The Wine of Angels

Jane smiled. Quentin strobed unhappily about six feet away. Colette put her squashy lips against Jane’s ear.

‘Janey, I can’t unload the dim bastard. I go for a tinkle, he waits outside the fucking door.’

‘... you want me to do?’

‘Take him off my hands?’

‘You are joking ...’

‘Oh, come on, your night’s ruined anyway. You don’t have to snog him or anything, just keep him for two minutes while I melt away. The guy’s so sad if you tell him you have fantasies about having sex on a tractor, he’ll just ask you what make. Please, Janey ...’

Colette looked desperate, like life was running out on her. But then it was her party. On the stage, Dr Samedi hovered demonically over his mixers, moving in a vibrating swirl of lights, as though he was turning himself into light, into pure, bright energy. And Jane understood – hated the heartless music, understood perfectly about Dr Samedi’s need to become light. Dr Samedi was in his element. In his orb.

She felt suddenly half-separated from it all, as though the dance floor represented all human life and she was flickering on the edge of it. For an instant, she felt weightless, as though she might vanish into one of the cracks of darkness between strobes. She felt like this quite often now, but never inside a building before. Well, except for the church, for a moment, earlier on.

‘Janey?’ Colette clutched at her. ‘Christ, I thought you’d ...’

‘Sorry.’

‘Please, Janey ...’

‘Sure,’ Jane said, squeezing her hands together to bring herself down. ‘Whatever.’

When Merrily awoke on the sofa in front of the dying fire, she was happy for a moment. Frozen and stiff, but she’d been asleep for two, three hours and hadn’t dreamed about anything she could recall. A small miracle.

But this time, reality was the curse. The priest-in-charge had tonight been physically sick in her own beautiful and historic church in front of the biggest congregation she’d ever pulled.

How could she have just let that happen? Children did that, just threw up without warning. The priest-in-charge was not even in charge of her own metabolism.

Merrily rolled down from the sofa to the rough, industrial carpet. After a while, she sat up, shivering, and threw more lumps of coal onto the embers in the dog grate, thrusting in the poker, levering up some heat, inching closer, on this balmy May evening, to the miniature medieval hell of smoking cliffs and molten canyons.

Medieval hell. She was part of a medieval institution. Just that the modern Church refused to connect with its roots. Which was why the modern Church was losing it.

If you’d said that to her six months ago, she’d have flared up a whole lot faster than this coal, but there was no denying it any more: in a world where huge numbers of people were begging for spiritual sustenance from exotic gurus and mediums and clairvoyants and healers, the Church was getting sidelined.

David Campbell had actually asked the question, Do these phenomena really fit inside our field of operation? The Church still asking everyone to put their faith in a huge all-powerful supernatural being while loftily backing away from lesser phenomena.

Like a pale, naked figure, cold as a slug, crawling towards you up the aisle of your church. Obviously, a representation of her own perceived isolation as the first woman minister of Ledwardine?

Ha.

From far up in the soaring hollows of the house came a sudden, resonant bump.

There was a break in the music, the strobes were off. On the stage, Dr Samedi was guardedly allowing some of the boys to examine his mixers and tape decks and things. At a table near the door, Jane sat with Quentin the Suitable in his baggy cricket shirt.

It had been hard going at first, but so far he hadn’t mentioned tractors.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I didn’t really want to come tonight at all’

‘No kidding.’

‘It’s just that my parents come for dinner here quite regularly, and they’ve become fairly friendly with Colette’s parents.’

‘They must be really sad, lonely people,’ Jane said.

Quentin didn’t get it.

Jane smiled at him. ‘So tonight’s the first time you’ve actually met Colette?’

‘I tend to be away at school a lot. Only this weekend, our half-term’s started, so ... No, I’ve never actually met her before.’

Jane said airily, ‘Some bitch, huh?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Take my advice, Quentin, don’t get involved. She’s, you know, she’s kind of been around.’

Quentin looked puzzled. ‘You mean abroad?’

Jane rolled her eyes. ‘I mean been around as in eat-you-for-breakfast kind of been around.’

‘Oh,’ Quentin said. ‘I see. Well, she did seem a bit disconcerted when her father asked her to sort of ... look after me. I think she had other plans.’

‘Colette always has plans.’

‘No, I mean someone she was interested in.’

‘Oh?’ Jane sat up.

‘I may be wrong.’

‘No, go on.’ Jane looked into his soupy eyes, but he quickly averted them. ‘This is interesting. What made you think that, Quentin?’

But she didn’t find out because this quivering shadow fell across the table and she looked up into the face of a grossly sweating Dean Wall.

‘This’ll do.’ Dean pulled out a chair opposite Jane and sank into it and beamed at Jane and then at Quentin. Danny Gittoes was with him and Mark, the reputed dealer. ‘All right, are we?’

Jesus, Jane thought, who let these bozos in? She’d forgotten about Colette’s professed need for ‘tension’. Silly cow. She looked around for Barry, the manager, locating him behind the bar where a waitress was putting out things to nibble, apparently on the instructions of Colette’s mother who didn’t realize that the only things that got nibbled at parties like this were ears. To begin with.

Mark the Dealer stood by the door, hands in his pockets. Danny Gittoes sat down opposite Quentin, who seemed to be urgently wishing he was somewhere else. Like the dentist’s.

‘So, go on ...’ Dean nodded towards Dr Samedi and looked at Danny. ‘Voodoo, eh?’

‘Kind of thing,’ Danny said.

‘Where’s this then, Gittoes? Jamaica?’

‘Haiti. He was this voodoo God in Haiti. Only he was called Baron Samedi, see. God of the dead. Hung around graves. Led these tribes of zombies. And he wore that same gear – coat with tails and a top hat. Maybe a stick. Like a cane. I read this book. So that’s where he gets it from, see?’

Dean winked at Quentin, who smiled stiffly. ‘And this was, like, devil worship, right?’

‘Yeah. Well, more or less.’

“Cause Jane’s well into that, see,’ Dean said, not looking at Jane.

‘You on about?’

‘Got her ma into it now, too, from what they says.’

‘OK.’ Jane half rose. ‘Watch it.’

She saw Quentin’s hand tightening around his can of Dr Pepper’s.

‘What they’re saying,’ Dean said, ‘is that Jane’s mother, the vicar, she chucked her load in church tonight.’

Danny Gittoes said, ‘Eh?’

‘You en’t yeard? All over the village, man. ‘Er chucked up. Splatted all over the bloody bishop.’

‘Geddoff!’ Danny said theatrically. Jane smelled set-up.

‘Runs in the family, see.’ Dean’s little eyes glinting. ‘Can’t keep nothin’ down. Throws up right in the middle of’er ordination service, whatever they calls it.’

‘Never!’