Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

‘We’d’ve heard,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘We’d know.’

‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘I didn’t want to say anything about this. I’m just a dreamy, whimsical songwriter, looking to pull tunes and textures and things out of the air. I don’t know why I went to that place last night. I just did. And it was a bloody awful place.’

Merrily slowed.

‘Awful how?’

‘I’m probably being subjective.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Tell me.’

‘It just… I don’t want to use emotive words, it just sounds like a cliche.’

‘This is no time for songwriter-pride, Lol.’

‘It was like it didn’t want to let me go. Like even the barbed wire was alive and hungry. Yeah, I know.’ Lol put up his hands in defence. ‘I know what that sounds like.’

‘Go on.’

‘So when the lights… when I found out it was only the police, I was so relieved I would’ve confessed to murder just to get the hell out of there.’

Merrily took the next left and turned the Volvo round clumsily in the mouth of the junction.

‘Hardwicke, then.’

It was a shock, really. She was in a wheelchair.

Brenda Cardelow, proprietor of The Glades Residential Home, pushed her into a big lounge freshly painted in magnolia. Bright red cushions on four cream sofas, like big jammy-dodgers.

A bulky cardigan around her tiny shoulders, a blue woollen rug over her knees.

‘Of course, Cardelow’s entirely to blame for this,’ Miss White said in her little-girl voice. ‘Tries several times a week to kill me. Utterly psychotic.’

Mrs Cardelow, a large woman with bobbed white hair, said nothing, apparently still trying for dignity. It was never going to work.

‘But how little she knows.’ Miss White smiled, crinkling her malevolent mascaraed eyes. ‘The poor cow has no comprehension of what I shall do to this place when I’m dead.’

Mrs Cardelow sighed, stepping away from the wheelchair. Miss White turned her sooty smile on Merrily.

‘How charming you look, my dear. And Robinson, with a bandage to hide the needle marks. Hadn’t realized you people put it into the wrist nowadays. So long since I used to watch Crowley shooting up.’

Lol, smiling patiently, had wandered over to the window, which had a long view down the garden, over the Wye to the Radnorshire hills, pale as old mould. Lol had a jittery rapport, which Merrily found unsettling, with Anthea White, she who insisted on Athena.

‘You don’t mind if I leave you,’ Mrs Cardelow said. ‘One can only stand so much of this. She gives the other residents tarot readings and tells them when their friends are going to die.’

Miss White didn’t react, sat gazing placidly into the coal fire behind its guard, not looking up until there was the click of a closing door.

‘Has she gone?’

‘She’s gone,’ Merrily said.

Miss White tapped the arm of the wheelchair. ‘I keep a cyanide capsule in here, you know, to be used if ever I see a doctor approaching with a catheter.’

Lol said, ‘For him?’

‘Ah, how well you know me, Robinson.’

Miss White giggled, a sound like the chinking of old bones in an ossuary. Merrily coughed.

‘What, erm…?’

‘Hip. Common or garden. I’m apparently in the queue for a stretch in some frightful NHS hellhole where, if they don’t like your face, they slip you a fatal infection. Somewhere else to haunt. In the interim, I do rather like this chair – it allows one to move around in a perpetual meditative state. Would you like me to describe your aura?’

‘Not really.’

‘Jaundiced.’

‘What?’

‘A worrying amount of yellow. You’re afraid of losing control. In fear of your immortal soul again. Oh, dear God, keep her out, keep her out! ’

Merrily moistened her lips, recalling the first time she’d been to The Glades, when there’d been reports of a presence on the third floor and the then proprietors had wanted an exorcist to calm the residents. Underestimating Miss White’s propensity for playfulness, like the elderly kitten she so resembled. A kitten with over fifty years’ experience of the techniques for personal growth circulating in the ruins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Hell’s kitten.

‘But how strange to see the two of you in the same room at last. An item.’

Her eyes twitching from Merrily to Lol and back again.

‘Flitting in and out of one another’s energy fields, like neurotic damsel flies. Delightful in its way, but… it must not go on much longer, do you hear me?’

Arching suddenly out of her chair, expanding into so much more of a presence.

‘Sort yourselves out at once. You don’t have long to decide before something makes the decision for you. And that may not be the one you hope for.’

‘Thank you, Miss White,’ Merrily said lightly.

A constriction in the throat. Dear God, how stupid was it to have come here?

‘Now, remind me, Watkins, what was the name of the detritus that became briefly attached to you?’

Merrily hesitated, just like she had the first time. There were clergy she could name who’d have her defrocked for even talking to this woman.

‘No, don’t tell me,’ Miss White said. ‘How could I forget? It was delightfully appropriate. Joy. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘ Joie de vivre… Joie de morte. He’s back, is he?’

‘He isn’t back. It isn’t me, this time. It’s someone else.’

‘Someone who can’t come in person?’

‘Due to being dead.’

‘But not at rest.’

‘Athena, I don’t know.’

The Glades had a lift, and they went up in it to the exotic room on the third floor. Not much had altered. The same Afghan rugs on the walls, the same book cupboards, the same radiogram, although the whisky bottles inside would be several generations down the line.

Miss White sent her chair whining softly to the uncurtained sash window and turned her back on the view of Hardwicke Church, which was greystone, Welsh-looking like Brinsop, a small bell tower with the bell on show. Your church, she’d said that first night, is like some repressive totalitarian regime. Everyone has a perfectly good radio set, but you try to make sure they can only tune in to state broadcasts.

Signalling Merrily to the Parker Knoll armchair and Lol to the bed, her face became momentarily serious.

‘So it’s Mithras, is it?’

‘If you’d be so good,’ Merrily said.

‘Which one? The original Persian lord of light, who pre-dates Zoroastrianism… or his very much darker Roman descendant? Who may just spoil your day. Do you mind awfully?’

Merrily sat down.

‘We had a one-off lecture at theological college. It was about dealing with the smart-arses who’ll tell you Jesus was just another permutation of the pagan archetype. Wasn’t Mithras born on December 25th?’

‘Indeed. And his mother was a virgin, and he never had sex. His crib was visited by adoring shepherds. His followers were baptized and worshipped on a Sunday. They represented holy blood with wine and, at this time of year, ate hot cross buns.’

‘And all this half a millennium before the birth of Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘What’s left to spoil?’

Miss White frowned. Always encouraging.

‘They’re just patterns, Athena. Death and rebirth, all that. Early Christianity slipped into the time-honoured seasonal rituals so people could begin to see them in a new light – now that the world was finally ready to learn about the unifying chemistry of love. There you are – a quiet revolution and no blood shed but His. How’s that?’

‘Glib.’

‘I prefer succinct,’ Merrily said.

Never entirely comfortable with all this, though. The candles of faith flickering feebly under the arc lights of history and scholarship. The nights when you couldn’t get to sleep and doubts hovered in the shadowed corners, challenging you to snap on the bedroom lights and discover there was really nothing there… nothing at all…