by Phil Rickman
‘And the way Jane’s been hanging around her ... I did warn you about that. Don’t get too close, I think were my words.’
‘Yes. Thank you, Ted.’ She felt like clubbing him with the phone. ‘I need to ask you, are there any relatives in the parish?’
‘None left alive I know of. McCready’s her solicitor, he’ll deal with all that.’
‘No, I meant— Oh, forget it.’
‘I’m trying to be down to earth, Merrily. Trying to rescue a runaway situation. Somebody has to.’
‘Situation...?’
‘You should never have gone out on that platform this afternoon. Here was I, telling people you’d contracted a stomach bug, and now it starts to look like, shall we say a nervous complaint?’
‘Oh, a nervous complaint. I see.’
‘Merrily, I don’t know what your personal problems are, as you haven’t seen fit to come and talk to me about them, but I do know that people are beginning to see you as a little too ... too ...’
He broke off. The line throbbed with the unspoken: he’d seen the posters and God knew what else. And one did have to think of one’s own position in the community.
‘Lucy Devenish,’ Lol said, ‘can’t die like this.’
‘Lucy Devenish just did,’ Merrily said gently. ‘And there’s nothing you or Jane, with due regard to superstitions and omens, can do to alter that.’
He stopped pacing. From the market square came the merry wail and thump of an accordion band, for the morris dancing.
‘Not Christian, I suppose. Omens.’
Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘You smoke, Lol? I can’t remember.’
‘Used to.’ He took one, his fingers twitching. ‘Thanks. There’ve been shocks, but this ... She could make you believe you weren’t abnormal, you know? Everything has a rational explanation, she’d say. Just that most people’s idea of what’s rational is severely limited.’
‘Especially the Church’s?’
‘Maybe. She’s dead, I’m alive. Where’s the divine logic there?’
‘I’m supposed to know that? Being a priest?’
‘I can’t see you as a priest,’ Lol said. ‘I don’t know why someone like you would want to be a priest.’
‘Lol.’ She put her lighter to his cigarette. ‘Is there something happening that it’s not been considered suitable for me to know about? Because of me being a priest?’
‘I don’t ...’He looked apprehensive. ‘Maybe.’
‘There have certainly been things I don’t understand.’ She took a lungful of smoke, breathed it out hard. ‘And that the Church doesn’t want to.’
‘Like?’
‘Like, the house haunts me. I hate it. Nothing’s been right since we moved in. I have bad dreams. The kind that make you wonder if they really are dreams. What would poor Lucy have said about that, do you think, if I hadn’t been a priest?’
He took a small, self-conscious puff on the cigarette. ‘She once said to me that I was living too near the orchard.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Well, this was the Village in the Orchard. The orchard was its life-force. Now that’s all gone, maybe the orchard isn’t such a good place.’
‘Resentful. They grows resentful.’ Merrily put the cigarette in the ashtray, pushed it a couple of inches away. ‘I’m having too many of these.’
‘If an apple had rolled right up to my feet from a tree full of blossom,’ Lol said, ‘I’d probably feel much like Jane.’ He looked at his cigarette as though it represented some aspect of his past he didn’t really want to remember. He put it out in the ashtray. ‘Sorry. Wasteful.’
‘You always been superstitious?’
‘Or paranoid? Is that the same thing? Like I was always influenced by this guy, Nick Drake. Called the band after one of his songs.’
‘Hazey Jane.’ Merrily started to sing it, went wrong and gave up. ‘Never quite figured what that song was about, but she was obviously maladjusted. Cursing where she came from, swearing at the night. My step-brother had his albums. He was very appealing, was Nick Drake. But probably ill.’
‘Probably was,’ Lol said. ‘For a long time, I was convinced I was going to die when I was twenty-six, like him. And then I was twenty-eight and I hadn’t died, and so I felt guilty. And let down, somehow. That was when I went in for the second time.’
‘The hospital?’
‘Sounds’ – he smiled – ‘insane. But these things get inside you and they get mixed up with everything else that’s wrong, and it’s like ... Is it illness, or is there something else? Alison thought it’d be good for me, moving out here, fresh air, simple life. Only Lucy saw the problems. Everywhere has its own bag of superstition. Wherever I go, it all seems to connect. I remembered Nick’s song “Fruit Tree”, which more or less says you don’t make it till you die. Sometimes, I had the feeling that Nick and Robert Johnson and these guys were out there, among the apple trees. That make sense? Does it hell.’
‘Yes, it does. I’ll tell you what happened to make me do it, if you like. I mean join the clergy.’
She undid her dog collar, placed it on the table so that it surrounded the ashtray and the smoking cigarette.
The past unclouding. The days when it all fell into place. Sean away in London for a week of meetings, and on the second day, there was this tentative visit from his anxious clerk, with a briefcase full of grief, and it was all laid out before her, all the corrupting entrails.
The third day, trying to lose the bad smell, she took her shrieking headache on a long drive into the country in the ill-gotten Volvo. Ending up at the unknown church of some saint with an obscure Celtic name – you could see the tower from a couple of miles away, but it turned out to be a tiny little place reachable only by a track. How could you put into words what happened in that bare, little church? What happened inside you that chose to happen there.
‘See, for some time before this, I’d been helping our local vicar. Decent guy, but what a waste, this man being a vicar, collecting ten grand a year, whatever it was then – if you lived with Sean, everybody was rated according to their income: he’s a forty a year man, whatever. So ten grand a year and a regular congregation of nineteen. What a loser.’
Merrily watched the smoke rising out of the white circle.
‘It was funny – one of the things that occurred to me in that little church was ... nineteen, that’s a hell of a lot of lives. And that was when I saw the blue and the gold.’
Ah. The blue and the gold. An inner vision? Hey, watch it – warning finger raised by Dr David Campbell – you’re in danger of crossing the demarcation line.
Aw, come on, David, aren’t I allowed one mystical experience, if I don’t talk about it too much? The sense of a huge benevolence, the awesome moment of cosmic awareness, the dwindling of self in an exhilarating vastness of blue and gold?
‘Anyway, whatever it was,’ she wound up, with a half-desperate cynicism, ‘it got rid of the headache.’
‘You ever experience it again?’
’A trace. An essence. Whenever I knelt to pray, it would be there, like a backcloth. This velvet security blanket of deep blue and gold. It kept me going.’
And it isn’t there now?’
‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘It isn’t, now. I don’t quite remember when it stopped. These past couple of weeks have seemed like about ten years.’
‘You ever go back to that little church?’
‘I’d be scared to,’ she said frankly. ‘In case it was just a little, grey, empty building. Wow, you’re really getting everything here, Lol. The full crisis-of-faith bit.’
She pulled the cigarette out of the ashtray, out of the dog collar.
‘It’s ironic, because I thought, the way you do, that I was being guided here. Like you maybe? Did you feel that?’
‘No. Just Alison. Alison wanted to come here, and I was the guy who could afford to take on a mortgage. Nice place, no special sense of destiny.’
‘I thought
there was. Then, in a matter of weeks, the whole edifice is developing cracks. I don’t know why that is. Something I did, something I didn’t do? Maybe women really aren’t strong enough for this job. Shit, wash my mouth out.’
‘Was that why you were ill in church?’
‘Because I was feeling like a fraud? That doesn’t matter any more, didn’t you know? There’s now a whole bunch of ministers within the Anglican Church ready to tell you the Virgin birth and the Christmas story and the resurrection are all myths and God as we know Him is just Father Christmas. No, I don’t know why I was sick.’
A lie. Because she couldn’t talk about the worst of it: that while her prayers had become flat and dead, while she was getting no comfort, no response, no sense of resonance, she was also becoming prey to cold visions from the other side of the demarcation line. Visions which began in dreams and finally made it. Finally got into the church.
Superstition. Mental illness.
‘You know what occurred to me ...’ Lol hesitated, playing with the sleeve of his alien sweatshirt, winding it like a tourniquet around his forefinger, ‘when you were on about the blue and gold?’
‘Go on.’
‘I thought of Jane’s room. The ceiling. See, the night we brought Jane out of the orchard she was rambling about little golden lanterns.’
‘She was drunk.’
‘I don’t think she was. I think she was ... heavy word coming up, Merrily. Can you handle this?’
‘Hit me.’
‘Enchanted. She was enchanted. Everything that word says to you. All the different meanings ... like, elated. Like, under a spell.’
‘You’re right,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s a big word.’
‘And what about you, when you were in the little church?’
‘That,’ she said mock-primly, ‘was what we like to call a religious experience.’
‘There you go. Something’s happened to Jane and you’re in denial about it because she’s just a kid and you’re an ordained minister. Lucy would say that was a fairly primitive attitude – everything not connected with God must be ...’
‘Yeah,’ Merrily said. ‘I get the message.’
‘I’m sorry. You’ve been really good to me and I’m insulting you.’
‘Listen, I’m ... OK, maybe what happened to Jane – and to you – was just ... Lucy.’
‘No,’ Lol said.
‘She was a very persuasive woman.’
‘It wasn’t just Lucy.’
‘There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you talked about to Lucy Devenish.’
‘Tried to,’ he said cautiously.
‘You and Lucy talked about my daughter and something that happened to her?’
‘Kind of.’
‘All right.’ She put up both hands. ‘I’m not accusing you of anything. But it relates to what you told me before? About the girls?’
‘Everything relates to that,’ Lol said. ‘But this was scary.’
‘It was scary, but nobody thought to tell me.’
‘Like you said, I suppose it was because of what you are. Lucy said that when you were ready to hear this stuff, you’d go to her.’
‘And now it’s too late for that.’ Merrily stood up. ‘So let’s go and ask Jane.’
‘Both of us?’
‘Oh yes. I think so.’
Together, in silence, they walked up to the Apartment. They were nearing the top of the second staircase when the radio came on in the sitting room/study. Newstime on Radio Hereford and Worcester.
‘The search for a Herefordshire schoolgirl has been stepped up following the discovery of clothing in a ditch two miles from her home. Police say they’re now very concerned for the safety of Colette Cassidy, who disappeared from her sixteenth birthday party in the village of Ledwardine. This report from Bella Ford.’
Bella Ford said over a telephone line, ‘The items of clothing were found by a farmer about midday at King’s Oak Corner between Ledwardine and Madley. Police have declined to say what exactly they were but confirm that they’ve been identified by Colette’s parents as belonging to their daughter and probably worn by her when she disappeared.’
‘Oh God, that means underwear,’ Merrily whispered, ‘or they’d be sure she was wearing them.’
‘Detective Inspector Annie Howe, who’s leading the search for Colette, says they now have to be worried for her safety and are appealing to the public for any information. It was around two o’clock this morning when Colette, a student at the Hereford Cathedral School—’
‘It’s him,’ Lol said. ‘It has to be.’
‘—elderly woman has died in a road accident—
‘You don’t know that. Hang on. Lucy.’
‘—country lane near Ledwardine. The dead woman, who was riding a moped, has not yet been officially identified. No other vehicles were involved.’
They heard Jane moan. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know anything!’
‘—Meanwhile, a man who died when his car left the Hereford to Abergavenny road and smashed into a stone wall at Wormbridge late last night has been identified as Anthony Karl Windling, from Abingdon, near Oxford. There’s been a mixed reaction to the news that fifty thousand pounds of National Lottery money is to go to—’
The radio went off. Merrily turned to find Lol sitting on the stairs. She looked up to see Jane in the doorway of the sitting room/study. Nobody spoke.
35
The Little Golden Lights
LOL LOOKED UP at her from his stair, like one of those small dogs that quivered. He was still institutionalized, Merrily thought. Looking, with Lucy gone, for someone else to administer the drug of reassurance. Mutely asking what he was supposed to feel.
‘Where’s Wormbridge?’ he said at last.
‘It’s a place you pass through when you’re heading for Abergavenny and the M4.’
‘So he was leaving.’
‘He must have been very drunk,’ she said. ‘That’s the usual reason cars go out of control when no other vehicles are involved.’
‘Yes.’
He shook his head slowly, like a boxer coming up after being knocked to his knees, only to be told that he might still win on points. Some part of him trying to equate the random, meaningless deaths of his mentor and his tormentor within the same twenty-four hours, both in road accidents with nobody else involved. Punch-drunk. Not sure what any of it meant.
‘So Colette ...’
‘Ruled out, Lol. According to that report, he died last night. When she was still at the party. They never met. It’s all a bitterly ironic coincidence.’
I’ve been there, she wanted to say, sensing Sean moving towards her across bare, bedroom floorboards, smiling through his fatal injuries. I’ve been exactly there.
Feeling, in one of those spinning, crystal moments, that they must both be part of the same bizarre pattern.
And then, turning, she saw Jane looking down at them in manifest bewilderment from the doorway of the sitting room/ study. Her face was white and blotched, her usually sleek dark hair like knotted string.
She said, ‘Mum, will you come in? Please?’
They clung together for a long time, Jane’s hot, wet, sticky face against Merrily’s under the blue and gold ceiling, Jane’s body shuddering as the accordion was wheezing up from the market square, and Merrily found she was crying too, for Miss Devenish and Sean and even the wretched Windling, united in road-death. Crying for Colette and the suffering Cassidys and other sufferings, known and unknown, and Lol and all his wasted years and all those senseless wasted days for Jane and her, hiding from each other behind screens of divisive superstition.
From the square came a chattering of polite, muted applause. Jane broke away and stood in the centre of the room as if unsure where she was. She swallowed. Merrily looked around.
The cheap stereo and its white-cased speakers sat on bare boards. There was also the old couch the kid had insisted on having in her bedroom in Liverpool, even thou
gh you had to climb over one of its arms to get to the bed. There were paperbacks in piles. There was Edwin, the teddy, one-eared and balding. Familiar items. But the blue of the timber-framed walls and ceiling made the room dark and mystical, like a grotto in a wood. The yellow-white lights were out of an over-the-top starry night by Van Gogh.
‘Lucy said ...’ Jane sniffed and straightened up. ‘She told me to like paint it out of my head. To externalize it.’
‘She told you to paint all this?’
‘She gave me this book of hers to read, The Little Green Orchard, and this kid in the book did that. She was afraid of the orchard until she brought it home in her head and did drawings and that gave her ... not control, exactly, but like a stake in the orchard, a connection. I’d already told Lucy about the Mondrian walls idea, so ...’
‘This is what you saw in the orchard? The night you ...’
‘The night Colette dragged me into the orchard and she was trying to scare me, saying the ghost of Edgar Powell had been seen by the tree where he shot himself. But when I looked up, instead of seeing something horrible and grisly, it was—’
Jane looked up to the ceiling.
‘It was beautiful?’ Merrily said.
‘Yeah. I was floating. It was awesome. And warm. Dreamy. It was like outside time. And all these little lights moving about among the branches, and they were like ... like they had existence. Life. You felt they were responding to your moods. Needs. Lucy said it was kind of reaching out to me. The spirit of the orchard.’
‘Why couldn’t you tell me about it?’
‘You need to ask that?’
Merrily remembered her anger at the absence of headache, queasy tummy, morning-after contrition. Lucy Devenish’s explanation about the cider and the orchard, Like curing Like. Natural holistic medicine.
Crawl into the centre of the orb and curl up. Let nature do the rest. Wouldn’t work for everyone. The orchard’s a risky place, an entity in itself a sphere. And this is a very old orchard. So it tells you – or rather it tells me – something about your daughter.
