Friends of the Dusk (3 page)

‘In the original sense. How come you keep putting yourself through it?’

‘I dunno. She’s been helpful to me, as you know, even though I feel it would be wrong to tell her that. She knows all the places…
all
the places angels fear to tread. Because of what they might pick up on their sandals.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Also I know she’s never going to admit how lonely she is. And so, occasionally, I… expose myself to it. I’d hate to think we’re two halves of something, but… Anyway she looks at me in that knowing, baleful way, like some evil granny, and she asks me if I’m thinking of packing it in.’

‘The Night Job.’

The Night Job.
Jane had been the first to call it that. Huw loved it, had added it to his lexicon of secret-service style euphemisms for this madness.

‘The lot, actually. The whole fancy-dress party. Cassock in the Oxfam bank, as she put it. Which was odd because I’d just been thinking about that, in quite a level, realistic kind of way. I’d been over to Hay, to look in on the Thorogoods in their shop. See how things are now.’

‘Aftercare.’

‘Mmm.’

Part of the deliverance programme; in the end, she’d done a minor exorcism of place in the shop in Back Fold. Betty Thorogood had phoned, Merrily asking her what they’d be doing tonight, for Samhain, the Celtic Feast of the Dead.
Nothing
, Betty had said.
It doesn’t matter any more.

And Merrily had found that disturbing because she’d thought it did matter. They’d followed a spiritual path, believing in something bigger, albeit pagan, and now, because they felt it had rebounded on them…

Supporting the heavy old phone with both hands, she stared into the empty dog collar on the desk. She could hear Jane coming downstairs, home prematurely from Pembrokeshire. After so many weeks alone in the house, it sounded like burglars. Jane had once delighted in paganism, too. A couple of years ago, the kid would be galvanized by Samhain. This morning, she hadn’t mentioned it, perhaps hadn’t even noticed the date.

‘It’s a secular society, Huw. Comparatively few of us will now admit to believing in anything unscientific. I can accept that half the world thinks I’m fooling myself. What’s harder to take is that a proportion of the other half think I’m trying to fool
them.
’

‘You’re grasping at straws, thinking any kind of spirituality – paganism, whatever – is better than nowt?’

‘And how far the night job is conditioning my own faith. No, of course, I don’t want out. It’s just that sometimes you examine your reasons for carrying on.’

‘Ah,’ he said.

Like he knew what was coming, and maybe he did.

‘Bottom line, I’ve even asked myself if I could do one without the other now. And that’s not good at all. The Night Job’s become a touchstone.’

‘Touchstone,’ Huw said. ‘What a lovely word that is.’

‘Like I’m starting to measure everything against whatever evidence of transcendence – or an afterlife or
something else
– that
I’ve collected through working as an exorcist. Like I’m using the woo-woo stuff as support for an increasingly unstable belief system.’

‘Highlighting a failure of faith?’

‘Isn’t it?’

The phone felt damp against her skin. She scrabbled around for her cigarettes and then remembered.
Bugger.

‘Listen,’ Huw said, ‘
I
can’t tell you how strong your faith is. That’s summat between you and Him. Or Her, depending. Or it might be faith’s just a device to enable us to carry on in the face of all the shit, and some of us need that bit of extra hands-on to top it up. For which—’

‘Yeah, but if we
need
that—’

‘—for
which
, if you hadn’t realized this, we bloody suffer. We get
extra
shit.’

‘We can’t win?’

His laughter crackled in the heavy old phone, multiple creaks suggesting he was coming to his feet.

‘Jesus Christ, you want to be seen to
win
now?’

She was silent. The whole house was silent. Last night, she and Jane had crouched over an open fire in the sitting room, and she’d sensed an uncertainty in Jane about the future, about what kind of adult she wanted to be. She’d been working with real archaeologists in West Wales to get an idea of whether she wanted to become one, whether real archaeology would support her fascination with ancient myths in the landscape or crush it.

‘You still there, lass?’

‘Sorry. I try to be open to possibilities while, at the same time, sceptical and impervious to people like Anthea White who undoubtedly know how to mess with minds. But I don’t know what kind of person this is turning me into.’

And was she going to be the same person Lol had loved?

He was coming home tomorrow after a long summer of touring, session work, production work. All of it good for him. Maybe
too
good. So good he’d be restless. So good that
Ledwardine, the village he’d once been almost agoraphobically reluctant to leave, would probably seem tame and restrictive.

Normal, irrational anxieties. Hints of an early menopause? God, don’t start that again. Merrily found the e-cig in her bag. It had run out of charge. She had a packet of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen, but if Jane smelled smoke…

‘So, it’s tomorrow.’

‘Huh? Oh… yeah, the Bishop. He’s coming over to the gatehouse. Sophie says he wants to see the set-up.’

‘Sophie’s staying on as Bishop’s secretary?’

‘And mine. I hope. And probably whoever comes after me.’

‘She said owt to you?’

‘No.’

It had all happened with unexpected haste. They’d thought at first that Bernie Dunmore’s stroke would be less disabling. Hadn’t expected him to call it a day so rapidly. And suddenly he’d gone and there was a new Bishop of Hereford.

Huw said, ‘What’s the word in the cloisters? About the new regime.’

‘I’ve no idea. I don’t spend time in the cloisters.’

‘Happen you should. Them Cathedral lads always hear the whispers.’

‘Huw—’

‘Course, he might’ve changed.’

‘You keep
saying
that… When I first hung his name on you, you asked me to pardon your French and then you called him—’

‘I know what I called him. And it were thoughtless of me to burden you, wi’ my prejudices.’

‘Might’ve been less thoughtless if you’d gone on to tell me what they were. No! Sorry. I don’t want to know. I’ll make up my own—’

‘Quite right.’ Huw paused. ‘So what time are you scheduled to meet the cunt?’

‘Two-thirty tomorrow afternoon. You want me to give you a call afterwards?’

‘If you want. I’ll happen send up a prayer for you, lass.’

4

Win-win

F
OR A FEW
moments, it looked to Lol like the old days. Car lights on the square warped in ancient glass, the shifting of apple logs in the hearth. Familiar cider taps on the bar top. Except that Barry was wearing a raffish black eye patch and, against the Jacobean oak of the pillars, the smoke pluming around Gomer Parry was Vatican-white.

It couldn’t be…

He pulled out a stool under the long mullioned window, next to Gomer, who glanced at him, nodding.

‘Ow’re you, boy.’

Lol registered that it wasn’t smoke.

‘
Gomer?
’

The old guy looked down, through his glasses, at the device in his hand, smiled.

‘Janey, this is.’

‘Gave you that?’

‘Present from Pembroke.’

‘And you’re… getting on OK with it?’

‘En’t bad,’ Gomer said.

God, you really had to hand it to Jane. The old guy must’ve been doing roll-ups for well over sixty years.

Barry was watching from behind the bar, formally attired with it being Friday night: black suit, black eye patch. In no time at all, the patch had become part of his legend, another ex-SAS emblem, except it was more recent. Lol felt close to tears, all they’d gone through together, these guys and him.
He never wanted to leave this village for so long again. Maybe wouldn’t have to.

He nodded at Gomer’s cider glass.

‘Another one?’

Whole weeks had passed over the summer and early autumn with Lol only occasionally getting back to Ledwardine, each time having to leave after less than two days. No half measures with touring. He hadn’t liked it one bit, but he’d done it.

Proving he could.

And then, just as it was coming to an end, Prof Levin had called to say Belladonna was demanding his services as session man –
sole
session man – on the comeback album nobody other than Bell was going to describe as long-awaited. It had taken the best part of a month at Knight’s Frome studio. Another month away. With Bell, you couldn’t snatch days off, couldn’t even count on a full night’s sleep. A woman that age with so much latent creative energy, it was scary.

But he was a professional again. Hell, not even
again
, this was probably the first time. He’d earned the right to return, look guys like Barry in the eye when he walked into the Black Swan.

And then, as he was preparing to leave this morning, job done, Prof, instead of just handing him an envelope, had taken him into the office to write a cheque.

But that wasn’t the half of it.

Bloody
hell.

‘Thing is,’ Gomer said, ‘I can do it in yere and
he
can’t say nothin’, see.’

‘Not yet, anyway,’ Barry said. ‘Government’ll doubtless find a way of screwing it. Or taxing it bigtime. It’s what those bastards live for.’

Gomer wafted the vapour at him as the e-cig lit up green. The tube looked like a combination of opium pipe and hypodermic.

‘En’t giving up proper ciggies, mind. Rollin’ a ciggy quiets your mind, see, gives you a bit o’ time to think summat over.’ Gomer turned to Lol. ‘Where’s the vicar?’

Lol nodded at the e-cig.

‘Did Jane, er…?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Brung one for the vicar, too.’

‘Blimey.’

‘En’t seen her with it yet, mind.’

Lol gazed around the bar to see if anything else had changed in the dimness between the mullioned windows and the smouldering logs. No candles, no pumpkins, no concessions to Hallowe’en; this was England. Barry brought over Lol’s half of cider and one for Gomer, picked up Lol’s tenner from the mat.

‘Merrily said you wasn’t coming back till tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, well, we worked all last night in the studio. In case there were going to be power cuts tonight. Finished mid morning. So I came back early. And the storm didn’t last. Win-win.’

Lol shivered. Not a phrase he’d ever used before. The night was mild, but the logs in the big ingle were alive. Dry, fragrant apple logs, and a stack of them. Barry was no longer having to economize. Might only have one eye but at least he now owned half the Swan – something to rebuild.

Back at the bar, he’d offered Lol a fee to do a gig here in a couple of weeks’ time. Lol had said yes but thought he might not take the money. He didn’t really need to take money from Barry.

Didn’t need…

He drank some cider, feeling the strangeness of it, looked up at Barry.

‘I was thinking… Merrily doesn’t know I’m back. Thinking maybe I could surprise her, and we could come back and have dinner in the restaurant?’

‘Dinner?’ Barry said.

‘You got a table free, about nine? Maybe Jane, too?’

Neither he nor Merrily had ever actually dined at the Swan except for the celebration night when Barry had acquired half the pub. Sandwiches. On a good week, they did sandwiches.

Barry looked uncertain.

‘She might’ve eaten already. Not used to… late dinner. You know?’

‘No. No, you’re right. I didn’t think.’

‘You better ring her, mate.’

‘Right.’

‘You all right, Laurence?’

‘Think so.’

Lol brought out his phone then he turned at the sound of laughter outside, saw Barry frown.

‘Here we go.’

Through the old glass, torchlight brought up chalky face-masks in the market square.

‘Not even dark yet,’ Barry said, ‘and out they come. Demands, with menaces. Worst thing to cross the Atlantic since McDonald’s. Let’s show little kids how to prey on pensioners.’

5

… or treat

M
UM SAID
, ‘G
ET
that, would you, flower?’

Calling down the stairs. She’d been in the bathroom, doing her face, actually singing to herself. She’d got out the new black and silvery knitted dress, from the summer sale at Ross Labels.

For Lol, this was. Lol had rung. Lol was back early and inviting Mum to dinner at the Swan, for heaven’s sake. Jane had absolutely refused to join them. She wasn’t
stupid
. Whoever was at the door, she’d tell them the vicar was out or in the bath or something.

The bell rang again, too soon, conveying impatience. It annoyed the hell out of Jane, how people thought vicarage hours were like 24/7 for any kind of trivia. For the kind of money Mum collected.

She waited. In the Holman-Hunt print by the side of the front door, Jesus was limply dangling his lantern over a few Mars bars lying on the table underneath.

Oh,
right.
Of course.

Jane hung on a while longer then opened the door to four kids, all male, packed into the open porch under the light. One was mumbling
trick or treat
, in a nonchalant way, like he was here to read the meter. You expected them to flash their ID:
We are accredited children, give us stuff.

Jane checked them out, recognizing one as Jude Wall, Dean Wall’s little brother, though not little any more – close to sixteen and even closer to clinically obese. He was the only one
of them not ghouled-up, probably figuring his normal face was scarier. His mask was pushed back on his head. He wore an old black overcoat. Two of the others carried rucksacks for the loot, which was all that the Celtic feast of the dead meant to these little bastards.

A car drew up in the street outside, headlights brushing the vicarage hedge.

‘Trick,’ Jane said.

A kid said, ‘You what?’

Jane shrugged.

‘Go on. Spook me.’