He can enter you without moving, that man, one of the nurses had said.
Merrily’s hand instinctively moving to the pectoral cross. Don’t shudder. Do not shudder now.
‘Cut to the car chase, lass,’ Huw said. ‘And don’t omit the exhaust.’
She told them the rest. Well, most of it.
Trying to convey that sense of all the light in the room being sucked sourly into a man on the very rim of extinction, whose touch was like an enema.
‘Looking back, it leaves me asking a number of questions. Fierce sexual energy coming from an old, dying man – can that be explained medically? Possibly it can, I’m not qualified to say, but the nurses didn’t think so, and nurses, no matter how compassionate, can be very cynical people.’
It was quieter now, the wind in remission.
‘The psychological explanation,’ Merrily said, ‘might be that here was a man who’d enjoyed exploiting women sexually, degrading them. A man in search of increasingly perverse pleasures – to what extent you want to demonize this is up to you.’
Huw was looking at her, head on one side. OK, I’m coming to it.
‘You can usually find a rational explanation, but there has to be a cut-off point. You need to recognize when you’re trying too hard to explain something away, because that can be when you’re most vulnerable. And if it reaches you, there’s not much hope for whoever you’re trying to protect.’
Shona said, ‘When you say “if it reaches you”…?’
‘What do I mean by it? Not sure. But I think if you’re unable to accept the premise of an external evil, you may not be able to deal with some problems. I think… looking back, I don’t think I handled it forcefully enough. I let the psychology make too many decisions. And afterwards I failed to draw a line under it, as a result of which… something… seemed to be hanging around, for some time.’
Looking at Shona, hoping she’d ask another question, move the thread.
Nobody spoke.
‘I felt unclean. Bad dreams. Night… sensations. Subjective, you might say, psychological. I’ve since encountered criminals, accepted as being disturbed, and this was just an ordinary old man. Yet Mr Joy was a notorious case in that hospital. Canon Dobbs had had dealings with him before and could have done so this time, but he set me up.’
She didn’t want to go into the burning of garments, and no way was she going to tell them about the essential advice which had come not from Huw but from an old woman who’d lived in a care home and who’d been surrounded by some very dubious books. Wouldn’t help anybody. Although it had helped her.
Maybe seeing she was floundering, Huw stood up.
‘The point being,’ he said, ‘that it might’ve been years before Merrily encountered owt as extreme as that – if ever. Make or break, and Dobbs is expecting break. I’d still say that were irresponsible of him.’
Heads turned at a slow creaking sound from outside, some distance away but ominous.
‘Another tree coming down,’ Huw said. ‘Nowt we can do.’
‘It’s like a series of doors,’ Merrily said. ‘You start off opening the psychological door, and sometimes that’s as far as you need to go, and it ends with prayers and a blessing. But quite often, several doors down the line, you’ll come to one that a psychologist wouldn’t go through.’
She drank some water.
‘I don’t know, to this day, whether Mr Joy was afflicted with some violent sexual anomaly which had more or less eaten away his humanity. Or whether that had opened him up to something else. But you don’t have to. That’s why we have the rituals and the liturgy. To an extent… just do it. Without it, you’d be off the rails.’
The posh girl – did the card say Bethany? – had her hand up.
‘What happened finally? Were you there when he-?’
The wind had started up again but now it was less ferocious, as if slightly dismayed at what it had done. The big gust which had brought down the tree had also driven clouds away from the moon. It flared suddenly in the lowest window and lit the face of the man at the back. Briefly, before he slid into the adjacent chair.
The man at the back of the chapel had flat, grey hair and his eyes still looked like they’d been sewn on. No bags, no wrinkles. A soft-toy’s eyes.
Bloody hell.
‘He died that night,’ Merrily said. ‘I was there, yes. Nurses will often tell you stories about the dying being… helped over. Claiming they can see the faces of people they’ve known. Parents, old friends, grannies. Brain chemicals, if you like, comfort visions. Lots of rational explanations, but it keeps happening. Someone to beckon you over.’
‘And was there someone waiting for Mr Joy?’
‘At the end, he was conspicuously disturbed. As if he could see something which… didn’t seem like his granny.’
‘Did you see anything?’
‘No. And I came away, as I’ve implied, with a quite acute sense of failure. Sat and smoked a cigarette with the ward sister. Both of us fairly shattered after watching an old man who’d scared us all… go out in a state of abject terror.’
Shona said, ‘And when, subsequently, you felt that something of this man hadnae gone away… do you think this sense of failure might’ve been a contributory factor?’
‘Haunted by my own inadequacy?’
Nobody followed up on this. Merrily glanced at Huw, sitting with his eyes half-closed. She had that sense of being set up, manoeuvred into place, as surely as she had with the late Canon Dobbs.
‘Were you afraid,’ the girl, Bethany, said, ‘when you thought something was coming for him?’
‘Hard not to be. He was.’
‘Afraid for your immortal soul? Or afraid that you weren’t going to be able to handle the job?’
‘Mmm.’
‘And what did you do about that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s never gone away.’
Huw was nodding.
‘You’re always afraid?’ Bethany said. ‘Whenever you’re asked to deal with…’ Her face, at last, showing dismay.
‘Pretty much,’ Merrily said.
Glancing towards the guy at the back, half expecting to see a spiral of smoke. Remembering a summer afternoon in a big church in the Malvern Hills, the vicar there finishing off his cigarette, leaving little cylinders of ash at the foot of the lectern. Remembering what he’d said that day.
Not a lot frightens me. I can deal with most physical pain, emotional pain, stress.
He’d probably done his training up here in the Beacons, and the exercises prior to selection. It was said they had to run up to fifty miles with an eighty-pound pack and when they took their boots off their socks were thick with blood. I can achieve separation from the weakness of the body, he’d said that day in his church.
It was fairly clear now that he hadn’t been expecting to see her here. Maybe hoping to slide away quietly when the session had ended, so they wouldn’t have to meet? The moon had screwed that.
He looked up at last, and their eyes met, and his were small and almost flat to his head like a teddy bear’s, and his smile was tentative, wary.
7
Fallen trees had restructured the landscape. Two of them were down on the hillside below the chapel, the biggest near the bottom of the track, just before it joined the main road. A crackling, skeletal mesh in the blurred moonlight.
Huw Owen was standing on a crag with a lambing lamp. Like one of Holman Hunt’s rejected sketches for The
