Midwinter of the Spirit

back to talk to her in private.’

Merrily felt a tension in the room.

‘Sorry, Huw.’ Charlie held up his hands, something ribboning and rustling there, and glistening in the lamplight. ‘Don’t know what happened here.’

Holding up the video cassette. About four yards of tape had become unravelled.

‘Screen went blank. Ejected the tape, and the damn thing was on fire. Had to rip it out and stamp on it. Extraordinary thing. Wasn’t your only copy, was it?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Huw accepted the remains of the video. ‘Coming to the end of its shelf-life anyway, that particular case-history.’

‘Need a new player, too, I’d guess.’

Merrily leaned in and saw that the lips of the machine were scorched and warped. She’d never known this happen to a VCR before.

‘That’s the fourth one in two years,’ Huw said. ‘It’s a right difficult place, this.’

‘Jesus.’ Merrily’s legs felt weak; she clutched at a chair. ‘You’re not saying…?’

‘No, luv. I don’t say anything, me.’

Silence in the stone room. One of those moments when spiderwebs of cracks appeared in the walls of reality, and Merrily thought: Do I really want to be doing this? Should anyone be doing it?

Huw looked over the lamplit assembly of bemused vicars and rectors and priests-in-charge. God’s elite commando unit, Merrily thought, and wanted to give in to hysterical laughter, except one or two of them might then think she was possessed.

‘So, lads,’ Huw said, ‘which of you would like to practise his cleansing routine?’

Charlie Headland’s mouth tightened. Merrily guessed he was wondering if Huw had rigged this. And she even wondered that, too. Tests – little tests. Lies. Disinformation.

‘And should we bless and cleanse the entire premises? Or perhaps each other?’

Merrily thought, horrified: It’s getting completely out of hand. How quickly we all rush to the edge.

‘This is insane,’ Nick Cowan, the ex-social worker, said. ‘It’s nonsense. There was obviously some sort of electrical fluctuation. A power surge, that’s all.’

Huw beamed at him. ‘Good thought, Nicholas. You do get problems like that in the mountains. That’s a very good thought. There you are…’ He spread his hands. ‘Lesson for us all. Always consider the rational nuts-and-bolts explanation before you get carried away. Why don’t you go and check the fuse-box, Charles? In the cupboard over the front door. There’s a torch in there.’

When Charlie had gone, Merrily sat down. She felt tired and heavy. To break the uncomfortable silence, she said, ‘Was that a genuine case – the woman on the video?’

‘Ah,’ said Huw. In the wavery light, he looked much younger. Merrily could imagine him in some rock band in the sixties.

‘You said they went back to talk to her again.’

‘Well.’ He began to wrap the unravelled videotape in a coil around his hands until it was binding them together. ‘Our man in Northampton knocks on the door and gets no answer, but he can hear a radio playing loudly inside the house, and the door’s unlocked, so he goes in and calls out, like you do. And the radio just goes on playing, and our man’s beginning to get a funny feeling.’

‘Oh, dear God, no,’ said Clive Wells. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘Afraid so, Clive.’ Huw held out his hands, pressed together as though in prayer but bound tight, somehow blasphemously, with black videotape. ‘There she is on the settee with a bottle of whisky, nearly empty, and a bottle of pills, very empty, and Radio Two playing comforting sixties hits.’

Merrily closed her eyes. Huw wouldn’t be lying about this. He wouldn’t be that cruel.

‘And we still don’t know if she was genuine or not,’ Huw said sadly. ‘The bottom line is that our man in Northampton should not have left before administering a proper blessing to leave her in a state of calm, feeling protected. Psychological benefits, if nothing else. The worst that could’ve happened then was he’d have looked a pillock if it came out she’d made the story up. But, then, looking like a pillock’s part of the clergyperson’s job, in’t it, Merrily? Get used to it, don’t we?’

Merrily was still staring into the scorched and grinning maw of the VCR when the lights came on again.

‘First law of Deliverance,’ Huw said. ‘Always carry plenty of fuse wire.’

PART TWO VIRUS

3 Storm trooper

THEY WENT TO look at Hereford Cathedral – because it was raining, and because Jane had decided she liked churches.

As distinct, of course, from the Church, which was still the last refuge of tossers, no-hopers and sad gits who liked dressing up.

Jane wandered around in her vintage Radiohead sweatshirt, arms hanging loose, hands opened out. Despite the presence of all these vacuous, dog-collared losers, you could still sometimes pick up an essence of real spirituality in these old sacred buildings, the kid reckoned. This was because of where they’d been built, on ancient sacred sites. Plus the resonance of gothic architecture.

Merrily followed her discreetly, hands in pockets, head down, and didn’t argue; a row was looming, but this was not the place and not the time. And anyway she had her own thoughts, her own decision to make. She wondered about consulting St Thomas, and was pleased to see Jane heading for the North Transept, where the old guy lay. Kind of.

They passed the central altar, with its suspended corona like a giant gold and silver cake-ruff. On Saturdays, even in October, there were usually parties of tourists around the Cathedral and its precincts, checking out the usual exhibits: the Mappa Mundi, the Chained Library, the John Piper tapestries, the medieval shrine of…

‘Oh.’

In the North Transept, Merrily came up against a barrier of new wooden partitioning, with chains and padlocks. It was screening off the end wall and the foot of the huge stained-glass window full of Christs and angels and reds and blues.

Jane said, ‘So, like, what’s wrong, Reverend Mum?’ She put an eye to the crack in the padlocked partition door. ‘Looks like a building site. They turning it into public lavatories or something?’

‘I forgot. They’re dismantling the shrine.’

‘What for?’ Jane looked interested.

‘Renovation. Big job. Expensive. Twenty grand plus. Got to look after your saint.’

‘Saint?’ Jane said. ‘Do me a favour. Guy was just a heavy-duty politician.’

‘Well, he was, but—’

‘Thomas Cantilupe, 1218 to 1282,’ Jane recited. ‘Former Chancellor of England. Came from a family of wealthy Norman barons. He really didn’t have to try very hard, did he?’

Well, yes, he did, Merrily wanted to say. When he became Bishop of Hereford, he tried to put all that behind him. Wore a hair shirt. And, as a lover of rich food, once had a great pie made with his favourite lampreys from the Severn, took a single succulent bite, and gave the rest away.

‘Must have had something going for him, flower. About three hundred miracles were credited to this