Phil Rickman: The Cure of Souls

Ordinary? Listen, ‘ordinary’ would have been just fine by Jane, who had no illusions, didn’t expect rockets and Catherine wheels. ‘Ordinary’ would’ve been an enormous relief.

She found herself stomping across the playing field between the tennis courts, panting with anguish under the merciless sun. A torrid sun, guaranteed to turn the Pembrokeshire coast into Palm Beach. Did Eirion’s fat-cat family have their own beach? Did they all sprawl around naked and uninhibited? Like, just because they were Welsh didn’t mean they were all buttoned-up and chapel-whipped, necessarily. Probably the reverse: she and the Young Master would be assigned a double room and presented with a gross of condoms.

Shit . She shouldn’t be feeling like this, because back in the exam room she’d probably done OK. You always sensed it. She’d get her ten GCSEs and then come back in September and do some A levels.

Come back as an adult, with a lover.

She swallowed.

So Eirion, at seventeen, was experienced and mature, had done the rounds, and had met Jane – who was sexually backward to what, in this day and age, was a frightening extent – and she had become like ‘special’ to him, maybe because when they’d first met she’d been physically hurt by someone she’d thought was a friend, and he’d felt protective and stuff… and that was OK, that was acceptable.

And ‘special’?… yeah, OK, that was flattering.

Or would have been flattering if she was ready to be ‘special’, which might have been the case if there’d been others – or least one other – before Eirion. But the first guy you actually did it with, at the age of sixteen, really should not be ‘special’, should he? Not long-term special, not Jones-and-Eagles special. Not the very first guy.

Why the hell had she said she’d go there?

Jane began to blink back tears, seriously unravelled, not knowing what she wanted – except not to be a virgin. Not to be a virgin now . Not to have to take this useless lump of excess baggage with her to the Holiday Cottage.

In fact, if there’d been some not-over-acned sixth-former wandering towards her right now, she’d probably have been tempted to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, just to get IT out of the way.

Sure.

She was alone on the playing field. Somewhere in the distance she could hear howls of laughter – Wall and Gittoes on the loose, ready to crash the Royal Oak, pick a fight with a teacher. Their last week at school, the week they’d been dreaming of for five long years. They were adults now, too. Official. Even Wall and Gittoes were adults!

Panic seized Jane and she stood there, feeling exposed, the sun directly above her like a hot, baleful eye.

She was a child. Still a child.

Ahead of her was the groundsman’s concrete shed, a square bunker standing out on its own. The groundsman was called Steve and he was about thirty and had big lips, like a horse, and this huge beer gut. He was a useful guy to know, however, because of this concrete shed: a safe house where card schools could meet, cigs and dope could be smoked, and Es and stuff exchanged. Steve would also deal the stuff himself, it was rumoured, but not with everybody; he was very careful and very selective.

Lower-sixth-formers Kirsty Ryan and Layla Riddock were less selective. They laughed openly at Steve but sometimes went into his shed with him after school. And what did slobbery Steve give them in return? Nobody knew, but it was rumoured that he could get actual cocaine for anyone who offered that kind of payment.

School life. Sex and drugs and —

Jane saw that the blinds were down over the window in the shed.

There was absolutely no reason why a groundsman’s hut should have blinds at all, but every window in the school was fitted with the same type, black and rubbery, so that educational videos could be shown at any time or the Net consulted.

There was no TV in here, obviously, no computer. The lowered blinds could only mean one thing: with the English Language GCSE not half an hour over, slobbery Steve was in there doing business.

You couldn’t get away from it, could you? Jane shook her head wearily and was about to turn back across the field when the wooden door of the shed swung open.

She stiffened. The sun-flooded playing fields stretched away on three sides: everywhere to run, nowhere to hide.

‘Well, come on ,’ a voice drawled from inside. ‘Don’t hang around.’

Jane didn’t move. She imagined pills spread across Steve’s workbench – or maybe some really desperate sixth-former. Jane felt cocooned in heat and a sense of unreality.

She blinked.

Layla Riddock, large and ripe, stood there in the doorway of Steve’s hut – in her microskirt, blouse open to the top of her bra. Like a hooker in the entrance to an alleyway.

‘Well, well,’ Layla said. ‘The vicar’s kid. We are honoured.’

SAFETY IN NUMBERS… spread the load… a problem shared . The Bishop was heavy with clichés this morning, although what he was saying made sense when you accepted that the Church of England looked upon the supernatural like the Ministry of Defence regarded UFOs. Visitations? The blinding light on the road to Damascus? The softly glowing white figure in the grotto? God forbid.

The blinding sunlight over Ledwardine Vicarage was diffused by the thin venetian slats at the kitchen window. Bernie Dunmore’s friar’s tonsure was a fluffy halo. He topped up his glass with Scrumpy Jack from the can, beamed plumply at Merrily.

‘They look at you , they see a symptom of escalating hysteria. They see the Church being dragged towards the threshold of a new medievalism simply to stay in business. Oh no.’ Bernie shuddered. ‘If the Third Millennium does witness the collapse of the Anglican Church, we’d rather go down quietly, with our passive dignity intact, leaving you out there waving your crosses at the sky and waiting for the angels.’

‘That’s not me , is it, Bernie?’ Below the dog collar, Merrily wore a dark grey cotton T-shirt and black jeans. Her hair was damp from the swift but crucial shower she’d managed to squeeze in between Alf Rokes’s funeral and the arrival of the Bishop. ‘They’re saying that? Even after Ellis?’

But, OK, she knew what he meant. Nick Ellis had been a rampant evangelical who preached in a village hall plastered with CHRIST IS THE LIGHT posters and used the Holy Spirit like an oxyacetylene torch. Merrily Watkins was the crank who prayed for the release of earthbound spirits, currently setting up the first Hereford Deliverance Website to offer basic, on line guidance to the psychically challenged. They hadn’t liked each other, she and Ellis, but to a good half of the clergy they were out there on the same ledge.

And one of them was mad, and the other was a woman.

Bernie Dunmore was quite right, of course: she’d been putting it off too long.

She saw that he was blatantly inspecting her from head to feet – which wasn’t far – as if looking for signs of depreciation.

‘So you want to build a team, then, Bishop?’

‘If Deliverance has its back to the wall, better it should be more than one back,’ Bernie said sagely.

Well, fine. Most dioceses had one now: a Deliverance cluster, a posse of sympathetic priests as back-up for the exorcist. It was about spreading the load, fielding the flack, having people there to watch your back.

‘OK, let’s do it.’ She came to sit down opposite him at the pine refectory table, where bars of yellow sunlight tiger-striped her bare arms. ‘The problem is… who do we recruit?’