The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  ‘She tell you that?’

  ‘No need. When it comes to religion, Anne stands shoulder to shoulder with Brother Morrell. Always been her blind spot.’

  ‘Hasn’t held her back. Not even in a cathedral city.’

  ‘No.’ Charlie Howe stood with his legs apart, his back to the horizon. He must have cut an intimidating figure as a detective, framed in the doorway of the interview room. ‘Not as a copper, no.’

  Merrily, who’d had two encounters with Charlie’s daughter, didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t sure she could have got on with Annie Howe if the woman had been Mary Magdalene with a warrant card.

  Charlie took out his car keys and tossed them from one hand to the other. ‘Didn’t tell Brother Morrell everything, did you?’

  ‘I doubt it would have helped. What do you think?’

  ‘Oh no, you’re quite right, it wouldn’t’ve helped at all. But you wouldn’t have brought him out here in the school holidays if there wasn’t something about this issue that had you particularly worried – now, would you?’

  Merrily met his eyes: they were deep-sunk but glittery, playing with her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t really like this kind of thing. New Age stuff I can put up with – a bit of fortune-telling, astrology, meditation. Trying to contact the dead, that’s unhealthy. Let them go, I say.’

  ‘And where do the dead go, young Merrily? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory?’

  ‘Leominster, Charlie. Everybody knows that.’

  He grinned. ‘Well, you have a think about talking to my subcommittee. I’ll give you a call in a week or two.’

  She stood by the old Volvo and watched him drive away in his dusty Jaguar. She thought she liked him but she wasn’t sure if she could trust him – he was a councillor.

  Back in the vicarage, she paused under the picture in the hall: a good-quality print of Holman-Hunt’s The Light of the World. It had been a gift from Uncle Ted, who knew nothing of the lamplit path, and showed Jesus Christ at his most sorrowfully benign. A middle-aged Jesus, laden with experience of humanity at its most depressing.

  What am I learning from this? she asked him. Because it seems to me I’m just muddling around, getting up everybody’s noses and not helping a soul.

  Summer had never been her favourite season. People expected it to be a time of pleasure: new feathers, cares dropping away like rags. But too often the old feathers refused to fall, and the rags still clung, clammy with sweat.

  Inside the house, tiredness came down on Merrily like a tarpaulin. She checked the answering machine – nothing pressing, no Jane – drank half a glass of water and fell asleep on the big old sofa in the drawing room, with Ethel the cat on her stomach.

  And dreamed she was back in the church.

  It was evening. The sandstone walls were sunset-vivid and the apple glowed hot and red in the hand of Eve in the huge west-facing stained-glass window, and Merrily was standing in a column of lurid crimson light and she could hear her own thoughts as she prayed.

  Oh God, please tell me. Is Jane involved in the summoning of the dead? Please tell me. Heads for yes. Tails for no.

  Her thumb flicked against old copper; it hurt. The coin rose up sluggishly into the dense air, rose no more than three or four inches and she had to jump back to avoid catching it as it fell. She didn’t see it fall but she saw it land because it appeared dimly on the flags, rolling onto one of the flat tombstones in the floor at the top of the nave, into the gaping, time-ravaged mouth of the skull at its centre.

  She peered down, couldn’t make out whether it was heads or tails. She bent over double and the shadows deepened. She went down on her knees and all she could see was a void.

  She started to weep in frustration and found she was scrabbling in her bag, buried in the shadows beside the sofa, like a great catafalque in the dreary brown light.

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Mum…?’

  ‘Jane!’ She struggled to sit up, clutching the mobile phone to an ear.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I… yeah. Of course I’m OK.’

  ‘Good.’ Jane’s voice was as light and hollow as bamboo.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Merrily sat on the edge of the sofa, hunched up. The room was dim and felt stagnant. The dull day, deprived of any summer glory, was refusing to go gently and seemed to be sucking out the last of the light like a vacuum pump. The feeling she had was that Jane was not OK.

  15

  From Hell

  JANE LAY ON Eirion’s single bed, watching the last of the light in the sky over the sea. All kinds of emotions were pressing down on her – guilt, regret, some bitterness. But mainly she was furious, and not only at herself.

  ‘So what did you tell her?’ Eirion whispered.

  ‘Everything. What could I tell her?’

  Eirion had claimed the only bedroom as yet converted from the attic. It had white walls and the smell of new plaster, and even he could only just stand up in here. But the views towards Porthgain and the old mine workings were incredible.

  If would be OK, brilliant even, if it was just Eirion and the views and this amazing moist, translucent feel you got in Pembrokeshire, the mystical otherness of the countryside.

  Oh, no, she’d been about to say to Mum, the house is top, it’s the family that’s from hell. But she’d wound up playing that down, in the end, because of the guilt. And the fury.

  Eirion stroked Jane’s bare arm. ‘You didn’t tell me about any of this.’

  ‘What was to tell? All kinds of shit happens at school. You put it behind you, don’t you? And when you get back after the holidays it’s all forgotten and there’s a new kind of shit waiting.’

  ‘So this Layla… is she a genuine medium?’

  ‘Dunno. She claims to have psychic powers, gypsy ancestry, all that. And she’s certainly got this… charisma’s not the word, it’s more threatening than that. Can there be like negative charisma? I mean, she lays it on, obviously – she’s clearly found that being threatening, looking brooding, that works… gets you stuff. Even the teachers don’t mess with her – I’ve noticed this. Teachers are very polite to her, especially the men. Arm’s-length situation. They are… kind of scared.’

  ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

  Jane rolled over. ‘Enlighten me, O Experienced One, Mr Been Around, Mr Done All That.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ Eirion said wearily, ‘you’ve made your point.’

  ‘So what’s it mean? Half the male staff are shagging Layla Riddock?’

  ‘It only needs one,’ Eirion said. ‘Or maybe she set one of them up and he was just that bit slow saying, “How dare you, young lady?” They’re only human, aren’t they? And then they start gossiping in the staffroom as well, warn each other of the traps – “Let’s be careful out there”.’

  ‘She’s certainly got Steve on a string, the groundsman guy.’

  ‘There you go.’

  ‘But this kid, this Amy… I didn’t realize how far it went, you know? I mean, how could I? Like, OK, she’s Miss Prim, fourteen going on forty-five-year-old spinster, stiff enough to snap any time.’ Jane turned over, leaned across him and clicked on the bedside table-lamp. ‘And she set me up. She’s scared shitless of Riddock so she set me up. All it was, I just happened to be there… and virtually dragged in anyway. I was nothing to do with it. This Amy’s more or less claiming I organized it! And I told Mum the truth, but all the time I’m thinking, why should she believe me this time?’

  ‘You should’ve told her in the first place, shouldn’t you? You knew that stuff was right in her ballpark.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Irene, you don’t, do you? You just bloody don’t. Even if it’s somebody you don’t particularly like, unless it’s life and death, you just don’t grass them up. And now Mum could be in some deep trouble over this.’ She sank back, rolling her head on her bit of pillow. ‘She was really pissed off with me. More than she was saying, because whatever I’d done she wouldn’t want to louse u
p my holiday – she’s cool that way. But I could tell she thought I was going to say it was all total crap, that I didn’t know a thing about it, that somebody had obviously fitted me up, et cetera. She was like totally shattered to find out there was some truth in it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Eirion said. ‘I’m not being very helpful, am I?’

  ‘It’s not your crisis. Maybe I should have noticed how it was with Amy and Layla Riddock. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?’

  ‘Bullying? Intimidation?’

  ‘You ever have days you were so scared to go to school you were faking stupid symptoms? Hasn’t happened to me since I was like really young… eleven, twelve. I was quite small then, for my age. Thought I was going to wind up looking like Mum.’

  ‘Little and cute?’

  ‘Little is not cute at school.’

  ‘Always the ones who are just a bit bigger who go for you, isn’t it?’ Eirion said. ‘The ones who’ve maybe been bullied a bit themselves. They do much worse stuff and they get away with it because nobody suspects them.’

  ‘And you’re just so scared at the time. Adults are like, “Oh, you should stick up for yourself.” But you know they can do anything to you at school, right under the noses of the staff. Like, even if you die, it’s only going to look like an accident! They’re completely outside the law. Nobody out there realizes how totally evil kids can be. It’s like some false-memory thing sets in with adults, and all kids become cute and need protecting. And that’s how you wind up with teenage psychos like Riddock.’

  ‘When you’re nine’ – Eirion lay on his back, gazing into the darkness of the room – ‘there are eleven-year-olds who’re like… like Charles Manson.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This weird American guy who got people to kill for him. Murdered this movie star and all these rich people, just went into their homes and ripped them to pieces. Manson was claiming to be receiving these psychic messages. And the people who killed for him – who included women – they wrote “pigs” and stuff on the wall in the victims’ blood.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jane said. ‘You’re really not being very helpful.’

  She wondered if he’d grown up thinking of this guy, Manson, as the ultimate bogeyman because his own family was so damn rich.

  There was a knock on the bedroom door.

  ‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!’ Jane reached up and snapped off the lamp. Did they never, never, never go to sleep?

  ‘Eirion?’ That hated tripping, lilting, little-girly voice.

  ‘What?’ Eirion called out hoarsely.

  ‘Ydy Jane yno?’

  ‘Er… no,’ Eirion replied.

  ‘Wel, ble mae Jane?’

  ‘Probably gone to the shop.’

  ‘Aw, Eirion… ma’r siop ar gau!’

  ‘That does it!’ Jane swung her legs off the bed. She was wearing her jeans and her lemon-yellow top. She moved across the bare boards to the door.

  Eirion was looking anxious. ‘Look, don’t,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t you just let it go?’

  Jane stopped at the door and thought for a moment, then smiled. She crept back and lay on the bed. Eirion was sitting on the side of the bed by now, shoving his bare feet into his trainers.

  ‘Sioned?’ Jane called out in this foggy, slurry voice.

  ‘Jane!’

  ‘Look, would you mind giving us a few more minutes. We’re having sex, OK? Ni’n, er, yn shaggio.’

  A wonderfully awed silence.

  Eirion kind of crumpled.

  ‘Again!’ Jane breathed loudly. ‘Harder! Deeper! Oh God…!’

  From hell? Oh yeah.

  See, most of the ordinary Welsh people she’d met, Jane liked. This might seem like generalized and simplistic, but they seemed kind of classless, no side to them. Contrary to what everybody said, you could have a laugh with them. Look at Gomer Parry.

  Look at Eirion, for that matter: chunky, honest, self-deprecating… and this incredible smile that was (as she’d written in a poem she was never going to show him in a million years) like all the birds starting to sing at once on a soft spring morning.

  The poor sod. Raised among the crachach.

  This was what they were called – the Welsh aristocracy, the top families. A few of them had titles, but most of them were contemptuous of English honours, although – being sharp business people – they were usually incredibly polite to the English people they encountered.

  Eirion said his dad, Dafydd Sion Lewis, was some kind of Welsh quango king. He ‘served’ on the Welsh Development Agency, the Welsh Arts Council, the Wales Tourist Board, the Broadcasting Council for Wales. And he was a major executive shareholder in whatever Welsh Water and Welsh Electricity were calling themselves this week. There was a bunch of them like his dad, Eirion said. The names of the organizations and businesses might change but it was always the same people in control.

  Dafydd Sion Lewis was plump and beaming and hearty and, according to Eirion in his darker moments, majorly corrupt.

  Gwennan was his second wife, about fifteen years younger. She was a former secondary-school teacher of the Welsh language and now – as a result of being married to the quango king – a key member of the Welsh Language Board, which existed to keep the native tongue alive and thriving.

  Not that Jane had a problem with this. She was all for having more languages around: Gaelic, Cornish… anything to keep people different from each other, to create a sense of otherness.

  At first, she’d thought that Gwennan, with her two cars and her movie-star wardrobe, was a fairly cool person.

  It had taken only one day of the holiday for her to realize what Eirion had already kind of implied: that everything had gone to Gwennan’s head – the wealth, the status, the establishment of the Welsh Assembly. She was now a warrior queen of the New Wales, wielding the language like a spear.

  ‘Except it isn’t a new Wales at all,’ Eirion had said morosely. ‘It’s the same old place, run by the same old iffy councillors, except they’re now known as Assembly Members, supported by the same old bent financiers, but with this new sense of superiority. Suddenly, they’re looking down on everybody…’

  ‘Especially the English?’ Jane had suggested.

  ‘Especially the English because the English don’t have Wales’s unique identity.’

  Actually, Eirion said, most of the time he found Gwennan quite amusing. She was essentially superficial and quite naive. And she could be very kind sometimes. When she noticed you.

  Unfortunately, Gwennan had come with baggage: Sioned and Lowri, eleven and eight, the little princesses. Bilingual through and through. Pocket evangelists for the language and the culture.

  ‘No, Jane,’ Sioned would say, wagging her little forefinger until Jane wanted to snap it off. ‘I’ve told you and told you, I’m not doing it unless you ask me yn Cymreig.’

  ‘You know what I’m really doing here, don’t you?’ Jane said to Eirion when Sioned had gone, presumably to wait for her mother and Dafydd to return to receive the shocking facts. (Was there such a verb as shaggio? They seemed to have converted every other English term coined since about 1750.) ‘You know what I am?’

  ‘If she says anything, we’ll just simply tell her you were joking,’ Eirion said uncomfortably. ‘Kind of a risqué joke to make to an eleven-year-old, mind, but…’

  ‘I’m the first English au pair in Wales, that’s what I am. Do you realize that?’

  Behind the door in the farmhouse kitchen Gwennan had hung an appointments calendar. Every day this week displayed a lunch date for her and Dafydd. Every evening they went out for dinner in St David’s or Haverfordwest, because several of their friends also had cottages in the area. Because the Pembrokeshire coast was becoming like some kind of Welsh Tuscany.

  And who had to look after the bloody kids, meanwhile?

  ‘It’s exactly like being an au pair,’ Jane said with acidic triumph, ‘because I work my butt off for the privilege of learning the fucking language!’ />
  She began to beat the pillow with her fists.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ Eirion almost sobbed. ‘I genuinely didn’t realize she’d be quite so…’

  ‘Opportunistic?’

  Eirion was too honest to reply.

  It was a big old farmhouse. The first floor had been divided into two sections. There was a separate staircase to Dafydd and Gwennan’s suite; the other staircase led to three small bedrooms: Sioned, Lowri… and Jane in the middle. Most nights the kids fell asleep with their respective boom-boxes still pumping Welsh-language rock through the plasterboard walls either side of Jane’s bed.

  Come to think of it, Gwennan and Dafydd were unlikely to be at all put out by the thought of the young master giving one to the English au pair.

  Not that he had, yet. The daily and nightly presence of the evil little stepsisters seemed to be intimidating him more than whoever had been his school’s version of Charles Manson.

  Stepfamilies: a nightmare.

  She’d made the kids’ supper. She’d made them tidy their rooms. She’d made them go to bed at ten p.m. She’d made them go back to bed at ten-fifteen. And in the course of this endlessly crappy evening, she’d been grilled by Mum over the phone and made to feel like shit. At eleven-thirty, probably looking like some totally knackered housewife, she’d followed Eirion up to his attic bedroom and collapsed, fully clothed, onto his bed and poured it all out.

  ***

  ‘Let’s go over it again,’ Eirion said. ‘This Layla and this…’

  ‘Kirsty.’ Jane moved closer to him, which wasn’t difficult on a single bed.

  ‘… Find that by staging little seances, or whatever you want to call them, they can wield enormous power over certain kids.’

  ‘It’s addictive, I reckon. You keep going back, even though you’re terrified. I mean, I’m not terrified – OK, maybe a little scared – but I’m, like, somebody who’s attracted to all this stuff anyway. As you know.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eirion said grimly.

  ‘But this is a buttoned-up kid from some fiercely Christian household, who’s been taught that spiritualism is, like, firmly in the devil’s domain, and her immortal soul is at risk – and she still keeps going back because something about it has… grabbed her.’ Jane gripped what she thought was going to be Eirion’s arm but turned out to be his thigh. ‘Sorry.’