The Cure of Souls (5 page)

‘I can’t… I can’t tour.’ Face it: he couldn’t even
play
all that well any more.

‘Right, let’s see, now.’ Prof went on like he hadn’t heard. ‘It would have to be as support, the first time. But supporting somebody
tasteful
– don’t worry about that, it can be arranged. REM, Radiohead… all these guys admit to being influenced by your work. You’re a cult… OK, a minor cult. But a cult is still a cult…’

‘Prof?’ Lol was resting the guitar on his trainers, his fingers among its machine-heads. ‘Be honest – you don’t even know that’s true, do you?’

‘The hell does that matter? Laurence, I apologize in advance if this sounds immodest, but if I’m the one spreading it around, everyone is going to believe it, therefore it
becomes
the truth.’

‘I can’t tour.’ Lol stood with his back against the partition wall again, his breathing becoming harder at the very thought of
on the road
.

‘You
can
tour! You
need
to tour… this will kick-start your confidence. You’re just using this therapy shit as some kind of
buffer against the real world. You’re institutionalized and you don’t even know it. It’s like… like so many schoolteachers are really just kids who were afraid to leave school. Believe me, Laurence.’

And part of Lol did believe him, because Kenneth ‘Prof’ Levin had been down in the half-lit caverns, too – in his case alcoholism, the destruction of a good marriage.

Lol recalled the buzz he’d felt when he’d had the message to call Prof, a couple of weeks ago – around the same time he was concluding that knowing the difference between cognitive therapy and humanistic therapy didn’t make either of them any more effective. In fact, the day after his senior tutor had told him, not with irony but with something approaching pride:
Therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the third millennium. And we’re the priests
– the voice slick with self-belief, after a few glasses in the wine bar down the road from the college.
Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness
. This senior tutor, this high priest, was younger than Lol, maybe thirty-four.

‘All right!’ Prof Levin had finally backed off. ‘Enough. We’ll talk about this again. For starters, we just do the album.’

‘
Album?
’

Prof had spread his arms magnanimously. With his own studio set up, he was at last able to make these decisions without consulting anyone in a suit.

And Lol had thanked him for the offer – very profusely, obviously, because having Prof Levin produce an album for you was kind of like having Spielberg take on your screenplay – but then pointed out, reasonably enough, that he had only four songs: not quite
half
an album.

Prof had smiled beatifically through his white, nail-brush beard.

‘You have the whole summer, my son. This summer… is yours.’

And he had shambled smugly away to his room in the adjacent cottage, leaving Lol to switch everything off before climbing to his own camp bed in one of the old haylofts.

Like he was really going to sleep after this?

Instead, he’d stumbled out, bemused, into the warm night, to commune with the Frome. But the river was already asleep and that was how he ended up following the track running down a line of poplars and out the other side, close to where the hopkilns stood. The sky was now obscured by a tangle of trees, and he was aware of a high, piercing hum that somehow translated itself into
Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness
.

Not exactly the wisest analogy to hang on Lol who, in his late teens, had seen his parents find religion, watched them being swept away on waves of foaming fundamentalist madness, causing them to reject the Godless kid playing the devil’s music – the kid who would always remember coming home one weekend to find that those two small mantelpiece photos of himself as a toddler had been replaced by framed postcards of Jesus. Which was probably how it had started – the alienation.

And then – in just this last year – a surprise development. Lol’s fear and resentment of the Church had been fatally compromised by encounters with a priest called Merrily Watkins who lived and worked, as it happened, less than twenty miles from here… but if this was another reason for coming back to Herefordshire he wasn’t going to admit it, least of all to himself. Their last meeting had followed events so dark that maybe she wouldn’t want to be reminded.

He felt a sharp pain below his knee and stopped, feeling suddenly out of breath. He realized he’d been running, like he sometimes did to try and overtake a dilemma, to put an impending decision behind him. He must have veered from the path and now he was in the middle of an unknown wood and there were brambles tangled around his legs.

Wrong turning, somehow. It was easy enough to do, even in the daytime, even in countryside you thought you knew. In the middle of this unknown, unmanaged wood, snagged with hawthorn, he heard his T-shirt rip, and he stood there, shaking his head.

Lost again. Story of his life.

Knight’s Frome was a scattered hamlet with no real centre, so it wasn’t as if he could look around for a cluster of lights. Or even listen for the river. All he could hear was the humming: a plaintive sound that rose and fell and pulsed as if a melody was trying to escape.

Lol turned, walked back the way he’d come, putting a hand up to his glasses, pushing them tight onto the bridge of his nose; losing your specs was not something you did in a wood at night. When he took his hand away, he saw the trees and bushes had fallen away and there was now a clear space up ahead. A small yellow light appeared, not too bright, a little unsteady, with a black cone above it: a witch’s hat. The kiln tower again.

When the sky was clear of branches, a trailing scarf of brightness told him which direction was north… and then it was suddenly split by something black and rigid that made him reel back, startled. He slipped and stumbled, went down on one knee before it – waiting for the thing to move, bend down, snatch him up, hit him.

Nothing moved. Even the humming had stopped. Lol scrambled warily to his feet.

It was only a pole, half as thick as a telegraph pole, but not tall enough to carry telegraph wires or electricity cables – although it did support wires of some kind. To avoid it, he took a couple of steps to the right. No trees or bushes stood in the way and the ground was level.

A second black pole appeared, rearing hard against the northern sky, and this one had a short crosspiece like – his first thought – a gibbet. From it hung something limp and shrivelled, the skeletal spine of a dead garland; when he passed between the two poles, his bare elbow brushed against the remains with a dry, papery crackle.

Now he could see the extent of it: dozens of black poles against the pale night, in lines to either side of him across the barren ground, most of them with crosspieces, some connected by dark wires overhead. It was like a site laid out for a mass crucifixion. Between the wires, he could still see the yellow kiln-house light,
perhaps two hundred yards away. And the nearness of the kiln told him what this was… or
should
have been.

It was high summer and these poles should be loaded with foliage, the ripening bines high on the wires, rippling with soft green hop-cones. But this whole scene was in black and white and grey, and there was an awning of silence: no owls, no scurryings in the undergrowth. No undergrowth, in fact.

The silence, Lol thought, was like a studio silence: soft, dry, flat and localized. The air seemed cooler now, and he could feel goosebumps prickling on his bare arms as he ventured tentatively into a hop-yard where no hops grew, along an alley of winter-bleak, naked hop-poles, a place as desolate as the stripped-back bed of someone recently dead. He felt a little scared now. There was no contented cattle-breath around this place – it felt less like a memory of the womb than a premonition of the grave.

No reason to stay. Lol started to turn away. Afterwards, he couldn’t remember whether these thoughts of death had occurred in the moment before the humming began again, or whether it was the combination of the sound and the stark setting that conveyed the sense of mourning, loss, lamentation. The bleak keening seemed to be around and above him, as if it was travelling along those black wires, as if they were vibrating with some kind of plangent sorrow.

And then, as he turned, there was another noise – a crispy swishing, like dried leaves in a tentative breeze, like the noise when he’d touched the remains of the dead hop-bine, only continuous – and a pale smear blurred the periphery of his vision like petroleum jelly spread on a camera lens.

Lol saw her.

It was like she was swimming through the night towards him, from the far end of the corridor of crosses.

No sense of unreality here, that was the worst of it. It was not dreamlike, not hallucinatory.

She stopped between the poles, legs apart, leaning back, one moment all shadows, and then shining under the northern sky:
a thin, white woman garlanded with pale foliage. Rustling and crackling like something dead and dusty, moved by the wind.

But there
was
no wind.

Lol backed into a pole, felt it juddering against his spine and the back of his head, as he gasped and twisted away, semistunned and reeling, into a parallel hop-corridor, the poles rushing past him like black railings seen from a train.

Between them, he saw the woman moving. A long, dried-out, bobbled bine was wound around her like a boa, around her neck, under her arms, over her shoulders, pulled up between her legs – the cones crackling and crumbling on her skin, throwing off a spray of flakes, an ashy aura of dead vegetation.

As she drew level with him, he could see, under the winding bine, black droplets beading her breasts, streaks down her forearms, as though the bine was thorned.

She turned to Lol and the bine fell away as she extended her hands towards him.

Lol very nearly took them in his own.

Very
nearly.

I
T WAS LIKE
she’d told the Bishop: anything iffy, out came the coal-tongs and the asbestos gloves, and it made you wonder whatever happened to that old job description:
The cure of souls
.

‘I’d just said “The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life,” and that was when the girl went slightly crazy,’ Canon Dennis Beckett explained on the phone.

To be fair, he had good reason to feel this wasn’t really his problem. He was retired now, and lived on the other side of the county. He only came across to Dilwyn to take the Sunday services for two weeks a year, when Jeff Kimball, his godson, was away on holiday. Which was a diversion for Dennis, too, and a nice place to drive out to: this neat black and white haven with its village green.

But at the end of it, the thing was, other than on a superficial, hand-shaking level, he didn’t really
know
these people, did he? And in this case there was a young girl involved – always dicey. Also, for extra tension, a touch of drama, it had happened during Holy Communion.

‘We’ve all had situations of people becoming ill, of course,’ Dennis said, ‘even dying in their pews on two occasions that
I
can recall. But… well, it’s usually elderly people, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm.’ Since coming to Ledwardine less than two years ago, Merrily had seen a stroke, a blackout, an epileptic fit and a birth. ‘Not invariably.’

She wasn’t yet seeing this as a deliverance issue. She’d met Canon Beckett two or three times at local clergy gatherings, remembered him as grey-bearded, vague, affable. She wondered why, if this incident had occurred last Sunday, it had taken him five clear days to decide he should tell her about it.

It was the first morning of Jane’s school holidays. Friday the thirteenth, as it happened.

‘It was embarrassing rather than anything else, at the time,’ Dennis said. ‘The mother appeared to be affected the most – essentially such a good family, you see, in the old-fashioned sense; a family, in fact, to whom the term
God-fearing
might once have applied. And I’m afraid you can’t say that of very many of them nowadays, can you?’

‘No.’ Merrily tucked the phone under her chin, leaning forward through a sunbeam to pull over her sermon pad and a felt pen. ‘I suppose not. So, what
did
happen, exactly?’

‘She dashed – that’s the only word for it –
dashed
the chalice from my hands. And then she was sick.’

‘She actually—?’

‘Threw up. Copiously. Tossed her cookies, as my grandson would say. In the chancel. On everything. On me.’

‘Oh.’

‘Rather a mess. And the smell soured everything. Hard to continue afterwards.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Everyone was extremely understanding and trying not to react. Someone said,
Oh dear
, very quietly, and then they all discreetly moved out of the way. The mother was absolutely white with the shame of it, poor woman. She’s one of Jeffrey’s regulars – cleans the church, arranges the flowers. There she was, dragging the child away down the aisle, followed by the father, and I was starting to go after them when this elderly lady suddenly began clutching her chest. I thought,
Oh Lord, that’s all we
… Anyway, as it turned out, the old dear wasn’t in the throes of some cardiac crisis, which was a mercy, but by the time I reached the door, the whole family had vanished. So…
we simply cleaned everywhere up and… resumed. At the time it seemed—’

‘The best thing?’ Merrily said.

‘Luckily, I managed to find a fresh surplice. There were only about five communicants left by then. A few had walked away in… the wake of it.’

Dennis Beckett paused. Through the scullery door, Merrily heard impatient footsteps across the flags in the kitchen.

‘Look, I’m aware this doesn’t sound like much, Merrily,’ Dennis said. ‘Certainly didn’t seem so to me, at the time, but I thought I ought to reassure the parents, so I got their number and when I arrived home I gave them a call. No answer. I made a note to try again the following day, but I’m afraid it got mislaid and other things cropped up, and it wasn’t until this morning that I finally got through to them.’