Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Anyway, I’ve taken up too much of your time already. I’ve got the lunch to make and everything. Not that he’ll eat much.’

‘I’ll take you back down.’ Merrily let out the clutch, biting her lip. How to play this … ‘Look, you can take up as much of my time as you want, whenever you want. Any time you feel this is getting on top of you and you want to talk.’

She backed into some bushes in the fog – more scratches – before managing a clumsy three-point turn, dragging the Volvo back onto the track, crawling down the hill in second gear, foot on the brake, headlights on, until the farmhouse imprinted itself drably on the clogged air. Cherry was silent the whole way, and when Merrily pulled up, she made no move to open the door.

‘You’re not an ordinary priest, are you?’

‘Well, most of them are bigger…’

‘Mr Banks, it was, who told Tony. About what you do.’

‘Well, whatever Mr Banks said, I don’t think it’s anything to do with why I was asked to take over the funeral.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘If it is, nobody’s told me.’

Cherry stared out of the window. ‘You on e-mail, are you?’

‘Yes. Well, no… actually the computer’s crashed at home, but you can reach me at the office in Hereford.’

‘Write down the address for me, can you? Don’t look so surprised, I’m not a peasant, I’ve been doing the accounts on an IBM computer for four years now. Listen, if I write all this out for you and send it, no one will see it? You promise me that?’

‘Except possibly my secretary. Who’s also the Bishop’s secretary. Who you could trust like your mother. But—’

‘I don’t know what good it’s going to do – except I think we should’ve told the police and Tony wouldn’t do that. It was when the police told us about all these pictures on his wall, and they asked could we throw any light on it, and Tony said no, we couldn’t. And afterwards he was going, “What difference is it going to make now, anyway – except everybody thinking, Oh they’re all like that, all the Lodges . Mental. Sick.” ’

Merrily’s throat was dry. The fog seemed, if anything, thicker now; it felt like when you were a kid burrowing under the bedclothes with a pencil flashlight. Cherry opened the car door, got out and then leaned back in.

‘It torments me. I keep thinking, maybe we should have tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, we might’ve saved those girls. I mean, he went to his doctor, with the headaches, and he didn’t spot anything.’

‘Whatever it was, I think a lot of people failed to react to it,’ Merrily said. She was thinking of the Rev. Jerome Banks. She was thinking of her own wimpish relief at being denied access to Roddy Lodge at Hereford police headquarters.

Cherry said, ‘This is going to sound stupid, but what it comes down to is Roddy and dead people. From an early age, this thing about the dead.’ She leaned on the door frame, looking around, listening perhaps for the putter of the quad bike. ‘Maybe I’m making too much of it.’

THE SCHOOL BUS was actually starting up when Jane looked out of the window and saw Eirion standing there by his car, in his school uniform, in the fog. And her heart pulsed the way it used to when he drove all the way from the Cathedral School in Hereford because he just like had to see her. Serious turn-on.

And today he’d come all this way in terrible driving conditions.

But when she scrambled down from the bus, dragging her flight bag full of books, she saw that he wasn’t smiling. From the beginning, the most amazing thing about Eirion had been his smile, and when it wasn’t there he looked pasty, a bit jowly, even. These days, anyway. Especially through the fog.

In the old days – March, April – arriving at her school, he’d say, I was just passing . Both of them knowing that this wasn’t a place anyone in their right mind ‘just passed’. So it was a catchphrase nowadays, and they’d be touching one another before the car’s doors were properly shut. But tonight…

‘I just needed to see you.’ Eirion making it obvious by his tone that today it wasn’t that kind of need. ‘You want a lift home?’

When she got into the new old car, the sky was going dark. It always seemed to be going dark, Jane thought. Life was one long dusk. Eirion just started the engine and when they were through the gates, he said, ‘Jane, do you think we need to talk?’

Like how many crappy soaps did you hear that line in, in the course of an average week? Or you would if you watched them. Jane tried to think of a corresponding cliché, couldn’t come up with one.

‘What about?’ she said finally.

‘Well… you.’

He took the back lanes to Ledwardine, prolonging the journey like he used to when they weren’t quite going out together but he was hoping. It could take for ever today, with these conditions. The fog had never really cleared from this morning; they’d had the lights on in the school all day. And what a long and tedious day it had been. In Eng Lit, she’d collected a couple of dagger-glances from Mrs Costello whom she liked really but, come on , wasn’t life just a little too short for flatulent prats like Salman Rushdie?

‘I, er, checked out the insurance,’ Eirion said. ‘It’s probably OK for you to drive this car, after all. I mean… when it’s a better day than this.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘A better day.’

A better day. A bright new beginning. You’re so young , people said. What I wouldn’t do if I was your age again . When what they really meant was that when they were young the idea of a bright new beginning for the world didn’t seem quite so laughable.

In the summer, after she and Eirion had made love for the first time (the first time for both of them, with anybody, it later emerged) it was incredible, like climbing a mountain, and it was all there at your feet: the whole of life a glowing patchwork of endless, glistening greenery.

Jane scowled. Didn’t ‘make love’. Had sex.

And that was it. Done it now. Done it a bunch of times and, sure, sometimes – before and during and after – it felt as though she was very much in love and didn’t want there to be anyone else ever…

In which case, this was really it? Seventeen now, an adult. Now what?

And why? Why bother? It was all going to end in tears, anyway.

‘I’ve been wondering what’s made you so negative lately,’ Eirion said.

‘Oh, really.’

‘And whether there was any way I could help.’

The car heater panted. The dipped headlights excavated shallow trenches in the grey-brownness. It was a situation that, at one time, might have seemed cosily mysterious. As distinct from totally dismal.

‘Because if I can’t,’ Eirion said. ‘You know…’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, if you don’t know…’ After a while, Jane stopped noticing the limited views – atmosphere was just a psychological condition, right? She found she was gripping folds of her skirt. What was happening to her? She didn’t even want to drive. What was the point? Be gridlock everywhere within about ten years.

‘It’s like you just want to wreck things,’ Eirion said. ‘If things aren’t working exactly as you’d planned them, you don’t want to wait.’

‘Life’s short. Very short for some people.’ Thinking of Layla Riddock, who hadn’t even made it out of school when the big pendulum did it in one blow. Thinking of Nev. Thinking of their day out in mid-Wales, when Eirion had taken her to see this particular standing stone, and it had somehow just looked like… a stone. And Eirion had been dismayed because she wasn’t going like, Hey, wow, can’t you feel that earth energy?