The House of Susan Lulham (Kindle Single) Read online

  A flask of water had been blessed this morning in Ledwardine Church. Zoe looking on with disapproval as she’d taken it from the airline bag. Damn, should have pasted a label across it saying weed killer.

  Merrily had stifled the laugh like a hiccup. But it had been enough for something to blow inside her, a fuse no thicker than a hair, and a huge black shutter had came down, clack, and she’d been staring, blankly faithless, at the insanity of enacting a medieval ritual, toned-down for a woman who was buggered if she was going to let that bitch drive her out of her home even it meant employing a stupid throwback she’d pulled from the Net.

  Shocked at herself, she’d stumbled and kicked the flask and nearly fallen over to grab it before it toppled from the step and smashed. Catching it in time but half-wishing she hadn’t, because something inside her hadn’t wanted another chance at this.

  Zoe had watched from the doorway, clutching her smartphone, as Merrily stood in the rain and murmured. Very discreet, no histrionics, nothing that might upset a neighbour. Once round the house, then up to the master bedroom: expensive, but too dark and leathery for Merrily’s taste. Another long window with a view of a small field with two ponies in it and a tarmac pathway vanishing into shrubbery.

  …make the seasons to take their course and our days to end in sleep… Guard with your continual watchfulness all who rest within these walls.

  No sprinkling of water in the bedroom. Some priests would have made it a condition that the husband should be here, too. Or the wife. Or the civil partner, whatever. But if this guy was away on a course and an atheist anyway…

  She’d left the living room till last.

  No feeling of menace, but nobody who knew what had happened here could be entirely comfortable, particularly a woman. Coming home in the dark and flinging on all the lights. That sharp, involuntary intake of breath when you opened the door from the hall into the silence of the room where Susan Lulham had died. Even on a psychological level, what remained of Suze could be complex and upsetting.

  ….sanctify this house, that in it there may be joy and gladness, peace and love, health and goodness, and thanksgiving…

  You were told that it wasn’t the words that mattered, no precision of delivery, no sense of incantation. It should be about knowing what you wanted to get across, aligning yourself with the Source.

  * * *

  ‘And then,’ she told Sophie, ‘I suggested, she might like to wander down to the cathedral. Sometime. Just to… you know…’

  ‘Didn’t go down well?’

  ‘Like if she was feeling frightened or oppressed, she could maybe just sit there. Forget prayer, maybe just sit at the back for a few minutes, try to empty her head… and she’s looking at me like I’m some crazy evangelical screaming at her to come to God, throw herself on His mercy. “I don’t like old - didn’t you get that?”’

  And all she’d done was a first-stage blessing. Cupboards opened, mirror covered, TV unplugged, sprinkling of holy water, prayers. Sanctify this house, that in it there may be joy and gladness…

  Covering your back. Knowing you might still wind up looking stupid or naive, part of something obsolete. Some deliverance consultants avoided contact with the public, when possible, preferring just to offer technical advice to priests approached by parishioners disturbed by what they believed were paranormal phenomena - the third reason for remembering the clergy, after weddings and funerals. The one rarely spoken of in a secular society.

  Except, it seemed, on Facebook. Merrily shook her head.

  ‘She kept saying, “You have to exorcise me.” They all know that word. I’m trying to explain that exorcism applies only to something considered malevolent and essentially non-human. She said, “What do you think fucking Suze is?”’

  This had been outside, in a warm, desultory rain, both of them standing on the steps where Zoe had said the woman in the leather jacket had been visible. Merrily murmuring about peace and love, health and goodness, Zoe looking contemptuous. This was it? A bit of a blessing? Pat on the head?

  ‘I didn’t tell her a major exorcism needed permission from the Bishop, and a visit from a psychiatrist. How would you even approach that? Zoe, if you don’t mind, I’d like someone else to meet you?’

  Hadn’t told Zoe the truth of it. I’ve never done one. Never done a major exorcism. Most of us never have. It doesn’t get that far.

  But the fact that Zoe had said exorcise me… that at least indicated an awareness of where the problem might lie.

  ‘What exactly did she say when she first rang?’

  ‘Just… can I talk to the exorcist, please.’

  ‘She used that word? Not deliverance or advisor on the paranormal, or…?’

  ‘Exorcist,’ Sophie said. ‘Might she be deluded? Or is she hiding some emotional problem?’

  ‘Don’t know. You can never be sure. I told her if it continued, we could raise our game all the way to a Requiem Eucharist. But that would need more people, preferably including someone who’d known Susan Lulham personally.’

  ‘The Requiem would be for Susan?’

  ‘She didn’t seem to get that at all. It was like she expected the garlic and the crucifix. Driving Suze out of her house. I asked if there was someone she could stay with until her husband came home. She said she had a sister but they didn’t get on.’

  Sophie placed a mug of tea in front of Merrily.

  ‘I don’t think you’re entirely convinced by Mrs Mahonie are you?’

  ‘Oh God, she’s standing there in the rain, under an umbrella like she’s waiting for a bus. She doesn’t do churches or any old places. And she got my number from a woman on Facebook. And you know what was missing, Sophie? Fear. When it’s there, you can smell it, slightly sour, like… fresh sweat.’

  * * *

  She remembered Zoe, when they were in the leathery master bedroom, looking as if she wanted to hit somebody - like Merrily, who was smaller and who was there and who thought there was something not quite right about this.

  Can I explain?

  Zoe saying nothing, her thick arms folded. Merrily not moving. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the aggression. Not too long ago, on a bank of the River Wye, she’d stared into the face of someone and seen only evil and, against everything she was supposed to stand for, had wanted only to…

  God, God, God…

  ‘Zoe, listen to me… where something like this happens, a living person is usually involved. Whether he or she knows it or not. Sometimes you can be just the vehicle… you can be driven to do something you wouldn’t normally do, or to see something you wouldn’t normally see, by the conditions in a particular place. And afterwards you think you couldn’t possibly have done it.’

  Zoe’s pale blue eyes had been cold.

  ‘I’m not mad.’

  ‘No. Of course you’re not.’

  ‘You didn’t like her,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Not a very Christian reaction, is it? Another reason I can’t let it go.’

  ‘Best not to obsess over it. It’s what she wants.’ Sophie looked up. ‘Laurence - is he still on tour?’

  ‘Lol? No, that’s over. I mean the tour. But he’s not here, anyway.’

  Sophie’s gaze sharpened.

  ‘Nothing—?’

  ‘No, no. Nothing… like that. We’re OK. I think. He’s just doing some session work at Prof Levin’s studio. With Bell Pepper. First album in years. If Kate Bush could do it, etcetera… Bell, the old mystic, she likes to record in the hours before dawn, so he has to stay there. In his old flat over the granary. Until summoned.’

  Sophie’s eyebrows rose above her glasses and not with any sense of wonder.

  ‘They don’t change, these people, do they?’

  ‘Most people don’t,’ Merrily said, ‘I find.’

  4. Mostly old people

  Aftercare.

  She phoned Zoe’s house six times that night. Answerphone. A man’s recorded voice delivering the message in a clipped, impatie
nt way. Maybe Zoe had gone to her sister’s after all. Twice Merrily left messages, waiting in the scullery office, watching her own face, grey, in the screensaver.

  Forty next year, a daughter out there in the adult world. How long could she keep this up? How to deal with change: a TV turning itself on in the night, spirit messages in the hard disk, phantoms on Facebook, firewalls breached by the demonic.

  A level of scepticism was essential, but how far should you allow it to rise before you felt obliged to throw on all the lights and walk away from the Night Job?

  She phoned Jane’s mobile. Voicemail. There was rarely an adequate signal around the Pembrokshire dig where Jane was doing her gap year as a gopher for archaeologists. She left a message.

  ‘No pressure, flower. Just wondered if you remembered a physics teacher at Moorfield called Jonathan Mahonie.’

  The absent Jonno was important. Coming between a wife and a husband was never good, but an atheist husband… and she’d gone behind his back. An atheist husband and Susan Lulham.

  She’d gone into Google and found another of Suze’s claims to fame. The year before her death, she’d done a daytime TV slot, discussing new hairstyles and how to achieve them in your own bathroom. No YouTube sequences from that, just the razor picture of Suze with blurred eyes, lavish, white smile exposing gums the colour of offal. On full-screen you could read the brand name on the razor: Bismarck. The only other pictures were from a magazine feature which had not been in Sophie’s portfolio: Suze showing off her new home, the living room looking much as it had this morning, same pale colours, even a mirror in the same position. A shot of the house from outside had been taken from a low angle in bright sunlight, and its walls looked hard, like bone. Savagely modern when it had been built, decades earlier, but now somehow just very Suze.

  Ethel padded in and curled into her basket. Merrily closed her eyes to the sound of soft purring and the climbing rose tapping the window in the night breeze. She thought about the concept of an unquiet spirit, restless essence of someone who’d died not peacefully.

  Zoe didn’t call back. Nor did Jane till the following day.

  * * *

  After Midweek Mass, this was. She’d been doing the Wednesday Eucharist for a while now, never really liking the word Eucharist but worried about simplifying it in case anyone thought she’d picked up the Catholic virus. But as Anglo-Catholic priests tended still to disapprove of female clerics, how likely was that, anyway?

  ‘Mahonie?’ Jane said. ‘He’s not moved into the village, has he?’

  ‘He lives in Hereford. I ran into his wife, that’s all.’

  ‘Poor cow.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He only arrived a few weeks before I left, so I rang Rhiannon for you. Rhiannon Hughes? Who’s still serving time at Moorfield, so please don’t stitch her up. Bottom line, Mahonie’s a slimeball? Leans over you to make a point on your laptop, and his hands… you know?’

  ‘Nobody report it?’

  ‘It always could’ve been accidental, apparently. Rhiannon says he thinks - inexplicably - that he’s God’s gift.’

  Hell, what did you do in this situation? Merrily reached for a cigarette - should she report it to somebody? Just quietly tip someone off to keep an eye on Mahonie?

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be a paedophile,’ Jane said. ‘It was only big girls.’

  ‘Only.’

  ‘Anyway, he was at this school in the Forest of Dean before, so Rhiannon put his name into the system for me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Facebook. It’s mostly sad old people on there now, but she found some former students, and Mahonie’s famous for like… well, for shagging a dinner lady. She sponged soup from his trousers after he broke up a fight in the sixth-form restaurant. Something like that. He was married at the time.’

  ‘So she was the other woman.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘Sorry. Talking to myself.’ Merrily was staring through the scullery window at the glittery lichen on the churchyard wall. ‘Thank you, flower. Good of you to take the time. Everything OK?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s interesting…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Bit of a shoestring operation. They might have to wind up before Christmas. Could even be back in a few weeks.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Though it’ll be good to… have you home.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet,’ Jane said.

  Several times that day, Merrily rang Zoe, getting the voicemail. As an early autumn evening dimmed the scullery and she was thinking about maybe driving over there, Sophie called.

  ‘Merrily, you might want to turn on your computer. I’ve sent you a link. Call me back when you’ve read it.’

  * * *

  The Facebook picture was very like the wedding photo, with Zoe looking slim and tanning-centre gorgeous. She listed her favourite singer as Adele and her fave TV shows as Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor, EastEnders and Celebrity Big Brother. Her latest posting said, in reply to a Facebook friend called Lou,

  I was very dissapointed. she didnt even look like a proper priest. She said o yes it was definately an evil spirit but she wasnt up 2 exercising it on her own. She said i shouldnt be alone here at night. She said I should go 2 the church and lock myself in. I said I was frightened of churches but she didnt get it. I dont know what 2 do. Im 4king shitting myself.

  Lou: Vicars dont believe in nothing these days. U want to try one of these ghostbusting groups. Id still get out of there tonite tho.

  Lou’s picture was of a navel with something rubyesque in it.

  Zoe: Nowhere 2 go have I? Im trying sleeping pills.

  Merrily scrolled down to where one of Zoe’s Facebook friends had chipped in. She was called Nattie. Her picture was one eye peering between fronds of dark hair.

  Sleeping pills R bad news. U hv shit dreams.

  Then Lou was back.

  I had 2 go 2 a funeral about a year ago done by this woman Watkins. Only time Lloyd was ever interested in church. It was a month or so b4 we split and I was starting 2 realise what kind of Rs hole he was by then. Couldnt take his eyes off of her. Shes quite little not his usual type he liked them with big tits usually. I shouldve known. Take him 2 a funeral and all the bastard can think of is shagging the vicar. (lol)

  Merrily called Sophie back.

  ‘Who told you about this?’

  ‘Somebody told Grace Lulham Mrs Mahonie was making a big thing about Susan’s house, on the Internet. One of her friends, as you know, put your phone number online for her and they were all demanding she call you. As they would. To find out what you’d do.’

  ‘She was supposed to be keeping it quiet so it didn’t get back to her husband. Doesn’t make sense, Sophie. Also, I didn’t say any of that stuff. Evil spirits? Or that I wasn’t up to exorcising it on my own. It’s… lies, or…’

  Silence. Who would know she hadn’t said any of that? Who in the wide world?

  She’d been given a part in a reality show.

  ‘I think it’s accepted that social networking sites are largely held together by lies and fantasy,’ Sophie said eventually. Sophie who didn’t gossip, Sophie who worked for the cathedral. ‘I hate all this. Hate the way if people have a problem they type it into their computers, and scream it out to the world and wait for the world to give them stupid, dangerous advice.’

  ‘Am I really supposed to let her get away with making things up and publicly attributing them to me?’

  ‘At this stage,’ Sophie said, ‘I rather think you have to. If it was in a newspaper, that would be altogether different. But social media… Ultimately, I suppose, you may have to consider legal action, but…’

  ‘Hell, no. I used to be married to a lawyer. I know what a long trail of heartache and penury that would involve. That’s not what I meant. I need to go and see her.’

  ‘I think that would be very stupid,’ Sophie said.

  ‘What’s the alternative?’

  ‘To do absolutely nothing except
write out a report, email it to me, and I’ll copy it to the Bishop. Not that he’ll read it, now.’

  ‘Is Bernie even in town?’

  The Bishop was as good as gone. Due to leave at the end of the year, but in the dog days of August he’d had a slight stroke.

  ‘So you’re saying just cover my back?’

  ‘Just accept that your initial feelings might not have been so far from the truth,’ Sophie said. ‘And that you don’t have to do penance for them.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Merrily said.

  But, by the following afternoon, it had become harder to ignore.

  Oh God, yes.

  5. Fifty-three hits

  Jane had left a message that sent Merrily to the computer again. She called Jane back at once, waited for her daughter to climb a hill.

  ‘You found this yourself?’

  Turning the computer screen to face her. At the centre of it, the YouTube screen, ready to re-run.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Jane said. ‘I had to walk halfway to Milford Haven just to bring it up on the mobile. No, it was Rhiannon. Her curiosity was like piqued by the possibility of Mahonie-linked gossip. She just followed Zoe around cyberspace for a while. Mum…’ Exasperation. ‘I mean, Christ, how could you let her do this to you?’

  ‘I’m an idiot.’

  ‘You bloody are.’

  ‘Yeah well, you don’t think, do you? She was just standing in the doorway, holding her phone… You just don’t think.’

  She recalled Zoe with her smartphone held in both hands at waist level, as if she thought she might need to call her husband or the police, or just to give her hands something to do.

  The clip lasted less than two minutes. She ran it again. A small woman in black moving around the Mahonies’ front garden, head down, hands raised periodically, muttering like the people you saw in town centres, in the care of the community.

  ‘…and defend from harm all who enter…’

  Fortunately, the sound was mostly weak and at least she wasn’t wearing the kit. The clip ended with a slice of sky. Its title was Merilly Watkins exercises the ghost of Susan Lulham. To the right of it, a number.