Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

Out here, where it was quiet and death resonated, he’d been part of the fabric, working the sandstone and the timber and the Welsh slate.

And the girlfriend. Mum was not going to be easy to live with tonight.

Now the stuff in the airline bag, the printouts – from, admittedly, some fairly lurid websites – felt like some kind of porn. Not the kind that could get you banned from using the computer for the rest of term, more insidious than that.

Unnerved by the billboard, switching the bag from her left shoulder to her right, Jane crossed to the vicarage.

She’d seen the woman somewhere before, she was fairly sure of that. Fiftyish and elegant, heavy hair with a dull sheen like pewter, serious grey eyes, dark grey suit. Dog collar.

Mum said, ‘Jane, this is Siân.’

Mum was looking, to be honest, frazzled, her skin close to grey, standing at a corner of the refectory table, like the kitchen wasn’t her own. Which of course it wasn’t . The Church owned it. The Church owned everything. Owned Mum.

There was a case in the hall. A real leather traveller’s case, with stickers, next to Mum’s old overnight bags.

Siân? Jane stared at the woman. The woman smiled in this bland way. Perfect teeth.

Holy shit . It had to be Siân Callaghan-Clarke.

‘Siân’s going to be looking after things here for a few days,’ Mum said. ‘As you, erm, suspected this morning, I need to go over to Garway, sort some things out.’

This was the woman who, only a few months ago, had nearly destroyed Mum after getting herself made diocesan Deliverance coordinator . Callaghan-Clarke’s view of Deliverance seemed to be that it was totally about helping deluded people to seek treatment – bringing in this smooth shrink as part of the Deliverance Module . At least he ’d gone, and the last time Mum had mentioned Callaghan-Clarke it was to say that she’d been keeping a low profile lately, not interfering, never going into the office.

But Mum was inclined to take her eye off the ball.

‘Jane is fairly self-sufficient, Siân. She has her own apartm— a big room on the second floor. And a lot of studying to do. So, with all the parish business, you probably won’t get to meet a lot. Anyway …’ Mum smiling inanely ‘… here she is.’

Jane just stood there, like struck dumb, Ethel doing a figure of eight around her ankles.

‘Hello, Jane,’ Callaghan-Clarke said. ‘I’ve heard such a lot about you.’ Black farce. Mum had collapsed into the old captain’s chair in the scullery. The door was shut, Jane with her back to it.

‘Have you gone insane?’

Callaghan-Clarke was upstairs in the guest room, unpacking her fancy case of Italian leather covered with stickers from international church synods, and it was a big house where voices didn’t travel … so, like why, in God’s name, were they whispering ?

‘Nothing I could do,’ Mum said. ‘ Fait accompli . Ruth Wisdom couldn’t make it, Sophie asked around by email, Siân offered.’

‘Sophie accepted that?’

‘If she’d said no, how suspicious would that have looked? Siân’s … highly placed in the Diocese. I wouldn’t want Sophie to get on the wrong side of her over something like this.’

‘I have to stay here with this monster?’

‘She’s not a monster , Jane. She’s just an ambitious, very smart, exbarrister with … some kind of calling.’

Mum started to laugh. One of those laughs where things really can’t get any worse.

‘Your builder guy,’ Jane said. ‘There’s a news bill outside Prosser’s. It says the girlfriend’s …’

‘Yes.’

It was worse than Jane had expected. Immediately, she was imagining doing it: one ear squashed into the cold steel track, the other exposed to the enormous saw-bench scream of the oncoming train. Did she lie facing it, watching the lights? Or was she turned away, feeling the vibration inside her brain, her whole body hunched and tensed, foetal? What could make a fairly young and apparently beautiful woman batter to death somebody she’d loved and then have herself demolished, her face ground into fragments of bone, shreds of tissue?

Jane pulled the plug on it. She dragged over the other chair and sat down.

‘Why does Callaghan-Clarke want to come here? Like, what’s the ulterior motive?’

‘Jane, there—’

‘I’m not a kid any more, Mum, I can keep my mouth shut and I’ve been around this situation long enough to get a feel for seedy C of E politics. Why ?’

‘OK,’ Mum said, ‘to look at it charitably—’

‘Oh, yeah, sure, let’s all be terribly Christian about it—’

‘To look at it charitably, first … Maybe she just wanted to help out, knowing this was a job that the Bishop’s keen we deal with efficiently and it would need to be a woman.’

‘She wants to be the first woman bishop, right?’

‘Archdeacon, apparently. In the short term.’

‘What?’

‘The present Archdeacon’s coming up to retirement, possibly next year. Becoming Archdeacon would be a good stepping stone to a Bishop’s Palace, when that becomes a possibility for a woman.’

Jane thought about this. As she understood it, the Archdeacon was like the Bishop’s chief of staff, the Head of Human Resources in the Diocese. He – or she – organized priests.

‘The Archdeacon’s in charge of like not replacing vicars who retire or burn out, so the rest of you can all have seventeen parishes each? The Bishop’s axeman. Or woman.’

‘Something like that.’ Mum wasn’t laughing now. ‘The word is – according to Sophie – that Siân’s shadowing Archdeacon Neale for a month, using the time to put together a new game plan for rationalizing the Diocese. I’ve known for a while that I could be affected.’

‘But you can say no to more parishes, can’t you?’

‘I can. But I’m on a five-year contract, which may not be renewed if I don’t agree with whatever they propose. No getting round the fact that I’m one of the very few to have only one church. Because I’ve also got Deliverance.’

‘She wants to figure out how to turn you into the Vicar of North Herefordshire, with South Shropshire, and no time for Deliverance?’

‘Who knows?’

‘You sound like you don’t care.’

‘What can I do, anyway? Siân’s view has always been that Deliverance should be spread out over quite an extensive team. So you have a larger number of clergy with rudimentary training in aspects of healing and deliverance. Like the way – stupid analogy, but it’s all I can think of – a percentage of police are firearms-trained. Many more now than there used to be.’

‘And you’d …’ Jane was dismayed ‘… you’d actually go along with that?’

‘ I think too many armed cops can be dangerous. Better to have a handful who know when not to shoot. But I didn’t get ordained to become Deliverance Consultant.’

‘You’re good at it. I don’t care what you say.’

‘Anyway, it might all be academic. She may not become Archdeacon. And there’s nothing she can do in a few days.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Just stay cool, disappear into your apartment, feed the cat and don’t get into arguments.’

‘ Me ? Arguments?’

‘Please?’

‘I’ll try not to antagonize her. But I will be keeping an eye on her.’

‘Just don’t make it too obvious.’

‘Discretion is my middle name.’

Mum smiled this weak kind of if only smile. Her face looked drawnin, blotchy.

‘You know what?’ Jane said. ‘You shouldn’t be going to Garway, you should be going to the doc’s.’