Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘Excuse me.’ At the mouth of the mews, a plump, twenty-something woman stepped out in front of Jane. ‘I’m with BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester. I don’t suppose you know Colette Cassidy, do you?’

She looked a bit harassed. She wore a black velvet hat and had a small recorder with a microphone.

‘Sure,’ Jane said.

‘Thank God. Could I ask you a few things about her?’

‘OK.’

‘Terrific’ The microphone had a blobby thing on the end. ‘Be with you in a couple of seconds. Sorry, your name is?’

‘Jane W— Wilkins.’ It was OK talking about Colette, but she didn’t fancy any vicar’s daughter stuff.

‘OK, Jane ... So, were you at the party?’

‘Yeah.’ The microphone about six inches from her nose.

‘I gather it was fairly lively.’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘Not really.’

‘ No? ’

‘It was quite dull, actually. People were just dancing and stuff. And drinking Coke.’

‘Why did they all come outside?’

‘Fresh air, I suppose.’

‘Oh. I understood there was some dancing going on out here.’

‘No, not really. People were just kind of wandering off. It was no big deal’

‘Wasn’t Colette trying to ... you know ... get them going?’

‘No, she’s not like that. She’s very quiet. I don’t think she really wanted a party. It was just kind of expected. Normally, she liked, er, reading. And going for walks. Very interested in wildlife and, er, flowers. That sort of thing.’

‘So what do you think’s happened to her?’

‘Well, knowing Colette, she probably went off somewhere with a friend to get away from it all. For cocoa or something. Stayed the night.’

‘Oh.’ The reporter switched off her machine. ‘Well. Thanks, Jane.’ Turned and walked off towards the radio car on the square. ‘Thanks a fucking bunch,’ Jane heard.

Merrily tried to remember if she’d read about it at the time, but as Hazey Jane were hardly famous, it probably hadn’t been widely reported.

‘They said I was very lucky,’ Lol said. ‘It could easily have been rape.’

‘It was rape, surely?’ Merrily said. ‘And how on earth did he persuade that girl not to give evidence, if this was her friend?’

Lol was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know. I imagine he threw her around a bit and gave her some money. Karl thinks on his feet, even when he’s stoned.’

‘So you were alone in the dock. What did you get?’

‘Probation.’ He was looking down at the table.

She could see him fighting the tears. Eighteen years ago, and the wound was still wide open and oozing. Did she believe this? If it was true, it was hardly shocking when you considered that the alleged victim was not so much younger than the alleged criminal and probably emotionally more mature.

‘I mean, I did it, ’ Lol said. ‘I pleaded guilty. I had sex with an under-age girl. It was enough. In the eyes of God ... as they say’

‘Who say?’

‘My parents. Well, they’re dead now. It was what they said at the time. Well, they didn’t actually say it because neither of them ever spoke to me again. Only their minister. He spoke for them. And for God. As you priests do.’

‘What denomination was this?’

‘I can’t remember. Big pink building, with posters outside.’

Merrily smiled.

‘They’d caught religion in middle age. It just pushed everything else out. I was like a lodger by then. The old pictures of me as a kid all gone. Replaced by pictures of Jesus.’

‘Only child?’

He nodded. ‘But I’d stopped being their son in any real sense when I wouldn’t go to their church. After they threw me out, they had my room ... cleansed.’

Merrily said, ‘Lucy Devenish know about this?’

‘Some. After that, I went a bit ...’

Gigging doesn’t come easy when your last public appearance was in court. When your parents have thrown you out – spawn of Satan – and you’re living in one room over a fish and chip shop in Swindon. And your music is stuck in a time warp and you keep dwelling on Nick Drake who was afraid of playing live and so never built up a following, so his records didn’t sell and the black depression set in – the ‘Black-Eyed Dog’ at the door, like the ‘Hellhound on my Trail’ of the 1930s blues singer Robert Johnson who was so shy they had to record him facing the wall and died at twenty-six, just like Nick Drake. And you’re getting more and more confused and taking pills and you get it into your head that there’s some dark virus in the music, passed from Johnson to Drake and maybe other people in between, and now it’s in you.

The band fizzles out, as bands do. You’re living alone in one room and a toilet. One day, Dennis Clarke, the drummer, comes to see you.

Suburban Dennis is appalled at the way you’re living, the stuff you’re taking, your hair unwashed, your eyes way back in your head where it’s always night. And your current girlfriend, who picked you up in a pub, is nearly old enough to be your mother, almost certainly on the game, and she takes your money and brings you drugs. You’re ill and she’s making you worse.

The truth of it was blindingly obvious to Merrily.

‘You were afraid of young girls, weren’t you? You were probably even afraid of girls your own age in case they turned out to be younger than they said they were, right? You felt safe with this woman.’

Lol shrugged.

‘Are you still afraid of them, Lol? Were you afraid of Jane? Even though you came into the house with her last night? Went up to her room?’

Lol’s fist tightened.

It was this Dennis who realized Lol had had a breakdown. Dennis who got him into the hospital. Dennis and a mate of his who was a doctor. Voluntary, of course. Lol was a voluntary patient. No kicking and screaming, no straitjackets. On the other hand, no analysis. No therapy that you couldn’t swallow with a glass of water. But he was glad of the rest.

And time passed.

‘ How long?’

‘Yeah, I know, I know. It’s very easy for people on the outside to say you should have got yourself out. But you get very ... grateful. It’s to do with people helping you. Stopping people helping you, that’s the hard bit. Saying, no, I don’t want help, I don’t need your help. I’m all right, piss off. It was like Karl – he helped me get through the court thing.’

‘How did he do that, Lol?’

Lol sighed. ‘He gave me stuff to make it so that it didn’t matter.’

‘Or so you didn’t have second thoughts about implicating him. Was that how you got started? Was it heroin?’

‘No. I don’t know what it was. Well, I do. But that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t addiction, just reliance. That’s different. I think. But the more you took, the less it mattered, sure. In hospital, they call it your medication. ’

‘God.’

‘Can we skip the hospital? I did get out eventually. People helped. Dennis again. Then this sound-engineer we once worked with, Prof Levin, who was an alcoholic, nice guy, he put me in touch with Gary Kennedy, who was looking for a lyricist. So things looked up, money came in, quite a lot. Things were better.’

And then there was Alison. Alison was a friend of one of the nurses at the hospital, who’d become a friend of Lol’s and kept in touch. Alison was the first girlfriend he’d had in a long, long time who was younger than him. So Alison was progress. She also made Lol realize he wasn’t such a young person any more, and where had it gone, his youth?

Missing years. You never make up for missing years. But he’d made it through to the other side of something. Unlike Nick Drake and Robert Johnson, he had not died, although there’d been a period when the thought of it hadn’t frightened him too much.