Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

The Grey Monk was still there, in the ladies’ lavatory, his face fogged and his arms spread wide.

A deja vu moment and it made Merrily feel unsteady. The wind was whining in the rafters, buzzing in the ill-fitting glass of the leaded window, whipping into the thorn trees around the chapel. All the different rhythms of the wind.

Had this ever been a friendly place? Its stone looked like prison stone. It stood mournful as an old war memorial in a shallow hollow on the yellowed slopes where the SAS used to train. Nearer to God? All it felt nearer to was death.

She glared at the grey monk by the side of the door, where he lived in the plaster. Where you’d see him in the mirror as you tidied your hair. According to Huw, he’d been a Nonconformist preacher who’d roamed the hills sick with lust for someone’s wife down in Sennybridge. He’d been found dead where the women’s toilet now stood, head cracked open on the flags.

The point being that he was said to have left his imprint there, later known, because of its general shape, as the Grey Monk – Huw explaining how most so-called ghostly monks were not monks at all, just a vagueness in the electromagnetic soup suggestive of robe and cowl.

Merrily saw herself in the mirror standing next to the monk. She was thirty-nine years old. Were the crow’s feet becoming webbed or did she just need more early nights? She nodded to the monk and walked out to where Huw was waiting for her at the top of the passage, standing on his own under a small, naked bulb, spidery filaments glowing feebly through the dead flies and the dust.

The course students had all gone into the chapel. Merrily shut the doors on them. The only chance she’d get.

‘OK. I was absolutely determined not to ask, but…’

‘It’ll be obvious, lass,’ Huw said. ‘Also, good for you. A chance to step back and see how far you’ve come. Rationalize it.’

‘It can’t be rationalized. It isn’t rational. You taught me that.’

Huw put on his regretful half-smile. His dog collar was the colour of old bone. Huw’s collars always looked like they’d been bought at a car-boot sale, maybe a hearse-boot sale. Merrily remembered the first time she’d heard his voice, expecting – Huw Owen? – some distant Welsh academic with a bardic lilt, but getting David Hockney, Jarvis Cocker. He’d been born in humble circumstances just down the valley here, then taken away as a baby to grow up in Yorkshire.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘It’s partly on account of you being the first woman ever to get sent here for deliverance training.’

Which he’d hardly been happy about at the time. Walking her over the unwelcoming hills, telling her what a turn-on women priests were for the pervs and the creeps. As for a woman exorcist…

‘Two on this course,’ Huw said.

You could tell by his tone that he hadn’t been impressed. The hanging bulb glowed the colour of wet straw. The wind was leaning on the new front door at the top of the passage, and Merrily had an urge to walk through it, out onto the hill. Try and keep a cigarette alight up there. Or just keep on walking into the rattling night, back to the car, foot down, out of here, with the wind behind her.

‘So what do you want me to tell them?’

‘Just answer their questions, best you can. Feel free to downplay everything. We don’t want to put the shits up them.’

Then, suddenly, impulsively, Huw sprang up on tiptoe and headed the bulb, setting it swinging like a censer. In its fibrous light, his smile looked slightly insane.

‘Although we do,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’

The women on the course were a brisk, posh girl and a squat, quiet matron in her fifties who Huw said had been governor of a women’s prison. If it wasn’t for the hungry female clergy, a third of the churches in England and Wales would probably be nightclubs and carpet warehouses. They had the confidence of being needed, these women.

‘So why are you all here?’ Huw said. ‘Eh?’

Over twenty clergy in the body of the chapel, mostly young middle-aged. The higher number on the course reflecting not so much an increased interest in exorcism, Merrily was thinking, so much as the trend for deliverance panels within each diocese. Health and Safety. Back-up. Decisions made by committee.

There was a kind of formality about them. No jeans, no sweatshirts, more dog collars than Crufts. But somehow it felt artificial, like fancy dress. The only obvious maverick here was Huw himself, so blatantly old hippie you expected flecks of spliff down his jacket.

‘I’m serious. Why were you picked for this – the one job the Church still gets all coy about? And Dawkins on the prowl, knife out.’

Somebody risked a laugh. Huw gazed out. Now they were out of fashion again, he wore a ponytail, grey and white, bound up with a red rubber band. He was sitting next to Merrily, behind a carafe of water, at a mahogany table below where the lectern used to be.

‘You…’ Levelling a forefinger. ‘Why’ve you come? Stand up a minute, lad.’

The guy into the second row was about forty, had narrow glasses and a voice that was just as soft and reasonable as you’d expect.

‘Peter Barber. Luton. Urban parish, obviously, high percentage of foreign nationals. The demand was there. I was invited by my bishop to consider the extent to which we should address it.’

‘And how much of it do you accept as valid, Peter? When a Somali woman says she thinks the Devil might be arsing about with her daughter, what’s your instinct?’

‘Huw, we discussed this. I have a respect for everyone’s belief system.’

‘Course you do, lad.’

Huw glanced at Merrily, his lips moving slightly. They might have formed the words Fucking hell. The wind went on bulging the glass and swelling the joints of the chapel.

‘How many of you are here because you’ve had what could be called a psychic or paranormal experience?’

Silence.

‘Nobody?’

Someone coughed, smothered it. Merrily felt Huw wanting to smash all the lights. Then the woman who’d been a prison governor stood up. She wore a black suit over her clerical shirt. Her lapel badge said Shona. Her accent was lowland Scottish.

‘I’ve been close to situations which were difficult to accommodate. We had a disturbed girl with a pentagram tattooed on the side of her neck, who we found was organizing Ouija-board sessions. Something not exactly unknown in women’s prisons and not invariably stamped upon.’

‘Because at least it keeps them quiet,’ Huw said.

‘Not in this case. We had disturbances bordering on hysteria, which spread with alarming speed. Girls claiming there were entities in their cells. The equilibrium of the whole establishment seemed to have been tipped. The prison psychologist was confident of being able to deal with it but eventually our chaplain asked me if he could bring in a colleague. From the deliverance ministry.’

‘When was this?’

‘Five or six years ago. I’d been reluctant at first, expecting him to… I don’t know, subject the girls to some crude casting-out thing. But he just talked to them, and it gradually became quieter. No magic solution, and it took a number of visits by this man, but it was resolved.’

‘Never an exact science, lass.’

‘I was impressed. Wanting to know how it had been achieved. When I took early retirement a couple of years later and sought ordination, that incident kept coming back to me. So here I am. A volunteer.’

Huw nodded and didn’t look at Merrily. If the first guy had seemed unlikely to go the distance, it would be hard to fault this woman on either background or motivation. Merrily watched Huw bend and lift the carafe with both hands and tip a little water into his glass.