Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘He was annoyed at Stephanie, the way she was behaving.’

‘But on the video he isn’t going for Stephanie, he’s going for you. And me – he’s questioning what I ’m doing there. Am I there as a psychotherapist in case he’s bonkers? So what’s this other guy about ? the jury asks itself…’

‘Is directed to ask itself,’ Merrily said, ‘by the smart brief.’

‘Meanwhile, back on the video, Stock’s trying to find out what’s been achieved there, and he’s not satisfied with the answers. He loses it completely, hurls the brimstone tray to the floor. And what do we do? We just walk out, leaving this unstable and clearly violent man—’

‘With the offer of a few prayers to tide him over,’ Merrily said bitterly.

‘And then they… I suppose they put you in the witness box.’

‘And screen the – what they’ll keep on calling an exorcism. They take me through it, prayer by prayer, line by line, demanding explanations, justifications. They ask: What happened to you when you looked like you were choking? Why did you suddenly start rushing around opening doors?’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Well, that was… that was just something I should’ve done before we started. You’re supposed to open all the doors.’

‘So the evil spirits have nowhere to hide?’

‘I…’ She stared down into the sink. ‘Something like that.’

‘You actually had an awareness of evil?’

‘Maybe.’ The water was very hot on her hands and wrists, but she didn’t remove them.

Lol took a step back. ‘ Did you?’

‘Yeah, I know – how do I qualify that? How do I define evil?’

‘No,’ Lol said. ‘This is me, not the barrister. I want to know. Did you feel an evil?’

‘I… I smelt sulphur. I tasted sulphur. It went to the back of my throat in this raw, searing way that sulphur does. I can’t explain that, but it did feel like I was choking. For a couple of seconds I felt like I was going to—’

The water began scalding the backs of her hands and she pulled them back with a small scream. Lol wrenched a hand towel from a hook on the wall.

‘—die.’ She pushed her hands gratefully into the towel. ‘Now that sounds really stupid, doesn’t it? Imagine having to say that in court. But yeah… I mean, obviously, what happened afterwards took the edge off it in a big way, but for one terrifying split second I really thought I was about to choke to death, or at least pass out, lose consciousness. So I started to say in my head something called St Patrick’s Breastplate, which is a complete spiritual self-defence thing, surrounding yourself with the power of Christ, and I went around opening doors, and it… it went away. And I got my act together and carried on. How would your psychologist and your agnostic barrister react to that?’

Lol didn’t reply. He was holding her hands, still wrapped in the towel.

‘Go on.’ She felt her voice shrink. ‘Finish the scenario.’

Crunch of tyres on the track outside. Sophie?

Lol took his hands away. He stood there in that same old alien sweatshirt, those same sad, whipped-puppy eyes behind his brass-rimmed specs. But this was Lol back from psychotherapy school – six months exposed to concerned humanism, sympathetic psychobabble. He was right: he did know these people now.

‘They’d take me apart, right?’ Merrily said. ‘They have full access to science and psychology and scepticism and cynicism. I’m—’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t’ve started this. It could be that none of it will happen.’ He followed her to the door. ‘I was just playing devil’s advocate.’

She turned and stared at him, and he realized what he’d said and smiled ruefully, eyebrows rising above his glasses.

‘Jesus,’ he murmured.

‘Two thousand years of exorcism on trial,’ Merrily said.

It seemed so ridiculous when you put it like that.

So why was she sweating?

LOL FOLLOWED MERRILY out to the grey Saab, its engine running. She was wearing a short, orange-coloured skirt and a crumpled white jacket and carrying a canvas shoulder bag under an arm. The exorcist.

He thought: They’ll do it. They’ll sacrifice her .

At the car, as though she’d simultaneously reached the same conclusion, Merrily turned to him, tried for a smile but failed. She shrugged instead.

Her image misted. Behind her, in the meadow sloping down to the Frome, the hay had been cut and turned and lay heavy, like acres of gold leaf, a heat haze hanging over it.

From behind the wheel of the Saab, the stately Sophie raised a hand in formal greeting, like the Queen or somebody. She wore a dark blue business suit and no smile. She revved the Saab like a getaway driver. Sophie would do her best for Merrily. Probably even the Bishop would do what he could. But in the end they’d both have to walk away.

Lol watched the Saab turn, crunching baked red earth, vanishing around the curve of the track. A cold electricity was branching through him as he walked rapidly away, down the footpath, across the hay meadow, to the river that seeped below the brambles, under the hedge and the fat, purple-spotted banks of willowherb.

The River Frome, flowing invisibly. Like the truth.

Just when it seemed entirely unimportant, the substance of the final verse of his river song seeped unbidden into his head.

What you did, Lol realized, was join another river.

Walking through Knight’s Frome, he saw nobody: no police, no press. He crossed the bridge, to the small, sunken church. The churchyard was wilderness, so overgrown around the perimeter that you couldn’t tell where the countryside began, several gravestones even poking out of bushes.

Lol stood in the porch and listened: no voices, no clatter. He went in, letting the iron latch fall behind him.

Sometimes they still oppressed him, churches, with their rigidity and weight, the ungivingness of them, their atmospheres dense with the residue of humourless old hymns. This one was almost frugally plain, the air inside ochre with sunlight and dust. Lol went and sat in a back pew, over in a corner. He couldn’t quite see the altar; that was OK.

He sat for a while in silence. The prayer-book shelf was thick with dust; in it, someone had finger-drawn two sets of initials and a heart.

Lol took off his glasses, wondering how often Merrily did this, how many times a day – how long it took to break the ice. His feeling was that it could be like meditation, that you’d have to connect with your deepest inner self, the part that flowed into some collective unconscious, rippling under the light of whatever it was you called God.

Rivers again.

‘Listen,’ he whispered, when the level seemed beyond his reach. ‘I mean, we don’t really know each other – at least, I don’t know you. But we’ve got one mutual interest, and I hope you’re not going to let her down.’

His eyes had half closed and all he could see was a dark yellow haze, with blobs of white where the windows were.

‘Because she’s not going to help herself, you know that. She’ll just keep on telling the truth as she sees it, and that might be the wrong kind of truth for certain people. And I realize we only learn by suffering, by screwing up, and maybe she did screw up… but her heart was in it, and what else can you ask? And if she goes, she won’t come back, and I don’t think that’s going to help anybody. I mean, how do you want to play this? You want a church run by politicians or by people who actually give a shit?’

He glanced over his shoulder towards the vestry, which Merrily had entered as a woman and emerged from as a priest. He leaned back and thought for a few minutes.