women.
‘So why are you all here?’ Huw said. ‘Eh?’
Over twenty clergy in the body of the chapel, mostly young middle-aged. The higher number on the course reflecting not so much an increased interest in exorcism, Merrily was thinking, so much as the trend for deliverance panels within each diocese. Health and Safety. Back-up. Decisions made by committee.
There was a kind of formality about them. No jeans, no sweatshirts, more dog collars than Crufts. But somehow it felt artificial, like fancy dress. The only obvious maverick here was Huw himself, so blatantly old hippie you expected flecks of spliff down his jacket.
‘I’m serious. Why were you picked for this – the one job the Church still gets all coy about? And Dawkins on the prowl, knife out.’
Somebody risked a laugh. Huw gazed out. Now they were out of fashion again, he wore a ponytail, grey and white, bound up with a red rubber band. He was sitting next to Merrily, behind a carafe of water, at a mahogany table below where the lectern used to be.
‘You…’ Levelling a forefinger. ‘Why’ve you come? Stand up a minute, lad.’
The guy into the second row was about forty, had narrow glasses and a voice that was just as soft and reasonable as you’d expect.
‘Peter Barber. Luton. Urban parish, obviously, high percentage of foreign nationals. The demand was there. I was invited by my bishop to consider the extent to which we should address it.’
‘And how much of it do you accept as valid, Peter? When a Somali woman says she thinks the Devil might be arsing about with her daughter, what’s your instinct?’
‘Huw, we discussed this. I have a respect for everyone’s belief system.’
‘Course you do, lad.’
Huw glanced at Merrily, his lips moving slightly. They might have formed the words Fucking hell. The wind went on bulging the glass and swelling the joints of the chapel.
‘How many of you are here because you’ve had what could be called a psychic or paranormal experience?’
Silence.
‘Nobody?’
Someone coughed, smothered it. Merrily felt Huw wanting to smash all the lights. Then the woman who’d been a prison governor stood up. She wore a black suit over her clerical shirt. Her lapel badge said Shona. Her accent was lowland Scottish.
‘I’ve been close to situations which were difficult to accommodate. We had a disturbed girl with a pentagram tattooed on the side of her neck, who we found was organizing Ouija-board sessions. Something not exactly unknown in women’s prisons and not invariably stamped upon.’
‘Because at least it keeps them quiet,’ Huw said.
‘Not in this case. We had disturbances bordering on hysteria, which spread with alarming speed. Girls claiming there were entities in their cells. The equilibrium of the whole establishment seemed to have been tipped. The prison psychologist was confident of being able to deal with it but eventually our chaplain asked me if he could bring in a colleague. From the deliverance ministry.’
‘When was this?’
‘Five or six years ago. I’d been reluctant at first, expecting him to… I don’t know, subject the girls to some crude casting-out thing. But he just talked to them, and it gradually became quieter. No magic solution, and it took a number of visits by this man, but it was resolved.’
‘Never an exact science, lass.’
‘I was impressed. Wanting to know how it had been achieved. When I took early retirement a couple of years later and sought ordination, that incident kept coming back to me. So here I am. A volunteer.’
Huw nodded and didn’t look at Merrily. If the first guy had seemed unlikely to go the distance, it would be hard to fault this woman on either background or motivation. Merrily watched Huw bend and lift the carafe with both hands and tip a little water into his glass.
‘So in other words,’ he said, ‘you’re a set of dull buggers.’
Outside somewhere, a branch snapped. Huw took an unhurried drink.
‘Men and women of common sense and discretion. Selected for their stability. Safe pairs of hands. Individuals who won’t embarrass the essentially secular element inside the modern Church. No mystics, no evangelicals, no charismatics.’
Merrily stared at Huw. That was a bad thing? He shrugged lightly.
‘Well, aye, we don’t want crackpots. We don’t want exorcisms prescribed like antibiotics, to cure shoplifting and alcohol abuse. Ideally, we don’t want them, in the fullest sense, at all. But let’s not dress this up…’
Merrily watched his fingers flexing on the mahogany tabletop then taking his weight as he leaned forward.
‘This is no job for a digital priest. At some stage, if you decide to go ahead with this particular ministry, you’ll be pulled into areas you never wanted to go. You’ll be affected short-term and long-term, mentally and emotionally and spiritually. Every one of you’s guaranteed to encounter summat that’ll ruin your sleep. I don’t want any bugger leaving here thinking that’s not going to happen.’
She was aware of him glancing into the bottom left-hand corner of the chapel, where the shadows were deepest and you couldn’t make out the faces.
‘Which is why I asked this friend of mine to come over. Through the rain and the gales.’ Turning to look at Merrily, who couldn’t kill the blush and frowned. ‘This is Mrs Watkins, deliverance consultant for the Diocese of Hereford. Successor to one of the most experienced exorcists in the country. Quite a responsibility. So… we have to ask, how did a young lass get a job like that? Safe pair of hands? I don’t think so, though she is now. No, she were hand-picked by the Bishop of Hereford at the time, because…’
Huw. Glaring up at him, not moving her lips. For God’s sake…
‘Because he fancied her,’ Huw said. ‘It were a glamour thing.’
Merrily had come in jeans and a cowl-neck black sweater with her smallest pectoral cross. Nowt formal, Huw had said on the phone. She sighed.
‘Runner-up in the Church Times Wet-Cassock competition. Never going to live that down.’
‘ Runner-up.’ Huw sniffed. ‘That were a travesty.’
Only half of them laughed. You could almost see the disdain like a faint cloud in the air around the posh girl who was probably planning a paper on how the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were part of the same complex metaphor.
‘With Merrily, you can’t see the damage, but it’s there.’
Huw wasn’t smiling now. She noticed that his face was thinner, the lines like cracks in tree bark.
‘Tell them about Mr Joy, Merrily. Tell the boys and girls what Mr Joy did to you.’
And then he turned away so he wouldn’t see her eyes saying no.
4
Cornel – was that his first name or what? Cornel. You had to try and laugh. He didn’t even need to open that wide, loose, red mouth to be screaming, Look at me, I’m from Off. That too-perfect combination of plaid workshirt and Timberland-type boots… and the Rolex. Or whatever it was. Some flash old-fashioned status watch, anyway, and he’d be thinking all the country girlies would be like, Take me, Cornel… take me away in the Boxter and show me the penthouse.
Well, not quite all of them.
‘I’ve never been up there myself,’ Jane said. ‘The Court… it’s like real mysterious to us.’
The localish accent rolling out nicely, not too pronounced. If this wasn’t so serious it could almost be fun.
