Friends of the Dusk (28 page)

‘So I, like, tentatively join in with the discussion and one of the dowsers lends me his rods and, yeah, I’m getting reactions. You can feel it in your arms. But I’m still being fairly reticent, saying, gosh that’s quite interesting, isn’t it? Not revealing how much I actually know about earth energies and stuff.’

Which was quite a lot. Lol knew that Jane had been reading about all this for two or three years. Jane had a wooden box containing two pendulums and a pair of Joey Korn swivelling rods.

‘And then Sam stands back, with a little smile and paraphrases Hamlet. Shakespeare.
More things, Horatio, more things.

‘… in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Talking your language.’

‘Sam nailed it. Ancient people, we don’t just need to find out what things they made, how they lived. We need to see through
their eyes, sense what they sensed… aware that their senses would have been much sharper than ours… accepting that they might well have been aware of things we no longer perceive.’

‘That really
is
your language.’

‘God, yes. I could’ve kissed Sam. Never been more grateful to anybody in my life. Rescued me from rock bottom. I suppose I kind of worshipped Sam, like when you have a crush on your teacher.’

She was looking at the floor again, hands on her knees.

‘Went to the pub that night, just the two of us, and it was really great. I felt like I was… you know, in the vanguard of something. We talked till we got thrown out. About Hereford and Alfred Watkins and the Straight Track Club. Sam said Watkins was a really significant archaeologist whose contribution had been ignored because it came from instinct rather than scientific methodology. I told Eirion on the phone. He said that was great. Somebody I was in tune with.’

Lol didn’t know how to respond. It was clear where this was going, and he felt sad about it, for both of them. He’d known Jane for just a little longer than he’d known her mother, but he wasn’t sure that unloading this on him was going to help her.

‘It all turned around.’ She looked up, bleakly dry-eyed. ‘I didn’t want it to end. I was learning – or thought I was – that it didn’t matter how you came to it, or how you found the commitment. And because I was a mate of Sam’s, other guys started to take an interest in helping me, and they’d take me off to the pub and places, and nobody mentioned Bill Blore again.’

Lol could hear Eirion.

We’d both heard that these archaeological digs were, like, shagfests, but there was none of that that I could see. The guys were quite protective towards Jane.

‘I thought I’d grown up,’ Jane said. ‘I thought I’d changed. I was looking back at the waste of space I was at fifteen. Looking back from the adult world. God, how we fool ourselves.’

Lol took off his glasses, couldn’t find a tissue and rubbed the lenses with the hem of his sweatshirt.

‘If you want to leave them off,’ Jane said, ‘I’ll cut to the chase. On the last night, everybody went to the pub and, like, no way was I going to get pissed, so I stuck to cider. Cider and me, I thought we had an arrangement.’

‘Not all ciders are the same.’

‘Quite. I knew that better than anybody. So obviously I don’t remember getting back to the B and B. Except when I woke up next morning and realized it wasn’t my B and B.’

‘Sam’s?’

He thought she nodded, but maybe not.

‘You heard from Sam since you left?’

‘We haven’t spoken since.’

‘So it’s over?’

‘Lol, it never really started, except…’

She looked back at the floor. Lol sat there with his glasses in his lap, feeling the onus on him to make her feel better.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘You know… I mean, these things happen.’

‘There was a text,’ Jane said. ‘Asking if I’d got Sam’s email. Perhaps there was something important in it. I don’t know. I’d deleted it as soon as I saw the name.’ She paused. ‘Dr Samantha Burnage.’

Lol said, ‘Oh.’

Jane looked almost relieved.

‘It’s not just about telling you. I’ve told Lucy now.’

She looked up. All around the room. As if she might find her there: Lucy Devenish, soul of the village, mentor to Jane, mentor to Lol, living on in the stone and the timber and the applewood smoke.

37

Coffin wood

T
HERE WEREN
’
T SUPPOSED
to be discussions afterwards, at least not in the church. The deal was that they just left quietly, carrying something away with them. Something positive, you hoped.

But whatever you suggested, there’d always be two or three people who wanted to talk. Tonight, in the porch, Gus Staines, in a long grey woolly, handed her a small Ledwardine Livres carrier bag. For Jane. As promised. No hurry to have it back.

‘She
is
all right, isn’t she?’

‘Jane? She’s a bit undecided, I think. About what she wants to do with her life. We’ve all been there, I suppose. Why do you ask?’

‘They grow up very quickly, don’t they,’ Gus said. ‘We forget.’

‘I suppose it just doesn’t seem very quick to us at the time. Seems to take forever. Sometimes I wonder if we ever do. Grow up.’

Hell, was that even true? One of the worst aspects of being a priest was people expecting you to have a higher level of wisdom.

Merrily hurried out of the lychgate, over the cobbles and back to the vicarage without meeting anybody else. It would’ve been nice to see Lol hanging around at the top of Church Street, although, even before the call to Sophie, the idea of inviting him over for a meal had lost its momentum. What kind of an item were they, really?

The vicarage was silent, only the smallest lamp on in the kitchen and a note on the table.

When did they stop being children? Should she go up to Jane, or would that be an old-hen thing to do?

She wasn’t tired. If she sat down she wouldn’t relax. If she went to bed early she wouldn’t sleep. Talking to Jane, sharing a meal would have passed the time. Now there was no excuse.

How was she supposed to sleep anyway, with this hanging over her?

She went through to the scullery and sat down behind the computer, a sleeping monster with one small, baleful white eye. She stared at the blank screen then awoke it.

Ledwardine Broadband wasn’t the fastest. Downloading the audio file took over half an hour. She went back to the kitchen and gave Ethel more food, thought about getting herself something to eat and couldn’t face it. Made herself a pot of tea.

It was around ten before she switched off all the lights except the scullery Anglepoise, opened the document in iTunes, plugged in the headphones.

‘
Sophie’s an admirable woman in many ways
,’ Craig Innes said into her ears. ‘
But Merrily Watkins would appear to be her one blind spot
.’

She’d never really listened to his voice before. It was quite high-pitched. A good, fluty preacher’s voice. You thought of sheeny new pine. Coffin wood.

‘—not including those who’ve eventually wound up in psychiatric care,’
Craig Innes was saying.

The quality was startlingly crisp. Innes must have been sitting at Sophie’s desk, quite close to the iPhone.

‘Hasn’t happened to many women. To my knowledge.’
Siân’s voice more distant, probably from the desk in the window. Her desk. Her former desk.
‘Craig, there haven’t yet been many female deliverance ministers.’

‘I don’t have figures. It’s not widely discussed.’

Siân talked about her own, limited experience in deliverance, her conclusion – unexpected – that there was actually quite a significant demand for it, even in what was increasingly perceived as a secular age. After this came a slow, muted hiss, like
tssk, tssk,
that could only be Craig Innes expressing impatience.

‘I’m increasingly inclined to think that it’s simply a demand we’ve created. Or have – unwisely – allowed to create itself.’

‘Craig, it’s a traditional ministry. Admittedly not always monitored, but—’

‘But if the only way we can fill pews is by becoming… ghost-busters… what does that say about the Church in the Third Millennium?’

His voice faded over, you could hear his footsteps. He was pacing, angry.

‘… if she says no to rural dean…’

‘Do you think she’s even had enough experience to be a rural dean?’ Isn’t that likely to cause some resentment amongst the… the lifers?’

‘As exorcist, she replaced a man of over seventy!’

‘Yes. But a man who was so forbidding and slightly sinister that people – even priests – were often disinclined to consult him.’

‘You’re saying it was a bad thing, to discourage people from allowing their imaginations to run riot?’

‘What I think I’m saying is that Merrily Watkins, with her sometimes hesitant and even rather nervous approach, makes people—’

‘And you think that’s a good thing?’

‘She’s been more accessible,’
Siân said lamely.
‘That’s all I’m…’

Silence.

‘Like a convenience store,’
Innes said.

A longer silence before Siân tried again.

‘It might be argued that she brings people to us who… the kind of people who never expected to have anything to do with the Church. And they come to us for help because they’re at the very least puzzled and at the worst terrified. And there’s nowhere else to go.’

‘At best imaginative. At worst, mentally ill. And also—’

‘Craig, look, I’m… I’m not sure I’m really the best person for you to be discussing this with.’

‘You’re the Archdeacon, for heaven’s sake! My chief of staff.’

‘However, the deliverance minister, by tradition, reports exclusively and directly to the Bishop.’

‘Does she? Does she really? My understanding is that she blatantly takes advice from someone outside the diocese. Now. Am I at fault in not wanting the business of this diocese discussed with an outsider who appears to exercise influence over a woman occupying a position I already distrust?’

‘Huw Owen.’

‘Who lives alone on the top of a mountain with his head in the clouds. I grew up in Brecon, I have many friends there who’ve had dealings with this man.’

‘Craig, surely it’s been normal practice for several years in dioceses either side of the border to have priests sent for deliverance training to Huw Owen.’

Pause.

‘Who is mad. Who is known to be increasingly and terminally mad.’

It was after midnight by the time she’d listened to the end, replaying some of it and scrawling notes on her sermon pad.

She sat for another twenty minutes drinking industrial black tea before pulling the phone over and letting her fingers find
the number on the old metal dial. Waiting until the answering machine kicked in.

Aware that her voice was going to sound robotic. Only way she could get the words out.

‘What worries me most,’ she said to the machine, ‘is that I don’t think it’s purely personal. Because if it was, I think I’d get a sense of a reason for him to hate me.’

She broke off, clapping a hand over the mouthpiece to take an e-cig hit.

‘And yet I surely can’t be insane enough to see a wider picture. Can I? You listen to some bits again, you get a sense almost of something, I don’t know, almost apocalyptic?’ She laughed. ‘Oh shit, wish I could erase this and start again.’

‘Aye, all right, lass,’ Huw said. ‘Start again in the morning.’

‘Can that machine even work without you?’

‘Don’t sleep well these nights. Happen it’s me age.’

‘Where
are
you this morning?’

‘On your doorstep,’ Huw said. ‘Wouldn’t want to miss owt apocalyptic.’

‘You know what? That’s not a word I’d erase.’

‘Quite right,’ Huw said. ‘Get to bed and don’t oversleep. I’ll be early.’

Part Four

In some cases, with regard to superstitious beliefs, there is a deep reserve to be overcome; the more real the belief, the greater the difficulty.

Ella Mary Leather
The Folklore of Herefordshire

38

FOTD

J
ANE AWOKE FOR
maybe the eighteenth time into the same impenetrable, hurting, darkness.

A lousy, lousy night. Bruises on her thighs, arms, ankles, bruises she hadn’t known about until she got into bed, and each one started opening up aching memories of where it had come from. A dusty, dry shower of shredding leaves kept making her cough as she squirmed in and out of dreams. Dry leaves and damp, rotting leaves and slimy long grass which became, on waking, just her own sweat on the ruched and wrinkled undersheet.

She trailed a hand down the side of the bed, groping for her phone on the wooden floor. The phone told her it was coming up to five minutes past four. Wasn’t that the hour of the wolf? Or maybe the hour of the grainy white body that she kept trying to turn, oh God, into a naked man.

Jane rolled painfully on to her back, looking for the attic window. Any window. Any way out.

What had she done? Her instinct was to call Lol, call him now, wake him up, hiss into his ear:
You just forget it, you understand? You didn’t see me last night, I didn’t come round, I didn’t tell you anything and we’re never going to discuss it again. You just delete this from your memory.

As if.

She would, of course, have to go back to Lucy’s cottage, sit down with him again. She’d have to find answers to his quite reasonable questions:
Did anything happen? Do you
even remember?
And then, with hope in his voice,
Could this amount to sexual assault?
Questions she’d evaded, saying she had to go. Needed to get home before Mum came back from church.

What it must have done to him asking her those things. Recalling – as if he needed to, as if every day wasn’t tarnished by those memories – the time when, as a teenage rock musician given too much to drink by an older bandmate, he’d wound up in bed with a girl who’d looked at least as old as he was and was probably a lot less innocent. The smashing of his future, his sense of who he was.