The Moon Spun Round (50 page)

‘
She’s
at the bottom of it, isn’t she? Her and those other bloody women. They’re making it happen, aren’t they?’ He moves towards her.

‘Stop there! You put one foot on that road and I’ll scream so loudly every house in the village will hear.’ Anger, that’s what it is. Waking, stirring…

‘All right, all right.’ He backs off. ‘I won’t touch you. But you’ve got to make them stop. I’ll stay away from you if you get them off my back.’

Claire laughs. Not at him, but at herself. At all the times she could have screamed and didn’t dare.

‘That’s right, go on, laugh at what those bitches have done to me. You’re one of them, aren’t you? A witch like all the rest. I should have killed you when I had the chance.’

‘Like you killed Ruth?’

Ayden raises his hand as if he will strike her. But he senses she’s beyond his reach now and it’s not only the width of the road that separates them.

‘Yes, we know, Ayden.
All
of us know what happened to Ruth.’ Her voice is calm, lilting. ‘It only needs one of us go to the police. Any one of us could tell them.’ She looks straight at him, her gaze meeting his, until he lowers his head.

He breathes heavily, as if gathering his words before he speaks. ‘You’ve got to help me, Claire.’ His voice is breaking. ‘They’ll lock me away.’

‘I’m going home now. And if you try to follow me, I’ll make
certain
they lock you away.’

Claire takes a step backward, then another, turns her body. Her eyes are still fixed on him and a smile, a small flicker of victory, moves on her mouth as she speaks. ‘You know what, Ayden? You’re right. I
am
one of them. Yes, we
are
all in it together. The house, the car, everything,
we
did it. So why don’t you
try explaining
that
to the police? And if they don’t believe you, well, you can always plead insanity.’

W
HAT DO YOU MEAN
, you caused the fire?’ ‘Claire’s house? You burned Claire’s house down?’

‘But you two were at home all evening. Isn’t that right, Claire?’

‘Yes, we were, but—Naomi, what have you been up to?’

The five women are seated around Sally’s kitchen table. Sally has insisted on opening a bottle of wine, guessing they might need it.

‘I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.’ Naomi is fighting back tears. She arrived with Claire, looking like a traitor about to face a court martial. As soon as Abbie explained why they’d been summoned, she pleaded guilty and made a garbled confession.

‘I don’t understand how can you accidentally set fire to someone’s house when you’re not even there.’ Sally fills Naomi’s glass. ‘What
is
this fire-vault thing, anyway?’

‘It’s all right, nobody’s blaming you.’ Claire pulls her chair closer and takes hold of Naomi’s hand. ‘Take your time, tell us what happened.’

‘Come on, sweetie,’ Fran hands her a fistful of tissues. ‘Blow your nose and tell us what this is all about.’

‘You say you’ve been doing some other magic stuff?’ asks Abbie. ‘That’s not what we agreed. We gave it to the Goddess to deal with, remember?’

‘It wasn’t supposed to be about Ayden. I was doing something personal. A meditation to try to shift some memory blocks. I suppose they got muddled up.’

‘What did?’

‘Ayden and my father. It was like the feelings got crossed over. There was so much anger, like a fire, it was eating me up.’

‘So you threw it at Ayden?’

Naomi nods. ‘I couldn’t allow myself to hate my father, could I?’ she whispers.

‘It depends what he did.’ Sally’s voice is steady and calm. ‘It must have been something very bad.’

Naomi raises her damaged hand. ‘This. He did this.’

‘You’ve remembered how it happened?’

Naomi bites her lip and nods again, before telling her friends about the fireworks party. ‘He should never have been allowed to be in charge of a child. That’s what I was to him—another kid he could play with. Only this time we were playing with fire. He lit a Roman candle and gave it to me to hold.’

‘Oh, my God.’ Fran is already halfway out of her chair. Sally pulls her back and silences her with a look.

‘Was he stoned?’

‘Yes, he’d take whatever was available. They all did it; it was part of the music scene. Amphetamines, mostly—you know, speed—that’s how it started. By the time he died, he was mainlining heroin. It said on the death certificate it was pneumonia. I think the doctors were trying to be kind.’ She takes a deep sigh. ‘The great Simon Walker died of Aids.’

‘And you remembered all this during the meditation?’ The others are silent, leaving the questions to Sally.

‘That’s right. I was so angry. With him, for being what he was, for robbing me of my music. And angry at myself because I had lied to protect him. I lied when it happened, said I picked the firework up by mistake. And I’ve lied ever since by making him something he wasn’t.’

‘That was to protect yourself.’

‘It was like a fire, inside me, burning me up. I had to get rid of it.’

‘But you threw it at Ayden?’

‘I couldn’t hate my father, could I? Only I suppose I must have—you see, that’s another lie.’

‘Not all of it, though. He
was
great at what he did. And he loved you, even if he did make a lousy job of it.’

‘Yes, I know. That’s why I couldn’t put my anger where it really belongs.’

There’s a silence, which is broken by the clatter of the pet door. Cat mews as she leaps up onto the table, and her arrival seems to ease the tension.

‘I still don’t understand what that has to do with the house fire.’ Sally raises her glass, reminding the others to drink up. ‘What’s a fire-vault?’

Naomi empties her glass. ‘It’s like a sort of psychic hand-grenade. Or perhaps more like a land mine because it has to wait for the right conditions to set it off. You understand a bit about the elements now, don’t you? Well, if you’re working on a non-physical level, those qualities take on a solid reality. It’s possible to isolate a particular element, condense it, and then direct it to a certain time or place.’

‘But why would you want to do that, unless you’re an arsonist?’

‘No, that’s not the idea at all. Vaults are useful for influencing a situation. You’d send Earth to stabilize something, Air to generate communication. Stuff like that. Fire is supposed to energize. Water unblocks emotions. Only with this one I got all my personal feelings mixed up in it, and then I threw it all at Ayden. I didn’t realize what I’d done until afterwards, and even then I was only aware that something had got out of control. Ayden must have somehow created the right conditions for it to be activated.’

‘What, you mean it sort of hovered about in the house waiting for him to set it off?’

‘Like an accident looking for somewhere to happen?’ Fran laughs.

‘Well, yes, more or less.’ Naomi looks at her hands.

The others manage to raise a smile, except for Sally. ‘Naomi’s not the only one who’s been causing accidents,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a confession to make, too.’ Cat goes over and rubs herself against her mistress’s arm, then she turns in a circle, settling down in front of Sally, so that Sally can run her hand along the length of Cat’s back. She recounts the night she sat up in bed, stroking Cat and thinking about the day Jonathan died. How she felt the energy move through Cat’s body as she relived the minutes in which her husband sped towards his death. And the photograph of the crumpled mess that once was Ayden’s BMW.

There’s a silence, then Abbie looks around the circle of women.

‘We asked the Goddess to punish Ayden,’ says Abbie, ‘but we didn’t specify how that was to happen. Could it be that Naomi and Sally are acting as channels?’

‘That’s possible,’ says Naomi. ‘Or maybe we just messed up. Maybe your Edward is right, Fran: perhaps witchcraft is too dangerous to be good?’

‘Oh, that’s rubbish and you know it.’ Fran drains her glass and looks around for the bottle.

‘Lots of things that are useful are potentially dangerous,’ says Abbie, ‘but that doesn’t make them evil. But you were both being irresponsible. Sally, you were playing about with things you didn’t yet understand. And Naomi, that was sheer incompetence, you should have known better.’

‘Yes, I guess you’re right.’ Naomi looks miserable.

‘Look, none of us are guiltless in this.’ Claire’s voice holds a new authority. ‘We’ve all allowed our personal, emotional baggage to influence the working of the spell.’

‘Have we?’ Fran looks baffled. ‘How? I’ll admit my marriage problems came to a head—’

‘Oh, Fran,’ says Claire, ‘they’ve been coming to a head for years. What made you decide to leave him now? If Edward hadn’t been such a sanctimonious prick, women like me might have gone to him for help and Ruth mightn’t have died. You stood up and condemned both of them together, remember? And those wasted years, Fran—where did all that anger go?’

‘Fair comment.’ Fran refills her glass and takes a large gulp.

‘I’m aware I’ve been struggling with my own loyalty issues.’ Abbie looks into her glass. ‘Knowing what I ought to be doing and resenting George because I haven’t had the guts to stand by my own convictions. I’m so angry, and the poor old boy’s done nothing to deserve it. Again it all started with Ayden.’

‘And I’ve not been exactly impartial in this.’ Claire takes a deep breath. ‘I saw him this afternoon, after I left the shop.’

‘Who? Ayden?’

‘He was waiting for me on the green. If we wanted to break him, well, I think we’ve succeeded. And what’s more, he knows that we’re responsible for the things that have happened. He was pleading with me, begging me to make you all stop. And when he tried to threaten me, he was like a pathetic, snivelling kid. And, oh, God, how I loved it. Twisting the knife, watching him squirm.’

‘Do you remember the mouse, the one that Cat brought in after Ruth’s funeral?’ Sally sits back and studies Cat’s head, the tilt of her ears as she moves them to follow the conversation. ‘That’s what we’ve done to him.’

‘Not at the ritual,’ says Fran. ‘We gave it to the Goddess to deal with, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, we gave it to the Goddess,’ says Claire. ‘We asked for justice for Ruth.
For the life that was lost and sorrow heavy borne, let Truth be known and Justice be done
. We
asked
for justice but what we
wanted
was revenge. For what our partners did, for what our fathers did. For a lifetime of bullying and suppression, of having to deny what we really are. How much anger is that? I think it’s time to let go.’

‘Claire’s right,’ says Naomi. ‘We’re all too bound up in this. We need to give it back to the Goddess.’

‘Or report him to the police. We could still do that,’ says Sally.

‘You must be joking. We’d all be up in court for withholding evidence.’ Abbie stands up and walks over to the window. ‘Helping in the cover-up of a murder, that’s a pretty serious offence.’