Crybbe

CHAPTER IV

The one time Rachel had seen Guy Morrison, at a preliminary meeting with Max in London, he'd been wearing a lightweight suit with sun-glasses in the breast pocket and carrying a briefcase and a mobile phone.

Today, Guy was in director mode. He wore denims and a leather pouch, like a holster, on his belt. He had blond hair and craggy features. A TV man from central casting, Rachel thought. At his shoulder stood a dumpy, stern-faced girl with straight black hair and a waterproof clipboard.

Hustling J.M. off to the Cock, Goff had told Rachel over his shoulder, 'Morrison wants to do a few exterior shots of the Court with nobody about. Stick around till he shows, Rach, keep an eye on him.'

'Who is this, Catrin?' Guy Morrison asked the black-haired girl in Rachel's hearing. 'Remind me.'

'Guy, this is Rachel Wade, Max's PA.' Catrin's accent had a clipped sibilance Rachel identified as north-west Wales.

'Of course, yes.'

Rachel offered him a languid hand. 'We've spoken on the phone.'

Guy Morrison look the hand and held it limply for an extra moment, looking steadily, unsmiling, into her eyes. 'You're almost everything your voice implied, Rachel Wade.'

'Good,' said Rachel, with a tight, tired smile.

Guy Morrison dropped Rachel's hand, stepped back, looked around the courtyard then up into the sky again, where clouds and mist still formed a damp canopy.

He frowned. 'I wanted some GVs today. Establishing shots. But this weather's not conducive. At all. So I've told the crew, Rachel Wade, to set up in that stable-place. Acceptable to you, yes?'

'Fine.'

'Because what I thought I'd do after lunch is bang off a brief opening interview with Max Goff. Background of sawing and rubble everywhere. Traces of sawdust on the white suit, emphasizing the hands-on approach. May not use it, but I'm not happy unless there's something in the can on Day One.'

'You'd better see how he feels about that.'

Guy Morrison nodded and turned away. She watched him pace the courtyard, looking up at the hills fading into mist and at the Court itself, grey and spectral in us small hollow, like an old galleon half-sunk into a mud-flat.

When they arrived back at the Cock, close to 1 p.m., a car was being parked on the square, close to the steps: a silver-grey Ford Escort with an Offa's Dyke Radio sticker on its windscreen.

The driver got out and came over.

'Rachel, is it? Could I just have a word?'

Guy Morrison, peering at the car-sticker and registering it was only local radio, went ahead, up the steps, with his assistant.

'I'm from Offa's Dyke Radio. We carried a report yesterday without checking the details with you.'

Rachel had never seen this person before He was a shortish, muscular man, about twenty-five, with a half-grown moustache.

'Word reached me you weren't happy about what went out, and I just want you to know I've looked into it. Gavin Ashpole, News Editor. You'll be seeing more of me.'

'Good,' said Rachel dismissively. 'Now if…'

'Problem is, we've been using a freelance. Fay Morrison, in Crybbe, but it hasn't been working out.'

'Apart from this one instance,' Rachel said, 'I don't think. ..'

'So, from now on, any major stories in this area, we're going to handle direct. What Mr Goff's doing amounts to a major story, naturally, so if there's anything you want to say, anything you want to get out on Offa's Dyke Radio, you call me direct. Here's my card.'

'Thank you.'

'In fact – this is off the record – we're considering putting a staff reporter into Crybbe. Especially if your thing takes off and the population starts to expand.'

'Really.'

'In which case' – Ashpole spread his hands, palms down in a flat, cutting movement – 'we'd simply stop using Morrison altogether.'

'I see,' Rachel said.

What an appalling little creep, she thought.

Over a bland buffet lunch – carnivores catered for, but strictly no smoking – Max Goff explained his plan to publish, in perhaps two years' time, The Book of Crybbe.

'Gonna be an illustrated record of the project,' said Goff. He paused and looked into his audience. 'And a blueprint for the Third Millennium.'

Warm applause. They'd needed extra tables in the dining room at the Cock.

Goff said, 'I've asked J. M. Powys to write the book. Because his work remains, to my mind, the most inspiring evocation of a country still able to make contact with its inner self.'

Powys smiled modestly. The magical, mystical J. M. Powys. Too old, he thought miserably, to become someone else. Too young not to want to.

About forty people were there, some from London and elsewhere, to hear about the project and consider getting involved. Thin, earnest men in clean jeans and trainers and women in long skirts and symbolic New Age jewellery. Powys didn't know most of them. But he felt, dispirited, that he'd met them all before.

There was a delicate-looking tarot-reader called Ivory with a wife old enough to be his mother and big enough to be his minder. A feminist astrologer called Oona Jopson, in whose charts, apparently, Virgo was a man. She had cropped hair and a small ring through her nose.

After Goff sat down, Powys listened idly to the chat. He heard an experimental hypnotist talking about regression. 'I've got an absolute queue of clients, mostly, you know, from London, but what I'd really like is to get more of the local people on the couch…'

Apart from Andy Boulton-Trow, the only person he'd actually encountered before was the spiritual healer, Jean Wendle, from Edinburgh, who was older than the rest, grey-haired with penetrating eyes.

'This really your scene, Jean?'

'This? Heaven forbid. Crybbe, though… Crybbe's interesting.'

'You reckon?'

'Well, goodness, Joe, you said it. If you hadn't revealed what a psychically charged area this was, none of us would be here at all, would we?'

'You're very cruel.'

She narrowed her eyes. 'Come round one night. We can discuss it. Anyway… She smiled at him. 'How are things now?'

He looked around the room for Rachel, couldn't see her.

'I think things are finally looking up,' he said.

Later, Goff took him into a corner of the dining-room and lowered his voice.

'Confidentially,' he said, 'I need somebody who understands these matters to make sure this arsehole Morrison doesn't screw it up. Part of the deal, he uses you as script consultant. No J. M. Powys, no documentary. J. M. Powys disagrees with anything, it doesn't go out.'

That'll be fun.'

Goff put a hand on Powys's arm. 'Hey, you know when I first knew I had to have you write the book?'

Powys smiled vacantly, beyond embarrassment.

'See, when I first came to Crybbe, the very first day I was here, I look around and suddenly I can see this about the border country being a spiritual departure lounge. I'm standing down by the river, looking over the town to the hills of England on one side and the hills of Wales on the other. And that other phrase of yours, about the Celtic Twilight Zone, I'm hearing that, and I'm thinking, yeah, this is it. The departure lounge. It just needs a refuel, right? You know what I'm getting at here? You can feel it in this room right now. All these people, all reaching out.'

'Maybe they're reaching out for different things.'

'Ah shit, J.M., it's all one thing. You know that. Down to generating energy and throwing it out. What you put out you get back, threefold. Jeez, pretty soon, this town is gonna glow'

'Seems to me there are things you need to work out, Joe,' Andy Boulton-Trow said. 'Maybe this is the place to do it.'

Those lazy, knowing, dark-brown eyes gazing into your head again, after all these years. I can see your inner self, and it's a mess, man.

Andy was probably Goff's role-model New Ager. He had the glow. Like he'd slowed his metabolism to the point where he was simply too laid-back to be affected by the ageing process.

'Let's talk,' Andy said, and they took their wine glasses into the small, shabby residents' lounge just off the dining-room.

Andy lounged back on a moth-eaten sofa, both feet on a battered coffee-table. Somehow, he made it look like the lotus position.

He said, 'Never got over it, did you?'

Powys rolled his wine-glass between his hands, looking down into it.

'I mean Rose,' Andy said.

'It was a long time ago. You get over everything in time.'

Andy shook his head. 'You're still full of shit, Joe, you know that?'

'Look,' Powys said reasonably, trying to be as cool as Andy. 'We both know I should never have gone round the Bottle Stone. And certainly not backwards.'

'Bottle Stone?' Andy said.

'And certainly not backwards. I should have told you to piss off.'

'I'm not getting you,' Andy said.

'What I saw was.. Powys felt pain like powdered glass behind his eyes. 'What I saw was happening to me, not Rose.'

'You had some kind of premonition? About Rose?'

'I told you about it.'

Andy shrugged. 'You had a premonition about Rose. But you didn't act on it, huh?'

'It was me.'

'You failed to interpret. That's a shame, Joe. You had a warning, you didn't react, and that's what's eating you up. Perhaps you've come here to find some manner of redemption.'

Andy shook his head with a kind of laid-back compassion.

If it was a big job, Gomer Parry worked with his nephew, Nev. Today Nev had just followed him up in the van and they'd got the smaller bulldozer down from the lorry, and then Nev had pushed off.

No need for a second man. Piece of piss, this one.

Unless, of course, they wanted him to take out the whole bloody mound.

Gomer chuckled. He could do that too, if it came to it.

He was sitting in the cab of the lorry, listening to Glen Miller on his Walkman. The bulldozer was in the field, fuelled up, waiting. Not far away was a van with a couple of loudspeakers on its roof, such as you saw on the street at election time. Funny job this. Had to be on site at one o'clock to receive his precise instructions. Seemed some middle bit had to come out first. Make a big thing of it, Edgar Humble had said. A spectacle. No complaints there; Gomer liked a bit of spectacle.

With the Walkman on, he didn't hear any banging on the cab door. It was the vibrations told him somebody was trying to attract his attention.

He took off the lightweight headphones, half-turned and saw an old checked cap with a square patch on the crown, where a tear had been mended. Gomer, who was a connoisseur of caps, recognized it at once and opened his door.

'Jim.'

'What you doin' yere, Gomer?' the Mayor, Jimmy Preece, asked him bluntly.

'I been hired by that Goff,' Gomer said proudly. 'He wants that bloody wall takin' out, he does.'

'Does he. Does he indeed.'

'Some'ing wrong with that, Jim? You puttin' a bid in for the stone? Want me to go careful, is it?'

Jimmy Preece took off his cap and scratched his head. Even though it was still drizzling, he didn't put the cap back on but rolled it up tighter and tighter with both hands.

'I don't want you doin' it at all, Gomer,' he said. 'I want that wall left up.'

'Oh aye?' Gomer said sarcastically. 'Belongs to you, that wall, is it?'

The Mayor's eyes were watery as raw eggs. 'You're not allowed, take it from me, Gomer, that's a fact. Been there for centuries, that wall. He'll have a protection order on 'im, sure to.'

'Balls,' said Gomer. 'I was told he was Victorian, no older'n that.'

'Well, you was told wrong, Gomer. See, I don't want no argument about this. No bad feeling. Just want you to know that we, that is me and Jack and several other prominent citizens of this area, includin' several farmers and civic leaders, would prefer it if the wall stayed up.'

Gomer couldn't believe it.

'Just 'ang on, Jim, so's I gets this right. You're sayin' if I falls that thing, then…'

Jimmy Preece tightened his old lips until his mouth looked like a complicated railway junction.

'You bloody well knowed why I was yere, di'n't you?' said Gomer. 'You knowed exac'ly.'

'I been invited,' the Mayor said sadly. 'That Goff, 'e phoned me up and invited me to watch. Silly bugger.'

'So what you're sayin', if I brings him down, that wall you'll

…'

'I'm not sayin' nothin',' the Mayor said firmly. 'I got no authority to order you about, and I don't intend…'

'Oh no, Jim, you're only bloody threatenin' me! You'n sayin' if I starts workn' for Goff, then I don't get no work nowhere else around yere. Right?'

Gomer levelled a grimy forefinger at the Mayor. 'You bloody stay there! Don't you bloody move! I'll get a witness, an' you can say it again in front of 'im.'

The Mayor said calmly, 'You won't find no witnesses in this town as'll say I threatened you, Gomer, 'cause I 'aven't. You can do what the hell you likes for Mr Goff.'

' "Cept pull that wall down, eh?'

' "Cept pull that wall down,' the Mayor agreed.