The Wine of Angels

‘I’ve tried, really. I mean, we always talked the same language basically, if we stayed off religion. And like, after what’s been happening I thought maybe there’s some chance we could connect there as well, but we’re coming at it from different directions, aren’t we? I mean, sometimes I feel really ... alight with it. But I can’t tell her, she’s like so blocked ... yeah? With all the dogma and stuff. I mean, I left the Traherne book lying around, but she’s always so busy.’

‘Jane.’ Lucy looked very serious. ‘This is not the time to sit up on your superior teenager’s perch ... And don’t look at me like that, you little snot. Your mother may have a restricted viewpoint professionally, but there’s a thinking, feeling, responsive person under that cassock.’

‘She doesn’t wear that thing any more, thank goodness. Except, like, on the shop floor.’

‘Yes. A sign, perhaps, that the person’s re-emerging. She’ll come to it in her own way, perhaps, and while you might have had a crash course, her knowledge is still a hundred times greater than yours. But you have to help her. If she won’t come to me, and I can understand why she won’t, then she needs you to tell her that coming here was not the mistake she’s fearing it may have been. That she’s very much needed here. She needs assurance from you, not from the bishop, not from the Cassidys, not from that pompous old fool, Ted Clowes.’

‘She just asks me questions!’

‘Then answer them as best you can, and pray for help.’

‘Pray?’ Jane turned away from the toilet smell, avoiding Lucy’s hawk-like eyes. ‘Who to?’

‘You’ll know,’ Lucy said. ‘And there’s another thing. Last night, your mother indicated to me that she was going to refuse to allow Richard Coffey to put on his dreadful play in the church.’

‘Yeah. We had a bit of a row about it. She talked to Stefan Alder and she thought he’d got this unhealthy obsession. This kind of gay thing, you know? But that’s not why she’s against it. It’s because he’s in love with someone who’s dead and it’s like, you know, spiritual necrophilia and all that yuk stuff she doesn’t think I know about. Like she doesn’t want him to satisfy his weird lusts or whatever in church. I said I thought it was cool and kind of beautiful and she was being stupid.’

‘You were right,’ Lucy said. ‘But for the wrong reasons. Jane, she must change her mind. She has to let Wil’s spirit speak. She must be convinced. You’ll have to be subtle.’

Jane was confused. ‘But you said it was a dreadful play ...’

‘It’s not the play, it’s the machinery of it. The cogs it turns. The play may not be the play Coffey envisages. Not if Merrily stays. I thought she’d be a catalyst, but I thought it might take years, but it isn’t, it’s happening very, very quickly.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Lucy was looking feverish again, burning up inside. ‘Jane, I have to go.’

‘Where?’

‘Perhaps I shall come and see you and your mother. It’s too much for one person to carry, especially someone old and creaky like myself.’

‘What is?’

Lucy lowered her arms, stepped away from Jane, looking about as old and creaky as a jumbo jet on the verge of take-off. Jane didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone as powered-up. She thought she ought to tell Lucy about Lol and his problems, why he’d spent the night at the vicarage, how he’d inadvertently let Mum in to see the painted walls, leading to one of those questions Lucy said she’d have to try and answer.

‘Go home, Jane. Remember what I said.’

‘OK.’ They walked out of the alley into Church Street, where Lucy climbed on to her moped.

A police car went past. ‘I didn’t tell them anything,’ Jane said.

‘The police? The police questioned you?’

‘Inspector Howe. She was horrible. She looks like a sadistic dentist. She’s coming back if they don’t find Colette. She seems to think I know something.’

Lucy smiled briefly. ‘Jane, if you told her what you know I think it would be safe to say she would never bother you again.’

‘She’d think I was bonkers? She told Mum something I couldn’t hear, when they were leaving, and Mum was a bit funny afterwards.’

Lucy stopped. ‘Funny in what way?’

‘Kind of shocked. And when I felt I had to come out of there and think about things on my own and I said maybe I’d go for a walk and kind of cool off, she seemed glad and she almost pushed me out, you know? I think that woman told her they thought Colette had been attacked or raped or something so bad she couldn’t face talking to me about it. I mean, you don’t think ...?’

‘I shall be honest with you, Jane,’ Lucy said. ‘I fear your inspector maybe right’

‘No!’ Jane stared at her, filled with a horrid, stark dismay. ‘I wanted you to tell me I was wrong! Tell me that old apple was just ... just like some stupid coincidence.’

Realizing as she said it that this was a stupid, make-it-all-right-mummy, little-girl reaction.

‘Help your mother,’ Lucy said. ‘Be there, as they say, for her. I shall come and talk to you both.’

‘You’re not going to the orchard, are you, Lucy?’ Lucy’s smile was somehow less ... brave.

‘Not exactly. Go to your mother.’

The vicarage looked at its biggest and drabbest when approached uphill from Church Street. Its timbers needed a few coats of paint or preservative, or whatever they used, its white bits were grey, its windows black, except ...

Jane froze on the pavement, looking up. There was a light in the third storey. In the Apartment. A single, white light.

It was the sun, surely, the sun must have come out. She turned, looked all over the sky for the sun, catching a sliver of light between two bunches of cloud, but it wasn’t enough. Something in that room was alive.

Wrong word, Jane thought, in terror. Wrong word.

30 Affliction

IT WAS THE way she looked at him.

Lol came in from the scullery.

She was waiting for him in the kitchen. Merrily. Little and dark and not girlish. This quietness around her.

The way she looked at him made him feel sick. The black-eyed dog was with her, like a shadow.

He’d listened to the detective dealing out the questions in a clipped and unsympathetic way that was surely all wrong for getting information out of a kid like Jane. Maybe, wherever the detective had come from, the teenagers she was used to questioning were hard and sullen, you had to be heavy with them. Lol thought Jane had been incredible, the way she’d handled it. So young, so much together.

And then the heavy one.

How well do you know Laurence Robinson? The question coming over like a missile, making him cringe into the corner of the doorway, a greasy, steel hinge biting into his forehead.

‘OK,’ Merrily said coldly, ‘sit down, Mr Robinson.’

He went and sat in the chair vacated by Jane and then wished he hadn’t; she was looking at him like he was caressing some item of the girl’s underwear.

‘She told you, right?’ Asking the question, but he couldn’t look at her. ‘The policewoman.’

‘Told me what?’

‘About Tracy Cooke.’

Merrily sat down opposite him, in a self-conscious way which showed she was forcing herself to do this, as an ordained church-person, a licensed member of the soul-police. He remembered the way his parents’ minister had spoken to him, youngish guy called Gregory Wallace, meeting him at the door of the family home, informing him, on their behalf, that he was no longer welcome here. Suggesting he might care to join a church. Some other church, in