by Phil Rickman
‘Yes.’ She sat down at the table. ‘All of you. Please.’
‘You go to bed.’ Dr Kent Asprey gave her a shrewdly caring look. ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’
‘I’ll call you,’ Merrily said. ‘If it’s necessary. Thank you.’
‘I’ll tell the bishop you’ll be in touch,’ Ted said ponderously. ‘When you’re well.’
‘I’ll call him tomorrow.’
Thank God Dermot Child had been detained at the organ; he’d have been less easy to get rid of. Merrily let her head fall briefly into her hands as the door closed behind them and Jane came back alone. Peered through her fingers at the kid’s face, flushed with concern, or it might have been humiliation.
‘Go and change, flower. Get off to the party.’
‘You are joking,’ Jane said.
‘I need to do some thinking.’ Merrily raised her head. ‘All right?’
‘Mum, you’re ill. If you go to bed, I’ll bring you whatever you need ... hot-water bottle.’
‘I don’t need anything, and I’m not going to bed.’
‘Well, you can’t stay in here, it’s dismal. I’ll light the fire in the parlour.’
‘Just leave me, Jane.’
Jane hung on.
‘What was it? Something you ate?’
‘I didn’t eat anything all day, did I? I expect that was the problem. And getting uptight. Anyway, I feel terrible about everything, and I’m always better feeling terrible on my own.’
‘I’m going to stay,’ Jane said.
‘All right, you light a fire and we’ll sit and have a good old discussion. We’ll talk about Miss Devenish and what happened when you went to her aid that day instead of going to school and what you talk about together. All those things we’ve been meaning to discuss.’
‘I’ll get changed then,’ Jane said.
But she wasn’t too happy about it. Throwing up in church, when you were in Mum’s line of work, was not exactly a really brilliant thing to do, and since coming to Ledwardine Mum had been, for the first time, quite hot on keeping up appearances. This was going to damage her. Maybe, in the years to come, she’d be quite affectionately known as the vicar who tossed her cookies down the nave. But maybe there wouldn’t be years to come, not now.
How did she feel about that? Bad. Because coming here had put her on to like a whole new level of life. What Lucy called a new depth of Being. Whatever this meant, it wasn’t in the Bible, which was why it was unwise to even approach the subject with Mum. Particularly tonight.
In the solitude of her apartment, Jane looked up.
At what were supposed to have been the Mondrian walls. And the sloping ceiling between the beams. Into the blue and gold. Into the otherness. It was all so strange. Made her feel ... ooooh. She shook herself.
Clothes-wise, she didn’t overdo it. Black velvet trousers and silky purple top. Not a good night for making a spectacle of herself. Plus, if it turned out to be the kind of party Colette had in mind, a quick getaway might just be called for.
She’d gone ahead and lit the fire in the drawing room. Not so much because it was cold as because it might look halfway homely in there with a few flames. Before changing, she’d brought in some logs and filled up a bucket with coal. Kind of wishing she was staying in. But that invitation to a serious discussion left her no option. Jesus, Mum, she wanted to say, I don’t know what happened that day. Or that night under the apple tree. I’m not clear on it.
But I’m getting help.
Before she left, she stoked up the fire. Mum was down on the rug in a thick bottle-green polo-neck jumper and jeans, hugging her knees. It was a May night out there, but the vicarage remained in January. Except for the top floor.
‘I won’t be too late.’
‘I’ll wait up.’
‘You mustn’t. I’ll be annoyed if you do.’
‘OK, flower,’ Mum said.
With her face washed clean of make-up and her hair pushed behind her ears, she looked awfully young and vulnerable. Younger than me in some ways, Jane thought. And feeling there’s so much she doesn’t know.
24
Uh-oh ...
AT THE CORE of a bedlam of bodies, Colette Cassidy was mouthing at her.
‘What?’
‘... you been, Janey? It’s nearly midnight.’
Jane stayed where she was and let Colette come stammering towards her through the strobe storm, through a foundry of sound. The restaurant at Cassidy’s Country Kitchen was this square, attic space with irregular beams and white, bumpy walls. There was a stage area, where the Cassidys sometimes had a pianist, but tonight the piano, like most of the tables, had been taken away and the stage had become Dr Samedi’s spectacular sound-lab.
‘Sorry. Had problems.’
‘So I heard.’ Colette’s grin was lifted by the lights and put back intact. ‘Cool’
‘What?’
‘Give the Reverend Mummy my compliments. Bet the bloody bishop wasn’t expecting that.’
Gossip seemed to spread at more than the speed of sound in this village. Jane didn’t bother to explain that it hadn’t actually been all that funny at the time.
There must be eighty or ninety people here, mostly imports, Colette’s age and a year or two older. The flashing lights were reflected in a lot of sweat on faces. Jane recognized hardly anybody, suspecting she was the youngest here. Some of the dancers looked ... well ... out of it. There was nothing stronger than Coke and Dr Pepper on the tables pushed up against the walls, but she thought she’d seen the boy from her school called Mark, who seemed to be the fourth-form’s principal dealer in Es and speed.
‘All the same, Janey,’ Colette was saying, ‘you didn’t have to spend half the night with the old girl.’
‘Sorry. Something else came up.’
Colette didn’t seem to hear. Dr Samedi was squealing something over the industrial drum ‘n’ bass on tapes. He wore a top hat, with ribbons, and a black bow tie. No shirt. Jacket open to his shiny chest with a white necklace showing. It was a jacket from a morning suit, black, with tails, and strategically torn in several places like the jackets the punks used to wear in Mum’s day. It was a scarecrow’s jacket, and that was what Dr Samedi looked like, a scarecrow animated by lightning.
‘I said,’ Jane shouted, ‘something came up!’
‘You should be so lucky. Listen—’
Colette was wearing something black and shiny and daring, naturally. A gangly guy in a white shirt was hanging around behind her. Colette moved close to Jane.
‘OK, listen, that’s Quentin the Suitable.’
‘Who?’
‘Like, the parents always have to make sure there’s a Suitable One, you know what I mean? His old man’s some kind of exalted surgeon at the General. I just wish somebody would surgically remove him.’
Quentin was tall and looked about seventeen.
‘He’s not bad,’ Jane said.
‘Especially if you’re into vintage tractors. His hobby. He also dances like one.’
Jane smiled. Quentin strobed unhappily about six feet away. Colette put her squashy lips against Jane’s ear.
‘Janey, I can’t unload the dim bastard. I go for a tinkle, he waits outside the fucking door.’
‘... you want me to do?’
‘Take him off my hands?’
‘You are joking ...’
‘Oh, come on, your night’s ruined anyway. You don’t have to snog him or anything, just keep him for two minutes while I melt away. The guy’s so sad if you tell him you have fantasies about having sex on a tractor, he’ll just ask you what make. Please, Janey ...’
Colette looked desperate, like life was running out on her. But then it was her party. On the stage, Dr Samedi hovered demonically over his mixers, moving in a vibrating swirl of lights, as though he was turning himself into light, into pure, bright energy. And Jane understood – hated the heartless music, understood perfectly about Dr Samedi’s need to become light. Dr Samedi was in his element. In his orb.
She felt suddenly half-separated from it all, as though the dance floor represented all human life and she was flickering on the edge of it. For an instant, she felt weightless, as though she might vanish into one of the cracks of darkness between strobes. She felt like this quite often now, but never inside a building before. Well, except for the church, for a moment, earlier on.
‘Janey?’ Colette clutched at her. ‘Christ, I thought you’d ...’
‘Sorry.’
‘Please, Janey ...’
‘Sure,’ Jane said, squeezing her hands together to bring herself down. ‘Whatever.’
When Merrily awoke on the sofa in front of the dying fire, she was happy for a moment. Frozen and stiff, but she’d been asleep for two, three hours and hadn’t dreamed about anything she could recall. A small miracle.
But this time, reality was the curse. The priest-in-charge had tonight been physically sick in her own beautiful and historic church in front of the biggest congregation she’d ever pulled.
How could she have just let that happen? Children did that, just threw up without warning. The priest-in-charge was not even in charge of her own metabolism.
Merrily rolled down from the sofa to the rough, industrial carpet. After a while, she sat up, shivering, and threw more lumps of coal onto the embers in the dog grate, thrusting in the poker, levering up some heat, inching closer, on this balmy May evening, to the miniature medieval hell of smoking cliffs and molten canyons.
Medieval hell. She was part of a medieval institution. Just that the modern Church refused to connect with its roots. Which was why the modern Church was losing it.
If you’d said that to her six months ago, she’d have flared up a whole lot faster than this coal, but there was no denying it any more: in a world where huge numbers of people were begging for spiritual sustenance from exotic gurus and mediums and clairvoyants and healers, the Church was getting sidelined.
David Campbell had actually asked the question, Do these phenomena really fit inside our field of operation? The Church still asking everyone to put their faith in a huge all-powerful supernatural being while loftily backing away from lesser phenomena.
Like a pale, naked figure, cold as a slug, crawling towards you up the aisle of your church. Obviously, a representation of her own perceived isolation as the first woman minister of Ledwardine?
Ha.
From far up in the soaring hollows of the house came a sudden, resonant bump.
There was a break in the music, the strobes were off. On the stage, Dr Samedi was guardedly allowing some of the boys to examine his mixers and tape decks and things. At a table near the door, Jane sat with Quentin the Suitable in his baggy cricket shirt.
It had been hard going at first, but so far he hadn’t mentioned tractors.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I didn’t really want to come tonight at all’
‘No kidding.’
‘It’s just that my parents come for dinner here quite regularly, and they’ve become fairly friendly with Colette’s parents.’
‘They must be really sad, lonely people,’ Jane said.
Quentin didn’t get it.
Jane smiled at him. ‘So tonight’s the first time you’ve actually met Colette?’
‘I tend to be away at school a lot. Only this weekend, our half-term’s started, so ... No, I’ve never actually met her before.’
Jane said airily, ‘Some bitch, huh?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Take my advice, Quentin, don’t get involved. She’s, you know, she’s kind of been around.’
Quentin looked puzzled. ‘You mean abroad?’
Jane rolled her eyes. ‘I mean been around as in eat-you-for-breakfast kind of been around.’
‘Oh,’ Quentin said. ‘I see. Well, she did seem a bit disconcerted when her father asked her to sort of ... look after me. I think she had other plans.’
‘Colette always has plans.’
‘No, I mean someone she was interested in.’
‘Oh?’ Jane sat up.
‘I may be wrong.’
‘No, go on.’ Jane looked into his soupy eyes, but he quickly averted them. ‘This is interesting. What made you think that, Quentin?’
But she didn’t find out because this quivering shadow fell across the table and she looked up into the face of a grossly sweating Dean Wall.
‘This’ll do.’ Dean pulled out a chair opposite Jane and sank into it and beamed at Jane and then at Quentin. Danny Gittoes was with him and Mark, the reputed dealer. ‘All right, are we?’
Jesus, Jane thought, who let these bozos in? She’d forgotten about Colette’s professed need for ‘tension’. Silly cow. She looked around for Barry, the manager, locating him behind the bar where a waitress was putting out things to nibble, apparently on the instructions of Colette’s mother who didn’t realize that the only things that got nibbled at parties like this were ears. To begin with.
Mark the Dealer stood by the door, hands in his pockets. Danny Gittoes sat down opposite Quentin, who seemed to be urgently wishing he was somewhere else. Like the dentist’s.
‘So, go on ...’ Dean nodded towards Dr Samedi and looked at Danny. ‘Voodoo, eh?’
‘Kind of thing,’ Danny said.
‘Where’s this then, Gittoes? Jamaica?’
‘Haiti. He was this voodoo God in Haiti. Only he was called Baron Samedi, see. God of the dead. Hung around graves. Led these tribes of zombies. And he wore that same gear – coat with tails and a top hat. Maybe a stick. Like a cane. I read this book. So that’s where he gets it from, see?’
Dean winked at Quentin, who smiled stiffly. ‘And this was, like, devil worship, right?’
‘Yeah. Well, more or less.’
“Cause Jane’s well into that, see,’ Dean said, not looking at Jane.
‘You on about?’
‘Got her ma into it now, too, from what they says.’
‘OK.’ Jane half rose. ‘Watch it.’
She saw Quentin’s hand tightening around his can of Dr Pepper’s.
‘What they’re saying,’ Dean said, ‘is that Jane’s mother, the vicar, she chucked her load in church tonight.’
Danny Gittoes said, ‘Eh?’
‘You en’t yeard? All over the village, man. ‘Er chucked up. Splatted all over the bloody bishop.’
‘Geddoff!’ Danny said theatrically. Jane smelled set-up.
‘Runs in the family, see.’ Dean’s little eyes glinting. ‘Can’t keep nothin’ down. Throws up right in the middle of’er ordination service, whatever they calls it.’
‘Never!’
Dean cackled. ‘Er’d prob’ly been on the cider!’
‘Shut your fat face!’ Jane was out of her seat. But Dean went on as if he hadn’t heard her.
‘Well, what’s that but a sign of Satanism, see. A devil-worshipper, witch, whatever you wanner call ’em, they can’t go into a Christian church without they vomits. I seen it in a film. Ole black and white job. Mark o’ the Witch, some shit like that. Chucks her—’
‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘You bastard!’
‘You year some’ing then, Gittoes?’ Dean leaned back smugly. ‘Makes you think, though, dunnit? Why don’t Jane Watkins ever go to church of a Sunday? You ever see Jane in church?’
‘Don’t go, do I?’
‘Well me neither, but my gran does and ’er says to me the other day, ’er says, You never sees the vicar’s daughter at no services, do you? En’t right, that. En’t right at all!
‘She was there tonight,’ Danny Gittoes said. ‘I seen ’er goin’ in. School uniform an’ all.’
‘Ec ... sacly,’ Dean said. ‘Exacly, boy. Special occasion, so ‘er’d need to be there, bring down the forces of darkness, innit? Now ... No, listen, this is interestin’ ... You remember that night Jane threw up on us. Where’d that happen exacly? Right outside the bloody church! In fact ... in fact... it was up agin’ the ole church wall, right? So that’s holy ground, ennit? An’ we said, we sa
id we was all gonner go in the church porch, open a coupler cans, and that was when she done it. You think about that, Gittoes ...’
‘Fuckin’ hell, Dean—’
Danny Gittoes broke off because the lights began to fade and the strobing began from the stage, Dr Samedi demonstrating something. Dean’s voice rose placidly out of the flashes.
‘She only got to think about goin’ in the church porch, see, an’ up it comes. Splat. Well, all right, Jane never threw up tonight, see, but her evil presence in that church was enough to—’
Jane threw herself at him, knocking the glass out of his hand, seeing alarm on his fat, porous face, but, because of the strobe, when she saw it again it was wearing a grin and he was on his feet, around her side of the table and his arms were around her.
‘Wanner dance with me, is it ... devil woman?’
‘Get your filthy—’
Dean gripped her tightly; she felt something hard against her stomach. She realized that in the strobe it might look as though they were actually snogging. She couldn’t kick him because of the chair legs in the way. She wondered where she could bite him without encountering great pools of sweat.
‘All right.’ Quentin was on his feet. ‘Now let’s stop this.’
‘Hey,’ Dean said over Jane’s shoulder. ‘It fuckin’ talks. I ‘ad it figured for one ‘o Doc Samedi’s zombies.’
‘You just ... just let her go,’ Quentin said uncertainly.
‘Let her geeeow! What you gonner do about it, sunshine? Phone up your dad on the mobile, is it?’
Through the flashes, Jane saw that Danny Gittoes had pushed his chair back but was still sitting on it. The third boy, Mark, however, had moved in from the door. His hands were out of his pockets, something gleaming in one of them.
Jane screamed, ‘He’s got a knife!’
And the room went quiet.
‘Lights,’ someone snapped. Dean Wall’s arms went slack and Jane stepped away as the strobe stopped and the main lights came up.
Barry, the manager, ex-SAS, came across the room like a small tank. Behind him, Lloyd Powell.
‘Who shouted?’ Barry demanded.
Jane looked across at Mark. He was a slight, quiet-looking, mousy-haired boy. You tended not to notice him. Both arms hung by his side, the hands empty. Could she have been mistaken?
