Published by
Strident Publishing Ltd
22 Strathwhillan Drive
The Orchard, Hairmyres
East Kilbride G75 8GT
Tel: +44 (0)1355 220588
[email protected]
www.stridentpublishing.co.uk
© Gillian Philip 2008
The author has asserted her moral right under the Design, Patents and Copyright Act, 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-905537-08-2
eISBN 978-1-905537-59-4
Typeset in Optima
Designed by Sallie Moffat
Cover image © the earlybird, 2008
Printed by Creative Print and Design
Gillian Philip was born in Glasgow and has been writing all her life, starting with short but frenetic novels about Captain Scarlet and The Man From UNCLE (having massive crushes on both). She has worked as a barmaid, theatre usherette, record store assistant, radio presenter, typesetter, and political assistant to a parliamentary candidate. While living in Barbados, where her steadiest job was as a singer in an Irish bar, she took up writing professionally, and wrote many short stories for women’s magazines. In 2001 she moved back to Scotland, and now lives in Morayshire with husband Ian, twins Lucy and Jamie, and Oscar, the fastest terrier in the west.
For
Jamie and Lucy
and for my dad, Bob Allsopp
Thank you...
Hilary Johnson, for endless help and encouragement; Lin Anderson, for restoring my faith in Bad Faith; Alison Boyle and Sarah Molloy, for great advice on the manuscript; Kate Pool at the Society of Authors, for answering legal questions; the Rt Revd Mark Strange, for reading my manuscript and not minding when I stole his cheese; all writing buddies, especially Maggie Craig, Elizabeth Garrett, Linda Gillard, Michael 'Mad Dog' Malone and Elizabeth Ramsey; Frances Smith; Keith Charters, Graham Watson, Alison Stroak and Sallie Moffat at Strident, for everything; Susan Sloan for her wonderful cover illustrations; Cherry Allsopp, Derek Allsopp...
And Ian, Lucy and Jamie – for putting up with a wife and mother who is more often than not away with the faeries.
A little water clears us of this deed
Macbeth
It Ain’t Necessarily So
Ira Gershwin
Dystopia (n): an imaginary place that is depressingly wretched
The Penguin English Dictionary
Contents
Before
1: Graphic Violence
2: Cancellations
3: Fugue
4: Flotsam
5: Maenads
6: Roadkill
7: Looking For Clues
8: Jaw Jaw
9: Bodies
10: It Runs in the Family
11: Surfacing
12: Waking
13: What Todd Did Next
14: Running
15: Taking Precautions
16: Crumbling
17: Holy Joe
18: The Return of Todd
19: Weather Change
20: Don’t Look Back
21: Jetsam
After
Before
Before I slipped on the mud and fell over the Bishop, our family didn’t have a lot to do with murder.
A little, but not much.
There was Holy Joe, of course, and that family legend about the narrow escape of Aunt Abby’s best friend’s boyfriend’s sister, but that’s another story.
Though not entirely.
Holy Joe stopped killing women about twenty years ago and was never heard of again. Perhaps he thought he’d done his bit for the morality of the nation, though heaven knows what the poor throttled women felt about that, since none of them had done more than leave a dance late, or give a boyfriend a seriously mistimed goodnight smooch. You might call Holy Joe a serial killer; the religious militias called him a folk hero. He was doing the One God’s work. Rumour said he was a high-ranking militia member himself. Maybe that’s why the police didn’t exactly fall over themselves to find the old psycho.
That was my Dad’s theory, anyway.
You might also think the militias would disband when they got their way and their God-fearing religious state. Well, it turns out that telling everyone what to do, and shooting them in the kneecaps when they don’t oblige, is way too much fun to give up just because you get what you say you want. So the militias went on defending the nation’s morals and generally having a rare old time and I daresay nobody liked to ask them to stop, least of all the One Church.
That was my brother’s theory.
You can tell from all this how much ear-bending I have to put up with at home. Personally, I don’t give politics a lot of thought. Be modest and pious and keep your mouth shut, that’s my motto. I suppose I love my country, and I like a peaceful life, and there’s not much crime, apart from political crime and an occasional morality offence. (I’m not counting the militias. After all, the police don’t.) Women have rights like anyone else: when anyone complains (and they tend not to), the One Church only has to point to Ma Baxter, President, First Minister and Mother of the Nation. And militias or no militias, at least us girls don’t have to worry about Holy Joe any more. Not that we ever did, if we were good and holy and kept our hands and bodies and opinions to ourselves. Holy Joe stopped his killing because the nation stopped being godless.
And that was my grandmother’s theory, when she was alive.
Two years ago she was only just alive, flat out in a hospital room that smelt of Pine-Sol, dead dahlias and pee, and for some reason I thought about her Holy Joe theories as I sat by her deathbed. I felt depressed because the place and the smell were so familiar and I’d spent way too long in here myself, that time I was incredibly stupid and didn’t look where I was going and ran in front of a car. I really hated dahlias, having got mightily sick of them when I was stuck in this same private room with a splintered pelvis and a fractured skull, so that’s why I hadn’t got Bunty a fresh bunch even though I should have. To make up for it I was holding onto her hand the way you’re expected to, the way I’ve seen it done on TV soaps like Angels and Martyrs, only I was beginning to wonder if Bunty was planning on taking me with her. Her grip was that strong. Since I was only thirteen at the time, I had no intention of tagging along.
They say old people don’t want to linger, but not Bunty. Bunty intended to linger indefinitely. I sat there holding onto her hand, feeling sorry for her but a little uncomfortable too – we weren’t really a hand-holding family – and I kept hoping Mum or Dad would come back and give me a break. My grandmother was trying to say something, and I dreaded that she might manage. I didn’t want her last words to me to be You look like a boy, Cassandra, grow your hair! Or You get your scrawny behind into Church tonight or I’ll be leathering it for you. Or Why aren’t you taller, look at the height of me!
Well, she’d shrunk a bit now, marginally reducing her power to terrify, and whatever she wanted to tell me would have to wait for the afterlife, because my grandmother had lost the power of speech. She had not lost the power of her fingers. She hung onto mine like grim death – and I know that’s a tactless way to put it, since that was just what she was trying to avoid. But she did not want to slip peacefully away. She did not want to slip away at all.
Well, if you’ve been fighting the world your whole life like Bunty did, fighting to keep your family fed and clothed, and then just fighting your family afterwards because it had become a bit of a habit, maybe you’re bound to fight the end of it. Her rheumy eyes were locked on mine and I could almost hear her yelling in my head, Don’t you let me go, Cassie! Don’t you dare! Bunty was hanging onto life by her gnarl
ed fingernails the way she always had, and she wasn’t about to let go now, which meant my hand was starting to turn blue.
In the end I did get my circulation back, because of course Bunty could not hold on like that forever. She died anyway. Not on my watch. She died while I was out of the room, and I still reckon she was so annoyed with me for prising her fingers off, she did it out of spite.
Only afterwards, when I’d stopped being ashamed and slightly embarrassed, and started being sorry she was dead, did I realise she was scared to die. She was hanging on not out of habit but because she was petrified. I wondered what exactly she was petrified of, and I suppose I could have asked my father, but the way things turned out, I’m glad I didn’t. I was always nervous of asking these great theological questions anyway, in case I was supposed to know the answer already and just hadn’t been paying attention in school. (Which I hadn’t.)
Well, Bunty had been dead ancient, and now she was just dead. Dad took the funeral, of course, despite his lifelong hatred of Elvis Presley. I don’t think Bunty was that keen on him either, but Aunt Abby was a big fan, and Aunt Abby chose the music. Elvis hadn’t been banned by then, so Bunty was sent off to the strains of How Great Thou Art. Should have been Please, Don’t Release Me. Oh, Please Don’t Let Me Go.
Beneath the Elvis CD you could just hear the electric hum of the conveyor belt taking Bunty to meet her probably apprehensive Maker. When the pleated curtain came down to swallow her, the music stopped and you could hear Dad intoning something reassuring and pious, which is his job. And right then, as I was looking at him and wondering if he knew just how much Bunty had wanted not to Go Forth Upon Her Journey From The World, I saw him look at Mum, and then I saw Mum look at Aunt Abby.
They were not exchanging the look that meant Aw, it was a release poor soul, it was how she’d have wanted it. They just looked enormously relieved, as if to say That’s that, then.
Out of nowhere I thought again about Aunt Abby’s best friend’s boyfriend’s sister and her famously narrow escape. If that was what it was, since nobody could be sure it was Holy Joe who walked her home. Maybe it was some other black-haired limping pale-eyed man with a scar above his eyebrow. I suppose there might have been two like that in a city the size of Bunty’s.
It was odd, but I knew, as Dad and Mum and Aunt Abby crossed themselves hurriedly, that they were thinking about Holy Joe too.
Then we were all standing in line to be kissed by damp and weepy friends and neighbours, a lot of whom would be going the same way as Bunty in the not-too-distant future, and they knew it. Which was a big part of why they were sad.
And I thought the same as Mum and Dad and Abby: That’s that, then.
But as it turned out? It wasn’t.
1: Graphic Violence
Up in his disgusting pit of a room, my brother was brutally murdering an innocent nun.
‘How’s it going?’ I ventured.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Level one.’
‘Still?’
‘Go away.’
One toe in the door, one eye open, I watched. These black market games could be stomach-churningly realistic, even trash like Hell Breaker II. I made a show of turning my face away, but I was as riveted as I was repelled.
Level One. Jeez. Griff was not very good at computer games, lacking both dexterity and focus. I like to think he also lacked ruthlessness, but I’m less sure about that now.
Besides, he was quite often trying to play with one hand. His console sat on his desk, his desk sat right by the open sash window, and his left hand was usually hanging out of it. He was not fooling anybody, of course. You could smell the cigarette smoke a mile off, but he liked to think he was fooling the parents.
My brother started out as a chubby and adorable blond baby (I’m told), became a chubby adorable toddler and then a lanky adorable fair-haired child, at all stages capable of sending maiden aunts into paroxysms of love (even Aunt Abby, who Dad said was no maiden).
When puberty hit, he turned overnight into Gothic Grim Griffin. His hair went dark. His taste in music went dark. His long night of the soul went dark. The broody Young Byron look was somewhat spoiled by the rash of acne on his chin, but maybe Young Byron had plooks too.
Now I said, ‘Guess what?’
‘No,’ said Griff, decapitating a demon of the sixth circle.
‘No, really. Okay, don’t guess, I’ll tell you.’
He sighed. He must have got decapitated right back, because he relaxed in his swivel chair and folded his arms, brought the cigarette indoors for a suck, and blew the smoke out into the blue sky. ‘Go on then. And go away after that.’
‘Bishop Todd’s gone missing,’ I said.
It was a bit of a strain to put the right amount of concern and sadness into my voice. Bishop Todd was popular, jolly and pious and stout, but nobody can deny it is lovely being first with Breaking News. I could almost see the strap of text running along the bottom of the imaginary screen in front of me. Bishop Todd Goes Missing.
‘No. Has he really?’ Griff’s tone was on the sarcastic side.
‘Yes, really.’ Bishop Todd Really Goes Missing. ‘He never came back from a walk yesterday. They’ve had helicopters out.’
Griff rolled his eyes. ‘I’m surprised they haven’t got the army out.’
‘They have,’ I told him smugly. Army Joins Bishop Todd Search.
‘Really?’ Now he did sound impressed. ‘The Army? So, really missing, eh?’
‘Uh-huh. Well, a bit of the army,’ I admitted. ‘Ma Baxter was on TV, expressing the nation’s deep concern. Dabbing her eyes with a hankie, the works.’
That wasn’t surprising. Bishop Todd was big pals with the Mother of the Nation, and he was her Spiritual Adviser too, which gave him more power than her Vice President and her Finance Minister put together. He’d been one of the first to abandon his sect and join the One Church, as soon as he saw which way the political wind was blowing. He’d been loudest in denouncing doubters, and fiercest in defending the militias. (‘Their methods may be misguided, but the anger of these young people is righteous and their motives are holy.’ I knew that quote off by heart because you saw the edited version on a thousand t-shirts, printed beneath a portrait of the Bishop: Our anger is righteous, our motives are holy.)
At any rate, he’d raced up the One Church hierarchy like a demented squirrel. He’d kept his home in a very posh part of our suburb, and sometimes we saw him, striding around rather pompously in his cassock and pressing the flesh of the Faithful. (He didn’t need bodyguards. Nobody would ever dare mug the Bishop.) Most of his time, though, was spent in the heart of the capital, lurking at the seat of power and giving spiritual guidance to Ma Baxter. The rumour was he’d be her Religious Security Minister within six months, and then the rest of the Cabinet might as well stay home and knit. Oh yes, Todd and Ma Baxter could handle the nation’s economy, security and spiritual health all by their little selves, or so my Dad snarled sarcastically at the radio. As for the TV, I was amazed the screen was still intact.
‘Cassaaahn-dra,’ drawled Griff now. ‘Two words. Publicity Stunt.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Well, apart from being rhyming slang for Bishop Todd, obviously it means the man would do anything for two column inches in the Messenger.’
‘It’ll be more than two column inches,’ I said. ‘They reckon he’s been kidnapped.’
Griff shrugged, lit another cigarette, and blew the smoke out the window.
I thought Griff might have shown a little more interest. Griff, after all, used to dote on Bishop Todd Lamont, though that was back when only Griff’s hair was pale and he used to smile more, and eat a lot more, and Bishop Todd was merely Rector Todd. Just call me Todd! Griffin had idolised him – Todd being funny and magnetic and ambitious, a smiling bundle of charisma – and my brother’s hero-worship drove my father to distraction, since he loathed the man. Todd’s handsomeness was turning into that slightly fat self-importance that’s exacerb
ated by a cassock, but I never really understood Dad’s visceral loathing.
When Todd was elected Bishop, I walked in on my father and found him banging his head on his desk. I mean, literally banging it. Dad did not notice me – too busy trying to give himself brain damage – so I backed out and sucked on a knuckle. The banging stopped, after a bit, and I eased the door open. He still didn’t notice me.
This was the only time I’ve seen my father cry. He had his hands in his hair and he was staring at his little wooden crucifix (suspect and idolatrous, but he shoved it in the desk drawer whenever the doorbell rang) and going Why? Why? Why would you let him? over and over again. I decided that whatever I had to ask wasn’t so important after all, because I didn’t want to know what was wrong. It didn’t look like the kind of thing I could help with, the kind of thing anyone could, so there was no point letting him know I was there.
I suspected it was the Griff Thing. I knew there had been a terrible falling-out. I knew Griff had done something wrong, and it must have been terribly wrong, because Griff wasn’t allowed to serve at the altar any more when Arch-Rector Todd – as he was by then – came to officiate at Dad’s church. But I didn’t know why. I was young and my recollections of that time were hazy. I knew only that there were arguments and rows and a lot of anger, but falling out with Todd wasn’t an option. He and Dad were One Church clerics, and the One Church was about unity more than anything else. It was terrified of a return to the days of quarrelling sects, of religious wars, of marginalised and dying faiths. That was why disunity was stamped on from a terrific height. If I understood very little else, I could at least understand that.
Well, after Todd was elected Bishop, my father had to get on with it, Todd being his boss and spiritual superior and all. There was much gnashing of paternal teeth, but no more tears. I never saw my father cry again.
Bad Faith Page 1
