It was unsigned. Quite expensively done, judged by the standards set by these creeps. Usually the paper was cheap and crumpled, and whereas most of them were pushed into a letterbox, either here or at the church, this one had come by post.
Surprising how many anonymous letters you got. Or perhaps male ministers didn’t get so many – quite a few of these letters muttered that you should stop pretending to be a priest and go out and get yourself a husband like ordinary, decent women did. One or two of them also offered to give her what ordinary, decent women were getting, but she evidently wasn’t. She picked these ones up by one corner and washed her hands afterwards.
Some of them she felt she ought to file, or give to the police in case other women were receiving similar messages and the sender ever got nicked. Some she really didn’t want to take to the police, in case anyone at the station suspected there was no smoke without fire.
But most of them got burned in the grate or the nearest ashtray.
Merrily flicked the Zippo. It would be true, of course. Jane had laid it on the line that altogether fateful afternoon in the coffee lounge at the Green Dragon. The Church has always been on this kind of paternalistic power-trip, doesn’t want people to search for the truth. Like it used to be science and Darwinism and stuff they were worried about. Now it’s the New Age because that’s like real practical spirituality .
Psychic fairs were where people went in search of ‘Real Practical Spirituality’. Merrily didn’t doubt that what the letter said was essentially true. It would explain a lot of things, not least the allure of Rowenna.
She knew the Devil’s Picturebook was the tarot – a doorway.
Et tu, flower . She felt choked by acrid fog. Her head ached.
No option now.
She sent the Bishop his e-mail, walked out of the office and down the stone stairs.
SHE FELT COLD, and dangerously light inside, as though a dead weight had rolled away, but releasing nothing. She stepped through a tide of pensioners, a coach party heading towards the Cathedral. The sky was overcast. Nobody seemed to be smiling any more. One of the old men looked a bit like Dobbs.
She should tell Dobbs that it was OK now. That he could go ahead and recover. She’d do that, yes. She’d go to the hospital at visiting time and tell him. Jesus Christ was the first exorcist; the pattern is unbroken . This would draw a final line under everything.
Unless Huw was there, the bastard, with his holy water and his candles.
Jesus!
The city swirled around her in the fog, undefined. She mustn’t look back at the Cathedral. It was no part of her life now. She should go back to her own parish and deal with the church break-in. Head Ted Clowes off at the pass. At Ledwardine – her home.
Or not?
Sweat sprang out on her forehead. She felt insubstantial, worthless. She had no home, no lover, no spiritual adviser, no…
Daughter?
Failed her. Too bound up in your own conceits. Sending her into the arms of New Age occult freaks, a reaction to living with a…
Pious bitch?
Her dead husband Sean had been the first to call her that. After a day quite like this, a headachy day, the desperate day when she’d found out just how bent he was, and screamed at him for his duplicity and his greed, and he’d screamed back: I was doing it for you, you pious bitch .
She hated that word. Don’t ever be pious . Smoke, curse, never be afraid to say Jesus Christ! in fury or astonishment – at least it keeps the name in circulation. Strive to be a good person, a good priest, never a pious priest.
Once, up in Liverpool, she’d conducted a youth service wearing a binliner instead of a cassock. It was half a generation too late; some of the kids were appalled, others sneered. Not so easy not being pious .
Merrily found herself back on the green, watching the Cathedral placidly swallowing the coach party. The fog was lifting, but the sky behind it was darkening. She had no idea which way to go next.
Suppose she’d backed away from the lamplit path and supported Sean, had said, Let’s fight this together ? Would he have made the effort for her, found some fresh, uncorrupted friends, a new but much older secretary? Would he, in the end, have survived ? Might she have saved his life by not following the Path of the Pious Bitch into the arms of God?
She stood at the barrier preventing cars turning into Church Street. She was panting, thoughts racing again. Wasn’t it true that having women in the priesthood was creating a new divide between the sexes – because men could love both God and their wives, but no truly heterosexual woman could love both God and a man with sufficient intensity to make both relationships potent? Was it all a sham? Was it true that all she was searching for in God were those qualities lacking in ordinary men? Or, at least, in Sean.
Oh Christ . Merrily flattened herself against a brick wall facing the side of the Cathedral. The headache had gone; she wished it was back, she wanted pain. Fumbling at her dogcollar, she took it off and put it in her bag. A cold breeze seemed to leap immediately to her throat, like a stab of admonishment.
She zipped up her coat, holding its collar together, turned her back on the Cathedral and walked quickly into Church Street.
Lol saw Merrily from his window, through the drifting fog: gliding almost drunkenly along the street, peering unseeingly into shop windows newly edged with Christmas glitter.
He ran downstairs, past the bike, past Nico’s sepulchral drone and the very interested gaze of Big Viv.
‘Merrily?’ Close up, she seemed limp, drained.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’ And he was shocked because she looked as vague as Moon had often been, but that was just him, wasn’t it – his paranoia?
But paranoia hadn’t created the shadows and creases, the dark hair all mussed, dark eyes moist, make-up escaping.
He looked around. Not the flat now – it had been too awkward there the other night, as if foreshadowed by the death of Moon.
She let him steer her into the corner café where he and Jane had eaten chocolate fudge cake.
There was no one else in the back room. A brown pot of tea between them. On the wall above them was a framed Cézanne poster – baked furrowed earth under a heat haze.
The letter lay folded on the table, held down by the sugar bowl, revealing only the words ‘known that such events attract members of Occult Groups in search of converts’.
‘But surely,’ he said, ‘they mainly just attract ordinary people who read their daily horoscopes. It doesn’t mean she’s sacrificing babies.’
But he thought of seeing Jane and the other girl coming out of Pod’s last night, long after it was closed. And Jane pretending, for the first time ever, not to have seen him.
‘If this was London,’ she said, ‘I could get away with it. Or if Jane was grown-up and living somewhere else. If she’d even been up-front about it, I could have—’
‘Merrily, it means nothing. I can’t believe you’ve just quit because of this. It’s the Bishop, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘He made another move on you, right?’
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘He’s been… fine. And anyway I might have taken that the wrong way: late at night, very tired. No, I’m just… paranoid.’ She held up her half-smoked cigarette as though using it as a measure of something. ‘Also I have filthy habits and a deep reservoir of self-pity.’
He nodded at the cigarette. ‘What are the others, then?’
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