The Lamp of the Wicked (8 page)

‘Seventeen, mabbe eighteen,’ Gomer said. ‘No more’n twenty.’

‘What?’

‘Miles.’

Merrily sighed. ‘To this Pawson place, right?’

‘No traffic in Hereford, mind. Say half an hour, max?’

‘And what are we going to do if we find out he
has
taken the tank?’

‘Vicar, we’ll know.’ The two moons were clear and sharp in Gomer’s glasses. ‘We’ll bloody
know
.’

S
O THIS WAS
what they called The Hour of the Wolf. Something like that.

The dark night of the soul. The time of being transfixed by this acute, piercing awareness of the total pointlessness of everything – and of an utter, mindless, universal cruelty.

Jane had lain awake for nearly an hour, with Ethel the black cat on the bed beside her and real life hanging over her like this huge, leaden pendulum swinging slowly from side to side in the darkness.

You might as well just lie here for ever because, if you sat up at the wrong time, the lead weight – which you were never going to see coming – would suddenly smash you down again with sickening force.

This was what happened. This was the great, almighty secret of everything.

The moon – the once-beloved moon – made fitful appearances amid smoky cloud in the attic window, turning the coloured squares between the timber framing of the Mondrian walls into variations of grey. Everything was variations of grey.

Jane felt suddenly almost breathless with horror… with the thought that this – where her life was now – could actually be as good as it was ever going to get. Felt aglow inside with this bitter rage – the understanding that, as you got older and your body got weaker, the lead weight would smash you harder and more frequently until you couldn’t get up any more.

The way it was hammering Gomer Parry, who was one of the kindest, most actually decent people Jane had ever known, like a grandad to her now.

Because Gomer was getting
old
, and
old
people got ill and they got mugged – some universal law setting them up for this, the law that said:
it’s always going to get worse
. It was as if she’d never fully realized this painfully simple fact of life.

Made her mad as hell at Mum, this smart, still-attractive woman devoting most of her creative essence to the totally pointless adoration of something which, if it existed at all, existed only to
treat us like shit
!

Jane sprang up in bed, switching on the wall light, plucking the pay-as-you-talk from the bedside beanbag. She leaned back against the headboard, switching on the phone, punching out Eirion’s mobile number. OK, totally uncivilized time to ring anybody, especially the guy you were supposed to be in love in, but he’d have switched off his phone by now, so it wouldn’t matter; she’d just dump something into his voice-mail. Had to say something about this, and couldn’t call Mum without sounding like the little girl all alone in the big, dark vicarage.

‘Hello, Jane,’ Eirion said.

Oh sh—!
She nearly stabbed the
no
button. ‘Jesus, Irene, I am so
sorry
– I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, why isn’t your phone switched off? It’s nearly one a.m.’ She reached up in a panic and snapped off the light, as though he could somehow see her with her hair all over the place and her eyes all puffy. ‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Because,’ Eirion said patiently, ‘of the solemn pact we made that we would always leave our phones switched on at night, so that if one of us was in crisis and needed to talk…’

Jane swallowed. ‘Oh.’

‘We remember now, do we?’

‘I didn’t think we meant it.’

‘Obviously one of us didn’t.’

She started to cry. ‘I’m sorry, Irene. I’m truly sorry. I’m the worst kind of bitch that ever—’

‘What’s wrong? You been listening to that Eels album again?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jane said. ‘It was very stupid of me. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Jane…’ Eirion’s soft Welsh voice sounded like it was weighted with all the sorrow of his ancestors. ‘If you hang up on me now, I may have to steal my stepmother’s BMW again and drive thirty miles to quench my overwhelming desire to strangle you very slowly.’

‘All right.’ Jane sniffed hard. ‘You asked for this, right? Big question: am I the only person of my age ever to realize that God, if God exists, is in fact some enormous, moronic, cosmic…
infant
who just, like,
sits
there, pulling the legs off spiders?’

Eirion thought about it for some time.

‘Probably not,’ he said.

Jane said, ‘Is there a longer answer?’

‘There undoubtedly has to be a longer answer,
cariad
, and probably a good reason why that concept is theologically unsound. Just don’t ask me what it is without giving me some kind of notice.’

‘And you’re
really
proposing to go to university next year?’

‘But not to read theology.’

‘Theology’s shit, anyway. I speak from insider knowledge.’

‘Jane, just tell me what’s wrong, could you do that? What’s happened?’

‘How do you know something’s happened?’

‘Because you didn’t ask me if I was naked.’

‘Right,’ Jane said.

‘That was a joke.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m not, anyway.’

‘Tonight, I don’t think I even care,’ Jane said.

And she told him why she was alone in the vicarage at one a.m.

It evidently knocked him back. He didn’t seem to know how to react. He knew Gomer; she couldn’t remember if he’d met Nev. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Oh bloody hell, that’s… The poor guy. Shit.’

‘Like, consider, OK? Nev. Consider that this guy was just put here – this human being was created – to be a digger driver… to live in the same valley all his life… to become overweight… to have a very bad marriage, to… to get humiliated, get drunk… and then get fucking
burned to death
. That’s it! I mean, that’s
it
, Irene – The Nev Parry Story. The whole incarnation! What was
that
about? What was it supposed to teach him? How is it going to help refine his immortal soul? And like don’t give me any of that Welsh-chapel bollocks about redemption through endless suffering.’

‘I don’t know,’ Eirion said soberly. ‘Maybe it’s not something we’re permitted to understand.’

‘Yeah, great. Either that, or it’s all complete crap. How often do you think of that? I find I’m thinking it a lot now: no God, only chaos.’

‘You’re an emergent atheist suddenly? What happened to paganism?’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Paganism. What
did
happen to paganism? You want the truth? Sometimes I’m inclined to think modern paganism’s purely and simply about having fun – a reaction to the grey, studied bloody misery of Christianity. Dressing up, casting spells, cobbling together phoney rituals that
sound
heavy and significant, and kidding yourself you have like
exclusive access
to some arcane inner knowledge, which… I mean, somehow, it all just like… dissolves in the face of real life, the fucking savagery of it.’ Jane rubbed a wet eye with the heel of her palm. She felt cold and barren, nothing left to cling to except… ‘I wish you were here, Irene.’

‘Well, me too, obviously. I’m coming over tomorrow anyway… later today, would that be? Knight’s Frome? The session?’

‘Oh yeah.’ Lol had finally fixed it with Prof Levin for Eirion, the all-time rock-obsessive, to sit in on a recording session. ‘I don’t even know about
that
now. I don’t know how things are going to turn out. Life just comes at you, doesn’t it, like an axe? I was just thinking –
again
– Is Mum Living a Lie? It often comes back to that.’

‘Why don’t you have a proper talk to her?’

‘There’s never time. If it’s not trivial parish crap it’s Deliverance stuff. And how valid is that, really? I used to worry that she was in genuine spiritual danger from the
unseen world
… But how much crap is that? How often does the bloody unseen world destroy your—’

‘Jane, is this the time to talk about this stuff? I don’t think so.’

‘
Au contraire
, Irene, it’s the time when you can see the reality of it in all its stark… reality.’

‘What about your psychic experiences? You were always going on about that stuff.’

‘I think… I think we fool ourselves half the time. We desperately want there to be something else, and our subconscious minds, our brains, help us out. Comfort chemicals.’ For a moment she was shocked at the hard, croaky sound of her own voice. ‘And she… like Mum always says, when everything else fails, you just have to believe in love.’ Jane stared into the darkness. ‘I don’t know whether that’s a smart answer or just a smart get-out.’

She was thinking,
What if love’s also a lie? What if there’s only sex, to take your mind off the shit for a few minutes?

‘I’d better go,’ she said.

‘Mabbe this was a mistake,’ Gomer said as they followed the A49, a couple of miles out of Hereford, hitting the open countryside again south of Belmont. ‘You needs your sleep, vicar, all these buggers in the parish trying to stab you in the back.’

‘Parish politics, I’m afraid,’ Merrily murmured, ‘are what people do when life isn’t happening to them.’

‘I gotter be up early, too, mind,’ Gomer said. ‘See about hiring some machines for a week or two. Got a mini-digger at the bungalow, but he en’t gonner handle much.’

She slowed. ‘Oh,
Gomer
.’

Got clients. They en’t gonner wait around.’

‘Gomer, that’s not – excuse me – entirely sane.’

‘Nev would want it.’ He sounded like he was somewhere else: Planet Plant Hire. ‘Twenty-four-hour service, see.’

Merrily flicked him a sideways glance. ‘If you even attempt to work this week, I’m going to have you sectioned.’

‘Wouldn’t work, girl. Buggers’d only put me in the care of the community, then you’d get me back.’ He paused. ‘You knows me by now, vicar – I don’t get back to work, it’ll all come down on me.’

She was silent. It was true. If he didn’t keep on, in the face of everything, he’d turn into some kind of elderly person, and not the most contented kind. This was why they were here now, heading towards Ross-on-Wye through the squally night. Nothing to do with obtaining evidence, because there wasn’t going to be any. This was about Gomer Parry never giving in.

‘Right.’ He was on the edge of his seat. ‘Not far now, vicar. We oughter stop some way off, pull off the road like we broke down. Don’t wanner look conspicuous, see.’

The traffic was mainly long-distance container stuff, widely separated. Merrily settled in behind a tall van with a sign on the back that read
How’s my driving?
, with a phone number. If there’d been one on the back of Gomer’s van tonight, the line would be jammed.

‘OK, slow down now… by yere.’ He tapped the wheel, and she took the van over the kerb and onto the grass verge, braking hard when high bushes loomed, skidding on a mud path. ‘That’s all right, girl. Shove him tight into them bushes. I’ll get out your side.’

Merrily switched off the lights and the engine, and climbed out onto the wet verge, looking around. She ought to have known where this was, but it was different at night: a stretch of tarmac, no houses visible. On the other side, the moon revealed what looked like endless fields, just a few tiny lights in the far distance. On the nearside, a ragged line of unbarbered bushes followed the road around a left-hand bend maybe a hundred yards ahead.

Gomer joined her. ‘Got the—?’

‘Torch, yes. Where’s the house?’

‘Just around that next bend.’ Gomer looked back along the verge, pointing. ‘See that wood – he runs along the back.’ But he made no move to go that way, as if he’d finally accepted the futility of all this, realized he’d clutched at the idea of Roddy Lodge as saboteur simply because he couldn’t face going home to an empty house, a cold bed and an answering machine with Nev’s voice on it.

‘I expect you’d be able to tell straight away if by any chance Lodge
had
moved this thing,’ Merrily said.

‘Sure to,’ Gomer said dully.

‘Let’s do it, then.’ She moved along the verge, the hem of her alb getting soaked in the long grass. ‘If anybody sees us, we can say the van broke down and we’re trying to find a phone.’

When they rounded the bend, the road began to dip and the house was below them, a block of shadow. It was no more than twenty feet back from the road and looked even closer because of its comparative isolation. Living here, you’d hear the traffic all night, a restless lullaby.

‘Entrance is just past the house itself, up a little drive,’ Gomer whispered. ‘All the land’s the other side, see.’

‘And that’s where the… thing is?’

‘The Hefflapure.’ He stopped and looked back at her, shaking his head as if he was just waking up. ‘Bloody daft, this, ennit?’

‘Something you had to do, that’s all,’ Merrily said.

‘Naw, just an ole man lookin’ for a… what’s the word?’

Scapegoat?
‘Can’t think,’ Merrily said. ‘Look, tonight we… you’ve seen what no relative should ever have to see. Maybe… I dunno… maybe we both needed to drive around a bit.’

‘Ar.’ Gomer stood at the edge of the A49, squeezing his fingers together. He seemed to have left his ciggy tin in the van. Merrily pulled out her Silk Cut, offered him one. Gomer shook his head.

‘People thought he must be called Neville. Used to get letters addressed to Mr Neville Parry.’ I thought that, too. What
was
he called?’

‘Nevin. Seaside place in North Wales, where his folks used to go on their holidays. Likely he was conceived there.’

Merrily smiled, and they both stepped back onto the grass as a high-sided touring coach swished past towards Ross, probably empty except for the driver. Its passenger windows, only feebly lit, were reflected, fragmented, in the leaded upper windows of the Pawson house.

But its dipped headlights set up more of a glare in Gomer’s glasses. And in the dusty back windscreen of the big digger in the drive.

All the breath came out of Gomer in a rush and Merrily actually went cold with shock.