by Phil Rickman
‘Huh?’
‘He owns the land what the village hall’s built on.’Herited it off his ole man last year. Gwyn Twigg? No? Had a petrol station over towards Monkland. Supermarket opens up at Leominster, cheap petrol, Gwyn shuts down, but he’s got these bits o’ ground all over the place, worth a good few hundred grand, so he’s all right, ennit? When he dies, Stu’s in the money. Lazy bugger, though, Stu Twigg. Calls hisself a mechanic, all he does is messes around soupin’ up ole bangers and scarin’ the life out o’ folks in the lanes.’
‘Got him now,’ Jane said. ‘I think. White Jaguar?’
‘That’s the boy.’
‘Came round a corner once, had Irene in the ditch. He’s insane.’
‘Not insane enough he don’t know the value of land,’ Gomer said. ‘Ground rent on the village-hall site, that’s peanuts, see – only public-spirited gesture Gwyn Twigg ever made. Mabbe owed somebody on the parish council a favour. Anyway, word is, Stu’s been talkin’ serious to one o’ the supermarket chains.’
‘You mean with a view to … ?’
‘Only one suitable site for a supermarket in Ledwardine, they reckons. Only it’s got a village hall on it.’
This didn’t take a lot of thinking out. The village hall was 1960s and a bit run down. Not exactly a listed building.
Jane said, ‘So if there was a new village hall … like one that was built somewhere else … ?’
‘Or a posh new leisure centre with playin’ fields, what’d need a bigger site. Mabbe a greenfield site, outside the village kind o’ thing. If you had some’ing like that…’
‘Stu could flog the village-hall site to the supermarket and clean up. And we’d have a big flash superstore dominating the bottom of Church Street like a … a shrine to commercialism.’
‘Ar. Some’ing like that. You wanner take a guess who Stu’s accountant is, Janie?’
‘Wow.’ Jane lurched forward against her seat belt. ‘You are kidding.’
‘Open secret, girl. Like I tole you, startin’ off thinkin’ your local councillor’s bent always saves a bit o’ time.’
‘Gomer, that is just so—’
‘En’t even the whole story, girl. Supermarket chain, they got a limit, kind o’ thing – what I mean is, a place needs to have a partic’lar head o’ population to make it worthwhile movin’ in. And Ledwardine’s borderline. Needs mabbe a hundred or so new houses to qualify. See where I’m goin’ yere?’
‘Luxury … executive…’ Jane lost her breath ‘… homes.’
‘It’s a start.’
‘That’s—’
‘And it don’t stop there. I been talkin’ to Jack Brodrick, see. Jack was a surveyor with the ole Radnorshire Council. He d’reckon Coleman’s Meadow’s a key strategic move. Strategic, see. His word. What it means is this: you got housing on Coleman’s Meadow, you gets to put a road through the ole orchard as was. Which opens up the whole of the east side o’ Ledwardine. And then you’re off, and big time, Janie. More new estates up the back of Ole Barn Lane, out towards the bypass, and all the way to…’
Gomer gave Jane a sideways glance and crushed out his ciggy.
Jane pictured it. The back of Old Barn Lane? That would take the housing to…
‘The bottom of Cole Hill, from the other side?’
‘Sure t’be.’
‘Which would mean … with Coleman’s Meadow built on, Cole Hill would be totally boxed in.’
‘’Course, this is only what Jack Brodrick reckons.’
‘Christ, Gomer!’
‘Shrewd ole bugger, Jack, mind.’
‘Pierce is quietly stitching up the whole village! We’ll be like … like a new town.’
‘Looks that way.’
‘How long have you known?’
‘I don’t know, Janie. It’s all guesswork, ennit?’
‘It’s not.’ Jane leaned back against the passenger door, her head out of the jeep, as if this would blow away the images of black and white houses crushed by an avalanche of pink brick.
Gomer drove on towards the Ledwardine turning.
‘Is it?’ Jane screamed against the slipstream.
‘Mabbe not,’ Gomer said.
As Gomer slowed for the Ledwardine turn, Jane checked her mobile, found the message from Mum. So what was new? Maybe Mum and Lol would be home by the time she got in. Anyway, she didn’t want to call back now. There was just too much to say. And she was too angry.
They came into the village. Ledwardine in the smoky dusk. The black and white houses timeless and ghostly in the fake gaslight from the square and the orange and lemon light spilling from the diamond-paned windows of the Black Swan. No neon.
Outside the Swan, the high-powered cars and SUVs of smug diners. A few young guys of fourteen or so with lager cans on the square.
Imagine it in five years, with twice the population.
Two ways it could go: either a refuge of the rich with high gates and burglar alarms and suspicion and unfriendliness. Or teeming streets, vandalism, drunkenness, fights, burglaries and gutters full of infected needles and crack pipes.
Not that there was anything new about all that, even in Ledwardine. In centuries past, the gutters would probably have been overflowing nightly with blood and vomit. And, like … well, everybody got drunk sometime, it was just…
… Just that the kind of mass drunkenness you got in the cities now was symptomatic of something scary: an almost suicidal hopelessness seeping through society. Jane had done this really heartfelt essay on it for the school magazine. The attitude was: the world is made of shit, the politicians of all three major parties are clueless tossers on the make, the country’s already more than halfway down the toilet, so if you don’t get pissed tonight, tomorrow could be too late.
There’d been times when she’d felt that way herself, obviously. And although she hadn’t used the words pissed or shit in the essay, it had still been censored. Good old Morrell. Good old Rob. Maybe it was time to leave, make her own way. Somehow.
‘Home, is it?’
‘Huh? Sorry, Gomer, I was…’
‘You wanner check if the vicar’s back, Janie?’
Gomer had stopped the jeep at the edge of the market square, engine clattering.
‘Actually, Gomer, I wouldn’t mind – like, now there’ll be nobody about – checking out Coleman’s Meadow? See if they’ve taken the fence down or anything.’
‘They en’t gonner do that, girl.’
‘Only … I feel bad about just going to ground all day. Not having the courage of my convictions.’
‘Wisest thing. You hadn’t got no proof.’
‘Yeah. And now we have. Can you take me back to Mrs Kingsley’s in the morning? Get those pictures photocopied?’
‘I’Il do that.’
‘You’re a star, Gomer.’
But still tomorrow morning seemed a long way off. What if – call it paranoia, but anything could happen in this sick world – what if Mrs Kingsley had changed her mind? What if Lyndon Pierce and Gerry Murray had found out and persuaded her to hand over the photos, and by tomorrow morning they were ashes?
‘Best to stay away from the meadow, I reckon, Janie. Don’t invite no trouble till you’re ready for it.’ Gomer pulled the jeep onto the square, switched off the engine. ‘I’ll come over the vicarage with you. If they en’t back, mabbe get some chips?’
‘Brilliant. See, all I was thinking … maybe more protesters might’ve turned up. I’ve got this fantasy of … like one of these old peace camps? Where people come and occupy the site?’
‘Got new laws to prevent all that, now.’
‘They’re stifling everything spontaneous, aren’t they? Free speech. Whatever happened to that?’
‘En’t gonner stifle me, girl,’ Gomer said. ‘Too old to be stifled, see.’
They walked across the square and under the market hall. It was around ten p.m. and the only light was in the northern sky – a strange light, with swirls of white, like cream i
n dark coffee.
There were no lights in the vicarage.
‘Chips then, is it?’ Gomer said.
‘Yeah, why not? My treat. You’ve done a great job tonight, Gomer. All we have to do now is make sure everybody knows … and about the leisure centre and everything. We’ve got to wake up the village.’
‘Easier said than done, Janie. Thing is—’
Gomer froze.
‘What?’ Jane said.
‘Y’ear that?’
All Jane could hear was the sound of a distant engine, like a lorry or something, carrying the way sounds did in the country after dark. Gomer stepped back onto the square, his head on one side.
‘It’s a JCB, ennit? Gimme a couple more minutes, I could mabbe tell you what size and how old.’
Jane smiled. Gomer Parry Plant Hire never sleeps.
Gomer wasn’t smiling. He stood hunched, looking down at his Doc Martens, listening hard.
‘Comin’ from the orchard, it is.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Seems to me there en’t many places back there where you can manoeuvre a JCB. Specially at night, see.’ He looked at Jane, and there was no light in his glasses. He took the ciggy out of his mouth and coughed unhappily. ‘You know what they’re doin’, don’t you?’
51
The Blade
Of course, Lol had half-lied to Merrily, and he hated that, but now he was compelled to go through with it.
By evening light, the sacred oak had seemed inspirational – its weight, its setting. The glow of sunset had instilled a transitional tension which was unsettling. And he needed that. Badly needed to be unsettled again. Have something reawoken in him, even if it was through fear of the unknown.
It was odd. Since the sun had gone down, the sky seemed brighter. The landscape, as he neared the oak, had the eeriness of a vast attic lit by a single candle. The voice of Dan the chorister was crackling behind his ears like tinnitus: I was a bit cynical about the whole idea at first but … I’d do it again tomorrow, I mean it, I’d travel a long way to do it.
Maybe the words of Dan the chorister had been quietly playing at the back of his mind for hours.
… Vibration going through you, like wiring … different parts of you lighting up in some kind of sequence … wasn’t just three churches coming together, it was like being inside a big orb of sound. Like we’d broken through to another place.
Lol was wondering when, since the terror and adrenalin rushes of the comeback concert at the Courtyard, he’d last experienced anything approaching that level of connection. What use was he to Merrily or Jane if he couldn’t feel their level of commitment? The way both of them, from their different directions, were driven, while he was just the hanger-on, the timid inhabitant of the witch’s cottage who hadn’t been able to construct a serviceable song for over a month.
Night had widened the landscape. Nothing visible between Lol and Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey. Two tawny owls conversed across the valley.
He stopped and looked up: stars … planets … spheres.
And then, as the naked, dead, topmost branches of the sacred oak appeared over the nearest horizon like a claw, he was shaking his head because this was faintly despicable. He should have gone with Merrily.
But Lol kept on walking until, at some point, the whistling arose.
Jane followed the tiny beacon of Gomer’s ciggy through the churchyard, through the wicket gate and into the orchard, which had once encircled the village. All that was around her now was the sluggish sound of the JCB flexing its metal muscles.
A friendly sound, normally. She’d always associated JCBs with Gomer. Gomer Parry Plant Hire: drain your fields, clear your ditches, lay your pipes, dig your soakaway.
Now it was a grinding headache, maybe the fantasy-migraine she’d invented coming back to haunt her, karmic retribution: clanking, dragging, ripping, an organ of destruction. Darkness closing in on mellow old Ledwardine.
‘Slow, Janie,’ Gomer said.
They were beyond the church, into the patch of ground where Jane had found the circular bump that might be a Bronze Age burial mound. Too dark now to make it out. There was a moon somewhere, but its meagre light wasn’t getting in here, and the nettles were high; she must have been stung a dozen times already, but that didn’t matter. Sweating, grit in her eyes, she stopped at the sound of a heavy blade on stone, raw friction, a pulling back, a meshing of gears.
‘Careful, girl – wire.’
Gomer, breathing hard, was feeling his way along an old barbed-wire fence, not the kind of fence you tried to climb over at night without a torch. He’d wanted to go back to the jeep for his lambing light, but Jane had been frantic by then, and anyway … there were headlamps on the JCB. She could see them at last through the trees, and the shape of the big yellow digger itself, monstrous now and brutal, an implement of scorched earth.
Gomer found the stile and tested its strength with both hands before climbing over and waiting to help Jane down. But Jane didn’t need any help and she hit the ground running, ripping the back of a hand on the bottom of the sign on which she could have read, if there’d been any light, Herefordshire Council Planning Department.
‘Bast—’
‘Janie—’
‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘You total bastards!’
Bursting into Coleman’s Meadow where they’d taken down a section of the new fencing to let the JCB in. The JCB that was approaching the middle of the meadow along twin bars of yellow-white headlamp beam. Moving in for another attack.
Jane ran out towards the digger – and hands grabbed her. The JCB reared up like a rampant dinosaur and its mud-flecked lights went spearing across the meadow towards Jane as she wrenched herself away, and then ricocheted from the yellow hard-hat worn by the man who’d held her arms.
‘Health and Safety regulations are very explicit,’ he said. ‘That’s as far as you go.’
Jane backed away, coughing, pulling hair out of her eyes, as he bent and picked up a lamp, throwing the beam full in her face.
‘Might’ve known,’ he said.
‘This is…’ She could hardly speak for the rage and the shock. ‘This is wrong. This is illegal. This is a crime against—’
‘Not wrong at all,’ Lyndon Pierce said, ‘and certainly not illegal. This is private land, and the man in the digger is the owner of the land. And also of the digger, as it happens.’
The lamp beam swung to one side to find Gomer. He was panting and his ciggy had gone.
‘By God, you en’t bloody changed, Lyndon, boy. En’t changed one bit.’
‘Not your problem, Mr Parry. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’ Pierce’s tone was remote; he didn’t look at Gomer. ‘But I strongly suggest you leave immediately and take this … girl with you before she gets into any more trouble. It’s not your business.’
‘En’t your business, either. You’re supposed to be a councillor, boy. Supposed to see both bloody sides.’
‘I’m not taking sides. I’m observing. I’m here as a member of the Herefordshire Council Planning Committee. An official … observer.’
He looked out across the meadow, and Jane followed his gaze. The digger had reversed back into a corner of the meadow, its blade up and retracted, its headlights illuminating what it had already done to Coleman’s Meadow, revealing the extent of the massacre.
‘Here I go now, in fact,’ Lyndon Pierce said. ‘Observing.’
Jane was too shattered to cry. It looked like pictures she’d seen of the Somme. More than half the central track had been dug up, ripped away. The surface turf torn off and dumped in rough spoil heaps, and deeper, more jagged furrows dug out where the ground was softer. Water coming up from somewhere, pooling in the glistening clay-sided trenches.
They’d systematically destroyed it. They’d all but obliterated the ley. They’d waited until it had got dark and the few protesters had gone and then they’d opened the fence and let in the JCB. Like letting a hun
gry fox into a chicken house, to do its worst.
The enemy was pointing at them across the meadow and Jane could see the shape of its driver, hunched behind the levers in the reinforced glass cab. Gerry Murray, presumably. Sitting there watching them now, waiting, an agent of the darkness.
‘Stop him.’ Jane’s fingers were sticky. ‘Stop him while you can. While there’s still some of the track left. Because it’s not going to look good for you tomorrow when … when the truth comes out.’
‘Truth?’
Pierce laughed. Jane felt the delta of blood washing down from the back of the hand she’d slashed on the sign, oozing between her fingers.
‘Jane, the only truth that’s coming out is the kind of truth that’ll be damaging to you and your mother and your mother’s hippie boyfriend. Now go home quietly before you make things worse.’
‘Like I’m really going to let you destroy an ancient monument?’
‘We’ve been there, Jane. This is no more an ancient monument than your friend Mr Parry.’
‘You’re just … you’re just a scumbag and a…’
All the names she wanted to spit at him, but that would just be abuse and childish, like the sad underage drivers you saw howling wanker at the traffic cops in all those cheap TV documentaries.
‘Why do you—’ She stared up at him, and then turned quickly away, feeling tear-pressure. ‘Why do you have to do this?’
‘I’ll remind you one more time,’ Pierce said, ‘that you’re on a development site and you’re not wearing protective clothing. If you don’t go, I’ll be calling the police to have you removed, and we’ll see how good that looks in the papers. Now be a good girl and let Mr Murray finish the preparation of his ground.’
‘Preparation? He hasn’t even got planning permission yet, even if it’s as good as a done deal. This is just sick, mindless … peevish … destruction. Why do you have to do this?’
‘Because of you, you stupid little—’ Pierce’s face coming at her, dark with evening-stubble. ‘What do you think all this fencing cost, to keep those cranks out? Eh? What if they come back tomorrow and there’s even more of them? What then?’
