Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  The bus was moving very slowly, in low gear. It must be like driving through frogspawn. Jane just hoped to God that Mum was feeling better – was not going to be really ill.

  Ledwardine was near the end of the line. Dean Wall, legendary greaseball, knew that, so there was no need at all for him to dump his fat ass on the seat next to Jane. He was on his own tonight, his mate Danny Gittoes off sick, supposedly.

  ‘Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss your stop in all this fog. Seein’ as how you en’t much used to buses these days.’

  Very funny! Jane gathered her bag protectively on to her lap. ‘Don’t worry about me. I have a natural homing instinct.’

  The bus was crawling now. She had no idea where the hell they were.

  ‘Only tryin’ t’be helpful, Watkins.’ Dean Wall shoved his fat thigh against hers, leaned back and stretched. The fat bastard clearly wasn’t going to move. ‘Goin’ out tonight?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Off with some bloke tonight, then, is she?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  Wall’s big fat lips shambled into a loose smile.

  ‘Look, just sod off, OK?’ Jane said.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry, Watkins – you’ll still get yours. Er’s likely bisexual.’

  ‘Will you piss off?’

  ‘You don’t know nothin’, do you? You’re dead naive, you are.’

  Jane gazed out of the window at dense nothing. ‘Stop trying to wind me up.’

  ‘I’m tryin’ to put you right, Jane. You wanner talk to Gittoes, you do. ’Cept he en’t capable of speech right now – still recoverin’, like. His ma’s thinkin’ of gettin’ him plastic surgery to take the smile off his face.’

  ‘I don’t want to know!’

  ‘I bet you do.’ Dean Wall leaned a little closer and Jane shrank against the streaming window. Dean lowered his voice. ‘’Er give Danny a blow job, back o’ the woodwork building.’

  She spun and stared at him.

  ‘Listen, I en’t kiddin’, Jane.’ He threw up his hands like she was about to hit him. ‘Gittoes was pretty bloody gobsmacked himself, as it were.’

  ‘You totally disgusting slimeball.’

  ‘’Er needed a favour, see.’

  ‘I want you to sit somewhere else, all right?’ Jane said. ‘I’m going to count to five. If you haven’t gone by then, I’ll start screaming. Then I’ll tell the driver you put your hand up my skirt.’

  ‘Mrs Straker?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Merrily Watkins again. I’ve tried several times to call back, but I suppose you had to go out.’

  ‘Who’d you say you were?’

  ‘Merrily – it’s Jane’s mum. She’s Rowenna’s friend. We spoke earlier.’

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number, dear.’

  ‘We spoke about an hour and a half ago. You said there was something I should know about Rowenna.’

  You won’t find it funny. I’ll guarantee that.

  ‘You must be thinking of somebody else,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘I’ve never spoken to you before in my life.’

  She couldn’t talk, Merrily decided. Someone had come into the house who shouldn’t hear this. Or someone she was afraid of.

  ‘Is there somebody with you? Has Rowenna come back? Is Jane with her? Could you just answer yes or no?’

  ‘Listen,’ Mrs Straker hissed, ‘I don’t know who you are, but if you pester me again I’ll call the police. That clear enough for you, dear? Now get off the fucking line.’

  She lay awake that night for over an hour, a whole carillon of alarm bells ringing.

  It was the first evening this week that she and Jane had eaten together. Afterwards, they made a log fire in the drawing room and watched TV, all very mellow and companionable. Later they put out the lamps and moved out of the draughts and close to the fire, sipped their tea and talked. And then she got around to telling Jane about Katherine Moon.

  ‘Dead?’

  So she hadn’t known. It was hard to tell how Jane really felt about this; she seemed to have assumed Moon and Lol had been, at some stage, an item. When Merrily came to Moon’s use of the Iron Age knife – this kind of stuff never seemed to upset Jane particularly, as long as no animals were involved – the kid nodded solemnly.

  ‘Sure. The later Celtic period, coming up to the Dark Ages, that was like this really screwed-up time.’

  ‘It was?’ Merrily curling her legs on to the sofa.

  ‘Bad magic. The Druids were getting into blood sacrifices and stuff. If your family was rooted in all that, you’re quite likely to get reverberations. Plus, who knows what else happened on the site of that barn? I mean way back. It could be really poisoned, giving off all kinds of mind-warping vibrations. If you don’t know how to handle these things, it could go badly wrong for you.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ Merrily had said mildly. ‘Where did you learn all that, flower?’

  ‘Everybody knows that,’ Jane said inscrutably. She was sitting on a big cushion at the edge of the hearth. ‘So this Moon was bonkers all along?’

  ‘She had a history of psychiatric problems.’

  Which led to a long and fairly sensible discussion about Lol and the kind of unsuitable women into whose ambience he seemed to have been drawn, beginning with his born-again Christian mother, then the problem over a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, when he himself was about nineteen but no more mature than the girl, and then some older woman who was into drugs, and later Alison Kinnersley who’d first drawn him to Herefordshire for entirely her own ends.

  ‘How’s he taken it?’ Jane set her mug down on the hearth and prodded at a log with the poker.

  ‘He thinks he should have known the way things were going, which is what people always say after a suicide. But in this case people were trying to help her. It’s very odd. It doesn’t add up.’

  ‘So, like, Lol… was he in love with her?’

  ‘I really don’t think so, flower.’

  And at this point the phone had rung and she’d waited and dialled 1471, finding it had been Lol himself. She called him back from the scullery-office, still answering monosyllabically, because Jane was sometimes a stealthy mover. So she never did learn how he’d discovered the kid had become involved with something called the Pod, which met above a café in Hereford. It could be worse, however, Lol said: women only, nothing sexual. Self-development through meditation and spiritual exercises. Progressing – possibly – to journeys out of the body.

  Oh, was that all?

  When she went back to the drawing room, Jane had put on the stereo and it was playing one of the warmest, breathiest, Nick Drake-iest songs on the second and final Hazey Jane album. The one which went, Waking in the misty dawn and finding you there.

  Merrily lay on the sofa and listened to the music, her thoughts tumbling like water on to rocks.

  During the remainder of the evening, the phone rang twice. Merrily said the machine would get it, although she knew it was still unplugged.

  The last caller, she’d discovered from the bedside phone, was Huw Owen. She fell asleep trying to make sense of him and Dobbs.

  She lay there, half awake for quite a while, dimly aware of both palms itching, before the jagged cold ripped up her, from vagina to throat, and then she was throwing herself out of bed and rolling away into a corner, where the carpet was still damp from holy water, and she curled up dripping with sweat and terror and saw from the neon-red digits of the illuminated clock that the time was four a.m., the hour of his death in Hereford General.

  Across the room, with a waft of cat’s faeces and gangrene, a shadow sat up in her bed.

  34

  A Party

  THE BULKHEAD LIGHT came on and the back door was tugged open.

  Somewhere deep in the stone and panelled heart of the Glades a piano was being plonked, a dozen cracked sopranos clawing for the notes of what might have been a hymn. />
  ‘Ah.’ Susan Thorpe stepped out in her Aran sweater, heathery skirt, riding boots. ‘Splendid. We were beginning to think you weren’t going to venture out.’

  No ‘How good of you to turn out on a night like this’. Mrs Thorpe appeared to think Deliverance was the kind of local service you paid for in your council tax.

  The singing voices shrilled and then shrank under a great clumping chord.

  ‘I can never say no to a party,’ Merrily said.

  She shed her fake-Barbour in the hall. Underneath, she wore a shaggy black mohair jumper over another jumper, her largest pectoral cross snuggling between the two layers. Susan Thorpe looked relieved that she wasn’t in a surplice. But her husband Chris obviously thought she ought to be.

  ‘This is a proper exorcism, isn’t it?’ He was extremely tall, with a shelf of bushy eyebrow and a premature stoop.

  His wife glared. ‘They aren’t all bloody deaf in there, you know.’

  ‘Let’s get this clear,’ Merrily said. ‘It isn’t going to be an exorcism at all. An exorcism is an extreme measure only normally used for the removal of an evil presence.’

  ‘How d’you know it isn’t that?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is yet, Mr Thorpe.’ Yet – that was optimistic. ‘If it does turn out to be, er, malevolent, we shall have to think again.’

  Believe me, if you had real malevolence here, you would know…

  ‘Always believed in belt and braces, myself,’ Chris Thorpe said gruffly. ‘Go in hard. If you’ve got rats, you put down poison, block all the holes.’

  Merrily smiled demurely up at him. ‘How fortunate we all are that you’re not an exorcist.’

  ‘Let it go, Chris.’ Susan Thorpe pushed him into the passage leading to the private sitting room, held open the door for Merrily. ‘The truth is, my husband’s a sceptic. He teaches physics.’

  ‘Oh, where?’

  ‘Moorfield High,’ Susan said quickly. Oh dear, a mere state school. The Thorpes were no more than late-thirties, yet had the style and attitudes of people at least a generation older. You couldn’t imagine this was entirely down to living with old people. More a cultivated image over which they’d lost all control.

  The sitting room was gloomily lit by a standard lamp with an underpowered bulb, but it was much tidier tonight – possibly the work of the plump woman who sat placidly sipping tea. On her knees was a plate with a knife on it, and cake crumbs.

  ‘This is my mother, Edna Rees. This is Mrs Merrily Watkins, Mother. She’s Dobbs’s successor.’

  The former housekeeper to the Canon had raw red farmer’s cheeks and wore her hat indoors; how many women did that these days? She put down her cup, and studied Merrily at length, unembarrassed.

  ‘You seem very young, Mrs Watkins.’

  ‘I’m not sure which way to take that, Mrs Rees.’

  ‘Oh, I think you are, my dear.’ Mrs Rees’s accent was far more local than her daughter’s – Hereford-Welsh. ‘I think you are.’

  Merrily smiled. How do I get to talk to her in private?

  Susan Thorpe frowned. ‘I don’t know how long this operation normally takes you, Merrily. But our venerable guest of honour is usually in bed by ten.’

  ‘So there’s going to be nobody on that floor until then?’

  ‘Nobody living,’ said Mrs Rees blandly.

  Chris Thorpe glanced at Merrily’s shoulder-bag. ‘You have some equipment?’

  ‘We don’t have to be near any power points, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Chris, why don’t you go and do something else?’ Susan said through her teeth.

  ‘It’s my house. I’ve a right to be informed.’

  ‘But I don’t feel you really believe it’s going to achieve anything,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s just that normally we like to do this in the presence of people who are a bit sympathetic – a scattering of actual Christians. I mean, are there any practising Christians around? What about the woman who saw… him? Helen?’

  ‘Supervising the party,’ Susan said. ‘Making sure it doesn’t get too rowdy. Anyway, she doesn’t want to be involved. Christians? No shortage of them but they’re the ones we’re trying not to alarm. You’re on your own, I’m afraid, Merrily. Can I offer you a fortifying cigarette?’

  ‘Thanks. Afterwards, I think. If you could just point me at the spot.’

  ‘Don’t fret.’ Mrs Rees put down her cup and saucer. ‘I’ll go with you.’

  Excellent.

  ‘Did you ever go with Canon Dobbs, Mrs Rees?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Mrs Rees stood up, shaking cake crumbs from her pleated skirt. ‘Wasn’t woman’s work, was it?’

  Jane and Rowenna ordered coffee and doughnuts at the Little Chef between Hereford and Leominster. Jane nervously stirred an extra sugar into hers. ‘I didn’t even tell her I was going out tonight. It’s come to this: separate lives.’

  Rowenna was unsympathetic. ‘You’re a woman now. You live by your own rules.’

  ‘Yeah, well…’ Jane looked through the window at the car park and a petrol-station forecourt. She kind of liked Little Chefs because they sold maps and stuff as well, giving you a feeling of being on a journey. They weren’t travelling far this time, however.

  Only to the pub where the psychic fair had been held – there to meet with the gracious Angela. Jane felt like Macbeth going for his second session with the Weird Sisters. Like, face it, the first meeting had changed Jane’s life.

  She hadn’t seen much of Rowenna over the past couple of days. Then, this morning, the lime-green Fiesta had slid into Ledwardine market square while she was waiting for the bus.

  She’d immediately wondered whether to tell Rowenna what Dean Wall had said. If somebody was spreading that kind of filth about you, you had a right to know. But the minute she got in, Ro was like: ‘Guess who called me last night?’

  Jane abandoned half her doughnut, pushed the plate away.

  ‘Don’t look so worried.’

  Rowenna wore a new belted coat of soft white leather; Jane was wearing her school duffel coat. People must think she was like some hitchhiker this genteel lady had picked up.

  ‘Is she going to give us a reading?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rowenna said. ‘You scared of that?’

  ‘I was so pissed off when I got up, I forgot to do the sun thing.’

  ‘So what’s she going to do about that?’ Rowenna said quite irritably. ‘Give you detention? Lighten up, these people are not like…’ With a napkin over her finger, she dabbed a crumb from the edge of Jane’s mouth. ‘Listen, you know what your problem is? Your mother’s dreary Anglicanism is weighing down on you. So gloomy, kitten. You spend your whole life making sacrifices and practising self-denial in the hope of getting your reward in heaven. What kind of crappy deal is that?’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Going to waste her whole life on that shit – and they get paid peanuts, don’t they? I mean, that great old house and no money to make the most of it? What’s the point? She’s still attractive, your old lady. It’s understandable that it pisses you off.’

  ‘I can’t run her life.’

  ‘No? If it was me, I’d feel it was my responsibility to kind of rescue her, you know? She’s obviously got talent, psychicsensitivity, all that stuff, but she’s just pouring it down the drain.’

  Jane laughed grimly. ‘Oh sure, I walk in one night and I’m, like: “Look, Mum, I can get you out of this life of misery. Why don’t you come along to my group one night and learn some cool spiritual exercises?” ’

  ‘You underrate yourself, Jane. You can be much more subtle than that,’ Rowenna said. There was something new about her tonight: an aggression – and a less-than-subtle change of attitude. Remember Listen to me. You cannot change other people. Only yourself. How many days ago did she say that?

  ‘Come on,’ Rowenna said, ‘let’s go.’

  A bulb blew.

  Merrily’s right hand slid under her top sweater to grip the pect
oral cross. A bright anger flared inside her.

  The lights were wall-mounted: low-powered, pearlized, pearshaped bulbs, two on each dusty bracket, the brackets about eight feet apart along the narrow passage. This was the one furthest away, so that now the passage – not very bright to begin with – was dimmed by new shadows and no longer had a visible end. Easy, in this lightless tunnel, to conjure a moving shadow.

  Edna Rees chuckled. She was sitting in a pink wicker chair pulled out from a bathroom. Merrily was kneeling on the topmost of three carpeted steps leading up to the haunted east wing.

  This was the third floor, and once was attics.

  This was a stake-out.

  Because you didn’t simply arrive and go straight into the spiel. Spend some time with it, Huw Owen said. Let it talk to you. No, of course they seldom actually talk. And yet they do.

  Could she trust anything Huw Owen had told her?

  They’d been here twenty minutes. Downstairs, Susan Thorpe would be glaring at her watch. Always take your time, Huw said. Never let any bugger rush you. Where some of these customers come from, there is no time. Don’t rush, don’t overreact, don’t go drowning it in holy water.

  Merrily’s bag contained only one small bottle of holy water, for all the use that was. Her only other equipment was a Christian Deliverance Study Group booklet of suitable prayers, most of which she knew off by heart anyway.

  She was just going through the motions, with no confidence that it would work.

  It doesn’t always work – Huw’s truest phrase. It should be printed on the front of the Deliverance handbook.

  It should be the title of the Deliverance handbook.

  And where was she really? How far had she come since the four a.m. horror? Since the fleeing of her bedroom, the vomiting in the kitchen sink, the stove-hugging, the burning of lights till dawn and the Oh Christ, why hast thou forsaken me?

  There was then the Putting On A Brave Face Until The Bus Takes Jane Away interlude. She’d had the time – hours – to wash and dress carefully, apply make-up. To stand back from the mirror and recoil at the sight of age and fear pushing through like a disease.