The Cure of Souls

expected to call in.

With a good hour to kill, Jane could have strolled round the back for a cigarette. If she’d been into tobacco. But when your mum smoked like a chimney, what was the point?

Jane’s nails dug into her palms.

An old maid who didn’t even smoke. What kind of life was this?

OK, the problem. The problem was that Eirion was giving every impression of wanting to move them up to the Scott Eagles–Sigourney Jones relationship level.

Jane watched Jones and Eagles heading hand in hand for the students’ car park. Scott had passed his test on his seventeenth birthday; he’d been driving Land Rovers since his feet could reach the pedals, which had probably been around the age of nine, because he was a tall guy, maybe fully grown now. Adult. Experienced.

Also, Eirion, himself – sexy enough, in his stocky, amiable way – had obviously been putting it about for years. Well, you know, I was in this band, he would say. Oh, Eirion had been around, no question.

And he could have had Jane, too, by now. She would have had sex with him, no arguments. In the back of the car or somewhere, anywhere; she just wanted the bloody thing cleared away, like dirty dishes – everybody said the first time was crap anyway, this messy chore to be undergone before you could start enjoying it.

But Eirion would gently detach her clammy little hand from his belt. I want this to be proper, he’d mumble. Do you know what I’m saying?

Proper? Like, what did proper have to do with it?

I don’t want this to be… ordinary, you know? Run-of-the-mill. Me and you, we’re… And then he’d go all embarrassed, looking out of the car window at the moon. Jesus.

Ordinary? Listen, ‘ordinary’ would have been just fine by Jane, who had no illusions, didn’t expect rockets and Catherine wheels. ‘Ordinary’ would’ve been an enormous relief.

She found herself stomping across the playing field between the tennis courts, panting with anguish under the merciless sun. A torrid sun, guaranteed to turn the Pembrokeshire coast into Palm Beach. Did Eirion’s fat-cat family have their own beach? Did they all sprawl around naked and uninhibited? Like, just because they were Welsh didn’t mean they were all buttoned-up and chapel-whipped, necessarily. Probably the reverse: she and the Young Master would be assigned a double room and presented with a gross of condoms.

Shit. She shouldn’t be feeling like this, because back in the exam room she’d probably done OK. You always sensed it. She’d get her ten GCSEs and then come back in September and do some A levels.

Come back as an adult, with a lover.

She swallowed.

So Eirion, at seventeen, was experienced and mature, had done the rounds, and had met Jane – who was sexually backward to what, in this day and age, was a frightening extent – and she had become like ‘special’ to him, maybe because when they’d first met she’d been physically hurt by someone she’d thought was a friend, and he’d felt protective and stuff… and that was OK, that was acceptable.

And ‘special’?… yeah, OK, that was flattering.

Or would have been flattering if she was ready to be ‘special’, which might have been the case if there’d been others – or least one other – before Eirion. But the first guy you actually did it with, at the age of sixteen, really should not be ‘special’, should he? Not long-term special, not Jones-and-Eagles special. Not the very first guy.

Why the hell had she said she’d go there?

Jane began to blink back tears, seriously unravelled, not knowing what she wanted – except not to be a virgin. Not to be a virgin now. Not to have to take this useless lump of excess baggage with her to the Holiday Cottage.

In fact, if there’d been some not-over-acned sixth-former wandering towards her right now, she’d probably have been tempted to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, just to get IT out of the way.

Sure.

She was alone on the playing field. Somewhere in the distance she could hear howls of laughter – Wall and Gittoes on the loose, ready to crash the Royal Oak, pick a fight with a teacher. Their last week at school, the week they’d been dreaming of for five long years. They were adults now, too. Official. Even Wall and Gittoes were adults!

Panic seized Jane and she stood there, feeling exposed, the sun directly above her like a hot, baleful eye.

She was a child. Still a child.

Ahead of her was the groundsman’s concrete shed, a square bunker standing out on its own. The groundsman was called Steve and he was about thirty and had big lips, like a horse, and this huge beer gut. He was a useful guy to know, however, because of this concrete shed: a safe house where card schools could meet, cigs and dope could be smoked, and Es and stuff exchanged. Steve would also deal the stuff himself, it was rumoured, but not with everybody; he was very careful and very selective.

Lower-sixth-formers Kirsty Ryan and Layla Riddock were less selective. They laughed openly at Steve but sometimes went into his shed with him after school. And what did slobbery Steve give them in return? Nobody knew, but it was rumoured that he could get actual cocaine for anyone who offered that kind of payment.

School life. Sex and drugs and—

Jane saw that the blinds were down over the window in the shed.

There was absolutely no reason why a groundsman’s hut should have blinds at all, but every window in the school was fitted with the same type, black and rubbery, so that educational videos could be shown at any time or the Net consulted.

There was no TV in here, obviously, no computer. The lowered blinds could only mean one thing: with the English Language GCSE not half an hour over, slobbery Steve was in there doing business.

You couldn’t get away from it, could you? Jane shook her head wearily and was about to turn back across the field when the wooden door of the shed swung open.

She stiffened. The sun-flooded playing fields stretched away on three sides: everywhere to run, nowhere to hide.

‘Well, come on,’ a voice drawled from inside. ‘Don’t hang around.’

Jane didn’t move. She imagined pills spread across Steve’s workbench – or maybe some really desperate sixth-former. Jane felt cocooned in heat and a sense of unreality.

She blinked.

Layla Riddock, large and ripe, stood there in the doorway of Steve’s hut – in her microskirt, blouse open to the top of her bra. Like a hooker in the entrance to an alleyway.

‘Well, well,’ Layla said. ‘The vicar’s kid. We are honoured.’

TWO Little Green Apples

SAFETY IN NUMBERS…spread the load… a problem shared. The Bishop was heavy with cliches this morning, although what he was saying made sense when you accepted that the Church of England looked upon the supernatural like the Ministry of Defence regarded UFOs. Visitations? The blinding light on the road to Damascus? The softly glowing white figure in the grotto? God forbid.

The blinding sunlight over Ledwardine Vicarage was diffused by the thin venetian slats at the kitchen window. Bernie Dunmore’s friar’s tonsure was a fluffy halo. He topped up his glass with Scrumpy Jack from the can, beamed plumply at Merrily.

‘They look at you, they see a symptom of escalating hysteria. They see the Church being dragged towards the threshold of a new medievalism simply to stay in business. Oh no.’ Bernie shuddered. ‘If