Reversing the clanking Volvo out of the vicarage drive, she saw Dobbs’s grim, stone face again, as though it was superimposed on the windscreen or the night itself. As if the old bastard had been in the car waiting for her. As if he was staying with her until she’d formally walked away from his job. As if This has got to bloody stop!
Merrily gripped the wheel, shaking it violently, but really shaking herself. She’d become oppressed by the dour image of Dobbs. When she’d had the chance to say a final No, thank you to Mick Hunter and to Deliverance, she was going to keep well away from the Cathedral precincts, because she – squeezing the wheel until her hands hurt – never… wanted… to… see… him… again.
OK – steadying her breathing – this was no state in which to minister to a dying man.
On the cobbles of the marketplace she thought she could see a glaze of frost. The wrought-iron mock-gaslamps had gone out, leaving only a small, wintry security light by the steps to the Black Swan.
She drove slowly across the square, not wanting to wake anyone. She’d left a conspicuous note for Jane on the kitchen table in case she didn’t get home by morning; you never knew with hospital vigils.
Virtually alone on the country roads, too tense to be tired, she found the kid’s all-time favourite album, the complex OK Computer, on the stereo and tried to concentrate on the words. But her perception of the songs, full of haunted darkness, only reminded her of Dobbs.
She stopped the music. She would go over this thing once more.
The truth was, after the shock of seeing Dobbs in the Cathedral, when she’d been all charged up and unstable, her mind inevitably had contrived this divinely scripted scene: he was there because she was.
But what about the unknown woman Dobbs had been with?
‘What have I been doing wrong?’ the woman had cried. What was all that about?
Well, it made no obvious sense, so forget it. The simple, rational explanation was that Merrily had walked, unexpected, into Dobbs’s scene. Perhaps he was just as shocked when who should suddenly emerge from the chantry but the notorious female pretender.
All right. Stop it, there. Stop looking for a way out. You made your decision, you stick to it.
The General Hospital was an eighteenth-century brick building with the usual unsightly additions. Messy at the front but, like the Bishop’s Palace, with a beautiful situation on the Wye, a few hundred yards downstream from the Cathedral. No parking problems at pushing three a.m.; Merrily left the Volvo near a public garden where a path led down to the suspension footbridge over the river, all dark down there now.
Been here many times to visit parishioners, of course, but never at this hour. And never to the Alfred Watkins Ward, named presumably after the Herefordian pioneer photographer, brewer, magistrate and discoverer of ley-lines. No relation of hers, as far as she knew, but then she didn’t know the Herefordshire side of the family very well.
‘Bottom of the corridor,’ a passing paramedic advised. ‘Turn left and immediately left again, through the plastic doors, up the stairs, left at the top and through the double doors.’
These old buildings were wonderful, Merrily thought, for almost everything except hospitals. A plaque on the wall near the main entrance discreetly declared that this used to be a lunatic asylum and, as you walked the unevenly lit, twisting passages, you could imagine the first ever patients wandering here, groping vaguely for their senses, the air dense with disease and desperation.
Despite the directions received, she lost herself in the dim labyrinth, and it was over five minutes before she found a sign to Alfred Watkins Ward. At its entrance, two nurses were talking quietly but with a lot of gesturing. When they saw Merrily, they separated.
She smiled. ‘Sister Cullen?’
‘On the ward,’ the younger nurse said. ‘Who shall I say?’
‘Merrily Watkins.’
The younger nurse pushed through the double doors into the gloom of the ward itself. Merrily unzipped her waxed jacket, feeling better now she was here. The presence of the dying used to scare her, but recently she’d become more comfortable with them, even slightly in awe – aware of this composure they often developed very close to the end, a calm anticipation of the big voyage – assisted passage. And she would sometimes come away with a tentative glow. Over her past three years as a cleric, several nurses had told her shyly that they’d actually seen spirits leaving bodies, like a light within a mist.
‘Oh hell!’ The older nurse spotted the dog-collar, took a step back in dismay. ‘ You’re the priest?’
‘At three a.m.,’ Merrily said, ‘you don’t get an archbishop.’
‘Oh, look…’ The nurse was plump, mid-fifties, agitated. ‘This isn’t right. Eileen Cullen shouldn’t have done this. She’s an atheist, fair enough, but she should’ve had more sense. Isn’t there a male priest you know?’
Merrily stared in disbelief at the woman’s face, pale and blotched under the hanging lights. And fearful too.
‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry, Miss… Reverend. It’s just that what we don’t need is another woman. Look, would you mind waiting there while I go and talk to Sister Cullen?’
‘Fine,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘Don’t worry about me. I don’t have to go to work until Sunday.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry.’
‘Sure.’ Merrily sat down on a leather-covered bench, pulled out her cigarettes.
‘And I’m afraid you can’t smoke in here.’
Sister Cullen was about Merrily’s age, but tall, short-haired, sombre-faced. More like a priest than I’ll ever look.
Behind her, the ward diminished into darkness like a Victorian railway tunnel.
‘I may have misled you on the phone,’ Cullen said. ‘I was confused.’
‘ You’re confused.’ Merrily stood up. ‘Forgive me, but sometimes, especially at three in the morning and without a cigarette, even the clergy can get a trifle pissed off, you know?’
‘Keep your voice down, please.’
‘I’m sorry. I would just like to know what this is about.’
‘All right.’ Cullen gestured at the bench and they both sat down. ‘It’s Mr Denzil Joy… that’s the patient. Mr Joy’s dying. He’s unlikely to see the morning.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘With respect, Mrs Watkins, you’ll be the only one.’
‘Huh?’
‘This is a difficult situation.’
‘He’s asked for a priest, hasn’t he?’
‘No, that… that’s where I misled you. He hasn’t.’
She jerked a thumb at the double doors. Behind the glass, Merrily saw the other two nurses peering out. They looked like they wanted to escape, or at least stand as close as possible to the lights outside.
‘ They did,’ Sister Cullen said. ‘ They asked me to call a priest.’
Following Cullen through the darkened ward, she was reminded of those war-drawings by Henry Moore of people sleeping in air-raid shelters, swaddled and anonymous. The soundtrack of restive breathing, ruptured snores, shifting bodies was inflated by muted hissings and rumblings in the building’s own decaying metabolism. And also, Merrily felt, by slivers of tension in the sour sickness-smelling air.
‘He’s in a side ward here,’ Cullen whispered. ‘We’ve always had him in a side ward.’
‘What’s his… his condition?’
‘Chronic emphysema: lungs full of fluid. Been coming on for years – he’s been in four times. This time he knows he’s not going out.’
‘And he isn’t… ready. Right?’
Cullen breathed scornfully down her nose. ‘Earlier tonight he sent for his wife.’
Merrily looked for some significance in this. ‘She’s not here with him now?’
‘No, we sent her home. Jesus!’
A metal-shaded lamp burned bleakly on a table at the entrance to the side ward, across which an extra plastic-covered screen had been erected.
‘There’s an evil in this man.’ Sister Cullen began sliding the screen away. ‘Brace yourself.’
Merrily said, ‘I don’t understand. What do you…?’
And then she did understand. It was Deliverance business.
Huw Owen had stressed: Compose, prepare, protect yourself – ALWAYS .
Directing them to the prayer known as St Patrick’s Breastplate, very old, very British, part of our legacy from the Celtic Church, Huw had said, and Merrily had seen the strength of the hermit in him, the hermit-priest in the cave on the island.
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger…
Binding yourself with light Huw had said; this was what it was about. A sealing of the portals, old Christian magic, Huw had said. Use it.
But she hadn’t even thought of that. She’d made no preparations at all, simply dashed out of the house like a junior doctor on call. Because that was all it was – a routine ministering to the dying, a stand-in job, no one else available. Nobody had mentioned…
We were given your number as somebody who should be the one to deal with this. There are some complications.
… it had simply never occurred to her that the hospital had been given her name as a trained Deliverance minister. It never occurred to her that this was what she now was. Who had directed them? The Bishop’s office? The Bishop himself?
I’ve been set up, she thought, angry – and afraid that, whatever needed to be done, she wouldn’t be up to it.
There were two iron beds in the side ward, one empty; in the other, Mr Denzil Joy.
His eyes were slits, unmoving under a sweat-sheened and sallow forehead. His hair was black, an unnatural black for a man in his sixties. A dying man dyeing, she thought absurdly.
Two pale green tubes came down his nostrils and looped away over his cheeks, like a cartoon smile.
‘Oxygen,’ Cullen explained in a whisper.
‘Is he asleep?’
‘In and out of it.’
‘Can he speak?’
Trying to understand what she was doing here, looking hard at him, wondering what she was missing.
Like little horns or something? What do you expect to see?
‘With difficulty,’ Cullen said.
‘Should I sit with him a while?’
‘Fetch you a Bible, shall I?’
‘Let’s… let’s just leave that a moment.’ Knowing how ominous a black, leathered Bible could appear to the patient at such times, wishing she’d brought her blue and white paperback version. And still unclear about what they wanted from her here.
There was a vinyl-covered chair next to the bed, and she sat down. Denzil Joy wore a white surgical smock thing; one of his arms was out in view, fingers curved over the coverlet. She put her own hand over it, and almost recoiled. It was warm and damp, slimy somehow, reptilian. A small, nervous smile tweaked at Cullen’s lips.
In the moment Merrily touched Denzil Joy, it seemed a certain scent arose. The kind of odour you could almost see curling through the air, so that it entered your nostrils as if directed there. At first sweet and faintly oily.
Then Merrily gasped and took in a sickening mouthful and, to her shame, had to get up and leave the room, a hand over her mouth.
The other hand, not the one which had touched Denzil Joy.
One of the patients on the ward was calling out, ‘Nurse!’ as loudly as a farmer summoning a sheepdog over a six-acre field.
At the door Merrily gulped in the stale hospital air as if it was ozone.
‘Dr Taylor found a good description for it.’ Eileen Cullen was standing beside the metal lamp, smiling grimly. ‘Although he never quite got the full benefit of it, being a man. He said it was like a mixture of gangrene and cat faeces. That seems pretty close, though I wouldn’t know for sure. Never kept cats myself. Excuse me a minute.’
She padded down the ward towards the man calling out, one hand raised, forefinger of the other to her lips. As soon as she’d gone, the plump middle-aged nurse appeared from the shadows, put her mouth up to Merrily’s ear.
‘I’ll tell you what that is, Reverend. It’s the smell of evil.’
‘Huh?’
‘He can turn it on. Don’t look at me like that. Maybe it’s automatic, when his blood temperature rises. It comes to the same thing. Did you feel him enter you?’
‘What?’
‘We can’t talk here.’ She took Merrily’s arm, pulled her away and into a small room lit by a strip light, with sinks and bags of waste. She shut the door. The disinfectant smell here, in comparison with that in the side ward, was like honeysuckle on a summer evening.
‘I’m a strong woman,’ the nurse said, ‘thirty years in the job. Everything nasty a person can throw off, I’ve seen it and smelled it and touched it.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘No, you can’t, my girl.’ The nurse pushed up a sleeve. ‘You have no idea. Look at that, now.’ Livid bruising around the wrist, like she’d been handcuffed.
‘What happened was: Mr Joy, he asked for a bottle – to urinate in, you know? And then he called me back and he said he was having… trouble getting it in. Well, some of them, they say that as a matter of course, and you have a laugh and you go away and come back brandishing the biggest pair of forceps you can find. But Denzil Joy was a very sick man and he seemed distressed, so I did try to help.’ She pulled down her sleeve again. ‘You see where that got me.’
‘Oh.’
‘Grip like a monkey-wrench, my dear. Thought I’d never get fooled again. You understand now why we wanted a male priest?’
Surely, what you wanted, Merrily thought, was a male nurse. ‘Look, Nurse… I’m sorry?’
‘Nurse Protheroe. Sandra.’
‘Sandra, this is a dying man, OK? He knows he’s dying. He’s afraid. He’s looking for… comfort, I suppose. That doesn’t make him possessed by evil. I don’t know what his background is. I mean…’
‘Farm-labourer and slaughterman. Been in a few times before, he has. When he wasn’t so bad – not so seriously ill, that is.’
‘Farm-labourer? So his idea of comfort might be a bit… rough and ready?’
Sandra snorted. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s more than that, girl. You’re not getting this, are you? I’ve dealt with that type more times than you’ve done weddings and funerals – rough as an old boar and ready for anything they can get. But Mr Joy, he’s different. Mr Joy’s an abuser, a destroyer – do you know what I mean? He likes causing pain and death to animals, and he likes doing it to women, too. Hurting them and humiliating them. Degrading them.’
‘Yes. That might very well be true. But it doesn’t-’
‘That smell… that’s not natural, not even in a hospital. That’s his smell. That’s the smell of all the things he’s done and all the things he’d still like to do. We even put Nil-odour under his bed one night.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Undertaker’s fluid. They put it in coffins sometimes, so it’s less offensive for the relatives.’
‘You put undertaker’s deodorant under a dying patient’s bed?’
‘It didn’t work. You can’t remove the smell of evil with chemicals. You spend a night in here with that man, you can’t sleep when you goes home. You keep waking up with that…’ Protheroe hugged herself. ‘As for young Tessa – white, that girl was. This was after his wife come in this afternoon.’
‘Sandra, look…’ Merrily moved to the door. This wasn’t how state-registered nurses were supposed to behave. She needed to talk to the duty doctor. ‘You say I don’t get this. You’re dead right, I don’t get this at all. All right, he might not be a very nice man, he may not smell very good, but that’s no excuse to make his last hours a total misery. I mean, what does his wife say about all this?’
‘Mrs Joy don’t talk,’ said Sandra. ‘Being as how you’re a priest, I’ll tell you about Mrs Joy, shall I?’
‘If you think it’ll help.’
Sandra exhaled a sour laugh. ‘About twenty years younger than him, she is, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her, state she’s in, the poor miserable cow. No, not a cow, a rabbit… a poor frightened little wretch. We left them alone for about half an hour, as you do at times like this. Then Dr Taylor comes on his rounds and he has to see Mr Joy, obviously, and Tess goes in to ask Mrs Joy will she come out for a couple of minutes, and-’
Footsteps outside. Sandra stopped talking, looking at the door. The footsteps passed. Sandra lowered her voice.
‘The chair’s pushed right up next to the bed, see? That chair you were just sitting on?’
‘Yes.’ Merrily found her hands were clasped in front of her, rubbing together. She wanted to wash them, but not in front of Sandra Protheroe. ‘Go on.’
‘So Mrs Joy’s standing on that chair, leaning over the bed. She’s holding her dress right up above her waist. She’s got her knickers round her ankles.’
Merrily closed her eyes for a moment.
‘And Denzil’s just lying there with his tubes up his nose and all the spittle down his chin, wheezing and rattling with glee, and his little eyes eating her up. But that’s not the worst thing, see.’
She swallowed, backed up against a sink, looking down at her shoes and shaking her head.
‘The worse thing is her face. What Tessa said was that woman’s face was completely blank. No expression at all – like a zombie. She’s just looking at the wall, and her face’s absolutely blank. She knows Tessa’s there, but she don’t get down. Showing no embarrassment at all, though God knows she must have been as full up with shame and humiliation as it’s possible to be. But she just stands there staring at the wall. Because he hadn’t told her she could get down.’
Merrily’s mouth was dry.
‘This is a dying man,’ Sandra said. ‘And he knows it and she knows it, and she’s still terrified of him. In his younger days, see, he thought he was God’s gift. A woman who knows the family, she told me about all the women and girls he’d had, and the way he abused them but they kept coming back. He charmed them back, he did. Not by his looks, not by his manners, he just charmed them. And then he got older and he got sick and he got married, and he controls the wife by fear. And he’s lying there delighting in Tessa seeing the poor little woman giving him an eyeful of what he owns. If that’s not evil then I don’t know what evil is.’
What is evil? Huw Owen had said. It’s the question you’re never going to answer. But when you’re in the same room with it, you’ll know .
Merrily said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can do.’
‘Protection. She wants protection.’
The door had opened. Sister Cullen was standing there, the darkness behind her.
‘She’s right, he’s a bad man with a black charm. But he’s just a man, and that’s where it ends as far as I’m concerned. I’m from Derry, so I’ve seen what religion does to people, and I want none of it. But this is one patient where I’m more concerned about his nurses.’
‘It’s getting stronger the nearer he comes to death,’ Sandra said. ‘Tell her.’
‘Sandra’s convinced the smell’s getting worse.’
‘And if you don’t do something, when he dies this ward’s going to be polluted for ever. And I’m not coming back tomorrow. I’m out.’
‘Let me get this right.’ Merrily looked from one to the other, the believer and the atheist, but both essentially of the same mind. ‘You’ve called me out in the middle of the night, not because you want comfort for a distressed terminal patient but because… you want protection from him?’
Cullen said with resignation, ‘If there’s anything you think you can do about it, feel free, but I’d strongly advise you not to touch the evil bastard again.’
‘Sister…’ The young nurse Tessa in the doorway. She was crying. ‘Can you come, please?’