The Cure of Souls

Merrily met his eyes: they were deep-sunk but glittery, playing with her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t really like this kind of thing. New Age stuff I can put up with – a bit of fortune-telling, astrology, meditation. Trying to contact the dead, that’s unhealthy. Let them go, I say.’

‘And where do the dead go, young Merrily? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory?’

‘Leominster, Charlie. Everybody knows that.’

He grinned. ‘Well, you have a think about talking to my subcommittee. I’ll give you a call in a week or two.’

She stood by the old Volvo and watched him drive away in his dusty Jaguar. She thought she liked him but she wasn’t sure if she could trust him – he was a councillor.

Back in the vicarage, she paused under the picture in the hall: a good-quality print of Holman-Hunt’s The Light of the World. It had been a gift from Uncle Ted, who knew nothing of the lamplit path, and showed Jesus Christ at his most sorrowfully benign. A middle-aged Jesus, laden with experience of humanity at its most depressing.

What am I learning from this? she asked him. Because it seems to me I’m just muddling around, getting up everybody’s noses and not helping a soul.

Summer had never been her favourite season. People expected it to be a time of pleasure: new feathers, cares dropping away like rags. But too often the old feathers refused to fall, and the rags still clung, clammy with sweat.

Inside the house, tiredness came down on Merrily like a tarpaulin. She checked the answering machine – nothing pressing, no Jane – drank half a glass of water and fell asleep on the big old sofa in the drawing room, with Ethel the cat on her stomach.

And dreamed she was back in the church.

It was evening. The sandstone walls were sunset-vivid and the apple glowed hot and red in the hand of Eve in the huge west-facing stained-glass window, and Merrily was standing in a column of lurid crimson light and she could hear her own thoughts as she prayed.

Oh God, please tell me. Is Jane involved in the summoning of the dead? Please tell me. Heads for yes. Tails for no.

Her thumb flicked against old copper; it hurt. The coin rose up sluggishly into the dense air, rose no more than three or four inches and she had to jump back to avoid catching it as it fell. She didn’t see it fall but she saw it land because it appeared dimly on the flags, rolling onto one of the flat tombstones in the floor at the top of the nave, into the gaping, time-ravaged mouth of the skull at its centre.

She peered down, couldn’t make out whether it was heads or tails. She bent over double and the shadows deepened. She went down on her knees and all she could see was a void.

She started to weep in frustration and found she was scrabbling in her bag, buried in the shadows beside the sofa, like a great catafalque in the dreary brown light.

‘Yes…’

‘Mum…?’

‘Jane!’ She struggled to sit up, clutching the mobile phone to an ear.

‘You OK?’

‘I… yeah. Of course I’m OK.’

‘Good.’ Jane’s voice was as light and hollow as bamboo.

‘Are you OK?’ Merrily sat on the edge of the sofa, hunched up. The room was dim and felt stagnant. The dull day, deprived of any summer glory, was refusing to go gently and seemed to be sucking out the last of the light like a vacuum pump. The feeling she had was that Jane was not OK.

15 From Hell

JANE LAY ON Eirion’s single bed, watching the last of the light in the sky over the sea. All kinds of emotions were pressing down on her – guilt, regret, some bitterness. But mainly she was furious, and not only at herself.

‘So what did you tell her?’ Eirion whispered.

‘Everything. What could I tell her?’

Eirion had claimed the only bedroom as yet converted from the attic. It had white walls and the smell of new plaster, and even he could only just stand up in here. But the views towards Porthgain and the old mine workings were incredible.

If would be OK, brilliant even, if it was just Eirion and the views and this amazing moist, translucent feel you got in Pembrokeshire, the mystical otherness of the countryside.

Oh, no, she’d been about to say to Mum, the house is top, it’s the family that’s from hell. But she’d wound up playing that down, in the end, because of the guilt. And the fury.

Eirion stroked Jane’s bare arm. ‘You didn’t tell me about any of this.’

‘What was to tell? All kinds of shit happens at school. You put it behind you, don’t you? And when you get back after the holidays it’s all forgotten and there’s a new kind of shit waiting.’

‘So this Layla… is she a genuine medium?’

‘Dunno. She claims to have psychic powers, gypsy ancestry, all that. And she’s certainly got this… charisma’s not the word, it’s more threatening than that. Can there be like negative charisma? I mean, she lays it on, obviously – she’s clearly found that being threatening, looking brooding, that works… gets you stuff. Even the teachers don’t mess with her – I’ve noticed this. Teachers are very polite to her, especially the men. Arm’s-length situation. They are… kind of scared.’

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

Jane rolled over. ‘Enlighten me, O Experienced One, Mr Been Around, Mr Done All That.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ Eirion said wearily, ‘you’ve made your point.’

‘So what’s it mean? Half the male staff are shagging Layla Riddock?’

‘It only needs one,’ Eirion said. ‘Or maybe she set one of them up and he was just that bit slow saying, “How dare you, young lady?” They’re only human, aren’t they? And then they start gossiping in the staffroom as well, warn each other of the traps – “Let’s be careful out there”.’

‘She’s certainly got Steve on a string, the groundsman guy.’

‘There you go.’

‘But this kid, this Amy… I didn’t realize how far it went, you know? I mean, how could I? Like, OK, she’s Miss Prim, fourteen going on forty-five-year-old spinster, stiff enough to snap any time.’ Jane turned over, leaned across him and clicked on the bedside table-lamp. ‘And she set me up. She’s scared shitless of Riddock so she set me up. All it was, I just happened to be there… and virtually dragged in anyway. I was nothing to do with it. This Amy’s more or less claiming I organized it! And I told Mum the truth, but all the time I’m thinking, why should she believe me this time?’

‘You should’ve told her in the first place, shouldn’t you? You knew that stuff was right in her ballpark.’

‘Oh, come on, Irene, you don’t, do you? You just bloody don’t. Even if it’s somebody you don’t particularly like, unless it’s life and death, you just don’t grass them up. And now Mum could be in some deep trouble over this.’ She sank back, rolling her head on her bit of pillow. ‘She was really pissed off with me. More than she was saying, because whatever I’d done she wouldn’t want to louse up my holiday – she’s cool that way. But I could tell she thought I was going to say it was all total crap, that I didn’t know a thing about it, that somebody had obviously fitted me up, et cetera. She was like totally shattered to find out there was some truth in it.’

‘Sorry,’ Eirion said. ‘I’m not being very helpful, am I?’