The Smile of a Ghost (36 page)

‘I’m sorry, when did I ever say you were delightful?’

‘And your only real experience of student life’ – Jane wrinkled her nose in distaste – ‘is bloody theological college… as a mature student… toting a kid. Like, where were the years of clubbing and getting pissed and waking up in strange beds?’

‘Actually that was how it all—’

‘What?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Hmm.’ Jane smiled, and then her brow furrowed. ‘Listen, there’s no penance to be paid, Mum. I mean, OK, yeah, we’ve finally got Lol into the village. But you’re still not getting it right. You’re taking a week off the parish to do this private-eye stuff in Ludlow for the Bishop, but you won’t take a break to maybe go somewhere special with Lol.’

‘You know…’ Merrily repositioned herself on the sofa, awkwardly. ‘I think I was happier when you were just laughing at the idea of me pretending to be psychic.’

‘Yeah, well, that was the wrong attitude. I’ve decided to take it seriously.’ Jane put the cushion behind her on the sofa and sat up straight. ‘You need specialist advice, or that woman is going to take you apart. She’ll just, like, totally dismantle your façade in about ten minutes.’

‘And you can, erm, school me, can you?’

Jane shrugged. ‘I’ve read the books. Spent a few months, if you recall, attempting to worship the moon… when I was young.’

‘It was less than two years ago.’ Merrily looked into Jane’s eyes, surely greyer than they used to be.

‘I mean, I’m not claiming to be anything more than some kind of failed neophyte, Mum, but I reckon I could probably save you from total humiliation.’

Merrily considered this.

When exactly had Jane’s paganism ceased to be a problem for her?

At first it had seemed like a basic teenage rebellion thing: Jane resenting the Church, seeing poor Lucy Devenish, with her talk of apple-lore and nature spirits, as a kind of guru… and then, after Lucy’s death, lying about her age to get into a goddess-worshipping group based at a Hereford health-food shop. In just a couple of years, Jane had encountered pagans and psychics, good and bad, and emerged, at the age of seventeen… oddly clear-headed.

Yes, it was still there in some form, Jane’s paganism, but no, it wasn’t quite a problem any more.

‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘Can we go through it?’

Yew trees. Jane appeared to have read entire books about yew trees.

‘Making love to one. That’s totally… I mean, I can connect with that.’

‘Are they poisonous to people? I’m not sure.’

‘I wouldn’t personally exchange life-fluids with one to find out,’ Jane said. ‘But I do get the point. She’s embracing immortality. Some yew trees could be the oldest living beings on this planet – and that’s heavy. The idea of a tree being a repository of ancient wisdom is not so crazy. So if she has an ancient yew near her house, and that’s the start of her ritual walk, and then she proceeds to this yew at the castle where Marion fell… Where’s the next one? Bound to be one in the churchyard.’

‘Several, apparently. I think there’s the remains of a yew alley,’ Merrily said. ‘I asked Jon Scole about that.’

‘Cool.’ Jane spread Merrily’s new street map of Ludlow over the OS map of the wider area. ‘And then one in this old cemetery?’

‘St Leonard’s, yes.’

‘So you’ve probably got an ancient and sacred route… maybe even pre-Christian. Maybe a processional route up and over the holy hill between the two rivers. If you think, way back, before there was a town or a castle there’d just be this hill… a holy hill.’

‘How do you know it was holy?’

‘Hah!’ Jane beamed in satisfaction. ‘I looked it up. It’s in one of my books upstairs, and I got some more off the Net. This is amazing stuff. The name “Ludlow”, right? “Low” usually refers to a tumulus or a burial mound, and sure enough there was one.’

‘Where?’

‘On top of the hills. What’s now the highest point of the town.’

‘The church? St Laurence’s?’

‘There was a tumulus which, until the end of the twelfth century, was right next to the original church. And then they extended the church into the tumulus and found that it contained bodies – bones. Which were alleged at the time to be the remains of three Irish saints, because in those days if anybody found any bones near a church it would be, like, more kudos if they were holy relics. They were probably the bones of Bronze Age chieftains… which is cool.’

‘They’ve gone now, presumably?’

‘Doesn’t matter. What matters is that the tower – the tallest tower on the border, OK, the Cathedral of the Marches – is rising up directly out of a pagan site, so it’s like’ – Jane held up a fist – ‘one of ours.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘It’s what they did,’ Jane said. ‘These are geopsychically sensitive sites. If the Church hadn’t built on existing places of power, Christianity would probably have vanished by the end of the Middle Ages. So if Belladonna’s making a personal connection with the sacred centres of Ludlow, that’s the big one.’

‘Well, she certainly goes into the church, even if she doesn’t go to actual services.’

‘There you go. She’s opening herself up to the vibrations.’

‘Opening herself up, all right.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Never mind.’ Ethel jumped into Merrily’s lap and started to wash her paws. ‘What exactly is she doing, do you think, Jane? Where’s she coming from? We looking at witchcraft, or what?’

‘She on her own?’

‘There are some young people who seem to have formed some sort of attachment to her. When I first saw her, she was with, I think, four of them – two men, two women, all wearing Edwardian-type gear, slightly funereal.’

‘Could be part of a coven. Doesn’t seem too likely, though.’

‘They just struck me as basic goths.’

‘OK, listen…’ Jane leaned into the corner of the sofa. ‘I’ve been thinking about this… Could she have any ancestry in the town? Are there any family roots she maybe wants to pick up on? Because that might explain why she was always with Robbie Walsh – he could’ve been helping research it, couldn’t he? That seems to have been the kind of thing he enjoyed.’

‘That’s actually not a bad theory,’ Merrily said.

‘Or, if you want to extend it in a more mystical direction, could she have been, like, hypnotically regressed into recalling some past life in Ludlow? For instance – and this makes sense – suppose she believes she’s the reincarnation of somebody like, for instance…’

Merrily brought her hands together. ‘Marion de la Bruyère!’

‘Well…?’

‘It’s a fascinating thought, flower.’

‘And it explains the suicide links,’ Jane said. ‘And it’s exactly the kind of bollocks a mad old slapper like Belladonna would go for.’

Afterwards, Lol followed Moira back up the M4 to the Severn Bridge services, where she was spending the night. They sat in the café by the big windows where you could see the sweep of the suspension bridge into Wales and the lights bouncing off the estuary’s dark water.

‘I’ve never done that before,’ Lol said. ‘Never.’

Two verses in, freezing up in the heat of the lights, standing quivering, like the mental patient he was singing about.

‘You mean it wasnae deliberate?’ Moira raised an eyebrow, cup of hot chocolate held in both hands, like a chalice. ‘Even I thought it was part of the act. And when you started laughing like that…’

‘Couldn’t stop.’

Doubled up, he’d noticed her watching him from the shadows at the side of the stage, in her long, sea-green dress, the strand of white in her hair like the crack of light down a doorway at night. Expecting her to walk on, gently detach the mike and salvage his set.

Not necessary, as it turned out. The audience had started laughing with him, with no idea why. In the lobby afterwards, Moira’s merchandising guy had sold over sixty copies of
Alien
. Now he was higher than the Severn Bridge and, every so often, he would shiver at the memory.

‘It was a wild moment, but you never looked back,’ Moira said. ‘You were soaring like a gull. I’m thinking, Jesus, he’s become a performer at last – wee Lol. However, just for the record… why?’ She’d put down her cup. Her hair was tied up now. She wore a grey woolly sweater and white jeans. ‘Go on… just out of interest. For m’ personal files…’

‘Must’ve been the song,’ Lol admitted. ‘It’s always that song. It’s got… something in it I can’t always control.’

‘ “Heavy Medication Day”?’

‘The day I refused to take the pills,’ Lol remembered, ‘Dr Gascoigne said… and I remember him leaning over me, I was sitting in a high-backed chair in the main day-room, and I’d turned it away from the TV, and he leaned over me and he said in my ear, “Don’t go thinking you’re ever going to leave here, Mr Robinson. You see that door? One day, when I’ve been long retired to the south of France, you’ll be straining to get your Zimmer frame through it.” ’

‘Jesus. This is a shrink? This is how they talk?’

‘Well, it’s been said before, but it’s true…’

‘That if it wasnae for the white coat you’d never know which were the patients, right? I tell you what… by the time you’d finished laughing and you did the whole song again, they were with you for the duration.’

‘Um, to change the subject – slightly – I was talking to Tom Storey.’

‘Poor Tom,’ Moira said. ‘Wasnae so rich and famous he’d probably have been under the shrinks years ago.’

Moira had once, way back, been in a band with Tom Storey. It was a very small pond, the British folk-rock scene.

Lol told her how he’d wound up talking to Tom. Moira rolled her eyes.

‘Belladonna, eh? The extraordinary Bell. Used to fancy the hell out of Tom, simply because he was rumoured to be, you know…?’

‘Sensitive?’

‘Amazing the number of women went after him because of that. To guys, a guitar hero. To women, a
psychic
guitar hero. None of them realizing it was the best way to have the poor guy heading for the airport. Bell couldnae figure it at all – she could’ve had anybody at that time.’

‘You knew her?’

‘Nobody knew her. We did a couple of the same festivals – you did one, I recall. This’d be before America discovered her. She was older than me and always kind of superior – she’s an artist, slumming, and I’m this folk-club kid on the make. And she resented me, probably for the same reason she fancied Tom.’

‘Because she’d heard you were…’

‘A touch fey, aye. Oh, and she’d made a wee pass at me and got soundly rebuffed. That didnae help.’

‘Went both ways?’

‘She went a hundred ways, Laurence, although I tend to think the allegations of actual necrophilia were no more than malicious gossip. It was all a major fetish thing. Other bands and singers, it was a phase. Her, it went on when goth stuff was no longer big-money cool, so…’

‘So there had to be a cause,’ Lol said.

‘Always a cause. They’re saying even schizophrenia’s no’ something you’re born with. The guy I did know was Eric Bryers, her boyfriend way back. Session bass-player, absolutely besotted with Bell. Do anything for her – coke, smack, acid. If you get ma point. She was gonnae have his child and everything, and it was all cosy-cosy, then she suddenly disappears – this is Eric’s version of events – and the next he hears of her she’s in LA and a big star, with no mention of a baby.’

‘Had it adopted, Tom said. He was furious.’

‘Ah, the adoption story, that’s one version. What I heard, the baby was stillborn, and she had a big funeral for it, fancy Gothic grave – that would be more in keeping. Last time I saw Eric, he… Aw, he was busking with another guy in Manchester – I had a gig at the Free Trade Hall, and there he was busking. I’m ashamed to say I couldnae face him, so I walked past quick, with ma scarf around ma head, and slipped all the cash I had on me intae his hat. Talked to a guy some time later, said Eric used to follow Bell’s gigs around the country, busking near the theatres, and getting arrested and moved on. I think he had a solid habit by then, and nobody was using him.’

‘Dead now.’

‘Aye. They got him off the smack and he turned to drink and his behaviour became erratic, and one day the poor devil threw himself off the top of a skyscraper block in London.’

‘Like Seress.’ Lol started to feel a little weird.

‘What?’

‘Rezso Seress – “Gloomy Sunday”?’

‘It’s late,’ Moira said. ‘Start again.’

‘There was this song about suicide which, according to the urban myths, has been leading to people actually topping themselves. By a Hungarian, Rezso Seress. He also died by throwing himself off a building. The Hungarian Suicide Song. Occasionally gets covered by artists feeling a bit daring.’

‘Bell?’

‘Very faithful version. Exactly like the original, down to the scratches.’

‘See, that’s just the kind of fuckin’ stupid thing that woman would do,’ Moira said. ‘The way Eric was, I can actually imagine him sitting there playing the damn thing over and over and refilling his glass. I’d like to give her a good slap.’

‘You ever see her now?’

‘Not in years, she’s well off the circuit – doesnae need it; weird kids keep rediscovering her. They also began using her music on commercials a lot – when TV commercials started becoming so diffuse and surreal you weren’t sure what they were advertising. Stroke me, poke me, invoke me – however that shit went. Only it would be a car. You staying here tonight?’