Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (34 page)

   
'Who is this, Catrin?' Guy
Morrison asked the black-haired girl in Rachel's hearing. 'Remind me.'

   
'Guy, this is Rachel Wade,
Max's PA.' Catrin's accent had a clipped sibilance Rachel identified as
north-west Wales.

   
'Of course, yes.'

   
Rachel offered him a languid
hand. 'We've spoken on the phone.'

   
Guy Morrison look the hand and
held it limply for an extra moment, looking steadily, unsmiling, into her eyes.
'You're almost everything your voice implied, Rachel Wade.'

   
'Good,' said Rachel, with a
tight, tired smile.

   
Guy Morrison dropped Rachel's
hand, stepped back, looked around the courtyard then up into the sky again,
where clouds and mist still formed a damp canopy.

   
He frowned. 'I wanted some GVs
today. Establishing shots. But this weather's not conducive. At all. So I've
told the crew, Rachel Wade, to set up in that stable-place. Acceptable to you,
yes?'

   
'Fine.'

   
'Because what I thought I'd do
after lunch is bang off a brief opening interview with Max Goff. Background of
sawing and rubble everywhere. Traces of sawdust on the white suit, emphasizing
the hands-on approach. May not use it, but I'm not happy unless there's
something in the can on Day One.'

   
'You'd better see how he feels
about that.'

   
Guy Morrison nodded and turned
away. She watched him pace the courtyard, looking up at the hills fading into
mist and at the Court itself, grey and spectral in us small hollow, like an old
galleon half-sunk into a mud-flat.

When they arrived back at the Cock, close to 1 p.m., a car was being
parked on the square, close to the steps: a silver-grey Ford Escort with an
Offa's Dyke Radio sticker on its windscreen.

   
The driver got out and came
over.

   
'Rachel, is it? Could I just
have a word?'

   
Guy Morrison, peering at the
car-sticker and registering it was only local radio, went ahead, up the steps,
with his assistant.

   
'I'm from Offa's Dyke Radio. We
carried a report yesterday without checking the details with you.'

   
Rachel had never seen this
person before He was a shortish, muscular man, about twenty-five, with a
half-grown moustache.

   
'Word reached me you weren't
happy about what went out, and I just want you to know I've looked into it.
Gavin Ashpole, News Editor. You'll be seeing more of me.'

   
'Good,' said Rachel
dismissively. 'Now if . . .'

   
'Problem is, we've been using a
freelance. Fay Morrison, in Crybbe, but it hasn't been working out.'

   
'Apart from this one instance,'
Rachel said, 'I don't think . . .'

   
'So, from now on, any
major
stories in this area, we're going
to handle direct. What Mr Goff's doing amounts to a major story, naturally, so
if there's anything you want to say, anything you want to get out on Offa's
Dyke Radio, you call me direct. Here's my card.'

   
'Thank you.'

   
'In fact - this is off the
record - we're considering putting a staff reporter into Crybbe. Especially if
your thing takes off and the population starts to expand.'

   
'Really.'

   
'In which case' - Ashpole
spread his hands, palms down in a flat, cutting movement - 'we'd simply stop
using Morrison altogether.'

   
'I see,' Rachel said.

   
What an appalling little creep,
she thought.

Over a bland buffet lunch - carnivores catered for, but strictly no
smoking - Max Goff explained his plan to publish, in perhaps two years' time,
The Book of Crybbe.

   
'Gonna be an illustrated record
of the project,' said Goff. He paused and looked into his audience. 'And a
blueprint for the Third Millennium.'

   
Warm applause. They'd needed
extra tables in the dining room at the Cock.

   
Goff said, 'I've asked J. M.
Powys to write the book. Because his work remains, to my mind, the most
inspiring evocation of a country still able to make contact with its inner
self.'

   
Powys smiled modestly. The
magical, mystical J. M. Powys. Too old, he thought miserably, to become someone
else. Too young not to want to.

   
About forty people were there,
some from London and elsewhere, to hear about the project and consider getting
involved. Thin, earnest men in clean jeans and trainers and women in long
skirts and symbolic New Age jewellery. Powys didn't know most of them. But he
felt, dispirited, that he'd met them all before.

   
There was a delicate-looking
tarot-reader called Ivory with a wife old enough to be his mother and big
enough to be his minder. A feminist astrologer called Oona Jopson, in whose
charts, apparently, Virgo was a man. She had cropped hair and a small ring
through her nose.

   
After Goff sat down, Powys
listened idly to the chat. He heard an experimental hypnotist talking about
regression. 'I've got an absolute queue of clients, mostly, you know, from
London, but what I'd really like is to get more of the
local
people on the couch . . .'

   
Apart from Andy Boulton-Trow,
the only person he'd actually encountered before was the spiritual healer, Jean
Wendle, from Edinburgh, who was older than the rest, grey-haired with
penetrating eyes.

   
'This really your scene, Jean?'

   
'This? Heaven forbid. Crybbe,
though . . . Crybbe's interesting.'

   
'You reckon?'

   
'Well, goodness, Joe, you said
it. If you hadn't revealed what a psychically charged area this was, none of us
would be here at all, would we?'

   
'You're very cruel.'

   
She narrowed her eyes. 'Come
round one night. We can discuss it. Anyway. . . She smiled at him. 'How are
things now?'

   
He looked around the room for
Rachel, couldn't see her.
   
'I think things are finally looking
up,' he said.

   
Later, Goff took him into a
corner of the dining-room and lowered his voice.

   
'Confidentially,' he said, 'I
need somebody who understands these matters to make sure this arsehole Morrison
doesn't screw it up. Part of the deal, he uses you as script consultant. No J.
M. Powys, no documentary. J. M. Powys disagrees with anything, it doesn't go
out.'
   
That'll be fun.'

   
Goff put a hand on Powys's arm.
'Hey, you know when I first knew I had to have you write the book?'

   
Powys smiled vacantly, beyond
embarrassment.

   
'See, when I first came to
Crybbe, the very first day I was here, I look around and suddenly I can see
this about the border country being a spiritual departure lounge. I'm standing
down by the river, looking over the town to the hills of England on one side
and the hills of Wales on the other. And that other phrase of yours, about the
Celtic Twilight Zone, I'm hearing that, and I'm thinking, yeah, this is it. The
departure lounge. It just needs a refuel, right? You know what I'm getting at
here? You can feel it in this room right now. All these people, all reaching
out.'

   
'Maybe they're reaching out for
different things.'

   
'Ah shit, J.M., it's all one
thing.
You
know that. Down to
generating energy and throwing it out. What you put out you get back,
threefold. Jeez, pretty soon, this town is gonna
glow'

'Seems to me there are things you need to work out, Joe,' Andy
Boulton-Trow said. 'Maybe this is the place to do it.'

   
Those lazy, knowing, dark-brown
eyes gazing into your head again, after all these years. I can see your inner
self, and it's a mess, man.

   
Andy was probably Goff's
role-model New Ager. He had the glow. Like he'd slowed his metabolism to the
point where he was simply too laid-back to be affected by the ageing process.

   
'Let's talk,' Andy said, and
they took their wine glasses into the small, shabby residents' lounge just off
the dining-room.

   
Andy lounged back on a
moth-eaten sofa, both feet on a battered coffee-table. Somehow, he made it look
like the lotus position.

   
He said, 'Never got over it,
did you?'

   
Powys rolled his wine-glass
between his hands, looking down into it.

   
'I mean Rose,' Andy said.

   
'It was a long time ago. You
get over everything in time.'
   
Andy shook his head. 'You're still
full of shit, Joe, you know that?'

   
'Look,' Powys said reasonably,
trying to be as cool as Andy. 'We both know I should never have gone round the
Bottle Stone. And certainly not backwards.'

   
'Bottle Stone?' Andy said.

   
'And certainly not backwards. I
should have told you to piss off.'

   
'I'm not getting you,' Andy
said.

   
'What I saw was . .
   
Powys felt pain like powdered glass behind
his eyes. 'What I saw was happening to
me
,
not Rose.'
   
'You had some kind of premonition?
About Rose?'
   
'I told you about it.'

   
Andy shrugged. 'You had a
premonition about Rose. But you didn't act on it, huh?'
   
'It was
me
.'

   
'You failed to interpret.
That's a shame, Joe. You had a warning, you didn't react, and that's what's
eating you up. Perhaps you've come here to find some manner of redemption.'

   
Andy shook his head with a kind
of laid-back compassion.

If it was a big job, Gomer Parry worked with his nephew, Nev. Today Nev
had just followed him up in the van and they'd got the smaller bulldozer down
from the lorry, and then Nev had pushed off.

   
No need for a second man. Piece
of piss, this one.

   
Unless, of course, they wanted
him to take out the whole bloody mound.

   
Gomer chuckled. He could do
that too, if it came to it.

   
He was sitting in the cab of
the lorry, listening to Glen Miller on his Walkman. The bulldozer was in the
field, fuelled up, waiting. Not far away was a van with a couple of
loudspeakers on its roof, such as you saw on the street at election time. Funny
job this. Had to be on site at one o'clock to receive his precise instructions.
Seemed some middle bit had to come out first. Make a big thing of it, Edgar
Humble had said. A spectacle. No complaints there; Gomer liked a bit of
spectacle.

   
With the Walkman on, he didn't
hear any banging on the cab door. It was the vibrations told him somebody was
trying to attract his attention.

   
He took off the lightweight
headphones, half-turned and saw an old checked cap with a square patch on the
crown, where a tear had been mended. Gomer, who was a connoisseur of caps,
recognized it at once and opened his door.

   
'Jim.'

   
'What you doin' yere, Gomer?'
the Mayor, Jimmy Preece, asked him bluntly.

   
 
'I been hired by that Goff,' Gomer said
proudly. 'He wants that bloody wall takin' out, he does.'
   
'Does he. Does he indeed.'

   
'Some'ing wrong with that, Jim?
You puttin' a bid in for the stone? Want me to go careful, is it?'

   
Jimmy Preece took off his cap
and scratched his head. Even though it was still drizzling, he didn't put the cap
back on but rolled it up tighter and tighter with both hands.

   
'I don't want you doin' it at
all, Gomer,' he said. 'I want that wall left up.'

   
'Oh aye?' Gomer said
sarcastically. 'Belongs to you, that wall, is it?'