Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘It’s my job. We’re told to work with shrinks. The Bishop would approve.’

‘The shrink doesn’t know,’ Lol said. ‘The shrink must never know.’

‘A non-believer, huh?’

‘Of the most intractable kind,’ Lol said. ‘You want me to drive you back now?’

‘No, Lol,’ Merrily annunciated carefully, ‘you’re – not – really – a – minicab – driver. That was for the benefit of the Bishop.’

She went smiling into the snow. She must be overtired.

At least the roads were no worse. Back in the vicarage just before five, she called the General Hospital. She gave them her name and they put her through to the ward. She just knew which one it was going to be – there was an ironic inevitability about it.

‘Reverend Watkins? Not the biggest surprise of the morning, to have you ring.’

‘What was the biggest?’

‘The biggest, to tell you the simple truth,’ Eileen Cullen said, ‘is that the auld feller’s still with us.’

‘Would that be an indication he might be coming through this?’

‘Ah, now, I wouldn’t go taking bets on that. He knows when you’re talking to him – his eyes’ll follow you around the room. But he’s not talking back yet.’

‘Mr Dobbs is not a big conversationalist, in my experience. The room? You haven’t got him—’

‘Christ no. We have this other wee side ward at the far end of the main ward. If Denzil was still with us, Mr Dobbs wouldn’t even be able to smell him.’

Merrily shuddered.

‘So, collapsed in the Cathedral, they say?’ Cullen said nonchalantly.

‘Yes, that’s what they say.’

‘Well, I’m off home in a while, but I’m sure they’ll keep you posted on any developments. I’ll mention it.’

‘Thanks.’

A pause, then Cullen said, ‘Funny, isn’t it, how things come around. Mr Dobbs arranging like that for you to have a mauling from Denzil in his death-throes, and now… You ever find out why he did that to you?’

‘I never did,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe never will now.’

‘Well,’ Cullen said, ‘a patient’ll talk about all kinds of things, so he will – in the night, sometimes. I’ll keep my ears open.’

SHE KNEW THE words, of course she did, she knew the words . But they wouldn’t come. She bent close to him – his breath uneven, his eyes closed against her, like this was an act of will. She brought the chalice close to his stony face on the hospital pillow, white as a linen altar-cloth, and tipped her hand very slightly so that the wine rolled slowly down the silver vessel and trickled between his parted lips, a drop remaining on his lower lip, like blood.

Blood. Yes. Yes, of course.

‘The blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ, which was shed for you, preserve your body and soul into everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for you…’

Thomas Dobbs began to suck greedily at the wine. She was so grateful at having remembered the words that she tilted the chalice again, at a steeper angle, and wine flooded between his lips and filled his cheeks, and she began to murmur the Lord’s Prayer.

‘Our Father, Who…’

There was a cracking sound, like splintering stone, and his eyes flicked open, shocking her. Dobbs’s eyes were grey and white and, when he saw who hovered behind the sacrament, they blurred and foamed like a stream over rocks in winter.

‘Hallowed be…’

Dobbs’s shoulders began to quake.

‘Thy kingdom…’

She watched him rising up in the metal bed, his cheeks expanding. She could not move; this was her job. She kept on murmuring the prayer. When, eyes bulging in fury, he coughed the consecrated wine in a great spout into her face, it was indeed as warm as fresh blood, and she felt its rivulets down her cheeks.

This was her job; she could not move.

His hand snaked from under the bedclothes, and when it gripped her wrist like a monkey-wrench, the green tubes were ejected from his nose with a soft popping.

She didn’t scream. She was a priest. She just woke up with a whimper, sweating – after a little over an hour’s sleep on the sofa, and half a minute before the alarm was due to go off.

‘You look awful,’ said Ted Clowes after morning service. As senior churchwarden and Merrily’s uncle, he was entitled to be insulting. ‘This damned Deliverance nonsense, I suppose. I’ve told you, I have an extreme aversion to anything evangelical.’

Uncle Ted, a retired solicitor, had read ‘widely’ (the Daily Mail ) about the Toronto Blessing and certain churches in Greater London where parishioners with emotional problems were exorcized of their ‘devils’ in front of the entire congregation. He was monitoring all Merrily’s services for ‘danger signs’.

‘In addition, there’s all the time it seems to take up – time that should be spent in this parish, Merrily.’

‘Ted, I wouldn’t have been doing anything here in the parish in the early hours of this morning.’

‘But look at the state of you! Look at the shadows under your eyes. You look as if you’d been beaten up. I tell you, these things don’t go unnoticed in a village. Half of those old women are not listening to a word of your sermon; they’re examining you inch by inch for signs of disrepair. Anyway, I should get some sleep for an hour or two after lunch. Put that child of yours on telephone duty.’

Jane was sitting in Mum’s scullery-office, with Ethel on her knees and her one purchase from the psychic fair open on the desk: a secondhand copy of A Treatise on Cosmic Fire by Alice A. Bailey. So far, she couldn’t understand how a book with such a cool title could be so impenetrable. It sometimes read like one of those stereotype fantasy sagas she devoured as a kid – well, until about last year, actually – with all these references to The Sevenfold Lords and stuff like that. Except this was for real. But wasn’t there a simpler way to enlightenment?

In her pocket, she had the phone number Angela had given her.

Sorrel.

She took it out, then put it back. Instead she rang Lol. Mum had said very little about last night apart from Dobbs and his stroke – like, tough, but the old guy was plainly out of his tree, as well as being seriously outdated on the issue of women priests. If you had to have soul police – and no way did you – better someone decently liberal like Mum; Dobbs should have bowed out long ago and gone to tend his roses or something.

Jane scratched behind Ethel’s left ear until the black cat twisted her neck, purred luxuriously and faked an orgasm.

Lol wasn’t answering his phone. Mum said she’d had a cup of coffee with Lol, that was all. Not as good as getting completely soaked through, and having to take off all her clothes on Lol’s hearthrug, but a start.

Jane hung up, closed Alice A. Bailey, put Ethel on the carpet.

She took a long, long breath and got out the piece of paper.

Denny had upgraded his studio to 24-track. ‘This is it for me,’ he said. ‘ Finito . I think we’ve all been getting too technoconscious. It’s not what rock and roll’s about. When I was a kid you had a two-track Grundig in somebody’s garage and you were bloody grateful.’

‘What on earth is a Grundig?’ asked James Lyden’s friend Eirion, unpacking his bass.

‘Forget it,’ Denny said.

The house was no more than half a mile from Dick’s place, about the same age but detached and with a longish drive. Just as well, with a studio underneath. However, Denny had also allowed for major soundproofing; the creation of an anteroom and homemade acoustic walls had reduced the main cellar to about two-thirds of its original size. Four of them now stood in the glass-screened control room, with Denny’s personalized mixing-board. It was a warm, secure little world.