Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

‘Easier said than done, Janie. Thing is—’

Gomer froze.

‘What?’ Jane said.

‘Y’ear that?’

All Jane could hear was the sound of a distant engine, like a lorry or something, carrying the way sounds did in the country after dark. Gomer stepped back onto the square, his head on one side.

‘It’s a JCB, ennit? Gimme a couple more minutes, I could mabbe tell you what size and how old.’

Jane smiled. Gomer Parry Plant Hire never sleeps.

Gomer wasn’t smiling. He stood hunched, looking down at his Doc Martens, listening hard.

‘Comin’ from the orchard, it is.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Seems to me there en’t many places back there where you can manoeuvre a JCB. Specially at night, see.’ He looked at Jane, and there was no light in his glasses. He took the ciggy out of his mouth and coughed unhappily. ‘You know what they’re doin’, don’t you?’

51

The Blade

Of course, Lol had half-lied to Merrily, and he hated that, but now he was compelled to go through with it.

By evening light, the sacred oak had seemed inspirational – its weight, its setting. The glow of sunset had instilled a transitional tension which was unsettling. And he needed that. Badly needed to be unsettled again. Have something reawoken in him, even if it was through fear of the unknown.

It was odd. Since the sun had gone down, the sky seemed brighter. The landscape, as he neared the oak, had the eeriness of a vast attic lit by a single candle. The voice of Dan the chorister was crackling behind his ears like tinnitus: I was a bit cynical about the whole idea at first but … I’d do it again tomorrow, I mean it, I’d travel a long way to do it .

Maybe the words of Dan the chorister had been quietly playing at the back of his mind for hours.

… Vibration going through you, like wiring … different parts of you lighting up in some kind of sequence … wasn’t just three churches coming together, it was like being inside a big orb of sound. Like we’d broken through to another place .

Lol was wondering when, since the terror and adrenalin rushes of the comeback concert at the Courtyard, he’d last experienced anything approaching that level of connection. What use was he to Merrily or Jane if he couldn’t feel their level of commitment? The way both of them, from their different directions, were driven, while he was just the hanger-on, the timid inhabitant of the witch’s cottage who hadn’t been able to construct a serviceable song for over a month.

Night had widened the landscape. Nothing visible between Lol and Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey. Two tawny owls conversed across the valley.

He stopped and looked up: stars … planets … spheres.

And then, as the naked, dead, topmost branches of the sacred oak appeared over the nearest horizon like a claw, he was shaking his head because this was faintly despicable. He should have gone with Merrily.

But Lol kept on walking until, at some point, the whistling arose.

Jane followed the tiny beacon of Gomer’s ciggy through the churchyard, through the wicket gate and into the orchard, which had once encircled the village. All that was around her now was the sluggish sound of the JCB flexing its metal muscles.

A friendly sound, normally. She’d always associated JCBs with Gomer. Gomer Parry Plant Hire: drain your fields, clear your ditches, lay your pipes, dig your soakaway.

Now it was a grinding headache, maybe the fantasy-migraine she’d invented coming back to haunt her, karmic retribution: clanking, dragging, ripping, an organ of destruction. Darkness closing in on mellow old Ledwardine.

‘Slow, Janie,’ Gomer said.

They were beyond the church, into the patch of ground where Jane had found the circular bump that might be a Bronze Age burial mound. Too dark now to make it out. There was a moon somewhere, but its meagre light wasn’t getting in here, and the nettles were high; she must have been stung a dozen times already, but that didn’t matter. Sweating, grit in her eyes, she stopped at the sound of a heavy blade on stone, raw friction, a pulling back, a meshing of gears.

‘Careful, girl – wire.’

Gomer, breathing hard, was feeling his way along an old barbed-wire fence, not the kind of fence you tried to climb over at night without a torch. He’d wanted to go back to the jeep for his lambing light, but Jane had been frantic by then, and anyway … there were headlamps on the JCB. She could see them at last through the trees, and the shape of the big yellow digger itself, monstrous now and brutal, an implement of scorched earth.

Gomer found the stile and tested its strength with both hands before climbing over and waiting to help Jane down. But Jane didn’t need any help and she hit the ground running, ripping the back of a hand on the bottom of the sign on which she could have read, if there’d been any light, Herefordshire Council Planning Department .

‘ Bast —’

‘Janie—’

‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘You total bastards !’

Bursting into Coleman’s Meadow where they’d taken down a section of the new fencing to let the JCB in. The JCB that was approaching the middle of the meadow along twin bars of yellow-white headlamp beam. Moving in for another attack.

Jane ran out towards the digger – and hands grabbed her. The JCB reared up like a rampant dinosaur and its mud-flecked lights went spearing across the meadow towards Jane as she wrenched herself away, and then ricocheted from the yellow hard-hat worn by the man who’d held her arms.

‘Health and Safety regulations are very explicit,’ he said. ‘That’s as far as you go.’

Jane backed away, coughing, pulling hair out of her eyes, as he bent and picked up a lamp, throwing the beam full in her face.

‘Might’ve known,’ he said.

‘This is…’ She could hardly speak for the rage and the shock. ‘This is wrong . This is illegal . This is a crime against—’

‘Not wrong at all,’ Lyndon Pierce said, ‘and certainly not illegal. This is private land, and the man in the digger is the owner of the land. And also of the digger, as it happens.’

The lamp beam swung to one side to find Gomer. He was panting and his ciggy had gone.

‘By God, you en’t bloody changed, Lyndon, boy. En’t changed one bit.’

‘Not your problem, Mr Parry. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’ Pierce’s tone was remote; he didn’t look at Gomer. ‘But I strongly suggest you leave immediately and take this … girl with you before she gets into any more trouble. It’s not your business .’

‘En’t your business, either. You’re supposed to be a councillor, boy. Supposed to see both bloody sides.’

‘I’m not taking sides. I’m observing. I’m here as a member of the Herefordshire Council Planning Committee. An official … observer.’

He looked out across the meadow, and Jane followed his gaze. The digger had reversed back into a corner of the meadow, its blade up and retracted, its headlights illuminating what it had already done to Coleman’s Meadow, revealing the extent of the massacre.

‘Here I go now, in fact,’ Lyndon Pierce said. ‘Observing.’

Jane was too shattered to cry. It looked like pictures she’d seen of the Somme. More than half the central track had been dug up, ripped away. The surface turf torn off and dumped in rough spoil heaps, and deeper, more jagged furrows dug out where the ground was softer. Water coming up from somewhere, pooling in the glistening clay-sided trenches.

They’d systematically destroyed it. They’d all but obliterated the ley. They’d waited until it had got dark and the few protesters had gone and then they’d opened the fence and let in the JCB. Like letting a hungry fox into a chicken house, to do its worst.