The Chalice (52 page)

      
'Just a hill?' Powys couldn't believe this.

      
'Indeed,' said the Bishop. 'Just a hill.'

      
'So what are your feelings about this plan to restrict public
access?'

      
The Bishop smiled. 'Good talking to you, Joe. Hope to see you
up there.'

Diane went over to sit in
her usual red typist's chair. She looked pale as watered milk.

      
'Go on.' Sam turned on an extra bar of the electric fire and
moved to the corner where Paul kept the tea and coffee and Diane's chocolate,
everything washed and neatly arranged. 'What did the slimy bastard want?'

      
'Me for Christmas,' said Diane dolefully. 'At Bowermead. They
have a gathering most years, and the awful Boxing Day hunt's been revived, so ...'

      
'Has it now? Well, well. Going, are we?'

      
'Bowermead? For Christmas? Gosh, no. I might never get out
again. They still have sort of dungeons underneath. Anyway, Juanita might be
out of hospital by Christmas. She'll need a lot of help.'

      
'Right,' said Sam. 'Right. Soya cream in your chocolate?'

      
'Perhaps not. Sam ...'

      
'Good job, we're clean out of soya cream. Sony?'
      
'Does anything ever, you know, ever
happen to you? The way it does to some people. Quite a ... a bigger percentage
of people than normal, I suppose. In Glastonbury.' Boxing Day hunt, he was
thinking. Got to have a go at this one. Especially after that 'MP elect'
bollocks. Make Christmas worthwhile, for once. Ring Hughie. Get some of the old
crew in from Bristol.

      
'Sorry, Diane .. . ?' God, but she looked tired. Wanted looking
after, this kid.

      
Diane watched him, unblinking. 'I was saying, did you ever
have ... did anything ever happen to you that. .. that you couldn't explain?
Like .. .'

      
'Oh, there's a whole lot of stuff I can't explain.' Sam dumped
two spoonfuls of drinking chocolate into a mug.
      
'Why folks will cheat and lie for a
few quid that isn't gonner make them happy. Why it's always the best people who
wind up dead before their time. Why otherwise humane, civilised folks'll go out
and make little animals run till they can't run no more and then watch 'em get
ripped apart. I don't include your old man in this, mind. I can understand why
he does it. It's because he's soulless and pig-thick.'

      
He pulled a cigarette out of the packet.

      
'Sorry. Shouldn't talk like that. He is your dad.'

      
Diane shrugged. She had her hands clasped between her knees.
Every few moments her shoulders would shake like she was fighting off flu.

      
'I know what you're asking,' Sam wanted to put his arms around
her. If he could get them all the way round. 'I'm just avoiding the question.'

      
Not the time to come on with the arms. Probably never would
be, after he said what he had to say. Shit. Should have realised he'd have to
deal with this at some point. Should've been prepared. Course, if he hadn't
grown to like her so much, as a person, it wouldn't have been a problem. In
fact he usually got quite a buzz out of laying it on people in this headcase
town - the people who'd looked at him, with his tangled, shoulder-length hair
and his bit of an earring, and made certain assumptions which were way, way out.

      
Both of them veggies, too. They agreed totally about animal
rights - although Diane was a bit more discreet about it than Sam was; didn't
seem to feel quite the same urge to go and beat the living shit out of a
huntsman. And, OK, she had this incomprehensible appetite for these totally disgusting
carob-covered cereal bars.

      
Beyond this, it got more difficult.

      
'Look at me,' Diane shook again. 'I've been like this all morning.
Couldn't open the shop.'
      
'You seen a doctor?'

      
Diane smiled thinly. 'Not anything a doctor could deal with.
I've spent most of the morning sitting in front of the fire trying to deal with
it.'

      
'Archer.'

      
'Sam, a sort of... blind hatred comes over me.'
      
'Fair enough.'

      
'And when it does, things start to happen. Awfully strange things.
In the room or wherever I am. Sometimes I can almost see it, see my own rage. I
suppose it's always been there. He just touches something in me and sets it off.'

      
'Seems a perfectly normal reaction to me. We are talking about
Archer Ffitch here.'

      
'When I was a child, I got a sort of perverse comfort from it
I would hug it to me. My hatred. Hug it to me like a dog. I think it's ... it
happened during the Glastonbury First meeting when he unveiled his plans for the
Tor. It was as if the Tor knew what he was planning and hated him for it, and
all that hatred is coming into me.'

      
'Ah,' said Sam, wishing he was out of here. 'Right.'
      
'And that's why the Tor's been
coming through to me since I was a baby. The Tor knew what was going to happen as
we approached the Millennium. It was all pre-ordained.

Why Violet - Dion Fortune -
was chosen to be my spirit guide. Because I have to stop them destroying the
Tor.'
      
'Diane, they don't wanner destroy the
Tor, they just wanner restrict…'

      
'It's the same thing.' Rage dancing in Diane's eyes. 'The Tor,
the road scheme. It's all anti-spiritual. You ask Woolly. Woolly was in the
shop this morning talking, you know, end-of the world scenario. What happens in
Glastonbury affects the spiritual life of the entire nation. This is the
cradle.'

      
'Diane, if Woolly runs out of dope it's an end-of-the-world
scenario.' Sam handed her the mug. 'Drink your chocolate'

      
Dammit, most situations you could work with people for years
and they never needed to know where you stood on the big issues, which way you
voted, etc.

      
Sam took a big breath, pulled on a handful of his long hair. Looked
at Diane and kept seeing Rufus the fox cub.

      
'The thing is ... I've got a big problem with all this, look. I'm
like .. . coming from a different direction, right? Like, far as I can make out,
you believe in just about the whole bit - UFOs, God, ghosts, the Holy Grail.'

      
'You have a way', Diane lowered her eyes, 'of making it all
sound frightfully tawdry.'

      
'Whereas, I ... I'm like… how can I put this ... an atheist,'
Sam said.

      
Diane looked up and sought his eyes. This time it was Sam who
looked away.

      
From what seemed a long distance, he heard Diane whispering,
'You don't believe ... in anything?'

      
'I believe in looking after the planet and, you know, each other,
and not being cruel to animals. Or even people. Most of them.'

      
'You don't even believe in the possibility of anything?'

      
'I believe in cleaning up your own mess. I believe in being
kind. But as for ... you know…'

      
Diane said, very faintly, 'The otherworldly.'

      
'If you like. I think, quite honestly, I think it's all bollocks.
The Grail, the Holy bloody Thorn. The Abbey…very pretty, look, but… it's all
bollocks.'

      
In Glastonbury, he thought, you were allowed to be a Christian,
a pagan, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim and maybe, at a pinch, a liberal kind of
agnostic. Anything, but...

      
'Where I'm coming from,' Sam said, 'this is a town built on
bollocks.'

      
Big,
big
patch of
quiet.
      
Then Diane just said, 'Oh.'

      
And for that moment, and maybe the one after it, Sam Daniel
wished he did believe in the resurrection of the body and the forgiveness of
sins and the shroud of Turin and the holy virgin of Knock and the men in silver
suits, the whole bloody shebang.

      
Diane was sitting there looking down at her clasped hands. She
hadn't touched her chocolate.

      
It occurred to Sam, for the first time, seeing her half in
shadow, eyes downcast, that she was actually kind of beautiful.

      
Diane stood up. 'I'd better go.'

      
No. Don't go. I could
have second thoughts.

      
'Yeah,' he said. 'OK, then.'

      
At the door, he said, 'It's coming along really well, Diane.
The Avalonian.
If this was for real, I
reckon we could have it on the streets before Christmas.'

      
Diane said very quietly, 'It's all for real. Everything's part
of everything else, and it's all for real.'

SIX

Small Things

Juanita sat in the bedside
chair and stared at her hands until her vision went blurred. 'There,' said
Karen, the nurse. 'Isn't medical science wonderful?'

      
She was too upset to reply. Every time they unwrapped the
dressings, the hands seemed to look more alien, the transplants in her palms
the revolting pink of an old-fashioned condom. And shockingly clean, devoid of
lines.

      
At first they'd looked like the hands of an excavated corpse
which someone had joined to her wrists. Frankenstein hands. Now they were
claws. She'd shrieked at the doctor,
I
can't move them, oh Christ I can't bend the fingers.
The doctor said they'd
become more flexible. In time. And the pink would fade. In time. As would the
pain.

      
Oh, sure, she knew she was lucky. Knew it could have been so
much worse. If she hadn't covered her face, if she hadn't been wearing the
Afghan.

      
And, just for a moment, she'd imagined how it would have been
the other way round. If she'd died in flames and Jim had been left with hands
which wouldn't hold a paintbrush, wouldn't paint with any delicacy perhaps ever
again. Jim gazing into his beloved dusk and watching it recede.

      
About to cry, Juanita sat up in the chair. Think angry.

      
What beautiful hands you
have, Juanita.

      
'Take it easy, now,' said Karen. She'd come on duty at four,
as usual. Juanita's hands had been unwrapped since ten. She'd got dressed for
the occasion, in the off-the-shoulder lemon top which Jim liked so much and a
long, Aztec-patterned cotton skirt which lay easy on her flayed thighs.

      
Juanita looked up into the small face full of professional interest.
A couple of times they'd sent a trauma counsellor to see her. At least, she'd
claimed to be a trauma counsellor, her questions reflecting a certain concern
for Juanita's mental-health. After all, what kind of normal person would hurl herself
at the blazing, flaking corpse of even a close friend?

      
She said to Karen, 'Did you find out anything about Ruth
Dunn?'

      
Karen looked even more anxious, then her face went blank.
'Talk about it later.'

      
'Come on, Karen, what did you find out?'

      
'Where's she now, Juanita? This woman.'

      
'Glastonbury.'

      
'Not in a hospital?'

      
'No.'

      
'Private clinic?'
      
'Nothing like that.'
      
'Thank Christ for that.'

      
'Jesus, Karen…'

      
'I'll see you later. Sister'll be on my back. We'll have a
chat.'

      
Juanita glowered at the uniformed back. A hospital was like a
police state. She thought about discharging herself, walking down to the
motorway intersection. Holding up her weird hands to thumb a lift. Frighten the
lorry drivers.

      
Then she sank back into the hard chair and wept.

San paced the office. He
had to do something. Couldn't just sit around like a spare prick. Sod it. He
snatched up the phone and rang Hughie Painter, Central Somerset's most experienced
hunt-saboteur.