'Sorry, Diane…?' God, but she looked tired. Wanted looking after, this kid.
Diane watched him, unblinking. 'I was saying, did you ever have… did anything ever happen to you that… that you couldn't explain? Like…'
'Oh, there's a whole lot of stuff I can't explain.' Sam dumped two spoonfuls of drinking chocolate into a mug.
'Why folks will cheat and lie for a few quid that isn't gonner make them happy. Why it's always the best people who wind up dead before their time. Why otherwise humane, civilised folks'll go out and make little animals run till they can't run no more and then watch 'em get ripped apart. I don't include your old man in this, mind. I can understand why he does it. It's because he's soulless and pig-thick.'
He pulled a cigarette out of the packet.
'Sorry. Shouldn't talk like that. He is your dad.'
Diane shrugged. She had her hands clasped between her knees. Every few moments her shoulders would shake like she was fighting off flu.
'I know what you're asking,' Sam wanted to put his arms around her. If he could get them all the way round. 'I'm just avoiding the question.'
Not the time to come on with the arms. Probably never would be, after he said what he had to say. Shit. Should have realised he'd have to deal with this at some point. Should've been prepared. Course, if he hadn't grown to like her so much, as a person, it wouldn't have been a problem. In fact he usually got quite a buzz out of laying it on people in this headcase town – the people who'd looked at him, with his tangled, shoulder-length hair and his bit of an earring, and made certain assumptions which were way, way out.
Both of them veggies, too. They agreed totally about animal rights – although Diane was a bit more discreet about it than Sam was; didn't seem to feel quite the same urge to go and beat the living shit out of a huntsman. And, OK, she had this incomprehensible appetite for these totally disgusting carob-covered cereal bars.
Beyond this, it got more difficult.
'Look at me,' Diane shook again. 'I've been like this all morning. Couldn't open the shop.'
'You seen a doctor?'
Diane smiled thinly. 'Not anything a doctor could deal with. I've spent most of the morning sitting in front of the fire trying to deal with it.'
'Archer.'
'Sam, a sort of… blind hatred comes over me.'
'Fair enough.'
'And when it does, things start to happen. Awfully strange things. In the room or wherever I am. Sometimes I can almost see it, see my own rage. I suppose it's always been there. He just touches something in me and sets it off.'
'Seems a perfectly normal reaction to me. We are talking about Archer Ffitch here.'
'When I was a child, I got a sort of perverse comfort from it I would hug it to me. My hatred. Hug it to me like a dog. I think it's… it happened during the Glastonbury First meeting when he unveiled his plans for the Tor. It was as if the Tor knew what he was planning and hated him for it, and all that hatred is coming into me.'
'Ah,' said Sam, wishing he was out of here. 'Right.'
'And that's why the Tor's been coming through to me since I was a baby. The Tor knew what was going to happen as we approached the Millennium. It was all pre-ordained.
Why Violet – Dion Fortune – was chosen to be my spirit guide. Because I have to stop them destroying the Tor.'
'Diane, they don't wanner destroy the Tor, they just wanner restrict…'
'It's the same thing.' Rage dancing in Diane's eyes. 'The Tor, the road scheme. It's all anti-spiritual. You ask Woolly. Woolly was in the shop this morning talking, you know, end-of the world scenario. What happens in Glastonbury affects the spiritual life of the entire nation. This is the cradle.'
'Diane, if Woolly runs out of dope it's an end-of-the-world scenario.' Sam handed her the mug. 'Drink your chocolate'
Dammit, most situations you could work with people for years and they never needed to know where you stood on the big issues, which way you voted, etc.
Sam took a big breath, pulled on a handful of his long hair. Looked at Diane and kept seeing Rufus the fox cub.
'The thing is… I've got a big problem with all this, look. I'm like… coming from a different direction, right? Like, far as I can make out, you believe in just about the whole bit – UFOs, God, ghosts, the Holy Grail.'
'You have a way', Diane lowered her eyes, 'of making it all sound frightfully tawdry.'
'Whereas, I… I'm like… how can I put this… an atheist,' Sam said.
Diane looked up and sought his eyes. This time it was Sam who looked away.
From what seemed a long distance, he heard Diane whispering, 'You don't believe… in anything?'
'I believe in looking after the planet and, you know, each other, and not being cruel to animals. Or even people. Most of them.'
'You don't even believe in the possibility of anything?'
'I believe in cleaning up your own mess. I believe in being kind. But as for… you know…'
Diane said, very faintly, 'The otherworldly.'
'If you like. I think, quite honestly, I think it's all bollocks. The Grail, the Holy bloody Thorn. The Abbey…very pretty, look, but… it's all bollocks.'
In Glastonbury, he thought, you were allowed to be a Christian, a pagan, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim and maybe, at a pinch, a liberal kind of agnostic. Anything, but…
'Where I'm coming from,' Sam said, 'this is a town built on bollocks.'
Big, big patch of quiet.
Then Diane just said, 'Oh.'
And for that moment, and maybe the one after it, Sam Daniel wished he did believe in the resurrection of the body and the forgiveness of sins and the shroud of Turin and the holy virgin of Knock and the men in silver suits, the whole bloody shebang.
Diane was sitting there looking down at her clasped hands. She hadn't touched her chocolate.
It occurred to Sam, for the first time, seeing her half in shadow, eyes downcast, that she was actually kind of beautiful.
Diane stood up. 'I'd better go.'
No. Don't go. I could have second thoughts.
'Yeah,' he said. 'OK, then.'
At the door, he said, 'It's coming along really well, Diane. The Avalonian. If this was for real, I reckon we could have it on the streets before Christmas.'
Diane said very quietly, 'It's all for real. Everything's part of everything else, and it's all for real.'
SIX
Juanita sat in the bedside chair and stared at her hands until her vision went blurred. 'There,' said Karen, the nurse. 'Isn't medical science wonderful?'
She was too upset to reply. Every time they unwrapped the dressings, the hands seemed to look more alien, the transplants in her palms the revolting pink of an old-fashioned condom. And shockingly clean, devoid of lines.
At first they'd looked like the hands of an excavated corpse which someone had joined to her wrists. Frankenstein hands. Now they were claws. She'd shrieked at the doctor, I can't move them, oh Christ I can't bend the fingers. The doctor said they'd become more flexible. In time. And the pink would fade. In time. As would the pain.
Oh, sure, she knew she was lucky. Knew it could have been so much worse. If she hadn't covered her face, if she hadn't been wearing the Afghan.
And, just for a moment, she'd imagined how it would have been the other way round. If she'd died in flames and Jim had been left with hands which wouldn't hold a paintbrush, wouldn't paint with any delicacy perhaps ever again. Jim gazing into his beloved dusk and watching it recede.
About to cry, Juanita sat up in the chair. Think angry.