‘Yeah… and all the time passing the place where her fucking father topped himself! What does that say to you?’
Denny sniffed hard and plucked twice at the balalaika’s strings, then laid it on the counter in disgust. ‘What use is a three-string shoebox on a stick? Kathy bought it from this poor, homeless busker, probably got the BMW parked round the corner.’
‘Soft-hearted,’ Lol said.
‘Soft in the head! I’ll tell you one thing: first sign of unusual behaviour, any hint of dope up there – she’s out. Kicking and screaming or…’ The CD ended and Denny lowered his voice. ‘Or however. Right?’
Lol nodded.
‘Long as we agree on that, mate,’ Denny said, as the girl customer turned around from the CD racks clutching a copy of Beth Orton’s Trailer Park, a slow delighted smile pushing her tongue into a corner of her mouth.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Lol Robinson, wow.’
‘Oh,’ Lol said. It seemed like ages since he’d seen her. He smiled, realizing how much he’d missed her even though sometimes, like Moon, she could be trouble. Well, not quite like Moon.
‘Hey, cool,’ the girl said. ‘And that same old Roswell sweatshirt. Is that the same one, or did you buy a set?’
‘Hello, Jane,’ Lol said. He wondered how much she’d overheard.
‘So, like who’s Kathy?’ Jane Watkins said. Dark mocking eyes under dark hair. A lot like her mother.
5
The Last Exorcist
THE BISHOP SMILED hard, talked fast, and wore purple as bishops do.
‘The Church, OK?’ His voice was public-school with the edges sanded off. ‘The Church is… hierarchical, conservative, full of rivalry, feuding, back-stabbing. And inherently incapable of ever getting anything bloody well done.’
The Bishop wore purple all over: a tracksuit and jogging gear. The Bishop jogged all over the city and its outskirts, usually in the early mornings and the evenings, covering, according to the Hereford Times, a minimum of thirty miles a week.
‘Now you’d think, wouldn’t you, that organizing an office in the Cathedral cloisters would be the easiest thing? Scores of cells and crannies and cubicles, but… all of them the Dean’s. And if the Dean says there isn’t an office to spare, I’m not even permitted to argue. Within the precincts of the Cathedral, even God bows to the Dean. So we shall have to look elsewhere. I’m so sorry, Merrily.’
‘It’s probably meant, Bishop.’
‘Mick,’ corrected the Bishop. ‘Meant? Oh it was meant, for sure. The bastard means to frustrate me. Who, after all, is the oldest member of his Chapter? Dobbs.’ The Bishop tossed the name out like junk-mail. ‘The old man’s ubiquitous, hovering silently like some dark, malign spectre. I’d like to… I want to exorcize Dobbs.’
‘Well, I feel very awkward about the whole thing.’ Merrily poured tea for them both.
‘Oh, why?’ The Bishop quizzically tilted his head, as though he really didn’t understand. He sugared his tea. ‘You know the very worst thing about Dobbs? He actually frightens people – imagine. You have what you are convinced is an unwelcome presence in your house, your nerves are shot to hell, you finally gather the courage – or the sheer desperation – to go to the Church for help. And what should arrive at your door but this weird, shambling creature dressed like an undertaker and mumbling at you like Poe’s doleful raven. Well, you’d rather hang on to the bloody ghost, wouldn’t you?’
The Bishop, Merrily had noticed, said ‘bloody’ rather a lot, but nothing stronger, always conscious of the parameters of his image as a cool Christian. She was determined to be neither overawed nor underawed by Mick Hunter this afternoon, neither bulldozed nor seduced. She wished he was more like Huw Owen, but men like Huw never ever got to be bishops.
‘Listen… Merrily…’ His voice dropping an octave – latenight DJ. ‘I realize how you must feel. If you were the kind of person who was utterly confident about it, I wouldn’t want you in this job.’
… not a fundamentalist, not a charismatic or a happy-clappy, you’ve no visible axe to grind and I can see why he was drawn to you. You’re in many ways almost exactly the kind of person we need in the trenches.
‘Do you know Huw Owen?’ she asked.
‘Only by reputation. Quite a vocal campaigner for the ordination of women long before it became fa… feasible.’
Fashionable, he’d been about to say. Until it became fashionable, Mick Hunter would have kept very quiet on the issue. Merrily was trying to see him as Jane saw him, but it wasn’t easy; Mick’s blue eyes were clear and blazing with a wild integrity. He had a – somehow unepiscopal – blue jaw. He smelled very lightly of clean, honest, jogger’s sweat and of something smokily indistinct which made her think, rather shockingly, of what a very long time it had been since she’d last had sex.
‘Your late husband was a lawyer, wasn’t he?’ he said, startling her upright, tea spilling.
‘Yes.’ She was blushing. ‘I… me too. I mean, I was going to be one too. Until Jane came into the picture, and a few other things changed.’
‘Shame,’ the Bishop said. ‘Road accident, wasn’t it?’
‘On the M5. He… he hit a bridge.’
They hit a bridge. Sean and Karen Adair, his clerk and girlfriend and accomplice in a number of delicate arrangements with iffy businessmen. Dying flung together in a ball of fire, at the time when Merrily was balancing an inevitable divorce against her chances of ordination, and Jane was just starting secondary school. How much of this did the Bishop know? All of it, probably.
‘Look,’ she had to say this, ‘the thing is, Huw’s position on the ordination of women doesn’t extend to Deliverance ministry – did you know that? He doesn’t think we’re ready for all that yet.’
His eyes widening. She realized he’d probably sent her on this particular course precisely because he knew Huw was sympathetic to women priests.
‘Not ready for all that?’ The eyes narrowing again. ‘All what?’
‘He doesn’t feel that we have the necessary weight of tradition behind us to take on… whatever’s out there.’
‘Which is a little bit preposterous’ – Mick Hunter leaned back – ‘don’t you think?’
‘It’s not what I think that matters.’
‘No, quite. At the end of the day, it’s what I think. The Deliverance consultant’s responsible to the Bishop, and only to the Bishop. And I think – without any positive discrimination – that, if anything, this is a job a woman can do better than a man. It demands delicacy, compassion… qualities not exactly manifested by Dobbs.’
‘I’ve… I’ve been trying, you know, to work out exactly how you do see the job.’
Mick Hunter stirred his tea thoughtfully. Two tables away, a couple of well-dressed, not-quite-elderly women were openly watching him. Beefcake bishop – a new phenomenon.
‘OK, right,’ he said. ‘While you were in Wales, we had some basic research carried out. Quick phone-call to all the parish clergy: a few facts and figures. Did you know for instance that in the past six months, in this diocese alone, there have been between twenty and thirty appeals to the Church for assistance with perceived psychic disturbance?’
‘Really? My God.’