by Phil Rickman
… had even talked of Mother God. Which the theologians said was no more than a recognition of God’s nurturing of mankind. But, hey, come on, how far was this really from Mother Goddess?
All the blood was running to Jane’s head, almost on the floor by now, in a nest of hair. This whole university thing was like some insidious conspiracy by the lousy Government, just a way of keeping you off benefits for another three years, while hitting you with mega tuition fees. By the time she was out of it, there’d probably be thousands of qualified archaeologists who were all going to be Indiana Jones and…
Jane’s head hit the floor. …
she didn’t have to go.
Shocked and excited, she wriggled back onto the bed then rolled off it, stood up, went to the window. The village lights were coming on, twin lanterns either side of the main door of the Black Swan, fake gas lamps on the square. The lights you could see, the lights you couldn’t.
Jane’s eyes widened.
Wasn’t going?
That simple? A decision already made? On some level, it had been decided?
Holy shit.
She was breathing very fast now. OK, maybe not a question of deliberately fluffing the A levels. Probably make a point of doing well, getting the grades, just to show she could do it. And then just not going.
No shame in that. It was actually kind of radical. She could just go out and get a job. Any kind of job that would allow her to stay in Ledwardine and fight for what mattered.
Jane felt suddenly still inside and terrifyingly clear-headed. She needed to be absolutely direct about this. No shit. She’d give it a few minutes, then go down and tell Mum before she could change her mind. Hadn’t Mum, after all, dropped out of uni after getting pregnant? Hadn’t she even been known to say – long after Dad’s death in the car crash alongside the woman he’d been shagging – that maybe it was all meant?
Jane stood gazing down at her village. Which needed her. In this sick, withering world, it needed all the energy it could get.
She saw a small shadow emerge from the vicarage gate. Mum, in jeans and sweater, tripping across the market square. Of course – off to meet Lol in the Swan, like it was still the early days of their relationship, courtesies to observe. What was the matter with them, hovering around one another still? Everybody hovering, nobody doing anything.
OK, give them an hour or so and then go across to the Swan. Telling Mum in front of Lol, that would diffuse the effect.
Still in her cloud of knowing, Jane went downstairs to the kitchen, talked it over with Ethel, the cat.
Ethel was like, Yeah, but what about your career?
‘It’s just a word, Ethel.’
Jane stood for an uncertain moment in the cold kitchen, then went over to the fruit bowl on the dresser and took out an apple. Cut it in half – crossways – to reveal the pale green pentagram at its heart. Carried it out into the garden and held it in the cup of her hands, open to the rising moon, only a misty grey-blue smudge, but it would do.
She stood in the silence, expanding the apple pentagram in her mind until she was standing in the middle of it, watching it widen and become a white-golden aura, eventually enclosing the whole of Ledwardine.
And then Jane prayed to the Goddess, to become a channel for the cosmic energy which would make things happen.
15
Dead Game
LOL SAID, ‘WOULD Barry have to kill me with his bare hands if I put that on the fire?’
Merrily followed his gaze to the basket in the inglenook, black and ashy.
‘The big log?’
‘The only log.’
He was right. She couldn’t remember ever before seeing only one log in the inglenook at the Black Swan, famous for its apple-wood fires, smoke-sweetened air over the cobbled square. She shivered. In the beamed and panelled lounge bar, only half the wall lights were on. Enough for the eight or so customers whose sparse voices made soft echoes.
‘You might not like what Savitch is doing,’ Lol said, ‘but you really notice when one of his wealthy hunting parties leaves the village.’
‘Barry’s that dependent on them?’
Lol shrugged. He was wearing his fraying grey Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt. He had a spiral-bound notebook – his lyrics pad – and, beside it on the table, a pint she guessed was shandy, not yet half-drunk.
‘Smoking ban,’ Barry said from behind the bar. ‘Cheap supermarket booze. And now Fortress Hereford. Yeah, we are getting dependent on them. Seven fewer five-course dinners, bar takings down by a third. Put the bleedin’ log on, Laurence, I can always saw up an oak settle.’
Lol left the log alone. Merrily stared at bulky amiable Barry in the black suit and the bow tie.
‘Fortress Hereford?’
‘All farm doors locked at nightfall, shotguns loaded. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me there’s another reason we’re nearly empty.’
‘What, because of—?’
‘Having your quad bike nicked is one thing, but getting killed like Mansel Bull is not a case for Farm Watch, as we know it.’
‘It’s not Texas, either,’ Merrily said. ‘Not yet.’
‘Civilization, vicar, has a thin skin. This is still a frontier. Face west, nothing but lonely Welsh hills. Don’t take much to send us to ground. See this?’
Barry slapped down a glossy flyer showing the winding Wye seen from above. A man in a hunting coat stood with his back to the camera, a riding crop in one hand. Under the photo it said:
WORTH FIGHTING FOR?
Under that:
COUNTRYSIDE DEFIANCE
Lol’s eyes flickered.
‘Who are they?’
‘The woman we saw on the box – Wiseman-France – she’s dined here a time or two, with clients. Professional PR, management consultant, not sure which, but you get the idea. You know the type. Move in and tell the hicks their interests are being ignored at national level because they’re not making their voices heard with sufficient eloquence.’
‘Mmm.’ Merrily nodded. ‘Then they offer their services free to give themselves a certain status in the community. Make them feel they belong. She’s created it, has she?’
‘She ain’t created the mood, but she’s given it a name,’ Barry said. ‘Don’t have to be thousands of people behind it, just a few dozen of the right people. The thousands will follow. And the money.’
‘Savitch?’
‘Put it this way… it was one of his minions brought the flyers in. I’m told it also comes in different languages. When the shooting parties come in from Europe, America, Japan they learn that the spiritual home of hunting since the eleventh century is under threat. You ask me, Defiance is pulling donations from US hunting and gun lobbies.’
‘This is Savitch?’
‘Probably excites him. Life on the edge can be quite sexy when you’re living behind big walls with big guys around and a game-keeper in the lodge with a rack of shotguns.’
‘Spoken by a man who knows all about life on the edge,’ Merrily said.
‘This and that.’
‘You know Syd Spicer?’
It just came out. Barry’s expression didn’t change. Lol glanced at Merrily, curious. You could hear the tunk of a pool game over in the other bar. Barry came round the bar, raked over the fire in the dog-grate, picked up the apple log and dumped it on top.
‘The last good log,’ he said. ‘’Scuse me a minute.’
Lol’s spiral-bound lyrics pad was half-filled. Merrily remembered him buying it in Hereford, maybe two weeks ago, after a rare lunch at All Saints.
‘You’re, erm, cookin’? As Danny would say.’
‘We need to get the album out before summer.’ Lol had a cautious sip of shandy. ‘It’s not just about me any more.’
Probably meaning not Danny so much as Prof Levin. Hard times for a producer with a studio and overheads, now that a band could make a perfectly professional album with digital kit in someone’s spare bedroom. She knew Lol was worried abou
t Prof going back on the booze, if only out of boredom.
‘And, um…’ Upturning his pencil, letting it slide through his fingers to the pad. ‘I’ve had another approach.’
‘Sorry?’
‘An agency. Nu-folk stuff – reputable. They could break me into tours, have me headlining middling events next autumn, and…’ Lol leaned back. ‘There we are. Serious money.’
‘Oh.’
With downloads and burn-offs, the profits were in gigs again.
‘I said maybe I’d get back to them,’ Lol said.
‘Of course.’
‘I won’t, obviously.’
‘Lol, don’t let—’
‘It’s not just that. I mean, it’s not just you.’
Merrily felt like the stone flags were falling away beneath her chair. That what he was saying was not what he was thinking.
Lol said, ‘I don’t actually want to be rich. You know that.’
‘I do?’
‘Well… be nice, in a way, to be so loaded you could buy out Ward Savitch. But realistically…’ Lol put his hands on his knees, stared down at them. ‘I’ve been handed a second chance, right? So I want things to be different from what they might’ve been if I’d made it first time. Partly because there’s going to be less time. And also… Like, when Prof says, we need more body on this album and why doesn’t he see if Tom Storey’s available, I’m going, no, there’s actually this guy called Danny Thomas who’s an ex-subsistence farmer and isn’t quite as good as Tom Storey, but is good enough…’
‘You didn’t tell me that, either. You didn’t tell me Prof wanted to get you Tom Storey.’
Unlikely to be an idle promise, because Prof had been around a long time and knew these ageing rock gods from way back, and some of them owed him favours. Merrily felt starved. What else hadn’t he told her?
Lol said, ‘Just we’ve not had that much time to talk lately, have we?’
‘Because you’ve been at Danny’s barn night after bloody—You just didn’t want to tell me, did you?’
‘You have enough to—’
‘So we have separate problems now? We keep our problems to ourselves? We keep them apart? Now you don’t need me to bounce this stuff off because you’ve got Danny?’
‘I don’t want a row…’
‘Jesus, Lol… you never want a bloody row.’
Merrily jerked her chair back. What was the matter with her? She liked Danny Thomas. She was glad that Lol was working with a local guy. But was he turning down tours only because he thought it would be incompatible with the life of a woman tied to a parish?
‘I like it here,’ Lol said. ‘I like being a guy living in a village where one day you’re playing music, the next you’re doing… something else.’
He pulled over the lyrics pad, pencilled a circle around something, then pushed it in front of Merrily. She read:
When life’s become a bitch
Dig out another ditch
Find some recovery
Back in the JCB
Referencing the times he’d spent helping Gomer Parry. She wasn’t really taking this in. She was thinking, This is a test. It had to happen one day. The Christian thing would be to persuade him to do the tour.
She saw a man walk into the bar, carrying a black bin liner.
‘Look,’ Lol said, ‘I’ve agreed with Barry to do a few more gigs here – at the Swan.’
‘And would that be a living?’ Merrily clutched her head. ‘All right, I’m sorry…’
‘And maybe something outside in the summer, with more music. Other people.’
‘A music festival? In Ledwardine?’
‘Too big a word. We’re thinking no more than one day… and a night. Just an idea. Well, Danny’s idea. He has Glastonbury dreams. I was going to see what you thought before we took it any further, because… festivals of any kind haven’t always gone well here, have they? Anyway, it would be useful to have the album finished and mastered and out there, before it happens. If it happens.’
‘Does the album have a title yet?’
‘A Message from the Morning.’
‘Oh God, I knew that. What’s the matter with me? Lol, look…’ Merrily reached across the table for his hand. ‘Maybe we should grab half a day. Drive over to Wales. Talk about all this. And other things.’
Lol said, ‘What’s up with Barry?’
Merrily turned her chair around. Barry was back and the man was holding up the bin liner. Barry was wiping his hands on a towel.
‘He’s not happy, Lol.’
Lol said, ‘Why were you asking him about Syd Spicer?’
‘It’s a long story.’
The guy put the bin sack on the bar.
‘For you, Barry.’
He was gangly, long-faced, jutting jaw. And not sober. Barry looked up, doing his professional beam.
‘Is this roadkill, sir, or did one of you finally learn how to shoot?’
‘Dinner.’ The guy slapped the bag on the bar. ‘My dinner for tomorrow, Barry.’
He wore a camouflage jacket, newish. He had a loose, rubbery mouth.
‘I wanna eat it,’ he said.
Merrily saw Lol look up, frown.
‘I thought he’d gone back to… wherever he came from. I thought they’d all gone.’
‘Guest of The Court?’
‘They love to find bits of lead shot in their dinner,’ Lol said. ‘Real men.’
‘Do us a favour, sir,’ Barry said, ‘Take it round the back. Not everybody likes dead game in the bar. Especially when it’s over a month out of season.’
‘It never fucking is, landlord!’
‘Then it’s probably unfit for human consumption,’ Barry said calmly. ‘Round the back, eh?’
‘I need to eat it.’
‘We’ll talk about it round the back.’
‘I can only thank God Jane’s not here,’ Merrily said.
She saw Lol wince.
16
The Rule
HALFWAY ACROSS THE square, under the amber wash of the fake gas lamps, Jane lost the certainty. Not cold feet exactly, just the need for a second opinion. Why ruin Mum’s night? She hadn’t seen Lol for days.
She slipped into the shadowy sanctuary of the little oak- pillared market hall, pulled out her mobile and called Eirion’s phone.
Eirion’s answering service kicked in.
‘It’s me,’ Jane said.
She’d give him two minutes to call back and then walk across to the Swan, see what kind of mood Mum was in. Let the fates decide.
She was alone under the stone-tiled roof of the market hall which sometimes looked even more ancient than it was, like a prehistoric burial chamber. In her plan of the Ledwardine henge, the market hall was just off-centre, maybe marking a confluence of energies. A fair bit of energy had been expended here, all those shadowy couples exploring each other’s bodies up against the pillars.
Which made her think about Eirion at university, with all its temptations, although he’d sworn to her…
Sod it. Jane tucked away her phone and walked across to the Swan, reaching the bottom of the three stone steps just as the door opened. She backed away as someone stumbled out, the porch lamp lighting his face and his slobbery mouth.
Oh God, no.
Still here? Weren’t they all supposed to have gone home to their penthouses? How long did these bloody courses go on?
Still here, still pissed.
I’ll be seeing you… girlie.
Bad, bad news. Jane slid into the alley which led to the Swan’s backyard. He might not even remember her, probably tried it on with a few more women since then, but it wasn’t worth the risk. She stood leaning against the wall, waiting for him to go.
Obviously not the time to talk to Mum. Too many negative signs.
The phone shuddered in her pocket. She eased it out of her jeans, moving further into the alley, holding it very tight to her ear.
‘I was finishing a curry,’ Eirion said. ‘Some
things must never be interrupted. And, before you ask, yes, it was a vegetable curry. Not easy to obtain in this part of Cardiff.’
‘Well, that—’ Footsteps, someone grunting. ‘Irene, I’ll have to call you back.’
‘Jane—?’
‘Sorry.’
She killed the signal, edged a little further against the wall. There was a sigh and a liquid splatter. Steam and stench. Gross. Jane turned away and waited until it was over, expecting him to go once he’d finished, but…
Damn, damn, damn. He was coming into the alley. Jane moved all the way into the inn yard. There was an old brick toilet block at the end, long out of use. Jane slid around the side of it, stumbling into a pile of rubble.
Only just making it in time. The kitchen door was opening. A splash of light. Jane saw Dean Wall standing in the doorway, wearing an apron. A local thug, basically, unless he’d changed since she’d been at school with him. Somehow, he’d persuaded Barry to take him on as an assistant chef, which probably meant he was responsible for sweeping the yard. Essentially, only a few years, a degree from the LSE and probably a Swiss bank account separated Dean from Cornel, who was standing on the step, one arm inside a plastic sack.
‘Tomorrow’s dinner, mate.’
Something was pushed at Dean, who went kind of duh, but it was crisply overlaid by Barry’s voice.
‘I’m sorry, mate.’
‘Don’t apologize, Barry. Just take it.’
‘You misunderstand. I told you once, I’m not accepting this. This is the country. There are rules.’
‘Wha—?’
‘Rules. Take it away.’
‘No, mate,’ Cornel said. ‘In the country, there aren’t any fucking rules that can’t be broken.’
‘Son, you don’t know anything about the country.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Season ends on February the first, and it’s now very nearly the end of March. That make sense to you?’
‘What?’
