The Chalice

SIX

Juanita sat in the bedside chair and stared at her hands until her vision went blurred. 'There,' said Karen, the nurse. 'Isn't medical science wonderful?'

She was too upset to reply. Every time they unwrapped the dressings, the hands seemed to look more alien, the transplants in her palms the revolting pink of an old-fashioned condom. And shockingly clean, devoid of lines.

At first they'd looked like the hands of an excavated corpse which someone had joined to her wrists. Frankenstein hands. Now they were claws. She'd shrieked at the doctor, I can't move them, oh Christ I can't bend the fingers. The doctor said they'd become more flexible. In time. And the pink would fade. In time. As would the pain.

Oh, sure, she knew she was lucky. Knew it could have been so much worse. If she hadn't covered her face, if she hadn't been wearing the Afghan.

And, just for a moment, she'd imagined how it would have been the other way round. If she'd died in flames and Jim had been left with hands which wouldn't hold a paintbrush, wouldn't paint with any delicacy perhaps ever again. Jim gazing into his beloved dusk and watching it recede.

About to cry, Juanita sat up in the chair. Think angry.

What beautiful hands you have, Juanita.

'Take it easy, now,' said Karen. She'd come on duty at four, as usual. Juanita's hands had been unwrapped since ten. She'd got dressed for the occasion, in the off-the-shoulder lemon top which Jim liked so much and a long, Aztec-patterned cotton skirt which lay easy on her flayed thighs.

Juanita looked up into the small face full of professional interest. A couple of times they'd sent a trauma counsellor to see her. At least, she'd claimed to be a trauma counsellor, her questions reflecting a certain concern for Juanita's mental-health. After all, what kind of normal person would hurl herself at the blazing, flaking corpse of even a close friend?

She said to Karen, 'Did you find out anything about Ruth Dunn?'

Karen looked even more anxious, then her face went blank. 'Talk about it later.'

'Come on, Karen, what did you find out?'

'Where's she now, Juanita? This woman.'

'Glastonbury.'

'Not in a hospital?'

'No.'

'Private clinic?'

'Nothing like that.'

'Thank Christ for that.'

'Jesus, Karen…'

'I'll see you later. Sister'll be on my back. We'll have a chat.'

Juanita glowered at the uniformed back. A hospital was like a police state. She thought about discharging herself, walking down to the motorway intersection. Holding up her weird hands to thumb a lift. Frighten the lorry drivers.

Then she sank back into the hard chair and wept.

San paced the office. He had to do something. Couldn't just sit around like a spare prick. Sod it. He snatched up the phone and rang Hughie Painter, Central Somerset's most experienced hunt-saboteur.

Mastersab, they called Hughie. Once jailed for three months after trying to ram a hunting horn down the throat of some pompous bloody Master of Foxhounds. A hero. A legend in sabbing circles. When you talked to Hughie on the phone you kept it short and careful.

'Half an hour, right? Under the Christmas tree? We'll be, like, anonymous figures in the crowd.' Sam laughed. 'OK. See you.'

About the only thing he could do for Diane was spoil Archer Ffitch's Boxing Day.

She couldn't bring herself to go back to the shop. She walked right past. Some people gave her sidelong glances.

She knew she probably looked pretty awful.

She'd never felt so isolated. There wasn't anyone she could trust. How could… how could anyone live in Glastonbury and not believe in anything?

How could you be, like Sam, a good person who cared about people and animals and the welfare of the planet, and not believe that it all existed for some purpose? How could you live in Glastonbury and not feel closer?

Actually, she didn't feel close to anything. She felt used. The candyfloss sunbeams rolling down the Tor and the ice-cream lights at night giving way to fragmented images, sharp and threatening as slivers of glass, to the dark vaporous forms which passed as fast as birds. To the black, portentous symbols you could only wish you'd never seen.

All nonsense to Sam. All bollocks. She didn't know whether to pity him or envy him his freedom.

What he thought of her; this mattered more. Sam Daniel thought Diane Ffitch was a loony. It didn't matter that most people had thought this for years, were thinking it now as they watched her trooping up the street like a fat scarecrow. It suddenly mattered awfully that Sam now thought it too. It wounded her. It was terribly unfair.

There was a funny atmosphere in the town again, the shapes of the buildings sharp against a cold, grim sky, everything so vivid, a thunderstorm air of energy-in-waiting.

She wished she could drive away for a while and think, but she hadn't even had the nerve to collect the van from the garage.

And of course that started her thinking about Archer again. That parting shot. He knew about the graffiti on the van. He might even have told them to do it. He was taunting her. Why did he always have to do that?'

She wandered, inevitably, up Wellhouse Lane, past the trees which screened Chalice Orchard, where DF had lived. Probably fooling herself over that as well. What would the legendary high priestess of Isis want with someone like her?

There was an unhealthy engine noise behind her, then an ancient Land-Rover clattered alongside.

'Lookin' for me, Miss Diane?'

Oh gosh. Moulder. Forgotten all about this morning's phone message.

'Hop in, my chicken.'

Another site-meeting, more disillusionment.

Under discussion this afternoon had been a Griff Daniel proposal for a new housing estate out on the Meare road. Green field site. Daniel's plan, an executive housing estate: four bedroom luxury homes two bathrooms (with bidets) and – and this, as far as Woolly was concerned, was the worst of it… double garages. Double bloody garages!

A double garage said this: it said you were expected to have two cars and maybe a third and fourth in the driveway far your teenage kids.

Woolly had tried to explain to his colleagues on the planning sub-committee that the only way to avoid Gridlock Somerset by the year 2020 was to start building homes with single garages or even no bloody garages at all.

And did they listen, his council colleagues?

They looked at him in his red and yellow bobcap and his pink jeans and then they looked at each other and they smiled in that He's from Glastonbury kind of way. Except for Griff Daniel (at the meeting in his capacity as developer), who'd looked at Woolly like he hoped he'd die of something painful in the not too distant future.

Afterwards Woolly had gone to a pub out past Wells for a bite of lunch with Fred Harris, the elderly Wedmore councillor, Fred trying to talk a bit of sense into him. Be pragmatic, Fred said. Your time will come.

Ho ho. His time wouldn't come until they had a New Age party with about a dozen like-minded members (if you could find twelve like-minded New Agers) and a sympathetic central government. Which was about as likely as a Mothership from Alpha Centauri coming down to a civic reception on Glastonbury Tor.

On the way back to the poor, beleaguered Isle of Avalon, he shoved Julian Cope's Autogeddon into the cassette deck. You and me, Jules, you and me. Ah, but nobody took Julian Cope seriously either, possibly on account of him being the only rock star left who dressed like Woolly.

He'd go and see Diane again. Shook him up, that did, bloody Archer Ffitch strolling in just as he was about to lay it on Diane about what the new road would do to the St

Michael line. Coincidence, or what?

'OK,' Karen said. 'No names and you didn't get this from me, all right?'

Juanita nodded. Her mouth felt very dry. She needed to hear this but didn't want to. She composed herself, crossing her hands lightly – with these hands you had to do everything lightly – in her lap in the vinyl bedside armchair.

Karen sat down on the bed. 'Geriatric ward, all right? I'm not saying where. This is what I've been told. That situation, I've been there, I know how easy it is to become impatient when you're on your own at night and half of them are incontinent. A saint would blow, some nights.'

'She isn't', Juanita said, 'a saint.'

'I was just saying that. I just need to know before I go any further that she's not any kind of friend of yours.'

'I mistrust her. I think she's a dangerous megalomaniac, a bad person to be around. OK?'

'All right.' Karen lowered her voice. 'Well, this goes back twenty-odd years. It's small things. Hard to prove. Publicly fitting catheters to old men who don't need them. Putting bedpans just out of reach of the disabled ones and then not cleaning them up and leaving the bedding unchanged for hours. Telling them stuff their relatives have said about them never coming home again and renting out their rooms – when they haven't said anything of the sort Stealing their sweets, taking away pictures of their grandchildren in the night. Telling them that there's, like, no God. That this is where it ends. Except for those who are… condemned to walk the ward. As – you know – as spirits. Take it from me, geriatrics are like little kids. They'll believe what you tell them.'

'Jesus. Those are small things?'

'Came to a head when Dunn left a dead woman on the ward all night, unscreened.'

Karen slid a robe around Juanita's bare shoulders. The warmth helped.

'Go on,' Juanita said.

'She took the Anglepoise lamp from the nurses' table and placed it on the dead woman's bedside table. So that it was lighting up the corpse's face – not a peaceful face, you know? Lit up for them all to see, all these old people, all night.'

'How do you know this?'

'Because a doctor came in unexpectedly, and she was reported.'

'She was sacked after that?'

'And blacklisted. The doctor did a good job, got a few signed statements, although the girls were pretty intimidated. God, I only had to mention the name Ruth Dunn to Jane, who came to us from Oxford… Anyway, Sister Dunn worked in another general hospital… as far as they know. The next they heard of her she was a matron at a public school.'

'Where?'

'Dunno. But some of these fancy schools, they like a sadist, don't they? Just stay well away from that woman, my advice. I better go, Juanita, I'll be getting hauled over the coals.'

'Hang on. Could I talk to this Jane? What about the doctor who reported…'

'I shouldn't have told you her name. Leave her alone, Juanita, Jane's jittery enough at the best of times.'

'What about the doctor?'

Karen rose to her feet, expressionless. 'They say the doctor's died. That's all I know. You take care, Juanita.'

Puttering into Magdalene Street in his old but catalytically converted Renault Six, Woolly spotted the coloured lights of the Christmas tree. He liked coloured lights and he liked Christmas trees.

He wondered what it would be like if you could only see the tree lights instead of headlights. If the only sounds you could hear were, like, carol-singing and stuff, not the rumble of this twenty ton truck coming up behind carrying God-knows-what to God-knows-where. All freight this size should be made to go by rail, was Woolly's view.

Fred Harris, the Wedmore councillor, who was a bit green around the edges, bless him, had patted him on the back as they straggled off Daniel's site. 'Never mind, old son. World'll catch up with you one day, look.' Fred always said that to Woolly.

Be dead by then, Woolly thought, as he drove down to where all the streets converged on the tree. He wondered why his cassette player had suddenly cut out.

'Forget it, my advice' Hughie Painter pulled Sam out the doorway of the Crown Hotel and up into High Street towards the NatWest bank and The George and Pilgrims. 'Jeez, was this your brilliant idea to come here? Can't hear yourself flaming talk.'

The kazoo band was doing a syncopated 'O little Town of Bethlehem', kids singing along, a bunch of young drunks dancing in the street

'Look, come on.' Sam hadn't been expecting this, not from Mastersab. 'They haven't done that hunt for three years at least, not on Boxing Day. Too expensive, look, too many people to entertain, too many hunt-followers. But now Pennard's pushing the boat out again for some reason, and you're saying…'

'I'm saying leave it. We got more important stuff to worry about.'

'No chance, Hughie. I'm gonner ruin that bastard's Christmas.'

Hughie pulled him up hard against the ancient walls of The George and Pilgrims and bawled into his ear, 'And how did you find out about it, eh, Sammy? Not been widely advertised, am I right?'

'Yeh, I know what you're thinking. She let it slip out by accident, OK?'

'Haw! You been set up, boy,' Hughie roared. He was about ten years older than Sam, grey in his beard. But Sam wasn't about to be humiliated.

'Hughie, this is straight up.' Sam was shouting too, now, and the words were coming very fast. 'She don't even speak to the old man. It's a dysfunctional family. Leastways, Diane's not functioning in it. I figured, what if we were to make a bit of a recce, maybe. Then we could have a meeting, draw up a ground plan, get it dead right, fuck these bastards good.'

He spotted his old man swaggering down the street with Quentin Cotton, both of them wearing big shit eating grins and enamel lapel badges with that picture of the Tor and a white no-entry sign slashed across it.

Sam wanted to leap out at the bastards, start a nice public barney, but Hughie held him back. 'What's got into you, boy?'

'What's got into me? Shit…'

'Listen!' Hughie yelled. 'The big issue right now has got to be the new road, right? The big wildlife issue. It's not just trees and fields, it's badger sets, the lot. Wholesale devastation. Word is we'll have bulldozers in by the end of January.'

'So?'

'So, naturally, we got to have the manpower ready. Like, not on bail.'

'Well, sure, I appreciate that, but this is…'

'They could start anytime, Sammy. Could be starting now, for all I know. Some civil servant, never been west of Basingstoke, gives the word, out go two damn big, nasty blokes with chainsaws. Private contractors, that's the way they work it now. Time's money. Evil buggers. Whole armies of security guards.'

'Yeah, well, Pennard's in full support of the road. Archer certainly is. We could, like, work the wider message in somehow while disrupting their hunt.'

Hughie Painter shook his head in disgust. 'This is not so much the hunt you wanner target, this is Pennard himself, right? What's this sudden thing you got about that bugger? Something to prove, maybe?'

'Bollocks.' Sam felt himself going red.

'So what's the angle here?' Hughie grinned. 'Afraid we'll all think you sold out, going into this magazine thing with Big Di?'

'Piss off.' Sam wanted to hit him, half aware of how ridiculous this was because big Hughie was a really gentle guy, nobody ever got into a row with Hughie. He walked away into a soup of swirling street noise: carol-singing, laughter, whoops and cheers. He saw traders in the doorways of their shops, some of which seemed to have reopened, lots of children of all ages.

There was a roaring in his ears. He looked up at the tree, saw coloured lights floating down like snowflakes. What?

'Bloody thing,' Woolly shouted 'Sheesh, nothing works for weeks together these days.'

And it was because he was fiddling with his stereo, worrying about the tape snapping and getting all chewed up in the mechanism that he didn't notice it until it was almost on him.

'Oh shit.'

Sweat seemed to spring out of the wheel. It was like he'd suddenly woken up, lights all around him, the big truck behind, people waiting to cross, and this bus… rumbling in a leisurely, rickety way down the wrong side of the road, the driver grinning, or maybe the bus itself was grinning, its radiator grille hanging open between the bleary headlights.

Woolly hit the brakes. Hammered his foot into the pedal, wrenching at the wheel, lurching inside his seatbelt and feeling the Renault spinning side on into the middle of the road and the bloody big lorry behind.

Gasp of airbrakes, screech and a ground-wobbling rumble like an entire block of flats collapsing.

Blur of rights, a coloured blizzard.

Woolly sat for a long, isolated moment, noticing how bone-chilling cold it was in his car and that his throat was ash-dry. Only vaguely aware of the screaming all around him, whoops of terror and pain that didn't stop, not even when he was struggling to open his door through the Christmas branches.