The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Go… go on.’

  ‘Kid knows she’s like doomed. She’s totally beyond the pale. I mean, I’ve listened behind the door when Mum’s been counselling individual parishioners – which is, like, her version of confession. You get some people who are really, really scared that they’ve thrown it all away because of some really piffling sin.’

  ‘Gets blown up out of all proportion.’ Eirion tentatively slid an arm under her waist.

  ‘You’d think it was only a Catholic thing, or hellfire Nonconformism or something, but I don’t think it’s anything to do with what denomination you are, or even what religion. It’s a psychological condition. A kind of dependency. A terrible fear of getting on the wrong side of God. I mean… no wonder she threw up in church. Holy Communion? The Eucharist? You’re kneeling there with a mouthful of the blood of Christ, knowing you’ve as good as sold your soul to the other guy? It’s all gonna come down on you in a big way, isn’t it?’

  ‘Layla would have known about this girl’s background?’

  ‘Oh yeah, Riddock knew exactly what she was doing. Must have been giving her a major buzz, a cruelty high. But you can’t help wondering how shocked she was when it really started to happen. When this Justine started coming through and turned out to be Amy’s real mother.’

  ‘Would heighten the power trip no end.’

  ‘Mind-blowing. She wouldn’t want to let Amy go after that.’

  Eirion pushed a hand through her hair. ‘You’ve got this pretty well sussed, haven’t you, Jane?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s all guesswork, isn’t it?’

  ‘You tell your mum all this?’

  ‘Not the theoretical stuff. But she’ll have worked that out for herself by now. She’s not thick.’

  Eirion drew her to him, the length of his body the length of hers, toe to toe, faces almost touching. ‘You haven’t told me how it ended.’

  Jane closed her eyes, saw the circle of letters, the glass with a mind of its own.

  J-U-S-T-I-N-E.

  ‘How it ended? We got raided, didn’t we? Pretty ludicrous. The shed door just like crashed open and they burst in. The drug squad – the deputy head and the caretaker. All very dramatic. “Nobody move! Hands on the table!” Like one of us might pull a gun. Of course they didn’t expect it would be so dark. Layla just blew out the candles, and it was probably Kirsty gathered up the letter-cards. I don’t know where she put them – down her front, I expect; they certainly weren’t there by the time the caretaker found the lights. The glass was knocked off the table and smashed. It was just a glass. They were expecting… I don’t know – Es or worse.’

  ‘They search you?’

  ‘Nah. Layla had her cigs out by then. Plain old Rothmans scattered across the table, like she was sharing them out. Smart bitch. You could see the relief on the deputy head’s face, now it was clearly no longer a police matter. “Now, girls, because it’s the end of the term, apart from confiscating these disgusting things, I’m not going to take this any further. However…” ’

  ‘That was smart of her.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What will she do now, your mum? Go and tell the girl’s parents, try and patch things up?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Or go after this Layla?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jane said soberly. ‘I’m afraid that’s exactly what she’s going to do – having not the slightest idea of just how massively evil that bitch can be. And if I try to warn her, it’ll look like there’s something else I don’t want her to find out. I… I’m like… feeling pretty pissed-off, Irene. On every front.’

  He kissed her gently on the lips.

  ‘OK,’ Jane said, ‘except maybe that one?’

  She put a hand behind his head, opened her mouth to his tongue and moulded her body into his. One of Eirion’s hands seemed to be trapped against her left breast.

  Jane was feeling less and less like a knackered housewife when they heard the doors of Dafydd Lewis’s new Jaguar slamming down in the yard, then laughter. And then something about Eirion, the great lover, Mr Experience, began to kind of shrink.

  Soon afterwards, Jane crept back to her own room and lay glowering at the ceiling. She’d been set up; she’d been framed; she’d been used to damage her own mother. She couldn’t live with this.

  16

  Mafia

  LOL GENTLY SHOOK the hand of the vicar’s wife.

  ‘I won’t get up,’ she said.

  Simon St John said, ‘You might think she says that every time.’

  ‘Just go and get me a drink, you bugger.’ Isabel’s accent was Valleys Welsh. She was plump and had light brown hair, with tufts of gold, and warm eyes. ‘No hurry. Give me time to get to know this boy.’

  ‘I’ll get these,’ Lol offered.

  Isabel glared at him. ‘Sit down, you!’

  Simon headed for the bar, still in plain clothes – the jeans, the crumpled collarless shirt. Vicar’s night off. It was gone nine p.m., the Hop Devil three-quarters full. Lol sat down.

  Isabel’s black top was low-cut and glittery. Over one shoulder strap and a handle of the wheelchair, he caught a glimpse of Gerard Stock, sitting in the shadow of the bellying chimney breast. So the landlord had let him back in.

  Stock was on his own, except for a pint of Guinness and a big whisky. He was leaning back against the wooden settle, with an empty smile and an arm extended along the top of the back rest like he was claiming an invisible girlfriend. Lol thought suddenly of the Lady of the Bines and felt uneasy for a moment.

  ‘You a Catholic, Lol?’ Isabel inquired loudly. ‘Only I’ve decided it’s time I went to Lourdes, but you’ve gotta go with a Catholic, isn’t it, or it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you need to be accompanied by a Catholic?’

  ‘Well, he won’t take me, anyway. And his lot’s rubbish at healing.’ Isabel pouted. Then she laughed. ‘I fell off a high wall, Lol, is what it was. A long time ago. So, that gets that out of the way. Now – what’s a nice-looking boy like you doing all on his own?’

  Simon had said he and his wife had made a practice of going to the pub on Monday nights, making it known that this was when the parishioners could get to them without making an official visit out of it – and therefore when delicate issues could be raised informally.

  He’d asked Lol to join them, explaining that Isabel liked to meet new people; she didn’t get out much.

  So Lol had back-burnered his usual reservations about country pubs. Tonight, he felt he owed Simon several drinks. The first analogue recording they’d made of the River Frome song – Lol humming the bits where the lyrics were incomplete – had been so much stronger, more atmospheric, more ethereal than the demo playing in his head. And this was all down to the cello, of course. The cello – dark, low-lying, sinuous – had become the spirit of the Frome.

  Simon had sat there, listening to the playback with his arms folded, wincing at the cello parts and then remarking shrewdly, ‘Somehow, you can’t settle anywhere, can you, Lol? You’re the kind of guy who really needs a proper home, but you don’t know where it’s safe for you to be.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Rejected by the born-again parents, shafted by the shrinks, dumped by the girlfriend in Ledwardine. You want to trust, but you’re scared to trust people. And then you fetch up here, and the first thing you latch on to is a sad little river.’

  ‘Very perceptive of you, vicar,’ Lol told him. ‘But I’ve learned how to psych myself now, thanks.’

  ***

  Isabel leaned her head close enough for Lol to smell her shampoo. ‘Expecting trouble, he is,’ she murmured.

  ‘Simon?’ Lol wiped condensation from his glasses.

  ‘Needs you for back-up,’ Isabel confided.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘And me. Who’s going to assault a clergyman minding a short-sighted songwriter and a cripple?’

  Lol grinned. He loved the
way she said crip-pel and troubel. Now Isabel had turned away and was loudly advising a woman who didn’t look pregnant to get the christening booked before she missed the boat. The woman looked alarmed for a moment, then dissolved into giggles and tossed Isabel an oh you kind of gesture on her way into the toilets. Lol thought that maybe the vicar’s wife had already become more a part of this community than the vicar was ever going to be.

  ‘There’s a reason someone would want to assault him?’

  ‘Oh, always someone who’d like to.’ Isabel grimaced. ‘Some people here, they’d do anything for Simon. Others… well… Trouble is, he doesn’t care, see. Doesn’t give a toss, not about himself nor who he offends. One reason I had to marry him. Give him a reason to keep himself alive.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re not one of those men who says “sorry” all the time, are you?’

  ‘Sor—no.’

  ‘Good. Play well for you today, did he?’

  ‘It was almost spooky.’

  ‘You want to hear him on electric bass. Always be a fallback for him, when they chuck him out of the Church.’

  ‘There’s a danger of that?’

  ‘He tries,’ Isabel said.

  Lol stood up to help Simon with the drinks: lagers and something golden-brown for Isabel. The atmosphere in the pub was like in the days before ventilators and smoking restrictions. Thin fluorescent bars glowed mauve between the beams, as Isabel jogged her neckline to and fro to fan the air on to her breasts. Lol tried not to look.

  ‘Stock’s over there,’ he remarked.

  Isabel pushed her wheelchair back to see. ‘On his own, too, poor dab. She’s a funny one, his wife. Adapted to that dreary hole like a bloody barn owl. Invite him over, shall I?’

  ‘This woman is a liability,’ Simon said to Lol, then he turned to his wife, and spoke as to a child. ‘Isabel, Stock has probably been in here three hours, at least. Do you know how drunk that makes him?’

  Lol said, ‘Why exactly are you expecting trouble?’

  ‘After a while, you learn never to ask him that,’ Isabel said. ‘Never tempt fate.’

  Trouble came, just the same. It came with the arrival of Adam Lake and a lovely young woman with a wide, sulky mouth and short hair the colour of champagne.

  ‘His wife?’ Lol wondered.

  ‘Fiancée,’ said Isabel. ‘Amanda Rae. She’s got a discreet little chain of tiny fashion shops in Cheltenham and Worcester, places like that. Not Hereford, mind – they wouldn’t pay those prices for that tat in Hereford.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Don’t much in Cheltenham, either, I reckon. That’s why she’ll always need someone like him. Shallow, pointless people, they are, supporting each other’s public façades.’

  ‘My wife the social analyst,’ Simon murmured.

  ‘They’ll’ve come out for the first time today, I reckon,’ Isabel told Lol. ‘All these press people about the place, see, and the wrong kind of press. Rip off all their clothes for a centrefold in Horse & Hound, but the buggers’ll lie low till this one’s over.’ She smiled slyly at Simon. ‘Bit like him. Taking off before ten in the morning with his cello case.’

  Simon glanced uncomfortably at Lol. Lol thought about the magical enhancement of the River Frome song. It was an ill wind.

  It was getting very warm in the bar. He noticed that all the tables had been taken except for the one in front of Stock, who sat there motionless, still smiling. See, I don’t have to talk to people, if I don’t want to. It’s a rare skill and I’m good at it, man. I can be very relaxed, very cool, sidding quietly, saying nothing. The level of Stock’s pint had gone down a couple of inches, though, like he was taking it intravenously.

  ‘Lake usually come in on a Monday night, too?’ Lol asked Simon.

  ‘More often than not. Meets his friends from the hunt. He’s taken up the cause – a crucial part of the salvation of his birthright. Just become local organizer for the Countryside Alliance, so called. Leads demonstrations to London.’

  ‘Hypocritical bastards, they are,’ Isabel growled. ‘Still the Norman overlords, isn’t it? All the countryside’s their hunting ground. It is a class thing, whatever anyone says. But they also grow to enjoy killing. I’ve seen it. Doesn’t have to be like that.’

  ‘She means that, in the country, sometimes things do have to be killed, if they’re preying on stock,’ Simon explained. ‘But there has to be something questionable about people who simply love to do it.’

  ‘He said that in the pulpit one week,’ Isabel said proudly. ‘That old bugger complained to the Bishop.’ Lol followed her eyes to a fat man, seventyish, in a khaki shirt, at the centre of a group at the bar.

  ‘Oliver Perry-Jones,’ Simon said. ‘Former master of the hunt. Failed politician. Almost made it into Parliament once, until the true nature of his politics became apparent, thanks largely to revelations by Paul Foot in Private Eye.’ He swallowed some lager, leaned back and scanned the room. ‘Knight’s Frome’s like all rural communities: scratch the surface and you come away with all kinds of crap under your—’

  ‘Shhhh.’ Isabel’s warning hand on his wrist.

  ‘Good for you, vicar,’ Adam Lake said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Simon looked slowly up at him. Lake wore a light tweed jacket. His mutton-chop sideburns had been pruned and razored to sharp points. The whole style looked too old for him, too old for anyone of his generation, Lol thought. Lake was like a gangly mature student playing a spoof squire in the college review.

  ‘It won’t be forgotten,’ Lake said, and Simon was on his feet.

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Isabel.

  ‘What won’t be forgotten?’ Simon said quietly.

  ‘Your support,’ Lake said. He was taller than Simon, taller than anybody here. ‘Your support for the community, against potentially disruptive influences.’

  ‘Right, listen!’ The bar noise sank around Simon like it was being faded by a slide control on some hidden mixing board. ‘I support what my particular faith tells me is right. And you, Adam – you don’t represent the fucking community.’

  Dead silence. Adam Lake smiled nervously, his girlfriend looked annoyed. ‘Fine language for a so-called minister,’ Oliver Perry-Jones muttered.

  ‘OK,’ Simon said. ‘As Adam’s raised the issue, is there anything anyone thinks I ought to know about?’

  And Lol realized what this was about: the vicar making himself available for questioning about the Stock affair. Most clergy might have saved it for the pulpit, but that would leave no opportunity for argument. In pubs, though, arguments never lasted long before they turned into rows, and rows turned into fights.

  This was Simon St John opening his arms to the accumulating shit.

  Which was admirable, Lol thought. Also a little crazy.

  Simon looked around, raised his voice. ‘Anyone here who thinks I’m under the thumb of what Gerard Stock likes to call the rural mafia? Anyone thinks I declined to assist Mr Stock purely for the purpose of currying favour with The Man Who Would Be Squire?’

  Silence. No sign of anyone rising to the bait. Maybe it wasn’t so crazy.

  Simon shook back his hair. Isabel had a hand around her glass as if she was expecting someone to knock it to the floor. Eddies of tobacco smoke fuzzed the lights.

  And then a slow handclap began.

  Pock… pock… pock…

  Heads started turning, cautiously.

  Stock didn’t lift his head, just went on clapping. His pint glass was down to its final quarter. His whisky glass was empty. The space in front of his table soon grew bigger, people instinctively edging away, until there appeared a meaningful emptiness between Stock’s table and the one Lol was sharing with Simon and Isabel. Although no one was looking at him, Lol, who hated an audience, felt exposed. I can get you a nationwide tour, Prof Levin promised in his head.

  Pock… pock… pock…

  ‘What’s the problem, Gerard?’ Simon said.

  Stock stopped clapping. His eyes were li
ke smoked glass.

  ‘You’re a hypocritical bassard, vicar.’

  Simon shrugged.

  ‘But thas how the Church survives, isn’t it? Never take sides.’

  Isabel shouted, ‘That’s ridic—’ Simon put his hand on her shoulder and she gripped her glass tighter, clammed up.

  ‘Thas right,’ Stock said. ‘Keep the liddle woman out of it.’

  Oliver Perry-Jones called from the bar, ‘Why don’t you just clear out, Stock?’ His voice was high and drawly – like a hunting horn, Lol thought. ‘Take your money from the gutter press and your drink-sodden fantasies, go back where you came from. People like you don’t have a place heah.’

  Stock stared into his beer for a moment and produced a leisurely burp before turning his head slowly. He was clearly very drunk. He peered in the general direction of Perry-Jones.

  ‘Jus’ like old Stewart, me, eh? Din’ fit in either, did he, the old gypo-loving arse-bandit?’

  ‘Take your foul mouth somewhere else,’ Perry-Jones said predictably. ‘There are ladies here.’

  Isabel smiled.

  ‘I bet…’ Stock pointed unsteadily at Perry-Jones. ‘I bet you were so fuckin’ delighted when Stewart got topped. Served the bassard right. And, hey, it also took a couple of dirty liddle gypos out of circulation.’

  No reaction. Stock’s rosebud lips fashioned a blurred smile. Lol caught sight of Al Boswell with his wife, at the end of the bar. Expressionless. Non-confrontational is all we are.

  ‘Din’ like the gypos, did you, you old fascist? Gypos and the Jews. You and old man Lake, eh? Fuckin’ blackshirts. Still got your armbands?’

  Lol wondered if Derek the landlord might intervene at this point, but Derek was looking down at the glass he was polishing; he’d know there were enough people here to deal with Stock – and enough people who would want to watch it happening.

  Perry-Jones had started to vibrate with fury, but Lake’s tanned face was like a polished wooden mask. His girlfriend, Amanda, had her mobile out. ‘I’m calling the police.’