The Lamp of the Wicked

being. You know what I mean? A woman whose appetites are so… extreme that… wow, it’s apocalyptic. See, we think of these larger-than- life people as being like, you know, big movie stars and rock idols. But that’s so totally wrong. In reality those guys are all dead lazy and boring and too vain to realize it.’

She didn’t seem very drunk any more, now she was back home in this well-organized bedsit, with a computer and printer and bookshelves with so many books that they were stacked horizontally, and a view over a car park to the tall steeple of St Mary’s.

‘I don’t include you among the boring rock stars, of course,’ she told Lol. ‘You are very interesting. You’re among the exalted ranks of the Disappeared – kind of Syd Barrett.’ She raised herself, propped her head up with an elbow. ‘He’s actually older than my dad, the great Syd Barrett. You can’t be anywhere near that old. I’m like… amazed how young you look. I’m even more amazed that you were wandering the streets, the night before your big comeback gig – looking for me.’

‘Gig?’ Lol said.

‘Aw, come on! I’ve known about that gig for days. It’s even on the Net.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘Lol… Lol… honey… you’ve got a serious cult-base out there, you know that? God, look at your face! You didn’t know, didn’t did you?’ Cola scrambled up and sat on the side of the bed. ‘The copper it was, told me who you were. Mumford, who came back to see Piers. So… OK, there’s this Website, right? Devoted to the Dead and the Disappeared – Morrison, Barrett, Drake, Edwards, et cetera – and you, as it happens. And so I e-mailed them. I said, I have just seen the real Lol Robinson and he was working for this little guy who installs septic tanks. And some dickbrain e-mails back and says, You’re talking crap because Lol Robinson’s on at the Courtyard, Hereford, on Wednesday night as support to Moira Cairns, so there! You can’t win. I can’t, anyway. Even bloody Dennis Potter dies on me.’

‘This woman’s Lynsey Davies, isn’t it?’ Lol said.

‘Huh?’

‘The woman with extreme appetites. The woman you’d be scared of being.’

‘Hmm.’ Cola’s eyes narrowed. ‘What makes you say that?’

Lol shrugged. He was sitting on a plastic pouffe at the foot of the bed, his back to a chest of drawers supporting a lamp made out of an ouzo bottle. The lamp had a red bulb and made the room look like an intelligent brothel.

‘The point I was trying to make,’ Cola said, ‘is that it usually isn’t the famous people who become the most extreme members of the human race, it’s the people with something to rise above. That’s what the play’s about. This woman who comes out of a council estate in the Forest, does surprisingly well at school even though she don’t give a toss, then drops out of college and goes on the game. Just because she’s bored. Does the booze and the drugs and then goes on the game, at the age of about seventeen or eighteen.’

‘In Ross?’

Cola exploded with laughter. ‘Ross? And make actual money at it? Listen, I know some of these women – they’re lucky if they can turn over a hundred a night in Hereford. Hey…’ She blinked. ‘You didn’t go with Lynsey ever, did you, at some time?’

Lol shook his head.

‘That’s not supposed to be insulting, by the way,’ Cola said, ‘because that woman could pull, you know? Where’d I put my cigs?’

Lol spotted them on the computer table with a book of matches. He went over and collected them for her.

‘Ta,’ Cola said. ‘Well, that’s something.’

‘A lot of people around here went with her?’

‘That a serious question?’

Lol recalled her saying, when they were digging up Piers Connor-Crewe’s Efflapure, Let’s be honest, she was good at men. He went back to sit on the plastic pouffe. ‘It’s just I remember you saying, when we were at the Rectory, that Lynsey Davies had this fierce determination to grab everything from life.’

‘Did I?’

‘I’m kind of a writer too, Cola. Despite “Sunny Days”. I remember these lines.’

Cola grinned and yawned and stretched. ‘Yeah, all right, the play’s about her. She’s the protagonist. Lynsey. She wanted to grab things from life that maybe you aren’t supposed to, and she scares the shit out of me, still. But you got to write about what scares you, otherwise it’s all meaningless, right?’

‘Why does she scare you still?’ Lol asked.

‘Do I have to? Couldn’t we just have sex?’

‘Please don’t give me a hard time,’ Lol said. ‘I have a feeling this is somehow very important.’

She lit up. ‘Why?’

‘Because of the reason I can’t have sex with you.’

‘A woman, right?’ Rueful smile through the smoke. ‘What else? Well, I’m glad for you. I read the stuff on the Website and I’m glad for you, OK?’ Cola rolled off the bed, leaned across him to the chest of drawers, brought out a wine case from behind the ouzo lamp. ‘But this is gonna fuck up your night’s sleep even more, sunshine, believe me.’

It had the feel, Merrily thought, of some desperate ballroom in the Depression, where, although it was semi-derelict, people still came to dance against the darkness.

How old?’ Huw asked.

‘About 1740, originally, but it was completely refurbished early last century, which, I expect, is why it avoided being listed.’ Ingrid Sollars offered a smile to Huw; it was thin but it was a smile. In the twenty minutes or so while Merrily had been with the TV people, he appeared to have sought out and charmed the formidable Sollars, so spiky and unhelpful to Frannie Bliss.

‘So 1740, that’d be… what?’ Huw said. ‘A century or so after they broke away from the C of E?’

‘They were a new and radical movement in those days, Mr Owen, and this was one of the earliest chapels. Nearly as old as the one at Ryeford, down the valley. I expect you’re surrounded by the things in your part of Wales.’

‘Not like this,’ Huw said.

It was big. Bigger than most village churches in this area. Coming in through the door – Victorian Gothic, like the school, so not the original one – there had been that numinous vacuum waft you always got when a small door opened into a disused auditorium. And then what Merrily always thought of as the slightly soured stench of spent spirituality.

Ingrid Sollars said, ‘Since it was abandoned as a place of worship in the 1970s, it’s seen service as a warehouse, a kind of sports hall and finally a water-bottling plant – another local enterprise that bit the dust.’

Huw said, ‘Water from… ?’

‘There’s a spring virtually underneath.’

‘Is there?’

‘Not a terribly reliable one, unfortunately.’ Mrs Sollars’s weathered face seemed more open than Merrily remembered; her dusty bun of hair less tight. ‘No one was surprised when the business failed, because things generally did, you see. That’s the story of Underhowle – a short wave of industry, then a long, slow, bloodless decline. We are – we were – hoping for a stronger foundation this time. Industry supported by education.’

‘So you’re the historian here, Ingrid,’ Huw said. ‘The curator.’ ‘I ran a small tourist initiative here years ago, when my husband was alive, had a few hundred leaflets printed. We had trekking ponies at the riding school then, making us probably the only tourist enterprise in the village. They… Well, I suppose the committee keep me on in recognition of that pioneering initiative – and as the token local.’

‘And how do you feel about them turning this place into a museum?’

‘I’m in charge of the project,’ she said, as though this effectively prevented her from commenting. ‘I’m the keyholder.’

‘So?’