Jago

by Kim Newman

  The play got boisterous, and Hazel was pushing a little boy. Hed probably said something about her sacred hat. She was very sensitive about it.

  ‘Careful, Haze,’ Paul shouted, ‘remember you’re bigger than them.’

  She made a sorry face and laughed again, running off. She’d be back.

  ‘How are the tutors coming along?’ he asked.

  ‘Expensive,’ Patch said.

  ‘I’ll try to get some more money, but…’

  She pressed against his shoulder. ‘No, Paul, I wasn’t complaining. It’s not your fault.’

  He didn’t argue.

  ‘Sometimes I try to think of it, and give up. Learning everything all over again, from Cuh Ah Tuh to GCSEs. I wouldn’t have the patience.’

  Hazel’s memory had been wiped like a videotape. She’d come out of Alder newly born. Now, four months later, she was about eight years old, gaining fast.

  ‘She’s starting to lose interest in horses, and think about boys.’

  Paul shivered. That could be complicated. And Patch knew it.

  ‘It’s not easy being an eight-year-old who menstruates,’ she said. ‘And she’s always breaking things.’

  Mike Bleach had sent Hazel some modelling clay, and she was sculpting little figures. Maybe she would grow up to be a potter again. Probably not. Very occasionally, Hazel would do or say something that proved she was still the same girl, but she’d been reduced to nothing and now was building herself up in different ways. Her passion for horses was something new. Paul had given in, and arranged for her to have elementary riding lessons on the Downs. She looked like a lady giant among so many plummyvoiced little girls on ponies.

  ‘You know what was over there?’ Patch said, nodding to a bright new seafront gift shop.

  Paul did. The Adullam. Like everyone in the world, Paul knew a lot more now about Anthony William Jago. The newspapers still wouldn’t leave him alone, and there would be a wave of books, films and television programmes breaking soon.

  ‘I took Haze there last week. She wasn’t afraid. There was nothing.’

  ‘Of course. Jago is dead.’

  He remembered the man with a hole in his face. A hole he had made.

  ‘They never found his body.’

  ‘He’s dead. No ghosts.’

  ‘No.’

  The Agapemone had proved, at the financial inquest, to be extraordinarily wealthy. However, the Lord God Eternal obviously hadn’t felt a need to make a will, and so the estate was tied up in red tape at the Circumlocution Office for the next century. The Abode of Love was run from an address in East Molesey. Its head was Sister Janet Speke, whose lawyers were putting in a very strong bid for the funds. However, even if she did get the millions, she’d find them insufficient to settle the thousands of damages claims still outstanding against the Agapemone. She was in hiding, under multiple death threats, but issued frequent press releases in an attempt to have Jago canonized. She had come over well on Newsnight, but he understood her congregation was tiny.

  Paul had been interviewed by three authors working on different books about Jago, Alder and the disaster. And researchers from Granada Television, planning ‘a major docu-drama’ about ‘the British Jonestown’ which would apportion blame and point the finger of guilt at the government, the police and profit-hungry festival organizers. He’d lied to all of them, as had the overwhelming majority of the survivors. Those who tried to tell exactly what happened—what they thought happened—were under treatment. The rest were like Hazel, mercifully forgetful blanks. The prevailing theory was that some new designer drug had cleaned out their heads, and the tabloids were still hunting for ‘Pusher X’ who was supposed to have distributed the mindwipe dope. Mrs Penelope Steyning, mother of two ‘Alder children’, was the chairperson of a pressure group lobbying for more government assistance. Gerald Taine, the bruiser who had thrown Paul out of the Manor House, was awaiting trial for several murders he might or might not actually have committed during the riots. He turned out to be a decorated Falklands veteran who was rumoured to have garotted three sixteen-year-old Argentine prisoners during a lengthy ‘interrogation’.

  Unable to cope with maybe three thousand faceless corpses, the Press had singled out one of the dead to represent the rest, and splashed Allison Conway’s picture, suitably airbrushed into a semblance of dusky glamour, on all their front pages. The chief constable of Avon and Somerset had resigned, the conduct of his force under investigation. Legislation was passing through Parliament, thanks to the tireless lobbying of Sir Kenneth Smart, the member who’d adopted Alder as his cause. Sir Kenneth wanted to straitjacket the organizers of pop festivals, to increase penalties for drug trafficking, and to provide for a permanent emergency disaster force to be kept on standby. And there were inquisitorial committees looking into the affairs of every fringe religious group in the country, from the Moonies and the Scientologists through to the Quakers and the Unitarians. Relatives were still waiting for a decision about compensation. Peter Gabriel, the Heat and Loud Stuff (the sell-out reincarnation of Loud Shit) had done a charity concert at Wembley Stadium to raise funds for the victims of Alder, while a skunk group called Pusher X had cut a ‘Live at Alder’ album. None of the published lists of the dead mentioned James Lytton, although, to be fair, it was frighteningly easy to get lost in the fine print sea of names. There were more than a hundred unidentified, unclaimed, unloved dead. Paul heard that Edward Gilpin and Jeremy Maskell had lost fathers, but otherwise were trying to pull through. It hadn’t rained in the West Country until late August, but now the weather was back to drizzly normal. Last week, Paul had heard someone tell an Alder festival joke.

  ‘Is that woman looking at us?’ Patch asked.

  ‘Ignore it,’ he said, glancing.

  A woman in a hat and coat was leaning against a railing by the gift shop. Paul knew her at once.

  He wondered if she’d come to see where the Adullam had been, or to see them.

  Hazel came back, out of puff, and Patch fixed her scarf more firmly around her neck, kissing the red tip of her nose and making her giggle. Hazel’s breath was a cloud of frost that misted Patch’s glasses.

  She broke away from her sister and hugged Paul impulsively, planting a cold, wet kiss on his cheek. These were the worst moments, especially when Patch was around. Hazel was still twenty-one on the outside.

  ‘Look at the lady,’ she said, pointing, excited.

  Hazel had a blue blotch, like a permanent bruise, on her ribs, above her heart. It was her only physical scar from Alder.

  When they looked again, the woman was gone.

  Wiping her glasses, Patch felt left out of it. She could tell Paul and Hazel were keeping something from her. Sometimes, in bed, quietly, she would try to draw out of him what really had happened. Paul was afraid one day he would try to tell her.

  ‘Who was she?’ Patch asked.

  ‘She’s my fairy godmother,’ Hazel said, eyes quickening.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The germ of this novel first appeared in 1979, before Anthony Jago founded the Agapemone. The initial, now unrecognizable, idea arose in the Common Room of the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex, during conversations with David Cross and Susan Rodway—both of whom have wound up lending their names to characters certainly very different from themselves—and has stuttered almost to life at several times over the last twelve years. So, forgive me, but the list of people who need to be thanked is annoyingly long. First, a credit to Charles Mander, author of The Reverend Prince and His Abode of Love (EP Publishing, 1976), who drew my attention to the nineteenth-century story of the Agapemone, which—in historical actuality—was founded in Spaxton, Somerset, in 1846. The Great Manifestation, as described here, was the chief sacrament of the Reverend Henry James Prince’s community, although without the psychokinetic fireworks, and post addressed to ‘the Lord God’ was duly delivered to Mr Prince.

  This debt to an individual leads to anot
her to an organization. In 1980, I was involved in the production of Charles’s play based on the history of the Agapemone, produced by Sheep Worrying Theatre of Bridgwater, Somerset. This group later staged my own My One Little Murder Can’t Do Any Harm, which first took me to the invented village of Alder and introduced the characters of Edwin Winthrop, Catriona Kaye and Irena Dubrovna. Thanks are due to the cast of that production for adding flesh to my 1920s flashback people: Dave Butland, Kevin Freeman, Sally Grieve, Pat Hallam, Elizabeth Hickling,

  Susannah Hickling, Dave Kieghron, Tim Mander, David Newton, Councillor Brian Smedley (who also wrote the music for the various original songs that crop up throughout this text), Catriona Toplis. Various people connected with Sheep Worrying also deserve nods for being around in Somerset in the 1980s, notably Angela Leeman and Andrew Napthine for taking me to a muddy Glastonbury Festival in 1982, Alex Luckes and Jon Lyon for being there when Brian stood on Burrow Mump and declared himself King of Wessex, Eugene Byrne, for numerous small points of detail, plus Lynne Cramer, Alan Gadd, Ed Grey, Rob Hackwill, Rodney Jones, Sarah Marks and Robin Tucker for being in various incarnations of Club Whoopee, and for all past and present members of various incarnations of Sheep Worrying Enterprises from 1980 onwards. And, of course, my parents, Bryan and Julia Newman, who own and run the Pottery, Aller (drop in and buy a coffee set) which is the physical inspiration for the Pottery, Alder.

  Other, major debts incurred during the writing of Jago are owed to Bryan Ansell, Clive Barker, Iain Banks, Scott Bradfield, Anne Billson, Saskia Baron, Dave Bischoff, Monique Brocklesby, Faith Brooker, John Brosnan, Steve Caplin, Ramsey Campbell, Yer Man Dave Carson, Richard Combs, John Clute, Stewart Crosskell, Meg Davis, Phil Day, Elaine di Campo, Alex Dunn, Malcolm Edwards, Dennis Etchison, Chris Evans, Fiona Ferguson, Jo Fletcher, Nigel Floyd, Chris Fowler, Carl Ford, Neil Gaiman, Kathy Gale (the editor, not the secret agent), Steve Gallagher, Gamma, David Garnett, Lisa Gaye, John Gilbert, Charles L. Grant, Colin Greenland, Guy Hancock, Judith Hanna, Phil Hardy, Antony Harwood, Will Hatchett, Rob Holdstock, David Howe, Kate Hughes, Maxim Jakubowski, Stefan Jaworzyn, Vanessa Jeffcoat, Nick John, Alan Jones, Neil Jones, Steve Jones, Mr Juicy-Juicy, Roz Kaveney, Leroy Kettle, Mark Kermode PhD, Garry Kilworth, Nigel Kneale, Karen Krizanovich, Joe R. Lansdale, Steve Laws, Samantha Lee, Laurence Lemer, James Litton, Amanda Lipman, Nigel Matheson, Paul J. McAuley, Professor Norman McKenzie (who was certainly not expecting things to turn out this way), Tom Monteleone, Mark Morris, Cindy Moul, Colin Murray, Sasha Newman, Peter Nicholls, Phil Nutman, Julian Petley, Linda Pickersgill, David Pirie, Terry Pratchett, Humphrey Price, David Pringle, Dave Reeder, Steve Roe, Nick Royle, Geoff Ryman, Clare Saxby, Adrian Sibley, Dean and Sally Skilton, Cathy Smedley (gurgle gurgle), Brian Stableford, Christa Stadtler, Alex Stewart, Janet Storey, Dave and Danuta Tamlyn, Jax Thomas, Steve Thrower, Tom Tunney, Lisa Tuttle, Karl Edward Wagner, Maureen Waller, Ingrid von Essen, Lucy Parsons, Mike and Di Wathen, Susan Webster, Chris Wicking, John Wrathall, Miranda Wood and Jack Yeovil. Finally, I’d like to thank those who’ve requested they remain anonymous but who provided the bulk of Mike Toad’s jokes, including one David Roper told me about Andrew Lloyd Webber that was too vomitous even for Mike to use in print.

  KIM NEWMAN

  Crouch End, March 1991

  …AND OTHER STORIES

  ‘Here are three stories featuring characters and settings which first appeared in Jago…

  ‘Ratting’ first appeared in New Crimes 2 (1993), edited by Maxim Jakubowski; it uses a couple of Jago characters as a way of retelling an anecdote I heard someone tell while I was at university. At the time, I assumed it was an urban legend—note how many urban legends take place in the countryside—like the dead granny on the roofrack or the naked teenagers at the surprise birthday party, and I’d hear it over and over. As it happens, it isn’t and I haven’t. So I thought I’d preserve it in fiction.

  ‘Great Western’ first appeared in New Worlds (1997), edited by David Garnett, and ‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ first appeared in The Time Out Book of London Short Stories, Volume 2 (2000), edited by Nicholas Royle. Obviously, these stories take place in a different continuum from Jago; ‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ also offers a different version of the Diogenes Club and associated characters from those found in the Anno Dracula books and my Diogenes Club stories.

  ‘Cold Snap’, in Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, incidentally features some of the characters from Jago too; it will reappear when Titan Books reissue that collection.

  RATTING

  You know Watership Down,’ Teddy said, hefting his .22 to his shoulder and tracking an invisible rabbit through muddy green grass. ‘You’ve read the book, you’ve seen the film, you’ve bought the video, now…’

  He made a pow sound and jerked his rifle as if he’d fired.

  ‘…eat the pie!’

  Terry grunted but didn’t laugh. He hadn’t read a book since Janet and John and only watched videos with exploding cars or big teats in them.

  It was a waste, really. Only having Terry as an audience for his funnies.

  ‘Weren’t no rabbit in they ditch,’ Terry said, missing the point.

  His brother’s gun scattered so much shot into anything he hit that it was useless for eating. To Terry, eating wasn’t the point: shooting was the point, killing was the point.

  It was another boring summer. No school, no work, no nothing. Teddy wanted to hitch round the country on his own, but Dad insisted he hang around Alder with Terry. Dad had the idea he could keep his brother out of trouble.

  Dad was daft.

  They were walking on the B-road that snaked out across the moor. It had been wet and everything was a stark green. One of Teddy’s boots was worn through at the sole; every time he put his foot in a puddle his sock got a soak.

  A blue van drove along and the brothers had to edge into a lay-by to let it pass. Teddy recognised Goddard, the vet. Someone out this way had trouble. How animals managed to survive the millions of years before they invented vets was a puzzle. Of course, back in prehistoric ages they hadn’t had Terry Gilpin to worry about.

  It was another day of poking around the countryside in search of something for Terry to kill. And of Teddy cracking funnies his brother didn’t understand.

  ‘Youm hear about Sharon Coram’s tattoos?’ Teddy said.

  Terry’s interest almost perked. Sharon was the girl who shagged everyone in Alder. Actually, Teddy figured she shagged everyone except Terry, which was why his brother was so interested.

  ‘Tattoos?’

  ‘Yeah, got ’em done over Taunton way. One of they New Age Traveller blokes.’

  ‘Sharon an’t got no tattoos.’

  ‘Not where you can see ’em. On her inner thighs, up under her skirts, so they rub together when she walks. She’m got Prince Charles on one side and Lady Di on the other.’

  ‘You’m shittin’ me,’ Terry said.

  ‘Know what happened when she got home and showed em to Gary Chilcot?’

  Gary was more or less Sharon’s most regular boyfriend.

  Terry shook his head.

  ‘Gary takes off her jeans and her knickers and that and says, “well, I don’t recognise the face on the right or the one on the left…”’

  Teddy paused, to punch up the laugh line.

  ‘“…but the one in the middle’s Terry Gilpin.”’

  There was a long pause. Teddy had meant to say the name of a teacher they didn’t like or some old village git, but the last time he’d told the funny he got laughs using his brother’s name.

  Gears ground painfully in Terry’s mind.

  ‘You callin’ I a cunt?’ he said, making a fist around his shotgun.

  ‘It’s a funny, thicko,’ Teddy said.

  Terry took a grip on Teddy’s shoulder and squeezed. Teddy’s arm popped and sharp pains leaped across his back.

  After the hurting stopped, things were even. Teddy was fed up with this. Every day, Terry would find som
e excuse to maul him. Usually he didn’t even have to tell a funny or pull a stunt.

  ‘Let’s go rattin’,’ Terry said.

  They were out near the Starkey farm anyway. It had once been one of the biggest in the county but bits had been sold off years ago and Jimmy Starkey just had a few fields with a couple of cows and an overgrown patch next to the house where all the rubbish of the village ended up. The yard, which was piled high with rotting junk, was the source of a smell famous throughout the village as the Starkey Stench. The pile was alive with rats and Starkey had been known to let village kids pop off guns at them. They were doing him a favour, really. The last time Teddy and Terry had freed the Starkey Stench of rats, Jimmy had given them a couple of fivers and a gallon of his home brew.

  But since then, Terry had been found out as the one who cut up the tyres on Jimmy’s car. He had been pissed on cider and didn’t remember why he’d done it. A typical Terry stunt: useless, pointless and doomed.

  Usually when you got near the Starkey farm, just about when the Stench hit the nostrils, your ears would be assaulted by yapping. Jimmy had a dog called Vindaloo, a mongrel old as Cliff Richard and noisier than a rusty chainsaw. If Vindaloo still had teeth, Jimmy wouldn’t have to let kids shoot his rats. The dog had been a well-known biter of vermin. Newcomers always thought him a dangerous child-killer, though Vindaloo had never, so far as Teddy knew, laid claw or tooth on human flesh.

  When they got to the Starkey yard, with the Stench all around them, Teddy saw Vindaloo in an old plastic laundry basket by the front door. He was breathing badly.

  Teddy knelt by the dog and realised Vindaloo smelled badly too. He started a feeble whine. Teddy stroked and the dog leaked a gallon of spit from his loose mouth.

  Terry stood in the yard, looking at the pile of rubbish. It seemed to seethe. Yesterday’s rain had turned much of it to sludge. A rat poked its head out of a hole near the top and vanished again. The rodents had tunnelled extensively in the pile, like Vietnamese soldiers in a Chuck Norris video. There could be dozens of them, slipping in and out of secret entrances, carrying off food, spreading disease.