Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Silence. A dismal, head-shaking silence.

Merrily said, ‘So you’d like me to resign?’

Mick Hunter grinned, teeth as white as the Doric pilaster behind him. ‘Certainly not. I’d far prefer you to go home, have a good night’s sleep, and forget this ill-advised visit ever occurred. It isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me, and it won’t be the last time it happens to you. Let it serve to remind you that people like us will always have opponents, enemies, within the Church.’

‘Mick, don’t you think this is far too complicated and too… bizarre to be a set-up?’

‘Oh, Merrily, I can see your experience of being set up is really rather limited. My advice, if you’re approached again by the source of this insane proposal, is that you tell him you questioned the wisdom of informing me and decided against it.’

‘Making it my decision to say no to an exorcism.’

‘It’s a responsible role you now have, Merrily. Learning discrimination is part of it. Or you could go ahead with it, without informing me – which would, of course, were I or anyone else to find out, be very much a matter for resignation. But I don’t think you’d do that, because you don’t really believe any of this idiocy any more than I do. Do you, Merrily?’

‘I don’t know.’ She put her face in her hands, pulling the skin tight. ‘I don’t know.’

Mick stood up and helped her to her feet. ‘Get some sleep, eh? It’s been a difficult week.’

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘How can I know?’

‘Of course you don’t know.’ He put an arm around her shoulders, peered down into her face, then said, as if talking to a child, ‘That’s what they’re counting on, Merrily, hmm? Look, if I don’t go back and be pleasant to the awful councillors, Val will… be very unhappy.’

At the door, she sought out and held his famous blue eyes.

‘Will you at least think about it?’

‘I’ve already forgotten about it, Merrily,’ he said. ‘Good night. God bless.’

The fog seemed to be lifting, but the grass was already stiff with frost. The Cathedral was developing a hard edge. She crossed the green and walked into Church Street. The door in the alleyway beside the shop called John Barleycorn was opening as she reached it.

‘Hi.’

‘Hello, flower.’

Jane stood outside in the alley, no coat on, her dark hair pushed back behind her ears. Face upturned, she was shivering a little.

‘I lied.’

They stood about five feet apart. Merrily thought: We all lie. Especially to ourselves .

‘I don’t have anywhere else to sleep,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t actually know many people at all. I, uh, don’t even know the people I thought I knew. So… like… the only friends I have are Lol and you. I… I hope…’ She began to cry. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m really, really, really…’

Merrily’s eyes filled up.

‘I think there must be a whole load of things,’ Jane snuffled, ‘that I haven’t even realized I did, yet. Like all the time I was doing this stuff – selling you up the river. I told the bitch everything. I told her about everything . And when I said that to you about selling my—’

‘You didn’t,’ Merrily said very firmly. ‘I didn’t hear you say anything, flower.’

As they clung together on the already slippery cobbles, she thought: This is all that matters, isn’t it? This is all there is .

SHE WAS LIKE an elderly bushbaby in some ankle-length mohair thing in dark brown. She was waiting for him in the residents’ lounge, where they were now alone – all the others at church, she said, ‘bargaining for an afterlife’. She did not want to know anything about him.

‘Waste of time at my age, Robinson; it’s all forgotten by lunchtime.’

Lol didn’t think so. Her eyes were diamond-bright behind round glasses a bit like his own.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I prefer to make up my own mind.’ And she peered at him, eyes unfocusing. ‘ Oh , what a confused boy you are. So confused, aren’t you? And blocked, too. There’s a blockage in your life. I should like to study you at length, but you haven’t the time, have you? Not today. You’re in a frightful hurry.’

Lol nodded, bemused.

‘Slow down,’ she said. ‘Think things out, or you’ll land in trouble. Especially dealing with the Purefoys. Do you understand me?’

‘Not yet.’ Presumably Sorrel Podmore had given her the background over the phone. Which was good: it saved time.

She’d collected all the cushions from the other chairs and had them piled up around her. She was like a tiny, exotic dowager.

‘What do you know about the Purefoys?’

‘Virtually nothing.’

‘That’s a good place from which to start. It’s a very, very unpretty story.’

Jane had stood at the bedroom window for a long time, still feeling – in spite of everything – an urge to salute the Eternal Spiritual Sun.

Without this and the other exercises, without the Pod, there was a large spiritual hole in her life. She wasn’t sure she was ready for Mum’s God. Although part of her wanted to go to morning service, if only to show penitence and solidarity, another part of her felt it would be an empty gesture – hypocrisy.

And, anyway, she was, like, burning up with anger, and if the Eternal Spiritual Sun – wherever the bastard was these days – could add fuel to that, this was OK by Mystic Jane.

While Mum was conducting her morning service, Jane pulled on the humble duffel and walked into still-frozen Ledwardine, across the market square where, at close to midday, the cobbles were still white and lethal. She moved quickly, did not slip, fury making her surefooted. Rage at what they were trying to do to Mum – and what they’d already done.

They? Who? Who, apart from Rowenna?

With whom there was unfinished business .

Jane walked down to the unfashionable end of the village, where long-untreated timbers sagged and the black and white buildings looked grey with neglect.

She and Mum had sat up until nearly two a.m., hunched over this big, comfort fire of coal sweetened with apple logs. Like old times together, except it wasn’t – because Mum was dead worried, and you could understand it. She’d talked – frankly, maybe for the first time – about the dilemmas constantly thrown up by Deliverance. The need to believe and also disbelieve; and the knowledge that you were completely on your own – especially with a self-serving, hypocritical bastard of a bishop like Mick Hunter.

But she wasn’t alone now, oh no.

Jane stopped outside the Ox. The pulsing oranges and greens of gaming machines through the windows were brighter than the pub sign outside. This was as near as Ledwardine came to Las Vegas.

Jane went in. She was pretty sure they would be here. They’d been coming here since they were about thirteen, and they’d be coming till they were old and bald and never had a life.

There was just one bar: not big, but already half full. Most of the men in there were under thirty, most of the women under twenty, dregs of the Saturday-night crowd. Though the pub was old and timbered, the lighting was garish. A jukebox was playing Pearl Jam. It was loud enough, but the voice from halfway down the room was louder.

‘WATKINS!’

Right .

Wall and Gittoes were at a table by the jukebox, hugging pints of cider. Jane strolled over to the fat, swollen-mouthed slimeball and the bony, spotty loser who had once, she recalled, expressed a wish to have unholy communion with her mother.

‘I want to talk to you, Danny – outside.’