To Dream of the Dead

morning with the rain oozing through the cracked putty around the window. She was wishing she’d kept it on now; the heating was, at best, sporadic in the village hall, circa 1964.

Was the heating functioning at all, in fact? Or had Pierce contrived to have it turned off to make the place seem even less, as he would put it, fit for purpose? Give him time and he’d be talking about a new leisure centre, part-funded by a National Lottery grant. Squash courts, pool, sunbeds.

‘So we grew,’ he was saying, ‘and we survived. But government criteria for what constitutes a viable community change all the time. Government get strapped for cash, they looks at what they can close. Think about that. Think what we got to lose.’

A rumble in the audience.

‘Think about the post offices,’ Pierce said. ‘You’ve seen how many of them’ve gone from other villages. And you’ve seen ours put out of its own building into a little cubicle, back of the Eight Till Late.’

Two rows in front, Shirley West sat up. Shirley was running the PO cubicle. Shirley who, as they came in, had peered at Merrily with disapproval — thought a priest should be wearing a cassock and dog collar for hanging washing on the line, mowing the lawn, putting out the bin sacks.

‘So how would you feel,’ Pierce said, ‘if even that was to be axed?’

‘Speaking as chairman of the Parish Council,’ James Bull-Davies said, ‘it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

‘Colonel, with all respect to the Parish Council, it would hardly be the first body on the consultation list.’

James stood up. We have a role, he’d told Merrily once. That role is to defend. But he looked worn suddenly. Stooping over the table as if the ancestral weight, the centuries of squirearchy, were finally becoming too much for his spine.

‘I… suggest we stop sidetracking, cut to the main issue.’

‘This is the main issue, Colonel.’ Pierce folded his arms. ‘Grow or die, like I say. Grow or die.’

Repeating it like he expected everyone to stand up and start chanting Grow or die, grow or die, grow or die!

And then, while he had the momentum, hitting them with the big one: what if the doctor’s surgery were to go, cosy Kent Asprey replaced by whoever was on duty at the time in some soulless community clinic maybe twelve miles away? Twelve miles to travel when you were sick. How about that, people?

Merrily detected a needle squeal from Edna Huws, sometimes church organist and last headmistress of Ledwardine Primary School, afflicted with a long-term blood-pressure problem.

It had started. Rising flames consuming Pierce’s kindling.

And it was raining again, which wouldn’t help. They didn’t have rain on GetaLife/welshborder, the relocation website all about convincing city-based would-be migrants that they could have a greener, saner way of life out here in the west. So appealing this time of year, when Ledwardine uncovered its sensory time-capsule: cobbles flushed amber, cold evenings softened by carols and woodsmoke, mulled wine from the Black Swan.

Lyndon Pierce looked up at the windows.

‘That’s another thing, look. When I was a boy, the fields all around here would flood regular, and the ditches couldn’t hold it and the lanes would be impassable. Now we got the bypass linking us to the main Leominster road — a lifeline.’

He paused, spread his arms wide.

‘It was growth done that for us. Everything we got now we owe to steady growth. That stops, people, we’re in trouble.’

The rain was driving at the windows now, pools swelling on the sills where the putty had rotted away. Pierce clenched his fists, brought them both down at once like mallets on the table.

‘And that’s why we must not throw out the wrong signals by opposing the development of Coleman’s Meadow. Why we can’t afford to listen to the ramblings of cranks from Off. They don’t care if you got nowhere to collect your pension, send off a parcel, get your prescription signed and dispensed when the village is snowbound. They don’t give a toss if this village lives or dies. They only care about what’s already dead. Dead and buried.’

‘I don’t normally want to kill people,’ Lol said to Merrily, ‘as you know.’

5 Serpent

The sunrise sprayed out from behind Cole Hill like a firework, with shivering shards of orange and gold. Jane was standing in the gateway with her bare arms raised, and she looked free and sexy as hell, like her hands were cupping the sun.

An instant of connection.

Probably her all-time favourite picture of herself. Eirion had taken it on his digital SLR, on that last September weekend, the day before he’d left for university. For a long time it had been her screensaver, until she’d realised it was only making her sad.

Now it was stashed in the Sacred folder on the laptop, along with the membership list of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society. Jane didn’t know why she’d brought it out tonight, unless it was as a kind of prayer to God or the Goddess or whatever unimaginable force might be represented by the bursting of the light over the holy hill.

Long ago, the way to watch the Cole Hill sunrise would have been between the standing stones in Coleman’s Meadow. The stones toppled and buried centuries ago by some pious or fearful farmer but which next year could be back, ancient silhouettes against the red dawn in awesome testament to the sacred status of this place. A ritual reconnecting of the hidden wires. This was what she’d written in an essay. And like, to be here when that came about. Oh God… If it came about. If they could prevent Lyndon bastard Pierce fixing it so that future dawns would be rising instead over the fake-slate on the roofs of ranks of crappy, post-modern, flat-pack luxury executive homes.

That wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t. With a few thousand members now, worldwide, the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society was a powerful lobby.

OK, maybe not powerful exactly; councils were rarely influenced by people whose strategies involved subtle threats on the lines of If we cannot stop it by any other means, we are prepared to invoke the Site Guardian. But the word was spreading.

Jane had built up the fire in the vicarage parlour. She was sitting on the sofa with Ethel, a mug of chocolate and the laptop on the coffee table, listening to an accelerating wind driving the rain into the 17th-century timbers. At least you could rely on Mum not to take any shit from Pierce tonight. Mum finally understood.

In fact, things were good with Mum right now, had been for a while. Spiritual differences, if not exactly resolved, were acknowledged as being not insurmountable. You couldn’t, after all, operate as a vicar for very long around here without becoming at least half pagan.

Anyway, no open confrontation any more. These days Jane was kind of wincing at the memory of herself a couple of years ago, doing her cobbled-together ritual to the Lady Moon in the vicarage garden. A little girl, back then. A virgin. Pre-Eirion.

Abruptly, she killed the picture and switched off the laptop. Ethel had nosed under her arm and onto her knee, lay there purring, and Jane stroked her slowly, staring into the reddening log fire.

She picked up the mobile, almost cracked and called Eirion in Cardiff, then pulled herself together and tried Neil Cooper again. Thinking she’d leave a message on his machine so that both he and his wife would know that she definitely wasn’t—

‘Cooper.’

‘Oh—’