The Secrets of Pain

78

The scream had been muffled, choked off, but it was still reaching for Lol like an imploring hand and, for just a moment, he’d thought it was Jane.

It sent him to the Nissen hut. The padlock had been broken, but the big doors were firm. A wall of wood, new oak that would break your shoulder. He turned in desperation to Danny who was alongside him, hands exploring the panels.

‘Bolted, it is, from inside.’

‘What do we do?’

‘All right,’ Barry whispered. ‘Options. We could bang on the door, shout “police, open up now”.’

‘But that’d warn ’em,’ Danny Thomas said. ‘We wanner do that?’

‘It would, yeah.’

‘And when they seen us… if there’s a whole bunch of ’em in there…’

‘True.’ Barry turned to Gomer, pointed across the compound to the biggest shed. ‘That old JCB… you reckon…?’

‘Oh aye.’ Twin moons floating in Gomer’s bottle glasses. ‘Sure to. Less he’s broke.’

‘You can hot-wire it?’

‘Don’t need no hot-wire.’ Gomer had dragged out a jangle of keys on a ring. ‘Digger that age, one size fits all.’

‘Try it. Go with him Danny, eh? If it don’t look promising, get out before you make too much noise and we’ll try something else.’

Barry moved away from the doors and Lol followed him to the original hole in the barbed wire, its ends springing free like brambles. Barry ran an uncertain hand across his jaw.

‘Bit too much like the old days, Laurence. But this is not the old days, it’s not warfare, it’s not terrorism… and I’m not your gaffer. Bearing in mind there could be very serious repercussions, you don’t have to do what I say, none of you.’

Lol threw up his hands. ‘You want me to make decisions? The songwriter? Barry, I don’t give a shit about repercussions. There’s something here makes my blood go cold.’

‘All right. Let’s quickly go over the situation one last time. What’s the worst we know happens that might be happening in there?’

‘They kill a bull.’

‘With?’

‘A knife. In theory.’

‘How many people involved in that?’

‘No idea.’

He looked back at the Nissen hut. Underground, Athena had said, to simulate a cave. Certainly no windows. It was a possibility.

‘If this was Regiment business,’ Barry said, ‘we’d have smoke bombs, masks and automatic bleedin’ hardware from Heckler and Koch.’

‘And one of us might even know what to do with it.’

There was a metallic clang from the JCB, then silence. Barry gazed across the compound, light as a dull day down there.

‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘Look at us, Laurence. Even you’d be too old to qualify for selection.’

From behind the big shed, they heard the slow clatter of an old, cold engine being coaxed back into active service.

‘And as for him…’

The moon lay in the palm of Merrily’s hand, its symbolism fully apparent.

The night before Good Friday was the night of the Last Supper.

This is my body.

Merrily looked down at the tiny full moon. Two of them, in fact, both consecrated. Must’ve fallen off the communion plate last Sunday morning and she’d found them when she’d come in at night for the meditation, slipped them into her back pocket and forgotten about them. One – still intact, she guessed because it had lodged near a seam – must have fallen out of her pocket when she’d sat down on the stone over the well. The other was already in pieces.

She looked towards the church porch, directly across from the well, and recalled the sorrowful shadow over the door on the inside, the weary, defeated Jesus, drained and desiccated, in the act of dying . Fading into the wall and into history. And soon, the way things were going, out of history and into myth and legend sooner than anyone would have imagined, least of all Mother Julian, who in some way had experienced the reality. An anchoress, a solitary, not part of a religious community. They spent their lives in prayer and contemplation, in a particular place which was felt to be blessed by their presence there, the way the atmosphere of an area could be darkened by the shadows of violence.

Merrily held up the intact communion wafer until it covered the moon, so that it looked like the fan of white-gold rays were spraying from the wafer.

Like, when a place gets into disaster mode, expecting the worst all the time, the worst just seems to go on happening. Unless you step in with an act of sacrifice.

Jane. Who’d been known to venerate the moon as Mother Goddess – how seriously Merrily was still unsure, but it was a very different concept from Julian’s Mother God. Who, in an odd way, was more like Syd Spicer’s God, the SAS commander in the field, on first-name terms with his team. Your best mate, none of that sir crap, no salutes. In the same way, back in the days when God was seen as a touchy tyrant with a pile of plagues and thunderbolts at his elbow, Julian had sensed only a source of infinite kindness and patience and politeness, without which, she’d insisted, it would be impossible for this flawed world to exist.

Merrily closed her fingers on the wafer. It felt warm. She had the surreal thought that here, in a place whose sanctity pre-dated both Christianity and Mithraism, there could be some act of fusion between the wafer and the moon.

It was cold now, her trainers crunching on frost as she went back over the stile and across the field to the car, where she took off Annie’s coat and laid it on the back seat. She stashed Syd’s books, Lol’s map and the compass from the glove compartment in her bag, checked her manicure case for nail scissors and went back to the churchyard, and now it was very cold.

In the swivelling seat of the old JCB, Gomer lit up a ciggy and then was still, looking across at Barry like an old toy dog with glass eyes.

Barry took a breath, held it for several seconds. They listened. There was no sound from inside the hut.

‘Remember the steps,’ Lol said.

‘And afterwards, Gomer, leave your lights on full-beam, but don’t get out. Danny, see he don’t get out.’ Barry moved back. ‘OK, off you go.’

Lol clocked Danny’s worried eyes over the beard, gave him a tight nod and slammed the cab door as the big shovel wobbled, the cig came spinning out of the window, the engine noise changed into a minor-key growl.

‘Back off till it’s done,’ Barry told him. ‘There’ll be flying splinters.’

But the hinges were weaker than the doors. The shovel, nearly as wide as the doors, just punched them off the side walls, and they collapsed into the void.

Job done.

Lol crouching, an arm thrown across his face, turned for guidance to Barry, but Barry had already gone. Lol saw him flattened against the wall at the entrance to the Nissen hut as the JCB roared and trembled massively in the entrance, like some wounded charging animal.

Barry made a backwards turning motion with his fingers, and Gomer switched off the engine but left the lights on. Danny had his window down, leaning out, yelling,

‘ Body…’

Barry said, ‘Dead or alive?’

‘Dunno, blood everywhere.’

Barry shouted into the hut.

‘Out now, please. Everybody. Slowly.’

A patch of silence and then one small voice.

‘Gomer?’

Jesus. Lol’s feet threw him forward, stumbling for the doorway, whispering, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Barry grabbed his shoulder, spun him round and away.

‘It’s Jane-’ Lol stumbled round the digger’s caterpillar tracks to Danny’s door, under the open window. ‘Danny, it-’

‘Best for Jane, boy, if we don’t get killed.’

‘If this thing goes down them steps,’ Gomer was saying, ‘and there’s anybody in the way…’

Lol saw Barry emerge on the other side of the digger, staying out of the lights, his back to the inside wall of the hut. A single sharp crack and its rapid echo and the headlight on Gomer’s side had gone out and Barry’s urgent hiss came out of darkness.

‘Geddown! Everybody! Down! ’

Lol slid onto hands and knees between the digger and the remains of one of the doors. Couldn’t just do nothing. He began creeping slowly forward. Ahead of him, a meagre ochre glow like a nursery night light wrapped in dusty muslin. A moment of waxy silence and then a long, torn cry, and that had to be Jane, and Lol was back on his feet, squeezing past the JCB, clambering up the broken wooden door.

Then he stopped. A man about his own height was facing him, knees slightly bent, arms extended like short girders in front of his face.

A spatter of impressions coming at Lol, questions answered almost as soon as they were formed, like, What’s that between his hands? Why are the hands wearing red gloves?

He was halfway along the big wooden door now, and the door was hanging half over the steps, seesawing. Legs apart, battling for balance, he was going up and down, and the man’s extended arms were tracking his movements, and the man’s blank eyes, inside a red mask, found his for an instant, and Barry was screaming at him.

‘Down. Lie the fuck down!’

And then something hit Lol and he did go down and, while he was falling, the arms of the man, his face glistening scarlet, swung round, away from him, and Lol registered Barry’s silhouette in rapid motion and a twitch from the man’s hands, then a small, gas-jet flash and the sound of a single massive handclap.

The shot’s echo died.

Lol turned sideways, his cheek against the wood. He saw Barry’s face twisting back.

Barry sinking to his knees, a red halo misting around his head.

‘ Oh… oh for God’s sake…’

This was Danny Thomas’s voice from inside the JCB, all fractured, as Barry’s heavy body toppled back across the shovel’s blade.