Jago (17 page)

‘Well… I suppose they all smiled a lot.’

‘What’s wrong with smiling?’

‘You have to do it with your eyes as well as your lips. You have to mean it. You have to have the choice not to, or it doesn’t count.’

‘You’re just being nasty because I’m interested.’

‘Okay, Haze, you know what you’re doing. But be careful. Never trust anyone who claims to be on speaking terms with God, especially if they’ve got collecting tins. I love you, you know that, and I’m not just saying this to whip up an argument. I hate pointless arguments, you know that too. Just be careful.’

She knew what he would say next, felt ground crumbling under her, and had to be ready to put up a defence. ‘The money? You’re not giving them anything from your sales at the festival?’

She looked down at her tea, reading her fortune in the dregs. ‘No, I pay a flat fee for the table.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty pounds a day.’

‘That’s a hundred pounds for the whole week!’

‘There’s a reduction.’

‘Still…’

‘It’s reasonable, Paul. I might sell out.’

‘Watch out. I don’t want you taken advantage of.’

‘By anyone else, you mean.’

‘That’s not fair.’

The wasp gave in and died. Hazel could chalk up another victim. She left her cup on the freezer and walked away from the verandah, back to the pottery. In the trap, nothing moved.

A
lone in the kitchen, Susan filled a kettle and set it on the cooker. She turned on the gas and pressed the ignition. The ring hissed, but no flame appeared. She tried again. Nothing. The device always was untrustworthy. Rather than root through drawers for matches, she lifted the kettle and held her right forefinger a few inches from the escaping gas. She
thought,
and a spark danced from her fingernail. The gas caught with a rush, and she pulled back her hand swiftly. Setting the kettle on the ring, she felt a tiny satisfaction. Using her Talent in small, useful ways made her feel harmless and empowered.

There was enough earth and stone between her and Jago to damp the interference. Susan knew she was only here, probably only
alive,
because Sir Kenneth Smart, the minister with responsibility, saw ‘defence applications’. During the two minutes of the Gulf War, he had asked David to run a scenario whereby a Talent could be used invisibly to stop the heart of an unnamed subject whose physical profile happened to match exactly that of Saddam Hussein. David dithered until the crisis passed, his file presumably picking up a black asterisk. At the time, Alastair Garnett, the minister’s liaison with
IPSIT
, was around the complex more often, assessing the project’s ten-year performance. David, she knew, was worried almost as much by all this as he was by knowing Jago was still out there.

She had been introduced to Sir Kenneth at various functions, but the constantly updated file on her relayed to him through Garnett was watered down, making her seem little more than a human toy, a barometer that sometimes produced results. Finally, she’d been given this position almost as much as a way of keeping her out of Smart’s clutches—David thought he wanted to slap a uniform on her and train her to dismantle missiles in midair—as of getting near Jago.

Inside
IPSIT
, Jago was a legend, file restricted to all but the Big Three. Susan heard rumours from the other Talents that Anthony Jago was gifted to such a degree that he couldn’t even be classed as human. The man, she’d been given to understand, was something between a god and a monster. The snakes had Lytton with the Agapemone almost from the first, and pored over his reports. From Sir Kenneth’s point of view, Jago was like the chemical weapons Britain had stockpiled. There was no point in making even tentative steps towards deploying him until he could be controlled; in the meantime he was watched but generally left alone.

It was David who decided Susan should be assigned to Jago. He turned her over to the snakes for a few months of training. They had taken her past, with its gaps and aimless drifts, and woven a close-fitting snake-skin, characterizing her as a restless neurotic, given to alternative religions. She was disturbed at how little they had to make up to make her convincing as a potential Sister of the Agapemone. Now, she often measured herself against Wendy Aitken or Jenny Steyning, asking herself how she was different from them, and how she was the same.

She found loose tea in a tin and snagged a teapot with a mentacle, pulling it down from a shelf she couldn’t reach with her hands without using a stepladder.

In the early days, Jago made a few conversions that did not completely take. Most of those would-be disciples were institutionalized or dead, but one or two had been deprogrammed and were staggering towards normality. Susan took part in debriefings, and learned what to expect within the walls of the Agapemone. She wasn’t shocked, although the Great Manifestation sounded like a service she wouldn’t be keen on participating in. With due consideration, the snakes tailored her skin to characterize her as a joiner
and
a loner, hoping she could get into the community but remain isolated within it, free to report back, safe from the more obvious dangers.

Finally, she’d been allowed to examine the Jago file. David talked her through it. ‘Born London, 1942. Not a very comfortable place and time. Both parents dead when he was an infant; raised by his grandmother, an elderly, superstitious woman. Schools, university, church activities, various unspectacular livings. A few odd little scandals. Likes the ladies, I suspect. A pretty standard ecclesiastical CV, I’m told.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ she’d blurted, finding the newspaper clippings.

‘Quite,’ said David. ‘Twenty-eight people dead. A few “accidents”, four murders, the rest suicide. The incidents took place between March and April 1975, within an area of no more than a few square miles.’

‘Inner-city decay?’ she ventured.

‘This was a prosperous suburb. They all went to his church. They were his parishioners. And they died. They weren’t manic-depressive pensioners on the dole, they were middle-class, mostly middle-aged, mostly secure. The man who strangled his sister-in-law was an alderman and on the board of Leeds United. No history of mental problems or violence. He killed her because they were waiting for his wife to come home and she wanted to watch the gardening on BBC2 while he was in the middle of
Morecambe and Wise
on BBC1. They were all like that: one minute, Mr or Mrs Boring, the next Jack the Ripper, Molly the Maniac. Until we came across them, the deaths were down as a blip on the statistics. “Something in the water” was the local scuttlebutt.’

‘You think it was projection?’

‘Right, Susan. Consider the report from his parish council. It’s obvious that from March through April 1975, he was going through a crisis of faith, I suppose you’d call it. The only way he could cope was to spread the load, dissipate some of his agony through the pulpit. The text of one of his sermons is in the file. It’s pretty cracked. The earth breaking open to disgorge clouds of wasps. Another man might have reached for paracetamol, but he had options not open to another man. If you want some light reading, there’s a sheaf of suicide notes in there. Mostly God-told-me-tos, but some are peculiarly elaborate. It’s not just Goodbye, cruel world. There’s visionary stuff. It compares interestingly with the sermons. We’ve always known a Talent like this could come along.’

She’d been impressed, and suddenly understood why David went along with Garnett’s D-notices and cover stories. Jago could bring bad publicity for the field. The last thing they needed were fearless vampire killers hunting out Talents.

‘We first turned him up as we turned you up, random applications of Rhine tests to students. He was told he was a Talent, but that’s not the interpretation he’s chosen. He has followers. Disciples. It’s well within his power to perform what might easily be classed as miracles. What do you think he thinks he is?’

The kettle whistled, and she poured boiling water into the teapot. She was shaking, remembering the cold seriousness David had radiated.

From somewhere, Garnett found Janet Speke, a fellow traveller with the Agapemone who was, after a traumatic childhood and a nightmare marriage, gradually jumping through the hoops that would turn her into Sister Janet. She was living in Achelzoy, attending services at the Agapemone, her petition for initiation obviously under consideration. Garnett arranged for her to be Janet’s upstairs neighbour and Susan did the rest. It was guilt-makingly easy to get close to the woman, and, through her, to pick up a crash course in the beliefs of Anthony William Jago. She was introduced to Mick Barlowe, who acted like Jago’s appointed representative on Earth, and attended some of Jago’s services, feeling power welling as he spoke. She’d met other Talents, but Jago was giant, a monster.

Janet was guaranteed a place at the Agapemone by virtue of her sincere belief in the Beloved Presence. Susan could only counterfeit so much, and Garnett thought it best she not appear too fanatical. To get even with her Sister, Susan had to have something else to bulk out her obviously shadowy faith. That was simple. Susan slipped to Janet, who most certainly revealed to Mick, that she’d recently realized a substantial sum through the sale of her dead parents’ house. The Agapemone practised sharing of communal property, so her savings were even more welcome than she was.

Sister Janet was selected by Beloved for a Great Manifestation, and Susan wondered gratefully why the honour had passed her by. How far could Beloved see through her? He must be able to read her to some extent, although he always gave the impression he was so close to Heaven that earthly matters were miles beneath him. Jago never took an interest in Susan, not in the way he took an interest in some of the other Sisters. Of course she was relieved, but at some level his inattention peeved her. What did the others have that she did not? She liked to believe the factor the Sister-Loves shared was a lack, not a quality. Jago towered above his devotees, but of all the Brethren only Susan could measure herself against him. He saw her, if at all, as furniture or an ornament, never speaking directly to her. Her dilettante researches into the house’s store of books and papers were tolerated so blithely that Susan assumed word must have come down from on high to let her get on with it. Despite everything, she knew Jago was watching her.

She poured her tea and added milk. She raised the steaming cup cautiously to her mouth. When she sucked in a mouthful, it was cold as ice. The heat had drained away somewhere.

I
t was the hour of the wolf, between sunset and night, dark enough indoors to have one or two lights on. They had not exchanged more than a few words since the afternoon, but Paul felt he should be here for the unpacking. It was important to Hazel, and he needed to understand her work better, to get back close to her. She didn’t complain about his being there, but she wasn’t welcoming either. The bricks were pleasantly warm to the touch, but there might still be dangerously hot spots. Hazel slipped on the large gauntlets. She made and unmade floppy fists and scrabbled at the top of the kiln, pulling the key brick out of the arch. She worked quickly and precisely, like a film of someone building a wall run backwards, pulling out the outer bricks and stacking them. Rapidly, she stripped away the bright orange outer layer, baring the core of white firebricks.

The clay-stained portable radio was tuned in to a Top Twenty show. She hummed along with bland, repetitive pop. She was trying to be matter-of-fact, but he could read her well enough to know she was wound tight. There was tension between them from the afternoon argument and other as yet unspoken grievances, but mainly she was worried about this kiln. Paul had the idea this was crucial for her, the one that decided whether she stuck with pottery and made something of it, or wrote it off as a passing enthusiasm and decided to do something else. He hoped the kiln would turn out well, not just for Hazel but for himself. If she were jogged out of her mood, he might have a chance of smoothing over the fracture between them.

Both were sweating. The double doors were wide open and the comparative cool of the evening had come, but the kiln shed was heavy with retained heat. He felt a headache coming. In her tatty jeans and clay-caked T-shirt, Hazel looked very gamine. She crouched on the box in front of the kiln door, easing out the first of the firebricks. As she went up on her toes, callused heels rose from flip-flops. Paul squashed the impulse to hug her from behind. The news was on now, and she wasn’t humming. Somerset was mentioned: the hippie convoy had been moved on again. Bricks piled up. The interior of the kiln was in shadow.

‘The torch,’ she said.

He handed her the rubber-coated torch, and she shone a beam into the cavity. Pots glistened and, as he looked over her shoulder, he saw unusual colours. Blues and greens. Not, thank God, browns.

‘It looks okay,’ he said, wishing it so.

She made a noncommittal noise, and passed back the torch.

‘Let me help.’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘but be careful to stack them in order. They’re numbered and lettered, see.’

He took hot bricks from her with bare hands and put them on the pile. She had laid out boards earlier to receive pots as they came out of the kiln.

Finally, the kiln was open. Hazel slid back off the box and stood away, staring in with an unreadable expression. Paul looked, too. A wave of invisible heat struck his face. It looked as good as anything she had ever done, and better than most of her output. He reached for a cup near the front, but she took his hand before he could touch it.

‘Fingers,’ she said. ‘Be careful. It’s hot.’

With a gauntlet, she pulled the pot out and held it up. An intricate design ringed the rim, vaguely Greek, white on blue.

‘It’s a success, isn’t it?’

She smiled tightly. ‘Yes, better than expected.’

She was puzzled, though. She put the cup on the nearest board, and started taking out other pots.

Paul knew she was better at throwing than glazing, that she always had problems with her gloss firings. Her usual complaint was that everything she did came out brown, no matter what it was when it went in. Now, as he saw from the cups, plates, jugs, bottles and bowls on the boards, she’d got it right. Her design was more imaginative, more richly coloured. It was as if she had finally discovered how to do the trick.