Phil Rickman - Crybbe

The ululation came again, and the sky seemed to shimmer in sympathy.

'I said, whose dog is it?'

FROM A wicker basket in the pantry Mrs Preece took the fattest onion she could find. She crumbled away its brittle outer layer until the onion was pale green and moist in the palm of her hand.

She sat the onion in a saucer.

'Stuff and nonsense,' commented Jimmy Preece, the Mayor of Crybbe. The sort of thing most of the local men would say in such situations.

With a certain ceremony, as if it were a steaming Christmas pudding, Mrs Preece carried the onion on its saucer into the parlour, Jimmy following her.

She placed it on top of the television set. She said nothing. 'A funny woman, you are,' Jimmy Preece said gruffly, but not without affection.

Mrs Preece made no reply, her mouth set in a thin line, white hair pulled back and coiled tight.

They both heard the click of the garden gate, and Jimmy went to the window and peered through the gap in his delphiniums.

Mrs Preece spoke, 'Is it him?'

Jimmy Preece nodded.

'I'm going to the shop,' Mrs Preece said. 'I'll go out the back way. Likely he'll have gone when I gets back.'

What she meant was she wouldn't come back until he was good and gone.

Jocasta Newsome, a spiky lady, said in a parched and bitter voice, 'It isn't working, is it? Even you have to admit that now.'

'I don't know what you mean.' Her husband was pretending he didn't care. He was making a picture-frame in pine, the ends carefully locked into a wood-vice to form a corner. The truth was he cared desperately, about lots of things.

'You,' Jocasta said. 'Me. It. Everything.' She was wearing a black woollen dress and a heavy golden shawl fastened with a Celtic brooch at her shoulder.

'Go away.' Hereward started flicking sawdust from his tidy beard, 'if all you can be is negative, go away.'

On the workbench between them lay the immediate cause of this particular confrontation: the electricity bill. He'd let sawdust go all over that deliberately. 'We'll query it,' Hereward had stated masterfully. 'Yes,' Jocasta had replied, 'but what if it's correct? How long can we go on paying bills like that?'

The worst of it was, they couldn't even rely on a constant supply. He'd never known so many power cuts. 'One of the problems of living in a rural area, I'm afraid,' the electricity official had told him smugly, when he complained. 'Strong winds bring down the power lines, thunder and lightning, cows rubbing themselves against the posts, birds flying into…'

'I'm trying to run a business here!'

'So are the farmers, Mr, ah, Newsome. But they've seen the problems at first hand, up on the hills. So they, you see, they realize what we're up against.'

Oh yes, very clever. What he was saying to Hereward, recognizing his accent, was: 'You people, you come here expecting everything to be as smooth as Surrey. If you really want to be accepted in the countryside you'd better keep your head down and your mouth shut, got it?

Hereward growled and Jocasta, thinking he was growling at her, looked across at him in his new blue overalls, standing by his new wooden vice, and there was a glaze of contempt over her sulky eyes.

'The rural craftsman,' she observed acidly. 'At his bench. You're really rather pathetic.'

'I'm trying to rescue the situation,' Hereward snarled through clamped teeth, 'you stupid bitch.'

Jocasta looked away, walked out, slammed the studio door.

And in the vice, the newly constructed corner of Hereward's first frame fell symbolically apart.

Hereward sank to his knees.

Very deliberately, he picked up the two lengths of moulded wood and set about realigning them. He would not be beaten. He would not give up.

And he would not let her disdain get to him. If they couldn't sell enough original works of art they would, for a limited period, sell a number of selected prints at reasonable prices. And the prices would be kept reasonable because he would make the frames himself. Dammit, he did know what he was doing.

And he had recognized that there would be problems getting a new gallery accepted in a lesser known area. Obviously, places like Crybbe had fewer tourists – all right, far fewer. But those who came were the right sort of tourists. The intelligent, childless couples who didn't need beaches, and the cultured newly-retired people with time to construct the quality of life they'd always promised themselves.

Slowly but emphatically, The Gallery would build a reputation among the discerning. They would travel from as far away as Shrewsbury and Cheltenham and even Oxford and London. The Gallery would expand, and then other specialist dealers would join them, and pretty soon it would be Crybbe for fine art, the way it was Hay-on-Wye for books.

'Of course, it took time,' he would say at dinner parties. 'Good Lord, I remember, in the early days, when, to save money, one actually made one's own frames…'

'Festival, is it?,' Jimmy Preece's eyes were like screwheads countersunk into old mahogany. 'We never had no festival before.'

'Precisely the point, Mr Mayor.' Max Goff tried to smile sincerely and reassuringly, but he knew from hundreds of press photos that it always came out wide and flashy, like car radiators in the sixties.

'No.' Mr Preece shook his head slowly, as if they were discussing water-skiing or first-division football, things which, transparently, were not part of the Crybbe scene. 'Not round yere.'

Goff leaned forward. He'd given a lot of thought to how he'd sell this thing to the townsfolk. A festival. A celebration of natural potential. Except this festival would last all year round. This festival would absorb the whole town. It would recreate Crybbe.

'The point is, Mr Mayor… You got so much to be festive about.' Go on, ask me what the hell you got to be festive about.

The Mayor just nodded. Jeez.

'Let me explain, OK?' White-suited Goff was feeling well out of place in this cramped little parlour, where everything was brown and mottled and shrunken-looking, from the beams in the ceiling, to the carpet, to Jimmy Preece himself. But he had to crack this one; getting the Mayor on his side would save a hell of a lot of time.

'OK,' Goff said calmly. 'Let's start with the basics. How much you heard about me?'

Jimmy Preece smiled slyly down at his feet, encased in heavy, well-polished working boots with nearly as many ancient cracks as his face.

Goff flashed the teeth again. 'Never trust newspapers, Mr Mayor. The more money you make, the more the c… the more they're out to nail you. 'Specially if you've made it in a operation like mine. Which, as I'm sure you know, is the music business, the recording industry.'

I've heard that."

'Sex, drugs and rock and roll, eh?'

'I wouldn't know about those things.'

'Nor would I, Mr Mayor,' Goff lied. 'Only been on the business side. A business. Like any other. And I'm not denying it's been highly successful for me. I'm a rich man.'

Goff paused.

'And now I want to put something back. Into the world, if you like. But, more specifically… into Crybbe.'

Mr Preece didn't even blink.

'Because you have a very special town here, Mr Mayor. Only this town, it's forgotten just how special it is.'

Come on, you old bastard. Ask me why it's so flaming special.

Goff waited, keeping his cool. Very commendably, he thought, under the circumstances. Then, after a while, Jimmy Preece made his considered response.

'Well, well,' he said. And was silent again.

Max Goff felt his nails penetrate the brown vinyl chair-arms. 'I don't mean to be insulting here, Mr Mayor,' he said loudly, with a big, wide, shiny smile – a 1961 Cadillac of a smile. 'But you have to face the fact that this little town is in deep shit.'