December (54 page)

      
'No,' she said. 'I don't think you knew that after all. Human fat.
There's intriguing, isn't it?'

      
Simon blinked helplessly, feeling again the warm, slick,
misshapen things, the grease on his fingers afterwards. Feeling an overwhelming
desire for the hollow, solitary emptiness of prayer.

      
Isabel lowered her glasses, said more calmly, 'Eddie sent one
away to a mate of his at Swansea University, who threatened to shop him to the
police if he didn't report it. He tried to find you, to warn you, but you weren't
there, weren't in. If you're going to be sick, Simon, the toilet's on the left
through the kitchen. All us cripples have them to hand.'

      
It occurred to Simon to go to the lavatory and slip quietly
away. To go where? Back to the new vicarage to sleep under blankets in the
armchair with the Good Book across his knees?

      
Isabel smiled, with difficulty. 'You've got nowhere to run,
Mister priest. You go home, you'd better have a good story because he didn't
believe Eddie's, that copper. Or you could go to Eddie's house if you want to
watch the poor old bugger crawling up the walls screaming, "No, no, it couldn't
have happened," and "Oh, Lord, I'm going out of my mind.'"

      
'I don't understand.'

      
'Oh, poor dab, he doesn't understand.' There was a quiver in
the last word and she bit down on it. 'Well, let me try and explain it to you,
best I can. When I arrived at the church tonight, there were these two ugly little
brown candles in the holders on the altar ...'

      
Simon shook his head, not wanting to believe this - that he didn't
even have to be there any more for the candles to ...

      
'... that Eddie swears blind were not there when he came in
with this policeman about twenty minutes before. And one was, you know,
smoking
. As if it had quite recently been
.. . blown ... out-'

      
'No,' he said uselessly.

      
'And I ...' She stopped, leaned back, coughed and swallowed. '
... I have never seen a grown man in such a state of terror, squealing that we
had to get them out of the way before the copper saw them. But too scared to go
near the things, he was, so I had to ... take them.'

      
Simon said, croaked, 'Where's the other?"

      
'Tossed one over the hedge,' she said rapidly. 'And the other,
of course, at you.'

      
There were glaring tears of fear and disgust in her eyes. Her
hands gripped the padded chair arms. 'I can't talk any more. Make like a bloody
priest, Simon, for Christ's sake, comfort me.'

      
She dragged three Kleenex from a box on the table, mopped her
eyes. Hesitantly, he went and knelt by her chair, picked up her left hand. It
was soft and warm with sweat, but there were still goose-pimples among the fine
down on her bare arms. Her body began to shake and she snatched her hand away
from him and wailed.

      
'Is that it...?' Cheeks streaked with mascara. 'Simon, my legs
might be written off, I might not be able to feel my fanny, except in my
fevered imagination, but I'm not a bloody porcelain doll, I'm not fragile. And
I don't care if you
are
a fucking
queer; just hold me, can't you?'

      
But he was afraid to touch her, knowing this wasn't only the
candles, that cheap, cosmic conjuring trick. He brought an arm awkwardly around
the back of the chair, meaning to squeeze her shoulder, but she lifted her left
arm and trapped his hand under it and against a breast.

      
'Simon.'

      
'Don't do this,' he said. 'I'm the fucking vicar.'
      
With her right hand, she clasped
his fingers tightly over her breast.

      
'Simon, will you do something for me? Take me back to the Abbey.'

      
Where he knelt, the open stove was pumping heat into his back.
It felt like the doors of hell had opened.
      
'You're joking.' His mouth was dry.

      
'I have these dreams. Recurring dreams. Listen, you must know
this isn't bullshit. It took away my feelings, that place, that Abbey. It took
away ...'

      
She gulped at her drink, held on to the glass and, weighing her
words, said, 'It took away a young, passionate girl, and threw out a crabby
spinster. No, listen!'

      
'I don't want to.' He'd closed his eyes tight, as if that
could seal off the sound of her voice. 'I don't want to know this.'

      
'I was flying, Simon, that night. Higher than I ever thought
you could fly. I can feel it now, I can feel it in places where there isn't any
feeling.'

      
Her breast swelling against his hand. Making him embarrassed,
ashamed, confused. Excited. A little. Flesh was flesh.

      
'All night, when I was lying there under the rubble, I wasn't,
see. I was flying. Not all the time, some of the time I was asleep, but other
times I was awake and flying. Hallucination, they said. But I know I was
flying, and the part of me that can fly, see ... it's still there. I have recurring
dreams. I go back there. Go back. For the healing.'

      
In his head, the scraping of the chair on the stone, the
flurry of air, the clash of metal and stone, metal and stone, metal and ...

      
'No, please ...' Simon dragged his hand away from her breast,
came violently to his feet, harsh tears like acid in his eyes. 'I won't take
you there.'

      
Isabel was rocking in her wheelchair.

      
'Why not? WHY NOT, YOU BASTARD?'

      
And threw the chair into electric motion, crashing her useless
legs into the trestles of the table, reversing, sending the chair whining
across the carpet at Simon.

      
'WHY NOT, YOU CREEPY LITTLE QUEER?'
      
The wheelchair's footplate bit into
his ankles and he was thrown across her, his arms around her neck, his face on
hers, a mingling of desperate tears.

'All I knew was,' Tom said,
'if that session wasn't busted up, and fast, somebody was gonna die.'

      
After barely an hour's sleep he'd started talking, lying there
on his back. I could be asleep, Meryl thought, and he'd still have to talk.

      
'You can't say how you know these fings, but I fink it was
gonna be Moira. Would've been Dave, but Dave pissed off first, got the shakes,
so Moira was in the frame. All down to this Aelwyn geezer. When he died, Dave
was gonna die. How? Maybe he'd beat his head on the stone wall, who can say.
Maybe one of us ... don't bear finking about, none of it.'

      
And he was only thinking about it now, Meryl thought, because he
was here, in this temporary place. He wouldn't let it pollute his home,
threaten Shelley or Vanessa.

      
'Somebody had to be in the frame. Some bastard had to go. We'd
done it all wrong, we'd screwed it, we was letting it dictate the terms.'

      
'It?' Meryl said softly. 'What was "it"?'

      
Tom's big hand roamed her midriff, fingertips like pumice-stone.

      
'Now you're asking, ain'tcher? Whatever it was, it wasn't
gonna let go, and it got into me, right in, after that last break.'
      
'Break?'

      
'Guitar break, darlin'. I'm going over the top like bleeding
John Wayne wiv a sub-machine-gun. Felt good. At the time. But afterwards ...
Warning signs everywhere. Monk shapes. Man wiv two mouths. Had to shake it.
Take it out. Grabbed the Jeep. Forgot about Debs.
Forgot about my fucking wife.'

      
Tom rolled away, lay on his stomach, lay on his anguish, face
in the pillow.

      
'Hiding away,' he mumbled. 'No use. No relief. I need to nail
it, nail it good.'

'Listen. Please. Will you
just listen?' Running his hands through his damp hair. A clock somewhere
chiming ten. Her mother would be back soon. She held the Southern Comfort
bottle upside down, shaking drops into her glass.

      
'Get some Scotch,' she said.

      
'Will you listen?' He'd told her, best he could, about Sile Copesake.

      
She put down the bottle.
      
'Sure.'

      
'You have to realise ... the Abbey cannot cure you. There is
no healing in the Abbey. The Abbey has become a bad, cruel place.'

      
'It's still got part of me.'

      
'And you won't get it back.'

      
'My youth. My energy. My virginity. All the best bits.'
      
'None of it. I promise you. Keep
away. You can only lose what you have left.'
      
'Some loss.'

      
'Isabel, listen to me. You're part of its history now. The
stones cemented in blood? You've heard that? Like attracts like. Blood attracts
blood. Stay away.'

      
'But you're going back. They want you to go back.'

      
'Yes. Sure. I think I'm going back. If the others go back,
I'll go back.'

      
'So how come, Mister Cleverdick Priest, if I go back I can
only lose what I've got left, while you ...'

      
'Because, you stupid cow, what you have left is good. You're a
good person, Isabel. That's the difference. You're worthwhile. Me, what I've got
left is really nothing worth saving. I'm soiled. I'm a piece of shit.'

      
'You're a prat is what you are.'

      
'OK, let me tell you about the candles.'

      
'Eddie said you'd know about them. What are you going to tell
me? You've been followed here by evil satanists who're desecrating your church?'

      
'Sweetheart, evil satanists, I just throw holy water in their
faces and kick their arses. Do you want to hear this? It isn't pretty. It isn't
endearing.'

      
'Do you want to tell me?'

      
'Yes, if it'll get you off my back.'

      
'Get the Scotch then.'

The up side of being in a
wheelchair was the curious power it gave you over intelligent, able-bodied
people. The way it was now, with everybody so politically correct, concerned
about facilities for the disabled, you almost had to be careful not to abuse
the power.

      
Simon St John was the first person who'd called Isabel Pugh a
stupid cow for precisely twenty-one years.

      
That
she found
endearing.

      
That and his longish fair hair, his rueful smile, his bizarre
reputation for slagging people off at their own funerals. And the knowledge,
gleaned from her mother, that in his attic, locked away like a weapon, he kept
an electric bass guitar.

      
And not afraid to use it?

      
Maybe he was. Maybe that was precisely what he was afraid of.
Simon was telling her horror stories. Not pretty. Not endearing. Stories to
convince her that he was a piece of shit. Stories which - but for one crazy,
orgasmic night twenty-one year ago - she would have been rejecting out of hand.
And him. Throwing him out, the pervert.

      
She poured herself more whisky. Bit of a risk. She pretended
to be a heavy drinker (hard-drinking, hard-hitting, bitter, cynical cow) but in
fact it tended to make her sick sooner than she'd care to admit.

      
She said, as conversationally as she could manage, 'And you don't
know who he is, this monk?'

      
Teeth-grindingly determined not to let him know how much -
whether she believed it or not - this was frightening her. And yes, all right,
nauseating her too. Or maybe that was the whisky.

      
Simon said, 'There must have been hundreds of monks over the
centuries. A large proportion of them were probably ...'

      
'Gay.'

      
'Or whatever they called it then. Yes. Buggers,' he said, verbally
scourging himself. 'Sodomites.'
      
'You mean he ...'

      
'Don't even think about it. I've been trying not to think
about it for fourteen years. Which is, I'm afraid, terribly difficult, because
he ...'