Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

Church of England

Diocese of Hereford

Ministry of Deliverance

email: deliverance@spiritec.co.uk

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If you’ve had a worrying experience of an unexplained or possibly paranormal nature, we may be able to help.

Many people troubled or frightened by the unknown are often embarrassed to discuss their problem or are scared of being laughed at or disbelieved.

The Deliverance Ministry is here to listen and advise – and we never make light of it.

IT WAS REALLY getting to Jane now, tormenting her nights, raiding her head as soon as she awoke in the mornings. The way things did when there was nobody – like, nobody – you could tell.

I’m sixteen years old, and I’m …

Feeling deeply isolated, she walked numbly out of the school, with its acrid anxiety-smell, and into the sun-splashed quadrangle, where Scott Eagles and Sigourney Jones were already into a full-blown, feely snog almost directly under the staffroom window.

The big statement. This was Jones and Eagles telling the sad old gits in the staffroom that the English Language GCSE that they and Jane and a bunch of other kids had just completed, was, like all the other GCSEs – the focus of their school-life for the past four or five years – of truly minuscule significance in comparison with their incredible obsession with one another.

Yes, having done their sleeping around, they were into something long-term and meaningful. Life-partners, possibly. An awesome thing.

Jane, however, felt like part of some other species. Sixteen years old and …

She closed her eyes on the superior, super-glued lovers. Walked away from the whole naff sixties edifice of concrete and washed-out brick sinking slowly into the pitted asphalt exercise yard, which the Head liked to call a quadrangle. She needed out of here, like now . And yet she kept wishing the term still had weeks to run.

‘So, how was it for you, Jane?’

‘Huh?’

She spun round. The sun was a slap in the face. Candida Butler was shimmering alongside her, tall and cool, the words head girl material shining out of her sweatless forehead as they probably had since she was ten.

‘The exam, Jane.’ Candida wrinkled a sensible nose at the Jones-and-Eagles show. Her own boyfriend was at Cambridge, reading astrophysics. An older guy, natch. Candida – who was never going to be called Candy by anyone – was serene and focused, and knew it.

‘Pity the essay titles were all so crap,’ Jane said.

‘Did you think so?’ Candida looked mildly surprised. She’d have opted for the utterly safe and anodyne My Grandmother’s Attic . ‘Anyway, it’s another one over, that’s the main thing.’ She looked down at Jane with that soft, mature smile. ‘So what are you going to be doing with yourself this summer?’

The sun’s reflection lasered out of the plate-glass doors of the new science block. Danny Gittoes and Dean Wall, who probably still couldn’t get the letters ‘GCSE’ in the right order, came out of the toilets grinning and ripping off their school ties in preparation for another bid to get served in the Royal Oak, where the teachers drank. Went without saying that they wouldn’t be coming back in the autumn.

Jane wished it was already winter. She wished she could spend the next seven weeks holed up in her own attic apartment, under the Mondrian walls, with a pile of comfort reading.

I am sixteen, and I’m an old maid .

‘I’m going on holiday for a couple of weeks,’ she said miserably. ‘With my boyfriend. At his family’s holiday home.’

From the edge of the quad, where it met the secondary playing fields, you could see across miles of open countryside to the Black Mountains on the horizon.

On the other side of the mountains was Wales, another country.

Eirion’s country.

On the edge of Wales, probably nearly a hundred miles away, was the Pembrokeshire coast, where Eirion’s family had their five-bedroom holiday ‘cottage’. Where you could go surfing and walk the famous coastal path and lose your virginity. That kind of thing.

‘Some people have all the luck,’ said Candida. ‘We’re kind of constrained this year, because Robert’s got a holiday job at his cousin’s software plant near Cheltenham.’

‘Beats strangling poor bloody chickens at Sun Valley.’

‘I suppose.’ Candida’s wealthy farming family probably had major shares in Sun Valley. ‘Welsh, isn’t he, your guy?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ Jane blushed. Then, furious with herself, she went over the top again. ‘I mean, he doesn’t shag any old sheep.’

Candida’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you all right, Jane?’

‘Yeah.’ Jane sighed. ‘Fine.’

Candida patted Jane’s shoulder. ‘See you next term, then. On the A level treadmill.’

‘Sure.’

Jane watched Candida stride confidently across the quad towards the car park, where her mother would be waiting for her in the second-best Range Rover. Jane’s own mum – ancient, clanking Volvo – would be a while yet. She’d had an early funeral to conduct: Alfred Rokes, who’d gone out at a hundred and two, having still been blacksmithing at ninety, so nothing too sorrowful there. And then – a little grief here, maybe – the Bishop was expected to call in.

With a good hour to kill, Jane could have strolled round the back for a cigarette. If she’d been into tobacco. But when your mum smoked like a chimney, what was the point?

Jane’s nails dug into her palms.

An old maid who didn’t even smoke. What kind of life was this?

OK, the problem. The problem was that Eirion was giving every impression of wanting to move them up to the Scott Eagles–Sigourney Jones relationship level.

Jane watched Jones and Eagles heading hand in hand for the students’ car park. Scott had passed his test on his seventeenth birthday; he’d been driving Land Rovers since his feet could reach the pedals, which had probably been around the age of nine, because he was a tall guy, maybe fully grown now. Adult. Experienced.

Also, Eirion, himself – sexy enough, in his stocky, amiable way – had obviously been putting it about for years. Well, you know, I was in this band , he would say. Oh, Eirion had been around, no question.

And he could have had Jane, too, by now. She would have had sex with him, no arguments. In the back of the car or somewhere, anywhere; she just wanted the bloody thing cleared away, like dirty dishes – everybody said the first time was crap anyway, this messy chore to be undergone before you could start enjoying it.

But Eirion would gently detach her clammy little hand from his belt. I want this to be proper , he’d mumble. Do you know what I’m saying?

Proper? Like, what did proper have to do with it?

I don’t want this to be… ordinary, you know? Run-of-the-mill. Me and you, we’re … And then he’d go all embarrassed, looking out of the car window at the moon. Jesus.