by Phil Rickman
Such a contrast to the hunched-up grey cottages of Ystrad Ddu crowding under their rocky canopy like old women under an umbrella.
The dream had been around her all day. This, she knew, was what had made her so restless. The dream meant that when at last she went to the Abbey, when she allowed herself to respond to its magnetic tug - a tug she experienced every time she left the house and walked into the lane, knowing where it ended - it must be at night, when the Abbey was at its most splendidly amorphous. And then, even if there was no soaring marble, it would still soar for her as it had in the dream.
Now the dream had come to the vicarage door in the form of a small, dumpy child with telescope glasses and the brown uniform - unmistakable, if creased and dusty - of a Gloucestershire convent school.
Meryl couldn't breathe as she put out a hand, expecting it to slip through the brown blazer, through the child.
And the shock of the real, of the dream made flesh, made her cry out.
'Oh my lord! It is you. It's ...' Frantically rummaging in her brain for the child's name.
'Vanessa,' the child said, in that voice that told you something was wrong with her. Not wrong, different. She had a different type of mind, a differently organised body.
For the first time, to Meryl, a Down's Syndrome child seemed as exotic as some extra-terrestrial being.
There was a great tumbling of Meryl's senses. Where had the child, Vanessa, come from? How did she get here? How and why had she come here?
When the miraculous occurred in your life, it was never the way you imagined it would be. Not the Lady Bluefoot but a hideous spirit with a torn face. Introduced not by a white-haired lady in veils but by a hulking, rough-spoken cockney guitarist with psychic agoraphobia.
The child looked up at Meryl.
The child said, 'I'm awfully cold.'
'Come in at once, my sweet,' Meryl said effusively. 'Come and get warm and I'll make you a lovely dinner.'
The child said, 'Can Grandad come in as well? And Weasel? They're awfully cold, too.'
IX
AA
WEDNESDAY, 7 DECEMBER
Several times in the night, Simon had gently lifted the Bible from his chest and placed it on his pillow. And then, in rubber-soled sandals, had crept down the spiralling stairs by the light of a pencil torch.
He'd placed himself in the smallest, topmost room. A cell with a slit, and more than fifty steep stairs to reach it: a penance, of sorts. It was also the room which the others were least likely to visit. So they wouldn't see the other little Bibles - one at each corner of the bed.
Moira's room was immediately below his, along with a bathroom. Then Dave, then Tom. Then another bathroom and also Prof Levin's room, which was Simon's destination.
Very quietly, shading the torch, he would ease open Prof door and peer in. Prof would be on his back and snoring. Or on his side and not snoring. Or on his stomach with a pillow over his head.
No smell of wine. Only the ancient aroma of stone and dust on the stairs.
No baluster jar tonight.
It never happened when you were prepared for it. Each time he returned to his bed and his Bibles and slept fitfully.
Now, in the minutes before dawn, Simon, in his oldest jeans and his sheepskin coat, let himself out of the tower by the studio entrance. Into the dark groundmist.
Under his arm he carried the glazed Stamford-ware baluster jar.
Under his sheepskin coat he was naked between the waist and the white band of his clerical collar.
There was a hard frost under his trainers as he crossed the grass to the other tower, the ruined one. The beam from his torch made a cold, white spot the size of a ping-pong ball on the ground and then the walls of the tower.
The lower stones in the walls were green with moss and peppery with lichen, the colours almost lurid in the thin, bright beam. The walls reared up on three sides. In the farthest right-hand corner was a black gouged area, as though masonry had been ripped away by a giant claw. Across this ruined, cavelike opening, to waist-height, were three iron bars, modern, and a half-toppled sign, which said in red: DANGER. KEEP OUT.
or you might wind up running an accounting business from an electric wheelchair.
Behind the bar, steps led up into the tower.
Stones lay in jagged piles on the grass at the bottom of the tower. Perhaps some of them had been winched from Isabel's lap and others from the smashed skull of Gareth Smith, dead with his trousers around his ankles.
Simon looked up into the thick air, still blue-black between the Gothic arches like hands steepled in prayer.
Then he set down the baluster jar underneath the lower iron bar and climbed over the bar and into the well of darkness where the stairs were.
He tucked the jar under his arm and shone the torch on to the steps, greasy with moss and ice-trickles. It was just like the stairway in their restored tower, a spiral.
Simon began to climb.
As he climbed, be found himself imagining the young Isabel Pugh and Gareth Smith in December 1973. A cold night, but they wouldn't feel it. They'd be hot with excitement, sharpened, on Isabel's part at least, with a certain apprehension.
Thinking of Isabel in this context, Simon was surprised to discover he'd developed an almost painful erection..
He stopped. He put down the baluster jar on the step by his feet.
It was wrong. He would have to get rid of it. He pressed himself against the cold, curving wall, dripping with damp; he filled his lungs with brackish air full of the stench of decay. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And then he emptied his mind.
It didn't work. On the wall above his head came a sudden, irritable flaring of amber light. Somewhere out there a bird squawked, as though the light had awakened it before it was ready. Simon snatched up the jar and clambered up three more steps, until a deepset slit-window came in sight, about a foot over his head. He climbed another step to reach it and stood looking out, gulping in fresh, dawn air.
Here, just above the level of the mist, the sun was trying to squeeze through, leaving long, livid bruises in the cloud-mass,
'It isn't wrong, is it?' Simon said aloud. And shouted out, 'It isn't fucking wrong at all!'
He pulled away from the window and staggered up the remaining steps until the stone walls, and the dead weight of the Abbey, fell away and the purple and orange clouds were all around him, parting like long hills for a sudden bright river of coppery sunlight.
Simon pulled himself up to the stone platform, over which there must once have been a roof. Below him, the countryside was still dark, buried in black mist.
But he was above it, in the light.
Simon put down the jar and stood up on the top of the tower.
He touched his crotch. He was still hard. He thought of Isabel and moaned.
In the east, above the trees, was silhouetted the point of the Skirrid, the keel of an upturned boat. Above it, the sun swelling behind the clouds. It was as if the Skirrid was helping to nudge the sun into view.
The swelling from Simon's groin rose into his solar plexus and then upwards into his chest, expanding there and flooding light into his arms, down to the tips of his fingers.
He held up his hands, and it was as though his fingers were alight. The brightness throbbed in his chest; he could feel it flaring between his ribs, pushing at his skin like the sun at the clouds.
And when the pale orange ball finally rolled free from the clouds, a great sob erupted from Simon. For several minutes he stood there and hung his head, rocking from side to side, tears bleeding from his half-closed eyes.
Without thinking, he took off his sheepskin coat and stood, naked to the waist in the icy morning.
Bent down and picked up the jar. It felt so much heavier up here in the light. Despite its glaze, it would not reflect the sun.
'Figures,' Simon said.
A sour old smell drifted out of the jar. An old, old smell. Baluster jars, sometimes made in Stamford, Lincolnshire, were comm
only used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to serve wine imported in casks from Bordeaux and Gascony.
Inside the Abbey, the jar had looked new. To Prof Levin, the wine had seemed fresh.
Up here, in the dawn - the first light, unsullied by mist, not yet darkened by the Abbey - the baluster jar had become a valuable antique.
Simon lifted it above his head like a trophy.
'Richard!'
In the dawn, the unsoiled time, there were no shadows around him on the tower, only light.
'Can you hear me, you bastard?'
The clouds were edged with copper wire. Down there, in the Abbey and its grounds, none of this would be visible.
'Parting of the ways,' Simon shouted. 'Official.'
He hefted the jar, the valuable antique, one last time and hurled it at the sun.
For almost a second, or so it seemed, the jar was a black stain on the bright morning. And then it dropped into the mist.
He didn't hear it shatter among the fallen masonry which had lain on Isabel Pugh. Perhaps the mist of ages reabsorbed it.
Simon turned away from the sun and the Skirrid and looked back into the black hole.
'God help me now,' he said, and lowered himself back into the darkness.
For some reason - and this had never happened before - Moira walked into the studio and threw her arms around Simon.
'What happened?'
Simon grinned.
'Hey.' Moira stepped back and surveyed him shrewdly for about ten seconds. 'You suddenly realised you're in love or something? Do I know him?'
'Yes,' said Simon. 'Maybe. And no, you bloody well don't know him.'
'Well, I'm pleased for you, Si. Now maybe you could explain what this is about.'
'Wait till the others get here.'
'Could be after lunch.'
'It won't be.'
And he was right. Within ten minutes, they were all standing around under the heavy white vaulted ceiling looking slightly bemused but not hostile. One of the guys from the mobile canteen had turned up with a trolley full of teas and coffees in styrofoam cups. Moira noticed Tom had had a shave and Davey wasn't wearing his scarf.
This was bizarre. The biggest bunch of paranoids in the music business and everybody looking almost relaxed.
Prof arrived last. Everybody cheered.
'Bastards,' Prof muttered and then grinned.
'Somefink's lifted from somebody,' Tom said. 'Somebody's lighter.'
'And we have to use it while we've got it,' said Simon, who'd gone round to everybody's door by nine a.m., waking them all up, summoning them to the studio.
Last night, they'd gone to bed in a state of major communal depression, Moira feeling no better than any of them, because the Abbey had taken Round One. All Simon had said was, It wasn't Prof's fault, OK? And didn't need to elaborate. They'd put Prof to bed and assembled in the studio and tried to make like a real band, and disaster was not the word.
They'd started with an old country rocker of Tom's, 'Take Me to the River', so basic and simple it almost worked first time - Simon on bass, Dave on rhythm and Moira backing vocals to Tom's gruff bark. Half-way through, even Lee Gibson - who nowadays, apparently, only went behind the kit for spotlighted drum solos during his own gigs - started beaming, enjoying himself.
Take me to the river (Tom sang)
That's where I wanna be
Take me to the river
Where it reaches the sea.
Sit me on a landin' stage
Down by the waterside
And let me watch my troubles
Floating out on the tide.
It broke down on Tom's solo. Or rather, Tom broke down.
Tom's solo on 'Take Me to the River' was legendary. So fluid, Moira remembered some critic writing that trying to separate out the individual notes was about as easy as lifting the waves intact from the sea.
Or single tears.
'Poor little bleeder,' Tom had wailed, the words shockingly amplified. 'It ain't right. It ain't right.'
Afterwards he couldn't remember what this was about. Dave kept repeating the words to him, Tom shaking his head. 'How should I know?' But too depressed to carry on. Lee Gibson grinding his teeth and throwing his drumsticks in the air. Moira rang the canteen on the intercom. Coffee. Black. Lots.
In a bid to cheer them up, Dave had climbed back on to his favourite McCarthy amp, sat up there like a garden gnome with the M38 on his knee, and performed his version of Dylan's 'Girl of the North Country'. Even though the North Country in Dave's song was Hartlepool and there were some good jokes, he'd had to stop because he was sounding so uncannily like Dylan he even scared himself. He'd felt driven suddenly, he said, by something he didn't understand.
'We're all scared to death, aren't we?' Moira had said. 'We're never gonna be able to let ourselves go. We're all terrified this time around of what we're gonna let in.'
'Hardly without good reason,' Dave said. 'You've got to admit that.'
'Yeah, but it's no good, Davey. We walk out of this one unfinished, we're never gonna live ...'
With ourselves, she'd been going to say, but the sentence stopped itself.
Stopped itself.
Moira had felt herself go pale and turned away and suggested they call it a night.
Now, Wednesday morning, 7 December, she'd come into the studio to find a circle of seats between the drumkit and the mixing desk: stools, the producer's swivelling rocking-chair and the McCarthy packing-case amplifier.
They were all here, bar Lee. This wasn't his problem, Simon said. And anyway he'd still be in the sack with Michelle from TMM.
'This a summit meeting, Simon?' Tom said.
'Not quite.' Simon waved him to a stool, Prof to his chair, Dave to his amp.
'Last night,' he said, 'Prof got pissed, through no fault of his own, on red wine probably imported from Bordeaux in the 1170s.'
Prof opened his mouth.
'Don't say anything,' Simon said. 'Accept it.'
'Shit,' said Tom.
'Prof's an alcoholic,' Simon said.
'Now, look ...' Prof was half-way out of his chair.
'Siddown,' said Simon. 'That's just one problem. We've all got problems. But since Prof's was the first to show, I think it's time he attended a support group.'
'No way,' said Prof. 'Who the hell d'you think ...?'
'And this is it.' Simon stood up, walked over to the mixing desk and produced from behind it a large plastic Pepsi Cola bottle. He removed the top and began carefully to lay a trail of water from the bottle around the outside of the circle of seats.
'Courtesy of the parish of Ystrad Ddu,' he said. The water soaked in, leaving a dark, circular stain on the pale grey carpet.
'Is that necessary, Simon?' Prof asked.
'Bet your ass on it.' Simon stepped inside the circle through the remaining gap and then, with a final sprinkle, closed it from the inside. He sat on his stool, next to Moira's, with the empty plastic bottle in his hands.
'OK?' The studio seemed a more intimate place, as if the walls were crowding in to listen. Moira was surprised to see Simon taking the initiative; he'd always been such a diffident guy. But, then, he was the only one of them formally recognised as being able to splash holy water around with impunity.
Until now, the atmosphere had seemed so much lighter this morning. It wasn't really; that was an illusion. The reality was last night.
But something had happened to Simon overnight to make him think it was worth carrying on. And he was sharing it while it lasted. Because they were a band.
Simon bowed his head over his hands, still holding the plastic Pepsi bottle. 'I'm not going to use any elaborate language, I'm not even going to address God, in case there are any of us to whom that kind of terminology doesn't mean a lot. Whatever message we're sending out here, you can all send it in whichever direction you want. Outwards, inwards, wherever.'
'I think we're all gonna be pointing in vaguely the same direction,' Moira sai
d.
'Thanks.' Simon glanced briefly towards the huge, white-washed stone arches in the ceiling. 'OK. We've got problems, we've all had problems for a long time, and now we've come together to admit we can't handle them alone.'
'Right,' Tom said.
'We've come back to the place where we were all severely tested, and some of us failed the test pretty badly.'
'Some us didn't even finish the paper,' Dave muttered.
'We need help,' Simon said and was silent.
Moira heard a popping sound and saw small bubbles appear in the carpet where the holy water had fallen.
'Ignore it,' Simon whispered, flashing her the Don't Worry Tom look.
Moira nodded. She could see where he was corning from. To get through a session here they needed to balance an awareness of reality with enough illusion to enable them to function. Like crossing a narrow, rickety bridge across a deep, deep canyon. To make it to the other side, you needed confidence and fear in equal measures. Maybe that was the definition of courage.
'You know ...' Simon smiled at Prof. 'I reckon you have been to AA meetings in the past.'
'Bollocks,' Prof said.
'We're meeting you more than half-way. Prof. Tell me, how does that intro go? You know ... when you go to an AA meeting, you have to introduce yourselves and everybody states their name and one simple fact.'
'Yeah,' Prof said. 'I believe I've heard of that. Maybe saw in a film once.'
'Go on then.'
'Sod it.' Prof sighed and then intoned, 'My name is Kenneth and I am an alcoholic'
'Terrific,' Simon said. 'Now I'll have a go.'
He closed his eyes for a moment, smiled to himself, and he said, 'My name is Simon. I am a pervert and a necromancer and, by continuing to practise as a priest, I am committing the grossest, most unforgivable blasphemy and endangering the immortal souls of all the poor bastards who, through me, seek God's blessing.'
There was a long silence.
'That's a tough one to follow, Simon,' Dave said. 'But I'll give it a whirl.'
