Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘It’s probably meant, Bishop.’

‘Mick,’ corrected the Bishop. ‘Meant? Oh it was meant, for sure. The bastard means to frustrate me. Who, after all, is the oldest member of his Chapter? Dobbs.’ The Bishop tossed the name out like junk-mail. ‘The old man’s ubiquitous, hovering silently like some dark, malign spectre. I’d like to… I want to exorcize Dobbs.’

‘Well, I feel very awkward about the whole thing.’ Merrily poured tea for them both.

‘Oh, why?’ The Bishop quizzically tilted his head, as though he really didn’t understand. He sugared his tea. ‘You know the very worst thing about Dobbs? He actually frightens people – imagine. You have what you are convinced is an unwelcome presence in your house, your nerves are shot to hell, you finally gather the courage – or the sheer desperation – to go to the Church for help. And what should arrive at your door but this weird, shambling creature dressed like an undertaker and mumbling at you like Poe’s doleful raven. Well, you’d rather hang on to the bloody ghost, wouldn’t you?’

The Bishop, Merrily had noticed, said ‘bloody’ rather a lot, but nothing stronger, always conscious of the parameters of his image as a cool Christian. She was determined to be neither overawed nor underawed by Mick Hunter this afternoon, neither bulldozed nor seduced. She wished he was more like Huw Owen, but men like Huw never ever got to be bishops.

‘Listen… Merrily…’ His voice dropping an octave – latenight DJ. ‘I realize how you must feel. If you were the kind of person who was utterly confident about it, I wouldn’t want you in this job.’

… not a fundamentalist, not a charismatic or a happy-clappy, you’ve no visible axe to grind and I can see why he was drawn to you. You’re in many ways almost exactly the kind of person we need in the trenches .

‘Do you know Huw Owen?’ she asked.

‘Only by reputation. Quite a vocal campaigner for the ordination of women long before it became fa… feasible.’

Fashionable , he’d been about to say. Until it became fashionable , Mick Hunter would have kept very quiet on the issue. Merrily was trying to see him as Jane saw him, but it wasn’t easy; Mick’s blue eyes were clear and blazing with a wild integrity. He had a – somehow unepiscopal – blue jaw. He smelled very lightly of clean, honest, jogger’s sweat and of something smokily indistinct which made her think, rather shockingly, of what a very long time it had been since she’d last had sex.

‘Your late husband was a lawyer, wasn’t he?’ he said, startling her upright, tea spilling.

‘Yes.’ She was blushing. ‘I… me too. I mean, I was going to be one too. Until Jane came into the picture, and a few other things changed.’

‘Shame,’ the Bishop said. ‘Road accident, wasn’t it?’

‘On the M5. He… he hit a bridge.’

They hit a bridge. Sean and Karen Adair, his clerk and girlfriend and accomplice in a number of delicate arrangements with iffy businessmen. Dying flung together in a ball of fire, at the time when Merrily was balancing an inevitable divorce against her chances of ordination, and Jane was just starting secondary school. How much of this did the Bishop know? All of it, probably.

‘Look,’ she had to say this, ‘the thing is, Huw’s position on the ordination of women doesn’t extend to Deliverance ministry – did you know that? He doesn’t think we’re ready for all that yet.’

His eyes widening. She realized he’d probably sent her on this particular course precisely because he knew Huw was sympathetic to women priests.

‘Not ready for all that?’ The eyes narrowing again. ‘All what?’

‘He doesn’t feel that we have the necessary weight of tradition behind us to take on… whatever’s out there.’

‘Which is a little bit preposterous’ – Mick Hunter leaned back – ‘don’t you think?’

‘It’s not what I think that matters.’

‘No, quite. At the end of the day, it’s what I think. The Deliverance consultant’s responsible to the Bishop, and only to the Bishop. And I think – without any positive discrimination – that, if anything, this is a job a woman can do better than a man. It demands delicacy, compassion… qualities not exactly manifested by Dobbs.’

‘I’ve… I’ve been trying, you know, to work out exactly how you do see the job.’

Mick Hunter stirred his tea thoughtfully. Two tables away, a couple of well-dressed, not-quite-elderly women were openly watching him. Beefcake bishop – a new phenomenon.

‘OK, right,’ he said. ‘While you were in Wales, we had some basic research carried out. Quick phone-call to all the parish clergy: a few facts and figures. Did you know for instance that in the past six months, in this diocese alone, there have been between twenty and thirty appeals to the Church for assistance with perceived psychic disturbance?’

‘Really? My God.’

‘And rising.’ Mick smiled. ‘If the Church was a business, we’d be calling this a major growth area.’

The Bishop then talked about apparent psychic blackspots revealed by the survey – the north of the diocese was worst – and Merrily thought about how fate pushed you around, all the unplanned directions your life took. Whether she would ever actually have become a lawyer had she not become pregnant while still at university. If she would ever have become a priest had Sean not died when he did and if she hadn’t discovered he was a crook. If she would ever have been drawn into the strange shadow-world of Deliverance, had her own vicarage in Ledwardine not been tenanted by an essence of something which no one else had experienced.

She felt targeted, exposed. She wanted to leap up from the table and run to the car and smoke several cigarettes.

Instead she said, ‘What exactly are we talking about here?’

The Bishop shrugged. ‘Mostly, I suspect, about paranoia, psychiatric problems, loneliness, isolation, stress. Modern society, Merrily. Post-millennial angst. We’re certainly not talking about the medieval world of Canon Dobbs. Nor, I think, should we be sending the local vicar along just to have a cup of coffee and intone a few prayers, which is what happens in most cases now.’

She began to understand about the office. He would want one that actually said DELIVERANCE CONSULTANT on its door. He wanted to bring the job out of the closet.

‘I’m glad the awful word Exorcism’s been ditched,’ he said, ‘though I’m not entirely happy with Deliverance either. A less portentous term would be “ rescue ”, don’t you think?’

Rescue Consultant? Spiritual Rescue Service? SRS? She raised her cup to mask a smile. He didn’t notice.

‘It would still be part of the parish priest’s role to deal, in the initial stages, with people who think they’re being haunted or little Darren’s got the Devil in him or whatever. But the public also need to know there’s an efficient machinery inside the Church for dealing with such problems, and that there’s a particular person to whom they can turn. And I don’t want that person to look like Dobbs. We need to be seen as sympathetic, non-judgemental, user-friendly. You’ve read Perry’s book on Deliverance?’

‘The set text, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a start. I find Michael Perry rather too credulous, but I like his insistence on not overreacting. The job’s about counselling. It’s about being a spiritual Samaritan – about listening. You notice that Perry seldom seems to advocate exorcizing a place?’

‘He suggests a Major Exorcism should primarily be focused on a demonically possessed person, and then only when a number of other procedures have proved ineffective.’