Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

At first it had seemed like a basic teenage rebellion thing: Jane resenting the Church, seeing poor Lucy Devenish, with her talk of apple-lore and nature spirits, as a kind of guru… and then, after Lucy’s death, lying about her age to get into a goddess-worshipping group based at a Hereford health-food shop. In just a couple of years, Jane had encountered pagans and psychics, good and bad, and emerged, at the age of seventeen… oddly clear-headed.

Yes, it was still there in some form, Jane’s paganism, but no, it wasn’t quite a problem any more.

‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘Can we go through it?’

Yew trees. Jane appeared to have read entire books about yew trees.

‘Making love to one. That’s totally… I mean, I can connect with that.’

‘Are they poisonous to people? I’m not sure.’

‘I wouldn’t personally exchange life-fluids with one to find out,’ Jane said. ‘But I do get the point. She’s embracing immortality. Some yew trees could be the oldest living beings on this planet – and that’s heavy. The idea of a tree being a repository of ancient wisdom is not so crazy. So if she has an ancient yew near her house, and that’s the start of her ritual walk, and then she proceeds to this yew at the castle where Marion fell… Where’s the next one? Bound to be one in the churchyard.’

‘Several, apparently. I think there’s the remains of a yew alley,’ Merrily said. ‘I asked Jon Scole about that.’

‘Cool.’ Jane spread Merrily’s new street map of Ludlow over the OS map of the wider area. ‘And then one in this old cemetery?’

‘St Leonard’s, yes.’

‘So you’ve probably got an ancient and sacred route… maybe even pre-Christian. Maybe a processional route up and over the holy hill between the two rivers. If you think, way back, before there was a town or a castle there’d just be this hill… a holy hill.’

‘How do you know it was holy?’

‘Hah!’ Jane beamed in satisfaction. ‘I looked it up. It’s in one of my books upstairs, and I got some more off the Net. This is amazing stuff. The name “Ludlow”, right? “Low” usually refers to a tumulus or a burial mound, and sure enough there was one.’

‘Where?’

‘On top of the hills. What’s now the highest point of the town.’

‘The church? St Laurence’s?’

‘There was a tumulus which, until the end of the twelfth century, was right next to the original church. And then they extended the church into the tumulus and found that it contained bodies – bones. Which were alleged at the time to be the remains of three Irish saints, because in those days if anybody found any bones near a church it would be, like, more kudos if they were holy relics. They were probably the bones of Bronze Age chieftains… which is cool.’

‘They’ve gone now, presumably?’

‘Doesn’t matter. What matters is that the tower – the tallest tower on the border, OK, the Cathedral of the Marches – is rising up directly out of a pagan site, so it’s like’ – Jane held up a fist – ‘one of ours.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘It’s what they did,’ Jane said. ‘These are geopsychically sensitive sites. If the Church hadn’t built on existing places of power, Christianity would probably have vanished by the end of the Middle Ages. So if Belladonna’s making a personal connection with the sacred centres of Ludlow, that’s the big one.’

‘Well, she certainly goes into the church, even if she doesn’t go to actual services.’

‘There you go. She’s opening herself up to the vibrations.’

‘Opening herself up, all right.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Never mind.’ Ethel jumped into Merrily’s lap and started to wash her paws. ‘What exactly is she doing, do you think, Jane? Where’s she coming from? We looking at witchcraft, or what?’

‘She on her own?’

‘There are some young people who seem to have formed some sort of attachment to her. When I first saw her, she was with, I think, four of them – two men, two women, all wearing Edwardian-type gear, slightly funereal.’

‘Could be part of a coven. Doesn’t seem too likely, though.’

‘They just struck me as basic goths.’

‘OK, listen…’ Jane leaned into the corner of the sofa. ‘I’ve been thinking about this… Could she have any ancestry in the town? Are there any family roots she maybe wants to pick up on? Because that might explain why she was always with Robbie Walsh – he could’ve been helping research it, couldn’t he? That seems to have been the kind of thing he enjoyed.’

‘That’s actually not a bad theory,’ Merrily said.

‘Or, if you want to extend it in a more mystical direction, could she have been, like, hypnotically regressed into recalling some past life in Ludlow? For instance – and this makes sense – suppose she believes she’s the reincarnation of somebody like, for instance…’

Merrily brought her hands together. ‘Marion de la Bruyère!’

‘Well…?’

‘It’s a fascinating thought, flower.’

‘And it explains the suicide links,’ Jane said. ‘And it’s exactly the kind of bollocks a mad old slapper like Belladonna would go for.’

Afterwards, Lol followed Moira back up the M4 to the Severn Bridge services, where she was spending the night. They sat in the café by the big windows where you could see the sweep of the suspension bridge into Wales and the lights bouncing off the estuary’s dark water.

‘I’ve never done that before,’ Lol said. ‘Never.’

Two verses in, freezing up in the heat of the lights, standing quivering, like the mental patient he was singing about.

‘You mean it wasnae deliberate?’ Moira raised an eyebrow, cup of hot chocolate held in both hands, like a chalice. ‘Even I thought it was part of the act. And when you started laughing like that…’

‘Couldn’t stop.’

Doubled up, he’d noticed her watching him from the shadows at the side of the stage, in her long, sea-green dress, the strand of white in her hair like the crack of light down a doorway at night. Expecting her to walk on, gently detach the mike and salvage his set.

Not necessary, as it turned out. The audience had started laughing with him, with no idea why. In the lobby afterwards, Moira’s merchandising guy had sold over sixty copies of Alien . Now he was higher than the Severn Bridge and, every so often, he would shiver at the memory.

‘It was a wild moment, but you never looked back,’ Moira said. ‘You were soaring like a gull. I’m thinking, Jesus, he’s become a performer at last – wee Lol. However, just for the record… why?’ She’d put down her cup. Her hair was tied up now. She wore a grey woolly sweater and white jeans. ‘Go on… just out of interest. For m’ personal files…’

‘Must’ve been the song,’ Lol admitted. ‘It’s always that song. It’s got… something in it I can’t always control.’

‘ “Heavy Medication Day”?’

‘The day I refused to take the pills,’ Lol remembered, ‘Dr Gascoigne said… and I remember him leaning over me, I was sitting in a high-backed chair in the main day-room, and I’d turned it away from the TV, and he leaned over me and he said in my ear, “Don’t go thinking you’re ever going to leave here, Mr Robinson. You see that door? One day, when I’ve been long retired to the south of France, you’ll be straining to get your Zimmer frame through it.” ’

‘Jesus. This is a shrink? This is how they talk?’

‘Well, it’s been said before, but it’s true…’

‘That if it wasnae for the white coat you’d never know which were the patients, right? I tell you what… by the time you’d finished laughing and you did the whole song again, they were with you for the duration.’