December (22 page)

      
Something very strange here, and he had to know.

VII

Delphinium Blue

Everything was the same.
And yet nothing was.
      
There was this small, cheap,
private hotel outside Greenock where she stayed when the finances were wobbly.
A good Presbyterian house, with no bar and therefore no commercial travellers.
But always a room - with a single bed - to spare for a
respectable
woman on her own.

      
Mrs Coffey, the widowed proprietor, would have noticed
that this time the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman didn't have a guitar case with
her. Would be gratified to think that the woman had at last found a respectable
job.

      
Would never know how alone Moira was this time. How the guitar
had been like a sister, and her moulded leatherette case had also enclosed, in
a concealed velvet pocket, the famous family heirloom, one comb.

      
What you see, Mrs Coffey, is a very confused woman entering
middle age with no mother, no job and no past that bears contemplation.

      
It was nearly seven p.m. when she arrived; she didn't feel
like one of Mrs Cs traditional home-cooked dinners. She went to the window of
her room and found that a new building had gone up across the street. Although
the hotel was still called the Clydeview this development would effectively
block out what used to be Moira's morning glimpse of ,he glum, grey sea.

      
Everything the same; nothing the same

      
She drew the curtains and fell down fully dressed on the bed,
under the dingy, brown-framed picture of a sad-looking Saviour on the Mount.

      
Within a minute or two, she was unhappily asleep and dreaming
of poor Dave Reilly, reams of fax paper around him from nose to feet, like a
winding sheet.

What was he supposed to do
after this? Go home to his bland, clean, modern vicarage, light the fire, make
a sandwich, watch TV?

      
Simon went, instead, head first into the night, pushing
through a hardening rain, eyes open wide.
      
Reverberating in his head, as he
walked, was the sound of the disgusting candles when Eddie Edwards had tossed
them into the dustbin behind the church, the mocking, cackling clang.

      
And as he walked swiftly along the slanting, hillside lane
into Ystrad Ddu, the twisted, skeletal candles went on clanging, as though they
were inside Simon's skull, bone on bone. He kept rubbing the rain into his face
and hair, as if this could stop it.

      
A dozen or so lights showed in the houses and in the bar of
the Dragon, which was able to survive because the licensee was also the local newsagent
and fuel-merchant. Out there, along the valley where the Abbey crouched, there
was nothing but darkness and falling water.

      
Simon reached the village hall, a feeble, tin-hatted bulb over
the door, as two women lowered their umbrellas and went in.
      
'
Good evening, ladies,' he
called in his cheery vicar's voice.
      
They both nodded, and then the door
slammed.

      
Good. It
was
Women's
Institute night. Simon waited a while in the darkness until he could be sure
all the women had gone in. Then he ran to a cottage set back from the road and
knocked lightly on its front door.

      
'Who is it?'

      
'It's Simon St John. The vicar.'
      
'Mother's out.'

      
'I know,' Simon shouted through the rain and the door-panels.
'I wanted to talk to
you
, Isabel.'

      
After a moment, the cottage door opened smoothly, and Isabel
Pugh looked up at Simon from her fire lit world. It was raining much harder
now; his cassock was soaked through, water dripping down his clerical collar.

      
The front door opened directly into the living-room. There
must have been a small hallway once, but the dividing wall had been knocked
down, perhaps because it would have been impossible to manoeuvre a wheelchair
around the corner to the door.

      
The stairs were in the enlarged room and there was also a
square hole in the ceiling for a chairlift like a fireman's pole. A coal fire
burned in a big black stove, blasting heat out of the door, out to the path
where Simon stood and dripped.

      
'If this is an excuse to come in and take all your clothes off,'
Isabel Pugh said, 'be my guest.'

Moira awoke suddenly, after
no more than half an hour. She was feeling awfully cold. On her own now, and
worse than naked, her first thought was.
It
doesn't have to be like this
.
      
Did it not?

      
She arose stiffly and put on the light, a forty-watt bulb in a
faded shade with burn-marks like black bruises. She went and stood by the
lukewarm radiator under the drawn curtains. It was a grumbling old accordion of
a thing; shivering, she pressed her thighs against it, but the heat was dying
on her. She was probably the only guest; Mrs Coffey wasn't going to waste any warmth
on her.

      
She filled the kettle at the basin, plugged it in on the unit,
dumped a couple of teabags in the pot. She knew this kettle of old; getting it
to boil was going to be like climbing Ben Nevis in a wheelchair. She plucked
the rolled-up fax from her bag and took it back to the cooling radiator.

Dear
Moira, Maybe you read about it in the papers … what happened in Liverpool on
December 13th, 1993.

I don't think so. Maybe I
read the wrong papers.

It was
like an Act of God …

Aye, well, everything
happening to Davey was either an act of God or the Other Guy. Or due to the
malfunctioning of something less reliably good or evil out there on the supernatural
shop floor.

      
The fax told her about an entire city losing its electricity after
the million-to-one failure of a couple of transformers. About this happening in
the thirteenth minute of the thirteenth hour, of the thirteenth day of the
dreadful month of December, and more or less exactly thirteen years since …

      
See, the other problem with Davey was, it always came back to
John Lennon, everything funnelling down to this one disaster, Dave's personal
vortex. Dave saying, OK, Lennon may not actually have been shot on the
thirteenth
, but it happened on a Monday and
sure enough, in 1993, the thirteenth was the first Monday after the anniversary
of the murder. And the thirteenth is, after all, the
thirteenth.

      
Davey, listen
...
She wanted to reach out and grab him by the psychic lapels, give him a good
shaking ... you can do anything with dates, times, synchronicity, all this
shit. Damn it, you should have learned that by now.

      
She tossed the fax on to the bed, turned back to the vanity
unit, pulling out a kind of piano stool to sit in front of the mirror. Reaching
down unthinking for the guitar case, where an ancient Celtic comb with many
missing teeth had lived in a velvet-lined pocket. How many times, weary in this
very room, had she drawn out the comb, let it glide through her hair, drawing
blue sparks in the dark. Bringing the place alive.

      
The comb lay in the Duchess's coffin. No redemption. On your
own, hen. You gave it back.

      
On the unit, the kettle was making a noise like a death-rattle.
She sat and watched the slow steam softening her face into a peachy fuzz.
      
Poor Davey.

      
Who would, this year, be exactly the same age as John Lennon
when a fruitcake had flown in from Hawaii to blow him away.

      
Poor Davey, who'd believed in love and peace, etc., and that you
could aspire to rearrange areas of your psyche that didn't conform to the
natural, the reasonable, the acceptable, the known.

      
Who'd talked of taking the unwelcome, the burdensome aspects
of himself and channelling them into
creativity.

      
Who had, therefore, bought it, the whole Epidemic scam,
accepting without question that the fusion of maverick minds would produce some
great, immortal music.
      
And didn't
you believe it just the teeniest bit yourself?

      
Aw, hell... at that age you still think this is something you could
learn to control, something you're
bound
to be able to discipline, given time.

      
And Jesus, this room was colder than the frozen food alley at
Safeway.

Half of him was pitying
her; the other half was increasingly in awe.

      
Papers were spread all over a trestle table, under an
Anglepoise lamp. Bills and invoices and bank statements. A new- looking IBM
computer.

      
'Do you do
everyone's
accounts round here?'

      
'Mostly,' Isabel Pugh said. 'The farmers like it if they don't
have to go into Abergavenny or Hereford. And they trust you, when you're a
cripple. They think you can't do a bunk.'

      
She was rather a pretty woman, a little overweight, as you'd
expect with her disability. She wore gold-rimmed glasses on a chain. Her hair
was brown, with gold highlights. 'I've got all the qualifications,' she said,
as if he'd challenged her. 'Correspondence course.'

      
There was a tartan rug over her knees. She flung it aside,
revealing a hand holding a carving knife.

      
'Jesus Christ.' Simon backed into the doorway.
      
Isabel Pugh tossed the knife on to
a settee. 'Can never be too sure nowadays, can you? It
sounded
a bit like your voice, but ... I like to be in control.'
      
'Right.' He breathed out. 'Actually,
I wasn't sure you'd be in. Thought you might have gone to the WI with your
mother.'

      
She looked disgusted. 'Sorry,' Simon said. He moved into the
room and closed the door behind him. It had a Yale lock and a double bolt
half-way up, so they could be reached from a wheelchair.

      
'I'm thinking of having an electronic device put in, with a
little two-way speaker thing,' she said. 'Why not? I can afford it. Going to
take those sodden clothes off now, are you? I haven't seen a dick this close in
twenty years.'

      
'No.' Simon smiled. 'But I'll sit by the stove and let them dry
on me, if that's all right.'

      
'Soft bugger. Can't rape you, can I? And I don't think you'd want
to touch
me
.'

      
'I'm a man of the cloth,' he said solemnly.

      
'And gay, too, isn't it?'

      
'You don't mess about, do you?' Simon said. Disabled people
tended to be aggressive, he'd found, especially with vicars; they often blamed
God. Part of a clergyman's job was taking the shit for all the things God
allowed to happen.

      
'Good-looking man like you,' Isabel said. 'It's obvious. All
alone and at your age. How old are you, forty-two, forty-three? Where do you do
your cottaging, Abergavenny?'

      
'It's no bloody fun, either, on nights like this,' Simon said,
no hint of a smile. 'I've been trying to persuade the council to build a public
convenience at the top of the churchyard.'

      
Isabel laughed. It made her look younger. She couldn't have
been more than fifteen when she fell from the south-west tower of the Abbey with
her legs around a boy called Gareth Smith.

      
'Like a coffee, would you, Vicar?'

      
'Simon. You wouldn't have any Scotch in the house, would you?
I'm perished.'

      
'Bottom cupboard, side of the fireplace. Glasses in the kitchen,
ice in the fridge.'

      
He found an impressive selection of good single malts. The
home-based accountancy business paid, then. 'You?'

      
'Why not. Southern Comfort. Neat. No ice.'

      
He went to look for glasses. The light oak-fitted kitchen had
been extended into a conservatory with double-glazing. The rain was very loud
in here.

      
'What've you come for then, Simon?' Isabel called out. 'Not the
usual time for sympathy calls.'