December (53 page)

      
'Super kid,' Martin said.

      
'Yeah,' said Weasel dourly. 'Triffic. And she's in a real fucking
state with all this shit.'

      
His face was thin and drawn, his hair a greasy pigtail in a rubber
band.

      
'I don't believe this, Shel. Tom's gone off with this loony
slag, and you're sitting around like the fucking Government debating the
bleeding issue.'

      
Shelley bridled. 'You got any better ideas, Weasel?'

      
'Yeah. Gimme a day off, lemme take the van. And I'll find him.'
He stared defiantly at Shelley and then at Martin Broadbank. 'I done it before,
ain't I? I come out of stir and I gone on the road and I found him.'

      
What could she say? It was true. Weasel's devotion to Tom was
legendary. But ...

      
'Yeah, I know,' Weasel said. 'It took me a few weeks. But I
got here, di'n' I, in the end? And I'm smarter now. And I got better reason.'

      
He looked towards the door, where Vanessa had gone.

      
Shelley said wearily, 'Sure. Take the van.'

Simon stumbled back alone along
the valley bottom with no light but the sliver of moon. He followed the
single-track road, the sound of the thin river to his left and owls all around.

      
He'd refused a lift from Sile Copesake, could hardly bring himself
to speak to the bastard.

      
It was cold, the tarmac shining with a breath of night frost,
bare trees making stiff silhouettes along the hedge between the road and the
river.

      
A set-up.

      
A record-company scam to lure Tom Storey out of hiding, bring
him safe into the bosom of his old band. The target could only be Tom; where
was the kudos - apart from the element of humour - in signing a neurotic
clergyman, a half-crazed club comic and a now-obscure Scottish folk singer?

      
Poor bloody Storey. Simon had had a couple of Christmas cards
from Shelley, trying to sound lively but the gloom seeping through.

We have the tapes
, Sile had said.
      
God forbid!

      
Fascinating stuff. We
could release it. Throw in a couple of spare cuts from the first album to make
up the set. But I don't think you guys would be happy, somehow.

      
Sile Copesake, this sixty-year-old man in his element, wiry,
athletic. Delightedly flicking switches, spinning tape, until some brittle
acoustic guitar chords started to sidle edgily out of the speakers, underpinned
by a hard, spiky bass.

      
And then the plaintive, razored, nasal voice of John Lennon ...

Don't
know what you got here
But it sure ain't a song
Sounds like Patience Strong
On a bad day ...

Only it wasn't John Lennon;
it was Dave Reilly, and Simon himself on bass, and he hadn't thought about it
in years.
      
You
can't put that out!

      
Never entered my head
to, Simon. I'm very sorry, I didn't intend to play you that one, I was going to
give you Aelwyn. Remember him?

      
Don't bother.

      
Sile had cut the sound.

      
Simon, listen, this is a
good studio with a unique location. It was my baby. I brought Goff here in
seventy-nine, he fell in love; didn't need persuading to buy the place. He'd
got this new band that was going to put the Abbey on the map just like Mike
Oldfield did with the Manor. Only better, because ...

      
Because the band were destined
to become part of the Abbey's bloody cement?
      
Sile had smiled.

      
If that was Goff's idea,
it didn't exactly work, did it? After what happened, nobody wanted to work
here. It was an unlucky studio. Unlucky for Epidemic and unlucky for the Abbey.
Wasn't even making it as a tourist attraction. The curse of Aelwyn Breadwinner
.

      
Sile had switched off the studio, leaving a couple of
concealed
lights on.

      
Goff was a New Age man.
All ley-lines and healing powers. He didn't believe in negatives. This was holy
ground, and if s ours now. TMM's. My baby again. I went out on a limb,
persuaded the Board to refurbish it. Just like it was. State of the art, 1980.
Same gear, most of it.

      
The vans that Eddie Edwards had seen. The vans which went to
the Abbey and did not come back for hours.

      
It must have been done in a hell of a hurry.

      
So we're saying, come
back. Finish what you began. Face the curse. What have you got to lose?

      
Sile Copesake's dry, Yorkshire rasp. So arrogant. How dare he?

      
You
came back, already, Simon. You were drawn to this place. I was amazed when they
told me. And delighted, of course. Gets you, this area, doesn't it? You have to
come back.
      
Who
told you?

      
People
I know in the area, from way back. You've been carrying some bad luck and you
came back to come to terms with something. I'm not going to ask you what that
is, I'm just asking you to come back and play, for one week, maximum. Fit it in
with your parish duties or take a holiday, it's up to you, but there's money in
it, for what that matters.

      
When?

      
Soon as
you like. The, er, eighth of December is next Thursday.
      
Piss off.

      
And Simon, clutching his head in his hands, blinded by images
of crunched cars blazing in the night, dirty brown candles, a wheelchair crashing
in pieces to the frozen earth, had raised his foot and slammed it flat against
the plate glass door of one of the new shiny, new recording booths, watching it
shatter around his ankle, the sound exquisitely trapped in the taut studio
ambience.

      
Piss off.

When he walked into Ystrad
Ddu he was thinking, why did you do that? This is why you came back; to face
the demons, to cleanse yourself, to maybe cleanse the Abbey. To find out why.

      
But was this the way? He'd thought it was a summons from God,
flashed down from the Skirrid, and it had turned out to be commercial
enterprise, a sleazy record company's bid to turn over another million.

      
He thought of his latest despicable dream: hurling aside the stricken
woman in her wheelchair to crawl towards the black-robed monk's cock. The
rejection of the spiritual to quench the body's base cravings.

      
Celibacy. Crap. A delusion.

      
Because you could never cage the mind.

      
He was sweating when he passed the chest-high, mud-splashed,
moon-fingered Ystrad Ddu sign, primitively grateful to be back in Ystrad, where
the cottage lights were coloured by curtains and the smells of woodsmoke and
coalsmoke drifted out to claim him.

      
Welcome back, vicar.

      
The village never felt more hospitable than at night when it
seemed to draw itself under the sheltering rock, and a beery haze formed around
the Dragon Inn. This was the real heart of it, not the plain, towerless church.
Everyone had been friendly enough the few times Simon had gone into the Dragon,
as if they were saying: when you're here, you're part of us. But you take the
road along the valley bottom at your own risk, Vicar.

      
Once again, he stood aghast at the thought that he, a feeble
deviant with a public school gloss, was supposed to be this community's
official spiritual adviser, God's sales-rep in Ystrad Ddu.

      
It was never quite funny.

      
Feeling too damned emotional to cry, Simon stumbled over the
boundary inside which a narrow country lane became an even narrower village street,
stone walls replacing the spiky, leafless hedgerows.

      
Under the first of Ystrad's three blueish streetlamps, metal gleamed.
His path was blocked by something as uncompromising as a small tank.

      
'Fancy one of these, Vicar?' Isabel Pugh sat in her chair at the
road's edge, holding something out towards him, like a carrot for a donkey.

      
It was stubby and brown and she held it very still.

      
It reminded him at once of the monk's cock, and he almost retched.

      
'Go on. Take it.'

      
He shrank away, but the wheelchair rolled inexorably towards
him and her hand came up, and the smell reached him, butcher's shop ripe.

      
'Uuuurgh!'

      
Shrinking as the malformed, earwax-brown candle hit his cheek
and slid down his front, leaving, he was convinced, a slimy trail like a black
slug. In his head, the scraping of the wheelchair over the edge of the tower,
the canteen-of-cutlery clash of metal on frozen earth and toppled stones.

      
'Please,' Simon whispered. The candle dropped, as if reluctant
to leave him, to the glistening road and began to roll away, making a hard,
wobbling sound.

      
'Please?' Isabel Pugh's face looked cold and angry under the
streetlamp. 'You've got a bloody nerve, you have. Want to talk and then' you
want nothing to do with me, and these evil things sprouting on our altar.'

      
Simon threw his head back, wolflike, and screamed aloud at the
shrivelled moon. 'Oh
God
!'

      
'You can come into the house,' Isabel Pugh snapped. 'Or not.
As you please.'

      
With a whine of the motor, she turned her chair abruptly
around and rattled over the cobbles to the cottage door.

XI

Flying

The stove doors were open,
revealing orange coals and a single skeletal log in a nest of white-hot ash.
The bottle of Southern Comfort was among the papers on the trestle table, down
to its last quarter.

      
She nodded at the bottle. 'Finish it with me?'
      
'Your mother?'

      
'Whist drive,' Isabel said dismissively. 'Be away a couple of
hours. Sit down. Vicar, warm yourself. Always wet and starved, you are, when
you come here.'

      
'Vicar? What happened to Simon?'

      
'What indeed?' said Isabel, surveying him through narrowed
eyes, her chained glasses magnifying a cluster of freckles on her nose. She'd pulled
off her cyclist's cape to reveal a blue silk top, provocatively tied with a
drawcord across her breasts.

      
It was as warm as ever in the living-room, but there were
blueing goose-pimples on her arms. She was clearly very frightened and
determined not to show it.

      
Making two of them.

      
'Eddie Edwards, he thinks he's gone bananas.' Words coming out
in a breathless hurry. 'We had a senior policeman in the church. Funny bloke.
He's still around. You go back home now, he'll nab you sure as ...'

      
'Police?"

      
'Detective Superintendent somebody-or-other Jones. Waiting for
you, he is. Crafty-looking devil. About the candles, Simon. He's here about the
candles.'

      
To cover his reaction, Simon went swiftly into the kitchen,
got himself a tumbler, brought it back, sat across the table from Isabel.

      
The candles? Police?

      
His wrist was still unsteady as he tilted the Southern Comfort
bottle, spilling some.

      
'Human grease,' Isabel said suddenly, almost shrilly, and he
swallowed half his drink and didn't even notice the sweetness of it. 'Can ...
Candles made from human fat.'

      
Stiffly upright in her wheelchair.

      
'But you knew that, didn't you?'

      
Fumbling her glasses straight, leaning forward and peering intently
into his eyes.

      
Which were frozen in shock, the words
human fat
sitting on his senses. He couldn't speak.