‘I said, who do you think I ran into in that poky little record shop in Church Street?’
It was almost dark, and they were leaving the city via the King’s Acre roundabout, with a fourteenth-century cross on its island.
‘Close. Lol Robinson.’ Jane said. ‘You do remember… ?’
‘Oh,’ Merrily said casually. There was a time when she could have become too fond of Lol Robinson. ‘Right. How is he?’
Jane told her how Lol had just started renting this brilliant flat over the shop, with a view over the cobbles and two pubs about twenty yards away.
‘Belongs to the guy who owns the shop. His sister used to live there but she’s moved out. Her name’s Katherine Moon, but she’s just known as Moon, and I think she and Lol… Anyway, he looks exactly the same. Hasn’t grown, same little round glasses, still wearing that black sweat-shirt with the alien face on the front – possibly symbolic of the way he feels he relates to society and feels that certain people relate to him.’
‘So, apart from the sartorial sameness, did he seem OK?’
‘No, he was like waving his arms around and drooling at the mouth. Of course he seemed OK. We went for a coffee in the All Saints café. I’ve never been in there before. It’s quite cool.’
‘It’s in a church.’
‘Yeah, I noticed. Nice to see one fulfilling a useful service. Anyway, I got out of Lol what he’s doing now. He didn’t want to tell me, but I can be fairly persistent.’
‘You nailed his guitar hand to the prayerbook shelf?’
‘Look, do you want to know what he’s doing or not?’
‘All right.’
‘You ready for this? He’s training to be a shrink.’
‘What? But he was—’
‘Well, not a shrink exactly. He hates psychiatrists because they just give you drugs to keep you quiet. More a kind of psychotherapist. He was consulting one in Hereford, and the guy realized that, after years in and out of mental hospitals, Lol knew more -ologies and -isms than he himself did, so now he’s employing him a couple of days a week for sort of on-the-job training, and Lol’s doing these night classes. Isn’t that so cool?’
‘It…’ Merrily thought about this. ‘I suppose it is, really. Lol would be pretty good. He doesn’t judge people. Yeah, that’s cool.’
‘Also, he’s playing again. He’s made some tapes, although he won’t let anybody hear them.’
‘Even you?’
‘I’m working on it. I may go back there – I like that shop. Lots of stuff by indy folk bands. And I’m really glad I saw him. I didn’t want to lose touch just because he moved out of Ledwardine.’
Merrily said cautiously, ‘Lol needed time to get himself together.’
‘Oh,’ Jane said airily, ‘I think he needed more than that, don’t you?’
‘Don’t start.’
‘Like maybe somebody who wasn’t terrified of getting into a relationship because of what the parish might think.’
‘Stop there,’ Merrily said lightly, ‘all right?’
‘Fine.’ Jane prodded the music up to disco level and turned to look out of the side window at the last of the grim amber sinking on to the shelf of the Black Mountains. A desultory rain filmed the windscreen.
‘Still,’ Merrily thought she heard the kid mumble, ‘it’s probably considered socially OK to fuck a bishop.’
That night, praying under her bedroom window in the vicarage, Merrily realized the Deliverance issue wasn’t really a problem she needed to hang on God at this stage. Her usual advice to parishioners facing a decision was to gather all the information they could get from available sources on both sides of the argument, and only then apply for a solution.
Fair enough. She would seek independent advice within the Church.
She went to sit on the edge of the bed, looking out at the lights of Ledwardine speckling the trees. They made her think of what Huw Owen had said about the targeting of women priests.
Little rat-eyes in the dark.
She hadn’t even raised that point with Mick Hunter. He would have taken it seriously, but not in the way it was meant by Huw.
Merrily shivered lightly and slid into bed, cuddling the hot water bottle, aware of Ethel the black cat curling on the duvet against her ankles, remembering the night Ethel had first appeared at the vicarage in the arms of Lol Robinson after she’d received a kicking from a drunk. She hoped Lol Robinson would be happy with his girlfriend. Lol and Merrily – that would never have worked.
Later, on the edge of sleep, she heard Huw Owen’s flat, nasal voice as if it were actually in the room.
Little rat-eyes in the dark.
And jerked awake.
OK. She’d absorbed Huw’s warning, listened to the Bishop’s plans.
It was clear that what she had to do now, not least for the sake of her conscience, was go back to Hereford and talk to Canon Dobbs.
The Last Exorcist.
Merrily lay down again and slept.
6
Sweat and Mothballs
‘OH YES,’ MOON said, ‘he was outside the window, peering in – his face right up to the glass. His eyes were full of this awful, blank confusion. I don’t think he knew who I was. That was the worst thing: he didn’t know me.’
‘He was in the… garden?’ How do I handle this? Lol thought. She’s getting worse.
‘I ran out,’ Moon said. ‘Then I saw him again at the bottom of the steps leading up to the camp. And then he wasn’t there any more.’
She was sitting on a cardboard box full of books. There were about two dozen boxes dumped all over the living area. Lol hadn’t been into the kitchen or the bathroom but, except for the futon in the open loft, it looked exactly the way it had been the last time he was here. She’d refused offers of help from Denny and Lol, and from Dick Lyden’s wife Ruth. You had to arrange your possessions yourself, she’d insisted, otherwise you’d never know where anything was.
But nothing at all seemed to have been put away, nothing even unpacked. It was as though she’d gone straight to bed when he left her on Saturday and had just got up again, four days later.
Sleeping Beauty situation, fairytale again.
The point about Moon was that she was utterly singleminded. Most of the time she had no small talk, and no interest in other people, although she could be very generous when some problem was put under her nose – like buying the busker’s balalaika.
But now she’d found her father, and nothing else mattered.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and he was wearing a flat cap which I recognized.’
Moon was wearing an ankle-length, white satin nightdress which had collected a lot of dust, a thick silver torc around her neck. She’d had on nothing over the nightdress when she’d opened the door to Lol. She didn’t seem cold. It was wildly erotic. Lol wondered how doctors coped with this.
‘It was this grey checked one with all the lining hanging out. Mummy always kept it – I mean for years, anyway. She talked about all the times she used to try and get him to throw it away. Denny threw it away in the end, I suppose. Now my father has it back.’
Delusional, Lol thought. Because she doesn’t seem scared. It has to be wishful thinking. But what did it mean, that she’d wished up a father who didn’t seem to recognize her?
The long nightdress rustled like leaves as Moon stood up, glided to the window.
‘When I was little, I used to wonder if that was the cap he’d worn when he shot himself, so that was why it was all torn. Of course, the gun would have made much more of a mess than that, but you don’t know these things when you’re little, do you?’