Crybbe aka Curfew

by Phil Rickman

  'OK,' Goff said calmly. 'Let's start with the basics. How much you heard about me?'

  Jimmy Preece smiled slyly down at his feet, encased in heavy, well-polished working boots with nearly as many ancient cracks as his face.

  Goff flashed the teeth again. 'Never trust newspapers, Mr Mayor. The more money you make, the more the c… the more they're out to nail you. 'Specially if you've made it in a operation like mine. Which, as I'm sure you know, is the music business, the recording industry.'

  I've heard that."

  'Sex, drugs and rock and roll, eh?'

  'I wouldn't know about those things.'

  'Nor would I, Mr Mayor,' Goff lied. 'Only been on the business side. A business. Like any other. And I'm not denying it's been highly successful for me. I'm a rich man.'

  Goff paused.

  'And now I want to put something back. Into the world, if you like. But, more specifically… into Crybbe.'

  Mr Preece didn't even blink.

  'Because you have a very special town here, Mr Mayor. Only this town, it's forgotten just how special it is.'

  Come on, you old bastard. Ask me why it's so flaming special.

  Goff waited, keeping his cool. Very commendably, he thought, under the circumstances. Then, after a while, Jimmy Preece made his considered response.

  'Well, well,' he said. And was silent again.

  Max Goff felt his nails penetrate the brown vinyl chair-arms. 'I don't mean to be insulting here, Mr Mayor,' he said loudly, with a big, wide, shiny smile – a 1961 Cadillac of a smile. 'But you have to face the fact that this little town is in deep shit.'

  He let the words – and the smile – shimmer in the room.

  'Terminally depressed,' he said. 'Economically sterile.'

  Still the Mayor said nothing. But his eyes shifted sideways like the eyes of a ventriloquist's doll, and Goff knew he was last getting through.

  'OK.' He pulled on to his knee a green canvas bag. 'I'm gonna lay it all down for you.'

  Yeah, there it was. A hint of anxiety.

  'Even a century ago,' Goff stared the old guy straight in the eyes, 'this town was home to over five thousand people. How many's it got now?'

  Mr Preece looked into the fireplace. Breathed in as if about to answer, and then breathed out without a word.

  'I'll tell you. At the last census, there were two thousand nine hundred and sixty-four. This is in the town itself, I'm not including the outlying farms.'

  From the canvas bag, Goff took a pad of recycled paper opened it. Began to read the figures. 'Crybbe once had a grammar school and two primary schools. It's now down to single primary and the older kids get bussed to a secondary school eight miles away, yeah?'

  Mr Preece nodded slowly and then carried on nodding as his head was working loose.

  'Even as recently as 1968,' Goff said, 'there were four police men in Crybbe. How many now?'

  Mr Preece's lips started to shape a word and then went slack again as Goff zapped him with more statistics. 'Back in the fifties, there were three grocer's shops, two butcher's, a couple of chemist's, and there was…'

  Mr Preece almost yelled, 'Where you gettin' all this from?'

  But Goff was coming at him like a train now, and there was no stopping him.

  '… a regular assize court earlier this century, and now what? Not even petty sessions any more. No justices, no magistrates. Used to be a self-sufficient local authority, covering wide area from Crybbe and employing over seventy people. Now there's your town council. Not much more than a local advisory body that employs precisely one person part-time, that's Mrs Byford, the clerk who lakes the notes at your meetings.'

  'Look, what… what's all this about?' Jimmy Preece was shrinking back into his chair, Goff leaning further towards him with every point he made, but deciding it was time to cool

  things a little.

  'Bottom line, Mr Mayor, is you got a slowly ageing population and nothing to offer the young to keep them here. Even the outsiders are mostly retired folk. Crybbe's already climbed into its own coffin and it's just about to pull down the lid.'

  Goff sat back, putting away his papers, leaving Jimmy Preece, Mayor of Crybbe, looking as tired and wasted as his town. 'Mr Mayor, how about you call a public meeting? Crybbe and me, we need to talk.'

  In the gallery itself – her place – Jocasta Newsome was starting to function. At last. God, she'd thought it was never going to begin. She walked quickly across the quarry-tiled floor – tap, tap, tap of the high heels, echoing from wall to wall in the high-roofed former chapel, a smart brisk sound she loved.

  'Look, let me show you this. It's something actually quite special. '

  'No, really,' The customer raised a hand and a faint smile. 'This is what I came for.'

  'Oh, but…' Jocasta fell silent, realizing that a £1,000 sale was about to go through without recourse to the skills honed to a fine edge during her decade in International Marketing. She pulled herself together, smiled and patted the hinged frame of the triptych, it is rather super, though, isn't it?'

  'Actually,' the customer said, turning her back on the triple image of the Tump, I think it's absolutely dreadful.'

  'Oh.' Jocasta was genuinely thrown by this, because the customer was undoubtedly the right kind: Barbour, silk scarf and that offhand, isn't-life-tedious sort of poise she'd always rather envied.

  The woman revived her faint smile. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. My boss thinks it's wonderful, and that's all that matters. I suppose it's the subject I'm not terribly taken with. It's only a large heap of soil, after all."

  Jocasta mentally adjusted the woman's standing; she had a boss. Dare she ask who he was? 'I'll pa… I'll have it packaged for you.'

  'Oh, don't bother, I'll just toss it in the back of the jeep. Haven't far to go.' How far exactly? Jocasta asked silently, directing a powerful ray of naked curiosity at the woman. It usually worked.

  The door closed behind him. Max Goff stood a moment on the sunlit step, Crybbe laid out before him.

  Jimmy Preece's retirement cottage was a fitting place for the Mayor to live, at the entrance to the narrow road off the little square, the one which led eventually 10 the Court – Jimmy Preece being the head of the family which had lived at Court Farm since sixteen-something at least.

  It was fitting also for the Mayor because it was at the top of the town, with the church of St Michael on the right. And you could see the buildings – eighteenth, seventeenth century and earlier – staggering, gently inebriated, down the hill to the river, with its three-arched bridge.

  From up here Goff could easily discern the medieval street pattern – almost unchanged, he figured. The newer buildings – the school, the council housing and the small industrial estate – had been tacked on and could, no doubt, just as easily be flicked away.

  It was bloody perfect.

  Unspoiled.

  And this was precisely because it was not a wealthy town, because it was down on its luck and had been for a long, long time. Because it was not linked to the trunk roads between Wales and the Midlands and was not convenient, never would be. No use at all for commuting to anywhere.

  And yet, beneath this town, the dragon slumbered.

  She was going to ring Darwyn Hall, the artist, immediately but Hereward walked in, still wearing his artisan's outfit and carrying a mug of coffee. The mug was one of the misshapen brown things they'd felt obliged to buy from the Crybbe Pottery.

  'Who was that?'

  Jocasta was sitting at her desk in a corner of the gallery, putting the cheque away. It was a customized company cheque, the word Epidemic faded across it like a watermark. 'A sale, of course,' she said nonchalantly.

  'Good God.' Hereward looked around to see which of the pictures had gone. 'Picking it up later, are they?'

  'You should be looking in the window.' Jocasta just couldn't hold her cool any longer and an awful smirk of delight was spreading over her face like strawberry jam.

  'You're jokin
g,' Hereward said, stunned. He strode to the window and threw back the shutters. 'Good grief!' He turned back to Jocasta. 'Full price?'

  'This is not a bloody discount store, darling.'

  'Stone me,' said Hereward. 'The triptych. Just like that? I mean, who…?'

  Jocasta waited a second or two, adjusted the Celtic brooch at her shoulder and then casually hit him with the big one.

  'Max Goff.'

  'Gosh.' Hereward pit down his cup. 'So it's true, then. He has bought the Court.'

  'Sent his personal assistant to collect it,' Jocasta said. 'Rachel Wade.'

  'This is far from bad news,' Hereward said slowly, 'in fact, this could be the turning point.'

  Mrs Preece waited across the square with her shopping bag until she saw the large man in the white suit stride out past the delphiniums. He didn't, she noticed, close the garden gate behind him. She watched him get into his fancy black car and didn't go across to the house until she couldn't even hear its noise any more.

  Jimmy was still sitting in the parlour staring at the wall.

  Mrs Preece put down her shopping bag and reached over Jimmy to the top of the television set, where the onion was sitting in its saucer.

  'You'll be late for your drink,' she said.

  'I'm not going today. I 'ave to talk to the clerk before she goes back to the library.'

  'What was he after?' demanded Mrs Preece, standing there holding the saucer with the onion on it.

  'He wants us to call a public meeting.'

  'Oh, he does, does he? And who's he to ask for a public meeting?'

  'An interferer," Jimmy Preece said. 'That's what he is.'

  Mrs Preece said nothing.

  'I don't like interferers,' Jimmy Preece said.

  There was nothing his wife could say to that. She walked through to the kitchen, holding the saucer before her at arm's length as if what it had on it was not a peeled onion but a dead rat.

  In the kitchen she got out a meat skewer, a big one, nearly a foot long, and speared the onion, the sharp point slipping easily into its soft, moist, white flesh.

  Then she took it across to the Rayburn and opened the door to the fire compartment. With a quick stab and a shiver – partly f revulsion, partly satisfaction – she thrust the onion into the flames and slammed the door, hard.

  CHAPTER V

  This may seem an odd question,' the vicar of Crybbe said after a good deal of hesitation, 'but have you ever performed an exorcism?'

  The question hung in the air for quite a while.

  Sunk into his armchair in Grace's former sitting-room, Canon Alex Peters peered vaguely into the thick soup of his past. Had he done an exorcism? Buggered if he could remember.

  The sun was so bright now – at least suggestive of warmth – that Alex had stripped down to his washed-out Kate Bush T-shirt, the letters in Bush stretched to twice the size of those in Kate by the considerable belly he'd put on since the doctor had ordered him to give up jogging. On his knees was a fiendish-looking black tomcat which Grace had named after some famous Russian. Chekhov? Dostoevsky? Buggered if he could remember that either.

  'Ah, sorry, Murray. Yes, exorcism. Mmm.'

  What should he say? East Anglia? Perhaps when he was in charge of one of those huge, terrifying, flint churches in Suffolk… Needed to be a bit careful here.

  'Ah! I'll tell you what it was, Murray – going back a good many years this. Wasn't the full bell, book and candle routine, as I remember. More of a quickie, bless-this-house operation. Actually, I think I made it up as I went along.'

  The Revd Murray Beech raised an eyebrow.

  Alex said, 'Well, you know the sort of thing… "I have reason to believe there's an unquiet spirit on the premises, so, in the name of the Management, I suggest you leave these decent folk alone and push off back where you came from, there's a good chap." '

  The Revd Murray Beech did not smile.

  'Expect I dramatized it a bit,' Alex said. 'But that's what it boiled down to. Seemed to work, as I recall. Don't remember any come-backs, anyway. Why d'you ask?'

  Although he wore the regulation-issue black shirt and clerical collar, rather than a Kate Bush T-shirt, young Murray Beech didn't seem like a real vicar to Alex. More like the ambitious deputy head of some inner-city comprehensive school. He was on the edge of one of Grace's G-plan dining chairs, looking vaguely unhappy about the can of lager Alex had put unceremoniously into his hand.

  'You see, the way you put it then,' Murray said carefully, as though he were formulating a point at a conference, 'makes it seem as if… you knew at the time… that you were only going through the motions.'

  'Well, that's probably true, old chap. But who knows what we do when we go through the motions?' A sunbeam stroked Alex's knees; the cat shifted a little to make the most of it. 'Do I understand, Murray, that someone has invited you to perform an exorcism?'

  'This appears to be the general idea,' the vicar said uncomfortably. 'The central dilemma is, as you know, I'm not into sham. Too much of that in the church.'

  'Absolutely, old chap.'

  'You see, my problem is…'

  'Oh, I think I know what your problem is.' Perhaps, Alex thought, it used to be my problem too, to an extent. How sure of our ground we are, when we're young ministers. 'For instance, Murray, if I were to ask you what you consider to be the biggest evils in the world today, you'd say…?'

  'Inequality. Racism. Destruction of the planet due to unassuageable… I'm not going to say capitalism, let's call it greed.' He eyed the Guardian on Alex's chair-arm. 'Surely you'd agree with that?'

  "Course, dear boy. Spot on. Look, Tolstoy, would you mind not sharpening your claws on my inner thigh, there's good cat. So who wants you to do this exorcism?'

  'Difficult.' Murray smiled without humour. 'Difficult situation. It's a teenager. Lives with the grandparents. Think there's some sort of – his mouth pursed in distaste – 'disruptive

  etheric intrusion. In the house.'

  'Poltergeist, eh? What have the grandparents got to say?'

  'That's the difficulty. I'm not supposed to speak to them. This… person is rather embarrassed about the whole thing. Having read somewhere that so-called poltergeists are often caused by, or attracted to, a disturbed adolescent. You know that theory?'

  'Rampant hormones overflowing. Smart boy. In my day, of course, the vicar would just have told him to stop wanking and the thing would go away.'

  Murray said, 'It's a girl.'

  'Oh.'

  'She wants me to go along when her grandparents are out and deal with this alleged presence.'

  'Oh dear.' Alex opened his can of Heineken with a snap 'You're right, my boy, it is a difficult one. Erm…' He looked across at Murray, all cropped hair, tight mouth and steely

  efficiency. 'Do you suppose this youngster might have something of a… crush on you?' Well, it wasn't entirely beyond the bounds of possibility; there were some pretty warped kids around these days.

  'Oh, I don't think it's that, Alex. That would be comparatively easy to deal with.'

  'Glad you think so. What have you said to her, then?'

  'We had a long discussion about the problems and insecurities of the post-pubescent period. Made more difficult in this case because she has no parents to go to – mother dead, father in the merchant navy. You see, I don't want to fail the kid. Because, you know, so few people in this town ever actually come to me for help. Especially with anything of a non-material nature – i.e. anything that doesn't involve opening jumble sales. It's obvious most of them find me an institutional irrelevance most of the time.'

  'Wouldn't say that, old chap.'

  'Wouldn't you? Oh, certainly, they're always there on Sunday. Well, enough of them anyway. So no congregation problems, as such, but…'

  'That's what it's all about, old son. That's the core of it, bums on pews.'

  'Is it? Is that what you think?' The dining chair creaked as Murray hunched forward, chin thrusting. 'Have you ever loo
ked out over your parishioners and seen all the animation, all the commitment, of a doctor's waiting room or a bus queue?'

  Alex nodded. 'They're not expressive people in this town, I grant you. Perhaps a chap like you ought to be working in a more happening situation, as they say.'

  Murray clearly thought so too. But Alex could see the difficulty. He'd been lucky to get a parish this size at his age, still in his twenties. Could be a key step on the way to the bishop's palace before he turned forty if he made the right impression…

  They heard footsteps on the path, a key in the front door. Ah, here's Fay. Look, Murray, why don't we ask her about your problem? Used to be a teenage girl herself not awfully long ago.'

  'No!' Murray Beech jerked on the edge of his dining chair. 'Not a word, if you don't mind, Alex. I don't want this turned into a joke on the radio.'

  'Good God, Murray, I hardly think…'

  'Please.'

  'OK, if that's how you'd prefer it. I say, what's wrong with old Chekhov?'

  The cat had leapt on to the chair-back next to Alex's shoulder, looking even less at ease than the vicar of Crybbe.

  'Dad,' Fay called from the hall. 'You haven't got Rasputin in there, have you? If you have, just hold on to him.' There was a patter of paws. 'We may have a minor integration problem.'

  The cat hissed in Alex's ear.

  'I must go,' Murray Beech said, putting the unopened can of lager on top of Grace's little nest of tables.

  The door opened and a dog came in, followed by Fay. The dog was straining on the end of a clothes-line. It was a rather bizarre dog. Black and white, the size of a sheepdog. But with a terrier's stance and enormous ears, like a donkey's.

  The dog ignored Rasputin but sniffed suspiciously at Murray Beech, as the vicar came to his feet.

  'Sorry about this, Dad,' Fay said. 'But you and Rasputin have to make allowances, show a little charity. Oh, hullo Murray, I'm quite glad you're here.'