3

MELODIOUS TWANG

Cap Marvell was not a devout woman. Her father was a tribal Anglican who regarded the Church as God’s way of affirming the Tories’ right to rule even when Labor was in power, while her mother was a devout Roman Catholic who made sure little Amanda was brought up in all the proper Romish observances and insisted she went to her own old school, St. Dorothy’s Academy for Catholic Girls, which she regarded as the only doctrinally sound school in the country.

Yet despite all these attempts to establish lines of control from the Holy See, it was the dear old domestic C of E which retained a niche in Cap’s affections when mature skepticism swept all other religious debris away, a fondness based almost entirely on childhood memories of her father’s insistence that his pack of assorted hounds, terriers, pointers, and retrievers should join him in the family pew at the village church. She hated the use they were put to, but she loved their company, and a heavenly kingdom without animals was not one she had any interest in entering.

Andy Dalziel reckoned that if there were a God, He should be done for dereliction of duty, letting His Creation get into such a mess and relying on folk like A. Dalziel Esq. to pick up the pieces.

This did not prevent him from being on good terms with the odd cleric, particularly if they shared his interest in the really important aspects of the human condition, such as where do you find the best whisky, and who would you pick for your eclectic all time XV?

Such a one was Father Joe Kerrigan, a parish priest of indeterminate age, with a creased and crumpled leathery face like an old deflated rugby ball. Sport and whisky had brought them together, and once they’d established the ground rule that Kerrigan didn’t try to solve crimes and Dalziel didn’t try to save souls, they had become good friends who many a night tired the moon with talking and sent her down the sky.

Cap, true to her own unbelief, and knowing Dalziel’s considered view that most religious ceremonies were balls, and them as weren’t balls were bollocks, had placed a strict interdict on admission to his room of any of the pack of spiritual predators who roam the corridors of modern multifaith hospitals looking for their defenseless prey.

Joe Kerrigan, however, was an exception. His distress at Andy’s plight was personal rather than professional, and he won her imprimatur as a friend, not as a priest.

But the leopard cannot change his spots, and that afternoon Father Kerrigan, visiting the Central to administer the last rites to a dying parishioner, was very much in professional mode when he decided to look in on Dalziel on his way out.

The guardian constable placed outside the room since the events of Sunday recognized the priest and let him in without demur. For the first time Father Joe found himself alone with his friend, and now the prayers which previously in deference to and, it must be said, in fear of Cap Marvel, he had offered silently from within now poured spontaneously from his lips. “Dear Jesus, Divine physician and Healer of the sick, we turn to you in this time of illness…”

As he spoke the priest’s words, through his mind ran the friend’s thought, “Where are you, Andy, me dear? Is it living you still are or am I talking to a lump of flesh in which the heart still beats but out of which the mind and the soul have long fled?”

In fact Dalziel is both closer than Kerrigan can guess and farther than he can imagine. Living he still is, but that point of awareness in which his being is now entirely focused has drifted back to the far edge of darkness, close up against the wafer-thin membrane which separates him from the white light of Elsewhere.

He’s here partly through necessity in that whenever the will to survive grows weary, this is where he automatically drifts, but also in some part through choice, because he is essentially a social animal and while his comatose limbo is filled with shadows of his consciousness, he is unable to truly communicate with any of them. Here, however, just beyond the membrane, there is possibly something distinct from himself.

“I know you’re in there,” says Dalziel. “We’ve got you surrounded. If you come out with your hands up, we can all go home.”

This approach is as unsuccessful as it was in Mill Street.

“If my lad Pascoe were here,” says Dalziel, “he’d soon talk you out. He’s been on a course.”

There is a something. Not a response. Something like that lightest breath of wind in a forest on a still day which reminds you of the huge canopy of foliage under which you stand. But it is enough for Dalziel.

“You are there then,” he says triumphantly. “Grand. Now we’re getting somewhere. Next off is find a name, that’s what the manuals say. I’m Andy. What shall I call you? God, is it?”

Again the breeze in the trees, and this time he thinks he gets a meaning.

Why don’t you come through and see for yourself?

“Nay,” says Dalziel. “Last time I tried that, I got blown up. Hang about. What’s going off?”

Apart from his brief out-of-body experience, which had come to a sudden end when his unexpected glimpse of Hector lying in bed had driven him back to the security of his coma, he has no sense of external context. All he knows is that at the end of the darkness furthermost from the membrane separating him from the white light of Elsewhere lies another Elsewhere from which derive those fragments of sensation which still have the power to call him back.

What is coming through now is a sort of monotonous mutter, which gradually he starts to break up into words.

Omnipotent and eternal God, the everlasting salvation of those who believe, hear me on behalf of Thy sick servant, Andrew…

“Bloody hell!” says Dalziel indignantly. “Some bugger’s praying to me!”

To me, for you, I think you’ll find, corrects the forest breeze.

“Same difference. You must get a lot of this stuff in your line of work. How the hell do you put up with it?”

C’est mon métier, says the breeze.

“Right. Like me having to listen to scrotes telling me they were somewhere else on the night in question, ladling out soup to the poor.”

Something like that.

“So what else you do apart from listening to this drivel? There’s got to be something else your side that keeps you too busy to take care of things my side.”

You still think of yourself as being part of what you call your side?

“Why shouldn’t I?”

Come through and we’ll talk about it.

“Nay, you don’t catch me like that. This is as close as I’m getting. In fact it’s a bit too close for comfort. I’m off back there. Ta ta.”

See you soon.

“You sound very sure of that.”

I am. You will be back. And each time you come back you will find it more difficult to retreat.

“Is that right. Not so clever telling me then, is it?”

I tell you because you will not be able to help coming back. And I tell you that because of course you know you already know.

“No one likes a smart ass,” says Dalziel as he retreats.

But he has to admit the breezelike Presence is right. It’s bloody hard, and if it weren’t for the help offered by that thread of sound he might never have made it.

This doesn’t make him any the less resentful when he gets close enough to confirm that the mournful muttering is indeed nothing less than prayer. All he knows about prayers is that most of the ones he’s felt constrained to utter, particularly the one asking for a widow’s cruse of single malt or the ones suggesting a thunderbolt might be good response to some particularly irritating piece of official idiocy, have remained unanswered. But now he thinks he recognizes the voice. Surely those rough raspings can only emerge from the smoke-and-whisky-corroded larynx of his old mate, Joe Kerrigan? If anyone deserves an answer, it’s good old Joe.

He concentrates all the power still at his command on finding a fitting response.

Father Joe paused in his prayer. He thought he detected a movement of the great bulk on the bed. Yes, he was right. Something was stirring down there. Dear Lord, he thought. Is it possible that just for once you’re giving me a quick answer to my prayers?

From beneath the bedsheet drifted a sound which put the scholarly Father Joe in mind of John Aubrey’s account of that spirit who vanished with a curious perfume and most melodious twang.

When it died away and the body once more lay, a sheer hulk on the bed of an unfathomable sea, Father Joe stood up.

“All right, you fat bastard,” he said, “I can take a hint. But God bless you anyway.”

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