Each of our dyings
IN THE BRECON Beacons, the ringing stopped, and the machine cut in.
‘This is Huw. Tell us what you’re after or just leave a number, and if nowt’s happened to me I’ll get back to you when I can. God bless.’
She said, ‘Huw? It’s me.’
In the vestry, the phone on speaker on the table beside the rack of Ledwardine picture-postcards. She’d packed the airline bag: wine, chalice. Unhooked her woollen funeral cape to take on the cold.
Nothing. Sometimes he let the machine do its bit to find out the score, then picked up. This time, he really wasn’t in.
‘Huw, don’t call me back. Just stay with me, if you pick this up. Couple of hours? I’m sorry, you know what I’m saying? I’ll call you when I—’
Bleep.
Damn.
She thought for a moment and then flicked through the numbers stored in the phone, selecting one and getting through instantly this time.
‘You’re asking for my advice?’ Abbie Folley said.
‘Second opinion. And, erm, back-up.’
‘I’ve never done anything like this.’
‘Well, me neither. That’s to say I’ve done it, but not in these circumstances. Or for this reason. Though that’s what a Requiem’s about in a deliverance context, isn’t it? Ostensibly for the soul of the departed, essentially for the people whose lives he’s complicating.’
‘You’re in the church with him now, Merrily? I mean the bloke who—’
‘Both of them, if you like. I’m in the vestry, Gareth’s close to the altar. And keeps looking around as if his dead friend might have followed us in.’
‘Jesus, you’re spooking me out already.’
‘This is a man whose funeral was… not as thorough as it might’ve been. Partly my fault. Mainly my fault. But there’s someone else who’s seriously screwing things up. Who’s… playing with the dead to score points. I’m not even going to… mention Darvill’s name. Or Iestyn’s name. Keep them both out of this. ‘If I had more time I’d probably try and summon a few more people, but the way things are, I just can’t see… oh God…’
‘Something happened?’
‘Good God, woman, you—’
‘What’ve I said?’
‘Not you, Abbie, me. Me. I’m stupid. I keep missing the obvious. It was staring me in the face, but if I hadn’t rung you it might not have occurred. Might be possible, might not. I need to call somebody else. Sorry, I’m all over the place…’
‘Listen, what time?
‘Not planning to start later than nine o’clock. Let’s say nine. If there’s a delay I’ll call you back. Would that be OK?’
‘Does Huw Owen know about this?’
‘He’s not answering his phone.’
‘Scraping the bottom of the barrel then. No, listen, I’ll be there. As it were. Do you want to give me the name?’
‘It’s Aidan Lloyd.’
She gave Abbie details of his death, told her where she could find a picture on the Net.
‘I’ll get into fancy dress, then,’ Abbie said, ‘and go down the church. Give me a call when it’s a wrap, if you’re not a gibbering wreck.’
She’d said the Lord’s Prayer with Gareth Brewer, advising him to keep on repeating it in his head, slowly, while she was away. A firewall.
When she walked back up the aisle, put down her bags, he was looking up at her, trusting, like a dog, putting himself in her hands as people, even today, tended to. When you were all they had left. Merrily thought of bereavement apparitions reported by friends in the pub, colleagues in the workplace – the ghost at the watercooler. Even children in a classroom when a favourite teacher had died. Usually, they just stopped. But when they didn’t…
The wrestler, Paul Crowden, cut in, so many of his words printed on her memory like the government warning on a cigarette packet.
I don’t want to get to know it, whatever it is, or find out what it’s after, or why it might be unquiet… As we have no means of understanding what’s actually happening, we should regard it all as potentially evil…
No.
She brought out her mobile phone, muted against incoming calls, and conjured up the picture of Aidan Lloyd from the Hereford Times.
Evidently a blow-up from a group shot at some farmers’ gathering. If there’d been time she’d have printed it out, because this was the Aidan she knew, if she knew him at all: face like a weather map, all smudges and shading, dark around the mouth, dark around the eyes.
‘Exorcism? Forget it,’ she told Gareth Brewer. ‘This is a Requiem Mass, or Eucharist, if you prefer. A second funeral service, if you like, the central purpose being to take the pressure off Aidan, wherever he is now. Which, thanks to Sir Lionel, could be anywhere. Reject this if you want, but I think what Sir Lionel had you do, out there in the churchyard, was… not a good idea. To say the least.’
‘You think we didn’t know that?’
Despite the cold, he’d been sweating, hair glued to his forehead. Molten candle wax was in freeflow on the altar, the flames erratic now. Yes, he’d said, he’d been to Holy Communion many times in his younger days. He was familiar with the procedure. She talked to him, keeping it conversational, as she prepared the altar.
‘I don’t know where Darvill’s coming from, and I’m not sure we have time to go into it. But whichever spiritual path you’re following – or psychological path, whatever – you have a guy here, a possibly troubled guy, with two personas, whose death came – bang! – in a crash. Unexpectedly. Who gets a duff funeral because his father’s angry, embittered, feeling betrayed by the son he’s burying. Whose grave is immediately invaded on the instructions of a man who’s convinced Aidan would rather be in Kilpeck.’
In full kit now, under the cape, she turned back to the chancel.
‘Now tell me there’s more to it than that.’
He shook his head, which could mean anything.
‘You can still back out, Gareth, I’m not going to twist your arm. Though I do feel obliged to tell you that, even if you walk away now, I’ll be going ahead with the Requiem – hopefully – because there’s someone else on her way.’
He looked up in alarm.
‘She won’t know about you, you won’t know about her. That all right?’
‘Her?’
She nodded and shed the cape. He stood up and took off his patched jacket, as if, she thought, for the sacred ritual of shoeing a horse.
It began, at its own pace.
We have come here tonight to remember, before God, our brother Aidan and to give thanks for his life.
Keeping it simple, using lines that Gareth might remember from the Sunday Eucharist.
Dying, you destroyed our death
Rising, you restored our life
Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
She’d done this many times, no two Requiems the same except for that sense of tremulous anticipation. The candles flickered occasionally, as if from some spear of draught out of the Bull Chapel behind the organ pipes.
When it came to responses, Gareth remembered. What you dreaded most was a situation where the words wouldn’t come, leaving a hollow silence that someone had once told her was apt to fill with a distant malevolent chattering in the back of your head.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Merrily’s mobile was propped up against a prayer book on the altar, the picture of Aidan dulled. Jane would approve of the picture. Sympathetic magic. Merrily no longer had qualms; the foundations were universal.
She was aware of her own breathing, amplified, as if the walls were breathing around her. As she’d placed the phone there, inclined her head and then moved away from the altar, Gareth Brewer had spontaneously talked about the worst feelings of all, as he’d fought to awaken in the bedroom. Always been claustrophobic – couldn’t work in the van without all the doors wide open. Certain now that he’d had the unbearable sensation of Aidan and him changing places in the smothering dark.
Suffocation. Asthma.
At this point, Rachel Peel had entered silently and Merrily had trotted down and locked the church door with the big key and switched off the lights. Then they’d walked back up the aisle and she’d performed very brief instructions and hands had been shaken. No discussion necessary, no happy-clappy hugs; they didn’t know one another, never need meet again.
let us not run from the love which you offer,
but hold us safe from the forces of evil.
On each of our dyings shed your light
As she lifted the chalice, she had one of those devilish panic images: Gareth choking on the wine, the wafer turning to clay in his throat.
She ignored it.
Earlier, she’d said he might feel the need to make a kind of sacrifice. To shed something. Give up the morris, he’d said. I know. And get out of the village. And lose significant clients – he hadn’t said that. She’d told him he might want to give up the morris just for a while. See how he felt.
Merrily let the candles burn and the shadows absorb her, the air carpeted by Rachel’s soft sobbing.
Gareth didn’t choke.
Rachel’s presence… God, how could she have lived with herself if she’d gone through with this without even offering her the opportunity to be here?
The shaded Aidan had vanished from the phone.
After it was over, Gareth walked down the aisle, shaking his head as if he’d given up trying to make sense of it. She was unlocking the door for them, asking if they’d like to come back to the vicarage for a coffee, but she was only half there and glad when they both thanked her and declined.
She threw open the double doors to a sky swimming with starlight, letting it in.
‘Have a walk around before you get into the car. And drive carefully.’
Gareth nodded.
‘This over?’
‘I hope so.’
Rachel was still breathing hard. She put her arms around Merrily. Over her black-coated shoulder the stars were chips of ice in a frozen firmament.
‘I’m so glad you rang,’ Rachel said.
And that was what mattered, what all this was about, a degree of customer satisfaction.
And nobody mentioned the alien smell that had come down from the rafters and settled in the air around them. After they’d gone, Merrily went back to extinguish the candles, drink the rest of the wine and put everything away, and the smell seemed stronger than ever, forcing her to her knees at the altar as a weight of exhaustion came down.
When she stepped out under the loaded sky, pulling on her waxed coat, Lol was there.
She smiled.
‘I thought I told you not to come into this place again in the hours of darkness. Not ever.’
‘You look shell-shocked.’
‘Just a bit dizzy.’ She turned to lock the church door. ‘It’s never what you expect. Which I suppose is how it should be. Otherwise, be routine, wouldn’t it?’
So glad it was Lol, that he was here. So grateful, wanting to hold him close, to love without complications.
‘Jane told you?’
‘She’s having an early night.’
‘Good.’
As they stepped away from the porch, pocketing the big keys, the ground was noisy in her head, as if some of the stars had drifted down and were getting crunched under her boots. She was grateful for his arm around her. Wanted so much to reassure him when he asked if this was over.
‘I’d like to think so.’
But she didn’t. For Gareth maybe and a turning point for Rachel, but it wasn’t over.
She glanced briefly towards Aidan’s tump as they walked towards the lychgate under the vast, unexpected planetarium of the Ledwardine night.
‘From a practical point of view,’ she said, ‘if Iestyn Lloyd wants to install some immovable granite monolith over his son’s grave, with bars all round, there won’t be any objections from me.’
She thought one of them might smile, guessed that neither did. The stone archway shielded her from the stars’ assault, but she still felt feather-headed and put both hands on the cold stone.
‘Haven’t missed anything, have I? Nobody called?’
‘Nobody important,’ Lol said, and she knew he was lying.
The stars were swarming like bleached insects around the church steeple. On the other side of the lychgate, the muted, mullioned lights of the Black Swan were less threatening, but the cold gnawed at Merrily’s hands and, for an instant, she was back in the church with its guttering candles and the pervading sweet, somnolent scent of marijuana.