December (23 page)

      
'I came because your mother was out.'

      
'Ooo-er.'

      
Simon brought whisky glasses back. Poured Southern Comfort
into hers until she nodded.

      
'To come straight to the point,' he said. 'I wanted to talk about
the Abbey.'

      
Isabel lifted her glass, frowned. 'You really will have to get
me pissed then.'

Moira flexed her shoulders.
The kettle raised its tarnished lid and let out a thin whine, turning the mirror
into mist, all white, white enough to write on. And because she couldn't see
her face in it any more, her mind projected upon the mirror an image of what she'd
been shoving to the back of her thoughts for some hours.

Dear
Ms Cairns,

Keeping
this brief - I should very much like to speak to you in connection with the masters,
which have come into my possession, of album tracks recorded at the Abbey
studio, Gwent, in the early days of December 1980. Perhaps you would contact me
as soon as possible.
                
Yours sincerely,

                            
Stephen Case
                            
Recordings
Executive

The short message -
ultimatum
? - was already burnt into her
mind, word for word, like a ghost image stencilled into a computer screen.

      
which have come into my
possession.

      
OK. Let's work this one out. The decision to destroy the album
was unanimous. That is, taken by Dave and Simon and me, in the absence only of
Tom - who would hardly have objected and has never, to my knowledge, raised the
issue since. And in the aftermath of Deborah's death, Russell Hornby, who
might
have resisted, just shrugged and
handed over the reels.

      
But - this is the question - were these the actual masters? One
reel of tape being just like another until you play it. Which, just wanting to
forget, we never did.

      
So, did you double-cross us, Russell? Maybe thinking we were
acting in haste, under stress, and would come around when the heat was off?

      
Are those tapes really still in existence? The sound - among
other sounds - of the young, wildly over-confident, fucking stupid Moira Cairns
allowing herself to be led like a lamb over Death's dark threshold?

There was no need to get
her pissed. Isabel Pugh leaned back in her wheelchair, took off her glasses,
let them fall to her breast on the chain.

      
'This may surprise you,' she said. 'But you're the first
person who's ever asked me about the Abbey.'

      
Simon sat quietly, sipping his whisky, his cassock drying stiffly
around him.

      
'When they got me out of the rubble it was the following
morning and I was semi-conscious. Delirious, they said. They took me to hospital.
A couple of days later the police took a statement to read at the inquest on
Gareth. They kept it very discreet. We'd been ... "exploring". I was
in various hospitals for about six months. Nobody mentioned the circumstances again,
not when I was in hospital, not when I came home.'

      
'When was this? What year?'

      
'Nineteen seventy-three. I was sixteen. Just old enough. I'd lost
my virginity - just - when it happened.' Isabel laughed without humour. 'When the
earth moved. For the first time And the last. How about that for bitter irony?
How about that for the wrath of God?'

      
'It wasn't God.'

      
'Well, pardon me, Vicar, but you would say that, wouldn't you?'

      
'Yes,' he said. 'I suppose I would. However ...'

      
He wanted to tell her now. All about the session inside the
walls cemented with blood and the dark brown candles and the centuries of evil
and the reason he'd come back. He said, 'You haven't even asked me why I wanted
to know.'

      
'Because I don't care.' Isabel held out her glass for more
Southern Comfort. 'Thanks. When I got out of hospital, see, people were quite
nice to me. People have
always
been
quite nice. But there's no basic respect. I've always been the little whore who
lured the Smith boy to the top of the tower and got him killed in the act.
"Oh, she didn't deserve
this
'"
- slapping her unresponsive denimed legs - "'but, well, it only goes to show,
doesn't it?'"

      
Simon said, 'I'm ...'

      
'Yeah, terribly, terribly sorry. So am I. Hardly thought to be
spending the rest of my life in Ystrad Ddu, with my mother, so chuffed to be collecting
her official carer's allowance. Still, I'm doing all right, biggest earner in
the village now. And nothing to spend it on except luxury domestic aids for
Mother and fancy mail-order clothes for the top half of me.'

      
'Damn,' Simon said. 'And I could've brought my violin.'
      
At first she looked furious. Then
she grinned, the firelight making little red coals in her brown eyes. 'Are you
really queer?'
      
'Let's just call me celibate.'
      
'Oh God, that's even worse.'
      
'We all have our cross to bear,'
Simon said.

      
Isabel's eyebrows rose. 'And you really
are
a clergyman, aren't you? You wouldn't be having us all on?'

      
Simon spread his hands. '
And
I really have got a violin. Isabel...' He leaned forward, hesitated.

      
'Go on,' she said. 'Ask me. Whatever it is, you've earned it.
You've made me laugh, loosened me up a bit. That's worth a lot.'

      
Outside, the rain seemed to have stopped. A trail of singing
reached them. 'The WI choir,' Isabel said. 'They're a good crowd, really. Keep
themselves entertained.'

      
Simon said, 'You've skipped over a few things: what
really
happened at the Abbey, and what
happened afterwards. You said you were delirious.'

      
'No. I didn't say that.
They
said I was delirious.'

      
How could she stand this life? What advantage was there in
living in the country if you couldn't stride out on the hills, seeing the
Skirrid rising in the east like a giant's nose, lie in the grass and watch
buzzards swoop?

      
Isabel stared into the bright embers behind the glass doors of
the stove. 'Simon, it's been fun tonight. Don't spoil it.'

      
'I don't understand,' he said. But of course, he did.
      
'This isn't what I wanted to go
into.'

      
'Listen,' he said. 'Whatever they said about what happened that
night being ... delirium, I'm not going to think that.'

      
'No?'

      
'No, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you what nobody else
here knows, though Eddie Edwards possibly suspects.'

      
And he told her about the Philosopher's Stone and the Black Album.

      
'My God,' Isabel said. 'The vicar's a rock star? I'm sorry - go
on.'

      
And he told her - not in any great detail - about the last
night at the Abbey. The end of which, of course, she knew.

      
'Tom Storey's wife. I remember being woken up by the ambulance
racing through the village. Everyone was out in the lane, you could see the
flames, I got them to push me ...'

      
She stopped. He couldn't tell whether her face was flushed by
remembered excitement or by the deepening glow from the stove. Or by
embarrassment because she and the other villagers had been animated by someone
else's tragedy.

      
'Keep it to yourself,' he said. 'For the present.'

      
Isabel put both hands to her cheeks, knowing they were red.
      
'Why?' she said. 'I mean, what the
hell are you doing here, Simon?'

      
'Good question. Never wanted to see the fucking place again.'
Simon paused. 'But what's the point of being a clergyman if you're aware of something
deeply spiritually amiss in a remote part of South Wales and you just shrug
your shoulders and bugger off to organise vicarage garden parties in Buckinghamshire?'

      
He stood up. 'Look, it'll be chucking out time at the WI in a
few minutes. I'll be back. I'll call in some time while your mum's Hoovering my
bedroom. Just one last question, OK?'

      
Isabel picked up her tartan rug and arranged it across her knees
to see him to the door.

      
'Have there been other ... accidents, like yours? At the Abbey?
I mean, over the years?'

      
'We don't keep records of that kind of thing,' Isabel said,
suddenly guarded, and Simon knew he was going too far, too fast. He pulled open
the door. The night was calm enough now for him to hear a barn owl's screech
from across the valley.

      
'Goodnight,' he said.

      
'Simon ...'

      
He turned to look at her at the door of her prison: Isabel
Pugh, thirty-seven, accountant, spinster of this parish, but not a virgin -
just.

      
'One thing. I'll tell you one thing. When Deborah Storey died
in that crash, everybody here was very sorry, for her and for her husband and
the poor baby '

      
'They're compassionate people,' Simon said. 'Thrifty, as Eddie
Edwards put it. But no less compassionate for that'

      
'They were sorry, yes. And yet they were also glad. In some
awful way that they would never admit even to each other, they were glad.'

      
He was still standing there, lips slightly parted, when it
began to rain again and the door closed gently in his face.

The kettle's whine had been
squeezed into a thin scream. Moira hit the red and black switch to cut it off.

      
And are they proposing to
release
this horror, the album that we used to call, in our innocence, the Black Album,
because of the name of the Abbey?
      
Well, they couldn't, surely;
insufficient material - five tracks? Six?

      
Whatever, of course, we have to stop this. All those Gothic
heavy-metal albums made by brain-dead fascists in leather-studded wristbands,
those albums the tabloids are always claiming drive fans to suicide, they're kidstuff.

      
So it has to be stopped, no question about that.

      
Who? Who's gonna stop it?

      
Maybe I'll call up this Case and say: Look, I think you should
consider the ethics of what you have in mind.
      
Ethics? A record company?

      
Damage to repair, the Duchess said one time. You have damage
to repair. Never making it clear what she meant ... 'What the hell is
wrong
with this antique?'

      
The kettle carrying on screaming and wobbling on the dresser,
bubbles fizzing around the lid. She hit the red knob again; damn thing was
stuck. She reached through the hot vapour -
ow,
Jesus
- to switch it off at the plug, and remembered there wasn't a switch;
it was so old even the plug was round-pin. 'Fuck you!' She grabbed hold of the
cracked, brown, Bakelite plug and let go at once, gasping at the heat in it.

      
We're the band that
should never've been. A toxic cocktail. We can't even see each other again.
Ever.
      
Did I say that?

      
The kettle was just about going berserk, the whole room
filling up now with grey steam. In its midst, the mirror was a luminous grey
screen, like when you switched off the room lights and the TV was still
radiating a dead glow.

      
Above her the ceiling bulb sputtered in its drab shade.
      
You too. Huh?

      
Moira went still inside. Even around the kettle, the room was
unpleasantly cold,
especially
around
the kettle, and that was wrong. That was
wrong.

      
She thought, I'm not gonna run from this. I'm gonna sit here
and wait it out. Wait until the kettle boils dry.

      
She saw her own face in the mirror and as she watched, the lips
of this face -
not me, not my face, this
doesn't scare me any more, it doesn't, no way
- stretched quite perceptibly
into a rictus, revealing teeth and gums. The eyes were widening in helpless
terror.