by Phil Rickman
The Secrets of Pain
( Merrily Watkins - 11 )
Phil Rickman
The Secrets of Pain
Phil Rickman
FEBRUARY
They came for me in darkness
They were black-eyed, grey and thin
Lol Robinson, ‘ Mephisto’s Blues ’
1
White Hell
The house was right next to the road, wherever the road was.
And out in front there was a woman.
Not exactly dressed for the weather, thin cardigan all lumpy with snow. Stumbling about in Bronwen’s lights and the blinding white hell, waving her arms. And they were going to run her down, cut her in half.
‘Gomer!’ Danny roared. ‘ No! ’
The snow was coming down like rubble now, had been this past four hours, and if Danny couldn’t see through it there was no chance that Gomer could. When Bronwen lurched and the snow sprayed up, Danny was thinking, Oh Christ, it’ll be all blotched red.
Then they’d stopped. Apart from Bronwen’s grumpy chuntering, there was silence. The front door of the house was wide open, yellow light splattered over the snow like warm custard on ice cream. Some of it reaching Gomer, sitting at the wheel in his old donkey jacket, with his cap and his sawn-off mittens and his muffler and the snowlight in his glasses.
‘What we done?’ Danny heard his own voice, all hollow. ‘What we done, Gomer?’
Oh God. Leaning on his side door, breaking through the crispy layer of snow. New tractor, out for the first time with the snowplough. This superhero routine of Gomer’s, coming out in the dark to clear – for free – the roads that Hereford Council wouldn’t go near… well, you learned to live with that, but how long before he was a danger to other folks and hisself?
You ask Danny, it was starting to look like the time had come.
A slapping on the door panel, Gomer’s side.
‘ Who’s that in there? ’
Danny went, ‘Woooh.’
Sagging in blind relief. It was her. Gomer, meanwhile, totally relaxed, was letting his window down, the ciggy glowing in his face.
‘We help at all?’
‘… dies of frostbite, what do he care? Long as he ’s bloody warm!’ The woman, entirely alive, glaring up at the cab, hair all white and wild. ‘Not you. Him in there, look.’
Glancing behind her just as the front door of the farmhouse got punched shut from inside and the warm light vanished.
‘En’t that typical? He won’t do nothin’, ’cept toss another bloody block on the fire. Serve the buggers right. Let ’em get theirselves out. Then back to his beer.’ She was standing back, snow over the tops of her wellies, squinting, then she went, ‘ Gomer? ’
‘Ah,’ Gomer said. ‘Sarah, is it?’
‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire! Thought you was long retired, boy!’
Danny was too cold to smile. Gomer had an angry puff on his roll-up. Long as the ole boy had his ciggies, the cold never seemed to bother him. Least, not as much as the idea of folks thinking he was too advanced in years to be driving heavy plant through a blizzard. His voice was distinctly gruffer as he drew out the last half-inch of ciggy.
‘Problem, is it, girl?’
‘Some fool in a car, it is,’ this Sarah said. ‘Come whizzin’ clean off the road on the bend back there. Slides across, crashes through the gate and straight down the bloody hill!’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure? I was at the bedroom window, Gomer, couldn’t hardly miss him. Straight through! Headlights all over the snow, then they’ve gone, look. Well, there en’t no way out of there. Ends in forestry.’
‘So, let’s get this right, girl,’ Gomer said. ‘There’s a car or some’ing gone down over this yere hill, and he’s vanished?’
‘Likely buried already, and we en’t got no gear to haul him out. Can you get through in that thing. Gomer?’
It was like the whole cab was bulging with Gomer’s outrage.
‘ This thing? ’
Danny sighed.
‘Gomer, mabbe we should call the-’
‘En’t nowhere…’ Gomer tossing the last millimetre of ciggy into the snow ‘… on God’s earth this girl can’t get through.’
Danny, defeated, looked up at the falling sky. Snow and ice had come hard and bitter after Christmas, right after the floods. Over a month of running out of oil, on account of the tankers couldn’t get through, and starving rats raiding your vehicle from underneath, dining on your electrics. A brief respite early in February and then, just when you thought you’d seen the end of winter, the bastard was back with both fists bunched, and Gomer Parry had got hisself a big new JCB tractor called Bronwen and something to prove.
Danny climbed down and found the car hadn’t gone crunching through the gate after all.
‘Some fool left him open.’
He climbed back in, slammed the door. No warmer in here. Bronwen had a cracking heater, only Gomer wouldn’t use it in case he nodded off at the wheel and some bastard magistrate had his HGV licence off him.
‘Shouldn’t be no gate there at all,’ Gomer said. ‘No fence, neither. Common land, it is. Bridleway. Only Dickie, see, he reckons if he d’keep fencin’ it off, one day folks is gonner forget it don’t belong to him.’
He lowered the plough: tracks in the headlights, but Danny saw they were filling up fast. Gomer set about clearing the field entrance in case they came back with something on tow.
Danny said. ‘Dickie who?’
‘On the pop half the time. Dickie Protheroe. Her’s gotter hold it all together, ennit?’
‘Ah, so that’s Dickie Protheroe’s new wife, is it? Never seed her before.’
‘Course you en’t. On account of Dickie’s in the pub and her’s back yere holdin’ it all together.’
‘Aye,’ Danny said. ‘Fair play to her.’
Pulling snow out of his beard, thinking whoever was down there could be badly hurt, or worse. Could’ve hit a tree or a power pole.
‘Land Rover, them tracks,’ Gomer said. ‘Long wheelbase. Only one set o’ tracks so he en’t out.’ He sniffed. ‘Right, then. We go for it?’
Ten minutes from midnight when they went in, and the windscreen was near-opaque. Like being inside a washing machine when somebody’d overdone it with the powder. Hoping to God this wouldn’t end in no pink snow, Danny dug his hands into his pockets. Warming himself inside with thoughts of the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on a hot night at the end of June, coloured lights in rippling sequence, the strobes going, the ole Strat hard against his thigh as he went sailing off into the solo from ‘Mephisto’s Blues’.
Well, it could be, if only Lol would realize how much he had to offer… if the boy could just overcome that persistent low self-esteem.
What the hell, life was good.
Had been good.
‘You all right, Gomer?’
‘Course I’m all right.’
Bronwen went grinding on between leafless trees turned into great white mushrooms. Humpy, glistening ground and a teeming sky, the countryside like a strange new-made bed, all the familiar creases filled in.
A slow, downward slope, now, the snow-level rising either side of them. Not going to be that easy getting back up.
‘Oh, hell!’
Patches of grey stone in the lights.
‘All right, boy, I seen him.’
‘What the hell is it, Gomer?’
‘Looks like an ole sheep-shelter.’
Gomer brought Bronwen grunting to a stop and Danny made out the roof of a vehicle behind the broken wall, a wedge of thick snow on top. How the hell did he get behind the bloody wall? Danny lowered his window.
‘You all right there?’
No reply. He glanced behind. The incline they’d just come down would look dangerously steep on the way back. He turned back to find shadows moving silently on either side, just beyond the lights. Danny stiffened. How many of the buggers were in this yere Land Rover, and why wasn’t they calling out? Like, Thank God you come, kind o’ thing.
‘En’t bein’ funny, Gomer, but I don’t altogether like the looks of this, to be honest.’
The shadows were spreading out, circling and crouching like a pack of wolves. Five of them at least, murky grey now in the swirling night.
A sudden massive bang on Danny’s side of the tractor.
One of them was there. All black, no face.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! on the panel.
The man was in camouflage kit. Gloves, balaclava. No glint of eyes behind the slit.
Danny got his window up to just a bit of a crack. Looked at Gomer across the grey light in the cab. In the past year, two JCBs had been nicked from this area. All right, not hijacked, just stolen out of their sheds, but there was big money in a brand new tractor and a first time for everything.
‘Don’t wanner make a thing ’bout this, Gomer, but how about we don’t get out till we finds out a bit- No! Gomer!’
‘Balls!’ Gomer was leaning across Danny, mouth up to the crack at the top of the window. ‘ Gomer Parry Plant Hire. You all right, there?’
Oh Jesus… Like these were the magic words, the key to not getting dragged out into the snow and having the shit beaten out of you while the lovely new tractor you’d called Bronwen and had blessed by the vicar got shipped out to Lagos.
Danny was going, ‘Look, pal, we-’
When the voice came out of the snow.
‘Yow know who we are.’
Aye, that kind of voice. Full of clouds and night and a bit of Birmingham, and now Danny could see two solid shadows, either side of the camouflage man. Gomer coughed, a bit hoarse.
‘This a hexercise, pal?’
Silence. Then a short, little laugh.
‘Give the ole man a coconut.’
‘What I figured,’ Gomer said. ‘Only, Sarah back there, see-’
‘… so yow just turn this bus around, yeah, and bugger off.’
All the breath went out of Danny in a steam of relief.
‘I should just do it, Gomer. These guys, they don’t make a habit of flashin’ their ID.’
‘Put your lights out, now,’ the camouflage man said. ‘Then fuck off and forget you seen anything.’
Danny shifted uncomfortably in his seat. You wanted cooperation, you didn’t talk quite like this to Gomer Parry. Five foot four and well past seventy, but you just didn’t. Everybody knew that.
‘And you might find it easier if you put that filthy cigarette out.’
‘Now listen, boy-’
‘Just do what he says, eh, Gomer,’ Danny hissed. ‘You can complain to the Government later.’
Gomer said nothing, just let the windows glide up, putting the tractor into reverse and reaching out for the lights.
Only, the mad ole bugger didn’t switch them off, he threw them on full beam, making a starburst in the snow, and – Jesus! – Danny was jerking back as Bronwen swung round hard, on a slide. In the lights he’d seen what he’d seen – what he thought he’d seen – before the tractor lurched and bucked and went snarling back along the track they’d made earlier.
Danny and Gomer didn’t speak at all till they’d managed to make it up the hill and out the gate and onto the road again. Then Danny sat up and looked hard into Gomer’s thick, misty specs.
‘We really see that?’
‘Hexercise,’ Gomer said gruffly. ‘That’s all it is. Kind o’ jobs they get, they gotter be hard, ennit?’
‘Well, yeah, but, Gomer…’
‘ Hexercise,’ Gomer said. ‘That’s what we tells Sarah Protheroe. Her’ll know.’
‘You reckon?’
‘And we don’t say nothin’ else. All right?’
Danny was shivering. He’d go along with that. Anything. But what they’d seen in the white hell… in other circumstances it could have been almost funny, but in a late-February blizzard, in the minutes after midnight, it was enough to scare the shit out of you.
Especially the way the fifth man had been just standing there laughing, bollock naked in the snow.
Part One
MARCH
Empty your septic tank
Take it to the bank
Lol Robinson, ‘ Wasted on Plant Hire ’
2
Longships
The bad stuff started with Jane insisting on getting the drinks. A Lotto thing – she and Merrily had both had ten-quid paybacks on the same number. Jane wanted to buy Lol and Danny Thomas a beer. Which was nice of her. She seemed determined these days, Lol thought, to do more things that were nice, as if she had something to repay.
He watched her at the bar. The tight jeans, the sawn-off white hoodie and the area of soft skin exposed between the two. Merrily had said, If you could just, you know, keep an eye on Jane…?
She’d been thinking about the weather. They all had, since the Christmas flood, a continuing source of unease in Ledwardine. Mid-evening on a Friday, the Black Swan was less than a third full but sounding crowded to Lol because of all the voices raised against the punch of the wind and the fizz of rain on the leaded windows.
Big weather. More big weather.
He’d seen it coming well before dark, the sky over Cole Hill chaotic with ripped-up cloud and flarings of wild violet beyond the church steeple. The last taunt of winter. Or maybe the first sneer of spring. The floods, then the snow, then more snow and now, just as you thought it was over, the gales.
And yet it was an ill-wind because, out of the black night and the white noise of the rain and his anxiety, suddenly the lines happened, like they’d been blown into his head.
The chorus had been hanging around for weeks, begging for an opening trail of memorably bleak images to illustrate the raw emptiness before love walked in. The rhyme was a bit bumpy, but maybe that was OK, maybe even good.
The wind is screaming through the granary
It turns the springtime into January.
This was the granary, where he’d lived for a time, at Prof Levin’s studio over at Knight’s Frome. The perpetual January of a lonely bed. Lol pulled over a beer mat, found a pen in his jacket, saw Danny’s eyes lighting up over the shoe-brush beard.
‘Cookin’, boy?’
Lol reversed the beer mat, steered it across to Danny then drew back as the gale pushed like a big hand – whump – on the leaded pane directly across the room. No let-up. The lines had probably arisen from his failure to prevent Merrily driving out into the storm… or at least letting him drive her. What if there was no Merrily? What if there’d been no Merrily? The void at the core of the song: I can’t define my sense of need.
Danny was gazing at the beermat like it was Mozart’s scorepad. Before Gomer Parry had rescued him, he’d been a struggling Radnorshire farmer with fading dreams. Also, three vintage guitars, a couple of ancient amps, a decibel-dazed wife and a sheepdog called Jimi.
He looked up.
‘I’m hearin’ it, boy, sure t’be.’
The grin reappearing in the beard, though still a little wary, like a poacher’s flashlight in the undergrowth. Not long after Danny had joined Gomer Parry Plant Hire, Lol had been looking for a lead guitarist, someone good but not too expensive. After two sessions in Danny’s barn over at Kinnerton, he’d said, You want a proper contract or will a handshake do? Danny grinning like a little kid, his muddied hand already out.
‘Should be in your barn, recording this,’ Lol said. ‘Under the storm noise, everything shivering.’
‘Storm noise in a barn en’t never as good as you imagines. Ole wind got his own backbeat, see, never plays to yours.’ Danny nodded towards Jane at the bar. ‘Growin’ up?’
‘I suppose.’
Getting the drinks herself was impo
rtant to Jane. Doing it legally was still a novelty. Barry, the manager, was behind the bar, and everybody in the Swan knew Jane. Some of them even liked her.
The wind came back, a fighter in the ring, leaving you no time for recovery, and Danny picked up on Lol’s anxiety.
‘You’re worried about your lady.’
You had to love the seventies rock-band jargon.
‘It’s not blowing over, Danny.’
‘Hard to blow an ole Volvo off the road.’
It had been mid-afternoon, after the first Severe Weather Warning, when Merrily had come across to Lol’s house, looking unsettled and facing an hour’s drive to the mountains the other side of Brecon. This was Huw Owen, inevitably. For reasons Huw hadn’t disclosed and Merrily couldn’t fathom, he’d wanted her to talk to his students at the grim, disused Nonconformist chapel up in the Beacons where he taught ordained priests how to mess with the unmentionable.
‘I’ll give Huw a call, anyway.’ Lol had his mobile out. ‘Make sure she…’
‘Makes you feel better, boy,’ Danny said, ‘do it.’
In Huw Owen’s rectory, thirty-plus miles away, the phone rang out. Maybe they’d already left for the chapel, which probably didn’t even have a phone. Huw liked to awaken in his students a sense of isolation and vulnerability. Lol killed the signal.
‘Nothing.’
But Danny Thomas was listening to something else, his long grey hair pushed back behind one ear. He caught Lol’s eye, lifting a cautionary forefinger. Lol heard a drawly voice from Off.
‘… what I said, George, I said the old totty-meter’s flickering into the fucking red.’
Then liquid laughter. Lol turned towards the bar. Kids, you’d think, but they weren’t. About five of them, late twenties to early forties, talking in low voices, but their London accents lifted them out of the background mush.
‘ Clean off the fucking dial, George. I mean, will you just look at that…’
