The Wine of Angels

market square well into orbit. This would be a good, safe pitch – rich kids at a posh party in a select restaurant in a picture-postcard village encircled by hills and woodland and with no resident police. Profitable, too. Most of these guys would have no idea of current street prices.

Not that Jane did. It was just cool to watch from the shadows and speculate about these things.

She was on her own now. The craven Quentin had made a swift escape, car keys in hand, a couple of other vehicles also puttering pusillanimously away from the square. She saw Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes watching Colette, keeping a respectful distance. A heavy chick.

She and Dr Samedi were at the back of his Transit van, one rear door open. Dr Samedi backing out, arms full of something black, the size and shape of a child’s coffin. ‘Oh yes!’ Colette cried. ‘Yes, yes yes!’

Dr Samedi was still unhappy and wouldn’t let go of whatever it was. But tonight you didn’t argue with Colette; she wrapped her arms around the black thing, wrestling with poor Jeff, until they both sprang back and the black box was in Colette’s arms now.

Lloyd Powell was watching from the foot of the Black Swan steps. Mr Responsible, Jane thought. He might seem cool now, with that rangy Paul Weller look and his white pick-up truck, but Lloyd would turn, as the years went by, into his father, get elected on to the council. By which time Rod would have shrunken into Edgar, half- baked and not to be trusted with a shotgun. It was the depressing side of country life; they all seemed to know their place in the Pattern and the Pattern didn’t change.

People like Colette fascinated them because they were part of a different pattern, Jane thought. But there was no meaningful overlap. She was thinking what a really profound philosophical concept this was, when it all began.

‘All right!’

A voice crackling into the night. Dr Samedi had materialized under swathes of bunting put up for tomorrow’s festival launch. He held an old-fashioned trumpet loud hailer. His top hat was back on.

‘How you doin’? Sweatin’? Yeah!’

A few cheers. Dean Wall’s familiar whoop.

‘All right!’ Dr Samedi raised the white loud hailer up over his head. A signal, obviously. Because, at that moment, the perfectly preserved medieval market square of rural Ledwardine just ... well, just erupted.

The black thing, like a small coffin, had proclaimed itself, in the way it knew best, as a huge ghetto-blaster with about eight speakers. It was sitting on the roof of the van now, pumping tumultuous drum and bass into the square at this unbelievable volume, and Colette Cassidy was bouncing up and down beside the van and screaming, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!’

A circle of people rapidly formed around her, everybody moving in a way it was hard not to when the big, black beat was everywhere and loud enough to pop up all the cobbles on the square. Oh my God, Jane thought, they’ll hear this in the centre of Hereford.

‘Welcome, ma friends ...’

Dr Samedi’s phoney West Indian drawl had been processed by the primitive megaphone into a deep and eerie croak.

‘Wel-come ... to ... de ... carn-i-valf

The ceiling light was blurred and swirling.

She was waking up. She’d been asleep. Dreamed it all. Again. Oh my God.

It was not possible. Hadn’t she heated her hands on the Aga, gripped the poker until it hurt, bashed her knee so hard the pain had given her a headache? Proving beyond all doubt that she was awake?

The light above her was in a warm, orange shade. Jane’s shade. Taken with her from Birmingham to Liverpool to Ledwardine ...

To the third floor.

She was in Jane’s bedroom, in the Apartment. Lying on Jane’s bed. She didn’t remember coming here. Why would she come in here, lie down on Jane’s bed? Fear streaked through her and she struggled to sit up and looked into a blank, grey, oval face with dark slits for eyes.

Merrily screamed and squirmed away. Hurled herself back against the headboard, slamming it into the wall behind.

‘It’s OK!’

The grey face was printed on a jumper, a sweatshirt. Over it was a real face behind glasses. The real face looked scared.

‘No ... look ... hey ...’ he said. ‘I’m harmless.’

She looked down, registering that she was fully dressed, the bed unrumpled.

‘Mrs Watkins ... I’m really, really sorry.’

‘Christ.’

‘I thought you might need a cup of tea ...’

One of her cups coming at her, on one of her saucers. She didn’t move.

‘What are you doing? What are you doing in ...’

Aware that, even in her fear, she couldn’t say, What are you doing in my house? It wasn’t. It was the vicarage. It was huge and alien and maybe this man lived here, too, in some derelict attic room, coming and going by the forgotten back stairs. Part of the mad, sporadic nightmare. Oh God, get me out of here.

‘I’m a kind of ... friend of Jane’s.’ He was very untogether; big, unsteady eyes behind the glasses. Like a scared version of the alien on his sweater.

‘Where is she?’

‘She went to a party. See, what happened, we met in the street, I needed to take a look at my cat, and she just like brought me up here, you know? Jane says, you know, Bring her inside, we’ll have a look at her. Obviously I didn’t realize she meant ... her room. Believe me, there is no way I’d’ve come up here.’

‘Cat,’ Merrily said.

‘Somebody gave her a kicking. We brought her up here and then she got away. We must’ve touched her in the wrong place. I’m sorry. I don’t do things like this.’

She accepted the tea with numb relief. ‘You’ve got an injured cat somewhere in the house? Wandering around, making bumping noises maybe.’

‘Probably.’

Merrily could hear heavy music coming through the trees from the square, insistent as a road drill. This wasn’t going to endear the Cassidys to their neighbours. ‘Let’s go downstairs,’ she said. ‘I need a cigarette.’

It wasn’t long before they started coming out of their homes, gathering in small groups. You could see pyjama bottoms sticking out of trouser turn-ups, one woman in an actual hairnet. Big torches, walking sticks.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ a man shouted. Not a local voice. A sort of retired colonel voice.

The music was turned up even higher. Maybe fifty people dancing. Someone grabbed hold of Jane’s arm, tried to pull her into the crush of quivering bodies.

It was Colette. ‘Aw, come on, Janey. Get your shit together. Stuff the Reverend Mumsy. Like she’s in any position to complain.’

‘You’re disturbing the peace!’ The man’s voice rose again. ‘This is noise pollution. If you don’t turn that racket off and go away now, at once, I’m going to call the police! Do you hear me?’

Jane let herself be dragged in, knowing they were all on borrowed time. If Barry hadn’t rung the police already, quite a few people were surely doing it right now; you looked up and you could see small, furious faces peering out of dark windows, could imagine outraged fingers stiffly prodding out 999. Anticipating it, Mark and his friend had already disappeared from the Marches Media doorway. But whatever they’d been selling was taking effect: all around her, open mouths and too-bright eyes.

‘We comin’ out,’ rapped Dr Samedi. ‘We comin’ back. We gonna turn, gonna turn de whole sky black.’ But he no longer sounded in control.

A boy pushed past Jane, having come out of the antique shop doorway, zipping up his jeans. ‘Did you see that?’ a woman yelped. ‘That yob’s just urinated in there!’

‘You hear me?’ the man shouted. ‘I’m calling the police!’

‘Oh, do fuck off, grandad!’ replied a girl with an equally posh voice, and there were wild peals of laughter and somebody turned the music up even higher, so that even Dr Samedi was drowned out.