by Phil Rickman
‘Just do what he says, eh, Gomer,’ Danny hissed. ‘You can complain to the Government later.’
Gomer said nothing, just let the windows glide up, putting the tractor into reverse and reaching out for the lights.
Only, the mad ole bugger didn’t switch them off, he threw them on full beam, making a starburst in the snow, and – Jesus! – Danny was jerking back as Bronwen swung round hard, on a slide. In the lights he’d seen what he’d seen – what he thought he’d seen – before the tractor lurched and bucked and went snarling back along the track they’d made earlier.
Danny and Gomer didn’t speak at all till they’d managed to make it up the hill and out the gate and onto the road again. Then Danny sat up and looked hard into Gomer’s thick, misty specs.
‘We really see that?’
‘Hexercise,’ Gomer said gruffly. ‘That’s all it is. Kind o’ jobs they get, they gotter be hard, ennit?’
‘Well, yeah, but, Gomer…’
‘Hexercise,’ Gomer said. ‘That’s what we tells Sarah Protheroe. Her’ll know.’
‘You reckon?’
‘And we don’t say nothin’ else. All right?’
Danny was shivering. He’d go along with that. Anything. But what they’d seen in the white hell… in other circumstances it could have been almost funny, but in a late-February blizzard, in the minutes after midnight, it was enough to scare the shit out of you.
Especially the way the fifth man had been just standing there laughing, bollock naked in the snow.
Part One
MARCH
Empty your septic tank
Take it to the bank
Lol Robinson, ‘Wasted on Plant Hire’
2
Longships
THE BAD STUFF started with Jane insisting on getting the drinks. A Lotto thing – she and Merrily had both had ten-quid paybacks on the same number. Jane wanted to buy Lol and Danny Thomas a beer. Which was nice of her. She seemed determined these days, Lol thought, to do more things that were nice, as if she had something to repay.
He watched her at the bar. The tight jeans, the sawn-off white hoodie and the area of soft skin exposed between the two. Merrily had said, If you could just, you know, keep an eye on Jane…?
She’d been thinking about the weather. They all had, since the Christmas flood, a continuing source of unease in Ledwardine. Mid-evening on a Friday, the Black Swan was less than a third full but sounding crowded to Lol because of all the voices raised against the punch of the wind and the fizz of rain on the leaded windows.
Big weather. More big weather.
He’d seen it coming well before dark, the sky over Cole Hill chaotic with ripped-up cloud and flarings of wild violet beyond the church steeple. The last taunt of winter. Or maybe the first sneer of spring. The floods, then the snow, then more snow and now, just as you thought it was over, the gales.
And yet it was an ill-wind because, out of the black night and the white noise of the rain and his anxiety, suddenly the lines happened, like they’d been blown into his head.
The chorus had been hanging around for weeks, begging for an opening trail of memorably bleak images to illustrate the raw emptiness before love walked in. The rhyme was a bit bumpy, but maybe that was OK, maybe even good.
The wind is screaming through the granary
It turns the springtime into January.
This was the granary, where he’d lived for a time, at Prof Levin’s studio over at Knight’s Frome. The perpetual January of a lonely bed. Lol pulled over a beer mat, found a pen in his jacket, saw Danny’s eyes lighting up over the shoe-brush beard.
‘Cookin’, boy?’
Lol reversed the beer mat, steered it across to Danny then drew back as the gale pushed like a big hand – whump – on the leaded pane directly across the room. No let-up. The lines had probably arisen from his failure to prevent Merrily driving out into the storm… or at least letting him drive her. What if there was no Merrily? What if there’d been no Merrily? The void at the core of the song: I can’t define my sense of need.
Danny was gazing at the beermat like it was Mozart’s scorepad. Before Gomer Parry had rescued him, he’d been a struggling Radnorshire farmer with fading dreams. Also, three vintage guitars, a couple of ancient amps, a decibel-dazed wife and a sheepdog called Jimi.
He looked up.
‘I’m hearin’ it, boy, sure t’be.’
The grin reappearing in the beard, though still a little wary, like a poacher’s flashlight in the undergrowth. Not long after Danny had joined Gomer Parry Plant Hire, Lol had been looking for a lead guitarist, someone good but not too expensive. After two sessions in Danny’s barn over at Kinnerton, he’d said, You want a proper contract or will a handshake do? Danny grinning like a little kid, his muddied hand already out.
‘Should be in your barn, recording this,’ Lol said. ‘Under the storm noise, everything shivering.’
‘Storm noise in a barn en’t never as good as you imagines. Ole wind got his own backbeat, see, never plays to yours.’ Danny nodded towards Jane at the bar. ‘Growin’ up?’
‘I suppose.’
Getting the drinks herself was important to Jane. Doing it legally was still a novelty. Barry, the manager, was behind the bar, and everybody in the Swan knew Jane. Some of them even liked her.
The wind came back, a fighter in the ring, leaving you no time for recovery, and Danny picked up on Lol’s anxiety.
‘You’re worried about your lady.’
You had to love the seventies rock-band jargon.
‘It’s not blowing over, Danny.’
‘Hard to blow an ole Volvo off the road.’
It had been mid-afternoon, after the first Severe Weather Warning, when Merrily had come across to Lol’s house, looking unsettled and facing an hour’s drive to the mountains the other side of Brecon. This was Huw Owen, inevitably. For reasons Huw hadn’t disclosed and Merrily couldn’t fathom, he’d wanted her to talk to his students at the grim, disused Nonconformist chapel up in the Beacons where he taught ordained priests how to mess with the unmentionable.
‘I’ll give Huw a call, anyway.’ Lol had his mobile out. ‘Make sure she…’
‘Makes you feel better, boy,’ Danny said, ‘do it.’
In Huw Owen’s rectory, thirty-plus miles away, the phone rang out. Maybe they’d already left for the chapel, which probably didn’t even have a phone. Huw liked to awaken in his students a sense of isolation and vulnerability. Lol killed the signal.
‘Nothing.’
But Danny Thomas was listening to something else, his long grey hair pushed back behind one ear. He caught Lol’s eye, lifting a cautionary forefinger. Lol heard a drawly voice from Off.
‘… what I said, George, I said the old totty-meter’s flickering into the fucking red.’
Then liquid laughter. Lol turned towards the bar. Kids, you’d think, but they weren’t. About five of them, late twenties to early forties, talking in low voices, but their London accents lifted them out of the background mush.
‘Clean off the fucking dial, George. I mean, will you just look at that…’
‘… he on about?’
‘His fanny-meter’s gone off.’
‘Ask the barman for a Kleenex.’
‘Not kidding, George. I’m in love.’
‘You’re rat-arsed.’
‘I think… I think I feel a wager coming on…’
None of them spoke for a few seconds. Apple logs shifted on the hearth. Danny looked at Lol. Red mud was still flaked in his heavy-metal hair. He’d been here in the village all day, working with Gomer on extra flood defences down by the river.
A wager. Lol could imagine florid men, squires and their sons, in three-cornered hats, with lavish waistcoats and long bendy pipes, under these same beams on Jacobean nights when the Black Swan was young.
‘How much?’
‘Hundred? Two?’
‘You’re not scaring me, George. I’ll go three.’
‘Bloody con
fident tonight, Cornel.’
‘He’s bladdered. He won’t—’
‘All right. Listen. I’ll persuade her into the paddock for nothing, and then… why don’t we say three-fifty if I get her upstairs? However—’
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t prove—’
‘However… any tricks, any remarks from you bastards that might put her off, and you pay up anyway. Deal?’
‘That’s—’
‘Deal?’
‘Don’t fall for it George.’ Mild Scots accent. ‘He’ll probably offer to split it with her if she plays along.’
‘He won’t, Alec, because we’ll be listening to every word.’
At some stage, probably when money came into it, the banter had shed its forced humour. At the other end of the bar, Jane was handing Barry a ten-pound note, leaning forward, exposing a widening band of pink skin just below the small of her back.
As the daylight faded, their cars would arrive on the square like Viking longships floating into a natural harbour, the top-of-the-range Beemer, the Porsche Boxter, the Mercedes 4-by-4.
Barry the manager, like half the village, was in two minds about them. They had – nobody could argue about this – seen the Swan through a bleak winter of recession, and yet…
Like they own the place. That old cliché. You heard it a lot around Ledwardine but it was only half right, Lol thought. You didn’t need to own a playground.
Only one man in Ledwardine actually seemed interested in owning the village. Lol had never actually met Ward Savitch, but you couldn’t fail to be aware of his presence, usually on Sunday mornings. Used to be church bells, now it was shotgun echoes.
The new hunter-gatherers. Paying guests of Savitch, who’d bought the old Kibble place, known as The Court, a farmhouse with fifty acres. Savitch was everywhere now, grabbing marginal land – woods and rough country, like he was reclaiming his heritage. In fact, he was building himself one. Came out of London just ahead of the big recession, with all his millions in a handcart. Now the fifty acres had more than doubled, holiday chalets had gone up. Shooting and paintballing weekends, for those who could afford them. Some were corporate jollies, designed to freshen up tired executives – Savitch clearly exploiting his old contacts.
Not many posh cars outside tonight, though. A couple of these guys were staying here at the Swan – overspill – and the others had come down from The Court on foot, intent on serious drinking. Some of them still in their designer camouflage trousers bought from one of the few retail chains in the county that were no longer on nodding terms with the Official Receiver.
‘Day’s shooting supervised by Kenny Mostyn and the kids from Hardkit and they think they’re fighting fit,’ Barry had said one night when it was quiet. ‘Well… fit enough to take on a five-course champagne dinner and a few gallons of Stella.’
Barry knew about fighting and fitness. Retired from the SAS at forty, still went running in the Black Mountains most weekends. He was on the portly side these days, but only portly like a bouncer.
‘But – what can I say? – it keeps the lights on. Most of these guys, it’s just about getting pissed and bringing me pheasants they’ve shot. Who loses?’
‘Apart from the pheasants?’ Lol had said.
Glad that Jane hadn’t been there.
But not as much as he wished she wasn’t here now.
Keeping an eye on Jane… this was getting increasingly delicate.
She’d been Lol’s friend before he even knew her mother, back when she was just an insecure kid, in a new place, and he was a part-time recluse in a cottage down Blackberry Lane. But Jane was eighteen now, approaching her last term at school, finding herself some space. Wasn’t as though Lol was her dad or even a dad figure. Not exactly a dad-figure kind of person.
Jane had said she was just popping to the loo, would get the drinks on her way back. But Lol had noticed she hadn’t actually gone to the loo. Directly to the bar. Purposeful.
He pushed his chair back so he could see her talking to the lanky young guy with the deep chin and the big lips. Because of all the voices raised against the rattle and hiss of the weather, you couldn’t hear what was being said as the guy bent down to her, like he was offering her a lollipop.
‘Stay calm, boy,’ Danny said. ‘This is the Swan on a Friday night. She can just walk away.’
But she hadn’t. She seemed to be listening, solemnly, then smiling right up into the big-jawed face. Wearing that close-fitting white top, half-unzipped, over very tight jeans. The small band of pale flesh and the navel.
‘… hand it to Cornel,’ one of the older bankers-or-whatever murmured to another. ‘Eyes in her knickers already.’
Lol looked helplessly at Danny. You could see the three lagers Jane had bought sitting on the bar top behind her left elbow, giving her a good excuse to prove she was not here on her own.
Jane could walk away from this any time she wanted.
But no, she went on talking to this Cornel.
Very much a woman, and smiling up at him.
‘Oh God,’ Lol said. ‘What do I do about this?’
3
Wet Cassock
THE GREY MONK was still there, in the ladies’ lavatory, his face fogged and his arms spread wide.
A déjà vu moment and it made Merrily feel unsteady. The wind was whining in the rafters, buzzing in the ill-fitting glass of the leaded window, whipping into the thorn trees around the chapel. All the different rhythms of the wind.
Had this ever been a friendly place? Its stone looked like prison stone. It stood mournful as an old war memorial in a shallow hollow on the yellowed slopes where the SAS used to train. Nearer to God? All it felt nearer to was death.
She glared at the grey monk by the side of the door, where he lived in the plaster. Where you’d see him in the mirror as you tidied your hair. According to Huw, he’d been a Nonconformist preacher who’d roamed the hills sick with lust for someone’s wife down in Sennybridge. He’d been found dead where the women’s toilet now stood, head cracked open on the flags.
The point being that he was said to have left his imprint there, later known, because of its general shape, as the Grey Monk – Huw explaining how most so-called ghostly monks were not monks at all, just a vagueness in the electromagnetic soup suggestive of robe and cowl.
Merrily saw herself in the mirror standing next to the monk. She was thirty-nine years old. Were the crow’s feet becoming webbed or did she just need more early nights? She nodded to the monk and walked out to where Huw was waiting for her at the top of the passage, standing on his own under a small, naked bulb, spidery filaments glowing feebly through the dead flies and the dust.
The course students had all gone into the chapel. Merrily shut the doors on them. The only chance she’d get.
‘OK. I was absolutely determined not to ask, but…’
‘It’ll be obvious, lass,’ Huw said. ‘Also, good for you. A chance to step back and see how far you’ve come. Rationalize it.’
‘It can’t be rationalized. It isn’t rational. You taught me that.’
Huw put on his regretful half-smile. His dog collar was the colour of old bone. Huw’s collars always looked like they’d been bought at a car-boot sale, maybe a hearse-boot sale. Merrily remembered the first time she’d heard his voice, expecting – Huw Owen? – some distant Welsh academic with a bardic lilt, but getting David Hockney, Jarvis Cocker. He’d been born in humble circumstances just down the valley here, then taken away as a baby to grow up in Yorkshire.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘It’s partly on account of you being the first woman ever to get sent here for deliverance training.’
Which he’d hardly been happy about at the time. Walking her over the unwelcoming hills, telling her what a turn-on women priests were for the pervs and the creeps. As for a woman exorcist…
‘Two on this course,’ Huw said.
You could tell by his tone that he hadn’t been impressed. The hanging bulb glowed the colour
of wet straw. The wind was leaning on the new front door at the top of the passage, and Merrily had an urge to walk through it, out onto the hill. Try and keep a cigarette alight up there. Or just keep on walking into the rattling night, back to the car, foot down, out of here, with the wind behind her.
‘So what do you want me to tell them?’
‘Just answer their questions, best you can. Feel free to downplay everything. We don’t want to put the shits up them.’
Then, suddenly, impulsively, Huw sprang up on tiptoe and headed the bulb, setting it swinging like a censer. In its fibrous light, his smile looked slightly insane.
‘Although we do,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’
The women on the course were a brisk, posh girl and a squat, quiet matron in her fifties who Huw said had been governor of a women’s prison. If it wasn’t for the hungry female clergy, a third of the churches in England and Wales would probably be nightclubs and carpet warehouses. They had the confidence of being needed, these women.
‘So why are you all here?’ Huw said. ‘Eh?’
Over twenty clergy in the body of the chapel, mostly young middle-aged. The higher number on the course reflecting not so much an increased interest in exorcism, Merrily was thinking, so much as the trend for deliverance panels within each diocese. Health and Safety. Back-up. Decisions made by committee.
There was a kind of formality about them. No jeans, no sweatshirts, more dog collars than Crufts. But somehow it felt artificial, like fancy dress. The only obvious maverick here was Huw himself, so blatantly old hippie you expected flecks of spliff down his jacket.
‘I’m serious. Why were you picked for this – the one job the Church still gets all coy about? And Dawkins on the prowl, knife out.’
Somebody risked a laugh. Huw gazed out. Now they were out of fashion again, he wore a ponytail, grey and white, bound up with a red rubber band. He was sitting next to Merrily, behind a carafe of water, at a mahogany table below where the lectern used to be.
