December

by Phil Rickman

  Dave feels frightened and very, very depressed. He doesn't know where to turn. He flashes his lamp up into the leafless branches of the tree which gave him sanctuary precisely fourteen years ago tonight.

  The glistening smoothness of the wood tells him at once what kind of tree it is and what's different about it.

  It's an elm tree, and it's dead now.

  They sit clustered like witches around the small vicarage hearth, a built-up coal fire pumping big yellow flames under the brass cowl, and Meryl asks, 'Do you believe in the power of the Spirit?'

  'I don't really know what you mean.' Isabel is restless, irritable. Never has she felt so helpless. 'If you've got the power, I've got the spirit,' she adds morosely.

  The little girl, Vanessa, is next to Isabel on the sofa. They must look like three of the strangest witches of all time.

  'Look into the fire,' Meryl says. She has switched off the light. Unearthly, she looks, with that burnished gleam to her long face. Woman's bloody daft. 'Look at the power there. We created it and we're containing it. It could burn this place down and us with it, but we're using it to warm us."

  'And how's that supposed to help Simon?'

  Isabel has telephoned to the Abbey, twice - oh yes, they have a phone number again - using her most authoritative, clipped, accountant's voice. A sugary female tells her that Mr St John is in session in the studio all day and cannot be disturbed.

  But it's urgent.

  She's sorry; she has her instructions.

  They could, of course, go along there and demand to be let in. An old man, a cripple, a mentally handicapped kid and a loony.

  They could storm the gates.

  Oh yes, there are gates now. The track terminates at big metal gates. Eddie has been and rattled them, demanding his rights of access to an ancient monument.

  Sorry, a big, leathered man from a security firm told him. Closed for structural repairs. Eddie stumping off, mumbling about complaining to his MP.

  There is another way, of course, he's told them. But it's a narrow little path, not much more than a sheep track. And totally impossible, Eddie is afraid, for a wheelchair. Especially as, with the security arrangements, they would have to go at night. Oh yes, Meryl said, and Isabel glowered.

  'There's so much power around us.' Now Meryl clasps her hands together, shaking them like a cocktail. 'If only we knew how to use it. This was a very blessed landscape once, with the Skirrid and all the churches built on holy soil. Once upon a time, we'd have known how to direct it.'

  Isabel is unimpressed. 'Prefer a flame-thrower, I would.'

  Meryl smiles at her. 'I'm sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I can tell how you feel about Simon.'

  'Unfortunately,' Isabel says, 'it's only from the waist up. And he doesn't like women anyway.'

  'I wouldn't have said that.'

  'What would you know?'

  'Perhaps a bit more about men than you, my dear.'

  There was no answer to that. She looks as if she knows a lot more about men than Isabel.

  'Is it always like this,' Meryl asks, 'in December of the seventh year? A tension in the air in this village?'

  'Not so's you'd notice. I'm trying to remember what it was like in '87. I don't remember anything happening then, that's the problem.' She sighs. 'What if all this is nonsense and we are all overreacting?'

  'It's very far from nonsense. And you know it. And this child knows it.'

  Vanessa has her hands folded on the lap. She looks up, blinking behind her enormous glasses.

  'Where's the soil?' she demands.

  Isabel looks blank. 'The soil?'

  'It's in the shed,' Meryl says. 'In a couple of plastic bin sacks.'

  'What soil?'

  'Vanessa and I bought a spade in Abergavenny and went up on the Skirrid to collect some of the holy earth. You know ... where it was shaken up by the earthquake on the first Good Friday.'

  'Personally, no. You can't climb many mountains in a wheelchair.'

  'It's not a mountain really. It's just a funny-shaped hill. But strange.'

  'Everything's strange to you, isn't it?' Isabel said disparagingly 'I bet you go to fortune-tellers and séances and stuff like that.'

  Meryl stiffened. 'Certainly not.'

  'I'm sorry,' Isabel said. 'Just a whingeing cripple, I am, and a sour old maid. All I've ever done is sit in this chair and moan.'

  'And build up the most lucrative business in the village, according to Eddie,' said Meryl. 'Don't sell yourself short. You have got the spirit.'

  'I don't even know what I want to do.'

  'But you know what you want,' Meryl says. 'That's a start.'

  A woman dying.

  Waxen face, dwindling tendrils of mist from parted lips, eyelids fluttering as feeble as a moth in winter.

  Hunched over his mixing desk, lights low, Prof remembers this as clearly as if he were hearing the music now. Not actually hearing the music again - he can't even remember the basic melody - but seeing the images it conveyed.

  He's thinking. Am I a bit psychic too, or was the music really that powerful?

  Music he has to re-record tonight, and Prof is ... well, nervous is not the word. He's seen and learned and experienced too much in the past weeks or so. At the age of sixty-four, his mind has been blown apart.

  And he's supposed to know how to piece it together again?

  Far more sensible, Prof thinks, to have a few drinks and let all these experiences and revelations sink into the general mush.

  Now that's a first - first time that drink has seemed like the sensible option.

  So far - last night, anyway - it's been quite a satisfying experience, producing this album. That last piece of Simon's recorded out on the studio floor, with the ambience of the stone very definitely captured, that was dynamite. Will be dynamite when Prof has mixed it, with the bass and drums on. These tracks were supposed to have been recorded today, but Simon hasn't shown his face in the studio all day, like last night really took it out of him. Lee Gibson keeps sticking his head around the door to see if he's wanted yet, getting increasingly pissed off, muttering about temperamental half-assed wankers.

  Lee isn't used to this, being kept waiting. Not for the first time, Prof wonders how the hell they persuaded a heavy-earner like Lee to fly over from the States, for this.

  He saw Steve Case briefly this afternoon over at the canteen. This is as far as Steve comes, he won't set foot in the studio. 'A deal is a deal, Prof. How's it going, am I allowed to ask?'

  'Not bad,' Prof told him. 'Had a few false starts and, er, minor setbacks, but it's shaping up OK. We're having a go at the number which should give us half of side two.'

  'Aelwyn.'

  'Yeah. The heavy one. The one that fucks people up, Steve.'

  'Do I look fucked up, Prof?'

  'I can't believe you heard it. I can't believe you heard the same music as me.'

  'You're a sound engineer, Prof. You're supposed to hear these little ... resonances.'

  Resonances.

  A woman dying.

  There's only one woman here.

  'Is ... is Mr Beasley there?'

  'No, he's not. Who's that?'

  'Doesn't matter, honest. I'll call back.'

  'No. Don't go. Please don't hang up. I know your voice, don't I, from somewhere?'

  'Yes, you do. That's Shelley, isn't it? It's Barbara Walker, Ginger Hodge as was.'

  'For heaven's sake, it is, too.'

  'Oh look, I'm sorry, it's just I promised Weasel, and I didn't want to sound like I was going behind your back.'

  'God, Ginger, if there's anything you can tell me. I'm ... I'm just going out of my mind, if you want the truth.'

  'What's ... ?'

  'It's Vanessa. She went off with Weasel and they've just... disappeared. Vanished. One mysterious phone call and then nothing. She's got Down's Syndrome, Ginger. She's got very poor eyesight, there was talk of a heart-murmur ... I can't sleep, I can't...'

  'Oh, Sh
elley. You haven't told the police or anything?'

  'Not yet. Weasel's devoted to her, I mean he wouldn't ...'

  'No, he wouldn't, I can tell you that. Oh, I wish I'd called earlier. I didn't want to ring from the office, in case ... I mean, they're not nice people at TMM. It's not like Epidemic was.'

  'Ginger, I'll do anything.'

  'Well, look, there's a lot of stuff I'm not sure about, so I don't want to say too much. But I do know where Tom is. At least, I'm pretty sure.'

  When Shelley puts the phone down, she's appalled, hot with anxiety and absolutely furious at herself,

  Why on earth didn't she realise?

  Yet it seems so terrifyingly bizarre and so utterly unlikely that Tom, of all of them, should have acquiesced ... agreed to return to the place which has given him the worst moments of his life.

  Unless ... that woman ... that insane woman ...

  Shelley stands trembling in the hall, Martin Broadbank watching from the bottom of the stairs. He's been here all day, running his business from her office, breaking off to calm her when she goes into her headless chicken routine,

  It's seven-thirty p.m. Shelley contemplates a journey.

  II

  Unhappy Ghosts

  Aelwyn.

  It's been a long haul, my friend.

  Eddie sits in his armchair, his papers on a coffee table. Marina is watching the television; such a placid woman, doesn't know what he'd do without her.

  The TV screen might as well be blank for all it affects his concentration. If there's one thing Eddie can do its focus.

  Aelwyn.

  In this mood, Eddie doesn't care who he bothers at home. The eminent professor of Welsh Literature at Aberystwyth he called an hour ago was not what you'd call cordial. How did Eddie get hold of his phone number? Who the hell was he anyway? If he wanted this kind of information, why didn't he drive over to the National Library like anyone else?

  Eddie had to throw a few heavy names at him, Department of Education high-ups who didn't know Eddie Edwards from Adam, but this professor wouldn't find that out tonight.

  'All I want is top-of-the-head stuff, I'm not after a biography,' Eddie said. Always so difficult to find out what these academic bastards really think. Everything has to be a considered, annotated response, with appendices and a bloody index. Takes him ages, like pulling bloody teeth, but he gets there in the end. And if Professor Vyrnwy Pritchard should ever discover that Edward Edwards never made it to chief education adviser and has in fact been safely retired for many a year … good.

  Aelwyn.

  This man, like many of these bardic figures, is an enigma. Perhaps the greatest enigma of his profession during the medieval period.

  In those days, bards were hacks, see.

  If you were a medieval chieftain who wanted your mighty victories commemorated in poetry and song so that other chieftains would be less inclined to chance their arm against you, what you did was to hire yourself a bard.

  The bard would sit around in your castle for a few weeks, getting well pissed up on your wine, and at the end of this period would produce some bloody awful piece of illiterate doggerel full of lurid verses about you slicing people's arms off with your mighty broadsword.

  Aelwyn was different.

  Aelwyn was not inspired by bloodstained battle-axes and intrepid acts of vengeance by the valiant Welsh against the brutal Normans.

  Aelwyn's work was dedicated to the promotion of what, in twelfth-century Britain, was a deeply unfashionable commodity: peace. Hence the name applied to him, Breuddwydtwr. For most of the Middle Ages, the notion of peace was strictly for the dreamers.

  Nothing remains of the man's apparently prodigious output: he was part of an oral tradition; if he committed anything to parchment, it has not survived. More out of legend, is Aelwyn, than recorded history, as Eddie has suspected. How could anyone survive, the historians ask, in such violent times when his message was one of conciliation and mutual understanding? When he stood up for the common people against the warlords? When the only chiefs and princes he was prepared to exalt in his verses were those who did not abuse either their power or the local peasantry?

  So, as men such as this were thin on the ground in the strife-border country of the twelfth century, how did Aelwyn survive?

  The answer - according, again, to legend rather than history - is in the personality and attitude of the bard. He hardly fitted the image of what might today be called a wimp. Aelwyn, it seems, was a tough customer, with an abrasive tongue, who would travel on foot with a harp over his shoulder but a sword at his belt.

  Aelwyn could hold his own. Aelwyn took no shit.

  And he had a following. There were few villages in Gwent and Powys and Hereford where Aelwyn was not welcomed with rejoicing, where food and ale and a bed would not be prepared for him.

  Man of the people, see.

  But in the eyes of the Norman, de Braose, and his kind, a very dangerous man. A rabble-rouser.

  It was entirely typical of de Braose that he should invite the famous pacifist to his castle to witness the signing of the treaty with Seisyll and the border Welsh. Reasonable, too, that Aelwyn should fall for it - well, Seisyll did, didn't he?

  Eddie leans back in his chair and closes his eyes.

  He sees Aelwyn fleeing the carnage at the dinner-table. A shout goes up that a witness, the worst possible witness, has escaped.

  But Eddie can't hear it. He's convinced now that it never came, that shout.

  Consider the situation. How did they know? When did they find out? If Aelwyn had slipped away unseen it would not have been until later, when the bodies were disentangled, that his absence was noted. If he had actually been seen escaping, they would have caught up with him in minutes. Men on horseback? And him on foot?

  He certainly would never have made it to the Abbey.

  And yet the story says he did. That he stumbled towards the lights and the smoke of what, at that time, could have been no more than a grouping of huts, perhaps with a stockade around it.

  Sanctuary, sanctuary.

  Eddie stands up. 'Off to the Dragon for a pint, my love.'

  'Bring some toilet rolls from the shop then, would you. Save my legs tomorrow.'

  Zap wags his tail. 'No, no, not tonight, boy, I'm sorry.'

  Eddie sets off, along the dark and freezing street, from the old vicarage to the new vicarage. In his overcoat pocket, two heavy torches. But he's far from sure about the wisdom of this.

  For on such a night ...

  No. On this night.

  Lee hurls a drumstick at the wall.

  'What's up with these bastards?'

  Prof is alone in the studio with the transatlantic megastar. It's the opportunity he's been waiting for.

  Lee,' he says. 'What the fuck are you doing here?'

  The reason they're alone is that the band have had five attempts at 'The Ballad of Aelwyn Breadwinner'; each time one or other of them has walked out of his or her booth shaking his or her head. It's not working. Is this cold feet or what? So they've gone through the ruins and across the grass to the canteen to try and work it out.

  When Prof asks the question, Lee looks at first kind of hunted and then kind of hostile.

  'You don't need this hassle,' Prof reasons. 'You don't need the money. You're not, with all respect, a guy renowned for being kind and sentimental. And what've you got to be sentimental about? By all accounts, they put you through the mill last time and the bloody album never even got released! Need I go on?'

  'Well ...' Lee hesitates, one hand pushing back his curly pirate's locks, it's partly contractual, obviously.'

  Prof carries a stool over to the drums, 'if you don't mind me saying so, Lee, that's crap. Nobody has a contract like that.'

  'Part loyalty, too, man,' Lee says uncomfortably, 'I got a lot of help from Sile Copesake. Sile found me the breaks. Shit, you know this business. One day, Sile says, I know you prefer drums, but don't neglect the guitar, yeah? Well, I use
d to play a bit, nothing virtuoso, just the chords. But I was surprised how well it came along after he'd said that. Then he says, like, there's this band could use a drummer. And so I go in as drummer and after a year or so I'm fronting the band. You know how it is.

  'He's got a piece of you, hasn't he?'

  'Shit, Prof, this is not something I talk about, all right?'

  'Because you're shit scared of him. He put you where you are, he can take you down again. But it's more than that. We've all heard stories about Sile Copesake. Not a nice man, basically. And he scares you, Lee. Not least because you can't think why.'

  'Why what?'

  'Why he's got to have you here. On drums. Nothing else. Not even back-up vocals. What's that gonna do for album sales? Lee Gibson: drums, sod all. Point is, it's just like last time, when you were just a session man. Everything just like last time.'

  'Not exactly everything. Prof. You weren't here last time.

  'Nor I was. Russell Hornby was producing, and young Barney Gwilliam was turning the knobs. You hear about Barney, Lee? You hear about Russell?'

  'Yeah. Unfortunate.' Lee's playing nervously with his other drumstick, pushing it through his fingers, it happens, in this game. It's not unusual.'

  'OK, then,' Prof says conversationally. 'Let's start with Barney. Terrific sound engineer. Very sensitive boy. Barney could pick up on the nuances, know what I mean? Very thin-skinned. That boy could feel the music. No surprise, then, that when he came out of that session, hearing all that dark, resonant stuff over and over again through his cans, he was polluted,' Prof taps his head. 'Up here.'

  'You don't know what kind of other problems he had, man.' Lee twirling a bit on his stool, eyes flicking from side to side.

  'You and Russell, on the other hand, were not so sensitive. You both thought all this picking up vibes stuff was total crap. You had thick skins. And anyway, on drums, you were beating it out of you as it was coming in.'

  'Like the shamans,' Lee saw suddenly.

  'What?'

  'One of them, Dave or Moira ... was saying shamans used to use drums to drive spirits away.'

  Yeah,' Prof says. 'That makes sense. Out, spirits, out! Bom! Bom! Maybe it explains why you were the one who didn't do away with himself rather than come back.'