Jago (13 page)

It should have been easy. There were no wet patches to be avoided, and the dry, solid earth was ideal for hammering in skewers. Pam and Salim got their tent pitched first. Although it sagged in the middle, they did a good job. Ferg, working on his own since Jessica was off gathering sticks for the fire, came second. His tent wasn’t straight either, but would do for tonight. Mike Toad, who had the biggest tent all to himself because he’d borrowed it from his sister, was waving his arms under floppy canvas pretending to be a ghost, while Dolar was hammering a skewer out of shape with a mallet. Ferg and Pam took over from Dolar and eventually, despite Mike, the tent was put up. It was collapsed at one end, but since Mike wouldn’t come out they assumed he must be satisfied. Pam looked in to make sure he was breathing, and they left him alone.

Jessica had made a real Girl Guide’s fire, with stones piled in a circle around a teepee of broken twigs and twists of newspaper. However, she was the only one interested in a barbecue. They’d brought down sausages and frozen hamburgers in a cool box, and Jessica was hungry. Ferg was hungry too, but in a vague way that was a part of a larger discomfort. He already had the hangover he’d expected to wake up with, and his back and neck still ached from the drive.

Mike Toad was snoring like a chainsaw. Pam and Salim had already crept into their tent: their shadows wriggled in torchlight as they tried to get out of their clothes in the wardrobe-sized space. Dolar came back from taking a leak in the woods; he staggered sideways into a thorny shrub and made a lot of noise. Syreeta pulled him out and pushed him towards the van. He rolled his eyeballs and let her put him to bed.

‘Where’s the food?’ Jessica asked.

Ferg was dead on his feet. This morning, he had thought to end his day making love in a tent. It had been a pleasant fantasy, but one he’d returned to with less and less enthusiasm throughout the gruelling afternoon and unnerving evening. Now, his ideal was to cocoon himself in a thick sleeping bag and never wake up.

‘The food?’ Jessica reminded, irritated. She would not be put off. She probably felt as much like eating as he did, but had made such a thing of it she had to keep up or be seen to back down. Even if there was no pleasure in it, she’d have her barbecue.

‘Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’ he said, knowing immediately that he shouldn’t have bothered with the suggestion. Her eyes bled dry of expression, her lower lip curled out. If he pushed, they’d get into a row that could last for days, seriously ruining his holiday. The simplest course was to go along with her.

‘Okay, okay. It’s here somewhere.’ He hauled his rucksack out of the tent, and found the plastic kitchen container. She had her lighter out. A snake-tongue of flame licked newspaper, and, in seconds, twigs crackled.

‘There’s been a fire here before.’

She could be right. The flames lit up the ground, and he saw a ragged circle around the fire, bare of grass. It was earth and loose shale, and did look as if, a long time ago, it had been charred.

‘Maybe a flying saucer landed here.’

She huffed and took the two-pronged barbecue fork from him. He had speared a pair of fat sausages on it. She held them in the flames. He knew she should wait for the wood to burn down to charcoal, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to drag this out. His eyes felt weighted. He opened two rolls with his thumb, and smeared in butter and ketchup. As far as he was concerned, Jessica could have both.

Inside their tent, Pam and Salim started breathing asthmatically in rhythmic union. The canvas shivered as they moved. Obviously,
they
weren’t too tired.

Jessica’s sausages went black and then split. Pink wounds opened and gristle dropped into the fire, which hissed like a kicked cat. Sitting by the fire, Ferg shut his eyes and looked forward to sleep.

H
azel was out with the kiln. At different points during the firing, the temperature had to be changed. She was obviously nervous. In Brighton, her tutor supervised the process. Here she was on her own, except for a tatty, clayey exercise book filled with Mike Bleach’s secret tips.

Paul was sitting up in bed, looking over notes for his imaginary war chapter. By tomorrow afternoon, he hoped to have a solid, closely argued 7,000 words on Chesney’s
The Battle of Dorking,
Wells’s
War in the Air,
Shiel’s
The Yellow Danger
(ugh!), Saki’s
When William Came,
with a footnote on the turn-of-the-century genre’s best-selling last gasp, Hackett’s
Third World War.
Invasion fantasies for an island nation. He wondered if he should consider the various if-the-Nazis-had-invaded fictions—Deighton’s
SS-GB,
the films
Went the Day Well?
and
It Happened Here
—an offshoot of the form. All very respectable, and it got a lot of boring books out of the way without his actually having to read—or reread—all through them.
The Battle of Dorking
was short, and the Wells and Saki good enough to be painless. The rest were mainly hysterical, and got in as second-rank filler to prove he was being really comprehensive here.

Hazel was improving; after supper, she’d finished packing the kiln, which was fiddly and demanding but a change from being bent over the wheel, and started her firing. That done, she’d been almost satisfied with her day. For the first time in nearly a week they’d made love, finishing almost together. For a while, they were as they used to be. The Alder festival had encouraged the change in Hazel’s spirits. She’d been working up enthusiasm ever since the couple from the Agapemone came round. He realized the recent upsurge in customers was probably due to the influx of festival-goers. In fact, he was about to start worrying about shoplifting. This was obviously how to turn into a reactionary before he was thirty. The local paper was full of awful warnings about a convoy on the way, laying waste to everything in its path, leaving desolation in its wake. This year, they probably couldn’t make much difference to the countryside.

Earlier, Hazel had called the Agapemone and confirmed that she wanted a stall. Paul suspected he’d be drafted into looking after it. However, he didn’t think he would find much joy in Christian heavy metal, or whatever Jago’s followers were pushing. The festival was well organized and extensive enough to suggest behind-the-scenes muscle. The profits weren’t going to starving Africans or endangered whales, but something must be making all these rock stars want to traipse to the West Country. He’d thought it unfashionable to be into spirituality these days. It had been a long time since pop groups went to maharishis or sang ‘Atlantis will rise, Sunset Boulevard will fall’. But the shadow of the Sixties lay on the county. Glastonbury wasn’t far away, and some of the landscape was decidedly hobbitesque. Maybe New Age was catching on.

‘More homework?’ asked Hazel, coming in.

Paul started. His mind had been wandering.

‘Yes. I should give it a rest, I suppose.’ He shut the notebook and shoved it on to the bedside table.

Hazel had gone out to the kiln shed in jeans and a dressing gown. She skinned her jeans off, dropped the gown, and slipped under the duvet.

‘How are things out there?’

A pause. ‘All right… I think. The glaze tests have melted properly. I’ve been following Mike’s instructions.’

He slid his arm round her as she wriggled deeper into the bed. ‘I’m sure it’ll be okay.’

‘Hmm. Maybe.’

She was cold, surprisingly so. It was a warm night, but Hazel had goose flesh. She was almost shivering.

‘It’s spooky out there,’ she said. ‘And I’ve got a whole night of it. It’s darker here in the country.’

‘Of course. There’s no streetlight. You can see the stars better.’

She set her travelling alarm clock for her next visit to the kiln. ‘Paul, are you sure you don’t want me to sleep downstairs on the sofa? I’ve got to be out again at three and five.’

‘I always sleep through your alarm anyway,’ he lied. ‘Just don’t tread on me getting up.’

She put the clock back, and he snuggled closer to her. She was warming up, but still distracted. He kissed her neck, and she gently shoved him away, mumbling. He turned the light out. He fell asleep, lulled by the distant roaring of the kiln.

E
ven in the dark,
especially
in the dark, Allison knew the woods. There were the footpaths and rights of way everyone knew, and she used them from time to time. But her woods were mapped with secret runs she travelled alone. She was mistress of paths you couldn’t see unless you knew exactly where to look, bushes that could be pushed aside like gates, fences where wires were loose, hollows that were tunnels under thick bramble, long-branched trees that made bridges over walls. Left alone by her parents and the other children, she had made the woods her own years ago.

She watched the kids from London sit by their dying fire, eating sausages. She had sent them to the clearing they called the Bomb Site, but which the oldest villagers called Bannerman’s Bonfire Site. There’d been burnings here. Some nights, she could see its ha’ant, a faint firelight in the shape of a man. She was the only young person in Alder who appreciated the spot, who understood its importance. She wanted people there, in case they were needed. It was one of the several sites around the hill where the power could be felt. Moonglow Paddock was another. Burrow Mump, to the west. And an attic room she had never been in, high up in the Manor House, where there was a machine she didn’t understand.

The goof-faced boy with the mohican and the plump, sulky girl with dyed hair and deliberately ripped clothes didn’t talk to each other, just ate glumly. There was nothing to be gained from watching them further. She knew enough. On her knees, she crawled away from the kids’ camp, feeling earth through torn jeans, and squeezed into one of her runs, forcing herself against the ground as she wriggled under a thorny mass piled thick against a fence marking the edge of the Starkey property. She’d dug a way under the fence a few months ago, and kept it open ever since. Her breasts rubbed against the ground, and she felt aroused. She was used to it. When she was in heat, she was more powerful, could see more things. Soon she would take care of her body’s needs. At the festival, thered be plenty of people to fuck.

She emerged into the Starkey orchard and stood up. Earth fell from her clothes. She stretched out, feeling strength in her muscles, and ran fingers through her hair, brushing out twigs and dead leaves. Pausing by a particular tree, she remembered making Tina Starkey cry by bending back her hand until the wrist popped. They were ten years old. By the end of primary school, she’d made all the children in her class cry or bleed. She had only needed to do it once or twice to each child to establish a pattern. She hadn’t had to hurt anyone for years now, but she knew the time would come again. She felt it coming, felt it in her nipples, her guts, her clit.

Working her way through orchards and back gardens, she made it to the road, a mile or so outside the village. She had a drop in a lay-by, hidden under three flat stones. It held a black-handled Stanley knife with three fresh blades and a tube of mints. She flipped up a stone and pulled out the mints. She squeezed one into her mouth and replaced them. Also in the drop was her single heirloom, a small swastika. Her granddad, the only relative she’d ever had who understood her, had given it her, claiming he’d got it in the war after killing a German parachutist. That had to be a lie, because she knew Granddad never went to the war. As a farmworker, he was let off. She picked up the swastika and gripped it, trying to feel the power inside the symbol. Once, it had been studded with fake emeralds, but only two remained in their dents. She gripped the swastika, feeling she was drawing strength from it, and slipped it back into the drop.

It was quiet, but in the distance she heard a motorcycle. Someone was coming towards Alder from the Achelzoy road, swerving with its bends. She crouched in shadow. The noise got nearer. She scooped dry earth from the verge and camouflage-smeared her face, rubbing it in around her eyes. The bike was just around the corner now, engine loud as a pneumatic drill. She could smell petrol. She sucked the mint thin, then crunched it to powder. The rider came into view, leaning as he took the corner. He stuck his boot against the road and skidded in a circle. He wore a helmet with a dark mirror visor. He looked straight at her and she stood up, wiping earth from her face. He gunned his engine, making it roar, and let it die. He reached for a tag at his neck and pulled a zip that split his black leather jacket from neck to waist. He was naked underneath. The meat smell hit her, and she was fascinated by the whorls and ridges of hardened flesh on his chest. With a heavily gauntleted hand, he raised his visor. Another girl might have screamed at the face of Badmouth Ben, but Allison loved him at first sight.

T
he kitchens were the oldest part of the Agapemone, vaulted caverns at the back of the building. On the ground floor, they were robbed by the rise of the hill around the foundations of all windows but a row of glassed horizontal slits near the ceiling. If Beloved ever had to feed a multitude, he would have earthly facilities to back up His divine powers. Brass pots hung on one wall, arranged from largest to smallest like a percussionist’s fantasy. Fine china, some of it over a hundred years old, was stacked and locked away in a huge, much-beaten dresser. There were enough deep sinks to service a morgue, and a yardage of work surfaces that could accommodate an attempt to break the world record for sequentially knocking over dominoes.

It was well past the ghosts’ high noon, but Jenny was still working. Being able to serve made her content. Her days were full now, with not a moment wasted. The confusions she felt only a few months earlier were as solved and remote as the teething and toilet troubles of her babyhood. Exams, rows with her parents, universities, jobs, boys. That was over; now she could get on with things. She’d found the faith to realize that the choices which had bothered her were false. She could only do what was right. Nothing else was possible. She suspected some of doubt, but their feelings were as mysterious and unfathomable to her as her certainties now were to her parents.