Remains of an Altar

‘With you?’

‘Tim is … kinda fragile. Like a lot of people with huge talent, he needs someone to hold him together. Oops, mind you don’t—’

‘Oh my God, what’s—?’

It had risen up like a column of smoke in the dusk, its eye sockets black, its mouth hanging open and the wings half-extended behind its arms. Its shoulders were black against a slash of red in the sky like the bar of a burning cross. Hands reaching up, palms outwards as if they were awaiting nails.

‘Kinda weird, huh?’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘They say kids from the Royal Oak come in here and make out on the graves. But, hey, not on this one.’

The angel was standing on a tomb the size of a double-oven Aga, the lettering on the side big enough to read even in the ebbing light.

JOSEPH LONGWORTH, 1859 – 1937

‘All holy angels pray for him

Choirs of the righteous pray for him.’

‘Guy who built the church,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘Found God and Elgar, not necessarily in that order.’

‘I’m trying to place the quote.’

‘You’re excused. It’s Roman Catholic. Newman – The Dream of Gerontius.’

‘I was listening to it on the way here.’

While she’d been trying to engage Elgar in conversation, an exasperated Sophie had gone out and bought her three CDs. Next to the spare and moody Cello Concerto, the fifty minutes of Gerontius that she’d heard seemed both complex and a little dreary, heavy on the deathbed angst.

‘Scary stuff,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘All those layers of celestial bureaucracy. OK, you know how after the soul comes round on the Other Side, he gets a pep talk from his guardian angel and then these demons start messing with him? Then he gets just one tantalizing glimpse of God?’

‘I’m not sure I got that far.’

‘OK, well, between the demons and God he gets handed over to this guy.’ Winnie Sparke reached up and tapped the arm of the grotesque figure on the tomb. ‘The Angel of the Agony.’

‘I don’t know anything about him.’

Merrily looked up into the wretched marble face, grateful, on the whole, that there was nothing like this in Ledwardine churchyard.

‘His job is to plead with Jesus to spare the soul of Gerontius,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘It’s a judgement thing. But you know what I think? I’m like, the hell with this guy, I think we can deal with purgatory right here.’

‘In Wychehill?’

‘On Earth, I meant. But Wychehill … yeah, sure. Wychehill’s as good, or maybe as bad a place as any for throwing off your demons. Maybe we can discuss this sometime.’ She flicked her shawl over a shoulder. ‘You’re gonna come back, now you won through?’

Merrily shrugged.

She lit a cigarette under the church lantern, one of its glass panes spider-cracked as if by a thrown stone or an air gun pellet. If Bliss was picking her up, she didn’t want to go back in there and get pulled into a discussion. Besides, if a requiem was going to be held, Syd Spicer would need to make the arrangements.

There was a mauve, last-light glaze on the road, a faintly rank smell. She kicked what appeared to be a shrivelled condom into the side of the wall. Obtained from a vending machine at Inn Ya Face?

‘Smoker, eh?’

She jumped.

Preston Devereaux was leaning on the wall under one of the oak trees. He, too, had a cigarette.

‘Congratulations, Mrs Watkins.’

‘I’m sorry. I was just … a bit…’

‘You were bloody furious. A woman scorned.’

‘I’m sorry. You’ve had a pretty bad week, too.’

‘Had better.’

‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Me?’ Devereaux leaned back against the wall, scratched his jaw. ‘Well, since you ask, last night I got drunk. Today, I sold the offending Land Rover for peanuts. Couldn’t stand to see it any more. I’m OK. Something happens, you live with it, move on. You don’t pick at it, like a townie.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Sorry if I’m causing offence again. I assumed you were local, name like Watkins.’

‘Local origins. I’ve moved around.’

‘Well, me too. But we came back, didn’t we? God help us.’

‘I hoped I’d be able to talk to you before the meeting,’ Merrily said. ‘But I think you answered my questions back there, anyway.’

‘You were really going to ask me that? If I’d seen the ghost of Sir Edward Elgar on his bike before the crash? Good God.’

Merrily shrugged. ‘My job.’

‘Well, if you get to know me better you’ll know it’s not in my nature to make excuses or throw the blame at anyone living or dead. I was tired. Had a long drive, wanted to get home. Perhaps, if I hadn’t been so tired, I’d’ve reacted quicker and there’d be two fewer funerals in Worcester. Who knows?’

‘If you’d been less tired, you might have been going faster and the result would have been the same. Only you’d probably have been seriously injured.’

‘I really don’t know.’ Devereaux shook his head slowly. ‘But what I won’t do, Mrs Watkins, is associate myself with the clowns who say this road’s haunted. So if that’s your idea of a cover-up, I’m sorry.’

‘Clowns?’

‘I don’t know what’s happening to places like this. At one time, we absorbed things. We, the community. Communities closed ranks, healed themselves. Scabs formed that eventually dropped off. Kind of people you got here now, the townies, they just got to keep picking and picking at it.’

‘What about the Royal Oak?’

‘The Royal Oak?’ He snorted. ‘Problem at the moment, but it won’t last. They never do, these places. We just got to sit it out. Make a fuss, you just give them more notoriety, and they love that. Look, I’m more sorry than I can say about what happened to those two kids. I was a wild boy, too, drove too fast, inhaled my share of blow. Not for me to take a moralistic stance. But, this all-encompassing fear of the Royal Oak … live with it, is what I say. Nobody can seem to live with anything any more.’

‘Well, yeah, everybody expects a perfect life. But it’s been suggested that a lot of Class A drugs pass through the Royal Oak. I don’t know if that’s right, but that’s what they say.’

Devereaux stared at her. ‘Do they? Who?’

Merrily didn’t know how to reply, never entirely happy about being Bliss’s snout, even if it was a two-way street.

‘Aye, well, they’re probably right, Mrs Watkins. And that’s not good. But it’ll pass. Be surprised if that place hasn’t changed hands again by this time next year. Raji Khan’s a businessman. When it goes off the boil he’ll get rid.’

‘You know him?’

‘Stayed with me when he was looking over the Oak. Stayed in one of my lovely holiday lets. Clever man, young Mr Khan. Knows how to surf the economic tides.’

‘You mean Mr Holliday was right about tourism grants to bring ethnic groups into the sticks?’

‘It’s the way this government operates.’ Devereaux took a long pull on his cigarette, holding it between forefinger and thumb. ‘But you know what makes me, laugh, Merrily – you don’t mind if I call you that … ?’

‘Not at all.’

‘What makes me laugh, my dear, is the way middle-class white folks move here from the harmless, peaceful