The Chalice (7 page)

      
Oh gosh. Don't like the sound
of that!

      
'Er .. .' She hesitated. ' ... you know you're not allowed to
do that? I mean, light fires. It's National Trust property.'

      
Not
a very Molly
thing to say.

      
Headlice stared at her and started to laugh. That means it
belongs to the people, you daft bat.'

      
A naked toddler sprang up giggling from the grass, bottom
smeared with her own faeces. Diane tried not to notice. She looked away, across
Moulder's field with its new covering of beaten-up vehicles painted with wild
spray-colours. It was supposed to have all the spontaneity of a medieval
country fayre, but it looked sad and dingy, like a derelict urban scrapyard.

      
Headlice said, 'Be fuckin' great.'

      
The tower poked the streaky sky, a stubby cigar waiting to be
lit.

      
'Won't be no bother about fires, Mol. Who's gonna try and stop
us?'

      
Another kind of unease was forming around her like a thermal
glow. To Headlice, paganism, with its loose talk of 'old gods' and 'old ways',
was just a sort of
alternative
social
ritual. But Glastonbury Tor was not the place for play acting.

      
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 on
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; it
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, ain'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 quality for instant arrest under the Act.
      
The news editor, an awful inverted
snob who thought that 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 the 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 light 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 had drawn
all she had out of the bank, paid £825 for the bus 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 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 on 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 frickin' secret
society now? I mean, come on, what's 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
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, and 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 so 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 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 treating 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.