Jago (72 page)

‘I’m sorry about Camilla here, but I don’t work as well as I used to.’

The nurse frowned.

‘I’m a Century Baby,’ the old lady said, ‘and I should like to see out the millennium.’

Camilla touched a button and the window rolled up, shutting out the glare of the sun. Susan wanted to sleep again.

‘We’ll talk when you wake up,’ the old lady said. ‘And then I’ll drop you off somewhere.’

T
he thesis was not what he had expected when he first planned it, but nothing ever was.
The Secular Apocalypse
was finished, typed and due back from the binders. Next week, he would submit. And,
viva voce
or not, it would be over. If anything was ever really over.

To celebrate, he took them out for an afternoon, going to the aquarium and for a walk along the seafront. The sea calmed Hazel down, and she could look at it for hours, even in the November cold. It was late for seaside holidays and there was almost no one around. Pie shops and arcades were shut up for the winter.

They sat on a bench and watched Hazel playing down by the tide. She was wearing the black riding helmet she had picked up somewhere and would never be without.

‘Watch out,’ he shouted, ‘you’ll get your shoes wet.’

She turned and stuck two fingers up to him, giggling. He wondered where she got that from. She was a fast study, and learned new things every day. The waves foamed an extra two feet when they came back, and swarmed around her new shoes, soaking her to the socks. She laughed. There were children—
other
children, he could not help thinking—on the beach, and, despite their disapproving parents, they let Hazel join in building a sandcastle.

‘She’s such a happy little girl,’ Patch said, squeezing his arm. ‘She wasn’t at all like that the first time round. She had moods.’

Paul remembered Hazel’s moods. His tongue rubbed his capped tooth. Living without pain was strange.

Hazel treated Paul and Patch as her mother and father, demoting her real parents to distant, barely tolerated relatives. It was embarrassing, and awkward in all sorts of ways. The couple with the sandcastle-building children twittered among themselves, discussing the peculiar family they had come across. The father said something about Hazel being ‘not all there’, and they grimaced, as if the condition were infectious, liable to spread to their precious kiddies.

The play got boisterous, and Hazel was pushing a little boy. Hed probably said something about her sacred hat. She was very sensitive about it.

‘Careful, Haze,’ Paul shouted, ‘remember you’re bigger than them.’

She made a sorry face and laughed again, running off. She’d be back.

‘How are the tutors coming along?’ he asked.

‘Expensive,’ Patch said.

‘I’ll try to get some more money, but…’

She pressed against his shoulder. ‘No, Paul, I wasn’t complaining. It’s not your fault.’

He didn’t argue.

‘Sometimes I try to think of it, and give up. Learning everything all over again, from Cuh Ah Tuh to GCSEs. I wouldn’t have the patience.’

Hazel’s memory had been wiped like a videotape. She’d come out of Alder newly born. Now, four months later, she was about eight years old, gaining fast.

‘She’s starting to lose interest in horses, and think about boys.’

Paul shivered. That could be complicated. And Patch knew it.

‘It’s not easy being an eight-year-old who menstruates,’ she said. ‘And she’s always breaking things.’

Mike Bleach had sent Hazel some modelling clay, and she was sculpting little figures. Maybe she would grow up to be a potter again. Probably not. Very occasionally, Hazel would do or say something that proved she was still the same girl, but she’d been reduced to nothing and now was building herself up in different ways. Her passion for horses was something new. Paul had given in, and arranged for her to have elementary riding lessons on the Downs. She looked like a lady giant among so many plummyvoiced little girls on ponies.

‘You know what was over there?’ Patch said, nodding to a bright new seafront gift shop.

Paul did. The Adullam. Like everyone in the world, Paul knew a lot more now about Anthony William Jago. The newspapers still wouldn’t leave him alone, and there would be a wave of books, films and television programmes breaking soon.

‘I took Haze there last week. She wasn’t afraid. There was nothing.’

‘Of course. Jago is dead.’

He remembered the man with a hole in his face. A hole he had made.

‘They never found his body.’

‘He’s dead. No ghosts.’

‘No.’

The Agapemone had proved, at the financial inquest, to be extraordinarily wealthy. However, the Lord God Eternal obviously hadn’t felt a need to make a will, and so the estate was tied up in red tape at the Circumlocution Office for the next century. The Abode of Love was run from an address in East Molesey. Its head was Sister Janet Speke, whose lawyers were putting in a very strong bid for the funds. However, even if she did get the millions, she’d find them insufficient to settle the thousands of damages claims still outstanding against the Agapemone. She was in hiding, under multiple death threats, but issued frequent press releases in an attempt to have Jago canonized. She had come over well on
Newsnight,
but he understood her congregation was tiny.

Paul had been interviewed by three authors working on different books about Jago, Alder and the disaster. And researchers from Granada Television, planning ‘a major docu-drama’ about ‘the British Jonestown’ which would apportion blame and point the finger of guilt at the government, the police and profit-hungry festival organizers. He’d lied to all of them, as had the overwhelming majority of the survivors. Those who tried to tell exactly what happened—what they thought happened—were under treatment. The rest were like Hazel, mercifully forgetful blanks. The prevailing theory was that some new designer drug had cleaned out their heads, and the tabloids were still hunting for ‘Pusher X’ who was supposed to have distributed the mindwipe dope. Mrs Penelope Steyning, mother of two ‘Alder children’, was the chairperson of a pressure group lobbying for more government assistance. Gerald Taine, the bruiser who had thrown Paul out of the Manor House, was awaiting trial for several murders he might or might not actually have committed during the riots. He turned out to be a decorated Falklands veteran who was rumoured to have garotted three sixteen-year-old Argentine prisoners during a lengthy ‘interrogation’.

Unable to cope with maybe three thousand faceless corpses, the Press had singled out one of the dead to represent the rest, and splashed Allison Conway’s picture, suitably airbrushed into a semblance of dusky glamour, on all their front pages. The chief constable of Avon and Somerset had resigned, the conduct of his force under investigation. Legislation was passing through Parliament, thanks to the tireless lobbying of Sir Kenneth Smart, the member who’d adopted Alder as his cause. Sir Kenneth wanted to straitjacket the organizers of pop festivals, to increase penalties for drug trafficking, and to provide for a permanent emergency disaster force to be kept on standby. And there were inquisitorial committees looking into the affairs of every fringe religious group in the country, from the Moonies and the Scientologists through to the Quakers and the Unitarians. Relatives were still waiting for a decision about compensation. Peter Gabriel, the Heat and Loud Stuff (the sell-out reincarnation of Loud Shit) had done a charity concert at Wembley Stadium to raise funds for the victims of Alder, while a skunk group called Pusher X had cut a ‘Live at Alder’ album. None of the published lists of the dead mentioned James Lytton, although, to be fair, it was frighteningly easy to get lost in the fine print sea of names. There were more than a hundred unidentified, unclaimed, unloved dead. Paul heard that Edward Gilpin and Jeremy Maskell had lost fathers, but otherwise were trying to pull through. It hadn’t rained in the West Country until late August, but now the weather was back to drizzly normal. Last week, Paul had heard someone tell an Alder festival joke.

‘Is that woman looking at us?’ Patch asked.

‘Ignore it,’ he said, glancing.

A woman in a hat and coat was leaning against a railing by the gift shop. Paul knew her at once.

He wondered if she’d come to see where the Adullam had been, or to see them.

Hazel came back, out of puff, and Patch fixed her scarf more firmly around her neck, kissing the red tip of her nose and making her giggle. Hazel’s breath was a cloud of frost that misted Patch’s glasses.

She broke away from her sister and hugged Paul impulsively, planting a cold, wet kiss on his cheek. These were the worst moments, especially when Patch was around. Hazel was still twenty-one on the outside.

‘Look at the lady,’ she said, pointing, excited.

Hazel had a blue blotch, like a permanent bruise, on her ribs, above her heart. It was her only physical scar from Alder.

When they looked again, the woman was gone.

Wiping her glasses, Patch felt left out of it. She could tell Paul and Hazel were keeping something from her. Sometimes, in bed, quietly, she would try to draw out of him what
really
had happened. Paul was afraid one day he would try to tell her.

‘Who was she?’ Patch asked.

‘She’s my fairy godmother,’ Hazel said, eyes quickening.

T
he germ of this novel first appeared in 1979, before Anthony Jago founded the Agapemone. The initial, now unrecognizable, idea arose in the Common Room of the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex, during conversations with David Cross and Susan Rodway—both of whom have wound up lending their names to characters certainly very different from themselves—and has stuttered almost to life at several times over the last twelve years. So, forgive me, but the list of people who need to be thanked is annoyingly long. First, a credit to Charles Mander, author of
The Reverend Prince and His Abode of Love
(EP Publishing, 1976), who drew my attention to the nineteenth-century story of the Agapemone, which—in historical actuality—was founded in Spaxton, Somerset, in 1846. The Great Manifestation, as described here, was the chief sacrament of the Reverend Henry James Prince’s community, although without the psychokinetic fireworks, and post addressed to ‘the Lord God’ was duly delivered to Mr Prince.

This debt to an individual leads to another to an organization. In 1980, I was involved in the production of Charles’s play based on the history of the Agapemone, produced by Sheep Worrying Theatre of Bridgwater, Somerset. This group later staged my own
My One Little Murder Can’t Do Any Harm,
which first took me to the invented village of Alder and introduced the characters of Edwin Winthrop, Catriona Kaye and Irena Dubrovna. Thanks are due to the cast of that production for adding flesh to my 1920s flashback people: Dave Butland, Kevin Freeman, Sally Grieve, Pat Hallam, Elizabeth Hickling,

Susannah Hickling, Dave Kieghron, Tim Mander, David Newton, Councillor Brian Smedley (who also wrote the music for the various original songs that crop up throughout this text), Catriona Toplis. Various people connected with Sheep Worrying also deserve nods for being around in Somerset in the 1980s, notably Angela Leeman and Andrew Napthine for taking me to a muddy Glastonbury Festival in 1982, Alex Luckes and Jon Lyon for being there when Brian stood on Burrow Mump and declared himself King of Wessex, Eugene Byrne, for numerous small points of detail, plus Lynne Cramer, Alan Gadd, Ed Grey, Rob Hackwill, Rodney Jones, Sarah Marks and Robin Tucker for being in various incarnations of Club Whoopee, and for all past and present members of various incarnations of Sheep Worrying Enterprises from 1980 onwards. And, of course, my parents, Bryan and Julia Newman, who own and run the Pottery, Aller (drop in and buy a coffee set) which is the physical inspiration for the Pottery, Alder.

Other, major debts incurred during the writing of
Jago
are owed to Bryan Ansell, Clive Barker, Iain Banks, Scott Bradfield, Anne Billson, Saskia Baron, Dave Bischoff, Monique Brocklesby, Faith Brooker, John Brosnan, Steve Caplin, Ramsey Campbell, Yer Man Dave Carson, Richard Combs, John Clute, Stewart Crosskell, Meg Davis, Phil Day, Elaine di Campo, Alex Dunn, Malcolm Edwards, Dennis Etchison, Chris Evans, Fiona Ferguson, Jo Fletcher, Nigel Floyd, Chris Fowler, Carl Ford, Neil Gaiman, Kathy Gale (the editor, not the secret agent), Steve Gallagher, Gamma, David Garnett, Lisa Gaye, John Gilbert, Charles L. Grant, Colin Greenland, Guy Hancock, Judith Hanna, Phil Hardy, Antony Harwood, Will Hatchett, Rob Holdstock, David Howe, Kate Hughes, Maxim Jakubowski, Stefan Jaworzyn, Vanessa Jeffcoat, Nick John, Alan Jones, Neil Jones, Steve Jones, Mr Juicy-Juicy, Roz Kaveney, Leroy Kettle, Mark Kermode PhD, Garry Kilworth, Nigel Kneale, Karen Krizanovich, Joe R. Lansdale, Steve Laws, Samantha Lee, Laurence Lemer, James Litton, Amanda Lipman, Nigel Matheson, Paul J. McAuley, Professor Norman McKenzie (who was certainly not expecting things to turn out this way), Tom Monteleone, Mark Morris, Cindy Moul, Colin Murray, Sasha Newman, Peter Nicholls, Phil Nutman, Julian Petley, Linda Pickersgill, David Pirie, Terry Pratchett, Humphrey Price, David Pringle, Dave Reeder, Steve Roe, Nick Royle, Geoff Ryman, Clare Saxby, Adrian Sibley, Dean and Sally Skilton, Cathy Smedley (gurgle gurgle), Brian Stableford, Christa Stadtler, Alex Stewart, Janet Storey, Dave and Danuta Tamlyn, Jax Thomas, Steve Thrower, Tom Tunney, Lisa Tuttle, Karl Edward Wagner, Maureen Waller, Ingrid von Essen, Lucy Parsons, Mike and Di Wathen, Susan Webster, Chris Wicking, John Wrathall, Miranda Wood and Jack Yeovil. Finally, I’d like to thank those who’ve requested they remain anonymous but who provided the bulk of Mike Toad’s jokes, including one David Roper told me about Andrew Lloyd Webber that was too vomitous even for Mike to use in print.

KIM NEWMAN

Crouch End, March 1991

‘H
ere are three stories featuring characters and settings which first appeared in
Jago…

‘Ratting’ first appeared in
New Crimes 2
(1993), edited by Maxim Jakubowski; it uses a couple of
Jago
characters as a way of retelling an anecdote I heard someone tell while I was at university. At the time, I assumed it was an urban legend—note how many urban legends take place in the countryside—like the dead granny on the roofrack or the naked teenagers at the surprise birthday party, and I’d hear it over and over. As it happens, it isn’t and I haven’t. So I thought I’d preserve it in fiction.