Phil Rickman: The Cure of Souls

‘I can’t… I can’t tour.’ Face it: he couldn’t even play all that well any more.

‘Right, let’s see, now.’ Prof went on like he hadn’t heard. ‘It would have to be as support, the first time. But supporting somebody tasteful – don’t worry about that, it can be arranged. REM, Radiohead… all these guys admit to being influenced by your work. You’re a cult… OK, a minor cult. But a cult is still a cult…’

‘Prof?’ Lol was resting the guitar on his trainers, his fingers among its machine-heads. ‘Be honest – you don’t even know that’s true, do you?’

‘The hell does that matter? Laurence, I apologize in advance if this sounds immodest, but if I’m the one spreading it around, everyone is going to believe it, therefore it becomes the truth.’

‘I can’t tour.’ Lol stood with his back against the partition wall again, his breathing becoming harder at the very thought of on the road .

‘You can tour! You need to tour… this will kick-start your confidence. You’re just using this therapy shit as some kind of buffer against the real world. You’re institutionalized and you don’t even know it. It’s like… like so many schoolteachers are really just kids who were afraid to leave school. Believe me, Laurence.’

And part of Lol did believe him, because Kenneth ‘Prof’ Levin had been down in the half-lit caverns, too – in his case alcoholism, the destruction of a good marriage.

Lol recalled the buzz he’d felt when he’d had the message to call Prof, a couple of weeks ago – around the same time he was concluding that knowing the difference between cognitive therapy and humanistic therapy didn’t make either of them any more effective. In fact, the day after his senior tutor had told him, not with irony but with something approaching pride: Therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the third millennium. And we’re the priests – the voice slick with self-belief, after a few glasses in the wine bar down the road from the college. Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness . This senior tutor, this high priest, was younger than Lol, maybe thirty-four.

‘All right!’ Prof Levin had finally backed off. ‘Enough. We’ll talk about this again. For starters, we just do the album.’

‘ Album? ’

Prof had spread his arms magnanimously. With his own studio set up, he was at last able to make these decisions without consulting anyone in a suit.

And Lol had thanked him for the offer – very profusely, obviously, because having Prof Levin produce an album for you was kind of like having Spielberg take on your screenplay – but then pointed out, reasonably enough, that he had only four songs: not quite half an album.

Prof had smiled beatifically through his white, nail-brush beard.

‘You have the whole summer, my son. This summer… is yours.’

And he had shambled smugly away to his room in the adjacent cottage, leaving Lol to switch everything off before climbing to his own camp bed in one of the old haylofts.

Like he was really going to sleep after this?

Instead, he’d stumbled out, bemused, into the warm night, to commune with the Frome. But the river was already asleep and that was how he ended up following the track running down a line of poplars and out the other side, close to where the hopkilns stood. The sky was now obscured by a tangle of trees, and he was aware of a high, piercing hum that somehow translated itself into Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness .

Not exactly the wisest analogy to hang on Lol who, in his late teens, had seen his parents find religion, watched them being swept away on waves of foaming fundamentalist madness, causing them to reject the Godless kid playing the devil’s music – the kid who would always remember coming home one weekend to find that those two small mantelpiece photos of himself as a toddler had been replaced by framed postcards of Jesus. Which was probably how it had started – the alienation.

And then – in just this last year – a surprise development. Lol’s fear and resentment of the Church had been fatally compromised by encounters with a priest called Merrily Watkins who lived and worked, as it happened, less than twenty miles from here… but if this was another reason for coming back to Herefordshire he wasn’t going to admit it, least of all to himself. Their last meeting had followed events so dark that maybe she wouldn’t want to be reminded.

He felt a sharp pain below his knee and stopped, feeling suddenly out of breath. He realized he’d been running, like he sometimes did to try and overtake a dilemma, to put an impending decision behind him. He must have veered from the path and now he was in the middle of an unknown wood and there were brambles tangled around his legs.

Wrong turning, somehow. It was easy enough to do, even in the daytime, even in countryside you thought you knew. In the middle of this unknown, unmanaged wood, snagged with hawthorn, he heard his T-shirt rip, and he stood there, shaking his head.

Lost again. Story of his life.

Knight’s Frome was a scattered hamlet with no real centre, so it wasn’t as if he could look around for a cluster of lights. Or even listen for the river. All he could hear was the humming: a plaintive sound that rose and fell and pulsed as if a melody was trying to escape.

Lol turned, walked back the way he’d come, putting a hand up to his glasses, pushing them tight onto the bridge of his nose; losing your specs was not something you did in a wood at night. When he took his hand away, he saw the trees and bushes had fallen away and there was now a clear space up ahead. A small yellow light appeared, not too bright, a little unsteady, with a black cone above it: a witch’s hat. The kiln tower again.

When the sky was clear of branches, a trailing scarf of brightness told him which direction was north… and then it was suddenly split by something black and rigid that made him reel back, startled. He slipped and stumbled, went down on one knee before it – waiting for the thing to move, bend down, snatch him up, hit him.

Nothing moved. Even the humming had stopped. Lol scrambled warily to his feet.

It was only a pole, half as thick as a telegraph pole, but not tall enough to carry telegraph wires or electricity cables – although it did support wires of some kind. To avoid it, he took a couple of steps to the right. No trees or bushes stood in the way and the ground was level.

A second black pole appeared, rearing hard against the northern sky, and this one had a short crosspiece like – his first thought – a gibbet. From it hung something limp and shrivelled, the skeletal spine of a dead garland; when he passed between the two poles, his bare elbow brushed against the remains with a dry, papery crackle.

Now he could see the extent of it: dozens of black poles against the pale night, in lines to either side of him across the barren ground, most of them with crosspieces, some connected by dark wires overhead. It was like a site laid out for a mass crucifixion. Between the wires, he could still see the yellow kiln-house light, perhaps two hundred yards away. And the nearness of the kiln told him what this was… or should have been.

It was high summer and these poles should be loaded with foliage, the ripening bines high on the wires, rippling with soft green hop-cones. But this whole scene was in black and white and grey, and there was an awning of silence: no owls, no scurryings in the undergrowth. No undergrowth, in fact.

The silence, Lol thought, was like a studio silence: soft, dry, flat and localized. The air seemed cooler now, and he could feel goosebumps prickling on his bare arms as he ventured tentatively into a hop-yard where no hops grew, along an alley of winter-bleak, naked hop-poles, a place as desolate as the stripped-back bed of someone recently dead. He felt a little scared now. There was no contented cattle-breath around this place – it felt less like a memory of the womb than a premonition of the grave.