Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘Sorry, Amy. I rang the bell, but—’

Amy was blinking, breathing hard. She had on a sleeveless yellow dress. Her thin, fair hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore white gymshoes, not trainers.

‘They’re not here.’

Merrily turned and closed the metal gate behind her, as if the girl might bolt like a feral kitten. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps—’ Moving slowly to the edge of the path, taking a step on to the lawn.

‘No!’ The kid backed away towards a small greenhouse in which the sun’s reflection hung like a lamp. ‘ No! You just keep away from me!’

Recognition at last, then.

‘It’s OK, I’ll stay here.’ Merrily looked down at her T-shirt. ‘It’s my day off. See – no cross, no dog collar.’

‘Go away.’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Not this time.’

‘You’re trespassing! It’s disgraceful. I’ll call the police.’

‘OK.’

Amy backed against the greenhouse, then sprang away from it and started to cry, her shoulders shaking – a gawky, stick-limbed adolescent in a large, plain, rectangular garden.

‘I only want to talk,’ Merrily said. ‘Or, better still, listen.’

‘Go away.’

‘What would be the point? I’d just have to keep coming back.’

‘People like you make me sick,’ Amy said.

‘So I heard.’

‘Ha ha,’ Amy cawed.

‘I was sick in church once. It’s no big deal.’

Amy looked down at her white shoes in silence.

‘And sometimes I’ve felt God’s let me down,’ Merrily said. ‘You think he’s watching you suffer and not lifting a finger. You think maybe God’s not… not a very nice person. And then sometimes you wake up in the night and you think there’s nobody out there at all. That everybody’s been lying to you – even your own parents. And that’s the loneliest thing.’

Amy didn’t look at her. She walked to the middle of the half-shadowed lawn. The garden, severely bushless and flowerless, backed on to open fields that looked more interesting. Amy stopped and mumbled at her shoes, ‘They did lie.’

‘Your mum and dad?’

‘They’re not—’

‘Yes, they are. They wanted you. Not just any baby… you . That’s a pretty special kind of mum and dad.’

Amy didn’t reply. She was intertwining her fingers in front of her, kneading them, and seemed determined to keep at least six yards between herself and Merrily. With feral cats, you put down food and kept moving the bowl closer to the house. It might take weeks, months before you could touch them.

‘Where are they – your mum and dad?’

Amy produced a handkerchief from a pocket of her frock. A real handkerchief, white and folded. She shook it out, revealing an embroidered A in one corner, and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

‘Shopping,’ she said dully, crumpling the hanky. ‘They go shopping every second Saturday. In Hereford. She can’t drive.’

‘How long have they been gone?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ Amy hacked a heel sulkily into the grass. Then she said, ‘They went off about nine. They always go off at nine. They’ll be back soon, I expect.’

‘And you stayed home.’

‘There was no point.’

It wasn’t clear what she meant. At first, she hadn’t seemed much like the teacher’s-pet type of girl described by either her mother or – more significantly – Jane. Yet there was something that kept pulling her back from the edge of open rebellion, making her answer Merrily’s questions in spite of herself.

‘Could we go in the house, do you think?’

‘ No! ’

Merrily nodded. ‘OK.’

‘I don’t have to talk to you.’

‘Of course you don’t. Nobody has to talk to anybody. But you often feel glad afterwards that you did.’

Amy shook her head.

‘You used to talk to God, didn’t you?’ Merrily said. ‘I bet you used to talk to God quite a lot.’

The girl’s intertwined fingers tightened as if they’d suddenly been set in cement.

‘But you don’t do that any more. Because you think God betrayed you. Do you want to tell me how he did that, Amy? How you were betrayed?’

‘No.’

‘Have you told your mum and dad?’

Amy nodded.

‘And what did they—?’ Merrily broke off, because Amy was looking directly at her now. Her plain, pale face was wedge-shaped and her cheeks seemed concave. She did not look well. Anorexics looked like this.

‘I don’t need to talk to God .’ Sneering out the word. ‘God doesn’t tell you anything. God’s a waste of time. If I want to talk, I can talk… I can talk to her .’

Her voice was suddenly soft and reverent. For a moment, Merrily thought of the Virgin Mary.

‘Her?’

Over Amy’s shoulder, the lamp of the sun glowed in the greenhouse.

‘ Justine ,’ Amy whispered.

‘Justine?’

In the softening heat of early evening, Amy’s lips parted and she shivered. This shiver was particularly shocking because it seemed to ripple very slowly through her. Because it seemed almost a sexual reaction.

Merrily went still. ‘Who’s Justine, Amy?’

Amy’s body tightened up. ‘No!’

‘Amy?’

‘Get out!’ Amy screamed. ‘Just get out , you horrible, lying thing! It’s nothing to do with you!’

As if she’d been planning this for some minutes, she suddenly hurled herself across the lawn, passing within a couple of feet of Merrily, and into the glazed porch, slamming the door, shooting a bolt and glaring in defiance from the other side of the glass, poor kid.

Three times that evening, Merrily tried to call Hazel Shelbone. Twice it was engaged, the third time there was no answer.

When she’d got home, there’d been a message from Jane on the answering machine. Merrily replayed it twice, trying to detect the subtext.

‘ Well, we got here. All of us. The whole family. It’s quite a big place, an old whitewashed farmhouse about half a mile from the sea, near an old quarry, but you can see the sea from it, of course. So it’s… yeah… cool. And the whole family’s here. Everybody. So… Well, I’ll call you. Look after Ethel and, like… your little self. Night, night, Mum .’

Hmm. The whole family, huh?

The shadows of apple trees meshed across the vicarage garden. In the scullery, Merrily switched on the computer, rewrote her notes for tomorrow’s sermon and printed them out. It was to be the first one in – well, quite a long time – that she’d given around the familiar theme of Suffer little children to come unto me . A complex issue: how should we bring kids to Christ? Or was it better, in the long term, to let them find their own way?

Merrily deleted a reference to Jane’s maxim: Any kind of spirituality has to be better than none at all . Dangerous ground.

We never pressed the Church on her, David and I , Hazel Shelbone had said. Never forced religion on any of our children .

Bet you did, really , Merrily thought, gazing out at the deepening blue, whether you intended to or not .

She recalled Hazel saying, in answer to her question about what might have got into Amy, The spirit of a dead person , in a voice that was firm and intense and quite convinced.

Now she had a question for Hazel: who is Justine?

She reached out for the telephone and, as often happened, it rang under her hand.

He said his name was Fred Potter. It was a middle-aged kind of name, somehow, but he sounded as if he was in his early twenties, max.

He said he worked for the Three Counties News Service, a freelance agency based in Worcester, supplying news stories to national papers. He said he was sorry to trouble her, but he understood she was the county exorcist.