Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Oh no.’

‘’Cause, like, your parents…’

‘It can put you off, when your parents are… extremists.’

A lorry full of gravel went clanging down Church Street, and Jack was silent for a moment, seemed to be thinking what else he could ask.

‘How long have you been in music-writing?’ Lol asked.

‘Oh, not long. My old man – he publishes specialist magazines now, but he used to be a newspaper reporter when he was young. But my grandad thought this was a really disreputable thing to be and he tried to persuade him to pack it in and get into the management side. My old man’s really encouraged me to go into cutting-edge journalism. Go for it, you know? Don’t look back.’

‘Music’s, er, cutting edge?’

‘I do other stuff. Anything that comes up, really. Anyway, Lol… I mean, you were really fucked up for a long time, weren’t you? It was like with Nick Drake – how long’s he been dead now, thirty years? I mean, like him you couldn’t cut it on stage, face an audience.’

‘I identified a lot with Nick Drake, from the beginning. Hence the name of the band, Hazey Jane.’

‘Huh?’

‘The Nick Drake song, “Hazey Jane”?’

‘Oh yeah, sure. Sorry, I thought you meant… So like, how did you get over that? ’Cause you did this amazing comeback gig… at the Courtyard in Hereford?’

Lol told Jack about all the help he’d had from Moira Cairns, folk-rock goddess, who happened to have been recording at Prof’s. How Moira had literally pushed him out in front of that audience. Scary? Oh yeah, cold-sweat situation. All those lights, all those faces.

‘And you’re still doing a few gigs as support for Moira, right? But you and her…?’

Jack moved his hands around.

‘Oh no,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing like that.’

‘But you’re with somebody?’

‘No, I live alone. A rural idyll.’

‘Right,’ Jack said. ‘Right.’

Still waiting for Eirion, Jane saw Lol and the guy from Q come out of the front door of Lucy’s house and walk up the street to the village centre. They seemed to be getting on OK. She didn’t know why she felt so responsible for Lol. He was just that kind of guy – vulnerable.

The journalist was a surprise. He didn’t look any older than Eirion, for God’s sake. He had a camera with him – a Nikon, digital-looking. Doing his own pictures, too. Jane slid behind one of the thick oak supports of the old market hall as they came onto the square. A few shoppers and tourists were glancing at them by now, and Jane saw that Lol was looking a bit unhappy.

‘’Course I won’t say where it is,’ the Q guy said.

‘Only the market hall’s fairly well known,’ Lol said. ‘Be a give away.’

‘No problem – we’ll face you the other way. Better for the light, too.’

The guy lined Lol up on the edge of the square, with the church in the background and people walking past, and Jane wondered if he was trying to simulate one of the famous black and white street-scene pictures taken for Nick Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left .

And she wondered, not for the first time, if that was a good thing. Nick Drake’s music was wonderful but he surely represented the old Lol. He had, after all, killed himself with an overdose of antidepressants.

Jane saw Eirion’s car arrive – little grey Peugeot with the CYM sticker, identifying him as a Welshman abroad. Eirion drove slowly around the square to park in front of the vicarage gate, and Jane stopped herself from running across, waving. A measure of cool might be more appropriate. Try and cobble together a few quid for the petrol, indeed.

She strolled casually over the cobbles as Eirion climbed out. He spotted her at once and did his incredible smile – the kind of smile that said you were the only person who could make it happen.

Smooth bastard.

OK, he wasn’t. Eirion wasn’t smooth. He didn’t even know he had any charm.

When they’d finished kissing, he said, ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Why?’

‘It’s very busy here today, isn’t it? I’ve never seen it like this.’

‘It’s Saturday.’ Jane looked back at the square. Lol and the guy from Q had gone already. Not a major photo-session, then.

‘Didn’t used to be like this on a Saturday, did it?’ Eirion said.

‘Tourism. It’s like tourists have suddenly discovered the area.’

‘Good for the shopkeepers.’

‘I suppose.’

Jane imagined the figure of Lucy Devenish, the ghost of Ledwardine past, standing in the shadows under the market hall. Lucy looking very old, the way she never had, and the poncho drooping. Something feeling wrong.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jane said.

MERRILY FOUND THE atmosphere stifling. Too much heat, food-smells, a sense of something out of everyone’s control.

She exchanged glances with Saltash from opposite ends of the sofa. Saltash raised an eyebrow. Mrs Mumford seemed to think he was some kind of priest. And the wrong kind, at that.

‘Where’s the Bishop?’ she kept shouting at her son. ‘You said you’d bring the Bishop. You never does what you says you’s gonner do.’

Mumford sat, impassive, on a hard chair by the TV, which was silently screening some Saturday-morning children’s programme: grown-ups wearing cheerful primary colours and exaggerated expressions, smiling a lot and chatting with puppets.

Soon after they’d arrived, Mumford’s dad had walked out. ‘Can’t stand no more of this. I’m off shopping. She won’t face up to it. You talk some sense into her, boy, else you can bloody well take her away with you.’

‘I’m cold.’ Mrs Mumford was hunching her chair dangerously close to the gas fire. ‘Fetch me my cardigan, Andrew.’

‘You got it on, Mam.’

Mumford looked down at his shoes. The room felt like the inside of a kiln. His mam wore this winter-weight red cardigan and baggy green slacks. She had one gold earring in, and that wasn’t a fashion statement. She looked from Merrily to Saltash to Andy. She’d done this twice before, as if she was trying to work out who they all were.

‘Why en’t the Bishop come?’

‘He en’t well, Mam, I told you. He had a heart operation.’

Her eyes filled up. ‘You’ll tell me anything, you will.’

‘Mam—’

‘He was always nice to me, the Bishop, he never talked about God and that ole rubbish. Used to come in when we had the paper shop. Used to come in for his Star nearly every night.’

‘Mam, that was the old bishop. He don’t live here no more.’

‘He can’t tell me why, see! That’s why he don’t wanner come.’ She turned to Saltash. ‘Can’t tell me.’

Mrs Mumford stared at Saltash in silence. Merrily looked away, around the room. The walls were bare, pink anaglypta, except for a wide picture in a gilt frame over a sideboard with silverware on it. But the picture had been turned round to face the wall. All you could see was the brown-paper backing, stretched tight.

What was it a picture of? Ludlow Castle?

‘What would you like the Bishop to tell you?’ Saltash asked.

Mam kept on staring at him, like she knew him but couldn’t place him. You could feel her confusion in the room, like a tangle of grey wool in the air. Her voice went into a whisper.

‘Why did God let her take him?’ Starting to cry now. ‘Why did God let that woman take our boy?’

Saltash leaned forward. ‘Which woman is that, Phyllis?’

‘You’re supposed to be a policeman!’ Mam rounding on Andy, chins quaking. ‘Why din’t you stop her?’

Andy Mumford drew a tight breath through clenched teeth, the veins prominent in his cheeks.