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| From THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE by Rosemary Furber |
I crack the neck of my alabaster jar, pour the oil into my palm and warm it. I spread my hands over his shin and hear him groan. It is a sound just for me.
I am smoothing the unguent around his toes now, my fingers sliding between them like fish in seaweed. He laughs out loud as I lift his foot high so that I can stroke his sole. His soles are lined and parched; they yield to the unguent under my fingers and soften. I take his Achilles heel between my thumb and first finger and pull rhythmically, and hear his intake of breath.
I am drenched in the aroma of smoke and of spikenard as I knead his joints. Bones again. His eyes are a sunburst of love. He says:
‘May the Lord deal kindly with you, Mary, as you have dealt with your dead brother Lazarus. And you now deal with me.’
I long to smother him in adoration. I long to anoint him my Lord and King, and my rabbi forever.
He rests his hands on my head. Is he blessing me? He combs his fingers deeper into my hair and cradles my skull. My hair falls free from its pins over my face and shoulders. I must not let him see me cry. But I think he knows.
‘You love me much, Mary,’ he whispers.
I love you so much, Helen. I hear you speak to me from your book. I hear your voice in my dreams. You say my name: Patrick. Patrick. I wish I could wake and see you sleeping and defenceless beside me. I long to spread you under me. It’s simple. It’s love. Since the day I met you I’ve been living more fully, even here in this cell, than I ever did before in my life. I can feel myself expanding to the edges of my body and soul.
What I adore about you most is that you never gave up. You were broken and you forced yourself to mend. You wanted to be a priest and you let no-one stand in your way.
Nothing was going to stand in my way either. I loved you, Helen. I still do. I had to make sure you understood how much.
HMP GREYMOOR
Dr Julia Bailey, MA, LLM, PhD,
Spencer College,
Cambridge
Dear Julia,
Don’t come again. I can’t stand it if you come again. You looked gorgeous. You always do but I remember especially - I remember this so clearly - that you looked more than usually wonderful walking away to the exit. Can you grasp how cruel that is? Did you dress like that on purpose? A dozen men you don’t even know are boasting to me every morning about how many they’ve been giving you in the night. ‘Hey, PatPrick, she got fourteen last night, your bird, loved every minute of it.’ In his dreams, of-course, but that man was a screw.
What did you tell me? What did we say? I remember almost nothing except how you sat far back in your chair as if you might catch something from me, or the place. My ribs are still bruised with pressing into the table trying to squeeze close to you. You mentioned Mark. Twice. Is Mark fucking you while I’m in here? Is he? Is he?
This place is doing my head in, as they say in here. In your terms, I may be going mad. I’ll try to do it discreetly. You don’t understand, Julia. I don’t see how you can. You say it must be awful for me in here and all that, but I wish you could know why I’m here, how it was never going to be otherwise, however things looked before. Maybe I should write it all down for you. If I did, I’d probably not send it. Maybe I will. Either way, please don’t come again.
With all my love,
Patrick
Spencer College,
Cambridge
Cambridge
Dear Patrick,
Thank you for your letter, received yesterday. While I understand that you are likely to be feeling fragile at the moment, I have the following points:
1. The fact that you are on remand in prison charged with murder has nothing to do with me. Whatever you did or did not do, took place in an area of your life that you did not see fit to share with me. My visit was an act of friendship. You did say you loved me once.
2. I understand that I have become a victim of repeated multiple psychorape. Tell your friends, officers and inmates, that if they continue to violate me in their dreams I shall come down on them like a ton of legal bricks. Smedley v. Oxless 2007 (European Court of Human Rights) applies.
3. I am entitled to dress as I like. There is no prison rule against visitors wearing a strapless bodice and jodhpurs.
4. My relationship (if any, which is not admitted) with Mark is none of your business. It is months since you bothered to make any gesture of love, or even friendship, to me so I had assumed that my life was my own. You treat me as though we’ve only just met. Who helped you give up smoking? Who put together your CVs? Who helped you to pee when you broke both your wrists in Val d’Isere?
5. You say you can’t even remember what we talked about. I was just trying to keep you up to date with events in the outside world. I agree. There seems little point in my coming again.
6. Write your explanation to me if you wish. I do not promise to reply.
Yours ever, Julia
Did you dictate that to a secretary, Julia? ‘I have the following points.’ Did you have a good laugh about it together?
‘You did say you loved me once.’ How could you say that? I told you I loved you all the time, and I meant it! Or did I just say it in my head? Maybe I did. Anyway I need you in here with me, Julia. I need you here beside me. I need you to know the truth.
Let me take you back to Helen’s room, to the last time I saw her, when I learned the real meaning of post-coital tristesse. Post-coital distress.
I sat there for hours looking at her, the dark red hair spread over the pillow, and her dress and the pillow red too, and my shirt, matching the red ribbons and Christmas decorations all over the place and I was thinking What a cock up. Of all the things - What a fucking cock up. What am I going to do? I was angry. Not scared yet.
That’s her phone over there, I thought, with my blood on it, next to the writing paper and a pyramid of books. I could smell her smoky breath on it. But who could I phone?
‘Hello, Mummy, it’s Patrick.’
‘Hello, darling. How are you?’ The voice was posher and perkier through the receiver than ever, like a caricature. What could I say? I’m sorry. Very sorry. For myself mostly.
‘Fine.’ Pause. What could I say next? What could I say?
‘I’m so glad you’ve called, darling. I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I left messages with Michael but he said he hadn’t seen you. Have you decided about Christmas Day?’
‘Ahm ...’
‘We’ve got Tim and Fiona and the girls coming. Seb’s being indispensable in Brussels as usual, but Angus says he might be able to make it.’ Angus. Her latest boyfriend, all Etonian languor and sexual satiety. Nauseating. ‘Are you ... ?’
‘I’m not sure, Mummy. Look, I’m a bit tied up. I’ve got stuff to do here. I need ... I need ...’
‘Well, it’s up to you. Are you still a vegetarian, or has that worn off?’
‘I haven’t been vegetarian for two and a half years.’
‘Oh good. Well, let me know as soon as you can. Damn, the gardener’s here, I have to go and pay him. Call me again soon. OK?’
I need ...
Mummy, I need ...
‘OK, darling? Still there?’
‘Yeah. I’m still here.’
‘Call me soon, won’t you, darling? Gob less.’
I put the receiver down. Gob less. I could taste blood. There was a ridge across my tongue as I licked my cut lip. It looks like blood, tastes like blood, must be a cock up.
Was my tongue cut in half? That old taste slapped me right back to Tim and Seb and torture games, with me tied over my head in a sack and them rolling me round the garden over the gravel and the tree stumps, with me crying and crying through a sore mouth.
Suddenly I was so fucking angry I kicked a shiny little leather-topped table away from me. It rolled over and lay with two legs in the air, two on the floor and all the ash and fag ends from the ashtray splayed on the rug beside the books. I looked over at her lying on the bed. At the elegant way her spine curved from the dress at her waist down to the divide of her beautiful arse. I decided to kiss her again. You won’t bite me now, Helen, I thought. I’m going to kiss you, and you won’t bite me again.
If only I’d never even heard her name. That was down to Cyril. I can just hear him now on the phone, pompous old fart, wanting me to get my thumb out of my bum and do a piece for him.
My heart was crashing in my chest when the phone rang. He’d interrupted my peaceful contemplation of the nurses’ home, an ugly concrete block with promising contents off Vanbrugh Hill, still just visible as long as the trees were bare. Crows were fussing in the top branches and grey squirrels leapt about showing off. I could almost smell buds and new mown grass.
In the distance two police launches were cutting up the river, reminding me of Purple Sword’s latest video where their mighty axeman Gavin Whitehead steers his motorboat at a phallic angle with masterly flicks of his guitar while pretending to sing Older Than Winter. The track reminded me of another song I couldn’t place but it would come to me.
But I only noticed the river at all because the night shift wasn’t up yet. Just another nine or ten minutes and some of the girls would stir from their warm scented beds and draw the curtains, wearing nothing but t-shirts. Short t-shirts.
‘Yeah, wha?’
‘Got a pen?’
‘Yeah, hold on a minute.’ I reached for a pen.
‘I want you to go and see a Mrs. Helen Hubbard.’
‘Helen Hubbard.’
‘At the vicarage, Chasuble Road, Blackheath.’
‘Gawd, Cyril, what’s this, some holy bird?’
‘Lady vicar, yep. She’s got some new job in Chelsea that’s famous apparently.’ He gave a deep sniff. ‘I’ve got her book here. I’ll drop it through your door.’
‘Fuck’s sake, Cyril, why are you hitting me with this? I’m no godsquaddie, no way.’
‘It’s not a very long book,’ Cyril was exercising decades of experience in sounding pompous.
‘Has it got a candle and a dove on the front?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘The book. It’s got a candle and a dove on the front. Hasn’t it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Cross made of barbed wire?’
‘Nope. You’ll have to see for yourself. Look, it’s what, a hundred pages. Can you manage that?’
I know you’re not allergic to nuts, Julia, but if you were, you might understand my physical response to this conversation. My throat felt so swollen, I couldn’t swallow my own spit and my face began to boil.
My aversion to holy books can be dated precisely. It started on the 18th June 1995. That was the day my mother returned from Harrods and said that she had not been shopping, she’d been to church. She did have a few bags with her in the usual way, but they only confirmed her new status, for status it was. From that day our house became Mecca to dozens of sad old girls with time on their hands and an over-developed sense of how lucky they were to have their husband’s money. Every week my mother would play hostess at ‘asperity’ lunches for the harpies, all in cashmere and Chanel specs, who would keep to labelled water instead of gin and donate a fiver to charity each.
After the 18th June 1995 my father always described my mother as being in ‘an interesting condition’, which had nothing to do with being pregnant and everything to do with her having something in her or about her which meant that she was never quite ours, never quite our mother ever again.
She wasn’t his wife much longer either. Two years he stuck it, took a golfing sabbatical in Ireland and died in a bunker of a heart attack. He must have seen it coming because the day after his death, my mother received a postcard from him posted ten days before (a chilly picture of the eighteenth at Killarney), warning that in the event of his death, she was to mourn by sleeping only with black men throughout the first year.
She had other ideas of-course. The bags she brought home that day were full of books, holy books, and gradually she was in our house less and less and the space she left behind filled up with books. Meditations for the Busy Carer, Pilgrims in the Family, A Hard Coming We Had Of It, Mysticism in Action, all that sort of stuff. One’s Personal Saviour. No, I made that one up. And nearly every damned one of them had a candle and a dove on the front.
Cyril was murmuring about his six hundred words when a blonde nurse drew her curtains. She was wearing pyjamas, pale blue, nice and tight round the upper legs, but I was annoyed. She was the one who could usually be relied on to do a wide deep stretch, in a short t-shirt ...
‘A hard coming ... yeah.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry. I’m watching a girl get out of bed.’
‘You dirty bugger. The lady vicar’ll do you a bit of good. Have you got all that then?’
‘What?’
‘Wake up, for Christ’s sake. By Friday week at the latest.’
The nurse moved round her little room making coffee. She had a truly great wide arse. Fat-bottomed girls, I love them. And slim-bottomed girls. And those in-between ones aren’t too bad either, the ones with those kind of handles on the side peeking out of the tops of their jeans
‘Patrick!’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
As he repeated the details and I took notes, I was struck by a brilliant idea. My pulse began to rocket just at the thought of it.
‘Cyril, I’ll do it. I’ll be delighted. I’ll even make it sound as though she’s my personal saviour if you want, if you do something for me.’
‘Try me.’
‘Gavin Whitehead.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Never heard ... You’re showing your age, old man.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Lives in Coleraine Road with his manager, now his second wife. He’s the singer with Purple Sword since Pug died in 2003. They’re the only fucking group to drag British rock kicking and screaming anywhere near the twenty-first century.’
‘Never heard of them.’
Never what? He needed a sample of the latest single:
‘Ooooo – oooooooo – Wings that are o-older than winterrrrr.’
‘I never heard such bollocks in my life.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Look, I’ll interview the old girl if you let me do Whitehead. He really is God on two legs. He’s written a book too! Buy me the book, and I’ll halve my fee.’
There was a pause during which the girl stepped out of her pyjama bottoms and threw them the length of the room. She stood in the short blue top and nothing else, her fists resting on bare haunches talking to somebody I couldn’t see.
I took Cyril’s reply to be affirmative. It was two words:
‘What fee?’
As soon as I put down the phone, a monster squeezed my throat and tightened around my chest. I could almost smell my mother’s prayer groups, their face powder and piety. ‘God is calling you, Patrick, come and be alive in Jesus, come and be tight-arsed and superior like us.’
I stuck my fingers in my ears and was about to scream when I realised I had the antidote handy. Purple Sword’s first CD. Ten years ago it was the first album I ever bought and it still did the business. Ah yes … track one. No. Track two:
What is this I see before me?
Rugged crossroads, way to go.
Where’s your spear, O trusty Satan?
Where’s your arrows of desire?
My sword don’t sleep, you better run now,
What you reap is what you –
So so hot in here, flames are all a-burning,
So much pain here, hearts are all a yearning.
Hang on, maybe Rupture Bloody Rupture would clear my head better with its rolling bass riff pumping to the chest-busting finale. Or, In Thrust We Trust, the one which starts with the cod church organ and culminates in a choir of schoolgirls being run over by a steamroller? So much choice. Where was I to start?
There was only one answer: slap the bass and volume up to max and hear the whole lot ten times through without stopping.
Then I might be in a fit state to phone the lady priest.
I didn’t contact Helen immediately. I thought for once I’d look up religion a bit first. Once I started I couldn’t stop.
Church stuff didn’t really take up too many of my waking thoughts. I knew the clergy were always at it but hadn’t bothered much with the detail. Five minutes on the net and I could see that God was indeed all about love.
I suppose I should be grateful that my mum’s religious madness took the Anglican form. Within seconds of searching ‘Church’ and ‘sex’ I was drowning in pictures of smug Cardinals and their haggard, valiant victims. Non-Catholics seemed to prefer sex with adults, like the Californian pastor sacked for inducing sexual frenzy among middle-aged women at his Creator-God Theme park (second-hand dinosaur ride for sale, one careful owner). A naked Galway nun had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act for saying that God doesn’t exist, and an Italian priest was on trial for alleging that Jesus did. And just in case I thought only the Christians were daft, two thousand people were converging on an Egyptian village to see the skin folds of a new born calf make out the words: ‘There is no God but Allah’.
A quick search on Helen Hubbard produced nothing but a load of sites about cottages in Umbria. That couldn’t be right. Then the screen offered something else: Revd. Helen Halberd. Over eight thousand sites began to march down my screen. Eight thousand. Some were snoreworthy articles in theological magazines with a circulation, I imagined, of almost ten people. Zipping past those sharpish, there were sites promoting a book and – hey, what have we here? - a clutch of sites in capital letters were shouting about how the author was a blasphemous handmaiden of the Anti-Christ who’d trashed the Virgin Mary. That couldn’t be the one Cyril wanted me to see. Could it?
A related site was GodSense.com, topped by the face of a crinkly old lush. There was a deep cleft in his lower lip which made him look even more like the cat who’s just shagged all the kittens and got clean away with it. The Reverend Neil Sarbridge. I remembered his name from that day’s Evening Standard:
‘Darling of Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, Rev. Neil Sarbridge has been ‘kicked upstairs’ for not believing in the Almighty. In the wake of his disastrous GodSense shows at Wembley Arena, where he tried to impress a turnout of less than 300 with his revolutionary ‘sham-free’ theology, he has left his south London parish to become Dean of Spencer College, Cambridge. “Even the church can’t keep a good God down,” he said, without clarifying whether he meant himself or some other deity.’
It wasn’t just for my research that I spotted that. I remember cutting it out and writing in the margin ‘Know this guy? All my love, Patrick. PS: See you soon?’ I taped it into an old envelope and addressed it to Dr. Julia Bailey, Spencer College, Cambridge. Did you get it, Julia? You never said.
‘Skiers survive three days on Mars.’ I looked again. ‘Skiers survive three days on Mars bars and melted snow.’ Not a miracle after all.
Then I found something I’ve just about memorised, it was so fantastic. An interview with the Pope. Sales of his latest album must have been falling off or something, because there in the paper was Il Papa promoting for all he was worth, which is a euro or two more than the Anglican Church. Over a big photograph of the Holy Father looking like a piranha in drag ran the headline: ‘Pope on the ropes. Pope Pius talks forthrightly to Paul Kibitz.’ Kibitz’s name was in huge type of-course, beside his usual mugshot of a bloodhound in formaldehyde. What’ll he ask him, I wondered. The Pope’s favourite colour? He’ll not get much else surely. But that Kibitz is such a pro.
After the usual six paragraphs about how long it took to get a straight answer about whether he could see the Pope at all, and then how long he was kept waiting and how heroic Kibitz was to hold out against having one or two of his questions vetted, he played his first ace. When did the Pope lose his virginity?
‘I think I shall borrow if you don’t mind, something a secular saint once said, someone you may be familiar with, a Mrs Ritchie, of whose music I am extremely fond, and disclose to you no more than that I am, as you might say, like, a virgin.’
When I interview Whitehead, I thought, I’ll carve a line of stubble from long sideboards down below the lobe up and over my upper lip, just a thin line, and I’ll wear my beret, and I’ll take no half-arsed answers like that.
Had the Pope ever been in love? The answer wound round the Alps, Pyrenees, the Urals and all until he said that he had been in Luvia, Finland but never in love except with the one true God, in whose service is perfect freedom.
He has a good turn of phrase, that Pope, I thought. Service is perfect freedom. I liked that. Liked it a lot. Hadn’t a clue what it meant but it rolled beautifully. I didn’t half feel cheated later when it turned out he’d nicked it from somewhere.
So, had the Pope ever felt devotion (ace word, Kibitz) for any human person at any time? Woman or (dare he say it?) man? ‘As for man, his days are like grass; for the wind passes over it and it is gone ...’ Call that an answer, Kibitz?, I nearly shouted out loud. I let the wind pass over that one all right. I leant over on my right buttock to fart.
But after a few more volleys, the Pope began to respond like the perfect interview subject. He was getting tetchy. His favourite colour? Answer: His collars were all handmade by monks in Firenze. Ha ha.
“PZ: ‘And how does it feel to be infallible?’
Pope: ‘I’m not gullible.’
PZ: ‘I never said you were. I said ...’
Pope: ‘I may have led a sheltered life but I’m not gullible. How dare you!’
PZ: ‘No, no, listen, I didn’t say that, I said ...’
Pope: ‘Shaht ahp. Shaht ahp! You said what you said. You must not contradict me. I am the Pope. I am never wrong.’”
Perfect journalism, I thought then and I still think it, the perfect model for when I did Whitehead. I’d go to a passport photograph booth first though and get my mugshot done. Lean and moody, moody and lean.
Seeing as how Pug was well filled to overflowing with substances of one sort or another, it was something of a mystery how he found his way into the Daimler at all. Then this old bat with a trolley bag rolled up to him, shouting: ‘Young man, if you don’t get out of that car this minute, I shall call the police. You riff raff think you can just stroll up here from Deptford and steal cars belonging to respectable people...’ Pug’s electric window hummed open. He turned slowly, focused one eye on her and treated her to a unique rendition:
Who’s this cross old bat before me?
Eye of newt and nose of dog,
Stand well clear, dear, Satan’s Rising
Out of this here Blackheath bog.
She tried to yell over him, so Pug tried to close the window again but he kept getting his hair caught in it, and it was left to his trusty roadie, yours truly, to explain to the old girl as per usual that he was the greatest rock singer in the world and that it was his own car actually. I must have done a beautiful job. The old girl apologised.
A minute later while I wasn’t looking, Pug walloped the car straight into Drive, mounted the grass-covered hump along the edge of Princess of Wales Drive and headed all of fifteen feet towards the pond. Two wheels slumped over the lip of the pond before the car stopped dead, the engine growling, Pug growling and the old woman laughing her drawers off. She must have told the Standard or something, because next morning there it was in the paper: PUG DUG FROM SLUDGE, and how he’d never be as famous as Brian Jones in a month of Sunday papers. Little did they...
It was my mobile. Cyril.
‘Patrick, you listening?’
Yep.
‘I’m taking the little lady to the Maldives so we’re going to put the mag away on Friday. I need the lady vicar piece by noon on Thursday.’
I put my can of Special Brew down beside me on the bed, propped up by a half-finished packet of chocolate biscuits. What day was today? Cyril said it all again.
‘Yeah. No problem.’
‘When did you see her?’
‘Ahm...’
‘Have you even phoned her yet?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ I hadn’t actually. Her number was somewhere… ‘Good.’
‘Thursday’s OK then?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Get her to talk about the two lesbian vicars trying to adopt a baby.’
‘Right.’
‘Patrick, are you awake?’
‘Of-course I am. I was busy on something else, that’s all.’
‘Well get off her and get on with some work. I’m off to lunch now.’
‘Hang on, Cyril, when am I getting the money?’
‘Money?’ You’d think I’d asked him to share his vestal virgins.
‘Thirty quid.’
‘Sounds rather a lot.’
‘For the Whitehead book. I’m not going near that lady vic until’
‘It’s in the post, old boy.’
‘In the post?’
Hh. I’d experienced Cyril’s ‘in the post’ before.
‘Absolutely. Posted it myself. And make it zing, old boy. The lady vicar piece, I mean.’
Make a lady vicar zing? She was bound to be fat and ancient in a beige anorak.
Her biog on the back was pure mogadon: ‘Having worked for 20 years as a London Accountant, Helen Halberd (not Hubbard, Cyril had got it wrong) decided to be ordained. It cost her her marriage and her job. In this provocative best-seller her meditations on bible characters combine with personal memoir to explain how the Bible has been misunderstood for centuries.’
Yawn. The contents list was even worse: Adoration, Lamentation, Desolation, Guilt. Vomit Bag had unaccountably been left out.
The best bit was the cover. No doves, crosses or candles, FIRE DOWN BELOW appeared in gold letters on a purple background above a naked bint with grapefruit tits and big legs. Bathsheba, apparently. No surname.
I opened the curtain an inch. Sunlight blistered my eyes so I shut it again. I got back into bed and picked up ROCK OF AGES, the amazing, unexpurgated rock and roll story of Purple Sword by their roadie called Mugadossa, and Algernon Fox of The Times, still cracked open at the story of Pug’s first famous suicide attempt. I smelt the pages. Glue and toilet paper. Appropriate really.
I’d got beyond the first section of photographs and Gavin Whitehead hadn’t even been mentioned yet. I flicked on through...
Gavvers was a novelty all right, a new whore bringing fresh skills to the brothel. You see, Gavin is what you might call a real musician. If he heard Kate Moss singing in the bath, he’d put his ear to the keyhole. Old Pug, much as I loved and respected him, had been in it for the fans, pure and simple. That’s how he liked them, pure, simple and preferably under age.
Several pages covered how Gavin fell for their manager. I can’t remember her name but she’d have answered to Moose. Even Moses couldn’t have parted her knees or wanted to, but Gav was mad for her. He wrote miserable ballads for two years before he cracked it, and by then the band had played My Love Dove’s Rising on Jools Holland and were making it big. But once Gav joined, the groupies, drugs and daft parties stopped dead. Gav, it seemed, was the perfect expression of the Protestant work ethic: ten hours in the studio every day, one CD a year and straight home after every gig for lettuce juice and a tofu sandwich. And family prayers. The wife was into the God thing and in no time Gav was trotting along with her to church.
I woke up, and spilt my beer. In a panic I shook the precious books clear of the froth and cracked open the purple covers:
‘Desperation was overwhelming me. My life had become one of undiluted longing, of addiction without hope of satisfaction. I was burning up so much I could see only one solution: to extinguish myself.
I used to drive across Blackheath every day with my fingers tapping the steering wheel as the traffic around me crawled along the A2, then inched to the roundabout in front of the hotel where in various tempers we all make way for each other or not until we reached our destinations. Suddenly I had had enough. All my life I had been making way, fitting in, pretending to be if not happy at least content. No more.
The Heath can be exceptionally beautiful on evenings when the orange and red lights of traffic blend into the pink of early sunset. That night it was raining. The windscreen wipers were swishing in different rhythm from the Bach on the tape machine, and the tempo of the indicator clashed with both. At least ten cars were between the roundabout and me. I took it into my head to leave the road.
I closed my eyes, heaved the steering wheel through one hundred and eighty degrees and stamped on the accelerator. The engine thundered and I remember being aware of an insane excitement and a lot of rumbling and bumping along grass before the impact into the side of the church. The car was a write-off. The church sustained several thousands of pounds worth of structural damage. I was in hospital for three months.’
Good old Pug. My hero.
But Bach? Pug liked Bach? I turned the book over and choked. I had been reading the words of Helen Halberd. Undiluted addiction? Insane excitement? Thousands of pounds of structural damage? Maybe this old bird was worth a look after all.