The Chalice (8 page)

      
Still, for once, time was playing on his side, staying the dead
hand of winter, letting him go on painting outdoors into the early evening,
using the very last of the light. For this was when things happened. Often,
when he looked at the picture next morning, he'd find that the absence of direct
light had wrought some marvellous effects, textures he'd never have found if
he'd been able to see properly. All a matter of surrendering to the dusk.

      
And beyond the dusk ... lay the Grail.

      
Of course, everyone came to Avalon in search of the Grail. And
it was different for all of them. There was always the
possibility
of an actual holy relic somewhere. But for most people
the Grail was simply the golden core of whatever you dreamed you might achieve.
The vanishing point on life's horizon. Glastonbury being one of those spots on
the Earth's surface where the phantasmal became almost tangible, where you
might actually reach the vanishing point before you, er, vanished.

      
Jim's personal Grail - the mystical formula which would (he
hoped) come to define a Battle painting - was to be round at the very end of
dusk, the cusp of the day, the moment between evening and night when the world stopped.

      
It should happen at dawn too, but it didn't for Jim. He'd walked
out in the drizzle and the dew, to wait. In vain. The moment never came, or he
could not feel it. Time of life again: at his age perhaps you were just not
meant to feel the stopping of the world at dawn.

      
Not that he greatly wished for youth - only to have come to
Avalon as a younger man. Wasn't as if he hadn't known, then, what he wanted to
do.
Plenty of time for painting, bloody
Pat had bleated, when you've got your pension.

      
God. Why do we listen to
them?
If he'd left his wife and met Juanita twenty years ago, when she was
a very young woman and he didn't seem
so
much of an older man ...

      
Well, he hadn't. It was enough of a privilege that she was his
friend, that he could bathe in her aura. Jim left the canvas wedged into the
easel and manhandled the whole painting to the house. He propped it against the
open door and turned to accept the night.

      
The cottage was tiny but satisfyingly isolated, reached by a track
too narrow for a car. Ten years ago, although his worldly goods were few, the
removal men had been less than euphoric.

      
But Jim still was, much of the time. Especially when the sun
had gone, leaving its ghost to haunt the lush, sloping grass in the foothills
of Glastonbury Tor.

      
Behind the cottage was a wooded hillside which was always
immediately activated by the dying sun. He could almost feel it starting to
tremble with the stirring and scufflings and rustlings of badgers and rabbits and
foxes and owls.

      
Before him, the dark brown fields rolled away into the tide of
mist on the slopes of the Tor and the cottage snuggled into the huge ash tree
which overhung it, as if its only protection against the night was to become
part of this great organism.

      
The way that Jim himself wanted to go into the final night. To
be absorbed, become part of the greater organism, even if it was only as
fertiliser.
      
He grunted, startled.

      
Two extra shadows were creeping along the hedgerow.

Headlice saw the little
tubby guy in his garden, with his red face and his tweed hat. What a waste, eh?
People like that could go and live in nice suburban cul-de-sacs and leave the
power places for them that could still feel the electricity.

      
He dragged Rozzie into the shadow of the hedge. 'Ow!' she
screeched. 'Friggin' thorns.'

      
'Thorns round here are sacred,' Headlice told her. 'That Joseph
of whatsit, when he landed and planted his stick, it turned into a thorn tree,
right?'

      
'That's Christian. '

      
'It's still earth magic' Headlice gazed up towards the Tor,
very big now, almost scary in the flatlands. One side of the tower sucking the
very last red bit out of the sky, the other side, the one closest to them,
sooty-black.

      
He was glad they'd been sent first, to find their own way
through the tangled undergrowth to the Tor. This was how a pilgrimage ought to
end. Except he wished it wasn't Rozzie.

      
A fragile half moon had risen in a thin mist above the holy
hill's eastern flank.

      
'Fuckin' magic, in't it?

      
'You ain't seen nuffin yet.' Rozzie smiled secretively. 'Stop
a minute, willya? I've done me friggin' ankle.'

      
Headlice gritted his teeth. 'Been better off bringing Molly.
Least she knows the country.'

      
'Yeah,' Rozzie said. 'And you could shag her afterwards right?'

      
Headlice said nothing.

      
'What you had in mind, ain't it?' Rozzie said. 'You're
 
a transparent little sod.'

      
OK, so maybe he did wish it was Mol he was with. Sure; she was
fat. Fat
ish.
But she was nice-looking.
Open, when Rozzie was closed-up. Despite - and he'd always known this - her not
being what she made out. Plus she smelled nice.

      
When they crossed the lane, only a hedge between them and
where the ground started to rise, Headlice wanted to climb over and scramble
up, but Rozzie said they'd better find the gate Mort had told them to use. When
they reached it they could see a glowing path of concrete: chippings and stuff
had been put in, with steps. All the way to the top, it looked like. For the tourists.
Sacrilege.

      
There was a collecting box inviting visitors to contribute
towards Tor maintenance. Oh yeah, like patching up the concrete path? Balls to
that.

      
And then there was a National Trust notice board for the thicko
tourists. Headlice started to read it anyway, striking a match and holding it
close to the print.

Tor is a West Country word
of Celtic origin meaning a hill. Glastonbury Tor is a natural formation composed
of layers of clay and blue limestone, capped by a mass of hard,
erosion-resistant sandstone.

      
'How do they know that, anyway?' It was almost too dark to
make out the print. 'How do they know it's a natural formation?'
      
'What's it matter?' Rozzie said.
      
Because it could've been
built
here, you daft bat. By the ancient
shamans. Like the pyramids. According to the lines of force and the position of
the heavens.'

The Tor is and has been to
many people a place of magic, the focus of legend and superstition. One local
story is that there is a hollow space inside; another, perhaps very ancient,
that the hill has a secret entrance to the Underworld.

      
Headlice felt sick to his gut to see it spelled out like this,
baby talk, for every ice-lolly sucking day-tripper. He wanted to rip down the board,
smash the collecting box, hack up the concrete path. Then the Tor would be a
secret place again. A place for pilgrims. He turned away, needing to put this
tourist shit behind him.

      
'Come on.' Pulling at Rozzie.

      
'Get your mits off. Wanna read this last bit.'

The Tor was the scene of
the hanging, drawing and quartering of Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury,
when Henry VIII dissolved the Abbey in 1539.

      
'Heavy,' Rozzie said.

      
'Yeah. Shit.' Headlice dropped the match as it burned down to
his fingers. 'I didn't know about that.'

      
He looked up to where night had fused the hill and the tower
into a single dark lump.

      
'Still.' He walked off along the shining path. 'Maybe the old
git had it coming.'

Alone for the first time
since she'd joined the convoy, Diane sat in Headlice's bus, a woollen shawl
around her shoulders, and unwrapped a peppermint flavoured carob bar.

      
She was sitting on one of the original vinyl-covered bus seats
still bolted to the floor. The bus windows were purpled by a November night as
soft and luminous as June.

      
So this was it. Breathing space over. She was back.

      
What
happens now?

      
Part of her wanted to take her van and leave quietly. Drive to
Juanita's. She'd really missed Juanita, the older sister she'd never had. She
really ought to explain. But what on earth could she say? Juanita might run a
New Age bookshop, but she could be rather disparaging about people's visions. .

      
I was dreaming every
night about the Tor. Vivid colours
.
      
Common homesickness. You'll get
over it.

      
Kept seeing things sort
of metamorphose into the Tor. Salt and vinegar shakers in cafes. Plastic
bottles of toilet cleaner. And flashing images of it when I closed my eyes.

      
Hyper-active imagination. Next.

      
Stopping at traffic
lights behind lorries owned by Glastonbury firms. Or houses called Avalon.
      
Oh, really...

      
And sometimes I'd wake
up in the middle of the night sensing her near me, in the room.
      
Oh God, not...
      
The
third Nanny.
      
You're nuts, Diane.

      
She began to rock backwards and forwards, holding herself
tight in the shawl
. Oh God, Oh God, what
am I doing here?

      
Two weeks ago, Patrick had shown her pictures of his family's
villa in Chianti country. Wonderful place for a honeymoon. Lovely place, decent
man. Oh God.

      
A shadow passed the window. Then another. She sat very still
for a moment. They'd all gone, she'd watched them. Mort and Viper the last to
go. She heard a giggle and a hiss.

      
Kids. There were three or four children in a converted ambulance
at the other end of the field, in the care of a sullen teenager called Hecate,
a large girl who claimed to be sixteen but was probably younger.

      
There'd been quite a few babies in the convoy when it first
set off, but by the time they reached the beginning of the St Michael Line at
Bury St Edmunds, they all seemed to have gone, along with their parents. And
the dogs. None of the remaining travellers seemed to have dogs with them. She
was sure there'd been a few before, when they were on their way down from
Yorkshire.

      
And musicians. Two guitarists and a flute player. Now there
was only Bran, the dour shamanic drummer.

      
And there used to be lots of ghetto blasters. Endless rock
music. Old Rolling Stones albums and Oasis and The Lemonheads. Deep into the
night, and the children were used to it and slept through it all.

      
The hiss came again. Diane got up and went out to the
platform. 'What's going on?'

      
It didn't stop. She stepped off the platform and found herself
looking into the shadowed face of the girl called Hecate.

      
'What's your problem?' Hecate said.
      
'What are you doing?'

      
There were four small shadows moving about. Children who were
surely old enough to be at school. They were hovering around the bus, making
hissing sounds.

      
'Hey!' Diane realised what was happening. They all had big
aerosol sprays. It was almost dark, but she could see that several of the
yellow stripes on the bus's bee-panelled panels had already vanished. 'Stop
that, you little horrors. Headlice'll go mad!'

      
The children carried on spraying the bus black, didn't even
look round. In the near-dark there was something unearthly about them. They
were like silent gnomes.

      
Diane turned back to the older girl. 'Can't you stop them?'

      
'Why don't you mind your own bleeding business?' Hecate said.
'You nosy fat slag.'

      
'How dare ... ?' Diane calmed down, remembered to put on the
Somerset. '
That's
jolly nice, I must
say.'