The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Meaning religion. Merrily fingered her small pectoral cross on its chain.

It was easy to say that the Church was just jealous because these guys were offering direct experience. There were many people no longer scared of death because their departed loved ones were saying, We’re here for you. And even if it was faked, was that all bad? The main spiritualist wave had come after the First World War — all those grieving families who didn’t know how their sons and husbands had died, had no bodies to bury. A means of bringing closure.

The doorbell rang. Merrily groaned. The thought of an hour with Dexter Harris was not enticing.

She stood up, pulling on one of Jane’s old fleeces over her cowl-neck sweater. Half her wardrobe these days consisted of the kid’s cast-offs. No fire in the sitting room, so she’d have to keep Alice and Dexter in the kitchen, and it wasn’t too warm in there either, despite the Aga. She went through to the hall, meeting the eyes of the jaded Jesus hanging on to his lantern of hope in Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, Uncle Ted’s house-warming present.

To prove that the spirit world is an incontestable fact.

Slipping the catch, tugging the front door out of its frozen frame, she thought what a disappointment it must be to Conan Doyle, if he was still watching, that the great spiritual revolution had crumbled so quickly into the ruins of Crank City. The front door shuddered and the white night came in from the open porch in tingling crystals of cold.

For a moment, it was surreal. The front garden of the vicarage was like some kind of fairy-tale bedchamber, the lawn a lumpy white mattress, bushes squashed into piles of pillows, a night light glimmering from the village square through the bare trees.

Very much a part of this tableau, he unwound his scarf and a frieze of snow.

‘Um, I wondered if I might sing a carol.’

‘God!’ She laughed in delight, looking down the drive towards the snowbound square. ‘How did you—? Where’s your car?’

‘How would you feel about “Ding Dong M—?’

‘You’re insane!’

‘And there are medical records to prove it,’ Lol said.

26 White High

Lol sat barefooted on the rug in the scullery, defrosting his toes by two bars of the electric fire. The lights were out, but the door to the kitchen was ajar a couple of inches. His frayed blue jeans were somehow soaked despite his wellies, and there were wet patches on the dark green sweatshirt with white stencilled lettering. He sat there alone, watching the snow widening the window ledge outside, and he felt wildly happy.

The lettering on the sweatshirt said Gomer Parry Plant Hire, commemorating the days he’d spent as an unskilled labourer in the wake of Gomer’s disastrous fire. Another small breakthrough: if it makes you a little anxious, do it. A chance to shovel tons of earth with your bare hands before playing live on stage for the first time since your teens. An impossible polar expedition in a clapped-out, sixteen-year-old Vauxhall Astra, to be with the person you love? Do it.

The old Astra had slithered over snow-blinded hills, hugging a council grit-lorry down to Leominster. Tunnelling through the suffocated lanes, Lol had passed two abandoned cars, snow-bloated, and gone chugging on impossibly until the old girl finally gave up, rolling away into the cascading night.

But she only gave up — there was a God — on the hill that was already evolving into Church Street, Ledwardine, vainly spinning her wheels before sinking back, exhausted, into the Community Hall car park. Lol had climbed out like he was emerging from a trance state, and bent to kiss her cold grille thanks and goodnight before walking up to the vicarage on a white high.

On the deserted square, a Christmas tree stood in front of the squat-pillared market hall, the whole scene loaded with snow, the fairy lights reduced to gauzy smudges of colour like ice lollies in a deep-freeze. Lol had looked back for a sign — a For Sale sign on Lucy’s old house — as if the sudden enchantment of the night might have tossed it back onto the market.

No sign there, no lights. Maybe there was a forbidding, black-lettered sign somewhere that said he didn’t belong here, but right now he didn’t care. He sat in the glow of two faintly zinging orange bars and half-listened to Merrily in the kitchen, dealing with some people who had arrived soon after him. Best they didn’t see him; it would have been all over the village by morning. The way things had turned out, even his car wasn’t here. Snow was good at secrets.

From the kitchen, he heard about arrangements for what seemed to be a memorial service. There was an elderly woman with a croaky voice that he recognized at once. Salt and vinegar with that, is it? And a guy called Dexter who managed to be both gruff and whiny. Sounded like routine parish stuff.

At first, idly browsing the Cwn Annwn passages from Mrs Leather, Lol wasn’t aware of what Merrily was saying, just the soft and muted colours of her voice. Luxuriating in the proximity of her, recalling an old Van Morrison song from Tupelo Honey, about a woman in the kitchen with the lights turned down low.

It was quite a while before raised voices began to suggest that there was unpleasantness here.

‘No, what’s she’s saying,’ Alice from the chippy said, ‘is that we needs a proper funeral for the boy. With the full rites.’

Merrily said, ‘Well, not—’

‘That’s fucking creepy!’

‘Dexter!’

‘Funeral for a kid that’s already been in his grave for near twenty year?’

‘It’s not—’

‘You’re telling me that en’t creepy?’

‘It’s not a funeral,’ Merrily said, ‘and I honestly don’t think you’d find it creepy. However, it’s only an idea, a possibility.’

‘You got no right. Should never’ve gone round askin’ questions, rakin’ it all up. It’s in the past.’

‘It’s in you!’ Alice shrieked. ‘Don’t you see that?’ Her voice steadied. ‘Been like this all night, he has, vicar. I don’t know what’s the matter with him.’

Merrily said, ‘Dexter, first of all, we don’t have to do this, not if you don’t want to. And we don’t even have to do it in a church.’

‘Then where’s the bloody point?’

‘All I’m trying to say is that the Eucharist — communion — is a very powerful way of tackling these things, in which… we believe that Jesus himself is personally involved. And it can sometimes draw a line under things, create order and calm, where there’s been long-term unrest, ill feeling, distress… conflict.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said, ‘this is what we want.’

‘Alice asked me if there was any way I could help, and I’m sorry if it isn’t what either of you were expecting. If you don’t think it’s the right thing, you don’t have to have anything to do with it.’

‘But,’ Alice said, with menace, ‘you’ll be letting your family down if you don’t.’

‘No!’ An ache in Dexter’s voice. From the scullery, Lol could feel him wanting to beat his head on the table.

Alice said, ‘En’t no reason the rest of us can’t go ahead without him, is there, vicar?’

‘Well, we could, but that wouldn’t—’

‘What about Darrin?’ Dexter said. ‘He gonner be there?’

‘It might also help Darrin a lot,’ Merrily said. ‘It would be good if everyone was there, from both sides of the family. It can bring things out. In my experience.’

‘Bring out the truth?’

‘Well, it… it can bring peace.’