whatever. And the Doors, 'cause of Morrison, snuffed in a bath. And the Beatles - this is down to Lennon. Soon at somebody dies you dump their albums. They comes off the shelf and into the stove. Up the chimney. Gorn.'

  Red lights gleaming in the silvered machine heads of an acoustic guitar on a stand. Red lights in Tom's eyes like distant aircraft at night.

  'Weasel', eyes started roaming the junk, the guitars and the amps and stuff, wondering what he could pick up to defend himself. Then he saw the monster was crying quietly.

  He sat down on one of the practice amps, looking down at his hands in his lap. Couldn't look at Tom, couldn't watch this.

  'I been in Paris wiv Morrison,' Tom was whispering. 'Dead in the bath. Bloated.'

  Weasel went cold.

  'I've heard the crash of Marc Bolan's motor going into that tree. Time and time again.'

  Weasel wanted to be out of here but couldn't move.

  'I can't take the sound of a car crash, Weasel. Why I can't live in a city, no more. Always brakes squealing somewhere. I can't stand that.'

  'Yeah,' Weasel said faintly. 'I can understand that.'

  'Most of 'em was twenty-seven when they snuffed it. You know that? Hendrix, Morrison, Jones, Joplin?'

  'And Robert Johnson.'

  'Yeah. Free times free times free? Wossat mean? I dunno, I don't read those books. Who needs fucking books like that?'

  Weasel said, 'You're saying you play the records and you see 'em, how they died.'

  'Dead,' Tom said baldly. 'I see 'em dead.'

  IV

  Protection of the Ancestors

  Standing by the ragged hole, dug out of bitterly resistant stone and clay and already waterlogged, the vicar had intoned the usual.

  Man born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower ...

  It was, he thought, a depressingly long-winded way of expressing a fairly simple truth: Life's a bitch and then you die.

  And then what?

  He wished he knew.

  It was his first funeral here. A farmer of eighty-six, who'd died in the same house he'd been born in, raised hundreds of thousands of lambs in the same scrubby fields, protected them against the climate, the crows and the foxes and then sent them off to market and to die.

  The farmer, one Emlyn Roberts, had apparently gone out cursing. Life at Ystrad Ddu seemed to be all about cursing - cursing your neighbours, the council, the tourists, the foxes, the crows, the weather. Until the day you claimed your reserved chunk of the churchyard.

  As the mourners trooped away in apathetic silence, the vicar's surpliced arm was clutched by Mr Eddie Edwards.

  'Did you see it?'

  'No,' the vicar said. 'The family were merciful enough to keep the lid on.'

  'No, no, no ... the van, man. The big, white van.'

  'Van?'

  Mr Edwards said that shortly after the service he had seen the van coming up the valley road, having a hell of a job getting past all the Land Rovers.

  Too fast, far too fast, it had ploughed through the lane, past the church and the village and the cottages and the new bungalow, the way some vehicles often did before the drivers realised their mistake and turned round, the lane being a dead end leading only to a certain ruined, twelfth-century abbey.

  But this van did not return.

  'So,' Mr Edwards said, with his customary drama. 'To the abbey, it went. And at the Abbey it stayed, for quite some time. Four men, at least. Went into the tower block, they did, and there was knocking and hammering, I am told.'

  'You are told,' said the vicar.

  'Oh, all right, I cannot lie to the clergy, I went to see for myself. I couldn't get close enough, mind, to make out what they were doing exactly. That building, well, the windows are high, you can't see a thing from the outside. But is it changing hands again, I wonder? Is it being converted into something else? Have you heard anything?'

  Now, why should anyone tell me, Eddie? The Abbey's got no connection with the church. It's just an ancient monument.'

  Apart, that is, from the tower house. Which has been locked and derelict for years, and nobody knows who owns it.'

  The vicar stared at him. The late November mist hung drably over the grey settlement like dust-sheets over old furniture.

  And another thing,' Mr Edwards said. He paused, his glasses misting. 'Lights!'

  'Lights?'

  'In the Abbey, man. At night.'

  'You've seen the lights in the Abbey?'

  'Not me! I don't go out there at night, got to be careful at my age. But the farmers have seen them.'

  'What kind of lights?'

  'They would hardly go close enough to find out, now, would they?

  'Look, Eddie,' the vicar said hastily, 'funerals being major social occasions in these parts, I need to do some mingling. Why don't you pop round to my gaff in an hour or so, have some coffee.'

  'Good idea,' said Mr Edwards happily. 'I never refuse a warm drink. Gets to you, this damp, when you're retired.'

  After the burial of her mother, Moira concluded it was not wise to go back to the croft house on Skye. Too powerful, too much natural magic. The island didn't compromise; it made you confront your own weaknesses.

  'And there's things,' she said to Donald in the Duchess's caravan - no more character, now, than a china shop - 'that I don't even dare to think about.'

  'Get yourself some sleep,' Donald said.

  Moira rubbed her tired eyes. 'Big circles, huh?'

  'Aye,' said Donald, 'big circles.'

  The Duchess had made no formal will. Moira, as the nearest relative, had found herself presiding over an informal meeting of the Elders, assuring them she wanted nothing. The china and the brass were to be divided among the nieces, the palace to be sold and the proceeds to go, despite his protests, to Donald.

  There was no obvious successor, and the Duchess, she figured, was not in the market for a shrine.

  'Donald, before I go ...' Moira fumbled in her bag. 'I want you to read this.'

  She showed him the paper, with the two words on it.

  BREADWINNER

  and

  DEATHOAK

  'This wis it?' Donald scratched his head through the hole in his hat. 'What she wrote for you?'

  Mean anything to you, Donald?' Watching his eyes.

  He shook his head slowly, baffled. No, it meant nothing to him; wasn't supposed to. It meant nothing to anybody but her. Donald looked at her inquiringly, waiting. He would have sat there, silently waiting, for an hour or more until she was ready.

  This was his first visit. They'd always spoken at the church, or the village hall or during one of Mr Edwards's personal guided tours of the surrounding countryside.

  His first time inside the vicarage, and the little man was clearly making a mental inventory of the contents of the living-room.

  The vicar was glad to note that he seemed disappointed, the room being utterly anonymous, the furniture tidy and modern, the books on the shelves ecclesiastically anodyne. Only the view from the double-glazed, aluminium-framed window was at all distinctive, an expanse of wild hill-country probably unchanged for a thousand years.

  'Are we alone?' asked Mr Edwards.

  Mrs Pugh, who came in for half a day to clean and wash and prepare the vicar's lunch, had departed. The vicar nodded, trying not to smile.

  'Then,' said Mr Edwards, 'it's time I confessed that I have been studying you.'

  Mr Edwards was squashed into a wicker chair with his cap on his knees. He wore a collar and tie, suit and waistcoat. This was how he dressed even when there was no funeral. As well as an education adviser, he had been a churchwarden and a member of the local history society. The vicar had learned that there was, beneath his garrulous mann
er, a disturbingly shrewd man.

  'My conclusion, see, is that you are unlike most clergymen, Certainly the least reverent reverend I've encountered on my travels.'

  'That a compliment?'

  'For the life of me,' Mr Edwards said thoughtfully, 'I do not know. Most of the time you act as if you just don't care. Your eulogy to old Emlyn this morning, tongue quite patently in cheek. And - I have to say this - your language, for a man your calling, is often quite appalling.'

  'Jesus Christ,' the vicar said. 'So it's true what they about you Welsh being natural poets.'

  'See ...' Mr Edwards threw an exasperated fist at the air. 'And yet - I cannot help feeling in my gut that it is all a façade. Tell you what I think, shall I?'

  'Go ahead.'

  'Well, first, a man with your disregard of convention and protocol would surely feel happier in a rough area of Cardiff or Manchester or London, among the delinquent youngsters, the joy-riders, the ram-raiders, the racial problems. The people here, your irony is wasted on them. They are working farmers. All they want is someone to marry them, bury them and dip their offspring in the font.'

  'Oh, I don't know. It's an interesting area, really,' said the vicar inadequately. 'I've four churches to manage, scattered over fifty or so square miles of the Black Mountains. I keep busy.'

  'Pah,' said Mr Edwards. 'You know what I think? A man with a past. You've come here to hide away. What was it, a woman?'

  The vicar laughed.

  'And then,' said Mr Edwards, 'there is the Abbey. Why are you afraid of the Abbey?'

  'OK,' Moira said, 'a long time ago I was at a recording session down in Gwent, South Wales.'

  She broke off, thought about what she was going to say and then started again, at the beginning this time.

  Starting with when she'd left Scotland to go to university in Manchester and left there on a whim, mid-term, to join a professional folk group led by a man who played the pipes. Saying no more about that; it was part of a different story.

  'It'd all really started with the awakening to the glamour, you know? Meeting my mother again on the very edge of adolescence, rediscovering the bizarre family heritage, all this stuff. Discovering there were certain things I could ...do.'