by Phil Rickman
‘Amy. Please.’
‘I… am… not… going… anywhere! Do you understand? There is nothing wrong with me! And… and if there is, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s nothing to do with her. Just get her out of the house. Please. This is… disgraceful.’
Please? Disgraceful? Comparatively speaking, this was a restrained, almost polite response. In extreme situations, kids were rarely able to contain extreme language. You sad old bitch had sometimes been Jane’s starting point, before things got heated.
Hazel Shelbone murmured something Merrily didn’t catch.
‘No!’ Amy screamed. ‘You… How dare you make out there’s something wrong with me?’
‘Amy, do you really think you’d be in any position to judge, if there was?’
‘What do you know? What do you know about the way I feel? How can you understand? You’re not even—’
Merrily willed her not to say it. This was not the time to say it.
‘—my moth—’
Then the unmistakable and always-shocking sound of a slap. Merrily closed her eyes.
An abyss of silence. Jane would have been composing a response involving the European Court of Human Rights.
Amy just started to cry again, long hollow sobs, close to retching.
But this was surely not the first time she’d thrown out the not-my-mother line. There had to be something additional to have provoked Hazel, the seasoned foster-mother, the reservoir. And when I look into her eyes…
With no windows you could open, it was hard to breathe in here. Merrily ran a finger around the inside of her dog collar, walked away towards the front door. She felt like an intruder. She felt this was becoming futile. She looked across into the placidly glowing face of Jesus in the picture, and Jesus smiled, in His knowing way.
Merrily closed her eyes again, let her arms fall to her sides, stilled her thoughts.
Mrs Shelbone was saying, ‘Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry, but you—’
‘Go away. Just go away.’
‘We only want to—’
‘You can’t help me. Nobody can help me.’
‘The Good Lord can help you, Amy.’
Another silence. No sniffles, no whimpers. Then, as Merrily straightened up, Amy said,
‘There’s no such thing as a Good Lord, you stupid woman.’
‘Amy!’
‘It’s all just a sick, horrible joke! There’s nobody out there who can protect us. Or if… if God exists, he just totally hates us. He watches us suffer and die and he doesn’t do a thing to help us. He doesn’t help us, ever, ever, ever! He enjoys watching us suffer. You can plead and plead and plead, and you can say your prayers till you’re b–blue in the face and nobody’s going to ever save you. It’s all a horrible sick lie! And the Church is just a big… a big cover-up. It’s all smelly and musty and horrible and it’s full of dead people, and I don’t… I don’t want to die in—’
Merrily leaned back against the wall. Christ gave her a sad smile. The door of Amy’s Room opened. Hazel Shelbone stood there, stone-faced. ‘Mrs Watkins? Would you mind—?’
‘Don’t you dare bring her in here! I’m not talking to her, do you understand?’
Merrily took a step back along the hall. Something had happened to this kid. If not a sneering boyfriend, what about some cool, compelling atheistic teacher?
She whispered, ‘Hazel, I… think, on the whole, it might be better if Amy came out, and—’
‘I’m warning you, if she comes in here I’ll smash the window. Do you hear me? I’ll smash the window and I’ll get out of here for good! I’ll throw the chair through the window. Can you hear—?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Mrs Shelbone pulled the door closed behind her, new lines and hollows showing in her wide, honest face. ‘I don’t know what to do. She’s never been quite like this before, I swear to you.’
‘You just keep lying to me. Lies, lies, lies!’
Merrily opened the front door and stepped down to the flagged garden path, followed by Amy’s mother.
The bungalow was detached but fairly small, with a bay window each side of the door. There were other houses and bungalows either side of the country lane, well separated, with high hedges and gardens crowded with trees and bushes.
The sky was the colour of a cemetery. In contrast, a small yellow sports car, parked half up on the grass verge, looked indecently lurid.
‘Hazel, what does she mean by lies?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve told you, this is not my Amy. I don’t know how she can say these things about God.’
But she looked away as she spoke, and Merrily thought perhaps she did know… knew something, anyway.
‘What’s she been like at school?’
‘Well behaved, always well behaved. Her teachers have nothing but praise for her.’
‘Do you know her teachers?’
‘Most of them. We’ve always made it our business to know them. As good parents.’
‘What about her friends?’
‘She’s…’ A sigh. ‘She’s never had many friends. She’s very conscientious, she studies hard. She’s always felt she had to, because… well, she’s bright, but she’s no genius. Because she’s adopted, I think she feels she has to make it up to us. Make us proud, do you see? Good children, children who study hard, they aren’t always very popular at school these days, are they?’
‘Has she been bullied, do you think? Picked on?’
But after that one small confidence, Mrs Shelbone had tightened up again. ‘Look, Reverend Watkins, this isn’t what I expected at all. I think she needs an infusion of God’s love, not all sorts of questions.’
Merrily sighed. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I’m not really sure how to handle this. Can’t take it any further without talking to her, and if I go in there, it’s likely to cause a scene, isn’t it? The last thing I want is to upset her any more. I mean… I suppose I could start by taking off the dog collar.’
Mrs Shelbone’s brown eyes hardened. ‘What’s the point of that? You’re a priest. Aren’t you?’
Merrily stared hopelessly at the close-mown lawn, at the well-weeded flowerbeds. Demonic evil was something you could sense, like a disgusting smell – sometimes precisely that. The only identifiable odour in this house had been floor-cleaner wafting from the kitchen. All she’d sensed in there were confusion, distress… and perhaps something else she couldn’t yet isolate. But it wasn’t evil.
In the end, all she had – the only universally accepted symptom of spiritual or diabolic possession – was the mother’s suggestion of a sudden, startling clairvoyance.
‘You said she knew things. Things she couldn’t have known.’
‘I’m sorry I said that, now.’ A nervous glance back at the house, as though a chair might come crashing through the window. ‘It’s nothing I can prove.’
‘What things?’
‘This isn’t the time, Mrs Watkins.’
‘What kind of… intrusion do you think might be affecting her?’
‘Isn’t that for you to find out? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to—’
‘Help me,’ Merrily said.
Amy’s mother stared over the low hedge, across the lane. ‘The spirit of a dead person.’
Merrily didn’t blink. ‘Specifically?’
There was a movement at the window of a room to the left of the door. The child stood there, not six feet away. She wore a white, sleeveless top. Her fair hair hung limply to her shoulders. She looked maybe twelve. She looked stiff and waxen. The room behind her was all featureless dark, like the background to a portrait. It’s so cold now. There’s a sense of cold. The cold you can feel in your bones.
Merrily tried to attract Amy’s gaze, but the kid was looking beyond her.
She turned. Nothing. Nothing had changed in the lane. There was nobody about; even the yellow sports car was pulling away.
It began to rain – big, warm, slow drops. When she looked back at the bungalow, the girl had va
nished.
Hazel Shelbone walked back to the door. ‘My husband will be home presently. I don’t really want him to know you’ve been here. He’s under enough pressure.’
‘I’ll take advice,’ Merrily promised. ‘I’ll be back. I’ll leave you my number but I’ll call you tomorrow, anyway, if that’s all right.’
‘Just pray for her,’ Mrs Shelbone said limply. ‘I expect you can do that, at least.’
No thunder, yet, but the rain was hard and relentless, clanking on the bonnet of the old Volvo like nuts and bolts, turning the windscreen into bubblewrap. Both wipers needed new blades. After a few miles, Merrily was forced into the forecourt of a derelict petrol station where she sat and smoked a Silk Cut rapidly, filling up the car with smoke because she couldn’t open the window in this downpour.
Nothing was ever straightforward, nothing ever textbook.
In the car, behind the streaming windows, she prayed for Amy Shelbone. She prayed for communication to be reopened between Amy and her mother. She prayed for any psychic blockage or interference to be removed. She prayed for the healing of whatever kind of wound had been opened up, by the puncturing of what the kid now evidently believed to be the central lie of her upbringing.
She prayed, all too vaguely, for a whole bunch of whatevers.
With hindsight, if she couldn’t work with Amy, it ought to have been her mother. With extra-hindsight, she and Hazel Shelbone ought to have prayed together before they left the church. Except at that stage, Merrily hadn’t been convinced. She’d needed to see Amy.
And, having seen Amy, having heard her, she still wasn’t convinced.
She could perhaps have persuaded Mrs Shelbone to let her stay until Amy’s dad got home. Perhaps the three of them could have returned to the church this evening and, with Dennis Beckett’s permission, conducted a small Eucharist. Just in case.
In case what?
Six p.m., and she was back in the scullery/office, with the window open and the dregs of the rain dripping from the ivy on the wall. A Silk Cut smouldered in the ashtray. Jane was not yet back from Hereford.
Merrily felt like a cartoon person flattened in the road, watching a departing steamroller.
The phone was life support.
‘It’s the old dilemma,’ she said. ‘Don’t know whether I’m making too much of it, or not enough.’
‘When do we ever?’ said the Rev. Huw Owen. ‘You should know that by now.’
‘Did I tell you? Bernie wants me to set up a deliverance group.’
‘Never liked committees, focus-group crap. But in this case – traps everywhere, folk always looking for some poor bugger to blame when it all goes down the toilet. Do it, I would. Just don’t co-opt a social worker.’
She could picture him in his study in the Brecon Beacons, his legs stretched out, his ancient trainers wearing another hole in the rug. The old wolfhound, her Deliverance mentor, technical adviser to half the exorcists in Wales and the West Midlands.
‘Tell me that last bit again, lass. You asked the mother what she reckoned had got into the girl. And she said…’
‘The spirit of a dead person,’ Merrily said. ‘That was what she said.’
‘Anybody in particular?’
‘That’s what I asked her next, but she didn’t reply. Then she started to backtrack on what she’d said earlier about Amy telling them things she couldn’t possibly have known without—’
‘If they don’t cooperate, you’re buggered.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Basically, you want to know whether they need you or a child-psychiatrist.’
‘Mmm.’
Huw was silent for about a minute. She knew he was still there because she could hear his trainer tapping the fender. No matter how hot it was, he always kept a small fire going. Not that it could ever get over-hot in a rectory well above the snowline.
Outside a late sun was blearily pushing aside the blankets of cloud.
‘Got a favourite coin?’ Huw said at last.
Merrily’s heart sank.
‘Well?’ said Huw.
‘When you told us about this on the first course, I thought you were kidding. Then I read Martin Israel on exorcism, but I still think—’
‘Stop shaking your head, lass. I’ve done it a few times. It’s always worked – far as I could tell. It either tells you what you already knew or it tells you to think again. And once you start thinking again, you find some new angle you hadn’t noticed and that’s the way ahead.’
‘I wouldn’t have the bottle.’
‘Aye, you would. Take an owd coin and bless it and explain to God what you’re doing. I use this old half-crown. Not legal tender any more, therefore not filthy lucre. I keep it in the bottom of a candleholder on the altar.’
Merrily imagined some hapless parishioner wandering in and witnessing the Rev. Owen apparently settling some vexed spiritual issue on the toss of a coin. It could overturn your entire belief-structure.
‘Course, it’s nowt to do with the coin,’ Huw said.
‘Any more than the Tarot is to do with the cards.’
‘Don’t go fundamentalist on me, lass.’
Merrily laughed.
‘Look at Israel – a scientist, a distinguished pathologist. And they made him exorcist for the City of London. What d’you want? Oh aye, I know what you want. You want summat foolproof. You want a solution on a plate.’
‘A second opinion would do.’
‘If you don’t like the cold, come out of the mortuary.’
‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘Any time,’ said Huw.
Merrily sighed.
‘Look, luv, give yourself some credit, eh? I’d’ve kicked you out of the bloody ring meself if I didn’t think you were a contender.’
‘You tried.’
‘That were only before you got your little feet under t’table. Listen, trust your feelings and your common sense. If you want a second opinion, ask Him, not me. Like the song says, make a deal with God.’
‘You’re a complete bastard, Huw.’
Then she remembered that he actually was: born in a little bwthyn halfway up Pen-y-fan and then his mother escaped to Sheffield where he was raised, after a fashion.
‘Sorry,’ Merrily said.
Huw laughed.
At least Jane looked happier when she came into the kitchen. She’d been saving up the money she’d earned working two Saturdays a month at the Eight-till-Late shop, and she was loaded with parcels: clothes for the holiday. No alluring night-wear, Merrily hoped – though, from what she’d heard about Eirion’s father’s extended family, nocturnal recreational opportunities were likely to be seriously limited.
A small carrier bag landed in her lap.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a top. It’s for you. You never get yourself any new clothes.’
‘Gosh, flower… that’s very…’ Merrily pulled it out of the bag. It was pale orange, cotton, very skimpy. ‘It’s going to be, er, how can I put this… slightly low-cut, isn’t it?’
‘Won’t go with the dog collar, if that’s what you mean,’ Jane said smugly.
‘Well… thank you.’ Merrily put the top back in its bag. ‘Thank you very much. It was very thoughtful.’
‘If you don’t wear it, I’ll be seriously offended,’ Jane said. ‘It’s going to be a long, hot summer.’
‘That’s what we always say, and it never is.’
‘Yeah.’ Jane sat down, stretched her bare arms. ‘I expect Lol’ll be taking a summer break from his course about now. You do remember Lol?’
‘Ye-es.’
‘The greatest living writer of gentle, lo-fi, reflective songs and also a cool, sensitive person in himself.’
‘Yes, flower, I think I remember.’
‘No, all I was thinking was, if you found me an inhibiting presence, this would be a good opportunity—’
‘Thank you, flower, for considering my emotional welfare.’
‘Any t
ime,’ Jane said. ‘Oh, that Amy Shelbone – I remembered – she does go to our school.’
‘I know.’
‘I suddenly realized who you meant. Kind of old-fashioned. Always tidy. Bit of a pain, basically.’
Merrily nodded. ‘Mm-mm.’
‘So, is there, like, anything I can help you with?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Merrily said, ‘at this stage.’
‘Because, like—’
‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘What time’s Eirion picking you up?’
‘Half-nine.’
‘You looking forward to this?’
‘Sure,’ Jane said.
With the kid upstairs, Merrily went into the hall and ran a hand along the top of the tallest bookcase. It was still there, in all the dust, where she’d popped it hurriedly after they’d found it under the bath when they were having – the year’s big luxury – a new shower installed.
It was thick and misshapen, the head of the monarch obscured but Britannia distinct on the other side, also the date: 1797 – over a century after the death of Wil Williams the martyr, Ledwardine’s most famous vicar.
Feeling faintly ridiculous, she slipped the coin into a pocket of her denim skirt.
7
Stealing the Light
IN THE EARLY evening, a sinister, ochre light flared over the Frome Valley before the storm crashed in, driving like a ramraider down the western flank of the Malverns.
Although there wasn’t much thunder, every light on the mixing board went out at 7.02 p.m., leaving only Prof Levin incandescent.
‘Some farmer guy comes on to me in the post office in Bishop’s Frome: “Ah, you want to get yourself a little petrol generator, Mr Levin.” These hayseeds! You imagine recording music with a bloody generator grinding away out there?’
‘But think of the amazing effects,’ Lol said innocently. ‘The lights flicker… the tape stutters. Elemental scratching?’
‘Fah! You’re just being flippant because you got a new toy.’
‘It’s your toy. I’m just minding it.’ Lol had been trying to identify the different fragments of tree involved in the Boswell guitar. Here in the studio, its range and depth were incredible.
‘He’s getting it back,’ Prof said. ‘I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but he’s getting it back. They pulled a fast one on me. I said to Sally, “Help the boy if you can. Inspire him.” That’s all I said. So they palm you off with this ridiculous, overpriced—’ He pulled up the master switch so that everything wouldn’t happen at once if the power ever returned.
