Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

Merrily shouldered her bag amid a rush of whispers. Preston Devereaux said nothing. She slid around the table and walked away, out of the spotlight pool, down into the shadows of the left-hand aisle, aware of hushed discussions opening up on both sides, like a small motor coming to life, and then the scuffling sound of someone standing up.

‘Wait…’ A tall woman, black top, spiky red hair, standing sideways in the pew space.

Merrily stopped and leaned against a pew-end.

‘I saw it,’ the woman said. ‘This fully formed man on a bike – high up on his bike, this great, black…’ she stared around the church ‘… pulpit of a bike. Right there in front of me. And I wasn’t drunk, whatever people are saying. I hadn’t been drinking. When they gave me a breath test, it was totally negative. But I’m telling you I saw him. He was there. Absolutely and totally… bloody there.’

‘You’re…’ Merrily felt a small worm of excitement uncurling in her spine. ‘You’re Mrs Cobham, right?’

‘Correct. I swerved and he vanished and I went into this bloody camper van about half a second later.’

‘How did you feel at that moment?’

‘Feel? Mixture of… shock and… just sheer, primitive terror. I thought I was actually going to die. Die of shock, you know? All I remember after that was being out of the car and just standing at the side of the road, shivering. They wouldn’t come near me, the people in the camper, they wouldn’t leave their vehicle, I must’ve looked-’

‘Was there any… change in the atmosphere when you saw the cyclist? The temperature?’

Merrily saw that the focus of the room had altered, people drifting to the ends of pews on either side, two semicircles forming and Preston Devereaux on his own by the chancel, sitting upright, his long sideburns like the chinstrap of a helmet. Stella Cobham gripped the pew in front of her.

‘I felt cold. Whether that was just the shock… Couldn’t seem to keep a limb still until daylight. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think of anything else. Kept seeing him again and again in my head. I can see him now.’

‘Mrs Watkins…’ Preston Devereaux was on his feet. ‘This is neither the time nor the place…’

Merrily just kept on talking to Stella Cobham, a damped-down silence around them, the windows in the nave filled with a dull purple half-light that didn’t go anywhere.

‘Could he see you, do you think?’

‘I don’t think he could see anything. His eyes were… somewhere in the distance. It was the eyes I remember most. It was the eyes that… there’s a photo of him on the back of one of these books we bought – it’s called Elgar, Child of Dreams – and it’s one of those double exposures with his face superimposed on the hills, and his eyes are looking away, into some sort of infinity? You know? And there are these pinpoints of light in his eyes. Where’s… where’s Tim Loste?’

‘Gone,’ a man said. ‘Or he didn’t come.’

‘Well, can somebody get him back? Because he’ll be able to tell you-’

‘Leave him alone.’ Helen Truscott had appeared in the aisle next to Merrily. ‘He’s not well.’

‘Oh God, the fount of all medical bloody knowledge. I’m trying to give him a chance to unload it.’

‘And you think he’ll be happy to have his beloved Elgar exorcized? There, I’ve said the forbidden name, too. You don’t understand about Tim, do you?’

‘I understand what I saw, Mrs Truscott…’

‘You don’t understand what state that man’s in. You leave him alone.’

‘Look, I was told people would say I was sick or mental or drunk, like Loste, and I… I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Merrily.’

‘Well, Merry, whatever they’re saying.’ She swung her head angrily from side to side like a gun turret. ‘I’m telling you there is something wrong here. The cyclist… Jesus.’

In the swollen silence, Merrily looked around and saw… individuals. All these people together but essentially still pews apart. Maybe they knew one another by sight, by name, by reputation, but they were no more than a cluster of islands with separate climates, separate cultures.

Isolation. Midsummer Eve, and a chill in the air in a too-big church.

‘Excuse me.’ Preston Devereaux was brushing past. ‘I suspect this meeting is now over. Would the last lunatic out of the building please turn off the lights?’

‘Yeah, you go, Mr Devereaux!’ Stella Cobham snarling at his back. ‘You piss off. You keep nice and quiet about whatever you saw. You play it down. You weren’t for playing everything down when the fox-hunting thing was on, were you?’

Devereaux stopped. ‘That’s over. It’s over and we lost. You move on.’

Which was what he did. He walked out. At the same time, Merrily saw Leonard Holliday and three or four other people moving down the second aisle towards the main door… and more faces were swimming towards her.

‘If this-’ She took a breath, inspiration coming. ‘If this is really an issue, I’d just like to point out that the possibility of me or anyone attempting to exorcize Sir Edward Elgar… that is very much not an option. And even if there was a connection with Elgar-’

‘You can take it from me,’ Helen Truscott said, ‘that the connection was entirely in one unbalanced mind.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘And the devious heads of a few opportunists, who I hope have now seen the error of their ways.’

‘What I was going to say, Mrs Truscott, is, if there really is evidence of some pervading negative spiritual presence here, then a small roadside blessing is probably neither sufficient nor appropriate. I was going to say that another way of dealing with it would be to hold a full Requiem Eucharist, here in the church… perhaps extending out to the roadside?’

‘What’s that?’ Stella Cobham said.

‘A requiem is basically a funeral service. It’s not something we do lightly, but it’s sometimes a way of drawing a line under something.’

‘You want to hold a service for the cyclist?’

‘As some of you are a bit unsure about that, I’d be more inclined to suggest a service for the two people who died here last weekend, Lincoln and… Sonia? But I wouldn’t do it unless I was persuaded that there was a good reason, and I’d need to consult the relatives.’

The mobile began to chime in Merrily’s shoulder bag. She didn’t even remember switching it back on. She saw Joyce Aird staring at her, mouth half-open.

‘You want to hold a full requiem – a communion service – for those drug dealers?’

‘Think I need to take this call, if you don’t mind.’ Merrily backed off. ‘Look, that’s just a proposal, OK? If you want to have a bit of a discussion about this, I’ve got some cards in my bag with my phone number and my email if anyone wants to… talk about anything privately or tell me anything. Excuse me, I’ll be back.’

She hurried to the door, pulling out the phone, slumping on a bench in the porch with her bag on her knees.

‘Jane?’

‘Where are you, Merrily?’

Bliss.

‘I’m at Wychehill Church. Why? What’s happened?’

‘You don’t know?’ Bliss said.

She went cold, thinking as always, Jane.

‘Stop messing about, Frannie.’

She could hear the sounds of a car engine, the intermission of Bliss thinking.

‘Don’t go away,’ he said. ‘Might pick you up on the way, if that’s all right with you.’

‘The way to where?’

‘We’ve gorran incident.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Look, if you want to stick around I’ll pick you up on me way. Be about half an hour. Yeh, do that, would you? Stick around.’

The line was cut. Bloody cop-speak. Why did they never spell it out? What was she supposed to do now? She stood in the church doorway, the sky outside the colour of the flash around a blackened eye. It must be nearly half past ten.