Was that weird? Was she weird? Over the last couple of years, she’d done all the usual stuff — been totally hammered on cider, got laid — but somehow it wasn’t enough. Was she alone at Moorfield High in thinking it wasn’t enough?
Probably.
There were very few lights in Church Street, none in Lucy’s old house where Lol lived now. Sometimes, pre-dawn, you’d see him by lamplight, working on a song for his second solo album, at his desk under the window. But Lol had been at the meeting with Mum, listening to Pierce’s New Ledwardine bullshit, which was enough to sap anybody’s creativity.
A breeze blundered into the square, ripping away the mist like a lace-curtain and rattling the stacks of morning papers barricading the doorway of the Eight Till Late. The only sign of life. Not long ago, even in the bleak midwinter, you’d have had clinking milk bottles and the warm aroma of baking bread. Preparations for a day. Now even the morning post wouldn’t be here for hours, and the milk came in plastic bottles in the supermarkets, and soon nobody would be seen on the streets of Ledwardine until about ten when the dinky delicatessen opened for croissants.
Jane stopped on the edge of the square and looked out, over the crooked, 16th-century black and white houses and shuttered shops, towards Cole Hill, the first point of contact with each new day. Hearing Mum again, from last night.
I won’t dress this up, flower. When the stones are exposed and studied or measured or whatever happens, they want them taken away. Possibly erected somewhere else. Or… not erected.
This was Lyndon Pierce plus transient scum like Ward Savitch, of pheasant-holocaust fame. Mum had admitted she’d managed to say nothing; as the meeting was supposed to be for public information only, the words powder and dry had seemed appropriate. Jane was aware of trembling.
The church clock said 6.30, just gone. Still a while off daylight, and Mum wouldn’t be up for another half-hour. Jane walked under the lych-gate and into the churchyard, switching on her lamp, cutting an ochre channel through the mist which put ghostly wreaths around the graves.
The beam seemed to find its own way to the only stone with a quotation from Thomas Traherne:
Jane knelt. If she was late for breakfast, late for school, it didn’t matter. This was important. This was the person to whom she’d have to answer if the village lost its ancient heart.
‘Lucy,’ she whispered to the headstone, ‘the bastards want to have them ripped out. Put on a flatbed truck and taken away.’
Sometimes, when she was on her own in the early morning or at twilight, calm and focused, she’d almost see Lucy Devenish, eagle-faced and huddled in her poncho on the edge of some folkloric otherworld.
‘So, like, if there’s anything you can do?’
She’d been coming here every day for weeks now, far longer than she’d been going to the river. Talking to Lucy, keeping her up to date. It was important.
Jane looked up to see only steeple, mist and morning star, felt damp seeping through the knees of her jeans. She stood up, on the edge of the old coffin path along which the dead of Ledwardine had once been carried.
As she walked away, there was a tiny sound like a snapping twig on the path to her left, as if someone was walking beside her. Only some small mammal, but it made her smile as she set off along the ancient trackway which would later proceed, in perfect alignment with the gateways at each end of Coleman’s Meadow, to the Iron Age camp on Cole Hill.
It was like you were walking the border between worlds. Walking with ghosts. Could be down to Bill Blore, now, to stop the sacrilege, let Lucy walk in peace.
A voice came bubbling in the soggy air.
It said, ‘Who’s Lucy?’
Lol lay listening to the gunslinger wind prowling Church Street. Scared now. For a couple of days after London, it had been simple bewilderment and gratitude to whatever had got him through it. But this morning he’d awoken into darkness, the swaggering wind, anxiety.
Five days ago now, London, and reduced to a dream-sequence. Last night, to put it in its place, he’d been set on doing something real. Like maybe standing up and laying into Lyndon Pierce, this bastard who last summer had said to him, If certain people who en’t local don’t like the way we do things round yere, seems to me they might think about moving on.
Moving on? In London for just two days, Lol had been semi-paralysed by a fear of not getting back.
He looked up at the oak beam over the bed, thinking about its permanence, how it had become stronger with age. How, if you tried to bang a nail into it now, the nail would snap off.
A lot like the woman who used to live here.
But how unlike either the woman or the beam he was.
Remembering the routine cowardice assailing him as he’d climbed on the stool with his guitar to do ‘Baker’s’ in the big BBC studio, surrounded by an audience top-heavy with real musicians. Superstitiously sure he was going to fail because he was playing the Takamine rather than the ill-fated Boswell.
I want to know about everything, Jane had demanded when he finally did get home. Everything and everybody.
Lol had said they’d probably view the performance and then decide to lose him from the final edit. Jane had looked sinister. ‘Only if Holland and his producer want to be stalked for the rest of their lives by a vicar’s psychotic daughter with a machete.’
He’d smiled and told her everything. Everything he could remember about his big day out in the big city, recording ‘The Baker’s Lament’ for BBC 2’s flagship music programme, Later With Jools Holland. The New Year’s Eve programme. Hadn’t realised until he was in the studio that this was the one where they all had to feign excitement as the hands of the big clock closed in on midnight and the pipers waded in. A producer had said they’d have to do it live next year, in line with the BBC’s new drive towards truth and honesty.
Lol had been the cameo act, of course, the one-song guy — the big stars did three numbers — but it had been preceded, unexpectedly, by an interview with Jools. The great man decently glossing over Lol’s weird years, before screening a 30-second clip from the award-winning independent film about the death of village life, for which Lol’s music was the soundtrack. The micro-budget movie that was turning ‘The Baker’s Lament’ into a fluke Christmas minor hit, turning Lol’s long-dormant career around.
What he remembered most about the actual recording was not the cameras, or the one chord-change his fingers fluffed, but a bunch of people in the studio audience, swaying and mouthing the words of the chorus:
One of the mouthers, unless he’d imagined all this, had been Michael Stipe of REM, benignly smiling and inclining his long bony head. Jane had been wildly impressed. Lol, too, at the time, obviously. Before it was all put into a hard perspective by his next clear memory, of a guy approaching him afterwards, explaining that he was putting together an American tour for Original Sin and how would Lol feel about being considered for the support?
Five weeks, in the spring, the guy said. Someone else, who he’d declined to name, had pulled out, so they’d need to know fairly soon if Lol was up for it.
Five weeks.
All Lol remembered about his own response was,