by Phil Rickman
‘Of course, Cardelow’s entirely to blame for this,’ Miss White said in her little-girl voice. ‘Tries several times a week to kill me. Utterly psychotic.’
Mrs Cardelow, a large woman with bobbed white hair, said nothing, apparently still trying for dignity. It was never going to work.
‘But how little she knows.’ Miss White smiled, crinkling her malevolent mascaraed eyes. ‘The poor cow has no comprehension of what I shall do to this place when I’m dead.’
Mrs Cardelow sighed, stepping away from the wheelchair. Miss White turned her sooty smile on Merrily.
‘How charming you look, my dear. And Robinson, with a bandage to hide the needle marks. Hadn’t realized you people put it into the wrist nowadays. So long since I used to watch Crowley shooting up.’
Lol, smiling patiently, had wandered over to the window, which had a long view down the garden, over the Wye to the Radnorshire hills, pale as old mould. Lol had a jittery rapport, which Merrily found unsettling, with Anthea White, she who insisted on Athena.
‘You don’t mind if I leave you,’ Mrs Cardelow said. ‘One can only stand so much of this. She gives the other residents tarot readings and tells them when their friends are going to die.’
Miss White didn’t react, sat gazing placidly into the coal fire behind its guard, not looking up until there was the click of a closing door.
‘Has she gone?’
‘She’s gone,’ Merrily said.
Miss White tapped the arm of the wheelchair. ‘I keep a cyanide capsule in here, you know, to be used if ever I see a doctor approaching with a catheter.’
Lol said, ‘For him?’
‘Ah, how well you know me, Robinson.’
Miss White giggled, a sound like the chinking of old bones in an ossuary. Merrily coughed.
‘What, erm…?’
‘Hip. Common or garden. I’m apparently in the queue for a stretch in some frightful NHS hellhole where, if they don’t like your face, they slip you a fatal infection. Somewhere else to haunt. In the interim, I do rather like this chair – it allows one to move around in a perpetual meditative state. Would you like me to describe your aura?’
‘Not really.’
‘Jaundiced.’
‘What?’
‘A worrying amount of yellow. You’re afraid of losing control. In fear of your immortal soul again. Oh, dear God, keep her out, keep her out! ’
Merrily moistened her lips, recalling the first time she’d been to The Glades, when there’d been reports of a presence on the third floor and the then proprietors had wanted an exorcist to calm the residents. Underestimating Miss White’s propensity for playfulness, like the elderly kitten she so resembled. A kitten with over fifty years’ experience of the techniques for personal growth circulating in the ruins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Hell’s kitten.
‘But how strange to see the two of you in the same room at last. An item.’
Her eyes twitching from Merrily to Lol and back again.
‘Flitting in and out of one another’s energy fields, like neurotic damsel flies. Delightful in its way, but… it must not go on much longer, do you hear me?’
Arching suddenly out of her chair, expanding into so much more of a presence.
‘Sort yourselves out at once. You don’t have long to decide before something makes the decision for you. And that may not be the one you hope for.’
‘Thank you, Miss White,’ Merrily said lightly.
A constriction in the throat. Dear God, how stupid was it to have come here?
‘Now, remind me, Watkins, what was the name of the detritus that became briefly attached to you?’
Merrily hesitated, just like she had the first time. There were clergy she could name who’d have her defrocked for even talking to this woman.
‘No, don’t tell me,’ Miss White said. ‘How could I forget? It was delightfully appropriate. Joy. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘ Joie de vivre… Joie de morte. He’s back, is he?’
‘He isn’t back. It isn’t me, this time. It’s someone else.’
‘Someone who can’t come in person?’
‘Due to being dead.’
‘But not at rest.’
‘Athena, I don’t know.’
The Glades had a lift, and they went up in it to the exotic room on the third floor. Not much had altered. The same Afghan rugs on the walls, the same book cupboards, the same radiogram, although the whisky bottles inside would be several generations down the line.
Miss White sent her chair whining softly to the uncurtained sash window and turned her back on the view of Hardwicke Church, which was greystone, Welsh-looking like Brinsop, a small bell tower with the bell on show. Your church, she’d said that first night, is like some repressive totalitarian regime. Everyone has a perfectly good radio set, but you try to make sure they can only tune in to state broadcasts.
Signalling Merrily to the Parker Knoll armchair and Lol to the bed, her face became momentarily serious.
‘So it’s Mithras, is it?’
‘If you’d be so good,’ Merrily said.
‘Which one? The original Persian lord of light, who pre-dates Zoroastrianism… or his very much darker Roman descendant? Who may just spoil your day. Do you mind awfully?’
Merrily sat down.
‘We had a one-off lecture at theological college. It was about dealing with the smart-arses who’ll tell you Jesus was just another permutation of the pagan archetype. Wasn’t Mithras born on December 25th?’
‘Indeed. And his mother was a virgin, and he never had sex. His crib was visited by adoring shepherds. His followers were baptized and worshipped on a Sunday. They represented holy blood with wine and, at this time of year, ate hot cross buns.’
‘And all this half a millennium before the birth of Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘What’s left to spoil?’
Miss White frowned. Always encouraging.
‘They’re just patterns, Athena. Death and rebirth, all that. Early Christianity slipped into the time-honoured seasonal rituals so people could begin to see them in a new light – now that the world was finally ready to learn about the unifying chemistry of love. There you are – a quiet revolution and no blood shed but His. How’s that?’
‘Glib.’
‘I prefer succinct,’ Merrily said.
Never entirely comfortable with all this, though. The candles of faith flickering feebly under the arc lights of history and scholarship. The nights when you couldn’t get to sleep and doubts hovered in the shadowed corners, challenging you to snap on the bedroom lights and discover there was really nothing there… nothing at all…
Except Athena White showing her little teeth.
‘If you know all this, Watkins, what do you want from me?’
‘Well… that’s all I know about Mithras and Mithraism. Although I think I recall old pictures of him in one of those caps like a beanie.’
‘The Phrygian cap. I’ll accept that the little chap was less handsome than Christ, with that… perpetual petulance. But then, the Roman Mithras was all about finding spiritual fulfilment through killing. An ancient sun god adopted by Roman emperors, hailed as the protector of soldiers. A sun god worshipped in darkness… in underground chambers stinking of blood. Now, what exactly are you looking for?’
‘Don’t know how it works, basically. Only that it was eventually supplanted by Christianity.’
‘Supplanted. That’s what you think, is it?’
‘Well, it certainly came off second best. Even at the time.’
‘Did it?’
Miss White hunched herself up, coquettishly, like a venomous bushbaby in the fork of a tree.
‘I imagine you’re familiar with the missives of St Paul? Who instructed the Ephesians to put on the whole armour of God… the breastplate of righteousness… the helmet of salvation… the sword of the Spirit…’
‘What a thug that guy was,’ Merrily said uncertainly.
‘And wh
ere did he get it? Where did all that military imagery come from? His home town, of course. Tarsus. A veritable hotbed of Mithraism. Onward, Christian Soldiers. Mithraism wasn’t supplanted by Christianity at all – they existed side by side for centuries and one fed the other. Scholars ask why Mithraism suddenly disappeared. It didn’t, of course.’
Merrily sat shaking her head. Whatever you got from Athena White you had to pay for, big time.
‘Consider, Watkins. It’s not merely the military imagery that’s seeped into the churches, it’s the whole ethos. Think of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition… the ghastly Bush and that grinning shit Blair who took us to war and then had the audacity to turn Catholic.’ Miss White’s eyes lit up. ‘Now there was an interesting coincidence! The bloody thread of the true Roman religion. Does he even know, do you think?’
‘Not for me to say.’
‘Hold up your bloodied cross, and what do you see? The handle of the sword of Mithras. The sword which now forms what some might think of as the spine of Christianity.’
‘Well, that’s not quite-’
‘Tell me this, Watkins… how do you know that you yourself are not, to some degree, a child of Mithraism?’
Merrily smiled.
‘Because, Athena… I’m a woman.’
Miss White clapped her tiny hands.
‘ Excellent reply. Now we can begin.’
55
Cutting Edge
Danny looked up at the black iron gates which would’ve replaced a standard wooden five-bar, the wall of dressed stone where it used to be chicken wire.
‘What we gonner be looking for, then, Gomer? Blood? Feathers? Empty lager cans?’
He had his new phone with him. Supposed to be a decent camera in there with a shedload of pixels. Should do the job. Shading his eyes, he looked out over the shining roofs of all the cars to the high ground behind the Court.
‘It’s all changed.’
‘Can’t change the countryside, boy,’ Gomer said.
‘You reckon?’
‘The ole Unicorn was up by the top bridge, and the cockpit was in the field behind the yard, so I reckon it’s gotter be up by that stand o’ pine.’
‘Well fenced off,’ Danny said. ‘So we gotter do it the hard way?’
He’d been hoping they could get what they’d come for without having to go in with the media and the gentry and the dickheads in chains of office. Far as he could judge from the number of parked cars, there was likely two hundred people here: press, radio and telly and a bunch of bored freeloaders helping themselves to a rich bastard’s hospitality.
Halfway up The Court’s new gravel driveway they were stopped by a stocky woman, short bleached hair, a warning finger on her lips. Regional BBC were interviewing Savitch with his house in the background. The reporter, Mandy Patel, smiling up at him and nodding hard, the way TV reporters did but nobody ever did in real life.
‘Oh, dear me, no,’ Savitch was going. ‘Not the New Cotswolds, this is absolutely not about the so-called New Cotswolds. This is about the Old Marches! ’
Lifting a fist, like he’d just coined a new slogan. What a dick. A phoney cheer went up from behind him, from folks Danny had never seen before, whose idea of the Old Marches would be around 1998.
Gomer turned away, fishing out his ciggy tin. In his old tweed cap, yellow muffler, red and green trainers from Hay and Brecon Farmers, he looked like part of the stage dressing.
‘Now, it’s a fact,’ Savitch was saying, ‘that last year, by far the highest percentage of British incomers t’this area was from London itself. However-’
‘You included, of course,’ Mandy Patel said.
‘Indeed. Yes, of course, Mandy, but what’s seldom understood is that most of us don’t want t’bring London out here, we want t’sustain and fortify the essential character of the Old Marches. Everything we do here comes out of the area. Local skills, local tradition. I want to win the respect and trust of the real people.’
Jesus wept. This was how the Americans used to talk in Iraq, while all the corpses got shovelled off the streets. Hearts and minds.
Gomer sniffed, rolling his ciggy. Got a few hard looks but nobody was gonner challenge a man who looked more Old Marches than any bugger here. Danny looked beyond the TV people at the tarted-up farmhouse, its reblackened timbers bulging like black Botox lips around the white plaster. He saw men in old-fashioned leather jerkins, women dressed as serving wenches with trays of fizzy wine. He saw a load of phoney shite.
There wasn’t much more to Savitch than spreadsheets and flow-charts, but a few folks would clock the muted tweedy jacket and what looked like working men’s boots and go, Gotter hand it to him, at least he’s making an effort to fit in. Some country folks, when it came down to basics, were no wiser than town folks.
Mandy Patel lifted a finger, then the cameraman straightened up from his tripod and Savitch shook hands with both of them and moved on along the drive, people patting him on the back.
‘OK, thanks,’ the woman with the short bleached hair said to Danny. ‘You can go through now. Thank you for your patience.’
Looking down her nose at Gomer’s ciggy, then turning away, talking to a woman with a name-tag that said Country Pride magazine. Danny hung around, listening.
‘… going to ask you about Countryside Defiance, Rachel,’ the magazine woman said. ‘I see you’ve a stand over there.’
‘Well, sure,’ this Rachel said, and Danny recognized her now, from the TV. ‘Country-dwellers are still seen either as dinosaur gentry, old hippies or retired roses-round-the-door types. If we don’t start appealing to younger people with money we’re going to be dead in the water, darling.’
Danny turned away, feeling like he was drowning in liquid shit. Saw the TV woman and the cameraman, tripod over one shoulder, head across the lawns past the Green displays – solar panels, domestic wind-turbines, geo-thermal heating and other expensive kit that never quite worked.
‘Smiffy Gill doesn’t come cheap,’ Rachel said, ‘but he’s certainly good value if you’re trying to show how cutting-edge the country is.’
‘He’s not here, is he?’
The magazine woman looking hopefully around, Rachel frowning.
‘Might come later. Meantime, talk to Ward. Talk to Kenny, who’s an absolute treasure, frighteningly macho. Talk to the local councillor, Pierce, who’s youngish and local.’
‘And bent as a bloody ole fork-end,’ Gomer said before Danny towed him off.
‘Gomer, we don’t draw attention, right?’
Danny had nearly suggested that they call it off when he’d heard about Lol being in the slammer, but Gomer had said it could be even more important now to nail Savitch on the cocking, and mabbe he was right.
They moved on down past a white van with Oldcastle Catering on the side, Danny beginning to see folks he and Gomer had worked for, digging new soakaways, wildlife ponds. Also, the usual Ledwardine notables – James Bull-Davies tapping the green-oak frame of a new barn that was never gonner be used for hay, swimming pool more like. Poor ole James likely figuring out that it had cost more than his entire stable-block and his new roof. Realizing he was part of history, but mabbe not the kind Savitch was looking to restore.
Between two buildings not yet converted was a dark green marquee with HARDKIT HARDKIT HARDKIT stencilled in black all over it and these display boards with photos of men covered in muck. Alongside, a track ended at a stile, an empty field on the other side, stubbled with the dead stems of last year’s docks and stumps of trees and piles of branches gathered for burning.
‘That it, Gomer? Up there?’
Colder now, mucky-looking clouds converging as Gomer and Danny scaled the stile and walked up the field. The sound of a medieval band floating up behind them, drums and possibly a crumhorn. Merrie Englande. As they moved up the rise, Danny looked around, from landmark to landmark: the church steeple, Cole Hill, The Court itself, in its own green nest.
Then he saw they
were standing on the edge of what surely had been the cockpit behind the long-demolished Unicorn pub.
You wouldn’t be able to tell in summer, but the grass hadn’t really started growing yet and the shallow bowl was obvious. Not many trees left around it, and only a few scrubby bushes in the middle, so it had been preserved at one time, sure to’ve been.
And that was the point, wasn’t it?
One time.
‘Shit,’ Danny said.
No blood, no feathers, no beer cans. The ole Ledwardine cockpit was wilderness. Disappointment plunged deep into Danny’s gut.
‘I’m sorry, Gomer.’
Gomer didn’t move.
‘Mabbe we was a bit dull to think they was doin’ it yere,’ Danny said. ‘Most likely it moves around, farm to farm, like a circus.’
‘Where?’ Gomer’s fists clenching in the air like mini digger-buckets. ‘They was moving round, we’d know about it.’
He was right. They likely would.
‘It…’ Danny hesitated. ‘Gomer… it possible you was wrong about that cock?’
Gomer didn’t even answer. They climbed back over the stile, to the sound of some audio-visual presentation going on in the Hardkit tent, the voice of Smiffy Gill, mad-bastard presenter of The Octane Show, which Danny had watched just once when it’d been about Jeeps.
‘… just had an amazing time on the quad bike, Kenny, mate, but I would, wouldn’t I? ’
Smiffy’s haw-haw laugh. Danny couldn’t stand no more of this. Figured he’d forgo the free champagne lunch guaranteed by Lol’s tickets, unless Gomer…
‘You all right, Gomer?’
‘Bloody let her down this time, ennit?’
‘Jane? Gomer, you done everything a man could do. Mabbe we was wrong about Savitch. Mabbe her was wrong.’
‘No. Gotter be folks from Off. It was local folks, I’d know.’
Danny felt suddenly choked up. Things were changing yereabouts. Things were happening that even Gomer Parry didn’t know about. Because Gomer Parry’s era was nearly over.
He looked at the Hardkit tent. Had their catalogues through the post, same as most country folk, only now they were inviting him to spend?250-plus on a waterproof jacket. Three year ago they was just this one tiny little run-down shop with the window all blacked-out, looked on the verge of closing down. Now a bloody chain with jackets at two-fifty.
