The Chalice, page 20
‘Major, do you think I could call you back tomorrow evening?’
‘Look, Mrs Carey … All right, Rosemary … I’m sorry. Mrs Carey, how can I approach this with you? There are things you don’t know. Parts of the diary we couldn’t print for legal reasons. Elements of George Pixhill’s past which have a bearing on what I … what I understand is beginning to happen in Glastonbury.’
Bloody Pixhill, Juanita thought. I wish I’d never heard of bloody Pixhill.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come on Friday.’
‘Thank you,’ said Major Shepherd slowly. ‘Bless you, Mrs Carey.’ He said it in a peculiar way, as though it was an actual benediction.
‘A pleasure,’ Juanita said, strained. Through the window, she saw two women walking up the street; one was Dame Wanda Carlisle.
‘And please,’ the Major said, ‘please don’t let me down. Verity Endicott can no longer deal with this alone.’
She watched the two women pass under the window, Dame Wanda Carlisle flamboyant in a cape and – talk of the devil – Verity Endicott a pace behind, like a little chihuahua. Synchronicity.
Juanita hated synchronicity. She stood there holding the phone, pushing back the metal aerial. The button at its tip was missing and she kept pushing the point into her palm, to experience the reality of pain. More mystery. I don’t need any more flaming mystery.
‘Major, how does Verity Endicott come into this?’
She saw a man in a cap and a belted raincoat crossing the road towards the bookshop.
‘Goodnight, Mrs Carey.’ As though he hadn’t heard.
‘Major Shepherd …’
The man in the raincoat reached the kerb and pulled off his cap. Coils of thick grey hair tumbled out. It wasn’t a man at all.
‘Oh shit,’ Juanita said.
Ceridwen.
Don Moulder could never approach that bottom field now without a feeling of resentment.
It was well out of sight of the farmhouse. Bloody perfect, it was: gently sloping, easy access from the road, magnificent views to the Tor.
Ideal for housing. Also, the only field he’d hardly notice if it had gone. When the snooty beggars at the council had turned the plan down, Don reckoned this was because Griff Daniel was involved and now he’d lost his seat the planners were putting the boot in. Seemed like the only way to get the scheme through now was to get Griff back on the council.
Don slowed up, gun pointing downwards now. No lights down there. Nothing.
Crafty devils.
Griff Daniel had been round earlier with a roll of posters for Don to stick on his fences, on telegraph and electric poles, trees. The posters said: GLASTONBURY FIRST.
All would be clear very soon, Griff had said.
What was in the bottom field was not clear at all. Even though there was a bit of a moon, so he didn’t need his hand-lamp yet.
There was something – he could sense that, the way you could sense whether there was livestock in a meadow in the dark. Although, when Don put out a hand to the five-barred gate, he found the old length of electric wire still looped around the posts, and they never closed gates behind them, didn’t hippies. Rustlers he’d ruled out soon as he figured the noise had to be coming from the bottom field.
Sneaky. Well, two could play that ole game.
Don undid the wire, gave the gate a prod, moved silently through and pushed it shut behind him. He crept out into the field, to the edge of where it sloped down towards the road, laid the unlit lamp at his feet and hefted his twelve-bore.
Stand by.
Don stood there a moment in the soggy grass, then he took a deep breath and stamped down with his right boot on the button of his lamp.
‘Right then!’ he roared. ‘What’s all this? Who give you per—’
His voice cut out like a wireless in a power failure. The bloody ole lamp hadn’t come on. He snatched it up and shook it and still it didn’t light up. He dropped the useless bloody thing in the grass and thought about firing a shot into the air.
Maybe not.
He looked up into the sky. A haze of light was wreathed around the moon and you could make out a bit of nightmist below the Tor.
You testin’ me, Lord?
It wasn’t cold, but it was damp, and Don shivered, wanting to be in his bed with his old woman. Whoever they were, they’d probably been scared off. He picked up his lamp, shoved his gun under his arm and turned away, tramping grumpily back towards the gate.
At least, he thought he was going back to the gate. But when he put out his hand to unloop the wire, he shouted in pain.
‘Uuurgh!’
Bloody hedge. Fistful of damn thorns.
Angry with himself now. He must be in a wonky state if he’d got lost in his own bloody field. He kicked out with his left boot at where he figured the gate must be and it got snagged in the hedge and he was left limping about, in a right old mess, trying to drag his foot out and still keep the boot on.
While behind him, in the silence of the bottom field, came the hollow gasp-and-growl of an old engine starting up.
Don Moulder dropped his gun and lamp with the shock of it. He wrenched his foot out of the hedge, leaving the boot still ensnared there.
‘All right, come outer there. Show yourselves. I … I can see you!’
And he could. Under the moon, in front of an old oak tree the Green beggars had got officially protected so he wasn’t allowed to chop it down.
It sat there under the tree: a big, black hippy bus, engine throbbing.
‘Come on then. I’m a-waitin’ for you.’
Don standing on one leg, his bootless foot feeling cold. The Blight was over now all right, it was winter in that field. He could see the steam from his own breath rising, and he realised he was afeared. Lights were coming on in front of the bus: feeble, greasy, headlights that didn’t light up anything, not the grass, nor the hedge, nor the gate. The lights hung either side of a radiator grille that was peeling off like a scab on a child’s knee.
The bus lurched with a cackle of rusty-sounding gears and he thought, Oh Christ, they’re gonner run me over, crouching and feeling for his twelve-bore but finding only the lamp.
This time, when he pressed the switch, it lit up at once. He shone it directly at the bus and it lit up the grass and the hedge and the old oak tree he wasn’t allowed to chop down.
His mind spun. He blinked, lost his balance and fell to his hands. The bus was still making its rattling cough, but all he could see when, frantically, he shone his light at it, were the hedge and the oak tree.
The noise of the bus cranked up like catarrhal laughter and filled the night and his head, and all he could see in the lamplight was the grass and the hedge and the old oak tree he wasn’t allowed to chop down.
Oh no. Oh Lord. Oh no.
His thumb found the lamp’s switch. He had to do this. He had to. Oh Lord, please let …
Breath coming faster now, Don snapped off the light. The grass and the hedge and the oak tree vanished, and there was a moment of calm. Before the vibration began. The earth shaking under him. An acrid smell beginning to filter through, diesel and hot rubber.
Gears meshed in the air.
And there, in the roaring darkness, was the bus right in front of him, a halo of dirty smoke around it and wisps of grey steam dribbling out of its loose, grinning radiator and only smog and shadow where its wheels should have been.
EIGHT
Crone
Ceridwen wasn’t her real name. It was the name of the formidable Celtic Goddess of Rebirth and Transformation and thus was often brazenly assumed by seers and psychics with professional ambitions.
Her real name was Ruth Dunn and she used to be a nurse.
She also claimed to have been a witch since childhood, trained in ‘the robed, Gardnerian tradition’. Now she worked part-time at a New-Age nursing home on the Pilton Road and had an apartment near the Glastonbury Experience arcade where she forecast the future by scrying with a mirror and a bowl of rusty spring water from the Chalice Well.
Ceridwen, the Goddess’s representative in Glastonbury. Usually seen on the street dressed in a man’s greatcoat or, as tonight, in a district nurse’s gabardine mac, her dense grey hair clamped under a cloth cap.
‘Thank you,’ she said to Juanita. ‘Thank you for looking after her. I’ve come to take her home.’
‘Yessss,’ Domini breathed. She looked radiant. ‘I’m to be apprenticed to the Inner Circle. A neophyte.’
‘Wow,’ Juanita said. ‘Somebody open a bottle of champagne.’
She was furious. Bloody Ceridwen. She’d come back to Glastonbury after her divorce – after losing custody of the children when her husband played the witchcraft card in front of a Methodist judge. Raging with malice and greedily gathering the wretched wives of Avalon to her embittered bosom.
Now, to Juanita’s horror, Diane was presenting Ceridwen with a cup of tea.
‘Thank you, my dear.’ Ceridwen turned her large face on Juanita. ‘You must be glad to have her back.’
‘Yes,’ Juanita said non-committally.
‘She’s grown up.’
‘Yes. Big girl now, Ruth.’
‘Ceridwen.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Juanita smiled.
There was a silence. Ceridwen lowered herself into the armchair, sipped her tea. ‘Diane, do you remember coming to see me some years ago?’
‘Yes.’ Diane glanced apologetically at Juanita.
‘Used to like to call yourself Diane Fortune, do you remember?’
‘When she was a little girl,’ Juanita said. ‘People tend to grow out of giving themselves silly names.’
Ceridwen didn’t look at her, only at Diane. ‘When she was in adolescence. When the psychic portals were opening to her.’
‘When she was having problems at home,’ Juanita said. ‘When she was scrabbling for an identity in a family where women don’t count for much, especially if they aren’t slim and beautiful.’
Ceridwen smiled, still looking at Diane. ‘I had heard you were going through a denial phase. Can’t be good for business, Juanita, if you no longer believe in the books you’re selling. Indeed, hard to see …’
She turned to face Juanita at last. Her industrial-strength Alice band had slipped and thick, grey hair obscured one glittering, ebony eye.
‘… how can you go on living in Avalon. While contriving to block it all out.’
‘Maybe I’m growing old and faded and bitter and cynical.’
‘You’re beautiful, woman.’ A sharp rebuke. ‘But you lack wisdom.’
‘Thank you, Ruth.’
‘And yet’, Ceridwen shrugged. ‘You may still have … untapped potential.’
Domini said, ‘Ceridwen could help you to find it. If you showed some humility.’
‘Right.’ Juanita nodded seriously. ‘You mean, I could learn how to scatter my books down the street and turn over my shop window to a plaster goddess with big tits and a cunt like a culvert.’
Diane gasped. Domini scowled. Ceridwen sipped her tea and smiled to herself. Go on, Juanita thought. Turn me into a hamster.
Ceridwen’s eyes didn’t move. She said, ‘That’s not what we do any more.’
Something cold and needle-thin penetrated Juanita’s spine from within. Ceridwen sat in the stoveside chair like a big Whistler’s Mother, face still and hard and varnished. She began to speak, slowly.
‘The day will soon come, woman, when the only sanctuary to be found will be at the bosom of the Goddess. You know that we have to take full control of the spiritual life and welfare of this community. And soon. As for you …’
Ceridwen appraised Juanita, head to toe, like a fashion-shop manageress sizing up a customer. Or an undertaker estimating the amount of wood it would take for the coffin.
‘… your time is close, woman. You have to come to terms with it. It’ll happen sooner than you dread.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Oh, Juanita.’ Ceridwen laughed. ‘I mean the hot flushes. Have you had the hot flushes yet? There are, as we say, three aspects of the Goddess. The virgin. The Mother. And …’
‘Piss off,’ said Juanita.
‘And the crone.’ Ceridwen placed her cup and saucer on the arm of the chair. ‘The hag.’ She stood up, stately and mature and wise.
‘The last transition for a woman’, she said gently, ‘can be a wonderful and fulfilling time, full of enlightenment. If you are on the Path. A time of wisdom and reflection. And latent power.’
She paused. Her large bosom swelled under the tight gabardine.
‘But it can also be a time of disillusion and decay, constantly chilled by the draught of death. If you reject the Goddess inside you.’
Juanita found she’d backed into the doorway. The bitch. The fucking bitch.
‘That’s what they said about HRT,’ she said lightly and was gratified to see Ceridwen’s face darken.
‘Come, Domini,’ Ceridwen said.
Juanita stayed in the doorway. ‘Where are you taking her? Tony’s in the shop.’
‘Packing, I trust,’ said Domini.
‘We’re going to a place of sanctuary,’ Ceridwen said. ‘Let us through, please.’
‘Wanda’s house?’
Ceridwen didn’t reply. The actress’s elegant town house had been virtually taken over by the bloody Cauldron. It had endless bedrooms; they would put Domini in one, surrounded by candles and ministering angels and the brainwash would be complete.
Bollocks to that.
‘Why don’t you stay here, Domini?’ Juanita closed the parlour door, her back to it, both hands around its handle behind her. ‘Take some time, think about it. You’ve a lot to lose. Tony’s a decent guy.’
‘I’ve been trying to tell her …’ Diane said, as Ceridwen came forward, very much the nursing sister advancing down the ward. Briskly, she closed in on Juanita, rapidly detaching her hands from the doorhandle. Taking Juanita’s hands in each of hers and bringing them tightly together.
Grey coils of hair settled around the broad, coarse face, looking down on Juanita’s. It had all happened very quickly. Juanita flinched, half-expecting the woman to hit her, but when she spoke it was the voice of Ruth Dunn again, the firm but kindly nurse.
‘You silly, silly woman. I think you’re really quite unstable. I think you need counselling.’ Ceridwen putting on a show of strength and sanity for Diane and Domini.
She was a much larger woman than Juanita, built for holding down distressed patients in the night. The grip was stronger than it looked.
‘Oh, it’s understandable,’ Ceridwen said, the voice of experience. ‘You’re frustrated and depressed by your loss of belief. And by Diane’s youth, because yours has gone. You’re afraid that, before you know it, another twenty-five years will have passed and you’ll look into the glass and your face will be the face of …’
She raised her heavy eyebrows.
‘… Verity Endicott.’
Positioning both of Juanita’s hands away from her body, moulded together, palm to palm, like an old-fashioned teacher showing a child how to pray.
‘What lovely, slender hands you still have,’ she said almost tenderly, and Juanita was suddenly and irrationally scared that her palms might be fused together for ever.
‘But you’re afraid, I think, that beneath the silky, brown skin which, sadly, now caresses only books …’
Juanita saw a splinter of spite in Ceridwen’s eyes.
‘… are an old woman’s curling claws.’
‘Let me go.’ Juanita felt a coldness under her heart. ‘How dare you? How fucking dare you?’
After a long moment, Ceridwen smiled, relaxed and let both Juanita’s hands fall away like a discarded pair of silk gloves.
As the two women left, Domini smirking, Juanita felt sick and humiliated. Like Jim Battle after his Execution.
At first, she couldn’t feel her hands at all. Self-consciously she rubbed her palms together to restore the circulation, experiencing a moment of relief followed by a palpitating insecurity. And a creeping, bitter shame.
Diane went to shut the shop door.
‘No.’ Juanita walked out on to the pavement. ‘I need some air.’
It was gone midnight. The street was deserted, not even one of those stoned guitar-and-bongo duos under the church wall. The very air felt thin and exhausted, used up by lungs involved in excess panting and screaming and sighing. The town was full of madness tonight.
She walked across the street to the war-memorial, a good twenty feet high and carved like a Celtic cross. Iron railings separated it from St John’s churchyard. Juanita leaned against the railings, pulled out her cigarettes.
‘We’ve got problems here,’ she said as Diane joined her.
‘Look’, Diane stared down at her trainers on the first step of the memorial, ‘what she said. That was awful. Cruel. But …’
‘But true,’ Juanita said. ‘It wouldn’t have been cruel otherwise. I’ve looked at Verity Endicott more than once and thought, yeah, that’ll be me one day. Toddling round the town with my shopping bag when all the shops have closed.’
‘That’s not what I meant. You’re not remotely like Miss Endicott. I hope I look like you when I’m …’
‘Forty-something.’
‘I wish I looked like you now.’
‘Oh, shut up, Diane.’ Juanita lit a cigarette. ‘Listen, we really have a problem. Nothing to do with that woman.’
‘I wish you hadn’t offended her.’
‘Oh for God’s sake … Diane, that boy, Headlice …’
Diane went still.
‘He’s dead,’ Juanita said. ‘I’m sorry to tell you like this. It was in tonight’s paper. They found his body in an abandoned bus in a wood at Stoke St Michael.’
Diane stared across the street as if it were a distance of several miles.
‘He had head injuries,’ Juanita said. ‘It has to be him because of … you mentioned a swastika.’
‘On top of his head.’
‘The police are suspicious. You know what that means, don’t you?’
