Bad Faith

by Gillian Philip

‘Forget it?’ Glaring at him, I spoke clearly so he’d understand, ticking off my points on the fingers of one hand. ‘Dad cancelled his meeting with the Wardens. Nobody ever does that. He came out walking, but Mum didn’t see him because he was here in the wood. There’s his footprint. He hated Todd, everybody knows it, and I don’t blame him!’

  ‘You’re jumping to conclusions,’ mumbled Ming through his hands. ‘Crazy ones.’

  ‘Look.’ I tried to be patient with him. ‘This is a lucky break. Maybe it’s a sign, maybe we were meant to find him! I’ve never seen Todd in these woods before, have you?’

  I’d never seen anyone but us. It was too wild, too steep, the ground was too treacherous. It was child-unfriendly and dog-unfriendly, dark and spidery and oppressive. There weren’t forest walks and cycle tracks and play areas, like there were up at the forest park. Besides, it was meant to be haunted.

  Certainly was now.

  I sighed. ‘There’s nobody here for Todd to talk to. He can’t posture and preach and show off to ghosts. That’s why they haven’t thought of searching here yet.’

  ‘Cass, they think he’s been abducted by rebels. That’s why they’re not looking here. They’re not expecting to find his rotting corpse, they’re waiting for the demands!’

  ‘Ah.’ I made a dismissive gesture. ‘But why was he here at all?’

  Ming eyed me. ‘Go on.’ Like he was humouring a madwoman.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Suppose Dad arranged to meet him. Maybe he wanted to talk to Todd, in the most private place he could think of, somewhere they wouldn’t be disturbed. Maybe it just got out of hand. I’m sure it was an accident, Ming. I’m sure it was, but they mustn’t find... this. They’ll search here eventually, don’t you see that? If it stays here it’ll be found.’ I hesitated. ‘Him. Sorry, I mean him.’

  ‘Your Dad couldn’t do this,’ said Ming mechanically. ‘It was somebody else.’

  ‘Like who?’ I gritted my teeth in frustration. ‘Look, the Whistling Gypsy Rover could have done it, it doesn’t matter. Dad cancelled his meeting, he came out here, his DNA must be all over the place. My Dad will get the blame!’

  Ming didn’t speak. I didn’t know what he was thinking and that was unusual.

  ‘Listen,’ I snarled. ‘You don’t want to be involved in finding this? Fine. Okay. You do this one thing for me and neither of us will be involved.’

  He looked at me like he didn’t even know me.

  ‘Are you threatening me, Cass?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  We both knew it was a lie.

  • • •

  The Thing was heavy, heavier than I expected. I never knew what the term dead weight meant till I had one of the Bishop’s legs under each arm, his booted feet flopping loose and banging my thighs as I struggled awkwardly down the hill, trying to ignore the twinges of pain in my hip. I felt no fear, and not a shred of pity, which was funny when I’d had nothing against the man till a few hours ago. All I felt was revulsion.

  Worse, my head was starting to echo, thoughts and images were beginning to clamour and if I didn’t keep a firm grip on my brain, they’d get out of hand. Determinedly I shoved down the lid on the voices, shutting them up. Now was not a good time.

  It would have been fairer, this being my bright idea, for me to take the head end. But Ming insisted. It was the heaviest bit, he said, and he was stronger, and we’d get this done faster if I’d just shut up. His arms were locked around the Bishop’s chest, his fingers clasped together over his breastbone as if in prayer – ironic, since he’d never darkened a church door in his life – and the damaged head was jammed against Ming’s ribs. Luckily there was no blood dripping or anything. Ming said there wouldn’t be. Smart aleck. Bookworm.

  Tripping on lichened branches, stumbling on roots and hollows, we almost fell several times. To get flat safe access to the river, we actually had to clamber uphill a bit, over a shoulder of ground and down again. Where the river widened, where it wasn’t all churning rapids, there was a flat pebbly beach about two metres long, leading to a long stretch of calmer water by the bank. If we could get in there we could wade fifty metres downstream, floating the Bishop like a log. But we had to get there first.

  I ought to be crying or panicking, but there was more of that in Ming’s white face. All I wanted to do was laugh. I thought how ridiculous we must look, slathered in mud and grass and twigs, hauling a fat and slightly malodorous clergyman down to the river, sliding and stumbling and cursing. Ming cursed, anyway, over and over again. I said nothing. I needed all my breath for the slope, and besides, I had this terrible fear of laughing.

  We paused on the swirling edge of the flood, and Ming said, ‘Be careful,’ but I felt more immortal than ever as we waded gingerly into it. At knee-depth the tug of the current wasn’t too strong but we wouldn’t want to be going much deeper, that was for sure. Out in midstream the river still boiled and raced, heaping brown water against unseen rocks. Ming’s fair hair was falling into his eyes and his chin was resting now on the Bishop’s broken head, the body sagging in his arms. Through the strands of sweat-damp hair his eyes were very green and very scared, and he looked a lot more exhausted than I felt.

  ‘There,’ I gasped at last, and nodded. The bend of the river was ahead, together with the half-submerged secret cave where pirates and orcs and cowboys had once fought fierce cross-genre battles with plastic swords and cap guns. The memory made me hesitate for the first time, but then I thought: Well. It’s not a game any more, is it?

  ‘We’re fine,’ I said.

  Ming just looked at me.

  The cave mouth was well hidden and even at the best and driest of times you had to wade into the river to reach it. Now we floated our revolting burden in on the current, keeping hold of handfuls of cassock just to be on the safe side. We didn’t want it drifting off into the main torrent and pulling away from us. Then came the hardest part, because we had to duck into the concealed entrance, tugging the Bishop awkwardly after us. The river swirled into the cavern like it must have done aeons back, when glacial ice carved it. That was a strange thought but comforting. It gave everything perspective. The river must have seen stranger things over the millennia, though it was hard to imagine what. Cowboys battling orcs, maybe.

  Where the edge of the water lapped the cave floor we hauled the Thing onto dry land. The cave was cool and gloomy but it felt familiar, and it was much easier to drag the body, a leg each this time, across the smooth grainy sand. We took it as far as we could, bending double ourselves, till we found a ledge of rock that would take a body jammed underneath it.

  ‘The sand’s wet,’ said Ming. His hoarse voice echoed too loudly and made me jump.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It must have filled right up when the flood was higher.’

  Blood throbbed painfully in my temples, and I had that horrible choked feeling in my throat again, and a rising clamour in my head. No. Get a grip, I told myself. I stared hard into the dimness, seeing nothing clearly, concentrating on smothering the voices. I breathed in, I breathed out. I did it again. I pictured a pillow, pictured myself shoving it down over them. Gradually they fell silent, and I could let myself look at the real world again.

  There was enough light for me to see Ming scrabbling at the sand with his fingers, digging out a hollow and frantically trying to shove the Bishop tighter under the shelf of rock.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. I sounded very calm. ‘The water’s going down.’

  ‘This is crazy,’ said Ming again, breathless. ‘They’ll find him.’

  ‘No they won’t.’ I don’t know why but I’d never been so sure of anything in my life. Wishful thinking, maybe. ‘Who knows the cave’s here? Just us. Let’s go, okay?’

  Like I said, there was enough light to see by, and I very distinctly saw what Ming did as we turned away. Heard him, too. He spat on the Bishop.

  I hesitated as he pushed past me and back towards the sunlight. ‘That was a bit unnecessar
y, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, it was. Sorry.’ Outside the cave he stood up, waded to the bank and took great lungfuls of air. ‘Sorry. Pretend I didn’t do that, right?’

  In the dappled sunlight, blinking, I touched his arm. ‘It’ll be okay.’

  For the first time in ages he looked right at me and smiled a proper Ming-smile. ‘Yeah, Cass. Course it will. Listen, can you stay here a minute? You won’t be scared?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Surprisingly enough it was true. The Thing behind us in the darkness didn’t scare me at all. Not now it was dead. That seemed a surprising notion too.

  Ming wasn’t gone long. When he returned he had a pine branch in one hand and the bloody rock in the other. The rock he pitched into the deepest part of the river; the pine branch he took into the cave. I heard the swish of it over sand as he brushed away our footprints and the long shallow groove the Thing had made as we dragged it. That was good thinking. Cowboys and Indians, I thought. Buried Treasure.

  He flung the branch into the river, and with our breath stuck in our throats we watched it drift for a moment. It brushed against a tangle of downswept forest litter, then caught on it, resisting the tug of the current. It stuck there for what felt like a week. Then, abruptly, it was snatched by the current and swallowed, resurfacing ten metres downstream only to race out of sight. I heard Ming start to breathe again, so I did too.

  • • •

  ‘Listen, Cass, when we walk away? Don’t look back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I dunno. Superstition, that’s all.’

  ‘Ming! You’re not superstitious!’

  ‘No, but...oh, just...Cass, it’s just a feeling I’ve got. Please?’

  ‘Come on, why?’

  ‘Don’t laugh. Don’t. Please. Okay, it’s superstitious, but don’t look back. When you look back something bad happens. Always. Like Orpheus and Eurydice?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. He’s told not to look back but he does. And he loses her forever.’

  ‘Yes. See? You look back, you get dragged down to the world of the dead.’

  ‘Ming, this is so not you.’

  ‘Just this. Just this. Please, Cass.’

  ‘You reeead tooo muuuch.’

  ‘But don’t look back.’

  ‘Okay.’

  • • •

  I don’t know how poor Orpheus felt, but I’ve a rough idea. How can you not look back? He could see the light. He was out of the cave. He must have thought she was right behind him. The impulse must have been killing him. I always felt sorry for Orpheus, from the day my father first read me the story. It was so unfair. He was almost there. How could he stop himself looking?

  And I thought, as I glanced just once over my shoulder: How could I?

  5: Maenads

  I was on my knees in church the next morning like a good girl, but I didn’t stop kneeling even when I was supposed to, which got me a few funny looks from Dad. Fact was, I couldn’t get up, my muscles wouldn’t let me. I’d slept very well. It was only when I woke up that the memory hit me in the stomach and my blood froze in my veins.

  If I was expecting a bit of guidance, a few step-by-step instructions on what on earth I should do next, I was disappointed. God was not at home to Perverters of the Course of Justice. And I could not take my eyes off my father’s hands around the chalice as he intoned the words he was paid to intone. I kept seeing them in the basin at home, endlessly scrubbing themselves, over and over, till the lather crept over the edge of the sink.

  I didn’t want to take communion from him. I didn’t want to take communion at all; I was superstitiously afraid I might choke on the wafer. But Mum had already got up and gone to the altar rail, and Dad was eyeing me warily as his fingers fumbled on the paten. A lot of other people were staring too, so eventually I made myself get up on my feet and go forward. I was starting to look like an attention-seeking teenager, when the last thing I wanted was attention. As I sidestepped into the aisle I rubbed my hip as if it hurt. Didn’t fool Dad. Chancer, his face told me. I got a little scowl, and then a smile.

  I liked my Dad a lot. He was lovely, but as I watched his fingers pick up a wafer that I struggled to swallow, all I could see were those fingers round a rock, crashing it down and down again onto a splintering skull, pulverising the bone, blood splashing onto his hands, Fairy Liquid suds trying to get it off.

  When he moved on down the line I had to say Amen like Macbeth, only the difference was, I managed it. At the end of the service, I didn’t dare look up to see if Dad did or not.

  I never liked to look at his face during the final hymn anyway, and today the Warden of Music had picked a chorus Dad particularly hated. They’d banned all the old hymns when they banned Mozart and Stainer and Bach, because even an atheist could love that music. So now we had joyful jolly choruses and chants, and Dad wore a permanently pained expression. You absolutely had to be fervently pious to like One Church music.

  I didn’t like disturbing Dad afterwards, and I hadn’t gone into the vestry for years unless I had to. I found it intimidating. Maybe it was down to growing older, old enough to feel the miasma of religion and politics in the air, discussion and argument and things unsaid, threats unspoken but clearly heard. It was something you couldn’t feel when you were little enough to play under the big mahogany conference table. These days the malice and conspiracy hung in the air like a weight pressing down on my head, making it ache, making me want to run from the place whenever I set foot in it. Run, run, not stopping to think, not stopping to look...

  But I had to be here because there was something I wanted to ask Dad, and it couldn’t wait. Not the obvious thing, of course. That could wait forever.

  When I eased open the vestry door he was chatting to his crucifix again, nestled in the palm of his hand, only this time he didn’t sound much as if he was pouring out his soul.

  ‘You poor sod,’ was all he said. ‘What did they do to you, eh?’

  Like it was just an old pal, I thought suddenly. Or an imaginary friend, maybe, who used to be more real than anyone. One he’d grown out of, but couldn’t quite let go. And my spine went cold as ice.

  My Dad couldn’t be an apostate. Apostates were lower than unbelievers, lower than atheists. Apostates had renounced their faith, they were traitors, turncoats, heretics. Terrible things happened to apostates.

  But I was being stupid. Dad was a One Church cleric, of course he wasn’t an apostate.

  ‘Dad?’ I said.

  He glanced round. For a fleeting moment he seemed shocked, before he smiled at me and his blue eyes lit up. I knew he could make them light up. It wasn’t necessarily spontaneous.

  I looked around the vestry while he hung up his robes and pulled his jumper over his head. Once upon a time I’d loved it in here: the mushroom-coloured walls, the wood panelling, the shelves full of musty blue hardbacks I couldn’t believe anyone had ever read. It smelt of incense and old hymnbooks, bookworm and candle wax. It felt as familiar as the womb, but I wouldn’t want to go back there either.

  Besides, the room hadn’t been the same since the window got broken, the pretty stained glass one. St Michael, I think it was, with creatures and demons and angels around him, all in a little gothic arch that wasn’t more than a metre tall. It was amazing the window had survived the first enthusiasm of the militias, and it never was religiously correct. Well, it was gone now. I didn’t like the plain opaque replacement glass at all. It made me uneasy. The light that filtered through the leaded lattice was just sunlight, but it seemed cold and brutal after the angel-rainbow that used to spill over the floor, blurred as a half-lost memory. I frowned.

  ‘What’s up, Cass?’ Dad smiled at me quite gently.

  I shook my head and smiled brightly back. ‘Okay, this is a stupid question.’

  ‘My favourite kind!’

  I laughed, feeling better already. ‘What happened to Orpheus in the end?’

  ‘Who?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Orpheus
, Dad. You know, after he lost Eurydice the second time, what did he do? What became of him?’

  He half-laughed. ‘Oh, that Orpheus. You don’t want to know!’

  ‘Yeah, I do, though. Tell me.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dad. ‘You asked for it.’ Lowering his voice to a growl, he narrowed his eyes to menacing blue slits. ‘He gets torn apart by a mob of Maenads.’

  ‘He does?’

  ‘Literally.’

  I don’t know how I looked but I felt a little green. ‘Is that to do with...you know, when he looked back?’

  Dad could see I felt a bit sick, so he stopped joking around. ‘No, no. Long after that. He spies on the Maenads at their holy rites, and they see him. So they give chase and they catch him and tear him to pieces. But his head became an oracle and Apollo put his lyre among the stars.’ Glancing down at the little crucifix, he gave it a rueful knowing glance. ‘So that’s all right, then.’

  I’ll tell you now, Dad was right the first time. I didn’t want to know.

  ‘Come on, Cass,’ he said. ‘He’s just some priest who falls foul of a bunch of women. Won’t be the last.’ He wiggled his eyebrows. ‘Let’s go, I’m starving.’

  ‘Me too.’ I turned to smile at him as he put an arm round my shoulders and it was just then that I noticed it. Right beside the bookcase, there was a three-inch dent in the oak panelling. Some attempt had been made to sand it down and revarnish it but there was no hiding the deep damage to the splintered wood. The new stain wasn’t the right colour, either. Too dark.

  I stopped so suddenly Dad almost tripped, then I put my hand on his chest to hold him back so I could see better. He half-glanced back to see what had caught my attention.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘What did...’

  Now, Dad would never deliberately hurt me. He’d never hurt me in my life. I’d had smacks from Mum but never from him; indeed the grumpier old bats in the congregation ascribed the delinquent behaviour of Griffin and me to this well-known fact.

  But that was the closest he’d ever come to it, right then. His fingers bit into my arm and he practically yanked me out of the vestry, and I was too shocked even to gasp.