The Lamp of the Wicked

YOU HEAR ME? I WAS GONNER DO FUCKIN’… FUCKIN’ MADONNA!’ ’CAUSE I’M NUMBER ONE, LOOK… I’M NUMBER FUCKIN’ ONE!’

Silence fell like a canopy. Lol was suddenly and horrifically aware of something in the crowd that was less apprehension than a kind of active anticipation.

And yet he also actually heard someone beginning to weep, a hoarse, bubbling sound as the rain came down harder.

A distant siren – the ambulance or the fire brigade. Lol watched Gomer walking slowly away from the pylon, looking at the ground. The wind had reined itself in. There was a dense, waxy stillness to the air.

One of the police laughed uncertainly. ‘Got the biggest witness list of all time there, boss. When he’s in the dock—’

Lol heard Sam Hall saying very quietly, ‘He won’t be, will he?’

Gomer reached them, muttering.

‘We digs holes, is what we do. En’t no affair of ours now.’ His voice was shaking. Lol had never heard Gomer’s voice shaking before, not even with anger. ‘En’t up for no public execution. We just digs holes, ennit?’

He kept on walking, along the alley by the side of the garage. Lol followed him, holding his spade. At the end of the alley he looked back once and saw Roddy Lodge standing halfway down the arm of the tower, with his hands reaching up, as though other hands were up there in the night sky, waiting to catch him.

Lol didn’t think he either saw or heard what happened next; maybe his mind edited the moment, a jump cut. All he was fully aware of was the lights going out in Roddy’s bungalow.

20 Stadium Rock

THEY SEEMED to have awoken at about the same time, in the still hollow of the early hours. Merrily sensed him becoming aware, by touch, that she was actually here, in this strange bed, in this unknown timber-framed chamber that was strange to her, too – she’d never slept in here before, the air was different, the sounds in the walls.

And it was the first time they’d slept together with no sex. Not that they’d slept together many times. Pathetically few, in fact, since they’d first done it in the summer.

Done it.

Here she was, thirty-seven years old, actually thinking of it with that old teenage delight in the forbidden. An adventure: two kids in a small, secret room in an ancient house with timbers that creaked and grumbled in the late-October night. It felt deliciously out of time, a place you thought you could never re-enter, soft and sticky and warm and illicit. And in the vicarage… where the vicar might come in and catch you doing it…

Doing it: more spontaneously thrilling than making love. That hint of…

Sin?

Shameful. Utterly. When she thought, It’s me… I’m the vicar, she couldn’t stop giggling and hid her shame under the duvet, because there really was nothing at all to laugh at tonight.

* * *

Jane had gone off to bed with a book half an hour before Gomer had arrived at the back door. The kid must already have fallen asleep – if she’d heard him, she’d have been straight down.

It was eleven-fifteen p.m. Gomer had been looking very tired, his glasses half-clouded. In fact, more than tired: perturbed, unhappy. He didn’t seem in the mood to talk.

He had with him some wreckage dressed in Lol’s clothes.

‘Boy en’t in no fit state to drive home, vicar. Figured you might have a bed made up in one of the spare rooms. Being as how you’ve always been strong on the idea of sanctuary, see, for the weary.’

Yes, Merrily had agreed, that was a possibility. Lol had smiled lopsidedly. There was a smear of dried mud on his forehead. A pocket of his jacket was hanging off. He stood there among the fallen apples, looking like a refugee who’d crossed Eastern Europe on foot. She’d wanted to laugh, and to touch him.

Gomer said, ‘And I figured you’d wanner know, anyway.’

Know?

Evidently, this had not turned out as expected. Looking at Gomer now was reopening narrow channels of anxiety. Merrily hadn’t asked about anything, only offered him some tea and something to eat, which he’d declined, claiming that if he sat down, he wouldn’t get up till morning.

She’d watched him tramping back to his truck, small and grey against the remaining lights of Ledwardine. There was only one other vehicle parked on the square. She’d gone back in and made some tea for Lol and left him to drink it while she slipped upstairs and quickly made up a bed – in the fifth bedroom, the small one at the back of the house, over the kitchen and therefore warmer than most of them. Also, well away from the stairs leading to Jane’s attic.

‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ Merrily had said.

Lol had wanted to tell her everything now, but she’d slipped away to run a bath for him. He was here, in her home. What else mattered?

A lot, but it would wait. While he was in the bathroom, she’d stolen most of his clothes and loaded them into the washing machine. When she came back upstairs nearly an hour later, dressed for bed, he was still wrapped in the towel, lying on his stomach on the single divan in the fifth bedroom.

She’d stood looking at him for quite a while, his compact body, his wet hair, before taking away the towel and covering him with the duvet. Then she’d set her alarm clock on the window sill, knelt and prayed silently, and then slipped in next to him, putting out the light.

‘So we… we went back,’ Lol said. ‘How could we not?’

They had their arms around one another, holding themselves together in the narrow bed in the darkness.

‘Chaos. People screaming and pushing, as if they thought the whole area was in danger of becoming electrified. Couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’

She was visualizing it, recalling the pylon standing over the bungalow in a whole valley polluted with pylons.

‘Bliss went crazy. Had everybody thrown out, except Gomer and me – and that was only because he wanted to give Gomer a bollocking.’ Lol stared into the dark. ‘Gomer was right. It turned into a public execution.’

‘He wasn’t still… up there?’

‘No, he fell off. When we got back to the field, he was lying at the foot of the pylon. Someone said he was still twitching, but I couldn’t…’

‘But you didn’t actually see it happen?’ Wanting him not to have. Detailed images lived for years in Lol’s head. Today had left multiple bruises and scratches on his body and his face, and that was enough.

‘I don’t know.’ His hand tightened around her upper arm, against the memory. ‘It’s all mixed up with what other people said they saw. There was a bang. A flash of light. He was all lit up for a moment, somebody said.’

Merrily was picturing Roddy Lodge’s angular, jutting, puppet face jerking in spasms. She shuddered. Was this really where he’d wanted to end up, when he’d slipped quietly away from the police? She recalled him screaming at Gomer that night at the Pawson house: Chicken, then, is it? You chickenshit?

‘When we saw him afterwards,’ Lol said, ‘I didn’t know what to expect. Whether he’d be… burned to a crisp. But it doesn’t… this guy told me it’s like a microwave… cooks from the inside.’

‘But was he trying to kill himself? Did he know what he was doing?’

She was feeling leaden inside now, with guilt and remorse, recalling that initial relief when she’d been