The Chalice, page 5
She saw Don Moulder leaning over his gate, watching them. He was waiting for his money.
‘And keep it to yourself, Mr Moulder. About me, I mean.’
‘I won’t say another word, Miss Diane.’
Don Moulder’s currant eyes were pressed into a face like a slab of red Cheddar.
Don was a sort of born-again Christian with Jesus stickers in the back window of his tractor. It meant he never quite lied. So he’d probably told someone already.
Three hundred and fifty pounds changed hands. This left less than two hundred in the pocket sewn inside Diane’s Oxfam moonskirt.
The travellers didn’t know she was paying for the land; that would have been against their code. They thought Don Moulder was Molly’s uncle. He raised an eyebrow at that.
And then said, ‘Hippies.’ Dumping the word like a trailer-load of slurry. ‘Gonner be pretty bloody popular, aren’t I, lettin’ the hippies on my land. What I’m sayin’ is, I’m not sure three hundred covers it, all the goodwill I’m losin’, look.’
Don Moulder held all the cards; it cost her an extra fifty.
When she’d first encountered them, the travellers had been camping up on the moor – illegally, but there weren’t enough of them to qualify for instant arrest under the Act.
The news editor, an awful inverted snob who thought overfed, upper-crust Diane needed exposure to the lower strata of society, had sent her to do a story on them. Hoping, no doubt, that they would refuse to talk to her and she’d come back with her tail between her legs and he could smirk.
Determined that this would not happen, Diane had toned down her accent, adding a little Somerset burr which she thought at the time was rather good, actually. She’d even passed their very obvious test: accepting a mug of tea made from brown water scooped from a ditch.
This certainly broke the ice with Headlice; he’d begun to tell her things, despite Rozzie’s attempts to shut him up.
You print what you like, luv, we’re not stoppin’ here, anyroad.
Where are you going next then?
Leave it, Headlice, she’s only trying to …
Home, luv. Our spiritual home. It’s a pilgrimage. Along the pagan way.
Shut it, shithead.
To the sacred Isle of Avalon. Know where that is?
Diane had gone weak. It was another sign. Like a magic carpet unrolling at her feet, and the carpet went diagonally through the spine of England all the way back to Glastonbury. She’d felt almost sick with a combination of longing and dread.
Still holding the tin mug between her hands to stop them shaking she’d heard herself say,
May I come with you?
She didn’t even remember deciding to say it; the question just popped out, as strange and spontaneous as a lightball over the Tor.
I could, you know, write about it for the paper – what it’s really like, what you’re trying to do, all the hassle you get and the abuse. Would that be possible?
And she’d told them her name was Molly Fortune and she came from Somerset, and her accent went even fuzzier.
In a complete daze over the following two days, she’d drawn all she had out of the bank, paid £825 for the van and spent half an hour spraying pink blobs on the side. Absolute madness. Her father would have paled into one of his thin rages. In her father’s Somerset, New Age travellers were the worst kind of vermin, the kind you weren’t allowed to shoot.
For wealthy, handsome Patrick (fortuitously away at the time on an editors’ conference) embarrassment would be the worst of it. Embarrassment tinged, perhaps, with a certain relief. He was very good-looking, slim, two years younger than she. But he had affection for her; he would have been faithful. Perhaps.
Diane had sealed up her beautiful antique diamond ring in a registered envelope and posted it to Patrick, with a letter full of babbling incoherence. Sorry. I just can’t. I’m so sorry, Patrick. It’s out of my hands. I’ll write properly soon. Please don’t hate me.
It had been just a week before the widely publicised engagement party at the biggest hotel in Harrogate.
The worst of it for Diane was that, in spite of everything – in spite of Patrick’s being virtually the Chosen Suitor – she could have loved him. Probably. But something so far inside that she couldn’t reach it loved Glastonbury more.
‘So we start going up now, and we wait quietly.’
Mort had with him his new floozie, a slinky little redhead with a muted Germanic accent who seemed to be called Viper. She was wearing a loose, white shift and Mort’s hand was up one of the sleeves, carelessly cupping a breast.
Mort had dark, swarthy skin, high cheekbones; his hair was pulled back into a tight braid. He looked like he ought to be wearing a broadsword at his belt.
‘Ain’t a piece of street theatre.’ It was as if he’d picked up Diane’s thoughts about play-acting. ‘This is the real thing. The real place. The place.’
‘What’s with this quietness shit?’ Headlice demanded. ‘We’re goin’ to our church. We don’t have to hide it.’
Mort sighed. ‘This is your first time, init, Headlice? There’s people don’t like us being here. We don’t want no Stonehenge situation.’
Even to Diane this seemed a little over-cautious. Stonehenge was a restricted area and the Tor was not. And this was the middle of November, not Midsummer’s Eve.
‘Also, we don’t want local kids tagging along. So we go up in small groups.’
Headlice was right: this wasn’t how it had been. Paganism was not against the law, and the whole ethos of the New Age travellers was a kind of defiant exhibitionism; why else have purple hair, lip-rings, nipple-rings and luminous pentacles on the sides of your bus?
The vehicles in Don Moulder’s bottom field were now in rough, concentric circles, the night beginning to join them together, like walls. It was strangely silent; no ghetto-blasters blasting, no children squealing.
‘Idea being that we’re up there by nightfall,’ Mort said. ‘And no lights. You and Roz first, OK? I’ll show you the path.’
‘No problem,’ Headlice said. ‘Mol’s been up loads of times.’
‘Mol ain’t coming.’ Mort’s voice had tightened like his hair. He’d taken his hand out of Viper’s sleeve.
Headlice stared at him. ‘Huh?’
Mort turned to Diane. ‘Don’t take this wrong. We got nothing against you, Molly Fortune, but we ain’t forgotten you’re a reporter, and Gwyn don’t conduct rituals for the Press. Sorry.’
‘You got to be fuckin’ kiddin’, man!’ Headlice was furious. ‘That goes against everything we’re up for! Like we’re a fuckin’ secret society now? I mean, come on, what is paganism about, man? If you, like, worship the sun and the moon and natural stuff, you do it in the open.’
Diane wanted to tell him to calm down, it didn’t matter, it wasn’t right for her to be part of a pagan ceremony, certainly not the kind Headlice envisaged. But he straightened up, absurdly like a little war veteran.
‘Listen, I’m proud of what I am, me.’ He prodded Mort in the chest. ‘I worship the earth, yeah? And that hill’s not private land, so if nobody can stop us goin’ up, what right you got to tell Mol she can’t come?’
Mort’s face had darkened. He snatched Headlice’s prodding forefinger, bent it slowly back. Headlice went white. Mort forced him to his knees, towered over him.
‘This is religion, Headlice,’ Mort said. ‘It’s between us …’
There was a slight crack from Headlice’s finger.
‘And the gods,’ Mort said.
‘You fuckin’ …’ Headlice shoved his hand
between his thighs. ‘You’ve broken it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh look …’ Diane thought she must be as pale as Headlice. ‘You go. To be quite honest …’ Inspiration came. She produced a hopeless sigh. ‘It’s a pretty stiff climb, OK? I’m not built … Sometimes I get sort of out of breath, you know?’
Rozzie twirled her black beads and dropped a tilted grin that was sort of, Stupid fat cow, why didn’t you say in the first place?
‘I’ll mind the camp,’ Diane said. ‘See the kids are OK.’
‘Thank you,’ Mort said quietly. He turned and walked off down the field, his woman clinging to his arm. When he’d gone, Diane felt distinctly uncomfortable. A real journalist would have protested, been absolutely determined to go up the Tor with them.
‘Who’s that twat think he is?’ Headlice struggled to his feet. ‘We got a fuckin’ hierarchy now?’
‘It’s, you know, it’s all right. Really. I didn’t want to cause any … I mean, it’s not the same at night, anyway. You can’t see the view, and it gets very cold.’
‘What you sayin’ here, Mol?’
Diane rubbed her goose-pimpled arms. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you?’ She saw that Headlice was confused almost to the point of tears. ‘I’m fed up wi’ this. Everybody treats me like a fuckin’ dickhead. And you …’ Staring at her resentfully. ‘Wi’ your fancy accent slippin’ through. You’re a bit deep, Mol. You come on like fat and harmless. I reckon you’re weirder than all of us. I reckon you’re the weirdest person here.’
Diane was silent, biting her lip.
SEVEN
Sliver of Light
Increasingly, the dusk obsessed Jim Battle. He supposed it was due to his time of life: slipping away, as everyone must, into the mauve and the sepia.
But still it was endlessly challenging. Midges, for instance. How were you supposed to paint midges? In clouds, perhaps? A thickening of the air? Or just a dry stipple.
‘Dry stipple,’ Jim said aloud. One of those phrases that sounded like what it meant. There was a word for that; buggered if he could remember what it was.
With a thumb he smudged the sun. In the finished painting, it would be merely a hazy memory, a ghost on the canvas. Same with the Tor; you should be able to feel it in the picture, but not necessarily see it.
Jim stepped away from the canvas. The tangled garden, by now, was all blues and greys and dark browns. As there were no lights on in the cottage, Jim could barely see the canvas. Time to stop. Time to wind up the Great Quest for another day.
Still, for once, time was playing on his side, staying the dead hand of winter, letting him go on painting outdoors into the early evening, using the very last of the light. For this was when things happened. Often, when he looked at the picture next morning, he’d find that the absence of direct light had wrought some marvellous effects, textures he’d never have found if he’d been able to see properly. All a matter of surrendering to the dusk.
And beyond the dusk … lay the Grail.
Of course, everyone came to Avalon in search of the Grail. And it was different for all of them. There was always the possibility of an actual holy relic somewhere. But for most people the Grail was simply the golden core of whatever you dreamed you might achieve. The vanishing point on life’s horizon. Glastonbury being one of those spots on the Earth’s surface where the phantasmal became almost tangible, where you might actually reach the vanishing point before you, er, vanished.
Jim’s personal Grail – the mystical formula which would (he hoped) come to define a Battle painting – was to be found at the very end of dusk, the cusp of the day, the moment between evening and night when the world stopped.
It should happen at dawn too, but it didn’t for Jim. He’d walked out in the drizzle and the dew, to wait. In vain. The moment never came, or he could not feel it. Time of life again: at his age perhaps you were just not meant to feel the stopping of the world at dawn.
Not that he greatly wished for youth – only to have come to Avalon as a younger man. Wasn’t as if he hadn’t known, then, what he wanted to do. Plenty of time for painting, bloody Pat had bleated, when you’ve got your pension.
God. Why do we listen to them? If he’d left his wife and met Juanita twenty years ago, when she was a very young woman and he didn’t seem so much of an older man …
Well, he hadn’t. It was enough of a privilege that she was his friend, that he could bathe in her aura. Jim left the canvas wedged into the easel and manhandled the whole thing to the house. He propped it against the open door and turned to accept the night.
The cottage was tiny but satisfyingly isolated, reached by a track too narrow for a car. Ten years ago, although his worldly goods were few, the removal men had been less than euphoric.
But Jim still was, much of the time. Especially when the sun had gone, leaving its ghost to haunt the lush, sloping grass in the foothills of Glastonbury Tor.
Behind the cottage was a wooded hillside which was always immediately activated by the dying sun. He could almost feel it starting to tremble with the stirring and scufflings and rustlings of badgers and rabbits and foxes and owls.
Before him, the dark brown fields rolled away into the tide of mist on the slopes of the Tor and the cottage snuggled into the huge ash tree which overhung it, as if its only protection against the night was to become part of this great organism.
The way that Jim himself wanted to go into the final night. To be absorbed, become part of the greater organism, even if it was only as fertiliser.
He grunted, startled.
Two extra shadows were creeping along the hedgerow.
Headlice saw the little tubby guy in his garden, with his red face and his tweed hat. What a waste, eh? People like that should go and live in nice suburban cul-de-sacs and leave the power places for them that could still feel the electricity.
He dragged Rozzie into the shadow of the hedge. ‘Ow!’ she screeched. ‘Friggin’ thorns.’
‘Thorns round here are sacred,’ Headlice told her. ‘That Joseph of whatsit, when he landed and planted his stick, it turned into a thorn tree, right?’
‘That’s Christian.’
‘It’s still earth magic.’ Headlice gazed up towards the Tor, very big now, almost scary in the flatlands. One side of the tower sucking the very last red bit out of the sky, the other side, the one closest to them, sooty-black.
He was glad they’d been sent first, to find their own way through the tangled undergrowth to the Tor. This was how a pilgrimage ought to end. Except he wished it wasn’t Rozzie.
A fragile half moon had risen in a thin mist above the holy hill’s eastern flank.
‘Fuckin’ magic. In’t it?’
‘You ain’t seen nuffin yet.’ Rozzie smiled secretively. ‘Stop a minute, willya? I’ve done me friggin’ ankle.’
Headlice gritted his teeth. ‘Been better off bringing Molly. Least she knows the country.’
‘Yeah,’ Rozzie said. ‘And you could shag her afterwards, right?’
Headlice said nothing.
‘What you had in mind, ain’t it?’ Rozzie said. ‘You’re a transparent little sod.’
OK, so maybe he did wish it was Mol he was with. Sure she was fat. Fatish. But she was nice-looking. Open, where Rozzie was closed-up. Despite – and he’d always known this – her not being what she made out. Plus she smelled nice.
When they crossed the lane, only a hedge between them and where the ground started to rise, Headlice wanted to climb over and scramble up, but Rozzie said they’d better find the gate Mort had told them to use. When they reached it they could see a glowing path of concrete: chippings and stuff had been put in, with steps. All the way to the top, it looked like. For the tourists. Sacrilege.
There was a collecting box inviting visitors to contribute towards Tor maintenance. Oh yeah, like patching up the concrete path? Balls to that.
And then there was a National Trust notice board for the thicko tourists. Headlice started to read it anyway, striking a match and holding it close to the print.
Tor is a West Country word of Celtic origin meaning a hill. Glastonbury Tor is a natural formation composed of layers of clay and blue limestone, capped by a mass of hard, erosion-resistant sandstone.
‘How do they know that, anyway?’ It was almost too dark to make out the print. ‘How do they know it’s a natural formation?’
‘What’s it matter?’ Rozzie said.
‘Because it could’ve been built here, you daft bat. By the ancient shamans. Like the pyramids. According to the lines of force and the position of the heavens.’
The Tor is and has been to many people a place of magic, the focus of legend and superstition. One local story is that there is a hollow space inside; another, perhaps very ancient, that the hill has a secret entrance to the Underworld.
Headlice felt sick to his gut to see it spelled out like this, in baby talk, for every ice-lolly-sucking day-tripper. He wanted to rip down the board, smash the collecting box, hack up the concrete path. Then the Tor would be a secret place again. A place for pilgrims.
He turned away, needing to put this tourist shit behind him.
‘Come on.’ Pulling at Rozzie.
‘Get your mits off. Wanna read this last bit.’
The Tor was the scene of the hanging, drawing and quartering of Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, when Henry VIII dissolved the Abbey in 1539.
‘Heavy,’ Rozzie said.
‘Yeah. Shit.’ Headlice dropped the match as it burned down to his fingers. ‘I didn’t know about that.’
He looked up to where night had fused the hill and the tower into a single dark lump.
‘Still.’ He walked off along the shining path. ‘Maybe the old git had it coming.’
Alone for the first time since she’d joined the convoy, Diane sat in Headlice’s bus, a woollen shawl around her shoulders, and unwrapped a peppermint-flavoured carob bar.
She was sitting on one of the original vinyl-covered bus seats still bolted to the floor. The bus windows were purpled by a November night as soft and luminous as June.
So this was it. Breathing space over. She was back.
What happens now?
Part of her wanted to take her van and leave quietly. Drive to Juanita’s. She’d really missed Juanita, the older sister she’d never had. She really ought to explain. But what on earth could she say? Juanita might run a New Age bookshop, but she could be rather disparaging about people’s visions.
