‘We’d hear something, would we not? And frankly I can’t see Byron permitting it. He don’t do entertainment, on any level.’
‘Might not start till later, boy. This en’t bingo. And he’s in yere. Mostyn.’
‘He works here. Bleedin’ hell, you never give up, do you, Gomer?’
But it was clear they were going in.
Lol wondered if it would feel any different entering the compound by what passed for an actual entrance. Going in mob-handed, unblooded. He checked his mobile to see if there was anything from Jane and found a short text from Merrily.
This is getting weird. please don’t go anywhere
It was on the way home, anyway.
Almost.
Still wearing the atheist’s coat, Merrily stood close to the grave of Jane Winder, whose potted history was spotlit by the moon.
AND DIED AT BRINSOP COURT,
IN THIS PARISH, OCTOBER 16, 1843.
IN THE 43 YEAR OF HER AGE
Poor Jane. A stranger. From Off. No age at all. By night, the stone was a monolith in front of the trees on the dark pond – which was labelled moat on the map – and all the mysterious humps in the moon-scratched fields below Credenhill. And you held on to it to steady yourself against what seemed like an irreversible madness.
Brinsop Church was locked for the night, of course. Merrily had thought about calling the local team minister, Dick Willis, but she wouldn’t have got away this time without an explanation.
She stood there, an arm around Jane Winder’s cold shoulder, and took in the long view to the right, where it was as though the whole wide area overshadowed by Credenhill had been stripped back by the full moon. Nothing but a skim of soil and rock and clay over what remained of the Romans. The men that have been reappear. A poet’s imaginative exercise, probably nothing more than that. Nothing about a brutalized religion reinvoked from the soil. But the poem had been there, in the book left out by Syd.
A rabbit hopped across the graveyard and sat by the church porch, sniffing the night.
No Bible, no Bergen, no cross, Merrily slipped away out of the churchyard and over the stile to the field where the Dragon’s Well lay in sodden grass, its round stone like a small cider wheel. A modern metal drain cover was embedded in the stone.
Ewes and big lambs were watching her from the hedge. Round eyes like lamps. Could be innocence, could be cynicism. If you were looking for an adversary, it could be the dragon but was more likely, in this place, to be George.
Merrily lit a cigarette.
‘Advice, Syd?’
In her darkest moments she thought that, if exorcism hadn’t found her, she might not have stuck this job. How feeble was that, if the only way you could convince yourself that you were more than just another badly paid professional carer was by re-enacting medieval rituals and seeing what happened? The psychic son et lumiere and the bangs and whistles that real mystics discounted as foreplay.
‘But that wasn’t you, Syd. You didn’t want any of it. Came out of the army, looked back in horror.’
Leaps I can’t make, he’d said to her, smoking in his church. Aspects I can’t face.
‘Any more,’ Merrily said. ‘ “Can’t face any more” – that was what you meant.’ She sat down on the wellhead, watched the smoke rising from her fingers towards the moon.
‘The Bible in the Bergen, Syd. This is what I think. A reminder of which side you were on now. Well, sure. But going up Credenhill with that on your back, it’s like Christ carrying his cross. A constant reminder, every step you take – the tug of the pack, the weight of the book, brass-bound, bulky, uncomfortable. Every step you take up that hill, you feel it. Who you are, what you’re about. The weight of responsibility.’
She felt Syd moving up Credenhill, like Thomas Traherne in the blazing stained glass. Bump, bump of the Bible on the spine. Total consciousness.
Why, if he wanted to confront the shadow of Mithras, had he gone up Credenhill rather than come here? Perhaps he didn’t know. Hadn’t worked it out.
Whatever, something had found him. Death had found him.
Idiopathic Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.
Merrily stood up, folded her arms, looked down at them, swaying a little, then looking up at the moon in its halo of pagan complacency. She felt profoundly empty inside, like a sucked-out seashell. The night before Good Friday, the night of the Last Supper. Always tainted with the sour odour of failure and betrayal.
Bending to pick up her bag from the well-cover, she thought for a moment that it wasn’t there, that the well water was exposed and the full moon, a perfect pale disc, was reflected in it.
Merrily straightened up, gazed down for some time and then nodded, remembering. She slipped a hand down one of the back pockets of her jeans and found splinters. Crumbs of faith.
Always a rational explanation.
Slowly, she bent and retrieved the moon.
77
The piece of concrete fell short. Inevitably. Even desperation hadn’t produced the necessary strength.
Jane watched it landing on the edge of the bench, rolling into the gulley at the same time as the torch rolled off and died, and the only light was from the Roman lamp on the altar, the air thick and fetid with hot animal fat. One small lamp had done that.
But Jane was bone-achingly cold, looking down at Cornel lying in the gulley with his knees drawn up, foetal.
Kenny Mostyn was standing slightly away from Cornel, quite calm with his arms by his side. But loosened up, springy, watching as Cornel began to roll away, and his hand came out and even Jane could tell what he was trying to reach and knew he wouldn’t make it.
Kenny’s knee rose up and his foot cracked down on the clawed hand, and Cornel screamed hideously, rolling helplessly onto his back as Kenny kicked something away.
‘We don’t need this, do we, mate? We’re men.’
‘I was just-’
‘What?’ Squatting down. ‘Tell your Uncle Kenny.’
‘Just trying to scare you, that’s all. That’s all it was.’
‘Course it was,’ Kenny said softly.
Cornel was sobbing. Jane hated anybody sobbing. A sob was not something you could fake, and she could feel his fear.
‘Kenny, listen, it really was just a joke. Like one of your tests, one of your exercises, where you’re thinking you’re gonna die, and at the last second…?’
‘Sure.’ Kenny crouched down next to Cornel. ‘You’re all right, mate. I understand.’
Jane saw Kenny’s face for the first time – actually, not for the first time; she realized she’d seen him several times in Hereford, maybe among the Saturday scrum in High Town or sitting outside one of the pubs where they had tables. Short, round-faced guy with a moustache and the hint of a beard which made a dark circle around his mouth.
He was looking up towards the gloss-painted metal ceiling but saying nothing, no expression on the face, and his eyes were white, like a blind man’s eyes. He seemed to be stroking Cornel’s hair, calming him down, then abruptly he turned his head away, looking up. Not at her, perhaps at the smears of movement which she could see as though through old, speckled glass.
Jane shook her head and the glass brightened and then fragmented and then coalesced and broke apart and coalesced again, like migraine lights, and there were human forms, wet naked men, glowing greasily like in some rugby team’s communal bath, a fatty stew of nudging, squirming, white-eyed men around her, touching her skin, and she like shrank into herself in disgust, all her senses full of the steam and the stink of sweat and the disconnected cries from a long way down in her mind, and then one man stepped out of it and became Kenny Mostyn.
He was holding up a short blade which he briefly inspected before nonchalantly folding it and putting it away in an almost military fashion, not once looking down.