Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘Lol.’ She put her lighter to his cigarette. ‘Is there something happening that it’s not been considered suitable for me to know about? Because of me being a priest?’

‘I don’t ...’He looked apprehensive. ‘Maybe.’

‘There have certainly been things I don’t understand.’ She took a lungful of smoke, breathed it out hard. ‘And that the Church doesn’t want to.’

‘Like?’

‘Like, the house haunts me. I hate it. Nothing’s been right since we moved in. I have bad dreams. The kind that make you wonder if they really are dreams. What would poor Lucy have said about that, do you think, if I hadn’t been a priest?’

He took a small, self-conscious puff on the cigarette. ‘She once said to me that I was living too near the orchard.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Well, this was the Village in the Orchard. The orchard was its life-force. Now that’s all gone, maybe the orchard isn’t such a good place.’

‘Resentful. They grows resentful .’ Merrily put the cigarette in the ashtray, pushed it a couple of inches away. ‘I’m having too many of these.’

‘If an apple had rolled right up to my feet from a tree full of blossom,’ Lol said, ‘I’d probably feel much like Jane.’ He looked at his cigarette as though it represented some aspect of his past he didn’t really want to remember. He put it out in the ashtray. ‘Sorry. Wasteful.’

‘You always been superstitious?’

‘Or paranoid? Is that the same thing? Like I was always influenced by this guy, Nick Drake. Called the band after one of his songs.’

‘Hazey Jane.’ Merrily started to sing it, went wrong and gave up. ‘Never quite figured what that song was about, but she was obviously maladjusted. Cursing where she came from, swearing at the night. My step-brother had his albums. He was very appealing, was Nick Drake. But probably ill.’

‘Probably was,’ Lol said. ‘For a long time, I was convinced I was going to die when I was twenty-six, like him. And then I was twenty-eight and I hadn’t died, and so I felt guilty. And let down, somehow. That was when I went in for the second time.’

‘The hospital?’

‘Sounds’ – he smiled – ‘insane. But these things get inside you and they get mixed up with everything else that’s wrong, and it’s like ... Is it illness, or is there something else? Alison thought it’d be good for me, moving out here, fresh air, simple life. Only Lucy saw the problems. Everywhere has its own bag of superstition. Wherever I go, it all seems to connect. I remembered Nick’s song “Fruit Tree”, which more or less says you don’t make it till you die. Sometimes, I had the feeling that Nick and Robert Johnson and these guys were out there, among the apple trees. That make sense? Does it hell.’

‘Yes, it does. I’ll tell you what happened to make me do it, if you like. I mean join the clergy.’

She undid her dog collar, placed it on the table so that it surrounded the ashtray and the smoking cigarette.

The past unclouding. The days when it all fell into place. Sean away in London for a week of meetings, and on the second day, there was this tentative visit from his anxious clerk, with a briefcase full of grief, and it was all laid out before her, all the corrupting entrails.

The third day, trying to lose the bad smell, she took her shrieking headache on a long drive into the country in the ill-gotten Volvo. Ending up at the unknown church of some saint with an obscure Celtic name – you could see the tower from a couple of miles away, but it turned out to be a tiny little place reachable only by a track. How could you put into words what happened in that bare, little church? What happened inside you that chose to happen there.

‘See, for some time before this, I’d been helping our local vicar. Decent guy, but what a waste, this man being a vicar, collecting ten grand a year, whatever it was then – if you lived with Sean, everybody was rated according to their income: he’s a forty a year man, whatever. So ten grand a year and a regular congregation of nineteen. What a loser.’

Merrily watched the smoke rising out of the white circle.

‘It was funny – one of the things that occurred to me in that little church was ... nineteen, that’s a hell of a lot of lives. And that was when I saw the blue and the gold.’

Ah. The blue and the gold. An inner vision? Hey, watch it – warning finger raised by Dr David Campbell – you’re in danger of crossing the demarcation line.

Aw, come on, David, aren’t I allowed one mystical experience, if I don’t talk about it too much? The sense of a huge benevolence, the awesome moment of cosmic awareness, the dwindling of self in an exhilarating vastness of blue and gold?

‘Anyway, whatever it was,’ she wound up, with a half-desperate cynicism, ‘it got rid of the headache.’

‘You ever experience it again?’

’A trace. An essence. Whenever I knelt to pray, it would be there, like a backcloth. This velvet security blanket of deep blue and gold. It kept me going.’

And it isn’t there now?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘It isn’t, now. I don’t quite remember when it stopped. These past couple of weeks have seemed like about ten years.’

‘You ever go back to that little church?’

‘I’d be scared to,’ she said frankly. ‘In case it was just a little, grey, empty building. Wow, you’re really getting everything here, Lol. The full crisis-of-faith bit.’

She pulled the cigarette out of the ashtray, out of the dog collar.

‘It’s ironic, because I thought, the way you do, that I was being guided here. Like you maybe? Did you feel that?’

‘No. Just Alison. Alison wanted to come here, and I was the guy who could afford to take on a mortgage. Nice place, no special sense of destiny.’

‘I thought there was. Then, in a matter of weeks, the whole edifice is developing cracks. I don’t know why that is. Something I did, something I didn’t do? Maybe women really aren’t strong enough for this job. Shit, wash my mouth out.’

‘Was that why you were ill in church?’

‘Because I was feeling like a fraud? That doesn’t matter any more, didn’t you know? There’s now a whole bunch of ministers within the Anglican Church ready to tell you the Virgin birth and the Christmas story and the resurrection are all myths and God as we know Him is just Father Christmas. No, I don’t know why I was sick.’

A lie. Because she couldn’t talk about the worst of it: that while her prayers had become flat and dead, while she was getting no comfort, no response, no sense of resonance, she was also becoming prey to cold visions from the other side of the demarcation line. Visions which began in dreams and finally made it. Finally got into the church.

Superstition. Mental illness.

‘You know what occurred to me ...’ Lol hesitated, playing with the sleeve of his alien sweatshirt, winding it like a tourniquet around his forefinger, ‘when you were on about the blue and gold?’

‘Go on.’

‘I thought of Jane’s room. The ceiling. See, the night we brought Jane out of the orchard she was rambling about little golden lanterns.’

‘She was drunk.’

‘I don’t think she was. I think she was ... heavy word coming up, Merrily. Can you handle this?’

‘Hit me.’

‘Enchanted. She was enchanted. Everything that word says to you. All the different meanings ... like, elated. Like, under a spell.’

‘You’re right,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s a big word.’

‘And what about you, when you were in the little church?’

‘That,’ she said mock-primly, ‘was what we like to call a religious experience.’