The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  But, OK, she knew what he meant. Nick Ellis had been a rampant evangelical who preached in a village hall plastered with CHRIST IS THE LIGHT posters and used the Holy Spirit like an oxyacetylene torch. Merrily Watkins was the crank who prayed for the release of earthbound spirits, currently setting up the first Hereford Deliverance Website to offer basic, on line guidance to the psychically challenged. They hadn’t liked each other, she and Ellis, but to a good half of the clergy they were out there on the same ledge.

  And one of them was mad, and the other was a woman.

  Bernie Dunmore was quite right, of course: she’d been putting it off too long.

  She saw that he was blatantly inspecting her from head to feet – which wasn’t far – as if looking for signs of depreciation.

  ‘So you want to build a team, then, Bishop?’

  ‘If Deliverance has its back to the wall, better it should be more than one back,’ Bernie said sagely.

  Well, fine. Most dioceses had one now: a Deliverance cluster, a posse of sympathetic priests as back-up for the exorcist. It was about spreading the load, fielding the flack, having people there to watch your back.

  ‘OK, let’s do it.’ She came to sit down opposite him at the pine refectory table, where bars of yellow sunlight tiger-striped her bare arms. ‘The problem is… who do we recruit?’

  Bernie sank more cider. Merrily tried to think what his appearance suggested if not Bishop. You could almost think he’d been appointed simply because he looked so much like one – unlike his predecessor, Mick Hunter, who might have been a rising presenter from Newsnight. Previously, Bernie had been suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, the number two who rarely made it to the palace. But his formal acceptance by Downing Street as Bishop of Hereford had been a relief all round: a safe option.

  ‘Anyone in particular you want to sound out, Merrily?’

  Of course, she’d already been thinking about this a lot. But the members of the local clergy she most liked and trusted tended to be the ones who wouldn’t touch Deliverance with coal-tongs and asbestos gloves. And the ones who actively sought involvement in what they imagined to be a hand-to-hand battle with Satan… well, Nick Ellis had wanted the job for himself; that told you all you needed to know.

  ‘There must be any number of people out there better equipped spiritually than me.’ Fighting off the urge to dig for a cigarette, she poured herself some spring water. ‘I mean, so many people who seem to be living in what, seen from my miserable level, looks awfully like a state of grace.’

  She glanced at him, worried he might think she was fishing for praise and reassurance. But there truly wasn’t a day that went by without her feeling she wasn’t up to this job, wondering if she wasn’t any better than the mystical dabblers she was obliged to keep warning off.

  ‘Then make me a list of these saintly buggers.’ Bernie Dunmore would never have considered himself one of them either, but then saintliness had never been a prerequisite for bishops. ‘Fax it across to the Palace or give it to Sophie. I’ll make the approaches, if you like. Suppose we start with… what would you suggest… two?’

  ‘Two clerics?’

  ‘That’s enough to begin with. Don’t want Deliverance looking like a faction. And, ah, would they… pardon my ignorance, but would these two need to be, ah…?’

  ‘What?’ Merrily blinked.

  ‘You know.’

  ‘You mean psychic?’

  He looked pained. ‘What’s that other word?’

  ‘Sensitive?’

  ‘Yes. Well… would they?’

  ‘That’s a good question.’ She sipped some water.

  ‘I mean, I never liked to ask, Merrily, but would you say that you yourself…?’

  ‘Well, er…’

  ‘This is not a witch-hunt, Merrily.’

  ‘I don’t honestly know,’ she said. ‘Maybe we all are, to a varying degree. And maybe just doing this job gives you… insights. That is, God—’

  ‘All right,’ Bernie said. ‘Forget it. What else do we need?’

  ‘A tame shrink. Sure, we can make a good guess at who’s in genuine psychic torment and who’s clinically paranoid, but a guess isn’t good enough.’

  ‘And how on earth do we go about finding one of them?’ The Bishop shook his cider can, but found it empty. Merrily rose to fetch him another from the fridge, but Bernie shook his head and put a hand over his glass. ‘I mean, should we make a direct approach to the Health Authority, asking for nominations? And wouldn’t a proper psychiatrist require some kind of retainer? Doctors don’t like to do anything for nothing, in my experience, and the Archdeacon would be the first to query any kind of—’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Merrily sat down again. ‘There’s a whole lot I don’t know.’

  ‘We’re all feeling our way here,’ said Bernie, whose official elevation had been confirmed only at the end of May. ‘I mean, it’s all hit-and-miss, isn’t it? You get the wrong shrink, point him at some little old lady spouting the Lord’s Prayer backwards in a rich baritone, and he’ll still swear she’s a paranoid schizophrenic.’

  ‘Be hard to find one who won’t always say that. And he – or she – also needs to be a Christian because, if we ever get someone with a malignant squatter inside them, the psychiatrist is going to have to be there for the showdown.’

  Bernie winced at the terminology. ‘I really can’t help you much there, I’m afraid. I don’t think I actually know any psychiatrists of any religious persuasion.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Merrily said. ‘But I know a man who does.’

  He looked at her with the interest he usually displayed when she mentioned she knew a man. She didn’t elaborate. She was aching for a cigarette. Ethel, the black cat the vicarage had acquired from Lol Robinson, jumped onto her knee as if to prompt her, but Merrily kept quiet.

  The Bishop got up and moved to the window. He was wearing his golfing clothes: pale green polo shirt over cream slacks and over what you didn’t like to call a beer gut. If this had been Mick Hunter, the ensemble would have been mauve and purple-black: episcopal chic. But Mick Hunter wouldn’t have played golf.

  ‘What you said a few moments ago’ – Bernie was looking out over the vicarage lawn, which Gomer Parry insisted on mowing twice a week – ‘about people living in a state of grace.’

  The lawn ended at the old Powell orchard, which belonged now to the church. There were already tiny green apples on the trees, like individual grapes. Where was the year going to?

  Merrily glanced at the clock. She was going to have to leave soon to pick up the kid after her English exam. No anxiety on that one, at least; English came naturally to Jane and it was the one GCSE that required no revision.

  The Bishop coughed. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for a while.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘You’re still young.’

  ‘Ish.’

  ‘Young,’ he said firmly. He had grandchildren Jane’s age. He turned back into the room. ‘And a very young widow.’

  Merrily was about to remind him that if it hadn’t been for a particular fatal car-crash on the M5 she might have been a notso-young divorcee and therefore would never have made it into the priesthood. But she guessed they’d been into all that before.

  Bernie said, ‘We all know that when Tommy Dobbs was exorcist here he felt it incumbent upon him to develop a rather rigid, monastic way of life. Frugal. Steeped himself in prayer.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I can understand that fully now – why he did that.’

  ‘However, he was an old man. You’re a—’

  ‘Whatever.’ She stood up.

  ‘Obviously, stepping into Dobbs’s shoes, you were bound to feel you were walking on eggshells.’

  ‘Well… that, and for other reasons, too.’ She had a vague idea what was coming and clapped her hands together briskly. ‘Look, Bernie, I’m afraid I’ve got to be off in a minute. Have to collect Jane from the school. GCSE-time? Once they finish a
n exam they can go home. I don’t really want her heading down the pub.’

  He nodded, not really taking it in. ‘I… we’ve never minced words, you and I. Both accept that Hunter set you up to succeed Dobbs, to appear trendy… politically correct… all that tosh. And again, in my opinion, as I’ve told you on a number of occasions, in spite of all that it was probably one of Hunter’s better moves. Not least because people who wouldn’t dare go near that gruesome old bugger Dobbs will talk to you, as a human being. Young people, for instance. It’s very important that we should help the young people.’ He screwed up his face. ‘What I’m trying to say, Merrily… I don’t want you to be scared to be a human being.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I mean, there must be times when you find yourself looking at young Jane – with all of it just beginning for her. Boyfriends, parties, you know what I mean. You must feel—’

  ‘They’re fairly human, too, in my experience.’ Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘Nuns.’

  There was a moment of silence, then the Bishop sighed softly. ‘Well, you said it.’

  ‘I was trying to help you out.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Merrily!’ He brought his left fist down on the back of a dining chair.

  Well, what was she supposed to say? She hadn’t exactly applied for the job down here on the coalface of Christianity: day-to-day confrontation with the intangible, the amorphous and the unproven, as experienced by the damaged, the vulnerable, the disturbed and the fraudulent.

  Was the Bishop actually implying that she might find all this easier to cope with if she went out, got drunk, and got laid a time or two?

  Probably not. He was probably just covering himself.

  ‘All I’m saying’ – Bernie thrust his left hand into his hip pocket, maybe to conceal the fact that he’d hurt it on the back of the chair – ‘is that Deliverance has started taking on a much higher profile than any of us imagined. I don’t want you cracking up on me, or tightening up – building some kind of impenetrable spiritual shell around yourself, the way Dobbs did.’

  ‘Oh, I doubt I’d have the personal strength for that, Bernie.’

  ‘Didn’t matter with Dobbs, because half the Hereford clergy didn’t even know what he actually did. He could go his own way. All his pressures were… inner ones.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She noticed that a few of the little green apples had either fallen or been plucked from the orchard trees and now lay forlornly on new-mown grass that was already showing signs of sun-scorching. She wondered if there was some sinister piece of local folklore about premature windfalls.

  ‘Anyway,’ the Bishop said, ‘I’ll want you to email me that list by tomorrow night.’

  ‘I will, I will.’

  ‘And start helping yourself to a bit of ordinary life, Merrily. Before it gets eaten away.’

  THREE

  Soiled Place

  IT WAS LIKE some illicit members’ club for which she’d accidentally given the secret sign. One foot over the threshold, and she was pulled in and Layla Riddock had closed the door behind them. Then she heard a lock turn and Layla was pulling the key out of the door, sliding it into her skirt pocket.

  What?

  The two candles on the workbench made shadows rise and turned the metal handles of the oldest lawnmower into twin cobra-heads. One of the flames was reflected, magnified and distorted, in the bevelled side of a glass. It looked like one of the water glasses from the dining hall, upturned in the centre of the bench-top.

  ‘Welcome,’ Layla Riddock said.

  If Candida Butler looked mature, Layla looked somehow old, as in seasoned, as in tainted, as in kind of corrupt – or maybe you just thought that because of what you knew about her and all the guys she’d had. Like, actual guys, not boys.

  But there were no guys in here today, not even Steve the beer-gutted groundsman.

  ‘Take a seat, then.’ Layla pulled out some kind of oil drum, tapped on the top of it with her nails.

  The other girls said nothing.

  Only the chunky Kirsty Ryan, Layla’s mate, turned her spiky red head towards Jane. Kirsty was sitting on the mower’s grassbox turned on its side. The other girl, on a stool, kept on looking down at the bench-top where pieces of cardboard the size of playing cards were arranged in a circle, the candles standing outside of it, in what looked like tobacco tins.

  ‘Well, go on,’ Layla said.

  Jane sat down on the oil drum, next to Kirsty Ryan, because… well, because when Layla told you to do something, you somehow just did it. Layla was tall and good-looking in this kind of pouting, sexual way, and she somehow had this forceful thing about her, an aura of grim authority. Her father had been a gypsy – she liked to tell people that, liked hinting she had a long tradition of secret powers behind her. The gypsy must have moved on pretty quick, though, because Layla’s mother was long-married to Allan Henry, the well-known builder and property developer – ALLAN HENRY HOMES – and they lived in this huge, crass, ranch-style bungalow, with a swimming pool and a snooker room, out near Canon Pyon. Riddock was presumably her mother’s family name… or the gypsy’s.

  ‘It’s Jane, right?’ Layla sat down on a stool at the head of the bench, behind the candle tins. ‘Kirsty you know, I assume. And that’s Amy. Fourth year.’ She pushed the candles further apart, so that they were arranged either side of her and she looked like some sombre, smouldering idol in an Indian temple.

  The card in front of Jane said NO. The letters were printed on white paper stuck to the card. Now she had an idea what this was.

  Kirsty Ryan turned to her. ‘You got the ten quid on you?’

  Jane said nothing.

  ‘She can bring it in tomorrow,’ Layla said crisply, then looked at Jane without smiling. ‘Cheap at the price, love, you’ll find out.’

  Kirsty smirked.

  Jane thought she saw Amy stiffen. The kid was slight and fair-haired and was the only one in here wearing her school blazer, despite the heat. She was sitting directly opposite Jane. In front of her was the card that said YES.

  Kirsty said to Jane, ‘You come with a special question? Got a problem you want sorted?’

  Jane shook her head.

  ‘Lying little cow,’ Kirsty said.

  Jane said nothing. She had to get out of here, but it would be seriously unwise to let any of them know that.

  ‘Told you there’d be another one along, didn’t I?’ Layla folded her arms in satisfaction.

  ‘There was this other kid,’ Kirsty explained, ‘but she got shit-scared and backed out, and we were worried they wouldn’t like it. There should be four.’

  They? Jane cleared her throat. ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause we started out with four. So, like… your mother’s a vicar, yeah?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Oh, not just a vicar,’ Layla said, ‘is she, love?’

  Jane shrugged, keeping her lips clamped. She didn’t like talking about what Mum did, especially to someone like Layla Riddock.

  ‘So what would she say to this, your old lady?’

  Jane managed a nervous grin but still said nothing. Her old lady would probably have snatched up the glass, scattered the letters and called on God and all His angels to cleanse this soiled place like now.

  Kirsty said, ‘Who told you about this?’

  ‘Nobody,’ Jane said. ‘I was just—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Layla leaned forward, those big, heavy breasts straining to come bouncing out of her blouse. ‘This is excellent. I think… I really do think that this is going to be a really good sitting.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kirsty, rebuked. ‘Right.’

  Jane had never actually done this before. It belonged to the realm of sad gits, people with no real hold on life. It was a joke. Unhealthy, maybe, but still a joke.

  She had to keep thinking like that, because she knew there was no way she was going to get out of here until it was over. OK, she could leap up and demand the key and they probably wouldn’t us
e violence to stop her. (Or would they?)

  But that wouldn’t be awfully cool, would it?

  Besides, it might be, you know… kind of interesting.

  The air in the groundsman’s hut smelled of oil and sweat. The candlelight had found a little moisture in the cleft over Layla Riddock’s upper lip as it curled at last into a sort of smile.

  ‘Let’s go for it, then,’ Layla said.

  It was terrifying.

  And like… really addictive.

  The glass made an eerie sound as it moved across the greasy surface of Steve’s bench. Like a coffin sliding through the curtains of a crematorium, reflected Jane, who had never been inside a crematorium, not even when her dad had died.

  The first time—

  ‘Are you here?’ Layla had asked calmly.

  —the glass shot directly to YES with the snap precision of a fast cue ball on a snooker table, and the sudden movement made both candle-flames go almost horizontal, like in the wind created when someone suddenly slams a door. Jane was so shocked she almost jerked her finger away.

  ‘Good,’ Layla said.

  Jane let out a fast breath. She hadn’t expected that to happen. Nobody could be pushing; it just wasn’t possible.

  ‘Now, tell us your name,’ Layla instructed.

  It, Jane thought.

  There couldn’t be an it. Not on a summer afternoon in Slobbery Steve’s filthy shed in the precincts of the dreary once-modernist Moorfield High School, Herefordshire.

  It was a scam, that was all. There had to be a trick to it, a method of setting up momentum without appearing to apply pressure – an interesting end-of-term conundrum for the anoraks in the new science block.

  Jane looked into Layla’s face. Layla’s eyes were shut, but her wide mouth was set into a closed-lips smile that seemed to shimmer in the moist light, and Jane felt sure that Layla could see her through those lowered lids, as—

  The glass glided, dragging Jane’s finger, then her hand across the oily bench-top towards the letter J.

  OK, that was it. She was annoyed now. So, like, suppose she tried to manoeuvre it. Suppose she exerted a little deliberate pressure of her own next time. Suppose, with some really intense concentration, a blast of hyper-focused will power, she could make it spell out Jane…