Crybbe aka Curfew

Slowly but emphatically, The Gallery would build a reputation among the discerning. They would travel from as far away as Shrewsbury and Cheltenham and even Oxford and London. The Gallery would expand, and then other specialist dealers would join them, and pretty soon it would be Crybbe for fine art, the way it was Hay-on-Wye for books.

'Of course, it took time,' he would say at dinner parties. 'Good Lord, I remember, in the early days, when, to save money, one actually made one's own frames…'

'Festival, is it?,' Jimmy Preece's eyes were like screwheads countersunk into old mahogany. 'We never had no festival before.'

'Precisely the point, Mr Mayor.' Max Goff tried to smile sincerely and reassuringly, but he knew from hundreds of press photos that it always came out wide and flashy, like car radiators in the sixties.

'No.' Mr Preece shook his head slowly, as if they were discussing water-skiing or first-division football, things which, transparently, were not part of the Crybbe scene. 'Not round yere.'

Goff leaned forward. He'd given a lot of thought to how he'd sell this thing to the townsfolk. A festival. A celebration of natural potential. Except this festival would last all year round. This festival would absorb the whole town. It would recreate Crybbe.

'The point is, Mr Mayor… You got so much to be festive about.' Go on, ask me what the hell you got to be festive about.

The Mayor just nodded. Jeez.

'Let me explain, OK?' White-suited Goff was feeling well out of place in this cramped little parlour, where everything was brown and mottled and shrunken-looking, from the beams in the ceiling, to the carpet, to Jimmy Preece himself. But he had to crack this one; getting the Mayor on his side would save a hell of a lot of time.

'OK,' Goff said calmly. 'Let's start with the basics. How much you heard about me?'

Jimmy Preece smiled slyly down at his feet, encased in heavy, well-polished working boots with nearly as many ancient cracks as his face.

Goff flashed the teeth again. 'Never trust newspapers, Mr Mayor. The more money you make, the more the c… the more they're out to nail you. 'Specially if you've made it in a operation like mine. Which, as I'm sure you know, is the music business, the recording industry.'

I've heard that.'

'Sex, drugs and rock and roll, eh?'

'I wouldn't know about those things.'

'Nor would I, Mr Mayor,' Goff lied. 'Only been on the business side. A business. Like any other. And I'm not denying it's been highly successful for me. I'm a rich man.'

Goff paused.

'And now I want to put something back. Into the world, if you like. But, more specifically… into Crybbe.'

Mr Preece didn't even blink.

'Because you have a very special town here, Mr Mayor. Only this town, it's forgotten just how special it is.'

Come on, you old bastard. Ask me why it's so flaming special.

Goff waited, keeping his cool. Very commendably, he thought, under the circumstances. Then, after a while, Jimmy Preece made his considered response.

'Well, well,' he said. And was silent again.

Max Goff felt his nails penetrate the brown vinyl chair-arms. 'I don't mean to be insulting here, Mr Mayor,' he said loudly, with a big, wide, shiny smile – a 1961 Cadillac of a smile. 'But you have to face the fact that this little town is in deep shit.'

He let the words – and the smile – shimmer in the room.

'Terminally depressed,' he said. 'Economically sterile.'

Still the Mayor said nothing. But his eyes shifted sideways like the eyes of a ventriloquist's doll, and Goff knew he was last getting through.

'OK.' He pulled on to his knee a green canvas bag. 'I'm gonna lay it all down for you.'

Yeah, there it was. A hint of anxiety.

'Even a century ago,' Goff stared the old guy straight in the eyes, 'this town was home to over five thousand people. How many's it got now?'

Mr Preece looked into the fireplace. Breathed in as if about to answer, and then breathed out without a word.

'I'll tell you. At the last census, there were two thousand nine hundred and sixty-four. This is in the town itself, I'm not including the outlying farms.'

From the canvas bag, Goff took a pad of recycled paper opened it. Began to read the figures. 'Crybbe once had a grammar school and two primary schools. It's now down to single primary and the older kids get bussed to a secondary school eight miles away, yeah?'

Mr Preece nodded slowly and then carried on nodding as his head was working loose.

'Even as recently as 1968,' Goff said, 'there were four police men in Crybbe. How many now?'

Mr Preece's lips started to shape a word and then went slack again as Goff zapped him with more statistics. 'Back in the fifties, there were three grocer's shops, two butcher's, a couple of chemist's, and there was…'

Mr Preece almost yelled, 'Where you gettin' all this from?'

But Goff was coming at him like a train now, and there was no stopping him.

'… a regular assize court earlier this century, and now what? Not even petty sessions any more. No justices, no magistrates. Used to be a self-sufficient local authority, covering wide area from Crybbe and employing over seventy people. Now there's your town council. Not much more than a local advisory body that employs precisely one person part-time, that's Mrs Byford, the clerk who lakes the notes at your meetings.'

'Look, what… what's all this about?' Jimmy Preece was shrinking back into his chair, Goff leaning further towards him with every point he made, but deciding it was time to cool

things a little.

'Bottom line, Mr Mayor, is you got a slowly ageing population and nothing to offer the young to keep them here. Even the outsiders are mostly retired folk. Crybbe's already climbed into its own coffin and it's just about to pull down the lid.'

Goff sat back, putting away his papers, leaving Jimmy Preece, Mayor of Crybbe, looking as tired and wasted as his town. 'Mr Mayor, how about you call a public meeting? Crybbe and me, we need to talk.'

In the gallery itself – her place – Jocasta Newsome was starting to function. At last. God, she'd thought it was never going to begin. She walked quickly across the quarry-tiled floor – tap, tap, tap of the high heels, echoing from wall to wall in the high-roofed former chapel, a smart brisk sound she loved.

'Look, let me show you this. It's something actually quite special. '

'No, really,' The customer raised a hand and a faint smile. 'This is what I came for.'

'Oh, but…' Jocasta fell silent, realizing that a ?1,000 sale was about to go through without recourse to the skills honed to a fine edge during her decade in International Marketing. She pulled herself together, smiled and patted the hinged frame of the triptych, it is rather super, though, isn't it?'

'Actually,' the customer said, turning her back on the triple image of the Tump, I think it's absolutely dreadful.'

'Oh.' Jocasta was genuinely thrown by this, because the customer was undoubtedly the right kind: Barbour, silk scarf and that offhand, isn't-life-tedious sort of poise she'd always rather envied.

The woman revived her faint smile. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. My boss thinks it's wonderful, and that's all that matters. I suppose it's the subject I'm not terribly taken with. It's only a large heap of soil, after all.'

Jocasta mentally adjusted the woman's standing; she had a boss. Dare she ask who he was? 'I'll pa… I'll have it packaged for you.'

'Oh, don't bother, I'll just toss it in the back of the jeep. Haven't far to go.' How far