Jago (3 page)

Still moving with the girl, he looked up. In a series of photographic flashes, he gathered that Grace and he were not the only ones among the flock who had taken this last opportunity to pleasure in the flesh they would soon leave behind. There would be a resurrection in the flesh, but it would be better, cleaner stuff than this.

The Angel was smiling upon all: Granver Shepherd fumbling with the widow Combs; Tom Pym—Tom
Pym!
—kneeling behind Louisa Gilpin, the girl on hands and knees, her hair over her face, his hands working her hips; Jerrold and Jem Gosmore’s youngest son, conjoined in an unimagined act of love; Winthrop, still in his breeches, kissing Jem Gosmore’s wife, his hands on her breasts; Bannerman and Grace…

Grace!

She gasped under him and collapsed, crying his name as he spent. They lay cooling together for a minute, and then she rolled away. He lay on his back, grass and earth beneath him, stung all over from the spark-spitting fire. He sucked in great gulps of cold air, and tried to shake fevers from his brain, but a Pym girl—Alice, this time?—came to him, hot hands stroking, and he was lost...

* * *

Bannerman woke up warm between bodies. A blanket or something had been thrown over them.

A horror came upon him.

He sat up, elbowing one of the Misses Pym in the process. She groaned, and pulled the blanket. Bannerman was cold now.

‘Have I…?’

‘Missed it?’ came a voice. ‘No, vicar.’

He looked around. The voice had been Jerrold’s. The verger was cross-legged by the fire. Jem Gosmore’s boy slept with his head in the old man’s lap. Bannerman got his eyes to focus. Few of the faithful were standing, most were dozing. The fire had collapsed and spread, but still burned fiercely. Louisa Gilpin squatted, her unbound hair tented about her. She held out a cloth-wrapped arm.

‘I burned myself, Mr Bannerman.’

‘You must have it seen to, child.’

‘No point to it. I won’t have no use for this poor carcass when the Lord comes. He’s a greater healer than you’ll find in Yeovil. Or in London either.’

The clouds had gone, and the moon illumined the hillside. The firelight was dimmed by comparison. The night was half over. He had no way of knowing the exact time. His watch was in his waistcoat, and his waistcoat was gone to the fire.

Someone was sobbing. It was Tom Pym, wrapped in someone else’s coat.

‘What happened to us, Mr Bannerman? To be so close, and yet to throw it all away…’

Others looked at him. Other unhappy faces. Bannerman stood up, confused for a moment. What had happened?

Then he remembered.

‘This is only flesh, Tom, and of no consequence. You know that. You all know that. We have been taught well. There will be no shame, for there can be no sin among us. We are the Chosen of God. The old ways are hard to put aside, but we must.’

Bannerman was not sure the words were right, but the Spirit was still strong in him. He cloaked himself in the blanket. The Misses Pym, awake now, shook in the cold, and huddled together. He saw the dirt on their bodies, in their hair; and the blood…

He opened the blanket, and invited them to the warmth of his body. Grace slipped in quietly and was enveloped, but Alice drew back. She was pouting, not playfully. She did not make a dimple.

She touched herself, and her fingers came away bloody, ‘I’m hurt.’

‘No, Alice —’

‘Yesssss!’
It was a cat’s hiss, venomed with loathing. Alice darted lithe as a naked Indian into the bushes. He heard her fighting branches and thorns. Then she was gone.

The fire crackled and burned lower. It would have been perfect for baking potatoes. For a long while, no one said anything.

‘Daughter,’ said Tom, ‘let us go home.’

Grace, snug next to Bannerman, pretended not to hear. She pressed herself to him, kittenish and coy. Tom looked death at his vicar, then turned and left. He found a path from the clearing and trudged after Alice.

It was as if Bannerman had been slapped, hard. He knew this was the Last Night, yet the faithful were divided among themselves. They had been Chosen, but they imperilled the privilege, spurning the Lord’s favour. It would be a tragedy to suffer eternal perdition because of a lapse of belief scant minutes away from the sure and certain hope of.

Alice and Tom had not been the first to leave. Others had crept away while he slept. Winthrop was gone, taking Jem Gosmore’s wife—whose name was Katy or Kitty, one or the other—with him. There were more than a few faces missing, and those that remained were shadowed with despair. Shame, even.

The faithful were sadly depleted. He began to preach to them, to recite rather, taking the Revelation as his text. He had most of it by heart, and his voice was good. The words came easily. He had read them so many times at Lampeter, and they had been given new fire by the Angel. He sounded strong. But his flock still drifted away in ones and twos.

Hastily, shamefully, defiantly, in disgust, in anger they left. Many cursed him out loud. Others were too exhausted to say anything. Still, he preached. Until there were only three beside him, and his voice faltered. Old Jerrold, pity in his eyes; Grace, asleep on her feet; and Louisa, face shining with madness, he realized, not divine light.

The fire was a circle of ashes. The sky was light in the east. The moon was low. It was nearly dawn. A dawn that should not be, but was.

The Reverend Mr Timothy Charles Bannerman wept for all he had lost. Even Jerrold was gone now, to face the things he had found within himself. Grace was curled up, an unburned dress over her like a bedspread.

Only Louisa was there to witness the very end. The End of All Things. She knelt, adoring the Lord, adoring him, waiting with him, aching for his dreams to be the truth…

‘I seen him too,’ she said. ‘Raphael. Angels tell no lies.’

He had nothing more to say. There was a half-circle of sun on the horizon. His eyes watering, he kissed the girl on the lips. Perhaps, underneath everything, she was prettier even than the prettier Miss Pym. Maybe madness made her beautiful.

Gingerly, Bannerman stepped over the fireline and felt soft hot ash under his soles. He half knelt and scooped up a handful of cinders, rubbing them into his skin, smearing chest and limbs and face. There were a few hot coals. He ignored them, feeling burns less than itches.

He straightened and walked towards the centre, the last of the flames nipping at his ankles, scorching the hair off his shins. He did not know where he was going.

…but when he got there, Raphael was waiting.

Bannerman was closer than he had ever been to the burning Angel, and in daylight. He saw the dead cores of its flaming eyes.

He opened his mouth to ask a question, but the Angel—light dimmed by the dawn—took him in his arms and kissed him. The eternal fire bit deep into his back and spread over his body, raising great blisters as it spread in irregular patches. Hot breath crept down his throat.

The Angel’s empty face was near, and Bannerman’s eyes popped with the heat. He felt himself being burned alive, and was not sorry...

Louisa watched him until he fell in pieces from the Angel’s embrace. The burning figure stood over the pool of stinking, steaming oil that had once been a man, and faded in the sunlight. To a yellow ghost, then to nothing. She found rags to cover herself, and went back to her father’s farm.

Grace Pym slept until someone came for her.

W
hen they first came to Alder, the big heat had already been on for over a month. In the daytime, the house, built to weather centuries of winters, was like a Casablanca gambling hell. Paul had tried working upstairs and almost come down with heat stroke. Luckily, there had been a wobbly rolltop desk on the verandah. Hazel helped him set it up surreally on the lawn, under the fairly constant shade of a survivor elm. He replaced the missing foot with a nonessential book—William LeQueux’s nigh-unreadable
Great War in England in 1897
—and now had a decent workspace. The extension cord of his IBM electric snaked back into the house through the kitchen window. Papers flapped under makeshift weights, which was irritating, but even the slightest breeze was better than still heat. The typewriter hummed, but he didn’t even have a sheet of paper in the roller. This was one of his ‘thinking’ sessions, which meant he was stalled, letting his mind wander until his unconscious sorted out what he should do next and passed the message upstairs.

The converted cow sheds had big folding doors that opened to turn the studio into a cutaway diagram. Hazel was hunched over her wheel, working a lump of clay. She pushed her longish hair out of her eyes with a dry wrist, then got her wet fingers back to the emerging pot. Clay rose and fell, a mushroom cloud, a vinegar bottle. Throwing pots was hypnotic, almost erotic, to watch. Sometimes the process appealed more than the result. Paul knew nothing about ceramics but could tell Hazel relied too often on what her tutors told her. In the shop attached to the studio, her pots were distinct from the Bleaches’, wax fruit among the real. But she was improving. Certainly, she had been the more productive of them so far this summer. She applied herself with enviable concentration, a strength he hadn’t expected.

He had been going out with her since Easter, and it was now mid-July. Paul supposed he loved her, although he was always uncomfortable with the ‘L’ word. She was named Hazel for hazel eyes, naturally. In fact, almost almond eyes. She had very slight epicanthic folds. Her father had been in the Navy. Maybe a seafaring ancestor once took a Chinese wife. Otherwise, he guessed she was just pretty. She was Paul’s first major affair since Sally the Psychotic—
she
had liked skunk music and torn up T-shirts for a rock-merchandising company—and they had arranged to spend the summer together before deciding whether she should move into his flat back in Brighton. He’d thought this a formality, but now the possibility of it not working out was starting to tickle the back of his mind. While the countryside was very obviously burning up, they were almost imperceptibly cooling off.

The crisis had been official since spring, and the harvest was set to be a disaster. The land was ailing. Around him, the grass was piss-yellow. Up in the orchard, the property was a post-holocaust wasteland. The apples had ripened early, but under shiny skins the fruit had been sour and hard. This morning, Hazel had had to get up at six to phone the Bleaches, on their lecture tour in Canada until September, and break the bad news. Their garden was suffering a slow, lingering death. Mike and Mirrie were understanding. The instructions were to do the best to limit the damage. Paul had only met the couple once, but liked them very much. Mike was external assessor for the polytechnic, and one of Hazel’s tutors recommended her as a working caretaker for the summer. The Bleaches were right not to shut up shop while they were away; agriculture might be down, but tourism was up. The shop was so busy some mornings that Paul had to fill in for Hazel with customers so she could get a few uninterrupted hours at the wheel.

The bell by the showroom steps jingled. He looked across the lawn. Hazel was sliding off the seat of her wheel, brushing off her apron. The visitors weren’t customers. They hadn’t gone into the shop. Hazel joined them on the steps. Paul realized immediately they were a pair of Jago’s peace-and-love zombies. In their Woodstock-era outfits and beatific living-dead expressions, they were unmistakable. He’d seen a few of the species around the village, but had never had to speak to any of them. Until now. He’d heard of Alder before this summer, of course. The Village Where God Lives. Thered been a piece on cults in the
Independent,
and an acid profile of Anthony Jago in
The New Statesman.
The Agapemone was well away from the village but could be seen from the moor, a prime sample of early Victorian megalomaniac architecture halfway up its own little hill.

‘Hi,’ said the broad-hipped woman, ‘my name’s Wendy, and he’s Derek. Welcome to Alder. Wed have been round before, but it’s been hectic.’

She had brought flowers, miraculously unshrivelled, and handed them into Hazel’s arms carefully, as if passing a baby. The Lord God evidently outranked the parish council when it came to water regulations. Paul had been yearning to violate the local authority’s sprinkler ban and give emergency aid to the lawn, but water laws were being enforced with the zeal eighteenth-century revenue men had employed sniffing out lace smugglers.

‘Hello, I’m Paul Forrestier.’ They’d come over to his desk. Hazel had provisionally put the flowers in a vase in the showroom, and was wiping clay-grey hands on her caked apron. ‘This is Hazel.’

‘Chapel,’ she added, smiling. Her name was Chapelet actually, but she didn’t like it. ‘Hi, thanks for the flowers.’

‘We’re from the Agapemone,’ said Wendy, ‘that means—’

‘Abode of Love,’ said Paul.

‘Right. I’m impressed. I heard you were a brain of some sort. Are you a Greek scholar?’

‘No,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘English Lit. I read an article…’

‘Oh.’ Wendy dropped a hint of defensiveness. ‘Well, never mind. Don’t be put off. Jesus Christ didn’t get a good press either. We’re not really like the Manson family, honest.’

Wendy’s cheeriness was suddenly unconvincing.
The New Statesman
had compared Jago with Sun Myung Moon, L. Ron Hubbard and, tactfully, Jim Jones, but Paul let it pass. He didn’t want to go into a discussion of the tenets of the Acid Gospel. He had Wendy and Derek pegged as old hippies, but Wendy’s conversational daintiness was almost conventional. She wore CND, Animal Rights and Legalize It patches on her embroidered waistcoat, and her grey-touched hair was frizzed and long. However, she’d have been as happy representing the Women’s Institute as a fringe cult which worshipped God in the flesh. Under multicoloured skirt and tie-dyed blouse, she was creeping chubbily into middle age.

‘Tony’s amazing,’ said the man, Derek. He was thin and worn, his Midlands-accented hesitance suggesting he did little of the talking. ‘He’s got the whole world sussed.’

‘Oh yes.’ Wendy took over again, digging leaflets out of her Rupert Bear shoulder bag. Hazel took one. ‘He’s helped us sort ourselves out. We used to be really screwed up.’