A Crown of Lights (17 page)

Never
really
imagining that the nerves wouldn’t just float away once they were on the air. Because... well, because this was trivial, trash, tabloid television, forgotten before the first editions of tomorrow’s papers got onto the streets.

This really mustn’t be taken too seriously.

Merrily froze, two thousand years of Christianity setting like concrete around her shoulders. The light was merciless and hotter than the sun. She was in terror; she couldn’t even pray.

‘Merrily Watkins,’ he’d said, ‘you’re a vicar, a woman of God. Let’s hear how you defend your creator against that kind of
logic. Isn’t there really a fair bit of sense in what Ned’s saying?’

He was slight, not very tall. His natural expression was halfway to a smile, the lips in a little V. He was light and nimble and chatty. He earned probably six times as much as a bishop – the shiny-suited, eel-like, non-stick, omnipotent John Fallon.

‘Well, Merrily,’ he said. ‘
Isn’t
there?’

And yet, there were no tricks, no surprises. It had started, exactly as Tania Beauman had said it would, with the parents Jean and Roger Gillespie, goddess-worshippers from Taunton, Somerset, who wanted their daughter’s religion to be formally accepted at her primary school. They’d have a second child starting school next year; later a third one; they wanted new data programmed into the education machine, respectful references to new names: Isis, Artemis, Aradia. Roger was an architect with the county council; he maintained that his beliefs were fully accepted on the executive estate where the Gillespies had lived for three years.

They were both so humourless, Merrily thought, as Jean demanded parity with Islam and boring old Christianity, and special provision for her family’s celebration of the solstices and the equinoxes, the inclusion of pagan songs, at least once a week, at the school assembly.

Fallon had finally interrupted this tedious monotone. ‘And what do you do exactly, Jean? Do you hold nude ceremonies in your garden? What happens if the neighbours’ve got a barbecue going?’

‘Well, that’s just the kind of attitude we
don’t
get, for a start.’ Jean’s single plait hung like a fat hawser down her bosom. ‘Our rituals are private and discreet and are respected by our neighbours, who—’

‘Fine. Sure. OK.’ John Fallon had already been on the move, away from Jean, who carried on talking, although the boom-mic operator had moved on. Fallon had spun away through ninety degrees to his next interviewee: the elegant Mr Edward Bain, nothing so vulgar as King of the Witches.

‘We’re here to talk about religious belief,’ Fallon had read from the autocue at the beginning of the show, ‘and the right of people in a free society to worship their own gods. Some of you might think it’s a bit loony, even scary, but the thousands of pagan worshippers in Britain maintain that theirs is the only true religion of these islands, and they want their ceremonies – which sometimes include nudity, simulated and indeed actual sex – to be given full charitable status and full recognition from the state and the education system...’

When he had his back to Merrily, she saw the wire to his earpiece coming out of his collar, like a ruched scar on the back of his neck. Relaying instructions or suggestions, from the programme’s director in some hidden bunker.

‘Ned Bain,’ Fallon said, ‘you’re the high priest of a London coven – can we use the word “coven”? – and also a publisher and an expert on ancient religions of all kinds. I want you to tell me, simply and concisely, why
you
think paganism is, today, more relevant and more important to these islands than Christianity.’

And Edward Bain had sat, one leg hooked casually over the other like... like Sean had sat sometimes... a TV natural, expounding without pause, his eyes apparently on Fallon, but actually gazing beyond him across the studio. His eyes, in fact, were lazily fixed on Merrily’s... and they – she clutched her chair seat tightly – they were
not
Sean’s.

‘Well, for a start, they’ve had their two millennia,’ he said reasonably. ‘Two thousand years of war and divison, repression and persecution, torture, genocide... in the name of a cruel, despotic deity dreamed up in the Middle East.’

From the seats tiered behind Merrily came the swelling sound of indrawn breath, like a whistling in the eaves. Part awe, part shock, part admiration at such cool, convincing blasphemy.

‘Two thousand years of the cynical exploitation, by wealthy men, of humanity’s unquenchable yearning for spirituality... the milking of the peasants to build and maintain those great
soaring cathedrals... created to harness energies they no longer even understand. Two thousand years of Christianity... a tiny, but ruinous period of Earth’s history. A single dark night of unrelenting savagery and rape.’

There was a trickle of applause. He continued to look at Merrily, his mouth downturned in sorrow but a winner’s light in his eyes. The space between them seemed to shrink, until she could almost feel the warm dusting of his breath on her face. On a huge screen above him was projected the image of a serene, bare-breasted woman wearing a tiara like a coiled snake.

‘Now it’s our turn,’ he said softly. ‘We who worship in woods and circles of rough stone. We who are not afraid to part the curtains, to peer into the mysteries from which Christianity still cowers, screaming shrilly at us to
come away, come away
. To us – and to the rest of you, if you care to give it any thought – Christianity is, at best, a dull screen, a block. It is
anti
-spiritual. It was force-fed to the conquered and brutalized natives of the old lands, who practised – as we once did, when we still had sensitivity – a natural religion, in harmony with the tides and the seasons, entirely beneficent, gentle, pacific, not rigid nor patriarchal. The Old Religion has always recognized the equality of the sexes and exalted the nurturing spirit, the spirit which can soothe and heal the Earth before it is too late.’

The trickle of applause becoming a river. John Fallon standing with folded arms and his habitual half-smile. Someone had dimmed the studio lights so that Ned Bain was haloed like a Christ figure, and when he spoke again it might have been Sean there, being reasonable, logical. Merrily began to sweat.

‘The clock of the Earth is running down. We’ve become alienated from her. We must put the last two thousand years behind us and speak to her again.’

And the river of applause fanned out into a delta among not only the myriad ranks of the pagans, but also the shop-floor
workers and the wages staff and the middle and upper management of the paint factory in Walsall. The claps and cheers turned to an agony of white noise in Merrily’s head and she closed her eyes, and when she opened them, there was the fuzzy boom-mic on a pole hanging over her head, and the camera had glided silently across like an enormous floor-polisher and John Fallon, legs apart, hands behind his back, was telling her and the millions at home, ‘... really a fair bit of sense in what Ned’s saying? Well, Merrily... isn’t there?’

She’s frozen, Jane thought in horror, as two seconds passed.

Two entire seconds.... on
Livenight
! A hush in the bear pit.

‘Come on, love.’ Gerry’s hands were chivvying at the monitors. ‘You’re not in the bloody pulpit now.’

Maurice, the director, said into his microphone, ‘John, why don’t you just ask her, very gently, if she’s feeling all right?’

Jane wanted to haul him from his swivel chair and wrestle him to the ground among the snaking wires. But then, thank Christ, Mum started talking.

It just wasn’t her voice, that was the problem. She sounded like she’d just been awakened from a drugged sleep. Well, all right, it was going to be a tough one. Ned Bain was a class act, a cool, cool person, undeniably sexy. And Jane admittedly felt some serious empathy with what he was saying. Like, hadn’t she herself had this same argument with Mum time and again, pointing out that paganism – witchcraft – was a European thing, born in dark woodland glades, married to mountain streams. It was practical, and Jane didn’t even see it as entirely incompatible with Christianity.

The camera was tight on Mum – so tight that,
oh no
, you could see the sweat. And she was gabbling in that strange, cracked voice about Christianity being pure, selfless love, while paganism seemed to be about sex at its most mechanical and... feelingless.

Feelingless?
Jesus, Jane thought, is that a real word?
Oh God
.

‘This is bloody trite crap, especially after the pagan guy,’
Maurice told John Fallon. ‘Let’s come back to her when, and if, she gets her shit together.’

‘All right.’ John Fallon spun away, a flying smirk. ‘That’s the, ah, Church of England angle.’

Someone jeered.

Oh God!
When she was sure the camera was away from her, Merrily dabbed a crumpled tissue to her forehead, knowing immediately what she
should
have said, how she
could
have dealt with Bain’s simplistic generalizations. Now wanting to jump up and tug Fallon back. But it was, of course, too late.

From halfway up an aisle between rows of seats, she caught a glance from Steve Ewing, the producer, his mouth hidden under a lip-microphone as used by ringside boxing commentators. It was as if he was ironically rerunning his pre-programme pep talk:
‘... you’ll be kicking yourself all the way home because you missed your chance of getting your argument across on the programme.’

From the adjacent seat to her left, a hand gently squeezed her arm: Patrick Ryan, the sociologist who was supposed to have shagged half the priestesses in the southern counties while compiling his thesis on pagan ritual practice. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he whispered.

She nodded. She sought out the eyes of Ned Bain, but they were in shadow now; he seemed to be looking downwards. He appeared very still and limp, as though his body was recharging. She thought, He was staring at me the whole time. And afterwards I couldn’t do a thing.

‘... gonna talk to Maureen now,’ John Fallon was saying, back on the other side of the studio floor, just across the aisle from Ned Bain. ‘Maureen, your teenage daughter was into all this peaceful, New Age nature worship. But that was only the start, because Gemma ended up, I believe, in a psychiatric unit.’

Oh, sure... blame Bain for your own deficiencies.
Merrily shook herself, furious.
Blame poor dead Sean
.

‘She’s still attending the unit, John.’ Maureen was a bulky woman, early fifties, south London accent. ‘Apart from that, she won’t hardly leave the house any more, poor kid.’

‘She became a witch, right?’

‘She became a witch when she was about seventeen, when she first went to the tech college. There was a lecturer there like... him.’ Maureen jerked a thumb at Ned Bain, who tilted his head quizzically. ‘Smooth, good-looking guy, on the make.’

Ned chuckled.
Really nothing like Sean. How could she have
—

‘But let’s just make it clear,’ Fallon said, ‘that this was
not
Ned Bain here. So this other man recruited Gemma into a witch coven.’

Maureen described how her daughter had been initiated in a shop cellar converted into a temple, and within about six months her personality had completely changed. She’d broken off her engagement to a very nice boy who was a garage mechanic, and then they found out she was into hard drugs.

‘But I never knew the worst of it till her mate come to see me one day. This was the mate she’d joined the coven with, and she told me Gemma had got involved with this other group what was doing black magic. She said Gemma went with the rest of them to St Anthony’s Church – and I know this happened, ’cause it was in the papers – and they desecrated it.’

‘Desecrated, how?’

‘Well... you know... did... did their dirt.’ The big face crumpled. ‘Things like—’

‘John, let me say...’ Ned Bain was leaning forward. The camera pulled back, the boom-mic operator shifted position. ‘This is satanism, and satanism is a specifically anti-Christian movement. It is entirely irrelevant to Wicca or any of the other strands of paganism. We do not oppose Christianity. We—’

‘The hell you don’t!’ Merrily was half out of her seat, but well off-mic.

‘We are an
alternative
to Christianity,’ Bain stressed. ‘And also, I should perhaps point out at this stage, a precursor, of the
tired, politicized cult of Jesus. And I say precursor, because there’s evidence that Christianity itself is no more than a fabrication, a modification of the cult of Dionysus, in which the story of the man-god who dies and is resurrected...’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Fallon stopped him. ‘Fascinating stuff, Ned, but I want to stay with satanism for a moment.’

‘As you would,’ Merrily muttered.

‘Now, Ned,
you
would say that satanism is as much anathema to pagans as it is to the Christian Church. And yet young Gemma graduated – or descended – to some kind of devil worship after being initiated as a witch. I want to come back...’ Fallon wheeled ‘... to Merrily Watkins...’

Merrily’s hands tightened on the arms of her chair.
Please God...

‘Now, what we didn’t say before about Merrily is that, as well as being one of the new breed of female parish priests, she’s also the official exorcist – I believe Deliverance Minister is the correct term these days – for the Diocese of Hereford. That’s right?’

‘Yes.’
Ignore the camera, the lights. Don’t look at Bain’s eyes.

‘So what I want to ask you, do people like Maureen often come to you with this same kind of story?’

‘I...’ She swallowed. How could she say she hadn’t been in the job long enough to have accumulated any kind of client base. ‘I have to say... John... that what you might call
real
satanism is uncommon. What you have are kids who’re playing old Black Sabbath albums and get a perverse buzz out of dressing up and doing something horribly antisocial. Quite often, you’ll find that these kids will join a witch coven in the belief that it’s far more... extreme, if you like, than it actually is. That they’re entering a world of sex rites and blood sacrifice.’