by Kim Newman
When he had stopped laughing, Terry took his stubby thing out and piddled in the water. Jenny thought he was disgusting, and said so. She had learned the word ‘grotesque’ from a comic last week, and was tempted to use it. But God’s Volkswagen bus turned up.
Actually, it was the disciples who arrived in the minibus. Dad said the disciples were stupid people who had given all their money to Jago. The men mostly had long hair and beards, which made them look like the real disciples in her Scripture book.
A lady in a long skirt with an armful of red flowers came up to them.
‘Have a flower, it’s as pretty as you are,’ she said, handing her one. The lady also gave flowers to Terry and Teddy. ‘And as handsome as you, and you.’
The lady had long hair, a headband and lots of beads. She was floppily fat. Jenny got the idea she was the same age as her parents but wanted to pretend she was younger. She didn’t know whether that was stupid or not.
Jenny said thank you. Terry and Teddy didn’t want their poofy flowers but had to take them anyway. Jenny thought that funny but didn’t laugh out loud. When the lady went away, Teddy started pulling the petals off his flower and Terry said something rude about her teats. Terry was stronger than Jenny and thought he could boss her about even though he was thick.
They sat on the lawn and watched the disciples. The man who had lived in the Manor last had chased them away once, but the God people didn’t know they weren’t allowed in the garden and let them stay. A big lorry came, and the disciples took lots of things out of it. Furniture, boxes of books and records, cooking stuff, gardening tools, bright-coloured clothes. The disciples were happy and nice to each other, which seemed sensible rather than stupid.
Terry got bored, and went away to let off some rook-scarers near Mr Keough’s cats, but Teddy stayed, with Doug. When Terry was there, Teddy was just as horrible as his brother, but on his own he was almost nice. She knew he’d sent her a valentine card this year. She didn’t fancy him, though, because he picked his nose and ate it.
After the big lorry had gone away and it was getting near lunchtime, a Saab came down the road. There were three men on motorbikes with the car. They wore leather and had Jesus slogans on their crash helmets. She knew who Jesus was. Jesus H. Christ. Granddad had said his name lots of times, usually when he banged his toe or something. ‘Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle.’ The people who drew the pictures in the Scripture books always left the bicycle out, and when she put it in with her blue biro the teacher told her off.
The motorbikers stood in a line when Mr Jago got out of the Saab. He didn’t look much like the God she’d heard about. He had no long white beard and wasn’t shining like the sun. He had a TV-star type face, and a collar like the vicar’s. He had on black jeans, a long purple coat, and a white hat that did look a bit like a halo. The lady with the headband gave the rest of her flowers to him, and he gave her a squelchy kiss. Teddy had run away with Doug, leaving the bits of his flower behind.
She watched God some more, but knew Mum would have cooked by now. She was hungry, and Mum would be mad if she was late for lunch. She hoped Mum had stopped crying. It made her tired when Mum cried. When she left the Agapemone, the disciples were gathered around Mr Jago and he was talking to them. They looked very happy. She wondered if they’d be having loaves and fishes for lunch. That sounded like an odd recipe, especially with no butter or chips or tomato sauce, but it was God’s favourite food.
Just down from the Gate House, she saw another girl, hiding in the bushes. It was Allison Conway, the dark-haired fright with big eyes who lived over the road. Jenny was afraid Allison would jump out and chase her, which she did sometimes, but the girl shrank back further into hiding. She must be spying on God, too, and be worried about being caught. Mum and Dad mightn’t like Terry and Teddy Gilpin, but they’d actually told her not to play with Allison. Mrs Yatman had told Mum about something Allison had done to her daughter Elizabeth at a fete, which Elizabeth wouldn’t talk about. It must have been very bad.
Jenny walked past Allison, pretending not to have seen her. On the way back to the garage, Jenny had to go down a path that was paved but too narrow for cars. It had high hedges on either side, and was scary at night. It was all right in the daylight, though. There was a sign prohibiting cyclists, but Jesus must not have seen it. He was riding a lovely bike. She bet angels polished the metal parts every day. They shone like the sun.
Jesus H. Christ stopped and talked to her for a bit. He was nice. He wanted her to follow him. Not follow like Mary’s little lamb, hanging around wherever He went, but follow like being kind to poor people and doing all the things He liked you to do. She said she would, and gave Him her flower. He was pleased.
PART
II
1
Syreeta was right: putting up tents in the dark wasn’t easy. It especially wasn’t easy when most of the workforce were wrecked.
They weren’t in any of the official sites. On Allison Conway’s advice, they’d driven up the hill and off the narrow road into the woods. There was a hard earth track, and Ferg had had to manoeuvre the Dormobile carefully to keep its wheels out of deep tractor ruts. In the pub, the local girl had given precise directions. According to her, there was a part of the woods that was common ground where anyone could set up a camp. He wasn’t sure he was convinced. He expected they’d wake up tomorrow to find the area full of KEEP OUT and TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT Placards, with dead animals nailed to trees as explicit warnings to the foolhardy.
It was a clear night, but the clearing, surrounded by tall trees, was thick with shadows. Ferg left the headlights on, which gave them a semicircle of visibility to work in. Dolar, who would be sleeping in the back of the van with Syreeta, wanted to crash out immediately, leaving the rest to it. She persuaded him with threats to help the others. The gesture would have meant more if he had been in a condition to be of actual use rather than just get in the way and trip over guy ropes.
It should have been easy. There were no wet patches to be avoided, and the dry, solid earth was ideal for hammering in skewers. Pam and Salim got their tent pitched first. Although it sagged in the middle, they did a good job. Ferg, working on his own since Jessica was off gathering sticks for the fire, came second. His tent wasn’t straight either, but would do for tonight. Mike Toad, who had the biggest tent all to himself because he’d borrowed it from his sister, was waving his arms under floppy canvas pretending to be a ghost, while Dolar was hammering a skewer out of shape with a mallet. Ferg and Pam took over from Dolar and eventually, despite Mike, the tent was put up. It was collapsed at one end, but since Mike wouldn’t come out they assumed he must be satisfied. Pam looked in to make sure he was breathing, and they left him alone.
Jessica had made a real Girl Guide’s fire, with stones piled in a circle around a teepee of broken twigs and twists of newspaper. However, she was the only one interested in a barbecue. They’d brought down sausages and frozen hamburgers in a cool box, and Jessica was hungry. Ferg was hungry too, but in a vague way that was a part of a larger discomfort. He already had the hangover he’d expected to wake up with, and his back and neck still ached from the drive.
Mike Toad was snoring like a chainsaw. Pam and Salim had already crept into their tent: their shadows wriggled in torchlight as they tried to get out of their clothes in the wardrobe-sized space. Dolar came back from taking a leak in the woods; he staggered sideways into a thorny shrub and made a lot of noise. Syreeta pulled him out and pushed him towards the van. He rolled his eyeballs and let her put him to bed.
‘Where’s the food?’ Jessica asked.
Ferg was dead on his feet. This morning, he had thought to end his day making love in a tent. It had been a pleasant fantasy, but one he’d returned to with less and less enthusiasm throughout the gruelling afternoon and unnerving evening. Now, his ideal was to cocoon himself in a thick sleeping bag and never wake up.
‘The food?’ Jessica reminded, irritated. She would not be put off. She probably felt as muc
h like eating as he did, but had made such a thing of it she had to keep up or be seen to back down. Even if there was no pleasure in it, she’d have her barbecue.
‘Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’ he said, knowing immediately that he shouldn’t have bothered with the suggestion. Her eyes bled dry of expression, her lower lip curled out. If he pushed, they’d get into a row that could last for days, seriously ruining his holiday. The simplest course was to go along with her.
‘Okay, okay. It’s here somewhere.’ He hauled his rucksack out of the tent, and found the plastic kitchen container. She had her lighter out. A snake-tongue of flame licked newspaper, and, in seconds, twigs crackled.
‘There’s been a fire here before.’
She could be right. The flames lit up the ground, and he saw a ragged circle around the fire, bare of grass. It was earth and loose shale, and did look as if, a long time ago, it had been charred.
‘Maybe a flying saucer landed here.’
She huffed and took the two-pronged barbecue fork from him. He had speared a pair of fat sausages on it. She held them in the flames. He knew she should wait for the wood to burn down to charcoal, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to drag this out. His eyes felt weighted. He opened two rolls with his thumb, and smeared in butter and ketchup. As far as he was concerned, Jessica could have both.
Inside their tent, Pam and Salim started breathing asthmatically in rhythmic union. The canvas shivered as they moved. Obviously, they weren’t too tired.
Jessica’s sausages went black and then split. Pink wounds opened and gristle dropped into the fire, which hissed like a kicked cat. Sitting by the fire, Ferg shut his eyes and looked forward to sleep.
2
Hazel was out with the kiln. At different points during the firing, the temperature had to be changed. She was obviously nervous. In Brighton, her tutor supervised the process. Here she was on her own, except for a tatty, clayey exercise book filled with Mike Bleach’s secret tips.
Paul was sitting up in bed, looking over notes for his imaginary war chapter. By tomorrow afternoon, he hoped to have a solid, closely argued 7,000 words on Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, Wells’s War in the Air, Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (ugh!), Saki’s When William Came, with a footnote on the turn-of-the-century genre’s best-selling last gasp, Hackett’s Third World War. Invasion fantasies for an island nation. He wondered if he should consider the various if-the-Nazis-had-invaded fictions—Deighton’s SS-GB, the films Went the Day Well? and It Happened Here—an offshoot of the form. All very respectable, and it got a lot of boring books out of the way without his actually having to read—or reread—all through them. The Battle of Dorking was short, and the Wells and Saki good enough to be painless. The rest were mainly hysterical, and got in as second-rank filler to prove he was being really comprehensive here.
Hazel was improving; after supper, she’d finished packing the kiln, which was fiddly and demanding but a change from being bent over the wheel, and started her firing. That done, she’d been almost satisfied with her day. For the first time in nearly a week they’d made love, finishing almost together. For a while, they were as they used to be. The Alder festival had encouraged the change in Hazel’s spirits. She’d been working up enthusiasm ever since the couple from the Agapemone came round. He realized the recent upsurge in customers was probably due to the influx of festival-goers. In fact, he was about to start worrying about shoplifting. This was obviously how to turn into a reactionary before he was thirty. The local paper was full of awful warnings about a convoy on the way, laying waste to everything in its path, leaving desolation in its wake. This year, they probably couldn’t make much difference to the countryside.
Earlier, Hazel had called the Agapemone and confirmed that she wanted a stall. Paul suspected he’d be drafted into looking after it. However, he didn’t think he would find much joy in Christian heavy metal, or whatever Jago’s followers were pushing. The festival was well organized and extensive enough to suggest behind-the-scenes muscle. The profits weren’t going to starving Africans or endangered whales, but something must be making all these rock stars want to traipse to the West Country. He’d thought it unfashionable to be into spirituality these days. It had been a long time since pop groups went to maharishis or sang ‘Atlantis will rise, Sunset Boulevard will fall’. But the shadow of the Sixties lay on the county. Glastonbury wasn’t far away, and some of the landscape was decidedly hobbitesque. Maybe New Age was catching on.
‘More homework?’ asked Hazel, coming in.
Paul started. His mind had been wandering.
‘Yes. I should give it a rest, I suppose.’ He shut the notebook and shoved it on to the bedside table.
Hazel had gone out to the kiln shed in jeans and a dressing gown. She skinned her jeans off, dropped the gown, and slipped under the duvet.
‘How are things out there?’
A pause. ‘All right… I think. The glaze tests have melted properly. I’ve been following Mike’s instructions.’
He slid his arm round her as she wriggled deeper into the bed. ‘I’m sure it’ll be okay.’
‘Hmm. Maybe.’
She was cold, surprisingly so. It was a warm night, but Hazel had goose flesh. She was almost shivering.
‘It’s spooky out there,’ she said. ‘And I’ve got a whole night of it. It’s darker here in the country.’
‘Of course. There’s no streetlight. You can see the stars better.’
She set her travelling alarm clock for her next visit to the kiln. ‘Paul, are you sure you don’t want me to sleep downstairs on the sofa? I’ve got to be out again at three and five.’
‘I always sleep through your alarm anyway,’ he lied. ‘Just don’t tread on me getting up.’
She put the clock back, and he snuggled closer to her. She was warming up, but still distracted. He kissed her neck, and she gently shoved him away, mumbling. He turned the light out. He fell asleep, lulled by the distant roaring of the kiln.
3
Even in the dark, especially in the dark, Allison knew the woods. There were the footpaths and rights of way everyone knew, and she used them from time to time. But her woods were mapped with secret runs she travelled alone. She was mistress of paths you couldn’t see unless you knew exactly where to look, bushes that could be pushed aside like gates, fences where wires were loose, hollows that were tunnels under thick bramble, long-branched trees that made bridges over walls. Left alone by her parents and the other children, she had made the woods her own years ago.
She watched the kids from London sit by their dying fire, eating sausages. She had sent them to the clearing they called the Bomb Site, but which the oldest villagers called Bannerman’s Bonfire Site. There’d been burnings here. Some nights, she could see its ha’ant, a faint firelight in the shape of a man. She was the only young person in Alder who appreciated the spot, who understood its importance. She wanted people there, in case they were needed. It was one of the several sites around the hill where the power could be felt. Moonglow Paddock was another. Burrow Mump, to the west. And an attic room she had never been in, high up in the Manor House, where there was a machine she didn’t understand.
The goof-faced boy with the mohican and the plump, sulky girl with dyed hair and deliberately ripped clothes didn’t talk to each other, just ate glumly. There was nothing to be gained from watching them further. She knew enough. On her knees, she crawled away from the kids’ camp, feeling earth through torn jeans, and squeezed into one of her runs, forcing herself against the ground as she wriggled under a thorny mass piled thick against a fence marking the edge of the Starkey property. She’d dug a way under the fence a few months ago, and kept it open ever since. Her breasts rubbed against the ground, and she felt aroused. She was used to it. When she was in heat, she was more powerful, could see more things. Soon she would take care of her body’s needs. At the festival, thered be plenty of people to fuck.
She emerged into the Starkey orchard and stood u
p. Earth fell from her clothes. She stretched out, feeling strength in her muscles, and ran fingers through her hair, brushing out twigs and dead leaves. Pausing by a particular tree, she remembered making Tina Starkey cry by bending back her hand until the wrist popped. They were ten years old. By the end of primary school, she’d made all the children in her class cry or bleed. She had only needed to do it once or twice to each child to establish a pattern. She hadn’t had to hurt anyone for years now, but she knew the time would come again. She felt it coming, felt it in her nipples, her guts, her clit.
Working her way through orchards and back gardens, she made it to the road, a mile or so outside the village. She had a drop in a lay-by, hidden under three flat stones. It held a black-handled Stanley knife with three fresh blades and a tube of mints. She flipped up a stone and pulled out the mints. She squeezed one into her mouth and replaced them. Also in the drop was her single heirloom, a small swastika. Her granddad, the only relative she’d ever had who understood her, had given it her, claiming he’d got it in the war after killing a German parachutist. That had to be a lie, because she knew Granddad never went to the war. As a farmworker, he was let off. She picked up the swastika and gripped it, trying to feel the power inside the symbol. Once, it had been studded with fake emeralds, but only two remained in their dents. She gripped the swastika, feeling she was drawing strength from it, and slipped it back into the drop.
It was quiet, but in the distance she heard a motorcycle. Someone was coming towards Alder from the Achelzoy road, swerving with its bends. She crouched in shadow. The noise got nearer. She scooped dry earth from the verge and camouflage-smeared her face, rubbing it in around her eyes. The bike was just around the corner now, engine loud as a pneumatic drill. She could smell petrol. She sucked the mint thin, then crunched it to powder. The rider came into view, leaning as he took the corner. He stuck his boot against the road and skidded in a circle. He wore a helmet with a dark mirror visor. He looked straight at her and she stood up, wiping earth from her face. He gunned his engine, making it roar, and let it die. He reached for a tag at his neck and pulled a zip that split his black leather jacket from neck to waist. He was naked underneath. The meat smell hit her, and she was fascinated by the whorls and ridges of hardened flesh on his chest. With a heavily gauntleted hand, he raised his visor. Another girl might have screamed at the face of Badmouth Ben, but Allison loved him at first sight.
