“So come the day, we had young Vaughn’s test, and Richard said we’d best find something particularly dark, because his son had a steady nerve.
“Now, in the book—there’s an actual book, can you believe, and I imagine it’s worth a ton of money now, there’s likely only the one—there’s about a dozen really awful things they used to do. About the worst is to get the corpse of a condemned blasphemer and sew it up with cats inside, then tell the lad doing the test it’s your dear old mum or someone close. As ghoulish as it comes. Modern times, of course, there’s no way you’d get away with something like that, even if you were of a mind. But they found a way for Vaughn Parry, and this is what it was: they got a dead ape, and they shaved it all over and drew on a sailor’s tattoo, and then they put it in a suit and smashed the head up some so you couldn’t immediately say it wasn’t a man, just a really ugly one. And then—well, they couldn’t use a cat, that wouldn’t be right—so they caught a fox from the rubbish tip, knocked him out with a bit of doped luncheon meat, and stitched the poor dead ape up around him. And then they put Vaughn Parry up to bat.
“So they did it in the Alleyn place, because there’s a two-way mirror so old Vince could keep an eye on his lads while they were working and be sure the thing was done respectful. And we all crowded in to see what would happen. There’s Vaughn, working away, and the belly of the ape wriggles and heaves, and Vaughn glances over at it, but it’s stopped, so he goes back to work. And then a moment later it happens again, and then there’s this appalling noise, I swear you never heard such a thing, a scream fit to make you think someone’s being crucified, right there beside you, and the nails going in through bone and gristle. I swear, Joseph, I never heard such a noise. And we all thought it must be Vaughn, seeing what was happening, but it wasn’t. It was the fox, screaming for his life. Vaughn … he reaches over like he’s passing the gravy on a Sunday, and cuts the ape open, then goes inside for the fox and lifts it out, and without barely looking he snaps its neck and goes on with the job. And my dad, who never speaks in these things, never says a word, because he’s a shy old bugger, he says ‘Ah, well,’ like that’s decided something. And everyone leaves. They don’t bother to go and get Vaughn and tell him the gag. They up and leave. And the next day, when he comes looking, they won’t none of them talk to him, or even look him in the eye, and finally he goes to Roy Godric and asks what’s the matter.
“ ‘Sorry, Vaughn,’ Roy says quietly, ‘but you’re out. You failed your acquaintanceship. You’re done.’
“Now, I’ve never heard of no one failing before. Not passing, yes, but you just try again. But failing, so the Brotherhood won’t ever take you, I didn’t even know that was possible.
“ ‘What? What do you mean?’ Vaughn wants to know.
“ ‘Just what I say, Vaughn, boy,’ Roy says. ‘You won’t be one of us. Not ever.’
“ ‘But I passed! Look what you did, and I passed. I showed Quiet. I know I did!’
“ ‘No, boy. You ain’t got the Quiet. And you ain’t now, nor never will be, a Waiting Man. Now, off you go.’ And he points at the door, and Vaughn Parry just goes, because he doesn’t know what else to do.
“ ‘I’m sorry, Richard,’ Roy Godric says to Vaughn’s dad, and Richard, instead of getting angry, he hangs his head and he says he’s sorry too.
“ ‘But you knew, Richard, didn’t you?’
“ ‘Aye,’ says Richard Parry. And then he goes off after his boy.
“Well, God, I sat there and I drank my drink and wondered if I came close to having that happen to me. And finally, after I’ve nursed that same pint for an hour or so, and more stared at it than drunk it, my dad comes and sits himself down opposite me.
“ ‘All right, Billy?’ he says.
“ ‘All right,’ I tells him, but I’m not.
“ ‘Poor bastard,’ he says.
“ ‘I suppose he’ll find another job, then, and Richard will train up one of the other lads or something.’ And my dad looks at me as if I’ve gone funny in the head, and I realise he’s not talking about the son at all. He’s talking about the father.
“ ‘Dad,’ I say, because I need to know, Joseph, my world’s upside down and I’m confused because there’s rules I don’t know about and penalties I hadn’t imagined for breaking them, ‘what did Vaughn do wrong?’
“ ‘It’s the oath,’ he says, ‘the Waiting Man’s Promise. Remember?’ Well, of course I do, but there’s nothing in it says you kick a lad out on his arse for doing well on his test. ‘Say it to me,’ Dad says, ‘and think it through.’ So this, Joseph, is the oath we all take, and I’ll thank you not to noise it about.
“ ‘To wait up with the dead; to take what they have no use for and set it aside, that the corpse looks lively on the day; to see the dead from bed to dirt, and no indignity more than what fate inflicts; to serve the wailing widow and the lonely man with grace, and carry the Waiting Man’s Quiet like a comforter, that is lent at need; to hear the Screaming, and let it have no voice; to preserve the silence of the dead, and keep their secrets; to take fair payment and seek no favours; and to move on, without regret.’
“ ‘Aye,’ Dad says. ‘And there’s the rub. Young Vaughn, he ain’t got the Quiet, he’s got the other thing. He thinks he’s got the Quiet, Billy, and that’s as well. Because the truth is, he’s got the Screaming, and Richard knew it. He opened that poor monkey like it weren’t even a clutch purse, and he snapped that fox without a thought, and the whole thing as if he was making porridge.
“ ‘When you took your test, Billy,’ he says, ‘you smeared the pink on that lad’s cheeks, and gave him too much dark around the eyes. In the morning I had to redo him, he looked like a Chelsea trollop. But one thing you done perfect, and I was never so proud. In your heart, you cared about the dead man, more than you wanted to get out of that room or show you knew it was your test or anything else. You cared about a dead, gone bugger you never knew, and you laid him out, because you’re a Waiting Man. But Vaughn, he didn’t flinch because he doesn’t care one bit. And he doesn’t care about the living neither, not even a little. Vaughn Parry looks at us, and he sees corpses walking. He didn’t flinch in there because he’s always seeing dead men shudder. It’s how he lives. He was born dead himself, and that’s what the Screaming is. It’s a body walking without a heart to feel for anyone else. And if ever he realises that, Billy, you best not trust him, for the Waiting Man’s oath ain’t there for a laugh or our convenience. Them as have the Screaming, Billy, they’re empty inside, and the things they can do when they start to understand what they are, they’re black and cold and not for good fellows to dwell on. Time was the Brotherhood didn’t just test the twices, but every lad in a village, and they’d have marked a lad failed the test, and maybe a month later there’d be a coffin weighed double going in the ground and some young fellow with rot in him instead of life would be never more seen. That’s how it was.
“ ‘Truth, Billy,’ my dad goes on, ‘I suppose we’re better off this way. But from now on, you see Vaughn Parry, you step to the other side of the street. You don’t have him in the house, you don’t have no truck with him at all. He’s got the Screaming, and he’ll show it soon enough.’ ”
Billy Friend grinds his cigarette against the sole of his shoe. It’s a leather sole, grubby and stained with water, and the ball of the foot is thin and black with old burns. He tosses the butt out of the window.
“Well, he did, didn’t he?”
The Wistithiel station is made of grey stone and old, black iron. Billy Friend wonders aloud whether Wistithiel sprang up around a prison, the way towns sprout to serve whatever industry is nearby. “Or a lunatic asylum, Joseph, that would do nicely. Friends of Brother Vaughn all around. Cousins and aunts, red of tooth and long of nail, sitting in a hundred rocking chairs and making jumpers out of hair!”
In fact, the Parry family came from a town miles away up the coast, just across the county line into Devon, but Billy, unsettled, is
prone to flights of trenchant fantasy.
On a hardwood bench with green paint flaking leprously from it, a sullen, beery man growls in his throat. It might be words. It could just be phlegm. Billy flinches.
“I says ‘No, it bloody wasn’t,’ ” the drinker bites out. “It was baskets and fishing, and now there’s no bloody fish because of the bloody Spanish and the Russians and their bloody giant factory ships, and who wants bloody straw baskets when you can have nylon or polyester or that rubbish? Eh? So it’s tourism and piss all else, and London buggers like you come in, buy the place up, don’t like the mist and fog and show up two weeks in the year. And then they act like they’re doing us a favour. So the council puts bloody plastic slides and plastic cows and plastic bloody everything to bring ’em more and they come less, and who can blame ’em? So laugh all you bloody like.”
“Good evening,” Joe says, politely.
“Is it? Where?”
“Here, I hope.”
“Well, you hope in vain, don’t you? We bloody all do.”
“I was hoping you could tell us where to find Wistithiel Rental.”
The man nods once in the direction of the car park, and when Joe thanks him, he shrugs into life.
“I’ll walk you. You’re all right. Your chum’s got a clever mouth.”
“Yes. He has.”
“I like that in a pretty girl.” Joe doesn’t know quite how to respond to that, and behind him, Billy Friend is frantically miming a banjo and rolling his eyes. “Going on far, are you?”
“Hinde’s Reach House. But we’re staying in the Gryffin overnight.”
“Gryffin’s a decent place. The House … well. I wouldn’t go up there.”
“Why not?”
“Bloody long way.”
“Oh.”
“And they were always funny round that way. Webbed feet and that.”
“Webbed feet?”
“Aye. What farmers always say about them on the coast, and city folk say about countrymen. They eat missionaries, too.” There’s a glimmer of laughter in the man’s eyes. “But the Gryffin’s all right. Decent enough. And the barmaids wear those little T-shirts.”
Billy Friend perks up, and they pass into the chilly, grey day outside.
“When I get my hands on the old trout gave me this job,” Billy Friend murmurs in the saloon of the Gryffin, “there will be an accounting, not to say that harsh words will be spoken by me into her pious little ear. ‘Lady,’ I shall say, ‘you are a troublesome old baggage, and you owe me extra,’ and she, being a clean-living old bird and of a nervous disposition, will yield up the cash and introduce me to her lissom granddaughter by way of additional compensation. Bloody hell.”
“You said I needed an adventure,” Joe reminds him.
“You do. You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you’re trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don’t, though. I’m me and I’m good at it, and I hate the country. It’s full of bumpkins and pies and godawful bloody warm beer.” Tess the barmaid snorts, and Billy recollects himself. “Though it does have some compensations, I will say.” She turns her back on him and walks away with great emphasis, but the effect is muted by the handkerchief top and low jeans she is wearing, which together afford Billy a revitalising view of her spine and sacrum. He makes an approving, canine sort of noise, and she scowls.
“I think she likes you,” Joe says. Billy eyes him over his pint.
“Yes, you actually do, don’t you?”
“She sort of wriggles when she comes over here, and so on.”
“Indeed, she does, Joseph. She sashays, is the technical term. And do you know what all that proves?”
“She likes you.”
“No, Joseph, alas. It proves that you are a prat.”
Tess reappears a moment later with the food, smiles at Joe, and pauses on her heels as she turns back to the bar. “Got everything you need?” Billy nearly swallows his tongue.
“Yes, thank you,” Joe replies. “And I don’t suppose you’ve got a map, have you? We need to get out to Hinde’s Reach House.”
She gives him a funny look, as if he has made the kind of proposition Billy frequently does make and she weren’t the kind of girl who usually hears that sort of thing.
“I’m superstitious,” she says. “So I don’t go up there.”
“Don’t want to get webbed feet, I ’spect,” Billy suggests.
She scowls. “You’ve been talking to Lenny,” she says, indicating the man from the station, now sitting at a table by the fire. “He thinks he’s a laugh. Did he tell you they burn travellers as witches, too?”
“Something like, yeah.”
“He thinks he’s funny,” Tess repeats.
“We’ve got a parcel for the house.”
“There’s no one there. And it’s not safe.”
“Not safe how?”
She shrugs. “Crumbling cliffs and holes in the ground. Tin mine back when we had tin, then a government place in the war. And if you believe in ghosts, it’s haunted, too.” She smiles, embarrassed.
“Whose ghost?”
“Hundreds of them. It used to be where Wistithiel was, but it went into the sea in nineteen fifty-nine. Most of the village. Or burned down. Or there was an epidemic. To hear my grandmother tell it, you’d think it was all three. Or Galveston. They wanted to make it a tourist attraction, but there’s still people alive who remember and lost friends, husbands and so on. So we said, bollocks to that.”
“The ghost of a whole town, then.”
“Yes. Actually, if you put your hand on your chest and your foot on the right stones, you can feel the heartbeat of the dead. Hang on—” She peers around, then reaches over to a window ledge and hefts a small, solid piece of grey granite. “This is from the bay underneath. A lad from Bristol brought it back from the fields out there, then got scared in the night and left it in his bedroom when he went home. Silly bugger.” She puts the stone on the ground. “Here. Put your foot on it.”
Feeling silly, Joe puts his foot on the stone.
“Now, you put your hand … here.” She puts his hand dead centre of his chest. Billy Friend watches, bemused. “Can you feel anything?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s been here in the Gryffin a long time, and you’re not local. Here.” She replaces his foot with her own. “That’s better. Now, give me your hand a moment.”
Joe gives her his hand, and she places his hand, palm down, on her chest and leans firmly towards him. Her skin is warm, with just a trace of perspiration.
“There,” Tess says. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Sometimes it takes a while to find the right spot. It might be more to the left. Or down.” She tugs gently on his wrist, pushes her shoulders back a bit.
“No, I’ve got it.” He nods. “Definitely a heartbeat.” He nods again.
“Oh,” she says, a bit nonplussed, “good.”
The moment lengthens.
“Yes.” With the heel of his hand Joe can feel the curve of one breast. He has absolutely no idea whether this is deliberate. It’s lovely. He tries to be polite and not notice.
And suddenly the stone is back on the shelf and Tess is busily serving someone else.
Billy Friend puts his head in his hands.
The car is a grotty old banger, the best in a very small selection. Joe tentatively believes it is younger than he is, but would not put actual money on the assessment. On his left, Billy Friend holds Tess’s map. It is drawn in frustrated ballpoint, the road following the curve of the railway line, and there’s a grudging kiss at the bottom as if to point out what might have been.
“What you did to that girl ought to be illegal,” Billy Friend grumbles.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Of that we are all painfully aware. Lovely Tess is even now weeping in some kitchen corner, lamenting the waste of her heart. Not to mention her other salient attributes.”
r /> “All right, I missed the point.”
“Yes, I would say you did.”
“We can’t all be you, Billy.”
“We can all be ourselves, though, Joseph, and who the hell can’t tell when a woman is putting his hand down her top that she’s doing more than discussing local folk tales? Are you in residence, Joseph, at all, inside your head?”
“Of course I am.”
“I should coco.”
“I just …”
“You try too hard to be a gent, Joe. It’s all going on inside you but it never gets out. You’re all buttoned up.”
“I am not!”
“All right, then: what action could young Tess have taken which you would have regarded as an unequivocal invitation?”
“Read the map.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Make an instruction out of the following three words: the, read, map.”
Billy does.
There’s no sign of witch-burning as they drive through the narrow lanes towards Hinde’s Reach. As they turn a corner, Billy Friend points out a large, rusted, black barrel which he asserts might be a cauldron used for missionaries, but the silent gloom of the sky swallows the joke. Neither of them mentions webbed feet. They’ve passed two men walking and a woman on a bicycle, and Joe found himself looking instinctively at their shoes to see whether they were larger than they should be.
They come over a hill, and there’s a small cluster of houses. It’s marked on Tess’s map as Old Town, but in truth it’s not even large enough to be a village, and made of concrete and corrugated iron. There’s a farmhouse and a single lonely petrol pump with a battered credit card box on top.
Joe slows the car and winds down the window so that he can speak to the woman sitting on a bench watching the road. She has messy hair, dyed a shocking red, but when he speaks and she turns to him, he realises she is very old. Her cheeks are purple with broken blood vessels.