The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  Nick sang that there was a black-eyed dog calling at his door and it was calling for more. It called for more and it knew his name. Nick’s voice was cut up and broken by the volume. Under Lol’s jacket, Ethel, the little black cat, quaked with pain. Beyond the kitchen door there was cat-litter all over the carpet, fragments of food dish.

  In a high, scared, doomed voice, Nick Drake, at twenty-six, sang that he was growing old and he wanted to go home.

  There was apple blossom all over the lawn, and the white petals were huge now. The song ended and Karl Windling’s shadow filled the window for a moment before the stylus was ripped across the record with a jagged whizz of puckered vinyl.

  Lol saw that the white petals on the lawn were the torn and scattered pages of a book. He bent and picked one up and held it into the light from the window.

  ...to love all persons in all ages, all angels, all worlds, is divine and heavenly ...To love all ...

  The house invaded, the book torn down the spine, the album ruined, the cat kicked half to death. Fol’s life smashed and the fragments scattered.

  And there was me, getting all hyped up for a fight.

  Karl would be well-stoned by now; that was his style – a satisfying surge of violence and then a nice, fat joint to make it feel doubly all right. Fol thought, I should go straight in there – it’s my house, for Christ’s sake, my own home – and ... and ...

  I wanted you to hate, Alison had said, not half an hour ago.

  But Karl knew Fol Robinson from way back. Knew he didn’t fight and lacked the nerve to hate. Knew that Fol’s speciality was fear.

  All the lights on, the window open. Karl Windling standing in the centre of the room now, staring directly at the window, but he couldn’t see Lol in the darkness. Karl’s bearded face unsmiling.

  Lol glanced at the empty drive, wondering for a second what Karl had done to the Astra before remembering he’d parked it in the village.

  Under his jacket, Ethel had gone still.

  He heard his own thin whimper on the air, as he turned and walked away from his home into the darkness of Blackberry Lane.

  She felt like some child molester leaving court.

  As the remaining congregation sang, watched over by the bishop, Merrily Watkins was escorted from the church wrapped in the rug, surrounded by Kent Asprey and Uncle Ted and Jane and Caroline Cassidy and Councillor Garrod Powell, their bodies hiding hers.

  Hiding her from the eyes of villagers who’d left the congregation before the bishop had restored order but were still bunched in the darkness, like sightseers on the scene of a fatal road accident.

  ‘En’t a good sign,’ an old woman whispered too loudly.

  Across the square, Merrily saw the softly illuminated hanging sign of the Black Swan, a beacon of stability in what was turning into an alien world. They’d been happy there. Now she was cold and confused and frightened and she didn’t know why, and none of the people with her said a word, not even Jane; it was like a funeral procession.

  They took her into the vicarage. Ted still had keys, as if he’d known she was only on probation and it might not work out.

  ‘I’ll make some tea.’ Caroline Cassidy looked with distaste around the grim kitchen, still partly lit by unshaded, underpowered bulbs. ‘Where’s your kettle, my dear?’

  ‘No,’ Jane said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Look.’ Merrily struggled to keep her voice level. ‘You’ve done so much already and I’ve ruined it, but if you leave now you can still go ahead with your cider launch.’

  ‘Merrily, I wouldn’t dream—’

  ‘Yes, you would. You have to. Village life goes on. Anyway, I’d be less embarrassed if I thought it wasn’t all a total disaster.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure ...’

  ‘Yes.’ She sat down at the table. ‘All of you. Please.’

  ‘You go to bed.’ Dr Kent Asprey gave her a shrewdly caring look. ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ Merrily said. ‘If it’s necessary. Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll tell the bishop you’ll be in touch,’ Ted said ponderously. ‘When you’re well.’

  ‘I’ll call him tomorrow.’

  Thank God Dermot Child had been detained at the organ; he’d have been less easy to get rid of. Merrily let her head fall briefly into her hands as the door closed behind them and Jane came back alone. Peered through her fingers at the kid’s face, flushed with concern, or it might have been humiliation.

  ‘Go and change, flower. Get off to the party.’

  ‘You are joking,’ Jane said.

  ‘I need to do some thinking.’ Merrily raised her head. ‘All right?’

  ‘Mum, you’re ill. If you go to bed, I’ll bring you whatever you need ... hot-water bottle.’

  ‘I don’t need anything, and I’m not going to bed.’

  ‘Well, you can’t stay in here, it’s dismal. I’ll light the fire in the parlour.’

  ‘Just leave me, Jane.’

  Jane hung on.

  ‘What was it? Something you ate?’

  ‘I didn’t eat anything all day, did I? I expect that was the problem. And getting uptight. Anyway, I feel terrible about everything, and I’m always better feeling terrible on my own.’

  ‘I’m going to stay,’ Jane said.

  ‘All right, you light a fire and we’ll sit and have a good old discussion. Well talk about Miss Devenish and what happened when you went to her aid that day instead of going to school and what you talk about together. All those things we’ve been meaning to discuss.’

  ‘I’ll get changed then,’ Jane said.

  But she wasn’t too happy about it. Throwing up in church, when you were in Mum’s line of work, was not exactly a really brilliant thing to do, and since coming to Ledwardine Mum had been, for the first time, quite hot on keeping up appearances. This was going to damage her. Maybe, in the years to come, she’d be quite affectionately known as the vicar who tossed her cookies down the nave. But maybe there wouldn’t be years to come, not now.

  How did she feel about that? Bad. Because coming here had put her on to like a whole new level of life. What Lucy called a new depth of Being. Whatever this meant, it wasn’t in the Bible, which was why it was unwise to even approach the subject with Mum. Particularly tonight.

  In the solitude of her apartment, Jane looked up.

  At what were supposed to have been the Mondrian walls. And the sloping ceiling between the beams. Into the blue and gold. Into the otherness. It was all so strange. Made her feel ... ooooh. She shook herself.

  Clothes-wise, she didn’t overdo it. Black velvet trousers and silky purple top. Not a good night for making a spectacle of herself. Plus, if it turned out to be the kind of party Colette had in mind, a quick getaway might just be called for.

  She’d gone ahead and lit the fire in the drawing room. Not so much because it was cold as because it might look halfway homely in there with a few flames. Before changing, she’d brought in some logs and filled up a bucket with coal. Kind of wishing she was staying in. But that invitation to a serious discussion left her no option. Jesus, Mum, she wanted to say, I don’t know what happened that day. Or that night under the apple tree. I’m not clear on it.

  But I’m getting help.

  Before she left, she stoked up the fire. Mum was down on the rug in a thick bottle-green polo-neck jumper and jeans, hugging her knees. It was a May night out there, but the vicarage remained in January. Except for the top floor.

  ‘I won’t be too late.’

  ‘I’ll wait up.’

  ‘You mustn’t. I’ll be annoyed if you do.’

  ‘OK, flower,’ Mum said.

  With her face washed clean of make-up and her hair pushed behind her ears, she looked awfully young and vulnerable. Younger than me in some ways, Jane thought. And feeling there’s so much she doesn’t know.

  24

  Uh-oh ...

  AT THE CORE of a bedlam of bodies, Colette Cassidy was mouthing at
her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘... you been, Janey? It’s nearly midnight.’

  Jane stayed where she was and let Colette come stammering towards her through the strobe storm, through a foundry of sound. The restaurant at Cassidy’s Country Kitchen was this square, attic space with irregular beams and white, bumpy walls. There was a stage area, where the Cassidys sometimes had a pianist, but tonight the piano, like most of the tables, had been taken away and the stage had become Dr Samedi’s spectacular sound-lab.

  ‘Sorry. Had problems.’

  ‘So I heard.’ Colette’s grin was lifted by the lights and put back intact. ‘Cool’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give the Reverend Mummy my compliments. Bet the bloody bishop wasn’t expecting that.’

  Gossip seemed to spread at more than the speed of sound in this village. Jane didn’t bother to explain that it hadn’t actually been all that funny at the time.

  There must be eighty or ninety people here, mostly imports, Colette’s age and a year or two older. The flashing lights were reflected in a lot of sweat on faces. Jane recognized hardly anybody, suspecting she was the youngest here. Some of the dancers looked ... well ... out of it. There was nothing stronger than Coke and Dr Pepper on the tables pushed up against the walls, but she thought she’d seen the boy from her school called Mark, who seemed to be the fourth-form’s principal dealer in Es and speed.

  ‘All the same, Janey,’ Colette was saying, ‘you didn’t have to spend half the night with the old girl.’

  ‘Sorry. Something else came up.’

  Colette didn’t seem to hear. Dr Samedi was squealing something over the industrial drum ‘n’ bass on tapes. He wore a top hat, with ribbons, and a black bow tie. No shirt. Jacket open to his shiny chest with a white necklace showing. It was a jacket from a morning suit, black, with tails, and strategically torn in several places like the jackets the punks used to wear in Mum’s day. It was a scarecrow’s jacket, and that was what Dr Samedi looked like, a scarecrow animated by lightning.

  ‘I said,’ Jane shouted, ‘something came up!’

  ‘You should be so lucky. Listen—’

  Colette was wearing something black and shiny and daring, naturally. A gangly guy in a white shirt was hanging around behind her. Colette moved close to Jane.

  ‘OK, listen, that’s Quentin the Suitable.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Like, the parents always have to make sure there’s a Suitable One, you know what I mean? His old man’s some kind of exalted surgeon at the General. I just wish somebody would surgically remove him.’

  Quentin was tall and looked about seventeen.

  ‘He’s not bad,’ Jane said.

  ‘Especially if you’re into vintage tractors. His hobby. He also dances like one.’

  Jane smiled. Quentin strobed unhappily about six feet away. Colette put her squashy lips against Jane’s ear.

  ‘Janey, I can’t unload the dim bastard. I go for a tinkle, he waits outside the fucking door.’

  ‘... you want me to do?’

  ‘Take him off my hands?’

  ‘You are joking ...’

  ‘Oh, come on, your night’s ruined anyway. You don’t have to snog him or anything, just keep him for two minutes while I melt away. The guy’s so sad if you tell him you have fantasies about having sex on a tractor, he’ll just ask you what make. Please, Janey ...’

  Colette looked desperate, like life was running out on her. But then it was her party. On the stage, Dr Samedi hovered demonically over his mixers, moving in a vibrating swirl of lights, as though he was turning himself into light, into pure, bright energy. And Jane understood – hated the heartless music, understood perfectly about Dr Samedi’s need to become light. Dr Samedi was in his element. In his orb.

  She felt suddenly half-separated from it all, as though the dance floor represented all human life and she was flickering on the edge of it. For an instant, she felt weightless, as though she might vanish into one of the cracks of darkness between strobes. She felt like this quite often now, but never inside a building before. Well, except for the church, for a moment, earlier on.

  ‘Janey?’ Colette clutched at her. ‘Christ, I thought you’d ...’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Please, Janey ...’

  ‘Sure,’ Jane said, squeezing her hands together to bring herself down. ‘Whatever.’

  When Merrily awoke on the sofa in front of the dying fire, she was happy for a moment. Frozen and stiff, but she’d been asleep for two, three hours and hadn’t dreamed about anything she could recall. A small miracle.

  But this time, reality was the curse. The priest-in-charge had tonight been physically sick in her own beautiful and historic church in front of the biggest congregation she’d ever pulled.

  How could she have just let that happen? Children did that, just threw up without warning. The priest-in-charge was not even in charge of her own metabolism.

  Merrily rolled down from the sofa to the rough, industrial carpet. After a while, she sat up, shivering, and threw more lumps of coal onto the embers in the dog grate, thrusting in the poker, levering up some heat, inching closer, on this balmy May evening, to the miniature medieval hell of smoking cliffs and molten canyons.

  Medieval hell. She was part of a medieval institution. Just that the modern Church refused to connect with its roots. Which was why the modern Church was losing it.

  If you’d said that to her six months ago, she’d have flared up a whole lot faster than this coal, but there was no denying it any more: in a world where huge numbers of people were begging for spiritual sustenance from exotic gurus and mediums and clairvoyants and healers, the Church was getting sidelined.

  David Campbell had actually asked the question, Do these phenomena really fit inside our field of operation? The Church still asking everyone to put their faith in a huge all-powerful supernatural being while loftily backing away from lesser phenomena.

  Like a pale, naked figure, cold as a slug, crawling towards you up the aisle of your church. Obviously, a representation of her own perceived isolation as the first woman minister of Ledwardine?

  Ha.

  From far up in the soaring hollows of the house came a sudden, resonant bump.

  There was a break in the music, the strobes were off. On the stage, Dr Samedi was guardedly allowing some of the boys to examine his mixers and tape decks and things. At a table near the door, Jane sat with Quentin the Suitable in his baggy cricket shirt.

  It had been hard going at first, but so far he hadn’t mentioned tractors.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I didn’t really want to come tonight at all’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘It’s just that my parents come for dinner here quite regularly, and they’ve become fairly friendly with Colette’s parents.’

  ‘They must be really sad, lonely people,’ Jane said.

  Quentin didn’t get it.

  Jane smiled at him. ‘So tonight’s the first time you’ve actually met Colette?’

  ‘I tend to be away at school a lot. Only this weekend, our half-term’s started, so ... No, I’ve never actually met her before.’

  Jane said airily, ‘Some bitch, huh?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Take my advice, Quentin, don’t get involved. She’s, you know, she’s kind of been around.’

  Quentin looked puzzled. ‘You mean abroad?’

  Jane rolled her eyes. ‘I mean been around as in eat-you-for-breakfast kind of been around.’

  ‘Oh,’ Quentin said. ‘I see. Well, she did seem a bit disconcerted when her father asked her to sort of ... look after me. I think she had other plans.’

  ‘Colette always has plans.’

  ‘No, I mean someone she was interested in.’

  ‘Oh?’ Jane sat up.

  ‘I may be wrong.’

  ‘No, go on.’ Jane looked into his soupy eyes, but he quickly averted them. ‘This is interesting. What made you think that
, Quentin?’

  But she didn’t find out because this quivering shadow fell across the table and she looked up into the face of a grossly sweating Dean Wall.

  ‘This’ll do.’ Dean pulled out a chair opposite Jane and sank into it and beamed at Jane and then at Quentin. Danny Gittoes was with him and Mark, the reputed dealer. ‘All right, are we?’

  Jesus, Jane thought, who let these bozos in? She’d forgotten about Colette’s professed need for ‘tension’. Silly cow. She looked around for Barry, the manager, locating him behind the bar where a waitress was putting out things to nibble, apparently on the instructions of Colette’s mother who didn’t realize that the only things that got nibbled at parties like this were ears. To begin with.

  Mark the Dealer stood by the door, hands in his pockets. Danny Gittoes sat down opposite Quentin, who seemed to be urgently wishing he was somewhere else. Like the dentist’s.

  ‘So, go on ...’ Dean nodded towards Dr Samedi and looked at Danny. ‘Voodoo, eh?’

  ‘Kind of thing,’ Danny said.

  ‘Where’s this then, Gittoes? Jamaica?’

  ‘Haiti. He was this voodoo God in Haiti. Only he was called Baron Samedi, see. God of the dead. Hung around graves. Led these tribes of zombies. And he wore that same gear – coat with tails and a top hat. Maybe a stick. Like a cane. I read this book. So that’s where he gets it from, see?’

  Dean winked at Quentin, who smiled stiffly. ‘And this was, like, devil worship, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, more or less.’

  “Cause Jane’s well into that, see,’ Dean said, not looking at Jane.

  ‘You on about?’

  ‘Got her ma into it now, too, from what they says.’

  ‘OK.’ Jane half rose. ‘Watch it.’

  She saw Quentin’s hand tightening around his can of Dr Pepper’s.

  ‘What they’re saying,’ Dean said, ‘is that Jane’s mother, the vicar, she chucked her load in church tonight.’

  Danny Gittoes said, ‘Eh?’

  ‘You en’t yeard? All over the village, man. ‘Er chucked up. Splatted all over the bloody bishop.’

  ‘Geddoff!’ Danny said theatrically. Jane smelled set-up.

  ‘Runs in the family, see.’ Dean’s little eyes glinting. ‘Can’t keep nothin’ down. Throws up right in the middle of’er ordination service, whatever they calls it.’