by Phil Rickman
Lol’s pub crawl ended at an inn down by the River Wye, with a beer garden extending to the dark water’s edge. This was where he finally found the girl who had said her name was Cola French.
Down the far end of the bar was a group of people of varying ages but a shared self-conscious and slightly dated eccentricity. There was a woman of late middle age in a purple bolero and black lipstick, a bald guy in an elaborately torn biker jacket and bangles, and a small, round man with a long crimson beard who was doing the talking until Cola French, grinning, poked him in the chest. ‘Jaz, you’re a lying old bastard!’
‘And you are a whore,’ Jaz said mildly, and Cola cracked up laughing.
Then she saw Lol standing near the doorway – Lol, who didn’t drink much, never knew where to put himself and sometimes found the friendly English pub the loneliest place in the world.
‘Hey!’ Cola said. ‘Shit!’
Her hair was a dazzling white tonight with tiny gold stars in it. She wore the same black fleece top she’d had on the other day at the Old Rectory. It was not yet eight p.m. and she seemed to be moderately drunk: Cola French, the writer and occasional bookshop assistant whose TV play would have been perused by the great Dennis Potter himself, if he hadn’t snuffed it.
She unstitched herself from the Bohemian tapestry at the bottom of the bar, weaved right up to Lol and peered into his eyes.
‘This guy who was in, I dunno, some pub, said there was a bloke looking for me. Tell me it was you.’
‘Could’ve been,’ admitted Lol, whose quest had taken him to four other bars in Ross – soft drinks and suspicious looks that said, If you only want a small orange juice and you’re on your own, what are you really doing here, mate?
‘Which is like… serendi— serendipitous,’ Cola said. ‘Because you know what? I… know who you are.’
She prodded Lol once in the chest, making a big gesture of it and then stepping away like she’d identified him from a wanted poster. She bent forward, with a hand on each thigh, and began to sing softly:
And it’s always on the sunny days you feel you can’t go on. On rainy days, it rains on everyone.
And I’m running for the subway and I’m hiding under trees On fine days like these.
‘Hey!’ someone shouted. ‘If it was karaoke night, it’d say so on the bloody door!’
Cola said. ‘I grew up with that song. My older sister had the album. Hazey Jane Two, right?’ She leaned right up to Lol again, shared with him some warm brandy breath. ‘Right?’
‘Who told you?’ He was thrown. This did not happen. Nobody had ever recognized him. It was all too long ago. The bar was suddenly twice as full, and everybody was looking at him, and his body began to quiver with the need to run and keep on running.
‘Ah!’ Cola tapped the side of her nose with a forefinger. She took his arm and turned to the woman in the purple bolero. ‘Deirdre, if I do not shag this guy tonight, then all life is meaningless, right?’
It all happened so quickly, like a night raid, the first banner screaming WE DON’T WANT HIM!, then someone spotting the dog collar on Huw, a whoop going up, a dozen lamp beams clashing in the air like random fireworks.
And then figures were running at the car, some with placards brandished like shields, others pointing the poles outwards like battle stakes – Merrily hitting the brakes when the windscreen was filled with a white board demanding KEEP SATAN OUT! – and faces bloated with self-righteousness.
She looked around vainly for anyone she might recognize, couldn’t spot a Sam Hall or a Fergus Young or a Piers Connor- Crewe or even the fat man from the newsagent’s who didn’t want his adopted village connected with a sicko.
BURN HIM! appeared in Huw’s side window, and there was the blast of a hunting horn, sinister in the night, a baying for blood. If it hadn’t been for the TV crew she’d have locked all the doors. She certainly wouldn’t have wound down her window except for the young woman in the red jacket, with the furry-covered boom mike.
‘Amanda Patel, BBC Midlands Today. Is it Mrs Watkins? Could we have a word?’
The light on top of the camera was full in Merrily’s eyes. She was on her own; Huw had slipped out of the car without a word and moved away. Huw who had never been known to give an interview, not even to the Church Times.
‘Could you give me a minute to find out what’s happening?’ She’d managed to drive as far as the community centre before the crush of bodies had forced her to stop. There must be a couple of hundred people here: men, women, kids.
‘OK, look,’ Amanda Patel said, ‘we’ll come back to you in about five. If you want to listen to what some of these people have to say and then respond to it, is that OK? It’ll be for the half-ten bulletin, and breakfast.’
Merrily nodded. No dog collar, frayed old duffel coat. She didn’t want to do an interview at all, and the Bishop wouldn’t be happy, but it would look worse if she backed out and all they had was pictures of the Volvo surrounded, and her and Huw blinking in the lights, bemused, ineffectual clergy.
The camera light swept from her face to illuminate a placard opposite.
Roddy’s body – OUT!
Amanda Patel was setting up a tall, rangy-looking guy in a fur-trimmed leather jacket. ‘OK, Nick, if you just stand… yeah, that’s fine. OK, George? Right.’ A giggle, then into TV-tone. ‘Nick Longton, you’re the councillor for this area, why are you backing this protest?’
‘Well, let me say first of all that I’m very proud to represent this village on the Herefordshire Council – an example of the wonders that can be achieved when we all work together, the people and the local authority…’
Merrily recalled Fergus Young this morning saying that five years ago the council had been ready to shut down the school.
‘… And I don’t want to see this place becoming notable for the wrong reasons.’ Nick Longton’s accent was not local. ‘I also have enormous sympathy for the relatives of people already buried in the churchyard who don’t want to have to walk past the grave of a serial murderer.’
‘But surely,’ Amanda Patel said, over muted applause, ‘Roddy Lodge, in the eyes of the law, is an innocent man because, however damning things may seem—’
‘Amanda, we know he killed one woman, and dozens of the people here tonight heard him confess to killing at least two more. It may be weeks, months, even years before more bodies are found, and this is going to hang over everyone – particularly the family of Melanie Pullman, whom Lodge named as one of his victims – and it would be disgraceful if they had to keep walking past his name on a gravestone, with some pious Rest in Peace carving on it. What kind of peace will his victims be resting in?’
‘But he’s a local man. Isn’t his family entitled to have him buried here?’
‘In my view and the views of my constituents, a murderer forfeits that kind of right,’ Nick said. ‘We don’t want that man’s body here.’
Amanda Patel nodded, and the camera light went out. Merrily was thinking how pompous councillors had become, talking of their ‘constituents’, having their own ‘cabinet’. She felt annoyed. Stared at the flickering faces, saw duplicity, hypocrisy… and the funfair factor. How many of these so-called protesters were really angry or distressed at the thought of having a murderer in the churchyard? How many of them wouldn’t be secretly thrilled by the vicarious notoriety?
Merrily saw Huw beckoning to her from the village hall entrance, turned to him and spread her hands, helpless. And then the light was back on her, and up came the boom mike in its fluffy wind-muff, like an inquisitive woolly puppet, deceptively friendly.
‘Merrily Watkins,’ Amanda Patel said, ‘you’re the priest sent in by the Church to conduct the funeral service for Roddy Lodge, after the local minister refused. Do you feel entirely happy about what you’re doing?’
‘Nobody could really feel happy in this situation, but everyone, in my view, is entitled to a Christian burial. I feel deeply sorry for people whose missing relatives were
named by Mr Lodge, but even if he’s guilty – which, as you said earlier, he is not, in the eyes of the law – he should be properly laid to rest.’
‘Don’t you think it would be better if he was simply cremated?’
‘That’s not a decision for me.’
‘It’s no secret, Mrs Watkins, that you’re also the Diocesan Deliverance Consultant – the Hereford exorcist. Roddy Lodge referred to himself as Satan. Does that have any bearing on why you were selected for this job?’
‘Erm…’ Well, BBC News didn’t believe in the supernatural, and certainly not in connection with a hard news story. ‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘None at all.’
Amanda Patel nodded. ‘Mrs Watkins, these residents – now supported, as you can see, by dozens of people from surrounding villages – say they’re going to keep up a permanent watch, and any hearse attempting to bring Roddy Lodge’s body into Underhowle will be stopped. Even the regular gravedigger’s saying he’ll be refusing to dig a grave for Lodge. How do you feel about that?’
Merrily said, ‘I think you’ll find that any interference with the free flow of traffic is probably a matter for the police, not for me. However, grave-digging is a matter for the Church, and I’m sure something will be sorted out.’
‘So you’re saying you’re prepared to go ahead with this funeral no matter what happens.’
‘Like if somebody puts a bomb under the church?’
Amanda Patel smiled in resignation and signalled to the cameraman to stop recording. The light went out. ‘Cheers,’ Amanda said.
People had started chattering again. She heard a woman say, ‘Of course, half of them are lesbians…’ as some of the protesters set up a chant: ‘Roddy’s body OUT, Roddy’s body OUT ’.
It was unlikely, especially with the TV here, that this demo was spontaneous. But who would have planned it? Perhaps the media-wise Development Committee. Merrily stood in the lane, feeling furious. A bit player in a fantasy – several fantasies colliding like the torch beams, like short-lived fireworks, brief explosions in the common-sense night.
‘Merrily…’ A hand under her elbow.
She turned. Huw was standing under one of the globular lamps outside the village hall.
‘Let’s get out of here, Huw.’
‘Merrily,’ Huw said. ‘This is…’
There was a woman with him: flaking waxed jacket, penetrating brown eyes in a faintly familiar, wind-tanned face.
Huw said, ‘Ingrid’s going to show us the new tourist centre.’
‘Huw, I just—’
‘The Baptist chapel? You remember Jerome telling us about the Baptist chapel? A place of considerable historic significance. Well worth a visit. Besides…’ Huw nodded at an elderly woman in a long purple mac advancing from the crowd. ‘You might not want to hang around here.’
‘You!’ The elderly woman pointed at Merrily. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you’re the beginning of the end, you are, women priests! Only a woman so-called priest would bury the damned!’
‘Don’t get involved, lass,’ Huw murmured.
Amidst the half-manufactured excitement, the chants of Roddy’s body OUT, there was an eye-of-the-storm stillness around him, conveying an awareness of being exactly where he needed to be.
39
Good at Men
‘I’M WRITING A new play,’ Cola French said from the bed, ‘about a woman I’d be, you know, really scared of being. You know what I mean? A woman whose appetites are so… extreme that… wow, it’s apocalyptic. See, we think of these larger-than- life people as being like, you know, big movie stars and rock idols. But that’s so totally wrong. In reality those guys are all dead lazy and boring and too vain to realize it.’
She didn’t seem very drunk any more, now she was back home in this well-organized bedsit, with a computer and printer and bookshelves with so many books that they were stacked horizontally, and a view over a car park to the tall steeple of St Mary’s.
‘I don’t include you among the boring rock stars, of course,’ she told Lol. ‘You are very interesting. You’re among the exalted ranks of the Disappeared – kind of Syd Barrett.’ She raised herself, propped her head up with an elbow. ‘He’s actually older than my dad, the great Syd Barrett. You can’t be anywhere near that old. I’m like… amazed how young you look. I’m even more amazed that you were wandering the streets, the night before your big comeback gig – looking for me.’
‘Gig?’ Lol said.
‘Aw, come on! I’ve known about that gig for days. It’s even on the Net.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘Lol… Lol… honey… you’ve got a serious cult-base out there, you know that? God, look at your face! You didn’t know, didn’t did you?’ Cola scrambled up and sat on the side of the bed. ‘The copper it was, told me who you were. Mumford, who came back to see Piers. So… OK, there’s this Website, right? Devoted to the Dead and the Disappeared – Morrison, Barrett, Drake, Edwards, et cetera – and you, as it happens. And so I e-mailed them. I said, I have just seen the real Lol Robinson and he was working for this little guy who installs septic tanks. And some dickbrain e-mails back and says, You’re talking crap because Lol Robinson’s on at the Courtyard, Hereford, on Wednesday night as support to Moira Cairns, so there! You can’t win. I can’t, anyway. Even bloody Dennis Potter dies on me.’
‘This woman’s Lynsey Davies, isn’t it?’ Lol said.
‘Huh?’
‘The woman with extreme appetites. The woman you’d be scared of being.’
‘Hmm.’ Cola’s eyes narrowed. ‘What makes you say that?’
Lol shrugged. He was sitting on a plastic pouffe at the foot of the bed, his back to a chest of drawers supporting a lamp made out of an ouzo bottle. The lamp had a red bulb and made the room look like an intelligent brothel.
‘The point I was trying to make,’ Cola said, ‘is that it usually isn’t the famous people who become the most extreme members of the human race, it’s the people with something to rise above. That’s what the play’s about. This woman who comes out of a council estate in the Forest, does surprisingly well at school even though she don’t give a toss, then drops out of college and goes on the game. Just because she’s bored. Does the booze and the drugs and then goes on the game, at the age of about seventeen or eighteen.’
‘In Ross?’
Cola exploded with laughter. ‘Ross? And make actual money at it? Listen, I know some of these women – they’re lucky if they can turn over a hundred a night in Hereford. Hey…’ She blinked. ‘You didn’t go with Lynsey ever, did you, at some time?’
Lol shook his head.
‘That’s not supposed to be insulting, by the way,’ Cola said, ‘because that woman could pull, you know? Where’d I put my cigs?’
Lol spotted them on the computer table with a book of matches. He went over and collected them for her.
‘Ta,’ Cola said. ‘Well, that’s something.’
‘A lot of people around here went with her?’
‘That a serious question?’
Lol recalled her saying, when they were digging up Piers Connor-Crewe’s Efflapure, Let’s be honest, she was good at men. He went back to sit on the plastic pouffe. ‘It’s just I remember you saying, when we were at the Rectory, that Lynsey Davies had this fierce determination to grab everything from life.’
‘Did I?’
‘I’m kind of a writer too, Cola. Despite “Sunny Days”. I remember these lines.’
Cola grinned and yawned and stretched. ‘Yeah, all right, the play’s about her. She’s the protagonist. Lynsey. She wanted to grab things from life that maybe you aren’t supposed to, and she scares the shit out of me, still. But you got to write about what scares you, otherwise it’s all meaningless, right?’
‘Why does she scare you still?’ Lol asked.
‘Do I have to? Couldn’t we just have sex?’
‘Please don’t give me a hard time,’ Lol said. ‘I have a feeling this is somehow very
important.’
She lit up. ‘Why?’
‘Because of the reason I can’t have sex with you.’
‘A woman, right?’ Rueful smile through the smoke. ‘What else? Well, I’m glad for you. I read the stuff on the Website and I’m glad for you, OK?’ Cola rolled off the bed, leaned across him to the chest of drawers, brought out a wine case from behind the ouzo lamp. ‘But this is gonna fuck up your night’s sleep even more, sunshine, believe me.’
It had the feel, Merrily thought, of some desperate ballroom in the Depression, where, although it was semi-derelict, people still came to dance against the darkness.
How old?’ Huw asked.
‘About 1740, originally, but it was completely refurbished early last century, which, I expect, is why it avoided being listed.’ Ingrid Sollars offered a smile to Huw; it was thin but it was a smile. In the twenty minutes or so while Merrily had been with the TV people, he appeared to have sought out and charmed the formidable Sollars, so spiky and unhelpful to Frannie Bliss.
‘So 1740, that’d be… what?’ Huw said. ‘A century or so after they broke away from the C of E?’
‘They were a new and radical movement in those days, Mr Owen, and this was one of the earliest chapels. Nearly as old as the one at Ryeford, down the valley. I expect you’re surrounded by the things in your part of Wales.’
‘Not like this,’ Huw said.
It was big. Bigger than most village churches in this area. Coming in through the door – Victorian Gothic, like the school, so not the original one – there had been that numinous vacuum waft you always got when a small door opened into a disused auditorium. And then what Merrily always thought of as the slightly soured stench of spent spirituality.
Ingrid Sollars said, ‘Since it was abandoned as a place of worship in the 1970s, it’s seen service as a warehouse, a kind of sports hall and finally a water-bottling plant – another local enterprise that bit the dust.’
Huw said, ‘Water from… ?’
‘There’s a spring virtually underneath.’
‘Is there?’
