Remains of an Altar

and crack pipes.

Not that there was anything new about all that, even in Ledwardine. In centuries past, the gutters would probably have been overflowing nightly with blood and vomit. And, like … well, everybody got drunk sometime, it was just…

… Just that the kind of mass drunkenness you got in the cities now was symptomatic of something scary: an almost suicidal hopelessness seeping through society. Jane had done this really heartfelt essay on it for the school magazine. The attitude was: the world is made of shit, the politicians of all three major parties are clueless tossers on the make, the country’s already more than halfway down the toilet, so if you don’t get pissed tonight, tomorrow could be too late.

There’d been times when she’d felt that way herself, obviously. And although she hadn’t used the words pissed or shit in the essay, it had still been censored. Good old Morrell. Good old Rob. Maybe it was time to leave, make her own way. Somehow.

‘Home, is it?’

‘Huh? Sorry, Gomer, I was…’

‘You wanner check if the vicar’s back, Janie?’

Gomer had stopped the jeep at the edge of the market square, engine clattering.

‘Actually, Gomer, I wouldn’t mind – like, now there’ll be nobody about – checking out Coleman’s Meadow? See if they’ve taken the fence down or anything.’

‘They en’t gonner do that, girl.’

‘Only … I feel bad about just going to ground all day. Not having the courage of my convictions.’

‘Wisest thing. You hadn’t got no proof.’

‘Yeah. And now we have. Can you take me back to Mrs Kingsley’s in the morning? Get those pictures photocopied?’

‘I’Il do that.’

‘You’re a star, Gomer.’

But still tomorrow morning seemed a long way off. What if – call it paranoia, but anything could happen in this sick world – what if Mrs Kingsley had changed her mind? What if Lyndon Pierce and Gerry Murray had found out and persuaded her to hand over the photos, and by tomorrow morning they were ashes?

‘Best to stay away from the meadow, I reckon, Janie. Don’t invite no trouble till you’re ready for it.’ Gomer pulled the jeep onto the square, switched off the engine. ‘I’ll come over the vicarage with you. If they en’t back, mabbe get some chips?’

‘Brilliant. See, all I was thinking … maybe more protesters might’ve turned up. I’ve got this fantasy of … like one of these old peace camps? Where people come and occupy the site?’

‘Got new laws to prevent all that, now.’

‘They’re stifling everything spontaneous, aren’t they? Free speech. Whatever happened to that?’

‘En’t gonner stifle me, girl,’ Gomer said. ‘Too old to be stifled, see.’

They walked across the square and under the market hall. It was around ten p.m. and the only light was in the northern sky – a strange light, with swirls of white, like cream in dark coffee.

There were no lights in the vicarage.

‘Chips then, is it?’ Gomer said.

‘Yeah, why not? My treat. You’ve done a great job tonight, Gomer. All we have to do now is make sure everybody knows … and about the leisure centre and everything. We’ve got to wake up the village.’

‘Easier said than done, Janie. Thing is—’

Gomer froze.

‘What?’ Jane said.

‘Y’ear that?’

All Jane could hear was the sound of a distant engine, like a lorry or something, carrying the way sounds did in the country after dark. Gomer stepped back onto the square, his head on one side.

‘It’s a JCB, ennit? Gimme a couple more minutes, I could mabbe tell you what size and how old.’

Jane smiled. Gomer Parry Plant Hire never sleeps.

Gomer wasn’t smiling. He stood hunched, looking down at his Doc Martens, listening hard.

‘Comin’ from the orchard, it is.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Seems to me there en’t many places back there where you can manoeuvre a JCB. Specially at night, see.’ He looked at Jane, and there was no light in his glasses. He took the ciggy out of his mouth and coughed unhappily. ‘You know what they’re doin’, don’t you?’

51

The Blade

Of course, Lol had half-lied to Merrily, and he hated that, but now he was compelled to go through with it.

By evening light, the sacred oak had seemed inspirational – its weight, its setting. The glow of sunset had instilled a transitional tension which was unsettling. And he needed that. Badly needed to be unsettled again. Have something reawoken in him, even if it was through fear of the unknown.

It was odd. Since the sun had gone down, the sky seemed brighter. The landscape, as he neared the oak, had the eeriness of a vast attic lit by a single candle. The voice of Dan the chorister was crackling behind his ears like tinnitus: I was a bit cynical about the whole idea at first but … I’d do it again tomorrow, I mean it, I’d travel a long way to do it.

Maybe the words of Dan the chorister had been quietly playing at the back of his mind for hours.

… Vibration going through you, like wiring … different parts of you lighting up in some kind of sequence … wasn’t just three churches coming together, it was like being inside a big orb of sound. Like we’d broken through to another place.

Lol was wondering when, since the terror and adrenalin rushes of the comeback concert at the Courtyard, he’d last experienced anything approaching that level of connection. What use was he to Merrily or Jane if he couldn’t feel their level of commitment? The way both of them, from their different directions, were driven, while he was just the hanger-on, the timid inhabitant of the witch’s cottage who hadn’t been able to construct a serviceable song for over a month.

Night had widened the landscape. Nothing visible between Lol and Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey. Two tawny owls conversed across the valley.

He stopped and looked up: stars … planets … spheres.

And then, as the naked, dead, topmost branches of the sacred oak appeared over the nearest horizon like a claw, he was shaking his head because this was faintly despicable. He should have gone with Merrily.

But Lol kept on walking until, at some point, the whistling arose.

Jane followed the tiny beacon of Gomer’s ciggy through the churchyard, through the wicket gate and into the orchard, which had once encircled the village. All that was around her now was the sluggish sound of the JCB flexing its metal muscles.

A friendly sound, normally. She’d always associated JCBs with Gomer. Gomer Parry Plant Hire: drain your fields, clear your ditches, lay your pipes, dig your soakaway.

Now it was a grinding headache, maybe the fantasy-migraine she’d invented coming back to haunt her, karmic retribution: clanking, dragging, ripping, an organ of destruction. Darkness closing in on mellow old Ledwardine.

‘Slow, Janie,’ Gomer said.

They were beyond the church, into the patch of ground where Jane had found the circular bump that might be a Bronze Age burial mound. Too dark now to make it out. There was a moon somewhere, but its meagre light wasn’t getting in here, and the nettles were high; she must have been stung a dozen times already, but that didn’t matter. Sweating, grit in her eyes, she stopped at the sound of a heavy blade on stone, raw friction, a pulling back, a meshing of gears.

‘Careful, girl – wire.’