Phil Rickman - The Chalice

'Only Moulder, far's I know. Who, if any, like, action happens to be taken, requests that he be kept out of it, if you understand me.'

No change of expression, no inflexion in his voice, Archer said, 'I'm grateful for this. I won't forget.'

'Well,' Griff said. 'Long as we understands each other I think we want the same things for this town. Like getting it cleaned up. Proper shops 'stead of this New Age rubbish. Cranks and long-hairs out. Folk in decent clothes. Decent houses on decent estates. Built by, like, decent firms; And, of course, the new road to get us on to the Euro superhighway, bring in some proper industry. Big firms. Executive housing.'

Archer nodding. 'You're a sound thinker, Griff. We all need a stake in the twenty-first century.'

'Oh, and one other thing I want…'

Archer folded his arms and smiled.

'I want my council seat back off that stringy little hippy git Woolaston,' said Griff.

Archer patted the leather patch at the shoulder of Griff's heavy, tweed jacket. 'Let's discuss this further. Meanwhile, I have a meeting tonight. With a certain selection committee. After which I may be in a better position to, ah, effect certain changes.'

'Ah. Best o' luck then, Mr Archer.'

'Thank you. Er…' Archer looked away again. 'Diane's

…illness… has caused us considerable distress. It's good to know she has chaps like you on her side.'

'And on yours. Archer,' Griff Daniel said. 'Naturally.'

As Archer drove off in his grey BMW, Griff looked to the top of the unnaturally steep hill, glad to see there was still nobody up there, no sightseers, no joggers, no kids. And no alternative bastards with dowsing rods and similar crank tackle.

He hated the bloody Tor.

Not much over five hundred feet high when you worked it out. Only resembled some bloody green Matterhorn, look, on account of most of the surrounding countryside was so flat, having been under the sea, way back.

So nothing to it, not really.

But look it the trouble it caused. Bloody great millstone round this town's neck. Thousands of tourists fascinated by all that cobblers about pagan gods and intersecting lines of power.

If it wasn't for all that old balls, there'd be no New Age travellers, no hippy refugees running tatty shops, no mid-summer festival and women dancing around naked, no religious nuts, no UFO-spotters. Glastonbury Tor, in fact, was a symbol of what was wrong with Britain.

Also the National Trust bastards hadn't even given him the contract for installing the new pathway and steps.

Griff Daniel went back to his truck. G Daniel amp; Co. Builders. It would maybe have said… amp; Son. If the so-called son hadn't disgraced the family name.

When it came down to it, the only way you were going to get rid of the rift-raff was by getting rid of the damn Tor. He imagined a whole convoy of JC'Bs gobbling into the Tor like it was a Walnut Whip, the hill giving way, the tower collapsing into dusty, medieval rubble.

All the way back to his yard on the edge of the industrial estate. Griff Daniel kept thinking about this. It wasn't possible, of course, not under any conceivable circumstances. You couldn't, say, put the new road through it, not with a scheduled ancient monument on top, and also it was far too big a national tourist attraction.

But it did make you think.

It was a rather an antiquated bicycle, a lady's model with no cross bar, a leatherette saddle bag and a metal cover over the chain. Terribly sedate, an elderly spinster's sort of machine, ten quid from On Your Bike, over at Street. But Jim could get his feet to the pedals without adjusting the seat, and, more to the point, it was the kind of bicycle no youngster would want to be seen dead on.

So at least he could park it in town with an odds-on chance of it not being nicked.

Jim unloaded himself from the bike outside Burns the Bread, in the part of Glastonbury High Street where the Alternative Sector was rapidly chasing the few remaining locally owned shops up the hill.

He was puffing a bit and there was sweat on his forehead. It was rather close and humid. And November, amazingly. He pushed the bike across the pavement and into a narrow alleyway next to the bookshop called Carey and Frayne. Got out his handkerchief to wipe his face, the alleyway framing a at little street scene from a viewpoint he'd never noticed before – quite a nice one, because -

…by God…

… above the weathered red-tiled roofs and brick chimney stacks of the shops across the street reared the spiked and buttressed Norman tower of the town centre church, St John's, and it had suddenly struck Jim that the tower's top tier, jagged in the florid, late-afternoon sun, resembled a crown of thorns.

While, in the churchyard below, out of sight from here, there was one of the holy thorns, grafted from the original on Wearyall Hill. It was as if the Thorn had worked its way into the very fabric of the church, finally thrusting itself in savage symbolism from the battlements.

Yes. yes, yes. Jim started to paint rapidly in his head, reforming sculpted stone into pronged and twisted wildwood. But keeping the same colours, the pink and the ochre and the grey, amid the elegiac embers of the dying sun.

By God, this buggering town… just when you thought you had it worked out, it would throw a new image at you like a well-aimed brick. Jim was so knocked-sideways he almost forgot to chain his bike to the drainpipe. Almost.

Twenty feet away, a youth sat in a dusty doorway fumbling a guitar Jim gave him a hard look, but he seemed harmless enough. The ones with guitars usually were, couldn't get up to much trouble with an instrument that size to lug around. Penny-whistlers, now, they were the ones you had to watch; they could shove the things down their belts in a second, leaving two hands free for thieving.

Over the past eighteen months, Jim had had three bikes stolen, two gone from the town centre, one with the padlocked chain snipped and left in the gutter. Metal cutters, by God! Thieves with metal cutters on the streets Glastonbury.

'Jim, you're painting!'

'No, I'm not.' Reacting instinctively. For half his adult life, painting had been something to deny – bloody Pat shrieking. How many bills is that going to pay?

'New bike, I see.' The most beautiful woman in Glastonbury bent over the bike, stroking the handlebars. 'Really rather suits you.'

'You calling me an old woman?' Jim pulled off his hat. 'I'll have you know, my girl, I've just ridden the buggering thing all the way back from Street in the slipstream of a string of transcontinental juggernauts half the size of the QE2. Bloody Europe comes to Somerset.'

'Just be thankful that bikes are still allowed on that road. Come the new motorway you'll be banned forever.'

'Won't happen. Too much opposition.'

'Oh sure. Like the Government cares about the Greens and the old ladies in straw hats.' She straightened up, hands on her hips, and a bloody fine pair of hips they were. 'Tea?'

'Well… or something.' Jim followed her into the sorcerer's library she called a bookshop. He helped out here two or three days a week, trying not to look too closely at what he was selling.

He glared suspiciously at one of those cardboard dump-bin things displaying a new paperback edition of the silly novels of Glastonbury's own Dion Fortune. Awful, crass covers – sinister hooded figures standing over stone altars and crucibles.

'Over the top. The artwork. Tawdry. Way over the top.'

'Isn't everything in Glastonbury these days?'

Well, you aren't, for a start, Jim thought. He wondered whether something specific had happened to make Juanita distance herself from the sometimes-overpowering spirituality of the town and from the books she sold. You didn't run a shop like this unless you were of a strongly mystical persuasion, but these days she answered customers' questions lightly and without commitment, as if she knew it was all nonsense really.