Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

Anyway, I thought I had better let you know. Karl has changed ... well, a little. All the same, Gill didn’t take to him and was not at all happy when he took out what I would swear is the SAME TIN and rolled himself a joint, which, as you can imagine, is not exactly the drug of choice in our part of Chippenham.

Let me know if you hear anything. Give my best wishes to – Alison, is it? We were both so delighted to hear things are working out for you at last on a personal level and once again, sorry for keeping the album so long.

With very best wishes,

Dennis Clark.

Dear old Dennis Clarke.

Methodical, play-it-safe Dennis. If you work it out for yourselves, lads, you’ll see that if we do these two gigs in Banbury, we’ll be twenty-seven pounds better off than if we go up to Sheffield, taking into consideration at least three Little Chef meals, eleven gallons of petrol and tyre-wear ...

Dear old stupid, bloody Dennis. Put it behind you, Lol, it’s not the end of the world. Make a new start. In a couple of years you’ll be laughing about it.

Lol slumped into the old blue armchair.

Nick Drake sang ‘Cello Song’. Calm, upper-class English accent. And yet the black-eyed dog had been at Nick Drake’s door, as sure as the Hellhound had pursued Robert Johnson, the poor bluesman, over half a century ago. Both of them dead before the age of twenty-seven.

The thought of the hellhound who was Karl Windling back on his trail made Lol’s mouth go dry.

He thought, Where will I go?

The days were growing longer. Living in the country, you could really feel the earth turning, and it made you dizzy.

He would do it. He’d go. Now. In the springtime, when the sun was beginning to linger over the village with its ancient black and white cottages and inns, its old and mellowed church, its narrow, brown river.

In a similar village, not two hours’ drive from here, sometime in the night, Nick Drake had opened his door to the black-eyed dog.

Now, out there in the orchard, Nick was waiting for Lol.

ACTUALLY, JANE THOUGHT, it was excellent living at the pub.

Even though they had to share a bedroom: her at one end knocking off her homework, Mum at the other agonizing over a sermon. Even though you had to be up and into the bathroom pretty early to avoid having to watch Mum saying – oh my God – her morning prayers.

You tried not to be embarrassed, you really did try. But a grown woman, who actually wasn’t bad-looking for her age, down on her knees under the window, whispering sweet nothings to some invisible old bloke in the sky ...

What a psychologist would have said, how a counsellor would have put it, was that Jane was actually jealous of God. This single-parent only child, OK, a semi-orphan, and here’s her widowed mother taking up with Another Guy and this time it’s much more intense, this time it’s the Big Guy, the Real Thing.

This was what a psychologist would say. And was, in fact, more or less what a counsellor had said. The counsellor forced on her by Mum’s bloody theological college the time she ran away, as they insisted on putting it. Or took a night off, as she tried to explain it to them.

Anyway, the night off had involved putting on some serious make-up and going to a pub and getting chatted up by a computer salesman from Edgbaston before being spotted by one of the prissy bloody trainee vicars who fancied Mum and took great pleasure in grassing up the delinquent daughter. Jesus, how ironic.

‘All right, what’s on your mind, flower?’

Mum plonked two Diet Cokes on the pub table, the one near the toilets that was always the last to be taken – except, of course, when good old humble Mum was around.

‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘You know. I mean, nothing really. As such.’

‘As such.’ Mum nodded solemnly.

‘Just wondering if I can put up with that bloody school for another two years before I wind up doing drugs and self-mutilation.’

Third new school in as many years. Though, frankly, when you’d done it once, it got easier. The kids were always more curious about you than you were about them, everybody wanted to hang out with the new girl, and the teachers would give you the benefit of the doubt for months before proclaiming you Public Enemy Number One.

‘Mmm,’ Mum said. ‘Is it that particular school or just any school desperate enough to take you?’

Jane wrinkled her nose. ‘I just sometimes think I’m too old for it.’

‘Too old for school?’

‘Older than everybody else my age, anyway. Do you really have to wear that thing in here?’

Saturday lunchtime. With the post-Easter tourist season starting up, the bar was pretty full. Being seen lunching with your mother was one thing, sharing a table with the Vicar was something else.

‘Yes, I really think I do.’ Mum patted her ridiculous collar with something Jane was horribly afraid could be pride.

She lowered her eyes. Hell, even a real dog collar would look better, one of those with coloured-glass jewels or brass spikes. People of Mum’s generation apparently used to wear them quite a lot during the punk era. She remembered Dad telling her once that Mum, as a teenager, had been a sort of punk. Not exactly the full safety-pin-through-the-nose bit, but certainly cropped hair and black lipstick. Dad talking in a way that suggested he’d been quite turned on by it. Pretty revolting, really. And the music was embarrassingly awful.

‘Going undercover was never a good idea,’ Mum said. ‘Not in the parish. It only leads to embarrassment later.’

Possibly meaning the guy who’d tried to pick her up in this very bar and had turned out to be head of English at Jane’s new school, the smarmball who could be teaching her A-level next year. Which – him being married to the girls’ PE teacher – Jane would not hesitate to use to stitch him up if the oily git should give her any hassle.

It was OK staying at the pub, because you learned things about people. Things you might not find out for ages if you were banged up in the vicarage. Like that TV-playwright guy, Richard Coffey, moving this youngish actor into his house on a fairly permanent basis. The actor was called Stefan Alder and was really succulent totty. Apart from being gay, of course. Or maybe he just hadn’t met the right woman.

So, yeah, it was good at the Black Swan. Swinging off the school bus and strolling coolly into the bar. On the other hand, there was the question of her apartment. Mustn’t let that one slide.

‘So, how long before they finish de-Alfing the rectory?’

‘That’s what I was about to tell you.’

Mum was taking delivery of a couple of ploughmans-wifh-cheddar from the waitress. Don’t do it, Jane pleaded silently. Please don’t say fucking grace ...

‘I meant to say last night.’ Mum speared a piece of celery. (Thank Christ for that.) ‘The rewiring’s complete, they’ve nearly finished work on the kitchen. And yesterday, apparently, they took out that huge electric fire which is so old it breaks every known regulation. According to Uncle Ted, Alf Hayden must have been getting divine protection to have avoided being fried. Anyway the bottom line is, we could be in by next weekend. Good?’

‘Yeah. Could be OK.’

Give her the whole of the summer holidays to get things together, apartment-wise. She had in mind this kind of Mondrian effect for the main room; you could paint the squares inside the timbers in different colours. Ingenious, huh?

It was Uncle Ted, of course, who’d fixed it for them to stay on at the Black Swan, persuading the diocese to fork out for the Woolhope Suite, a bedroom, bathroom and small sitting room with a decent-sized TV. It was still off-season, so Roland, the proprietor, had been amenable to the kind of deal that people like Uncle Ted prided themselves on making.