The Cure of Souls

doors were open – no vehicle inside.

Family outing?

But as Merrily drove slowly past, she caught a flicker of movement at the end of a path running alongside the garage.

She drove on for about two hundred yards, past the last house in the lane, and parked the Volvo next to a metal field-gate. With no animals in the field, she figured it was safe to leave the car there for a while. She got out and walked back to the Shelbones’ bungalow, where she pressed the bell and waited.

No answer. OK. Round the back.

The flagged path dividing the bungalow and the concrete garage ended at a small black wrought-iron gate. As Merrily went quietly through it she heard a handle turning, like a door opening at the rear of the house. Around the corner of the bungalow, she came face to face with Amy Shelbone, emerging from a glassed-in back porch.

The girl jumped back in alarm, her face red and ruched-up, thin, bare arms down by her sides, stiff as dead twigs, fists clenched tight.

‘Sorry, Amy. I rang the bell, but—’

Amy was blinking, breathing hard. She had on a sleeveless yellow dress. Her thin, fair hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore white gymshoes, not trainers.

‘They’re not here.’

Merrily turned and closed the metal gate behind her, as if the girl might bolt like a feral kitten. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps—’ Moving slowly to the edge of the path, taking a step on to the lawn.

‘No!’ The kid backed away towards a small greenhouse in which the sun’s reflection hung like a lamp. ‘No! You just keep away from me!’

Recognition at last, then.

‘It’s OK, I’ll stay here.’ Merrily looked down at her T-shirt. ‘It’s my day off. See – no cross, no dog collar.’

‘Go away.’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Not this time.’

‘You’re trespassing! It’s disgraceful. I’ll call the police.’

‘OK.’

Amy backed against the greenhouse, then sprang away from it and started to cry, her shoulders shaking – a gawky, stick-limbed adolescent in a large, plain, rectangular garden.

‘I only want to talk,’ Merrily said. ‘Or, better still, listen.’

‘Go away.’

‘What would be the point? I’d just have to keep coming back.’

‘People like you make me sick,’ Amy said.

‘So I heard.’

‘Ha ha,’ Amy cawed.

‘I was sick in church once. It’s no big deal.’

Amy looked down at her white shoes in silence.

‘And sometimes I’ve felt God’s let me down,’ Merrily said. ‘You think he’s watching you suffer and not lifting a finger. You think maybe God’s not… not a very nice person. And then sometimes you wake up in the night and you think there’s nobody out there at all. That everybody’s been lying to you – even your own parents. And that’s the loneliest thing.’

Amy didn’t look at her. She walked to the middle of the half-shadowed lawn. The garden, severely bushless and flowerless, backed on to open fields that looked more interesting. Amy stopped and mumbled at her shoes, ‘They did lie.’

‘Your mum and dad?’

‘They’re not—’

‘Yes, they are. They wanted you. Not just any baby… you. That’s a pretty special kind of mum and dad.’

Amy didn’t reply. She was intertwining her fingers in front of her, kneading them, and seemed determined to keep at least six yards between herself and Merrily. With feral cats, you put down food and kept moving the bowl closer to the house. It might take weeks, months before you could touch them.

‘Where are they – your mum and dad?’

Amy produced a handkerchief from a pocket of her frock. A real handkerchief, white and folded. She shook it out, revealing an embroidered A in one corner, and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

‘Shopping,’ she said dully, crumpling the hanky. ‘They go shopping every second Saturday. In Hereford. She can’t drive.’

‘How long have they been gone?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ Amy hacked a heel sulkily into the grass. Then she said, ‘They went off about nine. They always go off at nine. They’ll be back soon, I expect.’

‘And you stayed home.’

‘There was no point.’

It wasn’t clear what she meant. At first, she hadn’t seemed much like the teacher’s-pet type of girl described by either her mother or – more significantly – Jane. Yet there was something that kept pulling her back from the edge of open rebellion, making her answer Merrily’s questions in spite of herself.

‘Could we go in the house, do you think?’

‘No!’

Merrily nodded. ‘OK.’

‘I don’t have to talk to you.’

‘Of course you don’t. Nobody has to talk to anybody. But you often feel glad afterwards that you did.’

Amy shook her head.

‘You used to talk to God, didn’t you?’ Merrily said. ‘I bet you used to talk to God quite a lot.’

The girl’s intertwined fingers tightened as if they’d suddenly been set in cement.

‘But you don’t do that any more. Because you think God betrayed you. Do you want to tell me how he did that, Amy? How you were betrayed?’

‘No.’

‘Have you told your mum and dad?’

Amy nodded.

‘And what did they—?’ Merrily broke off, because Amy was looking directly at her now. Her plain, pale face was wedge-shaped and her cheeks seemed concave. She did not look well. Anorexics looked like this.

‘I don’t need to talk to God.’ Sneering out the word. ‘God doesn’t tell you anything. God’s a waste of time. If I want to talk, I can talk… I can talk to her.’

Her voice was suddenly soft and reverent. For a moment, Merrily thought of the Virgin Mary.

‘Her?’

Over Amy’s shoulder, the lamp of the sun glowed in the greenhouse.

‘Justine,’ Amy whispered.

‘Justine?’

In the softening heat of early evening, Amy’s lips parted and she shivered. This shiver was particularly shocking because it seemed to ripple very slowly through her. Because it seemed almost a sexual reaction.

Merrily went still. ‘Who’s Justine, Amy?’

Amy’s body tightened up. ‘No!’

‘Amy?’

‘Get out!’ Amy screamed. ‘Just get out, you horrible, lying thing! It’s nothing to do with you!’

As if she’d been planning this for some minutes, she suddenly hurled herself across the lawn, passing within a couple of feet of Merrily, and into the glazed porch, slamming the door, shooting a bolt and glaring in defiance from the other side of the glass, poor kid.