The Cure of Souls (2 page)

Jane watched Jones and Eagles heading hand in hand for the students’ car park. Scott had passed his test on his seventeenth birthday; he’d been driving Land Rovers since his feet could reach the pedals, which had probably been around the age of nine, because he was a tall guy, maybe fully grown now. Adult. Experienced.

Also, Eirion, himself – sexy enough, in his stocky, amiable way – had obviously been putting it about for years.
Well, you know, I was in this band
, he would say. Oh, Eirion had been around, no question.

And he
could
have had Jane, too, by now. She would have had sex with him, no arguments. In the back of the car or somewhere, anywhere; she just wanted the bloody thing cleared away, like dirty dishes – everybody said the first time was crap anyway, this messy chore to be undergone before you could start enjoying it.

But Eirion would gently detach her clammy little hand from his belt.
I want this to be proper
, he’d mumble.
Do you know what I’m saying?

Proper? Like, what did
proper
have to do with it?

I don’t want this to be… ordinary, you know? Run-of-the-mill. Me and you, we’re
… And then he’d go all embarrassed, looking out of the car window at the moon. Jesus.

Ordinary?
Listen, ‘ordinary’ would have been just fine by Jane, who had no illusions, didn’t expect rockets and Catherine wheels. ‘Ordinary’ would’ve been an enormous relief.

She found herself stomping across the playing field between the tennis courts, panting with anguish under the merciless sun. A torrid sun, guaranteed to turn the Pembrokeshire coast into Palm Beach. Did Eirion’s fat-cat family have their
own
beach? Did they all sprawl around naked and uninhibited? Like, just because they were Welsh didn’t mean they were all buttoned-up and chapel-whipped, necessarily. Probably the reverse: she
and the Young Master would be assigned a double room and presented with a gross of condoms.

Shit
. She shouldn’t be feeling like this, because back in the exam room she’d probably done OK. You always sensed it. She’d get her ten GCSEs and then come back in September and do some A levels.

Come back as an adult, with a lover.

She swallowed.

So Eirion, at seventeen, was experienced and mature, had done the rounds, and had met Jane – who was sexually backward to what, in this day and age, was a frightening extent – and she had become like ‘special’ to him, maybe because when they’d first met she’d been physically hurt by someone she’d thought was a friend, and he’d felt protective and stuff… and that was OK, that was acceptable.

And ‘special’?… yeah, OK, that was flattering.

Or
would
have been flattering if she was ready to be ‘special’, which might have been the case if there’d been others – or least one other – before Eirion. But the first guy you actually did it with, at the age of sixteen, really should not be ‘special’, should he? Not
long-term
special, not Jones-and-Eagles special. Not the very first guy.

Why the hell had she said she’d go there?

Jane began to blink back tears, seriously unravelled, not knowing what she wanted – except not to be a virgin. Not to be a virgin
now
. Not to have to take this useless lump of excess baggage with her to the Holiday Cottage.

In fact, if there’d been some not-over-acned sixth-former wandering towards her right now, she’d probably have been tempted to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, just to get IT out of the way.

Sure.

She was alone on the playing field. Somewhere in the distance she could hear howls of laughter – Wall and Gittoes on the loose, ready to crash the Royal Oak, pick a fight with a teacher. Their last week at school, the week they’d been dreaming of for
five long years. They were adults now, too. Official.
Even Wall and Gittoes were adults!

Panic seized Jane and she stood there, feeling exposed, the sun directly above her like a hot, baleful eye.

She was a child. Still a child.

Ahead of her was the groundsman’s concrete shed, a square bunker standing out on its own. The groundsman was called Steve and he was about thirty and had big lips, like a horse, and this huge beer gut. He was a useful guy to know, however, because of this concrete shed: a safe house where card schools could meet, cigs and dope could be smoked, and Es and stuff exchanged. Steve would also deal the stuff himself, it was rumoured, but not with everybody; he was very careful and very selective.

Lower-sixth-formers Kirsty Ryan and Layla Riddock were less selective. They laughed openly at Steve but sometimes went into his shed with him after school. And what did slobbery Steve give them in return? Nobody knew, but it
was
rumoured that he could get actual cocaine for anyone who offered that kind of payment.

School life. Sex and drugs and
—

Jane saw that the blinds were down over the window in the shed.

There was absolutely no reason why a groundsman’s hut should have blinds at all, but every window in the school was fitted with the same type, black and rubbery, so that educational videos could be shown at any time or the Net consulted.

There was no TV in here, obviously, no computer. The lowered blinds could only mean one thing: with the English Language GCSE not half an hour over, slobbery Steve was in there doing business.

You couldn’t get away from it, could you? Jane shook her head wearily and was about to turn back across the field when the wooden door of the shed swung open.

She stiffened. The sun-flooded playing fields stretched away on three sides: everywhere to run, nowhere to hide.

‘Well, come
on
,’ a voice drawled from inside. ‘Don’t hang around.’

Jane didn’t move. She imagined pills spread across Steve’s workbench – or maybe some really desperate sixth-former. Jane felt cocooned in heat and a sense of unreality.

She blinked.

Layla Riddock, large and ripe, stood there in the doorway of Steve’s hut – in her microskirt, blouse open to the top of her bra. Like a hooker in the entrance to an alleyway.

‘Well, well,’ Layla said. ‘The vicar’s kid. We
are
honoured.’

S
AFETY IN NUMBERS
…
spread the load… a problem shared
. The Bishop was heavy with clichés this morning, although what he was saying made sense when you accepted that the Church of England looked upon the supernatural like the Ministry of Defence regarded UFOs. Visitations? The blinding light on the road to Damascus? The softly glowing white figure in the grotto? God forbid.

The blinding sunlight over Ledwardine Vicarage was diffused by the thin venetian slats at the kitchen window. Bernie Dunmore’s friar’s tonsure was a fluffy halo. He topped up his glass with Scrumpy Jack from the can, beamed plumply at Merrily.

‘They look at
you
, they see a symptom of escalating hysteria. They see the Church being dragged towards the threshold of a new medievalism simply to stay in business. Oh no.’ Bernie shuddered. ‘If the Third Millennium
does
witness the collapse of the Anglican Church, we’d rather go down quietly, with our passive dignity intact, leaving you out there waving your crosses at the sky and waiting for the angels.’

‘That’s not
me
, is it, Bernie?’ Below the dog collar, Merrily wore a dark grey cotton T-shirt and black jeans. Her hair was damp from the swift but crucial shower she’d managed to squeeze in between Alf Rokes’s funeral and the arrival of the Bishop. ‘They’re saying that? Even after Ellis?’

But, OK, she knew what he meant. Nick Ellis had been a rampant evangelical who preached in a village hall plastered with CHRIST IS THE LIGHT posters and used the Holy Spirit like an oxyacetylene torch. Merrily Watkins was the crank who prayed for the release of earthbound spirits, currently setting up the first Hereford Deliverance Website to offer basic, on line guidance to the psychically challenged. They hadn’t liked each other, she and Ellis, but to a good half of the clergy they were out there on the same ledge.

And one of them was mad, and the other was a woman.

Bernie Dunmore was quite right, of course: she’d been putting it off too long.

She saw that he was blatantly inspecting her from head to feet – which wasn’t far – as if looking for signs of depreciation.

‘So you want to build a team, then, Bishop?’

‘If Deliverance has its back to the wall, better it should be more than
one
back,’ Bernie said sagely.

Well, fine. Most dioceses had one now: a Deliverance cluster, a posse of sympathetic priests as back-up for the exorcist. It was about spreading the load, fielding the flack, having people there to watch your back.

‘OK, let’s do it.’ She came to sit down opposite him at the pine refectory table, where bars of yellow sunlight tiger-striped her bare arms. ‘The problem is… who do we recruit?’

Bernie sank more cider. Merrily tried to think what his appearance suggested if not
Bishop
. You could almost think he’d been appointed simply because he looked so much like one – unlike his predecessor, Mick Hunter, who might have been a rising presenter from
Newsnight
. Previously, Bernie had been suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, the number two who rarely made it to the palace. But his formal acceptance by Downing Street as Bishop of Hereford had been a relief all round: a safe option.

‘Anyone in particular you want to sound out, Merrily?’

Of course, she’d already been thinking about this a lot. But the members of the local clergy she most liked and trusted
tended to be the ones who wouldn’t touch Deliverance with coal-tongs and asbestos gloves. And the ones who actively sought involvement in what they imagined to be a hand-to-hand battle with Satan… well, Nick Ellis had wanted the job for himself; that told you all you needed to know.

‘There must be any number of people out there better equipped spiritually than me.’ Fighting off the urge to dig for a cigarette, she poured herself some spring water. ‘I mean, so many people who seem to be living in what, seen from my miserable level, looks awfully like a state of grace.’

She glanced at him, worried he might think she was fishing for praise and reassurance. But there truly wasn’t a day that went by without her feeling she wasn’t up to this job, wondering if she wasn’t any better than the mystical dabblers she was obliged to keep warning off.

‘Then make me a list of these saintly buggers.’ Bernie Dunmore would never have considered himself one of them either, but then saintliness had never been a prerequisite for bishops. ‘Fax it across to the Palace or give it to Sophie. I’ll make the approaches, if you like. Suppose we start with… what would you suggest… two?’

‘Two clerics?’

‘That’s enough to begin with. Don’t want Deliverance looking like a faction. And, ah, would they… pardon my ignorance, but would these two need to be, ah…?’

‘What?’ Merrily blinked.

‘
You
know.’

‘You mean psychic?’

He looked pained. ‘What’s that other word?’

‘Sensitive?’

‘Yes. Well… would they?’

‘That’s a good question.’ She sipped some water.

‘I mean, I never liked to ask, Merrily, but would you say that you yourself…?’

‘Well, er…’

‘This is not a witch-hunt, Merrily.’

‘I don’t honestly know,’ she said. ‘Maybe we all are, to a varying degree. And maybe just doing this job gives you… insights. That is, God—’

‘All right,’ Bernie said. ‘Forget it. What else do we need?’

‘A tame shrink. Sure, we can make a good guess at who’s in genuine psychic torment and who’s clinically paranoid, but a guess isn’t good enough.’

‘And how on earth do we go about finding one of
them
?’ The Bishop shook his cider can, but found it empty. Merrily rose to fetch him another from the fridge, but Bernie shook his head and put a hand over his glass. ‘I mean, should we make a direct approach to the Health Authority, asking for nominations? And wouldn’t a proper psychiatrist require some kind of retainer? Doctors don’t like to do anything for nothing, in my experience, and the Archdeacon would be the first to query any kind of—’

‘I don’t know.’ Merrily sat down again. ‘There’s a whole lot I don’t know.’

‘We’re all feeling our way here,’ said Bernie, whose official elevation had been confirmed only at the end of May. ‘I mean, it’s all hit-and-miss, isn’t it? You get the wrong shrink, point him at some little old lady spouting the Lord’s Prayer backwards in a rich baritone, and he’ll still swear she’s a paranoid schizophrenic.’

‘Be hard to find one who won’t always say that. And he – or she – also needs to be a Christian because, if we ever get someone with a malignant squatter inside them, the psychiatrist is going to have to be there for the showdown.’

Bernie winced at the terminology. ‘I really can’t help you much there, I’m afraid. I don’t think I actually know any psychiatrists of
any
religious persuasion.’

‘Me neither,’ Merrily said. ‘But I know a man who does.’

He looked at her with the interest he usually displayed when she mentioned she knew a man. She didn’t elaborate. She was aching for a cigarette. Ethel, the black cat the vicarage had acquired from Lol Robinson, jumped onto her knee as if to prompt her, but Merrily kept quiet.

The Bishop got up and moved to the window. He was wearing his golfing clothes: pale green polo shirt over cream slacks and over what you didn’t like to call a beer gut. If this had been Mick Hunter, the ensemble would have been mauve and purple-black:
episcopal chic
. But Mick Hunter wouldn’t have played golf.

‘What you said a few moments ago’ – Bernie was looking out over the vicarage lawn, which Gomer Parry insisted on mowing twice a week – ‘about people living in a state of grace.’

The lawn ended at the old Powell orchard, which belonged now to the church. There were already tiny green apples on the trees, like individual grapes. Where
was
the year going to?