Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘ “You’re pushin’ seventy, Gomer,” Jumbo says, “and Roddy Lodge en’t even forty. Don’t be a bloody hero.” ’

‘That was tonight?’

‘In the Swan.’

‘Look…’ Merrily sensed his absolute certainty and turned to face him, an arm around the wheel. ‘I accept that the guy’s erratic, possibly a little unhinged. I realize you were right to tell the police, and I think you should tell them again tomorrow. I ’ll tell them.’ She turned the key in the ignition. ‘Tomorrow, though. Let’s just… go home now.’

She let out the clutch and the van lurched into the empty road. Gomer was silent for a while. Merrily considered the possibility that, in his state of desolation, he was simply demonizing Roddy Lodge. What little evidence there was still pointed at poor Nev.

‘He knows they en’t there, see,’ Gomer said after a couple of minutes. ‘These Pawsons. Knows they en’t there ’cept weekends. Plus, he likely knowed we was coming to take out this Efflapure come the morning. Her said her was gonner tell him, right?’

‘Sorry… what are you getting at?’

‘Suppose he was plannin’ to go for that tank ’isself, meantime?’

‘Gomer, for… Why would he do that?’

‘Keep his good name, ennit? Small county, vicar. Man like that couldn’t live with folk knowin’ Gomer Parry Plant Hire had come and took away his fancy tank on account he’d put it in the wrong place and it weren’t needed anyway. Plus, also – I just figured this – we’d have one to look at, then, wouldn’t we? We’d all know what a piece of ole junk it was. Suppose he was makin’ sure we couldn’t do that job at all, by torchin’ the shed, destroyin’ the gear? Listen, I en’t sayin’ he knowed Nev was in there. I en’t sayin’ that… yet.’

‘Gomer, I know this has been a… an unimaginably awful thing to happen, but is that even vaguely—?’

‘Meanwhile he comes for the Efflapure ’isself under cover of dark, just to be sure. Knowing he got the place to ’isself…’

‘Is that entirely rational?’

‘He en’t a rational man, vicar. If he’s done the job tonight, if he’s been and took the Efflapure, that’s evidence.’

‘Possibly. If the Pawsons stick to their story.’

‘Don’t matter if they don’t, vicar, we got it on tape on the machine.’

‘Yes. I suppose you have.’ Merrily drove slowly into Eardisley, the first village on the black-and-white tourist trail which ended up eventually in Ledwardine. At night – all dark oak, whitewash and shadows – the village shed centuries and the car-dealer’s showroom right in the centre looked surreal.

‘Seventeen, mabbe eighteen,’ Gomer said. ‘No more’n twenty.’

‘What?’

‘Miles.’

Merrily sighed. ‘To this Pawson place, right?’

‘No traffic in Hereford, mind. Say half an hour, max?’

‘And what are we going to do if we find out he has taken the tank?’

‘Vicar, we’ll know.’ The two moons were clear and sharp in Gomer’s glasses. ‘We’ll bloody know .’

SO THIS WAS what they called The Hour of the Wolf. Something like that.

The dark night of the soul. The time of being transfixed by this acute, piercing awareness of the total pointlessness of everything – and of an utter, mindless, universal cruelty.

Jane had lain awake for nearly an hour, with Ethel the black cat on the bed beside her and real life hanging over her like this huge, leaden pendulum swinging slowly from side to side in the darkness.

You might as well just lie here for ever because, if you sat up at the wrong time, the lead weight – which you were never going to see coming – would suddenly smash you down again with sickening force.

This was what happened. This was the great, almighty secret of everything.

The moon – the once-beloved moon – made fitful appearances amid smoky cloud in the attic window, turning the coloured squares between the timber framing of the Mondrian walls into variations of grey. Everything was variations of grey.

Jane felt suddenly almost breathless with horror… with the thought that this – where her life was now – could actually be as good as it was ever going to get. Felt aglow inside with this bitter rage – the understanding that, as you got older and your body got weaker, the lead weight would smash you harder and more frequently until you couldn’t get up any more.

The way it was hammering Gomer Parry, who was one of the kindest, most actually decent people Jane had ever known, like a grandad to her now.

Because Gomer was getting old , and old people got ill and they got mugged – some universal law setting them up for this, the law that said: it’s always going to get worse . It was as if she’d never fully realized this painfully simple fact of life.

Made her mad as hell at Mum, this smart, still-attractive woman devoting most of her creative essence to the totally pointless adoration of something which, if it existed at all, existed only to treat us like shit !

Jane sprang up in bed, switching on the wall light, plucking the pay-as-you-talk from the bedside beanbag. She leaned back against the headboard, switching on the phone, punching out Eirion’s mobile number. OK, totally uncivilized time to ring anybody, especially the guy you were supposed to be in love in, but he’d have switched off his phone by now, so it wouldn’t matter; she’d just dump something into his voice-mail. Had to say something about this, and couldn’t call Mum without sounding like the little girl all alone in the big, dark vicarage.

‘Hello, Jane,’ Eirion said.

Oh sh—! She nearly stabbed the no button. ‘Jesus, Irene, I am so sorry – I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, why isn’t your phone switched off? It’s nearly one a.m.’ She reached up in a panic and snapped off the light, as though he could somehow see her with her hair all over the place and her eyes all puffy. ‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Because,’ Eirion said patiently, ‘of the solemn pact we made that we would always leave our phones switched on at night, so that if one of us was in crisis and needed to talk…’

Jane swallowed. ‘Oh.’

‘We remember now, do we?’

‘I didn’t think we meant it.’

‘Obviously one of us didn’t.’

She started to cry. ‘I’m sorry, Irene. I’m truly sorry. I’m the worst kind of bitch that ever—’

‘What’s wrong? You been listening to that Eels album again?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jane said. ‘It was very stupid of me. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Jane…’ Eirion’s soft Welsh voice sounded like it was weighted with all the sorrow of his ancestors. ‘If you hang up on me now, I may have to steal my stepmother’s BMW again and drive thirty miles to quench my overwhelming desire to strangle you very slowly.’

‘All right.’ Jane sniffed hard. ‘You asked for this, right? Big question: am I the only person of my age ever to realize that God, if God exists, is in fact some enormous, moronic, cosmic… infant who just, like, sits there, pulling the legs off spiders?’

Eirion thought about it for some time.

‘Probably not,’ he said.

Jane said, ‘Is there a longer answer?’

‘There undoubtedly has to be a longer answer, cariad , and probably a good reason why that concept is theologically unsound. Just don’t ask me what it is without giving me some kind of notice.’

‘And you’re really proposing to go to university next year?’

‘But not to read theology.’

‘Theology’s shit, anyway. I speak from insider knowledge.’