‘Don’t I even get to come in?’
‘I don’t think that’s very wise, do you?’
This was where he was supposed to lose his temper, break down, start asking her if Bull-Davies had a much bigger dick, that kind of hysteria.
‘When I saw his Land Rover on the square, I thought maybe I could go into the church, sit next to him, ask him a few things.’
‘That would have been embarrassing for you both.’
‘But only one of us would have anything to lose.’
Alison started to close the door. He put his foot in it. Knowing this rarely worked, that if she wanted to, with a door this size, she could probably just break his ankle. It would depend on whether she wanted to hurt him any more.
She drew the door back, for momentum. He left his puny trainer in the gap.
‘Fuck you.’ Alison let the door fall open and walked away into the house, and he followed her.
The bishop said, ‘In the declaration that you are about to make, will you affirm your loyalty ...’
When they’d met before the service, the bishop had enthused about Richard Coffey’s exciting plans. A parish church should be a Happening Environment, the bishop said. He was so glad that this beautiful, vibrant village, so full of creative people, should have a priest who was young and energetic and sensitive and, yes, dare he say it ...?
Female.
Sensitive. James Bull-Davies was out there, alone in his family pew. James, who had said he would support her
She hadn’t said a word to the bishop about Bull-Davies’s threat. It didn’t matter now. Bull-Davies had sworn allegiance, would be her friend for life. Coffey and Alder – and maybe the bishop himself – her enemies.
She felt dangerously light-headed. She should have eaten. She shouldn’t have drunk so much coffee.
The bishop intoned,’... in bringing the grace and truth of Christ to this generation and making him known to those in your care?’
A question? Oh God, it must be her bit now.
The bishop waited, the bright red evening sun burnishing his high forehead and the apple in the hand of Eve in the great, west-facing stained-glass window, the one so often reproduced on postcards. A congregation of over a hundred men, women and children waiting for their new minister to speak. In a woman’s voice.
Her face lifted slowly to the light. In the vivid sunset, the sandstone walls looked redder than she’d ever known them. The red of arterial blood. The red of hellfire. The red of the Pharisees Red, the traditional cider apple of Ledwardine, the Village in the Orchard.
They waited. The congregation ... the bishop ...
...God.
And Merrily shivered as, for wild, glowing moments, the walls of the church seemed to curve together, the pews warping, the congregation coalescing, faces blending into pink pulp.
As the church itself became a swelling apple, and she found she was caressing it in her hands, and its rigid stalk was the steeple, and she heard a roaring in her head and tumbled away from it, losing all sense of where she was or why.
... an acidic smell. Breath on her face.
‘Merrily?’
The bishop leaning over her, disturbed at her silence. A heavy, very earthly, pragmatic presence, the bishop: the Administrator, the Chief Executive. She could hear his breathing, faintly puffy, smell his vaguely vinegary breath. Her own body felt very light, as though she could raise her arms in her surplice and float away like a bat among the cob webbed, oaken rafters.
Someone coughed. She saw the congregation below her. Caroline Cassidy in her light blue jersey suit, the sun putting a sheen on Terrence’s pointed head. At the other end of the pew, Richard Coffey – here because of the bishop, his supporter – and Stefan Alder. A respectable distance between them and the Cassidys, but the fact that they were on the same pew showing how the battle lines had been drawn.
Stefan’s eyes were shining, reflecting some erotic Wil Williams fantasy and the conviction that the priest was on his side.
But you couldn’t trust a woman could you? He’d be there at the reception afterwards, with his glass of the Wine of Angels. How was she going to face him? What was she going to say to him?
Come
Why not? And did it matter?
She heard whispers washing through the congregation. A spreading awareness of something wrong. And it was her.
A tension, too, under Merrily’s arms, a friction on the skin, a burning sensation and then that sudden tightening around the chest, as though someone had grabbed her from behind, grasping both breasts, squeezing and pulling them back into her ribcage. She thought of Child, felt physically sick, rocked backwards, all the breath forced out of her.
She saw James Bull-Davies’s left arm stretched along the back of the pew, no concern on his face. Priests came, priests went; the rock on which this church was founded had
She saw Jane, half out of her pew now.
But the priest could not move. Her chest was as tight and rigid as a wooden board.
A shockingly cold thrill passed from pew to pew.
The priest saw Eve in the window, holding out the apple to her. The apple which she knew instinctively was a Pharisees Red.
Try. Try to speak. Draw a breath. Let it out.
‘
The breath caught in her throat like phlegm. The dregs of her voice drifted away into an empty church.
The pressure was abruptly released from her chest. She swayed, taking rapid, shallow breaths. She looked around.
She was on her own. The bishop was gone, the congregation had vanished. The church was empty. The soaring red walls had faded. There were no colours in the windows. The air was chill.
Something crawled, on hands and knees, up the aisle towards her. It was naked, pale and stark as a cold candle.
Her mouth opened as it slid towards her, its head bowed, its body racked and twisted. Its anguish crawled into Merrily’s raw and empty stomach and unravelled a dark ribbon of bile. She tried to scream but her throat filled up.
The congregation rose in horror as the priest-in-charge fell forward into her own thin vomit.
23
Black-eyed Dog II
