The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  Lol ran across the road. There was an iron gate on the other side, leading to the pink-washed field. For a moment, as he climbed over, he thought he saw her again, a flitting thing, a wisp, a trick of the light.

  He turned and looked back across the road towards the orchard. He should wait here. He should wait for Gomer.

  There was a flash, like magnesium, on the very periphery of his vision and he spun round and once more saw her, in total, absolute clarity, standing in the centre of the field with her arms by her sides. She was dressed in black.

  This time, he saw, in a heart-freezing moment, that her feet were not quite touching the soil. A girl dressed in black, hovering under a pink moon.

  He stood with his back to the gate, snatched off his glasses and rubbed his hands over his face, replaced the glasses, looked back at the road and then spun around again. But there was nothing now.

  He wasn’t sure if it had been Jane.

  Or Colette.

  Both of them? Both of them out here?

  His hands were trembling as he pushed himself away from the iron gate and began to walk across the churned-up field, soil the colour of raw meat, the pink moon above him, the black-eyed dog, he was sure, at his heels.

  He knew where he was going. Among the farm buildings behind the trees was the cider house, where The Wine of Angels had not been made. The place where the Bulls had once taken their women.

  Lol stopped and looked once over his shoulder before walking steadily towards the buildings.

  The Escort had turned down Church Street for Old Barn Lane before Gomer started to follow. He’d pulled back into the shadows to avoid Minnie spotting the Jeep when she came out of the lych-gate, accompanied by Tess Roberts and the Prossers. ‘Never get to keep my ole Gwynneth after this,’ Gomer muttered.

  Rod was turning into Old Barn Lane.

  ‘Never even signalled,’ Gomer observed. He sucked on his ciggy. ‘What you reckon a man like Powell does, he sees the blinds come down after three hundred years?’

  ‘Wondering that myself Merrily thought about the unmissable password she’d given Gomer to identify himself to Lol. Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’ was the song of his that seemed to get played more often than any other when she was a kid. She used to ask her step-brother, Jonathan, to put it on again because the idea sounded so pretty. It was years later before she found out the message was far from comforting, spoke of no escape. For anyone.

  ‘Magistrate like Rod,’ Gomer said soberly, ‘he feels it’s all over, last thing he wants is to sit the other side o’ the ole courtroom.’

  Merrily fastened the webbing seat-belt. ‘I don’t know where this is going to end. I think we lost control a long time ago.’

  ‘Will of God.’ Gomer turned into Old Barn Lane. ‘En’t that the bottom line of it for you, Vicar?’

  ‘I’m a bit unsure about the strength of my faith, Gomer. If something happened to Jane I’d be swearing at the heavens and cursing in the night like nobody ever did.’

  The sights and smells of the dream cider house swelled in her head. In the vaporous humidity, no longer the pulpy, sweating cheeks of the pumping Child but the emotionless, rhythmical rise and thrust of a piece of well-preserved, well-oiled farm machinery.

  Gomer glanced at her and then turned back to the lane.

  Lol had spoken to him only once before, when he and Alison had bought the apple wood for fragrant fires. But on another occasion, the week after Alison had left, he’d seen Lol buying cat food in the Spar shop and had laughed quietly.

  ‘What you doin’ yere?’ Lloyd Powell said now. Not a man who smiled, but he laughed sometimes.

  Lol stood uncertainly on the edge of the field, where it gave way to a weed-spattered gravel forecourt.

  ‘I’m speaking to you, sunshine,’ Lloyd said. ‘Come over yere in the light.’

  The only light was a dome-shaded bulb in a holder like a question mark over the door of what Lol took to be the cider house. He moved shyly to within six feet of it.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  Lloyd was Marlboro County Man in denims but with no cigarette. Lol saw Karl Windling with no beard.

  ‘Ah.’ Lloyd put his hands on his hips. ‘I know who you are. You’re that bloke Alison Kinnersley left for James.’

  Lol nodded. The pint-sized cuckold.

  Lloyd’s expression was blank.

  Pint-sized cuckold. With no bottle. Just phrases he’d overheard in the shop when they were laughing quietly, Lloyd and another bloke.

  Lloyd examined him for a moment then seemed to lose interest. ‘Go away, little man,’ he said. ‘I’m busy.’

  He turned his back on Lol, taking some keys out of his pocket.

  ‘No,’ Lol said. ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘What was that?’ Lloyd didn’t turn round. Lol saw that his dashing white truck was parked a few yards away with its tailgate open. In the back was a dead sheep and something not much bigger wrapped in bin sacks.

  ‘Got it all loaded then, Lloyd?’

  Lloyd still didn’t turn.

  ‘Give you a hand, maybe?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Lloyd said. ‘Don’t reckon you’d have the strength. Bugger off. Go’n look at your owls, your badgers, whatever you little fellers do at night.’

  The pink moon shone surrealistically down on a pastoral dreamscape. Lol wasn’t quite sure if he was actually here. He glimpsed the past few days in a series of frozen incidents fanned out like playing cards – the vicarage days, his own mirror image bizarrely in a dog collar, Alison unmasked, the glow of firelight on Merrily’s eyelids – and then the fan was closed and he was standing back where it all began, in Blackberry Lane, in front of the invaded cottage, the torn-up pages of Traherne like petals on the lawn, Karl Windling in the window.

  ‘I thought as I was passing,’ Lol heard himself saying, as though from some distance, ‘that I would take Jane home.’

  Lloyd turned slowly back from the door.

  ‘Come yere a minute.’

  Lol heard Karl Windling say, Now you fucking stay there. You understand? You go anywhere, I’ll find you. You don’t move the rest of the night. I’m coming over.

  He walked up to the door and stood there.

  ‘Right, then,’ Lloyd said.

  The pink moon bulged as Lloyd half turned and hit him in the mouth. As he fell back, Lloyd hit him in the stomach. As he doubled up and his face came down, Lloyd’s fist was waiting to meet it, crunching his glasses into his eyes.

  As he rolled over on the gravel, Lloyd kicked him in the head.

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ the vicar said as they came up to the junction of Old Barn Lane and the new road. Terrible stupid junction, this was, Gomer reckoned, right on a bad bend. ‘You don’t actually think Lol’s going to find her lying drunk in the orchard. Do you?’

  ‘Oh, Vicar ...’ Gomer slowed down, not wanting to come up to the junction right behind Rod, pretending that concentrating on his driving was the reason he hadn’t finished the sentence.

  ‘You think she’s in the cider house, don’t you?’

  ‘En’t my place to think nonsense like that,’ Gomer said gruffly.

  ‘What happens in the cider house?’

  ‘They makes cider. Used to.’

  They passed into a tunnel of trees, blocking the moonlight.

  ‘I dreamt about it once.’ Her voice was very low. ‘I’ve never been in one, but I dreamt about it. It was Dermot Child in there.’

  Gomer thought that Dermot Child, nasty little bugger though he was, wasn’t in the same evil league as the Powells, so inbred, deep-down evil they didn’t even know they was evil. He turned out on to the new road and had to brake sharply on account of Rod Powell’s Escort was dead in front of him, having slowed for a big lorry rumbling round the bend.

  ‘Strewth, you don’t expect heavy goods traffic this time o’ night.’

  It was a low loader with a big stack of crates on the back. The driver cranked the gear
s and the lorry built up to a steady speed as they approached the spot where poor ole Lucy bought it, just before you hit the straight, Powells’ farm turning about half a mile off.

  Too late. Before Rod, too, changed gear and speeded up, Gomer saw him look in his mirror to see who’d come up behind him. Not many folk in this village drove a US Army Jeep with a cigarette glowing in their gobs.

  ‘Bugger.’

  He’d have seen the vicar, too. He’d know they were following him. He wouldn’t like that.

  Gomer eased up, left some space between him and Rod. His view of it was that Rod was heading home fast to check everything was in order, mabbe throw some disinfectant around then figure out how he was going to play it. He wouldn’t want no company tonight.

  But whatever he did to clean up the cider house, there wasn’t a thing he could do about the orchard. About this Patricia Young, who Gomer was convinced lay under the Apple Tree Man. He weren’t that old. Thirty years was a good age for an untended apple tree.

  Bugger. Rod giving it some clog now, getting up behind the lorry so he could get past when they hit the straight. Gomer put his foot down.

  What happened next happened so quick that he’d hardly registered it before the Jeep was up the bank and not-so-clean through the hedge.

  ‘Where are you? Where are you? Where you gone?’ Moving about in the bilious fluorescence, throwing hay around, old bin sacks. ‘Don’t mess me about, you bitch, you little scrubber. You come out now and mabbe I won’t give you to Father for his pleasure, mabbe I’ll just finish it quick, quick as a chicken, see, humane ... You want humane, you come out now. Father, he en’t humane, n’more. You come out now, you hear. I know you can’t’ve got out, had my eye on you the whole time I’m removin’ your friend, efficient, we are, you don’t get round the back of us ... Don’t mess me about, Jane, you listen to me, I en’t got time ... When I find you I’m gonner hurt you, gonner hurt you very bad, you hear me, Jane, you hear me, you little slut? You can’t’ve gone, you can’t’ve gone, you cannot’ve gone, Jane. Jane. Jane. JANE!’

  He comes out, boiling with bewilderment.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Advancing on Lol, tottering away from the truck, half blind, body burning.

  ‘Think I’m daft enough to leave the keys in, is it? Think you can drive off? Think I’m daft?’

  Big, tough hands, farmer’s hands, bass player’s hands, picking him up and slamming him back against some wall.

  And he can feel the freshly washed hair of a girl called Tracy Cooke in his eyes and mouth in a dingy hotel bedroom and he can see Karl Windling’s yellow grin as he pushes Tracy over onto Lol’s arm and goes down on her.

  I’m gonner hurt you, gonner hurt you real bad, you hear me, Jane ...

  Jane?

  ‘Where is she?’ Lloyd’s screaming, his hard face up close. ‘What you done with her? I’m gonner tear your other eye out, mister!’

  Lol’s hand comes up with the bottle in it. The empty bottle he found rolling around in the back of the truck. The bottle coming up and striking Lloyd on the point of the chin with a small click.

  Lloyd stumbling and spitting a little blood.

  ‘Right then.’ Rubbing his jaw once. ‘You done it now, boy.’

  Lol swaying, hearing the words of Thomas Traherne.

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

  Lloyd comes for Lol.

  Karl Windling says, And you ... you’re just ... I mean, who’d notice? Who’d give a shit? Who’d put flowers on your grave.

  Lol, with both hands smashing the bottle into the side of Lloyd’s head, whispers, ‘Jane?’

  There is no reply. Lloyd is on his knees. The bottle falling to the gravel and rolling over, its label lit by the moon.

  The Wine of Angels.

  Tears are the wine of angels. Traherne sighs. The best to quench the devil’s fires.

  You’d’ve thought it would be all over the road, but it was very neat. From the bank, Gomer was looking down on it, the moon so warm and bright you could see everything. Very neat indeed, the car looking like it had taken a bite out of the bed of the lorry, like the car roof was its upper lip, clamped down.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Gomer said, putting out an arm to bar the vicar’s path. ‘Call me sexist, Vicar, but this is gonner be no sight for you. You stay in this yere field. I’ll go down and check this out first, see.’

  He slithered down to the mangled wire fence, stepped over it and through the gap the Jeep had torn out of the hedge. Lit himself a ciggy then went to look under the deck of the lorry, where the bonnet of the Escort was barely visible. The end of the deck had gone through the wind-screen like a wide-bladed stone chisel.

  Gomer bent his head, sniffed, then straightened up and wiped his hands on his trousers.

  The lorry driver was down from his cab. He’d thrown up in the road. He wore a baseball cap and a big earring.

  ‘Well, well,’ Gomer said. ‘Jeremy Selby.’

  ‘Gomer?’

  ‘Bit late for a consignment o’ cider.’

  ‘Going down Southampton way. Bit of a rock festival’

  ‘Ar,’ Gomer said. ‘Best place for it. All be too stoned to taste the ole muck.’

  ‘It was so bloody quick, Gomer. Couldn’t believe it. He was right on my arse, then it just come running out the hedge, I didn’t know what it was at first, just slammed on, you know, instinctively, it was a really big one, all white.’

  ‘Hang on, get a hold, boy.’ Gomer extracted the ciggy. ‘What did? What exactly come runnin’ out the hedge?’

  ‘Bloody great sheep. White as a bloody polar bear.’

  ‘Ar.’ Gomer walked round to the front of the lorry. No sign of a sheep. Naturally. Gomer nodded, ambled back. ‘Where’d it go, then, Jeremy?’

  ‘Fuck knows. It was here one second, gone the next. I swear to God, Gomer, it—’

  ‘All right, boy.’ Gomer patted him on the shoulder. ‘If the coppers asks, I’ll say I seen it too. You rung ’em?’

  ‘On my mobile.’

  They both stepped into the road. It was dead quiet.

  ‘Poor bugger,’ Jeremy said. ‘I suppose there really is no ...’

  ‘What, with half of him in the front, half in the back and his head—’

  ‘All right! Christ, I’m still shaking. Don’t suppose you recognize the car?’

  ‘Oh aye. Rod Powell, that is. Was.’

  ‘You what?’ Jeremy Selby snatched off his baseball cap in horror. ‘I just killed Councillor Powell?’

  ‘Ar.’ Gomer’s beam was a bright gash in the night as he stuck out his hand. ‘Put it there, pal.’

  It was a cawing sound, like a nightbird, sporadic but coming closer.

  ‘... ane ...? ane ...’

  Merrily stood in the pink ploughed field exactly where Gomer had left her, not looking where he’d told her not to look. It was as though all her muscles had seized up. She felt raw and frozen and unable to think clearly. She saw a large hole in her cashmere sweater, just below the elbow. She could throw it away now.

  Something was standing about fifteen yards up the field. It cawed again.

  ‘J ... ane?’

  Merrily looked up. ‘Lol? Is it Lol?’

  ‘...’errily? Sorry, I can’t ... glasses gone.’

  He stumbled down a furrow. Before he fell into her arms she saw his face was full of blood and his mouth was up on one side. One eye was closed.

  They crushed each other and Merrily began to cry. ‘Oh, Lol, what have they done to you?’ She felt his blood on her face. He looked like his cat had. She remembered waking up by the fire, seeing him looking down at her, closing her eyes again, content. She closed her eyes now and the night swirled around her, not pink but deep blue. She couldn’t understand that when everything told her it should be black, streaked with red.

  ‘Lol, boy!’

  Merrily blinked. Gomer stood a few feet away.

>   ‘Take it easy,’ Gomer said. ‘Everybody take it easy.’

  The night became real and hard-edged. Memories battered Merrily. A flame of fear enveloped her. She stared into Gomer’s terrifying face, with the white spikes of hair and the core of fire in his teeth.

  ‘Bloody useless, you are, Lol, boy,’ Gomer said. ‘Wouldn’t find an elephant in your own backyard. ‘Er just comes walkin’ out the orchard, cool as you like, through the ole gate.’

  Merrily swam upwards through the blue.

  ‘Flower?’

  Next to tough, wiry old Gomer, she was looking very small and young and fragile. Her face was as white as bread. Her eyes were on the move, still travelling back.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Lol said.

  Breaking away from Merrily to let Jane in, he looked up.

  Through a single, watering, blood-blurred, short-sighted eye, he saw a curious cloud formation above the moon, a dark cloud hanging there making a curving V-shape. So that the moon, for a long, undying moment, was like a big, red apple.

  He heard Jane saying,

  ‘Mum ... where have you been since yesterday?’

  H.L. McCready and Partners,

  Solicitors,

  Apex House,

  King Street,

  Hereford

  3 June

  The Revd M. Watkins,

  The Vicarage,

  Ledwardine,

  Herefordshire

  Dear Mrs Watkins,

  I shall be writing to you more formally about this matter in due course but felt I should give you informal advance warning of something which, until now, has been subject to a degree of secrecy. I am sure that, were she alive, the police would be more than interested to talk to Miss Devenish in the light of recent events! In the circumstances, one can only mutter about there being more things in heaven and earth ...

  First, may I say how pleased I have been to learn that you and your daughter are fully recovered from what must have been a most disturbing night. I doubt if Ledwardine has weathered a more eventful period in its lengthy history.

  But to business. Many people, no doubt, will be wondering who is to receive the bulk of Miss Devenish’s legacy, which will amount principally to the proceeds of the sale of her house and shop, both highly desirable properties in a much sought-after village. In January this year, Miss Devenish placed before me a proposal which I confess I greeted with some dismay. It was her intention that all the money should be left in trust to the Diocese of Hereford for the purchase of the orchard immediately adjacent to the Parish Church whenever it might come on the market, the land to remain as an orchard in perpetuity.