Phil Rickman - The Chalice

Jim shook his head. Never had liked single-sex outfits. Back at the building society he'd resisted all attempts to get him into the Masons, even the buggering Rotary Club.

'And so now she's been poring over pictures of fat, ugly Celtic fertility goddesses and producing these ghastly crude female figurines, sort of Earth-mothers with huge… you know…'

'Boobs?'

Tony glanced furtively around and then whispered it.

'Vaginas.'

He swallowed.

'Who the hell's going to buy those things? I said. Finally, I said it. Tonight. That was all I said – who's going to buy them?'

'Reasonable enough question,' Jim said. Lord, not another range of pot goddesses with giant fannies.

'That's what I thought.' Tony slid close to the wall. 'We have a living to make. I thought it was a reasonable… reasonable question. So I asked it. Who's going to buy them? I said. That was it. All I said.'

Tony lifted the bottom of his Guernsey sweater, pulled it up over his stomach.

'Look at this.'

'Good God, man, what are you doing?' Jim inched away in discomfort. Was this a preliminary to what they called 'male bonding'?

'She…' Tears forming in the poor chap's eyes. Lord, oh Lord.

'Look, steady on, Tony old chap.'

'… She smiled, Jim, and came close… snuggling up, you know? Hands inside the jersey, and then…

'Oh my God.' Jim recoiled.

'Like a puma.'

'Look, hadn't you better have those seen to?'

'Savaged me like a puma,' Tony said, displaying livid scratches, six or eight inches long, still half-bleeding.

He began to cry. 'Came here to find love and harmony. And she savages me. Like a puma.'

Most people would have flicked through the pages, reading an entry here, an entry there, get the idea of what kind of book it was. Not Diane. Diane had to start on page one.

Juanita watched brown, wavy hair flop over the girl's face as her head bowed over the unappealing book.

Actually, it was quite gripping, the introduction, in its recounting of how Pixhill had first been turned towards Glastonbury, a place he'd hardly heard of.

And even in the introduction Diane would discover one or two parallels, as a young army officer lay in a wrecked tank in the Western Desert in May, 1942…

A full moon, or very near. I expect I was staring up at the damn thing when it happened, head and shoulders out of the hatch, like a ginger cat I once saw peering out of a dustbin. Don't actually remember any of what happened immediately before and certainly nothing of the actual impact which, being a direct hit into the body of the Grant, must have been like having your legs shot from under you.

My driver and co-driver, down below there, wouldn't have heard the bang either. They must have died at once. Similarly Corporal Elliman, the gunner, took some chunk of metal, never knew precisely where it came from, into his brain via the left eye, I think it was.

It was Little, Charles Anthony Little, wireless operator, who caused me the most pain. He was the veteran among us at thirty-one, almost a father figure to me, his commander, Capt. Pixhill, twenty-two, and an immature twenty-two to boot, thinking back. Libya, this was, May twenty seventh, when Rommel pulled a fast one, the old werewolf rising to the moon and having us cleverly outflanked. By dawn, the desert around Bir Hacheim was a veritable ocean of metal, but I saw nothing of that. The battle, for me, was a battle with myself, to block out the pain of my smashed legs and the sounds of war and of Charlie Little dying. While, out of the morning sky, the arrogant moon still shone down through the open hatch like some freshly polished medal on a Nazi chest. What happened, I quickly worked out, having nothing better to do, was that a mounting pin from Elliman's machine gun had flown off when the whole damn thing sprang back with him, and (someone had speculated about the chances of this only a week or so earlier, but Major Collier said it couldn't happen) took poor Little in the throat. Not much conversation between us, as you can imagine. I remember the poor chap blubbing and gurgling. I remember the smell of cordite and blood and the smoke from a thousand Capstans, the last of them having fallen from Elliman's lips to his chest and burnt a hole through his shirt before expiring. I remember the extraordinary agony in my legs when I tried to reach Little, thinking that if I could pull the damn pin from his neck he'd be able to talk to me. Conversation. All I craved. I could hardly move at all, so I lay there shivering and entertaining poor Charlie with what must have been a devastatingly tedious monologue about my life thus far and how I had hoped to become a clergyman but war more or less resigned to an obscure career as a history teacher at some minor public school. My uncle William it was, Archdeacon of Liverpool, who had talked me out of the clergy. The Church, he said dryly, tended to frown on young chaps who 'claimed' to have had encounters with angels. Well only the one angel, I assured Little. The figure of a kindly chap in cricket whites who first bent over my bed when I was seven and quieted my whooping cough and thereafter was sometimes vaguely discernible at the edges of my vision, when someone close to me had died or the situation looked generally black. Each time the Cricketer came out to bat for me, I would have new energy to pull myself through whatever crisis. After Little died, with a dispiriting bubbling sound like a wet inner tube with a puncture, I looked around for that reliable old sportsman, wondering if there was room for him in the turret with me, but all I could see out of the comers of my eyes was death and dawn and moonlight, and I thought, this is it, George, not going to come out of this now, are we? Remember thinking, what IS the bloody point? And that even the whooping cough would have been a better death. I wondered, quite distantly, how long it would take for the Door to close. Knew I had a head injury but had kept my hands away from the cranial region, not wishing to know how serious. I thought that someone would tell my family I had died a hero. Was this what I had been preserved for? To die a 'hero's death'? To qualify for membership of the Valhalla Club, endless booze and loose women for all eternity? Mine would be, in fact, an inglorious death: the inexperienced, not to say incompetent junior commander who managed to get all his crew killed first. After all, if I hadn't been halfway through the hatch, sniffing the desert air, I too would have been gone by now. I thought of the Cricketer and I saw him not so much in the image of an angel as some serene, pipe-smoking fool in a Brylcreem advert, and I thought, it's a joke, it's all a damned joke, there is no purpose to life, we can have no control over our individual destinies, there is no 'divine guidance' to be had. And I was, for a sick instant, almost in awe of Hitler, who believed he had been chosen to alter the destiny of the entire human race. I think it was at that moment that I lost all desire to survive. The Allies, certainly, would be a sight better off without me. Equally, though, I had no wish to go out gasping and weeping bitter tears on the blood-sticky floor of a Grant tank. And so I wondered how I might pull myself up to the hatch to show my head so that some sharp eyed Panzer could shoot it off, quick and clean. I lay for a long time, staring up the circle of smoky blue, at the fading moon tike a chipped shilling, and feeling the numbness, a sort of permanent shiver, creeping up my lower body and – Well, I suppose you will say I fell asleep You will say I hallucinated or that it was due to the reaction of chemicals in my brain. For that is how we prefer to explain such phenomena in the nineteen-seventies, embarrassed as we are by the term… vision.